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Nietzsche on Suffering as an Inlet into Political Philosophy
This article was written back in the Spring of 1994 while I was in the second year of my
PhD in political philosophy. I had intended to send the article to Nietzsche Studien, but due to
my natural procastination, never did. Here I've included just the introduction to the paper.
Introduction of Paper
Imagine, for a moment, that after watching the evening news you go out for a walk around your
neighborhood. Prompted by reports of assassinations, plane crashes, ethnic cleansing and other
assorted crimes, you ignore the honking cars and barking dogs that usually assail your ears during
your walks. Instead, your thoughts begin to dwell on your own problems -- problems that tend to
stack up like plates in a cafeteria; no matter how many you remove, more keep popping up. Getting
more melancholic by the step, you arrive at one of your favorite spots in the neighborhood, a large
majestic tree. Suddenly, the tree bursts into flames and a mighty voice speaks out from the tree:
"All your suffering, all your misery, I can alleviate; all you must do is follow my instructions."
Now, if you were not religiously-inclined you would probably run to either your nearest bar, travel
agent, or psychiatrist. But if you were the least bit religious, if you stayed riveted to the spot
before that voice in the burning tree, would you think that voice was God's, or the Devil's?
Perhaps to most of us the voice would be God's. That is, we tend to think of human suffering as
an evil, as something to be overcome. In the penultimate chapter of what Friedrich Nietzsche
considered his greatest book, Zarathustra claims that he is "the advocate of life, the advocate of
suffering, the advocate of the circle." (Z III "The Convalescent") Nietzsche the advocate of life
and of eternal return is perhaps quite familiar to us, but Nietzsche the advocator of suffering is
much less so. Why was suffering so important for Nietzsche? And what does it mean to be the
advocator of suffering?
This essay examines the development of Nietzsche's views on suffering from
The Birth of Tragedy to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to try to answer these questions. From this
examination we will see that Nietzsche's advocation of suffering is not something peripheral to his
thinking but is absolutely integral to it. Throughout these works he insists that suffering is not
an unqualified evil, and could even be considered a good in that it helps individuals and also
societies to achieve a higher, better, more complete, even beautiful character.
Yet by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche attributes to suffering a meaning beyond the merely
instrumental. In this work, humanity's attitude towards suffering emerges as the great sickness
infecting it. Modern nihilism, the terminal state of this sickness, is seen as the inevitable
result of considering suffering to be something hateful, to be something that existence must be
cured of, whether it be in the eschatological, political, moral or technical future. As
Zarathustra eventually discovers, the existence of suffering is not the fault of sin, or of bad
political regimes, or of ignorance, or of a lack of control over nature, but is the inevitable
result of the passing of time, of the fact that we can not alter the past. Our inability to
alter time's direction and hence our ultimate impotence against suffering calls on us to recognize
the futility of orienting our thought around the goal of reducing suffering, whether it be through
religion, ethics, or technology. Instead, through the help of the thought experiment of eternal
return, we must, Zarathustra tells us, become thankful for and even perhaps want more suffering.
It is only when humanity fundamentally gives up considering the voice in the tree that of God's,
and instead realizes that it is figuratively speaking the devil's, will humanity prevent the
actualization of the last men of modern nihilism.
The Nietzsche who thus emerges in this paper will be one quite antithetical to the ethical
sensibility of the late twentieth century (and to the Nietzsche as he is presented by many of
his present-day interpreters). For at the very least, Nietzsche insists we must give up the
ethical expression of our ill-will against human suffering, namely compassion. This paper will
thus conclude by asserting that Nietzsche's view on suffering is of continuing relevance to the
political theorist for this as well as for two additional reasons. The first is that he
demonstrates the importance of the problem of suffering for political theory by illustrating how
the meaning we give to suffering fundamentally shapes our politics and ethics. And second,
Nietzsche shows us that many of the tensions within modern society are the result of our
contradictory allegiance to two opposite and irreconcilable goals: the goal of a suffering-free
existence that lies behind our politics, morality, and science and the goal of intellectual and
moral self-development present in our art and education. Nietzsche insists that the latter goal
requires suffering and hence must deny the former goal, and, concomitantly, the former goal requires
the denial of the latter. "Nietzsche on suffering" can thus be considered an inlet into political
philosophy in so far as suffering is recognized as a key problem around which political thinking
consciously or unconsciously revolves. But to argue this claim requires us to first examine what
Nietzsche has to say about suffering.
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