Neat-shee, Neat-che, Neetch…Fred.

Nietzsche: The Warm Blanket of Bitter Genius I Find Solace In

My pal Fred. He is a breath of fresh air. I always approach Fred with this in mind: people do not know what it is he is trying to say. I think this because I have come to very different conclusions about what Fred was trying to get at, and my conclusions typically still describe current affairs. And so, naturally, I assume mine is right. And I attribute my rightness and brilliance to actually reading Nietzsche instead of sifting through for something to hate.

We can read the opening two lines of the On The Genealogy of Morality and close the rest of the book. It begins in the Preface with “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day?” (1). The end.

Socrates used to banter about this idea of not knowing ourselves. Fred goes a step further though and says we don’t know because we haven’t actually been looking. Slight difference but a big one. Fred’s statement allows for the possibility of knowing something if we knew how to go about looking.

A lot of the rest of the book is Fred telling you how wrong the ‘knowers’ are. And it is delicious to read his keen observations on failed ideas that people bought into, hell, are still buying into. From the opening line you can taste and feel the word ‘knowers’ and its bitterness. How else are we to react to people calling themselves knowers? Especially when those knowers try to tell us ‘presumably-unknowers’ how to live.

We have to keep in mind he is offering a genealogy, a lineage of morality. I think what he is doing is tracing the lineage of what I consider our follies. I think it is ok to make these follies though. We’re not going to get it perfect the first time around. And at the least we have been left with a detailed list of wrong answers.

The important message from Fred is in his concluding lines regarding the basic fact of the human will needing a goal: “all of this means – let us dare to grasp this – a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not will…” (118). No matter what we like to think or what we consider we know the only thing that we really do know is that we are ‘willing’ creatures. We will will. Whatever we choose to will or however which way we choose to live we always will ourselves toward some goal. So go out there and will.