ecce homo

you have called nietzsche your favorite philosopher. could we go into that?

with nietzsche the mask if finally off. no more priestly modesty. no more getting power indirectly. in ecce homo, modesty is dispensed with; meglomania is naked. this is beautiful. this is hilarious.

it doesn’t go over well with most.

nietzsche himself is a sort of byronic hero. nietzsche is satan in paradise lost, but happier. the “crazy” nietzsche is as important as the “sane” nietzsche. his extreme egotism is the height of poetry. what can any writer desire more than to see himself as great, the greatest even. nietzsche, at times at least, experienced that. you can say he was wrong. you can say he was foolish. for him it was real. not only that, but his leap of faith was a self-fulfilling prophecy. it all reminds me of caligula as seutonius presents him, except nietzsche is a poet, a writer. nietzsche didn’t hurt anyone. you might blame the holocaust on him, but that’s a stretch. he was a poet who enjoyed the notion of himself as humanities greatest poet. in some ways he was right.

you really think nietzsche was that good.

at his best, yes. his self-honesty led him to see the omnipresence of egotism and it’s significance in the stories we tell ourselves. he turned this self-knowledge into a weapon against the philosophers before him. he finds cowardice in kant, resentment in plato, etc. etc. he raises the flag of affirmation. it was an old flag, red with the blood of soldiers. but he raised it in a philosophical context. he incarnated the aesthetic emperor. i think of nero and the giant gold statue he had of himself. nero the god. caligula the god. nietzsche the god. of course there’s a humor in this. because all of them are dead now. they were “nothing but apes.” but do we think they weren’t aware of that? do we think that nietzsche lacked irony, that the caesars lacked irony? they had conquered shame and hypocrisy enough to make a joke of their megalomania and indulge it simultaneously.

but isn’t that anti-social?

it is. who wants their slaves to be megalomaniacs? no one. we want our slaves to fear god, but only to better obey us. that’s what a cynic might say. nietzsche just rips the mask off power. power is not just a means but an end. to be more specific, we want to enjoy ourselves aesthetically as something potent.

you are saying that one of the high points of being human is to see oneself as beautiful and/or powerful.

right, they are one and same. power is beauty. beauty is power.

i thought truth was beauty, beauty truth.

power is truth, truth is beauty. the truth is what i think it is, what i can convince others it is.

but that is certainly anti-social.

yes and no. it’s complex.

how is it not anti-social?

the person who loves himself is radiant, can afford to be generous. i’m more afraid of those who are still seeking proof.

you are saying that a failed attempt at self-love is more dangerous.

yes. at the same time i don’t care if such and such is anti-social. it’s simply not my primary goal to see myself as social.

what is your primary goal then?

like i said, to see myself as potent and beautiful.

is that your notion of ethics.

yes. nietzsche made that bald. he took the mask off human nature. he built on schopenhaur, purged the contradictions. schopenhaur was biological in many ways but topped it off with buddhism, christianity.

so schopenhaur swerved from darwin at some point, got soft.

right. schopenhaur was an egotist of course, but he pitied human suffering. he said no to life, that life was a mistake.

this of course is completely different than nietzsche.

right. at some point nietzsche realized how anti-heroic such an attitude was. at the same time, he was obviously influence by life as will, the priority of will over reason.

so nietzsche corrected schopenhaur.

from my point of you, yes. of course i don’t believe in any “objective” truth as far as values are concerned.

this too from nietzsche.

right. nietzsche emphasized it. surely he had his influences, but who doesn’t. he came along at the right time and got the idea acknowledged.

did nietzsche invent anything?

i’m young. i’m still reading history. all i can say is that i’ve never found anything like ecce homo, for instance. i’m sure there have been many others to see christianity as a slave religion. what nietzsche did was incorporate anti-philosophy into philosophy.

what is anti-philosophy?

philosophers have long been (correctly) associated with priests. there have always been generals and business men with little sympathy toward the ascetic ideal. then the majority of humans also have little sympathy with the life of the mind in general. philosophy was a zone for the anti-worldly. those who think life stinks could retreat to it. then they could write their snotty denouncements of the marketplace and battlefield in esoteric prose.

whereas nietzsche accepted the battlefield and the marketplace?

he accepted the battlefield. he learned to tolerate the marketplace. at some point he saw resentment and moral indignation as weakness. no doubt he remained an aesthetic type. he could not abandon that without becoming a cyclops.

are saying that nietzsche jettisoned all of philosophy but aesthetics?

not exactly, but something like that. he retained the tradition and used it ironically. it was a vocabulary that was good for making jokes with. most philosopher have wanted influence, followers. so they could not afford to proclaim themselves god. instead they proclaimed an esoteric god (or “ideal”) that an elite could share in.

whereas nietzsche leaves no room for followers. to follow him would make one unworthy of him.

right, the only way to “follow” him is to eat him, become him. onanismo declares that onanismo is god. nietzsche is his john the baptist.

do you consider yourself greater than nietzsche?

yes and no. historically, not a chance. no one can take that from him. he was in the right place at the right time. on the other hand, i can absorb in my twenties what took nietzsche a difficult lifetime to learn.

you can stand on his shoulders?

exactly. if you arrive late, you get to stand on the shoulders of genius. on the other hand, it’s more difficult to be important historically.

i see. but one’s egotism can be comparably to nietzsche’s in ecce homo..

right. but to be that sort of egotist without irony would make one intolerable. i view ecce homo as half sincere, half joke.

but what if nietzsche was completely sincere?

he may have been. a brain tumor is the theory now. it’s hard to say. there’s something so pure in his meglomania. perhaps the artist and comedian in him knew what we was doing. but all that is secondary. i relish it with a wicked smile.

you don’t mind if philosophy is humorous.

that’s an understatement. so much of philosophy is worthless exactly because it is so inhuman, so falsely modest, so serpentine in its deceit.

you are disgust by the priestly in philosophy.

right, because when a person realizes that they themselves are god, what use have they for a mere priest? what are plato’s forms to me? i’m no longer looking for “god.” my religion is myself. there is something naked and pure in that beside which these indirect substitutes seems pale.

you think nietzsche offered what all philosophy offered, but in an undiluted form.

right. it was always about power. it always about egotism. nietzsche realized this and instead of cursing it, embraced it.

whereas schopenhaur might have cursed it.

right. schopenhaur cast the life force as the villian. nietzsche just inverted it into the hero. it’s all so contigent, historical. it makes good sense that nietzsche was what he was. he was the next number in the series.

but this doesn’t seem to keep you from respecting him.

not all. i love the man. but more than him i love myself. of course, right? nietzsche more than anyone helped me find myself, provided me with the purest myth, you could say.

is there anything you don’t live about him?

certainly. he’s not always at the top of his game. he exaggerates his originality. he attacks christianity with such an ugly resentful tone. he failed his own ideals at times. his early works are far from perfect. i read biographies of him and he was obviously not born great. he evolved himself over time into something unforgettable. he left plenty of scabs in his wake. get this clear: i’m anything but blind to his faults, his absurdities. i forgive all this in a spirit of humor. the best of the man is the best of any man. nietzsche should be viewed as a sculpture, as a work of art, as a character. anyone who kneels to him as a sage is ridiculous in my eyes. i’m afraid that my own respect for him has been misinterpreted by the under-developed.

they didn’t understand your attitude toward him?

how could they? they don’t understand the mustache (nietzsche). the mustache is probably the most misunderstood thinker in history. it annoys me, these people who believe the prattle and never read the god damned books.

i appreciate what you mean. the half-educated are worse than the non-educated.

so true. yet i too was one of those pretentious fools once. it’s a stage one goes through. no way around it.

why not?

well, it takes a certain egotism to play the smart guy to begin with. this egotism can’t wait the years it takes to be educated. instead it starts playing the asshole immediately, with the few scraps of knowledge it has gathered.

how does one get beyond this stage?

if one has a real love of ideas, of books, then one will slowly replace prejudice with understanding. wait a minute. no, one will replace one prejudice with another that’s more comfortable. it’s a gradual process. on the other hand, if one is not naturally curious, the pretentiousness will last a lifetime i think.

not a pretty picture.

not at all. what’s more odious than an old man who knows nothing and thinks he knows everything?

probably someone like you.

i think you’re on to something. in fact, i retract it all. this was only psychic judo. i’m the opposite of my apparent self. really. i’m a 16 year old girl with jesus tatooed on my ass.