“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal”
-Nietzsche
You’re Neither A nor B, You’re the Going Between
Yeah…even this guy’s name is hard, what’s his philosophy gonna be like?
Well, I’ll be honest here, it can be tough. But I don’t for a moment want that to be misinterpreted as unattainable. Even he understood that the complexity of his work and the ways in which he presented it, often aphoristically or in a maxim, sometimes poetically but sometimes narratively, makes it difficult to identify with. Shoot, even the subtitle of one of his greatest works is ‘A Book for All, and None’. Nietzsche liked to shape the medium through which he was delivering his thought in a way that reinforced the central tenets. I actually kind of like to think of his style (even as it shifts within single texts) as the canvas upon which he’s painting his philosophy. But all that to say, don’t shy away from his stuff because they look crazy. Immerse yourself in it, and if you take away even one thing, I promise you’ll come back for more.
Alright, so the guy’s name: Nietzsche. Knee-chuh. Not Knee-chee, not nitz-chee, not night-ski, just knee-chuh. But honestly who cares…he’s dead. He surely wouldn’t care and anyone who thinks it’s worth it to take the time to correct your pronunciation probably hasn’t dug too deeply into his philosophy. Now you’re free, you’re welcome.
There’s gonna be many knee-chuh quotes that I’ll touch upon throughout this blog but I’m especially excited to start with this one. Here he gives us a glimpse into the totality of his thought in the distillation of just 15 words, probably even less in German because one huge German word is like seven English ones. We, as mankind, are not an ends in and of ourselves. We are not a culmination that has become; we are ever culminating and ever becoming. There is no ideal for us to achieve, no parameters by which we must abide…we are that which is moving in the direction of creating what it means to be us, and we are doing it every day. To me, this speaks directly to all of us who feel as though we’re not good enough, not performing well enough, not being a good enough mom or dad, husband or wife, co-worker, friend, etc. Too often we form these idealizations about what the right version of us should look like. What if we could realize that there is actually no version of perfection that can be reached, only incremental movement down the path of becoming? Then perhaps we free ourselves from the chains of manufactured perfection, simultaneously leaving behind the ability to fall short of an ideal and realize that all we are, all we can ever be, is a bridge to the thing that we will be forever becoming.
Knee-chuh asks us to do many things throughout the gamut of his works, but maybe the most important thing is to overcome the external constraints society, religion, politics…that anything really has put on us and realize that we are the masters of our will. We are the authors of our story and nothing else writes it for us. “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 and a going under.”