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Nietzche’s second thoughts on suffering

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” would be among German philosopher Friedrick Wilhelm Nietzsche’s greatest philosophical hits, but researchers scouring some of his late, unpublished writings say he was working on a follow-up saying.

Notes unearthed from towards the end of his life have revealed that he was having second thoughts, and toying with a number of corollaries to the famous saying, in an unpublished volume of notes called Entschuldigung, auf Nachdenken (Sorry, On Second Thoughts).

Among his amendments to a life’s work was, “What does kill you doesn’t make you stronger.” This is thought to have been the result of ruminating on the likely effects of having tertiary syphilis, a condition that is widely blamed for Nietzsche slipping into madness.

“Later in his life, before he lost his mind to dementia, Nietsche seems to have realised that there may have been different qualities and types of suffering, some of them not beneficial to the sufferer,” says Professor Roger Lithcoe, from the Institute of Nietzsche studies at Heissenbaden.

“He was also toying with a follow up to the famous phrase, but sadly died before they were published.” They never appeared posthumously either,  “A series of publishers looked at them but didn’t think they were as catchy as his earlier one.”

“It is a great shame that Nietzsche’s On Second Thoughts did not come into the light sooner, or his earlier saying may not have been used so widely to  justify suffering sadism, coercion and neglect, often within educational institutions.”

“We only need to look at ideas like, ‘No pain, no gain’, ‘Tough love’, and the idea that suffering build character to see its ongoing influence,” says Lithcoe. “Nietzsche realised suffering is not necessarily of educational value. Endurance has its uses, but it only teaches us so much.”

In a lucid spell just before his death Nietzscheis said to have commented to a nurse, “Ich habe seit vielen Jahren Syphilis, aber ich habe nichts gelernt,” or, “I have had syphilis for many years, but I have learn nothing from it.”

We already treat machines like people

The recent buzz around chatbots should remind us of a human weakness already widely exploited: We readily bond with machines, including the large profit machines known as corporations, often to our detriment.

One technically clued-up journalist this week told of his discomfort at being the target of an attempted seduction by a pre-release version of Microsoft’s new Bing search bot in the New York Times. It is doubtless alarming when silicon gives us the come-on. But we should be uncomfortable too when sense a brand’s personality or a corporation’s kindness.

We put faces on everything like a graffiti artist doodling a smiley on fire hydrants. This urge to personify means we can be readily persuaded to become emotionally engaged with objects and machines, ascribing to them a personhood into which we read personality, motives and morals. It is harmless to see a goofy grin on a fire hydrant, but dangerous when an illusion of personhood is at odds with.

Human intelligence relies on an immensely more complex signal processor than any of our silicon-based chatbots. And our signal processors are deeply embedded in bodies which, in turn, are deeply embedded in the world. No chatbot is ever going to come close to mimicking the output of such an astronomically complex system. 

Corporations will not match any personification we make of them either. They exist solely to generate profits for shareholders with no other motive. Even the greediest person does not do that. Employees of corporations, though fully human, are paid to return profit for shareholders, whether or not the method is paralleled by normal human behaviour. Other employees are there to put a human face on it all.

So, while we should not worry that chatbots are getting close to being genuinely comparable with human intelligence, we should be worried we can be persuaded otherwise. We should explore this tendency to personify. It underlies current vulnerabilities to machine romance, notably to branding, public relations, are all charming chatbots attached to profit machines.

We should see machines for what they are, machines, not persons or pseudo persons to either love or to hate, or anything in the middle. These emotions are wasted. Instead we need to know how the machines that serve us operate, where they succeed and where they fail. Knowing this we can decide on  rules which would make them work better, rather than how we feel about them.

A hard-headed approach may one day be useful in navigating a world full of charming chatbots. We can warm up by finding ways not to be duped and manipulated by legions of highly sophisticated profit machines. ■

Time 45s with one minute fuses

Q: You’ve two lengths of fuse, of the kind used for bombs in cartoons. Each will burn for a total of one minute, but burn erratically. Can you use them to measure 45 seconds?

Reveal the solution

The first step is, as in any decent cartoon, to cackle in an evil way while lighting a match. Then light both ends of one fuse and one end of the other. Once the one burning at both ends is burnt out, light the other end of the remaining half-burnt fuse, cackling.