Conversations With Nietzsche
What would Nietzsche think of Musk
It happens quite frequently that one has conversations with one’s favorite thinkers after a certain point when one really gets to know their thinking. One of my favorite topics here is explaining to Nietzsche certain contemporary events, which he would find according to his taste. And the best that I’ve found here is an edit of one of the many SpaceX engineering marvels, specifically this one that shows the two boosters landing for the first time: YouTube link.
Not to get too much into details, but I think Nietzsche would certainly love Musk as the exemplification of a great, inexorable, and hard human being. He would appreciate him twice as much when he explained that Musk is not merely a leader but also an engineer working from first principles. Perhaps he might even think of him as a hybrid between Napoleon and Newton (without necessarily going too much in either direction), waging wars in an entirely different domain. He would certainly love his satire and sense of humor (for which he’d be willing to risk one or two ladders in his rankings). Perhaps it’s not even too much of an exaggeration to say that Musk more or less fits Nietzsche’s conception of the overman.
Nietzsche would undoubtedly love the very idea of space exploration and expansion; he would probably read into it a high-level sublimation of the warring nature of our species: that maybe, just maybe, it might finally be possible that one day man does not wage war against man but solely against the unknown.
He would love, when explained in detail, the insane work ethic (a.k.a. hardness) that is necessary for such strange ships to be produced. He would absolutely love the view of Earth from above, perhaps even cry at the sight of such marvel and the abundance of love felt towards the human being, as the sole species capable of achieving such wonders. Perhaps at this point, he would like to listen to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with a pair of AirPods so that he might finally really feel as if he were hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of immortality in his heart.
His heart would be filled with immense joy at the sight (towards the end of the video) of people jubilating in ecstasy, not because of nationalistic sentiments or their alleged superiority to other people but simply because the ships made it back to Earth for the first time ever.
Finally, in the end, the “Made on Earth by humans” bit would probably be the icing on the cake for him.
What is your favorite conversation with the man?
