This series of essays about the philosophy of happiness down through the centuries has been a revealing and beneficial exercise for me. I find myself less worried about the minutiae of my projects and more inclined to enjoy the ride, so to speak. This week, I’ve chosen Nietzsche as my philosophical signpost and I believe that the rigorous years of work that a younger me put into understanding these concepts has led us to a place where they can be quite lightly treated with.
This essay will attempt to lightly sum up the prior pair of essays about fixation and seriousness by situating those concepts in their own historical context.
Nietzsche: The Philologist’s Legend
It is always a fascinating walk down memory lane for me, whenever I pick up a Nietzsche text. This was the thinker who awakened me to the art of philosophical thought in the first place, and I still have all of the same books I initially marked up. At times like these I wonder whether I was better, then–whether the power and insight of these words held more for me, before all of this living and aging and so on. After all, how could it be that experience subtracts from us? We grow richer, wiser, more interesting as we age. The thought of Nietzsche is less shocking to me today precisely because I have spent many years inside of it.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote in a German academic world that he had conquered in a most unusual way, with a phenomenally unpopular first book called The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, released in 1872. Not only did this book find resounding critique among the other philologists of the day, but it also led to Nietzsche’s strange academic position, sometimes thought of as an arrangement in which he was paid to stay away from the university and not teach his students. As Frederick Grosz wrote in A Philosophy of Walking, Nietzsche spent his days out of doors, going for long hikes and struggling to write due to his headaches.
This strange life led to a strange body of philosophical work in which perhaps the least attention was paid to the canonical accounts of the ancient texts that Nietzsche spent his life studying.
The Philologist: The World Cannot Be Philosophically Reduced
Nietzsche stood against the trend of self-effacement and easy truth of his day, casting doubt upon some of the most well-known concepts he found in his world. For Nietzsche, Stoicism was one example of self-defeating philosophy in the wild. The problem for Stoicism is that, as an outcast or new arrival it exhibits a certain seductive influence, but then as soon as it becomes the majority view, it is immediately unacceptably vile and preposterous. People do not like, on the average, to live under the auspices of a self-effacing and self-defeating philosophical overhang. And yet, almost any philosophically-derived account of a particular way of life will run aground, here.
The problem, for Nietzsche here, is never the ideas themselves–these are to be explored, tampered with, used, used up, destroyed!–they serve us as toys serve children. We use them to find ourselves and to accomplish our goals. The ideas are weapons, moneys, connections–even sense itself. However, there is a real risk that they become top-heavy and capsize if we attempt to place more of ourselves onto them than they are able to admit. And in this moment, we find that philosophies fail.
It would have been wonderful if this idea had permeated the philosophical literature of Germany before WWII, but alas! Instead, the ideologically twisted philosophical games won the day and caused the masses of people to work against themselves in pursuit of a false solution to a nonexistent problem. “Even if language…. will not get over its awkwardness… it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life,” (Beyond Good & Evil, aphorism 24). In my philosophy, this shines through consistently whenever I speak of language–the built-in error component of description simply seems to escape the notice of almost everyone, almost all of the time, and the shining castles in the sky of philosophers such as Hegel are perhaps the most overbearing example.
Simone De Beauvoir’s lovely addition to this metaphysics of inconsistency is a device that accounts for the ambiguities inherent in sensemaking, the situational and attitudinal components of living. Nietzsche’s thinking aligns perfectly with this stylistic approach, though it is more situated in the academic vein of the time in which he was writing than De Beauvoir ever strove to be.
How curious that, after a lifetime of reading the most abstruse texts available and ostensibly getting the conclusions he was drawing about them right, how self-contradictory is Nietzsche’s attitude about the rightness of an idea! And yet, it is only this willing embrace of self-contradiction that stands as the highest achievement of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
To embrace self-contradiction as a philosophical position, one must avoid philosophical materialism–which is the idea that philosophy is valuable because of the conclusions that one reaches along the way. I wrote an entire chapter in Formal Dialectics called Against Philosophical Materialism to explore this idea, but truly mastering the concept here is a task that takes years of self reflection.
Strength & Memory
One of the most intriguing threads that runs through the writings of Nietzsche is the idea that strong people do not need memory the way that weaker people do. For the weak, the past is what dominates the horizon in every direction. Hangups dictate inaction, just as De Beauvoir denotes with her critique of seriousness. Philosophical suicide, for Albert Camus, is the story here–a fixation arises and further progress is impeded; which, when read in Camus’ terminology, might involve a person placing too much emphasis on the wrong idea and becoming convinced through something like a misguided leap of faith that the absurd world contains a particular order and hence that action of a particular sort is dictated.
The myriad ways in which people devote themselves to misguided ideas and misunderstood fragments of a poorly parsed reading of their situatedness in reality stand as a testament to the correctness of the Nietzschean view, yet memory itself is clearly a useful tool. Ideas like the focusing technique enable individuals to deal with problematic memories and move past the hangups that can occur, enabling us to rebuild our strength and continue to move forward even through the tattered wreckage of our prior worldviews.
Along with this rejection of the backward-looking orientation that our living can occasionally take on, Nietzsche rejects the idea of evil character. Misdeeds are not, for him, any particular reason to damn, exclude, excommunicate, reject, or eliminate someone–and in fact, the drive to carry out these actions finds fault because it assumes a higher order objective view’s truth, otherwise what else would provide a basis for the justification of this behavior? And, just as sin meets with this ultimate fallibility, so does virtue, which Nietzsche derides as taking the individual away from self via instrumentalism. If John is good because he does the right thing on Saturday, it becomes easy for him to mess it all up and become bad by doing wrongly Sunday. John’s character is no longer a property of his being, but rather his being is subsumed beneath his actions, obscuring him from view.
This is the power of forgetfulness. Rather than remembering failures, the strong mind strives to learn from them and then forget them. The forgetting washes away the stains of the old and makes way for the formation of new goals. Weakness is thus a trap that some minds fall into; it is as if some minds some of the time do in fact fail to learn and thus struggle to forget. The failure to move past and discard prior experiences is the lynchpin for the concept this essay hopes to drive home.
For Camus, accepting the absurdity of the world is a workaround that empowers us to discard experiences we cannot reduce and move beyond. For De Beauvoir, the struggle against seriousness is worthwhile because it forces us into a forward-looking open mentality. And for Nietzsche, forgetfulness is a means by which we can keep our strength up.
In Sum, Forget & Enjoy
Each of these philosophers has provided us with valuable insights that can help us to move past toxic, backward-looking fixations, but I still need to fully expound upon the relationship between them. And the concept we will use to accomplish this is the concept of fixation. A typical life will involve many fixations, and perhaps most of them will even be healthy fixations. A healthy, strong person will tend to not approach things with an attitude of seriousness because each experience is understood to be a passing phenomenon and in general these do not damage the forward-looking enjoyment of life. However, inevitably, we will find ourselves entwined in hangups on occasion.
It is on these occasions that the works of the philosophers described herein will be most useful. When we understand that our playfulness is what is good about being us, when we discard our failures and laugh about them, when we find ourselves enjoying our lives the most; these are the times when we are strongest and most ourselves.
Dear reader, if there was a universal formula for happiness, I would share it with you in hopes that it would make you happy and that we could enjoy it together in a playful spirit. However, life is a process and not a computationally reducible one. I neither understand your problems nor the attitudes you bring to bear when you attempt to deal with them. And I cannot, just as you cannot understand mine. This is the irreducible difference between living people.
What can, however, be said accurately about modern philosophy’s approach to the issue of safeguarding, protecting, nurturing, enjoying and being oneself–what we can claim to have learned through this reading–is that our minds are fragile things. By maintaining a certain levity as we deal with our problems, we can free ourselves from the need to be perfect and we can guarantee ourselves a degree of space from our problems. Doing so can make life a more enjoyable experience.
References
Camus, A. (1942). The Stranger (L'Étranger). (S. Gilbert, Trans.). Gallimard. (Original work published 1942)
Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe). (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Gallimard. (Original work published 1942)
De Beauvoir, S. (1947). The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté). (B. Frechtman, Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1947)
Nietzsche, F. (1872). The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik). (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1872)
Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft). (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1882)
Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft). (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1886)
