NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 169

CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE

ABSTRACT. In this paper I explore Nietzsche’s thinking on the notions of nobility and
the affirmation of life and I subject his reflections on these to criticism. I argue that we
can find at least two understandings of these notions in Nietzsche’s work which I call a
‘worldly’ and an ‘inward’ conception and I explain what I mean by each of these. Drawing
on Homer and Dostoyevsky, the work of both of whom was crucial for Nietzsche in
developing and exploring his notion of worldly nobility and affirmation, I then go on to
argue that Nietzsche provides us with no concrete examples of worldly nobles and that,
given his historicism, he cannot. Thus Nietzsche’s thinking here is broken-backed. I
turn, therefore, to explore the inward notions of nobility and affirmation. Discussing
Montaigne and Napoleon in the context of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue that we can
make good sense in Nietzschean terms of someone’s affirming his own life in an inward
sense. This, however, opens up the difference between someone’s affirming his own life
and his affirming life überhaupt, and I argue that Nietzsche needs to be able to make
sense not just of the former but also of the latter. Referring once again to Dostoyevsky, I
suggest that Nietzsche can only do so by accepting the idea that all human beings possess
dignity qua human beings. This thought is, however, one that he rejects. Thus Nietzsche’s
reflections in this area cannot be rendered finally plausible since they depend upon
something which can find no room in his philosophy.

KEY WORDS: affirmation, Nietzsche, noble, revenge, slave, spirit, suffering.

1.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Nietzsche’s conception of nobility

together with his related idea of the affirmation or love of life and to
discuss the strengths and limitations of his thinking in this regard. I shall
argue that we can find in Nietzsche two conceptions of nobility and the
affirmation of life which I shall call a ‘worldly’ and an ‘inward’ conception.
Having explained in detail what I mean by each of these, I shall argue that
Nietzsche provides us with no proper or complete understanding of the
former notion of nobility and affirmation. I shall further argue that we can
make sense of the inward notion of nobility and affirmation but only at
the cost of a certain view about the significance of individual human lives
which finds no proper place in Nietzsche’s work.
At the outset I must make it clear that it is no part of my argument to
claim that the two conceptions of nobility and affirmation which we can
find in Nietzsche are clearly distinguished by him. There are three reasons

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3: 169–193, 2000.

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
170 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

for this. Firstly, as I have already indicated, I shall argue that Nietzsche
does not properly work out either notion of nobility and affirmation. Hence,
and a fortiori, it would be mistaken to say that he distinguishes them clearly.
Secondly, there are no doubt many different conceptions of nobility and
affirmation to be found in moral discourse generally, some of which find
expression in Nietzsche’s work. Thus, when I claim that there are two
conceptions of nobility and affirmation to be found in Nietzsche’s work I
do not mean that there are only two such conceptions thus to be found. I
mean rather that these are two of the most significant such conceptions in
Nietzsche’s work and that others found in that work can be well, and
probably best, understood with reference to these. Thirdly, and connectedly,
I focus in this paper primarily on The Genealogy of Morals and, to a lesser
extent, on Beyond Good and Evil, since it is in these works that Nietzsche
makes his most concerted effort to articulate his understanding of nobility
and the affirmation of life. And this means that conceptions of these notions
found elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work are not subjected to detailed study
in this paper. Hence, it is part of the aim of this article to develop a helpful
perspective on Nietzsche’s reflections on nobility and affirmation, not to
claim that what I have to say here is exhaustive of all the things one might
say about these in Nietzsche’s work.

2.

The most obvious conception of nobility which we can recover from the
Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil is a worldly conception
of nobility. The worldly nobles are grand both in body and soul, strong,
healthy, and overflowing with vitality. They have a characteristic manner
and style of conduct, the manner and style of the ruling class which revels
in its privilege and function as the point or purpose for which society as a
whole exists:1 they thus identify themselves with a certain social role, a
role which allows them to stand boldly before the world and claim great
honours.2 They despise those who are not noble and think of themselves
as free to act towards them as they wish – “beyond good and evil”, as

1
F.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §265. [Hereafter: BGE].
2
Cf. L.Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. Oxford University Press: London, 1972,
ch. 2, esp. §ii. See also G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Felix Meiner Verlag:
Hamburg, 1988, pp. 320ff., on which Trilling draws. Cf. also J. Casey, Pagan Virtue.
Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1992, pp. 70–83.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 171

Nietzsche says.3 Their primary designation of value concerns their conviction

of their own goodness, hence their conception of value is active and
creative: they only come to a conception of that which is bad – which they
think of as base – in the light of their sense of their own goodness. And all
of this makes up what Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance: the strict
distinction between castes in society allows for the growth of those higher
states of soul which characterize the worldly noble.4
The worldly nobles are empty. Certainly they have an inner life – an
“inner world”, as Nietzsche puts it – and in this sense they are not just like
animals (which have no inner life although they have beliefs, desires and
the like), but they have no inner depths. Their inner life is, as Nietzsche
says, “thin, as if stretched between two membranes”.5 Nietzsche also puts
the point this way: the worldly nobles have no drives of the self which are
not expended immediately in action. When such a noble experiences a drive
– say a drive to harm, or appropriate – he simply acts. As Nietzsche puts
it in a famous passage, there is, for such a strong character, and contrary
to popular misconceptions, no self behind its actions.

In just the way the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the
latter for a deed [Thun], for the effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality
also separates off strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral
substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so.
But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming;
‘the doer’ is merely a fiction of the imagination added to the deed [Thun] – the deed
[Thun] is everything.6

This conception of nobility is, as I said, a worldly conception. The nobles

in question reverence one another, show one another respect and honour
and find their value in their social standing, their power, health and strength.
This conception of nobility is allied by Nietzsche to a particular
conception of the affirmation of life. In this connexion Nietzsche
emphasizes his idea of the eternal return of the same. The central idea is
that one affirms one’s life if one would accept the offer of living exactly

3
BGE, §260. Notice also that Nietzsche claims that the nobles sometimes help or pity
those who are not noble. But even here they are acting beyond good and evil as Nietzsche
understands this since they do so out of strength and vitality, not because they see this as
‘morally required’ in any modern sense of that notion. Hence, this makes up part of that
‘pathos of distance’ which I mention below.
4
BGE, §257.
5
F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 16. [Hereafter: GM].
6
GM, I, 13.
172 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

the same life over again including all its pains and sufferings. In this sense,
such an affirmation involves one’s wanting not merely one’s joys but also
one’s misfortunes and sufferings.7 Nietzsche clearly has this in mind when
he speaks of the ideal

of the most high-spirited, most vibrant, most world-affirming person who has not only
learnt to be reconciled with and to bear what was and is, but who also wants to have
it again as it was and is for all eternity, insatiably crying da capo, not only to himself
but to the whole play and spectacle. . . .8

Nietzsche sometimes speaks of this in terms of redemption: “To redeem

the past and transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it so!’ – that alone
do I call redemption!”9 And, Nietzsche suggests, the worldly nobles we
have discussed could affirm their own lives in the sense of wanting their
lives to recur. They are possessed of such a monumental hardness that they
can bear and affirm their own pains.
It is very difficult to give a concrete example of the kind of noble who
affirms life in the worldly way we have been discussing. The closest case
I know of is provided not by Nietzsche but by Dostoyevsky in his The
House of the Dead, his account of time doing hard labour in Siberia. In
this book, Dostoyevsky describes a character called Orlov who had been
convicted of the murders of many old men and children. He had killed them
by carving them up. Dostoyevsky describes him thus:

7
T. Adorno Minima Moralia, E.F.N. Jephcott (trans.) Verso: London, 1987, pp. 97–
98, is highly critical of just this kind of affirmation.
8
BGE, §56. An anonymous reviewer for Ethical and Moral Practice has raised the
objection that Nietzsche formulated the notion of the eternal return as an affirmation of
life in opposition to Christianity and thus that it could not be a feature of the worldly
conception of nobility I am at present considering since Nietzsche discusses the worldly
noble primarily in terms of his place in a pre-Christian world. The eternal return could
be, according to this objection, a feature only of the inward affirmation I go on to con-
sider below. I agree with this objection that Nietzsche does often present the eternal
return as if it had only to do with the modern condition – e.g., in BGE, §56 – but I do not
think that this means that the idea has no application to a pre-Christian condition. For, as
I understand Nietzsche, he takes himself to be articulating explicitly something which
was merely implicit for those amongst the pre-Christians who, as he sees things, af-
firmed life in a worldly sense. In this sense, I read Nietzsche as attempting to recapture
something in explicit terms for the modern world that was implicit in the ancient world.
To my knowledge, there is (as the reviewer pointed out) no direct textual support for this
position, but, given Nietzsche’s overall view that there is much we can and need to learn
from the ancient world in order to cope with the modern condition, it seems to me at least
as plausible as its denial and thus worth exploring in the way I go on to do below.
9
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, 20. [Hereafter: TSZ].
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 173

He was a man with a terrible strength of will and a proud awareness of his strength
. . . [He] . . . was not really quite an ordinary mortal. . . . I can say unequivocally that
never in my life have I met a man of stronger, more adamantine character. . . . This
was truly a case of total victory over the flesh. It was evident that this man had a
boundless self-mastery, that he had nothing but contempt for any kind of torture and
punishment, and that he was not afraid of anything under the sun. All that could be
seen in him was an infinite energy, a thirst for activity, for revenge, and for the
attainment of the goal he had set himself. I was also struck by his strange arrogance.
He looked at everything in an incredibly haughty manner. . . . I do not think that there
was any being in the world that could have influenced him by its authority alone. . . .10

There is certainly a spiritual grandeur about Orlov, as others have noted,11

and he possesses a terrifying health. Moreover, he certainly resembles those
nobles Nietzsche describes who could emerge exhilarated from exploits
of murder, arson, rape and torture.12 Furthermore, it seems that Orlov was
able to affirm his own sufferings, seeing them as a stimulus to life. He was,
in fact, almost flogged to death as a punishment whilst in prison, after which
he expressed an incredible thirst to go back and receive the second
instalment of his flogging. He went – without a shred of fear, even cheerful,
and thirsting for the challenge – before his back was properly healed. This
second beating killed him. Nietzsche was familiar with this character, for
he discusses the book of Dostoyevsky’s in which he appears in Twilight of
the Idols.13 Moreover, not only was he familiar with this book before writing
GM,14 he also said that Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom
he had anything to learn.15 And this raises a puzzle. For it suggests that if
Orlov was an affirmer of life in the worldly sense, Nietzsche would have
mentioned him explicitly in GM. But he does not. Why?
There are at least two possible – connected – answers to that. The first16
is that Nietzsche might have read Orlov as manifesting not simply the
capacity to endure and affirm his own suffering but actually to enjoy it.

10
F. Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, D. McDuff (trans.) Penguin: Harmondsworth,
1985, pp. 81–84.
11
K. Mochulsky Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work, M.A. Minihan (trans.) Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1967, p. 195.
12
GM, I, 11.
13
F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, §45. [Hereaf-
ter: TI].
14
See Walter Kaufmann’s note 8 to §24, Essay Three, of his translation of GM: On the
Genealogy of Morals, W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (trans.) Vintage: New York, 1967.
15
TI, §45.
16
I owe this suggestion, for which I am grateful, to an anonymous reader for Ethical
Theory and Moral Practice.
174 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

And this is something which, for Nietzsche, can only be life-denying. The
second is that Orlov was filled by a thirst for revenge of the type that
Nietzsche excludes from worldly nobility as he understands it. We see this
from his discussion of Dostoyevsky’s book in which the latter describes
Orlov.17 For Nietzsche says that the criminal type, of which Orlov is a
paradigm case, is degenerate since he lacks freedom from the constraints
of society and thus from the psychological traits of slave-morality. It follows
that on Nietzsche’s account Orlov’s thirst for revenge is not like the one
which he ascribes to the worldly noble – one which expends itself as soon
as it appears – but one which eats away at him.

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies . . . seriously for very long – that is the sign
of strong, full natures in whom there is a superfluity of the power to form, to mould,
to recuperate and to forget. . . . Such a man simply shakes off with a single shrug many
worms which eat deeply into others. . . .18

Such a thirst for revenge as that which Orlov possesses is one that one can
very often enjoy, for it can be the infliction of pain on oneself from which
one takes pleasure. And Orlov’s desire to go back for his punishment does,
indeed, look very like frustrated revenge redirected onto himself, i.e.,
pleasure taken in his own suffering. Thus the two reasons to deny worldly
nobility to Orlov are connected in an important way.
But these reflections on Orlov raise a more general worry. For not only
does Nietzsche not mention Orlov as the kind of worldly noble he has in
mind, he actually gives no concrete example of such a noble at all. Instead,
he contents himself with speaking in general terms of “the Roman, Arabian,
Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, [and] the Scandinavian
Vikings”.19 Why is he so vague at this absolutely crucial point in his work?
The answer is that these nobles do not, in fact, fit the model that Nietzsche
has given. Let us take, for example, Achilles, the best of the Achaeans. If
he is not noble in the worldly sense then it is hard to see who is. Yet
throughout the greater part of the Iliad he lounges around by his ships,
refusing to take part in the battle raging around Troy because Agamemnon
has stolen his girlfriend, his booty from the war. Achilles, in fact, has got
the sulks. Moreover, he is full of the pettiest desires for revenge, which
are unfulfilled, and a consequent frustration. He is nothing like the worldly
noble whom Nietzsche describes who simply acts on his drives and
impulses. On the contrary, he is scheming and cunning, plotting ways to

17
TI, §45.
18
GM, I, 11.
19
GM, I, 11.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 175

wreak havoc on his fellow Greeks: he cannot forget the disservice done to
him, and mulls it over continuously in his mind, feeding and enjoying the
spirit of his revenge. Nothing could be further from an accurate description
of Achilles than to claim that the following thought, which Nietzsche
applies to the worldly nobles, is true of him: “Ressentiment itself, should
it appear in the noble man, consummates and expends itself in an immediate
reaction, and it therefore does not poison. . . . .”.20
There is thus a lacuna in Nietzsche’s work: he does not give any concrete
examples of the worldly nobles he describes. And, in fact, by his own
historicist lights he cannot. For, despite the fact that he suggests that the
Homeric heroes and the rest provide examples of such nobles, elsewhere
he is quite clear that they could not be since they are, in essentials, just
like us – than whom, for Nietzsche, there is no one less noble. “Now,
everything essential in human development took place in primeval times,
long before the 4000 years about which we have some knowledge . . .”.21
Hence the deepest reason why Nietzsche can provide no concrete examples
of the worldly nobles is that, as this quotation indicates, his historicism
rules this possibility out. There is no one about whom any historical record
exists who is noble in the relevant sense. Anyone who is noble in this sense
existed as part of prehistory, about which we can know nothing. We can
only speculate about such times. And that means that we cannot, after all,
know that any such individuals existed.22 But even if we suppose they did,
it is clear that we moderns have not the slightest chance of becoming noble
in the worldly sense. We are simply too loaded down with the weight of
history for that. As Nietzsche himself says:

The past of every form and way of life, of cultures which earlier lay tightly next to
one another and on top of one another, stream into us ‘modern souls’ . . . our instincts
now run back in every direction, we ourselves are a kind of chaos. . . .23

Unable to give a concrete example of the worldly noble and sure, even if
he could give such an example, that we can never go back to being noble
in that sense, Nietzsche is unable to provide a plausible account of the notions

20
GM, I, 11.
21
F. Nietzsche, Human, all too Human, §2.
22
Cf. J.P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1977,
p. 104, who claims that Nietzsche’s thought shows a “compulsion, repeated in one area
of experience after another, that makes him group his reflections round an empty space”.
I do not agree with this as a general claim about Nietzsche’s work, but I think it true with
respect to the issue of worldly nobility, as I have argued.
23
BGE, §224.
176 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

of nobility and affirmation in the worldly sense. And with that inability an
absolutely central idea of his work – precisely the notion of the affirmation
of life – is in danger of collapsing.
If Nietzsche’s thinking is not simply to collapse at this point then what
we need to do is to try to make sense, using Nietzschean materials, of the
linked ideas of nobility and affirmation in a manner different from that
considered hitherto. To this task I now turn.

3.

To make any progress we need to look at the argument of GM in more detail.

The first essay of GM contrasts the nobles with those whom Nietzsche
calls the slaves. The slaves work with a conception of value that is wholly
reactive. Unable to create their own values, their primary value-designation
concerns not what is good for them but what harms or hurts them, i.e., the
nobles. Their definition of what is good is conceptually recessive to that
which they define as harmful, which they call ‘evil’. This is an expression
of their weakness, and of that mass of envy, fear, spite, mean-spiritedness
and thirst for revenge which Nietzsche called ressentiment.
Nietzsche goes on to consider the concepts of guilt and bad conscience.
He says that there are two basic sources for guilt, sources which we find
in long-dead cultures: (i) in the relation of debtor and creditor, in buying
and selling, and so on; (ii) in the sense of debt which later generations have
to their ancestors. Let us consider these in turn.
Nietzsche argues that the debtor provides security for the creditor by
guaranteeing that, should he not repay the debt, he, the creditor, may have
something else which the debtor possesses. The primary form of this,
according to Nietzsche, is the ability to inflict suffering on the debtor which
expresses a primitive, though even in modernity unextinguished, enjoyment
in inflicting suffering, and also leads to the idea that there can be an
equivalence between suffering and guilt (the guilt incurred as a result of
breaking the contract).
This relation between creditor and debtor is, according to Nietzsche,
further interpreted into the relation between a present generation and its
ancestors. The well-being of the tribe is understood to depend upon the
continued existence of dead ancestors ‘as powerful spirits’ and their good-
will towards the tribe. There is a felt need to pay these ancestors back, a
need which depends in large measure upon fear of these spirits and which,
so Nietzsche says, increases as the tribe prospers. This sense of guilt can,
however, not be repaid so long as the tribe thrives.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 177

At this point,24 Nietzsche notes that he has so far only considered a pre-
moral conception of guilt. But in the meantime25 he has provided an account
of the origins of the bad conscience. This results from the establishment
of fixed communities or state-like organizations. For in these communities
the natural and powerful instincts of man – for example, cruelty, the drive
to destroy, persecute and attack – cannot find a ready outlet, since this would
simply lead to the disintegration of these communities. These instincts are,
therefore, turned back on man himself by a process of internalization –
Nietzsche says that this is where the concept of the soul of man grew –
which results in an intense frustration and torment.26 This process of
internalization is the process of the acquisition of the bad conscience.
As already noted, Nietzsche considers this whole process of the
generation of guilt and the bad conscience so far to be pre-moral. The
decisive moment comes with what Nietzsche calls the pushing back –
Zurückschiebung – of the concept of guilt into the bad conscience.
Nietzsche explicitly refers to this as a moralization. The development seems
to be as follows: the subject feels a pre-moral guilt, the sources of which
we have noted. The subject also feels, in various ways, tormented – he is
suffering – as a result of his inability to release the pent-up energy of his
frustrated instincts. This is his bad conscience. The Zurückschiebung of
guilt into the bad conscience is the (mis)interpretation of the pent-up
instincts and the consequent frustration as the punishment of the gods. The
subject interprets the debt to the gods – being guilty before them – as the
reason for the suffering. And there the movement has been made and guilt
and the bad conscience have been moralized.
What exactly, according to Nietzsche, are guilt and the bad conscience
once they have become moral? They are forms of suffering which provide
meaning to the subject’s life and are thus desired by the subject for this
very reason. On Nietzsche’s story, the subject supposes himself to be
suffering because he is guilty and frustrated, hence that it is good to suffer.
And this way of thinking ties guilt, frustration and suffering so closely
together that the subject comes to think that central to the suffering which
is good are feelings of guilt and frustration themselves. In short, in
experiencing what Nietzsche calls moral guilt and the moral bad
conscience, the subject is taking pleasure in feeling guilty and frustrated.
24
GM, II, 21.
25
GM, II, 16–19.
26
Notice that this process of internalization and the suffering connected therewith can
result in a new form of pleasure, i.e., experiencing frustration can itself be a form of
pleasure. Cf. my comments on forms of pleasure and self-indulgence linked to the expe-
rience of guilt and ressentiment below, and those on Orlov, above.
178 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

Nietzsche’s reflections here are, I believe, extraordinarily insightful and

can, I think, most helpfully be understood as drawing our attention to, and
making clear, certain significant movements of the human soul. For we
very often, when struck by misfortune, use it as an excuse to wallow in
such emotions as self-pity in such a way as to show that we are enjoying
our suffering. Further, the experience of guilt is often pointless and self-
indulgent. What makes it so frequently pointless is that we are often racked
by guilt even as it has no effect on our behaviour in that, when the guilt
goes, we go on treating people in the way we did which gave rise to the
guilt in the first place. And hence this experience of guilt is, or becomes,
a form of self-indulgence, something we take pleasure in. Nevertheless,
such self-pity and feelings of guilt, however much we may enjoy them,
constitute, and, in one way or at one level, are experienced as, a form of
weakness, and so naturally bring with them that mass of mean-spiritedness
which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. For ressentiment gives us, in fantasy
or imagination, a compensating feeling of strength.27
Nietzsche himself describes the intertwining of feelings of guilt,
frustration, ressentiment and suffering in terms of the activities of a
character he calls the ascetic priest. For, according to Nietzsche, this
character persuades the ressentiment-afflicted subject, who is inevitably
looking for the agent responsible for his suffering, that he himself, the
subject, is responsible. And in doing so the priest is exploiting and
magnifying the fledgling sense of moralized guilt which had already got a
foothold in the way noted. Correlatively, he is deepening the hold of
ressentiment over, and in, his flock.
Nietzsche understands this whole process of the moralization of guilt
and the bad conscience, and the deepening of ressentiment, as a form of
life-denial or asceticism.

4.

We now have the main themes of Nietzsche’s GM before us, and with them
we can work out a conception of nobility and affirmation which take us
past the lacuna in Nietzsche’s argument concerning the worldly nobles
which we met earlier.
Consider, for example, the fact that Nietzsche says that every level of
civilization with which we are familiar, even the most primitive, had the

27
Cf. B. Williams, “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology”, in The European Jour-
nal of Philosophy, I, 1, 1993, esp. pp. 11–12.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 179

institution of creditor and debtor. Further, he says that the sense of guilty
indebtedness to ancestors in the form of spirits grows with the growing
fortunes of a civilization. But both of these clearly apply to the nobles as
much as to the slaves, so they, the nobles, are clearly subject to the pre-
moral guilt that Nietzsche describes.
But if the nobles are subject to pre-moral guilt, are they also subject to
the bad conscience in its pre-moral form? Nietzsche at no point says they
are not. The closest he gets to this is to say that the bad conscience did not
grow in the nobles,28 but this is evidently consistent with its becoming part
of their psychology at some later date. Moreover, when discussing the
rampaging campaigns of the nobles outside their own community,
Nietzsche explicitly says that they “step back into the innocence of
conscience of the beast of prey”,29 a comment which would evidently make
no sense if they were not possessed of the bad conscience inside the
community. And the fact that the nobles reciprocally limit one another in
their communities and thus cannot always there freely express their drives
supports this point.30 Further, in BGE, Nietzsche speaks of the noble man
as someone “who enjoys practising severity and harshness upon himself”,31
and clearly what he has in mind is, at least in part, the controlling, directing,
channelling and moulding of the drives of the self. Hence, we may conclude
that the nobles are subject to the pre-moral bad conscience.
If my argument so far is right, what follows is that we have on our hands
a conception of nobles who are not inwardly empty. For they experience
fear before, and a pre-moral guilty indebtedness to, their ancestors in the
form of spirits. And they suffer from the pre-moral bad conscience. Such
nobles are creatures with at least the rudiments of inner depth.
But now, the nobles we are discussing carry within them all the
ingredients for the Zurückschiebung of pre-moral guilt into the bad
conscience to create moral guilt and therewith generate ressentiment in
them – for the spite, meanness, envy and desire for revenge which make
up ressentiment are, as we have already noted, the natural, if not
inevitable, accompaniments in human psychology of the moralized guilt
and frustration we have been discussing. Is there any reason for thinking
that this Zurückschiebung takes place? There are, in fact, three such
reasons.

28
GM, II, 17.
29
GM, I, 11.
30
BGE, §260.
31
BGE, §260.
180 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

Firstly, the slaves and priests are, according to Nietzsche, far cleverer
than the nobles.32 This strongly implies that the ascetic priest exploits all
the ingredients in the nobles which he has to hand, just as he does those of
the slaves, to instil in the nobles a sense of moral guilt – a point which has,
indeed, been made by other commentators.33 And this interpretation is
confirmed by Nietzsche’s summing up his lengthy discussion of the effect
of the ascetic priest on moral thinking generally by asserting unequivocally:
“The ascetic ideal has . . . ruined health”.34 For Nietzsche must mean here
that the ascetic priest has ruined the health of the nobles: it would make
no sense for him to have in mind here the ascetic priest’s effect on his flock,
for, according to Nietzsche, they have no health to be ruined.
Secondly, and connectedly, Nietzsche has described in the Essay One
of GM what he calls the slave revolt in morality, i.e., just the infection of
noble morality with slavish thinking which I have just mentioned. But, in
Essay One, he does nothing to make clear the mechanism by which this is
supposed to take place. My suggestion is that Essay Two is meant, through
the discussion of guilt, the bad conscience and the like, to provide an
explanation of precisely how this slave revolt happens.
Thirdly, as we have already seen, the examples that Nietzsche gives or
implies of the kind of nobles he has in mind in GM, e.g., Achilles, do not fit
the account he provides of nobility as involving the instant expenditure of
energy in action etc. Achilles experiences, as we have also seen, self-pity,
envy and related moral emotions. Yet he is, according to Nietzsche, noble.
Taken together, these three points allow us to infer that Nietzsche is
suggesting that the Zurückschiebung we have discussed takes place in the
nobles. In other words, he is suggesting that there is a form of nobility which
is not exclusive of the kinds of feelings he describes as being characteristic
of slave morality, i.e., ressentiment, guilt, self-pity, envy, mean-spiritedness
and the like. But how can this be so? How can there be a form of nobility
that is not exclusive of these things?
We can begin to answer this – providing an answer is, in fact, the central
goal of the rest of this paper – if we turn again to consider Achilles.
Achilles does not show his true worldly nobility in his sulks – far from
it. Nor does he show an affirmation of life in this. When Patroclus is killed
and Achilles wreaks his revenge on Hector by dragging his body around
behind his chariot it is evident that he is doing everything but showing that
he would be willing to have his life back again as it has been. Clearly, he is

32
GM, I, 11.
33
See, e.g., M. Tanner, Nietzsche. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1994, p. 72.
34
GM, III, 23.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 181

filled with regrets of the most corrosive kind at what has happened. Yet
there is a point at which Achilles shows true nobility. It comes where he
finally begins to emerge from his god-like self-absorption when Priam
comes to ransom his son’s body. He shows his nobility in – at last – touching
his own humanity in being moved by Priam’s plight, thus showing that he
has done something to overcome his resentment and childish self-pity at
having been treated by Agamemnon as he was: finally, he is beginning to
put the past behind him, i.e., be reconciled to it as it was.
It is here in the ability to overcome the elements of slavish morality in
oneself that we can find a notion of nobility and the affirmation of life which
is true to Nietzsche’s aims but which breaks with these notions in a purely
worldly sense. The seeds of this new kind of nobility and affirmation are
found in Achilles – the Achilles of the end of the Iliad, not the beginning.
There can be a nobility and an affirmation which is consistent with the
patterns of moral emotions Nietzsche so deeply dislikes when we see that
these emotions are overcome by the person who experiences them. We must
try now to explain just what this conception of nobility and affirmation is.

5.
On the conception of nobility and affirmation that we are now to discuss
the affirmer would not, if offered the opportunity, want his life to recur
with all its pain and suffering in preference to a similar life in which there
was less pain and suffering. Yet, for all that, he does genuinely affirm life.
Achilles, when he is moved by Priam and begins thus to overcome his
feelings of revenge and envy, would much rather his life not have contained
the pain of losing his booty in the war to Agamemnon and that of the death
of Patroclus to which this led, yet, in being thus moved, he is able to be more
reconciled with, and accepting of, his past than at any other point in the Iliad.
There is, indeed, both nobility and affirmation in Achilles at this point.
Nietzsche rarely explicitly emphasizes this inward form of nobility and
affirmation, for, as noted at the outset, he does not properly distinguish it
from the worldly form of nobility. Yet he shows in his response to certain
lives that he is working with this idea. The most important of these lives
may be surprising: it is that of Christ. For Nietzsche certainly thought that
Christ affirmed life:35 “Denial is just that which is impossible for him”.36

35
For a sustained and interesting discussion of Nietzsche’s account of Christ as an
affirmer of life, see P. Berkowitz, Nietzsche: the Ethics of an Immoralist. Harvard Uni-
versity Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1995, ch. 4.
36
The Anti-Christ, §32. [Hereafter: A].
182 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

According to Nietzsche, Christ overcame the whole moral-psychological

apparatus of sin, guilt and so on.37 Further, Nietzsche thought of Christ as
having overcome ressentiment in himself.38 He even said: “One could, with
a certain tolerance in the expression, call Jesus a free spirit”.39 Again,
Nietzsche spoke of Christ as being childlike, recalling the latter’s injunction
that we become like little children, whilst declaring, in TSZ, that the third
and consummating metamorphosis of the spirit was a metamorphosis into
a child. But it would clearly be not only wrongheaded but vulgar in the
extreme to suggest that Christ in any sense would have wanted his
sufferings to recur. And Nietzsche, of course, despite his thinking that Christ
affirmed or loved life, entertained no such thing. Nowhere does he suggest
that Christ’s longings to be free of his sufferings – that his cup pass from
him, for example; or his despair in the face of his sufferings – for example,
on the cross – in any way impugned his affirmation or love of life. But
then, what kind of affirmation are we dealing with?40
Someone who affirms life in the sense we are now discussing is
possessed of a gratitude to life which does not involve his weighing up
the good and bad in it to arrive at an overall conception of, or balanced
judgement on, its worth. Nietzsche put this in terms of amor fati: he sought
to affirm his life in a way which was not dependent upon how well things,
on balance, and in a worldly sense, had gone in it. And he further spoke in
this connexion in praise of the squandering spirit (der verschwenderische
Geist), the person who does not, like an accountant, balance up the good
and bad in his life to come to a judicious judgement on its value, but who
affirms it even if it has not gone just as he wished. I shall try to make clear
this notion of affirmation.
We can make a start by reflecting upon a very common experience that
people have with respect to their past. For it is very usual for people to
feel an affection and warmth for their own individual past even when that
past has contained some pain and suffering. It is the sheer fact of its being
their past which makes this possible. A person’s past is a unique possession,
something which he has truly to call his own in a world where everything
else either is or readily seems merely common property – or, at any rate,

37
See, A, §§26, 33 & 38.
38
A, §40.
39
A, §32. The “tolerance in the expression” is necessary in Nietzsche’s eyes on ac-
count of Christ’s freedom from concerns of culture, and does not affect the substantive
point.
40
In what follows, I am indebted to R. Gaita Good and Evil: an Absolute Conception.
Macmillan: London, 1991, ch. 11.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 183

could easily become so. Even where that past has been painful, has
contained suffering or has been otherwise disappointing, it retains its
importance for the individual in question and is claimed by him as his own,
and it can be something that he cherishes even with all its pain. Of course,
not everyone is able to cherish his past when it contains pain and suffering,
but this is, I think, quite a common reaction where that pain and suffering
has not been great.
Such an attitude to the milder forms of one’s past pain and sufferings
does not exclude the thought that one would have liked things to go
otherwise with one. Someone who cherishes his past in the kind of way
we are discussing will no doubt accept the thought that, if he could have
his life over again, he would prefer it to contain less pain this time round.
But he would see this as a pointless thought and for this very reason be in
a state of affirmation towards that past. His attitude would be: “There is
nothing I can do about changing my past and for this reason I do not want
to waste time wishing it had been otherwise or having regrets about it. I
am who I am, the fruit – in part – of my past, and I seek to get on with
things as they are, am not forever looking over my shoulder to what might
have been.”
It is such a relation to one’s past which marks the beginning of the
possibility of the kind of attitude to life which I am suggesting underlies
Nietzsche’s notion of an affirmation of life that is not dependent upon how
well things have gone in it on balance in a worldly sense (though, as I argue
below (§10), we shall, finally, need to supplement and criticize Nietzsche’s
thinking on this topic to make proper sense of this kind of affirmation).
For what he has in mind is the development in two directions of the idea
of being able to cherish one’s past even when it has contained some pain
and suffering. The first is the deepening of this attitude so that it involves
the affirmation of not merely the smaller of one’s pains and sorrows but
all of them, including those that are the most profound and from which
one naturally shrinks. The second is the extending of this attitude to one’s
past to include one’s present so that one is able to affirm even present pains
and sufferings.
Someone who affirms life in this deeper way must leave his love or
affirmation of life open to repudiation. He must clear-sightedly know that,
despite all the pains and suffering in his life which he affirms, tomorrow
his life could be reduced to ashes and he could curse the day he was born.
But such an affirmer of life will love life even as he happily says that, if he
had the chance, he would prefer having his life over again without the pain
and suffering it in fact contained to having his life over again with those
very same things. The issue here is one of the quality of his spirit. He will
184 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

accept those things which harm or have harmed him with an equanimity
or, to use Nietzsche’s term, a freedom of spirit, even as in the case of present
pains he seeks to avoid them or to extricate himself from them: he will not
become bitter or resentful. It is the spirit of his acceptance of his pain and
suffering that is being referred to in saying that his love of life is not a
balancing up of the good and ill in it in order to come to a judicious or
balanced judgement on its worth (an attitude to life which, for Nietzsche,
can only evince a smallness of spirit). His affirmation of his life will be
shown by his attitude to the question: “Would you like to live your life
over again exactly as it was and is with all of its pain and suffering?” For
his answer to that would be: “I would prefer it with less pain and suffering.
But about past pain there is nothing I can do and I have no intention in
wasting my time in wishing things had been otherwise. I want to get on
with my life as it is, with its past as it is, making the best attempt I can to
turn that past to account in the present and for the future. And about present
pains I can do something: I am trying to ease them. But if the ease does
not come then I shall seek to draw on my spiritual resources to accept these
present pains with as little resentment and bitterness as I can.” That such
a person would be affirming his life would be shown by his indifference
to the question whether he would like his life over again with fewer pains
and sorrows: of course he would prefer his life with less pain and less
sorrow, but he will dismiss such a possibility as idle fantasy and thereby
show his affirmation of his life as it actually was and is. Those who do not
affirm their lives are precisely those who do not clear-sightedly see the
possibility in question for the fantasy that it is, i.e., do not give it up right
to the core of their souls. For it is extraordinarily difficult to give up this
fantasy: to do so is a very rare spiritual achievement which is marked by
the complete absence of idle wishes and regrets (‘If only . . .’, ‘What if
. . .?’) and bitterness and resentment about the past.
An example may help to make clear the kind of affirmation of life I have
in mind. Consider Montaigne. Towards the end of his life he suffered from
a ‘stone’ which caused “dreadful internal pain and the retention of urine
accompanied by paroxysms”.41 Montaigne discussed his illness in his last
essay, ‘On experience’, about which M.A. Screech has said that it “gives
us the distillation of his mature thought, showing us how to live our lives
with gratitude”.42 Montaigne writes:

41
M. Montaigne The Complete Essays, M.A. Screech (trans.) Penguin: Harmondsworth,
1991, p. xlvi, fn. 42.
42
Ibid., p. xliv.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 185

It is unfair to moan because what can happen to any has happened to one. . . . We
must learn to suffer what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of
the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat,
soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got
to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good
and ill, which are of one substance with our life.43

There is a genuine love of life and nobility in what Montaigne says,44 but
it would be quite wrong to suggest that he would in any sense not have
avoided his ill fortune if he could have. If he had been offered his life again
without that suffering he would have taken it in preference to the same
life with that suffering, yet he wasted no time in empty fantasy about the
possibility of having such a pain-free life and thereby showed his
affirmation of his life as it actually was. As he himself said: “I so order my
soul that it can contemplate both pain and pleasure with eyes equally
restrained . . . doing so with eyes equally steady, yet looking merrily at
one and soberly at the other and, in so far as it can contribute anything,
being as keen to snuff out the one as to stretch out the other”.45 Thus the
central way in which Montaigne’s love of life expressed itself was in the
quality of his spirit in his response to both pleasures and pains, to both
joys and sorrows. He was possessed of that which Nietzsche called a free
spirit. And when it comes to the quality of his spirit in his response to
misfortune in particular, we see in him neither any of that emotional self-
indulgence and self-pity which we so often go in for when struck by
misfortune, and which itself often prolongs our suffering and betrays the
fact that we are enjoying it; nor any of that mean-spiritedness of
ressentiment which compensates for our pain even as we are reaping
pleasure from it. We see, that is, none of that which in human beings
naturally accompanies suffering and which we can therefore think of
Montaigne as having overcome in himself – though I must stress that, in
speaking of Montaigne’s overcoming of ressentiment and the like, I am
not speculating on the occurrence of some psychological struggle on his
part – though one could not rule this out – but marking our sense that in
his response to suffering he was pushing at the limits of that which we think
humanly possible. There was an extraordinary strength in Montaigne. In
short, the most illuminating way in which we can understand Montaigne’s
affirmation of life is in the terms Nietzsche offers us.
43
Ibid., pp. 1236–1237.
44
Cf. A. Comte-Sponville, “The Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete: ‘Art in the Serv-
ice of Illusion’ ”, in L. Ferry and A. Renaut (eds.), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, R. de
Loaiza, (trans.) University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1997, p. 42.
45
M. Montaigne, op. cit., p. 1262.
186 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

Of course, Montaigne was able to react to his sufferings as he did

because there was much else in his life which gave him spiritual nourishment
or sustenance. Nietzsche put the need of this sustenance in order to affirm
life in terms of experiencing a moment so tremendous that for its sake one
would wish to live again.46 Montaigne sought to show in his final essay –
indeed, throughout The Essays – how, by attending to them properly, the
most banal and quotidian of activities – eating, drinking, shitting, dressing,
moving, breathing and so on – can provide (some of) the spiritual
sustenance which allows us to affirm even our misfortunes and sufferings
through accepting them in a spirit of equanimity. We see Montaigne’s
freedom of spirit as much as in his response to pleasure – and in his
willingness to find pleasure where he could – as in his response to
misfortune. This is why he said, in a comment that is profoundly
Nietzschean avant la lettre: “[T]he most uncouth of our afflictions is to
despise our being”.47 Montaigne was, indeed, in his understanding of, and
response to, pleasure and pain, “superficial out of profundity”.48

8.

The understanding of nobility we have been discussing I have called an

inward conception of nobility. I have done so because it is an understanding
of nobility according to which we find someone noble if he can affirm or
love life without becoming bitter and resentful even if things do not go for
him in a worldly sense in the way he wants. Someone may object that this
equanimity in the face of worldly success seems un-Nietzschean. However,
this objection overlooks the point that this affirmation of life is wholly
consistent with the attempt on the part of the affirmer of life in the relevant
sense to seek to change the world in the light of his desires, needs and so
on. For the point is rather that this kind of affirmation involves one’s not
becoming bitter if one’s will proves unable to shape the world in this way.
Further, this kind of affirmation is quite consistent with making very heavy
demands on life itself. There is nothing in this kind of affirmation which
requires modesty of desire. Consider, for example, the case of Napoleon,
than whom few make greater demands on life, and whom, of course,
Nietzsche admired as being noble. For the greater part of his career things

46
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341. [Hereafter: GS]. Cf. E. Heller, The Importance
of Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1988, p. 182.
47
M. Montaigne op. cit, p. 1262.
48
GS, Preface to Second Edition.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 187

went his way and he revelled in his success. Yet his nobility and affirmation
show through as much in his response (sustained for the most part) to his
final defeat and exile to St. Helena as in his response to his successes. As
Vincent Cronin has written:

During his five and a half years on St. Helena, right up until his final illness, Napoleon
remained unbroken in spirit. . . . [H]e never gave way to despair. His body might be
held prisoner but his soul, he liked to say, was still free. . . . [R]egret never became
his dominant mood. His thoughts, as revealed in conversation, were clear, trenchant
and positive. He still managed, on this forsaken rock, to be himself.49

He still managed, that is, to retain his freedom of spirit. And Evangeline
Bruce has written apropos of Napoleon’s final days that in the records of
his conversations “we are left constantly exhilarated by the incisiveness
of his views . . . and by his merciless clairvoyance as he meditates on battles
and treaties and on the administration of his armies. . . . When he judges
himself and his errors, there is no self-pity. He was a realist about
himself. . . .”.50 If Napoleon had become sentimental and self-pitying after
his defeat then this would for many have marred his achievements and his
nobility. As it is, the very grace and spirit with which he accepted his final
defeat and exile showed his nobility and affirmation of life as much as his
prowess in battle.51

9.

Thus far I have not distinguished between someone who affirms life (in
an inward sense) and someone who merely affirms his life. But we need
to make this distinction because a serious objection has been raised to the
notion of the affirmation of life which makes us see the significance of
that very distinction. Henry Staten has written:

49
V. Cronin, Napoleon. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 529.
50
E. Bruce, Napoleon and Josephine: an Improbable Marriage. Orion: London, 1995,
p. 507.
51
Nietzsche, despite his usual intense admiration for Napoleon, sometimes shows an
ambivalent attitude to him, e.g., when he says that even he was corrupted and “lost
noblesse of character” (see The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (trans.)
Vintage: New York, 1968, §1026). This, however, does affect the point I am making, since,
even if it is true that Napoleon lost his noblesse of character, we can still say that to have
retained it would have involved his not becoming bitter and resentful about his final
downfall.
188 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

For each of us to redeem our own relation to our personal past and to the past in
general might . . . make us affirmers of life. But as regards the past in general this
affirmation has not been thought through very seriously or in any detail, either by
Nietzsche or those of his interpreters who blithely tell us that “the eternal recurrence
signifies my ability to want my life and the whole world [emphasis added] to be repeated
just as they are”. . . . [W]hat about the inwardness of the world, the subjectivity of
each experiencing being which is itself an absolute origin of the world? Might there not
be such a thing as terror so overwhelming that the sufferer cannot or will not affirm it,
and in that case who can affirm it on his or her behalf?52

I have argued that we can make sense of the notion of the affirmation of
one’s own life. Staten’s objection thus raises for us the worry whether this
can ever be more than an affirmation of one’s own life, i.e., can it ever be
right to say of someone that he affirms not merely his own life but life –
life simpliciter or life überhaupt, as one might put it? I believe that we can
make sense of such a notion of affirmation and I shall try to explain how.
However, as I indicated at the outset of this paper, I shall argue that we
can do this only at the cost of embracing an understanding of the nature of
human individuality which finds no proper place in Nietzsche’s philosophy.
To that extent, Nietzsche’s notion of inward nobility and affirmation of life
cannot be defended within the terms of his own philosophy.

10.

It might seem that there is a quick answer to Staten’s worry. For suppose
there were a human being of such monumental hardness that he was utterly
indifferent to the sufferings of others. Perhaps the character Orlov whom
I mentioned earlier approaches such a condition. Such a person would not
be concerned about the inwardness of each subject and, if he were to affirm
his own life (in a worldly sense), would not be bothered by the sufferings
of others. (This should make us think once more of Achilles who fantasizes
at one point in the Iliad that the entire world be destroyed but for him and
Patroclus.) Would this not be an affirmation of life on behalf of others?
No. For, apart from earlier worries about whether Orlov really is noble and
an affirmer of life in the worldly sense, being utterly indifferent to the
sufferings of others is clearly not the same as affirming those sufferings.
If I do not care about your pains – or even if I enjoy your experiencing

52
H. Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1990, pp. 75–76, quot-
ing A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Mass., 1985, p. 191.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 189

pains – this does not mean I am affirming them.53 Otherwise put, my

indifference to your pain can just as readily be thought of as a denial of
your pain as an affirmation of it. This point may, indeed, seem so clear that
it is hardly worth mentioning, but in fact Nietzsche himself seeks to give
the impression that indifference to another’s suffering is the same as an
affirmation of that suffering, and he thereby conceals from himself the
difficulties there are in the worldly notion of nobility and affirmation.
Likening worldly nobles to birds of prey and the slaves to lambs, he
contrives to give the impression that the fact that the former like to eat the
latter means that they affirm them whereas the lambs, in not liking the birds
of prey, are unable to affirm them: “That the lambs dislike the birds of prey
is no cause for surprise . . . [but] the birds of prey say to each other ‘we do
not dislike these good lambs, we even love them: nothing tastes better than
a tender lamb’ ’’.54 Nietzsche’s joke here conceals the problem with which
we are dealing, rather then solving it. We need to seek for another response
to Staten’s worry. And to find such a response I turn once again to
Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche’s own superior teacher in matters of psychology.
In Dostoyevsky’s The Devils the character Kirilov says that he believes
that all life is good.55 He says that he is grateful for life. At one point he is
challenged by Stavrogin: does he think that the rapist is good?56 At first he
says yes, then the retracts this saying that the rapist is not good because he
does not know he is good: if he knew this, he would become good. No
doubt Kirilov is confused, but his confusion stems, I think, from the fact
that the question he is asked cannot be answered in the spirit in which it is
posed. I must try to explain why.
The inward conception of nobility and affirmation of life that we have
been exploring involves, I have argued, an attitude to one’s life which does
not depend upon the weighing up of good and ill in it to come to a balanced
judgement on its worth. Hence, this affirmation is consistent with preferring
that one’s life have contained less suffering even as one affirms it with that
suffering (Napoleon affirmed his defeat and exile but would have preferred
a life in which he was ultimately victorious). Similarly, if someone affirms
life in the inward sense he will not view others and their deeds on the model
of weighing up what is good and bad in them in order to arrive at a balanced

53
Cf. O. Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks. University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 1984, p. 69.
54
GM, I, 13.
55
F. Dostoyevsky, The Devils, D. Magarshack (trans.) Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972,
esp. Part II, ch. 5.
56
F. Dostoyevsky, ibid., pp. 243–244.
190 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

judgement on their value. Thus this will give him room, even as he affirms
their lives, for condemning them for their behaviour or, alternatively, for
seeking to bring about the cessation of their sufferings (or, at any rate, for
thinking such a cessation would be a good thing). Staten’s objection would
then get no grip here, for a Kirilov can affirm the lives of others – including
that of the rapist and of the rapist’s victim – in a way which has nothing to
do with actually affirming the very actions that they commit or the very
sufferings that they undergo. And this would be an affirmation of the
inwardness of others – an affirmation of the world on behalf of others –
not merely an affirmation of one’s own life. How are we to understand
this affirmation?
Most fundamentally, I think, the affirmation in question will involve
the thought that one shares a common lot with others. We can put the point
this way:57 however mean, squalid, petty or even evil a person’s life is, it
is still a life with a meaning, even if that meaning is elusive to the person
whose life it is. This differentiates it radically from an animal’s life, for an
animal’s life has no meaning: an animal cannot, for example, betray itself
or seek to be faithful to itself; it cannot despair of its life; it cannot find its
work soul-destroying.58 And someone who affirms such a life thinks that
the fact that it is a life with meaning gives the person in question a dignity
or value independent of e.g. the vileness of his actions. For, in affirming
such a life, what he is doing is expressing his sense that its meaning
illuminates his own life and that therefore he is implicated in that life in a
way he could not be in, say, an animal’s life. He will think that he shares
with the other a joint responsibility for humanity; that it is only by luck or
grace that he has not committed the deeds that the other has committed;
and that he is therefore in some way enmired in the guilt in which the other
is enmired. It is such an understanding which is expressed by those, of
whom Dostoyevsky speaks in The House of the Dead, who referred to him
and his fellow convicts as “unfortunates”, a way of speaking which, as
Dostoyevsky says, is “of profound significance”.59

57
For ease of exposition I am concentrating here on the affirmation of those of whose
character and actions one in some way disapproves. The same fundamental idea of this
affirmation underlies the affirmation of those who are suffering or are otherwise weak or
sick, i.e., they are thought to have a dignity or worth independent of their afflicted con-
dition and it is not this condition itself which is affirmed.
58
Cf. R. Gaita, op. cit. p. 133. Cf. also P. Winch, Ethics and Action. Routledge and
Kegan Paul: London, 1972, pp. 44ff.
59
F. Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, David McDuff (trans.) Penguin:
Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 80.
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 191

Hence it is that central to Kirilov’s affirmation of the rapist is the thought

that the meaning of his, Kirilov’s, life is illuminated by the meaning of
the life of the rapist. His thought is that it is only by luck or grace that he,
too, is not a rapist. But this does not mean that would not condemn his
actions. On the contrary, it means that his condemnation of his deeds would
express a profoundly pure conception of justice.
We can see this way of thinking more clearly if we consider some
comments of Primo Levi’s concerning his time spent in Auschwitz.
Levi certainly rejected the absurd idea, which some contrive to find
profound, that we are all murderers. “I know that the murderers existed,
not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and to confuse
them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a
sinister sign of complicity . . .”.60 However, Levi certainly thought of
himself as sharing a common lot with those who were deeply embroiled
in the evil of the Third Reich in the sense I have tried to bring out. This
emerges, for example, in his discussion of Chaim Rumkowski, the Jew who
contrived to get himself set up by the Nazis as the president of the Lodz
ghetto and managed to exercise a dictatorship which was, as Levi says,
“an astonishing tangle of megalomaniac dream, barbaric vitality, and real
diplomatic and organisational skill”.61 For Levi says of him: “We are all
mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we
hybrids moulded from clay and spirit”.62 Levi felt the same way about the
Nazis, and in his comments on them we can see his sense of sharing a joint
responsibility with others for humanity.

[T]he just among us [victims of Auschwitz], neither more nor less numerous than in
any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and
not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that
what had happened around them in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. It
would never again be able to be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species
– we, in short – were potentially able to construct an infinite enormity of pain; and
that pain is the only force that is created from nothing, without cost and without effort.63

Levi was able to affirm the Nazis in a way that had nothing to do with
approving of their actions and everything to do with wanting punishment
for them with a concern for justice of the purest form, utterly free from

60
P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, R. Rosenthal (trans.) Abacus: London, 1988,
pp. 32–33.
61
Ibid., p. 45.
62
Ibid., p. 50.
63
Ibid., p. 66.
192 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON

feelings of revenge. He was able to do this because he was free of hatred

for them, for he thought of himself as sharing a common lot, a common
responsibility for humanity, with them: as he understood things, theirs were
lives with a meaning which illuminated the meaning of his own life. And
it was because he thought of them in this way that he thought of them as
having dignity or value independent of their vile deeds. And all of this was
his affirmation of the Nazis.
If this line of reflection is right, then we can make sense of a form of
affirmation which is an affirmation not simply of one’s own life but of life
– of the inwardness of each absolute origin of the world, to use Staten’s
terms. Such an affirmation would be a rare spiritual achievement. But now
we are in a position to see that Nietzsche’s conception of nobility and
affirmation of life – understood in the inward sense – cannot, within the
terms of his own philosophy, be rendered finally plausible. For there is no
room in his work for the idea that each human being has a dignity or worth
independently of his actions. On the contrary, he precisely assimilates most
human beings to animals – the herd – thus denying not only that they
possess this dignity but that the meaning of his life – or the meaning of the
lives of those whom he thinks of great men in various ways (e.g., Napoleon,
Goethe) – could be illuminated by the lives of most people. He denies that
the lives of most people have meaning and that he and other great men
share a common lot with other human beings. And since he denies these
things, he cannot make proper sense of the notion of an (inward) affirmation
of life which is any more than an affirmation of one’s own life.

11.

In conclusion, then, I have argued that Nietzsche’s notions of nobility and

the affirmation of life are not plausible as they stand. For he does not and
cannot provide a proper account of these ideas in a worldly sense. And his
notion of affirmation in an inward sense is broken backed, since to make
plausible the idea of not merely an affirmation of one’s own life but of an
affirmation of life, there would have to be room in his philosophy for the
idea that each individual human being has a unique worth or dignity
independent of his deeds. But there is no such room.
Nonetheless, even though Nietzsche himself did not work out a coherent
notion of the inward affirmation of life, he has allowed us to develop such
an idea. I shall end by making one comment on this notion.
As we have seen, the idea of an inward affirmation of life involves,
amongst other things, a belief in the unique dignity or worth of every
 NIETZSCHE ON NOBILITY AND THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE 193

individual human being. But in such an affirmation this cannot remain a

mere belief. Really to live in the light of this idea would be a great and
rare spiritual achievement. It would involve, amongst other things, what
Simone Weil called the “supernatural virtue of justice” which

consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in
an unequal relationship. Exactly, in every respect, including the slightest details of
accent and attitude, for a detail may be enough to place the weaker party in a condition
of matter which on this occasion naturally belongs to him, just as the slightest shock
causes water which has remained liquid below freezing point to solidify.64

The idea that human beings have a unique worth or dignity has, of course,
in one way or another, passed into much contemporary ethical thought and
lies at the basis of modern liberal thinking. It is embodied in, for example,
our notion of human rights and human equality. But if I am right in my
characterization of the affirmation of life then we must acknowledge the
vast gap that exists between espousal of belief in human rights and equality
(the kind of thing that can be enshrined in positive law and can become
anyone’s possession overnight, so to speak) and the kind of rare spiritual
achievement that such an affirmation is – even though the same thought
lies at the basis of both. We should be less ready than we are to congratulate
ourselves on our unparalleled concern for human welfare. And that, after
all, is a Nietzschean point.65

27 Clifden Road
Twickenham
Middlesex TW1 4LU
UK

64
S. Weil, Waiting on God, E. Crauford (trans.) Fount: London, 1977, p. 100.
65
I am extremely grateful for the perceptive and valuable comments on an earlier
version of this paper by two anonymous referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
All translations from Nietzsche are my own. I have used: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische
Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari. de Gruyter:
Berlin, 1980.
194 CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON