SICKNESS OF THE WILL

“Sickness of the will”--- what on earth does that mean?!

What I now have in mind, is covered by the following passage in Nietzsche’s Jenseits (208), which I present here in near-entirety.

In the following text, Nietzsche’s passages are marked by blue font, while my comments are in red. I hope that the reader reading this for the first time will appreciate Nietzsche’s predictive genius… ---

When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic, everybody is annoyed. One begins to look at him apprehensively, and he is henceforth considered dangerous...

(Rather than suggesting that our bravely unskeptical philosopher is certifiable, the reason why he is seen as dangerous is because he has diagnosed his society as such. Not being a skeptic, he looks beyond the sickness of his contemporaries to the healthy beast of the society of the future. Deprived of their comfort in the status quo, the haters of all transformation find such a thought unacceptable and dangerous.)

…A skeptic consoles himself, and he, indeed, needs some consolation. For, skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it develops when races or classes long separated are crossed suddenly and decisively.

(What is it that Nietzsche has in mind here? Perhaps, a preoccupation with the sickness of the present [skepticism], unable to transcend the present and reach out into the future.)

…Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, and often mortally sick of its will. Paralysis of the will. This disease displays itself as objectivity, being scientific, l’art pour l’art, pure knowledge free of will, all this is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: I vouch for this diagnosis of the European sickness.

(I believe that in this paragraph Nietzsche simply confirms what I suggested in my previous note.)

The sickness of the will is spread unevenly over Europe: it appears the strongest where culture has been at home the longest; it disappears to the extent to which the barbarian still, or again claims his rights under the loose garments of Western culture.

(This thought rather neatly corresponds to the ‘botanical’ perspective of Nikolai Danilevsky, offered by him in his political masterpiece Russia and Europe. Like all the gorgeously blooming flowers whose glorious maturity signifies the onset of a morbid decay, the future belongs to those who have not bloomed yet on the world stage.)

In France today the will is most seriously sick.

(But is it so because the Napoleonic Empire had just bloomed, and the fall season had long set in?)

The strength to will is a little greater in Germany; but much stronger in England…

(…which is not surprising, considering that a revival of the national spirit was taking place in full swing, spurred by her vigorous imperial push of global colonization…)

Spain, and Corsica…

(a post-Napoleonic nationalist revival still going on in both these places…)

…not to speak of Italy, which is too young to know what it wants.

(Ironically, the greatest nationalist revival would take place in Italy after Nietzsche’s time, but even then, at the peak of fascism, Italy could still be suspected of hardly “knowing what it wants.”)

But it is strongest and most amazing in Russia. There, this strength has long been accumulated and stored up, there the will, uncertain whether to negate or to affirm, is waiting-- menacingly, to be discharged.

(We have already commented on this sharp prediction elsewhere. Tocqueville, however, is ahead of Nietzsche on this account, which should by no means diminish the much more pointed Nietzschean prophesy… But wait, the Russian prophesy is by no means done yet!)

I do not say this because I want this to happen: the opposite would be more after my heart.-- I mean such an increase in the menace of Russia that Europe would have to resolve to become menacing too, that is, would have to acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule Europe, a long terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence, so, the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic and democratic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring about the fight for the dominion of the earth, the compulsion to large-scale politics.

(Some questions could be asked here. How does America fit into Nietzsche’s picture: as France of the spirit, maybe? Was Nazi Germany an expression of that European reaction to Russia that Nietzsche was talking about? And, in modern application, is what is being called Islamic extremism the newest expression of the will, whose greatest expression in Nietzsche’s passage is ascribed to Russia? I strongly doubt that, if such a flourish of the new will presupposes a waning of the will in Russia, which looks reenergized after a temporary collapse of the 1990’s, like a snake recovering from her cyclical ailment by means of acquiring a new young skin over the never-aging body. In fact, there are several national wills asserting themselves on the world arena simultaneously from different corners of the earth… And if the American will is among these, I wonder what exactly it is after, and what exactly it represents. Ironically, I sense that the will of American nationalist isolationism is much healthier and more consistent and eventually promising than the will of her “internationalist globalists.” As a matter of fact, only the countries with the strongest nationalist drive have a decent chance to succeed in today’s clash of the wills.)

***

And, of course, revisiting the question regarding America and speaking philosophically, if modern American society represents that Nietzschean “sickness of the will,” is it possible that ‘skepticism’ is no longer the name of the game and that something else has taken its place? Or is it also skepticism, but with a new face?