Of all evil I deem you capable, therefore from you I want the good!

                  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

In the spring of 1962, as I was approaching the end of my junior year in high school, I was completely surprised to find myself nominated by enough fellow junior-year students in their “homerooms” to be officially certified by the school administration as one of three such candidates for election to the position of student body president for the coming 1962-1963 school year.

I was no athlete or the like, and never experienced myself as especially popular to my fellow inmates in the prison system we call “school.” Nor, indeed, did I have the popularity that normally goes with being an athlete or something similar. That was not at all what led to my being nominated.

What led to it, rather, was the fact that earlier in that same school year of 1961-1962 I had protested in my own homeroom class against what the school administration was imposing upon students as a “dress code.” Against any such arbitrary regulation by arbitrarily self-appointed administrative autocrats I protested that what we students wore was our own business, and nobody else’s.

Word of my protest soon made the rounds among the whole junior class, and that was what accounted for my being nominated. Surprised as I was by that nomination, I decided that as long as I had been so nominated, I may as well give getting elected my best shot. I figured that if I were elected, it would put me in a good position to continue to “stick it to the man,” in effect.

So run I did; and my efforts were successful: I was elected.

*     *     *

A major step in the election process was that those nominated had to give two speeches, one each to half the student body, in the large auditorium of the high school I attended. Before giving our speeches, we had to have them approved by our designated faculty “sponsor” to be authorized to deliver them. Accordingly, I submitted my draft of my own speech to the teacher who had agreed to serve in that capacity, who happened to be one of the few schoolteachers I truly respected, and even liked.

Before the faculty sponsors could sign off on the speech drafts, they had to be shown to the principal of the school and given that individual’s okay.

Well, my draft was directly critical of the school administration and was not approved. My sponsor so informed me and asked me to submit the draft for a new speech in which such critical comments were omitted. I did as he requested and received official approval to deliver that new speech, which I did — but only at the second auditorium assembly, not the first.

That’s because at the first assembly I delivered the speech that had not been approved by the self-proclaimed school authorities. Of course, those same authorities then lowered the boom on me, and ordered me not to repeat my offense at the second assembly.

I knew that word of my first speech would already have gone the rounds among the student body before I had to give my second speech, so I followed the orders that the school’s dictators had dictated to me. Why give them power to throw me out of the election for non-compliance? I’d already non-complied effectively.

At any rate, at one point in my speech at the second assembly, I quoted the line from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that appears at the top of my post today. In quoting it, I was myself addressing it to all my fellow students.

It’s a great line! One of many great lines that Nietzsche wrote.  

*     *     *

Nietzsche was my first love in philosophy.

The first book of his I ever read was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I read it, and was deeply addressed by what it said, not long after I first experienced my own vocation — that is to say my own calling, from the Latin for just that — to philosophy. I first heard that call to philosophy when I was still a high-school sophomore. Soon thereafter I found myself called by Nietzsche’s resonant voice. It was love at first read.

That love has continued to this day, and Nietzsche has remained for me one of my two greatest teachers. By the time I was a senior in undergraduate college, I found myself reading the works of Heidegger, who became my greatest teacher of all. Had I not learned so much from Nietzsche, however, I would never have been ready to learn from Heidegger, when I did eventually begin to read the latter’s work.     

Nietzsche led me along the path to remain on the way of which is to do philosophy, in the one and only legitimate sense.

Soon after I encountered Nietzsche for the first time, I also encountered the 94th sonnet of William Shakespeare, which has ever since served me as another reminder of the same thing that Nietzsche reminds us of in the line from Thus Spoke Zarathustra with which I began this post:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces

And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet

Though to itself it only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

         

May we all remain sweet summer flowers, rather than becoming the sort of festered lilies that took root in the administration of the high school I so long ago survived.