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The Psychology and Philosophy of Polyamory

Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.

The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.

We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?

Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive

The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.

Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.

Can Love Be Divided?

To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.

If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?

Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.

Polyamory as an Experiment in Love

In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.

Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.

Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.

Polyamory in Practice

Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.

Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.

The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.

For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.

The Burden of the One

The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love. 

Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.

Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.

Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.

Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.

Love, Jealousy, and Possession

Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.

People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.

Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.

Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.

Triangles Needing to Be Squared

Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.

This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.

The Measure of Love

Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.

But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.

There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Nietzsche on Master and Slave Morality—and Why You May Be Both

A greek marble statue juxtaposed with a crucifix.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only ‘racially pure’ Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the ‘good European’, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, ‘Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.’

Despite his contempt for nationalism, Nietzsche’s philosophy would later be appropriated by German nationalists and Nazis, helped along by Elisabeth after his collapse into insanity. Nietzsche held every herd in contempt, whether Christian, democratic, or nationalist. But he reserved his highest contempt for the nationalist herd.

Herd Mentality

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.

In that year, Nietzsche also published a new book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by ‘good’ and ‘evil’). Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a ‘herd mentality’, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the ‘involuntary and unconscious memoirs’ of their prejudiced authors. ‘Truth’ is no more than ‘the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live’.

Master vs Slave Morality

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also introduces the dichotomy between master and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. The Homeric era of Achilles and Odysseus was a pure expression of master morality, a time when actions were either noble or base, rather than good or evil.

Achilles does not apologise for seeking kleos, or glory. Homer does not ask his heroes to be humble or compassionate. Their virtues are precisely those qualities which distinguish them from other men: courage, strength, cunning, eloquence, and the capacity for magnificent deeds. The Greek word aretē, usually translated as ‘virtue’, originally carried the broader sense of excellence, and in Aristotle virtue blends with excellence. Aristotle doesn’t even know what forgiveness means—because the concept hadn’t quite been invented.

So, too, any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Slave morality, in contrast, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the virtues of the masters into vice.

Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.

What This Means in Us

Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through ‘priestly vindictiveness’, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens. God may be dead, but Christian values survive God, sometimes in other forms.

But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land. Thus, he is taught to admire humility, while being told to believe in himself. He condemns pride, but values ambition. He insists upon equality while idolising exceptional athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs. He preaches self-sacrifice, but also self-realisation; contentment, but also achievement; meekness, but also assertiveness. In sum, he wants to be good, while also wanting to be great.

But might these two things be incompatible?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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And His Challenge to Us: The Übermensch

NIetzsche's tightrope walker over an abyss
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On Nov. 5, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, nor why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, ‘So I really am going into utter solitude.’ He never saw Salomé or Rée again.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas Day, he wrote to Overbeck: ‘This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.’

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

The book is an act of self-overcoming of the kind that Nietzsche came to preach. Out of rejection, illness, and despair, he produced his magnum opus. He turned muck into gold.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: ‘You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore, all faith amounts to little.’ He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: ‘I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.’

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch and Last Man.

The death of God presents us with both a crisis and a choice. If our inherited values can no longer sustain us, we must either create new values of our own or retreat into self-deception, conformity, and comfort. We can be Last Men, or rise towards the Übermensch.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch, a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

The Übermensch is sometimes misunderstood as a biologically superior ‘Superman’, or as someone who seeks power over other people. But Nietzsche’s emphasis is on power over oneself: on self-creation, self-mastery, and, above all, self-overcoming.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a ‘rope over an abyss’—’a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daß er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.

Zarathustra delivers these words to a crowd that has gathered to watch a tightrope walker, who sets out along a rope stretched between two towers. The performance ends in disaster: the tightrope walker loses his footing and plunges into the void. The safe alternative would have been not to cross at all.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain ‘higher men’ who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on ‘little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night’ while maintaining a strict regard for his health. Unlike the tightrope walker, he lacks the gumption, or even the vision, to cross and risk himself.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as ‘blinking’—because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the overwhelming majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Übermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

Wo ist der Blitz, der euch mit seiner Zunge lecke? Wo ist der Wahnsinn, der mit euch ausgeimpft werden müsste? Seht, ich lehre euch den Übermenschen: er ist dieser Blitz, er ist dieser Wahnsinn.

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling ‘safe and happy’—in one word, for mediocrity.

The prophecy is disturbing because the Last Man does not appear miserable. On the contrary: he has engineered his world to minimise discomfort. But in removing danger, struggle, solitude, and uncertainty, he has also removed many of the conditions under which a person might overcome himself and be and become so much more.

For Nietzsche, becoming a person is not a matter merely of ‘discovering who we are’, when we are still nobody. It is the harder task of creating ourselves: of questioning inherited values, thinking our own thoughts, choosing what is worth suffering for, and accepting the danger of the rope over the abyss.

Nietzsche was writing in 1883. Since then, it has become ever more difficult to be free. I have seen it in my own lifetime. Very soon, if not already, it will be impossible to become a person.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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What If You Had to Live Your Life Again?

Sisyphus, by Titian.
Sisyphus, by Titian (c. 1548–1549). Like Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, the myth of Sisyphus challenges us to embrace a life that endlessly repeats itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What if you had to live your life again, exactly as before? Nietzsche’s eternal return is the ultimate test for measuring a life well lived.

Imagine this. Tonight a daemon appears at your bedside.

The daemon tells you that every moment of your life—every joy, every disappointment, every triumph, every humiliation, every love, every regret—must be lived again, exactly as it has been, over and over, for all eternity.

Would you despair?

Or would you rejoice?

Most people associate this thought experiment with Nietzsche. It is, in fact, much older. Long before Nietzsche, the Stoics imagined a universe in which everything returns.

Under the influence of Plato, who was himself influenced by Pythagoras, who was himself influenced by India, the Stoics held that the universe undergoes cycles, being periodically destroyed in a great conflagration (ekpyrosis, ‘blow-out’) and then reborn, ad infinitum.

Because God, being perfectly rational, is bound to make the same choices, each cosmic cycle unfolds as the last. Thus, the world as we know it, with us in it, existed before and will exist again. In around 200 CE, the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote, ‘[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…’

Maybe, in ten trillion years, I will once again be sitting at this desk, writing these words, with the same cat asleep on my lap.

The Roman Stoic Seneca hints at the same idea when, in his famous Letters, he writes to Lucilius:

Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.

Whether the Stoics thought of eternal return as literal cosmology or as a philosophical exercise scarcely matters. Its enduring power lies in the challenge that it poses.

Nietzsche’s Challenge to Us

In July 1881, Nietzsche discovered his arcadia in Sils-Maria, a place of ‘splendid isolation’. For one Swiss franc a day, he took an upstairs room in the house of Gian Durisch, the mayor of the village. The following month, along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, he stopped before a mighty pyramidal block of stone, where he had the ‘abysmal thought’ of eternal return (or eternal recurrence).

In The Gay Science (1882), he adapted this flash of inspiration into one of philosophy’s greatest personal challenges. In Aphorism 341, he asks how you would feel if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness and informed you that you would have to live your life exactly as it is, has been, and will be, over and over again. ‘Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!”’

For Nietzsche, how we respond to the demon is the acid test of life-affirmation. 

In Ecce Homo (1888), he says, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

Whereas the Stoics asked us to accept our fate, Nietzsche challenged us to love it.

For it is not enough merely to endure. Instead, we must embrace every joy and every sorrow so completely as to be willing to relive them for evermore.

Even Nietzsche himself struggled to meet the standard he had set himself: ‘I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence… is always my mother and my sister.’ After Nietzsche’s mental collapse, his sister Elisabeth deleted the remark from Ecce Homo.

Sisyphus

Albert Camus, who kept a photograph of Nietzsche in his office, took the idea one step further.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. 

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: 

‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

Or, in those wonderful words of Virgil,

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.

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This essay draws on themes explored at greater length in Stoic Stories, my overview of Stoic philosophy, and The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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