How Robert Anton Wilson Read Nietzsche

And Other Sundry Notes Around Fred N.

This post was impelled by my colleague Eric Wagner’s riffs on RAW as a Nietzsche reader when Wagner appeared as the guest in the Hilaritas podcast for May 23, 2025, but it was actually recorded many months before that. Eric is funny and thoughtful and the only thing I really disagreed with him was when he says, near the end, to not read Nietzsche. And though I disagree, he may be right. I tend to think that anyone who reads Wilson at a decent level of comprehension - EX: the ability to read irony? - should find Nietzsche safe and spiritually profitable.

But we all know where Wagner is coming from in that line. Which I’ll attempt to address as is my discursive wont.

Anyone who has listened/watched this podcast cited above will see I’m not really offering a rebuttal. It was only that, as my friend talked about RAW and Nietzsche I had a few ideas that might add to, as Robert Graves said, “all that.”

Nietzsche’s Health, and Overcoming

While Fred N’s lifelong suffering has been widely noted, I urge to underscore it in our reading of him. For a very long time it was widely believed FN went nuts from syphilis, but more recent forensics suggest he’d had a very slow-growing brain tumor from a young age. He had migraines, saw auras, had debilitating digestive problems, all of which aggravated a depression. (Not to mention that catastrophic sister of his, amirite?) I cannot read FN without this knowledge constantly present in my mind. I ran into a German term while reading about how phenomenology influenced Max Scheler’s sociology of knowledge: Geisteshaltung: roughly: a disposition of spirit. Immediately I thought of Nietzsche.

Yes, Fred was profoundly well-educated and probably the finest philosophical prose stylist since Plato (irony!), but you know how when you’re reading Nietzsche there’s a series of passages that are just elevating and mind-blowing, only for us to suddenly encounter a remark that seems juvenile, or even puerile? I can’t help but think that basically, it’s true: he wrote himself into exalted states. Writing as pharmakon. The buzz of psyching yourself into feeling like some…Superman type.

He had been suffering from a young age. (See this short passage about FN from Stefan Zweig’s Master Builders for a more vivid and garish scene.) And I think Robert Anton Wilson shared a bit in this business of reading and writing as radical, at least momentary, therapy.

RAW had polio, was born into poverty, his mother battered him during the Depression when money was tight, and spent most of his adult life as a scuffling freelancer in 20th century America. He suffered physically too. Not on the level of Nietzsche, but I do think they shared something in illness informing their writing. Fred was dapper and sickly and, as far as I’m concerned, bad-ass enough; RAW had his own Irish wit about it. The subject of RAW as futurist and optimist while challenged physically is a topic still to be addressed in full, but Gabriel Kennedy is the standard and substantial text on this: see Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson (2024)

More than a few times RAW said - no doubt ironically - that the paranoia in his books was from the feeling that the universe was out to kill him. However, he also seems to have become Adept at banishing paranoia and shifting to more exalted - especially humorous and psychedelic - states. He may have had some level of manic depression, suggestive from short statements he made about himself, but some of his letters also hint at very dark moods that occurred after highly productive creative periods. We aren’t sure. I’m not sure. Maybe he just got low when things - money issues - were bad, then they got better and so did he? He self-treated with cannabis, some psychedelics, and reading Nietzsche. In a letter to his American friend and benefactor Kurt Smith, from Dublin, August 3rd, 1983, we read this passage:

“[…] I’ve been re-reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, to cheer me up when it seemed I was not only about to go broke but lose my wife as well. One passage that I never noticed before really moved me:

A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future — and, alas, also, as it were, a cripple at this bridge: all this is Zarathustra.

All this is Nietzsche. Immodestly but also humbly, I think it is me, too. Sometimes I am more conscious of the cripple part than I am at other times…Nietzsche always cheers me up in the bad times. None of the mystical or “inspirational” literature I have around here cheers me when all seems black and hopeless, but Nietzsche’s soaring contempt for those who cannot bear suffering always braces me.

RAW’s writing around Nietzsche and suffering is fairly extensive. Earlier, in the Spring, 1979 ish of his close friend Robert Shea’s anarchist little mag No Governor, RAW writes in “A Few Blunt Statements About Neuro-Economics”:

There is, ultimately, a pleasure in enduring poverty. It is like the pleasure of surviving through grief and mourning and loss; the Hemingway pleasure of standing firm and continuing to fire at a charging lion; the saint’s pleasure in forgiving those who persecute hir. It is not masochism but pride: I have been stronger than I thought I could be. “I have not wept nor cried aloud.” This is the joy Nietzsche and Gurdjieff found, in ignoring their cruelly painful illnesses and writing only of the “awakened” state beyond emotions and attachments.

Someone could write a thesis on this topic alone, but I feel the need to address some other aspects of the RAW/FN nexus, so I must move on. Suffice one last note on this aspect: near the end of his life, Wilson was teaching a class on “The Tale of the Tribe” at his own MaybeLogic Academy. In a class note he opined that Nietzsche embraced the notion of “Eternal Recurrence” precisely because it was the most distressing idea, and that if he could still say “Yes” to all that - “affirming life instead of cursing it” - then he is truly a Philosopher. Then RAW openly wondered if Joyce “accepted” or “parodied” Eternal Recurrence in Finnegans Wake.

Finally, along these lines, I agree quite strongly with Richard Rorty, who saw some thinkers as Ironists who wrote for other Ironists, but mostly were inventing themselves. A major aspect of Rorty’s idea was that certain writers are best read privately, for the Ironist’s unique self-building; other writers - like Marx or Foucault - should be read as social philosophers who have something to say about how we ought to think and critique society. Nietzsche, for Rorty, was for private reading. And I heartily agree. (See, Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.) Wilson seems to have read Nietzsche this way: as someone the private liberal Ironist uses to constantly reinvent themselves and not as a writer who compels political action in the world.

Style and Improvement of Mind

Closely related to this writing and reading and what I often think of as “books as drugs,” Wilson thought a lot about style. He thought the way to improve your mind was to improve your style, and vice-versa. Wilson used a heavily-influenced-by-Nietzschean aphoristic style in many of his works, but it’s perhaps most pronounced in Sigismundo Celine’s “Wilderness Diary” passages in his novel, Nature’s God. This flavor of aphoristic style seems to bear a strong family resemblance to McLuhan’s “probes”: you write pithy, short statements with a poetic and ballsy attitude. Maybe the nature of things are this way. Maybe another way. These consist of informed hypotheses. These little bon mots are like a slugger in baseball: they swing for the fences and strike out a lot, but when they connect it goes a long way. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is the original social media post that goes viral: it’s short, pithy, and packing a huge punch. The analysis of Nietzschean aphorisms from a rhetorical view - how they are perceived - could provide an intense and full decade of study by any one of us and we wouldn’t exhaust it. Wilson wanted in on this, too, and he pulled it off.

McLuhan around 1964 until his death adopted a more scattershot, aphoristic approach around a de-centered multi-perspectival, “probing”series of points of view. For McLuhan this was a way of mirroring the re-tribalized nature of perception under electronic media and he would prefer us to see his precursors as Joyce and Pound. Which is valid, but I think Nietzsche got there first. That Nietzsche abandoned the Western approach of building up arguments in a logical sequence is now a trite observation; the notion that he could write about one thing (women, Jews, “the nobility”, etc) then later seemingly contradict what he’d written: we seem still challenged by this. Is it some sort of Aristotelian software in our nervous system? I think so. Give us the “best” argument for, say, Free Will, then we can read it, know it, believe it, fold it up and put it into our back pocket, then go see if there are any hors d’oeuvres left. If we look at Nietzsche’s oeuvre from 30,000 feet, it’s a mosaic of commentary. Perhaps only Montaigne preceded him in this. I see no robust argument over any one Big Idea, or even a series of them. Rather, he seems to always want to be provocative. And he succeeded. Let those of us who enjoy reading Nietzsche admit that we come for the provocations, which are more often than not delectable, due to his style, or maybe I ought to use the German term Denkstil? (“Thought-style”, roughly.)

Our style might be like our fingerprints, but only if we don’t work on it. How do we work on it? Read closely and internalize deeply those styles that strike us as revealing a further area of Mind. Or: keep reading the New York Times Bestseller List if you’re not into this. Your call. I’m trying to emphasize the improvement of our minds via improvement of style.

The aspect of style as a superior value is one that RAW shares with his old friend Tom Robbins, who argued for style being superior to content throughout his long run of novels. In his debut novel, the hippie classic, Another Roadside Attraction, Robbins had his character Marx Marvelous argue for content dictating style, while the hero, Amanda, thought style was superior to content. This argument reoccurs as a leitmotif throughout Robbins’s novels, and style always wins.

There’s much more to mine in this business of style, but I want to address Wilson’s appreciation of Nietzsche as a very valuable sort of Linguist.

Nietzsche as Linguist

When I listened to Eric Wagner, I thought this aspect was a lacuna, and so will try to add something from RAW and FN and linguistics/philology/semantics/Metalinguistics:

While Alfred Korzybski was the main influence on Wilson’s thinking about language and symbols, he saw Nietzsche - trained as a Philologist - as a significant contributor to his own thinking in Metalinguistics. Or perhaps a slightly more descriptive term would be Non-Chomskyan Linguistics?

In an August 30th, 1985 interview with V. Vale, RAW says this about FN:

I think among the books that had the biggest influence on me were several books by Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. Nietzsche, in general, has had a tremendous impact on me — his whole attack on grammar and the way language controls thought. There is no good and evil in the universe, and “The Leaf” does not exist — all that exists is this leaf and that leaf, and the other leaf, but nobody has ever seen “The Leaf.” The whole epistemological radicalism. Nietzsche was sort of the forerunner of 20th century linguistic analysis, in one dimension - his whole criticism of conventional morality.

In a discussion of critical errors conspiracy theorists make - they don’t understand how fungibility works - RAW returns to “The Leaf” argument (which serves as an example of non-fungibility) and adds:

“The leaf” exists nowhere outside grammar and Platonic philosophy -- and thus our language tends to promote neo-Platonism by populating the world with grammatical abstractions. Any conspiracy theory that moves towards fungibility evolves also toward Platonic Idealism. (Everything Is Under Control, p.6, italics in original.)

In his own little mag, Trajectories, Wilson once wrote an entire history of “Gaia: The Trajectories of Her Evolution” (issues #4-7, 1989-1990). He used his “Jumping Jesus” hypothesis of acceleration and doubling of information logarithmically over shorter periods in history. By the 19th century: “In about six years in the 1860s, Friedrich Nietzsche did a marvelous job of logical and sarcastic demolition of all previous philosophy, laid the foundation for such 20th Century philosophies as Existentialism, Operationalism, and Linguistic Analysis, and offered a post-Darwinian vision of humanity in process: ‘What is the ape to the man? A caricature, a parody. So shall man be to the Beyond Man…Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Beyond Man…a rope over an abyss!’.” (see these essays collected in Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, vol. 2, pp. 51-83, ed. D. Scott Apel, Impermanent Press ed. This passage on p.67)

In another book, RAW goes on about the use of language and influence of Benjamin Tucker, Korzybski, and Joyce, then, “So Nietzsche, Tucker, Joyce and Korzybski have all influenced me to look at language in a peculiar way. I see language as a means of human liberation, potentially — and the main mechanism of human slavery most of the time. It depends on how you use language.” (Robert Anton Wilson: Beyond Conspiracy Theory; V. Vale, pp.36-37.)

Perhaps more pertinent to the year as I write, Wilson quotes FN: “To ascribe predicates to a people is always dangerous.” (from an originally unpublished note that appears in The Portable Nietzsche. ed. Walter Kaufmann, p.41.) Wilson uses this quote and then elaborates using logic:

Racism, sexism and stupid prejudice in general consist, in logical terms, of ascribing predicates to groups. This takes the form All k are x. K represents a class or set or group and x is the predicate quality (e.g., “crooked,” “stupid,” “great sense of rhythm,” “wise,” “honest,” or whatever.) (Coincidance: A Head Test, p.79, Hilaritas Press ed.)

Further, RAW realized that the mind thinks with controlling metaphors by the early 1970s, if not earlier. He often quoted Norman O. Brown, “All that is, is metaphor.” Therefore, metaphor would reside at the heart of historical class warfare, among other places. The Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff cited a small number of brilliant thinkers and writers who saw this we-think-in-metaphors idea, pre-empirically: Vico (18th c.); Nietzsche (19th c.); and Ernst Cassirer and I.A. Richards (early 20th c.) I think the number is larger and includes Korzybski, Whorf, Brown, McLuhan, and RAW, with strong arguments to be made for many others, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, but that’s for some other day…(see The Political Mind, G. Lakoff, p.252)

Lakoff and other cognitive linguists have much to say about how our consciousness is embodied, we think with our entire body, and reason comes from neurobiological processes that are mostly unconscious. I was riffling through some books on Ethology a few months ago, and came upon a footnote in Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s massive Human Ethology: “Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that one must imitate another person’s body movements to understand their feelings. The conjunction of appropriate body gestures and sensitivity for the other person would result in creating a similar feeling in oneself.” (op.cit: p.480)

This speaks to Wilson’s idiosyncratic Metalinguistics. He and Leary devoured Lorenz and Tinbergen and other Ethologists in order to understand the linguistics of the mostly pre-verbal aspect of homo sapiens, for what they called the 2nd Circuit of consciousness. But isn’t this idea of FN’s also found in studies of interpersonal communication, not to mention Method Acting?

A final remark before moving on from this fecund area: Nietzsche’s philological chops are on display in disparate areas of the oeuvre. I often think of his comments on “noble” and “the nobility” from Beyond Good and Evil, esp. sections 257-261: “In the beginning the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie in physical strength, but in strength of the soul…” and then the term changes over time. The aristocracy makes language suit their needs for power and control. I think Vico preceded Nietzsche here, but a dialectical reading of both of them regarding language and class warfare would shed much light on any current political situation one finds oneself in. (Because I did not have the philological chops to address Vico on these grounds, I chose instead to concentrate on resultant histories of censorship in my long essay, “Notes on Wilson, Vico, Language and Class Warfare” from RAW’s TSOG: Tsarist Occupation Government, pp.245-293, Hilaritas Press ed. For an erudite discussion of how “virtue” changed meanings in early America from “the capacity of some men to rise above private interests to devote themselves to the public good” - which substantially aided the new republic in getting legs under it, to “virtue” morphing by 1800 into something like, “the capacity to look out for oneself and one’s family,” see Joyce Appleby’s Capitalism and a New Social Order, pp.9-16.)

Leave ‘Em Laffing

I need to cut this short. The foreman is nervously looking at me and pointing to his watch. I’m told there will be refreshments in the adjoining hall. What? Okay. I’m being told my remarks about gormless twits and Silly Valley jagoffs using Nietzsche’s Ubermensch idea must await some other day, so I need to get a joke in before the hook pulls me offstage. Just one? Okay. It seems there was this priest who one day visited a prostitute…What? That one takes too long? We don’t have the time? Okay, okay, I don’t want to further downgrade the festivities, so let me end with RAW’s friend George Carlin’s take on a famous Nietzsche riff:

“That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” Carlin saw as New Age pretentiousness. His rejoinder: “That which doesn’t kill me may still sever my spinal cord, crush my rib cage, cave in my skull, and leave me helpless and paralyzed, soaking a puddle of my own waste.” (Napalm and Silly Putty, p.78)

Wait! Just one more? (Everyone standing up and stretching, leaving the room, widespread chatter.) Did you hear the one about the Will To Power? Where are you going? Okay, well, the problem with German food is that no matter how much you eat, an hour later you’re hungry for power. Okay, OG out.

Thank you. (applause: “smattering.”)