Nietzsche's perspectives on suffering

Abstract

Suffering figures in a number of related and sometimes overlapping themes throughout Nietzsche’s works, from The Birth of Tragedy to the works of his last productive year: representing suffering artistically so as to affirm life, undergoing suffering, inflicting it, witnessing it, inflicting it on oneself, seeking redemption through it, interpreting it retrospectively and giving it significance in one’s life, wanting to prevent it in others and resisting that desire, allowing it to happen to oneself and to others, and seeking it out as a challenge to overcome. The article argues that when we examine the diverse contexts in which Nietzsche discusses suffering, we should conclude that asking after the value of suffering for Nietzsche is mistaken. Part of Nietzsche’s contention against the ‘morality of compassion’ is the very assumption that there is such a thing as the value of suffering. Nietzsche espouses what has been called normative contextualism: whether any instance of suffering has positive, negative, or indifferent value will vary according to context or the relations it stands in to other events and attitudes. According to Nietzsche’s method of perspectival inquiry, we understand suffering better by engaging with ways in which suffering calls upon a range of affective responses.

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ORCID for Christopher Janaway: orcid.org/0000-0002-9600-8837

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