Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "Writing With One's Foot"
An important theme in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the self-authorship of your own life story, creatively and artistically, not just in the things you create but in the way you live your life as a unique and strong individual. Nietzsche’s poem “Writing With One’s Foot” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 52) captures this theme, along with the simple insight that writing and philosophy should express themselves not just in words but in the way your live your life, with your feet planted on the ground blazing your own trail:
52. Writing With One’s Foot
I do not write with hand alone:
My foot does writing of its own.
Firm, free, and bold my feet engage
in running over field and page.
We sometimes have too narrow a vision of human artistry and creativity. We value the works of artists and poets and craftsmen as creative, but we forget that we are also crafting our own lives in the course of living, by the direction we choose to walk (literally and metaphorically) with our two feet planted on the ground, and by the values we choose for ourselves, by extension.
Nietzsche is saying that the choices we make, the steps we walk, and the directions in we choose to aim our lives should have the same dramatic and aesthetic qualities of the greatest, boldest, most epic stories authored in human history—rivaling even the epic poems of Homer or Virgil. Remembering our power to choose, with the boldness and artistry to be the authors of our own lives, is the meaning of the last half of the poem: “Firm, free, and bold my feet engage in running over field and page” and the metaphorical image of writing with one’s foot in the second line: “My foot does writing of its own.”
Writing and philosophizing—even merely creating an artistic work—should not be confused with living, especially with the boldness of living your best, most authentic, most individual life possible. It’s too easy to escape the burden of really living your life by fleeing into the realm of mere words, dreams, hopes, ideas, or even philosophical concepts. If those concepts do not change the course of your life, then they are merely empty concepts. If your hopes and dreams do not inspire you to redirect your life toward the horizon on which you’ve set your sights, then they are merely empty hopes and dreams. All the poetry in the world amounts to naught if it doesn't inspire you to choose to really live, not just to read or write about the lives and adventures and passions of others.
This squares neatly with Nietzsche’s claim elsewhere in The Gay Science that all of philosophy—indeed all of Western culture from Socrates and Plato onward, including Judeo-Christian morality—is a kind of escapism, a philosophical or religious death-wish keeping people from really living and embracing their embodied existence here on Earth, from embracing the burdens of really deciding what kind of life to live, and from being truly unique individuals who rely on their own inner strength instead of an abstract world of ideas and principles, hopes and dreams, or even poetry and philosophy. Even the novelist who merely writes stories but doesn't live them wouldn’t live up to Nietzsche’s standards of writing with both foot and hand. Such creativity is wasted on mere words, mere ideas, if it is never expressed in the author’s life—and in ours—a pathetic shadow of real authorship, Nietzsche might say, compared to writing one’s whole life as the grandest, most epic story of all.
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