Philosophy of Seneca and Nietzsche in Gabriel Term Paper

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philosophy of Seneca and Nietzsche

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's the challenge.

From the birth of humankind, the individual's propensity to suffering has caused great turmoil, both on the individual level, and in societal discourse.

Two of the greatest issues within the problem of suffering, or of "difficulties," include the misguided notion that problems and pain are impediments to success, and the notion that inevitable suffering, whether from sudden chance, or deliberate action (although, that, too, is always influenced by chance), is just or unjust.

Fredrich Nietzsche, after spending the years of his youth under a mistaken belief in the avoidance of suffering though avoidance of life, reversed his position and, instead, championed the philosophy that suffering is good and inevitable, due to its purifying and improving influence upon life, understanding, and art. He writes that one must be someone who "no longer denies..."

Goodness, success, happiness arises out of the lowest misfortune, failure, and misery. One may not grow or achieve true greatness without suffering, negative experience and emotions. We should not be distressed by our problems and difficulties themselves, but from our ability to better ourselves through them... "We no longer marvel at dentists who pull out teeth to stop them from hurting."

Out of ancient Rome came another philosopher who proposed that freedom from the anxiety, suffering, and despair of negative events can be prevented by the simple elimination of expectation. He wrote, "You say, 'I did not think it would happen.' Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen?" By this, he means, good or bad, painful or not, one must expect every possibility of disaster (or goodness) as a possibility of Fortune.

The Challenge is a personal history story of "a young writer proving himself," and it can be used to illustrate the application of Nietzsche and Seneca's ideas on the nature of difficulty.

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Marquez opens his story with the words, "I never imagined..." -- this, already is in violation of Seneca's rule of anticipation. He goes on, to describe the happy events surrounding the publication of his first written work.

Throughout, Marquez comments repeatedly on being "surprised" at fortunate events, which he attributes to "luck," the writing of the introductory note, the books he obtained by luck, the availability of new translations of work that would influence his piece. Further, he also believes that his intense interest in these translations is due to the financial difficulty he experienced as a student. Here, again, he regards it as a "chance" that the translations were available, and that they were usually unavailable to him, and thus sparked his interest. This also evokes Nietzsche's philosophy that adversity can produce good effects.

Nietzsche was a proponent of full living -- joy, experience, sex...and believed that good art and life suffered without these experiences (even if they produced negative consequences). We see in the Challenge, that the young writer begins his experience under the false notion that "living" is a distraction from art or work (instead of a necessary component in its evolution), he writes, "...they tended to talk more about women...than about their work or art." We will soon see that this will not work for him.

Nietzsche also believes that success in anything involves intense, perhaps, unpleasant and confusing, work -- work that might mislead the lesser individual to resignation. Marquez mirrors this idea in his description of his reading of Ulysses:

read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. This was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set….....

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