Being in Love with Being is more than just believing, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. “Seinsverliebt” means being in love with everything.
Why were the ancient Greeks thus happy?
Tonight I woke up and I think I managed to find a word for Nietzsche’s rapture for the ancient Greek people. The Greeks were „seinsverliebt“, in love with being. That’s the beauty of the German language: we can simply glue two existing words together and thus have a new word that every German understands. Seinsverliebt (in love with being) means that I am in love with everything, with the whole being, not only with my ego, not only with my girlfriend, not only with the sunset on the beach in Kenya or Portugal, but also with the rain, with the crazy and often “bad” people, with fear, with death, even with toothache (if I don’t have it right now and only remember it).
This infatuation with being is not a shrill thrill, it is even rather melancholic in mood. And this melancholic mood is anything but depressive. Melancholy1Actually, the more appropriate word is apatheia, which means so much like serenity. But the modern meaning of a melancholy experienced as happy, perhaps emotionally fits it better than apatheia. This apatheia is the basic mood, extreme feelings are by no means contradictory is perhaps most closely the feeling of the middle ground so cherished by Aristotle, between deep sadness and shrill mania.
Why Conservative or Progressive is not a pair of Opposites
When you think of being „seinsverliebt“, being in love with being, do you immediately think of preserving the status quo or even, with Rosseau, of “going back to nature”?
Because progressives always want to improve the evil world? And thereby always only worsen the world? Does seinsverliebt, being in love with being, therefore mean holding on to what is already there, rejecting change and even longing for a time when the world was still in order?
But being in love with being does not mean backward sentimentality. Rather it is simply, it is here only another point of view, about Parrhesia, about my love also and just to the apparently bad appearances.
Being in love is essentially also curiosity. I want to get to know what I have not yet known. Thus being in love with being also stands for progress. But progress that is not driven by dissatisfaction with the existing, but by curiosity about what more the world has to offer in terms of beautiful, exciting and dangerous things.
Curiosity about rediscovering old ideas, i.e., a reactionary attitude, can also be an expression of Seinsverliebtheit, being-in-love with being. Again, we want to know what it would really feel like to live in a romantic kingdom or to own slaves. Not because we find it evil to have to live without a king or slaves, but out of the same dangerous curiosity that is the basic drive of Seinsverliebtheit, being-in-love with being.
Read here: What is Parrhesia?
Thus parrhesia as self-realization, which does not mean self-improvement, also becomes the Cynic striving for realization of being, not for improvement of the world. Progress and preservation are then no longer opposites.
Read on: Real Romantics are Real Cynic/
- 1Actually, the more appropriate word is apatheia, which means so much like serenity. But the modern meaning of a melancholy experienced as happy, perhaps emotionally fits it better than apatheia. This apatheia is the basic mood, extreme feelings are by no means contradictory