There’s never a good time to encounter the Antichrist, but when I first ran into Friedrich Nietzsche I was fourteen years old, and that’s the worst time of all. The fourteen-year-old Nietzsche reader is AJ Soprano upsetting his family by announcing the death of God: a deeply annoying little twerp. They are not sophisticated readers, fourteen-year-olds, and when they come into contact with Nietzsche they all seem to suddenly discover the same thing: the reason none of the other kids like them isn’t that they’re generally weird and uncomfortable to be around, but that they’re actually intrinsically better than everyone else. Teenage Superman, standing above the common herd. When Nietzsche talks about the qualities of the superior man—‘pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest, the deification of passion’—our shy, pustulent little Jimmy somehow sees a perfect description of himself.
My experience was different, but only because at fourteen I was already hooked on something else. Maybe there are kids who can grow up without some kind of intellectual compensation for their lives, but I wasn’t one of them. I was a big, flabby child, dyspraxically graceless, and permanently undergoing some kind of orthodontic treatment. Little flecks of food got stuck in my braces and I spat them out when I spoke. The school had tried to force me to play football with the other kids during PE, and then accepted defeat; I had implicit permission to hide in the changing rooms and read my book instead. I had kissed two girls, on the lips, no tongue, but both incidents had been during games of spin the bottle at Jewish summer camp, and I was keenly aware that this didn’t really count. Meanwhile, some of the girls I knew, the girls I hopelessly pined after, were having actual sex with grown men in their early twenties. The girls had already been inducted into the secret velvet-fringed world of adult sexuality, and I knew that I had been permanently locked out. I was a child; I would remain a child; a huge hulking spacker in some primary-coloured nursery room, crouched over my tiny, hairless, useless cock. Of course, I knew that these girls had been inducted into the adult world by men screaming obscenities at them out of moving cars. I knew that every time they did the inconceivable act with these sophisticated older lovers they were, legally speaking, being raped. But that wasn’t what haunted me: it was the incontrovertible fact that unlike those cool grown-up paedophiles, I would die a virgin. Also, I suspected all my friends were constantly making plans to hang out without me. I had no actual evidence that this was taking place. But why wouldn’t they? Who could possibly want me to come along?
But it was all ok, because I’d discovered that sex wasn’t real. In fact, the entire physical world, with its inaccessible bodies and its frightening PE lessons, was an illusion. I’d read Valis by Philip K Dick, which had got me quite deeply into Gnosticism. I printed off several of the Nag Hammadi codices from a website called gnosis.org and read them in bed. I knew that the god of this world, the one my parents chanted to on Friday nights, was actually a lion-headed serpent called Samael, a blind idiot god who created the false world of matter and the flesh. Because the demiurge is blind, his world is utterly broken, which is why there’s so much poverty and injustice, and why I was locked out of all its good bits. But beyond Samael’s false creation there’s a true world, and this is where we really belong. The best part, though, is that we can get there through thought, knowledge, studying, which happened to be the one thing I was really good at. Later, I was delighted to discover that the exact same idea was at the core of a Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta. I composed big diagrams of the precise relation between Pāramārthika and Vyāvahārika, Brahman and Ishvara, Atman and Jiva, with a dotted line running through everything to represent the veil of Māyā. Moksha and gnosis were the same thing. In fact, I started to realise, this idea was everywhere. Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume. Whenever serious people had pondered the nature of the universe, they’d all concluded that the material world is fake, and genuine reality is made of pure thought. I was part of an intellectual confraternity that included Plato and Jesus and the Vedic sages. I was actually intrinsically better than everyone else. I was achieving ecstatic union with God.
When I picked up Thus Spoke Zarathustra at fourteen years old, all I knew about Friedrich Nietzsche was that he was a philosopher, which meant he would naturally be one of my people, who loved thought and learning and escape from the material world. So I started reading. Overcoming humanity, becoming the Overman: fine. I liked transcendence. But then, in the third chapter, I ran into this:
Once Zarathustra too cast his deluded fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen. Then the world seemed to me the work of a suffering and tortured God. Thus speak I to backworldsmen. It was suffering and impotence—that created all backworlds. And then it wanted to get its head through the ultimate walls—and not its head only—over into the ‘other world.’ But that ‘other world’ is well concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial nothing; and the bowels of existence do not speak to man, except as man. I teach man a new will: to choose that path which man has followed blindly, and to approve of it—and no longer to slink aside from it, like the sick and perishing! The sick and perishing—it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth! They sought escape from their misery, and the stars were too remote for them. Then they sighed: ‘Oh if only there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!’ Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones. But to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their body and this earth.
Well, I thought, fuck. I could feel the finger of this Friedrich Nietzsche, pointing through three centuries to jab me directly in the chest. He had my number. I thought I was special, I thought I was different from everyone else, but he had sussed me out without having even met me. His language was frilly and silly, but underneath all those verilys and untos and non-standard word orders there was something cold, arctically cold, clear and crystalline. Here was a blue sky and an icy wind to clear out all the mystical gunk that had accumulated in my brain.
I kept reading, in something like terror. And then, finally, I arrived at the eighteenth chapter, when Zarathustra meets the old woman, and delivers some little lessons about her sex. ‘Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy… Woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman’s nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters.’ In thanks, the old woman offers a lesson of her own. ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’ And suddenly, everything was alright again. I didn’t need to be afraid of this man who spoke in the voice of a frozen wind, and I didn’t need to listen to anything he had to say about me or my weakness, because this man was the worst thing it’s possible to be. He was a misogynist.
In fact, Nietzsche was more than just a misogynist. He was also against democracy, the working classes, peace, kindness, and humanity itself, and while he wasn’t exactly a racist he still found time to bemoan the abolition of slavery. He was every shade of reactionary going; at root, he hated the principle of equality. Equality meant mediocrity, degeneration, the Last Man; it meant reducing everyone to the state of those placid fish that eat the algae off aquarium walls. Against the dysgenic tide of liberalism and socialism, he believed that a man worthy of life ‘must be bred.’ He dreamed of a ‘party of life-advocates, which will undertake the greatest of all tasks, the ruthless extermination of all degenerate and parasitical elements.’ In the end, that party arrived, which is why so many branches in my extended family tree are cut off at the exact same point. But the bit that really upset me was the misogyny. I could entertain, in the abstract, a return to the body and this earth, but the misogyny reminded me that unlike the world of spirit and thought, the world of the body is split by the enormous scar of sexual difference. Returning meant reducing women to their bodies. This was what the cool paedophiles were already doing. But I also knew that despite all my Gnostic pretensions, I—sneaking onto the family computer under cover of night to download something called 3_girl_soapy_car_wash.jpg on LimeWire, print it out, stare hard at those hard round tits and those plastic American smiles and then, once it was done, tear up the picture and flush the pieces down the toilet before my parents came home—was guilty too.
Nietzsche said that every great philosophy is ‘the personal confession of its author, a kind of unintended and unwitting memoir.’ But I think that goes for readers as well. Nietzsche is a mirror. Tell me what you think of Nietzsche, and I’ll tell you who you are.