Matt Fradd

Oh, reading Nietzsche just about destroyed me.

He himself had concluded that once you figure it out, there's nothing left but either to laugh or be silent.

But I was even a little more Nietzschean than Nietzsche.

I realized that

Really, if he had it right, you had no objective reason left either to laugh or to be silent.

You had no reason left either to do anything or not to do anything at all.

I was a Nietzschean and a pickle, but I thought, well, okay, being in a pickle, being agonizing over this, being in despair over this, that's just the way that it is.

There's this emptiness at the heart of the universe and I'm one of these tough ones who can recognize it and still live.

I really don't think that there's anything good to take out of Nietzsche that you can't get anywhere else.

There are some true things that he says that he then distorts in radical ways.

For example,

He says that the truth is sometimes painful.

True.

Many people comment on this.

And then he draws from this somehow the bizarre idea that the will to truth is a will to pain.

No, I'm sorry.

This is just going to mess up your head.

My view of Nietzsche is, yes, we sometimes have to read Nietzsche, we sometimes have to study Nietzsche, but it's like the way that we culture diphtheria in our Petri dishes so that we can learn cures.

Is this what you have to put up with undergrads?

I sometimes do, but I have to be patient with my undergrads because I was even crazier than most of them then.