'The human being is, relatively speaking, the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most interesting.' The Antichrist Self-esteem is big business. In our time, there exists a whole industry of ‘learning to love one’s self’. Thousands of books sell its promise. TV shows, through the stories they tell, implicitly encourage us to value ourselves as well as others. Advertisers per

In my last post, on New Year’s Eve, I outlined a redrawn raft of Nietzschean self-help ambitions for myself in 2019. I didn’t give any real detail but promised to flesh out these goals in subsequent posts. Here, on day 14, we will deal with the first of them: 1. Optimization of Body We know that Nietzsche gives absolute primacy to the body - nay, more than this - body is all there is to you. You are not a mind piloting the world in a body; that’s the old religious conception