"8. From the Military School of Life. - Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger." (Nietzsche, 'Twilight of the Idols' in The Nietzsche Reader, Ed. Pearson & Large p.456)
In order to make some proper sense of this, firstly let's address the glaringly obvious. Nietzsche most certainly cannot refer exclusively to physical strength; to become crippled with an illness like motor neurone disease or another illness which gradually destroys the body's physical functions, or at least wastes the muscles, bone and nervous system. Obviously, in this circumstance, we would not be becoming physically stronger in virtue of that which hasn't [immediately] killed us.
In a different case, however, we can consider that things which pose a threat to our physical well-being do indeed, in a sense, make us stronger: when we contract certain illnesses, we develop immunity to them; chickenpox, for example. We are at first incapacitated, but once we are well again we then have a new strength; there is something we have conquered, and shan't be confronted with again.
This second sense is the kind of making stronger to which Nietzsche refers, but it extends well beyond merely the physical. Every emotional downfall is an experience from which we take injury; our heart can scar. We have a choice between learning our lesson, or dooming ourselves to repeat it, and in more than one way; by way of recurrence of similar events, and by the eternal return of the same¹. But to learn from an emotional scar is not merely to become cold and nonreactive in the face of a similar emotional challenge, rather it is to analyze and reach understanding over why we were affected in this particular way, what our weakness was, and how the emotion served as an obstacle. If, to use the cliche of jumping hurdles, we crash through a hurdle, the lesson is not to ignore the pain and fault in our technique, crashing through each further hurdle; rather we must learn that it was indeed a fault in our technique, an correct it. Of course, conditioning our shins against future errors is also beneficial, since we will receive lesser injury the next time - but primarily we are interested in successfully clearing the hurdle, and not just being able to tolerate failure.
Another consideration would be through the metaphor of deadly combat. Every strike which would have, but fortunately did not kill us, allows us to learn precisely how to avoid, counter or parry such a strike in future combat. We learn our opponents' moves without falling to them. Not only do we increase our capacity for defense, but also have a new offensive move in our own arsenal. Our challenge and our obstacle thus becomes our tool and our strength.
There is one last consideration I want to make here today, and that is of suicide. For the fortunate, life may pass by entirely without a single moment of doubt as to the will to survive and persist. But for the many, great obstacles at least once appear which can bring self-doubt regarding one's capacities to proceed. As Alan Watts once said "the game has to be worth the candle". So the last application to think about regarding Nietzsche's aphorism is that perhaps we can force the game to be worth the candle; that, to a certain mindset - which can be cultivated as a great crop should the seed exist within us to begin with - the obstacles which offer less hope than the sweet release of death and oblivion can be conquered through a certain blind belligerence and stubbornness; a great deal of screaming "no" in the face of death and uncertainty; a summoning of a will to power regardless of perhaps unconquerable odds; to climb a mountain to which there is no peak.
Perhaps I am merely stating the obvious regarding this aphorism, and that it is really a reiteration of the old adage 'everything is a lesson to be learnt'. But hopefully I have offered a slightly more holistic account of what this entails, since it is easy to limit ourselves to just one of the above understandings.
I'll close today with a pseudo-dithyramb inspired by the views expressed here:
A poem with a self-referencing title by the author
With loving humility Hephaestus calls out:
"Sisyphus!
You must take action!
let not the boulder reach the top;
Become inspired and push, so that it may thunder down
And crash through the gates
of the underworld!"
What then for Sisyphus?
The gods that bound him
had not anticipated this sudden turn of events.
Footnote
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