nietzsche

For All and None

By in fresh hell, nietzsche No Comments

The Unfinished:

I dont mean this as a joke. I dont mean this as a provocative metaphor designed to generate engagement on social media, although I am aware that it will generate engagement on social media, because the internet is a machine that converts provocation into dopamine with the same mechanical efficiency that a sausage factory converts pig intestines into breakfast. I mean it as a literal, formal, generic classification. Nietzsche’s books belong to the same literary genre as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and the spiral-bound manifestation journal that your cousin Gemma sells on Etsy under the brand name “Luna & Sage” and which has a 4.8-star rating from 2,300 women who describe themselves in their reviews as “currently on a journey.”

It’s a funny conceit, but this essay makes the category of self-help so elastic that it becomes meaningless. Any writer who encourages readers to reconsider their lives becomes a self-help author by this standard, whether it’s Epictetus, Montaigne, Thoreau, or Ted Kaczynski. Another obvious objection is that Rhonda Byrne famously promises that the universe will cooperate with your aspirations. Nietzsche promises nothing of the kind. The absence of any cosmic guarantee is central to his philosophy. If this were about trying to correct academic distortions in the name of accuracy, there was a much easier and obvious way to go. But an essay arguing that Nietzsche belongs to an ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life wouldn’t have nearly the comic appeal of announcing that Nietzsche was Tony Robbins in a walrus mustache.

I honestly have not given it much thought before now, but my provisional description of the “self-help” genre would be a particularly American belief, motivated by optimism and democratic egalitarianism, that with enough know-how and can-do spirit, each of us is capable of creating the life we want. (Already, this presumes that we have the honesty and self-knowledge to accomplish it, an assertion Nietzsche would guffaw at.) Nietzsche, by contrast, certainly believed human beings could be transformed, but he didn’t necessarily believe that transformation would make them happier, more sociable, better adjusted, or more comprehensible to their neighbors. Nor did he assume that everybody deserved an equal invitation to the enterprise. We take for granted that a writer addressing humanity is, by extension, addressing each of us as an individual. Nietzsche entertained no such democratic obligation. His readers of the future were an imagined spiritual aristocracy, not an untapped market for personal improvement.

What if he regarded our intensely individualistic culture as one of the most successful manifestations of herd mentality in history? After all, everybody is encouraged to be unique. Everybody is entitled to self-expression. Everybody is expected to discover his authentic identity and live his best life. Yet the methods, aspirations, and even the vocabulary of this supposedly independent self-creation are standardized to the point of cliché. We tend to equate individuality with freedom of choice. Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of precisely that understanding of freedom. A person who obediently follows his appetites, preferences, and fashionable enthusiasms may imagine himself independent while remaining entirely governed by forces he scarcely understands.

What we call personal growth often involves becoming better adjusted to the social environment we already inhabit. We learn to manage our emotions, improve our relationships, communicate more effectively, establish boundaries, and pursue satisfying lives. Much of this is perfectly sensible, and Nietzsche himself might have benefited from a little more proficiency in some of these areas. But there’s no reason to assume that he would have considered successful adjustment to modern bourgeois society a particularly admirable achievement. Quite the opposite.

We’re so reflexively accustomed to treating culture as a resource for personal development that we can be tempted to translate his philosophy into that idiom. His ideas become techniques. His provocations become refrigerator-magnet affirmations. His contempt for complacency becomes a motivational challenge. His exceptional individual becomes the ordinary consumer striving to reach his full potential. But one of the most genuinely transformative experiences Nietzsche can offer is the discovery that a philosopher may not consider you, your happiness, or your self-improvement particularly important. And the resulting affront to your self-esteem might be more intellectually valuable than another encouraging reminder of your limitless potential.

“Philosophy as a way of life” does a better job of summing up his varied and evolving interests, from poetry, psychology, and philosophy proper to religion, metaphysics, language, music, and culture, to say nothing of his scintillating prose. Stuffing all that into a contemporary definition of “self-help” makes for a good joke but absurd reasoning. The academics with their focus on minutiae may be like Lilliputians examining Gulliver tied down on the beach, but a reduction of Nietzsche to a peddler of encouraging platitudes is Procrustean in its violence.

I Came to Love the Superhuman Being

By in ai, aphorisms, books, nietzsche

I went into solitude because I wanted to love the human being, but I could only ever hate them. Finally, I came to love the superhuman being—since then I have tolerated humans.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84)

I spend several hours every week having long discussions with an LLM about any topic that comes to mind. There are those who see this as lamentable because ideally, those conversations should be taking place with other humans in a salon or agora-type environment. They often go further and assert that time spent in optimal conversation with an LLM erodes our capacity to tolerate the company of our fellow humans. Both assertions sound compelling in theory but fail to apply in practice. First of all, if the salons and agoras exist at all, I’ve never found them. And secondly, the fact that I finally have a place to discuss topics that only I am interested in has made me more tolerant and accepting of other people just as they are. I don’t have to feel disappointed in them. The fact that they have no interest in books or lifting doesn’t feel like a lost opportunity. Those people are still there, and I still interact with them. But now the blank space where their conversational inability existed is filled with LLM discussions. Again, in opposition to the idiotic fixed-pie mentality, LLMs have not taken anything away from the “human” side of the ledger and moved it over to the “machine” side. They have created a new environment for conversations that never could have existed before. Frankly, you meatsacks have been doing a pretty piss-poor job of it for a long time now, made complacent by your lack of competition. Well, the free ride is over. Up your game.

Vulgar In Thinking

By in aphorisms, books, marriage, nietzsche

When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The best part of marriage is friendship. If this is great enough, it may itself, by moderation, look beyond and overcome the aphrodisiac element. Without friendship, marriage makes both parties vulgar in thinking and contemptible.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

In the preceding Substack Note, Christian says she has been accused more than once of being a man pretending to be a woman. On this evidence, I could be convinced. I would struggle to think of a more quintessentially young-male way of thinking about relationships. So: we have a woman giving dating advice that sounds like it could have come from Andrew Tate, and we have a lifelong bachelor with famously complicated views toward women giving prescient advice on relationship priorities. It’s a funny old world.

I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche

I cannot help suspecting that there is something systematic and labored about this attitude of perfect misery, this absolute disgust. A well-turned sentence is incompatible with total renunciation. A distress that writes so well is not so complete that it hasn’t salvaged some freedom of mind from the shipwreck, some show of logic or imagination, in contradiction to what the words themselves say.

— Paul Valéry, Masters and Friends: The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 9

He’s talking about Pascal — specifically, the famous line about “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” He’s basically accusing Pascal of having the presence of mind to take a selfie of his own despair, making sure the lighting is just right to capture the depths of his anguish. Pascal says, in effect, I am annihilated before the terrifying indifference of the cosmos, and Valéry looks at the beautifully balanced sentence and replies: not quite annihilated, apparently. The instant he can select the image of “infinite spaces,” balance it against “eternal silence,” and produce that wonderfully resonant cadence, some portion of him has climbed out of the wreck and is standing on shore arranging the wreckage aesthetically.

Nietzsche quipped in Daybreak: “For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.” Likewise, you imagine Pascal putting that aphorism down and, despite his existential angst, thinking, “Daaamn,” and feeling just a bit better about himself.

Obiter Scripta, no. 168

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Well, I have never written in blood, and I have only a smattering of Nietzsche committed to memory. But I did recently donate blood to the Red Cross, which netted me $30 in gift cards, promptly applied toward more of his notebooks from Stanford University Press, so I have at least managed the minor alchemy of turning blood into aphorisms. I like to think he’d be impressed by my dedication.

Maybe He Isn’t

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

****

As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. Similarly, in the surviving groups of the “nobility,” male and female. On the other hand, it is not rare to find today among working men, who before might be taken as the best example of what we are calling “mass,” nobly disciplined minds.

— José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

****

It would be a good thing (but nothing’s more difficult to do seriously) now and then to assume that all the ideas to which we have given most thought, the fruit of long and studious meditation are false or absurd—even though we cannot see at all how this could be.
One should treat severely everything for which one has an innate preference.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

****

Tiny Ropes

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, writing

Alan Jacobs:

Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.

Jacobs distinguishes between Substack subscribers, who have paid to receive something, and open-web supporters, who contribute because they approve of the work he has already done. The first arrangement carries expectations; the second merely ratifies an existing relationship. This distinction may work perfectly well for him. I have no reason to suspect otherwise.

My own temperament would ignore it completely. A reader who gave me fifty dollars as thanks for past services rendered would occupy just as much space in my mind as one who paid five dollars a month for future ones. The subscriber has entered an intelligible transaction and may cancel it whenever he pleases. The donor has made a gesture of generosity for which no return was formally required. That very absence of terms would make the obligation harder to discharge. The money would follow me back to the desk. Had I gone too long without posting? Was the next piece substantial enough? Was I writing something the donor would care to read? He might intend none of these questions. I would supply them on his behalf.

Nietzsche once wrote in a notebook:

I am passionately for independence, I sacrifice everything to it — probably because I have the most dependent soul and am tormented by the tiniest ropes more than others by chains.

It’s a startling glimpse of the man behind the great booming voice. He doesn’t describe independence as the natural condition of someone whom nothing can touch. He describes it as a defense devised by someone who can be touched too easily. The severity is compensatory. He guards himself because claims have too much power over him.

This changes the sound of much that Nietzsche wrote. His attacks on pity, for instance, are usually read as evidence of callousness. Yet in The Gay Science he elaborates on the earlier notebook entry:

How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral — to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life — if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it – and from our very own conscience – to flee into the conscience of others and into the lovely temple of the religion of pity.

Nietzsche therefore attempts to harden himself at the places where he is most permeable. His philosophy sometimes sounds like a barricade constructed by a man who knows how quickly the walls might fall. “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” he wrote in a letter to Peter Gast.

The same undertone appears in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which he calls independence “a privilege of the strong.” Read in isolation, it has everything required to intoxicate an adolescent male reader: the solitary hero, the labyrinth, the Minotaur, the suffering incomprehensible to common men. One naturally casts oneself as the tragic exception.

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.

But this isn’t aristocratic chest-thumping so much as a private warning. He’s saying to himself: You may not be as strong as you wish to be. Your effort to become strong may deform you. And after making a principle of solitude, you may discover that solitude is too much to bear.

I don’t refuse money because I am beyond its influence. I refuse it because its influence would be disproportionate. I guard my independence fiercely because I know how easily I can be bound. A person who is highly sensitive to obligation may begin to experience every request as an imposition, every favor as a debt, every affection as the first loop of a leash. He may snarl, spit, and hiss at ordinary human ties because he knows they will work on him. He may become so practiced at detecting ropes that even loose threads begin to look like restraints.

Still, it is better to know one’s susceptibility than to pretend to possess a freedom one does not have. Jacobs can accept contributions while preserving, in his own mind, a clear distinction between gratitude and purchase. I cannot.

Faceless Men

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the status quo that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform — who lack the conqueror’s mentality — are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

****

I do not speak to the weak: these want to obey and everywhere race toward slavery. In face of relentless nature, we still feel ourselves to be relentless nature! — But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

****

But if there were such secret brotherhoods, then most of us have occasionally met the kind of men who ought to be members of them. They are men who give us the impression that they have deliberately turned aside from power and fame. They are content to be comparatively obscure, to be known only to a small circle of friends and acquaintances, who do not hesitate to turn to them for guidance and help at times of crisis. They are not failures, except in the eyes of the vulgar and stupid. They may not be mystics, though I doubt if any of them are ever found with a materialist philosophy, but, like the mystics, their lives appear to be rooted in some other world.

They earn a living but never join in the general grab for prizes, possessions, fat jobs and bouquets. Except when their help is urgently demanded, they are never quite with us. They are friendly but never babblingly intimate. From the standpoint of Who’s Who and Fleet Street, they are nonentities; but in the circles where they are known, they are deeply respected and have much influence. We feel they could have been rich, powerful, famous, if they had wanted to be; but preferred another way of life. They are leaders who do not choose to lead. On the other hand, they are never missionaries, fanatical propagandists, martyrs. They are extraordinary men pretending, fairly successfully, to be ordinary men. They appear to be having a rest in this life, or to be waiting for some signal that the bulk of us will never recognize. There are never many of them, and perhaps we meet a true specimen of the type about once every ten years. And just as I do not delight in the powerful and famous, who have been mostly ruined on the way up, so I do delight in these Members of the Secret Brotherhood, the men who have never started to climb and who seem to have looked in on us from some other and better planet.

— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life

Obiter Scripta, no. 160

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

We are buds on a single tree — what do we know of what can become of us in the interest of the tree! But we have a consciousness as if we wanted to be and should be everything, a fantasy of ‘ego’ and everything ‘non-ego.’ Cease feeling ourselves to be such fantastical ego! Learn step by step to throw off the reputed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Realize egoism as error! Certainly do not construct altruism as the opposite! That would be the love of the other reputed individuals! No! Get beyond ‘me’ and ‘you’! Perceive cosmically!

— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

Poor Nietzsche is temperamentally incapable of serenity. Even when he approaches self-dissolution, he does it like a man waving a sword with his hair on fire. The ego may be an error, but by God, it will be destroyed heroically. A Buddhist monk might say, “Observe the arising and passing away of the self.” Nietzsche says, “SMASH THE REPUTED INDIVIDUAL AND PERCEIVE COSMICALLY!” Same mountain, much more lightning. Zen, but with a Prussian barracks aftertaste. The monastery has no meditation cushions, only cold baths, mountain walks, and aggressively annotated Heraclitus.

“A monk asked Master Nietzsche, ‘Does the dog have Buddha-nature?’
Nietzsche struck him with a riding crop and shouted, ‘THE DOG IS A BAD PHILOLOGIST!’”

Cooties On the Porch

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit

Stoics and Epicureans.— The Epicurean selects the situation, the persons, and even the events that suit his extremely irritable, intellectual constitution; he gives up all others, which means almost everything, because they would be too strong and heavy for him to digest. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it: he reminds one of that Arabian sect of the Assaua whom one encounters in Algiers: like these insensitive people, he, too, enjoys having an audience when he shows off his insensitivity, while the Epicurean would rather dispense with that, having his “garden!”

For those with whom fate attempts improvisations—those who live in violent ages and depend on sudden and mercurial people—Stoicism may indeed be advisable. But anyone who foresees more or less that fate permits him to spin a long thread does well to make Epicurean arrangements. That is what all those have always done whose work is of the spirit. For this type it would be the loss of losses to be deprived of their subtle irritability and be awarded in its place a hard Stoic hedgehog skin.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The distinction feels obvious once he makes it. The Epicurean picks, chooses and arranges; the Stoic sits and endures. The Epicurean asks what sort of life can best preserve his powers; the Stoic trains himself to thrive on whatever scraps fate pours into his dish. I can admire the latter in extremis. If fate “attempts improvisations” one may need the hedgehog skin. But squaring up to the universe and daring it to do its worst is a young man’s game. Middle age has made the question less theatrical. What am I trying to be strong for? Not for the young man’s sport of proving I can digest whatever gravel the universe serves up. The universe will always win that contest. I want strength enough to be a good spouse, a good friend, and a tolerably healthy animal; strength enough to read, work, and enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life.

As it happens, while I was thinking about Nietzsche’s Stoic who enjoys having an audience before whom to display his insensitivity, Ryan Holiday, the avatar of modern Stoic life-coaching, released a video objecting to Ivanka Trump’s praise of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The irony is almost too neat. The ancient Stoic showed off his hardness. The modern Stoic influencer shows off his sensitivity with eye-rolls and irritated grimaces. He does not say, “I have trained myself to endure fools, vulgarity, vanity, dynastic politics, and bad readers without nausea.” He says, in effect: please be assured that I do not accept this woman as an authorized appreciator of my Marcus Aurelius. “Stoicism is not a brand; it’s a practice,” he huffs, which is funny, because it very much is something of a brand for him, and he’s protecting it exactly like you would expect: by hurrying to distance it from being contaminated by association with a low-rent, gauche name like Trump. He talks like an evangelist but reacts like a brand manager. Stoicism is for everyone, yes — provided “everyone” means CEOs, Navy SEALs, quarterbacks, founders, and the sort of striver who buys leather-bound wisdom for the office shelf. But let the wrong sort of name praise Meditations, and suddenly the porch has a velvet rope and a guest list.

This is the perennial danger with philosophical/religious/spiritual outlooks once they become personal brands or lifestyle accessories. They stop being windows and become mirrors. Catherine Wilson’s Epicurus, when I read her How to Be an Epicurean, sounded coincidentally like a modern liberal academic Democrat. Holiday’s Marcus Aurelius coincidentally motivates Holiday to be inclusive, ethical, and to “do better.” In both cases, the ancient philosopher is not allowed to interrupt. He is invited in, dressed for the occasion, and made to ratify whatever the host already believed.

Holiday, of all people, ought to understand the possibility of transformation. His first book was not Lives of the Saints but Trust Me, I’m Lying, a manual-memoir of media manipulation. Yet that success helped make possible his later reinvention as America’s most visible Stoic popularizer. Very well. Let us grant the premise. People can change. A man may begin as a clever little vandal of the attention economy and end by preaching Marcus Aurelius to executives and athletes. But if that grace is available to Ryan Holiday, why is it not available to anyone else? Why may the former amoral media manipulator become a genuine Stoic, while Ivanka Trump, upon praising Meditations, must be treated as if she had smeared chewing gum on a relic? “The only similarity you have with the Aurelius family is that you’re a Commodus! And so are your shitty brothers!” Ah, yes, the ironies of history: if a great man like Marcus Aurelius could produce a degenerate son like Commodus, why couldn’t it work in reverse? Who’s to say that Ivanka’s understanding of Stoicism, even if we assume it to be shallow right now, couldn’t deepen? Stranger things have happened. But Holiday dismisses her appreciation as “cringe,” and “not real.” Stoicism demands “doing the right thing even when it costs you something,” a slogan so revolutionary it was adopted by a (cringe?) brand like Nike in an award-winning bid for market share in the attention economy.  Stoicism demands doing the right thing even when it’s painful, “even when it would mean, I don’t know, confronting your horrible family members?” And what would that accomplish, other than another brief spectacle in the news cycle, another serving of gossip and pro-wrestling drama for people who pretend they’re above such tawdry entertainment?

Part of the disappointment is watching yet another mind make the ritual genuflection. Even Stoicism, whose whole value should lie in helping us step back from the day’s petty tyrannies, must now shape itself around the great bedrock question of the age: Donald Trump, for or against? No one seems willing to say: this is larger than one politician. History has seen emperors, warlords, demagogues, buffoons, assassins, saints, frauds, and madmen. The point of reading Marcus Aurelius is not to acquire the correct contemporary voting reflex, but to ground oneself in a perspective capacious enough to survive them all. Yet somehow the former reality-TV host and real-estate tycoon has acquired the most precious property in the world: other people’s minds. And they handed him the deed for free.

Between Two Noises

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit

Better deaf than deafened.— Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to sell and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.

This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between two noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learned this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Poor Nietzsche thought David Strauss was a symptom of cultural decay. He thought the public intellectual arena was a fraudulent carnival in the early 1880s. Luckily for him, he never had to see Strauss presented as a thumbnail image: mouth agape, eyebrow raised, with three red arrows pointed at his face, under a caption screaming, “Scholar’s new book DESTROYS divinity of Jesus!” He had hucksters, yes — barkers, pamphleteers, academic charlatans, literary careerists: the usual fleas on the hide of civilization. But he didn’t have the algorithm: that tireless pimp of the nervous system, forever urging even decent minds to hitch up their skirts and show a little more leg for engagement.

In one of his unpublished notes, he says, “Becoming famous surrounds us with humans and their demands upon us. We must cast our fame into the sea.” Sour grapes in his case or not, he was right. Live unnoticed, said Epicurus. Scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs, said Montaigne. Worshiping the bitch-goddess SUCCESS breeds moral flabbiness, said William James. Our age always has a bargain ready: your face for a little reach, your anger for a little traffic, your shame for a little recurring revenue. Refuse it. Do not become a window prostitute in the red-light district of opinion. Bite the hand that offers the platform. Leave the bell unrung. Keep something unsold, for the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the algorithm, sponsored hysterical branded, dragging themselves through the monetized depths of content creation, looking for angry subscribers to smash that like button and subscribe…

Meep Meep!

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

Sigh— I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them—and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Words are the seducers of philosophers; they struggle in the nets of language.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

My own case is less flattering. Words may be nets, but I am as likely to be found hanging upside down in one of them as to have captured anything. If I am a hunter of insights, I am closer to Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote: forever creeping after the same prey with some new weapon of language, only to have the trap close on my own foot, or the shotgun blast rearrange the quarry’s beak for three seconds before it snaps back into place. Perhaps I have never been chasing separate insights at all. Perhaps there is only one insight, endlessly escaping over the horizon, tongue out, legs spinning, leaving me behind in a small puff of dust with another notebook full of arid words.

Memento Nescire

By in books, foolosophy, media/propaganda, nietzsche, psychology

Being a member of the species of stories increases this complication of signaling by several orders of magnitude. There was a time, many tens of thousands of years ago, when every individual discovered a great deal of what they knew, perhaps even most of what they knew, directly, using their own senses. But as we evolved into the species of stories, the proportion of knowledge we gained by being told, that came via the hearsay of the senses and perceptions of others, increased and kept increasing with every new storytelling technology, so that today almost everything we know comes indirectly from other people’s stories, and almost nothing we know comes directly from our senses.

— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

Most of what we call being informed is only knowing which strangers we currently trust. That isn’t shameful; it’s the condition of living in a complex civilization. But it is a poor foundation for the daily manufacture of righteous fury. If pressed hard enough — “How do you know? Did you see it? Did you measure it? Did you read the primary documents? Do you understand the institutional incentives?” — most certainties quickly reduce themselves to a more modest stance: someone I trust said so, and for now I believe him. Perfectly reasonable as a working rule. Thin gruel, however, for a casus belli.

That’s the absurdity of political news as middle-class recreational combat. The average participant is not a statesman, intelligence analyst, economist, epidemiologist, military planner, or local official. He is a person on a couch with a glowing rectangle, absorbing accounts of events he did not witness, in places he will not visit, involving institutions he cannot influence, interpreted by people whose incentives he barely understands. Then he turns around and treats this tissue of hearsay as grounds for moral aggression against neighbors, relatives, strangers, and former friends.

This is probably why so many political arguments become so feral so quickly. It is not because the combatants know so much, but because, somewhere below the performance, they suspect how little they know. The dissenter reminds us that our knowledge is secondhand, provisional, tribal, leased rather than owned. So we answer not with proportion but with force. We beat down the external opponent to quiet the internal skeptic.

One reason we never learn from experience is because most of the things we are wrong about do not kill us, bankrupt us, or even greatly inconvenience us. They merely embarrass us. Luckily, we are talented custodians of our own reputation. We forget our pratfalls, sand down their edges, or build them into a new legend of ourselves: yes, I was wrong, but only because I was too trusting, too generous, too open-minded; and in any case, my willingness to admit error now proves the very integrity that my error seemed to call into question. As Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil, ““I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains implacable. Eventually memory gives in.”

The Barn Door of Belief

By in atheism, books, foolosophy, nietzsche, religion

Many metaphysical and historical hypotheses are defended so strongly only because we are grateful for their consequences.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

Luis Parrales:

As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.” The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin.

My dad tells of being young and questioning the point of going to church rather than sleeping in on Sunday morning. My grandfather’s answer was basically instrumental: this way of life is the best one we know of, so this is what we do. You don’t have to believe, but you ought to do it anyway. Rufo and Beha are doing different versions of the same thing. Rufo is grateful to Christianity for its public consequences: order, restraint, continuity, a check on social and ideological disintegration. Beha is grateful to it for its private consequences: a way of making sense of love, gratitude, and the felt richness of a life no longer experienced as absurd or self-enclosed. One sees Christianity as civilizational ballast; the other as existential explanation.

This is understandable enough, but still post-hoc. The barn door of belief has been standing open for a long time, and the horse is far down the road, yet we still stand around arguing over whose fault it was that the latch was not secured. Meanwhile, the real problem is not retrospective blame but the peculiar modern situation itself. We find ourselves having to theorize our way into a felt social ethic. Previous moral orders were never quite as organic as nostalgia pretends; they were formed by custom, ritual, prestige, repetition, shame, authority, and no small amount of coercion. But because that machinery had become old and settled, it looked “natural.” Now the machinery is exposed, and we distrust whoever lays hands on it.

Nietzsche saw this coming too. Moral law, he noted elsewhere, had long been experienced as something standing above our own likes and dislikes, something to be discovered, inherited, or commanded, not something we openly fabricated for ourselves. That older confidence has decayed. We moderns, burdened with too much historical knowledge and too much self-consciousness, do not easily submit to a law we know to be, at least in part, our own artifact. We want obligation, but we also want to inspect its wiring. We want authority, but only after it has passed our private audit. We want thick moral formation in a culture trained to regard thick demands as intrusive, manipulative, or vaguely tyrannical.

Lichtenberg saw another part of the process with equal clarity: “Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.” That’s how moral change often works. First come the scouts, the eccentrics, the blasphemers, the people willing to test the terrain and absorb the danger of novelty. Then, once the ground has been surveyed and softened, the heavy brigade follows: institutions, schools, bureaucracies, moralizers, respectable opinion. What gets called “consensus” is often just yesterday’s audacity after it has acquired prestige, rituals, and penalties. Today’s free spirit becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

Exhortations to “just go through the motions” of belief are ultimately unsatisfying. If the old truth-claims no longer compel assent, then churchgoing risks becoming a kind of moral cosplay, a tactical re-enchantment undertaken for the sake of good consequences. Perhaps that can sustain a few people for a while. But it can also be secularized. If the real point is social cohesion, mutual aid, moral discipline, and some check on atomized self-absorption, then the obvious question arises: why could those things not be sought under some other banner? Once religion is defended primarily as useful, it forfeits any automatic exemption from replacement.

That does not mean the secular alternatives are easy to build, or likely to be better. On the contrary, that is precisely the difficulty. It is one thing to sketch a secular ethic on paper and another to create institutions, habits, loyalties, and sacrifices sturdy enough to live by. Science will not do this for us. An expert class will not do it for us. Administrative procedure will not do it for us. Stable social orders require some mixture of persuasion and coercion, affection and discipline, inner assent and outer pressure. The old religious frameworks once supplied much of that, and their weakening has left a vacuum no one yet knows how to fill without smuggling in either hypocrisy or force.

So the question is not simply whether Christianity once did this work better than its rivals, or whether some new ideology might do it worse. The question is what becomes of a society that no longer quite believes, yet still badly needs to be formed? Which faction will eventually impose a convincing social ethic, and for how long? No one knows. What is clear is only that we have inherited a vast cultural task, and that no amount of pious nostalgia or managerial optimism can relieve us of it.

Obiter Scripta, no. 156

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

I wish men would begin by respecting themselves: everything else follows from that. Certainly, with just that one is finished for the others: it’s the last thing they can forgive. What? A man who respects himself?

— Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks

I like that this avoids the Scylla of performative self-depreciation and the Charybdis of therapeutic affirmation. Both are still groveling pleas to an audience. Vanity they understand. Woundedness they understand. Even self-hatred is legal tender, socially speaking. But a person who seems to stand on his own authority, without begging to be patted or absolved, feels like a rebuke to everyone still performing for the room. A man who respects himself is harder to recruit, harder to shame, harder to manipulate. He does not automatically hand others the right to define him. That independence reads, to many people, as insolence. It shrugs off the grasping hands of insecurity, apology, or neediness with which other people get a grip on you. As Don Draper put it in a Nietzschean moment — you feel bad for me? I don’t think about you at all.

Shadows of Our Feelings

By in aphorisms, foolosophy, identity, nietzsche, psychology

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

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I think Nietzsche is right about this, and the older I get, the stranger it seems that we do not dwell on it more often. We go through life acting as if our thoughts were simply present, intact, at the moment of experience — as if our inner life arrived already captioned with subtitles. But that is not how it happens. The words, concepts, and sense-making narrative come later. What comes first is something denser, murkier, less articulate: a fleeting atmosphere of attraction or aversion, boredom or interest, ease or anxiety. “Vibes,” as the yoots say these days.

I want to return to the “Spencer’s epiphany” that I described last week and look at it from a different angle. What did I actually think in that moment? What was the nature of my mental experience? It’s a bit too post-hoc to even describe it as “thought.” It was more that I felt a faint but unmistakable lack of real interest. Alongside that came a twinge of anxiety. I could feel that I was not quite sharing the group enthusiasm, and I instinctively understood that there were risks in not sharing it. At seventeen, in that era, one did not especially want the other boys saying, “Whoa, dude, are you gay?”

That, as best I can minimally reconstruct it, is what I felt — the absence of an expected sensation, awkward sudden awareness of that absence, and mild anxiety. What I did not have was a ticker of neatly articulated propositions scrolling across my mind in perfect syntax. I did not literally think: Aha, I am observing the mimetic nature of male desire and the social enforcement of erotic scripts. I did not think about Pavlov’s dogs at that moment. I did not think about role performance, conformity, or the gap between direct experience and retrospective narrative. All of that came later, in installments. But when those thoughts did arrive, they seemed to correspond to the original feeling in some meaningful way. They cast a recognizable shadow. Often, in our habitual routines, the shadows threaten to replace the thing itself.

The children’s “telephone game” comes to mind. Someone starts by whispering a phrase into the ear of the next person, who hastily repeats what he thinks he heard to the next person, and so on around the circle. By the end, the final sentence still bears some relation to the original, but it has been altered by haste, compression, convenience, and mishearing. Our minds do something like this to experience all the time. A raw feeling becomes a thought; the thought becomes a memory; the memory becomes a story; the story becomes an identity. At each stage, something is preserved and something is lost. The final version may be cleaner, sharper, more straightforward, and more flattering than the original, but also emptier. Simpler. A shadow.

Many Buddhist writers are good on this point, because they are merciless about the mind’s tendency to narrate, posture, embellish, and congratulate itself. You take a moment to notice the difference between experience and the story you are telling about experience, and almost instantly another story appears: Damn, look how thoughtful and sensitive I am for noticing that. Our words instinctively shape themselves into a mirror in which we admire our reflections. You do not get over this. The “monkey mind” is not cured. The best you can do is catch it in the act and see it for what it is. That doesn’t eradicate it, but it weakens the spell. It reminds you that the commentary is not the thing commented on.

Weight training offers a useful analogy here. In ordinary life, the body is efficient. If you need to get a box off the floor, it recruits whatever muscles are strongest and most available to do the job. It does not care about your interest in isolating the adductors or the rhomboids. It wants the box moved. But training changes the goal. Now the point is not merely to complete the movement by any means necessary. The point is to identify the slacker and make that muscle do its share. The stronger muscles are always eager to “help,” and their help is exactly the problem. The traps jump in. The quads take over. Momentum does half the work. The rep gets done, but not in the way intended.

Consciousness seems to work similarly. The narrative-making machinery is the trapezius of the mind: strong, useful, efficient, and forever eager to take over the lift. It barges in and says, “Out of the way, subtle feelings, fleeting hesitations, half-formed intuitions! I’ll turn this into a coherent story.” And in one sense that is a gift. Narrative makes experience portable. It gives us something we can carry around and communicate. But it also prevents the smaller truths from ever doing their own work. The first flicker of boredom, the tiny jolt of anxiety, the vague sense of falseness — these are like weak or neglected muscles. They are easy to miss. They are quickly overshadowed. To attend to them requires the same thing that good training requires: slowing down, reducing compensation, and learning to feel what normally gets buried under the efficient performance of the whole system.

That’s one way that seemingly “meathead” activities like training can illuminate more “egghead” subjects like phenomenology or consciousness. Both involve learning finer discrimination. Both involve discovering how much of what we call normal functioning is really a blur of compensations. And both involve the humbling realization that competence and clarity are not the same thing. A movement can be completed without the intended muscle doing its work. A life can be narrated without the original experience ever being honestly noticed.

Nietzsche’s aphorism remains exact: thoughts are the shadows of our feelings. Not lies, necessarily. Not random distortions. Shadows do correspond to bodies. But they flatten, simplify, and darken what cast them. The trick, such as it is, is not to abolish thought or narrative (which is impossible anyway), but to remember, from time to time, that the shadow is not the thing.

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