Nietzsche wrestled with this problem in his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy. “It is suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desires that such a world should exist in the same way, to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative.” ( Will to Power, 579) His answer can be seen in this remark found among his notes after his death: Thus Spake Zarathustra, he wrote, “can only be regarded as his religious testament.”Īs Nietzsche criticized religion and metaphysics, he pondered again and again the reasons why the human mind is bewitched by the notion of a true world behind the apparent world. This is why Henry Aiken once pointed out that Nietzsche was not a secular but a religious thinker. This concern underlies all of the distinctive positions he took on the role of tragedy in Greek culture, his critique of morality, his view of human nature, his theory that ‘ego’, ‘thing’ and ‘substance’ are ‘fictions’, as well as his criticisms of religion and metaphysics.

SUBSCRIBE NOW Articles Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering Van Harvey on the metaphysical aspects of an anti-metaphysical philosophy.įriedrich Nietzsche shared at least one fundamental concern with the religions and metaphysical systems that he so criticized: the problem of suffering and how one deals with it.

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