Coming Into Existence: The Good, The Bad, and The Indifferent

Nietzsche tells a story in The Birth of Tragedy of King Midas’s capture of Silenus, the wise companion of Dionysus. While in his clutches, King Midas insisted to hear from Silenus ‘‘what was best and most desirable of all things for man.’’ After resisting for a while, Silenus asked ‘‘why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is— to die soon’’ (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). Nietzsche explains that Silenus’s claim is part of the folk wisdom of the Ancient Greeks. He says, ‘‘The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence’’ (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). We are vulnerable, we suffer, we die, and at crucial stages of our lives, our survival requires the good will of others on whom we are dependent. These are the facts of our finitude as embodied creatures. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes how the Greeks developed their particular forms of religion and art as a response to the horror of this finitude. The profound need to avoid this horror was the ‘‘impulse to call art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life’’ in spite of Silenus’s wisdom that what is best is never to have been born (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). Nietzsche’s account is part of a tradition of philosophers who have developed responses to the experience of finitude. Phenomenologists in particular have played a prominent role in this tradition. For Heidegger the experience of finitude is to be met with a kind of resoluteness. More recently, working in the tradition of virtue ethics inspired by Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum argues that our essential vulnerability is an existential condition for leading the good life (Nussbaum 1986). The development of virtues necessary for human flourishing is often dependent upon luck. In order to flourish as a human being, one must be fortunate enough to have