#affirmationism

[swordrose-fluidflux]

Towards a Theory of Nietzschean Antinatalism

It is fair to say that much of antinatalist thought is underpinned by a rejectionist philosophy, a nay-saying attitude towards life, a pessimism about the state of human life and the world at large. The line between such pessimism and antinatalism seems logical: if you believe existence is – overall – a bad deal, an…

Concluding Thoughts

I hope that this discussion on Nietzschean antinatalism has shown the different directions that antinatalism can take. I recognise that life-denial is perhaps the dominant narrative in antinatalist thought but it is certainly not the only one. Antinatalism is a moral position that is separable from an individual’s disposition and particular attitude towards life, even if there are clear and understandable correlations between the two. To recapitulate Akerma’s point, there is no logical reason why you cannot be an optimistic and life-loving antinatalist. It is, moreover, an interesting question, for the individual antinatalist, whether affirmationism or rejectionism is the right philosophy to embrace. What reasons do we have to endorse one but not the other? If rejectionism helps to strengthen the antinatalist position, is this necessarily a reason to prefer it? If either one can be combined with antinatalism, why not opt for the one that also happens to improve one’s life?

My feeling at the moment is that there are benefits to both the yes-saying and the nay-saying attitudes towards suffering, and so the challenge at hand is to figure out when to take one stance over another – or perhaps we must hold both attitudes at once, which Ram Dass alludes to when he talks about the paradox of suffering. I still somewhat hold the prejudice that to be a yes-sayer to life makes antinatalism unthinkable, yet I am not convinced that it is a form of cognitive dissonance to adopt both attitudes simultaneously. The two positions can be combined, without contradiction.

Nietzschean, life-loving antinatalism may rarely be expressed in antinatalist circles. However, I find the worldview fascinating for precisely this reason. To say “yes” to life without wanting to create more lives is a worldview that defies expectations.

[helge]

Returning from an intense summer school with Rosi Braidotti, I found myself struggling with her neo-vitalist politics of affirmation. Not being the greatest Deleuzian myself, in fact, not even having read an awful lot of Deleuze, I am still somewhat drawn to the philosophy of immanence and abstract materialism, not least because of its radically decentering move, doing away with any anthropocentric pretensions. Conceptually, this is all very exciting.

Politically, I was left speechless by some of Braidotti's exhortations not to fall into the trap of negativity: do not protest, rather become someone, become powerful in the sense of Spinozan potentia - when pressed for specifics, she would urge us to become managers, professors, politicians, ruling elites, really, and then do things differently. What irony to preach to a room full of privileged students able to afford spending a sunny week in Utrecht that they should become elites, when this is clearly what they are already set to be, by chance of birth - into the right families, in the right countries, in the right moment. Having to digest a lot of new concepts, I could not fully articulate my dissensus back then, but luckily Benjamin Noys does the job rather well:

I bluntly suggest the poverty of vitalism is that it operates as a philosophy of defeat, regarding itself as ‘empowering’, but remaining locked into structural place within the value-form. Certainly, I can’t propose a solution to the failed dialectic of antagonism, and to this extent political vitalism certainly indicates correctly the problem we face (those of us who might want to change the conditions under which we live), however it elides that problem in visions of ontological power, or reversible conceptions of ontological poverty, or in the ‘powers’ that align with a passivity of the body overrun by forces of life (or death), precisely, that is to say, in myth.