nietzsche

Penelope’s Cloth

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

Future of science. To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented.

If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Nietzsche sounds surprisingly close here to Isaiah Berlin’s later picture of modernity. He sees that science, criticism, and truthfulness are indispensable, but also that human beings cannot live by demystification alone. Art, religion, metaphysics, passion, illusion — these may be intellectually suspect, yet they supply warmth, motive, and psychic cohesion. A higher culture would somehow preserve both: the discipline of science and the heat of nonscience. That’s very close to Berlin’s sense that our civilization inherits rival goods from Enlightenment and Romanticism alike, and that neither can simply abolish the other. The tragic note is that this balance is not a settled synthesis but a permanent strain. We do not solve the conflict; we merely endure it, or fail to.

Nietzsche’s image of “double brain chambers” is both striking and hopelessly optimistic. It imagines a mind neatly built for compartmentalization: truth in one chamber, life-giving illusion in the other, each kept separate but cooperative, each doing its proper work. Fine in theory, but human beings aren’t like that. We are less like a feat of mechanical engineering than a stew pot, with scientific claims, myths, political passions, inherited loyalties, utopian fantasies, and resentments all simmering together and threatening to boil over. Our balance, when it exists at all, is less the poise of an ballet dancer than the arc of a pendulum: from far away, there may be a predictable, constrained range of motion; on the ground, where we actually live, there’s a ceaseless lurch from one extreme to the other.

Obiter Scripta, no. 154

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche, obiter scripta

Hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it is almost a question mark over his right to ‘philosophy.’ Precisely because he is the exception, he must take the rule under his wing, must help everything average to keep up its faith in itself.

— Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks

This is one of the aphorisms that changed my life when I read it as a young man. Here he’s basically saying: if your identity depends on hating the average, you’re still orbiting the average. It was a call to stop needing an enemy. Contempt is a dependency: you require the thing you despise to complete your self-image. Nietzsche suggested a better ideal: genuine tolerance for difference, and a kind of intellectual independence that refuses the cheap pleasures of being reactive. We can’t live free of all relationships, but we can choose them more deliberately: not as planets chained to the obvious gravitational centers, but as comets — still in a larger orbit, just not the one everyone expects.

Talkin’ About Your Damage and You’re Wasting My Time

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, psychology

Where will we find, we loneliest of the lonely, we human beings — for this is certainly what we will one day become through the aftereffects of science — where will we find a companion for the human being! Formerly we sought a king, a father, a judge for everything, because there was a shortage of proper kings, proper fathers, proper judges. Later we will seek the friend — human beings will have become self-sufficient majesties and solar orbits — but lonely. The myth-building drive will then turn outward toward the friend.

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

Meghan Murphy:

As mentioned in my last piece, I am very Mean and Bad and Not Compassionate, unlike the Goods and Empathetics of the world. As such, it should come as no surprise to you that I am tired of your mental illness.

To be specific, I am tired of your labeling of every struggle and character flaw you have as a “mental illness,” with which you will be stuck with for life, and that impedes you from doing any normal thing humans have always had to do.

…You people are pathetic and ridiculous. I’m sorry. I realize this, again, sounds mean and uncompassionate and that I will be told I just don’t understand what it’s like to struggle with ailments like not being able to get places on time (or at all) or think about what food I might eat tomorrow or the next day.

Some mental illness is devastating, disabling, and not something you can shame people out of with a brisk pep talk. But her irritation isn’t pure cruelty. It’s a reaction to a culture that has turned “mental health” into the default explanatory language for a huge range of ordinary misery, often with a tone of grave sanctimony that leaves no room for distinctions. We all know people who act like a list of diagnoses is a substitute for a personality, or an excuse for multiple failures.

But Murphy is yelling at people who, in many cases, are merely doing what humans always do: responding to incentives. They’re lonely, anxious, and trying to gain approval in a culture that rewards visible suffering with sympathy. Under this climate of opinion, the safest way to ask for attention is to frame it as a diagnosis, and the easiest way to feel special is to feel wounded in a tasteful, boutique way. Indeed, where will we self-sufficient majesties, we moderns, find “the friend”? The tragedy is that many go looking for him or her in the comment section or among the followers, where “validation” is cheap, intermittent, and addictive, and where the one thing they actually need, a real person who cares enough to stay and help through hardship, can’t be manufactured. Even if the cure is as boring as good habits, physical movement, and a fuller social life, the lesson has to arrive as friendship, not as another angry performance on the same virtual stage.

And the friend really is missing, for a nontrivial slice of the country. Pew found 8% of Americans say they have no close friends. The Survey Center on American Life reports 12% with no close friends, and notes that in 1990 it was 3%. The Surgeon General’s advisory goes even broader: it cites survey evidence that only 39% of U.S. adults felt “very connected” emotionally, and that approximately half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness. If that’s even roughly true, then a lot of what we’re calling a “mental health crisis” is also, perhaps even mostly, a friendship and connection crisis.

Many people are overdiagnosed and overmedicated, but doctors aren’t necessarily stupid or wicked; the system just runs on what scales. A quick checklist can flag “loss of interest” and “low motivation,” but it can’t tell you whether you’re clinically depressed, merely demoralized, socially starved, or trapped in a life that has become frictionless and empty. The scalable outputs are predictable: therapy referral, a prescription, symptom management. Sometimes that’s the right path. Sometimes it’s just looking for your lost keys under the streetlight blocks away because the light is better there.

Viktor Frankl should be read more widely. For a lot of otherwise comfortable people, the problem isn’t a disorder so much as a lack of meaning: the absence of projects worth suffering for, relationships that fill the days, responsibilities that make life feel necessary. When meaning is missing, people still experience the ache; they just call it anxiety. They call it depression. They call it ADHD. They call it “burnout.” Then they shop for management strategies, because management is what modern life offers.

And so we get the “worried well” as a social type: healthy, wealthy, educated people treating therapy as routine maintenance, like a dentist appointment for the soul. The married couple with two personal therapists and a marriage therapist isn’t necessarily ridiculous; it may even be helping them. But it’s also a sign of the times: friendship professionalized, conversation outsourced, meaning handled by appointment. A paid hour of attention stands in for what used to come from a circle of friends, a congregation, a club, a shared craft, a common project.

If the deepest need is “the friend,” then the remedy won’t be found in a bottle, and it won’t be delivered by a social-media lash. Pills scale. Protocols scale. Even therapy, now, is being packaged, systematized, and app-ified. I personally know of people who use chatbots for therapists. But friendship doesn’t scale. Meaning doesn’t scale. You can’t automate the one person who knows you well enough to tell you, with affection, “Stop doing that. Come on. Let’s go do something hard and worth doing. I’m here.” Nietzsche is prophetic once again: we became self-sufficient solar orbits — and then discovered that self-sufficiency is a poor substitute for a steadfast companion.

Test the Smallest Thing

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

All habituations (e.g., to a certain food, like coffee, or a certain timing) in the long run have the result of cultivating a certain kind of human being. Therefore look around you! Test the smallest thing! Where does it want to go? Does it belong to your kind, to your goal?

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

Another day, another viral video. Like a moth to a flame, someone else decides to blow up their life and career for a moment of attention on social media. I don’t believe most of these people sit down and choose ruin in cold blood. What they choose, over and over, in tiny doses, is something smaller: the little performance, the little outrage, the little “say the thing” that gets rewarded. Then one day the habit reaches its natural conclusion, and the person who hits “post” is already doomed.

Aristotle and Nietzsche agree on one blunt point: you become the kind of person you practice being. Aristotle says we become just (or not) by doing just acts (or not), until the repetition hardens into character. There’s something liberating about this. It loosens the superstitious grip of “That’s just how I am” and even “That’s what my upbringing made me.” But it also hands you the responsibility: if you can be formed, you can be reformed — and that means noticing which habits are shaping you into someone you don’t actually want to be. As Unamuno said, we should aim to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

Nietzsche’s advice is almost insultingly practical: test the smallest thing. Not your grand ideals; your reflexes. What do you do in the ten-second gaps? What do you reach for when you’re bored, or annoyed, or lonely, or pleased with yourself? Those are not neutral gestures. They’re the training regimen.

The Devil Take All the Imitators and Followers

By in books, nietzsche

My goal is not for everyone, nevertheless it is communicable, on account of similar humans as well as because those opposed will gain strength and pleasure from it to formulate their essence for themselves, too, and to realize it as working spirit. I want to help all who seek their model by showing how one seeks a model: and my greatest joy is encountering the individual models that do not resemble me. The devil take all the imitators and followers and panegyrists and admirers and devotees!

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

This might be easy to misread as mere hauteur: he’s “not for everyone,” he’s writing for “similar humans.” Lots of people say that and mean, “I’m for a better everyone.” Nietzsche is saying something stranger, and rarer: my aim is communicable without being recruiting. The point isn’t to gather admirers; the point is to create a kind of wake turbulence in which different types, sympathetic and hostile alike, clarify themselves. He would even prefer that those opposed to him will “gain strength and pleasure” from the encounter, because the opposition forces them to formulate their essence — to stop living on borrowed slogans and become, in his phrase, a “working spirit.” (That is: not a mere opinion-haver, but a stance that actually animates a life.) It’s a surprisingly big-picture, almost civic-minded ambition.

“The devil take all the imitators…” The disciple is the least interesting kind of agreement: it’s agreement that produces no new organism, only a photocopy. He’d rather be misunderstood by a live mind than perfectly understood by a dead one. This is why he’s so hard on evangelism. In The Will to Power he asks why idealists, the moment they find some “bizarre ideal,” feel compelled to propagandize for it, almost as if they have no right to it unless everyone else recognizes it too. The hipster and the conformist secretly shake hands. One asks the herd what to like; the other asks the herd what to like so he can like the opposite. Both are still crowd-directed.

Nietzsche’s better alternative isn’t “always be avant-garde.” That’s just a different uniform. The alternative is inner-directedness — liking what you like because it answers something real in your temperament, your needs, your curiosity, your sense of life. If it’s popular, fine. If it’s obscure, fine. If people join you, fine. If they don’t, also fine. The goal is not to found a sect of “Nietzscheans,” but to help people (including opponents) become more sharply themselves. He can sound almost Zen-master-ish — “go away ”— because he knows that the easiest way for a reader to evade the hard work is to turn the writer into an idol. The writer becomes a permission slip to stop thinking. He’d rather you take your own ideal as far as it will go, and then take heart, because others will fly even farther.

Obiter Scripta, no. 152

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

I have always composed my writings with my whole body and life: I do not know what “purely intellectual” problems are.

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

Same here. When I write, I’m not filing papers in a cabinet labeled Ideas; I’m trying to metabolize experience into something I can understand. Often, I’m not even sure what I think until I start trying to write it down. Philosophy as “how to live” begins in the pressure of actual days and tries to make a life more lucid.

Cultivate Our Temperament

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

It is in our hands to cultivate our temperament like a garden. To plant experiences in it, to strike out others: to found a beautiful quiet avenue of friendship, to be conscious of secret views upon glory — to have ready paths to all these good spots in one’s garden so that it may not fail us when we need it!

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

I like that he envisions an active role in what most people treat as a given. Temperament not as a horoscope, but more like a landscape — worked, shaped, improved. You don’t have to deny what happened to you, but you also don’t have to treat it as your permanent job title. The modern temptation is to explain yourself until the explanation becomes the self: “My father was aloof, my mother was manipulative — therefore this is what I am.” That story may be true as history, even useful as diagnosis; but it’s a terrible constitution. It turns causes into fate. Nietzsche’s instinct is to demote the past from sovereign to raw material: what can I do with this? what can I plant? what can I prune? what paths should I keep clear so I can reach the good places when I’m under strain? Some experiences you cultivate because they make you steadier: friendships that calm you, habits that keep you sane, small “views” that restore perspective. Other experiences you strike out — not by pretending they never happened, but by refusing them unlimited squatter’s rights. And even the worst things are still compostable. They can become material that, once broken down, feeds something better.

Tomorrow Answers Everything

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy, nietzsche

The unfortunate who all at once want to attain virtue through a transformation! And despair at a relapse! Whereas practice makes perfect.

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

January is when my gym turns into a little Ellis Island of self-improvement. New faces. New vows. The staff gives tours to people interested in signing up. I’ve seen a fair amount of them these last few weeks.

I’m glad people are trying. I mean that. But I also start from a skeptical stance, because the whole thing is so heavily scripted. The cultural calendar has a “New Year, New Me” plotline built into it, and plots are hypnotic. They lend borrowed conviction. They make you feel like you’re already halfway changed, just because you’ve announced the intention to change.

I’m not proud of it, but January brings out my inner Snafu from The Pacific — the guy who tells Sledge not to bother learning the new replacements’ names because “they’ll be dead in a few days.” The gym translation is obviously less tragic: most of them won’t be dead, however much they feel like it after a few hard training sessions. They’ll just be gone by February, evaporated with the resolution-enthusiasm. And I hate that this cynical little reflex exists in me, because the decent response is the opposite: be friendly anyway, and help the ones who end up staying.

Transformation is a romance-novel word. It promises a before-and-after montage. It suggests that what you really need is not a new habit but a new identity — some sudden moral molt where you wake up and discover you have become the kind of person who loves broccoli and Bulgarian squats. Relapse, in the transformation story, isn’t “part of training.” It’s “proof you are who you always were.” One missed week becomes an existential referendum. The spell breaks, and the old self trudges back in. But relapse is only catastrophic if you were depending on feeling to do the work.

That’s why I trust the April or September sign-up more than the January sign-up — maybe irrationally. The April/September person doesn’t have a national chorus chanting behind them. No “fresh start” motivation. No holiday guilt. Just an ordinary Tuesday and a decision that doesn’t come prepackaged with fireworks. I could be wrong about this (the calendar is a convenient on-ramp, and I’m sure plenty of January people stick), but the vibe is different: April/September feels like someone quietly taking responsibility rather than auditioning for a reboot.

Motivation is what you have when the gym is new and the possibilities are infinite. Practice is what you build for the day when the gym is crowded, your sleep was trash, the parking lot is icy, your knees feel 10 years older, and your brain starts bargaining: You can go tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Practice is what happens when tomorrow comes and is not better.

Obiter Scripta, no. 151

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

Daily I am astonished: I do not know myself!

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

According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud said that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” And yet, here we have it otherwise, straight from the horse-hugger’s mouth. More proof that Nietzsche was ahead of his time: he revealed Freud to be a charlatan even before the old bullshit artist’s career had begun.

“Know thyself” is the foundation stone of Western philosophy. You try to know yourself; you discover an impulse you didn’t authorize; you explain it; then you discover the explanation was also an impulse. At that point you begin to suspect that Delphi wasn’t offering guidance so much as taunting humanity with a red-dot laser pointer and watching us pounce on the wall for three thousand years.

Repaying a Teacher Badly

By in identity, nietzsche

Richard Hanania:

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life.

There’s a certain genre of essay that pretends to be about an author but is really about the narrator. The author is a mirror, held at a flattering angle, so the reader can watch a man become the kind of man who writes essays about becoming the kind of man who writes essays. Hanania announces he’s “outgrown” Nietzsche, and the essay ends with…Hanania as lone hero, proudly savoring the mob’s demands for his banishment. Nietzsche isn’t useful to him as a philosopher with arguments, contradictions, and a very specific historical location. He’s useful as a personality test young men take when they’re trying to decide whether their contempt for the herd is a virtue or a coping mechanism. Nietzsche becomes a kind of cologne: spray it on, feel sharper, walk taller.

Then you remember he did the same thing to Shakespeare. “Shakespeare is Fake” isn’t an argument that Shakespeare is bad. It’s an argument that you’re a sheep if you think Shakespeare is good — and, by implication, that Hanania is the rare non-sheep who can see through the spell. He explicitly calls the pro-Shakespeare response “the kind of argument made by people who are such sheep that they can’t imagine a non-sheep existence,” and says the reader is a “conformist.” Shakespeare is a foil so Hanania can play the role of brave iconoclast who might, in a controlled lab setting, dethrone the Bard. (Reach out, psychology professors! Let’s do a randomized controlled trial of my greatness.)

His “elite human capital” theme is where the self-narration becomes a full brand. It takes the old “smart people should run things” assumption and gives it an air of social science, so it can mingle at better parties. In his essay “Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal,” he treats the association between intelligence/education and political orientation as a kind of hard political reality.

The rhetorical advantage is obvious: if the “smart set” tends liberal, then any conservative movement worth taking seriously must either appease them, or explain why the smart set is wrong without sounding anti-smart. Hanania’s solution is to build a bridge that always leads back to Hanania: a conservatism that flatters elite cognition, calls itself empirical, scolds the populists, and stands ready to be adopted by credentialed liberals who enjoy the thrill of “I listen to edgy people, I’m not tribal.” Nonetheless, as Nietzsche might say, behold the man:

Like a cat landing on its feet, he manages to convince himself that his ineptitude at the sort of simple labor that countless teenagers can handle without a problem is actually proof that he was destined for greater things. Well, similarly, when Nietzsche retired from academia, he first aimed at becoming a professional gardener:

It’s a funny parallel: bookish, socially-inept man fantasizes about “real work,” gets humbled by the physical world. But then it splits at the exact point where character shows. Nietzsche’s response was: Fine — then overcome yourself anyway; turn weakness into a discipline; make your life a task. Hanania’s response is more modern: not “overcome,” but “rebrand.” Nietzsche wanted you to become harder on yourself; Hanania mostly wants the world to become softer on Hanania.

In a Maggoty World

By in aphorisms, foolosophy, nietzsche

But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty world really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace which the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, be made to lie down in green pastures?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

Strictly speaking, that’s the logical conclusion of seeing clearly in a world where nothing “matters” in any cosmic sense. If life is short and ends in oblivion, why not just believe whatever makes you feel good and be done with it? Why not take the spiritual fentanyl?

A thinker, Nietzsche says, is the creature in whom “the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.” The old opposition — cold truth versus warm illusion — won’t quite do anymore. The appetite for truth itself can become a way of living, even a way of consoling oneself. You can take pride in being the sort of person who stares at the rictus grin on the face of existence without flinching, perhaps even while smirking. You can make a little ego-cult out of not needing the green pastures.

That, I suspect, is where a lot of unbelievers end up, myself included. I don’t believe in souls, afterlives, or a creator god keeping score, but I still behave as if there were such a thing as truth — lower-case and provisional, perhaps, but not wholly plastic — and as if harmonizing with it offered a satisfaction you can’t get from being your own sycophantic courtier. Even if “truth” isn’t another name for God, it serves much the same function: something that stands outside me and corrects me, something I can fail to live up to.

Of course that, too, may be one more life-preserving error. But if I’m going to live on stories, I’d rather live on the story that says: see as clearly as you can, refuse the deliberate lie, and then, knowing full well that nothing lasts, help build and protect a few small oases of decency and meaning anyway. Not because they’ll endure forever, but because a world of sand castles honestly built is still preferable to a Disneyland of comforting fables.

Distinct Observations

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, while a good many of the numbered sections in which most of his books consist have the compactness and epigrammatic quality supposedly characteristic of aphorisms, a good many others do not. They instead are paragraph-length or even page-length reflections of a frequently related but also relatively self-contained nature. Yet even these longer reflections share with genuine aphorisms the characteristic of being distinct observations, rather than clearly connected sequential paragraphs in a sustained line of thought. They typically make (and sometimes elaborate) a point of some sort on some topic, but need (and are intended) to be thought about in conjunction with other points on the topic, both in the same book parts and elsewhere. This makes reading most of Nietzsche’s books a very different experience — and challenge — from reading chapters in a typical philosophical monograph. And what makes understanding both his kind of philosophy and his philosophical thinking even more challenging is that he wrote no definitive treatises, and instead gives us almost nothing more than these bits and pieces, leaving it to us to try to figure out what to make of them collectively.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

Nietzsche was my first experience of “aphorisms,” so I’m afraid I’ve imprinted on him to the extent that it’s hard to read other, more traditional versions without seeing them as lacking. The ones that are brief often seem too shallow to me, little more than quips. Others rely on rhetorical symmetry, like a tweet I saw at random this morning: “The left wing view of human nature is rosy and idealized while left wing art is grim and ugly. The right wing view of human nature is grim and ugly while right wing art is rosy and idealized.” The effect relies on the neat inversion of chiasmus, which can lull the reader into accepting the premise without thinking, “Wait a minute; is that really accurate in most cases?” It seems to me that many of Nietzsche’s best aphorisms are too long to be rhetorically tidy like that (while still displaying genuine rhetorical skill), but not so long as to outgrow the “aphorism” designation.

In his book The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, Gary Saul Morson — who pleasingly agrees with me that Oscar Wilde’s witticisms are formulaic and shallow, a charge I might extend to La Rochefoucauld — classifies and examines several varieties of short-form writing, from aphorisms and maxims to apothegms and dicta. He categorizes “thoughts,” which he names in honor of Pascal’s Pensées, as belonging to “the family of short genres while more closely resembling an unfinished longer one.” He adds, “It is hard to say just where the thought as a genre ends and the essay begins. Many resemble the germ, or else the residue, of an essay.” He names Lichtenberg and Nietzsche as the other two masters of the form. I like the cut of his jib here, but I fear that “thoughts” is too generic of a term to describe a specific style of short-form writing. Same goes for “reflections.” If I were forced to choose a term, I might go with “reflective fragments.” Maybe even “assays,” just so I could say, “Outis Niemand: putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assay’ since 2005.”

Livin’ La Vida Contemplativa

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, nietzsche, who's žižoomin' who?

In the end, however, the Nietzsche of Human rather surprisingly accords the highest rank—among levels of Cultur of humanity and sensibility in both a society and a human being—to a quite different kind of spirituality he envisions. He introduces it by way of the classical expression vita contemplativa — the “contemplative life,” which rises above involvement in all things human, reflects upon them, and endeavors to comprehend them.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

The phrase vita contemplativa may suggest incense and monk’s cells. I take it more pragmatically: the practice of standing far enough back from the day’s noise to see the pattern in it. Not otherworldly “spirituality,” just disciplined perspective — history when it helps, psychology when it helps, a scrap of everyday conversation when it helps, all woven into a view of how to live. And the contemplative life is my summum bonum. I’m one of those “whose only aim is to observe how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of other men’s lives, in order to judge and regulate their own,” as Montaigne put it. A life spent reflecting and endeavoring to comprehend is a life well-lived.

I Googled “vita contemplativa” to remind myself what Aristotle originally said about it. The first page of results were mostly for a recent book of that title by Byung Chul-Han, “the Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher,” as he was dubbed by the New Yorker. Knowing that “the Internet” has previously been infatuated with that flatulent, fraudulent pufferfish of a self-promoting provocateur posing as a philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, I went to the “read sample” page on Amazon with low hopes. They were not subsequently raised. Within the first four pages, we’ve already been treated to mentions of Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, and “capitalist relations of production.” Well, thank goodness I didn’t waste any money on more grad-student seminar bullshit, at least.

Mihi Ipsi Scripsi (In the Age of ‘Doing Numbers’)

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

On the other hand, just as many pronouncements may be found that attested to his disinterest in potential readers. “Mihi ipsi scripsi” — “I wrote it for myself” — was the motto he had selected for himself, perhaps also to prevent disappointments, while working on Zarathustra. The same ambivalence emerged from the fact that he had addressed the book to “everyone and to no one.” “How could I write for readers?…Rather, I make notations for myself,” can be read in a notebook from the late 1880s. The question of Nietzsche’s audience was further complicated by the fact that he was convinced he was ahead of his age by a generation, if not by several.

— Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: A Tale of a Redemption

In 2005, a couple friends and I started a short-lived blog to join the general conversation. I didn’t have a voice yet, so my efforts were mostly derivative. By the time I finally started to write things that didn’t suck, the crowd had drifted to newer platforms and shorter attention spans. It didn’t matter; writing turned out to be intrinsically rewarding. The bargain I made with myself was simple: keep the work addressed to one exacting reader —me— and let others overhear it if they like.

Then came the metricized web. In 2006 I was uploading obscure musical tracks to YouTube and getting DMs like, “love this!! hey subscribe to my channel!!” I’d check their page: a few shaky cam clips and nothing I’d ever want to see again. I kept wondering, like an overly-rational Vulcan, why would I volunteer to be notified every time this dork posts? Eventually I learned that this was just the new etiquette: don’t offer value, collect it. The request wasn’t transactional (“here’s something you’ll love in return”); it was numerical (“help me inflate this meaningless metric so that I can pretend my inner self is something other than a howling wasteland”). Today’s creator programs formalize it: payouts and promotion tied to “engagement,” with replies and outrage acting like adrenaline. If ten thousand people rage-reply and thirty thousand boost it, the algorithm pays out, and discourse tilts toward provocation. It’s not about conversation; it’s a slot machine that rings louder the more you debase yourself to pull the lever. Now, I feel an irrational rage every time I see an ostensible adult boast about achieving a particular round-number follower count, or about a viral post “doing numbers.” How many of these “followers” are real people who actually read each post carefully and comprehend it? How many of these “content creators” even care, though? Numbers are all that matter, like insecure teenagers in a perpetual dick-measuring contest. I want to charge into the Temple of Elon and overturn all the payout tables. “My blogosphere was to be called a house of conversation, but you have turned it into a den of shitposters.”

I’m Gen-X, and the old ethos still feels right: strive for status if you must, but don’t pant for it in public. Obsession over “selling out” could get precious, and of course it was largely hypocritical, but it kept dignity within reach, at least. Even a “too cool for school” stance like ours was still a tribute to an established norm: it would be pathetic and undignified for an adult to chase after mere popularity for its own sake. By the early ’00s, I was belatedly realizing that no such restraint existed anymore. Empty affirmation was all anyone seemed to care about. I’d rather stick with the Nietzschean attitude — a book for all and none — and use outdated measures of value instead: posts reread, saved, passed along from one person to another. If the age needs me later, it will find me; until then, I’ll keep making notations for myself — several generations ahead, naturally.

On the Urology of Style

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche

There are trickling thinkers and flowing ones, just as springs differ from one another. Lichtenberg holds his glass diligently beneath and eventually fills it full; but he did not have the time to pass the full glass to us; his relatives have measured out the drops to us.

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

I make time on weekends to read a little more of Leopardi’s Zibaldone. Now there’s a flowing thinker. I’m one of the trickling thinkers. Nietzsche practically diagnoses a condition I call benign prostatic hermeneutics: frequent urges to compose, minimal output per attempt, and the sense that something crucial remains lodged behind the sphincter of style.

My muse is enlarged and pressing on the urethra of expression. There’s pressure, there’s intent, there’s even dignity if you squint — yet what arrives is a dribbling paragraph, two if I’m lucky. Mine is not a river of thought; it’s a late-night bathroom visit: urgent, meager, repeat. Still, the cup fills…eventually.

 

The Philosopher of Sensual Pleasure

By in books, bricolage, nietzsche, philosophy

The philosopher of sensual pleasure. — A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends — these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

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So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

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From the beginning, detractors misconstrued Epicureanism as unlimited license or philosophical permission to pursue pleasure to any degree and of all kinds. Yet Epicurus clarifies that a pursuit of pleasure is not the same as licentiousness. He advocates “plain fare” in eating,  for example, and offers a clear definition of pleasure as he sees it: “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.”

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

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The modern use of the word “epicureanism,” though, is not a good guide to the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicurus would have been nonplussed — though not upset, since he let nothing upset him — to discover his name being associated with the life of a gourmet. In fact he encourages us to be ready to enjoy the simple delights of plain bread and water, and his philosophy certainly did not center around the search for refined pleasure.

Yet it’s true enough that he was a hedonist. This is another word that might confuse us. It comes from the ancient Greek word for pleasure, hedone. Nowadays, we use “hedonist” to refer to someone who is unrestrained in their pursuit of pleasure. Although Epicurus was a hedonist, he certainly did not recommend the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Rather, he was a hedonist in the sense of someone who believes that pleasure is the good, the sole criterion we should use in determining the right way to live, the right choices to make, the right actions to perform. As we navigate our way through life, pleasure is the only star we need to steer by. But this doe snot imply lack of restraint, or a thoughtless embrace of every pleasure that comes our way. On the contrary, Epicurus teaches that the most pleasant life is a life of moderation, discipline, and careful planning. In this, Epicureanism makes a contrast with the Cyrenaic teaching of Aristippus the Younger.

— Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 2

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It might help to put Epicurus in the context of his time, focusing primarily on his chief competitors, the Stoics. Epicurus distinguishes himself from the Stoics by recognizing that we can suffer misfortunes that are harmful, worthy of grief, and non-providential. When a friend dies, we lose something of genuine value that has contributed to our happiness. Epicurus denies a cosmic justification or purpose for suffering such that it could be reconstrued as good. For Epicurus, misfortune is not a divine will at work, a point we will revisit in the chapter on religion. Nor is it a welcome opportunity to gain strength. Instead, misfortunes are harms that happen without design or intention. While we might in some cases gain personal insight from misfortunes, misfortunes never occur for the sake of insight because they do not happen for the sake of anything.

Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, suggests strategies for coping with and counteracting grief rather than encouraging its elimination. The Stoics seek to eliminate grief because they think it arises from a false judgment that something bad has happened. Epicureans, by contrast, manage grief, and they recommend distracting ourselves by replaying pleasant memories, expressing gratitude for past and present pleasures, and engaging with close and caring friends.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

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For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas — “live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world.

This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to persecute heresy — an arresting inversion of modern beliefs.

— Will Durant, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II

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Praise of Epicurus. — Wisdom has not gotten a single step beyond Epicurus — and often many thousands of steps behind him.

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

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