I like Schopenhauer’s ideas more than I like Nietzsche’s and I agree with him that one can make oneself stupid by reading too much and I’ve re-read “On Thinking for Oneself” a couple of times, but that’s about it.
See, a couple of years ago I’ve read this in “On the suffering of the world”. In it, he claims that “misfortune in general is the rule” and that we think more about the unpleasant and painful things because that is felt directly, instantly and with great clarity. This instant property of the unpleasant reminds me somewhat of the asymmetry between the destruction and construction and how the good changes are usually gradual and incremental while bad things tend to happen suddenly and how this is one of the reasons why the news is biased towards negativity. It’s not only because we are drawn to the negative and so it makes economic sense to do so, but also because bad events are simply easier and more exciting to report on. It also reminds me of that Warren Buffett quote: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”.
But I digress — reading “On the suffering of the world” made me stumble upon this sentence:
For evil is precisely that which is positive, that which makes itself palpable; and good, on the other hand, i.e. all happiness and all gratification, is that which is negative, the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain.
And for the love of everything that’s holy, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would say “evil is precisely that which is positive”. But after contemplating a bit on this, I think he is referring to the fact that how the evil is usually an addition, while the good is usually a subtraction. Taleb calls this subtractive path to the good “via negativa” and in his books provides examples mostly centered on health and how instead of addition of complicated pills one would achieve better results by mere elimination and stop smoking for instance, or stop drinking, or overeating. So in this sense smoking and drinking is an evil that is positive because it’s an addition to the natural way of things and we would be good without it.