Not just tangible possessions, but more generally positive life happenings, e.g. to fall in love, to have children, etc.
Thank you, Gracie Mrry, for such an interesting question.
This is an interesting question for people like me who find themselves in a condition of relative privilege, but questions of desert can apply to anyone’s life, especially if we move beyond just positive life happenings and reflect on the events of our life in general. Questions of desert seem closely related to questions of justice: a world where people ‘get what they deserve’ would be a just world. While it would be tempting to jump to the conclusion that our world is unjust, I want to argue that ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ aren’t categories that apply to the world at all, and that questions of desert are therefore meaningless.
Nietzsche understood the world as a mere aesthetic phenomenon. In the face of the events of life, ‘why?’ is a meaningless question. In a world where God is dead – that is, where God is no longer a purposive creator – there are no reasons, things simply happen, they manifest themselves as aesthetic phenomena.
To illustrate this idea, we can think of life as a movie and of God (or whatever we want to call the origin of the world) as the director. No one would ever think that the director is evil because a character got sick or died a painful and undignified death, or that the director is just because the movie has a happy ending. Being mere aesthetic phenomena, the meaning of the events of a movie is exhausted in the events themselves, in their manifestation. One could certainly have sympathy for a character and grieve for her misfortunes, but no one would question whether she deserved the events that befell her. No one would confront the director of the movie and say: “How dare you let her die like that?” Yet often we hear people say that they’d like to ask God how he could let children die from cancer or allow wars to happen.
In asking such questions, we would be seeking a justification (in the literal sense of ‘making just’) for the world, spurred by the naive but deep-rooted conviction that the world has to be just. No one thinks that the world is just (just look around), but we all think that it should be. In asking such questions, we hope that God will give us a transcendent justification for the evil and good in the world, maybe even show us his master plan – all so that the world could be made just.
But such a justification doesn’t exist. The world is ‘justified’ only as an aesthetic phenomenon, which is to say that it isn’t justified in any meaningful sense, that ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ aren’t categories that apply to it, just as they don’t apply to any aesthetic phenomenon, to anything insofar as it merely manifests itself. Things simply are; they just happen. To wonder whether we deserve them is to bark up the wrong tree.
What do you think? Do we deserve things? Let us know in the comments.
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I did a BA in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Exeter, and I am now pursuing an MA in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. I have read a lot of Nietzsche and I have studied Philosophical Anthropology for a while, but I am now focusing on Gender Studies. I am also interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, and I study Ancient Greek. My favourite philosophical idea is Nietzsche’s concept of life-affirmation and his critique of Christianity. I also like provocative texts like Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto.