In this interview, philosopher and Nietzsche scholar, Babette Babich argues we must stop searching for life’s purpose in the realms of both science and religion. Instead, life must be appreciated through an admiration of its beauty and its poetry. We must love life’s constant change and becoming, and admire it, as much as is possible, from the perspective of eternity.

See Babette Babich live in London at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival alongside Slavoj Zizek, Sadiq Khan, Phillipa Gregory and many more speakers, musicians and comedians. Book your place now.

Ricky Williamson: You are appearing in three debates at this year's HowTheLightGetsIn festival. One on whether aesthetics should be our highest value, one on language, and one on purpose in life. All relate nicely to your work on Nietzsche. Starting with aesthetics… 

Nietzsche of course said many very interesting things about aesthetics. One of those things was this, "it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." I take this as meaning that existence cannot be justified morally, or by having meaning. Rather, existence is only justified in the sense that a work of art is justified. So we must make existence an aesthetically good enough work of art to be justified. If you accept the question on these terms... how can we make existence aesthetically good enough to be justified eternally?

Babette Babich: This is a very challenging question! And you are quite correct when you say that existence, for Nietzsche, is justified neither ‘morally nor by having meaning.’ It seems to me that Nietzsche does not disagree with Byron when he writes in his She Walks in Beauty from his Hebrew Melodies, reflecting: One shade the more, one ray the less, in keeping with the ethos of HowTheLightGetsIn.

But how are we to make existence “aesthetically good enough” as you say? We have the lovely notion of wabi-sabi for artists (and philosophers of existence) and there is kintsugi — should there be cracks and supposing we find ourselves with sufficient resources, in the form of gold. In general, we suppose wealth a fair prerequisite for what we call a beautiful life, but this does not seem to be what Nietzsche was talking about.

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What we allow into our sight makes all the difference as the abyssal or monstrous as he says, looks into us.

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Striking for me is that Nietzsche thinks about where we find ourselves, the view we take on things, and he emphasizes that our disposition or mood makes all the difference. Thus he promises himself not to denigrate ugliness as that initiates a cycle of recoil but only to look away, it’s unclear he achieves this, but that is what he says. What we allow into our sight makes all the difference as the abyssal or monstrous as he says, looks into us. To be the poets of our lives requires a certain focus.

I should add, but this goes further than the scope of this conversation, that the idea of an aesthetic justification of existence corresponds to Nietzsche’s world artist. Seeing existence from the perspective of this ‘world artist,’ here Nietzsche agrees with Plato, affords the needed aesthetic distance — Plato says we are not to take anything human too seriously — the vantage of eternity as the point of view of the world artist.

R: Now, a question about your second HowTheLightGetsIn debate, on language. What do you make of much of philosophy's focus on language? And Nietzsche and Heidegger's rejection of language as a guiding principle for philosophy. Does philosophy suffer from this obsession with language? Or, is there something metaphysically fundamental about language? Can we only perceive the word in terms of language? Or is language always a shadow of reality, and some experiences ineffable?

B: This is a great question and I am looking forward to this debate but it is predicated on an analytic approach to philosophy. Thus Stanley Cavell can ask Must We Mean What We Say? but the question would be meaningless for Nietzsche or indeed for Heidegger, both of whom think that more is going on when it comes to language than what we know or think we can say. Language is ‘the house of being’ as Heidegger says and Nietzsche focuses on the ‘art’ of language and both Nietzsche and Heidegger are hermeneutically minded.

20th-century philosophy inaugurates a certain recognition of the limits of language (with Wittengstein) but what follows?  For some it becomes a matter of what Mary Midgely (and not only Midgely) characterizes as a penchant for games, as she says, played by clever undergraduates placed at top-tier universities. There is a connection, hyped to be sure, with AI and large language models but that’s another topic.

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Everything one can do with language which includes poetry and what language ‘does’ with us

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Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger exclude the relevance of language but they both invite us to question, especially in the case of Nietzsche, the role of deception, illusion, style, and rhetoric, thus everything one can do with language which includes poetry and what language ‘does’ with us, which was of course informative for Freud and later for Lacan and what Heidegger called thinking.

You observe that we ‘only perceive the world in terms of language’ and I think this is true but words have their own shadows, surprises, and shocks. We need hermeneutics as language emerges in conversation, in use. To a certain extent, and this is how language can ‘speak’ us, we don’t quite know what language can do. This for Nietzsche was part of what philosophy needed to consider, and I think he took that aesthetically but also provocatively, as truth and lie.

R: Your final debate at HowTheLightGetsIn, on purpose in life. Nietzsche famously said that 'God is dead', and also that we now live in God's shadow, meaning that we still live as though God or something like God existed. We still haven't quite accepted the consequences of God's death, which is surely nihilism. Without God is not life without meaning and all our endeavours cancelled out and forgotten upon our death. This is of course the age-old problem of meaning. What is your solution?

B: Ah: good old theodicy, complete with Pascal’s spin, parodically revived in Zarathustra’s exchange with the dying tightrope dancer: who rues that if it’s true there is no God, no soul, no heaven, then he is an animal taught to dance for nothing — and more nothing.

The ascetic ideal is so very durable that, as Nietzsche says, even a mosquito regards the eyes of the universe as collimated upon its whirling in the air and every porter, he says (Nietzsche was very class conscious) ‘wants an admirer.’ If there is purpose, a ‘why,’ one can live, Nietzsche says, with any ‘how’. The point is a provocation.

The death of God is not Nietzsche’s proclamation: he puts it in a madman’s mouth and one can trace it to Hegel’s dictum, canonically Christian: our entire liturgical year runs from the birth of incarnate deity through to the death (and vanquishing of death) of incarnate deity, year in, year out: proclaimed from the pulpit every Good Friday: God is Dead — and we have killed him. For Nietzsche, we no longer go to church to hear such proclamations but we have science which he says, so far from opposing the ascetic ideal or religion has simply taken its place.

Although I hardly claim to have a solution, we might push past both religious and scientific versions of the ascetic ideal, which intriguingly brings us back once again to the aesthetic which was for Nietzsche a matter of affirmation and necessity.

R: I, and others, have done some work exploring Nietzsche's use of drugs and the experiences he had due to them (see here and here). I argued that Nietzsche likely had mystical experiences due to his drug use and also argued that some of his admiration of Ancient Greek culture was in part due to their Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries in which drugs were consumed. As Nietzsche writes, "Might visions and hallucinations not have been shared by whole communities, by whole cult gatherings?". While his descriptions of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy align much more with the phenomenology of mystical experience via what he called 'intoxication', than from some more general form of chaos or the like. What do you make of Nietzsche's relationship with mystical experience and drugs?

B: Thank you, Ricky! I have great sympathy for these insights! To be sure, there are historical, hermeneutic issues when it comes to ‘intoxication.’ Nietzsche’s word is Rausch — and Heidegger gave a complete lecture course on the connection between art and intoxication.

The danger of reducing the Dionysian to drug culture in The Birth of Tragedy is that one almost automatically misses the rest of the book, in particular the ‘marriage’ between the brother-gods Apollo and Dionysus, a marriage key to aesthetic justification: tragedy being the offspring of this brotherly union. To my mind, one needs to fit the tragic as Nietzsche maintains it throughout his text along with the focus on music which is also, so Nietzsche argues, an ‘intoxicant’ (as is, in a more routine sense, sheerly mechanical activity). I take a full third of my book The Hallelujah Effect to talk about this (see here).

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Dionysian ritual and mystical experience by no means exclude the effects of drug use on Nietzsche’s part.

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The alternative might not be between drugs and chaos but what Nietzche called, this is the original subtitle of his book, the ‘spirit of music’ and Nietzsche thought he had made scientific discoveries in his field of classical philology concerning the musical character of the spoken pronunciation of ancient Greek.

That said, the complexities of Dionysian ritual and mystical experience by no means exclude the effects of drug use on Nietzsche’s part and I very much agree with your insights if I would add that starting at a very young age, Nietzsche also suffered from the darker side-effects of modern, physician-prescribed drugs. Given the drugs he prescribed for himself as you mention this, the combination would amount to a devil’s cocktail, yielding iatrogenic tragedy (see the last section here). I think we ignore the human tragedy of Nietzsche’s end of life when we, as scholars, diagnose in retrospect by ignoring drugs and their interactions overall ignoring (and medicine today continues to ignore) the question of cumulative effects of taking such drugs, but assessing Nietzsche’s collapse as an ontic affair of physiological debility, hereditary (via his father) or otherwise acquired.

R: Finally, you will also be doing a solo talk at the festival. Can you give our readers a taste of what is to come in that?

B: The talk is scheduled at the end of the afternoon on Saturday, compounding the challenge of the topic. The theme is connected to Nietzsche’s suggestion that we need a solution to the question you began with concerning aesthetic justification, more precisely as Nietzsche puts it: “how can we make things beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not?” I find the counterweight worth thinking about.

We appreciate beauty just given that we are in the right place and given that we are in the mood for it (Nietzsche as I noted above thinks that seeing beauty has a range of preconditions). But what struck Nietzsche was that we are ready to condemn life if it doesn’t suit us, often for the least reason such that rancor against what is lacking in or what we take to be missing from our lives can preoccupy us to the exclusion of everything else when a single thing ought to be enough to redeem, this is Nietzsche’s language, ‘the innocence of becoming.’

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Nietzsche has a formula for an ideal vision of what it is to be human that I return to: to love life from the perspective of eternity as a perspective of consecration which requires that one not be ‘in love with it.’

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One thing I will try to ask is what would it take for us to become, as Nietzsche says, ‘the poets of our lives’? At issue is affirmation along with what he called the ‘redemption of becoming.’ We tend to see change as problematic and thus to be resisted be it illness or aging or death and so on. Nietzsche thinks that all of this is life and he maintains that philosophy has traditionally condemned this in favor of the changeless.

Nietzsche has a formula for an ideal vision of what it is to be human that I return to: to love life from the perspective of eternity as a perspective of consecration which requires that one not be ‘in love with it.’ Thus he imagines the sun at evening, splashing everything with gold, so that even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.

This is appearance.  The oars are the same as they ever were, the fisherman is still poor, the perspective is golden: the consecration of mortality, vulnerability, indigence that is the human, here and now. That’s the poetry.