Hegel and Nietzsche on Self-Judgment, Self-Mastery, and the Right to One’s Life

1 Introduction

Nietzsche’s contrarian position regarding the permissibility of suicide has been interpreted as a response to arguments prohibiting suicide across Christian, Kantian and, perhaps most notably, Schopenhauerian ethics.^[2] The prohibition of suicide in Christianity marks, according to Nietzsche, yet another feat of a weak-willed worldview that seeks to exchange the individual plight of value-creation for a mediocre earthly life that promises an afterlife instead.^[3] The Kantian emphasis on rational self-determination, on the other hand, treats life as a contingency opposed to the unchanging morality of the rational subject. Thus conceived, any thought of self-destruction can only be produced by contingent matters that the subject ought to resist out of duty to herself. To Nietzsche, however, a life that creates its own values cannot be undermined by an alien morality and its arbitrary dictates on the subject, even regarding fundamental issues such as the value of her life.^[4] In a more immediate response to Schopenhauer’s asceticism and his rejection of the assertive use of the will in the matter of one’s own death, Nietzsche defends a notion of voluntary death that exposes its opposite, namely, involuntary death to be an unnatural way of ending one’s life. Recently, Rebecca Bamford has argued that Nietzsche’s defense of suicide in the above encounters should be understood as an implication of his vitalist ethics, that life and its augmentation are one’s native yardstick to distinguish good from bad.^[5] Accordingly, death is not a negation of life, but rather its consummation or even “coronation.”^[6] For all empathetic interventions on behalf of Nietzsche’s argument, it remains puzzling as to 1) what extent the subject stands in a capacity to deliver the right kind of judgment regarding one’s life such as qualifying the kind of conditions under which one should feel empowered to end it, 2) how suicide can be considered an augmentation of one’s vitality or an empowerment of the will, 3) and whether suicide can be considered an exercise of freedom on the part of the subject who thereby cancels the very grounds and means for will and action.^[7]

In this essay, I suggest an alternate defense of Nietzsche’s position to provide compelling responses to the three problems posed above. To do so, I appeal to Nietzsche’s notion of life as an aesthetic phenomenon throughout The Gay Science (1882–87) and argue that thus conceived, one is in a position 1) to stand both within and above one’s own artistic creation, enabling a unique perspective from which to view one’s life including all of the social dependencies involved, 2) to determine the time and manner of one’s death as an aesthetically pleasant component of one’s life as opposed to determining one’s self-destruction, and 3) to exercise this act freely, as an expression of the will, without having one’s decision in the matter attributed to extrinsic causes, pathology, or other forms of interference into one’s agency. Only such an act expresses a creative distinction willed by the doer from the rest of nature, which otherwise prosecutes all life to a slow death in which all is consumed into non-distinction. Accordingly, this reading treats Nietzsche’s concept of suicide not as a lesser evil one might be led to under certain circumstances to spare a remaining degree of dignity or vitality for oneself, but as the practice of a poetic license upon one’s life. Such a poetic license, everyone possesses – but only a few know how to act on it and live aesthetically and, thereby, die aesthetically. So instead, Nietzsche contends, most of us inadvertently die slowly, accidentally, or even violently at the hands of alien forces our will was never awakened to counteract in a creative manner. Nietzsche’s position does not strictly promote suicide in its own right, but rather, is raised as a criticism of convictions that rule out the possibility of an authentic suicidal act. There is a remarkable difference between condoning suicide in its own right and recognizing how suicide might be enacted out of an authentic dimension of self-relation. Hence, we can distinguish two claims, one minimal, and one more strict, against prohibitions of suicide. Nietzsche asserts the minimal claim that we are not licensed to disqualify suicide as a mere response to one’s dissatisfaction with life. The stronger claim, on the other hand, is rooted in Nietzsche’s expressivist theory of action according to which death cannot be abandoned to the whims of causal laws, that one’s life and its consummation ought to be the subject’s (artistic) property.

To set up the above problem, I proceed by considering a novel opponent of Nietzsche’s contrarian answer to the problem. I first present Hegel’s ethical prohibition of suicide in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1820) and then position Nietzsche’s account as a response to it. This is not warranted by any profound contact on Nietzsche’s part with Hegel’s ethics, but rather by the fact that both figures treat the concept of life as self-possession and reach radically different conclusions about the permissibility of its willed alienation from the subject. Certainly, Hegel is not new in conceiving of life as a property relation, as both Locke and Kant appear as two prominent figures who have assessed the permissibility of suicide on similar grounds.^[8] However, Hegel is unique in predicating his answer to the question on a special form of knowledge and judgment concerning the implication of one’s living activity, labor, and social availability in the lives of others and the constitution of the ethical community. In turn, I suggest that we can read Nietzsche’s argument for the permissibility of suicide as a response to this epistemic challenge, namely, that such a judgment can be delivered on the basis of an aesthetic insight regarding one’s life. In the meantime, I clarify how Nietzsche’s argument that we are justified in ending our lives in a manner pleasurable and, thus, appropriate to ourselves is consistent with his non-dualism, aversion to substance-metaphysics, and his expressivist views concerning agency.^[9] The ability to treat one’s life as an aesthetic phenomenon, I argue, is at stake in achieving this distinction from Hegel’s otherwise similar notion of life as self-possession. Finally, I respond to the socially-grounded prohibitions of suicide, of the kind Hegel espoused, from a Nietzschean standpoint.

2 Hegel on Life as Inalienable Property

But the main question is: have I a right to commit suicide? The answer will be that, as this individual, I am not master of my life, for the comprehensive totality of activity, i.e, life, is not something external to personality, which is itself immediately this. Thus, it is a contradiction to speak of a person’s right over his life, for this would mean that a person had a right over himself. But he has no such right, for he does not stand above himself and cannot pass judgement on himself. When Hercules burned himself to death or Brutus fell on his sword, this was a hero’s behaviour in relation to his own personality; but if it is a question of a simple right to kill oneself, such a right may be denied even to heroes (Philosophy of Right, § 70).^[10]

Hegel’s argument against the permissibility of suicide has two components. The ontological premise that the subject does not stand over and above her life leads to the epistemic one, according to which she therefore has no adequate knowledge regarding her life and cannot deliver an appropriate judgment about its value. A notion of self-mastery is at stake here: were the subject able to stand outside of her life, she would potentially be its master (Herr), recognizing all the social dependencies the totality of her life is implicated in. It is after all, these social dependencies that both create her in the family and sustain her in civil society, as well as actualize her freedom in the State (PR § 33). Participation in these social spheres is not extrinsic to her individuality; this is in fact what Hegel thinks substantiates her ethically. Since her vitality, her immediate organic life is already integrated into these social spheres, a decision regarding suicide would require insight about the totality of her life throughout these layers of ethical life. With an unlikely insight of this sort, she would possess her life in a way she possesses other forms of property and would be justified in reaching a decision about potentially alienating it on her own will.

While Hegel recognizes a so-called “right of heroes,” which entitles extraordinary subjects to engage in revolutionary actions against unethical political formations, even such figures do not stand over and above their individual lives to reach a decision to potentially end it.^[11] Of likely crimes against a political formation, Hegel says: “Either an ethical existence has already been posited in the family or state, in which case the natural condition referred to above is an act of violence against it, or there is nothing other than a state of nature, a state governed entirely by force, in which case the Idea sets up a right of heroes against it” (PR § 93). It remains unclear whether heroes have a revolutionary right against unethical political formations because they are able to stand above them and recognize the wrong in them, or because the Idea cunningly works its way through their often violent actions in the interest of the foundation of an ethical state.^[12] Since there is no textual evidence regarding the possibility of a self-conscious hero who decides to transgress in order to establish the ethical state, it is difficult to argue that Hegel should have conceded that heroes do stand over and above their lives and are able to judge them.^[13] This means that there is no place for martyrdom through suicide in Hegel’s system, even in a clearly unethical world. Not even the hero is a master of his life and can judge it adequately.

Hegel argues that the subject and her life are bound in an inalienable property relation and defines this relation in substance-metaphysical terms. The will has an objective reality for others to respect only when it is asserted into matter. The plight for recognition starts with one’s taking possession of one’s organic unity, the body, by asserting one’s will into it, by regulating and maintaining it “in so far as I so will it” (PR § 47). Once the organic unity of the body is willed by the subject, and the body thus transformed into a property of the subject, the subject is empowered to appropriate matter external to the body to her use and ownership. This is possible because the subject is able to wield her body to assert her will into matter and seize it into her ownership (PR § 47n). It appears to Hegel that animals do not take possession of themselves in this manner and that they therefore cannot bring harm to their vitality in the same way humans can, that is, by consciously undermining this property relation: “I have these limbs and my life only in so far as I so will it; the animal cannot mutilate or destroy itself, but the human being can” (PR § 47). In addition to not being able to renounce it, the absence of a willed property relation to one’s life ostensibly disqualifies animals from a right to their life or what renders them the target of the justified violence for the ownership, use, and consumption by another: “Animals are indeed in possession of themselves: their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it” (PR § 47, Addition). Humans are not merely given a life and are instinctually determined to maintain it. Rather, they actively take possession of themselves, shape this most fundamental property of theirs, refine it spiritually, and distinguish it not only from nature’s unconscious forces, but also from the possible grasp of other members of the social whole:

The human being, in his immediate existence in himself, is a natural entity, external to his concept; it is only through the development of his own body and spirit, essentially by means of his self-consciousness comprehending itself as free, that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from that of others. […] By this means, what one is in concept is posited for the first time as one’s own, and also an object distinct from simple self-consciousness, and it thereby becomes capable of taking on the form of the thing (PR § 57).

Giving shape to one’s life, consciously taking possession of one’s being, and transforming oneself into an ethical actuality that others have to recognize are challenges the subject of Hegel’s civil society has to face. What is more, this subject, under her so-called right of appropriation, imparts purposefulness to external matter when she takes possession of it as her will substantiates it with rationality, utility, need, and pleasure (PR § 44, § 61). The necessary determinations which underlie the subject’s encounter that imparts this purposefulness onto the world are both inalienable and imprescriptible (PR § 66). Since right is the existence of freedom in activities of self-possession, production, accumulation, and contractual exchanges of property with others (PR § 40), it follows that the act of suicide is a crime against the very concept of right. We can thus formulate Hegel’s argument for the impermissibility of suicide on the basis of two premises:

1. A version of the “not in the same subject argument” according to which one has no right “to destroy that which allows one to be a bearer of rights in the first place”^[14]: the organic unity of the body allows the subject to participate in civil society and be recognized as a subject of rights, so we cannot conceive of a right to destroy the very foundation of this rectitude.

2. A version of socially-grounded arguments of the kind Michael Cholbi calls “the social goods,” “reciprocity” and “role responsibilities” argument.^[15] These proceed from the premises that the subject is the product of a social whole, that she stands in reciprocal relations of benefit and dependence with members of that whole, and that she has an obligation to continue those relationships which in part determine other people’s lives. Similarly, Hegel takes that the totality of our lives is not ours to judge, that we exist in part for other people, and that our ethical substance is the community with whom we maintain these relationships. It follows that we cannot deliver an adequate judgment about how the totality of our living activity is implicated in the lives of others, let alone reach a decision about completely withdrawing it from that set of relations.

Considered in the terms of Hegel’s substance-metaphysical thinking, both formulations express this identical problem. Hegel insists that the subject’s ethical substance is the social whole (PR § 33, § 156, § 349) and her participation in it is what enables her to take possession of her organic unity willingly, shape, refine, and maintain her being in a way appropriate to her. So, an attack on one’s organic unity contradicts the social whole that makes the production and maintenance of that organic unity possible.

Consider also that Hegel allows the reverse case that the social whole can demand one’s life as the consequence of one’s crimes, in a demonstration of mastery over the individual: “It is certainly the case that the individual person is a subordinate entity who must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Consequently, if the state demands his life, the individual must surrender it” (PR § 70, Addition). The ethical whole and its institutions can deliver judgments about their lives since they are subordinated to the whole and can be scrutinized in terms of their participation in it. But the same perspective, Hegel contends, individuals do not possess over themselves: they are not subordinated to themselves to attain the necessary perspective to judge their own lives.

This above exposition of Hegel’s argument brings us to a capacity to interpret Nietzsche’s defense of the permissibility of suicide from a novel angle. In the following section, I will show that considering the subject onto her life as an artist onto her artwork gives us a compelling viewpoint to revaluate the stakes of the subject’s participation in the ethical whole, even in the act of suicide. In addition, this consideration provides us with an alternate notion of self-possession and self-mastery, according to which suicide is not inevitably self-destructive, but rather the mark of a creative individual who styles her death to be distinct from mere dissolution into nature. The kind of insight Hegel denies the subject regarding her life because she does not stand over and above it, is available in the artistic distance from which the subject can at once craft and appreciate her artwork.

3 Nietzsche on Living (and Dying) in Style

Since Nietzsche infamously contends that one never lives through another’s cause, will, or desires, it follows for him that one also never dies through another’s interference: “One never perishes at the hand of anyone but oneself” (TI, Raids 36). At stake here is Nietzsche’s non-causal theory of action, or what has since been called his “expressivism” especially with regard to his pronouncements in GM I 13. According to the view, the subject’s volitional capacity cannot be characterized without reference to its expression and realization in action, as if it were a causal substrate leading to external consequences.^[16] A relevant implication of this position that we encounter in Twilight of the Idols (1889) is the view that even death is a venue in which the subject and her will are expressed. Death is not something that happens to the subject, it is rather the subject in her capacity to will that dies a certain death. It is an act in which her will disappears, and yet it has to have appeared in order to make its disappearance. Who the subject is as a person is expressed in her dying. Accordingly, the onus is on her will to craft who she has become in her dying. It is also evident that Nietzsche considers dying another activity of becoming. Against the rigidly delineated conceptions of philosophy that are idolized as self-subsistent entities, Nietzsche contends that death is not an objection to life, its destruction as a form of property, or unwarranted alienation as a social good:

They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts – they endanger the life of whatever they worship. For them, death, change, and age, like reproduction and growth, are objections – refutations, even. Whatever is does not become; whatever becomes is not … (TI, “Reason” 1).

Since death is a state in which one becomes and therefore is as opposed to is not, death finds itself in the list of matters that are a measure of the subject’s agency. By contrast, a life invested in the ideals and workings of a collective, in which the living activity of the organism slowly stagnates into death, amounts to, for Nietzsche, a slow death for the collective or even, a suicide pact with the collective:

Indeed, a dying for the many was invented here, one that touts itself as living; truly, a hearty service to all preachers of death! State I call it, where all are drinkers of poison, the good and the bad; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad; state, where the slow suicide of everyone is called – “life” (Z I, Idol).

The difference is not more than one of pace, whether one dies following a willed act of self-harm, or whether one dies a long-winded death devoted to the collective. In both instances, according to Nietzsche, one’s own will was implicated in living one’s life to its end as well as the kind of person one was in one’s dying.

Nietzsche’s Spinozistic critique of anthropomorphized metaphysics poses a problem for this aestheticist account of suicide. His remarks in GS 109 that we must “beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is only a form of what is dead, and a very rare form” forbids any strict distinction to be drawn between the dead and the living. The suggestion that the living is a type of matter subsumed under the dead makes any aestheticist characterization of suicide very difficult, since no manner of dying should be distinguished from another in this routine event of transition between two taxonomic ranks. Aestheticizing death could then be characterized as another illegitimate effort to anthropomorphize an event that can be explained in purely causal and physical terms. However, shaping one’s life into an aesthetic unity that is finalized in one’s manner of dying, so that it is not shaped by the arbitrary workings of social forces, is different from imposing a learned meaning onto one’s life per Christianity, morality, or other customs. For it is in the same passage that Nietzsche asserts: “There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses,” which, as Lawrence J. Hatab suggests, are different from the forms of logical, teleological or causal necessity that Christianity, morality, or any form of ideology will have to wield.^[17] Since artistic self-creation is a form of necessity among others in flux across time and space, the subjective endeavors of self-creation and self-interpretation are compatible with the larger picture of existence, both organic and inorganic, as an expression of the will to power.^[18] As Hatab goes on to argue, necessity for Nietzsche simply describes the immediate conditions under which temporal becoming ensues, where what one becomes is not dictated by some teleological vision beyond here and now, but by those immediate conditions that the subject transforms into her artistic norms for becoming who she is. Since, for Nietzsche, as we have seen, both the series of events that unfold in a finite lifetime and the moment of dying are states of becoming, it follows that the subject is permeated with the necessity to enhance her experience across these events. Only, Nietzsche warns that she should not do so by defaulting to an available system of evaluation. This is where art and life as an aesthetic phenomenon emerge as viable alternatives. Since one’s aesthetic mastery of one’s life is in turn an expression of the will-to-power, creating and interpreting all aspects of one’s lifetime, including one’s death, is more than another aesthetic anthropomorphism. Becoming who I am is not the teleological dictate of some transcendental authority that especially addresses me in my uniquely “human” capacity to transcend my physical reality. Rather, expressing myself in my necessity to become who I am is one of the many processes by virtue of which the will to power articulates itself in space and time.

It is evident that Nietzsche’s notion of life as an aesthetic phenomenon persisted well beyond The Gay Science. For instance, in the later Twilight of the Idols, the same idea recurs, especially in his pronouncements against philosophy and its “fictionalization” of human experience as meaningless (TI, Raids 23–4). Against the judgment that art falsifies a fundamentally vacuous life, Nietzsche suggests that the artist in fact crafts “reality once again, but in the form of a selection, an emphasis, a correction” (TI, “Reason” 6). When artistic intervention thus correctively modifies its object, Nietzsche suggests that the artist engages in an activity of “idealizing,” which does not, as it has been thought, proceed by eliminating the accidental features of an object until it reaches an unchanging essence, but rather by bringing out “the principal traits” of the object in question, “so that the others disappear in the process” (TI, Raids 8). This transformative activity is not exhausted “until [the objects] are mirrors of your own power – until they reflect your perfection.” The artist does not bring an a priori truth into finite shape in her lifework. Rather, truth only emerges in the artist’s engagement, when the artist has forced “a second nature out of nature,” including her own.^[19] In a move that foreshadows his contention against Schopenhauer’s attitude towards the act of suicide, Nietzsche suggests that Schopenhauer was wrong to think that art helps us in our “liberation from the will” (TI, Raids 24). Art should bring us to a more vivid confrontation with the will and the vitality we craft with it.

“You should become who you are,” Nietzsche asserts (GS 270). In appearance, this assertion seems to contradict Nietzsche’s argument that the will is wholly expressed in action and that volition cannot be characterized without reference to its expression. If who I am is not already evident in my actions here and now and I can instead become who I am through future action, does this not contradict the fact that I have always been myself? Asked differently, if there is no will independent of action, underlying action as a substratum ready to cause it into one determinate form or another, how can it be expected of me that I become at all? Rather than a transcendental subject who stands beyond her empirical self in order to unite it into action, or a self crafted in relations of property and labor to other members of the ethical whole as in Hegel’s account, Nietzsche suggests we should be standing completely above ourselves, hovering, moving, floating and more importantly, playing with ourselves in complete embrace of the contingencies such an observation might bring to us:

At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance […]. We have to discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased about our wisdom! […] We have also to be able to stand above morality. – And not just to stand with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float and play above it! (GS 107)

An artistic distance to her life enables the subject to draw pleasure from seeing herself for who she is without subjecting her to static notions of right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. This does not require her to detach herself from her empirical self, or to become a disinterested observer of routine matters of fact about herself. The unity of human experience has no transcendental source, nor is its possibility undergirded by a social context of property relations. The artist masters her life by uniting it according to “an artistic plan” under which all aspects of her experience “delight the eye” (GS 290). As Alexander Nehamas puts it, the unity of the self is not a given but “something achieved, not a beginning but a goal,” so the task is one that continually renews itself until the moment of death, with each moment introducing new contingencies awaiting interpretation and integration by the subject.^[20] While it is not posited as an a priori fact of human existence, such aesthetic unity allows the subject to see her life as a cohesive whole, and access it from a normative standpoint that assesses the harmonization of the drives and affects.^[21] As I suggest in the next section of this essay, these are the premises for Nietzsche’s reformulation of the problem of self-mastery and self-ownership, issues which Hegel took to justify his prohibition of suicide.

4 Conclusion

In this essay, I have offered an aestheticist reading of Nietzsche’s apparent endorsement of voluntary death. I have done so in response to a prohibitive argument that is not usually associated with Nietzsche in the literature. Hegel’s argument, according to which one’s life is at once one’s property to shape and at the same time not one’s property absolve, hinged on an epistemic stricture that the subject is not in a capacity to appreciate the implication of her living activity in the lives of others. Only this totality-objectifying perspective would enable her to possess herself in the full sense, that is, in the sense that allows her to absolve her life if she wanted to. In response, I have shown that Nietzsche’s argument harnesses different notions of self-mastery and self-possession that precisely grant the subject this impossible judgment over her life. Drawing on his notion of life as an aesthetic phenomenon, I have argued that Nietzsche’s endorsement of voluntary death follows the necessity of artistic unity, that the shaping of life is not to be left to the whims of natural or social forces. According to his expressivist account of action, death qualifies as a venue where the subject is still expressed into an interpretive space shared with others. From an artistic distance, then, Nietzsche argues, the subject is able to unify herself, deliver judgments on the totality of her living activity, and even make decisions of the kind that Hegel prohibited. Unless this is the case, what is assigned to the subject by the social order as her property, might very well not be of her in a fundamental sense. Most people die deaths that are alien to them.

However, this is not to be understood as a straightforward promotion of suicide. The minimal claim Nietzsche at points offers is that we, the bystanders, are in no capacity to condemn another’s suicide as an inauthentic response to their life. The stronger claim, on the other hand, is aligned with his expressivism and suggests that all death is an intrinsic component of life, and those who assert the necessity of their artistic unity into the world do not die deaths that are arbitrary or alien to them. Suicide would then be simply one form that the voluntary consummation of life takes on. Neither versions of the argument promote suicide in its own right. Nietzsche’s response to social premises prohibiting suicide consists in an appeal to the necessity by which the others are to shape their own lives under their artistic unity. This is Zarathustra’s wish for those who knew him: that they extract his life-affirming activities from the sphere of causality and interpret it for themselves, that they appreciate the aptness of his living activity for his self-assigned ideals, and that they carry this pursuit over into their own artistic trajectory.