Tagged: pain

My Morality

Everything that makes life worth living is something we do not have. That is how it makes life worth living. If we had it, there would be no reason to continue. This means that desire is the evidence of everything meaningful in our lives. The voices of the modern world tell us every day that we should “live for our desires,” but they really...

Pleasure and the Status Quo

We can gain more from one painful confusion than from a hundred satisfying pleasures. This formula is most true — is amplified — in those times when recourse to easy pleasure might seem most comforting, or even essential. For pleasure, by its nature, reinforces certainties and reassures us against doubts, thereby softening precisely those hard edges of the practical and psychological status quo...

On Nihilistic Certainty

A convenient naïveté.– What if the great modern certainty, namely that the cosmos has no purpose (which is another way of saying that there is no cosmos), is, like most certainties, merely a matter of faith, answering to a deeply felt need? In that case, the great modern certainty would be an ingeniously subtle expression of underlying purpose — and not just a...

Helping

To the extent that we are social animals, we all have an urge to help. The problem is that we also have a common weakness — perhaps, paradoxically, an expression of our lust for power — for confusing helping with “making the problem go away.” Nietzsche observes, in The Gay Science, that the “religion of pity” thrives on the self-important air of the...

Gratitude

A student sent me a text message this morning with the following question: “Would it be good for me to feel grateful to a person who gave me pain?” Without knowing the specific context she had in mind, I replied: “If the person gave you pain while trying to help you, then yes. If the person gave you pain while trying to harm...

Tomorrow

It may not come. If it comes, it will bring disappointments, including the disappointment of reliving everything that disappoints you about today. Something will anger you. Someone will annoy or offend you. You will find yourself struggling to start a task you had hoped to undertake with enthusiasm, or you will start one but fail to complete it satisfactorily. You will fall short...

Reflections on Life and Living

A dragon sitting on his gold.— Nothing that makes life worth living requires that one’s life be particularly long. On the contrary, to state what is self-evident, the obsession with longevity represents little more than a search for more time to postpone what one ought to do — ideally, to postpone it long enough that one forgets what the prolonged time was for,...

The Pleasure Principle

Pleasure ameliorates pain. Pain is a condition of growth. Therefore, pleasure either interrupts or thwarts growth. The only possible exception to this conclusion would be a pleasure that was specific to the process or achievement of growth itself. This latter pleasure — the pleasure that accompanies or rewards growth as such — would thus be the only pleasure consistent with the life impulse....

Rarefaction

He craves the desert, where he would be alone, and as far as possible untouched by water — by anything that cools, dampens, or tends to suffocate. He would slake his thirst, when necessary, on cactus fruit, or perhaps track an occasional passing bird to its water source. The cacti, who would be his only friends in this setting, are ideally designed to...

The Uncomfortable Life

From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. You want, if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and...