The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isnāt exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers youād prefer not to bother with anyway). Heās funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that youāre a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, Iām a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if youāre a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.
[ā¦] If youāre a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldnāt you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, thereās something in every book youāre likely to pick upāsome enticement of form or content or bothāthat addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy.
[ā¦] Nietzsche is aphoristic even when heās being systematic, and when heās being aphoristic, his writing is simply unmatched in its beauty and mayhem, its uncanny mix of compression and infinite suggestion. And for a young guy whoās intellectually hungry but doesnāt much enjoy reading, finding this section of philosophy-bits in the middle of this famous book is like a homecoming. You donāt even have to know what these epigrams mean to enjoy them. You just feel manly and brave in entertaining them at all, not flinching but laughing when Nietzsche says: āOne is best punished for ones virtues.ā (You even get to work out some of your girl-troubles by lingering over Nietzscheās several jabs at women.)
Of course, Nietzsche scholars will tell you not to run too far with these little wisecracks. You need to understand them in the context of his larger body of work, in which he often circles back to themes, again and again, revising and even contradicting his earlier writings. You have to understand the aphorisms as part of a vast poetic project of self-creation or becoming in which nothing is truly settled. Nietzsche himself predicted he would be misread, acquire misguided disciples, and so he has.
