for the first time. Interestingly, he concludes by calling it “the most extreme form of nihilism” and a “European form of Buddhism.” It
is against this background that in entry 7 of the same notebook, he
wonders whether pantheistic affirmation is possible in the face of
eternal recurrence. He asks himself whether it is still possible to
affirm life once it has been revealed to be purposeless and amoral.
He concludes that: “This would be the case if something within that
process were achieved at every moment of it – and always the same thing. Spinoza attained an affirmative stance like this insofar as every moment has a logical necessity: and with his fundamental instinct for logic he felt a sense of triumph about the world’s being constituted
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thus.” It seems from these notebook entries that Nietzsche might have first gained the courage for the ultimate affirmation of fate, or amor fati, that stands at the heart of his later philosophy, by means of Spinoza.
Attacking Judeo-Christian morality, Spinoza argues that: “we
do not strive towards, desire or long for a thing because we deem
it to be good; but on the contrary, we deem a thing good because
we strive, desire or long for it.”21 A morality of “good and bad” is
not metaphysical y rooted in the nature of the world, but is whol y
relative to individual subjects and their particular desires and aims.
For Spinoza the only ‘good’ is that which is useful, while the only
‘bad’ is that which is disadvantageous.22 Nietzsche’s vision of an ethic of ‘will to power’ is well known. In section 149 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “Justification, as function of a perspicacious power which looks beyond the narrow perspectives of good and evil, thus
has a wider horizon of advantage – the intention of preserving something that is more than any given person.”
For Spinoza, the idea that God engages in punishment and
reward is absurdly ridiculous; He neither hates nor loves anyone
in particular.23 Rather, we punish ourselves with despair when we
act in a way that is not true to our own nature. Nietzsche, the great
‘immoralist’ also believes in an ethics of conscience or the instinct
to adhere to one’s own nature. In section 270 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:
“What does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person
you are.’”
He continues in section 275:
“What is the seal of liberation? – No longer being ashamed in
front of oneself.”
21 Spinoza,
Ethics 3:9.
22 Ibid., 4: Definitions 1 and 2.
23 Ibid., 5:17, Corol ary.
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In section 7 of Chapter 12 of Book 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche contrasts moral ethics with his ethics of conscience:
“To be true – only a few are able! And those who are still lack the wil . But the ‘good’ have this ability least of al . Oh, these good
men! Good men never speak the truth, for the spirit, to be good in this way is a disease. They give in, these good men, they give
themselves up; their heart repeats and their ground obeys: but
whoever heeds commands does not heed himself.”
Final y, in section 906 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the
“strong man” as one who “is led by a faultless and severe instinct
into doing nothing that disagrees with him.”
In entry 131 of Notebook 2, Nietzsche discusses Spinoza in the
course of an outline for his never-to-be-realized magnum opus, “The
Will to Power.” Nietzsche deems “Spinozism extremely influential”
in “the devaluation of all values up to now.” He praises Spinoza for
an attempt to accept the world as it is, to “rid oneself of the moral
order of the world”, and to realize (perhaps for the first time) that
“Good and evil are only interpretations, by no means facts or in-
themselves.” Nietzsche concludes by commenting that: “one can
track down the origins of this kind of interpretation [so as to] slowly liberate oneself from the deep-rooted compulsion to interpret
moral y.” This suggests that Nietzsche’s characteristic method of the
good and evil. In section 15 of Essay II in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that Spinoza “banished good and evil to the realm of
human imagination” He praises Spinoza for viewing punishment as
an unfortunate consequence of transgression, not as a sign that one
should have done differently or as a cause for guilt, but simply as
something having unexpectedly gone wrong, leading to an emotion
that is the opposite of joy. He quotes Spinoza on this, citing Ethics
III, proposition XVIII, Schol. I.II. He favorably identifies this view of Spinoza with the outlook of Pre-Christian societies who believed in
corporal punishments, having the dignity to discipline the criminal
rather than make him feel guilty.
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For Spinoza, though human liberty is il usory, this does not
mean that human freedom is impossible. Spinoza claims that in
so far as we use our Reason to comprehend what is necessary and
then consciously affirm this in action, we are acting freely. The
degree of our freedom depends on the degree to which we rational y
comprehend the necessary causes of our actions, so that our act is
free in consciously following from the truly free will of God. In this sense Spinoza’s amor intel ectualis Dei (“intellectual love of God”), is an amor fati (“love of [one’s own] fate”), which fil s one with joy.24 By affirming Necessity we cease to be passive and we gain power over
that which affects us, not ‘power’ in the sense of “force”, but power
as elevation or perspective.25 Spinoza equates ‘virtue’ and ‘perfection’
with power in this sense.26 He argues that the source of our pleasure is to constantly increase our power, while true pain is a lapse into the weakness of negative passions born of ‘narrow-mindedness’.27 Mental
states are an expression of a degree of power, wherein a greater or
lesser awareness and affirmation of one’s bodily processes is present.
In this sense in which Power actualizes one’s ‘bodying-forth’ in the world, Spinoza equates it with ‘Reality’. Degrees of power are degrees of reality and of the enhancement of one’s conatus.28
If by wil e zur macht, Nietzsche means a (free) will to
empowerment, then the similarity with Spinoza’s metaphysics and
ethics of power would be merely superficial. However, as suggested
above, Nietzsche does not believe in an effective and free wil . If he also does not believe in a positive definition of power, we are forced to completely reevaluate what he means by ‘the will to power’. In
sections 633-634 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:
Two successive states, the one “cause”, the other “effect”: this is
false. The first has nothing to effect, the second has been effected 24 Ibid., 5:15.
25 Ibid., 5:6.
26 Ibid., 4: Definition 8.
27 Ibid., 3:11.
28 Ibid., 3: Appendix.
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by nothing. It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved
according to the measure of power of each of them. The second
condition is something fundamental y different from the first
(not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power... A quantum of power is
designated by the effect it produces and that which it resists. The adiaphorous state is missing, though it is thinkable.
The “adiaphorous state” which is missing, though readily conceivable
as an intellectual abstraction, is the positive quality of “power.”
Nietzsche explicitly defines this “power” as nothing but the difference of power between two states of two or more entities in respect to
each other. If he then also defines the essence of these entities or
‘beings’ as “power” – he is implicitly stating that every ‘being’ defers it’s being to the others in terms of which it exists at all and also
defers its present to its past conditions of existence. To speak of the difference of two quanta of power is redundant, for it is to speak of
the difference of difference. This differentiation is the structure of the creative matrix.
In German, wille (“wil ”) is derived from the verb wollen, meaning “to want”, even in the sense of ‘to be lacking’ in such
and such. Furthermore, macht (“power”) is derived from the verb machen, “to make” or “to render”, in the sense of dynamic creation rather than a static locus of ‘power-in-itself’. Final y, zur is a contraction of zu der, which means “towards the…”. So that wil e zur macht, suggests perpetual y moving “towards”, but never arriving at
“the making” or the creation of the world. As Nietzsche writes in
section 796 of the Will to Power: “the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.” This is not very different from Spinoza’s idea that to say we aim at the increase of power is to say that we strive to understand and knowingly affirm the will of Deus sive Natura.
According to Spinoza, the execution of mathematical or logical
proofs is the only activity in which we are likely to be able to attain the comprehensive knowledge of necessary causes required for
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total freedom. However, in this light, Spinoza believes that we can
increasingly bring our hitherto unconscious emotions within the
grasp of our conscious power by treating them “geometrical y”,
that is, by analyzing them (and their effect on us) in a cold, almost
mathematical y rigorous calculus.29 By means of this “emendation
of the passions”, emotions cease to be something in respect to
which we are passive.30 Thus the love of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding is the path to the serene blessedness of freedom,
and Spinoza equates following this path with the realization of our
essential “human nature” (that which differentiates us from other
beings).31
All of these notions are basical y present in Nietzsche’s thinking
as wel , even if they are not related in the same way as they are for
Spinoza. In section 490 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that:
“‘the important main activity [of the human mental and emotional
life] is unconscious’ and… consciousness is the effect of forces
whose essence, ways, and modalities are not peculiar to it.” Though
Nietzsche does not insist that these unconscious drives be rendered
conscious, he does speak of taming the chaos of human affects or
emotions into something obeying cold mathematical and logical
necessities. In section 530 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “All human knowledge is either experience or mathematics.” In section
842, he elaborates: “To become master of the chaos that one is; to
compel one’s chaos to become form: logical, simple, unequivocal; to
become mathematics, law – that is the grand ambition here.”
Superficial readers of Nietzsche would be surprised to learn that,
like Spinoza, he values the quest for knowledge above all else. In
his July 30th 1881 letter concerning Spinoza, he writes: “…his whole
tendency [is] like my own – to make knowledge the most powerful
passion…” These few lines make a subtle but very important point.
Nietzsche interprets Spinoza’s view of knowledge, as something that
conquers the passions not by neutralizing them (as is commonly 29 Ibid., 3: Preface.
30 Ibid., 5:3, Corol ary.
31 Ibid., 4: Appendix.
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supposed), but by dominating them as the strongest passion. For lack of agency, in both Spinoza and Nietzsche’s systems, there is no
way that the passions could be neutralized because they can never
become the object of action for a non-existent subject.
In section 2 of Book 1 of the Gay Science, entitled “The Intellectual Conscience”, Nietzsche praises the conscientious pursuit of certainty
as “that which separates higher human beings from the lower.” He
writes: “… what is good-heartedness, refinement, or genius to me,
when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his
faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for
certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress…” This “desire for certainty” is the essence of Spinoza’s quest for knowledge as a
means to affirm necessity. While Nietzsche values it as much or
more than Spinoza does, he realizes that it is ultimately no more
than another affect without a traceable cause, as Spinoza does not,
but should realize, given the implications of his metaphysics.
Final y, Nietzsche, like Spinoza, equates this transformation of
consciousness both with a sense of serene blessedness and with the
realization of an essential humanity. In section 799 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes “the highest feeling of power” as: “...calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration…To react slowly; a great
consciousness; no feeling of struggle.” In section 337 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes the realization of our true nature (by affirming the will of “the whole”), as the “divine feeling” of “humanity”:
He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as
his own history feels in this immense generalization all the grief of the invalid who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of
the dream of his youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved,
of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed, of the hero on the
evening of the indecisive battle which has brought him wounds
and the loss of a friend. But to bear this immense sum of grief of
all kinds, to be able to bear it, and yet still be the hero who at the commencement of a second day of battle greets the dawn and
his happiness as the one who has a horizon of centuries before
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and behind him…to take all this upon his soul, the oldest, the
newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of mankind:
to have all this at last in one’s soul, and to comprise it in one
feeling: – this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man
has not hitherto known – a God’s happiness, full of power and
love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun
in the evening, continual y gives of its inexhaustible riches and
empties into the sea – and like the sun, too, feels itself richest
when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars! This
divine feeling might then be called – humanity.
&n
bsp; We have seen how almost every major ‘innovation’ of Nietzsche’s
doctrine is already to be found in Spinoza’s thought, more than
two hundred years earlier. We have also seen evidence that, at least
in some instances, Nietzsche probably inherited these uniquely
paradoxical and iconoclastic ideas from Spinoza. Nietzsche follows
Spinoza in abolishing the materialist/idealist division between
mind and body, in denying agency while discerning a will to self-
preservation as characteristic of beings, in finding an ecstatic
freedom or realization of the human potential in the denial of
free will and the affirmation of fate, and final y, Nietzsche, the self proclaimed “first immoralist”, follows Spinoza in opposing the
reactive moral opposition of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with a positive ethics
based on the enhancement of perspectival power. Where do the two
thinkers real y diverge?
It may be that Nietzsche’s most serious departure from Spinoza is
not in his doctrine, but in his attitude. In section 157 of Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche speaks of Spinoza, together with Kepler, as a
‘learned genius’, contrasting him with the type of the artistic genius.
The latter type, which Nietzsche sees as characterizing himself,
laments of his greater sorrows and privations (in proportion to
other men), whereas a learned genius like Spinoza does not, because
“he can count with greater certainty on posterity and dismiss the
present.” In section 37 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche cal s Spinoza’s faith in the benign nature of Science and the “unselfish, harmless,
self-sufficient, and truly innocent” character of genuine scientific
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inquiry, one of the three errors on account of which science has
been promoted over the last several centuries.
In section 5 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza for having clad his philosophy in a “mail and mask” of “hocus-pocus
of mathematical form” in order to intimidate those who would
challenge it, to scare them off from defiling it, as if his doctrine were the goddess Athena protected by her armor. Spinoza is not singled
out for this, but cited as an example of philosophers in general,
who are dishonest in pretending that their wisdom is the product