Love That Nietzsche

[Blogger's Note: This is the last post I had backlogged from my extended period of silence.]

I already know that the defining experince of my first term of doctoral course work shall always be my intellectual and personal struggles with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. I previously shared the problems I had encountered in the Nietzsche seminar, stemming from a potent combination of difficult texts and the unfortunate structure of the course itself. The good news is that I survived all of this madness by achieving a grade of "A," and I arrived at an understanding of my instructor as an intellectual antagonist instead of a personal adversary.

The news that cannot be sugarcoated is the hellfire I had to pass through just to finish my final projects for that class. That's right, I said projects plural. Over the course of two weeks, I devoted an exorbatant amount of time to reading and reflecting on Herr Nietsche's writings as I strived to complete both a 20-page term paper and a take-home final exam. With no reading week provided by the quarter system, the time available for work was at a premium. To cut to the heart of the hellacious process I underwent to finish all of this, I needed a 5-day extension to finish my term paper and still had to spend nearly the entire day of Thanksgiving working on it, not finishing the damn thing until 5:30am the next morning. It was the second most stressful academic experience I've ever had, and I can unequivocally identify the Nietzsche seminar as the hardest class I've ever taken.

The primary reason this course kicked my ass so much was the great challenges Nietzsche himself posed to me. I don't mean simply that his writing proved difficult to understand, which is certainly true. I also mean that, in taking Nietzsche seriously rather than dismissing him with stock critiques, Nietzsche got to me. He successfully challenged deeply held values and patterns of meaning according to which I've made sense of my own life for years, irrespective of whether those values and meanings are rooted in Christianity or elsewhere. I've certainly not been provoked into apostacy but particular pre-existing doubts I held and critiques I levied against my inherited religious tradition have been intensified by this experience. The last week of classes I underwent a novel event: I become physically ill, not over the stress and anxiety of finishing an important assignment (that came the following week), but because the power of an polemic hit me like a steel-toed boot to the groin. Thus the completion of the aforementioned projects proved to be a struggle with self and worldview in addition to a challenging academic endeavor.

Now three weeks removed from the completion of all that maddening business, I find myself increasingly glad to have gone through it. One of Nietzsche's most quoted statements is that "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." I now see that the reason survival of this sort makes one stronger in a deep and meaningful a sense is that the very act of overcoming a formidable challenge requires us to draw upon potent and effective resources that, once tapped, we cannot help but draw upon with great regularity henceforth. The person that overcomes a threat also overcomes that previous constitution of the person that was threatened. I overcame the challenges Nietzsche posed to me last quarter, and I feel enriched as a result, now aware of resources in myself I had come to overlook or had failed to notice prior. The question that remains for me is whether I shall finally regard Nietzsche's writings themselves as threats to be overcome or resources to continue drawing upon in other ongoing battles. I suspect the latter shall be my course.

For those that may be interested in a relatively brief exposition of the materials that challenged me, see the post below. It contains one of my responses from the take-home final. Once I had this response finalized, I truly became confident that I understood much of what Nietzsche was up to and that I actually had a chance of finishing my assignments on time.