The Paradoxes of Joy and Suffering Abolition in Nietzsche

Note: All of Nietzsche’s works will be cited in paragraph citations with their standard abbreviations (e.g. BT for Birth of Tragedy) and their section, page, or aphorism numbers, while the translation/versions will be listed in the bibliography. All other sources will appear in footnotes. 

Two key paradoxes are built into Nietzsche’s views of suffering and joy. First, Nietzsche propounds the art and discipline of suffering while simultaneously praising happiness. This is the joy paradox. Second, Nietzsche denounces the wholesale abolition of suffering, but he also seeks to eliminate meaningless suffering. This is the suffering abolition paradox. I argue that Nietzsche has a complex, multifaceted account of suffering and joy that accounts for these apparent paradoxes. The first part of this paper reconstructs Nietzsche’s view of suffering, from its origins to his defense of its value. I also address several objections to this view, including the argument that some kinds of suffering are purely destructive and irredeemable. The second part traces Nietzsche’s less well-known view of the nature of joy and how it can be sought. Finally, the third part attempts to resolve the contradiction between these two aspects and outlines the prospect of a Nietzschean transhumanism.

1. Suffering

a. The Nature of Anguish

As per usual, Nietzsche begins in conversation with Schopenhauer and the Greeks. For Schopenhauer, life consists of endlessly chasing desires that can never be satisfied, making “life an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence.”^[1] He thus affirms the wisdom of Silenus: that it is best to have never existed, and second-best to die soon (BT §3). The constant source of suffering is not external, but within the individual’s will. The only liberation from this cycle of suffering-filled desire is the aesthetic contemplation that “lifts us out of real existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it.”^[2] In these moments, the “fierce pressure of the will” is briefly extinguished, and we can experience sublime joy without desire.^[3] The logical consequence of this view is that the complete cessation of the will would be ideal. Schopenhauer, with the Buddha, sought to eliminate the desires at the root of suffering.

Nietzsche accepts the noble truth^[4] that life is suffering, but his response to this fact is different: like the tragic Greeks, he affirms both the will and the suffering it causes. The Greeks realized that suffering is inevitable in the fragile, imperiled, and chaotic human condition; they “knew and felt the terror and horror of existence” (BT §3). To even endure this terrible understanding, the Greeks had to invent art, myth, and the Olympian gods. The beautiful Apollonian dream-vision is related to the painful Dionysian reality in the same way “as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr is to his suffering” (BT §3). The martyr envisions a salvation to redeem his pain, just as tragedy creates a beautiful narrative to instill meaning into suffering. Tragedy is not just a numbing drug or palliative, but an invigorating experience that brings exuberant health in the face of the worst suffering. Even if the tragedy’s plot is a series of disasters, it brings these events together to transfigure them into a joyful experience. The Hellenic pantheon also reflected human life rather than some other world, so the Greeks saw themselves glorified and made gods: beneath the “bright sunshine of such gods, existence is felt to be worth attaining” (BT §3). Greek myth-makers and tragic writers made life worth living despite its inherent suffering.

In this way the pain-prone, sensitive Greeks were able to courageously affirm their existence. Just as Raphael’s Transfiguration depicts “luminous hovering in purest bliss” above a world of woe and strife, the Greeks transfigured their pain into life-affirming tragic art (BT §4). The “hidden substratum of suffering” is not just a sideshow, but essential to creating beauty (BT §4). As Nietzsche exclaims, “how much must these people have suffered to be able to become so beautiful!” (BT §21). Ultimately, the cheerfulness of the Greeks did not rest on a contented freedom from suffering, but a powerful affirmation of it. Nietzsche continues to uphold the value of tragedy in his last works — “I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn.”^[5]

b. In Defense of Suffering

In Nietzsche’s view, “the problem is that of the meaning of suffering,” and not merely suffering (WP #1052). Man is accustomed to pain and “does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it” (GM §3 #28). With this fundamental understanding, Nietzsche develops concepts that will imbue suffering with meaning — and not just any meaning, but a life-affirming meaning that will bring genuine health.

Condemning value-systems centered on pleasure and pain as shallow and naive, Nietzsche urges hedonists, utilitarians, pessimists, and Epicureans to look for higher values (BGE #255). He has a “higher compassion which sees further,” recognizing that these value-systems make man smaller in the long-term (BGE #255). Nietzsche saw the British utilitarians of his time as seeking only a soporific, comfortable, mediocre, ‘herd animal’ kind of happiness (BGE #228). Those who “experience suffering and displeasure as evil, worthy of annihilation and as a defect of existence” merely subscribe to a “religion of comfortableness” (GS #338). Eliminating our species-preserving suffering would leave humanity anemic and unable to change, adapt, or resist, undermining the long-term future of mankind.

Most of all, Nietzsche condemns utilitarianism because of its “harmful consequences for the exemplary human being” (WP #399). He rejects the idea that the “ultimate goal” is the “greatest happiness of all” (SE §6). Nietzsche argues that the individual can “receive the highest value, the deepest significance” only by “living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars, and not for the good of the majority” (SE §6). This reflects a critical idea: Nietzsche may not be speaking to all people, and his defenses of suffering may not apply to everyone. His intended audience may only be these extraordinary individuals. For these brave and creative individuals, pleasure and pain are always epiphenomena and not ultimate values. To achieve anything, we must seek out both.

While the hedonists may want to “do away with suffering” with some fantastic means, Nietzsche’s higher souls want it “higher and worse than it ever was!” (BGE #255). Well-being as the hedonists understand it would be a contemptible endpoint for humanity. After all, he asks:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – don’t you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering which has created every enhancement in man up to now? That tension of a soul in misery which develops its strength, its trembling when confronted with great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and using unhappiness…

(BGE #255)

Man contains both chaotic, formless clay and the hammer to shape this rough clay into something more. We cannot have pity for the clay, for the parts of ourselves that must and “should suffer” to achieve positive transformation (BGE #255). The creature in us must suffer so that the creator in us can persevere and grow. For instance, by imposing the suffering of asceticism on himself, the philosopher “affirms his existence” (GM §3 #8). He strengthens his dominant instinct — to spirituality, knowledge, or insight — by rejecting small pleasures and sensualities. Furthermore, if we value the overcoming of resistance (the will to power), then we must also value the resistance itself – and the suffering it entails.

While we moderns mostly know agony through fantasy, the ancients trained themselves in real suffering. For them, Nietzsche argues, pain was less painful. Meanwhile, our lack of habituation to pain explains why “inevitable mosquito bites” seem to us like an objection against life as a whole (GS #48). The solution to this kind of oversensitive suffering may therefore be more suffering, so that we can become whole and strong enough to withstand the unavoidable ills of existence. Then we may welcome any kind of suffering because it will strengthen us, just as distress makes a bow tauter (GM §1 #12). Like our ancestors, we might even begin to see suffering as a virtue and as a genuine enchantment to life rather than an argument against life.

In line with Nietzche’s arguments, Haidt argues that some kinds of suffering can create posttraumatic growth.^[6] This is also known as anti-fragility,^[7] and it is more than just stable resilience, as it can result in positive transformation and improvements from the previous state. Posttraumatic growth has been empirically documented in many circumstances, including in refugees, Holocaust survivors, cancer patients, and prisoners.^[8] This research finds that an individual’s posttraumatic growth is often predicted by their ability to make the experience meaningful. As Nietzsche provides an abundance of tools for meaning-making, he encourages growth and enables more anti-fragility.

Furthermore, certain kinds of truth and knowledge are inextricably connected to suffering. Characters like Prometheus and Faust, who steal knowledge from beyond the human world and are thus tortured for eternity, represent this fundamental fact: truth has a price. This type of exemplary individual “voluntarily takes upon himself the suffering inherent in truthfulness” to create a complete revolution in himself (SE §4). This heroic individual who tries “to transcend the curse of individuation” and “attain universality” inevitably suffers from experiencing the hidden primordial contradictions of existence (BT §9). The value of an individual can even be assessed by how much truth they can endure (GM §3 #19; BGE #39).

Enduring suffering is especially critical for the free spirits that Nietzsche considers his audience: “we first had to experience the most varied and contradictory states of distress and happiness in our souls and bodies, as the adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called ‘man’” (HH #7). Nietzsche implores these knowledge-seeking free spirits to “collect the honey of knowledge from diverse afflictions, disturbances, illnesses,” exploring all types of experience while “despising nothing, losing nothing, savoring everything.”^[9] As voyagers in the state-space of consciousness, the free spirits must test the entire complex palette of human experiences, learning their nature and their interrelations. Therefore, extraordinary truth-seeking individuals cannot value knowledge without also valuing suffering.

Conclusively, Nietzsche defends suffering as a kind of transformative experience.^[10] Suffering can be personally transformative in helping us develop ourselves, recognize our authentic aims, and become stronger, more life-affirming, and more anti-fragile beings. Suffering can also be epistemically transformative. At the very least, suffering provides knowledge about certain qualia: it tells us what some kinds of experiences are like. But pain can also provide previously inaccessible knowledge, restructuring our entire worldview. Some knowledge worth pursuing may be inseparable from suffering. As suffering is an inherent feature of existence, Nietzsche argues that we should affirm it and make it meaningful rather than avoid it.

c. Critiques of Suffering

I will address three primary critiques of Nietzsche’s defense: (1) some responses to suffering are negative, (2) simply affirming suffering because it exists commits the genetic fallacy, (3) some forms of suffering are inherently negative and irredeemable.

First, Nietzsche agrees that there are many negative reactions to suffering. He makes it clear that there are both positive (creative) and negative (destructive) reactions to suffering. Positive reactions include sublimation, virtue development, meaning-making, and creativity. Negative reactions include ressentiment, pity, and collapse. Ressentiment consists of swallowing anger, fear, hatred, or other negative emotions and letting them fester.^[11] The resentful individual cannot forget some past wrong or suffering, and becomes nasty, filled with rancor, consumed by a desire to rectify or revenge a past event. This is just one example of a negative reaction. However, our harmful responses to suffering alone are not an argument against suffering itself.

Furthermore, some interpretations of suffering are negative. For instance, in Nietzsche’s view, Christianity tells those searching for something to blame for their suffering that “you alone are to blame for it!” (GM §2 #15). This provides some meaning – we suffer because we are sinful and infinitely guilty. As we are desperate for meaning, we cling to this interpretation: “any meaning is better than none at all” (GM §3 #28). But ultimately this meaning only brings “deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering” (GM §3 #28). For the Christian then redirects his ressentiment back onto himself, lashing himself for his guilt. Christianity thus encourages moralistic thinking that increases guilt and suffering.

Nietzsche also rejects slave morality in part because of its association with misery. Slave values reflect the ressentiment of the weak and suffering (GM §1 #16). Slave morality itself was created to relieve suffering, an upwelling of a long-impotent bitterness that finally finds expression in the revolt against the master. Clearly Nietzsche does not believe all suffering is positive, for he argues that “the preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion” (AC #15). The slaves compensate themselves for the suffering inflicted upon them by the masters with a psychological revenge: negating the values of the masters and painting them as evil. Under their revaluation of morals, “the suffering, deprived, sick, and ugly alone are pious,” while the “powerful and noble” are painted as evil (GM §1 #7). The slave is induced to follow these inverted values because of the promise of heaven as the reward for a true believer who suffers at the hands of evil. The priest thus manipulates the slaves’ sufferings to wreak revenge on the masters.

While Christianity, slave morality, and afterworlds all affirm or provide meaning for suffering in their own ways, Nietzsche opposes them all. They end up only making suffering worse, harming exemplary individuals, negating life, and damaging even their adherents. In contrast to the guilt-manufacturing Christianity, the Greeks vindicated humanity by making the gods guilty, as these gods “took upon themselves, not the punishment, but what is nobler—the guilt” (GM §2 #23). As the gods were the source of wickedness, man was liberated from self-loathing and guilt. Nietzsche sees guilt and shame as pathologies that can be overcome by cultivating a critical awareness, a sense of generosity and self-respect, and an unashamed affirmation of life. Clearly, Nietzsche recognizes that reactions and interpretations to suffering are not all equal, and the value of suffering will often be dictated by our response to it.

Second, some may argue that Nietzsche’s affirmation of suffering commits the genetic fallacy. But even if it is true that humans were shaped by evolutionary or historical forces to both suffer and see suffering as virtue, this does not imply we must keep suffering. This would make the fallacious assumption that the origins of a concept should dictate its current use.^[12] Furthermore, the claim that ‘life is suffering’ cannot entail the conclusion that ‘suffering ought to be affirmed.’ As Hume showed, descriptive claims cannot imply normative claims; an ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is.’^[13] Finally, a critic of suffering might argue that all the ‘goods’ of suffering are circular and non-transferable. These skills are only beneficial insofar as suffering exists. Yes, suffering may help us develop certain skills, including the capacity to respond to unpredictable suffering, to revise goals in calamity, and to move past loss. But these are essentially ‘virtues of dealing with suffering,’ or methods of getting used to it. It seems circular to claim that that suffering should exist because of the virtues it produces while these virtues are themselves justified by the existence of suffering.

Third, some suffering seems unaffirmable. Purely destructive agony can cause only harm, undermining health, strength, joy, and preventing the affirmation of life, and is therefore antithetical to Nietzsche’s own values. While Nietzsche’s defense emphasizes the growth and transformation enabled by suffering, he seems to ignore the kind of suffering that falls outside this description.^[14] Some suffering does not even involve resistance or overcoming – sometimes, it is just powerlessness, subjection, and destruction. These painful states are a form of “hermeneutical death,” as they destroy the victim’s abilities to interpret suffering or make meaning from it.^[15] As Levinas writes, this kind of suffering “rends the humanity of the suffering person,” and “intrinsically, it is useless, ‘for nothing.’”^[16] Critics may argue that Nietzsche’s praise of suffering ignores the existence of this purely destructive and life-negating suffering.

However, Nietzsche is not committed to the position that all pain develops us. His passages do not claim that all suffering should unequivocally affirmed, and he even objects to senseless suffering. As he writes, “what really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering” (GM §1 #7). What Nietzsche rejects is the “mortal hatred for suffering in general” (BGE #202), a position that universally rejects all kinds of negative experience. Nietzsche’s view is more multidimensional, affirming some kinds of upbuilding suffering while rejecting other kinds of destructive suffering (e.g. the festering, passive suffering that leads to ressentiment). He clearly supports the suffering that forges individuals from chaotic fragments into stronger, more creative beings, but nowhere defends purely destructive agony. He also implies that disciplined and voluntary suffering is more likely to be positively transformative, rather than the forced and externally imposed suffering that tends to be destructive (GS #48, BGE #62). Critiques of Nietzsche’s views that rely on the existence of extreme and pointless suffering are therefore strawman arguments, attacking a position that Nietzsche does not even defend. Of course, one could still argue that Nietzsche’s views of suffering have a key blind spot, as they fail to explicitly address useless, extreme suffering.

2. Joy

Despite his advocacy for transformative suffering, Nietzsche also extols emotional states that seem to be the opposite of pain: well-being, joy, happiness, and jubilation. He proclaims that the future needs “a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health,” and praises the ideal of “a superhuman well-being and benevolence” (GS #382). He dreams of “human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness…more fruitful human beings, happier beings!” (GS #283) He urges poets, artists, and philosophers to “let your happiness too shine out,” instead of “painting all things a couple of degrees darker than they are” (D #561). He testifies that joy is “deeper yet than agony,” for “woe implores: Go! / but all joy wants eternity” (TSZ pg. 340). He calls for us to “share not suffering but joy” (GS #338) and to “harken to all cheerful music” (GS #302), for “life is a well of joy” (TSZ pg. 208). He declares that it is a lack of joy that brings degradation and decay, for the “mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness” (MM #77). Nietzsche concludes that “man has felt too little joy: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin” (TSZ pg. 200).

How can we reconcile Nietzsche’s exuberant praises of joy with his embrace of suffering? Part III will address this apparent paradox. This section will extract some of Nietzsche’s core views of joy: (a) the defining features that characterize happiness, and (b) the methods and processes which produce or prevent joy.

a. The Nature of Happiness

What unites positive affective states is that “happiness…no matter what the sort, confers air, light, and freedom of movement” (D #136), and that it contains an “abundance of feeling and high-spiritedness” (D #439). Happiness for Nietzsche is closely associated with the expression of the will to power: “what is happiness? The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome” (AC #2). Indeed, he states that happiness can be “understood as the liveliest feeling of power” (D #113). There are also two kinds of happiness: “the feeling of power and the feeling of surrender” (D #60). This is similar to the distinction “between the impulse to appropriate and the impulse to submit” (GS #188). The appropriating impulse feels joy in desiring and in transforming things into functions, while the submitting impulse feels joy in being-desired and becoming a function. Often, it is the “people who strive most feverishly for power” who most want to “tumble back into a state of powerlessness,” like mountain climbers who dream of effortlessly rolling back downhill (D #271). Power is an essential but hidden aspect of happiness.

Nietzsche’s conception of joy is antithetical to his era’s moderate ideas of ‘cheerfulness,’ ‘comfort,’ and ‘happiness.’ Zarathustra calls this pitiful, polluted, and stale conception of happiness “wretched contentment” (TSZ pg. 125). This mass-produced kind of pleasure only hinders the achievement of true joy. The rabble poisons life’s well of joy, and “when they called their dirty dreams ‘pleasure,’ they poisoned the language too” (TSZ pg. 208). The Last Man is the symbol of a self-satisfied and stable society that has given up on any ideal beyond wretched contentment, and that is “increasingly suspicious of all joy” (GS #259). This society teaches its members to live by the “ticktock of a small happiness” and to develop only those virtues that “get along with contentment” (TSZ pg. 281). The crowd embraces the Last Man, who preaches of acceptable levels of pleasure, rather than the ideal of the overman and great health. However, for Nietzsche, anything like this mild Epicurean satisfaction “is out of the question. Only Dionysian joy is sufficient” (WP #1029). Nice, pleasurable feelings are not enough, for “happiness ought to justify existence itself” (TSZ pg. 125). Joy, like suffering, must be transfigured into meaning.

Nietzsche rebukes the contemporary cheerleaders for the simple ideas of wretched contentment, the 19^th-century Last Men, for they

do not even perceive the sufferings and monsters that as thinkers they pretend to perceive and fight, and their cheerfulness provokes displeasure simply because it deceives, for it seeks to seduce one into believing that a victory has been won. For basically there is cheerfulness only where there is victory.

(SE §2)

This mediocre happiness will only depress and torment the insightful thinkers who recognize that it is founded upon a lie. The Last Men are not concerned with the long-term joy of humanity, and instead “want to cheat it out of its future for the sake of a painless, comfortable present” (HH #434). Nietzsche even argues that “the primal suffering of modern culture” is a result of the degeneration of “authentic art” into mere “superficial entertainment” (BT #19). Those with a more “delicate taste for joy” see this kind of “crude, musty, brown pleasure” as repulsive (GS Preface #4). Genuine cheerfulness arises not from deceptions but from a hard-fought victory over a difficult problem confronted honestly. While the weak consume opiate-like pleasures to numb and console themselves, the stronger spirits attempt to overcome challenges worthy of jubilation and actually build a life worthy of joy.

b. The Joyful Science

How can genuine joy be achieved? Unfortunately, there are no foolproof methods. Just as no medicine can cure all patients, no philosophy can guarantee happiness. Whether a philosophy produces happiness is no argument for or against it. As hunting for joy-guaranteeing wisdom is futile, “may each of us be fortunate enough to discover that philosophy of life which enables him to realize his greatest measure of happiness” (D #345). Universal laws cannot lead the individual to happiness, because each person’s happiness “springs from one’s unknown laws,” and “external precepts can only hinder and check it” (D #108). Forcing all people to abide by a single law to achieve happiness is as irrational as a tyrannical individual stamping his idiosyncratic, narrow, and personal way of suffering “as an obligatory law” upon all others (GS #370).

Despite this reality, one of humankind’s great errors is the belief that happiness can come from passive submission to prescribed rules or ideals. The classic moral refrain is “do this and that, refrain from this and that—then you will be happy!” (TI §6 #2). Nietzsche rejects this formulation. In his view, virtue does not cause happiness; happiness causes virtue. In reality, “a well-balanced human being, a ‘happy one,’ must perform certain actions and shrink instinctively from other actions,” and this virtue is a consequence of his happiness (TI §6 #2). Morality is also not the way to happiness. Indeed, morality has “opened up such abundant sources of displeasure” that we can conclude it is a wellspring of more profound misery and not a source of joy (D #106). Whenever moral precepts lead a person to “unhappiness and misery to set in instead of the vouchsafed happiness,” the moralists will claim that the person overlooked some rule or practice (D #21). The idea that those who disobey morality cannot experience happiness is absurd, for “evil people have a hundred types of happiness about which the virtuous have no clue” (D #468). Subscribing to a set of moral norms is no way to achieve joy.

Additionally, individuals who are stuck in the ‘it was,’ constantly tormented by the past, cannot experience joy. Happiness relies on limited horizons, restricting one’s view to the present and forgetting the past:

Anyone who cannot forget the past entirely and set himself down on the threshold of the moment, anyone who cannot stand, without dizziness or fear, on one single point like a victory goddess, will never know what happiness is; worse, he will never do anything that makes others happy.

(HL §1)

Without the ability to forget living is impossible. While stronger natures may be able to incorporate more of the past without being stifled, every person has necessary limits. Without these limits the past can “become the gravedigger of the present” (HL §4). Individuals seeking happiness must give up their “profound insight,” their over-satiated sagacity and exhaustive knowledge of their own past, in exchange for the “divine joy of the creative and helpful person” (HL §4). Furthermore, the will must become its own “liberator and joy-bringer” by embracing past events, converting all “‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’” in a demonstration of amor fati (TSZ pg. 253). Forgetting is vital for joy and creation.

Nietzsche also emphasizes the hedonic paradox, which states that pursuing happiness directly will only reduce happiness. At the fountain of pleasure, “often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it. And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: all-too-violently my heart still flows toward you” (TSZ pg. 210). Seeking fulfillment of pleasures will empty you of them. After all, “joy is only a symptom of the feeling of attained power…one does not strive for joy…joy accompanies; joy does not move” (WP #688). This paradox has also been validated by modern empirical research.^[17] Pursuing joy directly is ineffectual. This may be why Zarathustra declares “am I concerned with my happiness? I am concerned with my work!” (TSZ pg. 258) He implores his listeners that “one shall not wish to enjoy,” for enjoyment is a bashful thing that does not want to be sought — it would be better to seek out suffering! (TSZ pg. 311) This also suggests that simple hedonists have a deficient understanding of human psychology: seeking out pleasure will only reduce it, and often pursuing pain is more beneficial.

Furthermore, just as suffering provides epistemic access to some knowledge, some truths are only available during immense joy. The primordial unity (das Ur-Eine) is experienced through a form of Dionysian ecstasy, rapturous enthrallment or intoxication (Rausch). This Dionysian experience is characterized by a “mystical, jubilant shout” (BT §16), filled with “exuberant fertility” (BT §17) and an “immeasurable, primordial delight in existence” (BT §17). The Dionysian destroys individuation “so that the mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity” (BT §1). Ecstasy is required to apprehend the primordial unity, and the feeling of oneness with all of nature generates immense joy. The connection between joy and knowledge runs deep. This may be why philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Spinoza agreed that seeking knowledge “constitutes the highest happiness” for humans (D #500). However, “there is no preestablished harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity” (HH #517), and knowledge or truth do not necessarily generate happiness.

Ultimately the search for joy amounts to a search for personal meaning and a way to express one’s will to power. The individual need not ask why the “world” or “humanity” exists, or even why she personally exists. Instead, the individual must “try to justify the meaning of your existence a posteriori, as it were, by setting yourself a purpose…a lofty and noble ‘reason why’” (HL §9).^[18] Each individual must cross the stream of life alone and cannot be simply carried by another. Nietzsche urges the young soul to look back on the things they have truly loved, that have dominated their soul while “simultaneously making it happy,” for this series of revered objects can reveal the “fundamental law of your authentic self” (SE §1). By throwing all of her abilities and powers in the direction of this life-path, the individual can reach the highest joys possible for her.

3. The Paradoxes

a. Joy and Suffering

There is an apparent conceptual tension between Nietzsche’s defense of the discipline of intense suffering and his praise of joy. However, this paradox dissolves when one stops seeing pain and pleasure as antitheses. The “breadth of space between highest happiness and deepest despair has been established only with the aid of imaginary things” (D #7). We may also overestimate this distance between suffering and joy because language exaggerates the gap. We have words primarily for superlative, extreme states, while “the milder middle degrees” are left unnamed (D #433). As we cannot apply labels to the myriad emotional states between suffering and joy, we are unable to conceptualize a continuum between the two extremes. Once again, the human obsession with dichotomous thinking prevents us from seeing the complexity of spectrums and interconnected networks.

The extreme hedonic states are not opposites. Indeed, pleasure must always include pain and may itself be the overcoming of pain: “one could describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of little unpleasurable stimuli” (WP #697). Nietzsche conceptualizes happiness as a kind of overcoming, and overcoming requires resistance, which is experienced as suffering. This means that happiness is necessarily connected to suffering. As such, Nietzsche felt that the most sublime “happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually” (GS #45). As he wonders,

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?

(GS #12)

We must choose between either “as little displeasure as possible,” 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” (GS #4). In contrast, the “comfortable and benevolent” Last Men know nothing of human happiness, for they do not understand that “happiness  and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together” (GS #338). Suffering is essential to experience the height of joy. The two emotional poles cannot be separated from each other; they are two aspects of the same process.

However, Nietzsche does not claim that happiness justifies suffering. It is not a matter of a simple felicific calculus, where the positive valence in the world outweighs the negative valence. He rejects this utilitarian summation. It is not that the happiness vindicates the suffering, but rather that humans create joy despite the suffering:

Right beside the sorrow of the world and often upon its volcanic ground, human beings have laid out their little gardens of happiness…everywhere they will find some happiness sprouting beside the misfortune -and indeed, the more happiness, the more volcanic the ground was-only it would be ridiculous to say that the suffering itself could be justified by this happiness.

(HH #591).

This oft-overlooked passage demonstrates that Nietzsche does not merely think our sufferings are ‘justified’ by some happiness, but that we create happiness in response to suffering: “Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter” (WP #91). In more plain terms, “the sorrow in the world has caused human beings to suck a sort of happiness from it.”^[19] It is not that Nietzsche fails to see the unjustifiable badness of some suffering — like Schopenhauer, he has a devastating understanding of the sufferings of the world, but Nietzsche also sees the necessity to create joy and meaning despite the anguish.

Finally, the eternal recurrence transmutes the eternal return of suffering into something worth joyfully embracing. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is “a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering,” and it represents the “ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life” (EH pg. 272). The affirmer of life doesn’t desire the eternal recurrence because she wants suffering, but because she does not simply weigh pain against pleasure to determine life’s value. This kind of calculus is misguided because life is not a series of discrete events. Rather, all events are deeply interconnected by complex causal chains. (See The Calm and the Cataract for the connections between eternal recurrence and the Buddhist concept of interbeing). In affirming any single event, we affirm the whole. If each “individual” thing is connected to all other things, then when you say yes to one moment you say yes to all moments. If “all things are chained and entwined together,”^[20] then we affirm the entire chain when we affirm a single link. If we say yes to one moment of joy, then we also say yes to all the suffering intertwined with this moment.

b. Suffering Abolition

The question is not just what Nietzsche means to us, but what we would mean to him, how he might evaluate our contemporary situation, “how our epoch would appear to his thought.”^[21] To answer this question, this section brings Nietzsche into conversation with the modern transhumanist philosopher David Pearce, who upholds The Hedonistic Imperative: to “abolish suffering throughout the living world” through technological means like genetic engineering.^[22] While Nietzsche’s critiques of hedonism remains relevant and compelling, his thought may be surprisingly adaptable to this kind of transhumanist project.

After all, Nietzsche’s philosophical project is motivated by his desire “to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character.”^[23] This suggests that Nietzsche himself is engaged in the suffering abolition project. Nietzsche may “still be in the business of abolishing precisely the helplessness, the interpretive vacuum, that gives suffering its sting.”^[24] After all, if meaninglessness is constitutive of suffering, then suffering interpreted well is no longer suffering. Many philosophers define suffering as an unpleasant experience S conjoined with the desire that S not be occurring.^[25] By increasing the meaningfulness and value of suffering, Nietzsche’s work can reduce our desire to avoid suffering, making it a positive good. Suffering on its own is helpless and does not inevitably create growth. However, we can give it a value by making it constitutive of growth, creativity, and positive transformation. If we will our suffering, we are no longer helpless – it becomes an ‘I willed it,’ not a mere ‘it was’ out of our control. As Nietzsche writes about his trials, “I have never suffered from all this, for what is necessary does not hurt me” (EH pg. 332). This is abolition in a radically different sense than the simple elimination of suffering, the comfort-making that the hedonists of his time advocated. Nietzsche’s suffering-abolition focuses on filling the interpretative vacuum of suffering.

Transhumanists may be skeptical that we can really conjure suffering out of existence merely by coloring it with a kind of life-affirming interpretation. They may doubt Nietzsche’s exorbitant claim that he never suffered from necessary things. Furthermore, transhumanism can critique Nietzsche as stuck in his time. The technology to overcome suffering, end aging, or re-engineer human biology did not exist in the 1800s. Therefore, Nietzsche affirmed suffering as it existed because his best available option was to make our inevitable sufferings meaningful and beneficial. The transhumanist claims that we now have the technological ability to reform suffering dramatically or eliminate it. Maybe it is only a contingent fact that pain and pleasure are tied together, and not a necessary principle—and maybe this knot can be untied through technologies like neurobiological and genetic engineering. Indeed, the Qualia Research Institute is developing an understanding of the fundamental nature of pain and pleasure to lay the foundation for super-happiness. Nietzsche agrees that evolution “does not have happiness in view,” but only evolution itself (D #108). Why should we accept the haphazard consequences of evolution instead of guiding it towards joy? Perhaps life is suffering, but it does not have to be.

However, section 2 demonstrates that a core Nietzschean aim is to bring about immense joy, well-being, and great health for humanity. Ultimately, if happiness & suffering come into conflict, Nietzsche’s priority may be joy: “I may have done this and that for sufferers; but always I seemed to have done better when I learned to feel better joys” (TSZ pg. 200). Nietzsche also argues that “man is something that must be overcome,” and man is just “a bridge and no end,” a bridge that may be “the way to new dawns” (TSZ pg. 310). This, along with Nietzsche’s revulsion at the Last Man who is complacent in humanity’s current level of contentment, suggests that he is not satisfied with merely human happiness and instead strives for superhuman joy. This seems deeply compatible with Pearce’s supplication that we use all available technologies to create “information-sensitive gradients of superhuman bliss.”^[26] Furthermore, section 1c shows that Nietzsche does not explicitly defend pointless, destructive suffering, but only the kind of transformative suffering that enhances extraordinary individuals. If Nietzsche saw modern innovations, he may encourage some kinds of transhumanism that reduce our gratuitous and futile suffering, making humans stronger and more joyous.

Despite this essential agreement about some core ideas, Nietzsche’s critiques of the hedonistic imperative would be deep and numerous; a few can be addressed here. First, the transhumanist proposal fails to evaluate all values. It may reject the value of the “natural,” but it does not question most other values and is primarily a continuation of humanist morality. Nietzsche would not accede to this form of simple, egalitarian, utilitarian transhumanism. Second, Nietzsche would likely question the kind of happiness that transhumanism advocates. Will it be the numbing, anesthetic, decadent contentment of the Last Man, who blithely believes “we have invented happiness”? (TSZ pg. 129) For Nietzsche argues this kind of happiness will only throw humanity into a rut it can no longer escape, making our souls “poor and domesticated” so we no longer have enough chaos to “give birth to a dancing star” (TSZ pg. 129). Nietzsche would reject this type of transhumanism, for it uses “the holy pretext of ‘improving’ mankind, as the ruse for sucking the blood of life itself” (EH pg. 342). While not all forms of transhumanism are vulnerable to these critiques, Nietzsche would likely urge caution so we do not stumble into the trap of the Last Man.

Finally, transhumanism may simply be a form of afterworldliness. Some long for an afterworld, a dreamed-of place where suffering will be miraculously relived, as a desperate flight away from the painful human world we live in. These afterworlds are created as phantasmic compensations for the real suffering of the world: “It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds” (TSZ pg. 143). The inability to deal with or affirm the existing world leads the weary sufferer to abandon this world and dream of another, higher world, a “dehumanized inhuman world which is a heavenly nothing” (TSZ pg. 144). These afterworlds are rooted in a desire to lie about reality that comes from a sense of suffering from reality. But placing supreme value on this afterworld devalues earthly life and makes it meaningless, producing further endless suffering.

Transhumanists may respond that they are not afterworldly, for their proposals are not ideal dreams but can actually be implemented through concrete human actions. Transhumanism may even imbue life with even more meaning, for it strives for the kind of brilliant, hopeful future that makes all current efforts immensely important. In consonance with this idea, Zarathustra urged his students to fix all that is mere “dreadful accident” in man, to “work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been” (TSZ pg. 310). However, he cautions against manipulative idealistic visions, and condemns the idea of immortality as a “big lie.”^[27] Conclusively, some kinds of transhumanism may be sickly, sweet, dishonest, and dripping with impossible idealism. But a more realistic transhumanism that does not passively dream of contentment in some afterworld may be more congruous with Nietzsche’s aspirations for the future.

Conclusively, Nietzsche’s ideas may be compatible with some kinds of transhumanist suffering abolition. But he cautions against the dream of an eventual technological utopia based on the ideal of the cessation of suffering. The plausibility of this utopia is a difficult empirical question; if it is even possible, suffering abolition is tenuous and distant. A significant part of Nietzsche’s rejection of suffering abolition may rest on its implausibility. In the meantime, the dream of the end of suffering can become a passive afterworldliness, and the ideals of the afterworld can vilify the existing world. After all, the transhumanist abolitionists do not fill the interpretative vacuum—they just eliminate the actual suffering. In the process of abolishing suffering, we might undermine our interpretative ability to justify life despite its suffering, and thereby fall into nihilism. Transhumanism cannot instantly abolish suffering, and while we wait, we must make suffering meaningful.

In response, the transhumanist may argue that if we justify suffering too much, we might excessively affirm our existing condition. If we cling to the way we happen to suffer currently, we may be rendered unable to become more than human. Our strict commitment to Nietzschean suffering-affirmation could condemn us to the condition of the Last Man, preventing radical new futures and thwarting the overcoming of man. Making suffering meaningful can function to defend suffering and reduce motivation to prevent extreme, pointless, irredeemable suffering. The solution may be a synthesis: Insofar as suffering exists, we should sublimate it and make our experience of it more positive and growth-producing. But we should also strive to abolish extreme, pointless suffering wherever possible.

Conclusion

There are deep conceptual tensions in Nietzsche’s work: his defense of suffering contrasts with his accolades for joy, and he critiques the abolition of suffering while engaged in a kind of suffering abolition himself. This paper has attempted to explore and resolve these tensions. Just as Nietzsche withdraws his faith in morality “out of morality” (D #4), he withdraws his support for endless joy out of a desire for joy. Happiness alone is not enough, for suffering and joy are not antithetical but symbiotic. Both must be affirmed and sought after together. While suffering abolition is a dangerous proposition, Nietzsche may support some forms of abolition that focus on our pointless suffering. Regardless of the correct answer, probing these paradoxes reveals profound complexities in Nietzsche’s work—and in the human condition.

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Appendix

1. The Birth of Suffering

Nietzsche also tells a story about the origins of the suffering and its value. Under intense conditions, prehistorical humans developed the view that “voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, is meaningful and valuable” (D #18). Too much well-being invited mistrust, while hard suffering encouraged confidence. The community’s moral exemplars were those who had the “virtue of the most frequent suffering” (D #18). These individuals needed voluntary suffering, both to inspire belief and to believe in themselves. The practice of pain was a demonstration of overflowing strength and was viewed as a festive spectacle for the sacrifice-loving gods. Nietzsche realizes that we have not yet “freed ourselves completely from such a logic of feeling” (D #18). Even now, every step towards free thought and toward shaping one’s life has to be paid for with spiritual and bodily suffering. Prehistorical eras forged humankind’s character, and this character has not changed since. These eras saw suffering as a virtue, and this is a human instinct that has only been suppressed through civil society.

“Enclosed within the walls of society,” early humans felt that “suddenly all their instincts were disvalued” (GM §2 #16). They were unable to cope with even the easiest challenges in this new world. Civilization undermined the trustworthy instinctual guides that had once provided strength and joy. As he could not trust instincts that were only well-adapted to wilderness, man had to rely on his “most fallible organ,” the conscious mind (GM §2 #16). But his old instincts still needed expression. Thus, they were turned inward. Man’s will to power, hostility, cruelty, joy in attacking, and drive to adventure were directed against himself, creating the “bad conscience” (GM §2 #16). This introduced a new appalling plague: “man’s suffering of man, of himself” (GM §2 #16). Of course, some may question if this narrative about is anthropologically or historically plausible. But even taken as a fable, it reflects important ideas about the nature of suffering.

2. Nietzsche’s meaning-making

Even if he never touched pen to paper, Nietzsche’s ability to affirm his life in the face of immense pain is a testament to his meaning-making ability. Nietzsche exemplifies the unity of suffering and joy in himself, for he felt that “my health is disgustingly rich in pain,” and despite the near-constant affliction he kept “contemplating life with joy.”^[28] In Ecce Homo, he expresses gratitude for his sickness, because it allowed him to develop the skill of “looking from the perspective of the sick toward healthier concepts and values” (EH pg. 233). He attributes his capacity to instigate the revaluation of all values to this ability to reverse perspectives. Nietzsche writes that if “my sickness had not forced me to see reason,” he may have abandoned his great task and become a mere pathetic specialist (EH pg. 239). Both his and Wagner’s incredible creative gifts were enabled only by their capability to endure profound suffering (EH pg. 250). His existence was filled with physical and mental suffering, isolation, excruciating trials, and unknown efforts – and yet he has unabashed love for his fate, and does not give into yearning for something different, or much less some ideal afterworld.

We continue to live only through illusions: the “pleasure in understanding,” “art’s seductive veil of beauty,” or through some “metaphysical solace” (BT §18). What matters is not the truth of these artistic illusions but their life-affirming nature.

3. Ennui-stricken youths

Sometimes ennui-stricken youths have a desire for suffering because it gives them a motive “for doing something” (GS #56). Their imaginations invent monsters “so that they may afterwards be able to fight with a monster” (GS #56). The problem with these “distress-seekers” is that they cannot create distress internally to motivate action, but instead need some external menace – “they always need others!” (GS #56). This desperate need for troubles from outside is ultimately a form of “the nihilistic question ‘for what?’ which is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority.” ^[29]

4. Buddhism & Suffering

Nietzsche praises Buddhism over Christianity, as it “is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains…it simply says, as it simply thinks, ‘I suffer.’”^[30] Buddhism does not create a glorious, moralizing, or anesthetic story for suffering. It simply describes suffering without condemning it as the result of sin. It sometimes even affirms suffering in a Nietzschean style. As Zen Buddhist thinker Thich Nath Hanh writes, “Touch your suffering. Face it directly, and your joy will become deeper.”^[31] In Nietzsche’s stated utopia, the “troubles of life will be meted out to those who suffer least from them,” so that those “who are most sensitive to the highest and most sublimated kinds of suffering” will be freed from unnecessary suffering (HH #462).

5. The Jews & Suffering

The Jews are exemplars of this discipline of suffering, as they have converted crisis and oppression into spiritual strength, cultural depth, and moral, ethical, and aesthetic masterworks. As a result of terrible centuries of education, “the psychological and spiritual resources of the Jews today are extraordinary,” and every Jew can look up to exemplars who exhibit courage, endurance, and heroism in the face of the worst situations (D #205). Their suffering has only strengthened their virtue and their conviction in a higher calling.

6. Nietzsche & Levinas

However, Nietzsche’s proposals are not the only ways to make meaning from suffering. Levinas argues that pointless pain can only be made meaningful when it becomes a suffering for the suffering of someone else.^[32] Suffering becomes meaningful when the individual recognizes the call to help a fellow-sufferer gratuitously, without any concern for reciprocity. Nietzsche may see this view as a “debilitation and cancellation of the individual” for the sake of the herd, “adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng” (D #132). Nietzsche’s nuanced and numerous critiques of pity cannot be enumerated here. But other interpretations of suffering, like Levinas’ view, may have other aims and values. It is not clear that Nietzsche’s responses to suffering are the ideal responses for all individuals – and he would likely not defend this claim himself.

7. Responses to Parfit

Derek Parfit argues that “when Nietzsche tried to believe that suffering is good, so that his own suffering would be easier to bear, Nietzsche’s judgment was distorted by self-interest.”^[33] However, Nietzsche does not simply assert that suffering is good. As discussed in 1b, Nietzsche is not clearly committed to defending all types of suffering, but only the kind of suffering that promotes meaning, growth, or positive transformation for the kinds of individuals he is concerned with. Thus, Parfit begins with an inaccurate premise.

Furthermore, Nietzsche recognizes that at its core, life is suffering, and the harm of suffering primarily stems from its meaninglessness. He then claims that an individual (and perhaps only some individuals) can imbue their pointless suffering with meaning to affirm existence and make life worth living. Nietzsche would likely admit that he has a vested interest in affirming and making life meaningful even if it does not have an inherent meaning. He does not aim to be an indifferent, unbiased spectator who investigates suffering from a neutral perspective. In fact, he recognizes that for this kind of indifferent spectator, the wisdom of Silenus would be overwhelming and life would seem to be not worth living. In the end, Nietzsche does not claim that he is an unbiased evaluator of life, but instead acts as a deeply interested creator of values seeking to redeem life. Therefore, Parfit’s claim of bias is largely insignificant. However, even if his example of Nietzsche does not hold, he does accurately diagnose a cognitive bias towards overestimating suffering’s value because we need it to be valuable in order to live. Nietzsche could be construed as doubling down on this bias, rendering suffering as supremely meaningful to promote the affirmation of life.

8. Responses to Vinding

Magnus Vinding argues that while meaning and purpose can help keep suffering at bay and make it more bearable, their “ability to reduce suffering should not lead us to consider them positive goods that can justify the creation of more suffering.”^[34] However, first, Nietzsche does not accept an overriding imperative to eliminate suffering. Instead, he sees some kinds of suffering as worth experiencing, and focuses on values far beyond pain and pleasure — perhaps great health, the affirmation of life, or the development of the overman.

Second, he may also argue that a constitutive aim of any value-system is to imbue life with meaning, and thus meaning-making is not merely a side pursuit. Having some kind of meaning or reason to live is nearly a prerequisite to any human action, and so this is a strong argument that finding meaning must necessarily be an intrinsic positive good. Perhaps in Nietzsche’s view, the value of meaning or purpose does not reduce to the amount of suffering they prevent. They are intrinsic positive goods beyond just suffering-prevention. Why? Well, the simple argument is this:

• P1. All thought, action, and ethics require living beings to carry them out. In other words, an action cannot be performed without a being to perform it.
• P2. Living beings, or at least humans, require some kind of meaning or purpose to remain alive.
• C1. Without meaning or purpose, thought, action, and ethics cannot be carried out. Thus meaning or purpose are necessary prerequisites to all thought, action, and ethics. Meaning/purpose are therefore ‘ethical priors’ in that without them, one cannot have an ethics.
• C2. Meaning/purpose are prerequisites for all other goods. It would therefore be logically contradictory for ethics to deny that meaning/purpose are goods.

One could contest P2, arguing that individuals can live without a purpose. This may be the case. However, the premise can be strengthened by adding some caveats: (a) consciously lacking a purpose, (b) while having both the ability and mental capability to end one’s life, (c) will often lead to the end of a person’s life, (d) if the person is in a circumstance that leads to the desire to end their own life (e.g. suffering). Arguably, most humans live with an implicit purpose of some kind, or are unaware of their lack of a purpose (cf. Sartre’s idea of bad faith). Still, P2 certainly remains open to critique.

If the argument above holds, it may be justified in principle to produce some kinds of suffering to develop meaning. This is especially true if meaning is an inherent positive good. However, (a) this will likely only be justified if an individual is producing suffering for themselves voluntarily, and (b) this does not include extreme suffering – especially because under my understanding of extreme suffering, it is meaningless and destructive of purpose almost by definition. Nietzsche’s views are compatible with both (a) and (b).

Finally, insofar as meaninglessness is an essential feature of suffering, adding purpose will always reduce suffering. This makes meaning and purpose such indispensable instrumental goods that they can be functionally treated as inherent goods.

9. Various related quotes/segments

“Have I not changed? Has not bliss come to me as a storm? My happiness is foolish and will say foolish things: it is still young, so be patient with it. I am wounded by my happiness: let all who suffer be my physicians.”^[35]

“Like a cry and a shout of joy I want to sweep over wide seas, till I find the blessed isles where my friends are dwelling. And my enemies among them! How I now love all to whom I may speak! My enemies too are part of my bliss.”^[36]

The eternal recurrence means that “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you.”^[37] As Zarathustra asks, “are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come?”^[38] We cannot separate pain and pleasure from each other because they are two aspects of the same process.

Even though “in all ages barbarians were happier,” we fear the return to barbarism because we value knowledge so much that we cannot “value happiness without knowledge.”^[39]

A simple hedonic calculus would squander these exemplary individuals. These individuals see beyond immediate consequences and focus on “more distant aims,” even at the “expense of the suffering of others.”^[40] For example, they seek knowledge even if this freethinking will make others feel doubt or distress.

The Atonement may assuage his suffering temporarily by making him feel he will not be punished. But ultimately, it will only increase a key cause of suffering: guilt. After all, mankind was already infinitely guilty, and the Atonement makes us also guilty for the death of the son of God.

To buy the sublime happiness of the Greeks, “the most precious shell that the waves of existence have ever yet washed on the shore,” one must be capable of immense suffering.^[41]

These afterworlds need not be religious – in Nietzsche’s lifetime, political ideologies like nationalism would also dream up utopian ideals of collective redemption.

Furthermore, vice does not destroy or decay a people, but destruction and decay produce vice as a symptom of this “degeneration of instinct.”^[42]

Footnotes

1. Psychological Observations, pg. 20. In Schopenhauer, Arthur. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism. Good Press, 2019. ↑
2. Schopenhauer, Psychological Observations, pg. 25. ↑
3. Ibid, pg. 26. ↑
4. In Buddhism, the first noble truth is that ‘life is suffering’ or that dukkha (suffering) is an inherent feature of life in samsara (the cycle of earthly existence). ↑
5. EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’ §34. Pg. 274. ↑
6. Haidt, Jonathan. The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Basic books, 2006. ↑
7. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. Vol. 3. Random House Incorporated, 2012. ↑
8. See Kroo and Nagy (2011); Fosse (2005); Chan, Marta, and Sharif (2016); Elderton et al (2017); Meyerson et al (2011); Davis et al (1998); Park et al (2008). ↑
9. Notes to HH, fall 1855-86, in the Stanford translation of HH. ↑
10. See Paul, Laurie Ann. Transformative experience. OUP Oxford, 2014. Also see Carel & Kidd, “Suffering as Transformative Experience,” in Bain, David, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, eds. Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity. Routledge, 2019. ↑
11. Bain, David, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, eds. Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity. Routledge, 2019. ↑
12. “Genetic Fallacy.” In Honderich, Ted, ed. The Oxford companion to philosophy. OUP Oxford, 2005. ↑
13. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature: 1. Longmans, 1874. Pg. 335. ↑
14. Coronado, Amena. “Suffering & The Value of Life.” PhD diss., UC Santa Cruz, 2016. Pg. vi. ↑
15. Medina, José. “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge, 2017. Pg. 41. ↑
16. Levinas, pg. 157. ↑
17. Gleibs, Ilka H., Thomas A. Morton, Anna Rabinovich, S. Alexander Haslam, and John F. Helliwell. “Unpacking the hedonic paradox: A dynamic analysis of the relationships between financial capital, social capital and life satisfaction.” British Journal of Social Psychology 52, no. 1 (2013): 25-43. ↑
18. This proto-existentialist maxim came before Sartre’s statement that “existence precedes essence” in Existentialism is a Humanism, but it conveys a similar idea. ↑
19. Notes to HH, in the Stanford edition of HH pg. 343. ↑
20. TSZ, pg. 333. ↑
21. Zizek, Slavoj. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Verso Books, 2009. Pg. 6. ↑
22. Pearce, David. Hedonistic Imperative. David Pearce., 1995. ↑
23. Letter to von Stein, as cited in Higgins, Kathleen Marie. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Lexington Books, 2010. Pg. 8 ↑
24. May, Simon. “Why Nietzsche is still in the morality game.” Cambridge University Press (2011). ↑
25. Carel, Havi, and Ian James Kidd. “8 Suffering as transformative experience.” Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity (2019): 165. ↑
26. “The Imperative to Abolish Suffering. David Pearce Interviewed by Sentience Research (Dec. 2019).” 2020. Hedweb.Com. https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/sentience-interview.html. ↑
27. Hauskeller, Michael. “Nietzsche, the Overhuman and the posthuman: A reply to Stefan Sorgner.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 21, no. 1 (2010): 5-8. ↑
28. Letter of January 22, 1879. In footnote, Portable Nietzsche, pg. 110. ↑
29. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015. 12:9[43]. Pg. 355. ↑
30. The Antichrist, #23. ↑
31. Hanh, Thich Nhất. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 1998. Print. ↑
32. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Useless Suffering.” The Provocation of Levinas (2002): 168-179. Pg. 163. ↑
33. Parfit, Derek. On what matters. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2011. Chapter 126. ↑
34. Vinding, Markus. “Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications.” Ratio Ethica (2020). Pg. 147. ↑
35. TSZ, pg. 196. ↑
36. TSZ, pg. 196. ↑
37. GS, #341. ↑
38. TSZ, pg. 270. ↑
39. Daybreak, Book IV, #429. ↑
40. Daybreak, Book II, #146. See also D, Book IV, #467: “You will cause a lot of people pain that way.- I know it; and know as well that I will suffer doubly for it, once from compassion with their suffering and then from the revenge they will take on me. Nevertheless, it is no less necessary to act as I am acting.” ↑
41. GS, #302. ↑
42. Ibid. ↑