Nietzsche and The Earth by Henk Manschot

Author:Henk Manschot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Experimental life

When Nietzsche talks about experiments or experimentation, he does not mean the type of scientific testing with which we are all familiar as a way of verifying a hypothesis. Instead he always uses the term in relation to his own way of life. The terrain of the experiment is you, your comings and goings, the way you feed and clothe yourself, move and travel, work and relax, enter into relationships, live married or unmarried, like a Don Juan or like a monk, and so on. Recall what he writes under the heading ‘In media vita’:

In media vita. – No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge – and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. – And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure – for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. ‘Life as a means to knowledge’ – with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory? (GS, IV, §324, italics in original)

The knowledge Nietzsche is referring to is that which you need if you are going to undertake new things in your life or if, better still, a desire for innovation and creativity comes to characterize your attitude to life. Living this way is exciting and risky. It turns life into a game of dangers and victories, in which you have to be brave, prepared for failures and setbacks but in which you learn the art of putting things into perspective, of laughing and living joyfully. Could there be a better description of what might be called the art of living well?

What can persuade people to take this stance in life? For Nietzsche one of the strongest motivations was a deep dissatisfaction with the lifestyle that had shaped him and that he had made his own. He had developed a thorough loathing of the bourgeois existence in which he felt trapped, and from time to time he felt an equally thorough loathing of himself. Dissatisfaction, emptiness, disappointment and anger at the crude notions of happiness to which people had resigned themselves were no doubt important aspects, but even more so was his discovery that it was possible to see life – one’s own, but also life in a general sense – as a dynamic process full of potency and ingenuity, qualities that reveal themselves in all life forms and in the case of the human species can lead to great creativity or to tragic failure.

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