Happy Birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche

At the age of 14, I sat in the cavernous balcony of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City, waiting for the science fiction movie with the odd title to begin. The house lights went down and I settled deeper into my seat, ready to begin the familiar, beloved ritual.

The screen was completely dark. Slowly I became aware of a strange, deep bass rumble coming from the enormous Dolby speakers on the walls. The floor itself, the seats, were vibrating. On the screen, the camera was panning up over the dark side of the moon. Three brass notes sounded, rising; the music suggested infinite distance and enormous possibility. On the screen, Earth broke above the curve of the moon, and an enormous orchestral outburst slammed me back into my seat. As the fanfare continued, I experienced something I’ve never experienced since: the hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. I had to know what this music was, what it meant. The subject was not open for discussion. It was an obsession, you understand.

My investigations took me to the King Kullen record store in one of the sleazier neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan, where I bought the sound track for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I played that LP until it became unplayable, its uneven grooves reamed smooth by the needle. The liner notes told me that the piece that possessed me had an odd title, in a language I didn’t recognize: Also Sprach Zarathustra. The liner notes explained that it was composed by Richard Strauss as homage to a book with the same strange, incomprehensible title, written by some man with an equally comprehensible name. How exactly should I pronounce that name? Nye-chy? Nitch-key? Nysh?

Another (warning: bad pun ahead) odyssey to Manhattan secured me a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, which contained Zarathustra and several other works. And so I started reading.

Let me be clear: had it not been for Nietzsche, I would have wound up just another dead junkie in the low, dangerous, feral neighborhood where I grew up. I damn near wound up that way anyway, which is a whole other story. I have a t-shirt that reads, “Friedrich Nietzsche Saved My Soul.” People tell me how witty and totally post-modern it is. I tell them I'm dead serious.

Miraculously, I escaped to a small Jesuit college, where I majored in Philosophy and went head-to-head with the priests, full of the sort of tedious, humorless sincerity that only Humanities undergrads can muster. Nietzsche led me and my college peers to Camus and Sartre, and we all styled ourselves as engaged, indignant Existentialists, determined to change the world or at least change a few lives. You were either a Camusien or a Sartrean, and your life wasn’t worth a plugged franc if you got caught after dark on the Sartre gang’s turf with a copy of L’Etranger in your back pocket. We all wrote boatloads of philosophy, but in the spirit of our heroes we also wrote novels and plays and short stories. All of what we wrote was completely awful, of course, full of trite, portentous bathos and strident poseur bravado. What the hell; we put our hearts and souls into it, and we lived and wrote like we meant it.

You know the next chapter: life got in the way, as it always does, and I got waylaid, sidetracked, stopped ... for 30 years. And then one day five years ago, I found myself working on a software development project far from home, driving hours to and from work in the dark. With nothing in front of me but the cone of headlight, and no radio stations that far out, my quotidian mind slowed down and finally became quiet for the first time in decades. And that’s when I heard the little voice. Lethargically at first, as if struggling to wake from a long, drugged sleep, and then with increasing urgency, the small still voice said: Become who you are! At that moment, I felt something slip. It was a sensation, an actual physical sensation of a deep slippage inside my head. Something broke free, some great inner dam gave way and ideas poured through the breach and into my mind. An enormous flood of ideas, each demanding not only that I pay attention to it, but that I help it on its way out into the world.

And so, this blog. A place in the world for those ideas that are unlikely to grow into full-fledged essays, or books. I write constantly now, and am having some modest success in placing my work. But this place here, this is the place for the runts of my litter, my beloved runts.

So I found my way back, at the end, to Philosophy, to all of it, and when I’m grinding out the miles on the treadmill at my gym I wear my t-shirt proudly. And last March, I made an important pilgrimage, and stood at the head of the “Nietzsche Trail” in the mountaintop Hobbit village of Eze, the trail he walked up and down every day when he was writing Zarathustra. Standing there, I finally understood Nietzsche’s poetry of the great heights, his poetry of over-coming and under-going.

Noble Lies

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

- Seneca the Younger

Many of the top thinkers in the freethinker/atheist “movement” believe we have an obligation to drag all people – kicking and screaming, if need be – into our brave new secular world. They propose that we take away people’s primitive but cherished illusions and in return we offer them ... what? Ah yes, of course: The Truth. In exchange for surrendering your belief in the ancient Bedouin sky god, we will reveal to you The Truth: that life is random, that the universe views us with supreme indifference, and when you die you brain is extinguished and your body rots.

And we wonder why so many of them say “No thanks!”

We need to ask ourselves: do we really want to take away the primitive, childlike faith of the common people? Perhaps we should be mindful of Nietzsche’s theory that one can judge the strength of a person’s character by how much truth that person can stand. Anyone who has spent any time rubbing shoulders with the common people can attest to the fact that their tolerance for truth is very small indeed. What can we expect will happen to those people when we bring them the truth about a godless world? How will they react? Dostoevsky said that if there was no God, then anything is permitted. Anything. Think about that for a moment; think about the implications of it. Think about the prospect of millions of newly godless people waking up simultaneously to that single realization: anything is permitted. Think of the things your neighbors and coworkers might be capable of were they not restrained by the fear of an eternity in a lake of fire.

Perhaps Plato was right. Perhaps our best course of action is to just leave the common people to bask in the illusory comfort of their noble lies.

A Casual Stroll Through The Lunatic Asylum (quote of the week with Commentary)

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Like Nietzsche, I view people who say “I believe in God” the same as I would view people who say “I believe in Santa Claus” or “I believe in the tooth fairy” or “I believe in a six-foot invisible rabbit named Harvey.” That being said, I stand firmly in solidarity with the principle that every adult human being has the right to believe in any god or gods, no matter how ridiculous or puerile. But let’s be clear: your right to believe in your God does not impose on me an obligation to take your belief seriously. Your right to believe in your God does not deprive me of the right to laugh and point at your antic and to call your belief a silly thing. And should you be too outré in your demonstrations of belief – to the point where you go from being an annoyance to being a danger – I have not only the right but the moral obligation to push back against your insanity by any means necessary.

Quote of the Week - now with Commentary(tm)!

The Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages – which is to say, the theologians, since all philosophy in that era was nothing more than theology – were great ones for taking a small snippet from the Bible, or from “The Philosopher” (Aristotle) and writing these long, elaborate, often quite gonzo “commentaries” on the snippet. Thomas Aquinas was the most famous of the lot, but they all did it. They would offer their quote from an authoritative source, and then use it to prop up some (often philosophically indefensible) position that often had nothing to do with the quote itself. Reading Aquinas and some of the others, I get a sense of the enormous fun they had with this process. And since this is my blog – and since, as we all know, there’s nothing we bloggers like to do more than write lengthy commentaries about every little thing – I thought I’d try an experiment and sex up my Quotes of the Week with some (often philosophically indefensible) positions that will often have nothing to do with the quote itself. It’s going to look a little something like this ...

"God is dead -- and we have killed him."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

This one sentence has generated thousands – maybe millions – of words of commentary, interpretation, and condemnation; the likelihood that I will have anything of interest to say about it is very small. But since I love the quote so much – it’s stuck with me since I first encountered Nietzsche at the age of fifteen – I thought I’d explain what this quote means to me. What Nietzsche is saying here is that our view of humanity as nothing more than another species of ape (and keep in mind that Darwinism was very new and very powerful in Nietzsche's time) has destroyed any sense among the common people that they were somehow "special" because there was some benevolent eternal Big Daddy who loved them and viewed them as the center of his universe. In other words, "we killed" God by virtue of no longer believing in him -- which is to say, no longer believing that we humans had some special place in the universe above the animal kingdom.

Nietzsche was bluntly terrified by the implications of this "death of God," by this idea that there was no longer any eternal reward or punishment for any behavior we might choose to indulge. Nietzsche would have completely agreed with Dostoevsky's famous formulation: "If there is no God, then anything is permitted." Anything. The end result of the "death of God" was, quite simply, the 20th century -- and Nietzsche saw it coming.

Quote of the Week

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche: The Most Crusty Polemicist Of Them All

At the age of 14, I sat in the cavernous balcony of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City, waiting for the science fiction movie with the odd title to begin. The house lights went down and I settled deeper into my seat, ready to begin the familiar, beloved ritual.

The screen was completely dark. Slowly I became aware of a strange, deep bass rumble coming from the enormous Dolby speakers on the walls. The floor itself, the seats, were vibrating. On the screen, the camera was panning up over the dark side of the moon. Three brass notes sounded, rising; the music suggested infinite distance and enormous possibility. On the screen, Earth broke above the curve of the moon, and an enormous orchestral outburst slammed me back into my seat. As the fanfare continued, I experienced something I’ve never experienced since: the hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. I had to know what this music was, what it meant. The subject was not open for discussion. It was an obsession, you understand.

My investigations took me to the King Kullen record store in one of the sleazier neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan, where I bought the sound track for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I played that LP until it became unplayable, its uneven grooves reamed smooth by the needle. The liner notes told me that the piece that possessed me had an odd title, in a language I didn’t recognize: Also Sprach Zarathustra. The liner notes explained that it was composed by Richard Strauss as homage to a book with the same strange, incomprehensible title, written by some man with an equally comprehensible name. How exactly should I pronounce that name? Nye-chy? Nitch-key? Nysh?

Another (warning: bad pun ahead) odyssey to Manhattan secured me a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, which contained Zarathustra and several other works. And so I started reading.

Let me be clear: had it not been for Nietzsche, I would have wound up just another dead junkie in the low, dangerous, feral neighborhood where I grew up. I damn near wound up that way anyway, which is a whole other story. I have a t-shirt that reads, “Friedrich Nietzsche Saved My Soul.” People tell me how witty and totally post-modern it is. I tell them I'm dead serious.

Miraculously, I escaped to a small Jesuit college, where I majored in Philosophy and went head-to-head with the priests, full of the sort of tedious, humorless sincerity that only Humanities undergrads can muster. Nietzsche led me and my college peers to Camus and Sartre, and we all styled ourselves as engaged, indignant Existentialists, determined to change the world or at least change a few lives. You were either a Camusien or a Sartrean, and your life wasn’t worth a plugged franc if you got caught after dark on the Sartre gang’s turf with a copy of L’Etranger in your back pocket. We all wrote boatloads of philosophy, but in the spirit of our heroes we also wrote novels and plays and short stories. All of what we wrote was completely awful, of course, full of trite, portentous bathos and strident poseur bravado. What the hell; we put our hearts and souls into it, and we lived and wrote like we meant it.

You know the next chapter: life got in the way, as it always does, and I got waylaid, sidetracked, stopped ... for 30 years. And then one day five years ago, I found myself working on a software development project far from home, driving hours to and from work in the dark. With nothing in front of me but the cone of headlight, and no radio stations that far out, my quotidian mind slowed down and finally became quiet for the first time in decades. And that’s when I heard the little voice. Lethargically at first, as if struggling to wake from a long, drugged sleep, and then with increasing urgency, the small still voice said: Become who you are! At that moment, I felt something slip. It was a sensation, an actual physical sensation of a deep slippage inside my head. Something broke free, some great inner dam gave way and ideas poured through the breach and into my mind. An enormous flood of ideas, each demanding not only that I pay attention to it, but that I help it on its way out into the world.

And so, this blog. A place in the world for those ideas that are unlikely to grow into full-fledged essays, or books. I write constantly now, and am having some modest success in placing my work. But this place here, this is the place for the runts of my litter, my beloved runts.

So I found my way back, at the end, to Philosophy, to all of it, and when I’m grinding out the miles on the treadmill at my gym I wear my t-shirt proudly. And last March, I made an important pilgrimage, and stood at the head of the “Nietzsche Trail” in the mountaintop Hobbit village of Eze, the trail he walked up and down every day when he was writing Zarathustra. Standing there, I finally understood Nietzsche’s poetry of the great heights, his poetry of over-coming and under-going.