Listening to Nietzsche

During my latest round of "monitoring" I had a long commute and needed something to listen to in the car. I had been doing mainly novels lately and wanted something else. Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human came up, and I had never read it, so I thought, why not? I never tried listening to philosophy before. But that's how all the ancients did it, so I gave it a try. I thought it went really well. I'm sure I missed a lot, but on the other hand I never bogged down and proceeded quickly to the end, which I think might be a better way to experience some books than slogging through a few pages a day for months.

Human, All Too Human was one of Nietzsche's earlier works, from the stage he later called "philosophizing with a hammer." A decade after its first publication in 1878 he reissued it bound together with two other short books, and he wrote a very interesting preface that explained how the book fit into his overall development.

Nietzsche's project his whole career was to stare down the grim reality of human existence, as he saw it – life sucks and then you die, more or less – but to emerge happy. Like many young Romantics he first looked for the answer in art. He especially loved the ancient Greek tragedies because he thought they achieved his goal, boldly confronting the human condition but refusing to be saddened or made afraid. He first came to prominence as an acolyte of Richard Wagner, writing a whole book arguing that Wagner's tragic, pagan operas had recaptured this Greek sense of the tragedy and beauty of life. But then Wagner wrote Parsifal, a sappy Christian opera in which everyone good goes to heaven. Nietzsche felt personally betrayed. More than that, he began questioning European Romanticism as an answer to anything, deciding in the end that it was really just another elaborate scheme for avoiding reality.

So what, then? That is the question he posed in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. The "free spirits" of the subtitle were the ones who could confront human reality in a spirit of joyous discovery. In that later preface he explained his mindset like this:

So there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism, which is a sign as much of the severity as of the strength of the intellect (taste, emotion, conscience). With this will in our hearts we do not fear, but we investigate ourselves the terrible and the problematical elements characteristic of all existence. Behind such a will stand courage and pride and the desire for a truly great enemy. 

The great enemy he found was, as he summed it up concisely, "the metaphysical significance of morality." 

Many philosophers, he argued, started from the morality they wanted to defend and erected a metaphysical scaffolding – gods, angels, devils, sin, commandments, categorical absolutes, etc. – to hold it up. But Nietzsche had been reading Darwin, and reflecting on human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years he found the claims of the Bible and the Koran rather silly. Surely things that appeared so late in human history cannot be the point of the whole story. He had also been reading physics and chemistry and questioned whether they left any room for anything like free will. Humans do, he decided, whatever they think will help them survive. He found support for this view in the writings of skeptics like La Rochefoucauld, a 17th-century Frenchman whose specialty was pointing out how much of what we interpret as piety or honor is really mere vanity.

Besides the openly religious, there were philosophers in the mid 1800s who claimed to base their  metaphysics in science, but Nietzsche wasn't having it:

The Metaphysicians' Knapsack —To all who talk so boastfully of the scientific basis of their metaphysics it is best to make no reply. It is enough to tug at the bundle that they rather shyly keep hidden behind their backs. If one succeeds in lifting it, the results of that “scientific basis” come to light, to their great confusion: a dear little “God,” a genteel immortality, perhaps a little spiritualism, and in any case a complicated mass of poor-sinners'-misery and pharisee-arrogance.

I find Nietzsche's hammering powerful; he hunted down and called out faith-based ideas and murky spiritual prose wherever he found them, exposing them to his scorn. And he wasn't just skeptical about religion, but went after nationalism, anti-semitism, and various other intellectual castles in the air. As for the second half of his project, finding reasons to be happy about the Death of God, that didn't go so well. So far as anyone can tell, he was never a happy person, and rather than achieving any sort of enlightenment he instead went slowly mad. At first this was a sort of artistic, metaphorical madness, involving lots of opium; one product of this phase was a strange book called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche tried to become the prophet of his own religion. But things progressed until he went flat-out crazy, and he died in an institution. Most likely this was an organic disease, rather than some fable about a man driven mad by his overly dangerous ideas, but there is no agreement about his actual diagnosis.

Anyway I recommend audiobooks as a way to force yourself through difficult texts you haven't ever gotten around to reading. Worked very well for me in this case.