My journey finding meaning in modernity/A mad man’s “manliness”/Nietzsche’s choicest rose

Toward the end of high school I started taking interest in philosophy - partly out of personal interest, partly to review for the philosophy classes that were part of my college’s core curriculum.

Looking back, I can remember expecting that tackling the subject would be like taking up a new language, just one more thing to add to my vocabulary of knowledge. I did not expect it to frame my thinking when considering any “profound” questions or thoughts.

Part of the reason for the paradigm shift was the fact that my reading philosophy correlated with my decision to no longer consider myself a traditional Christian. Dogma, theology, and the impossibility of being an “ideal” member of any organized religion made me recognize that life’s questions went broader than any one written book.

Before I got of copy of what has became one of my favorite books, I bought a book that reviewed some of the highlights of history’s greatest philosophical works which started with Plato’s Republic. It took me through the medieval era, the Renaissance, and ended with the existentialists. That section was the one that stuck with me – existentialism to this day is most often the framework in which we understand our internal conflicts on individual and social levels.

Names like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard started espousing a perspective that better-fulfilled a craving for truth inside me that the worldviews I was born into did not.

Existentialism sees humanity as being challenged by two things: the fact that existence in this world is temporary and the belief that a universe not ruled by a deity meant life has no inherent meaning. Existentialism says instead that one must not “descend into nothingness but have the courage to be” - that we are the stewards of life’s meaning.

Some time passed before I learned of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (A Tale for All and None), Nietzsche’s epic philosophical allegory. A fairly well-known movie Little Miss Sunshine highlighted the book as well as Nietzsche, first catching my attention. Dwayne, the son of the fictitious family, a stereotypically angst-filled pubescent late teen under a self-imposed vow of silence was reading the book throughout.

I’ve found a worthy discussion/synopsis of this movie from a blog called SpillSpace.com. Warning, spoilers:

“I really think that the whole movie was intended as a Nietzsche-esque morality tale. The moral of the story given near the end of the movie is similar to one of Nietzsche’s teachings, which is to embrace suffering. Nietzsche felt that suffering was the most authentic human experience, and also one that human nature sets out to deny itself of. And in denying itself, it inflicts it upon one another, and on the innocent.

Each character in the movie is discovering that the things they pursue are not only illusive, but ultimately meaningless. The grandpa is reflecting on his life regretting that he didn’t pursue his passions more when he had the chance. The father is desperately pursuing fame and success which seems to remain always out of his grasp. Frank, the brother, has pursued a love and a career that have ultimately betrayed him. The son Dwayne has already abandoned all his dreams in life save one, his quest to be a test pilot. Then life swoops down and strips him of his last and final hope when he realizes that he is colorblind – and thus ineligible for flight. The daughter seeks in vain to be a beauty queen; a quest that is so transparently harmful, meaningless and futile, and so obviously destined to cause her to cast aside her own natural authentic self in exchange for the generic plasticity that the pageant encourages.

All this ultimately sets the stage for the entire cast of characters to have to question not just the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant, but the pageant of their own lives as well. The Little Miss Sunshine Pageant serves as the vehicle for the process of group realization. The palpable absurdity of watching Olive trying to win (or even compete) in this ridiculous pageant, and the sadness of seeing her tempted to exchange her own authentic beauty for the imitation of beauty the pageant rewards, helps the group to see that their own life pursuits have been absurd and inauthentic theatre pieces as well. As they watch the little girl innocently striving towards something that will ultimately crush her, the group together comes to appreciate those “tawdry baubles” which we seem so willing to trade our authentic selves for are actually rather meaningless and absurd.

Nietzsche wrote that it is in that moment of discovery, when life has essentially defeated you and utterly destroyed you, that you are finally able to reflect honestly and realize that you have willingly exchanged your own authenticity for things that you are not. This becomes ones moment of awakening, and finally gives one the inner will to cast meaninglessness aside and embrace Authenticity.”

At the time I had no idea that there were parallels between Nietzsche’s philosophy and this movie. I thought the movie’s message was ‘nice’ but with no knowledge of how it could be taken as ‘Nietzsche-esque morality tale,’ it only made me curious about reading a book by a philosopher I only knew as controversial. The reactions of people in the movie to Dwayne’s summertime reading made me want to read this book more. He seemed a sort of misfit philosopher, bacchanalian yet future-minded, passionate, and focused but at his heart an emotional space cadet. Nietzsche also grew up in a family of mostly females, something which I could identify with and something I believe greatly shaped my development.

I may have well had picked up Karl Marx, the book of Satan, or Mein Kampf in the eyes of others. Nietzsche was and in some cases still is a philosophical contrarian - someone who went against popular conventions/beliefs/thoughts of the time - not just for the sake of combating groupthink but because he could not be authentically himself any other way.

Living in the wake of the European Enlightenment, Nietzsche picked up on the conflict between scientific achievements and the old rule by the Church and monarchical states. He dared to write ‘God is dead, and we have killed him’ but cautioned against nihilism. He thought that, in order to do away with the dated conventions of our world and pave the way for a better future, we must transfer our need for the numinous away from a metaphysical exaggeration and into a religious zeal for living one’s life.

Well intentioned as we he was, Nietzsche’s reputation was dirty.

We all get a little concerned when we hear about a passionate German: Adolf Hitler peering at a bust of Nietzsche
 

Eva Cybulska: “Nietzsche’s name has often been associated with Nazi ideology, much of that owing to his Machiavellian sister Elisabeth, who invited Hitler to her brother’s shrine in Weimar in 1934, and made an offering of his philosophy. But did not Nietzsche court this destiny? ‘I know my fate.’ he wrote. ‘One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something horrific – a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified.’”

A chilling prediction from the grave. However, Nietzsche did not court that destiny, his sister helped force this destiny and poisoned the memory of him.

A 2010 article in UK’s The Telegraph goes on to outline how his sister ruined his reputation – to say nothing of how she might have ruined his personal life:

“Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who went on to become a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler, systematically falsified her brother's works and letters, according to the Nietzsche Encyclopedia.”"Förster-Nietzsche did everything she could – such as telling stories about Nietzsche, writing false letters in the name of her brother, and so on – to make it seem that Nietzsche had been a right-wing thinker like herself. It was she who created the most destructive myth of all: Nietzsche as the godfather of fascism."“The Nazis selectively used Nietzsche's writings to bolster their ideology and built a museum in Weimar to celebrate the philosopher, though it is unlikely Hitler himself read much, if any, of Nietzsche's work.”“Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche edited her brother's writings after his mental breakdown in 1889 and quickly began to add, remove and change passages to align his philosophy with her own beliefs and those of her virulent anti-Semite husband Bernhard Förster. Along with her husband, she founded a Utopian "Aryan" colony in the Paraguyan jungle called Nueva Germania in 1887. It was a disaster: her husband committed suicide in 1889 and Förster-Nietzsche returned to Germany. When she died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.”“Of the collection of 505 of her brother's letters that Förster-Nietzsche published in 1909, just 60 were the original versions and 32 of them were entirely made up.”“In her edition of the famous book, The Will to Power, Förster-Nietzsche included only 270 of the 374 aphorisms her brother wrote – and most of them were incorrect. She cut out the maxim in which her brother condemned anti-Semitism with the words: "Have nothing to do with a person who takes part in the dishonest race swindle."

“While acknowledging some of Nietzsche's early writings could be interpreted as fascist and he shared an early friendship with the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner – a relationship that later broke down – the philosopher was never a fascist or anything like it. Rather, he was above all an iconoclast who was deeply contemptuous of both anti-Semitism and nationalism.”

While there is nothing quite as distasteful these days as anything paired to Hitler in any way, Nietzsche’s true literary intent lived on through Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who completed his life’s work ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ while in concentration camps. The horrors of the holocaust were a testing ground for Frankl’s hypothesis that we are driven by a search for meaning in our lives, inspired by Nietzsche’s quote “One who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He renamed and refined Nietzsche’s concept from ‘the will to power’ to the much more palpable ‘will to meaning’.

After finishing a primary look into the important points in the complex background of Nietzsche and his works, I was primed to receive Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s message properly.

Zarathustra, the book’s protagonist, is an allusion to the ancient Persian religion whose namesake came from the prophet Zoroaster. I recognized the name Zarathustra from the name of the religion a best friend of mine was born into, Zoroastrianism. Judeo religions were heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, though after centuries of persecution the number of practicing members today has dwindled greatly.

It is a complex and beautiful religion that inspired Nietzsche, but its attachment to a theistic worldview led Nietzsche to a conclusion for how he shall take up the name Zarathustra in the modern world:

“Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. ... Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. ... His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality ...—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.” - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

The book is styled like a religious text, rich with wordplay and reiterating several themes, the most important of which (according to Nietzsche) was the eternal recurrence. The question prompted by the eternal recurrence is that, if your life should repeat forever, exactly the same, over and over, would you embrace the highs and lows of your life, or would you be tortured by the idea?

I’m currently on my third re-read of the complex book, the same way many re-read religious texts. Without the need for the faith in a god, the faith that life is worth living became my new religious challenge. Every time I read it I pick up on some more secret cracks and crevices of meaning in the heavily-figurative language. Every time I read it, it helps me force me to reexamine myself and to see how I’ve progressed to being a more fulfilled person – to look back at myself in my last reading and mediate on how I’ve changed (or if I even have).

Even when Nietzsche through Zarathustra seemed to voice unsavory things about the nature of and separate destiny for women, I found something to gain from reading him – refining my own understanding of women, my relative truth. There is still much debate about the true nature of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the place of women in this modern world he anticipated, so I will outline the background of two passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

“’You go to women? Do not forget the whip!’”

“There is little of man here – therefore, their women make themselves manly. Only he who is man enough will – redeem the woman in woman.”

Lou Salome (more on her further on), bearing the whip on Paul Ree and Nietzsche

The line came from a chapter where Zarathustra was asked by an old woman to tell her his thoughts on women. Hesitantly he describes woman as a the essential piece to bringing about better human beings in the world, seeming to leave not much more than motherhood as a woman’s aspiration. The old woman agrees with him.

But Nietzsche was supposed to be a future-thinker that did not protest change but embraced it wholeheartedly – why did he seem to want to admonish the world for disagreeing with what is usually known as a Roman Catholic sentiment? According to most Nietzsche’s scholars, in his early life he was quite sympathetic toward the plight of nineteenth-century women. Why did he seem to preach a rather reactionary behavior in his later publications? It seemed to have a basis in his meeting, falling in love with, and romantic rejection by Lou Salome as well as the influence of his rigidly religious mother and conniving sister.

Lou Salome was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author who courted the respect and attention of some of the great thinkers of the day including Freud (whom she studied under) and the poet Rilke. At the age of 17 she persuaded Dutch preacher Hendrik Gillot to teach her philosophy, theology, world religions, and French and German literature. He was so enamored by her that he planned to divorce his wife, leave his family, and marry her. Ultimately, that same preacher would be the one she asked to officiate her marriage.

In the 1880 Lou’s mother took to Zurich, where the University was the first to open its doors to women. The completion of her studies there was cut short by signs of TB which led her and her mother, among other reason, to move south to Rome where in May 1882 she met Nietzsche. Their meeting was preceded by various letters from Ree tempting Nietzsche to meet the woman. Nietzsche started to believe might the woman who could be the lover he dreamed of – however desperate a dream.

During Nietzsche, Salome, and friend Paul Ree’s time together traveling through Italy, Nietzsche is said to proposed to her 3 times, all of which she rejected. Even when Salome did marry, she never engaged in a sexual relationship with her husband but had many sexual relations with others while still married, including famous thinkers of the age, all of who spoke very highly of her intellectually. She believed that marriage love and sexual love should not be mixed and that experiencing love through sexual relations allowed her not to be possessed by it – a radical concept at the time and legitimate position for both males and females alike, provided they are not partial to monogamy.

Monogamy or not, Lou Salome would not be a woman to sacrifice all her aspirations to honor the will of her man.

Scholar Carol Diethe: “Nietzsche and Lou Salome believed that women are entitled to enjoy their sexuality…this is what places Nietzsche outside the circle of conventional male opinion, medical or otherwise, where the view at the time prevailed that genteel women did not desire sexual gratification…”

Given his early beliefs, it seemed to me to suggest that Nietzsche’s attitude toward changing and rethinking the place of women in society was greatly shaken by the rejection of a woman who likely loved him sexually, but could not commit to a life with him. The story reminded me of many similar tales where women had undergone a similar occurrence and reacted with anger and hatred, rather than understanding and empathy- or were simply unable to find companionship or empathy in their mourning.

Lurking in this change is a kind of insulting slap-down of everything Lou aspired to. It is not hard to see what has happened. In the aftermath of the affair, Nietzsche [seemed to ease] his pain by taking a kind of fictional revenge.

In the sorrow of rejection, rather than overcoming his emotions and seeing a resilient truth, Nietzsche seemed to despise the empty shallow society women of his time; but the societal contexts which made them empty-headed appeared not to have concerned him as much.

During the first reading of the book, the line, “There is little of man here – therefore, their women make themselves manly. Only he who is man enough will – redeem the woman in woman,” was something I adopted as a sort of mantra in my relationship at the time. Without an understanding of the background of that statement, I ascribed to the quote a simple command to myself, however imperfect I was at fulfilling it: to allow the woman I was with to be fulfilled, I must be the type of man she needs to encourage her where needed, caution if necessary, and always be there to comfort her when the time comes.

This might have helped on an individual level when I had that understanding of the sentence, but when I was shown the deeper context of Nietzsche statement, my impression of the man changed again.

He appeared to not be picking up on women’s need to strengthen themselves and each other in a modernizing world, he was answering a question about women and the “need” for redemption.

There is scholarly debate about whether Nietzsche was caricaturing the Christian view of womanhood that still lives on today (that a woman is to be the right hand of her husband) or expressing his desire to usher in a greater generation of humans born from ‘overmen’. Now we can even speculate that his anti-Semite sister altered his writings to more properly align with Nazi ideologies. We do know Elisabeth Nietzsche despised Lou Salome and had unpleasant interactions with her, the extent to which this impacted Lou and Friedrich’s relationship post-rejection was uncertain.

The scholar Frances Nesbitt Oppel interprets Nietzsche's attitude towards women as part of a rhetorical strategy: framing the conversation within the context that it was understood by the masses at the time. “Nietzsche's apparent misogyny is part of his overall strategy to demonstrate that our attitudes toward sex-gender are thoroughly cultural, are often destructive of our own potential as individuals and as a species, and may be changed. What looks like misogyny may be understood as part of a larger strategy whereby "woman-as-such" (the universal essence of woman with timeless [often stereotypical] character traits) is shown to be a product of male desire, a construct....Nietzsche’s picture is beyond caricature; it is satire…in degrading women, these references challenge the myth of the Ewig-weibliche, the eternal feminine as moral guardian and redeemer of men, a dominant middle-class ideal across much of Europe at Nietzsche’s time…the situation of the speaker in the text must be considered. He occupies a negative and reactive position in relation to real women: dogmatic and essentialist, Zarathustra believes that he knows what is good for the “true man” and how to solve the “riddle” of woman.”

Whatever the passage in his autobiographical book Ecce Homo that answers how one ‘redeems’ a woman truly meant about Nietzsche’s belief about the role of women in modernity, speaking-out-of-place as a male, Nietzsche brought up difficult questions that later feminists are said to have been inspired by. He observed a sort of dissonance between those in conventional female roles and those who sought a polar-opposite world where there is a matriarchy.

I can only imagine how Nietzsche might have interpreted the changes in the life of a modern woman and the science that has developed since then. After all, we are ultimately affected by the different levels of neurotransmitters & hormones that we have in our brains, not what lies between our legs. Masculinity and femininity as they are commonly understood are merely cultural memes.

Those who decry with sincerity the “masculation” of women in modernity are resisting a trend toward shifting cultural gender expectations where there are a myriad men and women who can be defined as exhibiting both traditional “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors. It’s the same with those who seek to criminalize or devalue homosexuals - modern psychology has now refined its understanding of homosexuality with the advent of neurology.

In a world where women anticipate a reaction of violence from angry fathers males - whether a woman in an abusive relationship or a girl whose abusive father conditioned her to overact to any angry male – it should be expected that a woman would take arms in the traditionally “masculine” sense against predatory males. It speaks to a crisis in men more than any sort of crisis in women which requires “redemption.” Perhaps this realization is what Nietzsche wanted the reader come to themselves.

As I write this, on my latest reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I see that in my previous readings of the book I was more like Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine before his dreams were crushed than after. My setbacks in life and relationships had nothing to do with my behavior in my mind; they were all a result from faults with my culture and my world – a world that should be forsaken. I didn’t have the humility to expect life to rip the rug from under my feet, my egoism overtook my creative/productive potential, and the valleys of life that were to follow my peaks came unexpected and painfully.

Nietzsche teaches that one must be destroyed to become authentic, but perhaps a better way to phrase it is that to “place one’s hope and security in the inauthentic things, one will ultimately suffer and feel destroyed as a result.” Nietzsche’s writings have been a huge help for someone like me in extracting meaning from the peaks and valleys of my life. Nietzsche’s life has helped me learn from my own feelings of rejection and not dwell in sadness, helped me learn what I can expect from idealistic thinking and expectations, and that I need to actively refine my pursuit of happiness and meaning in the wake of life’s storm. I can’t dismiss the idea that anyone who hopes to call themselves wise will think at least once: I was wrong.

AFTERTHOUGHTS, NOTES

-A thorough examination of Lou and Friederich’s relationship.

-Another stain on Nietzsche’s reputation came from a rumor perpetuated after WWII that he had died of syphilis, though it’s widely understood now to have probably been a slowly-developing brain tumor. Part of the reason Nietzsche may have never sought love again, never ventured into the rosebush once more, was the understanding that he was not to live much longer. If the affair with Lou shook his understanding of women, then his life did not allow for a final overcoming. After their relationship and in declining health, he retired into loneliness to finish his work before death and his posthumous besmirching. If he couldn’t fulfill his desire to start a family, he would give birth to a literary baby, a “book for all and none.”Ida von Miaskowski on Nietzsche and women: “In the 1880s, when Nietzsche's later writings containing some of the oft-quoted sharp words against women appeared, my husband sometimes told me jokingly not to tell people of my friendly relations with Nietzsche, since this was not very flattering for me. It was just a joke. My husband, like myself, always kept friendly memories of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s behavior precisely towards women was so sensitive, so natural and comradely, that even today in old age I cannot regard Nietzsche as a despiser of women.”

-Medical News Today recently reported on a study focusing on ancient skulls that suggested early humans' breakthrough in tool-making 50,000 years ago coincided with a lowering of testosterone levels in our species.

-"One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something horrific – a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite.”

-Lou Andreas-Salome on love: “Whoever reaches into a rosebush may seize a handful of flowers, but no matter how many one holds, it’s only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we can’t possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole of the bush itself – only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown to us, and we are left alone.”

-Nietzsche seemed to me to exhibit signs of manic-depression/bipolarity. If true, it puts his philosophy in a very interesting, clearer context.

-In his last letters to Lou, Nietzsche still referred to his former lover as his friend. I don’t think we would know him the way we do now had they not crossed paths. A meeting to two minds thats eternal recurrence is easily welcomed.

Dwayne might have posted this on his Facebook :P