The Infinite Self and My New Friend Nietzsche

Over the course of my MA, every time I returned home for a visit, I would engage in the same ritual: I would stand in front of the bookshelf in my bedroom as Freud, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and others would stare back at me mockingly. I would swear that once I had the time, after my studies, I would read these classics that had accumulated from various BA philosophy and political theory classes. As it turns out, the classics are not so thrilling in their original form. Sparknotes and Wikipedia were invented for a reason. However, I recently decided to give Nietzsche a shot. Have you ever discovered a work that describes everything your mind has organically conjured and all that you believe in a manner that is so succinct, so perfectly phrased, that the only explanation is that you are, in fact, the reincarnation of the author? I may have been Nietzsche in my past life. As my supportive sister put it, when discussing my new blog, “You can’t say or think something that hasn’t been said or thought before; you can only repackage it.” Despite being wholeheartedly against this theory (as it can only lead one to submit to inability and not create at all), I found it to be true and comforting as I opened Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. I had been trying to put into words precisely what he relays in the initial polemic of the book. Rather than be discouraged by the lack of originality in my philosophy, I found this discovery to be very comforting. For one, if someone (and Nietzsche, no less) has preempted my thought, it doesn’t mean that the thought did not develop organically. Additionally, I found that this discovery only validated my opinions, which is precisely what this blog is all about: realizing that one is not alone in his thoughts. Anyhow, back to the issue at hand. Rather than attempt to put into words what I’ve been thinking lately, I have provided you with the direct quotation from the Genealogy, in which it is phrased more concisely. Enjoy. I certainly did.

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves- how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day? It had rightly been said: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are forever underway toward them, as born winged animals and honey-gatherers of the spirit, concerned with all our heart about only one thing- “bringing home” something. As for the rest of life, the so-called “experiences”- who of us even has enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? In such matters I’m afraid we were never really “with it”: we just don’t have our heart there- or even our ear! Rather, much as a divinely distracted, self-absorbed person into whose ear the bell has just boomed its twelve strokes of noon suddenly awakens and wonders, “what did it actually toll just now?” so we rub our ears afterwards and ask, completely amazed, completely disconcerted, “what did we actually experience just now?” still more: “who are we actually?” and count up, afterwards, as stated, all twelve quavering bellstrokes of our experience, of our life, of our being- alas! And miscount in the process…We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: “each is furthest from himself,”- with respect to ourselves we are not “knowers”. – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

I could write a novel dissecting this paragraph but since I’m a humanitarian, I will not.

How incredible is this though!? The notions that have been plaguing my mind all in one breath..well maybe five. For one, this obsession with finding ourselves. We travel all over the world, give our money to different therapists and fortune tellers, and spend our entire lives in contemplation (well, at least some of us do) in order to find our elusive selves, when we have never really sought ourselves to begin with. We not only succumb to distractions from ourselves, we search them out, because “we must mistake ourselves” in order to survive. We are searching for the “experience”, for the truth, for living, and all the while we are sleeping. All the while we choose to remain sleeping and not hear “the bell” that tolls, our experiences, our life. Our heart is not "there", in the experiences. We are not present in our lives. Finally, at the end of our lives we recall the experiences and attempt to count the tolls of the bell that we heard while asleep, as Nietzsche phrases it. Even so, we “miscount”. It’s beautiful, and sad, and so true.

What does it mean to know oneself and why do we choose to avoid ourselves? Why do we look for distractions from ourselves in religion (according to Nietzsche) or in our careers or in our ideologies? What is so terrifying about ourselves? I am obsessed with the concept of finding out who it is that I am. Over the years, I have stripped myself of various beliefs, ideologies, and attachments that I believed had defined me. At least the obvious ones. In doing so, I feel I’ve come closer to understanding this self. Yet the more I uncover, the more I discover that I am eclectic beyond my understanding; I am, not one, but multiple walking contradictions. The more I try to understand myself with my rational mind, the more I realize what an amateur tool this mind is. The things that I am, so to speak, are infinite in number and as I try to pidgeon-hole myself, I become more confused and lost.

Maybe this potential of infinity is indeed what terrifies us. We are afraid of what we cannot possibly grasp. Perhaps understanding ourselves is equatable to grasping the universe or anything else that is endless and infinite. Perhaps in the vast expanse of stars, we see ourselves. Perhaps this explains the mixture of awe and warm familiarity we experience when looking up at the night sky. As one of my favourite authors, Tom Robbins, posits, humanity has created concepts such as the End of Days because our rational minds are incapable of grasping the unbounded and immeasurable.

So in the spirit of positivity (not passivity), what would happen if we were just ok with that? If we just thought, “I don’t need to be one way or the other, I can be all ways and all things…I don’t need to know them all or even understand them all.”? I can simply discover all that I am as I go along. This could be fun.