Part of the Royal Institute of Philosophy's lecture series: The History of Philosophy
The question of how to affirm life - of how to ‘say Yes’ to life in view of all its suffering and loss - has a strong claim to be the guiding question of Nietzsche’s whole philosophical enterprise. This question motivates his famous attack on traditional morality, which he takes to be life denying if only because, out of resentment against life’s suffering and injustice, it attempts to reject central presuppositions of life itself, such as transience, luck and necessity. But, I will argue, in his search for an ideal or ideals free of traditional morality he relies heavily on a central ambition of that very morality: namely to justify suffering in terms of a higher meaning or end to which it is essential.
The meanings that Nietzsche gives suffering - in terms of higher goods like creativity in art, values and thought that it makes possible or of which it is constitutive - might themselves be free of moral presuppositions. But as long as he even poses the question of the meaning or purpose of suffering he remains within morality, and so, on his terms, cannot fully affirm life.
Genuinely to affirm one’s own life, I will suggest, is to take joy in its ‘there-ness’ or quiddity as a whole - a whole conceived as necessary or fated in all its elements and experienced as beautiful. Crucially, such affirmation would in no way be grounded in justifications of suffering. Moreover it would be consistent with despising particular instances of suffering that we cannot possibly affirm - though it is not consistent with seeking alternatives to the actual life we have. Finally I will ask what it would be for our ethics and our attitude to our own life to cease being so powerfully driven by the question of the meaning of suffering.
Filmed on 5th December, 2014