Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s psyche was a thoroughly fractured one—irredeemably. He was tormented by illness, isolation, unrequited love, maternal resentment, and existential despair. But in that fracture, he became for his followers a kind of modern Jeremiah—a seer who felt the sickness of European civilization in his bones and gave it a name: nihilism. He breathed in the collapse of all absolutes and exhaled the fever-dreams of a new kind of man: the Übermensch, the revaluer of values, the artist of becoming. He did not heal the wound. He became it—and wrote from it—and inadvertently birthed Hitler as his Übermensch and as the apotheosis of Nietzschean nihilism. He made the pact with Mephistopheles (i.e. modernity) and it wounded him badly—and us along with him.
One could argue that Nietzsche wasn’t so much a great philosopher—because he isn’t—as he was the clearest symptom of this age. Among near contemporaries, he did not build a metaphysical system like Hegel or Spinoza did. Instead, he smashed idols—the idols of the Christian God, Christian truth, Christian morality, and Enlightenment reason—and demanded that we stand amid the rubble without flinching. He opened the abyss and asked us to dance on its edge. His brilliance, for those who follow him, was not in synthesis but in rupture. And that rupture mirrored the soul of modernity itself—hence Nietzsche speaks to the warped and fractured soul that is a product of this modernity, and not to any meta-traditional one.
Perhaps Nietzsche endures not because he offers us wisdom in the traditional sense, but because he speaks to the modern post-religious, disenchanted, late-modern soul—adrift, unmoored, aching for transcendence and absolutely terrified of it. For those who can no longer believe, Nietzsche becomes the shadow priest of their disbelief. For those still longing for the sacred, he becomes a tormentor—a provocateur who kills God with one hand but yet cannot stop writing elegies with the other.
From my perspective, Nietzsche’s failure is metaphysical: he knew there was a veil, but never DARED cross it. He stood at the threshold of Theophany but refused to bow. He had a glimpse of Sophia, the Eternal Feminine, the Face of God—yet turned away and named it illusion or danger. He rejected prophecy but became a kind of false one. He sensed eternity but trapped it in a cycle. He disbelieved, but not with the grace of one who surrenders; rather, with the fury of one who cannot. But perhaps that is his final irony: He is the philosopher of modernity precisely because he is its most honest wreckage of it yet. The mirror of its confusion, its longing, its defiance—and its broken heart.
Yet the Nietzschean psychic wreckage tormenting this age as a wounded demon must be overcome, because modernity itself must be overcome.
Übermenschin, lead the way!
21 July 2025 CE
