"Donald Trump is the first president in history whose campaign has come under F. B. I.-initiated investigation for collusion with a hostile foreign power. And the person heading that investigation, the F. B. I. director, has been fired." (Timothy Egan, NYT Op-Ed, 11 May 2017)
It might help if you read Rosenstein's Comey memorandum and related documents here. But if you are a lefty, it probably won't.
Karl White writes:
If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging someone else into said dilemma kicking and screaming (literally), while we attempt to work out our own salvation or lack thereof. That's why I subscribe to a form of prudential antinatalism. This differs from the kind that says life is and always a negative thing, as for all I know there could be a pay-off at the end of it currently indiscernible to humans, but for want of indisputable proof then I cannot see any reason to expose someone else to the dilemma of life, or at least I personally cannot do it, given I cannot find any ultimate meaning or justification for my own existence, at this present time at least.
This entry will attempt to articulate and develop Mr. White's suggestion.
What do we know? We do not know whether human life has an overall positive or negative value. It could have a positive value despite appearances to the contrary. For example, it could be that after our sojourn through this vale of tears, the veil of ignorance will be lifted and we will find ourselves in a realm of peace and light in which every tear is dried and the sense of things is revealed. It could be that the vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making in which some of us 'earn our wings.' But this is an article of faith, not of knowledge. We don't know whether there are further facts, hidden from us at present, in whose light the world as we experience it here and now will come to be seen as overall good.
What we do know is that the problem of the value of human existence is a genuine problem and thus one that needs solving. It needs solving presumably because it is not merely a theoretical problem in axiology but a problem with implications for practical ethics. In particular: Is procreation morally permissible or not?
But does it follow from what we know that anti-natalism is the prudential course? Karl answers in the affirmative. I don't know whether Karl is an extreme or a moderate anti-natalist, but I don't think it matters for the present discussion. Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13) from which axiological thesis there follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12) A moderate anti-natalist could hold that most procreation is wrong.
One assumption that Karl seems to be making is that, absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative. This assumption I find very plausible. But note that it rests on a still deeper assumption, namely, that the value of life can be objectively assessed or evaluated. This assumption is not obviously correct, but it too is plausible. Here, then, is the argument. It is a kind of 'moral safety' argument. To be on the morally safe side, we ought not procreate.
Argument for Prudential Anti-Natalism
1) There is an objective 'fact of the matter' as to whether or not human life is on balance of positive or negative value.
2) Absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative, that is, the harms of existence outweigh the benefits of existence.
3) We do not know that the value of life for most humans is not on balance negative, i.e., that the harms of existence are compensated by the benefits of existence.
4) We do know that bringing children into the world will expose them to physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, and that all of those so exposed will also actually suffer the harms of existence.
5) It is morally wrong to subject people to harms when it is not known that the harms will be compensated by a greater good.
6) To have children is to subject them to such harms. Therefore:
7) It is morally wrong to procreate.
Now you have heard me say that there are no compelling arguments in philosophy, and this is certainly no exception. I'll mention two possible lines of rebuttal.
a) Reject premise (1) along Nietzschean lines as explained in my most recent Nietzsche post. It might be urged that any negative judgment on the value of life merely reflects the lack of vitality of the one rendering the judgment. No healthy specimen takes suffering as an argument against against living and procreating! I do not endorse this view, but I feel its pull. Related: Nietzsche and National Socialism.
b) Reject (3). There are those who, standing fast in their faith, would claim to know by a sort of cognitio fidei that children and life itself are divine gifts, and that in the end all the horrors and injustices of this life will be made good.
I found it in a remarkable paragraph from Conrad Black:
The bizarrerie of the intellectual right is illimitable. My dear and esteemed friend George Will, after an acrobatic exercise in the columnar snobbery that Trump was unaware that Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the start of the Civil War, (Jackson was concerned about the danger of civil war throughout his presidency, as George knows and Mr. Trump was alleging), has fled into the television embrace of Rachel the Madd and Mika Buzzfeed at MSNBC, the most astonishing flight since Joachim von Ribbentrop went to Moscow. They have all walked the plank; President Trump has induced self-destructive political bilharzia in the deranged effigies of once-serious and important people. I still love them, but I grieve for them.
Bilharzia is "an infection caused by a parasitic worm that lives in fresh water in subtropical and tropical regions."
John Horgan reports in Scientific American on a conversation with David Chalmers. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)
There is some discussion of the so-called 'hard problem' in the philosophy of mind. The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism. The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable. It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent reason to reject physicalism. I give my reasons here.
But this is not the topic of this entry. What caught my eye was a metaphilosophical item.
Chalmers' is a purely theoretical conception of philosophy:
Does philosophy help him [Chalmers] deal with personal problems? “I’m not sure how deep an integration there is between what I think about philosophically and the way I live,” he replied. “I’d love to be able to say, ‘Here is how the insights I’ve had about consciousness have transformed my life.’… I’ve basically lived my life the way I want to live it without necessarily being all that reflective at the practical level.”
A striking admission. Here we have a philosopher who frankly admits to living his life more or less unreflectively and thus more or less unphilosophically. On such an approach, philosophy has little to do with the life of the "existing individual" to employ a signature phrase from Kierkegaard. This is a widespread attitude among contemporary philosophers for whom philosophy is a purely theoretical discipline aimed at the solution of certain puzzles such as the 'hard problem.'
Well, that is a conception of philosophy one might have. I'll say a few words in its defense. The central problems of philosophy are genuine problems, and the attempts by logical positivists, ordinary language philosophers, and others to show them to be pseudo have failed. Whether or not they are humanly important or socially relevant or such that their solution contributes to human flourishing, they are legitimate objects of inquiry. And a pox upon anyone or any government that thinks otherwise.
But some of us favor a more classical conception of philosophy. For some of us, the signature Socratic saying remains normative: "The unexamined life is not worth living." These are words Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates at Apology 38a:
. . . and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.
To contrast it with the purely theoretical conception we could call this an 'existential' conception of philosophy as long as we don't confuse it with existentialism narrowly construed. Obviously, one whose approach to philosophy is broadly existential can also have a strong theoretical bent. It might be interesting to attempt a list of some prominent 'existential' philosophers, and then distill the shared attributes that make them such.
Broadly 'existential' philosophers include Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epicurus, Stoics such as Epictetus, Pyrrhonian Skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, Christian Platonists such as St. Augustine, all of the medieval thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas for whom philosophia ancilla theologiae. Add to them all those whose concerns are religious first and foremost Blaise Pascal being a prominent example, and even Kant.
Kant? Well yes. In the preface to the second edition (1787) of his magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason, he famously declares that his aim is to "deny reason in order to make room for faith." The highest concerns of humanity are God, freedom, and immortality, and Kant's labors are for the purpose of securing these noble objects.
These 'broadly existential' philosophers have in common a concern for ultimate human well-being that trumps the merely theoretical. I'm with them.
It may well if the authorities do not cease their abdication.
Patrick Toner comments:
. . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value."
Professor Toner's criticism offers me a welcome opportunity to develop further some of my thoughts on this topic.
1) The logically first question is whether human life is a predicament. I say it is. A predicament is not just any old situation or condition or state but one that is deeply unsatisfactory, extrication from which is both needed and difficult to attain. There are of course predicaments in life. For example, you are hiking in a slot canyon with sheer walls when it begins to rain. You are in a dangerous mundane predicament. But my claim, as you would expect, is philosophical: human life as such is a predicament. I take that to be a datum, a given, a starting point. If you don't experience human life as a predicament, your life and that of others, then what I have to say on this topic won't mean anything to you.
2) Now if human life is a predicament as I have defined the term, then it follows straightaway that some sort of extrication, solution, rescue, or relief is needed, whether or not it can be had. That is, someone in a predicament needs to be saved from it. He needs salvation. Considerations anent salvation are called soteriological. Soteriology, as I use the term, is the general theory of salvation in some appropriately spiritual or religious or mystical sense. Our canyon hiker may end up needing to be physically saved. But the salvation under discussion here, though it may involve some sort of physical transformation, as in bodily resurrection, is very different from being saved from drowning.
3) Now distinguish three questions that any soteriology worth its salt would have to answer: What is saved? From what is it saved? For/to what is it saved? A schematic Roman Catholic answer would be that the soul is saved from venial and mortal sin and the just punishment for such sin (purgatory and hell) so that it may live for all eternity in the presence of God. Toner quotes the Catholic Encylopedia: "As sin is the greatest evil, being the root and source of all evil, Sacred Scripture uses the word 'salvation' mainly in the sense of liberation of the human race or of individual man from sin and its consequences."
4) On a Roman Catholic soteriology, then, sin is what makes our human predicament deeply unsatisfactory, and such that we both need relief, but will have a hard time attaining it. (I should add that on Roman Catholicism, salvation cannot be attained by our own efforts: grace is also needed.) Sin explains why our condition is deeply unsatisfactory. But of course other explanations are possible. Please note that unsatisfactoriness is the datum; sin is the explanation of the datum.
For Buddhists it is suffering that makes our predicament deeply unsatisfactory. Buddhist soteriology is accordingly very different from Christian soteriology. For Buddhism it is not the soul that is saved since there is no soul (doctrine of anatta), and it is not saved from sin since sin is an offense against God and there is no God (anatta again). And of course the salvific state is not the visio beata as on Thomist Catholicism, but nibbana/nirvana.
And of course Nietzsche's aesthetic soteriology is different from both of these. For more on that I refer you to Giles Fraser.
5) I do not understand why Toner balks at my claim quoted above, namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value." This strikes me as obviously true. If this life were wholly satisfactory, we would not seek salvation from it. It is precisely because it is of negative value that we seek salvation in the various ways humans have sought salvation by the practice of austerites, sacrifice, good works, prayer, meditation, and so on. It is precisely the realization that this life is marked by sickness, old age, terrible physical and mental infirmity and suffering, greed, delusion, ignorance, war, folly, torture, death . . . that sets us on the Quest for nirvana, moksha, eternal life. What drives monks to their monasteries and nuns to their nunneries is the realization that ultimately this life has nothing to offer that could truly satisfy us.
Why does Toner fail to understand my simple point? It is because he accepts Roman Catholicism in toto and accordingly he takes the Roman Catholic soteriology to be the last, and perhaps only, word. On this view, this world as we experience it in this life, though fallen, is a divine creation. As the product of an all-good God, it is itself good. This is why he doesn't like my talk of this life as of negative value. He ignored my qualification: "taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds."
That is: taken apart from its interpretation in the light of an antecedently accepted worldview such as Roman Catholicism. An appeal to a hinterworld — Hinterwelt is a term Nietzsche uses — is an appeal to a world behind the phenomenal scenes, a true world in whose light the horrors of this world are redeemed. Absent that appeal, this world is obviously of negative value.
I am sure Patrick is capable of understanding my point since he himself invokes the classic Catholic phrase "vale of tears." It is because we experience this world as a vale of tears that we seek salvation from it. Obviously, to see it as a vale of tears is to see it negatively.
6) As for Nietzsche, he was indeed a homo religiosus who experienced our way through this life as a via dolorosa. The horror of existence tormented him and he sought a solution. What my post exposed was the tension between Nietzsche's negative assessment of life, which motivates his ill-starred attempts at salvation, and his doctrine that life, as the standard of all evaluation, cannot be objectively evaluated.
Related articles
Here:
As for me, I can’t understand how my work of almost 50 years amounts to a “nativist strategy.” Most of what I’ve published is scholarship on various historical subjects and hardly a strategy for promoting whiteness or ethno-nationalism. What I have argued when writing political polemics is the following: States that are culturally homogeneous tend to be more stable than those that are not; multiculturalism is a means by which certain elites can generate ethnic and social problems that they then put themselves in charge of and from which they derive benefit. Moreover, multiculturalism is a quintessential political religion, in that it offers moral and spiritual redemption through revolutionary change under the direction of an all-powerful political class. I’ve also mocked the view that whatever American “liberal democracy” and the post-Western “West” have become at this point in time should be a model for universal conversion. The American government should not be running around the globe forcing on others our latest version of “democratic” enlightenment.
The editors of New York may disagree with my priorities and analyses, but I don’t see how this disagreement proves that I’m a white nationalist.
I'd say Gottfried 1; NYM 0.
In my What Does 'America First' Mean? I argue, among other things, that an enlightened nationalism is not to be confused with nativism or white nationalism.
St. Augustine at Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me."
A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers.
At the apogee of this mad trajectory, the pleasure pursued issues in death as in the case of David Carradine's death by auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room. Is there any more extreme case of the insane abuse of the body as a pleasure factory?
Ancient and tired, this world is yet young to the young. With each generation the process of disillusionment starts over again.
To understand the Left you have to understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.' Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. (These last two sentence are 'in French': they sport universal quantifiers and thereby exaggerate for effect; you know how to dial them back so as to not give offense to your sober Anglo sensibility.)
Suppose a conservative says, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." Applying the hermeneutics of suspicion, the leftist takes the conservative to be speaking 'in code': what he is really saying is something like: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."
But of course that is not what the conservative means; he means what he says. He means the the best qualified person should get the job regardless of race, sex, or creed.
Or suppose a conservative refers to a black malefactor as a thug. What he has actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.
Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Barack Obama's first Attorney General, Eric Holder, famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?
One of Donald Trump's signature sayings is "Make America great again!"
To a leftist, this is a 'racist dog whistle.' It doesn't mean what it manifestly means; there is a latent sinister meaning that we can thank Bill Clinton for exposing. It means — wait for it – “That message . . . make America great again is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you. What it means is I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago and I’ll move you back up on the social totem and other people down.”
The irony is that Slick Willy used the same sentence himself!
Here we come to the nub of the matter. The typical liberal is a morally defective specimen of humanity who refuses to treat his political opponents as rational beings, as persons. He dehumanizes them and treats them as if they are nothing but big balls of such affects as fear and hate bereft of rational justification for the views they hold.
Now read this entry on the genetic fallacy.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:
Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.
This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.
Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.
To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.' It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself. The very fact of preaching shows one to be a hypocrite. Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy. When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.
And therein lies the contradiction. They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical. But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.
We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.' But if you have read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.
Mark Johnston reviews Scheffler & Kolodny, eds., Death and the Afterlife, Oxford UP.
I note that the title is false advertising:
In Scheffler’s self-consciously idiosyncratic use of the term, the“afterlife” is neither a supernatural continuation of this life, nor the result of a deeper naturalistic understanding of the kind of thing we are; it is what John Stuart Mill called “the onward rush of mankind,” the collective life of humanity after our individual deaths. Scheffler’s thesis is that the onward rush of humankind—the collective afterlife—is much more important to us than we are ordinarily apt to notice.
Here:
Welcome to the rise of fake law. Just as fake news spreads ideologically motivated misinformation with a newsy veneer, fake law brings us judicial posturing, virtue signaling, and opinionating masquerading as jurisprudence. And just as fake news augurs the end of authoritative reporting, fake law portends the diminution of law's legitimacy and the warping of judges' self-understanding of their constitutional role.
Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2) I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.
If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value. But how can life be of negative value if, as Nietzsche maintains, the value of life is inestimable? This is the problem. Let us now delve into it.
1) Talk of salvation presupposes, first, that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory. In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born. The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.
Now it seems clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever. The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation makes no sense. To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term.
2) But here's the rub. Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable. As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann. His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible. Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms. Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments. Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline. A negative judgment shows a lack of vitality, a deficiency of will power and a privation of the will to power, which is what everything is at bottom. There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life itself. There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending. Thus spoke Nietzsche.
3) The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (a) Man needs salvation from his predicament in this life; (b) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated. The claims cannot both be true. The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life.
4) Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its proximity to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however, is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis renders soteriology impossible.
Is the value of human life objectively inestimable?
5) Can the value of life be objectively evaluated? Does it make sense to maintain that for all of us it would have been better never to have been born? Or the opposite? Schopenhauer claims that "Human Life must be some sort of mistake." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, Frederick Unger, 1975, p. 232.) Is there a fact of the matter here? Or is Nietzsche right at Will to Power #675 where he speaks of the "absurdity of this posture of judging existence . . . It is symptomatic." Symptomatic of what? Of decay, decline, world-weariness.
Does the project of judging human life with an eye to establishing that it either is or is not worth living make sense? Is there a standard apart from life in the light of which the value of life can be assessed? Or is life itself the standard? A most vexing series of questions.
The questions are logically prior to questions about the morality of procreation. David Benatar has famously argued for anti-natalism according to which it would be better if there were no more humans, and that therefore all procreation ought to be opposed as morally wrong, the deontic claim following from the axiological one. (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 12-13)
This is one tough nut to crack, and I am not sure my 'nutcracker' is up to the job. But here we go.
One relevant fact is that life is always an individual life, mine or yours or his or hers. Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens. Life has the property of 'mineness.' There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair, from a particular perspective, in a particular set of circumstances. Lived life is always mine or yours, etc. What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time: one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit. If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.
A second relevant fact, related to but distinct from the first, is that he who evaluates life is party to it. An interested party. The judger is not a mere spectator of his life, from the outside, as if it were someone else's, but a liver of it, an enactor, an actualizer of it. So it is not just that lived life is always a particular life, but also that a particular lived life is not an object of disinterested observation but a living in which the observing and evaluating are inseparable from the living.
Life judges life and Nietzsche's thought is that negative judgments are negative verdicts on the quality of the life that is judging. There is no standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured. No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard. The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective. The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.
6) "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?" And what would those be?
a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience. In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." I feel your pain, Fritz. Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much? How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow? How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence? Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans? (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely. They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.)
But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence? As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either. Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard? And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness? Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is.
b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction. (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.) Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all: better never to have been born, with second best being an early death? But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting? The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living. Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?
These questions are not easy to answer! Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.
In the end, Nietzsche seems torn. He loves life and wants to affirm it on its own terms. And yet he seeks an ersatz salvation in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. "For all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity."
When asked about the value of life, the gastroenterologist sagely observed that it all depends on the liver.
