In his understanding of passion, Nietzsche closely follows Kant and Schopenhauer. For all three, passion is a uniquely demanding variety of desire: desire so strong that we are compelled to pursue its object regardless of the cost. In his evaluation of passion, however, Nietzsche is unique: while Kant and Schopenhauer both condemn passion, Nietzsche celebrates it. I argue that this celebration of passion is more central to Nietzsche’s thought than it might initially appear. Nietzsche does not encourage appreciation of passion simply because it functions as one means among many for driving change and growth. Rather, Nietzsche holds that valuing passion is essential to valuing life. This follows from passion’s role in resolving a problem highlighted by Schopenhauer’s pessimism: namely, the difficulty of valuing life when avoiding harm is your dominant concern.
In a recent paper, Keith Ansell-Pearson (
On Ansell-Pearson’s account, this follows from passion’s contribution to self-cultivation. Passion offers a powerful motivational force. As such, it can push us into new experiences and situations, leading to change. Change, in turn, is a prerequisite for growth. Passion is thus valuable as one means among many for the individual’s transformation into their most beautiful form.
What Ansell-Pearson says about passion’s role as a source of growth seems right to me. However, focusing on this aspect of passion’s value undersells its significance. Nietzsche does not just identify passion as one means among many that can contribute to self-cultivation. He also suggests that valuing passion is essential to valuing our lives.
In what follows, I will take a somewhat indirect route to justifying this assertion. After saying a bit about how Nietzsche understands passion, I will turn my attention to a surprising claim Nietzsche makes about Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Nietzsche suggests that the clearest evidence against Schopenhauer is provided by
If this is correct, then Nietzsche took Schopenhauer’s pessimism to be refuted by the possibility of valuing passion. In the remaining sections of the essay, I will explain this connection between valuing passion and valuing our lives. I will argue that Nietzsche took Schopenhauer’s pessimism to turn on the claim that human beings spend life fleeing harm rather than pursuing benefit. The merely
Passion’s uniquely demanding character allows it to answer these Schopenhauerian worries. A passion compels us to pursue its object
This will hold, however, only if passion’s object is not itself valued as a mere means of escaping harm: even if there is one harm that I would undergo any other harm to avoid, the avoidance of harm still remains my priority. It is here that the possibility of not only having passions but
Throughout this paper, I will argue that Nietzsche takes valuing passion to be a precondition of valuing life. As noted above, however, Nietzsche uses the term ‘passion’ (
In the
Inclination that prevents reason from comparing it with the sum of all inclinations in respect to a certain choice is passion. (
A passion, then, is a desire strong enough to rule out consideration of the costs involved in pursuing its object. The passionate person does not consider whether pursuing this one thing that they want might cost them many other things that they want: in Kant’s terms, they do not compare the significance of gratifying this one inclination with that of gratifying all other inclinations. Even if obtaining the object of their passionate desire means losing the objects of every other desire, they still press ahead. In this respect, Kant presents the passionate person as uniquely insensitive to
The ambitious person nevertheless also wants to be loved by others; he needs pleasant social intercourse with others, the maintenance of his financial position, and the like. However, if he is a passionately ambitious person, then he is blind to these ends, though his inclinations still summon him to them, and he overlooks completely the risk he is running [
Ordinarily, the ambitious person pursues status
This same view of passion appears in Schopenhauer’s explanation of regret:
Like Kant, Schopenhauer understands passion as a uniquely
Nietzsche’s discussion of passion rests on this same view. Thus, Nietzsche characterizes passion as an ‘unconditional inclination and urge [
An animal that protects its young at the risk of its life, or that during the mating period follows the female even into death, does not think of danger [
As in Kant and Schopenhauer, passion is presented as an obstacle to rational deliberation: when in the grip of passion, an individual’s reason ‘pauses’, they ‘become[] more stupid than usual’, and their intellect is reduced ‘to silence or to servitude’. Again as in Kant and Schopenhauer, passion is taken to have this effect because it prevents us from considering the costs of pursuing its object: the passionate individual ‘does not think of danger and death’. For this reason, Nietzsche characterizes passion as a uniquely
All these morals directed at the individual person to promote what people call his ‘happiness’—are they anything other than recommendations for constraint, in proportion to the degree of danger [
Passions are desires that ‘want to play master’: that is, desires which require their objects to be pursued unconditionally. In this sense, they are rightly condemned by any morality focused on reducing the ‘degree of danger’ in which an individual lives. To be in the grip of passion is to no longer make avoiding danger a priority. Passion is thus a threat to the kind of happiness that Nietzsche puts in quotation marks: namely, the
Nietzsche, then, seems to share an understanding of passion with Schopenhauer and Kant: for all three, passion is a desire strong enough that no consideration is given to the potential harms involved in pursuing its object. For both Kant and Schopenhauer, it follows from this view that passion is a disaster. As Kant puts it:
No human being wishes to have passion. For who wants to have himself put in chains when he can be free? (
Nietzsche, then, has a question to answer. He shares Kant and Schopenhauer’s definition of passion. Why does he nonetheless encourage us to value it?
I argue that Nietzsche has a striking answer to that question: valuing passion is a prerequisite for valuing life. As noted earlier, I rest this interpretation on a claim Nietzsche makes about Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Namely, that this pessimism finds its clearest counterexample in
Before getting into the details of this argument, it will help to explain what Nietzsche means when describing something as a
As many have noted, however, Nietzsche’s engagement with pessimism takes an atypical form. This is because Nietzsche denies that pessimism’s fundamental problem admits of an epistemically significant answer: no human being can
Judgments, value judgments on life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms [
Judgments about life’s value ‘can be taken seriously only as symptoms’: that is to say, they always reflect features of the individual making the judgment rather than the thing being judged. When someone denounces life, that does not tell us anything about life. Rather, it tells us something about the psychology of the person judging life. For Nietzsche, then, seriously engaging with pessimism requires converting it into a
This way of thinking about pessimism is what underwrites Nietzsche’s claim that pessimism might have a
a patient and tedious campaign against the unscientific basic tendency of [] romantic pessimism to interpret and inflate individual personal experiences into universal judgments [
The pessimist overgeneralizes: they take a limited number of cases and inflate those cases into the basis of a universal judgment. In so doing, they overlook the sharp differences between human beings, never acknowledging that different
Nietzsche makes this same claim about Schopenhauer specifically. Schopenhauer’s pessimism consists in taking features of his own psychology—things that made valuing life difficult for him in particular—and treating them as general obstacles to life’s appreciation:
But it [the will to immortalize] can also by the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering [
On this account, Schopenhauer’s pessimism consists in taking something idiosyncratic as if it were ‘a binding law’: the particularities of some individuals’ psychology (in this case, of Schopenhauer’s own psychology) are treated as reflecting the basic laws of human nature.
Where a general conclusion is reached using a narrow dataset, counterexample becomes the relevant form of counterargument. Schopenhauer holds that human beings cannot value their lives. He rests this conclusion on the claim that
As noted earlier, this counterexample is the ability of at least some people to create and appreciate tragic drama. This point is made in
The psychology of the orgiastic, as an overflowing feeling of life and strength where even pain acts as a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of
The details of this passage are difficult to parse. I will elucidate them later by appealing to places where Nietzsche presents tragic psychology in plainer language. For now, what matters is simply the following: tragic psychology, the variety of aesthetic experience involved in the creation and appreciation of tragic art, is ‘the decisive refutation and
What, then, does Nietzsche identify as tragic psychology’s distinctive features? I take the answer to be the following: tragic psychology is distinguished by
A good starting point is the following passage from
Whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theater has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with
Tragedy expresses the attitude of someone ‘enamored of the passions as such’. This love is passed to the viewer not by inspiring new passions, but by changing the experience of passions already possessed:
This reading is borne out by a variety of places where Nietzsche identifies tragedy’s valorization of passion as the aspect of it which the Schopenhauerian pessimist must misunderstand in order to maintain their view:
Schopenhauer taught that the overall aim of art was ‘to free yourself from the will’, and he admired the great utility of tragedy in ‘teaching resignation’.—But this—I have already suggested—is a pessimist’s optic, his ‘evil eye’—: you need to ask artists themselves.
Schopenhauer rightly notes that tragedy presents many of life’s most horrible possibilities. Maintaining his pessimism, however, requires him to miss that tragedy presents these horrible possibilities only in order to celebrate passion’s ability to shine even in the face of such horrors. It is ‘the courage and freedom of
What happened to [Wagner] has happened to many artists: he misinterpreted the characters that he himself had created and misunderstood the philosophy that was implicit in his most characteristic works of art. . . . nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of Schopenhauer than what is distinctively Wagnerian in Wagner’s heroes: I mean the innocence of the utmost selfishness,
Holding on to Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the face of his own early works required Wagner to overlook what was most essential to them: the celebration of passion.
As a confirmation of this reading, it also explains Nietzsche’s language in the difficult
Nietzsche identifies tragic psychology as the chief counterexample to Schopenhauerian pessimism. I have argued that tragic psychology plays this role by establishing that we possess a particular capacity: namely, the capacity to delight in passion itself. Nietzsche must, then, take Schopenhauerian pessimism to turn on the claim that human beings cannot value passion. The next question, then: why did Nietzsche understand Schopenhauer in this way?
My answer to this question will come in two stages. In this section, I will argue that Nietzsche identified Schopenhauer’s pessimism with the claim that human life is dominated by the flight from harm. Then, in the next two sections, I will argue that Nietzsche took valuing our passions to be the key to avoiding this domination.
As I understand Schopenhauer’s pessimism, a crucial role is played by the distinction between negative goods and positive goods. A negative good is valued for removing something harmful from our lives. It makes us better off by making our condition in some respect
At a big-picture level, Schopenhauer’s pessimism turns on the view that human life is exclusively spent in the pursuit of negative goods. He claims that
I know of no greater absurdity than that of most metaphysical systems which declare evil [
Human beings experience various things as
Schopenhauer takes it to follow from this that the best human efforts can achieve is access to a
In the end, we never gain anything more than liberation from some suffering or desire, and so we find ourselves just the way we were before we had the desire. (
A negatively good condition has exactly one thing to recommend it: it is a state in which some harm is absent. As such, accessing a negatively good condition does not move us one step beyond a state of neutral indifference. Rather, it simply restores that neutral state by cancelling out a distressing departure from it. In the absence of positive good, then, human life is composed of two basic states: conditions of positive evil, which are experienced as harmful; and conditions of negative good, which are experienced as having merely neutral value.
From this account of life’s components, Schopenhauer concludes that human beings inevitably experience life as harmful. Human life is a whole composed out of parts that are experienced as harmful and parts that are experienced as neutral. If some parts of life are experienced as harmful, then it will be experienced as harmful on the whole unless it contains other parts capable of compensating for those harms. As Schopenhauer sees it, harm can only be compensated for by benefit. Human life, however, contains no beneficial parts. As such, the presence of
The above account of Schopenhauer’s pessimism skims over a tremendous amount of detail. Nonetheless, I hope it has established that it is at least plausible to see Schopenhauer’s pessimism as turning on a particular claim: namely, that human beings are not capable of aiming at anything better than negative good. Our lives are not spent pursuing things we experience as beneficial; they are spent fleeing things we experience as harmful. This asymmetry ensures that life is always experienced as harmful on the whole.
That this understanding of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is plausible does not necessarily mean that it is correct.
As far as the first question is concerned, the answer is clear: Nietzsche reads Schopenhauer as holding that
Philosophers have at all times appropriated the propositions of the examiners of men (moralists) and
For Nietzsche’s point to make sense, he has to view the three Schopenhauerian claims mentioned as fully universal. Popular moralists offered pleasure’s negativity as an ‘approximate signpost[]’: they meant to highlight the negativity of
Nietzsche, then, takes Schopenhauer to view
Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to
That Schopenhauer is included among the pessimists Nietzsche references here is apparent from the larger context of the passage: a critique of the morality of pity and the effort to ‘abolish suffering’ (
In Germany it was Schopenhauer, in England John Stuart Mill who gave the widest currency to the teaching of the sympathetic affects and of pity or the advantage of others as the principle of behaviour. (
As Nietzsche presents them, pessimists and utilitarians are united by a commitment to the morality of pity. Underlying this is another shared commitment: namely, an embrace of evaluative hedonism. It is only because Schopenhauer and Mill both take pleasure and pain so seriously that they converge on the project of suffering’s elimination. On Nietzsche’s reading, then, Schopenhauer takes all pleasure to be negative, and identifies pleasure as the only good. From this, it follows that Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer to identify all
Having answered the first question, the second still remains. Nietzsche took Schopenhauer to view all good as negative, but did he see this as the distinctive marker of Schopenhauer’s pessimism? An affirmative answer to this question can be supported in two ways: by looking at how Schopenhauer was presented in works Nietzsche was familiar with, and by looking at how Schopenhauer was presented in Nietzsche’s own work. To start with the contextual point: in the late 19th-century pessimism dispute, Schopenhauer was frequently discussed alongside the more contemporary pessimist, Eduard von Hartmann. Nietzsche, who thought little of Hartmann, acknowledges this pairing with regret:
There are even worse case of ‘and’; I have heard with my own ears, although only from university professors, ‘Schopenhauer
However much Nietzsche disliked this ‘and’, it was unavoidable in contemporary work on pessimism. This led contemporary discussions of Schopenhauer to emphasize places where his and Hartmann’s views diverged: what was distinctive of Schopenhauer’s pessimism was, above all, what distinguished it from Hartmann’s pessimism. Among the things commonly used to draw this distinction was the claim that Schopenhauer views all pleasure (and hence all good) as negative, while Hartmann takes some positive pleasure (and hence some positive good) to exist. To take examples from sources Nietzsche knew well, consider the following passages from the pessimist Olga Plümacher and the anti-pessimist James Sully respectively
Schopenhauer does violence to experience from love of his theory and denies the positive nature of pleasure [
if pleasure be nothing but satisfaction of will, it follows, and has been commonly held to follow, that all pleasure is preceded by desire, that is by pain. . . . Hartmann, as we have seen, seeks to modify this doctrine; of this I shall speak presently. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, recognises the connection between the idea of pleasure as satisfaction of will and that of the negativity of pleasure, and asserts the logical consequences of his doctrine without any attempt at qualification. (
Both commentators take it as a given that Schopenhauer denies the existence of positive good. Moreover, far from treating this as a marginal feature of Schopenhauer’s account, both treat it as a defining feature of his view. Schopenhauerian pessimism is a distinctive kind of pessimism in part because it rests on the negativity of all good.
This same suggestion appears (albeit in a complex way) in Nietzsche’s discussion of Schopenhauer in
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the
In this passage, Nietzsche draws a distinction between two kinds of people: those who suffer from ‘the
Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness [
In the last section, I suggested that Nietzsche identifies Schopenhauer’s pessimism with the claim that human beings exclusively seek
We can now return to passion. Above, I argued that Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer’s pessimism to be refuted by the possibility of valuing passion. If I am correct about how Nietzsche understands Schopenhauer’s pessimism, then we can convert this into a claim about negative good. The claim that human beings pursue exclusively negative goods is refuted by the possibility of valuing passion. To put it another way: that human beings are capable of valuing passion proves that their lives can be spent on more than the effort to escape harm.
To understand this claim, it will help to recall the definition of passion Nietzsche is working with. A passion is a desire strong enough that we disregard the costs of pursuing its object. An ordinary desire only pushes us to pursue its object on the condition that this can be done safely. A passionate desire, in contrast, is an ‘unconditional inclination and urge’: our concern to pursue its object so far outstrips our concern to avoid harm, that the possibility of harm is not even taken into consideration before we act.
From this definition alone, we can already see the shape of a challenge to Schopenhauer’s pessimism. For a passionless person, the desire to avoid harm holds a veto power over all other motivations. Nothing else is desired strongly enough to break aversion to harm’s grip. As Nietzsche puts it when contrasting ‘noble’ passionate individuals with ‘common’ passionless ones in
What distinguishes the common type [
For the passionless person, concern for ‘advantage’ functions as the dominant motive. In this context, however, seeking ‘advantage’ simply means avoiding inexpedient risks: which is to say, potentially harmful actions. In case there is any doubt about this last point, it is even clearer when Nietzsche picks up the same distinction again in a later work:
There is something in Plato’s moral philosophy that does not really belong to him, but is there in spite of him, as it were: namely, the Socratism that he was really too noble [
Here again, we see Nietzsche distinguishing the noble and the common. As in
Nietzsche, then, takes the passionless person to live in a way that fits Schopenhauer’s account. For the passionless person, positive good is, at the very least, a marginal concern. The Schopenhauerian project of escaping harm is the dominant project of the passionless individual’s life. Negative good and negative good alone is what they prioritize. Judging solely from passionless individuals, Schopenhauer’s conclusion that life cannot be valued may be correct.
What blocks Schopenhauer’s conclusion is the existence of the passionate. The passionate are not dominated by the desire to avoid all harm. Rather, there is something else that they desire with such force that any general desire to avoid harm fades into the background. If the object of this powerful desire is something experienced as
This is, I take it, what Nietzsche had in mind when distinguishing between those who suffer from ‘the
Passion, then, opens a path for life to be experienced as more than a whole composed out of harmful and neutral parts. Where the object of passion is experienced as
An objection may quickly arise against the suggestion that passion answers Schopenhauer’s pessimism. As we saw back in section 2, Schopenhauer was very much aware of passion’s existence. He too understood that human beings can desire something so strongly that they disregard any dangers involved in its pursuit. Above, I suggested that Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer’s pessimism to rest on a hasty psychological generalization. Whatever that generalization is, it cannot be moving from the observation that some people lack passion to the conclusion that everyone lacks passion. The mere possibility of passion, then, cannot be sufficient to overcome Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
To clarify, however, the previous section’s claim was not that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is answered by the mere possibility of passion. Rather, it was that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is answered by the possibility of passion
When Schopenhauer thinks about passion, it is precisely this that he has in mind. On this view, the passionate person is
Neglect of one’s own well-being can lead to an egoistic regret: for instance, if an otherwise unadvisable marriage takes place as a result of passionate love that is extinguished [
As Schopenhauer sees it, passionate desire is
Countering Schopenhauer’s pessimism, then, requires more than just the possibility of passion. It requires the possibility of passion
What explains this is Nietzsche’s belief that only valued passion will have positive good as an object. When a passion is disvalued, we will suffer from it in the way that Schopenhauer suggests. Suffering from passion, we will long for its elimination. Longing for passion’s elimination, we will come to experience passion’s object as valuable for its role in securing that elimination. The object of a disvalued passion thus comes to be experienced as a negative good, appreciated only for removing the harm that passion itself constitutes. We see this in
His most basic desire is for an end to the war that he
When conflict between passions leads them to be experienced as suffering, it changes the motivation that they provide. What might have been experienced as an impulse to obtain some wonderful good is instead experienced as an impulse to escape a terrible misfortune. Passion’s object is seen as nothing more than a kind of ‘medicine’: a mere means to bring a disquieting desire to an end.
As discussed earlier, Nietzsche understands a valued passion as one that ‘at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction [
Countering Schopenhauer’s generalization, then, is more complicated than it initially appears. It is not enough to show that some human beings are capable of passion. For positive good to play a significant role in human life, human beings must be capable of actually
Nietzsche claims that tragic psychology offers the clearest counterexample to Schopenhauerian pessimism. I have argued that this follows from tragedy’s role in the celebration of passion. That at least some people are capable of genuinely appreciating tragic drama proves that at least some people are capable of genuinely appreciating passion. This is decisive evidence against Schopenhauer, because his pessimism turns on depicting human life as nothing more than an endless flight from harm. The passionate individual is not dominated by the flight from harm
There are many different obstacles to valuing life. An individual who values their passion is able to overcome
Ansell-Pearson (
Ansell-Pearson (
I have slightly modified Kaufmann here: he translates
For the standard definition, see Beiser (
This point has been made by several scholars. See, for example, Came (
As noted in Kirwin (
Additional discussion of tragedy’s role in celebrating passion can be found in
Young (
This view of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not intended to be revolutionary. It is close to what Simmons (
This reading would be denied by many modern interpreters, who suggest that Schopenhauer grants the existence of some positive good. In agreement with Bather Woods (
For a particularly clear expression of this, see GM “Preface” 5, where Nietzsche characterizes his struggle against the morality of compassion as primarily a struggle against Schopenhauer.
As will be discussed in the following paragraph, Nietzsche took Schopenhauer’s pessimism much more seriously than that of later figures like Hartmann. This is sometimes explained by suggesting that the later pessimists made heavier use of hedonism, which Nietzsche saw as playing a more secondary role in Schopenhauer’s argument (see, e.g.,
For Plümacher’s influence on Nietzsche, see Janaway (
The translation is my own.
Langsam (
Nietzsche’s depiction of ‘the last men’ may offer a helpful image of the passionless life. The last men possess no powerful desires: they ask ‘What is yearning [
It is worth noting that the passionless individual is not entirely identical to the Schopenhauerian individual. The Schopenhauerian individual is
Nietzsche does not use the term
Beyond conflict between passions, many other things might lead to passion’s devaluation. Passion’s inherent recklessness creates natural pressure against it (
This is compatible with Nietzsche’s claim that Schopenhauer did delight in one of his passions: namely, anger, understood as a desire to fight enemies. For Nietzsche presents this as in tension with Schopenhauer’s self-understanding: Schopenhauer ‘would have become a
The ideas in this paper developed out of my dissertation work, none of which would have been possible without the support of Agnes Callard, Brian Leiter, and Martha Nussbaum. The paper itself benefited from the feedback of several anonymous reviewers and my colleagues at Bryn Mawr College: Macalester Bell, Lawrence Dallman, Robert Dostal, and Adrienne Prettyman.
The author has no competing interests to declare.