“Don’t trust a thought discovered while sitting in your chair”
Or so said Friedrich Nietzsche. And like much of what Nietzsche writes, it appeals to my heart to agree. For what can we learn while we sit unchallenged by other cultures, languages, gender, classes, centuries and much more? Even in reading some of the classic texts of all time we are confronted by these and rest our whole thinking on their shoulders. Not to say this justifies constant flights away to far flung places by necessity. We could perceivably fulfil these very words in our modern day world by simply mixing with those different to us – something that doesn’t come naturally to many of us.
It’s one of the main reasons I ended up reading Nietzsche and others like him (and loving him). To challenge me in my bubble of Christianity that can so easily rise up in life. I think quite a few are shocked when I say he’s one of my favourite philosophers. But he’s someone who tried to take his philosophical thoughts to their logical outworkings in life, and for that I respect him a lot. His nihilistic leanings make sense to me and were I not to think logic and life points more towards Biblical Christianity, Nietzsche grabs my heart in a depressing hold as the next most reasonable option. Whether I’d ever be able to live it out, is another question.
For those wanting a starting place, his “Beyond Good and Evil” was where I started, and didn’t regret.
al-jabr 