Breakfast at Nietzsche’s

I’m genuinely surprised that creatures like us get up every day and somehow summon the will to live. Amazingly, and in spite of the sordid array of fresh and fertile frustration that greets us in the morning, we find a way to persist— to go on— to endure, even when the easiest solution to the abundance of misery we face would be to shake off this frail and fleshy prison with a slash across each wrist and a swift plunge into nothing. We brew that first pot of coffee, wait for the caffeine to temporarily purge any creeping contempt bubbling up, and then we get on with it. It’s a fraught repetition and the mendacity of it all is enough to tempt even the strongest among us to replace their creamer with cyanide. However, we typically don’t resort to prematurely ending our tenure on earth in violent and self-effacing resignation. We carry on, even when we fail to do so calmly.

It’s inspirational, really. So much suffering curiously met with so much resilience. Yet, our endurance isn’t what really marvels me. After all, survival is the common denominator underlying almost every instance of biological striving. It’s an innate yearning shared among living beings, the majority of which lack the cognitive complexity required to identify and articulate their perseverance. This ubiquitous will to exist extends to brainless, single celled bacteria thoughtlessly multiplying in our gut. But, to my knowledge, only humans have the capacity to do more than just survive. As far as I can tell, only we can live for something. There is a variety of jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii, that can, at least in theory, keep jellyfishing indefinitely, so long as it evades prey and natural disaster alike. I’ve been told that lobsters may share this peculiar characteristic, though I’m no biologist. Yet, no jellyfish can compose music, poetry, or literature that affirms, in no uncertain terms, the occasionally beautiful, often nightmarish, and always poignantly paradoxical experience of what Martin Heidegger deemed our “thrownness” in this life. A jellyfish can keep surviving but can they do anything else?

Then again, every distinctively human aspiration— that is, all those qualities that truly set us apart from a brainless blob of translucent plasma clumsily dancing around the ocean— requires agency to realize. If self-determination is a possibility any one of us can hope to achieve, it probably exists on a spectrum that most have woefully unequal access to. Crafting value is much easier if you start life under the auspices of a wealthy, upper Manhattan family than if you come of age in a dilapidated trailer park with a stunning surplus of disadvantage and an obscene dearth of opportunity. In these latter situations, the only real victory possible often seems to reside in our indignant response to the vicissitudes inflicted upon us by an outside aggressor. In fact, there’s a cathartic nobility —a rare and courageous beauty, if you will — in surviving long enough to tell the whole wide world to eat shit. Unfortunately, this potent but nevertheless limiting assertion of strength is where too many of us stop in our quest for self-realization. We applaud the endurance required to overcome the obstacles we face, but fail to positively qualify what it is we are surviving for. Is it merely spite that keeps us going or is there something more singularly worthwhile prompting our effort?

Friedrich Nietzsche insisted upon the creative potential of humanity. He not only endorsed our advancement beyond bare survival; He raged against any person or social order threatening to infringe upon or dull the expression of what he considered to be the most fundamental orienting faculty we possess: the will. This fundamental feature of ours reflects a universal human instinct for freedom; the primordial drive underlying all human striving. Nietzsche’s hope was that, in freeing ourselves from the fetters of fundamentally life-denying attitudes and beliefs, humans could secure within themselves the courage to cultivate audacious displays of creative achievement that defy convention and expand the parameters of what we imagine when we reflect on the possibilities present in human experience, whether that be a finite matrix of meaning or an infinite array of unrealized opportunity. If our achievements transgress a social order that aims to limit and control the pull towards raising the ceiling of creative expression, then all the better according to Nietzsche. By his estimate, humans have the unique capacity to rebel, create, and, in the end, become even more worthy of praise and admiration than the broken idols we are compelled to mindlessly worship. Our humanity is “a constant self-overcoming”, the ultimate ambition of which is, at least in one sense, to decisively affirm our values through a deliberative process that is ultimately our responsibility and ours alone. We should aim to achieve this, not via appeals to an otherworldly divinity, but through deliberately manifesting a life constituted by integrity and courage, affirming the suffering and the joy and the ambiguity of it all in equal measure. What’s more, we must happily will that life to unfold again and again and again. Might Nietzsche have willed for the one night stand that gave him syphilis to recur eternally? I’m not sure. But, for his sake I like to think that she was, in fact, that good.

The power of self-creation sounds lofty, but it does not imply limitless self-expression. Philosophers and theologians, from the Greeks to the Christians to the Stoics to the Buddhists to the postmoderns, have long insisted that human freedom is not limitless. We can certainly aspire towards unbridled greatness all we want, but time, chance, and material conditions impact the ceiling of what’s realistic for us. Yet, despite that ceiling and the various constraints influencing the shift from simple potency to concrete actuality, we are not the slaves of circumstance.

For my own part, I regularly oscillate— and frustratingly so— between competing polarities; the universal and the particular; the desire to determine the path ahead of me on my own terms and my finite existence in a matrix of limited possibility; the acute need I feel to assert my identity against the mob no matter the cost, always complicated by a subtle longing to lose myself to the collective, and, perhaps, experience subliminal unity in the act of forfeiting whatever it is that constitutes “Me”. Occasionally, however, I don’t feel so torn between these tensions in my life. Instead, I find myself in the midst of temporary reconciliation with no clear understanding of how that unity is even possible. When it happens, I have the inexplicable need to create and so I do whatever it takes to feed my parched soul. I play my guitar or bang on my piano. I paint. I toy with new algorithms with which to solve a Rubik’s cube. I write until I have nothing left to say. Once, I even learned how to juggle clubs on a unicycle. The point is always the same: to do something, anything at all, that screams “Yes!” to life.

The form my creativity takes is always conditioned by contingencies I had no say in, certainly. After all, whatever level of skill I have developed in these areas is the product of natural talent, perseverance, and neurodivergent fixation. Yet, in those creative moments, I am not simply distracting myself from the angst of it all. I'm creating for the sake of creation itself, materializing in the real world an innate impulse that exists within each of us regardless of our socio-temporal location. If I step back from it all, I can clearly see my efforts as they are entangled in a universal process. At the instant that my embodied will takes flight, the creativity particular to my existence–everything that makes me Me–also exists universally. It’s simultaneously mine and not mine. And during the moment of my will’s instantiation into concrete form, I feel my finitude engrossed in a shared process that erupts universally. I don’t fear death and decay because, for a second or two, I’m certain that I did something important–something that transcends my own litany of traumas–the meaning of which won’t perish just because my heart stops beating one day. Even if nobody sees my work, it exists because I wanted it to. I did that. And, at the end of the day, I contributed to a dynamic creative process, wherein a near infinitely complex multitude of I’s have the power to become a self-transcending We. The concrete form my creativity takes is subject to erasure, sure. The music will stop, the art will fade, and the words will become obsolete rants temporarily preserved to a hard drive that will probably be recycled into a toaster oven one day. However, the reality of my creativity's temporal expression won’t be wiped from the mesmerizing tally of all human achievement nor will the momentary unity I felt with everything that’s worth a damn in this world be expunged from the record of my life. It happened, and that happening is, for better or worse, a constituent part of something eternal.

For a clearer idea of what I’m getting at, imagine, for a second, Beethoven haphazardly hovering over his piano, methodically writing melodies that reflect, in equal parts, both the maddeningly manic and subliminally magnanimous tenacity of a troubled man who made music, not merely because he wanted to, but because an unrelenting force in the nucleus of his being compelled him to create symphonies he’d never hear beyond the boundaries of his imagination. The complications of his own broken embodiment and the historical setting he inhabited undoubtedly shaped the products of his tempestuous creativity. But these contingencies weren’t the fundamental forces motivating a frenzied man desperately grasping after a brief glimpse of the absolute. What Beethoven exhibited was a perseverance of creative willpower that circumstantial calamity could not curb.

I don’t pretend to maintain Beethoven’s rare genius. However, I do hope that, just maybe, the same restlessness that drove him to painstakingly hammer out Symphony No. 9 over the course of two tumultuous years lives somewhere inside of me, eager to emerge in some more or less inchoate fashion. Like Beethoven, I want to momentarily reach out and touch infinity by externalizing the various particularities that make me the person I am, differentiating my will from the will of every other being without losing sight of the fact that the unique drives that distinguish me as my own person are also what connect me, in some miniscule way, to what’s ultimately real. It connects us all—you, me, Beethoven—uniting each through our shared capacity to live deliberately, engage in courageous acts of creation, and “put to rout all that [is] not life”, as Thoreau so eloquently expressed it.

But this wide breadth of expression can just as easily sound like well-articulated bullshit, particularly for those of us who feel like little more than flies to wanton school boys, as King Lear quipped, utterly helpless against forces we lack the power to resist. I descend into a bitter rage anytime I start to dwell on the unfairness of struggling to thrive in a society that feels deliberately designed to squeeze life out of me until I have nothing more to give. It suffocates my urge to create, most of all when I remember the fact that I participate in an economic machine that reduces self-expression to easily digestible “content” that is always at the ready to be streamed on-the-go. In this system, creativity is, first, about generating ad revenue and, second, about distracting all curious parties from figuratively setting their twitter account ablaze and, together, subversively reaching towards those very values that have the potential to disrupt the stagnation of the status quo. To paraphrase the world’s most lovable skeptic of all things jazz, Theodore Adorno, consciousness is rather deceptively replaced by conformity. Much like the very substack post currently before you, it is empty amusement…assembly line existentialism intended to perpetuate the illusion that, unlike everyone who tried to make a difference before, our voice will somehow overcome the deafening cacophony of the buyers, the sellers, and the ones who get bought.

In the end, that incessant impulse toward self-destruction we all feel from time to time tends to become overwhelming. I have nothing, I create nothing, and I start to believe that, in truth, I amount to nothing. Maybe, I think, I was lying to myself when I imagined anything could ever get better.

The industrial culture complex undergirding so much of our contemporary media is saturated in positivity porn aiming to assure us all that, actually, life is good. Contemporary public intellectuals preach a secular gospel that emphasizes the relative advances we have collectively achieved in promoting human wellbeing over the last century. On the whole, these people reason that a healthy sense of optimism is warranted given the empirically evident progress human beings have made in reducing interpersonal violence, diminishing the lethality of disease, and, above all else, increasing the general wealth shared among all living persons on earth. As they say, the system isn’t perfect but look at all of the measurable good it’s done so far!

The reality experienced by many poorly exemplifies the humanistic progress championed by those who hold this attitude. Maybe it is true that I do own more wealth than my great-grandparents and, certainly, vaccines likely saved me from ever being planted in a toddler shaped coffin. I’m definitely more educated than the farmers and coal miners and house wives from whence my stock was hewn. But my existence—my freedom, my expression, my life— is nevertheless constrained by unnecessary structural entrapments wrought by a socioeconomic system that exploits, oppresses, and dehumanizes anyone ensnared in its jaws. How can a person manage to paint or sing or dance or write if they can barely hold their head up at the end of a tortuous workday? How can they express, with authenticity and integrity, the values that give them reason to keep surviving when the only value that seems to matter to the rest of the world is market growth at all costs? The Marxists have been pointing to this fact for over a century and a half, but it bears repeating: modern life revolves around an ethic of acquisition that conflates the worth of a person’s life with the number of digits in their bank account. Ultimately, those at or near the top in our society enjoy the luxury of examining the world with the radical confidence that, omitting any unanticipated disaster, the next generation will have an even better standard of living than the one available in our present era. They can entertain a bird’s eye view of history, all the while detaching themselves from the most common experiences of pain, meaninglessness, and strife that the other 99% of humanity persistently struggles to overcome. For all of those drowning at the bottom- right here and right now- that display of confidence not only seems misguided, it feels like a slap in the face. All things considered, it isn’t very hard to understand why our current politics reflects hostilities, divisions, resentments, and deeply incommensurable desires of every variety rather than a shared commitment to ideal ends that very well could to liberate us all from the emptiness many of us feel so acutely. The widespread feeling of institutional betrayal— the rage, the mistrust, the violent expressions of alienation— perniciously reflects where we are as a global society of have-nots and have-everythings; a community of citizens who only seem to grow more fractured with each new point of international connection. Aye, and there’s the rub. Sure, in a different system, despair would linger. Communistic statelessness, if ever achieved, won’t disrupt the existential ontology of personhood. But, with some effort, maybe survival wouldn’t necessitate shrouding my estrangement beneath the carefully curated façade of four different online profile pictures that all express the same basic lie: Everything is fine. It’s just one more tension in life that lacks the hope of simple resolution.

And yet through it all, I find myself more certain than ever that uncritically leaning into this anger and creating identities that reflect toil and social antagonisms of every sullen sort is the easy answer to a problem that requires imagination, faith, and courage to resolve. What we urgently need is to exercise, in sustained solidarity, the potent creativity we each possess in conversation with a set of negotiated ends that require collective effort to both imagine and engineer into existence. In examining my own life, I can only feel shame when I consider the various ways my anger routinely manifests as an unproductive and hopelessly static feeling of envy that I direct at anyone I perceive to exist in a more advantageous position than my own. I don’t look to the creative potential of humanity nor to my own unrealized possibility for a sense of empowerment. Neither do I turn my gaze towards practical solutions that might amend the problems generating distress in my life. Instead, I languish in bitter discontent, hoping that one day others will hurt as I have hurt even if I have to light myself on fire to make them burn with me. I’m not only limiting myself when I succumb to these feelings. I’m violating my very humanity by privileging the perverse and cathartic pleasure of harming others over engaging in a significantly more worthwhile creative act that, though frequently difficult to actualize, might ultimately produce an internal harmony capable of curing my incessant alienation and reconciling me to a world full of equally lonely people.

The path I'm describing is hard and everyone who treads it will do so clumsily; It is neither well-worn nor easy to navigate. But the longer I live, the more tragic losing oneself to the slow suicide of resentment feels. In fact, withering in my identity as a victim of civil society’s most uncivilized vicissitudes now strikes me as both a display of cowardice and a lapse in fortitude. As such, I think we should strive to avoid identities, philosophies, and moral commitments that have us deriving meaning and purpose from whatever affliction proves to be the most salient. I’m even more reluctant to only think about life as the summation of cosmic and social injustices that I must identify myself against in order to experience existence on my own terms. In the end, that mode of antagonistic thinking represents the illusion of agency, not an authentic and undaunted affirmation of one’s own capacity for constructive creativity. Resistance in the face of suffering is noble, but it is only one part of the human story and, on its own, produces little closure. It cannot and will never supply any affirmative content to our lives because knowing what you hate can’t give you an idea of what you ought to love. Furthermore, the truth is that none of us are invariably defined by structural forces existing outside of our control. We have the freedom to choose, however limited that choice may be, to not only withstand the coercive influence of those structures but to fundamentally improve upon them. Ultimately, humans devalue our own creative potential when we predominantly see ourselves as creatures defined by our opposition to the things and people and institutions we ache to tear down. We lose sight of the infinite and obscure the possibility for self-transcendence. More importantly, we devalue one another. To behold and cultivate the creative potential endemic to my own person is, I think, to likewise cherish that quality as it exists beyond my own fractured, biased, and experientially sheltered subjectivity. To realize this potential, its fullest expression, requires, as Hegel described it in an elegant piece of word salad he called Phenomenology of Spirit, that I look into the eyes of another and, when I do, that I see my freedom…my creative potential…the depths of my personhood, staring back at me because “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction in another self-conscious.”

I don’t want to spend my life reacting. Neither do I intend to be a person defined only by my perseverance through struggle. What I want, instead, is to positively flourish, not in spite of the adversity I live with, but because I’m a curiously complex creature who knows that the joy and the beauty manifesting in this world is just as real and just as integral to the human experience as the sensation of pain and loss that I spend so much time lamenting. I intend to pay attention to those rare moments within which my own stunning particularity is temporarily reflected back to me in a collaborative process that I contributed to for no other reason than not fulfilling my need to actualize my creative potential might kill me. I want to grow stronger and wiser through a transformation Nietzsche described as “deciding slowly; and […] holding firmly to the decision once it is made.” I want to make things, great and enduring, as well as those that, if you blink, you’ll miss. I want to create, not out of nothing, but from the ashes of all the beauty and ugliness that came before me. And more than anything else, I aim to simply live and to help others do the same... in such a way that, should anyone express disapproval or cast doubt on what I’ve sculpted from the marble of my existence, my only response will be, perhaps not unlike my pal Beethoven, something along the lines of, “I can’t hear you.”