New Year approaches and with the advent of 2018 we welcome the prospect of a clean slate; an opportunity for personal renewal. Hell, just one more chance, dammit! Don’t worry if you’ve been feeling bad about yourself in 2017. It’s normal, healthy – perhaps even necessary. Without the dissatisfaction that you currently feel, where would you get the impetus to change? To become a better version of you? Nietzsche would tell you that this yearning for self-overcoming is the naggi

‘Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one's own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only hinder it’. Daybreak Christmas day musings on self-help: Pretty obviously, self-help is about people making things better for themselves. Self-help systems aim to provide a formula to enable people to achieve that better life. The key measure of better i

The proclamation of the death of god and a celebration of the birth of baby Jesus might seem somewhat at odds. So it may be surprising to discover that Friedrich Nietzsche was a fan of the festive season. Sure, he famously declared that god was dead, but Christmas retained an allure for him that persisted throughout his life. Like most of us, as a child he was especially caught up in its excitement. At age 13 he asks himself in his diary why he loves Christmas even more than

The key question. 'Do you shudder at the thought of re-living your life, as it is and has been, over and over again, or are you exhilarated by this prospect?' I talked about the Eternal Return a couple of weeks back and how it can provide an opportunity for personal reflection (see post ‘You Specks of Dust’ from 2nd December). Feelings about this question, I suggested, can provide a barometer concerning one's desire for life-changes, but also clues as to where those life-chan

It is a terrible irony that the herald of the Superman - of human triumph, excellence and self overcoming - should have suffered such an agonising, ignominious, drawn-out end to his life. Bed-ridden, confused, nursed by his sister and mother, unable to write, he rotted away in obscurity for over a decade. The crowning indignity was the diagnosis of his condition given at the time, and repeated ad nauseum, in the century since his death: syphilis. 'The French disease', as it w

It may be appropriate at this point to talk a little about how this project came into being. There was a confluence of factors that spurred its initiation. Firstly, after a decade of travelling fifty miles to London for work every day, I had a change of job in February of this year that allowed me to radically cut down on my commuting. So just before the summer began, I found myself with some welcome extra free time on my hands. The toilet might be basic, but the view... wow!

Our central mission is to bring together the lofty philosophical speculations of Nietzsche with the everyday aspirations of real people wanting to make positive changes to their lives. This is to marry the sublime with the ordinary. With hard work, I believe life can be made far less ‘ordinary' in the process – can perhaps even be made exceptional! Over the past few months I have been doing lots of studying. Not just Nietzsche's books, but books about Nietzsche - the man and

As this blog tracks the development of a book, there will be no real plan or syllabus for the blog itself. I will be led where my researches take me, but over the coming weeks and months I expect we will cover such topics as Nietzschian Self-Overcoming, his idea of ‘Great Health’, free will and fatalism, and the Dionysian, as well as those more infamous ideas: the Superman, Master Morality versus Slave Morality, and what it means to go ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. I also want to t

I recall when I was first attracted to Nietzsche's work. It was around twenty years ago. I read all his books (well the greatest hits anyway) but I found many parts of them difficult to grasp. To be sure, Nietzsche is often cited as one of the more accessible philosophers, and this is probably one reason why some of his ideas are so well known, but he still writes from a perspective heavily informed by his academic background and his historical situation. For example, he assu