Throughout history, there have been those who transformed prevailing ideas, examined their origins, and anticipated their future trajectories. Among the most accomplished in this regard were philosophers, who succeeded in distinguishing between good and evil, while excelling at interpreting reality and envisioning what lies ahead.
The influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, continues to renew itself, with new studies and commentaries constantly emerging on the radical theories he developed, his innovative style, and his dense aphoristic writing. Gilles Deleuze viewed the philosopher as a “creator of concepts,” and Nietzsche led the path of what might be called “poetic philosophy,” an approach that Martin Heidegger admired in some of his writings and in the way he read the poets of his age. Heidegger himself wrote poetic texts. Philosophy, then, is not a set of isolated entities or warring tribes, but rather a plurality within a larger whole.
In an important interview conducted by Franz-Olivier Giesbert and translated in Hikma magazine by Hassan Elaj, Michel Onfray reflected on his long engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, philosophy, and theories.
Onfray argued that one must “follow one’s own path. The man who affirmed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that one must invent freedom, and for whom this was an existential program spanning an entire lifetime, which is also my own program, is not an authoritarian teacher. He is a model, as was the case throughout ancient philosophy, where philosophy did not consist in verbosity, idle chatter, or merely writing philosophical books, but in living a philosophical life, a life consistent and in harmony with oneself. Nietzsche praised a virtue that is rarely discussed and about which we know very little, if anything at all, despite the difficulty of its name: integrity, or skeptical authenticity. Striving to live an honest life, that is what I retain from him.”
Onfray summarizes his understanding of Nietzsche in these terms: “At the beginning of Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks of three transformations: one must become a camel to bear the burdens of the past, then a lion in order to rid oneself of that past, with the aim of ultimately becoming a child, in the sense of attaining the ‘innocence of becoming’ that allows for the creation of a new philosophy. This three-stage dialectic, while post-Hegelian, remains Hegelian in a certain sense. It is Nietzsche’s own dialectic, which, as is often the case with him, provides in coded form the keys to his entire body of work.”
But what exactly is the “age of the camel” in Nietzsche?
“For Nietzsche, the age of the camel is the age of reading Schopenhauer, when the author of The World as Will and Representation offered new philosophical horizons: a monistic vitalism, a philosophy of the will that rendered the old Judeo-Christian dualism obsolete and proposed a vital interpretation of existence. This famous will is not the psychologists’ notion of will, nor merely the faculty of choice or volition, but a force that makes being itself possible. It is also a tragic philosophy in which boredom and suffering are inseparable from human life, while simultaneously affirming aesthetic contemplation in general, and music in particular, as a means of confronting the inevitability of negativity. It is also the Wagnerian period, when Nietzsche encountered the dramatist and believed they could work together to transform opera into an occasion for aestheticizing politics through myth, much as the Greeks did with their theater. It is the age of The Birth of Tragedy.”
By contrast, “the age of the lion is an Epicurean age. It follows the rupture of his friendship with the German composer, who failed to make Bayreuth a laboratory for building a politics rooted in German music dedicated to advancing a European dynamism, and instead turned it into a place devoted to his own persona and to the wealthy class that financed his project. It is the age of The Gay Science, of Epicurean friendship, shaped by French thought, Voltaire and the French moralists.”
As for “the age of the child, it is the age of Nietzsche’s true philosophy: the age of the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and amor fati as the ethics of a new human being who has cast off both the camel and the lion. It is, above all, the age of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a great and astonishing poem.”
Asked which of Nietzsche’s books he preferred most, Onfray offered a nuanced answer:
“I believe the reader understands that it is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, though it is also the book with which one ought to conclude, after reading all the others. Yet there is also The Gay Science, particularly for its magnificent preface, and because it condenses everything Nietzsche achieved: lightness, depth, style, elegance, vitality, clarity, and radicalism.”
The conclusion is that Nietzsche’s impact has been immense. He once wrote of himself: “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous and terrifying, a crisis unlike any known before on earth, the deepest upheaval of consciousness. I am not a man, I am dynamite.” At the time, he may have anticipated the magnitude of his influence, though perhaps not the extent to which it would remain continuous and continually renewed.
The role of thinkers in times of turmoil is fundamental. They possess a powerful theoretical arsenal capable of establishing deeper meanings, reinforcing social stability, and enriching the public sphere with vital concepts.
