17 - What Nietzsche Teaches Us About Good Parenting

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, artist, and Latin and Greek scholar who is perhaps best known for his study of tragedy in ancient Greek mythology. Nietzsche conceptualized an important element of tragedy, the artistic depiction of human suffering. According to Nietzsche, theatre reified in spectators an appreciation of the human condition, the powerful forces that lead us astray, the dilemmas that have no solution, and the deterministic quality of flawed individual traits. Extending from these ideas, Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" denoted a sense of contentment with one's life and an acceptance of it. The notion of eternal recurrence has been linked to the Latin phrase "amor fati" which, loosely translated, means "love of fate" or "love of one's fate." It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or as meant to be, based on the origin of one's being and the many factors impacting this being.