Radical Acceptance

Nietzsche on Self-Hatred and The Affirmation of Life

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence”

(Nietzsche, The Will To Power)

In this quote from Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks, he proposes a solution to the problem of Nihilism. Nihilism is the idea that life has no meaning, value, or purpose. Writing in the late 19th century, Nietzsche believed that the collapse of traditional value systems created a crisis of meaning that threatened the foundations of modern human life. Developing a solution to this problem was the fundamental concern of Nietzsche’s philosophy. How did Nietzsche think it was possible to find meaning in an increasingly meaningless world?

Nietzsche believed that we can overcome Nihilism through the radical acceptance and affirmation of our lives. He actually went further, arguing that we can even overcome Nihilism through the radical acceptance of just a single moment of our lives. He thought that by truly accepting a single moment of our lives, we are able to justify and redeem our entire existence.

This may sound easy to do, but that would be to misunderstand what is required to truly affirm even just a single moment of our lives. Nietzsche thought that a true affirmation requires that we are willing to relive our entire lives exactly as they were infinitely many times. There are two powerful ideas behind Nietzsche’s position.

First, there is the idea that every moment of our lives necessarily depends upon what came before it, and therefore requires everything that preceded it to be exactly as it was.

Second, there is the idea that if we aren’t willing to relieve our lives exactly as they are infinitely many times, then we do not truly affirm them.

Nietzsche’s basic thought is that while many people accept the parts of themselves that feel good to them, they also wish away the parts which feel bad. In doing so, we deny ourselves and live with a varying degrees of self-hatred. The parts of ourselves that we don’t like are necessarily connected to the parts we welcome. By denying one, we deny the other. Therefore, in order to truly affirm who and what we are, we must accept that all the parts of our lives are not only interdependent but worth choosing again.