In defense of Nietzsche’s enduring cool we must first ask ourselves: is it the creative zest of the camel/lion/child (lockerroom tarot) and incendiary (historically normative, actually) proclamations of the Übermensch that compel legions of basement philosophers to continue propping him up as a demigod of existential swagger, or could it be something far more superficial? Something as seemingly innocuous as his (incredibly impressive) mustache and that (very good) portrait?

Nietzsche’s philosophical cachet has, for a long time, been motoring on pimple-shy tweens looking for esteem, relying less on the nuance of his thought and more on his status as an aesthetic *icon*. I’d wager that Nietzsche’s modern appeal owes as much to his mustachioed and incandescently sullen visage as it does to any treatise on eternal recurrence (cool thought experiment, bro).

The man *looked* the part. Its IMPRESSIVE. That niagra mustache, an entity unto itself, gave him an aura of fuck you, a nonconformist brior patch. This makes for great Instagram, where Nietzschean quotes are often matched with his portrait, glowering Victorian bad boy, whiskers bristling with latent fury.

And let’s not kid ourselves: people have a funny way of digesting "high philosophy” and by that I mean they go for comic books and call it high philosophy. Thus Spoke is unreadably tedious if what you're after is philosophy.

But then again his main contribution to philosophy has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, appropriately, it has to do with WEARING SUPERFICIAL MASKS!! Against the backdrop (foreground, actually) of his own damn face, his reflections on human masks is what makes Nietzsche a philosopher worth studying…

“Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, THANKS TO THE CONSTANTLY FALSE, SHALLOW interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.”

(Beyond Good and Evil) (caps mine).

Nietzsche’s entire project is embedded in the above. In his case, the overtly “profound” (superficial) mask gives “serious philosopher”. So then what is Nietzsche’s profundity concealing? Precisely shallowness itself.

Nietzsche, brooding and bedraggled, had nothing - and THAT is his great philosophical gift to us (if we can bring ourselves to admit it).

Philosophy is hard; a great mask is harder.