That which does not kill me

My thoughts on Nietzsche

Dear S,

For a while I wondered if anybody I knew actually finished a book by Nietzsche. Or at the very least understood it. Or read it at all.

I began to think this when I realized his most famous works are Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power — the first of these an unreadable foray into fourth-rate Old-Testament soapboxing, and the latter three written on the verge of insanity. Go ahead and pick them up yourself. I've never met anyone who could explain what they just read*, and I also never met anyone who, in the process of reading him, said they were having fun. After a slight badgering by Yours Truly, the answer was always a “no” on both counts.

I’ve seen somebody online say he's their “favorite philosopher” after spelling his name Neechy. I’ve seen two people argue about what Nietzsche “really said” and then both admit they never read him. I swear on Schopenhauer's grave — a much finer and less trendy philosopher — that what most people really love about Nietzsche is the fact that other people say they love Nietzsche; and the immense amount of faith they put into his works is the very thing that makes his works so profound to them. Simply put, they can’t understand him; and in the immense struggle to not be left out, and in the hacking and mowing through the weedy, tangled jungle of his later prose, they put meanings into his words which he probably didn’t intend, but which feel personal, profound — even sublime. Because he had to mean something, right?

Not that surprising an attitude, though, as Nietzsche himself wrote, well before he was spacing out and licking windows,

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.

This being from The Joyous Science, the first 3/4ths of it written long before he went off the rails. During this period, a time of both real profundity and almost crystal clarity, he threw barbs at writers such as himself.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, and simpler.

And this admission of philosophy's limits,

He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are.

Anyhow, I posit that there are two types of people (somewhere out there) who actually love Nietzsche. The first is the one who struggles hard, trying to get at what Nietzsche meant*. For this person, the sheer untangling of a mess is the joy of the chase in itself. Not that hard to believe, because Nietzsche does say things — and even many great things, when you dig long enough. These are the people who read Beyond Good and Evil.

But the second kind of person who loves Nietzsche loves him for his cleverness, his poetry, and his clarity. And I believe the person who enjoys this side of him — his comfortable armchair profundity, his terseness, his relevance to everyday life — prefers The Joyous Science, Human, All Too Human, The Dawn of Day. So pick these up if you want to grow and have a good time.

An example of something that hits home:

Why does our conscience prick us after ordinary social gatherings? Because we have treated serious things lightly, because in talking of persons we have not spoken quite justly or have been silent when we should have spoken; because, sometimes, we have not jumped up and run away. In short, because we have behaved in society as if we belonged to it.

Something both uncomfortable and true. He says a little earlier in Human,

It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg for forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character. The person injured, however, if he does not wish to be considered inhuman, must forgive — his enjoyment of the other’s humiliation is insignificant on account of this constraint.

Not just a piece of speculative philosophy or arguing, like a lot of Kant's or Plato’s works, but something you can really touch — because it has already touched you at some point. Which is the best kind of philosophy, I think.

And this judgment on two kinds of souls,

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to someone.

I also love this passage from The Joyous Science (Hill translation) about being “successful” at life, but knowing you were meant for more,

Everything he is doing now is decent and in order, and yet he has a bad conscience. For he was tasked with the extraordinary.

And this passage, which, if it had been written this century, would be about woke anthems, and ham-handed Christian movies,

This artist offends me by the way in which he presents his ideas, even his very good ideas: so broadly and emphatically, and with such crude rhetorical tricks, as if he were addressing the mob. After devoting some time to his art we always feel as if we've been in bad company.

Noting a stark difference between the sexes, he writes,

Fathers and sons have much more consideration for each other than mothers and daughters do.

And what about this musing on literature — that we can only get from them what's already inside us?

Everything in nature and history which is my sort of thing speaks to me, praises me, urges me on and comforts me — other things I either do not hear, or immediately forget. We are always only in our own company.

Something which I think especially applies to his own writings. A statement which comes with a flipside:

A: ‘We are only praised by our equals!’

B: ‘Yes! And he who praises you is saying, ‘You are my equal!”

I also like this reminder that real self-denial and asceticism spring from abundance of self,

Today he is poor, not because everything has been taken away from him, but because he has thrown everything away. What does it matter to him? He is accustomed to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.

And this reminder that reason can be easily employed by the unreasonable,

There is a way of asking us for our reasons that leads us not only to forget our best reasons but also to conceive a stubborn aversion to all reasons. This way of asking makes people very stupid — and is a trick used by tyrannical people.

And this reminder of what pride really is, and that it’s really all a sham,

The proud feel chagrined even by those who advance them: they are angry with the horses of their carriage.

This last one is interesting to me because one of the theories Nietzsche really did throw out there and which people really do understand is the idea of “master and slave morality.” Which is effectively that Jesus’s ideals are for people on the bottom of the totem pole: those who can only achieve peace by throwing away their rights and (on some level) their dignity.

The reason I know this idea is bunk is because I am “a person.” And I’m not only a person, but I'm in the position of almost every other person. Which is to say I’m for hire.

Not really that much of an embarrassment, if you think about it. The richest man in the world was hired by somebody else. That's how he got rich. The President was also hired by somebody else. And the fact is, almost everybody who ever lived has had to either build a coalition or be a servant of some kind. And the first on some level usually involves the latter. Nobody can get anywhere good without being something good to somebody else.

So my philosophy is, everybody is somebody else’s monkey. And if this is the case, why not train to be a great monkey? And isn’t that the heart of Jesus’s teachings anyway? Put yourself at the lowest place, and somebody will seat you higher. If you want to eventually be a master, first learn how to be a great servant.

I really love Nietzsche's thoughts on suffering and greatness:

You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible — that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified — that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity— do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?

Thus it is pity versus pity.

A great question, which many on the right and left argue about today: which pity do you live by? Fatherly pity, which seeks suffering as a means to growth — to strength — to mastery? Or motherly pity, which just wants to comfort?

Neither, I think, is appropriate in all seasons; but either way we live in a shifting world of constant change. It is failure which makes winners, and it is winners which make things easy — and thus breed failures. We are incapable of having one without the other. And if the value of being strong is bulldozing through people's obstacles, isn't this "motherly” anyway? The former only makes the latter possible. And conversely, the mother nurses the infant who turns into the champion.

The question was never so much which. It was always when.

Probably the most surprising thing about Nietzsche is his poetry — a series of short jabs, in The Joyous Science, which are fun to chew on (if read in the Kevin Hill translation, at least).

Where you stand you must dig deep,

Below you is the well!

Let the superstitious shout,

That down there’s only hell!

This is clearly about one’s willingness to explore — to seek even the deepest and worst parts of yourself and ask what they mean. The drive of a true psychologist. And this one, about being something great one day and having to abandon it for something else you need, maybe something almost contrary, tomorrow,

Our virtues ought to dash, and so,

Like Homer’s verse, should come and go!

I love this reminder that Nietzsche isn’t a series of arrivals, but a bold and almost reckless chase:

Attracted by my style and voice,

You would follow after me?

Walk your own path faithfully,

And – bit by bit – become like me.

I also love his insistence that his errors and recklessness are due not to his shortcomings, but to his abundance.

I spill much of what I pour,

And so you say I’m filled with scorn.

And yet whoever’s cup is full

Will find that when he drinks, he spills –

Without despising wine the more.

And my personal favorite, about exploring and embracing every aspect of himself — a full, confusing, and boisterous being:

Incisive, gentle, crude, refined,

Familiar, foreign, pure and vile,

A tryst of sage and imbecile:

All this I seek and claim as mine,

To be at once dove, snake and swine!

Something that feels close to me, who in these essays am filled with Christian charity and vitriol, jokes and lamentations, sex and sobriety, cleanliness and filth. Each essay is so different from the spirit of the essay before it that I could almost be considered a fraud — and yet I could never hold on to any aspect of myself for too long.

All of Nietzsche's works require work. None of it is an end in itself, and many times it's worth a rebuttal. But this proves that Nietzsche is a dynamic being; explosive, organic, living, moving; full of assailable observations, half-truths, and uncomfortable questions. In other words, not interested in being a “perfect” man, he aims for being real instead.

Nietzsche’s middle period is sturdier, humbler, and keeps to surer footing. In All Too Human, The Joyous Science, and The Dawn of Day, you’ll find lots of practical introspection, social criticism, and wise musings in general — but they’re each modest, straight-forward, almost chaste-feeling. In the later years, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Gods, and The Antichrist, you'll find a lot of high-flying prose and a general feeling of light-headedness. They have the feeling that he flew too high like Icarus: the air was too thin, and that what you’re seeing is a man hacking out his own thoughts, postulating, prophesying, blabbering, shouting, standing on an edge. In these later books you’ll have to dig harder for meaning; but when you find it — and I believe what kind of a man you are determines what you’ll find — you’ll know it was worth it. The diamonds will be fewer and further between, in some sections, but they will be brighter.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is dog shit.

Yours,

-J

P.S. My honest assessment of Nietzsche goes thusly. The whole purpose of looking deep inside yourself and questioning and trying so many things is to realize how finite you are, how false, how rotten and tumultuous — and to cling onto Someone infinite, and good, and sturdy, and true. The end of all the study of man is to find out how much he needs God. Solomon got there. Nietzsche went crazy.

Like Karl Marx, Nietzsche’s father was a clergyman and Nietzsche turned into the devil. He was weak and sick and he looked down on the weak and sickly. He threw God aside and found he couldn’t keep a woman — and even looked down on women in general. The sign (in my opinion) of a true loser. A real winner is loved by women — and he tends to love them back. Even if he doesn't understand them.

This being said, he’s still worth a read. Since most of us can’t read Nietzsche in German, if you want to understand him better and enjoy him less, try Walter Kaufmann. If you want to enjoy him more and understand him less, try Helen Zimmern. For a healthy balance between the two, something readable and digestible, try Kevin Hill for The Joyous Science, and John McFarland Kennedy for The Dawn of Day. The Penguin translations of Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols are all modern and stylish.

To be honest, there were so many good passages that it was difficult to fit them all in the essay without ruining it. Some I couldn't leave behind are,

Those who have thoroughly denied themselves something for a long time will almost imagine, when they accidentally encounter it again, that they have discovered it — and what happiness there is in being a discoverer! Let us be wiser than the snakes that lie too long in the same sun.

He also comments almost prophetically about the Russian and Chinese bots which spread lies about American politics,

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

And I love this poem about every man's climb from incompetence to mastery,

Among the pigs, a child is crawling

Never rising to his feet.

Listen to his endless bawling!

When will he get up and stand?

No, he won’t admit defeat!

Soon the child will learn to dance!

First he walks on his two feet,

But in the end walks on his hands.

And what about this musing on romantic jealousy — one of the principle pillars of marriage?

The lover wants the unconditional and exclusive possession of the person he longs for, he wants unconditional power as much over her soul as over her body, he wants to be loved exclusively, and to live and reign in the other soul as what is highest and most desirable.

When we consider that this means nothing less than to exclude the whole world from a precious commodity, and from the happiness and enjoyment it affords, that the lover contemplates the deprivation and ruin of all rivals, and would like to be the dragon of his golden hoard, the most inconsiderate and selfish of all ‘conquerors’ and exploiters, and finally that to the lover himself the rest of the world seems pale, indifferent and unprofitable, and that he is ready to make any sacrifice, disturb all existing arrangements, and put his own interests above all others — we are astonished that this ferocious avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified to such an extent. Still more astonishing is the fact that the concept of love as the opposite of selfishness has always been modeled on it, when it is perhaps precisely the most candid expression of selfishness!

Something I personally have known too well — and, in my youth, paid for dearly.

*To be fair to Nietzsche’s fan club, who can say what Nietzsche “really meant” when he meant so many things — about so many things? And from so many angles?

Nietzsche’s lack of one overriding position in many of his books isn’t a testament to his opacity or imbecility, but to his fertility. His most quotable materials, such as

that which does not kill me makes me stronger,

and,

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

and

He who has a “why” to live can deal with almost any “how,”

and

Whatever is done for love is done beyond the realm of good and evil

are fun, but they barely scratch the surface. He's incapable of being pinned down because he almost seems infinite — always on the move. A mess of a man, really, but which of us isn’t? We can’t put him in a box because we can’t box God or ourselves either. And others, to us — those we view from the outside, the casual acquaintances and siblings and coworkers — are caricatures. We merely have Nietzsche’s inner man in writing. And this hodge-podge and turmoil is what makes him feel so real.

**One famous internet joke about Nietzsche.

God is dead — Nietzsche, 1882.

Nietzsche is dead — God, 1900.

A reminder that man is small — and that he really ought to remember it.