#affirmationism

Concluding Thoughts

I hope that this discussion on Nietzschean antinatalism has shown the different directions that antinatalism can take. I recognise that life-denial is perhaps the dominant narrative in antinatalist thought but it is certainly not the only one. Antinatalism is a moral position that is separable from an individual’s disposition and particular attitude towards life, even if there are clear and understandable correlations between the two. To recapitulate Akerma’s point, there is no logical reason why you cannot be an optimistic and life-loving antinatalist. It is, moreover, an interesting question, for the individual antinatalist, whether affirmationism or rejectionism is the right philosophy to embrace. What reasons do we have to endorse one but not the other? If rejectionism helps to strengthen the antinatalist position, is this necessarily a reason to prefer it? If either one can be combined with antinatalism, why not opt for the one that also happens to improve one’s life?

My feeling at the moment is that there are benefits to both the yes-saying and the nay-saying attitudes towards suffering, and so the challenge at hand is to figure out when to take one stance over another – or perhaps we must hold both attitudes at once, which Ram Dass alludes to when he talks about the paradox of suffering. I still somewhat hold the prejudice that to be a yes-sayer to life makes antinatalism unthinkable, yet I am not convinced that it is a form of cognitive dissonance to adopt both attitudes simultaneously. The two positions can be combined, without contradiction.

Politically, I was left speechless by some of Braidotti's exhortations not to fall into the trap of negativity: do not protest, rather become someone, become powerful in the sense of Spinozan potentia - when pressed for specifics, she would urge us to become managers, professors, politicians, ruling elites, really, and then do things differently. What irony to preach to a room full of privileged students able to afford spending a sunny week in Utrecht that they should become elites, when this is clearly what they are already set to be, by chance of birth - into the right families, in the right countries, in the right moment. Having to digest a lot of new concepts, I could not fully articulate my dissensus back then, but luckily Benjamin Noys does the job rather well: