Values

Here's something I read this morning while browsing the net (as you do, while you're meant to be job searching)

For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals--because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.--We require, sometime, new values.

Friedrich Nietszche
The Will to Power

Something hits home to me here; the idea that an extreme idealist like Nietszche felt forced into nihilism in order to re-evaluate his own values.

Nihilism. To me, the idea evokes Jeff Bridges in the bath fighting a ferret, surrounded by German gangsters in tight black leather (The Big Lebowski) But somehow it also stands to reason that ideals are clearer when the background is cleared.

Nietszche seemed to be trying to rid himself of his European idealism in order to start an entirely new philosophy. Ironically, his anti-religious and anti-establishment thinking became the very thing it hated. He was an idealist whether he liked it or not, and invariably European in his views. Perhaps I won't ever shake my Europeanness either, nor the very European ideas of education I picked up during 5 years of working in schools in Europe. But I can try...