Notes on Nietzsche 12: In Defence of Discomfort

By Sadhika on

Book IV, The Joyful Wisdom

“There is a certain climax in life, at which, notwithstanding all our freedom, and however much we may have denied all directing reason and goodness in the beautiful chaos of existence, we are once more in great danger of intellectual bondage, and have to face our hardest test.”

Drunk with the modern ideas of our time, we are given to fits of “intellectuality” every now and then. Although we may have understood the limits of reason and goodness, and acknowledged the intellect of instinct, we fall prey to the objective voice in us that constantly tries its best to outcry the other voices. The objective voice seems to have turned arrogant, and rightly so, for it is our most favourite pet, beloved more than the other voices whom it has silenced. We must give reason its due; being a captive of the unconscious is a sign of neurosis, according to good old Jung. But let us not not be a captive of objectivity either, that we might force-fit the subjective into an objective template, failing which, we deny the existence of the former altogether, as we do with things we do not understand.

“For now the thought of a personal Providence first presents itself before us with its most persuasive force, and has the best of advocates, apparentness, in its favour, now when it is obvious that all and everything that happens to us always turns out for the best. The life of every day and of every hour seems to be anxious for nothing else but always to prove this proposition anew; let it be what it will, bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, a calumny, the non-receipt of a letter, the spraining of one's foot, a glance into a shop-window, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a deception:—it shows itself immediately, or very soon afterwards as something "not permitted to be absent,"—it is full of profound significance and utility precisely for us!”

Tragedy always looks less bleak in retrospect, and for this reason, we are tempted to stroke its head in fondness once we have surpassed it and grown bigger in comparison. This kind of “people are inherently good” thinking is a naive one when applied to others, and dangerous when applied to our own selves. If we cannot change reality, we change our memory of it, so it does not prick the insides of our delicate heads. We fool ourselves with more frequency and ingenuity than do our enemies. Keep the chaos of your external experiences in immediate memory, so that you do not trip over the same stone twice. Take brief dips in the pool of your internal chaos lest you forget the extent of your wickedness: too often does one take one’s own harmlessness as a given. 

“Well—I mean in spite of all this! we want to leave the Gods alone (and the serviceable genii likewise), and wish to content ourselves with the assumption that our own practical and theoretical skilfulness in explaining and suitably arranging events has now reached its highest point. We do not want either to think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom, when the wonderful harmony which results from playing on our instrument sometimes surprises us too much: a harmony which sounds too well for us to dare to ascribe it to ourselves.”

We are constantly on the lookout for safe spaces: in our homes, in our universities, in the company we keep and in our solitudes. We have scarcely walked three steps barefoot, before we want to rush back into our comfortable armchairs. We look for people who challenge not one thought we have, so that our conversations with them validate our own rather low resolution perspectives. We want to be included in every conversation in every group, even though we may not deserve it. 

We like to sit with our group of equally worthless and lazy friends and revel in our collective incompetence, celebrating mediocrity and irresponsibility. We get a sense of second-hand achievement by playing video games for days on end, as if those level-ups are in our actual lives. We garner likes on our profile pics on social media as if we ought to be congratulated about the symmetry of our faces. We pride ourselves on the amount of trivia our heads can hold about sports persons as if knowledge of someone else’s achievement confers part of his glory upon oneself. We like to associate ourselves with grand problems of the world for it allows us an escape hatch from our own inadequacies. To compensate for the dullness of our own lives, we like to identify as whole nations to feel patriotic, as whole groups to feel exalted, because when we are simply our individual selves, we feel more insignificant and our achievements are not celebrated. How are we not uncomfortable in these comforts?


 

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