Chapter Nineteen: What Nietzsche Did Not Tell You

Chapter Nineteen: What Nietzsche Did Not Tell You

Nietzsche is a philosopher most easily loved when young. He says the things young people most need to hear: you are capable of more than you have been told. The values you have inherited are not necessarily the values worth keeping. The will to create your own meaning is the highest expression of human being. Become who you are. This is true. But it is true the way gravity is true — it applies to everyone without exception, including the people falling. What Nietzsche does not foreground — what his young readers reliably miss — is that the creation of one's own values requires something that cannot simply be willed: a coherent self that knows what it actually values, as distinct from what it desires in the present moment. And the construction of this coherent self is not a philosophical exercise performed in private. It is a project conducted in relation — in the specific, costly, inescapable relation to other people. You cannot become who you are alone. You become who you are in the reaction of others, in the way they receive you and resist you, in the way they say "okay, Hur" when you deserve more resistance than that. The freedom Nietzsche describes is not freedom from others. It is the freedom that becomes possible only after you have understood what you owe them. This is the part I missed. This is the part that cost me the specific things I have described. *** Camus's absurd hero accepts the absurdity. Does not pretend it resolves. Does not reach for the consolation of false meaning or borrowed purpose. Looks at the

indifference of the world and chooses, deliberately, to live in full awareness of it. Sisyphus is happy — this is the famous line. Sisyphus pushes the boulder up the mountain and watches it roll down and pushes it up again and is happy. I spent a long time with this idea. I spent a long time wondering if I was living the absurd heroically or if I was using the absurd as a philosophical alibi — as a way of making indifference look like courage, of making the refusal to commit look like the embrace of freedom. There is a difference between the man who has looked clearly at the indifference of the world and chosen to live fully anyway, and the man who has looked away from the parts of the world that would cost him something and called the lookingaway freedom. Meursault is the former. I had been, in stretches, the latter. The distinction is uncomfortable. I am still learning to hold it.