What Doesn't Kill You
Thrill-seeking and risk-taking in philosophy and in life
When my son was just barely two years old, we stumbled on a game. I would lie down with one knee bent to make a tunnel for him to crawl under. Partway through, I would collapse the tunnel and declare “Oh no, you’re stuck!” He would shriek with delight and struggle to escape. I made him work for it, forcing him to push against me and squirm to get out.
If it took too long, he’d plead for me to stop; sometimes he sounded genuinely distressed. But the more dangerous it felt, the more he loved it. He would enthusiastically exclaim “Stuck, stuck!” in a childish lisp, asking for another round. The whole thing made my son so deliriously happy that I am not sure I will ever succeed quite so thoroughly as a parent in such a short period, or with so little effort.
It paid off, too. A couple of months later, my son’s shoe buckle got stuck on a swing. In his panic, he looked likely to fall head first with his foot still anchored above. I instinctively called out “Oh no, you’re stuck!” and he calmed down immediately.
John Encaustum had a thoughtful post on Nietzsche, a while back, in which (among other things) he sounds a word of caution about the maxim “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It’s not true in any absolute sense, and yet the aphorism persists because it conveys such a compelling mindset of growth through pain and risk.
I’m not as big of a thrill-seeker as my son, who loves rollercoasters and has a distressing tendency to regard all forms of parental disapproval as exciting dangers to be repeatedly invoked for the fun of it. Still, as a child I had my own feats of daring. My mother despaired over my habit as a baby of getting bored, climbing out of my cot, and wailing in distress after falling to the ground on the other side. She thought the pain ought to teach me not to do this. It did not.
I grew up to be a tree climber. I measured my growth by my ability to climb each of the trees in our yard. Every tree was its own rite of passage, a new lonely realm of awe and conquest. The ground was a threat below me, branches were challenges, and the sunlight through the leaves was an unreachable beauty beyond all grasping.
This brings me to my erstwhile existentialist practice of letting go of frameworks just to see if I can. I made a habit of returning to the risk of being free. Iris Murdoch thinks people like me are simply unwell:
Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction … Those who are, or who attempt to be, exhilarated by Angst, that is by the mere impotence of the will and its lack of connection with the personality, are, as I have suggested above, in danger of falling into fatalism or sheer irresponsibility.1
Murdoch has her reasons for thinking this way, and I agree with one of them. People have personalities, and only a very silly and extreme existentialism would feign otherwise. Still, I admit, I sometimes do find Angst exhilarating. It’s not the only reason I’ve returned to the void so many times, and it’s certainly not the main reason, but it’s there.
Given my philosophical tendencies, I’ve actually read surprisingly little Nietzsche. When I did pick him up, though, I went straight for Beyond Good and Evil. I wanted context for the quote:
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.
Joke’s on me; it’s an isolated aphorism.
I’ve always wondered, a little bit, about those monsters. I never saw any. Perhaps I am just comparatively unencumbered by demons, but I think that if you find monsters in the abyss, you probably brought them in with you, and you probably shouldn’t fight them. Nietzsche would scorn me for saying it, but when I fall into the abyss I win by losing. I remember why I came in, I submit to what compels me and I’m free of what doesn’t.
It was interesting to arrive at Nietzsche as an already-experienced abyssal navigator. Having boasted that he might narrate the world as consisting only of “the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power,” Nietzsche remarks in Chapter 1 of Beyond Good and Evil that: “Granted that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better.” But I don’t think he really expects a reader with a pre-existing, resilient alternate response to the kinds of moves he is making.
I think that remark is supposed to make you feel smart, so that you’ll be more likely to let the later pages to get under your guard. It’s like when scammers praise people for asking if this is a scam, and then continue as if they’ve given a credible answer. By Chapter 9 he’s going on and on about how one quality is a sign of being particularly noble, and another quality is a sign of being particularly weak, and he clearly wants you to see something meaningful in these statements, but—of course—it’s just an interpretation, and not an especially compelling one.
Nietzsche is masculine to the point of parody, and not just with regard to the risk-taking that leads him to stare into the abyss. All of his responses to that fear are masculine, too. He builds his structures on daring, on hierarchy, on the sneering challenge of a dominance ritual. As a woman, it feels natural to respond with a shrug. Risk-taking has its charms, and the bragging rights can be fun, but I’m not really vulnerable to that kind of insinuation that I have something to prove.
It can be useful to practice facing a danger. Arguably, that’s part of what Nietzsche is getting at. It’s just that, when it comes to the existential abyss, one of the most useful things about experience with that particular danger is the ability, where appropriate, to resist the likes of Nietzsche. “Oh no, you’re falling!” You don’t say.
Not all philosophical danger takes place on a personal level, however. My own existentialism is vulnerable to the accusation that it is merely the philosophy of a specific individual, and that it therefore does not in itself give any answer to the question of how a society might answer deep questions together. One might plausibly claim that morality ought to have a social component, and thus that finding personal reasons to act is necessarily an incomplete ethical framework.
It’s a fair complaint, and it intersects with a broader fear that solving this problem for yourself might still not solve it for society. Nietzsche, certainly, is trying to address societal questions as much as personal ones. Without pretending to have a full answer to the fear of a Godless society, I will say that a workable response to that fear ought also to involve the free embrace of risk, to some extent.
A few months after I started dating the man who is now my husband, I wrote him a sonnet. It was about tree climbing. More specifically, it was about our relationship as a tree that we were climbing: beautiful, ever-growing, and sometimes vertigo-inducing. Loving someone is one of the riskiest things you can do, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I found myself reaching for those early lessons in solitary courage, repurposed for a joint exploration of something that was swiftly becoming too big to comprehend.
Society is always a jointly-embraced risk. We can try to shape it towards better ends, but it will always be beyond our control to some extent. If you believe in God, you can comfort yourself that somebody is in charge. If you don’t, you’d be a fool to think that you or anyone has the power to take the place in society that an all-powerful God occupies. Better, I think, to embrace a Taoist-style acceptance that much of what is important will always be trickling along, out of sight and out of our control. The courage to face existential freedom can be echoed in the courage to face the fact that everyone else has freedom, too.
There’s a kind of theistic belief that almost looks like immaturity, a yearning for the universe to take us into her arms and tell us that she loves us and that it was all a game. But every risk that has been taken under the hope of that embrace has been a real risk, honourable as such, and many of those risks strike me as worthwhile, whether you believe or not. So why wouldn’t I take them? What is existential freedom worth, if not the ability to risk myself for love, or for the truth, or for the hope of a better world?
From The Idea of Perfection, in Existentialists and Mystics, pages 330-331.