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Over Man | The Point Magazine

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Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection. Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors had been presented to me as radical or revolutionary voices, but only with Nietzsche did the act of reading itself feel thrillingly subversive. I knew in a general way, of course, that other thinkers of the nineteenth century whom I had read, such as Marx and Dickinson and Thoreau, had in some sense rejected what we call “society.” But Nietzsche felt like a profound revolt in a way that they had no

Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra . These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection. Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors

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