While the classic "reject versus affirm" framing belongs largely to existentialism, the Age of Reason and the Anglo-American analytical and empirical traditions approached the value of life through different conceptual toolkits. Rather than framing existence as an ontological crisis of cosmic affirmation or denial, they interrogated the calculus of happiness, the limits of human reason, and the empirical verification of meaning.

1. The Age of Reason (Rationalism)

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists sought to ground existence in clear, distinct ideas and logical necessity, viewing life not as a tragic burden to be endured or a dramatic theater of absurdity, but as a structure to be understood and optimized through reason.

• Baruch Spinoza (Amor Dei Intellectualis): Spinoza offers the rationalist analogue to Nietzsche's amor fati. For Spinoza, everything that occurs does so with the absolute necessity of divine substance (Deus sive Natura). To reject life, sadness (tristitia), or suffering is to suffer from inadequate ideas—failing to see reality sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). True intellectual love of God is the ultimate affirmation of reality as it is rationally structured.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (The Best of All Possible Worlds): Leibniz famously argued that an all-good, all-powerful creator must have selected the best of all possible worlds. While this provoked Voltaire's savage satire in Candide (rejecting the Panglossian optimism that "all is for the best"), Leibniz maintained that the total sum of perfection outweighs the localized suffering within the system. Reason dictates that existence is fundamentally coherent and rational, even if human finitude cannot trace the full harmony.

2. British Empiricism

Empiricists discarded grand metaphysical frameworks in favor of experience, observation, and utility, treating life's value as an empirical question of pleasure and pain.

• David Hume (Mitigated Skepticism & Sentiment): Hume dismissed both dogmatic optimism and radical pessimism as flights of metaphysical fancy. For Hume, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Life is not to be abstractly "rejected" or "affirmed" in a cosmic vacuum; rather, it is navigated through custom, sociability, and natural sentiment. If life becomes too heavy, Hume famously defended suicide in his essay Of Suicide as a rational choice when the pain of living outweighs the utility of existence, cutting against both Christian prohibitions and romanticized endurance.

• Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill): Empiricism culminated in the quantitative and qualitative calculus of utility. Life is affirmed if and only if it produces an excess of pleasure (or happiness) over pain. Bentham quantified this mechanically, while Mill introduced qualitative distinctions ("better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"). For the utilitarian, the rejection of life is a failure of social arrangements or individual circumstance to generate net utility, rather than an existential tragedy.

3. Analytic Philosophy and Logical Positivism

As philosophy shifted toward language, logic, and verification in the twentieth century, analytic thinkers argued that the question "to reject or affirm life" is, strictly speaking, meaningless in a technical sense.

• Logical Positivism (A.J. Ayer and the Vienna Circle): According to the verification criterion of meaning, statements about the ultimate "meaning," "value," or cosmic justification of life are neither tautologies (like logic and math) nor empirically verifiable facts. Therefore, they are literally nonsensical—emotive expressions of attitude rather than propositions about reality. An analytic philosopher would analyze the grammar of the question: what empirical conditions would falsify an "affirmation" of life? If none, the debate collapses into a matter of psychological preference.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus): Wittgenstein famously declared that "the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem." To worry about whether to accept or reject life is to look in the wrong direction; the mystical lies not in how the world is, but that it is. Life is not a problem to be solved or a thesis to be judged, but a boundary condition of language and experience.

Analytic vs. Continental Approaches to Existence

Dimension	Age of Reason & Empiricism	Analytic Philosophy
Primary Method	Logical deduction (Rationalism) or observation of utility/passion (Empiricism).	Linguistic analysis, formal logic, verification criteria.
Status of the Question	Addressed through ethics, political economy, and the calculus of pleasure/pain.	Treated as a category mistake or an emotive expression rather than a cognitive proposition.
Stance on Suffering	A problem to be minimized via social reform, institutional design, or rational understanding.	A clinical or psychological state, or a consequence of conceptual confusion.