Reflection: The Demon's Question

Prompts to consider

• The demon's question: if you had to live your life exactly as you have lived it, infinite times, with nothing changed, would you say yes? Try to answer honestly, not aspirationally. Which parts of your life could you affirm on this condition, and which parts feel like things you are enduring rather than embracing? And what does the geography of your answer tell you about the gap between the life you are actually living and the life you would choose if you were genuinely your own legislator of values?
• Nietzsche's slave morality is built on ressentiment: the reactive condemnation of what one cannot become or cannot achieve. Think about the moral judgments you make about people who have more power, success, or excellence than you in some domain you care about. How much of that moral disapproval is genuine ethical concern and how much is the ressentiment of someone who finds it easier to condemn excellence than to pursue it? This is an uncomfortable question. Nietzsche wants you to sit with it rather than dismiss it.
• Nietzsche's Last Man is the person who has invented happiness: comfort, safety, small pleasures, no great demands, no great aspirations. Is there a version of you that is gravitating toward the Last Man, that finds the prospect of a thoroughly comfortable, thoroughly average, thoroughly un-demanding life appealing? And is there another version of you that finds this prospect unbearable? What is the relationship between those two versions, and which one is winning?