A certain sort of very young man – a sort that both I and John Kaag once were – falls hard for Friedrich Nietzsche, for the incomparable boldness of his voice, the way he systematically undermines and ridicules the tradition from which he emerges, the intensity with which he expresses and hence achieves his individuality. Nietzsche refers to himself as “dynamite” and “a volcano”, and he blows things up right there on the page. That may strike a bookish young man as exciting stuff, as a kind of intellectual super-hero film, featuring the Overman. Nietzsche’s self-enactment is, furthermore, theatrically masculine, and presents the awkward proto-intellectual with a model of manliness. For me in the 1970s and Kaag in the 90s, reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra constituted an aggressively secular and in some respects rather unfortunate rite of passage into manhood.
Deeply problematic in a hundred dimensions though Nietzsche is…