As I began to read Nietzsche for the first time (beyond his renowned Thus Spoke Zarathustra), I immediately realized that I was in over my head. I took a seminar on Nietzsche where we read and discussed many of his major works, including the recently published Writings from the Late Notebooks. The more that I read, the more I became enamored with his iconoclastic motivations and bizarres methodology.

As I have shared my enthusiasm for Nietzsche, there is an understandable trend in the reactions. Most people are interacting with Nietzsche very superficially, just as we interact with many of the influential scholars without appreciating the nuances of their approach. This blog is meant to be a resource that would merely motivate people, especially Christians, to give Nietzsche’s work another look. I will offer two juicy quotes as a means of wading into Friedrich’s world:

You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers?… There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni– if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship.
…Be a philosopher, be a mummy, portray monotono-theism with a gravedigger’s pantomime! — And above all, away with the body, this patheitc [pet idea] of the senses, afflicted with every logical error there is, refuted, even impossible — although it has the nerve to behave as if it were real!” -Twilight of the Idols

“Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematising and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression – not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’.
Logic and mechanics never touch on causality –” -Writing from the Late Notebooks

Resident & Naive Nietzschephile,

Dru