de Ștefan Bolea
Is Schopenhauer right? Is life just pain and suffering? To put it differently, aren’t the positive aspects of life prevalent? Nietzsche’s famous yes comes to mind. Was it the yes of a masochist seeking an ideal escape route? This yes, like the affirmation of the overman, bears a distinctive utopian feature. Yes to a life of debilitating pain, yes to a type of human being that exists only as a nightmare… Is Nietzsche faithful to his earth and world? Or does he resort to masochism because there’s no way out of the overwhelming pain?
Optimism is hardly justifiable. We easily repress, rationalize and sublimate the hardship and hopelessness of life. What is, however, the political aspect of the denial of life’s inferno? We are tiny cogs in the machinery of hell, crucified on the wheel of the Will. These cogs have been trained to develop a strong work ethic, to make themselves useful members of the society, to seek self-improvement and to embrace tenacity. If the cogs were able to see the world as it is (an inferno marketed as a joyride), their lives as they are (bliss as only the bait of suffering), they would acknowledge that life-affirmation is madness. Nonexistence appears more reasonable. That does not imply that suicide is a default recommendation. The fading of the Will, the quenching of the thirst for life… There are many ways to extinguish the karmic duty to pain.
In some situations, life-in-death can heal the blatant hysteria of life. We are cured, we are cleansed, our eyes can see again. What do we gain? Peace and focus. What do we lose? Compulsion, neurosis, the permanent itch. Life is a series of ‘next-next-next,’ where the ego gets access of him/herself through the clones of alterity, acknowledging him/herself as primordial other. (What a scandal! I’m not me. This you is me.) Life-in-death cares little for outside events, fake relationships and derogatory mirrors. The will to power is only cancerous inflation (Mehr-sein-wollen = God complex). The-will-to-life-in-death is detachment. Aim to become a true self, not an overman.
For more on this, see The-Will-to-Life-in Death.