On the “How” and the “Why”: Nietzsche on Happiness and the Meaningful Life

1 Introduction

Nietzsche is commonly interpreted as strongly rejecting and even despising any possible conception (or pursuit) of happiness. His biography is known to be full of suffering, sickness, pain, and solitude, and thus, he is not the first philosopher to come to mind when it comes to defining or discussing happiness. Unsurprisingly, the topic of happiness in Nietzsche’s thought is largely overlooked by most Nietzsche scholars,^[2] while preferred attention is often given to alternative notions such as Heiterkeit and Fröhlichkeit (cheerfulness, joy, and serenity).^[3] And yet, the concept of Glück (happiness) appears more than a thousand times in Nietzsche’s work, and there is no published book by Nietzsche that does not deal with the notion in one way or another. While the importance of a given concept in Nietzsche’s work should not be evaluated through merely quantitative methods, the prevalence of the notion in Nietzsche’s corpus at least suggests that perhaps not enough attention has been given to this particular topic in Nietzsche’s thought.

In fact, one of the most pervasive themes in Nietzsche’s work is the problem of human suffering, the pursuit of meaning (or purpose) in life, and the possibility of a joyful or affirmative disposition toward existence. Thus, despite his general suspicion of classic definitions of happiness, I will try to show that Nietzsche’s criticism of common conceptions of happiness should be seen as a complexification, rather than a rejection, of the very notion of human happiness. Like in several other crucial notions in his work, Nietzsche revalues and redefines the concept and presents an alternative notion of happiness (“his” notion), which is built by way of contrast with the most common assumptions on the matter, adding nuances that may have important implications for contemporary discussions on the topic.^[4] To make this clear, I will first address three of the main contemporary theories of happiness from a Nietzschean perspective, trying to underline both the points of convergence and the points of divergence between Nietzsche and each one of these accounts. I will follow the standard tripartition of contemporary theories of happiness and well-being and focus on ethical hedonism, the theory of desire satisfaction, and objective list theories.^[5] I will then gather the conclusions of the previous section, add Nietzsche’s positive claims on happiness and the meaningful life, and sketch what might be called a Nietzschean theory of happiness. Finally, I will situate Nietzsche’s position in the contemporary debate on the topic and outline what I take to be his most important contributions to current discussions on happiness, meaning, and well-being in human life.

2 Nietzsche and Contemporary Theories of Happiness

One of the best ways to try to make sense of Nietzsche and the problem of human happiness is to address Nietzsche’s criticisms of certain ways of understanding happiness. This is a procedure that Nietzsche himself has used throughout his work, where most of “his” concepts are defined through opposition to other widespread ways of understanding the same concepts. While Nietzsche’s views on happiness have been contrasted with classic theories of happiness – especially ancient accounts of happiness, hedonism, and utilitarianism^[6] –, little work has been done to relate Nietzsche to contemporary theories on the topic. Considering the fertility of this dialogue and the actuality of some of Nietzsche’s criticisms and insights on the matter, that will be the focus of this article.

For the sake of economy, I have chosen to contrast Nietzsche’s views on happiness with three conflicting contemporary theories of happiness: ethical hedonism, the theory of desire satisfaction, and objective list theories. While these theories are far from exhausting all the trends in contemporary discussions on happiness and well-being,^[7] they reflect the standard tripartition of these theories into “Hedonism, Desire-fulfillment, Objective list”^[8] and are thus representative of the main trends in this debate. As such, they were strategically chosen for two main reasons. First, their main arguments are, in their diversity, particularly apt to evidence both the elements that Nietzsche most vehemently rejects and the elements he endorses in his own notion of happiness. Second, given their popularity and relevance in current discussions on the topic, they are also particularly useful to infer Nietzsche’s most important contributions to this ongoing debate.

Even though Nietzsche was obviously unfamiliar with contemporary theories of happiness, some of these accounts share similarities with preceding ones of which Nietzsche was well aware – and where this is not the case it is not difficult to infer what Nietzsche’s stance toward their fundamental claims would be. While Nietzsche’s historical, cultural, and philosophical landscape was significantly different from ours – thus making this endeavor particularly challenging – both Nietzsche and contemporary theories explore questions such as the nature, sources, and meaning of happiness, as well as its fundamental components and pathways to achieve it, thus making this dialogue particularly interesting and useful, not only for understanding the subtleties of Nietzsche’s views on the topic, but also as a tool for critical reflection on contemporary widespread assumptions regarding happiness and well-being.

3 Nietzsche on Happiness and the Meaningful Life

Let us now consider Nietzsche’s own positive notion of happiness and the meaningful life. From the above discussion of the main contemporary theories of happiness and what Nietzsche would have thought of them, we can draw a series of preliminary conclusions that are essential to understanding Nietzsche’s own views on happiness. First, pleasure and pain are not the ultimate criteria of value (and not even decisive) when it comes to determining an individual’s happiness. Second, happiness is subjective and dependent on the absolute singularity and individuality of each particular human being. Third, desire is a fundamental component of human life, and happiness is connected to the intensification of desire and the feeling of power related to self-overcoming. Finally, and as a consequence, happiness is a process, not an end state. When it comes to characterizing Nietzsche’s views on happiness, the notion of human flourishing is likely a more accurate concept: not only does the notion of (human) flourishing emphasize process and activity (while happiness tends to be associated with an end state), but it also involves a broader sense of realization of one’s potential and an overall sense of fulfillment and meaningfulness, which, as we shall see, are central elements in Nietzsche’s views on the topic.^[41]

Indeed, one last factor that needs to be taken into account when sketching a possible Nietzschean concept of happiness or human flourishing is the problem of meaning. While this problem is not thoroughly addressed by any of the previously discussed theories of happiness, it is likely the most important element of Nietzsche’s views on the matter. Indeed, in the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche identifies the lack of meaning or purpose for suffering as the problem of human existence, the most pressing issue for which humans must necessarily find a solution or an answer. As we read in the last section of the third essay:

Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse that has so far blanketed mankind […].^[42]

As the final sections of the Genealogy make clear, the most important thing when evaluating one’s life is not the prevalence of pleasure or pain but one’s sense of meaning or purpose. According to Nietzsche, human beings do not necessarily avoid suffering – they may even welcome it and will it, provided it has meaning. Indeed, one might have everything a happy life is thought to objectively require and still not have a sense of happiness or fulfillment if one’s life lacks meaning; conversely, if one’s life has meaning or purpose, all possible circumstances (even apparently unfavorable ones) can be integrated into a whole that is meaningful to the individual. As Nietzsche claims at the beginning of the epigram of Twilight of the Idols which opens this essay, “[i]f you have your ‘why?’ in life, you can get along with almost any ‘how?’”^[43] This means that, according to Nietzsche, the happiness (or meaningfulness) of a life depends not on attaining pleasure, satisfying particular desires, or obtaining certain basic goods but on having a purpose, that is, on feeling that one’s life has meaning.

But how does one’s life acquire meaning, or how can one make one’s life meaningful? In the vast majority of cases, meaning is acquired from the outside, and religion tends to be the strongest candidate in this regard. For this reason, Nietzsche views the human need for meaning not only as the most fundamental problem of human existence but also as its greatest “curse.” Indeed, it is precisely because of this ineradicable need that Western culture has fallen prey to what Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal”: a worldview of Christian inspiration that offered a meaning (the “why”) of human existence but at the cost of a complete negation and castration of life (a “how” that is completely inimical to life). According to Nietzsche, in exchange for this meaning, human beings were led to devalue their bodies, to condemn the senses, to castrate their desires, instincts and passions, to annul their individuality for the sake of the “herd,” to see their suffering intensified with feelings of guilt and sin, and finally, to devalue their earthly life for the sake of redemption in a putative “other world” – in short, life was given meaning, but at the cost of its complete negation.^[44] Christianity and its life-denying morality are thus, in Nietzsche’s eyes, largely responsible for the nihilism he diagnoses in Western culture as a whole. If human beings are truly to flourish, this purpose must be overcome: as Nietzsche claims in a posthumous fragment, “a new purpose – that is what mankind needs.”^[45]

Given that individuals cannot live without a purpose or meaning, the alternative to life-denying meanings imported from the outside would be the creation of one’s own meaning – a goal to which Nietzsche dedicates much effort, especially in his middle and late works. Indeed, if life is to be affirmed in its entirety and singularity preserved, meaning must be sought and created by each individual, according to their own particular needs, aspirations, and life goals. This is not independent of two important topoi in Nietzsche’s work. First, the revaluation of all values leads to a reassessment (and potential rejection) of the Judeo-Christian life-denying morality and the individual creation of new values based on one’s own singular needs, desires, and aims. In the wake of the “death of God” and in the absence of divine moral authority, Nietzsche encourages his readers to take absolute responsibility for their own lives, actions, and individual destinies. Second, but in strict connection with the previous point, the self-creation or cultivation of one’s character, which Nietzsche urges in several key passages. As he claims in a famous aphorism from The Gay Science, “you should become who you are.”^[46] In another passage from the same work, he adds the following:

One thing is needful.—To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan …. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small—whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it was one taste!^[47]

Nietzsche is one of the most important precursors of what Foucault would call the “aesthetics of existence.”^[48] In order to preserve one’s individuality and reject life-denying ideals, one must create oneself “as a work of art,” “through long practice and daily work at it,”^[49] integrating each of one’s traits (strengths and weaknesses), as well as one’s needs, priorities, and aspirations, into an artistic plan that is meaningful to oneself. As Turner notes, happiness is a process that “involves a heroic struggle against convention and habit to become eventually a self-constructed person.”^[50] In this process of self-construction, the most important component is finding a “goal” that gives meaning to one’s individual existence and that makes the whole meaningful regardless of its particular details: “Formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal […]”^[51]

One can thus say that for Nietzsche, self-creation and self-cultivation are the key to an affirmative, fulfilling, and flourishing life. Since this process of self-cultivation (this work of the self on the self, aimed at continuous self-overcoming) is a never-ending task, and since the artistic plan is a perpetual work in progress, happiness is a never-ending progression as well: in Nietzsche’s eyes, it is a process (rather than an end state) in which one is permanently engaged and which can be sustained regardless of the circumstances in which one finds oneself, provided one’s affirmative relation to oneself and existence as a whole is preserved. In short, happiness, for Nietzsche, is a certain way of life,^[52] dominated by an affirmative disposition toward one’s singular and unique existence, which simultaneously integrates all of its past, present, and future events and gives meaning to the whole. Nietzsche’s famous formulation of this fundamental disposition toward existence is amor fati:

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it—all idealism is hypocrisy towards necessity—, but to love it […]^[53]

Just like the thought of the eternal return of the same,^[54] amor fati as an imperative implies that one develops the capacity to affirm and “say yes” to life as it is, including all the pain, suffering, loss, decay, and transitoriness it (necessarily) includes, not only accepting but loving all that destiny might bring to one’s individual existence. As such, it also involves the capacity to accept that life does not have a transcendent meaning and that each of us is responsible for creating one’s own.

Even though this acceptance and love of destiny might seem contradictory with one’s absolute responsibility for one’s own life and flourishing, the two precepts should be seen as complementary aspects of Nietzsche’s theory of happiness. While amor fati involves embracing one’s fate and affirming life in its entirety, even in the face of suffering and adversity, Nietzsche’s emphasis on individual responsibility encourages individuals to take ownership not only of their actions but also of their reactions to external events. Even though individuals may not have control over external circumstances, they do have control over their responses to those circumstances and can cultivate the capacity to respond to them in ways that affirm life and promote self-overcoming. Far from representing passive acceptance of and resignation to one’s fate, amor fati implies an active affirmation of life in its totality. In other words, amor fati demands the active engagement of the individual, such that the capacity to say “yes” to life and to one’s individual existence is itself part of the “artistic plan” to which one should be committed – a plan that involves fashioning not only one’s self but one’s life and the things with which one is involved.

Indeed, in the Gay Science Nietzsche suggests that we should learn from artists how to make “things beautiful, attractive, and desirable when they are not,” so as to become “poets of our lives.”^[55] It is through this type of activity, which presupposes learning and training, that individuals become capable of making things beautiful and hence discover (or artistically create) the beauty of their own lives and individual destinies.^[56] In contrast to the ascetic ideal, such a fundamental attitude – which could in contrast be called an “aesthetic ideal”^[57] – allows one to see life itself as an “aesthetic phenomenon”^[58] of which one is simultaneously creator and spectator, and in which all pain and suffering is integrated in a whole that is beautiful and hence worthy of being fully loved and affirmed. Far from putting in question the value of one’s existence, pain, suffering, and all life’s challenges and adversities can be seen as opportunities for growth, transformation, and self-overcoming, hence fostering rather than hindering one’s sense of meaning and fulfillment. It is precisely this aesthetic understanding of the world as a work of art and the capacity to be not only a passive spectator but an artist, fully engaged in the development of this artwork, that gives life and the whole an immanent meaning. Hence, it is this very capacity and internal disposition that, from a Nietzschean perspective, makes life happy and meaningful. In Hadot’s words, “happiness …, for Nietzsche, consists in participating, even in the midst of suffering, in the great artwork of the world.”^[59]

4 Conclusion

Nietzsche was suspicious (and critical) of the notion of happiness because he associated it with some modern definitions of happiness that in his view involve laziness, conformity, and self-satisfaction.^[60] As I hope to have made clear, however, it is possible to find in Nietzsche an alternative concept of happiness or human flourishing – which he sometimes refers to as his happiness, Zarathustra’s happiness, etc.^[61] – that might make an important contribution to current discussions on the topic.

Compared to contemporary approaches to happiness, the theory that is likely closer to Nietzsche’s views on happiness is the life satisfaction theory.^[62] Developed in the context of positive psychology, this theory emphasizes, like Nietzsche, the importance of one’s internal disposition toward life as a whole, regardless of material conditions, the possession of external goods, the satisfaction of particular desires, or the frequency of pleasure. On this theory, happiness is “mind-dependent” and “detached from the states of things external to the subject.”^[63] In other words, a fulfilled or meaningful life essentially depends on a given “disposition, an orientation toward the conditions of one’s own life: what matters is not so much the experiences that happen to us but the way in which we accept and evaluate them.”^[64] In particular, happiness depends, as Nietzsche claimed, on having a positive or affirmative disposition toward life as a whole and on the capacity to affirm or assert oneself in the world: “the theories of ‘life satisfaction’ describe happiness as a favorable attitude toward one’s life taken as a whole, a sort of global assessment that is not only a theoretical or intellectual consideration, but means embracing and asserting one’s life as such.”^[65] Hence, both Nietzsche and life satisfaction theorists argue that one’s sense of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment is entirely subjective and dependent on one’s values, priorities, and aspirations.^[66] Happiness is subjective, individual, and dependent on an equally individual and subjective sense of meaning and value that only the individual is able to assess and evaluate.

While Nietzsche’s stance resonates with this branch of psychology, it also retains relevance as a powerful means of criticism and resistance to popular contemporary trends. Nietzsche’s views on happiness remain relevant and current, in particular with regard to superficial conceptions of happiness and the so-called “happiness industry” generally leading to consumerism, as well as to surveillance and manipulation of the population by economic and political forces.^[67] In contrast to the instant gratification and superficial optimism promoted by the happiness industry, Nietzsche encourages the pursuit of a deeper sense of meaning and fulfillment, warning against conforming to external standards of happiness and the herd mentality that upholds them. By emphasizing the importance of accepting life’s suffering, challenges, and adversities and embracing them as opportunities for growth, transformation, and self-overcoming, Nietzsche’s notion of human flourishing contests all the modern conceptions of happiness that are focused on the attainment of easy pleasure, superficial contentment, and the satisfaction of immediate desires.^[68]

Moreover, it alerts us to the dangers of universalizing, standardizing, and quantifying happiness, as tends to be the case in most contemporary utilitarian approaches to happiness and well-being. Vehemently opposing the imposition of universal standards of happiness to all individuals, Nietzsche stresses the importance of recognizing heterogeneity and diversity in the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, by imposing rigid criteria and benchmarks for happiness, utilitarian accounts risk marginalizing and suppressing alternative modes of flourishing that deviate from the accepted norm. Besides, reducing happiness to a quantifiable metric undermines the diversity and complexity of human existence, promoting a superficial and reductive understanding of human flourishing.

Finally, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the individuality, singularity, and subjectivity of each conception of happiness challenges the basis of most contemporary theories of happiness while at the same time calling attention to the individual’s absolute responsibility for his or her own flourishing and self-fulfillment. Happiness is a matter of individually creating one’s own values, cultivating one’s own self and finding one’s own singular meaning in life, rather than conforming to external standards and social expectations, as often conveyed by contemporary approaches to happiness and well-being. Indeed, the idea that happiness essentially depends on the individual’s internal disposition toward the whole seems as old as revolutionary today – even if, as we have seen, Nietzsche does not stand alone in this regard.