"Tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas.

"Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.
This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.

No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong.

He was not at all bold.

He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought.