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.Suffering cannot berevalued merely by giving it a new justification that is free of the meta-physical or teleological categories of Christianity and its secular successors.***Nonetheless, if we look at Nietzsche s propensity to justify suffering, we seean interesting movement in his thought, one which suggests that he istending towards such a dissolution of the problem.In his early work,notably The Birth of Tragedy, he is overtly in the business of theodicy,despite his gathering hostility to the pessimism (Christian and atheist/Schopenhauerian) that fuels it.In his middle to late period, beginningwith The Gay Science, he, on the one hand, still invokes or justifies sufferingas a necessary condition of his supreme goods great art, great men, heroicdeeds, knowledge,7 the creation of new values, creativity in general8 andlooks for ways of seducing even his higher human beings to life; while, onthe other hand, moving powerfully towards a more ungrounded affirmationof life in his first statement of both amor fati9 and eternal recurrence. 10Finally in his last two active years and especially in his concluding publishedwork, Ecce Homo, he seems to make a decisive further move away fromgrounding life-affirmation in justifications of suffering.Thus in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), affirmation is explicitly presented asthe result of justification, indeed as a justification: only as an aestheticphenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified (BT, 5 and 24).It matters little that the terms in which Nietzsche is seeking to justifyexistence and its horrors are aesthetic by contrast to the various religiousand non-religious theodicies that justify existence in moral terms, such asthe necessity of free will to striving for goodness and salvation and yet also tothe possibility of evil.The very terms in which this famous pronouncementis couched the observer s stance of evaluating existence or the world asa whole, the search not just for justification but for eternal justification are the terms employed by precisely the pessimism that Nietzsche comes torepudiate.(And in his late preface to The Birth of Tragedy, his attempt at aself-criticism, he criticizes his younger self as a pessimist marked by deep hatred against the Now , against reality.believing sooner in theNothing.than in the Now [BT, Attempt at a Self-Criticism, 7].Which7The thought of life as a means to knowledge was, Nietzsche says, his great liberator GS, 324.8For example, Nietzsche has Zarathustra posit creation as the great redemption from suffering. Indeed that the creator may be, suffering is needed (Z, II, 2, Upon the Blessed Isles ).9GS, 107.10Paradigmatically formulated at GS, 341, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z, III, 2, On the Vision andthe Riddle, 13, The Convalescent from 1883 85). Why Nietzsche is still in the morality game 89is consistent with the equation that I am suggesting: namely that the verydesire to justify suffering is a mark of pessimism.)By contrast, in The Gay Science (1882)11 he recasts this same thought andpointedly drops the idea of justification. As an aesthetic phenomenonexistence is still bearable for us, he now says (GS, 107).12 We see herethat Nietzsche in no way affirms existence unconditionally: after all, onlyunder the aspect of its aestheticization is existence bearable.Indeed, in thesame passage he remains unable to affirm existence without the counter-force that art provides against the nausea and suicide that honest lookingat the nature of things would induce (GS, 107).The same is true when hesays that we possess art lest we perish of the truth (WP, 822, from 1888), andspeaks of art as the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.theredemption of the man of knowledge.the redemption of the man of action.the redemption of the sufferer (WP, 853, §2).That Nietzsche s approach to affirmation in this middle period remainsresidually structured by the conceptual form of theodicy is seen, moreover,in the fact that the referent of his affirmation is existence, which, from thecontext, seems to be existence as such rather than my individual existence.Yet in Book V of The Gay Science, a late work published in 1887, he poursscorn on the whole standpoint of evaluating existence as such:the whole pose of man against the world, of man as a world-negating principle,of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the endplaces existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting.(GS, 346)And in Twilight of the Idols (1888), he makes a similar point:One would require a position outside of life, and yet to have to know it as well asone, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch theproblem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is forus an unapproachable problem.(TI, Morality as Anti-Nature, 5; cf.TI, TheProblem of Socrates, 2)Yet in suggesting that an existence not experienced as an aesthetic phenom-enon would be unbearable, or that life (and specifically truth-seeing) notbuttressed by art would warrant suicide, Nietzsche is very much involved in the problem of the value of life
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