Nietzsche's View Of Happiness

Man’s final and complete happiness consists of actualizing his potential. The potential consists in the contemplation of the divine essence. Thus, happiness and the divine essence are in turn identical and inseparable. Although, contemplating the divine essence is withheld from us until we are in the world to come. As long as man desires and seeks something, he remains unhappy. This is because the intellect seeks the essence of a thing. For example, knowing an effect, like a solar eclipse, the intellect is provoked but is unsatisfied until it discovers the cause of the eclipse. The intellect desired to understand the essence of the cause. For this reason, the intellect is unsatisfied to know only that God exists. It seeks to know the very essence …show more content…
Nietzsche begins by attacking the Christian understanding of human nature. He believes it’s meant to make us happy but it really shows us that being unhappy will get us farther in the eyes of God. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness. Christianity conditions its followers to be weak “with its perspective of blessedness, [as] a mode of thought typical of a suffering and feeble species of man” (349). In Nietzsche’s’ eyes, Christianity is fundamentally opposed to life. It attempts to deny all the characteristics he associates with a healthy life. The promise of an afterlife makes Christians devalue the faith and blessings here on earth. The values Christianity promotes are temporary happiness and distracts from what we should be pursing on a personal level. Nietzsche considers Christianity to be the hated enemy of …show more content…
Artists are some of the few people who can take their sufferings and create with them. Not everyone has the ability or the sense to harness his or her sufferings in a constructive way. Artists are able to create order out of the flux of reality. From my experiences, artists learn from their failures and continue to strive forward. They do not let set backs keep them from realizing their will to power. Their will to power is what drives artists to stay at the top of their game. They are also good at directing their will to power inward and trying to create self-mastery. They strive to be the best version of themselves by perfecting their techniques and accepting criticisms. How artists perceive their reality also makes them the most convincing ideal type. Nietzsche believes we can trust nothing in the world based on our perceptions, as there are too many. Artists are always taking reality and bending it to become what they want. Pablo Picasso perceived his reality and painted the world in angles. He did not bother taking into consideration the how others perceived the world, he saw the world as angles and that’s what he drew. All these behaviors make artists are the highest human expression of