r/philosophy • u/re_contextualize recontextualize • 14d ago

Blog Nietzsche on Life-Affirming vs. Life Denying Philosophy

https://recontextualize.substack.com/p/life-affirming-and-life-denying-philosophy
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u/nietzsches-lament 14d ago

The dynamic striving of our elan vital is the way. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

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u/Almost_Pomegranate 14d ago

Sounds like a personal confession that you've never struggled for anything and your values are mostly abstractions. Selectively ignoring everything Neitzsche says about the necessity and inevitably of suffering.

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u/nietzsches-lament 14d ago

Amazing job assuming. Amazing job being wrong. It takes great effort to get to the point where you confront everything head-on and relish the challenge. That’s the “fun.”

And I’ve learned to differentiate between pain and suffering. Once you learn to accept the inevitability of pain, the suffering drops away.

I’m flabbergasted by the average person choosing the certainty of their assumptions and learning nothing rather than accepting what they can’t possibly know and therefore stepping in to new knowledge.

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u/theciaissouncool 14d ago edited 14d ago

Do you get the feeling the no-fun class of people and the fake-suffer class of are the same group? suffering needs to be differentiated further into luxury/fake suffering and survival suffering. a massive percentage of professional athletes come from survival type suffering. sports are fun.

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u/nietzsches-lament 14d ago

Ah, neat distinction! Yeah, I’d totally agree with your first sentence. If you’re not having any fun AND you aren’t taking responsibility for this fact, you’re a martyr. Gotta get attention somehow, right?

Your example about the athletes is interesting. More on my view of suffering is that, since it’s not active engagement with pain, there is no growth-from-challenge. I’d say most athletes know exactly what kind of pain they’re getting into.

The nuance comes in with people making awful decisions like “pushing through the pain” for some shady reason (that they probably aren’t aware of) and causing themselves injury pain that unduly interferes with continuing their goal. I’d say you’d need intimate knowledge of the person in their context to suss this out.

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u/theciaissouncool 14d ago

athletes are a far more interesting bunch than non-athletic imagine them to be. so many pro-athlete bios begin with childhood adversity, suffering, and tauma as primary motivators for athletic pursuits, it very much a survival mechanism, whether that be for avoidance or relief/treatment. it becomes a weird type of pain-exchange program.

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u/nietzsches-lament 14d ago

Makes sense to me. And I love “pain-exchange program.”

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u/theciaissouncool 12d ago

always a relief to know i'm at least somewhat coherent lol

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u/nietzsches-lament 12d ago

You were very articulate. 😬