David Brooks for eternity
Yglesias taps Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to counter David Brooks’ arguments about happiness:
There’s more to life than being happy. There’s something to be said for extraordinary achievement as a goal apart from its hedonic value, and there’s something a bit perverse about the idea of saying that Tolstoy shouldn’t have wasted so much time working on Anna Karenina because at the end of the day having a warm relationship with your kids is more conducive to happiness than producing a literary classic. Quality time with the family doesn’t meet the eternal recurrence test, achieving preeminence in your field perhaps does.
I think this is questionable; while Nietzsche certainly valued professional success over family life for himself, one suspects that for a very large number of people quality time with the kids would really be what they would choose for eternity. (See: last man). In fact, given the degree of suffering (physical, mental, and philosophical) that Nietzsche endured, one could be forgiven for choosing many other lives besides that of the family man over Nietzsche’s fate.
-John
Related posts:
- Make it better David Brooks
- The David Brooks manual of style
- On commuting and value neutrality
- Happiness is an elephant
- Brooks vs. Taibbi on Haiti
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
