Anti-nature

(un)spirituality

Me with our wonderful guide Douglas from Vendome Circle standing outside the place where Albert Camus completed ‘The Stranger’ - one of my all-time favourite books.

This is my last travel post before we get back to regular programming - exploring tantric philosophy in conversation with science (next week) and Buddhism (the week after).

I recently got back to Australia from a 3 week trip to France. The journey between France and Australia is brutal - door to door it’s about 30 hours all up, and about 24 of that is spent in a plane. One of the things that I do on those long flights is to work on a project to digitise a particular series of English translations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s published works.

This most recent flight was spent on his last book - Ecce Homo. One thing in particular struck me as I worked on this text: Nietzsche’s use of words like ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality.’

Nietzsche spent quite a bit of his writing career standing against spiritual ideas. So it is interesting that…