What Nietzsche Means

What Nietzsche Means to Me

Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche has become enormously influential, penetrating all manner of intellectual bastions. From philosophy to literature to psychology to history to linguistics, to cultural studies – his presence is ubiquitous. Given the nature of his writing style, the aphoristic structure of his principle works, and the breadth and depth of his piercing thought, his words could be applied to almost any serious discussion, in multiple ways.

I suspect that the full implications of his work have yet to be realized, given the scope and the relevancy of his insight into the modern world. Many top thinkers have contributed to this project, at times applying unique and even questionable methods in their exegesis of Nietzsche’s work. I won’t be one of them.

What I present is a reflection of my own encounter with Nietzsche’s thought. How reading him opened up entirely new vistas of comprehension and awareness. What he taught me, what he made me: “To become what you are.” Grasping Nietzsche’s perspective shifted every thought I held in another direction, adding several dimensions to elements of existence I thought I already understood. He created in me a third eye to judge, to ascertain, to aspire. Before inculcating Nietzsche’s thought, I was a stumbling, half-blind zombie-intellectual weaving without direction from one heedless activity to another with no purpose in sight. Nothing mattered, and I didn’t know it; I didn’t know that I didn’t know it.

In addition to reading and re-reading all of Nietzsche’s work, I have read thirty-seven books dedicated to an attempt to understand the man and his thought. One of the interesting things about reading what others think about Nietzsche is the wide range of perspectives they take. I would assert that we all read Nietzsche in our own way, and I can cite thirty-seven examples to demonstrate, all of them more or less valid on their own terms. In other words, what follows is entirely mine. I claim no special authority. In some cases, my interpretation might conflict with the consensus, or contravene some noted authority. I don’t care. This isn’t about what Nietzsche really meant, or what a scholar claims, but instead, what he means to me.

Nietzsche wrote some horrible things, and it would be a mistake to accept any of his work without a serious critical filter. He advocates violence on occasion, something I despise and reject. He favors an odd social arrangement, some form of noble anarchy where the superior do what they please but somehow act with civility to the weak out of some form of obligation. ‘To have claws and not use them,’ or something like that. He gives the impression of favoring a war-like posture and that the violent conflict of rival social entities brings forth some form of benefit by favoring the victors. Bunk, I say. Nothing good comes from war. Full stop. No justification exists for launching one, and appropriate self-defense usually evolves rapidly to some form of retribution, eliminating any remaining ‘rightness’ that may have been originally bestowed on the attacked.

Here is a representative example of such thinking:

The maintenance of the military state is the last means of all of acquiring or maintaining the great tradition with regard to the supreme type of man, the strong type. And all concepts that perpetuate enmity and difference in rank between states (e.g. nationalism, protective tariffs) may appear sanctioned in this light.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power

I don’t believe there is a generous way to interpret this fragment, and the sentiment expressed fairly common in his work. ‘Nationalism’ and ‘protective tariffs’ have frequently led to devastating wars, ones from which no victor arose.

But I don’t have to accept Nietzsche whole: I can pick and choose, and I do. As such, in general I will forego any further negative criticism, given the appreciative purpose of this piece.

My Encounter With Nietzsche

Prior to my 34th year I had heard the name “Nietzsche” but didn’t know anything about him. Some vaguely anti-Semitic associations, as I recall. While walking through a mall in 1992 (remember what those are?) I picked up a copy of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind from a bargain bin. I read the book with interest, but without understanding. His constant reference to two philosophers I didn’t know—Nietzsche and Heidegger—made his argument indecipherable. I didn’t have the key. For example:

Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possible salutary stage in human history. In it man faces his true situation. It can break him, reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide. But is can hearten him to a reconstruction of a world of meaning. Nietzsche’s works are a glorious exhibition of the soul of a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

I completely missed the significance of Bloom’s words. So I set out to understand these two thinkers better. In the case of Heidegger, I purchased George Steiner’s book on the man, and paradoxically, when I finished, set Heidegger aside and sought out more Steiner. I have since read and re-read every book Steiner has published. Returning to Heidegger, I read Being and Time, the book he published in 1927 and is most famous for, and his four-volume work in Nietzsche, along with a few books of commentary in order to better understanding Heidegger. I have yet to succeed, despite the fact that a thinker I greatly admire—George Steiner—express tremendous respect for Heidegger, and claims to read him every day.

I think Heidegger muddies the water to make them appear deeper than they are. His prose is tiresome and difficult, inviting a wide range of interpretation, allowing thinkers of various stripes to claim him as their own. French intellectuals really like Heidegger.

Despite my sincere effort, I have failed to find anything truly original or significant for me. His work on Nietzsche is more about him than Nietzsche, which I suppose is to be expected, but by doing so he twists Nietzsche into shapes I don’t recognize.

By the end of 1992, I had read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At that point, I didn’t grasp the significance of what I was reading. I recall sitting in the chair of a Jewish oral surgeon (my upper jaw was broken and I lost some teeth playing softball) and felt vaguely guilty having brought Nietzsche’s book to read, concerned I may offend him. I asked him what he thought of Nietzsche, holding Beyond Good and Evil for him to see, and he said, “He’s an asshole.” I just nodded, as he went to work on my jaw. Perhaps not the wisest choice, as he decided it would be easier to yank out the wire that held my jaw in place without applying any painkiller. “It’s going to hurt, either way, and this is faster.” The gums had grown around the wire and he was right – it hurt.

Comprehension still eluded me. Walter Kaufmann translated the three books I had read, so I obtained his study of Nietzsche and read it. Doing so unlocked the mystery, somehow providing the key necessary to read and understand the thinker.

Over the next ten years I read all of Nietzsche’s work and admired them all.

The only book I was slightly disappointed with was a posthumous collection from his late notebooks. Perhaps I expected content similar to what went into The Will to Power, another posthumous collection. But I found nothing new, or remarkable in the collection. The two Wagner books didn’t leave much of an impression, and I can’t recall anything specific from The Anti-Christ, but perhaps when I get into specific content of Nietzsche’s work I will be reminded. Of these smaller books, Ecce Homo the most amazing. That he could make such prophecies about his work and his legacy long before anyone had a clue. For example:

What defines me, what sets me apart from the whole rest of humanity is that I uncovered Christian morality. The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. He that is enlightened about that, is a force majeure, a destiny—he breaks the history of mankind in two. One lives before him, or one lives after him.

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Simply remarkable.

The works most meaningful to me, in order of publication, include:

The Birth of Tragedy
Untimely Meditations (four essays)
Human, All Too Human (the first of his aphoristic works)
Daybreak (aphoristic)
The Gay Science (aphoristic)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (unique in literature, more akin to an Eastern religious text than anything else, and Nietzsche’s personal favorite)
Beyond Good and Evil (aphoristic, contains many of his principle themes)
Genealogy of Morals (essay style, one of Nietzsche’s principle themes)
Twilight of the Idols (aphoristic)
Philosophy and Truth (aphoristic, posthumous collection from early notebooks)
The Will to Power (aphoristic, posthumous, gathered unpublished notes from his later years)

I read The Will to Power in 1996, while working in Denver for AT&T. I am almost ashamed to admit, given the cliché, and the provenance of this particular work (edited by Nietzsche’s sister and surely different from how Nietzsche would have used the material) that I found it the most powerful and mind-shaping book I ever read. While I will get into more detail below, I recall thinking, “How could anyone remain a Christian after reading this?”

I completed the first round of reading Nietzsche in 2013 with Daybreak, a work considered one of his least successful. As in most cases, I made new discoveries in this work, including the following, one of a half dozen I have pinned on my wall:

Do not renounce: – To forego the world without knowing it, like a nun – that leads to a fruitless, perhaps melancholy solitude. It has nothing in common with the solitude of the vita contemplativaof the thinker: when he chooses that he is renouncing nothing; on the contrary, it would be renunciation, melancholy, destruction of himself if he were obliged to persist in the vita practica: he foregoes this because he knows it, because he knows himself. Thus he leaps into his element, thus he gains his cheerfulness.

Nietzsche, Daybreak

This from Daybreak is also on my wall:

To what extent the thinker loves his enemy. – Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. A victory and a conquered fortress are no longer your concern, your concern is truth – but your defeat is no longer your concern, either!

Nietzsche, Daybreak

Between 2014 and 2016 I re-read all of Nietzsche in the order written and/or published. He is one of three thinkers that I have studied above all others, George Steiner and Walter Benjamin being the other two.

Friederich Nietzsche

Books and Commentary On Nietzsche

As for the secondary literature, as I stated above, I have read thirty-seven books dedicated to Nietzsche’s life and thought, some 10,100 pages. In most cases, I find the subject of these books far more compelling than anything that can be said about it (present work not excepted.). Even so, there are highlights.

I will begin where I began, with Walter Kaufman’s book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Nietzsche delved deep into the essence of human existence, and the absolute value of life, as it is lived every day:

Nirvana is not ultimate happiness but a substitute desired by some of the weak who are incapable of achieving that state of joyous power which they, too, would prefer if they had the strength to attain it. The pleasures of “modern man,” finally, are even further removed from true happiness, which is not an aggregate of pleasures, nor any conglomeration of sensations, but a way of life. To be sure, such happiness is not the only thing appreciated for its own sake. Every pleasurable sensation, however trivial--the smell of a flower or the taste of cold water--is valued for its own sake.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

The concept of “power” is central to Nietzsche’s thinking, and the key to a joyful existence:

If happiness is defined as the state of being man desires; if joy is defined as the conscious aspect of this state; and if pleasure is defined as a sensation marked by the absence of pain and discomfort; then Nietzsche’s position can be summarized quite briefly: happiness is the fusion of power and joy--and joy contains not only ingredients of pleasure but also a component of pain.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

To have the strength and courage to “keep the blow” (Saul Bellow), and prevent from spreading the violence beyond oneself:

To have claws and not to use them, and above all to be above any ressentiment or desire for vengeance, that is, according to Nietzsche, the sign of true power;

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Modern Western culture is imbued with Christianity to its moral core. Nietzsche ruthlessly deconstructs Christian ethos everywhere it exists:

First, the conception of a life after death has historically furnished the basis for the deprecation of this life. The expectation of perfection in another world has made men condone their imperfection in this world. Instead of striving to become perfect here and now, as Jesus had exhorted them to do, they put their trust in the distant future.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

It is not Christ that Nietzsche denigrates and despises. It is the church, and what they made of Christ’s legacy:

Much of his attack on Christianity is similarly based on what he took to be the Christian repudiation of reason and the glorification of the “poor in spirit.” He ever insisted that “the first Church fought, as is well known, against the ‘intelligent ones,’” and he concluded that it was for that very reason that the Church had to urge the extirpation of the passions and “castratism”: the people to whom the Church addressed itself simply lacked the power to control, sublimate, and spiritualize their passions; they were “poor in spirit.” The lack of reason, intelligence, or spirit is a lack of power; and Nietzsche, far from repudiating these faculties, charged Christianity with the supreme crime of having deprecated them...

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

One of Nietzsche’s greatest insights was the identification of master and slave morality, and the turnabout in relationship between the two:

To be kindly when one is merely too weak and timid to act otherwise, to be humble when any other course would have unpleasant repercussions, and to be obliging when a less amiable gesture would provoke the master’s kick or switch—that is the slave’s morality, making a virtue of necessity.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

As a consequence of the ascension of slave morality, the mediocre is extolled at the expense of the exceptional. Nietzsche was an unapologetic elitist, a thinker who valued genius, excellence, and the superior man.

In our time, however, equality is confused with conformity—as Nietzsche sees it—and it is taken to involve the renunciation of personal initiative and the demand for a general leveling. Men are losing the ambition to be equally excellent, which involves as the surest means the desire to excel one another in continued competition, and they are becoming resigned to being equally mediocre. Instead of vying for distinction, men nurture a ressentiment against all that is distinguished, superior, or strange.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Nietzsche teaches a radical individualism, where value and potential can be fashioned into a personal artistic expression of self:

Ecce Homo! Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another. Where Kierkegaard, at the outset of his Fragments, poses an alternative of Christ, the Savior, and Socrates, the Teacher, and then chooses Christ and revelation, Nietzsche, as ever, prefers Socrates: man’s salvation is in himself, if anywhere.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Within the creative self, the advent of new “values and norms.” It is the great man, the lawgiver, the creator of gods:

The positive significance of the passage may be seen in the fact that Nietzsche’s philosophy is indeed a sustained celebration of creativity—and all genuine creation is, as we have tried to show, a creation of new values and norms.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

The creative genius operates beyond social confines, establishes the new norms, leads humanity beyond the limits that restrain most of us:

The powerful man is the creative man; but the creator is not likely to abide by previously established laws. A genuinely creative act contains its own norms, and every creation is a creation of new norms. The great artist does not stick to any established code; yet his work is not lawless but has structure and form. Beethoven did not conform to the rules of Haydn or Mozart; yet his symphonies have form throughout: their form and law Beethoven created with them.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

For Nietzsche, the state threatens the realization of our “unique selves.” It gathers the strength of the otherwise weak, and coalesces to constrain the independence and unpredictability of those heedless and without need of society’s regulatory agencies:

Men are afraid of social retaliation and do not dare be their own unique selves. It is for this reason that the State becomes the devil of Nietzsche’s ethics: it intimidates man into conformity and thus tempts and coerces him to betray his proper destiny.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Nietzsche advocated the highest culture in its finest forms, and acknowledged social realities at odds with the ruling Christian paradigm. The enlightened philosopher lived without fear or uncertainty, aware of the world’s wonders and most intimate secrets.

Men, as Nietzsche saw them, were not naturally equal, did not naturally love one another, and were not naturally free. Nietzsche agreed with Hegel that freedom is essentially a product of culture—though he thought, unlike Hegel, that true “culture” could be achieved only through an open break with the State. Primitive man, far from enjoying freedom, lived in constant fear of savage animals, of his barbarian enemies, of his gods, and even of his own dreams.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Nietzsche as one of the first, and perhaps finest, psychologist. Embrace the internal chaos. Allow the flooding passions to bloom in healthy expressions of life:

Our impulses are in a state of chaos. We would do this now, and another thing the next moment--and even a great number of things at the same time. We think one way and live another; we want one thing and do another. No man can live without bringing some order into this chaos. This may be done by thoroughly weakening the whole organism or by repudiating and repressing many of the impulses: but the result in that case is not a “harmony,” and the physis is castrated, not “improved.” Yet there is another way--namely, to “organize the chaos”: sublimation allows for the achievement of an organic harmony and leads to that culture which is truly a “transfigured physis.”

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Kaufman convinces us that Nietzsche was committed to reason, and that Nietzsche wasn’t the irrationalist that others believed. Instead of promulgating a particular set of truths, or a sophisticated philosophical structure, Nietzsche instead breeds a unique frame of understanding. Wielding such an understanding generates a deepened insight into nature, the character of society, and a way to view history as it is written.

Reason is extolled not because it is the faculty that abstracts from the given, forms universal concepts, and draws inferences, but because these skills enable it to develop foresight and to give consideration to all the impulses, to organize their chaos, to integrate them into a harmony--and thus to give man power: power over himself and over nature. In human affairs, too, Nietzsche points out, reason gives men greater power than sheer bodily strength. Foresight and patience, and above all “great self-mastery” ... --that is, according to Nietzsche, of the very essence of Geist.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

Nietzsche was a merciless and insightful critic, especially of himself, leaving nothing sacred untouched. Nietzsche teaches—no, he demonstrates—what it means to criticize creatively, and why it is necessary for every thinking human to do so.

Nietzsche, the philosopher, considered philosophy “the most spiritual will to power” and proposed to measure power and weakness in terms of man’s willingness to subject even his most cherished beliefs to the rigors of rationality. Those who take refuge in irrationality, dogma, or systems based on unquestioned premises, seemed slack and weak to him.

Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche

There are many things we can leave to authority: how to fix a car, say, or drill for oil. As individuals, we don’t need to understand everything about everything. In a complex commercial society there exist countless tasks, principles and technologies that are not of fundamental importance, and we expect the experts and technologists in those fields to solve problems and create solutions. This perspective pertains to most people and for everything: what is right and wrong, the ultimate nature of existence, and the color of water, say. They accept without question what they were taught be their parents, their teachers, their priest. God is good, murder is bad, and our nation the best. They live without unanswered questions or unpuzzled mysteries. To question eternal truths simply doesn’t occur to them.

For those few who do consider such things, the intellectuals and philosophers among us, the same principle comes into play. Do we accept Plato’s view of the world, or Kant’s, say, without question? Do we submit to the authority of Martin Heidegger or Ayn Rand? Nietzsche would say no: don’t accept what I say, or what you think I believe. Subject every thought, every concept, every notion to the utmost critical attention. Try to reach an understanding for yourself. Determine the source of your belief. What serves as its fundamental foundations? Are those foundations genuinely supportive of your world view? Are they the genuine foundations, even, or must you dig deeper to uncover them? Severely question any free-floating abstractions, those concepts detached from an integrated understanding, and seek connections that will make them relevant.

As a thinker you have two options: accept the conclusions of others without submitting them to your internal critical analysis, or prevent the acceptance of anything that you cannot completely understand and fit its multiple implications smoothly within your world view without having to force it into unnatural positions.

With all due humility, I consider the world and its inhabitants with the utmost concern, and struggle to develop an understanding that will shift the world’s perspective towards one more compassionate and peaceful. I am not alone in this endeavor, or particularly original in the way this global concern manifests within me. As a world people, why do we experience so much pain, deceit, personal tragedy, betrayal, corruption, violence, repression, torture and meaningless murder? Why do we stand at the end of a blood-soaked and hate-filled history? I have learned the answers to these questions, without discovering yet the key to changing it:

…what moves the philosopher to undertake his history-making labors? Why not just watch, just contemplate the amazing spectacle of human affairs on a transitory planet? Why take part and fight?…Nietzsche…argues that the genuine philosopher acts out of a philanthropy that is a love of the highest in humanity, a love of reason or the logos. As Nietzsche put it in his first book, the contemplative man stands deeply moved at the gates of present and future, a witness to tremendous struggles and transitions; charmed by those struggles he must take part and fight.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

As an engaged and dynamically involved philosopher, an activist and an author, I, too, stand as a witness at the gates of the present and future, and have chosen to fight, to object, to express a vision of an alternative. Have I made a difference? It’s hard to say. Will my work influence the future in a positive way? Will it influence it at all? Impossible to know. But one thing is certain: without making the effort and leaving this world without making a mark of any kind, guarantees simple oblivion and zero chance of impacting the world for the better.

Lampert points to one of the central foundations of Nietzsche’s thought, and the thinker’s potential impact on humanity. A radical acceptance of life, fate and nature, just as they are:

…who “could live in accordance” with nature when nature is “wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time” [Beyond Good and Evil– Nietzsche]…who could live in accord with that? Who indeed. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy, his mission, flowers beautifully into its ultimate aims in this fine ironic setting: to give an account of nature that is in some sense true (while kept under the police supervision of mistrust), and to create the music and poetry that make it possible to live in accord with nature. In Nietzsche truth and art combine into an ecological philosophy post-theistic and posthumanistic. Post-God and post-Man, it would not have beings be other than they are.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

We understand how Nietzsche’s penetrating insight into Western civilization leads right up to our doorstep in the 21st century, how relevant his relentless pursuit in identifying the genuine nature of what we generally take for granted:

Nietzsche is the first philosopher to rethink the Baconian and Cartesian project from the perspective of its relative completion. He allows us to observe the consequences of the Baconian ascendancy, for in his writings the character of modern times is luminously articulated: our progressive view of history, our heedless rape of nature, our fiction of scientific certainty via a method of counting, and, most comprehensively, our ideal of the common good. In Nietzsche, modern times are revealed as embodying a comprehensive myth construing time as progress, beings as malleable, and human wellbeing as the meaning of the universe.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

While Nietzsche aims to destroy all traditional moral and spiritual gods (because their time has passed and their power and relevance depleted) he proposes the reconstruction of new values and a new morality to take their place:

Nietzsche’s openness, his rashness, his betrayal of Platonic sheltering, forces a confrontation with perhaps the most profound and problematic of all the issues of Nietzsche’s thought, his true radicality: Can a human community be built on the deadly truths known to philosophy?...Nietzsche aims to make philosophy not only post-Christian but post-humanism, to free society from all forms of humanism based on myths of special origins that confer on humankind special rights of dominance and mastery over nature. Nietzsche’s thought is a post-Baconian naturalism, a complete immanentism affirming the natural order, an ecological philosophy dubbed “joyous science” by Nietzsche….Nietzsche’s destruction of the many humanizations of nature—shadows of dead gods—is far better known that the other, constructive part of his work, the naturalization of the human—his ground work for a human society that affirms the natural order as it is.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

Understanding the ugly nihilistic truth puts a special burden on the philosopher who desires to create new values based on world-healthier myths. Setting aside Nietzsche’s positive program of creating a society that he envisions, one of questionable relationships between a powerful aristocratic elite subject to nothing but their generous whims, I would assert a complete absence of social targets or goals. In a genuinely free society, it’s impossible to predict a specific social structure or cultural arrangement. In very important ways, it doesn’t matter what people decide what to do, what practices they choose, how to affiliate with each other, if institutional violence and repression have been eliminated. It’s bound to be healthy, if kept violence-free.

Nietzsche reveals, and revels in, the “ugly” truth, the “deadly” truth that others would obfuscate. Are we better off knowing such things? Or would we be better served remaining ignorant of metaphysical actuality? The ontological truth? You can understand the hostility such questions might engender:

The philosopher, lover of truth, will have to learn to endure the necessary lie and not become incensed when others hail as truth what he well knows is a lie. Platonic philosophers like Bacon and Descartes are marked by such endurance. Nietzsche is not. From the perspective of Platonic philosophy Nietzsche is a maimed soul recklessly bent on publicizing deadly truths.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

Such ugly ontological truths are only available to those who pursue them. It’s questionable whether or not such ugly truths can ever be generally known, or accepted as part of a widespread and shared world view. Among an intellectual class, perhaps, but even then so many other considerations come into play. In any case, I wouldn’t insist on shouting these truths from the collective roof-tops, but at the same time, will not avoid the implications such truths engender. It seems to me unlikely a general consensus will ever be attained, even by the world’s brightest and best informed, concerning fundamental ontological and epistemological considerations. We are unlikely ever to fully agree with each other. That being the case, we can attempt to point this out (that we don’t agree) and realize that everybody can’t be right (we hold mutually exclusive certainties) and yet it’s quite possible that we are all wrong. Hold that thought for a moment, and consider the implications: if everybody’s held certainties are somehow incorrect, or incomplete at best, shouldn’t we exhibit a bit more tolerance to those who hold a worldview different from our own?

Somehow (and this is one of the genuine mysteries of Nietzschean thought) before quantum, relativity, and uncertainty, Nietzsche understood the limitations of science, in radical opposition to the smugness of 19thcentury society in their conviction of scientific power and promise. This wasn’t the thinking of a mindless Luddite, but instead, a sophisticated and far reaching conclusion that science was important, relevant, and socially worthwhile, yet inherently limited in what it could achieve:

Nietzsche attacks this mechanistic worldview, with its elevation of physics, its claim to certitude, and its claim to social benefit—and he does so as a friend of science.

Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times

The one certain lesson the history of science teaches is the tentative nature of any ruling scientific paradigm. We know from science the lack of solidity in our world, the ephemeral nature of the electron and quark, the uncertainty of the fundamental nature of anything. We hardly scratch the explanatory surface of cellular mechanics, or how the brain processes information. No matter how much our scientific understanding advances – and we expect and applaud every advance, large and small – we cannot reasonably anticipate a time where certain understanding, some form of holistic scientific truth, is ever attained.

The other book that takes Nietzschean thought further for me is not explicitly about Nietzsche (so not included in the thirty-seven), but Nietzsche plays a central role in Peter Sloterdijk’s The Critique of Cynical Reason:

Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work—in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen. The key social positions in boards, parliaments, commissions, executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties, and lawyers’ and editors’ offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so.

Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason

Fantastic book. Sloterdijk also wrote a book on Nietzsche, penetrating deeply into his subject’s interior:

Anyone who studies Nietzsche’s inner conflicts during the period of his separation from the cult of Wagner and from the constraints of the academic chair in Basel will find it hard to avoid speaking of a social death, a categorical existential and philosophical separation….But he who is experiencing a social death because he has begun to find himself can no longer be helped by anything general or by any external encouragement. Whoever believes that he is engaged in real thought without having first peered into the abyss of his own singularity is merely trying to convince himself that he is thinking—he dreams a conformist’s dream, and wishes it were the dream of a critical consciousness. He who really thinks is condemned to an isolation that compels him to begin anew and to fulfill himself; henceforth, there will no longer be any “tradition,” but only a rediscovery of himself in affinities and constellations.

Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage

Sloterdijk calls out a major difference between Nietzsche and system-building philosophers (i.e. Plato, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Rand). Nietzsche operates in a different way, one that eschews formal structures, defined epistemologies, and metaphysical constructs. He philosophizes with a hammer, either cracking the foundation of academic certainties and revealing the rotten core, or tapping a tuning fork and bringing forth insightful melodies otherwise obscured by the noise of modern life.

“All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.” (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy) He who expresses himself in this way does not sit at his desk and draw up the plans for better worlds; he does not analytically pull to pieces the moral vocabulary of his nation and, on the basis of this accomplishment, take himself for a philosopher. He who speaks in this way has, through experimentation on his own body, thrust forward into the tissue of reality and cast his gaze into the ecology of suffering life.

Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage

Gianni Vattimo’s Dialogue with Nietzsche was particularly insightful, and identified one of the keys to reading Nietzsche, and the value of making a serious effort to fully engage the thinker:

Rather than offer us a new philosophy, Nietzsche wants to propose a new way of understanding and doing philosophy….Nietzsche’s discourse does not ask to be accepted or rejected on the basis of proofs…it asks for a response.

Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche

Unlike many of the great thinkers in the past, those whose thought has become stale and irrelevant, of value mostly to the academic, Nietzsche remains utterly pertinent:

Today, when we all know that television lies and that the media do not in the least supply disinterested and objective representations of the world, and when even what we call “nature” is only accessible to us through scientific paradigms fraught with historicity and loaded with theory, hence with “prejudice” (lacking which, for that matter, we would be unable to know anything), we can no longer tranquilize ourselves by pretending to stand with our feet on the ground observing things as they are and dismissing the rest as nonsense. The end of ideology is also the triumph of ideologies, of the multiple interpretations of the world seen for what they are, that make individual choice and decision ineluctable.

Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche

One of the world-changing concepts I learned from Nietzsche relates to the nature of truth, and the purpose of ideology in human life. We can’t navigate world, protect and feed ourselves, live in society or prosper without it:

But: why is it that “received” values and truths deserve to be jettisoned, done away with? Mainly because, although they make a pretense of being eternal values and truths that have never undergone any process of “becoming”…they are simply expressions of the condition without which “a particular kind of living creature could not live.” “We have projected the conditions of ourpreservation as predicates of being in general.” What we believe to be the truth, the structure of being in itself, is nothing more than the ideological projection of a certain form of life—whether of individuals or societies. Now the reason these ideological masks deserve to come to ruin is also the reason they are necessary: every form of life needs a truth, a system of conditions of preservation and truth projected into an “interpretation” of the world.

Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche

Recognizing the existence of these necessary lies is important for a philosopher interested in discovering the fundamental truth. A truth independent of culture or a given society. Understanding that all received ideologies represent strategies for personal survival and social cohesion allows the philosopher to take the next crucial step, one that deconstructs these false truths for what they are and replacing them with a radical tolerance for differing world-views and embraced certainties. If more people could understand this one thing, and if more philosophers could make this one thing understandable and palatable to more people, the world would be a far safer, kinder and more peaceful place.

Leslie Paul Thiele in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul provides a nice overview of Nietzsche studies:

Previous scholarship on Nietzsche…may be divided into four broad, often overlapping fields…the root of Nietzsche’s philosophy is Nietzsche himself, a man who chose to reveal himself through his work. Nietzsche has been interpreted by some primarily as a worldly theorist. He has been posited as the ideologue of aristocratic or racial politics and as the harbinger of world empire….Nietzsche also has been presented as a literary stylist. He is then approached as an unsystematic albeit profound thinker whose trademark is the aphorism, or, more recently, as an author whose books’ literary identities and agendas constitute the subject of inquiry. A third standpoint marks Nietzsche above all as a philosopher….The fourth interpretive practice situates Nietzsche as the herald of deconstructive thought. Herein his writings are investigated as announcements of the demise of systematic philosophy and the destruction of the philosophical subject….
Whatever their differences, these four fields of interpretation border a common frontier. All restrict themselves to a conceptual comprehension of Nietzsche. All divorce Nietzsche from his work. As a political theorist Nietzsche is taken primarily to speak for and about others, not himself. As a literary stylist Nietzsche is understood to be concerned with producing works of written art, relishing the detachment allowed by fiction. Those concerned with Nietzsche’s reputation as a philosopher have held the status of his work to be dependent on its distinction from his personal opinions and predilections. Philosophy only waxes, it is understood, as individuality wanes. Lastly, those interested in describing Nietzsche’s explosion of philosophical thought are particularly prone to isolate the writer from his writings, as the passion for truth is understood to have been extinguished by skeptical distance and irony. In short, previous scholarship has not breached the frontier that separates works of politics, art, and philosophy from biography, that is, from the individual life that produced them. Yet this is the boundary Nietzsche claimed to have crossed in word and deed. He propounded a philosophy of individualism and he lived an individualistic philosophy. He claimed his work as the vestige of his life. Conceptual accounts of Nietzsche fail to penetrate this vitality.

Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul

As a consequence of engaging Nietzsche, one comes to understand the inherent inconsistencies between language, thought, truth and the actual nature of human existence:

Philosophy for Nietzsche was not about truth, but about living without truth. What remains of import in philosophical works is the portrayal of individuals who have struggled with the contradictions of existence. Their writings never provide resolutions of these contradictions, but they may serve as testimonies to battles well fought.

Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul

After returning from the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche was essentially stateless, as his residency in Switzerland required seven uninterrupted years, which the war interrupted. He moved from Switzerland to France to Italy, migrating each season to a more favorable climate. Thiele relates Nietzsche’s principle political position, one consistent with Nietzsche’s stateless status:

The modern hero is destined for an alienated existence. His determination to celebrate the tragedy of individuation means that the social and political battles that rage about him are viewed as so many distractions. Human relations in general are seen as a threat to his allotted task…The majority remain happy in their masquerade, fulfilling their social roles and playing the part assigned to them in the “theatre of politics.”…Included among Nietzsche’s Ten Commandments for Free Spirits is the proscription, “You shall not practice politics.”…

Politics, in short, constitutes a threat to the individual. The purpose of the state, according to Nietzsche, ought to be the cultivation of individuals. But this is never the case.

Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul

I have generally adhered to his stance on political participation, until we reached the age of Trump. Desperate times…

Nietzsche teaches the radical nihilistic reality of existence, and the imperative that comes with that understanding:

In a world without purpose, accountability, merit, or transcendent values, all weaker beings perish in the grip of meaninglessness…Only deeds done for their own sake, constituting their own reward and justification, are tolerable in a world without meaning.

Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul

With the lapse of religion and the loss of faith in continuous social progress, post-modern thinkers wail against cultural emptiness and hollow lives. The awful proliferation of strip malls, reality TV, fast food and mindless violence wracks the country and the world without purpose or possible end. In such a world, especially for those people who no longer lack the means to live comfortable and effort-free lives, the challenge to avoid daily angst, deep depressions, or headlong falls into drug-induced temporary utopias, seems beyond the willful means of all too many of them. In contrast, those people who maintain control of their life, regardless of external circumstances, and decide who they will be, and how they will face one difficulty or another, and take responsibility for creating their own meaning, their own values, and what they choose to pursue, prosper. Nobody can choose where and how they are born, and nobody can alter primary circumstances, but people can decide how to respond to those circumstances and who they are going to be as they struggle to achieve one thing or another. As Camus says, there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

As we engage with Nietzsche we find ourselves pummeled about between skepticism, morality, nihilism, and rumors of the truth, with no soft safe space too land:

“When the moral skeptic arrives at mistrust of morality there remains one more step for him to take—skepticism of his mistrust. To deny and to trust—go hand in hand” (GW 14:30). Compared to former skeptics who believed they had attained the truth that truth was impossible, Nietzsche held himself to be even more suspicious. No truth is known at all. In other words, one must be skeptical vis-à-vis one’s own skeptical passion. One is to doubt that doubting itself constitutes an undischargeable obligation.

Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul

As we grow older (and I believe this pertains to just about everyone) we become more certain of the truths that we have discovered, or adopted, or simply have come to believe. Maintaining the radical skepticism that Nietzsche teaches is very difficult, particularly for those of us committed, as Thiele points out above, to a fundamental skepticism. No matter what we think we know for certain, we must recognize the provisional nature of all understanding. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best when he wrote, “We are not sure of many things and those are not so.”

I have yet to discover a single thinker that ranges so high, so low, and across such a broad spectrum of fundamentally philosophical considerations as Nietzsche. He doesn’t create a system, or demand adherence to dogma, or spew thou shalts.

Nietzsche went out into the swamp much further than any other explorer; he left such pallbearers of the spirit as Spencer, Comte, Descartes and even Kant all shivering on the shore. And yet he never got bogged, and he never lost the attention of his audience. What saved him was the plain fact that he always gave a superb show—as good, almost, as a hanging.

H. L. Mencken, Smart Set Criticism

Mencken published the first book on Nietzsche in English (as far as I know) in 1908, less than a decade after the German philosopher died. The book is unique in that Mencken dispenses with his usual ire and sarcasm and treats his subject with interest and respect. And yes, he takes us all, those willing to go, deep into the human swamp where we witness the genuine nature of existence and the limitations of knowledge, human consciousness, and the scientific enterprise.

We get a taste of Mencken’s classic sarcasm and humor in what follows:

In detail, of course, [More] occasionally ventures upon a novelty. This time it takes the form of a strange politeness to the late Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the scoundrel who plotted the Great War twenty-five years ago [this is written in 1921], and then launched it suddenly fourteen years after his own death, to the colossal surprise of the French War Office and the British Admiralty, neither of which suspected that anything of the sort was afoot.

H. L. Mencken, Smart Set Criticism

Terry Eagleton hasn’t written a book dedicated to Nietzsche, but he did have this relevant remark to make, pointing to the positive direction that Nietzsche presents:

If the world for Nietzsche is valueless, meaningless chaos, then the point would seem to be to create one’s own values in defiance of its blank indifference.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic

Chamberlain’s description of Nietzsche’s deep readers seems apposite, and certainly pertains in my case.

Nietzsche’s spiritual survivors are deep, independent, abrasive, noble loners with a love of language and a sensitive ear; they are skeptical, critical yet passionate readers of great artists and thinkers. They do not think anything in particular because they have listened to ‘the genius of the heart, who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen, who soothes rough souls and gives them a new desire to savor – the desire to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them’.

Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin

Nietzsche didn’t establish a school or engender followers, unlike, say, Plato, Kant, or Rand. Every deep encounter (and perhaps even shallow ones) creates individual reactions that greatly differ from one to the other, with no two precisely the same. I could name thirty-seven authors who wrote books about Nietzsche, from Kaufman to Heidegger, from Sloterdijk to Jaspers from Mencken to Salome, and show how they each took something different from the German thinker. His words can be used in so many ways, some more convincing than others, but all of them more or less valid. Almost any point of view, or philosophical conundrum, or political attitude might be illuminated by Nietzsche’s words. Often because he was a grand stylist and sometimes discarded precision in favor of literary effect. He encourages the creation and production of a limitless quantity of meaningful perspectives.

The title for my latest novel is The Suicide Note. For most people, living too long is hardly a tragedy. But for Nietzsche, who spent the final ten years of his life mindlessly insane, it’s difficult to imagine a worse fate for the man. He suffered from poor health most of his life, along with the trials and frustrations that arose from his creative intellect and the lack of genuine peers. He went insane in 1889, basically unknown and unappreciated. Perhaps he gained a glimmer of his impact before he died, some form of recognition for his artistic and philosophical powers. I don’t know.

Nietzsche suffered a major breakdown and collapsed on January 3, 1889, reportedly after trying to save a horse from being flogged. He was all of fifty-four years old. Several of his finished books had yet to be published, and he left a rich trove of unfinished and unpublished material. Immediately after his initial collapse he wrote and sent letters making outrageous claims, indicating the onset of his fall from the sane. In the coming years multiple strokes rendered him immobile and mute.

Of his completed, unpublished work at the time of his collapse, Ecce Homo perhaps the most amazing. That Nietzsche could make such prophecies about his work and his legacy long before anyone had a clue. For example:

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Simply remarkable, and almost certainly true.

There is no doubt Nietzsche would have preferred a different ending, had he retained the means to render one:

“Many die too late, and a few die too early… ‘Die at the right time!’…: so teaches Zarathustra.”
Even Nietzsche at this point recoiled from drawing the logical conclusion: that the solution for those who have ‘overlived their time’ and who are a burden to society is a form of discreet suicide.
All [Nietzsche] could do was lavish scorn on those beings who, having lived too long, cling to life like yellow-wrinkled, late autumn apples.

Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche had clearly ‘overlived’ his time, and it was pure tragedy for him to spend his final years the mental imbecile he had become. Taking one’s life at the proper time, place and circumstance, is the final and fulfilling act of a fully autonomous being. Only the truly free person can accomplish this, and do so in a way that brooks no argument from the gods.

The epigram for my novel Suicide Note is the following:

I do not wish to live again. How have I borne life? By creating. What has made me endure? The vision of the Superman who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself—but ah!

Nietzsche, quoted by Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind

The “tried” and the “but ah!” – did Nietzsche pass with feelings of failure, or regret?

Steven Aschhelm’s Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890 – 1990 serves as a corrective of Nietzsche’s rumored anti-Semitism and cooption by National Socialism. I found his argument consistent with my reading, in that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites, including his brother-in-law. Nietzsche’s work is strewn with generalizations about “Germans,” “the English,” and “Jews,” any of which may be considered problematic in treating any group of people as a unified whole, as if every individual possessed the generalized traits. Or as if “the German volk” possessed some inherent characteristics independent of the actual people. But within this context, Nietzsche expresses far more respect and admiration for Jews than just about anybody else. Again, just as racist, but definitely not anti-Semitic. As for National Socialism, while Nietzsche writes many things that could be taken, out of context, as supporting something like the Third Reich, with any genuine understanding of Nietzsche comes the conviction that he would be appalled by the Nazi regime, and repudiate it in the strongest terms. Nietzsche disparaged the state, and the Reich, and any notion of “mob” thinking. While he rails about “blood” and “war” and “conflict” in sometimes despicable ways, the words never point to fascism. Aschhelm quotes Bataille:

Fascism and Nietzscheanism are mutually exclusive, and are even violently mutually exclusive, as soon as each of them is considered in its totality: on one side life is tied down and stabilized in an endless servitude, on the other there is not only a circulation of free air, but the wind of a tempest; on one side the charm of human culture is broken in order to make room for vulgar force, on the other force and violence are tragically dedicated to this charm….There is a corrosive derision in imagining a possible agreement between Nietzschean demands and a political organization which impoverishes existence at its summit, which imprisons, exiles, or kills everything that could constitute an aristocracy of “free spirits.”

Georges Bataille, Nietzsche and the Fascists

Krieck (an influential National Socialist philosopher) provides a wonderful summary of Nietzsche’s relationship with National Socialism:

All in all, Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent of racial thinking. Apart from these three bents of mind, he might have made an outstanding Nazi.

Ernst Krieck, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in his Nietzsche

As I explored my Nietzsche literary treasures, I re-discovered Rudiger Safranski, and his biography of Nietzsche. (And one of the most attractive books in my library.) This turns out to be a particularly rich vein of meaningful material, beginning with Nietzsche’s notion of play, echoing Schiller:

Man, Nietzsche contended, is a being that has leapt beyond the “bestial bounds of the mating season” and seeks pleasure not just at fixed intervals but perpetually. Since, however, there are fewer sources of pleasure than his perpetual desire for pleasure demands, nature has forced man onto the “path of pleasure contrivance.” Man, the creature of consciousness whose horizons extend to the past and future, rarely attains complete fulfillment within the present, and for this reason experiences something most likely unknown to any animal, namely boredom. This strange creature seeks a stimulus to release him from boredom. If no such stimulus is readily available, it simply needs to be created. Man becomes the animal that plays. Play is an invention that engages the emotions; it is the art of stimulating emotions. Music is a prime example. Thus, the anthropological and physiological formula for the secret of art: “Flight from boredom is the mother of all art.”