My depression feed on and amplified my feelings that life had become meaningless and even poisonous in its meaninglessness. Depression became nihilism. I had read Nietzsche and I had read Camus. I should have known better.
Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche: The meaning of suffering sets out what we should all know about fighting against nihilism:
In fact, he thought, the older philosopher had suffered a failure of nerve. Rather than toting up pleasures and pains like an accountant, Nietzsche thought that our confrontation with suffering could be the key to a different kind of attitude toward life; “a hammer and instrument with which one can make oneself a new pair of wings”.
The confrontation between these two perspectives has much to teach us about how to think of suffering and life in general. Is the goal of life to achieve a surplus of pleasure over pain? Or is there another way to measure our experiences that is less mechanistic?
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Where Schopenhauer wants to hide from the time-bound character of existence, Nietzsche suggests we embrace “the joy of becoming,” which means taking the narrative quality of life as a feature and not a bug. Suffering and death are the fate of every human but, unlike the animals, we have an opportunity to make something of that experience that no animal could make. Tragic art may show us the way, but one doesn’t have to be an artist to have human relationships with real love, faith and beauty. One only has to embrace the terms of the bargain.
Think about it. Change your ways.
sch 4/5/22
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