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Articles

Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering

Van Harvey on the metaphysical aspects of an anti-metaphysical philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche shared at least one fundamental concern with the religions and metaphysical systems that he so criticized: the problem of suffering and how one deals with it. This concern underlies all of the distinctive positions he took on the role of tragedy in Greek culture, his critique of morality, his view of human nature, his theory that ‘ego’, ‘thing’ and ‘substance’ are ‘fictions’, as well as his criticisms of religion and metaphysics. This is why Henry Aiken once pointed out that Nietzsche was not a secular but a religious thinker. Thus Spake Zarathustra, he wrote, “can only be regarded as his religious testament.”

As Nietzsche criticized religion and metaphysics, he pondered again and again the reasons why the human mind is bewitched by the notion of a true world behind the apparent world.

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