Over Man

On Nietzsche and our crisis of masculinity

We’ll be resuming bringing you original content from Point editors and writers following the New Year, including previews from our upcoming issue 34, a dialogue on the sociology and strategy of the millennial left in the late 2010s, and a series I intend to write examining the afterlives of David Foster Wallace and the new sincerity. In the meantime, we’ll be announcing our top 10 most popular articles from 2024 later this week, and using this space to share a couple of them with Substack readers. Today, without any paywall interruptions, we present our #2 most popular essay of the year and one of my personal favorites, on how to read Nietzsche rigorously without “disconnecting him from his social meaning outside the university.” —JB

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By Mat Messerschmidt

Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection.

Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors had been presented to me as radical or revolutionary voices, but only with Nietzsche did the act of reading itself feel thrillingly subversive. I knew in a general way, of course, that other thinkers of the nineteenth century whom I had read, such as Marx and Dickinson and Thoreau, had in some sense rejected what we call “society.” But Nietzsche felt like a profound revolt in a way that they had not. It seemed to me that he succeeded, in a far deeper way than those other writers, at saying what was not supposed to be said, and saying it in a way in which it was not supposed to be said.

The voice of Nietzsche was unmistakably the voice of a man—a man who was asserting himself as a man. Maybe I was especially susceptible to the allure of such a voice at that specific moment in time, as I endured the deeply emasculating experience of undergoing a surgery that would leave me bedridden for a month, enfeebling my body, causing pretty dramatic weight loss and ruling out further participation in high school sports, which had been central to my identity and the basis of many of my male friendships. In that state, Nietzsche’s valorizations of pain were particularly appealing: the days-long headaches were given meaning by statements like “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” (a declaration that had not yet been appropriated by Kelly Clarkson). This idea of manly strength in suffering was embodied by a cast of male characters ranging from Greek tragic heroes to Roman Stoics and Germanic warriors. Nietzsche celebrated strength, assertiveness, stoicism, self-affirmation and, above all, power—an inward-looking power over the self and an ecstatic, outwardly questing power that projected itself onto the world. He fused together these virtues, unmistakably cast as masculine, in the invigorating term “self-overcoming.”

I had grown up, I was repeatedly told, in a culture dominated by men, by male voices, by male interests, by male points of view. Raised in a progressive family in the college town of East Lansing, Michigan, I accepted this description of the world. Yet, paradoxically, it was precisely the assertive maleness of the voice I encountered in the Nietzsche text that felt so profoundly radical. At home, my father would never have talked about being a man, and my mother seemed only ever to tell me about how men were in order to tell me how I should not be: men didn’t listen to women; men were stubborn and vain; men didn’t know how to load a dishwasher. At school, there were plenty of class discussions like the one led by our German teacher on how much better the world would be if women held all political power. But this sort of talk wasn’t simply transmitted by our elders. At our staff meetings for the high school newspaper’s opinion page, the hottest discussion topic was sex and gender, and an especially well-worn theme was generalized male entitlement and selfishness in sex—a stressful conversation topic as a virgin already obsessed with worries about basic performance. Of course, it isn’t as if any one of these reflections on men was emotionally devastating on its own, but they were coming from all sides. The world demanded masculine men, but smart people could not say that men needed to be masculine. Smart books certainly could not say that—or so it appeared to me, until I found Nietzsche.

What was so powerful about Nietzsche was not that he was presenting some new, as-yet-unheard-of way of being a man. On the contrary, the masculine ethos articulated by Nietzsche felt as if it was what the world already demanded of boys. To do any of the things that really mattered to a fifteen-year-old boy, one needed the assertiveness and purposiveness he counseled—and one would have needed them whether or not one ever got around to reading Nietzsche. These traits seemed necessary to attract girls, to excel at sports, to earn the respect of other boys.

But the gap between the world as seen by Nietzsche and the world as seen by a progressive college town was that Nietzsche openly extolled the masculine characteristics demanded by the real social world, whereas the real social world condemned those characteristics while it demanded them. Despite all the very real social penalties for failing to live up to standards of masculinity, in any and every conversation I ever had in East Lansing about gender, those very standards were explicitly and roundly condemned as poisonous. In such discussions, the words “male,” “man” and “masculinity” were far more often invoked pejoratively than neutrally or positively. “Toxic masculinity” was not yet a catchphrase in the early aughts, but masculinity was already toxic in our town. His challenge to this enforced cultural contradiction was something both new and liberating.

I’m not sure I knew any boy in East Lansing who was not raised in a similarly progressive household, or who did not grow up to be at least left-of-center enough to vote for the Democratic Party. But even among that political demographic, there was, in hindsight, a clear thirst for masculinist literature more broadly. I shared and circulated my Nietzsche books, and from other teenage male readers, I found my way to Ernest Hemingway, Yukio Mishima and Cormac McCarthy. We all knew that patriarchy was real, that women made some eighty cents for every dollar made by men, that rape culture at the local Michigan State University was a very serious problem, that our mothers spent more time cleaning up the house than our fathers did. Still, there was a near universal appeal among boy readers to male writers who did what our progressive hometown could not do: assign meaning to the experience of being a man, and offer up a positive vision, however flawed, of masculinity. Prior to my encounters with such authors, I had not so much believed as simply assumed that masculinity could only ever be a problem, never a positive possibility—that bringing out the best in me would mean overcoming my manhood, not finding the right way to live my manhood. This was just the way everyone around me talked.

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Twenty-two years after my first encounter with Nietzsche, I am a Nietzsche scholar. It was some time after I had written what could be termed a feminist interpretation of Nietzsche for an edited volume on Nietzsche and women that I reflected, for the first time in a long time, upon my initial encounter with the philosopher and on what his thought had meant to me as a young man. I found myself deeply conflicted, in ways that catalyzed a broader reflection on both gender and academia.

The mainline academic response to Nietzsche and gender over the last half century, influenced by thinkers in and adjacent to poststructuralist continental philosophy such as Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman and Judith Butler, finds in Nietzsche a largely unwitting ally to the cause of feminism. Despite being an over-the-top misogynist, Nietzsche teaches us that there is no innate human essence, let alone a timeless essence of man or woman. A “genealogy” (Nietzsche’s word, adopted, then, by Butler) of the human desires that structure our society today reveals that these desires are historically indexed and malleable, and that the social identities—such as gender identities—that are founded on them are therefore changeable. A human being becomes who they are in the performance of an identity that is realized in the very performance, rather than by expressing a “true” self, deep down inside, that precedes and determines the performance. This foreshadows Butler’s notion of gender performativity, which applies this logic to gender identity.

I don’t want to deny the validity of this way of reading Nietzsche, and in fact find it both correct and important. But when one interprets Nietzsche this way, the question becomes what to make of the Nietzsche that greets his teenage boy reader. That Nietzsche is also a real Nietzsche. Nietzsche routinely fetishizes the martial values of the Greeks; he appears to celebrate the masculine virtues prized by the Romans over those virtues emphasized by Christianity, which are unambiguously cast as effeminate. In art, tragedy, loved by Nietzsche, is harsh and manly, whereas Romantic poetry and opera, despised (selectively) by Nietzsche, is indulgent and feminine. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the “overman,” though perhaps most accurately translated as “overhuman,” is clearly a male figure, an avatar of unprecedented creative production achieved via great destruction.

For half a century, academic engagements with Nietzsche have often treated these gendered accents that run throughout his corpus as entirely undercut by the latent feminist possibilities I described above. As a matter of interpretive correctness, this can come across as a kind of wishful thinking: while Nietzsche’s misogyny is hardly ever flatly denied by critics, the valorization of manliness and denigration of woman is generally assumed to be utterly defanged by scholarly analysis. Moreover, this way of reading also risks sterilizing Nietzsche’s writing. In my experience, explaining to undergraduates that Nietzsche is loved for his feminist possibilities is less likely to receive an immediate response of either indignation or invigorated sympathy for Nietzsche than it is to be met with glazed eyes: the text becomes much more boring when the case is made that the clear (masculinist or misogynist) message of the text we have been reading is not the real (gender-deconstructing or feminist) message—that intelligent, educated twenty-year-olds need someone with a Ph.D. to tell them the real message, which is a message that they would never have arrived at on their own. This renders Nietzsche not just arcane but boring.

This whitewashing approach to Nietzsche can obscure Nietzsche’s present cultural meaning in the world beyond academia. And its influence detached me, for a long time, from any consideration of the overwhelmingly male Nietzsche who had appealed to me as a boy. I was jolted back into reflection upon that Nietzsche last year when, in office hours, a male student sheepishly brought up Jordan Peterson in connection to the Will to Power notes we had read in class, relating the austere self-control that Nietzsche calls the mark of strong life to Peterson’s injunction to young men to “clean your room.” For many boys and men, Nietzsche is still a specifically male voice addressing young male readers. Just why is it that so many Nietzsche readers are very young men? What is Nietzsche offering them?

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When my college course syllabus turns to Nietzsche, someone invariably volunteers that he read some Nietzsche in high school, and that someone is invariably a man. Men are visibly more passionate about Nietzsche than about other writers I teach. Even when students love Nietzsche, though, the most controversial questions that I raise in reference to his thought render them shy. Is human behavior really governed by the will to power? Could violence really be as health-inducing as Nietzsche suggests? Can we accept anything that Nietzsche says about men and women? These blunt questions sometimes slow down class discussion, generating diplomatic, tiptoeing answers, and are usually avoided entirely on papers. I have never taught a class with Nietzsche on the syllabus without at least one male student coming to office hours to reveal a passion for Nietzsche that either preceded our class or led him beyond the assigned reading—but even these excited discussions, which I am grateful for and enjoy, rarely result in a crystal-clear claim about how some controversial Nietzschean idea causes us to rethink the world.

Maybe, though, my demand that students take a firm stance on these sorts of questions is unfair. Maybe their silence is not entirely due to fear of controversy but rather—or also—due to the difficulty of answering such questions confidently. My margin notes on the Nietzsche books I read in high school transition back and forth from worship to visceral attack several times in the space of two pages. When I ask my students to yield confident answers to such questions, then, I am in effect asking them to take a stronger stance on Nietzsche than I was ever able to do as a young reader.

When I was a teenager, there was an enticing, fantasy-inducing path to masculine meaning implied in the Nietzsche that my friends and I were reading, but that path felt so captivatingly edgy precisely because we were products of our progressive upbringing, and we knew that we were. We did not secretly hope for a return to traditional gender norms. My friends in East Lansing who were reading Beyond Good and Evil and For Whom the Bell Tolls responded positively to idealized portraits of masculinity, but they also supported gay marriage, used the word “bro” disparagingly and called themselves feminists. Nietzsche, like those East Lansing boys, neither believed in nor wished for the possibility of a return to the past. The starting point of his thought is that God is dead, and old paths to meaning have irretrievably fled from the world as it exists today. We have “unchained the earth from its sun,” he has a madman say in the Gay Science that announces the death of God, and are “plunging perpetually … backwards, sideways, forwards, toward all sides.” In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche “whisper[s] to the conservatives” that, under these modern conditions, “a backtracking is in no shape or form possible.” To be sure, Nietzsche poetizes a version of masculinity that borrows from the past, but he does not yearn for a return to traditional, conservative gender roles, because for him the wish to return to traditional forms of meaning-making is generally delusional in modernity. For any man who wants to find meaning in such traditional roles, then, Nietzsche is not the sympathetic voice that he might at first appear.

Nietzsche believed, in proto-existentialist fashion, that the void of meaning that is modernity must urgently be filled, and that this task must be an individual endeavor, at least for the person who is strong enough for it. All of the masculine self-assertion, the will to power that he celebrates, is not in the service of some old patriarchal form of life but is rather to be harnessed and focused toward new, as yet unseen forms of life—toward new paths to meaning. In other words, Nietzsche’s anguished masculine energy builds on the abyss, to invoke one of his favorite terms. This, it seems to me, is a view of the world that resonates strongly with the worldview of boys who grow up believing that an old version of masculinity has indeed grown toxic, that old masculine ideals have expired without being replaced by new ones.

Manhood has become an abyss, in a place like East Lansing. The notion that changing gender dynamics are liberating for you, personally, and offer you new possibilities of meaning has, for good reasons, been pitched far more fervently to young women growing up in progressive environs than to young men. Society has told young women, for instance, that you can find meaning in your job instead of your family, if you want to do that. The opposite message—that you can be a whole and happy person by raising a family—has been pitched far more weakly and infrequently to young men. Young men see that an old vision of masculinity has grown problematic, but no new vision has taken its place. There is only a void of meaning. Nietzsche’s word for such a void is nihilism, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that modern masculinity has become nihilistic. Who is better equipped to serve as an interlocutor for the young man whose very gender identity is experienced as a state of being unmoored and rootless than the philosopher who says that our entire world has come unchained from any center of gravity or source of warmth?

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Perhaps this is why boys continue to be drawn to Nietzsche. Of course, their reasons for reading Nietzsche should not necessarily be our reasons for prescribing Nietzsche to them. To tell young people to drive aggressively toward their own chosen meaning in life, in a world which has lost the ability to provide meaning for them, is a message that carries great risks. What if they drive so aggressively that their aggression forecloses other possible directions, or turns to violence? Why shouldn’t it turn to violence, if they are living in a modern world that has no meaning? Who would feel the responsibility to care for such a world? And what if their own chosen meaning turns out to be dark, even despicable?

During my nine years at the University of Chicago, I heard more than once from faculty or graduate students that Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago Law School students who in the 1920s sought to commit the perfect murder and become Nietzschean overmen, had a stupid, caricatured sense of Nietzsche’s message. Over drinks at Nietzsche conferences, I have heard similar complaints about the association of Nietzsche with Fight Club, the 1999 film about men escaping a cubicled modern American dystopia by finding distinctly male meaning in the act of mercilessly knocking the shit out of each other. These may be caricatures of Nietzschean thought, but they are not completely unrelated to what Nietzsche says and thinks. To pretend that they are runs a risk similar to that of the feminist take on Nietzsche I described above: it can disconnect an ivory tower view of the philosopher from his actual social meaning outside the university.

Nevertheless, I hope my male students keep finding their way to Nietzsche. Many of them are searching for alternatives to the message that they are toxic, and some of the spokesmen for masculinity they have found offer solutions that are worse than the problem to which they are reacting.

What solutions does Nietzsche offer? As with so many other topics in his body of work, to distill his “vision of masculinity” into any static, systematic and coherent dogma would be to falsify his thought. Yet that very fact may make Nietzsche the perfect thinker on manhood for a time like ours, when good men can find themselves pulled in multiple contradictory directions, ethically compelled to listen to the demands of feminism, but in search of a male identity that modern gender paradigms do not seem ready to supply. The path out of outdated ways of living masculinity cannot be simply to keep telling men that their maleness is bad, and Nietzsche’s call to self-affirmation may have something to offer them as a corrective to that message. In his best moments, Nietzsche’s ideal of manly purposiveness is expressed as confident, focused, goal-directed action that is conducive to the building of a better world: “The active, aggressive, ambitious man is still a hundred paces closer to justice than the reactive one,” he tells us in Beyond Good and Evil. This purposiveness has an individualistic strain that could speak to the lonely, atomized modern male, but without inviting him to wallow in a tragic heroism of loneliness like Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista killer and self-identified incel, did. Nietzsche has Zarathustra tell his listeners that he is going “my way,” because “the way—does not exist!”—and yet Zarathustra takes the time, over and over again over hundreds of pages, to speak to men searching for meaning. Nietzsche consistently champions focus: “The formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” Yet the indefinite article (“a goal”) leaves open the question of what this striving should be for, or what values should inform it. Indeed, a critical element of this vision of striving seems to be that the man himself supplies the goal.

This picture of focused, independently minded striving has the potential to be a healthy model for men, and that Nietzsche views it as a masculine picture cannot, on one level, be doubted. Yet, at the same time, the contours of that masculinity are not static. This vision is delivered by the philosopher who calls himself the “disciple of Dionysus,” a quasi-nonbinary god who is represented in Nietzsche’s early Birth of Tragedy as the female element in a heterosexual union with Apollo, supplying chthonic, earthly energy to Apollo’s form-giving potency. There are moments when Nietzsche seems to identify himself or his philosophical project with Ariadne, the female human lover of Dionysus. And for the creative, focused striving he valorizes, Nietzsche doesn't just draw on Apollonian manhood; he also uses the metaphor of motherhood. In short, Nietzsche seems to say, as stridently as possible, “Be a man!” but to ask in the same breath, “But what is a man?” Reactionary followers seem to want to hear only the imperative, and feminist scholars to hear only the question.

Perhaps now it sounds as if the writings of Nietzsche place men in a bind similar to the one I experienced as a teenage boy: the need to “be a man,” and simultaneously the need to question manhood itself. The critical difference, I think, is that Nietzsche removes the guilt from this state of internal division, proceeding as if one can assertively do both at the same time. It took me a long time to consider this as a possibility, in Nietzsche’s thinking or in general. Masculinity cannot be an untroubled concept today—if it were untroubled, that would indicate that feminism had failed entirely. But men remain and need ways to understand themselves positively as men. As a teenager, I only heard Nietzsche saying, “Be a man!”, and as a young scholar, I abandoned my earlier way of reading him, hearing only, “But what is a man?” Now, as a teacher to male students who are strongly impacted by the first message, I have learned how to hear both together.