On Friedrich Nietzsche

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star - Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember being enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil, in which he argues that the good person is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice.

I then moved on to The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morality and read the in-vogue Thus Spake Zarathustra while lying on a deck crossing the Ionian Sea from Bari to Patras.

One of his concepts that has stayed with me is "eternal recurrence", which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The past can be particularly difficult to accept, Nietzsche observed, despite the fact that it is out of our reach and impossible to change. Life itself can be made unbearable with the thought that there are some things that are impossible to rectify: in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, when the day recurs, there will be nothing new in it; this is eternal return of the same. Nietzsche called this his ‘abysmal thought’. He thought it was so profoundly terrifying because it confronts us with the idea that once we’ve lived our life, our cards have been dealt and we cannot exchange them for a fresh hand. In Nietzsche’s recurrence, there are no second chances, no fresh starts, no second acts. However, the lesson from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is the power of affirmation, of accepting that we would re-live the day exactly as before.

Now, The School of Life notes that one of the strangest yet most intriguing aspects of Nietzsche’s ideas is his repeated enthusiasm for a concept that he called amor fati (translated from Latin as ‘a love of one’s fate’, or as we might put it, a resolute, enthusiastic acceptance of everything that has happened in one’s life).

Meanwhile, Nietzsche had very little time for God or religion. Religion (Christianity, especially) was for him for those of a weak character. It’s the underhand, manipulative, and insidious poison of the coward and weak-willed. It inverts what it is to be human, and sees the “highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation".

An iai article argued that everyone - wrongly - seems to think Nietzsche fits with their political agenda. Contemporary right-wing figures see in Nietzsche the great diagnostician of the decadence that would follow the death of God, and use his insights to dismiss the “woke” left as being driven by resentment towards the powerful. On the left, 20th century thinkers like Michel Foucault found in Nietzsche powerful tools to use against societal power structures and embraced his emancipatory message.