WRETCHEDNESS OF WARUM

Why such a title, Wretchedness of Warum? Perhaps, because the splendid philosophical question Why man at all? has become so inextricably entangled with the whining of the other Warum?-- Why do I suffer?, that the legitimate inquiry drowns in petty complaint, and the positive kernel of objectivity is lost in the negative cesspool of pointless subjectivity.

The reader may have guessed already from looking at the blue font below that this is another reflection on a Nietzsche passage, and if you have, you have guessed correctly.

“…Apart from the ascetic ideal, man had no meaning so far. “Why man at all?” was a question without an answer. This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: something was lacking. Man did not know how to justify, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal, but his problem was not suffering as such, but that there was no answer to the question: “Why do I suffer?” Man, as the bravest of animals, does not repudiate suffering, he desires it. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind, and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!” [From Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; 3rd Essay (28).]

Here is a sparkling variation on the well-known German “Warum?!” Assuming that there is more to it, in practical terms, than abstract philosophical curiosity par excellence, is this a peculiar theological question of the seemingly irrational, theologically speaking, unpleasantness of Evil. (“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Presumably, only the good people are supposed to ask it, because all the bad people ought to know it already!) Or can it be the more sociologically oriented question of Injustice?

But, come to think of it, I have another idea. Granted that the teleological argument is the most appealing argument in the quest of converting faith into knowledge, or instinct into reason, a much better argument than the one from design, and all the rest,--- what if this great Nietzschean question: “Why man at all?” is man’s attempt to prove teleologically, alongside God… his own existence?! The Cartesian “Cogito, ergo sum!” is, perhaps, no longer good enough to prove anything, although, as I noted before, I believe that it is still full of its pristine original merit wherever innocence has not been hopelessly lost.

In a nutshell, the answer to Nietzsche’s inquiry can be put as this:

Man’s Warum? is not about suffering. “Why man at all?” is not the right way of putting it, either. Just like Dèscartes was preoccupied with this question without being quite able to formulate a convincing answer, man is mostly preoccupied with the fact of his own existence. If all reality is so illusory, how can we know that man is not a figment of an inflamed imagination, not some fiction of a thought that exists and thinks of its own, using man as a host only. In other words, how can man prove to himself that he, not God, but man, exists at all?

To put it in a nutshell, Warum? is a wretched question. A much better way of asking it would be: Wieso?

A splendid philosophical puzzle! It would have been very much to Nietzsche’s liking… and maybe it is?