Friedrich Nietzsche is generally regarded as having given the par excellence account of the origin and consequences of nihilism, deriving from his conception of the death of God. Yet Fyodor Dostoevsky offers an alternative account of the cause of nihilism in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879), that locates the cause of nihilism not in the death of God, but in man’s understanding of God in relation to the problem of evil. Far from Nietzsche’s representation of God as an exploded fiction, God Himself is implicated as the primary source of the conflict between the evil and suffering that mankind experiences, and the deficit in reasons for why, if God is just and benevolent, man was ever allowed to suffer at all.
Nietzsche’s theory of the “will to power” stands as a challenge to Dostoevsky’s cautionary axiom, “if there is no God, everything is permissible.” The “will to power” is simultaneously Nietzsche’s all-inclusive answer to the mysteries of human psychology, and his answer to the question of how one should live. By inverting the consequence of Dostoevsky’s claim that the absence of God entails the absence of any restriction on human behavior, Nietzsche spins his predictions and hopes for the future of mankind out of the unlimited “permission” granted by nihilism. The absence of God does not precipitate the absolute social and moral ruin of man; on the contrary, within the shapeless matter of nihilism lies the means for crafting man’s redemption without God, his liberation from all empty dichotomies (good and evil, true and false, subject and object, cause and effect), and the possibility for his re-acquaintance with the total potential of the will that has lain dormant since the end of Imperial Rome.
Nietzsche holds that “the character of existence” is inherently brutal, and men possess no special quality to distinguish them from brute beasts, except a talent for self-deception — men dream of themselves as created just a little lower than the angels on the scale of created things, when in reality they are brutes that possess the same unlimited desire for power common to any beast — even the most cursory examination of the habits of man confirms the fact.1 Dostoevsky enters a similar description of human nature in The Brothers Karamazov, but with the additional implicit premise that man’s barbaric actions are a result of the great distance that lies between man and God— God being perfect and lacking nothing, and man being imperfect and sorely deficient in his capacities and his “Euclidean” faculties:2
By the way [says Ivan], a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow… told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by their ears to fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them — all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel… I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. 3
Because weakness and corruption is common to the nature of mankind, it is only a matter of time before men become cannibals and butchers of other men without the authority and Providence of God to restrain them from giving free reign to the worst side of their nature. This is the reason why no flowering of culture and art is foreseen in the conclusion to Dostoevsky’s tales of the madmen that nihilism produces. In his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the fictional society built on the totalitarian principles of the Grand Inquisitor is awash with men’s blood, with torture as its chief art.
Within this work, Dostoevsky provides two conclusions concerning why nihilism, which renders mankind’s experience of evil and suffering meaningless and absurd, can never supply a starting or stopping point in mankind’s search for the meaning of why he experiences evil. The first is that man is foremost a moral being — he possesses a conscience that acts as a guide for moral behavior. Yet the conscience, if God does not exist, has no other function than as a hindrance that can be gotten rid of by habituation since the categories of good and evil, true and false do not have any objective existence; as the “active” nihilist might maintain, whenever the bite of conscience is silenced, the resulting sensation of increased power “presupposes a resistance overcome.” If the conscience that prevents man from doing anything and everything that comes into his head is silenced, and his actions, no matter how extreme, contain no further consequences than those imposed by positive law, then he has nothing greater to fear (should he be caught) than punishment by a civil authority. If God is not watching, mankind, in this case, has no moral incentive that prevents him from lapsing into brutality and cannibalism.
Alyosha Karamazov, one of the three fraternal protagonists in The Brothers Karamazov, provides the second reason why nihilism as an answer does not suffice (and this must be taken in light of the first reason): he maintains that only if God Himself suffers along with mankind can God be exonerated for having ever allowed even one man to suffer. God, Alyosha maintains, has come in the Person of Christ and has given “His innocent blood for all and everything.” This formulation, which comes, in The Brothers Karamazov, at the end of the chapter titled “Rebellion,” is illuminated by contrast with the statement, “if there is not God, everything is permissible.” The latter is a core statement in The Brothers Karamazov, and serves to crystallize the meaning and purpose of Ivan’s stories of human barbarism, and his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.”
Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism constitutes a broad base from which are derived the dichotomies of master/slave moralities, “active” and “passive” nihilism, and his conception of the “overman.” The fact that Nietzsche appears not to place an overwhelming emphasis on nihilism as the center of his thinking in his published works does not disprove the implicit fact that if nihilism as a foundation is taken away, the project of the revaluation of values, as Nietzsche conceives of it, makes no sense. One must postulate nihilism as the antecedent of all events (namely the death of God), and all modes of acting, in order to attempt to move beyond nihilism. The so-called death of God is another way of proclaiming the end of the possibility of metaphysics as an objective construct. Metaphysics, by definition, is the search for transcendent principles that exist independently of the material world, and dictate the rules concerning how all things material things (subject to generation and corruption) are essentially ordered. It can be said, then, that the existence of metaphysical principles is tantamount to an ordered kosmos. As a result of the death of God, the possibility of attaining objective knowledge about the world (particularly, for our purposes, in the area of ethics) is rendered an impossibility, as all truth claims are without any ultimate significance or meaning beyond what the individual attaches to them. The universe, human life, and morality have the value of nil after God ceases to stand as the absolute guarantor of meaning in the universe, as the purposeful creator of human life, &c. Without the death of God, there is no validity to the genealogical critique of values, nor is there any such thing as the self-deception of “passive” nihilism for the individual to extricate with his “will to power.” Where else in Nietzsche’s vision of the world but with the death of God could nihilism originate, or the genealogical critique of values for that matter? The conclusion is that nihilism, precipitated by the death of God, is the necessary basis on which all of Nietzsche’s thought rests.
If, for Nietzsche, the death, or non-existence, of God is the catalyst for nihilism, in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brother’s Karamazov, the catalyst for nihilism is, ironically, God Himself; or rather, the inscrutable nature and will of God. In the chapter entitled “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” Christ returns to earth “in the most terrible time of the Inquisition” (i.e., the 16th century). He performs miracles, and has a magnetic and transforming effect on the mass of people that gather in awe around Him; but the Grand Inquisitor does not receive Christ’s unexpected visit in quite the same way, and promptly has Christ arrested and thrown in prison. Upbraiding and haranguing Christ for undoing the Church’s work of rescuing humanity from its misery, the Grand Inquisitor maintains that humanity is wretched due to the fact that the moral example Christ set for man is impossible for man to live up to, or even to approximate. The Grand Inquisitor avows that Christ gave men their freedom from the Mosaic Law when all they wanted was bread; that is, Christ’s gift of freedom was bestowed on a recipient ill suited to accept such a gift, being “weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious.” 4 Man was previously guided in his every action according to the dictates of the Mosaic Law — which commandments are characterized by necessity and orderliness — but Christ’s work abolished the Law and replaced it with man’s freedom to choose between good and evil, having only His superhuman ideal as a model for his actions.
According to the Grand Inquisitor, the desire of all men’s hearts is not the exercising of their freedom to choose between good and evil out of the resources of their respective conscience, but to be ruled and ordered under a lawgiver, who’s sole purpose is to take such decision making out of their hands. The Grand Inquisitor strikes upon a very simple remedy for the absurd meaninglessness of human suffering, but only after he himself spent nearly a lifetime subduing his flesh and subsisting on roots in the desert in order to make himself “free and perfect” before God:
[A]ll his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it was no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God’s creatures have been created as a mockery, that thy will never be capable of using their freedom… In his old age he reached the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit [the devil] could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly “incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.” And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the council of the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think themselves happy. And note, the deception is [carried out] in the name of Him in Whose ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long.5
Christ came to give men their freedom from the Mosaic Law. After Christ’s work, the written law is no longer binding over the hearts of men; the conscience is now the seat of judgment between good and evil, and “man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as a guide”6 Men though, according to the Inquisitor’s estimation, are incontinent — they have an inability to do what is good and moral, while having perfect knowledge of what goodness and morality demand. Freedom is the most terrible burden God could have placed on humanity, since so few are capable of being consistent with so perfect an exemplar as Christ. The presence of God’s moral standard in the world is an burden that men can neither throw off nor endure, and so men alienate the freedom given them by Christ as a gift — an ill conceived gift indeed, according to the Inquisitor, and he gladly takes the freedom from men and exchanges it for happiness.
Under the dictatorship of the conscience, a corollary to the gift of freedom, man is unhappy and ever mindful of his continual failings when compared to the life lived by the theanthropus, Christ. Conversely, under the dictatorship of divine law, or even the rule of a civil authority, man’s life is content because his conscience is clear — the decision to do this-or-that, or not, is never his to make, and thus ultimate responsibility for the consequence of his actions is taken from him as well. In the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment of Christ, it is Christ’s eradication of the Mosaic Law that has placed God beyond the reach of man’s ken, and beyond the goal of man’s “merely mortal” activities:
And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and emblematic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all… for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.7
When God bestowed the gift of free moral agency in the matter of salvation to a weak and rebellious animal such as man, the nature of God’s decision demonstrated that God’s will is radically free to alter, modify, or abolish what He has previously decreed, and furthermore, the divine decision does not have to accord with man’s abilities or faculties. Christ is, as He declares Himself to be, not the destroyer, but the fulfillment of the Law,8 thus the end of the Law is freedom through Christ. Man, whether under the old Law or the new, is entirely reliant on his own abilities and faculties, and can neither destroy the Law himself, nor can he fulfill it — thus, even what God decrees specifically for man is in every sense “exceptional, vague and emblematic.” The same God who led the Ancient Hebrews out of slavery and through the wilderness has deliberately become an obsolescent God with the advent of the Incarnation, and His sinless example. How is man to be saved under such a situation, and what guarantee does man have that God will not again alter the rules, leaving man’s mind, actions, and hopes clouded even further? Indeed, such a possibility always exists if God is bound by nothing, and acts according to His omnipotent will.
The eternal standards of truth, good and evil, and the way to salvation, are all overturned by the advent of Christ’s example, which example is set by God’s free choice. Being unable to grasp the full capacity of this change, man is forced to turn to other resources, and rely on other faculties that were not necessary in order to adhere to the Mosaic Law, such as reason, in order to discern between good and evil, and to determine by what means he might be saved — by God, or by human industry. Nihilism, according to Dostoevsky, is a result of man’s bewilderment before and omnipotent and willful God (and not because God simply does not exist); man’s subsequent reliance on himself and his own powers is due to the fact that he is forced to compensate in light of the fact that what God has determined as good cannot be relied upon to be good for man.
The Grand Inquisitor embodies Dostoevsky’s particular conception of nihilism, viz., and nihilism’s revolutionary and bleakly individualistic spirit. When Christ returns unexpectedly, performing miracles and disrupting the proceedings of the Church’s authorities, the Grand Inquisitor demands to know why Christ has come, and assumes that His visit is for no reason other than to spite man’s obviously epistemically precarious position, and spur on his desire to move beyond such a position. Christ never says a word during the whole of the Inquisitor’s interrogation, and even to the Inquisitor’s most tremendous disclosures there is no discernible response from Christ:
Just eight centuries ago, we [the Catholic Church] took from him [the Devil] what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our work… It has long to await completion and the earth has yet much to suffer, but we shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man.9
Man, taking up the sword of Caesar, does not overcome God, nor can he ever — the Grand Inquisitor has no illusions that his vision of a utopian Rome is for any other world than the one inhabited by man, and can never extend into the sphere of the divine. Only by seizing upon and cultivating the Promethean spirit can man do for himself what Christ rejected with scorn to do, that is, to found a universal state and attain universal happiness. Because only a few men, out of the whole host of mankind, have the potential to come close to living up to Christ’s moral example, the Inquisitor asks Christ what need mankind-at-large has for a God that has overestimated man’s capacity to manage the intellectual and bodily exertions that necessarily come with the exercise of freedom? In the nihilistic spirit of the Promethean, the Grand Inquisitor finally commands Christ, “Go, and come no more… Come not at all, never, never!”10 The Promethean efforts of a few men (i.e., the Grand Inquisitor and a few others like him) to rescue humanity from self-destruction and to bring about universal happiness provides the foundation for totalitarianism; the incomprehensible God is replaced by the institution of a state religion, which is actually no religion at all, only an absolute civil authority armed at all points in the tinsel and trappings of religion.
Nietzsche holds that to believe in the existence of objective values is to believe in an illusion that is devoid of any constructive meaning, and therefore nihilistic: “In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value positing.”11 Nietzsche maintains that the capacity to actively create values necessarily takes into account the many nuances and shades of distinctions involved man’s experience of the world, and reflects man’s actual subjective experience in ways that all closed (and therefore passive) forms of value judgments fail to. The origin of nihilism, for Nietzsche, lies in two opposing directions: the first is moral passivity (which he conceives of as a negation of existence, and therefore lacking any actual meaning), and the second is the power to actively create values that have meaning insofar as they are powerful. Regarding the former, when the will of the self is subordinated to the will of God, or alienated to what Nietzsche often refers to as a “beyond,” the content of experience (that is, willing, hating, loving, &c.) is negated, and man’s “will to power,” which is an affirmation of life, is replaced by the “will to nothingness,” or the denial of life:
…metaphysics, religion, morality, science — all of them only products of his [man’s] will to art, to lie, to flight from “truth”… This ability itself, thanks to which he violates reality by means of lies… He himself is after all a piece of reality, truth, nature: how should he not also be a piece of genius in lying… That the character of existence is to be misunderstood — profoundest and supreme secret motive behind all that is virtue, science, piety, artistry… Man has once again become master of “material” — master of truth! — And whenever man rejoices… he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power.12
When man’s moral character is shaped according to the dictates of a universal moral norm, the question of “what kind of man should I be” is simply a given — the answer lies not with the will of the individual, but with the will of God. Man’s nature is shaped not by his intellect, but by the dictates of his will; the justification behind all moral and intellectual hierarchies is the power that one interpretation of the world has over all other interpretations — power equals precedence. In his study of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Gilles Deleuze points out that, “We know what transmutation or transvaluation means for Nietzsche: not a change of values, but a change in the element from which the value of value derives.”13 This shift he describes represents not the reversal of evil transmuting into good, or vice-versa, but that all interpretations of what is good or evil, or beneficial or harmful, are materializations of the “element” that Nietzsche calls the “will to power.” As a source or criterion for all valuations, the “will to power” transcends all valuations of good and evil, and true and false, by transferring the source of all moral standards from the objective and eternal perspective, to the subjective individual perspective. Rather than delimiting thought or action by assigning to them certain levels of truth or falsity in relation to an abstract objective standard of true and false, thought and action are more effectively measured according to the quantity of power behind, or inhering in a given thought or action. This is why it is better to say that the individual will naturally seeks power — all individuals have discrete perspectives on the world, and power is the element of differentiation between individuals; and since there is nothing that inherently binds one perspective to another, power determines the precedence of thought and action between individuals. By this rationale, the question of “what kind of man should I be” is always open-ended, because there is no given direction, save that the will’s sole desire is for the increase of power.
Nietzsche divides nihilism, as was mentioned above, into two rather flexible, basic categories — “active” nihilism and “passive” nihilism. “Active” nihilism is nihilism divested of its religious trappings, and with a bent not necessarily toward self-destruction, but decidedly toward the destruction of what passes for true, right, or authoritative. This is not the nihilism of the herd (of which Christianity is representitive), but the nihilism of Nietzsche himself. The individualist, according to Nietzsche, is the man who has the will to believe in himself, in the truth of his own powers, and in the efficacy of his own volition. The “active” nihilist, as opposed to egalitarian man, is radically individual. Yet Nietzsche does not concede that the “active” nihilist is capable of discovering the means to direct his destructive despair toward creating a new world of “higher” values (values that exalt what is noble, exceptional, and powerful) in place of the world of popular pseudo-religious values that he takes the same pleasure in destroying that the condemned man takes in a last act of vengeance against his punisher:
Nihilism does not only contemplate the “in vain!” nor is it merely the belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy. — This is, if you will, illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical. — It is the condition of strong spirits and wills, and these do not find it possible to stop with the No of “judgment”: their nature demands the No of the deed. The reduction to nothing by judgment is seconded by the reduction to nothing by hand.14
Aside from Nietzsche’s conception of the nihilist as those possessing a “strong spirit and will,” i.e., the “active” nihilist, he formulates the antithetical condition that he calls “passive” nihilism to accord with his conception of Christianity, which he believes epitomizes the steamroller effect that mediocrity has on everything it rolls over:
The lower species (“herd,” “mass,” “society”) unlearns modesty and blows up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values. In this way the whole of existence is vulgarized: insofar as the mass is dominant, it bullies the exceptions, so that they lose their faith in themselves [i.e., the exceptional individuals lose faith] and become nihilists.15
Christianity seeks to replace the world as it is with the soul’s wish fulfillment of immortality in a “beyond.” The postulating of a “beyond,” to Nietzsche, is nothing but a subterfuge; the rejection of the world in the Christian worldview as corrupt and passing away devalues experience in the world in favor of a heaven that transcends all material existence. Nietzsche’s line of reasoning assumes that the ens realissiuum is the fiction of fictions, and the experience of life as an “end-in-itself,” or as a perpetual “becoming,” is wasted at the expense of the sacred wish of the soul’s immortality:
The Christian conception of God — God as God of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit — is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God denigrated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God — the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”! God — the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!16
Nietzsche’s rationale for attacking the values of Christianity lies in his assertion that “slave morality” paralyzes and cheapens the value of what is truly noble and powerful by equating nobility and power with dominant egalitarian “virtues;” for example, the toleration and encouragement of mediocrity is understood in the framework of slave morality to be evidence of greatness of soul and the strength of virtue. Whether the conception of Christianity that Nietzsche demolishes with his genealogical method is an historically accurate conception is certainly debatable, yet Nietzsche’s point that any culture’s avid promotion of egalitarian pieties is a sign of an impending cultural eclipse is well taken.
Art, that is, creation as such, is for Nietzsche the most potent means of stimulating life, of making life something man can endure; but art has a greater function beyond providing a comfortable assurance to the bien pensant pieties of the self-deceiver. Art contains the means to reveal “the terrifying and questionable character of existence,” and thus it presents, by analogy, another side of the “will to power.” Because truth cannot be known objectively (since nothing exists “in itself” or “through itself”), truth is necessarily the domain of the artist, who fashions what passes as “the truth” according to this seemingly simple dichotomy: truth as the “will to power,” or truth as the “will to nothingness.” The exceptional man, the “strong spirit,” as Nietzsche calls him, desires to “live dangerously,” to say Yes to life, and this mode of affirming the will and the self contrasts to all forms of the “will to the denial of life.”Nietzsche’s conception of the artistic life relates dialectically to his conception of the self-overcomer, i.e., destroying to create, creating to destroy, with all dialectical oppositions being ultimately obliterated in the eternal return. The values created in the course of the will’s drive toward the expansion of its power are always provisional at best, because values are created out of, and according to, the individual’s will, which is to say, the individual’s perspective. Even though Nietzsche dispenses with any localized standard for the establishment of values by placing the creation of values in the hands of the self-overcoming, his explanation for the phenomena of pain and suffering in the world provides a clue about what sort of standard the values of the “strong spirit” comply with, and that standard is reducible to one word — power — which is the objective of the unceasing drive of the will. The quantifiable increase or reduction of power in the individual man is the only kind of economy Nietzsche recognizes. Whereas the “passive” nihilist, or the “good” man, seeks to mollify his desires and neutralize his pains and pleasures within the safety of the group, the will of the “strong spirit,” or the “evil” man, is driven both by a staunch individualism, and the creative benefits that come from unmitigated hardship, suffering, and destruction:
Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil, belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our species so far.17
Nietzsche’s conception of theodicy (if I may be permitted to stretch the meaning of the term) is bound up with the principle of the “will to power,” and ultimately derives, again, from his considerations concerning nihilism. Nietzsche, declaring God to be dead, aims at eradicating the entire edifice of value judgments altogether — no longer can good be discerned from evil, or truth from falsity — every means of judgment and determination has been abrogated when no such thing as truth exists, only interpretations of, only perspectives on, “truth.” As Nietzsche has it, God is not the arbiter of moral standards, nor, ultimately, is man; the principle of the will is the determining factor of all that is, and directs the unceasing and limitless accumulation of quantifiable power. By this standard, the source of human pain and suffering, of human hardship and brutality, is part and parcel of the essence of “the character of existence”:
Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation…18
The innumerable discrete wills that strive to assert and increase their respective quantity of power do so without any final goal, except a further increase of power. If the active principle of the will is interpreted as Nietzsche’s singular metaphysical principle, then the goal-less, unceasing march of wills willing power, and willing in opposition to every other will, is his theodicy— the operation of will in his eternally recurring cosmology vindicates, or justifies, the phenomena of pain and suffering. Being neither “good” nor “evil,” pain and suffering play a necessary role as a component facet of the driving principle of all things, the will:
Man does not seek pleasure and does not avoid displeasure… Pleasure and displeasure are mere consequences, mere epiphenomenona — what man wants, what every smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increase of power. Pleasure or displeasure follow from the striving after that; driven by that will it seeks resistance, it needs something that opposes it… man does not avoid it [displeasure], rather he is in continual need of it; every victory, every feeling of pleasure, every event, presupposes a resistance overcome.19
An “economy of high prices”20 is the preserver of the species in a world where the categories of good and evil do not apply: only the distinction between strong wills and weak wills is relevant to an understanding of the order of things. The story is of a similar nature with Nietzsche’s interpretation of all the other commonplace dualisms found in value judgments: pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, joy and sorrow, &c. These sensations signify, respectively, either an increase or decrease of power, according to the strength of the action of the will.
For Dostoevsky, the question of why man, as God created him, suffers and experiences evil, strikes at the heart of the question concerning what the nature of God is, and how man comes to terms with, or rejects, a God that transcends his primitive “Euclidean mind.” The question of why is there evil in the world is, to Ivan’s “Euclidean earthly mind,” impossible to settle:
Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart… and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?… Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to “dear, kind God”!21
The question of why God could just as easily have created a world where evil does not exist, as a world where it does, is the axis on which Ivan’s argument for atheism turns: why the world is overrun with evil is far from self-evident, and no sufficient reason can be uncovered for why the world is thus and not otherwise. Evil exists in a plenary of forms, and for this reason Ivan finds the world as it is, and consequently the God who permits evil, for any reason whatever, unacceptable. The world, in Ivan’s mind, is devalued to the point of absurdity and meaninglessness as a consequence of the problem of evil: man is forced to beg the question of why there is evil at all if God is good and benevolent, and all of His works are good. In short, Ivan says that he is an atheist by default because he cannot supply a satisfactory answer to why men (and especially children) must become causalities of God’s unknowable reason for allowing the world to be overwhelmed by evil before He finally redeems His creation through His goodness. Ivan’s rejection of God is not tantamount to his disbelieving in the existence of a creator, &c.; it is his rejection of allowing any recourse to God in order to explain the existence of evil. If mankind suffers, there must be a reason — but no viable reason can be given for the fact that mankind does suffer; thus, mankind suffers for nothing. For Ivan, God exists, but He may just as well not, since the existence of an infinite, incomprehensible God explains nothing to finite men of simple mind about the problem of evil, or anything else. Ivan’s argument against God is not an argument spun out of the subtleties of logic; rather, it is argument made on instinct. The fact of evil is an inescapable reality, and his reaction to the immediacy of the misery that inexplicable evil entails leads him first to question the goodness of God, then to reject God, and the evil nature of the world altogether. That “there is a strength to endure everything” is Ivan’s answer to the inexorable conclusion that existence is futile; but that strength to endure everything is a tenuous strength, as Ivan’s end in madness reveals.
Dostoevsky’s account of theodicy in The Brother’s Karamazov acts as a foil to the moral and social disorder that he envisages as an inevitable consequence of nihilism. Ivan’s rejection of God stems from his inability to cognize, or otherwise grasp with his “Euclidean mind,” the meta-narrative of God’s plan for redeeming the fallen world from evil and suffering — God is rejected on the grounds that the “higher harmony” of good and evil that He intends to bring about at an indeterminate future time is incommensurate with the severity of suffering endured by human beings — is it not possible for the same “higher harmony” to exist without being fashioned from human misery? The answer is yes, but if God does not exist, or if He is rejected on the grounds that He torments human beings by allowing them to suffer unnecessarily, then what is there to restrict or prevent man from rejecting compassion and charity and giving full reign to the lawless and brutal side of his nature? What motivation would there be for men to be civil, if not for the presence of a divine authority regulating and instructing man in his actions? Why would men endure evil and suffering and be compassionate if there were no ultimate purpose, or no higher good for doing so? Ivan’s rejection of God’s Providential authority for the bringing about of a divine harmony between the murderer and his victim allows for the possibility that man has no legitimate reason not to murder his fellow man — Providential authority or not, evil is part of the nature of men.
Since God, understood as either a concept or a reality, according to Nietzsche, possesses no more efficacy than the strength of the weakest kind of men (who are the representatives of the Christian God on earth), the will of the individual, by virtue of his superior strength, must naturally reign supreme. All that is required for this seemingly obvious fact to become a reality is that the resources of the will be exploited to their fullest potential. Even though terms such as “master morality,” “individualism,” and “subjective” play a large role in describing how reality is parsed up in the theory of the “will to power,” the world ordered according to the demands of the principle of the will is actually rigidly hierarchical, and distributed on a scalar magnitude. The efficacy of the will manifests in the degree of independence seized upon by the individual, and accordingly, when there is an individual possessing a powerful will, there is likely to be far greater numbers of subordinate wills beneath him; and beneath these subordinate wills… &c. The hierarchy that arranges itself according to degrees of power springs from the internal source of the will of the individual person, rather than from without, as is the case in a hierarchy that begins with God at the top, and continues in a descending order with all less perfect, or less divine beings, occupying their respective, untransgressable positions in relation to God.
For Nietzsche, nihilism is a negatively idealistic, decadent dead-end, and he has no illusions about the destiny of cultures and moralities that grow out of views of the world where the belief in a “beyond” persistently diminishes the value of the world, and where egalitarian envy of the strong crushes the exceptional man to elevate the mediocrity. According to Nietzsche, the mores, laws, and truths of man in the post-Classical era are nothing more than expressions of servile weakness stemming from an institution-based sublimation of the “will to power.” The state of civilization post the imperium Romanum represents a reversal of the power structure that built and preserved Antiquity for millennia due to the fact that the slave has enviously usurped, and thus corrupted, the virtues of the master; as a result, the weak now dominate the strong:
… the imperium Romanum… [was] not buried overnight by a natural catastrophe, not trampled down by Teutons and other buffaloes, but ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires [i.e., the early Christians]. Not vanquished — merely drained.”22
The means by which Nietzsche seeks to overcome the nihilism inherent in the religious values is by reinventing (what he takes to be) the bedrock of the secular values of Antiquity — nobility, bravery, and power — for the modern world. The creation of values in accord with the demands of the “will to power” is Nietzsche’s answer to how nihilism is ultimately overcome, and this conception provides at least a provisional structure for the framework of secularized morality that he envisages. The advent of Nietzsche’s Romanesque “overman” signifies the time when the last shadow of an illusory God on the cave wall has been blighted out, and when what made the men of Antiquity great is successfully reinstated. This is achieved by redefining how the standard for the legitimacy of any given thing is defined — God is replaced by the “will to power, ” and the individual is the sole arbiter of what is harmful or beneficial to him; and what is harmful or beneficial is always decided in relation to his will’s limitless desire for the acquisition of power. The relation of the individual man to God, insofar as morality is concerned, is not a reciprocal relation; man can adhere, or not adhere to the dictates of the moral law because the moral law is not his own construct, and lies outside of his power to change; Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to power,” by comparison, is circular — the antecedent, will, always implies the consequent, power. As Nietzsche has it, God, as the foundation of the moral law, ought to be rejected because the demands of the moral law are always in opposition to the demands of the will; thus, the demands of the moral law can never actually be instantiated or fulfilled, whereas the demands of the will (for the self) is most easily known thing in the world. For Nietzsche, there is no precedent for holding the Christian values of charity, pity, and humility over and above the will’s insatiable desire for power, when charity, pity, and humility ostensibly contradict what precisely constitutes the “character of existence.” Any other basis, besides power, upon which values are created (or have been hitherto created), is simply a corruption of the will’s active principle. The “will to power” is not a rational process of thought that aims toward the discovery of truth; rather, the “will to power” is a pure act of creation, or affirmation — it is the willing of truth: “truth is… something that must be created, and that gives a name to a process, or rather a will to overcome… as a process ad infinitum, an active determining — not a becoming conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined…”23
To be in accord with the nature of the will, man must become the rule giver to himself, for the will cannot abide outside rules imposed on its archaic desire for power. The will of the self-legislating, self-overcoming individualist (i.e., Nietzsche’s “overman,” Ubermensch) is always a subjective center unto itself. The ideals generated out of this radical individualism are at all times, and all ways, a fluctuating, organic creation guided solely by the will’s desire for power. Aristotle refers the type of men who are their own masters as megalopsychia, or the man who possesses greatness of soul. Such ones as these are Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, and Nietzsche’s “overman,” viz., they who give to themselves their own rules, their own morals, and their own ideals. This is not to say that megalopsychia lives in open defiance of all laws that exist outside of, or in spite of their nature, or simply cannot abide any law; rather, the rules such severe individualists give themselves are part and parcel of their own nature, and accord with the order of nature to the same degree as the rules guiding the slave, the incontinent man, or the self-deceiver are in violation of the order of nature:
Therefore if, as they say, men become gods by excess of virtue, of this kind must evidently be the state opposed to the brutish state; for a brute has no vice or virtue, so neither has a god; his state is higher than virtue, and that of a brute is a different kind of state from vice.24
Given the nature of the will as Nietzsche conceives of it, the expectation of the advent of a Promethean figure (his obscurely drawn “overman”) is consistent with the demands made by the theory of the “will to power,” but the flesh-and-blood manifestation of the Promethean “overman” follows neither of necessity, nor teleologically from Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to power.” In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brother’s Karamazov, the dawn of the Promethean spirit in man is caricatured, ironically, by the Devil himself; and the pastiche is even carried using terminology that anticipates Nietzsche’s theory of the “will to power,” and his vision of the advent of the “overman”:
I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work… As soon as all men have denied God — and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass — the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and what’s more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that its useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward… What’s more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immorality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the world, and promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep the barriers of the old morality of the slave-man, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will at once be the foremost place… “all things are lawful” and that’s the end of it!25
It must be borne in mind that neither the Promethean efforts of the Grand Inquisitor, nor Ivan’s rejection of God on the grounds that God explains nothing about why man must suffer and experience evil, represent Dostoevsky’s final answer to the question of whether God is necessary for man’s moral life and thought. In fact, his portrait of nihilism serves to implicitly show precisely why God is necessary — that man without God is but one step away from cannibalism and brutality. For Dostoevsky, the possibility of man successfully propping up traditional or conventional morality with “humanistic” atheism, purified of the anthropomorphisms of religion, is an absurdity. That man is “weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious” is a given to Dostoevsky. Man is no Prometheus; rather, he is in constant need of aid coming from outside of him. If divine law, or the ever-present eye of god, is done away with, man lives in rebellion from all that has hitherto preserved him. Dostoevsky admits that human nature is guided largely by its own inherent baseness, but the added observation that man is naturally rebellious provides the key to understanding Ivan’s atheism: the instinct towards baseness is the instinct to rebel (this instinct is best observed in the self-interestedness of children). Incontinence, or self-indulgence, is the foundation for Dostoevsky’s conception of nihilism, which is the license to do anything, so long as the consequences (i.e., under positive law, &c.) can be circumvented. The totalitarian authority of the Catholic Church, as it is portrayed in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” is not in place to prevent people from “sinning” — rather, the state’s only purpose is to subdue men by subduing their conscience, and this is accomplished by taking away their freedom and accountability (freedom and accountability mutually imply one another), which the people (because they are as nothing more than children) willingly alienate to an authority.
Ivan’s rejection of the eschatological conception that God will bring about an harmony between good and evil at some distant point in time does not necessitate that man must undertake the Herculean project of founding a universal state for the institutionalization of happiness. Rejecting God on the grounds that He is capricious in His decrees and inscrutable in His designs does not necessitate that man take steps in any particular direction, or adopt any particular ideology to compensate for his palpable dilemma. Indeed, once God is done away with, an unlimited number of radical possibilities emerge. One point is certain: once the divine order has been rejected (whatever the grounds for rejecting it may be), the notions of how good is discerned from evil, and how true is discerned from false, can be redefined according to an arbitrary standard, or thrown out altogether.
Dostoevsky’s portrayal of man’s attempt to create moral norms without God in The Brother’s Karamazov represents an ironic parable against man’s egotism, vanity, and brutality, while Nietzsche’s presentation of the “will to power” as an endless “becoming” represents man’s vanity, egotism, and brutality apotheosized to the status of the highest values. Nietzsche holds that a wholly secularized culture will be born out of the ashes of nihilistic, or traditional religious values, with his visionary “overman” as its image and embodiment. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, holds that it is not within man’s power to overcome nihilism — without God, man will inevitably destroy himself. The figure of the Grand Inquisitor represents the failure of man’s attempt to enforce moral standards without God. Under the rule of the Grand Inquisitor, the penal institution replaces man’s conscience as the only deterrent against immoral or criminal behavior. Nietzsche predicts that universal madness (lying just under the surface) will break out when the fact that God is dead is finally understood in its totality. The sooner the gravity of this fact is understood and dealt with, the sooner man can realize the truth of his potential as a “will to power.” The curious fact behind the Nietzschean view of things is that it can only provide the most superficial account of the “character of existence” — there is nothing novel in asserting that every civilization is built out of human tears and misery (e.g., Hegel famously refers to history as a slaughter bench) — but that does not account for the “why,” which nihilism cannot answer. Ivan asks to what end is mankind served by God’s plan for bringing about a harmony between god and evil in some distant future while meanwhile mankind suffers inexplicably? Ivan’s question is far more compelling in terms of the practical function of morality because it addresses the problem of evil and suffering in terms of how mankind experiences it, and does so without any valorization of evil and suffering that ends with such a phrase as, “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.” Because the exploitation and “overpowering of what is alien and weaker”26 is a natural consequence of strength passes unquestioned as a self-evident rule, Nietzsche’s thought on the reality of suffering fails to account for why anyone or anything suffers at all, or why the problem of evil was ever a valid moral question in the first place. He gives us an account of the benefits of suffering which no man feels, and confounds common experience by promoting a conception of wanton power that appeals wholly to the instinct while it neglects the mind, and provides no new insight into the inexplicable adaptation of man to the world that man lives in and communally experiences.
Philosophy Major 