![]() These works intrigued me, especially Plato of course, but Nietzsche struck me like a hot iron. So I had been introduced to philosophy sort of circuitously through my father and the bookshelf in his study room, and before Nietzsche, I had read with fascination some of the great Socratic arguments in Plato I tried Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia to no avail (the word “anarchy” drew me in, my having no clue what he was talking about saw me out) I read Ayn Rand ( The Virtue of Selfishness ) with instinctive revulsion I read snippets of Kant with much confusion and some little eureka moments and I had read a bit of existentialism (Only Camus, I believe-I don’t think I read Sartre until considerably later.) Over politics (I was a little lefty liberal from watching Michael Moore movies and reading PunkPlanet articles on the Iraq War he was-at that time-a “moderate Republican” waning toward the “center”), over God (I was by turns wooey and spiritual, and caustically atheist he was a resolute doctrinal Protestant true believer), and the like. By then I’d already developed a sort of intellectual sparring relationship with my father. My father, a steely and authoritative yet somewhat cerebral and self-doubting police administrator (previously a regular beat cop), was in the midst of going to college for the first time in his forties toward the ultimate end of getting a law degree, and a substantial part of his jurisprudence degree curriculum was applied ethics and philosophy. For now, I want to start from the beginning and speak for a moment about how Nietzsche affected me as, more or less, a kid-legally speaking, a child. ![]() And today, I would still count Nietzsche as one of my favorite philosophers, perhaps in spite of major tensions with my normative intuitions. And long after my adolescence, into my college years-by then considering myself a feminist, and a leftist of a vague anarchistic sort-I became even more invested in Nietzsche, taking a course called Introduction to Nietzsche as my first undergraduate philosophy class. Stereotypical though it may be for an angry and socially alienated teenage boy, Nietzsche was my first love in philosophy. Last week marked the birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche, so I felt then that it was as good a time as ever to register some hopefully-instructive accounts first briefly of my intellectual relationship with Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s uneasy legacy and tarnished contemporary academic reception, and finally, what I believe to be Nietzsche’s most potent contributions to modern thought. ![]() Friedrich Nietzsche (right), with Louise Andreas-Salomé and Paul Rée, 1882.
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