Dear friends,
I had a peculiar encounter recently that I want to share with you. I was with my fiancée and stepson in Greece, and I was struggling to fall asleep in our hot, tiny hotel room, which faced a noisy main street. I was sweating all over, tossing and turning, suspended in some kind of liminal, hallucinatory space where dream and reality intermingled. In this space, there appeared before me, just as real and matter-of-fact as the furniture around me, my old mentor, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
I was not in any way surprised by Nietzsche’s presence. If anything, I felt happy to see him after such a long time apart. As soon as I greeted him, I started sharing about my experiences in recent years and the lessons life has taught me. I was eager to hear his thoughts and for the two of us to celebrate our shared love of wisdom, as we had in old times. But this time, something was off.
Whatever insight or opinion I shared with him, Nietzsche obliterated it with impeccable logic and psychological criticism. Without mercy, he pointed out the vanity and inconsistencies in every bit of wisdom I thought I had acquired. The experience was humiliating. To make something good out of it, I decided to take it as a learning opportunity. I started agreeing with Nietzsche’s arguments (which appeared unassailable) and ended up extolling the exact opposite of every idea and view I had shared at first. I hoped my mentor would be pleased that, while I had not been able to reach the right conclusions myself, at least I could recognize the errors of my thinking.
To my utter dismay, Nietzsche shook his head in disapproval. He took each of the arguments he had given me—arguments I had just agreed with—and demonstrated how crude and naive they were. While at first I had been unable to defend my own position, I was now just as unable to defend the opposite of my position! Desperate and confused, I started suggesting alternative concepts, theories, and interpretations, hoping that something would land, but Nietzsche kept refuting every statement I made. Seeing that whatever I said only got me more tangled up in his web of logic, I gave up.
