3. Nietzsche's glad tidings

What is happiness, and how is it achieved? 

In this episode, we begin our exploration of Nietzsche’s provocative ideas of happiness, desire, and self-overcoming. Is happiness simply getting what we want? Or is it something deeper—something tied to struggle, triumph, and the will to power? 

Exploring the limitations of desire, the Epicurean pursuit of contentment, and Nietzsche’s rejection of passive pleasure, we uncover a vision of happiness that demands more than comfort—it demands transformation. 

Tune in as we start to unfold Nietzsche’s philosophy and its radical implications for living a fulfilled life.

Music: The Arrival of the Birds by The Cinematic Orchestra and The London Metropolitan orchestra

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Transcript

“We should not give the individual, in so far as he desires his own happiness, any precepts or recommendations as to the road leading to happiness; for individual happiness arises from particular laws that are unknown to anybody, and such a man will only be hindered or obstructed by recommendations which come to him from outside sources…”

That’s from Daybreak, passage 108.

What is happiness? The trouble with trying to define happiness is circularity. Saying something like, happiness is a state of feeling joy, contentment, well-being, pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfilment, is really just to say happiness is a state of feeling happy. It adds little to our understanding. It is to substitute many words where before we had one. To understand happiness as a concept we can analyse it more broadly, perhaps in terms of the phenomena which accompany it (smiles, optimism, sociability etc.) or its psychological, social, behavioural, or neurological aspects, or in terms of its evolutionary function, but really we are all much more interested in its recipe. We want to know what the formula for happiness is.  

Ask a hundred people what would make them perfectly happy and you will get a hundred different answers, albeit with some common themes. Each answer will be a Christmas list of things that are desired which, if obtained, promise happiness. So maybe we could define happiness as simply “getting what we want”. But no, it’s a truism that getting what we want doesn’t tend to result in lasting happiness. Perhaps then, happiness is defined not so much by its recipe, as by its status as the ultimate object of our striving, the universal desirable thing that everyone is compelled to pursue.

Everyone wants happiness. The desire for it is inescapable. Even if I claimed to want unhappiness, I’d be claiming, in effect, that it would make me happy to be unhappy. It doesn’t even make sense to say “I want to be unhappy” because this adds up to the logically absurd claim: “I want what I don’t want.” But if I want it, it just can’t be what I don’t want. 

It is sometimes suggested that the true formula for happiness is to stop wanting altogether. This could be an admonition to want what you’ve already got—St. Augustine recommended this approach—and this isn’t necessarily bad advice, but you still want what you’ve got, right? You want to hold on to it i.e. you don’t want to lose it. So that’s still desire. Indeed, in behavioural science “loss aversion”, as it is known, is considered a more powerful motivator than the desire for acquisition.

There are those that go further and aspire to a condition where they want nothing at all—I’m thinking of the radical religious ascetics in particular here. But is it truly possible to want nothing? Even if we ignore the fact that in pursuing such a goal you have to want to stop wanting, where could the motivation necessary for the practical business of living come from? You want food when you are hungry, water when you are thirsty. You want to scratch that itch. You want to get out of the way of that truck that is hurtling towards you. You want to evacuate your bladder on occasion, right? To not want anything is to be dead.

The stoics were more pragmatic in that they wanted to tame their desires rather than get rid of them completely; to mute them and stifle them to a minimum. Consider the prescription for happiness from the Ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus’s,: a garden, a few friends, and some bread and cheese to eat. The theory was that reduced desire meant less suffering and less disappointment. Sure, but does it not also mean less pleasure? Nietzsche though so. 

“But suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to know ‘rejoicing to heaven’ must be prepared for ‘grieving unto death’ as well? And such might be the case! At least so the Stoics believed, who were consistent when they sought as little pleasure as possible, that life might afford them as little pain as possible.” (GS.12)

Hmm . . . this is a point to be proved. Does a maximally pleasurable life really have to contain great pain too? Certainly, extraordinary triumphs require extraordinary trials—think about the investment of blood, sweat, and tears that an Olympic victory requires. But consider that even to love another human being is to risk suffering and loss. The Buddha himself lamented the vulnerability to suffering that the birth of his son, Rahula, exposed him to. Nietzsche writes “as Buddha said, when the birth of a son was announced to him: "Râhoula has been born to me, a fetter has been forged for me””  and he adds: “(Râhoula means here "a little demon”)” That’s from GM.3.7. The name Rahula can also be translated as “fetter” and illustrates that relationships constitute an undesirable attachment, tying the Buddha to the life of craving and clinging which brings joy but also suffering. The Buddha’s stated goal was to escape from all this: the cycle of samsara—of endless birth, death, and rebirth driven by that craving and clinging. There are varying interpretations but in one the buddha’s goal was self-annihilation, not only from this incarnation but from every reincarnation. The implication of this spiritual quest seems to entail the judgement that life and the world is bad or wrong in some sense, and one should aspire to get out of it, avoiding any chance of coming back through reincarnation. Compare this with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence where the goal is to affirm one’s life so passionately that you would choose to live it over and over again forever. And they call Nietzsche the nihilist!

We note also, that the Epicurean solution, ostensibly so modest, necessitates having a garden and the time to enjoy lolling about in it. Most people are too preoccupied with trying to keep a roof over their head and put food on the table to be able to pursue such a genteel existence. The advice to want what you have got from those who have already got what they want is not particularly compelling. 

So, yes trying to manage your desires so they don’t overwhelm you is prudent advice which Nietzsche would endorse as good psychological hygiene, but even this requires that you desire to have that control over your desires and you desire this because, of course, it promises you some kind of happiness. 

Let’s say then, that each person’s conception of the path to happiness will differ: some want a lot, some want a little, some want what they already have, and some want to not want anything. However, the one thing that will not differ is that something is always wanted—the state of happiness itself always represents the fulfilment of that desire. 

In fact, as a workable definition of happiness, this is not without its merits: happiness is the one thing that everybody inescapably wants and aims for. 

Whatever you most want represents your idea of happiness. The rub is, of course, we can all be wrong about what will make us happy and we often, perhaps usually, are.

How then is happiness achieved? 

This is an enduring and seemingly insoluble question because happiness is a shy creature; fickle, protean, and evanescent. For even the most fortunate people, happiness can be damned hard to come by. It is a tantalising will-o’-the-wisp that retreats as you pursue it. Even on those wonderful occasions when you do catch it by the tail and, for a moment, revel in its thrilling proximity, it slips through your fingers and flees. Then the chase must be resumed. Our lived experience is that complete happiness is rarely, if ever, secured for anything other than brief periods. 

In the last episode, I asked you what it is that you want. You want happiness—of that much, we can be certain. But as we’ve already noted, this doesn’t tell us anything particularly useful—after all, everybody wants happiness! The real question is this: what, specifically, would constitute complete happiness for you? You might feel confident that you already know the answer: the flashy car, the big house, the devoted partner—etc. etc. . . . you did make a list, right?. But let’s entertain the possibility that you don’t truly know what happiness would be for you. If that were the case, how could you ever hope to achieve it?

Albeit that Nietzsche doesn’t think you can give specific prescriptions for happiness, how does he think it is achieved? Soon, we are going to start to excavating his mature conception of happiness. He stated it baldly and succinctly. Implicit within it is the formula for its achievement; a formula that is applicable to everyone, but one that can and must be expressed in a multitude of individual ways. 

But before that let’s find out a little more about Nietzsche.

The year is 1887, and in a letter to a friend, Nietzsche writes, ‘what I have never yet revealed to anyone—the task which confronts me, my life’s task […] I would like to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character.’⁠1 If you have been exposed to the popular conception of Nietzsche, this sentiment will surprise you. His reputation is as some kind of nihilist and misanthrope, proclaiming that god is dead, espousing the virtues of ‘will to power’, fulminating against our modern morality, and writing books with hair-raising titles like Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist? And so, for those who are as yet not properly acquainted, let us meet this weird iconoclast and anti-philosopher.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a philosopher in Germany during the late 1800s. There are a handful of photographs of him in existence and his most imposing likenesses are instantly recognisable—we might even say, iconic—due to the formidably enormous walrus moustache he sported. His mature philosophy, that on which his fame (and notoriety) is premised, was almost entirely ignored during his lifetime. He developed his ideas in relative isolation as a rather sad and stateless loner, courteous and soft-spoken, half-blind and plagued with terrible sickness, wondering across Europe in search of the weather most conducive to maintaining his fragile health. In January 1889, at the age of 44, precipitated by a public breakdown in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche collapsed irrevocably into complete insanity. This is no overstatement—his subsequent behaviour included drinking his own urine, throwing his excrement at the wall, playing the piano frenetically in the nude, and howling unceasingly for hours on end like a wild animal. He spent the last decade of his life being cared for by his mother and sister, slipping ever further into a state of profound debilitation and catatonia, utterly dependent on them for the most basic tasks and barely able to string a coherent sentence together. With his productive years forever behind him, he became a faded vestige of his former self, unable even to recollect the books he had authored and the calling which had given his life meaning. 

It is a cruel irony that Nietzsche’s fame rapidly swept across the continent after his mental breakdown. Although he was way beyond being able to grasp it, he quickly became one of the most notable figures in European culture. His fame endures today, but now its reach is global. As I mentioned in the last show, it is no exaggeration to say that in the century and a quarter since his death, virtually every branch of philosophy, psychology, art, and literature has been influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas. Even our contemporary popular culture and our everyday discourse bears his stamp—for example, it was he who first put into print that familiar injunction: ‘live dangerously’, GS.283, and it was he that coined that ubiquitous affirmation in his book, TI.8,: ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’. 

Nietzsche’s impact has been far-reaching and it continues to be felt—this podcast is evidence of that—however, I will be arguing that the real import of his ideas has yet to make itself fully manifest. Nietzsche himself predicted that this would take time; a self-styled ‘untimely’ man, he conjectured that it might be a matter of centuries before humanity grasped what he saw as the inevitable implications of our modern condition. In his book, The Joyous Science 125, he has the madman (clearly an avatar for Nietzsche himself) say, ‘I have come too early,’ […] ‘this is not yet the right time. This tremendous event is still on its way and headed towards them – word of it has not yet reached men’s ears. Even after they are over and done with, thunder and lightning take time, the light of the stars takes time, and deeds too take time, before they can be seen and heard.’ In this sense, Nietzsche saw himself in his lifetime as a kind of Cassandra. Cassandra was a princess in Greek mythology who was gifted with foresight but was doomed to be ignored or disbelieved by others. However, unlike Cassandra, Nietzsche didn’t just predict an enormous crisis, he also saw a singular opportunity too; he believed he was the herald of something historically momentous and, in EH.Destiny,1, he stated it plainly: 

‘I know my lot. One day my name will be connected with the memory of something tremendous, – a crisis such as the earth has never seen, the deepest collision of conscience, a decision made against everything that has been believed, demanded, held sacred so far. I am not a human being, I am dynamite. – And yet […] I am a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was before; I am acquainted with incredibly elevated tasks, where even the concept of these tasks has been lacking so far; all hope had disappeared until I came along. And yet I am necessarily a man of disaster as well. Because when truth comes into conflict with the lies of millennia there will be tremors, a ripple of earthquakes, an upheaval of mountains and valleys such as no one has ever imagined.’

This might seem like a rather grandiose set of claims, if not the ravings of a lunatic, but I invite you to reflect on the matter over the coming weeks. Certainly, there are those who see in such feverish outpourings a warning sign of Nietzsche’s coming mental disintegration and, together with his lifelong loneliness and sickness, grounds for the repudiation of his philosophy—if his life was so miserable, if he went completely batshit mad, what qualifies him to give us advice on how to live? 

In answer, it’s not true that Nietzsche’s life was entirely miserable; in his later years, the years in which his philosophy achieved its affirmative culmination, Nietzsche frequently experienced long periods of intense euphoria and joy. Take a look at this letter to his friend Peter Gast from 1881: 

‘Well, my dear good friend! The August sun is overhead, the year passes on, the mountains and the forests become more quiet and peaceful. On my horizon, thoughts have arisen such as I have never seen before – I will not speak of them, but will keep my unshakable peace. I really shall have to live a few more years! Ah, my friend, sometimes the idea runs through my head that I am living an extremely dangerous life, for I am one of those machines which can explode. The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh; several times I could not leave my room for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed—from what? Each time, I had wept too much on my previous day’s walk, not sentimental tears but tears of joy; I sang and talked nonsense, filled with a glimpse of things which put me in advance of all other men…’⁠2

Then in 1885, he wrote in his notes: ‘I have experienced moments of pure ecstasy in which everything made sense, in which all my doubts and fears vanished, and I felt a sense of oneness with the universe.’,⁠3 and in the year before his breakdown, he wrote to his friend, Franz Overbeck, ‘I feel a joy beyond all joys, a bliss beyond all bliss, a kind of drunkenness that has nothing to do with wine.’⁠4 That same year, in a letter to Carl Fuchs, he claimed, ‘I have experienced what can only be called divine moments – moments in which I felt I was one with the universe.’⁠5 It is tempting to see in these sentiments descriptions of the experience of enlightenment such as is praised and sought after by religious mystics—however, it cannot be denied that much of Nietzsche’s life was characterised by uncommon suffering. 

But to imagine that the ideal for life is to achieve an unbroken, unwavering, constant state of hedonic stupefaction is simply to misunderstand what life is. This isn’t happiness; it’s an delirious nightmare. Then greeks as ever, in their myths, anticipate this questionable state. This is the apathy of the lotus-eaters from Homer’s Odyssey, a people so entranced by the consumption of the narcotic lotus fruit that they lose all desire to return home or strive for anything beyond their immediate pleasure. Similarly, it reflects the condition of the citizens in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, where societal stability is maintained through the drug soma, which numbs individuals to their existential despair and robs them of meaningful agency or true individuality. In both cases, the pursuit of constant pleasure leads to a dehumanising stagnation, stripping life of its struggles, purpose, depth, and meaning, reducing existence to a vapid cycle of artificial gratification.

For Nietzsche, happiness is found in a life that presents challenges; it is in overcoming them that real fulfilment is found. Not only is this the only realistic notion of happiness, it’s the only possible one, as we shall see in the coming weeks. The life well lived isn’t some kind of unending opium dream—living, if you can call it that, as some sort of blissed-out zombie, with an inane smile stretched permanently across one’s face—someone who’s elated mood isn’t interrupted even when their house burns down or their child dies. No, it is an adventure with ups and downs, with great love and terrible grief, with festivals and perils, with crushing defeats and spectacular triumphs. We all know, anything worth having must be struggled for; it frequently only has value because it must be struggled for. As Joseph Campbell wrote: "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." A dynamic relationship seems to exist between adversity and fulfilment.

So true happiness is something about one’s psychological orientation to the inevitable tribulations that life throws at us. How we make use of these experiences. This is why Nietzsche writes in TI.8: “What does not kill me makes me stronger” - what did he mean by this? Think of it, not a statement of fact, but as a statement of affirmation. Just about every experience in life can be put to use, even the worst ones - perhaps especially the worst ones. Naturally, such experiences tend to discourage, diminish, and demotivate us, but the happiest and most fulfilled individual has cultivated the fortitude to exploit every failure, disappointment, or crisis as opportunity for growth. 

Now, it would be fatuous to suggest that every calamity can be turned into an opportunity—we are in the hands of fate in that respect and we do not know which cards life will deal us. Ultimately, in the end, we all succumb to degeneration and death. But it is the tragic nature of humanity, the animal that knows it is doomed, that makes it unique and gives it an opportunity that no other animal has and that even the immortal gods of Olympus envied: only the human can live heroically. This is a kind of existential resilience to adversity, a refusal to shrink from life and denounce it despite all the hardships it throws in our paths. To paraphrase Nietzsche’s words from one of his private letters, such a person has learned “the alchemists’ trick of turning even shit into gold”.

This is the experience of overcoming, and it is in overcoming that the highest kind of happiness is found. In his Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: ‘Life wants to raise itself on high with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into the far distance and out upon joyful splendour – that is why it needs height! And because it needs height, it needs steps and conflict between steps and those who climb them! Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.’⁠6  

This is not just about the fulfilment that comes from overcoming external challenges though, but about overcoming one’s own self. Developing, growing, getting stronger and wiser; aligning oneself with the natural drive to want things to be getting better and better. The popular conception of Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power” evokes images of be-muscled barbarians roaming the wastelands and it’s true he occasionally used such Homeric imagery when talking about ancient history, but this is a very narrow understanding of will to power. ‘Power’ is a morally-loaded concept in our culture; it has uncomfortable associations with compulsion, domination, exploitation, and perhaps insane, guffawing megalomaniacs. Nietzsche believes these pejorative associations are a result of what he called our pervasive “slave psychology”. In truth, we all need power and we continually express power and we cannot do otherwise. 

And what is the greatest power one can possess? 

Think about that for a moment while I share with you this week’s music recommendation. As I said in the last show, due to licensing restrictions I can’t play you the music I would like to. But Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of the aesthetic, of feeling, I’m going to recommend you a track every week that reflects the emotions experienced during the development of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have been significant. Remember, sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

I invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, making use of your own digital music platform subscription or YouTube, Bandcamp etc. So, reflect on what we’ve discussed today while listening to The Arrival of the Birds by The Cinematic Orchestra and The London Metropolitan orchestra. Link in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested in hearing about them. 

We asked what is the greatest power one can possess? 

It is, quite obviously, power over oneself. Self-overcoming is the greatest source of fulfilment and is the greatest asset one can posses for overcoming external challenges. 

The philosopher and Nietzsche translator, R. J. Hollingdale, wrote: 

“the joy which is synonymous with this self-overcoming: that would now be the meaning of life - for joy is to Nietzsche, as it is to common-sense, the one thing that requires no justification, that is its own justification.” 

Joy is overcoming and especially self-overcoming, and one of the most profound varieties of self-overcoming resides in one’s ability to deal with the harsh vicissitudes of life without letting them crush you. So much suffering depends on our interpretations of things, the way we view them.

And so Nietzsche himself, alone and isolated, his published books ignored, crippled in the late stages of a terrible degenerative neurological condition, three quarters blind, and on the cusp of a madness that would render him into an imbecile, writes in Ecce homo, abridged slightly: “How could I not be grateful to my whole life? On this perfect day, when everything is ripening […], and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once.”

1 1887 letter, Heinrich von Stein

2 Letter to Peter Gast, August 14th, 1881

3 Notes, 1885

4 Letter to Franz Overbeck, 1888

5 Letter to Carl Fuchs in 1888

6 Z.Of the Tarantulas