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A century and a half later, Nietzsches healthy ego has proven largely right for a
surprising and surprisingly modern reason: the assurance he offers that lifes greatest
rewards spring from our brush with adversity. More than a century before our present
celebration of the gift of failure and our fetishism of failure as a conduit to fearlessness,
Nietzsche extolled these values with equal parts pomp and perspicuity.
In one particularly emblematic specimen from his many aphorisms, penned in 1887 and
published in the posthumous selection from his notebooks, The Will to Power (public
library), Nietzsche writes under the heading Types of my disciples:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation,
sickness, ill-treatment, indignities I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar
with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the
vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can
prove today whether one is worth anything or not that one endures.
(Half a century later, Willa Cather echoed this sentiment poignantly in a troubled letter to
her brother: The test of ones decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has
stopped caring.)
Not only that, but Nietzsche also believed that hardship and
joy operated in a kind of osmotic relationship
Nin memorably put it, great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions,
instabilities, and it always balances them. In The Gay Science (public library), his treatise on
poetry where his famous God is dead proclamation was coined, he wrote:
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as
much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other that
whoever wanted to learn to jubilate up to the heavens would also have to be
prepared for depression unto death?
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You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as
much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle
pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and
desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and
lower the level of their capacity for joy.
He was convinced that the most notable human lives reflected this osmosis:
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves
whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad
weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of
hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not
belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue
is scarcely possible.
the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains
Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor
achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and
in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between
who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy
Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at
all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from
challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the
savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.
Nietzsche arrived at this ideas the roundabout way. As a young man, he was heavily
masterwork The World as Will and Representation and later recounted this seminal life turn:
I took it in my hand as something totally unfamiliar and turned the pages. I do not
know which demon was whispering to me: Take this book home. In any case, it
happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise never rushing into buying a
book. Back at the house I threw myself into the corner of a sofa with my new treasure,
and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work on me. Each line cried out with
renunciation, negation, resignation. I was looking into a mirror that reflected the
world, life and my own mind with hideous magnificence.
And isnt that what the greatest books do for us, why we read and write at all? But
blossomed into his own ideas on the value of difficulty. In an 1876 letter to Cosima Wagner
the second wife of the famed composer Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche had
Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain
rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, in a small
fireproof room advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a
perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, hidden
in forests like shy deer. Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by
recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything
good.
And this, perhaps, is the reason why nihilism in general, and Nietzsche in particular, has
had a recent resurgence in pop culture the subject of a fantastic recent Radiolab episode.
The wise and wonderful Jad Abumrad elegantly captures the allure of such teachings:
All this pop-nihilism around us is not about tearing down power structures or
embracing nothingness its just, Look at me! Look how brave I am!
Quoting Nietzsche, in other words, is a way for us to signal others that were unafraid, that
difficulty wont break us, that adversity will only assure us.
And perhaps there is nothing wrong with that. After all, Viktor Frankl was the opposite of a
nihilist, and yet we flock to him for the same reason to be assured, to be consoled, to feel
like we can endure.
The Will to Power remains indispensable and The Consolations of Philosophy is excellent in
its totality. Complement them with a lighter serving of Nietzsche his ten rules for
writers, penned in a love letter.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/15/nietzsche-on-difficulty/
www.brainpickings.org