Nietzsche on Living Life

November 20, 2008

I am trying to remember how old I was when I went through most everything by Nietzsche. I think I was 22 or 23.. out of college and thinking through my views on life. Still when I open up a book by Nietzsche I feel a small thrill.. as the other day when I was hunting for a passage and came across this section from Human, All Too Human:

Free-spirited people, living for knowledge alone, will soon find they have achieved their external goal in life, their ultimate position vis à vis society and the state, and gladly be satisfied, for example, with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up to live in such a way that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it. They expend as little energy as possible on all these things, so that they can plunge with all their assembled energy, as if taking a deep breath, into the element of knowledge. They can then hope to dive deep and get a look at the bottom. [§291]

These ideas have been important to me for some time. As usual with Nietzsche the language overshoots our preference for understatedness. It's hard now to claim to be "free-spirited" or one who seeks to "touch bottom" in the sea of knowledge. But with a little skewing in these areas, it is remarkably close to a philosophy of living that I can agree with. A limited position in life is the trade for keeping one's thoughts to oneself.. and honest. Anything else means participation in the systems of symbols from which social, political, and religious life is constituted. And the work of thinking is to critique those systems.. which is what Nietzsche means by "touching bottom."

Nietzsche continues in this same section:

He, too, knows the week-days of bondage, dependence, and service. But from time to time he must get a Sunday of freedom, or else he will not endure life. [§291]

Again, the language is skewed to a Romantic extreme.. and moments of vision and joy come exactly in those week-days of "dependence and service." But it is good to separate what one does to pay the bills from the moments of free-thinking that gives life its colors. The "Sunday of freedom" sounds quaint, but I recognize my Sunday of rest now in the minutes I get to work out a thought in this blog.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human. Trans. Marion Faber. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.