Living with Nietzsche

Abstract

Abstract This is a different kind of book about Nietzsche. It is about Nietzsche as a personal role model and a guide to a “rich inner life” and focuses neither on Nietzsche’s biography nor on the usual scholarly questions about “what Nietzsche really meant” but on Nietzsche’s effects on his readers and students. Nietzsche is an example as well as a promulgator of “passionate inwardness,” a life distinguished by its rich passions, deep emotions, exquisite taste, and a sense of personal elegance and excellence. He urges us to embrace an unusually powerful sense of personal virtue and integrity, like that of Socrates and the ancient Stoics, who also focused their attention on that “health of the soul” that was more or less independent of external forces and fortune. But where the Stoics identified virtue and the health of the soul with a sort of peace of mind (ataraxia), Nietzsche rather urges us toward an energetic “Dionysian” life, filled with enthusiasm. A virtuous life is a creative life, a life of exquisite good taste. Since our modern world so celebrates the very opposite, “celebrity,” fame and public display, vulgarity, and mass culture, many of Nietzsche’s efforts make him seem like a snob, an elitist. But this is to misunderstand him.