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Nietzsche For Breakfast is a bright jewel in the vast literature that considered Nietzsche’s thought in the dark century that succeeded it.  Nietzsche famously said he was philosophy with a hammer, yet his work is among the most stylistically beautiful in German literature.   In a volume of just over one hundred pages Ferguson concisely examines a dozen books from the philosopher’s final decade.

Let’s begin with the distinction between thought and consciousness.  All life is in possession of thought—thinking is what monitors the biology that sustains it.  Consciousness is an epiphenomenon that arose in homo-sapiens late in Darwin’s evolution. What was once the province of instinct evolved into self-consciousness—the most lauded of the many virtues that separates man from brute and beast: 

What a piece of work is man; how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, 

 However, Nietzsche sees this paragon rather as a trickster that has introduced the errors not only of time and space but also the errors of “…enduring things… identical things… that a thing is what it appears to be… that every deed presupposes a doer…  a belief in the subject…”  all of which is “a great stupidity”, before concluding with Hamlet that man delights not me.

Nietzsche is popularly known (or infamously so) for his critique of Christianity and his proclamation of the death of God which appears in several books and is dramatized in Zarathustra.  But these attacks on religion are based on a more profound attack on the foundations of knowledge/epistemology—that man is even the thinker of his own thoughts:

… when I analyze the event expressed in the sentence “I think”, I acquire a series of rash assertions… that I know what thinking is… Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an “I” as a cause of thought.

This robust skepticism had been cogently argued by Hume in the previous century.  Nietzsche’s certainty in the face an argument that questions his own existence is, however, new in its candor:

“It is a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate think… this is, to put it mildly,  only an assumption, an assertion,  above all not an immediate certainty.”

Nietzsche argues that man’s psychological experience of “the dream”  divided the world into two pieces.  Nietzsche believes this bifurcation is the basis of metaphysics and religion—the belief in other worlds beyond the one in which live and breathe.

We behold all things through the human head…                                   What of the world  would remain if one had cut it off?
The real world has always been the apparent world.

Anything beyond the apparency of any moment is a conjuring trick of the words recruited to stabilize and define the infinite “flux” of our experience. This has been called Nietzsche’s perspectivism—a precursor to phenomenology.

And the human intellect cannot avoid viewing the world in its perspectival forms and only in them.  We cannot see around our own corner.                      The world has rather, once again, become infinite.                                                                                   

 Life is no argument, among the conditions of life could be error.

The only solution to a world in which one cannot find truth is to live the truth of the world.  This is Nietzsche’s Dionysus—living to love only this world and to dismiss the hope and falsity of any presumed other.

Dionysus sings and dances in the orgy of what is …                            what is separate and individual can be rejected …

   In the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed.

This affirmaton of an infinite apparency was first presented to Europe of the late 18^th century as scholars tackled Sanskrit in early translations of the Upanishads. Nietzsche’s study of Schopenhauer was one of his first exposures to Hindu scripture and its assertion that the god Brahman was the universal mind behind what we mistakenly take to be our personal reflections.  This idea is also prominent in Buddhism where the same totality of Being is identified with the Buddha “All things are Buddha-things—All things are the Buddha”.  Nietzsche found a similar kinship with Spinoza’s Substance and Emerson’s Nature—two philosophers with whom he felt an in intimate kinship.  Indeed, Spinoza’s God was not a deity in a distant heaven but the manifest content of all existence. And Emerson found God among Porters, Chimney Sweeps and in the natural surroundings of a fabled pond to which he allowed Thoreau to set up a rent-free shop. Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism in 1626 for his “abominable heresies” and Emerson resigned as the minister of Boston’s Unitarian Church in 1832 because their “mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me.”

Nietzsche would take hints from the Upanishads, Spinoza’s Pantheism and Emerson’s Essays and transform them into the doctrine of Eternal Return. Will Durant thought Nietzsche’s notion among the dreariest of philosophic constructs.  If every moment is destined to return again and again then Will and Ariel are destined to write the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization throughout eternity, when once was quite enough, thank you.  Both Bertrand Russell & Will Durant gave less than sympathetic readings to German philosophers after two World Wars.  Nietzsche’s quest is rather that of Goethe’s Faust who desired to find one moment not dissolved by time—one moment that he could bid stay and linger and discover that it was so.  Nietzsche discovered that if each moment is connected to every other moment, then it can be argued that each moment contains all the others for there is only one moment—the eternal moment where everything is redeemed and affirmed in its complete totality. Nietzsche has little good to say of Christianity—the last Christian died on the Cross—but, for the son of a Lutheran minister, he sees the redemption of the church in the figure of Christ himself, where the gulf between God and man is fused into a single entity. 

As Ferguson explains:

“The gospel of Jesus was free of guilt, punishment and resentment.        It was love of the here and now—if thou feels this                              (even when pinioned on a cross)—thou  art in paradise..

“Nietzsche wants to look Being in the face and say “yes” and not just yes to part of it but “yes” to the whole unfathomable, unknowable necessity.”

Nietzsche’s formulation for the Overman is the enrapturement of wanting nothing to be other than it is.  Man must pass over his present consciousness to embrace the eternity attendant to each moment. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity but also to love it.  Nietzsche has passed over because he understands that All things are chained and entwined together.

Despite its brevity, Ferguson’s evaluation is a seminal work of Nietzschean thought. He found Nietzsche’s deconstruction of European philosophy to fully warrant the philosopher’s claim:

I am not a man, I am dynamite…

Ferguson then concludes his tea and toast with a spread of marmalade:

“In Nietzsche’s vision to say yes to a single moment is to say yes to everything because that one single moment could not and would not have been if everything else had not been because all things are chained and entwined together. To want one moment is to want it all forever and ever…”