Henk Manschot is Professor Emeritus at the University of Humanistics in the Netherlands.

Amirali Maleki interviews him about Nietzsche's approach to philosophy and life

- Amirali Maleki

Is Nietzsche's philosophy - or not only Nietzsche's but all philosophers' philosophy - a reflection of their daily lives?

A very interesting question. I think that philosophers, like every human being, are embedded in their daily environment and their perceptions of it. But what makes a philosopher great is that he or she reflects on the images, ideas, and emotions he receives from his education, culture, and religion, and comes up with new ways of perceiving and feeling the world around them. This is in particular true for Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In place of philosophy as an academic study, Nietzsche advocates a personal engagement in which living and thinking are continually connected. As I explained in my book, Nietzsche and the Earth (2020), Nietzsche left the academic life and the decadent culture of the city of Basel in Switzerland, and started a completely new way of living for himself, striving for a radical new connectivity with the living earth'. I wrote in my introduction that if we want to walk in Nietzsche's footsteps, "a new philosophy of the earth demands of modern humans that they reconnect with the natural world around them in their daily lives." We soon realize, however, how difficult this can be. What does restoring contact with nature mean for our lives? And what new kinds of thought and reflection emerge from it? In an attempt to answer these questions, I followed Nietzsche's life and showed how his way of thinking changed, step by step. Instead of the academic philosopher he once was, he became a walker, writing aphorisms about what inspired him, and defining life as one great experiment.