Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment: Becoming who you are: “Owning up: To recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.”
Becoming Who You Are: Owning up: To recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.
Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.
Friedrich Nietzche saw the process of becoming oneself as governed by the willingness to own one’s choices and their consequences — a difficult willingness, yet one that promises the antidote to existential hopelessness, complacency, and anguish.
The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning? The answer, Kaag suggests in drawing on Nietzsche’s most timeless ideas, challenges our ordinary understanding of selfhood and its cascading implications for happiness, fulfillment, and the building blocks of existential contentment.
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What Does Nietzche Say About Jesus?
The metaphors Jesus used expressed his feelings of oneness and peace. As Nietzsche writes, “If I understand anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths,’ only inner realities – that he understand the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasions for metaphor.”
Jesus lived single-mindedly. He practiced what he preached, but he always preached in metaphors. From the very beginning, Jesus’s “followers” took those metaphors and made them literal. “But it is patently obvious what is alluded to in the symbols ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ – not patently obvious to everyone, I grant: in the word ‘Son’ is expressed the entry into the collective feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness), in the word ‘Father’ this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity.”
Ever the philologist, Nietzsche sees it as his job to disentangle the metaphorical from the literal. When someone asks you or me how we are doing, if we are feeling at peace with the world we might say, “I’m doing well” or “Today is a great day.” When asked the same question, Jesus says, “The Father and I are one.”
“The ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’” Nietzsche tells us, “is a condition of the heart – not something that ‘comes upon the earth’ or ‘after death.’” (From Nietzsche's Jesus ... and ours, Commonweal Magazine, Mar 24, 2014, by Scott D. Moringiello, commonweal.org)
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To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning. The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility. Kaag considers the power of Nietzsche’s thought experiment as a tool for calibrating our lives for true contentment: It might be tempting to think that the “rightness” of a decision could be affixed by some external moral or religious standard, but Nietzsche wants his readers to resist this temptation.
Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value — they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. (From The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment, by Maria Popova, brainpickings.org)
Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.
Friedrich Nietzche saw the process of becoming oneself as governed by the willingness to own one’s choices and their consequences — a difficult willingness, yet one that promises the antidote to existential hopelessness, complacency, and anguish.
The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning? The answer, Kaag suggests in drawing on Nietzsche’s most timeless ideas, challenges our ordinary understanding of selfhood and its cascading implications for happiness, fulfillment, and the building blocks of existential contentment.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What Does Nietzche Say About Jesus?
The metaphors Jesus used expressed his feelings of oneness and peace. As Nietzsche writes, “If I understand anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths,’ only inner realities – that he understand the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasions for metaphor.”
Jesus lived single-mindedly. He practiced what he preached, but he always preached in metaphors. From the very beginning, Jesus’s “followers” took those metaphors and made them literal. “But it is patently obvious what is alluded to in the symbols ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ – not patently obvious to everyone, I grant: in the word ‘Son’ is expressed the entry into the collective feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness), in the word ‘Father’ this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity.”
Ever the philologist, Nietzsche sees it as his job to disentangle the metaphorical from the literal. When someone asks you or me how we are doing, if we are feeling at peace with the world we might say, “I’m doing well” or “Today is a great day.” When asked the same question, Jesus says, “The Father and I are one.”
“The ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’” Nietzsche tells us, “is a condition of the heart – not something that ‘comes upon the earth’ or ‘after death.’” (From Nietzsche's Jesus ... and ours, Commonweal Magazine, Mar 24, 2014, by Scott D. Moringiello, commonweal.org)
••••••••••••••••••••••••••
To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning. The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility. Kaag considers the power of Nietzsche’s thought experiment as a tool for calibrating our lives for true contentment: It might be tempting to think that the “rightness” of a decision could be affixed by some external moral or religious standard, but Nietzsche wants his readers to resist this temptation.
Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value — they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. (From The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment, by Maria Popova, brainpickings.org)
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