TITLE: Nietzsche: A Gentle Introduction
SUBTITLE: If you gaze long enough into the abyss eventually the abyss looks back
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2026-03-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/nietzsche-a-gentle-introduction
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/nietzsche-a-gentle-introduction

This article will do two things. First, I will give the strongest and most honest presentation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas I can. Before second, reflecting substantially on his work myself. 

It would feel insincere to try to explain why I think Nietzsche is so important because he is arguably the most influential philosopher since Kant, and if you are a reader of my substack you will doubtless know at least some of the key terms from his thinking. Even phrases like “what does not kill me makes me stronger” or “If you gaze long enough into the abyss eventually the abyss looks back” come from his writings without most people even realizing it. 

But I do feel the need to explain why I am taking the time to write my own summary. Already the world is teeming with nearly five generations of historical analysis in every form, medium, perspective, and degree of sympathy imaginable. If you are looking for another one after this, I would recommend Will Durant’s. Still, I have found them all frustrating for a number of reasons.

Too often they are so academic and biographical that the author shrinks from any interesting conclusions into a confusion of trivia. Equally common are the attempts to salvage his core insights from the rest of his project. Because Nietzsche’s work is so central to all of postmodernism, finding a way to fit him into philosophies like feminism or socialism has consumed innumerable academic careers. And finally, failing that, he is often twisted into a cudgel by those who hate him as the most potent critic of universalism, and so see him, perhaps rightly, as the preferred thinker of any rogue Raskolnikov.

As a result, my answer is simply this. Nietzsche has been turned into such a ball of confusion and complexity by these accumulated conflicting interpretations that I would have wanted someone to simply sit down with him candidly and without an explicit agenda. Naturally, this article may, despite my best efforts, have mistakes, and so if you find anything feel free to let me know.

If you are interested in reading any of his books yourself, they are all available for free on Project Gutenberg. My hope is that this article helps you think about his project more clearly, or even better, equips you with a map to navigate his works directly for yourself. This is because Nietzsche is simultaneously one of the greatest and most frustrating authors I have ever read. There is, I believe, in his broad philosophical project a clear through-line, but the actual textual content is often purposefully confusing and colored by academic and artistic license, or, if I’m being less charitable, megalomania and madness.

This essay is long, so let me give you the short version first if you would like to go about your day. 

Short Version

Nietzsche believed that there was no ethical bottom to the universe, but that existence was still justified aesthetically. All of his work was, at its core, an attempt to figure out what these twin beliefs actually meant. 

His answer was to demand a new kind of human being, the Overman, who was able to create values out of themselves and so rise above the default answer of nihilism. But why did he think that there was no ethical bottom to the universe?

Simply put, he thought that without the Christian God, who he believed had been killed by the Christian virtue of honesty applied to its own evidentiary base, there was no reason to believe that Christian ethics were superior at all. Nietzsche was a trained classical philologist, and like many of his era was obsessed with classical civilization. In Greece and Rome he saw evidence for a different morality, an older morality, which seemed to lack any of the guilt and self-hatred he saw around him. In ancient Greece in particular he saw in the tragedy a model for holding life, in its pains and its pleasures, without flinching or asking for something else. 

It is here that we arrive at his most substantial academic contribution, the genealogy of morals. To show that Christianity was not the only possible moral system, he traced the origins of our words for “good” and observed that rather than being defined by the recipients, they were instead words the powerful used to describe themselves. Nobility was first a description of good birth long before it was applied to morality. Throughout his works he argued that this morality, the aristocratic morality of the master, had been subverted and twisted by the weak to create a “slave” morality. Specifically, the priestly caste — physically weak but psychologically brilliant — had redefined moral value to place the weak as the “good” and the strong as the “evil.” This “slave revolt in morals” had won so completely that people were no longer able to even recognize it as a system, but instead experienced it as self-evidently true.

So what are we to do instead? Nietzsche’s answer comes in the form of amor fati, or “love of fate.” In other words, we must love our lives so sincerely that if we were forced to live them again forever, with the same pleasures and the same pains, we would view this not as damnation, but instead as heaven. 

Underneath all of this sits his most fundamental concept, the will to power. This not only contains the will to dominate others, but instead represents what he believed was a basic biological urge to grow and overcome. Everything, whether ascending or descending, strong or weak, has a will to power, and the only question is what direction it takes, either outward toward creation, or inward toward self-punishment.

The long version of what Nietzsche believed

In order for any of Nietzsche’s project to make sense, you must first accept that “God is dead.” Now, if you are looking for a strong argument against the existence of God in his works, you will walk away disappointed. Still, I think that it is a defensible assumption on two levels. First, even if you believe in God, you can think of all of this as a counterfactual world where morality is truly rootless — and so if you find it repulsive, it is its own argument for the existence of God. And second, the sense in which he means “God is dead” is, in my opinion, broadly an accurate sociological description. 

Because what Nietzsche is really saying here is that people do not believe in God in the real sense, the sense of seeing the Christian creed as the unquestionable word of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator. I think this quote from Carlyle’s “On Heroes” captures the idea well. 

“[Religion is] the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there”

It is undeniably rare to, in the modern developed world, meet a person who fully defines their relationship “to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there” through a sincere and austere examination of the Gospels. Thus, rather than arguing for the Death of God, he is merely describing the already existent psychological state of modern society, a state that has undeniably only become stronger since he wrote these works. Importantly, though, Nietzsche did not believe that God had been killed by another competing explanation for existence or justification for suffering, but instead had been consumed by itself, specifically by its own insistence on honesty. Quoting from “The Gay Science”:

“even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine.... But what if this itself always becomes more untrustworthy, what if nothing any longer proves itself divine, except it be error, blindness, and falsehood;—what if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie?”

He explains the process through which the Christian God, the God of truth, consumes itself in a passage from “Twilight of the Idols” called “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable. The History of an Error”:

“1. The true world, attainable to the sage, the pious man, and the man of virtue,—he lives in it, he is it.

(The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, simple, convincing. It was a paraphrase of the proposition “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The true world which is unattainable for the moment is promised to the sage, to the pious man, and to the man of virtue (“to the sinner who repents”).

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more evasive,—it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.)

3. The true world is unattainable; it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought alone it is a comfort, an obligation, a command.

(At bottom this is still the old sun, but seen through mist and scepticism: the idea has become sublime, pale, northern, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world—is it unattainable? At all events it is unattained. And as unattained it is also unknown. Consequently it no longer comforts, nor saves, nor constrains: what could something unknown constrain us to?

(The grey of dawn. Reason stretches itself and yawns for the first time. The cock-crow of positivism.)”

So you can see the progression is from Plato to the collapse of all constraints. It is natural to ask what all of this implies to Nietzsche, and the answer is the abolishment of Christian morality, of course! Nietzsche’s interest in abolishing the Christian God extended also to attacking secular attempts at restoring Christian morality, in this case specifically George Eliot: 

“They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality: this is an English way of reasoning; but let us not take it ill in moral females à la Eliot.” But “when we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon all right to Christian morality.” Because “Christianity is a system, a complete outlook upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the whole is destroyed; nothing vital remains in our grasp.”

Nietzsche was not a neutral scholar here, and his opposition to Christian morality was rooted in a sincere belief that it was fundamentally hostile to Life itself. The religion took the natural drives of Man — strength, sensuality, pride, the desire to create and dominate — and turned them into sins. It is worth reminding you here that Nietzsche was a trained academic in Classical Philology — a fusion of linguistics and history — and was by all accounts a prodigy. This, combined with a wave of Grecophilia that had taken European society by storm in the second half of the 19th century, led Nietzsche to look back on the classical world as an alternative to modernity. Not only an alternative, but one which seemed more capable of beauty and sincerity than the world he was living in. 

In his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche identified two fundamental artistic impulses in Greek culture which he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian impulse was the drive towards order and beauty which found its outlet in sculpture, epic poetry, and philosophy. It stood in contrast to the Dionysian impulse which represented ecstasy and chaos and was celebrated with music, dance, alcohol, and ritualistic sexuality. It was in the ability to blend both of these impulses without negating either which, according to Nietzsche, gave their tragedies such beauty and their life meaning. In “Twilight of the Idols” he attempts to articulate the role that the Dionysian impulse played in the lives of the classical Greeks:

“In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced holy: the ‘pains of childbirth’ sanctify pain in general, — all becoming and all growth, everything that guarantees the future involves pain.... In order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in all eternity, the ‘pains of childbirth’ must also be eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signifies: I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian phenomenon.”

Much of his writing can only be read as grief over the fact that Christianity had destroyed this world and replaced Greek sanctification of pleasure and pain with “sins” and divine punishment. Again, from “Twilight of the Idols”:

“It was only Christianity, which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made something impure out of sexuality: it flung filth at the very basis, the very first condition of our life.” The Church’s method was not argument but castration — it “never inquires ‘how can a desire be spiritualised, beautified, deified?’ In all ages it has laid the

weight of discipline in the process of extirpation... But to attack the passions at their roots, means attacking life itself at its source: the method of the Church is hostile to life.” 

If you accept, at least for the sake of argument, that Christianity is hostile to life, the natural question is how did such a thing even emerge? To explain this Nietzsche introduces his most important contribution to academic philosophy, the concept of moral genealogy.

Moral Genealogy

The basic tool of genealogy is to examine moral systems not only through the lens of what they believe, but also by asking why they believe it and what type of person needed it to be true. What Nietzsche finds is that our attachment of virtue to concepts such as humility, meekness, or compassion for the weak is simply missing from the classical world, and in their place are virtues like nobility, magnificence, and proper pride (megalopsychia — “greatness of soul”), the last of which is definitely a sin. Take Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: nowhere in the entire book do we see a celebration of Christian meekness; the model man is one of power and vitality whose self-overcoming is external and active. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”: 

“I then found … that everywhere ‘aristocrat,’ ‘noble’ (in the social sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily developed ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ in the sense of ‘with a soul of high calibre,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ — a development which invariably runs parallel with that other evolution by which ‘vulgar,’ ‘plebeian,’ ‘low,’ are made to change finally into ‘bad.’”

The pattern Nietzsche identifies here is undeniably everywhere for those willing to look. Our word for “gentle,” for example, in the title comes from the French and meant of good birth. Carlyle has a great section on this from “On Heroes” that I’ll quote here: 

“All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is “sacred” enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise.”

In other words, the powerful had affirmatively defined themselves as “good,” and then they had defined everything they were not as “bad” as almost an afterthought. This, of course, was not done in consultation with the Vulgus because the powerful did not feel the need to justify their values; they simply declared them true by right.

But with civilization came structure and order. And with this structure came restrictions on our ability to express many of our animal instincts outwardly, such as aggression, cruelty, or the pleasure of the hunt. These instincts did not disappear, though; instead, they were turned inward upon ourselves. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”:

“All instincts which do not find a vent without, turn inwards — this is what I mean by the growing “internalisation” of man: consequently we have the first growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul. The whole inner world, originally as thin as if it had been stretched between two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded proportionately, and obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man’s external outlet became obstructed. These terrible bulwarks, with which the social organisation protected itself against the old instincts of freedom, brought it about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became turned backwards against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delight in persecution, in surprises, change, destruction — the turning all these instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of the “bad conscience.”

I think this is one of the most interesting sections because it is saying that not only did this confinement cause us to develop “bad conscience” through turning our instinct for cruelty on ourselves, but that this internalization was also the direct cause of us becoming ensouled. 

In a later passage: 

“It was this animal in the hands of the tamer, which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it was this being who, pining and yearning for that desert home of which it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self, an adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert.”

So now man is no longer a wild animal. He has equipped himself with mental adventures to satisfy his instincts, but they are still unorganized and individual. As a result, there was no meaning attached to the suffering in an objective, outward sense, and undirected agony is the one thing human beings cannot tolerate for long. We can bear enormous amounts of pain and grief if we believe the pain is about something important. 

And to give this pain meaning came the ascetic priest, who told the Vulgus that it was not arbitrary, but instead punishment. Punishment for sins against an all-knowing God who would dole out rewards to the moral in a world above and superior to our own. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”:

“Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons — reasons bring relief — in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last, consulting one, who knows even the occult — and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the ascetic priest, his first hint on the “cause” of his trouble: he must search for it in himself, in his guiltiness, in a piece of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a state of punishment.”

And here was the poison as Nietzsche saw it. People had replaced meaning in this life with the belief in another life, another life for which the evidence was weaker than most people wanted to admit. But to add insult to injury, he believed that in all of their piety and meekness what they were really channeling was sadistic resentment towards the powerful.  

“These weaklings!—they also, forsooth, wish to be the strong some time; there is no doubt about it, some time their kingdom also must come—”the kingdom of God” is their name for it, as has been mentioned: they are so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience that kingdom it is necessary to live long, to live beyond death,—yes, eternal life is necessary so that one can make up for ever for that earthly life “in faith,” “in love,” “in hope.” Make up for what? Make up by what? … Possibly we could quickly surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly attested by an authority who in such matters is not to be disparaged, Thomas of Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. “The blessed in the heavenly kingdom,” he says, as gently as a lamb, “will behold the punishments of the damned, so that their blessedness may be more pleasing to them.”1 

Now it is worth emphasizing here that to Nietzsche the ascetic priest was not merely cynical, but instead needed this system to exist because they themselves were sick and resentful but still brilliant, so their brilliance found a way to make that sickness a virtue rather than a failure. In fact, on the topic of Christ himself Nietzsche was unusually sympathetic, since he saw in Jesus a sincerity to himself which could, by definition, not be copied by any of his followers. “At bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” 

But they were deceivers and in their need to fit reality to their emotional needs they had transformed God himself, from an expression of the people’s strength into something else. Quoting from “The Antichrist”:  

“God becomes the formula for every slander upon the ‘here and now,’ and for every lie about the ‘beyond’! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!”

Even if Nietzsche believed Christianity to be the most potent agent of this illness, it was not the first manifestation. In “The Birth of Tragedy”:

“Socrates divined still more. He saw right through his noble Athenians; he perceived that his case, his peculiar case, was no exception even in his time” and that “everywhere the instincts were in a state of anarchy; everywhere people were within an ace of excess: the monstrum in animo was the general danger. ‘The instincts would play the tyrant; we must discover a counter-tyrant who is stronger than they.’”

In a way, no man is more responsible for the slave morality than Socrates because through him the world received Plato. And then eventually came “the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato.” 

It was in Paul, though, that Nietzsche saw the true architect of his enemy, “Christianity.” Quoting from “The Antichrist”:

“In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the ‘bearer of glad tidings’; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses.” Because “what he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs.”

Even in Paul, in the pinnacle of slave morality, there still existed a will to power because to Nietzsche all living things desired power. 

The Will to Power

As I said in the short version, underneath everything that Nietzsche wrote was the idea of the will to power. The concept appears most fully in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” where Nietzsche has Life herself speak:

“Behold,” said she, “I am that WHICH MUST EVER SURPASS ITSELF. To be sure, ye call it will to procreation, or impulse towards a goal, towards the higher, remoter, more manifold”

The will to power is a descendant of Schopenhauer’s will to life, but rather than constraining itself to perpetuation Nietzsche is adding that life has a need to surpass itself. Quoting from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: 

“He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it the formula: ‘Will to existence’: that will — doth not exist! For what is not, cannot will; that, however, which is in existence — how could it still strive for existence! Only where there is life, is there also will: not, however, Will to Life, but — so teach I thee — Will to Power!” Self-preservation, in other words, is a secondary effect. The organism does not fundamentally seek to maintain itself. It seeks to grow, to discharge its strength, to become more than what it currently is. Life would rather die than stop growing. ‘Rather would I succumb than disown this one thing.’”

In other words, as he said in “Twilight of the Idols”: 

“The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality, — where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. We should not confound Malthus with nature.”  

This applies to individuals also, of course; speaking of the great man, he “is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing energy in him forbids any such protection and prudence.”

Earlier, when I explained that Nietzsche argued that when our instincts were unable to be directed outward at the universe, they would instead be turned inward on the person themself, he thought of no instinct as more important or universal to Life than the will to power. Thus, to the idea’s artistic credit and logical deficit, everything we do can be understood through either a positive ability to express our self-overcoming outwardly or a negative, inward, resentful reimagining. But there is a normative ranking here where, to be good in the life-affirming sense, you must be able to extend this will to the external world. 

Still, if everything is will to power, and the morality we inherited is the product of the weak turning against the strong in resentment, and the God who gave that feeling moral weight is dead, then the natural question of what the fuck we are supposed to do emerges. 

The Overman

Nietzsche never fully settles on a concrete positive vision, if we are going to be honest. I’ll get more into this in his biography, but the most coherent answer is the image of the Overman — or, in the German, the Übermensch — which he paints in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: 

Note: the translation I’m using for this book refers to him as “the Superman,” and the term Übermensch has been variously translated in many ways. I am partial to “the Overman” since not only is it a more literal translation, as far as I know, I don’t speak German, but it also better captures the idea of surpassing oneself, which is core. I have thus replaced Superman with Overman where relevant. 

“The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Overman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!”

The last line there is his theology in about as plain English as he will ever state it: if God is dead, then let nature be our God instead. And since Life is “that which must ever surpass itself,” so too is this urge to surpass ourselves, which we must cultivate. Or as Zarathustra puts it: 

“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.”

Later in the same book, Life herself speaks again. 

“Verily, I say unto you: good and evil which would be everlasting — it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew. With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.”

So the process must always continue, always climbing and always self-overcoming, because “what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche articulates what this looks like more specifically. 

The “real philosophers,” he writes, “ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: ‘Thus SHALL it be!’ They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past — they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is — WILL TO POWER. —”

Thus the Overman is not merely someone who has freed himself from inherited morality, he is also a legislator who is able to align his will to truth and will to power. Nietzsche sees a version of something close to this in Christ which is why he is able to still see something admirable in him even if he despises his intellectual progeny.

What the Legislator Legislates

But if the Overman is a legislator, the question becomes: what does his legislation actually look like? Nietzsche does not leave this unanswered. In “Beyond Good and Evil” he describes his ideal society:

“the essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the SIGNIFICANCE and highest justification thereof — that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, FOR ITS SAKE, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments”

He continues in the next section. 

“Life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation... it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life”

If that is the structure, the next question is who should exploit and who should be exploited? In “Twilight of the Idols” he lays out the principle:

“Selfishness has as much value as the physiological value of him who practises it: its worth may be great, or it may be worthless and contemptible. Every individual may be classified according to whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. When this is decided, a canon is obtained by means of which the value of his selfishness may be determined. If he represent the ascending line of life, his value is of course extraordinary... If he represent declining development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickness... he is of little worth, and the purest equity would have him take away as little as possible from those who are lucky strokes of nature. He is then only a parasite upon them....”

And it is in “The Antichrist” and the “Improvers of Mankind” section of “Twilight of the Idols” where Nietzsche gives us his model for what this looks like in practice. He turns to the Laws of Manu, the Hindu caste system, as an example of what he considers a superior moral legislation to Christianity. From “The Antichrist”:

“I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition — it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into.”

What he admires in Manu is the caste system, which he believes reflects the natural hierarchy of life itself. Again from “The Antichrist”: 

“The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no ‘modern idea,’ can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another.” The superior caste, “the fewest,” has “as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth.” A high civilization is a pyramid that “can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.” This mediocrity is consolidated by the abuse of the Chandala. From “Twilight of the Idols”:

“the Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime... Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits” 

So the logic from beginning to end is: life is will to power, the Overman is the legislator of new values, society exists to produce Overmen, ascending life is to be cultivated and descending life eliminated, and the model for this is a caste system in which the lowest are deliberately degraded so that the highest may flourish. Christianity reversed this hierarchy, and that reversal is, for Nietzsche, the central catastrophe of Western civilization.

Amor Fati and Eternal Recurrence

But how do you know if you have actually become this model type? How do you test whether your affirmation of life is sincere and not merely another form of self-deception? Nietzsche’s answer comes in two interlocking concepts: amor fati — the love of fate — and the eternal recurrence of the same. From “Ecce Homo,” 

“My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed,—all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity,—but it must also be loved.”

It is this last line, that “it must also be loved,” that differentiates amor fati from Stoic resignation. It is not enough that we merely accept our lives; we must love them totally. Because to wish any of it away is to wish yourself away, since we are all the sum of everything that has happened to us. Consider the following thought experiment from “The Gay Science”: 

“What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: ‘This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!’—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: ‘Thou art a God, and never did I hear aught more divine!’”

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” the idea is dramatized when Zarathustra confronts a dwarf — the spirit of gravity — at a gateway marked “This Moment,” from which two eternal roads run in opposite directions. To the dwarf Zarathustra poses the following question:

“Must not whatever CAN run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever CAN happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by? And if everything have already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also—have already existed? And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? CONSEQUENTLY—itself also?”

In modern English: if the universe is finite and time is infinite, wouldn’t everything have to repeat eventually? Since a Newtonian billiards model of reality is no longer dominant, it is common for people to try to argue that Nietzsche only meant this idea as a thought experiment, and that is mostly how it is presented in his books. However, in his personal life the lines become less clear, and there is evidence he may have literally believed in eternal recurrence. 

But on some level I’m not sure the distinction between a literal and a figurative belief means much when you are discussing Nietzsche. Since as he said in “The Birth of Tragedy,” “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified” to begin with.  

Jews and women

Now that we have completed the survey of his philosophy, I want to turn to one final topic before I discuss his biography and more of my personal thoughts. Specifically, his treatment of women and Jews. This is an important topic to cover both because I think it is central to the way he perceived the world, but also because, candidly, I feel like most people who talk about it are, knowingly or not, lying. I will quote his own words here and avoid using either “The Will to Power” or “Ecce Homo,” both of which were published posthumously and edited by his antisemitic sister. 

Women

It is impossible to read Nietzsche honestly and not realize that he did not view men and women as moral or intellectual equals. A defender of him would argue that this is perhaps distinct from pure misogyny, but in my opinion he crosses that threshold also. Throughout his work he paints a consistent image of women as manipulative, foolish, and useful only for sex and pregnancy. This is not out of step with his general hierarchical view of society, so I’m not going to pretend that it is hypocritical, even if I disagree with him. 

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in the chapter “Old and Young Women,” Zarathustra delivers a series of pronouncements to an old woman who has asked him to speak about women:

“Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution — it is called pregnancy.

Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

The happiness of man is, “I will.” The happiness of woman is, “He will.”

Obey, must the woman, and find a depth for her surface. Surface, is woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.”

The chapter ends with the old woman offering Zarathustra a “little truth” in return: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”

“Beyond Good and Evil” presents what he describes as “merely — MY truths.” 

“Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed.” He concludes this aphorism by saying, “What does woman care for truth? From the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth — her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty.”

Later in the same book:

“Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts.”

The natural relationship between the sexes is one where the man of depth “can only think of woman as ORIENTALS do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein.”

These are only a small collection of his remarks which span the entire set of his works and are stated almost always without qualification.

Jews

The question of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism is a contested academic bog I would prefer to avoid. Unlike his position on women, which only cuts one way, throughout his works Nietzsche presents contradictory beliefs about the Jews. On the personal level he was unambiguously opposed to anti-Semitism, for example breaking with his publisher, and arguably with Wagner, over it, and in “Beyond Good and Evil” he lists anti-Semitism alongside other forms of nationalist stupidity: “among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, [and] the Wagnerian folly.” 

He also calls the Jews “beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe.” And yet it is unambiguous which group is collectively responsible for the moral illness which he identifies in Christianity. From “Twilight of the Idols”: 

“Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege: — it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low”

Or in “On the Genealogy of Morals”: 

“It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation.” And: “It was the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge.”

Remember, though, that to Nietzsche this act of moral reinvention was in its own way a representation of the will to power. From “The Antichrist”: 

“The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer.” 

Still, even if there is something admirable in the slave revolt, if only in Christ as the one true Christian, Nietzsche still believed that the Jewish priestly class had “a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.”

Nietzsche the man

Having now surveyed his philosophy, we now have enough material to ask what kind of man creates this theory. What type of soul needed these beliefs, and what kind of life did they live? 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the Prussian village of Röcken. At the time, the state was ruled by Frederick William IV, a man who contained both a cowardice and deep romantic feeling, and in 1848, only four years after Nietzsche’s birth, Europe was consumed by an explosion of Romantic nationalism and bourgeois liberalism. Although “The Revolution of 1848” was eventually put down by the conservative establishment, it did irreparable damage to the prestige of the old order. There is a great quote from Carlyle’s “Latter-Day Pamphlets,” written in the direct aftermath of that same revolution, which captures the ~vibe~ quite well. 

“Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, ‘Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!’ and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, ‘We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don’t kill us; we couldn’t help it!’ Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon”

This emotional reality, I believe, is central to understanding his writing. Nietzsche grew up in a world where the old aristocracy continued to rule, both in practice and in theory, but where everyone knew they were doomed to either be thrown down by revolution or reduced to an actor playing a role, such as under British constitutionalism. 

Nietzsche’s father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran pastor with enough bourgeois patriotic spirit to name his son after the king, but when Nietzsche was still a young child he fell down a stone step and hit his head. After this injury he rapidly declined over the course of a year and in July 1849 passed away from “softening of the brain.” 

After this, the family moved to Naumburg-an-der-Saale, where he was raised by a collection of female relatives, in what was, by all accounts, a deeply pious family. Nietzsche absorbed this world totally, and schoolmates often called him “the little pastor.” One day, when his mother saw him walking slowly home through heavy rain without any protection, she asked him why he did not run, and in response he said that they had been told not to run in the streets. 

As I mentioned earlier in the article, Nietzsche was an academic prodigy and one of the most brilliant young men of his generation in Germany. At thirteen he was admitted to Pforta, Prussia’s most rigorous boarding schools, where he was exposed to both rigorous education and abuse by the other students. It was here that he lost his faith. 

In the autumn of 1864, Nietzsche enrolled at the University of Bonn before transferring to Leipzig, where he studied classical philology. Here, as before, he excelled academically, and at the age of 24 he was given the chair in classical philology at the University of Basel. It was at Basel that he grew close with the brilliant artist Richard Wagner, with whom he formed a deep and complicated friendship. 

When, in 1870, France and Prussia went to war, Nietzsche opted to take a ~sabbatical~ to assist the motherland. He worked in an ambulance corps, where he spent the war tending to wounded soldiers. It was in this war that he contracted both diphtheria and dysentery, and began his slow process of mental deterioration. From then on he suffered from migraines of such intensity that he would spend days vomiting nothing but bile. After the war he returned to his academic position, where he published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” 

The book was substantially a celebration of Wagner’s work and, as you could probably tell from my extensive quotation of it, a full-throated attack on Christian society. Worse than this, the book is of dubious academic value as a neutral examination of classical Greece since Nietzsche came with an aesthetic observation about reality and then warped the historical facts to fit this preconceived mold. Unsurprisingly, this represented the end of his professional academic career, and a scathing review by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff titled — “Future Philology!” — led to near-universal social isolation within his discipline. 

As his academic career deteriorated so too did both his health and his relationship with Wagner. By 1876 he had physically deteriorated to the point that he was no longer able to teach and in 1879, at thirty-four, he was finally obligated to resign his professorship. 

From this point until his collapse in 1889, Nietzsche lived the life of a semi-vagrant, traveling with the weather and staying in cheap boarding houses. While living this nomadic life he first met Lou Salomé in Rome. She was twenty one years old, Russian, and Nietzsche was obsessed immediately. Although she had no interest in him romantically, the two formed a brief, intense friendship that was probably the single most important relationship of his entire life. 

One by one, he lost all of his friends during this period, and his books were met with almost total academic and public silence. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for example, which is, in my opinion, genuinely one of the most beautiful works of poetry ever written, was so poorly received that the final fourth part was printed privately at his own expense. 

Meanwhile, the world that Nietzsche viewed as degenerated and dying was exploding across the entire planet, and Christian civilization was busy subjecting every corner of the planet. The European bourgeois order, which rested upon every value that he hated — Christianity, liberalism, and sincere nationalism — was, by any material measure, the most powerful civilization in the history of the world. 

His first break happened in 1888 when Georg Brandes, the most influential literary critic in Scandinavia at the time, held a public lecture on his book “Beyond Good and Evil” to an audience of roughly a hundred and fifty. By the second lecture, the crowd had doubled and was bursting out into the halls. Nietzsche was ecstatic at this news and that same year, in a final burst of frenzy, wrote six books. To get an impression of the state he was in at this time, one only has to look at the chapter heads in “Ecce Homo” — which he began writing in 1888 — “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books.” 

Then, on January 3, 1889, in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Nietzsche saw a coachman beating a horse and threw his arms around the animal’s neck, speaking nonsense. In the days immediately surrounding the collapse, he sent letters whose contents can only be described as the bizarre ramblings of a madman. For example, to Jacob Burckhardt he wrote: “I am Ferdinand de Lesseps, I am Prado, I am Chambige … I have been buried twice this autumn.” 

Unable to take care of himself, he was cared for by his mother and sister for the remaining eleven years of his life before eventually passing away on August 25, 1900. Already by this time he had become probably the most fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and the fame he had so sincerely sought had arrived too late for him to enjoy. 

The Greatest Slave

In “Beyond Good and Evil” Nietzsche says the following in regards to every philosopher who has existed before him:

 “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of — namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.” 

I think it is only fair to apply the same standard to him. 

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher whose professed system of ethics barely, on its surface, had any similarity to the life he actually lived. Where he preached for the essential value of health and vitality, he rotted away and lived on the verge of utter destitution and failure. Rather than Zarathustra, who clearly he saw as the model for himself, I think the better image comes from his own work. Specifically, from the aesthetic priestly caste whom he despised. 

Quoting again from “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche described the reclusive philosopher the following way:

“These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones — also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos — always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers.” 

Who does this apply to better than Nietzsche himself? Because one way to understand his entire project is as a revaluation of morality to place the reclusive, truth-speaking philosopher at the center and push the compliant, rule-following bourgeois to the bottom. Here the genuinely powerful caste in his society has been reimagined as sick, and his exclusion is evidence of his own moral superiority in a society that worships illness. 

I would argue that his entire project is his own reenactment of the slave revolt in morals.

Not only this, but his own philosophy fails his test. In “Twilight of the Idols” he says:

 “To be obliged to fight the instincts — this is the formula of degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is the same as instinct.” 

Let’s assume this criterion is a good one and look honestly at the humans of his era. Picture a Prussian banker, circa 1885. Imagine his huge gut and his large family at church on Sunday, or relaxing at their manor on the Baltic. Is this man not happy? Is this man not living in alignment with his instincts? If not totally, then much more sincerely and totally than Nietzsche? 

He would call the banker a “last man” or someone who has chosen to “will nothing,” but I would ask, applying his own genealogical method, what kind of person needs to believe the powerful elite are secretly miserable to justify their own externally imposed suffering? 

And this hypothetical banker is not an anomaly; he represents exactly the type of person who was, at that moment, ruling as master over India and their Laws of Manu which Nietzsche held up as the ideal system. 

He was at his most brilliant during the moments of his most genuine sincerity, when he was able to accept his genuine gift of insight and poetry and at his worst when he tried to be something he was not, a legislator and precise academic. This tension between the man he was, an artist and a philosopher, and the ideal he held up, the warrior aristocrat, led to him brewing the most potent poison of resentment ever crafted. 

So why is he so famous?

Despite everything I have just said, I hope it is clear I still massively respect his intellectual project. Nietzsche was, in my opinion, one of the most piercing writers to have graced this planet of ours, and so the question of his fame could be ended there. 

But many philosophers are brilliant writers — I would argue Carlyle is brilliant! — and yet their books lie basically unread. Instead Nietzsche is an object of constant fascination and cultural interest on a level which is basically unparalleled. What I believe differentiates him from people like Kant or Rawls is that Nietzsche, despite loving hierarchy, also provided a toolset of unparalleled power to critique Christian bourgeois society. In addition to this, he places the philosopher who denigrates all his predecessors at the center of a vital moral arc. 

In particular, the method of using the genealogy of Christian morality to discredit it has been adopted by countless thinkers because you can take any prevailing moral order and show that its categories are constructed rather than natural, and even worse, that they are the product of resentment. So even if Nietzsche despised feminism, feminists can still take his framework and apply it to society’s conceptions of women. Or gays can apply it to heteronormativity. Or Blacks can use it to explain White racism.  

Thus the entire philosophical pipeline from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Foucault to contemporary critical theory is the reapplication of this same recipe to an expanding range of targets. 

Beyond this, Nietzsche’s Overman required nothing but sincere self-overcoming to achieve, since it rested upon the alignment of your life with your true self. In its own way, a transgender woman is as much the Overman in their own eyes as any sincere human who overcomes themself. 

Consider what his moral system offers. You can be smarter than the people who are richer than you, deeper than the people who are happier than you, and more in alignment with yourself than the society which rejects you. It is for this reason that the model Nietzsche reader is a young man who feels like the society around him is in decay for some deep, inarticulate reason. I’m saying this as someone who was once sincerely one of these young men, and arguably still am. 

Like with everything made by humans it is our job to find the truth and filter out the poison.

A Genealogy of Peter Banks - Paid Subscribers Only

Since I have now applied Nietzsche’s method to Christianity, to Greece, to Nietzsche himself, and promised in the introduction to turn it on my own writing, it would be dishonest to skip this part. So let me lay out what I actually believe and then do my best to explain why I need it to be true.

Across everything I have written there is a consistent through-line. The core of it is this: I believe that truth-seeking is the highest virtue, that sincerity is the only reliable method of accessing truth, that moral reality is experiential rather than axiomatic, and that cant — the institutional repetition of formulas no one believes — is the most dangerous force in human civilization. I believe that the character of the individual matters more than the system they operate within. I believe that you should do the thing you were made to do with full commitment, even if it is not the thing that maximizes your status or your wealth, because the alternative is a life of surrogate activities that will leave you hollow. And I believe that even these axioms are themselves subject to examination and that the willingness to interrogate your own foundations is not weakness but the logical extension of the sincerity you claim to worship.

Now the question: what kind of person needed all of this to be true?

The first reason is obvious and embarrassing. I am a writer and the president of a small think tank. My daily life is composed almost entirely of reading, thinking, and trying to articulate what I see as clearly as I can. If truth-seeking has no value then my life has no value. Every hour I spend writing instead of doing something more conventionally productive is justified only if the act of perceiving and articulating reality is itself a contribution worth making. I have built a moral framework where the man who sees clearly and speaks plainly sits at the top of a hierarchy, and I have done this while being, professionally, a man who aspires to see clearly and speak plainly. Nietzsche placed the truth-speaking philosopher at the center of a vital moral arc and I have done functionally the same thing with the sincere essayist.

The second reason is that Western civilization is powerful — materially, technologically, militarily — in no small part because of its worship of what I would call the Platonic god of truth. The entire apparatus of science, law, liberal governance, and institutional accountability rests on the premise that reality is knowable and that knowing it matters. My lifestyle, my ability to write freely, my wife’s safety, the fact that I can publish criticism of powerful people without being killed — all of this is downstream of a civilization that decided, millennia ago, that truth was divine. What I am doing in my work is not inventing a new religion. I am merely insisting that we strip everything else away and keep the core. If you are going to worship anything, worship the thing that built the world you live in. This is self-interested, obviously, since the civilization that values truth-seeking is the one that has a place for me in it. 

The third reason is the one I find hardest to write. I am a subjective person who will die. I do not believe in the existence of an immortal soul. I believe that this short spark, sandwiched between twin eternities of silence, is the only serving of existence I will ever get — I have written this before and I meant it. But meaning it does not make it easy to live with. Because if there is no soul, and no afterlife, and no God who will remember you, then the only form of survival available is through what you leave behind. Ernest Becker called this the causa sui project — the self-caused project by which mortal creatures attempt to echo in eternity. My writing, my institution, this very essay, all of it is an attempt to leave a mark deep enough that some version of me echos in eternity. 

Thus my beliefs are, as always, “a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography” and I would be a fool to think it could be otherwise. 

But here is where I think this tool reaches the bottom. Just because I need these facts to be true does not make them false. The only thing the genealogical method do is show you where a belief comes and what it says about the other, it has no positive constructive next step.

1The original Latin: Beati in regno celesti videbunt pœnas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.
