The Pursuit of Happiness – Part 4 – Embrace the Nietzsche Moment

Part 4 – Embrace the Nietzsche Moment

Now that we are at peace with our decisions, we do not care about the past or the future, we have shunned negative people from our lives and we have made peace with those whom we have wronged and those who have wronged us, we can sit back and enjoy every moment that we are alive and blessed to partake in the wondrous universe and people around us.

We need to look at this moment from Nietzsche’s point of view, contained in his “Will to power”:

If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

We have this anti-thesis between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – Nietzsche the positive passionate person and Schopenhauer the negative nihilist:

 Nietzsche celebrates the Greeks who, facing up to the terrors of nature and history, did not seek refuge in a Buddhistic negation of the will, as Schopenhauer did, but instead created tragedies in which life is affirmed as beautiful in spite of everything. Schopenhauer’s negation of the will was a saying no to life and to the world, which he judged to be a scene of pain and evil. Directly against Schopenhauer’s place as the ultimate nay-sayer to life, Nietzsche positioned himself as the ultimate yes-sayer …. Nietzsche's affirmation of life's pain and evil, in opposition to Schopenhauer, resulted from an overflow of life. Schopenhauer's advocacy of self-denial and negation of life was, according to Nietzsche, very harmful. For his entire mature life, Nietzsche was concerned with the damage that he thought resulted from Schopenhauerian disgust with life and turning against the world. (Comment by Walter Kaufman.)

What I understand from Nietzsche is that there is a moment called “now” which was specifically created for us as a moment that took conjunction of zillions of factors over an eternity just to make us happy, and we should embrace that moment and hold onto it forever.

That is the best definition I have ever read of our adage of “living in the here and the now – living in the moment”. If we can just forget everything else except this moment. Forget the past; do not look back; we are not going there. Forget the future; it does not exist.

For this Nietzsche talks about the historical (our past) and the a-historical (without a past) and explains in highly philosophical terms why we should be ahistorical like animals, and not historical like humans (you may skip it if you wish):

Nietzsche’s emphasis on movement is omnipresent throughout his corpus but finds a particularly explicit expression in The Utility and Liability of History. The distinct notions of the historical and ahistorical modes of being are at base notions concerning movement — for Nietzsche the ahistorical is the mode of perpetual forgetfulness and movement while the historical is the mode of rumination, reflection and stagnation. He writes:

The animal lives a-historically, for it disappears entirely into the present, like a number that leaves no remainder; it does not know how to dissemble, conceals nothing, and appears in each and every moment as exactly what it is, and so cannot help but be honest.

The animal is for Nietzsche the example of the purely ahistorical existence, for the animal does not incorporate the past into itself and therefore acts in a perpetually forgetful mode — in not being weighed down by the considerations of its past it moves into each new moment with vigour and without doubt. In short, the ahistorical mode is one of instinct, the ahistorical being acts without first remembering, measuring, calculating, and evaluating, which for Nietzsche results in a certain naive robustness. The human being, however, weighed down by his historical sensibility, is thus:

The human being, by contrast, braces himself against the great and ever-greater burden of the past; it weighs him down or bends him over, hampers his gait as an invisible and obscure load that he can pretend to disown, and that he is only too happy to disown when he is among his fellow human beings in order to arouse their envy.

I have published an article some nine years ago, which sets out in a simple way, the problem we have with living in the moment. It is only now that I have come to appreciate and apply the Nietzsche moment. Here it is:

https://pkodendaal.blogspot.com/2013/05/intermezzo.html

Next time: Part 5 – Start to read your Bible from Genesis to Revelation.