Confession

BROTHER Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that a philosopher is nothing more than a confessor. He means the psychology of an intellectual underlies and justifies their worldview—that a man or woman’s psychology and philosophy cannot be separated.

I chiseled these essays as I entered into the most pessimistic and jaded mood of my life thus far. Did the ideas cause the mood or did the mood cause the ideas?

Honestly, the creation of this hurt very badly. I would often close my laptop consumed by a dreadful nausea, which haunted me the rest of the day. I ideated suicide incessantly and became distant and apathetic to all the loving women in my life, whom felt worried sick—one even reported me to an authority as a danger to myself.

Nietzsche casually referenced the abyss in his own prose. It denotes an intellectual position of nonentity or non-ideology, an acceptance of unreality and amorality—to unveil false appearance. In simplest terms, it entails abandonment of faith in absolutist ideals like god, soul, morality, truth, beauty, and eternity.

In the abyss, psychic disillusionment and pessimism ensue. Nevertheless, as gloomy and unpleasant as this sounds, Nietzsche did not espouse traditional pessimism per se. To the contrary, he entreated fellow travelers to love life with his maxim amor fati, that is, love of fate.

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre soberly defined man as condemned to exist, as if humanity had been created then abandoned, left behind to live alone without the courtesy of an explanation as to why. To rationalize such a bizarre mystery, primitive humans invented vain ideals—religion—to glorify themselves, i.e., absurd mythical tales that not only excuse human ignorance but deify it rapaciously!

In order to really love life, a person needs to live in reality. To live in reality, a person needs to expunge idealism. As said earlier, philosophy is nothing but psychology, alas… this aphoristic dissertation is nothing but the tear-drenched diary of a solitary wanderer, the diary of a lost soul, of a freak in the abyss, of… the devil?