I read this from the comfort of my couch, and I blink. Isn’t that the right way to live, the model of polite society? Is it wrong to want to live that way?
Nietzsche’s point is not so much that it’s wrong to want to live that way, as small and pathetic. If their supreme values are comfort and health, are these people any better than domesticated pets? Where is the drive to excel? Where is the drive to exceed yourself? They have reduced their desires to match their limited capacities, rather than striven to increase their capacities to meet their boundless desires. Are these people actually happy, or are they merely content?
To quote Nietzche elsewhere:
For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
Nietzsche’s point is not so much that it’s wrong to want to live that way, as small and pathetic. If their supreme values are comfort and health, are these people any better than domesticated pets? Where is the drive to excel? Where is the drive to exceed yourself? They have reduced their desires to match their limited capacities, rather than striven to increase their capacities to meet their boundless desires. Are these people actually happy, or are they merely content?
To quote Nietzche elsewhere:
“Beyond good and evil, there is awesome and lame. Don’t be lame.”?