Hardship is a necessary evil

Excerpts from
‘Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness’

A television series written and presented by Alain de Botton

"Don't talk about giftedness or inborn talents. One can name all kinds of very great people who are not very gifted, they acquired greatness, they became geniuses, and they did so by overcoming difficulties."

“Nietzsche says that we live in a culture where failure’s not spoken of. It’s like there are these failures and that’s just this freakish things that happen to a few people and let’s just not talk about them. And then the success - but somehow the two are not brought together. And I think what’s quite interesting is to think, in every life, even a good life, even a successful life, is going to involve some failure at some level.”

“Hardship is a necessary evil.”

“Nietzsche says, in order to get great happiness from life, in order to harvest great happiness, you’ve got to live dangerously...that his idea, that life’s a risky business and ‘no pain, no gain.’”

“To imagine there is benefit in escaping our troubles once in a while with an alcoholic drink or two is to misunderstand completely the Nietzschean analysis of the relationship between happiness and pain. Happiness does not come from escaping troubles; it comes from escaping them and turning them to your advantage. The last thing Nietzsche thought we should do with our sorrows is drown them. Our worries are vital clues, telling us what’s wrong with our lives and pointing the way to our ultimate improvement.”

Nietzsche had engraved on a headstone for his father’s grave, “Love never ceases.” (Corinthians, 13.8).

“In the long-term, Christianity, in Nietzsche’s eyes, dulls pain, and, in this way, it also dulls the energy that pain can give us to overcome problems and, so, reach real happiness.”

Consolation “might dull pain but it will also weaken the resolve to overcome the problem from which the pain has arisen.”

“He writes sarcastically about people who are addicted to the ‘religion of comfortableness.’ He calls them small, mean people, hiding in forests like shy deer. But, those of us who dare to climb up above the tree-line will see the views and breathe the air. It’s then that we’ll understand the benefits of abandoning comfort for true fulfilment.”

“...Nietzsche was interested in making people happy...he believed that extremes of pain were a vital component of reaching the kind of happiness he had in mind. Not everything that makes us suffer is necessarily bad for us. Not everything that makes us feel good is necessarily actually good for us. To regard extremes of suffering as an evil, as something to be abolished, wrote Nietzsche, is the supreme idiocy.”

(Channel 4, 24 February 2002).