I am surprised by the coincidence of finding Nietzsche amidst my current flow of thoughts about life. It was seredipitous. Wandering down the lanes of bookshelves in PageOne, and looking desperately for a copy of “The Book of Quietude” by my newfound favourite writer, I heard two friends coming across Nietzsche. The conversation went like this:
A: “Oh Nietzsche, him and his talk about how God is dead”
Laughter ensues.
B: “Well, maybe God is really dead, who knows?”
More laughter ensues.
On a normal day, I would probably dismiss it as a random comment and go about my own business, but that night I had this overflowing sense of academic righteousness that was bursting at my heart. And thus, I thought instead, “What do these people know about Nietzsche. I really hate people who just throw ideas around when they might not even have a basic understanding of these ideas. But oh well, what do I know about Nietzsche to even bother? Perhaps he was not even deserving of mention, controversial as he is with all his trouble-making aphorism.” To save me from my own critical scrutiny, I picked up a book on Nietzsche and packed it along with me. Better be educated now than never.
After poring through it, I realised that he was really mistaken. Just because he had a book titled ‘Gay Science’, people assumed that he was a homosexual. Just because he said God is dead, people assume him to be an atheist apologist (as a matter of fact he issued that statement because he could not accept the way that Christianity issues what he calls a ’slave morality’, a morality that values meekness, suffering, weakness, sacrifice and pain) People dismisses his work because he descended into madness in his later years, when his earlier works did exhibit exemplary lucidity, organisation and brilliance.
Nietzsche advocates denouncing religion or any so-called moral code that subjugates the individual. He believes that the individual has long been suppressed by the herd mentality and he should free himself to achieve the ideals of an uberman. He used a thought experiment to parallel the Christian version of afterlife - if you were to live through your life repeatedly, how would you choose to live your life. He challenges his readers to focus on finding out all about oneself and emphasise that this self-knowledge is much more important than any other knowledge. I thought that this was a pretty neat idea because sometimes, people think they understand a lot about the world, how it functions and how people think but eventually they are not too certain about who they are. It is a journey, knowing oneself.
He also broached the topic of knowledge and I like the way he de-emphasised science and advocates a more well-balanced approach. He also warns of science becoming the new religion and that scientist using their much lauded ‘objectivity and empirism’ will hoodwink the masses and make believe that science was a really objective way of measuring Truth. I love this paragraph of his from ‘The Gay Science’ where he points out that although scientists can better describe things, they cannot really explain things better.
‘Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a ’scientific’ estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’. He asks, ‘ Do we really want to permit existence to be degrade to this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematics? This knowledge is ‘human, all too human”
Way cool. =)
