Saturday, December 09, 2006
(11:27 AM) | John Emerson:
Why Adam Kotsko is a Destiny
Workaholism and an adored Lou Salome figure are red-flag warning signs of terminal Nietzschification. Does Adam put his feet in a bucket of icewater to keep himself awake while studying? Does he use chloral hydrate as a sleeping potion?Despite their seeming normality, William James and Max Weber also went temporarily nuts for reasons identical to Nietzsche's: The Protestant Seriousness. The major pre-Protestant thinker Thomas Aquinas went nuts too, while writing his second
The Superman was Nietzsche's solution to the dilemma of all successful self-improvement programs. If all you know how to do is improve yourself, what do you do once you're completely improved?
What you do is set yourself an impossible and imaginary ever-receding standard so you can still fail. Nietzsche was the über-bourgeois, rejecting faith but not works -- but the works could never be quite enough, and he insisted on refusing absolution for the guilt of having been born.
Jaroslav Hašek's far superior solution was to dabble in three or four mutually-contradictory revolutionary movements, write gutter journalism, and drink 20-30 beers a day. Borges and Kafka invented imaginary animals, but Hašek put imaginary animals in a real children's science encyclopedia sold on the market. Hašek made his Dadaist contemporaries look like poseurs (Satie always excepted).
As the world becomes increasingly Holy Roman, with hereditary lunatic rulers starting civilization-destroying wars for no intelligible reason, it will become increasingly clear that Seriousness itself is the enemy and that Švejkismo is our only valid option.
