A Feeling of Life

Abstract

There is a contented way of living that is not only commonplace but strangely encouraged and even envied. Its hallmarks are moderation, utility, a faith in means–ends reasoning and damage limitation – the value of which all goes unchallenged for it appeals to the familiar and the habitual without questioning the nature of its appeal. Nietzsche claims that all human arrangements are actually designed to distract thought to the point at which one ceases to have any ‘sensation of life’ (UM III, 4). Few of the contented many suspect the proximity of savage and unbearable passions which, once touched, consign their convenient pleasures and tolerable pastimes to permanent exile. The prospect that supreme joy might be catastrophic is safely alien to a species that has perfected the art of bovine satisfaction. But to have experienced a joy so profound that one can only want what one will always want again is an affliction which far outweighs the discomforts of disturbed equilibrium. Is this why the artist, the lunatic and the lover live with an urgency quite disproportionate to any perceived necessity and more intensely than strictly they can bear? Shattered by a life that is too much, they struggle to minimize, to master, to contain – in the process, magnifying and augmenting the catastrophe that seethes beneath the surface.