Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children

Friedrich Nietzsche., Beyond Good and Evil, §94

Playfulness is an interesting personal characteristic. I also think it has a philosophical significance - what does it take, as a fully grown human adult, to be playful with life?

Nietzsche writes about playfulness is several ways. He connects it to childhood and ideas about innocence and naivety and to caprice, the random hand of fate and the malice of the gods. He also relates playfulness to philosophical and psychological questions - how can we be playful about something as serious-sounding as ‘truth’? What is the game that our internal drives playing?

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I think these are all connected. There is a sense in which, until you can be playful with something, you aren’t really serious about. You haven’t mastered it.

One of the reasons for this is unpredictability, and how you respond to it. In a game - cards, ch…

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I do not doubt that the best philosophers know a new and super-human way of laughing - at the expense of everything serious!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §294

I often hear discussion about purpose and meaning. The idea seems to be that you will find life somehow easier, or more fulfilling, if you can identify some kind of meaning or significance to your life. And this meaning comes from having purpose, often thought of as a higher (read: spiritual, personal, altruistic, or humanitarian) goal.

Where does this idea come from?

What would happen if we gave up on it?

I don’t think we will all become nihilistically enraged, or that society will somehow break down. We won’t decide to burn everything to the ground if we give up on the ideas of purpose and meaning.

I often think about all the people I come across every day either in my life or on a screen. Each of them a universe inside their own minds - going about their business with the utmost seriousness. Focused…

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We are sailing straight over and away from morality; we are crushing and perhaps destroying the remnants of our own morality by daring to travel there. Never before have intrepid voyagers and adventurers opened up a more profound world of insight

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §23

Strong emotions are an inescapable part of being human. But they can be a minefield, a complex web of internal experiences that we have to navigate.

These internal experiences - emotional, psychological, personal - are often important factors in how we behave towards other people. So it is unsurprising that philosophers and psychologists spend a lot of time studying them.

I think we have become used to thinking about these strong emotions in binary ways. Love, kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, joy are good. Hatred, disgust, contempt, envy, greed, lust - these are bad.

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Nietzsche does something different and interesting with these emotions, what ancient philosophy would call …

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Dancing in chains: making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §140

A dancer embodies two extremes. On the one hand, there is the sensation of freedom and abandonment. A great dancer appears to float effortlessly through their movements.

On the other hand there is absolute discipline. For a dancer to achieve this sensation of effortless freedom of expression, they must subject themselves to extremely rigorous training. Body and mind must synchronise around a set of rules - the rules of a particular style of dance.

The dancer is always dancing in chains, mastering the constraints of their bodies and the rules of their style, just so that at the crucial moment they seem to be completely free.

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Nietzsche uses this image to talk about how we live our lives. It’s easy to do just one of t…

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It isn’t always easy to get the balance right between being yourself as an individual and connecting with others. Often connecting with others means compromising on the things that make you who you are.

To give a basic example - if you go to a restaurant alone, you can choose exactly the cuisine and the dishes that appeal to you. If you go with others, you might have to choose the restaurant and dishes that appeal to others. But who wants to eat alone, right?

Is it possible to connect with other people without compromising your individuality? Are there connections with others that, instead, enhance your individuality?

Nietzsche calls this kind of connection “friendship.” One of his favourite images for friendship is the image of seabirds flocking together over an open ocean.

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I think this image is powerful. His idea seems to be that seabirds have a dangerous existence - adventuring out over the open sea, unsure what lies over the horizon. As the…

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We climb with open eyes, impervious to all danger, up the most dangerous paths, onto the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any vertigo, as though born to climb ... We untiring wanderers, silent as death, on heights that we see not as heights but as our plains, as our safety.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §59

Perspective is hard to get. We struggle to see the things that are closest to us. A lot of us spend our lives so enmeshed in what we are doing, thinking, and feeling, that we never really get the chance to step outside - of our situation, of ourselves - for long enough to see things from a new perspective.

I’m not talking about getting an objective perspective. I don’t think there is such a thing as objectivity - whenever you look at anything, you always see it through your own eyes.

I’m also not talking about being being more rational, less emotional. There’s a certain stupidity that goes along with some of the smartest people I know. This is the stupidity o…

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We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster. Life means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Preface §3

Are your passions a problem?

Some popular philosophies seem to think so.

Stoicism is about control - if you don’t control your passions, you can’t control your happiness.

Buddhism is about desire - if you can get rid of desire, then you will be happy.

Scientific thinking also has this avoidance of our emotional lives: if we think rationally - that is, unemotionally - we can get to the truth. And, somehow, the truth will satisfy us, or bring us serenity, or even happiness.

I think this is a problem.

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One: human life is full of passions - strong emotions - both good and bad. We love, we hate, we feel joy and despair, we despise people and …

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He who wishes to cure his soul must also consider making changes to the very pettiest of his habits. Many a man curses his environment ten times and pays little heed to the fact that he has created for himself a law of habit

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, §462

Do you have any habits that you want to break? Or ones that you want to start?

Sometimes we separate the grand things of life from the basic. Spirituality, religion, morality, the love of art and music and literature often seems to operate on a different level to our basic needs - sleep, diet, exercise, good company.

There is, of course, the realisation that mental health and wellbeing rely on these basic habits. But Nietzsche takes us further than this.

If we accept the idea that we are our bodies - and nothing more - then we also accept that even our ethical systems arise from our basic needs, and whether we are meeting them or not.

In other words, the way you think about right and wrong, good and evil, might have more to do w…

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