Cold, clean self-critique

or, how to avoid being a self-help narcissist

Scott Barry Kaufmann, a psychologist and Instafluencer recently published a post with this quote:

“The self-help industry is basically grandiose narcissists telling vulnerable narcissists how to live their lives”

This might be true for some people. One of the central features of the self-help movements is self-care (expressed as self-love, self-compassion and so on ). This is easy for narcissistic people to misuse. But for others, it is an important corrective to a culture that for a long time has emphasised the moral value of sacrificing yourself for others and placing others’ needs ahead of your own.

So how can you protect yourself from getting carried away with the idea of self-care and becoming too self-focused or self-involved, like a narcissist would.

The answer is not to go back to sacrificing yourself for others as the moralists would have it. The answer, at least according to Nietzsche, is to go mountain climbing.

Nietzsche frequently uses the image of climbing in high mountains as a metaphor for a radical kind of self-assessment: an honest one. The idea is that for you to be honest about yourself, you have to find a way to get into cold, clean mountain air.

These are the two features of healthy self-critique: it is cold and it is clean. It is cold because it is a self-reflection that is totally detached, and it is clean because it is unpolluted by the ideas, desires and hopes of other people.

Here are two characteristics of healthy self-critique that you might want to practice to avoid self-helping yourself to an unhealthy dose of narcissism.

A cold, hard look

It is necessary to look away from oneself in order to see much: this hardness is needed by every mountain climber.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Wanderer

Healthy self-critique, according to Nietzsche, happens when you can distance yourself, from yourself. You climb and climb and climb - up and away from yourself, so that you can look down on yourself and see who you really are without judgement - either positive or negative.

We are very used to immediately forming judgements when we look at ourselves. Looking back down on yourself from the mountaintop, the first thing you will want to do is to form a judgement. I hate my hair, I love my outgoing personality, I’m glad I work hard, it’s bad that I don’t have more money and so on.

The essence of healthy self-critique is to avoid all of this. To feel nothing. To think nothing. To have no reaction whatsoever. To just see what is there and to consider opportunities and limits. There are things about you that will help you and things that will limit you. Learning just to appreciate what these things are is the essence of mountain climbing according to Nietzsche.

Cleanliness is next to honest-ness

The vain. - We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities others ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

Daybreak, §385