2. Rate your life

Are you living a 10 out of 10 life? Or does that question strike you as crass, reductive, even absurd? And yet—indulge me—if you had to rate your life right now, what number would you choose? More importantly, what would it take to raise that number? Could you imagine a life so rich, so affirmable, so meaningful, that you would live it again, eternally?

Welcome to Becoming Übermensch, the podcast where Nietzsche’s philosophy is not merely studied but lived. Hosted by Jimmy—former senior professional in evidence-based behaviour change and longtime Nietzsche researcher—this is not your standard academic analysis or self-help regurgitation. This is philosophy for life.

Join us as we decode Nietzsche’s most potent ideas—eternal recurrence, will to power, Amor Fati—and apply them as tools for radical self-transformation. If you’ve ever felt stuck, restless, or like something more is possible—something higher, stronger, truer—this podcast is for you.

Music: Hand of God from the album Carnage by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

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Transcript

I wonder, if you were to give your life a rating out of ten, what number would you choose? 

Or is this question too crass? 

Possibly. But indulge me a moment. Go ahead and rate your life right now. 

Assuming you would not rate your life as a ten, what would need to change in order to move your rating up just one point—say from a five to a six? 

For that matter, what would need to change to get your rating right up to ten? Can you conceive of circumstances that could bring about such a spectacular improvement in your assessment of your life’s value?

Life is complicated. Assigning a score to it takes no account of this complexity. You feel differently about your life at different times; there are good days and bad days. This is true, but you are capable of making a judgement of overall satisfaction and you necessarily do. In Nietzsche’s estimation, valuations are the one thing that humans simply cannot avoid making; he describes the human in GM.II,8 as the being ‘who values and measures, as the “appraising animal in itself.”’. Even when this valuing does not take place consciously, it is always there, expressed not through a numerical rating, but in one’s feelings of liking and disliking. To what extent is your life to your liking? Are you too often disappointed, frustrated, or bored? Are things getting better, getting worse, or just staying the same? Are you happy with the way your life is shaping up?

Such silly questions maybe—navel gazing for people without real problems, but do you ever find yourself troubled by such questions, perhaps when you are lying awake in the early hours of the morning, staring into the blackness. For most of us, life is inarguably a problem; it is the problem. Your life is all you have, inasmuch as it is the only thing you have; and it is all you have, inasmuch as it is everything you have. What is the nature of this unasked for gift? Is it more burden than blessing? How should one dispose of it well? What, in the end, is your life worth? In JS.341, Nietzsche envisions a scenario where one is forced to face down this ultimate question of value:

‘What if one day or night a demon came to you in your most solitary solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again, and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it; but rather every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unutterably trivial or great things in your life will have to happen to you again, with everything in the same series and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or was there one time when you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: ‘You are a god, and I have never heard anything so divine!’ If that thought took hold of you as you are, it would transform you and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again, innumerable times again?’ would weigh upon your actions with the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life, that you might long for nothing more than this final eternal confirmation and seal?’

The question posed here is not, ‘is your life worth living?’, but ‘is your life worth living over and over and over again—forever?’ Can you affirm your existence eternally? This is the lofty standard that Nietzsche sets for humanity—this one question of affirmation is central to his entire project. But what is this maximally affirmable life and how is it realised? Ah, this is what we will uncover during the course of this journey. 

My name is Jimmy, with a career as a senior professional in face-to-face scientifically evidence-based behaviour change services for over two decades. At one time the team I led was supporting well over 2,000 people a year to successfully quit smoking—believe me, one of the most difficult lifestyle change challenges that many people will ever have to contend with. In addition I’ve worked in other areas of addiction, including with children and young people who have drug problems, and most recently I was leading a team of around 40 people to support clients to quit smoking, achieve a healthy bodyweight, get more physically active, eat better, drink less alcohol and make improvements in their mental health and wellbeing. For many years now, I’ve been a keen Nietzsche researcher, in my own time and under my own steam. In fact, it was specifically to devote myself full-time to the practical interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy that I quit my well-paid job almost a year ago. The Becoming Ubermensch podcast is the product of that commitment and the fruit of years of endeavour. So I am pleased you have chosen to listen.

So, briefly, that is me, but who was Nietzsche? This philosopher who famously declared, in EH.Destiny,1, “I am dynamite!” Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900. He was a German philosopher and cultural critic known for his profound and provocative ideas. His work challenged traditional values, religion, and morality, seeking to re-evaluate the foundations of Western culture and it is fair to say that today there is no branch of philosophy, psychology, literature or art that that has not been influenced by his thought. 

Nietzsche’s philosophy is aimed at the enhancement of human existence. In that sense it is meant to be practical and actionable, but you will find it very hard, perhaps even impossible, to find practical guidance that translates his philosophy into something actionable. That is indeed why this project exists. The Becoming Übermensch project is concerned with philosophy for life and so we will specifically focusing on the practical import of Nietzsche’s ideas. That is what’s different, perhaps even unprecedented, about this project. I use the word, unprecedented, because for many, many years I had been searching for the kind of guidance this project concerns itself with. In the end, if one cannot find what one needs, one is forced to create it for oneself. 

We will be learning a great deal more about Nietzsche over the coming weeks and we will, of course, be delving deeply into his signature concepts of the will to power, the eternal recurrence, Amor Fati (the love of one’s fate), master and slave psychology, his proclamation of the death of god and the revaluation of values it necessitates, the problem of nihilism, and yes, of course, the mysterious figure of the Übermensch. 

Ah, yes, what indeed is the Übermensch? This is the question that is going to be answered in the course of our journey together. Let’s be clear right now that what the Ubermensch isn’t. It is some kind of Nazi, aryan superhuman. The Nazi’s had their own superman premised on racial purity. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is better thought of as an evolution of consciousness and far from being premised on purity, he talks of his higher human as “the synthetic man”—a synthesis of what? Ah, that we will get to in good time. 

Nietzsche was no nazi; he died 20 years before the Nazi party was even formed. He had nothing to do with the Nazis, even if some of the Nazis wanted to have something to do with him. The unjustified association of Nietzsche with the German fascists has been largely debunked in academic circles since the 1960s, but the popular association remains. We’ll discuss how that came about and how valid or invalid that is in a later show.

This is not to say, of course, that Nietzsche doesn’t have opinions that many today would find shocking, deplorable, or morally outrageous, and we won’t dodge those controversies when we encounter them, but we will be firmly focused on the value of Nietzschean philosophy for the individual—for you. 

By the way, and for the record, I should state plainly that I do not claim the title of Übermensch. And neither did Nietzsche himself. He thought of himself only as its herald. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he has his avatar, Zarathustra, proclaim:  ‘Behold, I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Übermensch.’

I read somewhere that it is as if Nietzsche plays John the Baptist, proclaiming that ‘one mightier than I is coming!’

For myself, you can consider me just a fellow traveller, but one who has already scouted deeply into the strange territory of Nietzsche’s philosophy and returned with equally strange reports. How strange? This you will judge for yourself. But when one wanders off the map—off all maps—one should not be surprised if one encounters the bizarre, the incomprehensible, the awe-inspiring—sometimes even the enchanting. This material is the result of my years of reconnaissance and to me, at least, it is a precious thing, an earned thing. What it might be to you, I do not know. But I hope it might be something. I hope it changes you and that it does so in a way that you brings you gladness.

But to begin, what of the meaning of the word, Übermensch? This German word has been translated as ‘superman’ and though this has something to commend it, it also comes with all kinds of unhelpful cultural baggage that is just too obvious to mention. A better translation with less sensational connotations would be ‘overman’, and indeed many commentators these days prefer that term. However, Übermensch is a gender-neutral term—German being a gendered language, unlike English—and so a more appropriate translation than overman might be something like ‘over-person’. This gender non-specificity has its merits for our purposes, because there is no reason that the Übermensch should be male, but the term is clumsy and uninspired. Over-person sounds more like a production-line supervisor at a meat-packing plant than a personification of perfected, transcended humanity. I suggest that it would be tantamount to sacrilege to drain this idea of its mystique, so we stick with Übermensch, which is a suitably magnificent word for a magnificent thing.

So, together we will learn what the Übermensch is and what the idea offers to us that is of value for our own lives. 

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Broadly speaking, there are two groups in the world today that give Nietzsche’s work their attention. Chiefly it is, of course, the academic philosophers that do so because Nietzsche is one of the most significant figures in the history of philosophy. The other constituency is the personal growth community which invokes his name, and what it takes to be his ideas, in support of its self-improvement agenda. In my opinion, neither of these groups do him justice, but for different reasons. 

Academic philosophers treat Nietzsche’s philosophy solely as an object of intellectual study, forswearing the remotest suggestion of anything practical. The compass of their activity is confined to analysis, interpretation, and criticism. They are interested in Nietzsche’s place as a figure in the history of philosophy, and in the significance of his ideas to philosophical debates past and present. Even where they do draw some practical life lessons for the contemporary reader (for example, Robert Solomon’s Living with Nietzsche (2006)) we get mere intellectual advice rather than practical instruction. 

The possibility of putting theory into practice seems to be regarded by the academic community as something unfeasible, misguided, presumptuous, naïve—perhaps even embarrassingly juvenile. But in UM.3,8 Nietzsche writes scathingly of this narrow theoretical approach to philosophy: ‘The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.’ 

To be fair to them, it could be damaging to the credibility of an academic philosopher to encourage such a practical enterprise. It would be at odds with those austere, grown-up, scholarly virtues: seriousness, rationality, detachment, and objectivity. But Nietzsche is also sceptical of these so called virtues, instead elevating cheerfulness, playfulness, intuition, sensuality, and emotional engagement with the world. For him, there is no such thing as detachment or objectivity—only the pretence of detachment, the pretence of objectivity. For the greater part of recorded history and even more so today, the ideal of the philosopher is as one who stands back from life: a dispassionate observer positioned outside the hustle and bustle of the world, looking on without prejudice or partiality—he is ‘divinely unperturbed’, as Nietzsche scornfully suggests in BGE.4. He cogitates, he explicates, but he must never advocate. The philosopher’s mind concerns itself with ‘higher’ things—the practicalities of life cannot be of interest to him. It is to a great degree a legacy of Socrates and Plato that we believe man’s most edifying occupation is thinking rather than feeling or doing. The model modern academic philosopher is expert at thinking.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, presents us with an active, participatory philosophy: one that celebrates life with activity. This is a philosophy of passion—of ecstasy! His ideal philosopher does not merely think and talk and read books and write things down—instead they bestow value, they legislate, they destroy, they create, they sanctify!

Ah, from the divinely unperturbed to the superficial and our other group: the self-help and personal growth community. Nietzsche’s most quotable maxims are scattered liberally here amid the valorisation of individualism and authenticity, the pop-psychology, the positive visualisations, the appropriated eastern spirituality, the mindfulness retreats, the chanted affirmations, the productivity ‘hacks’, the millionaire mindsets, and the thousand dollar seminars. Nietzsche’s aphorisms are tossed in to lend a savour of gravitas or they are dovetailed incongruously into any number of new and purportedly-infallible personal development programmes guaranteed to bring health, wealth and unlimited happiness. 

This is a community that is better described as an industry, because the principal focus seems always to be maximum monetisation, with most of the ‘personal growth’ being enjoyed by the proprietors of the various systems and programmes. But hey, it’s easy to be cynical—at least there is an emphasis here on practical action to effect change. However, whereas the academics lacked any enthusiasm for practice, the self-help and personal growth community lack any real understanding of Nietzsche’s teachings. Their interpretations tend to have only the most simplistic and confused grasp of his ideas. In this sphere, one regularly encounters Nietzsche quotes like the following: 

‘one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’. 

A striking epigram for sure, from his Z.Prologue,5—the kind of thing you might see on a t-shirt or a coffee mug!—but does know what it actually means? Does anyone in the world of personal growth have any idea? The evidence is lacking. But, to be fair, unriddling Nietzsche’s enigmatic prose is quite an undertaking—I speak from experience. 

So on the one hand we have those that labour hard to interpret Nietzsche’s work but wouldn’t dream of actualising it and, on the other, we have those who are full of eagerness to take practical steps, but have little or no understanding of what Nietzsche is actually advocating. The Becoming Übermensch project fills that gap, marrying the rigour, depth and insight of the academics with the enthusiasm and willingness to make practical change of the personal growth community.

There are many, many good books about Nietzsche out there; why were these not enough for me? What was I looking for that they didn’t offer? What makes this project different? 

Firstly, in answer, it is important to understand that Nietzsche’s books can be tricky for the new reader. As philosopher and translator, Walter Kaufman put it: ‘Nietzsche’s books are easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.’ There is something almost esoteric about Nietzsche’s writings. Inevitably, this inscrutability makes definitive interpretation problematic and results in a plethora of varying interpretations in the secondary literature. 

Secondly, Nietzsche intended his philosophy as a formula for transforming human existence; he never meant it to be an intellectual cud chewed by chin-strokers in comfortable armchairs, with door locked, curtains drawn and bowels constipated, as he might put it. It is a philosophy to be experienced—not just studied. Like his hero, the 18th century German poet Goethe, Nietzsche hated  ‘instruction without invigoration, […] knowledge not attended by action’—that’s from his UM, slightly abridged. That is why there is such an emphasis on the sensual and the kinetic in Nietzsche’s writings, especially music, dancing and laughter. 

To illustrate: in Twilight of the Idols he writes:  ‘Without music, life would be a mistake’; in The Joyful Science:  ‘to my knowledge, there is nothing to which the spirit of a philosopher more aspires than to be a good dancer’; and in Beyond Good and Evil:  ‘I would go so far as to venture an order of rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughter – rising to those capable of golden laughter’. Yet books about Nietzsche’s philosophy tend to be firmly focused—it might be truer to say exclusively—on the purely theoretical. But knowledge should be a tool, not an ornament. Books are a means, not an end in themselves. As Nietzsche puts it:

 ‘We do not belong to those who only get their thoughts from books, or at the prompting of books,-it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question concerning the value of a book, a man, or a piece of music is: Can it walk? or still better: Can it dance?’ [JS.366]

There is something uniquely embodied about Nietzsche’s thought. This is a philosophy, not of the brain, but of the body in its physical immediacy—a philosophy of hot breath, coursing blood, dilating pupils, and twitching muscles. It’s something felt first and thought second. Can you imagine?

Little wonder that forays into Nietzsche’s works tend to leave one beguiled but bewildered; his writing is as elusive and as captivating as it is frustrating. He entices readers with a purportedly realisable vision of a more passionate and elevated form of life but his prescription for its practical realisation is obscure. Understanding him is only the first challenge; putting into practice his strange philosophy (and it has been called an anti-philosophy) is the second. Now then, there are plenty of books that offer help with understanding Nietzschean philosophy but none that I could find that offer guidance in implementing it. I wanted to know what this Nietzschean higher life would look like? How is it to be actualised? What are its implications? Is it even possible? The guidance I was looking for didn’t just explain his ideas, it also translated them into action—it gave instruction. That is the project I have been working on intensively for the best part of the last decade, but one that has been percolating for far, far longer. 

With the Becoming Übermensch project, I’ve taken Nietzsche’s ideas and run with them, blending them with my experience and expertise in evidence-based behaviour change, following them through to their practical conclusions. In this podcast, I will be sharing some of this material with you, including the occasional experiment or exercise you can try for yourself in order to get a sense of the benefits. The podcast format is open to change, I just really felt the time was right to share some of what I’ve learned from this work—consider it a stretching of the limbs—so we might have guests on or some philosophical friends of mine to chat, maybe even a read-through of some of Nietzsche’s texts. Things will develop, for sure. Post questions in the socials too and I may pick up some of those for future shows. I may even try a Nietzschean “agony aunt” item, speculating on Nietzsche’s responses to your personal troubles, who knows? Do engage as it helps me get a sense of what is working and what might be adapted.

I thought long and hard about what intellectual level I should pitch this material at. Although the knowledge I’ll share is premised on the philosophy of a rather unique philosopher, this is not a philosophy project per se—or, at least, let us say that it is no more a philosophical undertaking than is any in-depth exploration of the human condition. Really, all human life can be thought of as philosophy—we interpret the world, attempt to understand it, impute meaning to our experiences, wrestle with the ethical implications of our choices, and make judgements of value and of truth. I hope I’ve managed to make this material maximally accessible without dumbing anything down. If you find any of it difficult, I encourage you to work at it, do your own research, look up any technical-sounding terms if you are not familiar with them. I really want you to understand this. This is transformative stuff and I think your efforts will be richly rewarded so make that commitment. Nothing of great value comes without work.

If on the other hand you are used to an intellectual diet of more substantial fayre, stick around. We will be going deeper, much deeper, experimenting with a scepticism so disintegrative that it feels like a slippery slope to lunacy. 

Speaking of lunacy: intimately related to the Übermensch concept, we will be meeting Nietzsche’s patron god, Dionysus. Dionysus is the greek god of wine, ecstasy, fertility, and dance, but also animal savagery, annihilation, and insanity. This may may seem like an apt deity for a man who lost his mind towards the end of life—indeed some have speculated that it was Nietzsche’s philosophy that drove him mad—this is nonsense of course, but the man and his thought cannot be extricated so we’ll examine his madness in a future show. 

This devotion to Dionysus raises another question, however. Wasn’t Nietzsche the great atheist? What’s this about a deity? Well, yes, Nietzsche was an atheist. He prided himself on the naturalism of his philosophy—that is, finding natural explanations for the world and for human existence that do not rely on unprovable metaphysical notions. So Nietzsche rejects all supernatural explanations including supernatural entities like gods and spirits. So how is it that he called himself, “the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus” [BGE.295]? How does he reconcile his claim that god is dead with his devotion to this weird Ancient Greek deity? 

That we will uncover, but I will say now that the essence of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy is spiritual—But this is a spirituality without spirits. It is spiritual in the sense that it unveils the true meaning of human existence, provides a vindication of life, and affirms the value of this world right here right now, not some other invisible and hypothetical next world. In that sense, contrary to another stubborn popular misconception, Nietzsche is no nihilist—in fact, he is the anti-nihilist par excellence. Nihilism is the problem Nietzsche confronts and claims to resolve.

There’s so much more to say here. I hope and I expect that this podcast will raise as many questions as it answers, and that is appropriate because the philosophy of Nietzsche, this philosophy for life, is as vast as it is mysterious—this is why he talks in metaphors of labyrinths, of abysses, of mountains and of flying. It is also absolutely comprehensive, providing an account of all phenomena, from the birth of stars to your liking for chocolate ice cream, from the violent genesis of all human culture to the goosebumps that you get from good rock n’roll, from the development of our most refined ethical conscience to the reason you can’t get laid. 

This brings us to a question; perhaps the most important question you face every day, every moment, of your life - and the only thing more important than this question is its answer. 

But before we get to that… music! Unfortunately because of licensing restrictions and the fact this podcast has no budget, I can’t play you the music I would like to. But Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of the aesthetic, of feeling, not just thinking, so I’m going to recommend you a track every week that reflects the emotional states experienced during the development of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have been significant. Sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

Now, it’s very difficult to communicate a feeling—we all have our own individual impressions and experiences. In drug treatment services we have a theory about drug experiences; that the experience depends not just on the drug, but the set, and setting too… so not just the substance you take, but your set: meaning your mindset and the state your body is in, and the setting being the environment you are in. These three things influence the experiences you have. It’s the same with music. 

Of course, I can’t communicate to you how these tracks have made me feel with any precision, but I can invite you to have your own experience, framed within the project we are exploring. 

So, with that in mind, I invite you to use your own digital music platform subscription or other sources etc. to reflect on what we’ve discussed today while listening to Hand of God from the album Carnage by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Link in the show’s description. 

Maybe share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be very interested in hearing about them. 

So that hugely important question. That question is . . .

What do you want? 

What do you want right now? What do you want for the future? What do you want in life generally? 

What do you need to give you that ten out of ten life?

Whatever you want, bring to mind any or all of these good things—small things, big things, immediate desires or long-term life goals. Write them down. Make a list. Consider this our first tentative experiment.

Collating a list of the things you want, your goals, your dreams, is something you’ve probably done before. But this isn’t about smart planning, or New Year’s resolutions, or vision boards. This is an investigation of your own unconscious or only partially conscious motivations.

So, whatever it is you want, ask yourself ‘why do I want it?’. Then, when you come up with answers—there may be several—interrogate those answers by asking the why-question again and again, and then keep asking why until asking why stops making sense. You are analysing your desires by tracing your motivation right to its essential core. You must find out what it is you really want. What is it that is really valued in any particular object of your desire?

You haven’t reached the bottom with this analysis until you arrive at a conclusion something like, ‘I want it just because I want it.’  This is a subtle investigation, for sure, so don’t worry too much at this early stage if it confuses you. We will return to it soon. The important thing is that you take a look beyond the obvious: sure, you want the house, the career, the lifestyle, the network of friends, the romantic partner—but what fundamental needs are you really satisfying with these things?

Everybody wants something, everybody—humans are built to want and that’s part of their tragic condition. So, what is it you want, and I mean really and truly, deep down. I challenge you to make the list, investigate the items on it, analyse them to the point of absurdity, and in due course we will begin to scrutinise this question together, starting to drill down to what Nietzsche believes are the hidden foundations of all human desire.

What, in the end, is the one thing we all want?