You speak of love of the world, of the goodness of being, of the
adequation of intellect and thing. You distinguish essence from its flowing
perfections, and you would even enlist love as a guide to what is, as though
the heart might correct the abstractions of the head. All this is very subtle –
and very pious.
You wish to affirm the world without affirming its cruelty. But I ask
you: what world is this that you wish to love? Is it the one in which the weak
perish, the strong prevail, and every living thing feeds upon another? The one
in which life grows only by overcoming resistance, by consuming, by imposing
form upon what resists it? The one in which even your so-called civilization
rests upon centuries of conquest, domination, slavery? You say: these are privations, distortions, failures of what ought to
be. I say: they are the conditions of what is. Life does not grow in spite of
cruelty. It grows through it. You speak of love as revealing goodness, as attuning us to the
perfections grounded in the nature of things.
Very well. But what does love
reveal when it is honest? Does it reveal a harmonious order awaiting
fulfillment? Or does it reveal a world in which every creation requires
destruction, every flourishing exacts a cost?
Your craftsman loves the wood. Yes – but he cuts it, planes it,
forces it into form. Your farmer loves the land. Yes – but he ploughs it,
fences it, uproots what will not serve his purpose. Your astrophysicist gazes
in awe at the stars – yet knows that their beauty depends upon forces that
annihilate as surely as they create.
You wish to call these “perfections flowing from essence.” I call
them the will to power. You hope to rescue affirmation by distinguishing the
being of the world from the horrors within it, as though Auschwitz were an
accidental blemish on an otherwise good creation. But your moral protest
betrays you. You wish to love the world only if it conforms to your idea of
justice. You wish to affirm being only if it is innocent. This is not love of
the world. It is resentment against it.
To affirm the world is to affirm it whole – its beauty and its
terror, its creation and its destruction, its strength and its cruelty. The
love of the world that recoils from suffering is a half-love, a timid love, a
love that would prefer a different world if it could have one.
But the world is not obliged to justify itself to your conscience. You
ask whether it is moral to love such a world. I ask whether it is possible to
live without doing so. The refusal to affirm life because it includes suffering
is itself a symptom of decadence – a weariness that would rather deny existence
than accept its cost. The strong spirit does not reconcile itself to suffering
by explaining it away as privation. He embraces it as the price of creation.
You may call this cruelty. I call it honesty. Love of the world, if
it is to mean anything, must be a love that says Yes — not only to the
intelligible order you admire, but to the chaos that underlies it; not only to
the flourishing you celebrate, but to the destruction that makes it possible. Anything
less is not amor mundi but a longing for another world.
And there is no other world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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