A Nietzsche Reader by Friedrich Nietzsche

The literary career of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spanned less than twenty years, but no area of intellectual inquiry was left untouched by his iconoclastic genius. The philosopher who announced the death of God in The Gay Science (1882) and went on to challenge the Christian code of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), grappled with the fundamental issues of the human condition in his own intense autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888). Most notorious of all, perhaps, his idea of the triumphantly transgressive übermann ('superman') is developed in the extreme, yet poetic words of Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-92). Whether addressing conventional Western philosophy or breaking new ground, Nietzsche vastly extended the boundaries of nineteenth-century thought.

Why I Picked It Up

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Need I explain?

About the Book

I've seen plenty of Nietzsche quotes piecemeal, referenced in other works. I didn't feel the need to dive into his entire bibliography, and find that the Reader-type publications do a nice job covering the basics.

So here's what I thought about finishing the volume.

Nietzsche, like Dostoevsky, is the writer you reference when you want to sound especially literate. For that reason, it’s difficult to separate the pleasure of reading Nietzsche from the satisfaction of having read Nietzsche.

The reader doles out wisdom in bite-sized pearls, which is relatively digestible in most places. (I recently read Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric and found my head spinning.) He does go down tangents. Voice-wise: he’s kind of a wordy guy. Nietzsche could benefit from not being as much of a rambler, but I’m absolutely a rambler myself.

I am not a nihilist, but I’ve frequently said that Mountain Sounds (my debut novel) deals heavily with the ways in which we nudge people to or from belief, and “belief” as a concept is a core tenet of reading Nietzsche at all.

As I recently dove into within The Influential Mind by Tali Sharot, the desire to accumulate knowledge taps into our dopamine systems. (Nietzsche would be annoyed with me for using science as proof of truth, but whatever. I’m a neuro gal.)

Purity & Choice & Distillation

But like Nietzsche, I actually don’t believe in rationality. We often use rationality as a synonym for detachment or coldness, but many studies actually show that we make worse decisions when doing so; it mentally benefits you and your outcomes to be optimistic, and you could quite literally never achieve the salience that ensures you have all of the necessary information for clarity at a given time. So who are you to decide your perception is the clearest one?

I read too much about unconscious influences to believe in sheer rationality. How do you decide what the endpoint is? Ex: Nietzsche's whole argument about cause and effect being impossible to scaffold. We want a purity of truth, but perspectivism is probably more accurate anyway.

He also talks about how many philosophers deal with similar concepts à la simultaneous inventions. We are much more interrelated than we expect, and often reach for the same expressions of individualism to be unique too.

I appreciated his insistence that everyone craves being tested or divided as to prove a certain purity of the quality they’re devoting — ex: the soldier to know that they would fall in battle, the lover for their counterpart to cheat so they know their love was faithful, the mother to give everything to her offspring. In essence: a craving for contrast, or for battleground. For what they believe about themselves to be forged. (I think about distillation a lot.)

He writes about evil only possibly existing because of our belief in choice ie an evil person could have chosen to not perform an action that would cause harm. Very Consider the Lobster. The line from Nietzsche to DFW is a short one.

Easily my favorite line.

Nietzsche wants to tell you that whatever you did last Friday night after a couple of beers is completely fine. But at what point are you responsible for your intelligence, or lack thereof?

I have a lot to chat about in terms of what I resonate with vs. discard within Nietzsche’s most essential arguments, but want to leave y’all with a thought experiment that’s become a favorite—

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'”

I would change individual actions, to do better (re: his point about you can always be smarter and look back and think you were an idiot), but I love how I live. Do I wish certain things were different, and would I do what’s in my power to change them? Absolutely! But I affirm the methods and the values, time and time again, and that’s really all I can ask for.

On the temptation for polarization rather than nuance. I get this all the time as a twin. Re: everything I know about my twindom, he also makes the argument that any desire for distinction (like individuality and self-sufficiency being one of my most prominent values) is actually a desire for domination—that the former cannot exist without the latter. Something for me to chew on.

I really have been existential this year about the role of motivation and self-consciousness i.e. at what point self-awareness (especially of any dissonance or mismatches) becomes more harmful than helpful. At what point does morality enter the picture: motivation, action, effect?

Similarly, within my book, I talked a lot with others about the morality of utility and how we define ourselves by being helpful. I wouldn’t go so far into Nietzsche to establish the slave/master morality (but agree about our tendency towards fundamental attribution bias ie “what harms me/my self-image is therefore harmful”) but appreciate the discussion that most of what we define on a community level as “good” involves being deferential, which can go too far. (Apologies to my literary agents for veering into discussing Nietzsche and Mountain Sounds in the same breath. It was only a matter of time before I got here.)

Are you a being or a doer? According to him, there is no will for strength that does not involve the desire to overpower something/anything.

He makes valid points about morality not necessarily existing because it’s just a constant reassessment of scattered facts. In that sense, I do defer to the “herd” in that at a certain point, it’s not up to you to determine whether you’ve caused someone harm, but up to everyone else. Hence: the role of the judge.

But Nietzsche shifted my mind some in how he pointed out that the application of morality is uneven because the enactor will never feel the depth of pain that the sufferer endures, and thus could not have intended to inflict it at that level.

On the Nihilism Bit

In transparency, I’m a Christian myself, but have no qualms about reading nihilistic takes. For one, I’d like to think I read widely enough to also consume what I might disagree with. I’m also not offended by any differences in religion; I’ve never felt that I need to be around or partner with or only befriend those who are Christians, because I think it’s all part of the same system of how you reconcile belief in anything vs. the actions you choose to take. (In that way, I am so behavioral.)

Some more…ah…restrictive Christians often do not like that I approach the Bible with the suggestion that it was penned by human scribes prone to human error and that various editions imply contradictory things (exegesis); in other words, I think of the Bible as just as subject to the pros and cons of translation. But I just think if you’re going to use religion as a basis especially to be hateful, you better be prepared to back up your beliefs because I will argue with you about it. The religion class I took in college was the toughest course I ever took. In my view, faith itself is what is holy; organized religion—and the behaviors stemming from it—is not inherently so.

Nietzsche does not like that Christianity is intangible, but I don’t really see how that’s different to him than any other concept he discusses. But if you’re easily offended by anti-religion takes—in case you haven’t heard that “God is Dead” is basically Nietzche’s whole spiel—you should absolutely skip him.

Then again, Nietzsche ruminates on “thou shalt,” so you may find an appealing fictional complement in the translation of “thou mayest” or “timshel” — an existential condition analyzed in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is a newfound favorite book in my hall of fame.

His Thoughts on Aesthetics?

I do disagree with Nietzsche, predictably, in his view of aesthetics—because philosophy is just as self-indulgent as poetry, if not more so. He draws a line between the artist and thinker (the artist as willfully blind) which feels silly because he literally just argued for perspectivism.

It also feels a bit rich of him to rail against meter being unclear when his sentences could benefit from more organization too. He also absolutely adores italics, whereas I find them usually sloppy when used repeatedly for emphasis (and I have the same pet peeve around extraneous capitalization.)

There’s also a great paper on Aristotle’s view of aesthetics as catharsis, which Nietzsche touches on. (I'm hopeful that when my twin sister attends her MBA in the fall that she might bequeath upon me JSTOR access again. But I'm not sure if business school will do that for them...)

An excerpt.

If you act out something, you ultimately become it. I’ve been especially fascinated this year by self-fulfilling prophecy and the pros and cons of various labels. Also, everything is still becoming, which means we cannot evaluate it as a finished object. Picking endpoints for ourselves has always been tricky, and that's a skill I only built in studio art (as tested by my many, many book revisions.)

Overall Thoughts

There's plenty I like about Nietzsche, and many quotes to underline. I think he can be a little hypocritical at times, but I'm actually relatively gentle on philosophers for being so because I think philosophy as a whole needs the permission to constantly revise; without knowing the exact dates and publication times of each work, I'm not sure what evolved into what. Take what you need, discard the rest, revisit as needed. And now you have a nice conversation starter.