What if the most iconoclastic philosopher in history got a hold of an X (Twitter) account?

About a month ago I hijacked my wife's X account and turn it to what it now is: a place where I publish short pieces (very short pieces). In my defense she hadn’t logged there in years. She didn’t even have any followers...

Starting my own account kinda scared me at first (my original account was blocked for some reason, hence the hijacking). But it quickly turned out to be a great experience. The need to evaluate every word so the specific tweet I write won’t excide the limits set by the X was and is exciting. Truly every word needs to earn its rightful place. Which got me thinking, and it’s going to sound weird, but what if the most iconoclastic philosopher in history got a hold of a X (Twitter) account?

O.K. so I had to choose which philosopher is the most iconoclastic… Now I can’t say that I read each and every philosopher out there (I can say that I haven’t), so for me the choice was between Heraclitus and Nietzsche. I ended up going with Nietzsche and if you bear with me, I want to tell you why I think he would be amazing there - if he hadn't died like 106 years before Twitter was launched of course.

In ten years of feverish writing, the intensity of which can only be compared to the blazing trajectory of a shooting star, the renowned philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote numerous books and shorter essays. Most of them were written in an ancient literary form, perhaps the oldest, the aphorism.

Every literary culture has its own version of the aphorism. The book of Ecclesiastes, written according to the Jewish and Christian tradition by none other than King Solomon, consists of dozens of short sentences, proverbs, words of wisdom and practical advice, with the aim of finding the right way to live. In it we encounter the immortal sentence: There is nothing new under the sun.

In ancient Greek culture, aphoristic writing was primarily used by philosophers. Conceived perhaps as a way to distance their thinking and writings from works of myth like the long Homeric epics, with their intricate plots of war and heroism, the philosophers who came before Socrates sought to condense their complex thought into as few words as possible.

The most famous of the Greek aphorisms is no doubt the one uttered by Heraclitus: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Little is known of Heraclitus’s life. Later apocryphal anecdotes describe Heraclitus as a dark and melancholic man. These stories shed a somber and nostalgic light on his famous saying: just like the endlessly flowing river, we who enter it are forever changed by time. As much as we want to, we can never go back.

Eastern thinkers used their own version of the aphorism as well. The Chinese Lao Tzu taught us that, The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But as the legendary author of The Book of Dao, my favorite saying of him personally is found in the very first line of this wonderous work: The Dao that can be told is not the true Dao. Which teaches us, as I understand it, that some things, the important ones, cannot be spoken of directly, and maybe not at all. Not logically anyway. Not with precision.

There have been many definitions of the aphorism. In his book, “Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists” Author James Geary provides us with a helpful framework to think about. The aphorism involved one or more of these five traits:

1. It is succinct.

2. It is definitive.

3. It is personal.

4. It contains a witty or humorous twist.

5. It is philosophical.

Nietzsche turn to the aphorism for strength

In his first philosophical work, “The Birth of Tragedy and The Spirit of Music”, Nietzsche blames Socrates with bringing forth a new way of thinking, the scientific one.

Before Socrates, Greek culture was divided between the Dionysian and apollonian: that is, between forces of Apollonian order – the setting of boundaries within which the individual could attain glory and greatness, and the Dionysian forces of chaos – of excess, ecstasy, the collapse of logic and all separations. These two very different principles can be seen as forces in all human cultures and in the human soul itself.

The gentle balance of the forces of Apollo and of Dionysus that culminated in the greatest artistic creation of mankind – the Greek Tragedy, that delicate balance was forever disturbed by Socrates and his new method of reasoning. What Nietzsche calls “the dialectics, smugness and cheerfulness of theoretical man”.

The great lie that the Socratic method unleash to the world, our modern world, is the lie that man could control his fate by acquiring and using knowledge. Art, true Tragic art, the art of Wagner for the early Nietzsche, would never allow you to control your fate. Nothing can. It could console you to that fact that it is not possible to escape or even shape it, Which, for Nietzsche, is more than anything logic and reason could ever give you.

Is this the reason Nietzsche turn to another form of writing?

The aphorism, which will see Nietzsche take up in just a second, is much less concern with rigorous logic. As Richard Schacht writes in his introduction to Nietzsche second book, that while “Birth of Tragedy” was a scandal in the eyes of the philosopher's colleagues, at least it was centered around a “recognizably classical literary topic”. Nietzsche’s second book, “Human, All Too Human” was a step farther. It is a book comprised of 638 aphorisms. This style was a radically new style for Nietzsche and an important step in his search for his own voice.

As T-h-e condense form of literary expression, the aphorism inspires Nietzsche to his most profound Epiphanies.[1] You might be thinking that this is maybe asking too much from a tweet. But the aphorism was the perfect vehicle for just those sorts of experiences, especially coming from a great thinker and condenser as Nietzsche. Take a look at just three examples from Human, All Too Human:

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.

Wouldn’t these be great as tweets on X? Nietzsche did order his fragments in Human, All Too Human to achieve an overall effect, but his short discussions resemble beads strung together in one neckless, and not so much different essays on one large topic.  

From his second book onward, the aphoristic style takes over his writings. Two reasons led Nietzsche to developed it, a biographical and an ideological reason. Firstly, it suited his medical condition. Namely the head splitting migraines he began to suffer from and that prevented him from writing longer, more detailed works. Secondly, he saw himself as an anti-systematic thinker. He did not wish to create another vast all-encompassing metaphysical method that offer no value for actual living.

With his developing style of aphoristic thinking under way, we can find even better tweets for his imagined X account in his later works.

In “the Gay Science” Nietzsche reveals to us the power of a great aphorism. This work is Nietzsche’s first one to contain the sentence: God is dead.

The idea of the death of God is one that Nietzsche found in the writing of his predecessor, the German philosopher Hegel. Hegel thinks about the death of God as a state in which the individual sees no hope in life, because God is no longer with him - guiding and possibly guarding him. Hegel took the idea from a hymn by Martin Luther that speaks of the death of Jesus, God the son, and the state of horror and despair that his disciples experienced before Jesus’s eventual resurrection.

While Nietzsche may not have coined the expression himself, he uses both images from Hegel and Luther to craft his own unique one. God is dead is brought up two times in The Gay Science. The first time Nietzsche is more interested in the death of God from the perspective of modern science and the danger that it will replace religion as the holy (and now human) endeavor for the one and only truth, which Nietzsche didn’t believe exist.

The second occurrence is the most famous one, appearing in a story about a madman who is preaching in the marketplace to a crowd of atheists. These scientific minded men laugh at him, but the man is determined to explain to them that “we have killed him – you and I. all of us are his murderers.” The parable ends with the madman traveling to several churches to sing a hymn for the funeral mass of God. When asked to explain himself he only states: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

With only three words, God is dead (Gott ist tot), Nietzsche was able to take Enlightenment’s secularism to its logical conclusion and propagate the idea of the death of God as the prevailing condition of our modern era. The death of God is the death of meaning.

How One Becomes What One Is

In his highly unorthodox autobiography, “Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is”, we find discussions of Nietzsche’s daily routines, sorts of foods he ate and lots more. We also find statements (a lot of statements!) we would typically associate with the extravagant boasts of rappers: I am no man, I am dynamite is a particularly beloved one. The chapter titles are hilarious in themselves, a sort of parody on Socrates’s insincere modesty: “Why I am so Wise”, Why I Am So Clever”, “Why I Write Such Good Books” and so on.

“Ecce Homo” was the last book Nietzsche finished before succumbing to a physical and mental breakdown that he will never recover from. This work is where I go to find some of his best, most condensed and beautiful expressions. None of the ideas in Ecce Homo are new per se. But There is some strange and undeniable quality to this book, this vindication of a life. Nietzsche is putting himself on trial and his works are his evidence.     

The famous saying That which does not kill you makes you stronger, comes from the section “Why I Am So Wise”. Its an idea we recognize from our lives – from playing sports to acquiring new skills. Trying hard at doing hard things can improve us. But there is a limit. Nietzsche sets the bar pretty high, but if you start to fell your muscles cramping while jogging, it might be a good time to stop for rest.

This is what we mean by poetic expression. Socrates might have analyzed Nietzsche’s sayings to death, but the German thinker cannot be tied down. And if so, only by himself. As in another saying from the book: A man pays dearly for being immortal.

This one is tricky. We’re left wondering how much Nietzsche is being ironic when he talks about himself and his accomplishments. Here Nietzsche is referring to the publication of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the only fictional book he wrote and without a doubt his best-known work. The book left him exhausted. But it was another step toward what he called, his "yes-saying life task". The pessimism we’ve encountered in his first work is no more. He supposedly showed us the way forward.

What is obvious is that this saying, or the idea behind it, resonated with other great thinkers. Carl Jung, among others, thought that Nietzsche did pay dearly for publishing Thus Spake Zarathustra. That it was a work that ultimately led Nietzsche to his downfall. When Jung worked on his own poetic and artistic Magnum-Opus, known to us now as “The Red Book”, he kept it an open secret. He showed the manuscript to patients and friends but did not plan to publish it in his lifetime. He didn’t even finish it, but used the visions he experienced in Active Imagination, the meditative method he created, to explore and develop his understanding of the human psyche. For Jung, and not just him, Nietzsche flew too close to the sun and paid dearly for it.  

A selection of some of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, divided to random topics:

Till now I discussed Nietzsche’s aphorisms by connecting them to the larger context of his life and work, which some might call cheating considering we don’t really get a lot of context to most of the words we read on most social networks. Especially on a platform like X, with its abundance of statuary profiles and the ability to easily follow anyone – not just friends and acquaintances; unless we’re talking about celebrities, the words in a tweet need to stand on their own. so, here are a few examples of possibly viral tweets from an unknown German dude named Friedrich Nietzsche. Hope you like and repost.  

On Ghosting someone online: It seems to me that even the rudest word, the rudest letter is more good-natured, more honorable than silence.

On the true meaning of philosophy: I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir.

On Life goals: I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.

On divining the future: It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad.

On the job of the critic: I attack only things that are triumphant — if necessary, I wait until they become triumphant.

On the good versus the truthful: good men never tell the truth. The good taught you false shores and false securities: you were born and kept in the lies of the good. Everything has been distorted and twisted down to its very bottom through the good.

On true understanding (or clubbing): And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

On the value of things: The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

On piety and being bored: In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

Another one of piety: I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Lastly, On the self-help industry: No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

[1] Nietzsche wasn’t familiar with the modern meaning of the word epiphany when he was writing his works, that meaning was created by the Irish writer James Joyce when he borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a new secular context. Joyce’s epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception that stops you in your traces – just like the ones Nietzsche provided us in all his future works. Joyce didn’t limit Epiphany to the written form, we can experience moments of revelation in the midst of ordinary existence. A sight, a smell, a sound or the memory of them – anything could trigger us to this quasi-mystical experience.