Mariannecdotes

In a recent piece for Vanity Fair magazine, Christopher Hitchens states the obvious: he’s not a Nietzschean. During the essay, he recalls admitting during a radio interview that he didn’t owe any great insight to one of the most famous, influential atheists in Western philosophy. But what’s less obvious to Hitchens is why he isn’t a Nietzschean. 

Hitchens structures his essay around Nietzsche’s maxim as it relates to his own battle with cancer. “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

The question Hitchens poses is telling. “Does the rhyme suggest a reason?” he asks. Hitchens says no, and again he’s right. But again, for the entirely wrong reason.

The aphorism doesn’t have a “reason,” which is exactly the point. Nietzsche never intended any of his “words of wisdom” to be taken at face value. Good and evil, strength and weakness, body and soul, are all false dichotomies- and philosophies mired in these designations ought to be examined for falsehood. If anything, Nietzsche’s maxims are to be treated more like Zen koans than declarations of truth.

Hitchens fails at understanding Nietzsche this way, which leads to me to the most frustrating thing about New Atheists. For Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett, there’s a lack of regard for the more radical, philosophical atheism from Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre. (Even some contemporary theologians find the God of Christian fundamentalism to be absurd at best, and demonic at worst.) These “existential” atheists attacked not just the moral God (and they were hardly the first to do so), but all the other things that are justified by Christian onto-theology: reason, science, law.

Hitchens, like his fellow Horsemen, isn’t a Nietzschean, because he still subscribes to Western civilization’s pipe dream of progress achieved through Reason.

For a moment, I was excited to hear Hitchens speak on Nietzsche since I think more atheists should be exposed to his ideas. Who better to introduce them to Nietzsche, than one of mainstream atheism’s leaders?

Alas, it was not to be.