pleased to nietzsche

(WARNING: This post is generally philosophical in nature. It promises to be long, rambling, and of questionable interest to anyone)

I just started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche today. It's the first of his work that I've ever read, and now that I've started to enlighten my perspective a bit, I feel like Nietzsche gets a bad rep--his work is not at all what popular culture has made me expect.

To start with, Nietzsche is associated with nihilism, but nihilism itself is poorly portrayed and misunderstood. It's like in The Big Lebowski--"We are nihilists, Lebowski. We believe in nothing." That's not it; that's totally not the way I think the position should be interpreted. Rather, nihilism is a sort of specific anti-realism; it's a position that there is no objective meaning or great truth to life. That's really all I'm going to say about nihilism for now, since I feel like people have turned it into a rhetorical weapon. It's like something you use to disembowel an opposing view, where you say something like "That view is nihilist. If you accept it, you are rejecting everything, so it must be empty and worthless." I hate that kind of argument, like the Heap Argument or the Slippery Slope. Sure, sometimes it's true, but most of the time it's just a way to discredit an opposing position you can't take on directly.

So, back to Zarathustra. I haven't gotten very far into it, but so far I'm very impressed. I don't really know what the institution calls Nietzsche's philosophy or what kind of "-ist" he is (I don't really care, either; that's why I didn't more actively pursue that Ph.D. in philosophy), but I find his writing strangely compelling. What the title character proclaims appears to be a very direct rejection of the implicit dualism present in most of Western thought--that there is some great, important, ontological chasm between the spirit and the body. The body dies, the spirit lives on; the flesh should be rejected, the soul uplifted. At least early in the book, Nietzsche seems to be ardently arguing that that view is wrong. The soul and the body are not separate, and all that matters is the unified self (Nietzsche 30). (Yes, that's right. I cite my sources in my own blog.)

He also attacks the idea of an afterlife, which is closely related. Worrying about one's position in the hereafter is pointless and ultimately harmful; it's the coward's way out, because it provides a chance for one-shot access to justice, a way "to get to the ultimate with one leap" (Nietzsche 29).

In a way, it echoes a concept we talked about in my Judeo-Christian literature class a couple years ago: the idea of a "doctrine of retribution". The world can be rather unfair a lot of the time, but one of the dominant themes in the Abrahamic religions (specifically Christianity) is that God will make sure it works out in the end; everyone will get what they deserve, in terms of rewards for the virtuous and punishment for the wicked, like so:

[God] will render to every man according to his deeds: To them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality--eternal life: but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness--indignation and wrath. (Romans 2:6-8 KJV)

It's a tough concept to shake; justice is a big deal to the human psyche (that's another entire post in itself). But, at the very least, Nietzsche seems to reject the idea that there are objective, divinely-crafted laws that we need follow--"Behold the believers of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker--he, however, is the creator." (Nietzsche 18) At this point, I'm actually not sure if that's a direct rejection of the divine or if it's just a rejection of the proscriptions imposed by organized religion, but that'll probably clear itself up as I read further.

Instead, (and I know, I'm kind of going backwards here) Nietzsche seems to hold up those who are passionate about life, whether the good or the bad: "I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who may perish through a minor matter [...] I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him" (Nietzsche 12). That, to me, was the most surprising revelation of all of this; in my previous unenlightened state, I did not expect to find such a rousing endorsement of life in Nietzsche's work--it seems that society thinks of it as a rejection of life, when really he's rejecting the Stoicism that sometimes seems to drive our society.

Anyway, I may just come to find that the book carries on to destroy that very position. Either way, I'm very glad I picked this up; it's nice to get back into something deeper than JavaScript occasionally.

Nietzsche, F. (2005) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. C. Martin, trans. Barnes and Noble Classics: NY