The New Soft Nietzscheans
Part One of a series on the modern advocates of self-architecture
I am, if not exactly a connoisseur, a fairly eager reader of self-development literature. Propose a path of self-improvement in one direction or other, and my juices will stir. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, for example, captured my imagination as soon as I discovered it, and I have been teaching the concept to my own students ever since. (Begin with her TED Talk, but I also recommend Dweck’s book, Mindset.)
We do not “come out of the box” having achieved our end, our perfection, as human beings. We have to become a kind of project for ourselves and grow toward it.
A sub-culture of the self-development world can be found in the entrepreneurial space, where one will find a set of (typically, though not universally) young men and women who have attracted a large following due to impressive financial success in some online venture, usually in the digital marketing of self-improvement strategies.
Here is how one recent email started that I received from one of these young entrepreneurs (an email entitled “The Art of Self-Architecture”):
“Life is a game and your character determines the outcome.
Your character is malleable.
That's the first realization you must make.
You can change.
No matter how painful.
No matter what your mind tells you.
No matter how much you want to cling to the comforts of your current life that are causing more destruction than you think.”
Who can deny the truth in this exhortation? Character is malleable. You can change. We all cling to certain comforts that hold us back from genuine growth. So, what do we do about it? How do we make change happen?
“It all starts with an individual's ability to wake up from their mediocre trajectory, change who they are, and let their actions impact the world.”
We simply have to wake up and change. Change—choice—is what creates the new life. How could it be otherwise?
But here my Spidey Sense begins to tingle. What specific choices are we to make? And toward what ends?
In the face of these questions our young entrepreneurs customarily remain silent. True, they will recommend—their businesses are all about recommending—certain general means to self-improvement: education, deep focus, “obsession,” skill acquisition, social media mastery, etc. The person I have quoted even encourages his followers to read and develop a philosophy. All well and good. But about ends these entrepreneurs say nothing beyond vague references to some benign “impact” upon the world, understood, no doubt, in some broadly progressive way. They leave the choice of concrete ends to their followers.
What exactly is an end? An end is something in full actuality, the fruition of something.
Our friends, however, do not wish to trade in actualities but in possibilities. For them, reality is such that the potential is always prior to, and more perfect than, the actual. They see things this way: there are no ends in nature and established by God to be discovered and conformed to. Ends are things we human beings create by our choices.
Thus, our young entrepreneurs might better be called young Nietzscheans, as Nietzsche more than any other thinker encourages his followers to have the courage to embrace the will to create a new life according to one’s own best lights.
I am certainly not labelling our friends hard Nietzscheans, i.e. Nietzscheans of the Strict Observance. In the following passage from The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche vividly describes the predatory instincts of those who follow the “heroic” impulses of the will to power:
“Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community. They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank—convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within all these noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness” (First Essay, Section XI).
No, I am not accusing our friends of being such hard Nietzscheans. They would be appalled at any follower who chose to become the sort of “innocent” beast that Nietzsche describes in these lines. But Nietzsche’s passage is instructive in that it allows us to see exactly where the pursuit of self-architecture can lead if it is not guided by ends that human beings themselves do not make. Human passion and choice would not be disciplined and guided by anything other than more vehement passion. In such a wilderness of beasts let loose, some might choose to create a set of ends for themselves that are, more or less, benign. But others would certainly choose to release the “hidden urge” that “has to be satisfied from time to time.” I think we hear about this latter brand of “self-architecture” every day in the news.
Let us rather call our modern advocates of self-improvement, those who believe, with an attitude of vaguely benign progressivism, that reality is such that ends must be left to individual preference, “soft Nietzscheans.” If you still think that is too hyperbolic an appellation, consider the opening of another email from the same entrepreneur quoted above:
“I can't help but wonder what artists, thinkers, and visionaries from the past would think of today's world.
Would Alan Watts have a podcast?
Would Marcus Aurelius be Twitter famous?
Would Nietzsche do public speaking gigs about his New York Times bestseller?
Many people think they would "reject the world" and retire to the woods.
I would argue the exact opposite.
They would realize the raw power of the internet to spread their ideas to the world because humans have an innate drive to survive on more planes of existence than the physical.”
Alan Watts, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche—this strikes me as a catalogue of heroes.
Soon I will be releasing a new short story, “Pursuit Among the Ruins,” a sequel of sorts to events in my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
Here is the cover, brilliantly designed by Roseanna White, who also did the cover for the novel.
As a way of saying thank you, subscribers to The Comic Muse will receive the story as a free ebook.
If you haven’t yet read The Good Death of Kate Montclair, you can pick up your copy here. From one 5-Star Amazon Review:
“I highly recommend this book to anyone who, like me, enjoys a good mystery novel with interesting characters and witty dialogue. Who knew that a novel about a dying woman’s encounter with friends from her past could be so funny, sad, tragic, and uplifting, all at the same time.
Warning: it is hard to put this book down until you reach the end.”
The caricature of Nietzsche is by Stéphane Lemarchand Caricaturiste, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I would most certainly say so, Joe. Adele's fascination with Nietzsche is explicit (see the scene of Sunday Dinner with the "P Street Illuminati," where Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return is discussed). And the ending of the novel shows her to be a Nietzschean in the "hard" sense I write about in this post. Thanks for your observations!
I wish I had been told that instead of deciding what you want to be you should humbly pray and seek what God wants you to be. Replacing my ambitions with God's ambitions would have saved me a lot of harm.