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2 results

  • Chapter 3 - What Makes the Affirmation of Life Difficult?

  • Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick, Paul S. Loeb, University of Puget Sound, Washington
  • Book:
    Nietzsche's ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
    Published online:
    09 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022, pp 62-82

  • Summary

    The problem, according to Katsafanas, is the tendency to negate what presently exists in favor of an imagined future ideal. This tendency is dramatized in Zarathustra’s overwhelming urge to be rid of the rabble and the small human (ZII: “Rabble”; ZIII: “Convalescent”). At the same time, however, Nietzsche insists that life-affirmation should be unconditional, meaning that it should not depend on the possibility of removing objectionable elements from life. This is why Zarathustra needs the thought of life’s eternal recurrence. Since all such objectionable elements must eternally recur as the same, his attitude to this thought serves to reveal any conditionality in his claim to affirm life. Zarathustra must seek to affirm the eternal recurrence of life because only in this way will he be pursuing his higher values while at the same time affirming life as it is actually lived in the present moment.

  • Chapter 4 - Why Nietzsche is still in the morality game

  • Edited by Simon May, King's College London
  • Book:
    Nietzsche's <I>On the Genealogy of Morality</I>
    Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    13 October 2011, pp 78-100

  • Summary

    Nietzsche's thought it is necessary to propose the elements of an affirmation of life that is free of theodicy. Nietzsche diagnoses it to genuine life-affirmation need to consider the extraordinarily radical account of life-denial that emerges from the Genealogy. Intense effort has been devoted to reconstructing Nietzsche's portrayal of the values and concepts structured by slave morality and their search for transcendence of time, causality, fate, becoming all risk and danger. Life-affirmation is not a matter of merely reversing the valuations of life-denial. The pose of assuming that "life" or its suffering can be evaluated and justified is the pose of the life-denier. Fundamental philosophical positions that Nietzsche adopts, especially on the individuation of events and on determinism, also suggest that the individual event is a less suitable candidate for affirmation than the life in which it is situated.