THE CITY

The City
surprised if our world is not designed for our happiness, and is full of
suffering. If God is not good, we have little reason to be confident in
our judgments about what ought, or ought not, to happen.
Let us turn now to Nietzsche, whose response to the problem
is radically different from Hume’s. Here it is worth noting that
Nietzsche is not a figure commonly associated with the theodicy
debate. Nevertheless, Nietzsche had telling things to say about
the problem, albeit very atypical things in keeping with the radical
nature of his philosophy. In particular, he disdainfully dismissed the
whole problem as an embarrassing symptom of the sickly weakness
of modern man.
For Nietzsche, the problem is not that the world is hostile to human
happiness. Rather, it is Christian morality that is hostile to happiness
because it requires us to exercise moral restraints on the expression of
our instincts in ways that Nietzsche found unnatural and stifling. “To
have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as
long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.” 7
Nietzsche is zealous not only to celebrate this world in its entirety
just as it is, but also ready to pour scorn on any invidious comparisons
between this world and some other world purported to be more real,
whether that world is an ideal Platonic realm or the Kingdom of
God that Christians pray to come. To affirm this world just as it is
represents Nietzsche’s ideal of the Dionysian spirit as portrayed in
classic Greek tragedy.
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems,
the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through
the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I call Dionysian,
that is what I recognize as the bridge to the psychology of
the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not
so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its
vehement discharge—it was thus Aristotle understood it—:
but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal
joy of becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in
destruction…. 8
To affirm “joy in destruction” as a component of “the eternal joy
7
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(London: Penguin, 1990), 44
8
Ibid., 121.
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