1NC

Classic 1-Off Version
A Subpoint is the Real World—
The affirmative is a great escape— a condemning of tragedy, manifested by attempts to
resolve the chaos of life and avoid suffering. The plan constructs an unattainable ideal order
in a futile attempt to shape the world into its fantasy, culiminating in a hatred for life.
Saurette 96 – Professor of Political Studies (Paul, Prof of Political Studies @ UOttawa, “I Mistrust All
Systematizers and Avoid Them: Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International
Relations Theory” Millenium 25.1, DS)
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to
the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to
Power, this will to meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular
community.' Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical
foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and
natural. Nietzsche suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modern conception of
society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic
thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic
myths which honoured tragedy and competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful
and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and affirmed
as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However, this incarnation of the will to power as tragedy
weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the selfrespect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. 'Everywhere the instincts were in
anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from excess: the monstrum in animo was a universal
danger,.7 No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek
thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften the tragedy of life,
while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became paramount. In the words
of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind h is aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that h is case, the idiosyncrasy of
his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing
itself: the old Athens was coming to an end-And Socrates understood that the world had need of him -his
expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation.s Socrates realised that h is search for an
ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability
within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised
mastery and control, not through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual ,
the contingent, and the problematic. [n response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece
tried to renounce the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the
Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche's words, '[r]ationality was divined as a
saviour ... it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at
rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be
absurdly rational .... ,9 Thus, Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework.
The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by
renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is
inescapably comprised of both order and disorder, however, the promise of control through Socratic
reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World' of eternal and meaningful forms, in opposition to an
'Apparent World' of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is contained within the
Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World.
Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of
Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real World. According to
Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern' 10 understanding of life
which could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook
created a modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be understood only
as a phenomenon for which someone, or something, is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophicallyinduced condition ressentiment, and argues that it signaled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by
exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved
historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to
Nietzsche, ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent World
as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on
individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the
Real World As Nietzsche wrote, 'I suffer: someone must be to blame for it' thinks every sickly sheep. But his
shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: 'Quite so my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you
yourself are .this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,-you alone are to blame/or yourself-This is
brazen and false enough: but one thing is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered. I I Faced
with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in
peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational .... ' 12 The genius of the ascetic
ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad

absurdium the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World!
Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental world of
philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always
blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action . This subtle
transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised worlds creates the Will to Order as the
defining characteristic of the modem Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the
Apparent World, .the ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the
repose of deepest sleep, in short absence of suffering'. 13 According to the ascetic model, however, this
escape is possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order,
then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the moral
Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore, generates two interrelated
reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with
the dictates of the ideal, Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this, however, the ascetic ideal also
asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World must be established, creating an everincreasing Will to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement creates an interpretative structure within which
everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche
suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal-this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence
seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a
view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and
sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation. '4 The very structure of the Will to Truth
ensures that theoretical investigation must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer
to the perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it
creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent World. With this critical
transformation, the Will to Order becomes the fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.
Disorder and insecurity are inevitable— the affirmative’s attempt to secure and perfect the
world only produces endless violence and destroys the possibility of a valuable existence

Der Derrian

98 [James, Watson Institute research professor of international studies at Brown
University, “The Values of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard”, JSTOR]
The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It
can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in
Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power,
an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings--including selfpreservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather
than confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms,
incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always use those words in
which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the
pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But
the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality
or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear.
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which
is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the feardriven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which
produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life
which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science ,
Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar,
the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs
us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37 The fear of the
unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which
causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection
against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is
true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is
sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of
this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols The causal instinct is thus conditional upon,
and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own
sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and
relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a
cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but
for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the
most habitual explanations. 38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain
unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling
the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people
who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they

fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39
The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated
to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an
"artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in
being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of
being protected by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come
from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single
case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something
to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41

1.
The affirmative tries to fix the world– suffering is inevitable; the only option is to affirm the
value in that suffering and give it meaning

Kain ‘07 (Philip J., “Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence”, Journal of Nietzsche
Studies, issue 33, Penn state University, Muse)//RSW
Nietzsche simply dismisses the designed cosmos, which few believe in anymore anyway (WP 12a). On the
other hand, Nietzsche takes the perfectible cosmos very seriously. He resists it with every fiber of his
being.5 For Nietzsche, we must stop wasting time and energy hoping to change things, improve
them, make progress (see, e.g., WP 40, 90, 684)—the outlook of liberals, socialists, and even Christians,
all of whom Nietzsche tends to lump together and excoriate. For [End Page 50] Nietzsche, we cannot
reduce suffering, and to keep hoping that we can will simply weaken us. Instead, we must conceal
an alien and terrifying cosmos if we hope to live in it. And we must develop the strength to do so. We
must toughen ourselves. We need more suffering, not less. It has "created all enhancements of
man so far . . ." (BGE 225, 44; WP 957; GM II:7). If we look deeply into the essence of things, into the
horror of existence, Nietzsche thinks we will be overwhelmed—paralyzed. Like Hamlet we will not be able
to act, because we will see that action cannot change the eternal nature of things (BT 7). We must see,
Nietzsche says, that "a profound illusion . . . first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the
unshakeable faith that thought . . . can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is
capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion
accompanies science as an instinct . . ." (BT 15). In Nietzsche's view, we cannot change things. Instead,
with Hamlet we should "feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that [we] should be asked to set right a world
that is out of joint" (BT 7; cf. TI "Anti-Nature," 6). Knowledge of the horror of existence kills action—which
requires distance and illusion. The horror and meaninglessness of existence must be veiled if we are to live
and act. What we must do, Nietzsche thinks, is construct a meaning for suffering. Suffering we
can handle. Meaningless suffering, suffering for no reason at all, we cannot handle. So we give
suffering a meaning. We invent a meaning. We create an illusion. The Greeks constructed gods for
whom wars and other forms of suffering were festival plays and thus an occasion to be celebrated by the
poets. Christians imagine a God for whom suffering is punishment for sin (GM II:7; cf. D 78). One might find
all this unacceptable. After all, isn't it just obvious that we can change things, reduce suffering, improve
existence, and make progress? Isn't it just obvious that modern science and technology have done so? Isn't
it just absurd for Nietzsche to reject the possibility of significant change? Hasn't such change already
occurred? Well, perhaps not. Even modern environmentalists might resist all this obviousness. They might
respond in a rather Nietzschean vein that technology may have caused as many problems as it has
solved. The advocate of the perfectible cosmos, on the other hand, would no doubt counter such
Nietzschean pessimism by arguing that even if technology does cause some problems, the solution to
those problems can only come from better technology. Honesty requires us to admit, however, that
this is merely a hope, not something for which we already have evidence, not something that
it is absurd to doubt—not at all something obvious. Further technology may or may not
improve things. The widespread use of antibiotics seems to have done a miraculous job of
improving our health and reducing suffering, but we are also discovering that such antibiotics
give rise to even more powerful bacteria that are immune to those [End Page 51] antibiotics. We
have largely eliminated diseases like cholera, smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis, but we have
produced cancer and heart disease. We can cure syphilis and gonorrhea, but we now have
AIDS. Even if we could show that it will be possible to continuously reduce suffering, it is very
unlikely that we will ever eliminate it. If that is so, then it remains a real question whether it is
not better to face suffering, use it as a discipline, perhaps even increase it, so as to toughen
ourselves, rather than let it weaken us, allow it to dominate us, by continually hoping to
overcome it. But whatever we think about the possibility of reducing suffering, the question may well
become moot. Nietzsche tells a story: "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that
universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon
which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of
'world history,' but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths,
the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die" (TL 1, 79). Whatever progress
we might think we are making in reducing suffering, whatever change we think we are
bringing about, it may all amount to nothing more than a brief and accidental moment in
biological time, whose imminent disappearance will finally confirm the horror and
meaninglessness of existence. The disagreement here is not so much about the quantity of suffering
that we can expect to find in the world but, rather, its nature. For proponents of the designed cosmos,

suffering is basically accidental. It is not fundamental or central to life. It is not a necessary part of the
nature of things. It does not make up the essence of existence. We must develop virtue, and then we can
basically expect to fit and be at home in the cosmos. For the proponents of a perfectible cosmos, suffering
is neither essential nor unessential. The cosmos is neutral. We must work on it to reduce suffering. We
must bring about our own fit. For Nietzsche, even if we can change this or that, even if we can
reduce suffering here and there, what cannot be changed for human beings is that suffering is
fundamental and central to life. The very nature of things, the very essence of existence,
means suffering. Moreover, it means meaningless suffering—suffering for no reason at all. That cannot
be changed—it can only be concealed.

2.

C Subpoint is the impacts—

3.
Reducing humanity as something that needs to be saved makes its extinction desirable

Nietzsche 1886 [fredrich, “beyond good and evil”, aph # 225, pg. 342]

Whether hedonism, or pessimism, or utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism (6)—all these ways of thinking,
which measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to contingent
circumstances and secondary issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naïveté, which everyone
who knows about creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down on, not without ridicule and not
without compassion. Compassion for yourself—that is, of course, not compassion the way you
mean the term: it's not pity for social "needs," for "society" and its sick and unlucky people,
with those depraved and broken down from the start, and with the way they lie on the ground all around us
—even less is it compassion for the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious slave classes, who
strive for mastery—they call it "Freedom." Our compassion is a higher compassion which sees
further—we see how man is making himself smaller, how you make him smaller—and there are
moments when we look at your compassion with an indescribable anxiety, where we defend
ourselves against this compassion—where we find your seriousness more dangerous than any
carelessness. You want, if possible—and there is no wilder "if possible"—to do away with suffering.
What about us? It does seem that we would prefer it to be higher and worse than it ever was!
Well being, the way you understand it, that's no goal. To us that looks like an end, a condition
which immediately makes human beings laughable and contemptible, something which makes
their destruction desirable! The culture of suffering, of great suffering, don't you realize that up to this
point it is only this suffering which has created all the things which raise man up ?

4.

The affirmative’s escape from the present world creates
resentiment, a hatred for life where conflict and suffering are
inevitable
Turanli ‘03 [Aydan, Prof of Humanities and Soc Sciences @ Istanbul Technical Institute, “Nietzsche and
the Later Wittgenstein: An Offense to the Quest for Another World” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 26]
The craving for absolutely general specifications results in doing metaphysics. Unlike Wittgenstein,
Nietzsche provides an account of how this craving arises. The creation of the two worlds such as
apparent and real world, conditioned and unconditioned world, being and becoming is the creation of the
ressentiment of metaphysicians. Nietzsche says, "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" (WP III 579). Escaping from this world because there is grief in it
results in asceticism. [End Page 61] Paying respect to the ascetic ideal is longing for the world that
is pure and denaturalized. Craving for frictionless surfaces, for a transcendental, pure, true, ideal,
perfect world, is the result of the ressentiment of metaphysicans who suffer in this world.
Metaphysicians do not affirm this world as it is, and this paves the way for many explanatory
theories in philosophy. In criticizing a philosopher who pays homage to the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche says,
"he wants to escape from torture" (GM III 6). The traditional philosopher or the ascetic priest continues
to repeat, "'My kingdom is not of this world'" (GM III 10). This is a longing for another world in which
one does not suffer. It is to escape from this world; to create another illusory, fictitious, false
world. This longing for "the truth" of a world in which one does not suffer is the desire for a world of
constancy. It is supposed that contradiction, change, and deception are the causes of
suffering; in other words, the senses deceive; it is from the senses that all misfortunes come;
reason corrects the errors; therefore reason is the road to the constant. In sum, this world is an
error; the world as it ought to be exists. This will to truth, this quest for another world, this desire
for the world as it ought to be, is the result of unproductive thinking. It is unproductive because it is
the result of avoiding the creation of the world as it ought to be . According to Nietzsche, the will to
truth is "the impotence of the will to create" (WP III 585). Metaphysicians end up with the creation of
the "true" world in contrast to the actual, changeable, deceptive, self-contradictory world. They try to
discover the true, transcendental world that is already there rather than creating a world for themselves.
For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the transcendental world is the "denaturalized world" (WP III 586). The
way out of the circle created by the ressentiment of metaphysicians is the will to life rather than
the will to truth. The will to truth can be overcome only through a Dionysian relationship to existence.
This is the way to a new philosophy, which in Wittgenstein's terms aims "to show the fly the way out of the
fly-bottle" (PI §309).

5.
Their rejection of this world destroys the ability to create value—longevity of life doesn’t
matter if that life doesn’t mean anything

White, 90 (Alan, Professor of Philosophy Williams College, “Delusion Frames, From Within Nietzsche’s
Labyrinth,” http://www.williams.edu/philosophy/faculty/awhite/WNL%20web/Delusion%20frames.htm,)

I take as my starting point Nietzsche's assertion that the emergence of nihilism as a "psychological state"
is bound up with the failure of the attempt to endow the world with value by at tributing to it an ultimate
"purpose," "unity," or "truth" (N:11[99] / WP:12). This failure leads to nihilism as "the radi cal rejection of
value, meaning, and desirability" (N:2[127] / WP:1). These descriptions suggest that nihilism has its origin
in a negation, i.e., in the failure of an attempt, or in the rejection of a purported value. Yet neither of
these negations can be the first step towards nihilism, because neither is a first step at all. The failure of
an attempt presupposes that it has been made, and any rejection presupposes either prior acceptance or,
at least, prior awareness of a question.I therefore suggest that the first step towards nihilism -- a step that,
in Nietzsche's view, leads historically to the second -- is the step taken with the judgment that the
existence of our world of becoming would be justified only through a purpose that guides it, through an
"infinitely valuable" unity that underlies it, or through another world , a "true world" or "world of being" that
is accessible through it (N:11[99] / WP:12). This step, like the step to rejection, is a negation in that it contains, at least implicitly, the judgment that our "world of becoming" as it presents itself, in isolation from
such purpose, unity, or truth, "ought not to exist" (N:9[60] / WP:585); the step presupposes the judgment
that without some such source of worth, which cannot be contained within the flux of a "world of
becoming," that world -- our world -- would be worthless. Is the person who has taken this first step -- who
has judged that the world requires justification -- a nihilist? Certainly not an avowed one: this person will
use the appellation "nihilist," if at all, only for others. Nevertheless, this person is "nihilistic" in a way that
one who simply accepts the world of becoming is not. From the Nietzschean perspective, those who posit
the extraneous source of value are nihilists in that (1) they judge of our world that it ought not to be (on its
own), and (2) they believe in a world that is, despite their beliefs to the contrary, "fabricated solely from
psychological needs," a world to which we have "absolutely no right" (N:11[99] / WP:12). To be sure, they
are not aware that the world of their belief is a mere fabrication; that is why they will deny being nihilists.
For this reason, if it is appropriate to term them "nihilists" at all, an essential qualification must be added:
their nihilism is unconscious. Or, to adopt a more Nietzschean term, they are religious nihilists: their
affirmation of another world or source of value is a consequence of their denial of our world as bearer of its
own value.Nihilism becomes conscious -- avowed or, in a Nietzschean term, "radical" -- with a second step,
the step taken with the judgment that the sources of value are absent, that the three categories of value
remain uninstantiated. "Radical nihilism," in Nietzsche's explicit definition, is the conviction of an absolute
untenability of existence when it is a matter of the highest values that one recognizes; plus the insight that
we have not the slightest right to posit a being or an in-itself of things that would be 'divine' or incarnate
morality. (N:10[192] / WP:3)
D Subpoint is the alternative—
Our alternative is to renounce the affirmative’s violent and futile search for security affirms an
insecure life. The state of human existence is inherently tragic and any other view only blinds
us to the true value of life. We should celebrate our condition in order to seek out an ethical
politics of work on the Self.
Dillon 96 (Michael, professor of politics and international relations at University of Lancaster “The Politics
of Security: Toward a Political Science of Continental Philosophy,” pg. 137-143)
This, too, was the world of the polis—as it was part constituted, portrayed and explored, through tragedy—where life was lived in truth as
aletheia. If we, therefore, ask what political difference the ontological difference makes, which many commentators, like Richard Rorty for
example, effectively do, the answer is the tragic.31 The tragic is the ontological difference first experienced —not thought
as such—as the possibility and practice of a mortal politics. ‘For there to be tragic action’, a recent classic study of
tragedy concluded, ‘it is necessary that a concept of human nature with its own characteristics should have

already emerged and that the human and divine spheres should have become sufficiently distinct from
each other for them to stand in opposition; yet at the same time they must continue to appear as
inseparable.’32 In consequence, the tragic sense of responsibility makes its appearance at the point when, in human action, a place is

given to internal debate on the part of the subject [sic], to intention and premeditation, but when this human action has still not acquired
enough consistency and autonomy to be entirely self-sufficient. The true domain of tragedy lies in that border zone where

human actions are hinged together with the divine powers, where—unknown to the agent—they derive
their true meaning by becoming an integral part of an order that is beyond man and that eludes him. 33 138
The political and the tragic (Human action never, of course, attains that consistency and autonomy which would make it self-sufficient, its
very freedom to act and the character of its actions—which always, more or less unpredictably, set things in train—deny it this. The realm of
the gods was also the Greek way of pointing towards, and expressing the divinity of, the beyond of mortality to which limited mortality is
nonetheless linked.) All this is directly related in addition, of course, to the question of security and insecurity, and to
the radical ambiguity of (in)security as well. For within tragedy it becomes clear that it is not simply a question of

insecure human being seeking security. Merely to see a recoil back and forth between security and
insecurity is to miss the point altogether, because it misses something fundamental about human being
itself which tragedy seeks to depict and celebrate. It is, therefore, to miss something which Martha Nussbaum explored so
brilliantly that it is worth quoting her conclusion at length. ‘ There is a certain valuable quality in social virtue that is lost
when social virtue is removed from the domain of uncontrolled happenings’ , she writes: There is no courage
without the risk of death or of serious damage ; no true love of city that does not say (with Alcibiades), ‘Love of city is what I
do not feel when I am wronged’; no true commitment to justice that exempts its own privileges from scrutiny. In sum: This willingness

to embrace something that is in the world and subject to its risks is, in fact, the virtue of the Euripidean
child, whose love is directed at the world itself, including its dangers. The generous looks of such a child go
straight to the world with love and openness; they do not focus upon the safe and the eternal, or demand
these as conditions of their love…any life that devoted itself entirely to safe activities would be, for a
human being, impoverished. The Hecuba [for example] does not conceal from us the seductive dangers of romanticising risk
itself…. [But] there are certain risks—including, here, the risk of becoming unable to risk—that we cannot
close off without a loss in human value, suspended as we are between beast and god, with a kind of
beauty available to neither.34 Being human being is tragic, and so we are (in)secure. That anxiety which is
experienced in the duality of security and insecurity is the freedom—the very capacity to respond and so
be responsible—of the human condition. In the tragic we not only find that we have been here before, but
also that, in a sense, we have never truly been elsewhere because there is no escape from where we are
at. This juncture of the duality of human-ness that gives rise to the political and the democratic is what
tragedy sought to speak about and provide an education in; for ‘tragedy was born when myth began to be
assessed from the citizen point of view’.35 That is why the recovery of the political is not only something
which must always already take place in the context of the specific, historical circumstances of human
being—currently labelled ‘Modernity’—it is also why that recovery must take place with, in and through the
movement of democratic thought. Hence, while ‘[f]rom a political point of view, the questioning of modernity means the
questioning of democracy’.36 Democracy must also always remain a form of questioning which constantly recalls
the political to mind and seeks to make space for it in the obligatory freedom of human being . From within the
polis the tragic, therefore, called into question the very demarcations that constituted it. The drama was a showing whose effect was to
educate and individuate ‘everyman’ precisely because it derived its source material from the social thought peculiar to the fifth-century city,
with all the tensions and contradictions that appear in it when the advent of law and the constitution of political life place in question the old
religious and moral traditional values.37 When the ‘hero’ and the polis are thus publicly brought into question in

Greek tragedy ‘it is the individual Greek in the audience who discovers himself to be a problem in and
through the presentation of the tragic drama’ .38 Nothing less than human being’s civilising capacity and power is at issue in
the tragic.39 But because the tragic recognises Otherness to be immanent, as well as radical, it is compelled
to find ways of responding to it with agonistic respect. This sets the question of the political aside from all
those, conventionally studied in terms of the (inter)national politics of security, of the structures,
institutions, rationalities and technologies of our contemporary regimes of power and practices of rule.40 In
particular, it sets the question aside from the intense and pervasive cult of the subject which constitutes the
(inter)national politics of Modernity, as such. While the cult of the subject seems to have arisen as a liberatory move
within the dissolution of the Christian imaginary, it necessarily called into effect, and thereby entered into an intimate
alliance with, the rationalising and reifying practices of rule of which ‘we’ are the inheritors . This was no
mere accident. Neither was it a coincidence, nor the unfortunate pathology of an otherwise admirable development. It was integral
and essential to what was a radical mutation in the symbolic order, and intensification of the logic of ontotheology, by
which the very staging and sense of the political was fundamentally re-ordered . (Inter)national political Modernity,
as the legatee of that mutation, is, itself, already mutating—through the rationalising, technologising, globalising velocity of its very own
representational practices and dynamics—just as radically as the times which engendered it. That bequest from the dissolution of the
Christian world is, in consequence of the very logics at work within it, rapidly fashioning a radically different political bequest to ‘us’. The

(inter)national politics of Modernity must, therefore, become concerned not with living-out but with outliving the modern. Out-living it through recalling and affirming, for example, the continuous disclosure of the
excess of human (and other) being over appearance as this arises within and against the foreclosures
threatened by the web of Modernity’s technologising determinations . Such is a routine and mundane as
well as a 140 The political and the tragic monumental task; though the mundane, for many in it, is often itself a monumental
achievement. The need to engage in a contest for the political does not, therefore, arise somewhere else. Nor
does it operate in some other time or place yet to come from out of the past or out of the future. It always
already exists; here, now, for the future. Tragedy, therefore, does not have to invent its characters or plots. It
finds them already there in the human condition. Within the space, framework and interpretive dynamics
of the tragic consciousness, human being is not represented as a model — however defined and determined—nor
even as a problem, but as an excessive, abundant, temporal way of being. It is , therefore, a mortal riddle,
never fully to be decoded, precisely because it is temporal; because being temporal it knows not from whence it came, and

because being temporal it projects, that is to say, takesup its freedom. Tragedy, therefore, always has history as its material. But history
here is not history in the historiographical sense of a series of facts and events more or less statically present in a once-present. It is history
in the fundamental sense in which human being is temporal. ‘Dasein does not first become historical in repetition’, Heidegger notes in Being
and Time, ‘but because it is historical as temporal, it can take itself over in its history by repeating’.41 This historical sensibility, which is less
‘historical’ in the traditional sense and more radically temporal, recognises that what has taken place always already shapes and limits what
comes to meet us, and how we are disposed to meet it; including also how we meet the ‘past’. It thus recognises more than that we have a
past and that that past is of antiquarian or independent interest to us. Rather, it recalls that, because of time, we are always already
historical, shaped by the way the past unfolds through us as we project forward; and that the past is, therefore, always an issue for us in the
present as we practise that projecting forward there in realising our potentiality-for-being. In sum, history is human being taking-up what it
undergoes—the process, as Heidegger puts it, of its ‘having its being to be’—and therefore always arising anew in the process. Herein lies
a fundamental problem, however, one that further illustrates the bind that we are in. Because tragedy is Greek, and we are not, strictly
speaking we need a new name and new practices for that to which I have been using the tragic to draw attention. This lack is the gap that
contemporary political thought has yet to bridge. That I have both to affirm and yet reject the tragic illustrates how ‘we’ are still suspended in
the web of the political economy of the tradition of the ‘West’; still ensnared in that historical, and historically specific, manifold problematic

of identity which results in recurring cults of the subject (nation, people, state, class). ‘We’ shall not discover and elaborate for ourselves a
sense of the political and of the tragic, therefore, as if we could, by seeking simply to readopt the Greek polis and Greek tragedy. Instead we
can only do so by interrogating them for what they say about the very questions of origination and derivation themselves. The tragic may
take history as its material, but Greek history is not (or not simply) our history, and Greek tragedy is not our tragedy. For one thing,
metaphysics—and for another the fate of the Judeo-Christian God—intervene The political and the tragic 141 between then and now. In
short, we lack a political genre to give single voice to the ineradicable duality of the mortal life—simultaneously necessitous and free— of
human being as we encounter it in our present.42 That lack is itself something which distinguishes us from the Greeks and is integral to our
tragedy; part of which is the loss of the tragic sensibility itself. Whereas in classical tragedy ‘[t]he nature of tragic action seems…to be
defined by the simultaneous presence of a “self” and something greater that is divine at work at the core of the decision and creating a
constant tension between the two opposed poles’,43 in a way that seems powerfully to recall the ontological difference, it also forcefully
reminds us that the ontological difference is a contemporary philosophical expression. The Greek understanding of reverence and of the
divine is sufficient to indicate that the ontological difference was not experienced and thought by the Greeks in such terms. With the end of
philosophy, therefore, arises not simply the death of God, but the depiction and exploration of the tragic—the mortal life of human being
which exists in virtue of the very difference it bears within itself—without gods.44 Tragedy nonetheless constitutes the only

powerful voice we currently possess for recalling the political difference which the ontological difference
makes; as the mounting storm of technologising normalisation and representative-calculative thought
threatens to efface any re-collection of it, thereby operating always to foreclose the opening of the
political. While the tragic invokes ‘a transformed relation to the essence of the old’45 which asserts itself with such new vigour in our
times, however, tragedy promises neither a new language, nor a novel set of assertive or prescriptive device s.
Instead, through its very sensibility to human being, tragedy operates provocatively and evocatively to recall
the tragic character of our mortal being to us despite and against the inroads which technology is making
into it. Hence it remains an indispensable resource. Mortal being, the condition of the condition known as tragic, is tragic not
because we die or because we are fated and miserable, therefore, but because being temporal we live by virtue of death and are
consequently always already differentiated, open and excessive creatures indebted to an excess that we can never master: Beings that
know themselves to be and yet also to be had by, and so differ from, Being which they manifest. Destined to be some-thing, by

the gratuitous gift of life itself, but not determined to be one thing or another, we are not just alive and not
just dead (even, in a sense, when dead). We are always something more than either of them because we are
always already both—living and dying—at the same time. The tragic, therefore, discloses an insight into
existence as the mortality which is just this, a continuous adventure of freedom in an ethical frontier
constituted by the opening of the ontological difference which constantly challenges us to decide how we
should find the time and place to dwell freely in the freedom of our being, which is a being we share in
common; with ourselves, each other, and the earth itself.46 There, too, in the opaque borderlands of this difference,
knowledge and power constantly collide in a way that tragedy recognises: because there is no secure 142 The political and the tragic
place in the tragic consciousness for a stable hierarchy of types of knowledge; for the architectonics of power; or for the
contract they seek to conclude. Equally foreign to it is the enframing of the ineradicable duality of human being in terms of the endless
either/ors of metaphysical thought. More even than this, because there is nothing which guarantees that the gift of life is benign, the tragic
entertains the possibility of a fundamental indifference, or even antagonism, between truth and humanity and explores that very condition;

the freedom of being human is the challenge, regularly evaded in ways too numerous to catalogue, of
course, to discover ways of resolving the freedom of its (in)security . Hence the ‘truth’ of tragedy directly conflicts with

that of philosophical truth; logic is confounded in the tragic precisely because it affirms the a-logicality of the duality of the human condition.
The tragic effects what Krell would call a frontal ontology on the political,47 exploring being as it experiences the experiencing of the
ontological difference in its very own experience; out-facing, through its tropes and topologies, the vaunted ontic realism of our
(inter)national politics of security. Tragedy thereby shifts the political into a different dimension of space, time and truth; where time has
many cadences and the disclosive quality of truth retains a fundamentally obscure, divided and errant quality which finds its expression in
many voices and is a challenge to mortal being itself. This is a dimension that specifically does not function according to the polarities of
logic, the demands of adequation, and the policing impulse of a love that requires a why. Tragedy abounds, instead, in the boundary or limit;
where limit is, however, liminality, the very occasioning of something.48 Its world is a world of ambiguity and multiple disclosure where the
validity or invalidity of a thesis is ultimately not the point. It is one where double arguments and duality proliferate and where differences
encounter and counter, rather than simply negate, one another as they describe the struggle of being. Instead of being preoccupied with the
formulation of rules that tell us what we must do, tragedy is concerned with depicting the predicament of the Being of a being which lives life
in appreciation of the agonal freedom of the ontological difference. In the tragic consciousness the very formulas, norms
and boundaries employed to establish order are all themselves at issue. The very clarity of the world and the meaning
of events is hidden behind a foreground which none of the characters can penetrate with certainty. But the figure of the so-called

tragic ‘hero’—breaking the laws that give order, unsecuring what secures, lacking stability of place and
identity—is not simply the exceptional figure. Rather it is the figure that recalls the exceptional character
of mortal being itself. Exhibiting a capacity for greatness , prone to excess, the tragic ‘hero’ is a figuration
of the way in which for all human beings, their very being-ness, that is to say what it is to be human, has
continuously to be recovered and reconstructed in ever changing circumstances . Where, classically, the ‘hero’

confronts the extreme polarities of mortal life and is the very device ‘which springs the safe fastenings which hold together our logical,
ordered world’,49 a heightened sense of the political—as the very mobile relationality of human being (capacity
to respond to its being which is always and The political and the tragic 143 everywhere, necessarily, a being-in-

common with others in Otherness in virtue of the fact that Otherness inheres within itself) in relation to the
circumstances in which it finds itself—nonetheless arises . Precisely because the action and the character
are a-political (city-less, cut off from the city, inhabiting and disrupting its boundaries ) a sense of the political, as a
movement in which the critical liminality of boundaries is experienced and respected to facilitate the

disclosure of human being itself, is made available: a sensibility to precisely this arises—polis, not stasis. Thus tragedy
does not promise a release from the agonism integral to the freedom of human being, or from the violence
which it always threatens. How could anything? It explores the prospects, instead, for practising lifeaffirming approaches to it. Danger, therefore, stalks the tragic consciousness as well; a special danger these days, in all sorts of
ways, but especially since the miasma of Fascism has threatened profoundly to compromise the truth of the tragic itself, fundamentally
impairing our capacity to recover a sense of it appropriate to our condition. Yet, the tragic ultimately indicts rather than
invites Fascism. First, because for the tragic the limit is liminality (creativeness) rather than terminality (the
final solution). Second, however much it may have arisen in a time when the Greeks differentiated themselves from Barbarians,
because tragedy does not locate the boundary between the civilised and the savage on the frontiers of

society—at the limits of the inhabited/civilised world so that the immanent alterity of the human condition
can then be dealt with by projecting it out and onto some outside—‘but brings it within the polis itself,
within the very hearts of its rulers and citizens’,50 it thereby exposes how Fascism’s self-immolative rage
against others and Otherness is ultimately a self-loathing aimed at our very articulatedness. Possessing yet

also being possessed by existence, creative and yet created, that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be
praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that
circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply
happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to
try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason. 51
The tragic is not, therefore, an excuse for evil, it is the setting in which evil arises as evil. The same goes for the good as well. We do not
know securely what either is in advance, we have always to re-cognise what they are in our present circumstances. Not an escape from
judgement or responsibility, the tragic is the condition that calls it up and apportions it while also acknowledging the creation of injustice and
irresponsibility which judgement inevitably also entails. Rather than displaying the dilemmas of human beings as ‘pre-articulated’, 144 The
political and the tragic tragedy shows them ‘searching for the morally [ethically] salient’. 52 Mortal life— free life—which is tragic life, forces
each of us to be active in this way. That is to say, as an ‘undecided being’, to exit from the realm of undecided possibility into the contest
over good and evil—neither of which we can escape because there is also, of course, a belonging together of good and evil (how else
would we distinguish either?) which capacity is what constitutes freedom—and take-up that which we undergo, freedom itself, through the
challenge of decision and judgement; which, because they are always concerned with the freedom of the human condition, are neither
decisionistic nor arbitrary.53 ‘Interpreting a tragedy’, Nussbaum continues, is, therefore, ‘a messier, less determinate, more mysterious
matter than assessing a philosophical example’. And truer. With both the mortal and the tragic ‘even when the work has been interpreted it
remains unexhausted, subject to reassessment in a way that example does not’. 54 However much it addresses the general condition of
mortality, the tragic has always to be set in the specific world in which mortals come to appearance. Tragedy, then, seeks to explore the
meanings which constitute that world through the dynamics of what is meaningful in it, how and why they are meaningful, and how the
condition of mortality works its way out there. Tragedy therefore historicises, contextualises and particularises as it seeks to address the
condition of mortality. As it does so, it traces the history of a complex pattern of deliberation, exposes the roots of that conduct in a specific
way of life, and seeks to work through or anticipate the consequences it will have for that way of life, and for the human beings who inhabit
it. While involving us in that life, therefore, tragedy nonetheless also has a way of distancing us from its setting. Thus spacing things out, it
thereby provides a space in which our experience is extended in ways that relate to our immediate concerns and partisan commitments,
without allowing us merely to remain embroiled within them so that we get no other purchase on them than that provided by our immediate
preoccupations with them.55 Given its basic modus operandi, including of course the fundamental requirement to engage and
communicate, how would the dramatist, then, pursuade an audience to engage with a drama that has no perspective? Of what interest
could a view from nowhere be to people who are, however problematically, always already somewhere? There is no human point in
operating from an Archimedean point. Hence the tragic implicitly disdains the argument that we cannot know how to proceed or judge
unless we do have an Archimedean point from which to take our bearings and resolve our dilemmas. It knows that we do act, and have to
act. It knows that, however inadequately, we always have reasons for acting. It knows, too, that we can never be fully in control of our
actions, because much remains mysterious to us and there are always unintended, and often dreadful, consequences attached to what we
do. And it knows, finally, that we have to take public responsibility for what we are and do, even though we are not fully in control of our
actions and their outcomes, by virtue of the fact that as mortal beings we are open to Being and beings through our own being; and cannot,
therefore, escape taking-up the burden of that which we undergo, namely, existence itself. The political and the tragic 145 It appreciates
also that because our actions are public and that the very publicness of them is what always already installs the critical distance within them
which calls us forth from them so that we cannot remain solipsistically trapped by them. Here responsibility ‘has nothing whatsoever to do
with moral imperatives’ arising out of a command ethic, but arises instead from human being’s resolute openness which manifests itself in
the desire to make manifest and answer ‘before mankind for every thought’, by affirming the life that is lived in ‘that luminosity in which
oneself and everything one thinks is tested’. 56 Once more, that responsibility is, then, the holding open of that openness which is the
ability to respond. That indeed, precisely because we lack total control, we are destined to embrace such a world-creating responsibility; to
hold open a time and place, a disposition, posture and stance, which insists on remaining open to all that we are. This, literally, from the
perspective of tragedy, is the place and the function of the polis. In the process of doing so, tragedy claims, life is restored by a
selfrecognition through which humans can attain a certain greatness in that openness, for practical political questions emphatically do not
admit of truth in the sense of simple correspondence or coherence. Tragedy is, therefore, concerned precisely with the condition in which
we do not and cannot know what is correct in advance, and with how, nonetheless, we creatively work-out and work with our disclosure in
the truth of that condition in order to live the free manifold of life itself. And it can be this because correctness is ultimately not the point for it.
Its truth, the truth of this occulting dis-closure, is a truth which antecedes correctness. For these very reasons, the tragic is not ‘a form of
playful imitation, nor does it resemble daemonic impersonation, it is a transmutation of life’. 57 It shows the transformative, restorative
capacity operating within an existence that is free, not by writing a rule book but by offering, instead, the enacting of action, or the terrible
movements, demands and responsibilities of that free life itself. Above all, tragedy is an exploration of the adventure in the freedom of

repetition. Of course, there is imitation in that performance, but the mimesis of tragedy is not passive reflection; neither is that entailed in the
living of a political life.58 It is not a mere process of ‘repetition’. No repetition is ever in fact, of course, mere repetition: ‘variation is not
added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element, the interiority of repetition par excellence’. 59 Hence,
the mimesis or repetition referred to is a process of active composition in which displacement and disruption also—and necessarily—take
place. (As Deleuze noted: ‘the power of difference and repetition…[can] be reached only by putting into question the traditional range of
thought’.60) That mimesis is one in which the ambiguities and strains of coping with the interactions of the inherent freedom and plurality of
human being, and of the city (of the being capable of life in a polis), are explored. Tragedy, then, offered a unique mode of learning which
was itself a model of politeia because it literally called citizens forth into the specific situation—always a situation with others—in which they
had to act. That is to say, through its moment 146 The political and the tragic of on-site in-sight, tragedy called the citizen forward into the
situation where the political is itself always arising; the factical, contingent, temporal, spatial mise en scene and mise en sens of one of
those moments of all of the moments in which human being continuously takes up that which it is undergoing in the politics of the polis.
Such a moment—the undecidedness of freedom—is literally the moment where human being bears repeating; picks-up where it has been
left-off and takesover its temporal possibilities again, in that very situation and by virtue of that very situation. It is a moment which of
necessity cannot be determined in advance for it only ever arises in virtue of the specific way in which it has been entered into. It is not,
therefore, the abstracted kind of decision situation in which the options have been worked out beforehand, and are now present at hand
ready for choice. It is the moment in which what is possible is resolutely worked out in the turn of the moment. There is, then, no application
or mere repetition of models going on here, and neither is the outcome fully calculable in advance. This moment, enacted in tragedy, is the
very moment of the political. Politics has its turn in the tragic. As Franz Rosenzweig wrote, All criticism follows upon performance. The
drama critic will have little to say before it, no matter how clever he may be, for his criticism is not supposed to testify to what cleverness he
had prior to the performance but to that which the performance evokes in him. Similarly, a theory of knowledge that precedes knowledge
has no meaning. For all knowing—whenever anything is really known—is a unique act, and has its own method. 61 Showing, therefore,
teaches us to look for the sake of seeing. 62 It gets us to think from somewhere rather than nowhere—namely the standpoint of someone
else, thus allowing us not only to appreciate that other position, but also to recognise that it may legitimately be different and remain so—
and so focuses our attention and judgement as spectators (which means we are integral and indispensable to the public-ness of the
performance, bear witness to it) on the publicly available aspects and import of the play. 63 For showing also creates an audience which
represents the world ‘or rather the worldly space which has come into being’, by virtue of the play. 64 Thus not only do people learn to
speak and enact a politics through the tragic, a (political) people may be constituted this way. 65 In this moment a world is created anew. It
is a moment which, however, is neither making nor acting, in their metaphysical senses, neither creation ex nihilo, techne, nor the supposed
mere repetition of tradition. It is something else which seems to combine aspects of all of these elements without being able to be reduced
to any one, or any combination, of them. It seems to me to be, then, what Heidegger has tried to describe both in terms of resolute
openness and in terms of those moments which found a ‘people’ or a ‘State’. And yet, it is not as simple as either of these thoughts of his
have been made out to be either; nor even as dangerously simple as he himself seemed to be inclined to make them sometimes when
talking about the ‘German’ ‘State’ and ‘people’. Take Oedipus, for example; both because The political and the tragic 147 I want to come on
to him next but also because—which is why I want to come on to him next—he seems to exemplify precisely this condition. Oedipus
appears to be a radical, a State-founder. He arrives as a stranger, and saves Thebes. But Thebes was there before he arrived—and it
continues anew after his departure. Indeed, he was once a part of it, and there is some evidence for thinking that Sophocles creates a
deliberate ambiguity in the play to intimate that Oedipus and the rest are covertly aware of this. Oedipus, remember also, is both a native
and a stranger born. The problematic which the play addresses is, therefore, neither simply that of how to found a polity (pure creation), nor
is it simply that of how to ensure the continuation of a polity (supposed ‘tradition’). Rather, it is the problematic of political renewal, the
renewal of freedom and judgement posed by the aporia of freedom and judgement, and of the costs entailed in that process. Politics is not
a simple matter of new foundation in Oedipus. Rather, Oedipus’ guilt is a turn-up which precipitates a turn-around and a turn-over that
recalls the liminality of limits which frees the polis to its freedom again. This does not mean, however, that because Oedipus wins a certain
restoration and transformation, with his public assumption of responsibility for remaining open to limits and difference, that he wins it for
everyone; or that he wins it for Thebes forever. Neither does it mean that because he has won it once he might not have to win it again, and
take the lesson to heart himself. Indeed, Creon is forced to remind him, at the very end of the play, that he no longer commands even
though his instinct to hold-on to things seems as powerful as ever it was (in Greek the word to rule—kratein—means to grasp or hold-on to).
It insists only that at a cost, and because—somehow both all alike and yet all different— human being is a possibility continuously open to a
future, there is a real prospect of winning that renewal: ‘In distinction from its goal, the principle of action can be repeated [and re-learnt]
time and again, it is inexhaustible’.66 Manifest in the world only through action, it lasts ‘as long as action lasts but no longer’. 67 Oedipus’

Dionysian affirmation of life, and freeing of the polis, is not won without cost—the cost of his own blood.
Neither is it won once and for all for everyone. That yes to life, which is finally wrung from Oedipus—‘I am
Oedipus’—has to be endlessly uttered. It has to be continuously recovered and repeated , in all the
mundane, as well as the monumental, circumstances of life, through the resolute openness of which
human being is capable precisely because it is mortal.68 Gods do not need it, only mortals do. Gods, indeed, are not
capable of it, only mortals are.

6.

In the face of a crisis of suffering, we are presented with two options:
1) the world of the 1AC—a life-denying will to calculate the greatest good and manage the
herd—dooming us to mediocrity and hatred for the world. Or,
2) the alternative—we can accept that chaos and discord are inevitable, that preventing
suffering is impossible, and escape nihilism by affirming life as it is.
Owen and Ridley, 2000 (David Owen is Reader in Political Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy
at the University of Southampton. He is the author of numerous books and articles in social and political philosophy with a focus on Nietzsche.
Aaron Ridley is a professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. He has also written multiple books
about Nietzschean ethics. Why Nietzsche still? page 149-54)
The threat here is obvious: What is to be feared, what has a more calamitous effect than any other calamity, is that man should inspire not
profound fear but profound nausea; also not great fear but great pity. Suppose these two were one day to unite, they would inevitably beget
one of the uncanniest monsters: the "last will" of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism. And a great deal points to this union. (GM III:I4) So
suicidal nihilism beckons. The one response to the situation that is absolutely ruled out is the one that has so far proved most successful at
addressing problems of this sort, namely, adoption of the ascetic ideal, because the present crisis is caused by the self-destruction of that
ideal. But Nietzsche argues that two plausible responses to the crisis are nonetheless possible for modern

man. Both of these involve the construction of immanent ideals or goals: one response is represented by
the type the Last Man, the other by the type the Ubermensch. The first response recognizes the reality of
suffering and our (post-ascetic) inability to accord transcendental significance to it and concludes that the
latter provides an overwhelming reason for abolishing the former to whatever extent is possible. This has the
effect of elevating the abolition of suffering into a quasi-transcendental goal and brings with it a new table of virtues, on which prudence
figures largest. In other words, this response takes the form of a rapport a soi characterized by a style of

calculative rationality directed toward the avoidance of suffering at any cost, for example, of
utilititarianism and any other account of human subjectivity that accords preeminence to
maximizing preference satisfaction. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche portrays this type as follows: "What is love? What
is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" thus asks the Last Man and blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops
the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Man lives
longest. "We have discovered happiness," say the Last Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs
warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth. Sickness and mistrust count as sins with them:
one should go about warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or over men! A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant
dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does
not exhaust them. Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much
of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks

otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse "Formerly all the world was mad," say the most acute of them and blink. They
are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make upotherwise indigestion would result. They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health.
"We have discovered happiness," say the Last Men and blink. (Z: I "Prologue" 5) Nietzsche's hostility to this first form of

response is evident. His general objection to the Last Man is that the Last Man's ideal, like the ascetic
ideal, is committed to the denial of chance and necessity as integral features of human existence. Whereas
the ascetic ideal denies chance and necessity per se so that, while suffering remains real, what is objectionable about it is abolished , the
Last Man's ideal is expressed as the practical imperative to abolish suffering, and hence, a fortiori, what is
objectionable about it – that is, our exposure to chance and necessity. This general objection has two specific dimensions. The first is that the
Last Man's ideal is unrealizable, insofar as human existence involves ineliminable sources of suffering not least our consciousness that we come into being by chance and cease to be by necessity. Thus the Last Man's ideal is predicated on a
neglect of truthfulness. The second dimension of Nietzsche's objection is that pursuit of the Last Man's ideal

impoverishes and arbitrarily restricts our understanding of what we can be an d, in doing so,
forecloses our future possibilities of becoming otherwise than we are . Thus the Last Man's ideal entails an
atrophying of the capacities (for self-overcoming, etc.) bequeathed by the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche brings these two dimensions together in
Beyond Good and Evil: "You want, if possible – and there is no more insane 'if possible' – to abolish suffering. ... Well-being as you understand it
– that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible – that makes his destruction desirable"
(BGE 225). The second response to the nihilistic threat posed by the selfdestruction of the ascetic ideal is

definitive of the Ubermensch type. This response recognizes both the reality and the ineliminability
of suffering and concludes that an affirmation of chance and necessity must therefore be built
into the very conception of what it is for something to function as a (postascetic) ideal. So this
response, insofar as it cultivates an affirmation of chance and necessity (i.e., amor fati), overcomes the
(ascetic) hatred of or (modern) dissatisfaction with this-worldly existence. Yet the success of this overcoming is
conditional on the exercise and development of the very capacities and disposition that are the bequest of the ascetic ideal. The disposition to
truthfulness is a condition of recognizing the ineliminability of chance and necessity. But actually to recognize, let alone affirm, this awful fact
about human existence requires the exercise of the capacities for self-surveillance (so that one can monitor oneself for the symptoms of selfdeception in the face of this fact), self-discipline (so that one can resist the understandable temptation to deceive oneself about this fact), and
self-overcoming (so that one can develop, in the face of this temptation, one's capacities for self-surveillance and self-discipline). Thus the
ascetic ideal provides the tools required to overcome the crisis precipitated by its own self-destruction. In other words, the Ubermensch's ideal
simply is the exercise and cultivation of the capacities and the disposition required to affirm the fact that chance and necessity are
ineliminable. And because chance and necessity are ineliminable, and therefore require perpetually to be affirmed anew , such exercise

and cultivation must itself be perpetual, a process without the slightest prospect of an end. The contrast
with the Last Man's ideal is stark. Whereas the latter offers a feeling of power to its devotees by positing as
realizable the unrealizable ideal of no more suffering-that is, of a fixed, final, completed state of being – the
Ubermensch’s ideal offers a feeling of power predicated only on the continual overcoming of the desire for
any such state. What the Last Man longs for, in other words., the Ubermensch distinguishes himself by
unendingly and truthfully refusing to want. It is of the first importance that the Ubermensch's ideal
should represent a process as inherently valuable, rather than a product (such as the Last
Man's completed state of life without suffering). There are two reasons for thinking this important.
The first is the one mentioned above given that chance and necessity are ineliminable features of living a
life, a life oriented to the affirmation of this fact must recognize the ineliminably processual character of
such an affirmation, and hence the ineliminably processual character of an ideal that serves rather than

denies "the most fundamental prerequisites of life" (GM III:28). The other reason is that this ideal exhibits the form of
practical reasoning that Nietzsche's genealogy itself deploys. By contrast with, say, Kant's conception of practical reasoning, which centers on
an opposition between the real and the ideal (between the heteronomous and the autonomous), and denies "the most fundamental
prerequisites of life," Nietzsche's conception involves a continual process of movement from the attained to the attainable; and it is precisely
this that the rapport a soi constitutive of the Ubermensch exhibits. Thus, while Kant offers a juridical conception of practical reasoning
structured in terms of the idea of law, Nietzsche offers a medical or therapeutic conception articulated through the idea of the
type or exemplar. Which is to say, Nietzsche's genealogical investigation (at its best, i.e., its most self-consistent) exemplifies precisely that
commitment to the affirmation of life which it recommends, that is, to an Ubermenschlich rapport a soi. Process, not product; Dionysus, not
Apollo.

Voting negative accepts the imperfections of the status quo as products of chaos that are
beautiful. This allows us to understand pain positively.
Nietzsche, ‘78 The anti-christ Human, All too Human. Aphorism #284 1878
The means to real peace.— No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally
the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality
that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the
neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of selfdefense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the
desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for
reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to
overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each
other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This
presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the
challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus
provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense
just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people,
distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence,
and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We
break the sword," and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations.
Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed , out of a height of feeling—that is the
means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it
now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor
and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice
rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for
every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on
the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of
the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be
nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of
lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.
We believe in the endless beauty of the Eternal Return. We must imagine life will repeat itself
infinitely. When suffering is intrinsic to life, and we can recognize that, it becomes possible to
overthrow the guilt and pain of suffering. When suffering is life, we can use it to be stronger.
And in that strength, we can learn to reject those who try to alleviate our suffering.
Kain 7 (Phillip J., Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University "Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence",
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 33, Spring 2007) MZ
We have seen that in Nietzsche’s opinion we cannot bear meaningless suffering and so we give it a
meaning. Christianity, for example, explains it as punish- ment for sin. Eternal recurrence, however,
would certainly seem to plunge us back into meaningless suffering (WP 55). It implies that suffering
just happens, it repeats eternally, it is fated. There is no plan, no purpose, no reason for it. Eternal
recurrence would seem to rub our noses in meaningless suffering. In one sense this is perfectly
correct. And Nietzsche does want to accept as much meaninglessness and suffering as he can bear
(BGE 39, 225; WP 585a). Nevertheless, we must see that there is meaning here—it is just that it lies
pre- cisely in the meaninglessness. Embracing eternal recurrence means imposing suffering on
oneself, meaningless suffering, suffering that just happens, suffer- ing for no reason at all. But at the
very same time, this creates the innocence of existence. The meaninglessness of suffering means the
innocence of suffering. That is the new meaning that suffering is given. Suffering no longer has its old
meaning. Suffering no longer has the meaning Christianity gave to it. Suffering can no longer be seen
as punishment. There is no longer any guilt. There is no longer any sin. One is no longer accountable
(TI “Errors” 8; HH 99). If suffer- ing just returns eternally, if even the slightest change is impossible,
how can one be to blame for it? How can one be responsible? It can be none of our doing. We are
innocent. This itself could explain why one would be able to embrace eter- nal recurrence, love every
detail of one’s life, not wish to change a single moment of suffering. One would be embracing one’s
own innocence. One would be loving one’s own redemption from guilt. Eternal recurrence brings the
Übermensch as close as possible to the truth, meaninglessness, the void, but it does not go all the way
or it would crush even the Übermensch. Eternal recurrence gives the Übermensch meaning. It eliminates emptiness. It fills the void. With what? It fills it with something totally familiar and completely
known; with something that is in no way new, differ- ent, or strange; with something that is not at all
frightening. It fills the void with one’s own life—repeated eternally. It is true that this life is a life of

suffering, but (given the horror of existence) suffering cannot be avoided anyway, and at least
suffering has been stripped of any surplus suffering brought about by con- cepts of sin, punishment,
or guilt. It has been reduced to a life of innocence. Moreover, as Nietzsche has said, it is only
meaningless suffering that is the problem. If given a meaning, even suffering becomes something we
can seek (GM III:28). Eternal recurrence, the fatedness of suffering, its meaningless repetition, makes
our suffering innocent. That might well be reason enough to embrace it. Or, although we may not be
able to embrace it ourselves, I think we can at least see why Nietzsche might—and even why it might
make sense for him to do so. Eternal recurrence also gives suffering another meaning. If one is able to
embrace eternal recurrence, if one is able to turn all “it was” into a “thus I willed it,” then one not
only reduces suffering to physical suffering, breaks its psycho- logical stranglehold, and eliminates
surplus suffering related to guilt, but one may even in a sense reduce suffering below the level of
physical suffering. One does not do this as the liberal, socialist, or Christian would, by changing the
world to reduce suffering. In Nietzsche’s opinion that is impossible, and, indeed, eternal recurrence of
the same rules it out—at least as any sort of final achievement.23 Rather, physical suffering is
reduced by treating it as a test, a discipline, a training, which brings one greater power. One might
think of an athlete who engages in more and more strenuous activity, accepts greater and greater
pain, handles it bet- ter and better, and sees this as a sign of greater strength, as a sign of increased
abil- ity. Pain and suffering are turned into empowerment. Indeed, it is possible to love such suffering
as a sign of increased power. One craves pain—“more pain! more pain!” (GM III:20). And the more
suffering one can bear, the stronger one becomes. If suffering is self-imposed, if the point is to break
the psychological stranglehold it has over us, if the point is to turn suffering into empowerment, use
it as a discipline to gain greater strength, then it would be entirely inappropriate for us to feel sorry
for the sufferer. To take pity on the sufferer either would demon- strate an ignorance of the process the
sufferer is engaged in, what the sufferer is attempting to accomplish through suffering, or would show a
lack of respect for the sufferer’s suffering (GS 338; D 135). To pity the sufferer, to wish the sufferer did
not have to go through such suffering, would demean the sufferer and the whole process of
attempting to gain greater strength through such suffering. Let us try again to put ourselves in
Nietzsche’s place. He has suffered for years. He has suffered intensely for years. He has come to
realize that he can- not end this suffering. He cannot even reduce it significantly. But he has finally
been able to break the psychological stranglehold it has had over him. He is able to accept it. He wills
it. He would not change the slightest detail. He is able to love it. And this increases his strength. How,
then, would he respond to our pity? Very likely, he would be offended. He would think we were
patronizing him. He would not want us around. He would perceive us as trying to rob him of the
strength he had achieved, subjugate him again to his suffering, strip him of his dignity. He would be
disgusted with our attempt to be do-gooders, our attempt to impose our own meaning on his
suffering (treating it as something to pity and to lessen) in opposition to the meaning he has
succeeded in imposing on it.

Warming
Extinction inevitable- we cant stop warming.
Futurism 10 (Futurism Now: Political and Environmental News, “Human Extinction Possible in 100 Years,
Says Scientist”, http://www.futurismnow.com/?p=5437//umich-mp)
Doomsday will be decided in 2014, not 2012, according to an Australian scientist who says that if we keep
doing what we’re going, Drill-Baby-Drilling and having lots of babies, it’s the end of the human race

in about 100 years. Seriously, I wonder if we will last that long. He also claims that attempts to
stop climate change will not stop our extinction , only buy us time. Well he doesn’t
have to worry about that, because the United States isn’t going to do anything about climate change, thanks to
our obstructionist right-wing politicians. Some of them are still busy denying climate change, like they deny
evolution, and claim that dinosaurs lived with people. In other words, they suffer from serious sciencebackwardness, and the sheer force of it just might lead to our demise. Here’s to “Livin’ la Vida Loca” while
we still can. From the Daily Mail: As the scientist who helped eradicate smallpox he certainly know a thing or
two about extinction. And now Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian
National University, has predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years. He has
claimed that the human race will be unable to survive a population explosion and ‘unbridled consumption.’

Fenner told The Australian newspaper that ‘homo sapiens will become extinct,
perhaps within 100 years.’ ‘A lot of other animals will, too ,’ he added. ‘It’s an
irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to

do something, but they keep putting it off.’ Since humans entered an unofficial scientific period known as the
Anthropocene – the time since industrialisation – we have had an effect on the planet that rivals any ice age or
comet impact, he said. Fenner, 95, has won awards for his work in helping eradicate the variola virus that
causes smallpox and has written or co-written 22 books. He announced the eradication of the disease to the
World Health Assembly in 1980 and it is still regarded as one of the World Health Organisation’s greatest
achievements He was also heavily involved in helping to control Australia’s myxomatosis problem in rabbits.
Last year official UN figures estimated that the world’s population is currently 6.8 billion. It is predicted to
exceed seven billion by the end of 2011. Fenner blames the onset of climate change for the human race’s
imminent demise. He said: ‘We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island.

‘Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable
changes in the weather already.’ ‘The Aborigines showed that without science
and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive
for 40,000 or 50,000 years. ‘But the world can’t. The human species is likely to
go the same way as many of the species that we’ve seen disappear .’ Retired professor
Stephen Boyden, a colleague of Professor Fenner, said that while there was deep pessimism among some
ecologists, others had a more optimistic view. Ocean trash ‘Frank may well be right, but some of us still
harbor the hope that there will come about an awareness of the situation and, as a result the revolutionary
changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability.’ Simon Ross, the vice-chairman of the

Optimum Population Trust, said: ‘Mankind is facing real challenges including
climate change, loss of bio-diversity and unprecedented growth in population.’
Professor Fenner’s chilling prediction echoes recent comments by Prince Charles who last week warned of
‘monumental problems’ if the world’s population continues to grow at such a rapid pace. And it comes after
Professor Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge University said that a ‘Doomsday’ moment will take place in 2014 –
and will determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and
prosperous.* In the last 500 years there has been a cataclysmic ‘Great Event’ of international significance at
the start of each century, he claimed. In 2006 another esteemed academic, Professor James Lovelock,

warned that the world’s population may sink as low as 500 million over the next
century due to global warming. He claimed that any attempts to tackle
climate change will not be able to solve the problem, merely buy us
time. Cue Ricky Martin . . . . . Revolutionary changes? Not except by some outside force. Governments
can’t achieve “revolutionary changes” within themselves. Capitalism and consumption are too lauded and too
ingrained. And don’t look to our lawmakers. The U.S. Congress is seemingly incapable of passing a law that
puts a tax or price on carbon that is adequate to make the quick differences that are needed. I know that
some people still hold out hope that this can happen, but I don’t. For the record, Professor Lovelock

does not believe that climate change will cause human extinction,
not completely. But it will greatly reduce the herd. My biggest hope is that
these elderly scientists are suffering from some form of depressive dementia on this topic, but privately, I
think they are right and it may be too late to stop climate change. This makes me very, very

Of course capitalism =
consumption. More capitalism, more business and corporation friendly aspects
of our cultures, and the sooner we are all toast.
sad for all the people on the planet who are currently under the age of five.

We have hit the tipping point- warming is irreversible.
Scotsman 6 (International news source, “Global Warming: Is it too late to save our planet?”, January 17,
http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=76062006//umich-mp)

GLOBAL warming is irreversible and billions of people will die over the next
century, one of the world's leading climate change scientists claimed yesterday. Professor James
Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia principle (that Earth is a self-regulating, interconnected
system), claimed that by the year 2100 the only place where humans will be able to
survive will be the Arctic. In a forthcoming book, The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock warns that
attempts to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may already be
too late. "Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more
than three billion years of its existence," he writes. "It was ill luck that we started polluting at a
time when the sun was too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon
her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered,
but it took more than 100,000 years." Lovelock, 86, who now lives in Cornwall, reckons
temperatures will rise dramatically over the next 100 years: " We are responsible
and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses the temperature will
rise eight degrees centigrade in temperate regions and five degrees in the
tropics. "Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert; before
this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs that survive
will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable." The scientist says he has been
loathe to write such a depressing book: "I'm usually a cheerful sod, so I'm not happy about writing doom
books. But I don't see any easy way out." He believes pollution in the northern hemisphere

has actually helped reduce global warming by reflecting sunlight. However "this
'global dimming' is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke
that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse ". "We are in a
fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke," he says. Climate-change scientists have been
warning about the rise in temperatures reaching a "tipping point" when carbon and methane locked
up in the Amazon rainforest and Arctic ice would be released into the atmosphere as the climate becomes
drier and warmer. Lovelock says: "We will do our best to survive, but, sadly, I can't see the US or the

emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time and they are the
main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to
adapt to a hell of a climate."

Taylor 10 [James M. Taylor is a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of
Environment & Climate News., “Ocean Acidification Scare Pushed at Copenhagen,” Feb 10
http://www.heartland.org/publications/environment
%20climate/article/26815/Ocean_Acidification_Scare_Pushed_at_Copenhagen.html]
With global temperatures continuing their decade-long decline and United Nations-sponsored global

alarmists at the U.N. talks spent considerable time
will cause catastrophic ocean acidification,
regardless of whether temperatures rise. The latest scientific data, however, show no
such catastrophe is likely to occur. Food Supply Risk Claimed The United Kingdom’s
warming talks falling apart in Copenhagen,

claiming carbon dioxide

emissions

environment secretary, Hilary Benn, initiated the Copenhagen ocean scare with a high-profile speech and
numerous media interviews claiming ocean acidification threatens the world’s food supply. “ The

fact is

our seas absorb CO2. They absorb about a quarter of the total that we produce, but it is making

our seas more acidic,” said Benn in his speech. “If this continues as a problem, then it can affect the one
billion people who depend on fish as their principle source of protein, and we have to feed another 2½ to 3

Benn’s claim of oceans becoming “more
acidic” is misleading, however. Water with a pH of 7.0 is considered neutral. pH
values lower than 7.0 are considered acidic , while those higher than 7.0 are considered
alkaline. The world’s oceans have a pH of 8.1, making them alkaline, not acidic.
Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations would make the oceans less alkaline but
not acidic. Since human industrial activity first began emitting carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere a little more than 200 years ago, the pH of the oceans has fallen merely 0.1 ,
billion people over the next 40 to 50 years.”

from 8.2 to 8.1. Following Benn’s December 14 speech and public relations efforts, most of the world’s
major media outlets produced stories claiming ocean acidification is threatening the world’s marine life. An
Associated Press headline, for example, went so far as to call ocean acidification the “evil twin” of climate

higher carbon dioxide
levels in the world’s oceans have the same beneficial effect on marine life as
higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have on terrestrial plant life . In a
2005 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, scientists
examined trends in chlorophyll concentrations, critical building blocks in the oceanic food
change. Studies Show CO2 Benefits Numerous recent scientific studies show

chain. The French and American scientists reported “an overall increase of the world ocean average
chlorophyll concentration by about 22 percent” during the prior two decades of increasing carbon dioxide
concentrations. In a 2006 study published in Global Change Biology, scientists observed higher CO2 levels

The highest CO2 concentrations
produced “higher growth rates and biomass yields” than the lower CO2
conditions. Higher CO2 levels may well fuel “subsequent primary production,
phytoplankton blooms, and sustaining oceanic food-webs ,” the study concluded.
Ocean Life ‘Surprisingly Resilient’ In a 2008 study published in Biogeosciences,
scientists subjected marine organisms to varying concentrations of CO2,
including abrupt changes of CO2 concentration. The ecosystems were
“surprisingly resilient” to changes in atmospheric CO2, and “the ecosystem composition,
are correlated with better growth conditions for oceanic life.

bacterial and phytoplankton abundances and productivity, grazing rates and total grazer abundance and
reproduction were not significantly affected by CO2-induced effects.” In a 2009 study published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists reported, “Sea star growth and feeding rates
increased with water temperature from 5ºC to 21ºC. A doubling of current [CO2] also increased growth
rates both with and without a concurrent temperature increase from 12ºC to 15ºC.” Another False CO2
Scare “Far

too many predictions of CO2-induced catastrophes are treated by
alarmists as sure to occur, when real-world observations show these
doomsday scenarios to be highly unlikely or even virtual impossibilities,” said
Craig Idso, Ph.D., author of the 2009 book CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs. “ The phenomenon
of CO2-induced ocean acidification appears to be no different.
Oceans resilient

Kennedy 2

Victor
, Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate Change,
http://www.pewclimate.org/projects/marine.cfm
There is evidence that marine organisms and ecosystems are resilient to environmental change. Steele
(1991) hypothesized that the biological components of marine systems are tightly coupled to physical
factors, allowing them to respond quickly to rapid environmental change and thus rendering them
ecologically adaptable. Some species also have wide genetic variability throughout their range, which may
allow for adaptation to climate change.
They can’t solve – the environment is dead due to inevitable coral reef destruction

BRADBURY

12

ROGER
, 7/13/
(an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian
National University,"A World Without Coral Reefs" , New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-reefs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0//AKP)

the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of
tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither
dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of

within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral
reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting
millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be. Overfishing, ocean acidification and
pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the

The scientific evidence for this is
compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to
accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global
coral reef ecosystem. What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed
by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs,
like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are
portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is
global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it.

yet hope.” Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International
Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed

This is less a conspiracy than a
sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch,
conservationists apparently value hope over truth , and scientists often don’t
see the reefs for the corals. But by persisting in the false belief that coral
reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the
fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the
reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what
opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and
other useful ecosystem products and services . Nor is money spent to
preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them
into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural
adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have
focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the
processes killing them. Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in
common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with
global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades.
Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing
their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are
unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and
inertia — that have blindsided us. Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the
by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.

key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel
Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating

Overfishing is already damaging reefs
worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few
decades. Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves.
Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of
temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are
acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals
even as the global fish catch is declining.

will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective
international action on emissions. We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients,
particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the open ocean. This
change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These
conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can
say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable
pollution will force reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury. This is not a story that gives me
any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the
hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on

It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with
coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico
and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly
coral reefs for food.

damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global
conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed. What we will be left
with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the
limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the
sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the
microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more
than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved. Coral reefs will be the first, but
certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocen e — the
new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research,
government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time
we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering
now.
Biodiversity is bad – it makes ecosystems less stable and more prone to collapse – simple
systems are more stable
Heath, 99 (Jim Heath - Australian Orchid Council Inc., 1999, Orchids Australia, “WHY SAVE ORCHIDS
UNDER THREAT?,” http://www.orchidsaustralia.com/whysave.htm, CM)
Some people say we can’t afford to lose any species, no matter what species they are. Everything needs
everything else, they say, to make nature balance. If that were right, it might explain why the six orchid
species should be saved. Alas, no. We could pour weedkiller on all the orchids in Australia and do no
ecological damage to the rest of the continent’s biology. But wouldn’t the natural ecological systems then
become less stable, if we start plucking out species - even those orchids? Not necessarily. Natural
biological systems are hardly ever stable and balanced anyway. Everything goes along steadily for a time,
then boom - the system falls apart and simplifies for no visible reason. Diverse systems are usually more
unstable than the less diverse ones. Biologists agree that in some places less diversity is more stable (in
the Arctic, for example). Also, monocultures - farms - can be very stable. Not to mention the timeless grass
of a salt marsh. In other words, there’s no biological law that says we have to save the orchids because
they add diversity, and that added diversity makes the biological world more stable.

Biodiversity makes ecosystems less stable and more susceptible to
collapse – increased biodiversity prevents resiliency and collapses
the system

Naeem, 02 (Shahid Naeem - Director of Science at Center for Environmental Research and Conservation
(CERC), Professor and Chair of Columbia University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental
Biology, 07 March 2002, Nature Magazine, “Biodiversity: Biodiversity equals instability?,” pg. 23, CM)
Pfisterer and Schmid [3] studied biomass production in a combinatorial plant-diversity experiment, which
consisted of an array of replicate grassland plots that varied both in their number of plant species (from 1
to 32) and in their combination of species. The authors used their results to test the venerable 'insurance'

in the longstanding ecological debate over the relationship between complexity (diversity) and
stability [4]. Over the course of this debate, the prevailing view has see-sawed between
hypothesis of ecosystem stability. This hypothesis is one of several that have featured

the thesis that diversity begets stability, and the antithesis that diversity either leads to instability or is
irrelevant. Chief among the 'begets-stability' theories is the insurance hypothesis -- the impeccably logical
notion that having a variety of species insures an ecosystem against a range of environmental upsets. For
example, suppose an ecosystem faces a drought, then a flood, which in turn is followed by a fire. According
to the insurance hypothesis, if that ecosystem is diverse -- if it has some species that can tolerate drought,
some that are flood-resistant and some that are fire-tolerant -- then two scenarios are likely. The
ecosystem may show resistance, remaining broadly unchanged, because its many species buffer it against
damage. Or it may show resilience: if it does get hammered, it may bounce back to its original state
quickly because the tolerant species ultimately drive the recovery process and compensate for the

when
challenged with an experimentally induced drought, species-poor communities
were both more resistant and more resilient (as reflected by their ability to sustain and
recover pre-drought biomass production) than plots of higher diversity . The higherdiversity plots were originally more productive, but their resistance and resilience -- that is, their
stability -- was low (Fig. 1). This is the opposite of what the insurance hypothesis predicts. It also
temporary loss of their less hardy compatriots. But Pfisterer and Schmid [3] found that,

contrasts with what combinatorial 'microcosm' experiments have found [5, 6] and what theoretical models

findings [3] appear to support those who
claim that diversity does not lead to stability . But there's a twist, and those on each
side of the debate run the risk of having their own pet theories turned against
of biodiversity have claimed [4]. Pfisterer and Schmid's

them. Pfisterer and Schmid suggest that the observed inverse association between
diversity and stability is due to a theoretical mechanism known as niche
complementarity. This mechanism, however, is the very same as that touted as the chief cause of
the positive biodiversity-productivity relationships found in other combinatorial biodiversity experiments,

The central idea
of niche complementarity is that a community of species whose niches
complement one another is more efficient in its use of resources than an equivalent
set of monocultures. For example, a uniform mixture of early- and late-season plants and shallowsuch as those at Cedar Creek [7] and those run by the BIODEPTH consortium [8].

and deep-rooting plants that are spread over 4 m2 will yield more biomass than combined 1-m2
monocultures of each species [7, 9]. So niche complementarity can explain why higher diversity tends to
lead to higher productivity, and has also been adopted by those in the 'diversity leads to stability' camp
because one would expect that more efficient communities would fare better in the face of stress. Those
on the other side, however, feel that existing data better support a mechanism known as sampling, where
diverse communities produce more biomass simply because they are more likely to contain productive
species [10, 11]. In other words, we can't read too much into experiments in which higher diversity leads

complementarity among
species in a diverse plot could be its downfall when faced with perturbation .
Niche complementarity is disrupted and so the whole community suffers. But
this is not a problem for less diverse plots . So those in the 'diversity begets stability' camp
to greater productivity. What Pfisterer and Schmid suggest is that

risk being hoist on the petard of their own theory of niche complementarity. Meanwhile, although Pfisterer
and Schmid's findings support the idea that diversity does not lead to stability, the authors reject a large
role for sampling -- the theory generally favoured by the camp that disagrees with the idea that
biodiversity leads to stability.