#niezsche

When I read this week’s text, the first thing that I thought of was a song by Simon and Garfunkel called “Sound of Silence.” This song is written from the perspective of the narrator, a lonely character who finds himself suddenly in the midst of a group of people that appear to have adopted silence as a type of religion. When he tries to reach out to them, to tell them his truth, they are completely unaffected and unreachable: “‘Fools,’ said I, ‘you do not know/Silence like a cancer grows/Hear my words that I might reach you/Take my arms that I might reach you’/But my words, like silent raindrops fell/And echoed in the wells of silence.” The narrator goes on to tell us how the people are blind to true knowledge because of their religion: “And the people bowed and prayed/To the neon god they made/And the sign flashed out its warning/And the words that it was forming/And the sign says ‘the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.” To me, this story reflects that of Zarathustra, and also that of Nietzsche.

The documentary took me by surprise. During my senior year of high school, I didn’t really study Nietzsche’s philosophy in depth, but my humanities teacher often mentioned him with contempt. She was not a hateful lady, but she was strictly optimistic in her philosophy; she lead me to believe that Nietzsche believed only in pessimistic nihilism. Also- I went to a Catholic high school. Nietzsche is probably not the diocese’ favorite philosopher to sanction for study. I suppose that it is true that he spent time with pessimism, but now I know about his more optimistic beliefs. My humanities teacher chastised Nietzsche because he “believed nothing mattered,” when in reality, he was desperate to overcome the bleakness of the human condition. This documentary paints Nietzsche as someone who sought to rescue humanity from a meaningless life, not to promote a meaningless life.

I was raised in the Congregational church. My father was not raised under any strict religion, but participated in Christian holidays. My mother was raised Catholic, but later left the Catholic church, much to the disdain of my grandparents. My mother was the center of religion in my house, and insisted that we make God a part of our lives. But, the Congregationalist church is much more relaxed than the Catholic church, and thus, I have never considered myself to be a particularly devout believer. Nietzsche’s post-God ideals are heavily present in my life. My contemporaries and I, especially as students of higher education, are all driven by the idea of self mastery. My generation, in its effort to slough off any kind of conservative structures, has turned inward to our own intellectual powers. I think Nietzsche would condone our tendency to depend on our own thoughts rather than thoughts fed to us by higher powers, but, I think he would be disappointed in our desensitization from the world’s problems. Although Nietzsche was faced with intense tragedy throughout his life, he never gave up his intellectual quest to find meaning in a Godless world. He felt the pain of life deeply, and did not close himself off, but instead tried to find a solution.