Transvaluating Values with Dick and Jane

I need to present my Naomi Osaka and a couple of other essays as part of a series in which I am transvaluating values. I borrowed the word “transvaluation” from Nietztsche. His bizarre little philosophy. I love it so. But yet it is little; a world collapsing in upon itself into madness and self-annihilation. How could I not love one who “philosophizes with hammer”…that is to say in an effort to destroy idols! The only problem is the atheist’s final paradox from which he or she cannot escape. It is summed up thusly; it is not so much that the atheist rejects the existence of God thus he or she has no God, it is that the atheist has decided to become his or her own God….and ladies and gentlemen we make poor gods.

So yes, Nietzsche destroyed all the physical totems of God he could find with his philosophical hammer. The only problem was what happens when you have destroyed all of the idols you could find? You realize that there is only one idol left and the angel with the hammer destroys himself. Best to learn to live with other people’s idols…..that is, if you believe in God and the last the day. Cause when you get to destroying idols you cannot help but destroy your own.

One of the things I love about Nietzsche is how he attacked his former best friend, the celebrated German composer Richard Wagner…that is…after Wagner became successful…that is….after Wagner became much more successful than he. To be a fly on the wall in that rarefied air. What the fuck must Wagner in all his Operatic and dramatic genius have been thinking when he listened to Nietzsche perform his pedestrian songs on the piano. Nietzsche should have been humbled that it was even possible. Instead, Nietzsche resented him for his later success….kinda like I knew you when, but for like a really witty, educated and erudite (if also angry and resentful) nigga to attack you like that.

The bizarre part is that Nietzsche’s impotent attacks just reinforced how far Wagner had transcended his former friend. Wagner was so far a success that damn near nothing Nietzsche (a broke assed sickly writer whose printings probably never sold above 800 until well after his death) could possible do to derail the Wagner train which of course was well under steam long before the maestro’s death. Nietzsche’s attacks just made him look small and petty; of course the irony being he was one of the giants of philosophy and literature in my estimation. It’s the closest you could get to secular religion in my estimation.

Of course the part you have to wrestle with is that it has no morality. That is why Hitler and the Nazi’s found it so easy to appropriate. That is why Huey P Newton found Nietzsche’s philosophy so easy to appropriate. That is why I find it so easy to appropriate. If I listed the authors and personalities that have appreciated and appropriated Nietzsche I’d be writing a long time. I have to admit I liked the Canadian Academic and public intellectual Jordan Peterson even more when I found out what a great admirer he was of Nietzsche. Strauss dedicated a work to Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s work is liberating. It is bracing, like sailing heights in remote alpine or Himalayan canyons. Only Icarus is real. Nietzsche got too close to the sun.