Everything Is F*cked(38)
“Friedrich, this is silly,” Meta said, trying to grab his sleeve and pull him along. But he yanked his arm away; there was madness in his eyes.23
“Where is God? God is Dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” he declared.
“Please, stop this nonsense, Friedrich. Come on, let’s go to the house.”
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”
Meta shook her head. It was no use. This was it. This was how it would end. She began to walk away.
“What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Silence. A moo rang out in the distance.
“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture [to something greater.]”24
The words struck her. She turned and locked her gaze on his. It was this idea of man being an overture to something greater that had drawn her to Nietzsche so many years ago. It was this thought that had intellectually seduced her, because, for her, feminism and women’s liberation (her ideological religion) were that “something greater.” But, she realized, to Nietzsche, it was simply another construct, another conceit, another human failure, another dead god.
Meta would go on and do great things. In Germany and Austria, she would organize marches for women’s suffrage—and achieve it. She would inspire thousands of women worldwide to stand up for their own god projects, for their own redemption, their own liberation. She would quietly, anonymously, change the world. She would liberate and free more human beings than Nietzsche and most other “great” men, yet she would do this from the shadows, from the backstage of history. Indeed, today, she is known mostly for being the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche—not as a star of women’s liberation, but as a supporting character in a play about a man who correctly prophesized a hundred years of ideological destruction. Like a hidden thread, she would hold the world together, despite being barely seen and quickly forgotten.
She would go on, though. She knew she would. She must go on and attempt to cross the abyss, as we all must do; to live for others despite still not knowing how to live for herself.
“Meta,” Nietzsche said.
“Yes?”
“I love those who do not know how to live,” he said. “For they are the ones who cross over.”
Part II:
Everything Is Fucked
Chapter 6
The Formula of Humanity
Depending on your perspective, the philosopher Immanuel Kant was either the most boring person who ever lived or a productivity hacker’s wet dream. For forty years he woke up every morning at five o’clock and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours, and then eat lunch at the same restaurant every day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. He did this for forty years. Every. Single. Day.1
Kant was efficiency personified. He was so mechanical in his habits, that his neighbors joked that they could set their clocks by when he left his apartment. He would depart for his daily walk at three thirty in the afternoon, have dinner with the same friend most evenings, and after working some more, would go to bed at exactly ten every night.
Despite sounding like a colossal bore, Kant was one of the most important and influential thinkers in world history. And from his single-room apartment in K?nigsberg, Prussia, he did more to steer the world than most kings, presidents, prime ministers, or generals before and since.
If you’re living in a democratic society that protects individual freedoms, you have Kant partially to thank for that. He was one of the first to argue that all people have an inherent dignity that must be regarded and respected.2 He was the first person ever to envision a global governing body that could guarantee peace across much of the world (an idea that would eventually inspire the formation of the United Nations).3 His descriptions of how we perceive space and time would later help inspire Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity.4 He was one of the first to suggest the possibility of animal rights.5 He reinvented the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty.6 He resolved the two-hundred-year-old philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism in the span of a couple of hundred pages.7 And as if all that weren’t enough, he reinvented moral philosophy, from top to bottom, overthrowing ideas that had been the basis of Western civilization since Aristotle.8
Kant was an intellectual powerhouse. If Thinking Brains had biceps, Kant’s Thinking Brain was the Mr. Olympia of the intellectual universe.
As with his lifestyle, Kant was rigid and uncompromising in his view of the world. He believed that there was a clear right and wrong, a value system that transcended and operated outside any human emotions or Feeling Brain judgments.9 Moreover, he lived what he preached. Kings tried to censor him; priests condemned him; academics envied him. Yet none of this slowed him down.
Kant didn’t give a fuck. And I mean that in the truest and profoundest sense of the phrase.10 He is the only thinker I have ever come across who eschewed hope and the flawed human values it relied upon; who confronted the Uncomfortable Truth and refused to accept its horrible implications; who gazed into the abyss with nothing but logic and pure reason; who, armed with only the brilliance of his mind, stood before the gods and challenged them . . .