Curious Worldview

93: Stephen Hicks | Will To Power & Nietzsche On Modernity (Part 3/3)

• Stephen Hicks • Episode 93

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:10:36

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/stephen-hicks-nietzsche-on-modernity/

This is Stephen Hick’s 4th appearance on the podcast and as well the 3rd and final episode in our series on the “Life & Philosophy Of Freidrich Nietzsche”. Episode 1 here, and episode 2 here.

Stephen hicks is a Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, the Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and a Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. Stephen Hicks has published 6 books, the one most relevant here is his brilliant Nietzsche and the Nazis.

Stephen also has a podcast titled – Open College. 

In This Podcast With Stephen Hicks On Nietzsche On Modernity, You Can Expect To Hear About…

  • Nietzsche’s Productive Years In Turin & Descent Into Madness.
  • Will To Power.
  • Nietzsche On Modernity.
  • What Is Stephen Hicks Great & Impossible?

Jump In On My Newsletter 📋 🔑 - https://atlasgeographica.com/subscribe
📷 Instagram & Twitter 🐦 
-----

  • 00:00 – Introduction.
  • 02:00 – Nietzsche’s Heros & Final Productive Years.
  • 18:15 – Will To Power.
  • 40:25 – Nietzsche On Modernity.
  • 1:03:35 – What Is Stephen Hicks Great & Impossible?
  • 1:07:33 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

-----

Related Episodes Of The Curious Worldview Podcast


Links To Stephen Hicks

SPEAKER_00

The following is a conversation with it even here. This is his fourth appearance on the podcast, but as well, this is the third and final episode in our series of the life and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. You'll be able to find episode one and two of this series in the podcast library. They're episodes 39 and 54 respectively. However, I've also linked them in the podcast description. Episode one examined Nietzsche's early life, his influences, education, music philosophy, up until his lowest point, which was adjusted on the precipice of the Hubberger Zarathustra. Episode two picked up directly from there. Higgins explained Nietzsche's allegory for becoming who you are, beyond good and evil, the genealogies of morality, as well as Nietzsche's Master Slave Morality. And then finally this episode, which is the third and final one, that covers Nietzsche's descent into madness, his final productive years, the will to power. And then finally, Stephen Higgins reflects on what Nietzsche would make of modernity. So if you've already been listening to this series, then I'm sorry, but I'm just going to quickly introduce Stephen Higgins again for the benefit of people who this might be the first time they're listening to the podcast. Stephen Higgins is a professor of philosophy at Rockford University, the executive director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Zane is a scholar at the Atlas Society. Higgins published Ethics book is the one most relevant here is his brilliant Niji and the Nazis, which is available for free as an audiobook on YouTube. The link for that is in the description. But then he's also perhaps most famously known as the author of the 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism. Stephen also has a great podcast which I thoroughly enjoy. It is titled Open College. And as well, the link is in the description. So, all right, ladies and gents, with no further ado, please do hang around to the end. Hear my afterthoughts and as well my vision for the podcast. And with nothing else I give you, Stephen. So Nietzsche is now swelling with more ambition than ever. And he hopes to create, quite literally, the works that will replace the Bible. Not figuratively, but he genuinely has the ambition to usurp Christ and replace the Bible with his own text on morality. It's in 1888, he's in his early 40s, and he moves to Turin, Italy. And while it is initially an enormously productive time for him, he quickly falls into madness. There is the famous Hortonine, and then just several days later, he's incarcerated in a madhouse. It was a 44. Then for the next decade, he published nothing. He had been, for all intents and purposes, removed from his performance elf. And it was in this context that was discovered an unpublished work titled The Will to Power, a tome that represented this unbelievably ambitious dream of Nietzsche's. So could you comment first, like we were just saying off fair, a little bit of his productivity in this time that leads us up to the unpublished Will to Power?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, in his uh final productive year, uh after Genealogy of Morals in 1887, yes, he does uh put out a series of uh quite short works, and rhetorically they are uh they're scorching. Nietzsche always has a reputation for being a powerful writing writer, uh, but he he he ups it a level in these these final works. So Twilight Light of the Idols, Ecke Homo. Uh he revisits some of the Wagner themes he'd broken with Wagner a couple of decades earlier, but uh actually not quite a couple of decades, but at least a decade and a bit earlier. Uh but that's still on his mind what had gone on with Wagner, and uh and then the anti-Christ, and that sort of connects with the remarks you just made. That he does see himself as the anti-Christ, and that he's developing a philosophical uh system, might be a bit strong, but uh uh nonetheless an outlook that will replace uh traditional Christianity, which he sees as an ultimate form of decadence. Uh yes, so these works do come out and he reflects on some of his earlier works. He uh names some of the great uh heroes and villains from his own perspective. So Plato and Kant and Rousseau come under scathing attack. And Nietzsche really is like the best name-caller in the entire history of philosophy, so uh it's worth just uh uh you know browsing the aphorisms for his one-liners. Of course, those one-liners are backed up by deep insight in into why he thinks these guys are so horrible, disgusting, uh, catastrophic, and so on. And he does uh indicate some of his great heroes at uh at this point. Some of them we already know. So Dionysus, who uh was uh the god figure. This goes back to his first great work, Birth of Tragedy, where he had contrasted kind of a Dionysian and uh Apollonian perspective. Uh but what's one interesting rhetorical thing is that when he refers to Dionysus now, Dionysus is referred to as a philosopher and not as a god. And that might be an interesting uh rhetorical twist right there. But then at the same time, uh uh all of the various forms of decadence uh that he sees now operative in the modern world. This is now the 1800s. He's disgusted by the religious revivalism, the new strong forms of Christianity. Uh he doesn't see much difference between socialism and Christianity. Socialism is just a slightly modernized form of egalitarianism, but it comes from that same weakness, you know, that we're all supposed to be equal, and instead of an all-powerful God looking after us, it's supposed to be the all-powerful collective or the all-powerful state is going to look after us. And the idea of uh everybody being equal and let's all share and be nice and so on. So all of those things he sees as a cultural uh decadence and a sign of uh physiological weakness in the in the people who are renunciating them. Even uh democracy and liberalism, which uh many people are championing as the great achievements of the modern world. Not as bad as socialism, not as bad as Christianity, but also still uh quite a sign of sickness. So uh all of those themes are uh articulated. He revisits a number of his works and says what was going on in his mind. Some of them are semi-autobiographiographical, you know, just uh recapitulating certain important themes and putting them in a little bit of context, what he was thinking of at the time, some suggestive uh uh uh notes about his own place in the history of ideas. And uh certainly his uh his formulations are grandiose, uh, but we might also at the same time say that they are actually quite accurate. We uh here we are over a century later, and you know Nietzsche is high up in the in the pantheon. He he knew he was one of the greats, and I think whether we agree with him or not, he was in fact one of the greats. So, yes, uh at the same time, though, he is working on what came to be known as uh the will to power, and I'll I'll put some uh quotations around that so we'll we'll have to talk about that as well. He is trying to put together a great work, uh uh uh one all-encompassing book, and this one would be a big book uh that puts all of the themes together and and and uh uh recapitulate and extend. And in some cases, there are some innovations in there, his uh his overall philosophy of life. He's now in his mid-40s, he uh uh he is he is mature, he knows he's mature, uh, but then as you point out, he collapses, uh some uh brain problem, brain disease, and uh at that point he descends into psychological vegetative state. Although he doesn't die for another uh 11 years. So, how's that?

SPEAKER_00

Amazing. Um could you comment, apart from Dionysus, maybe some of the other heroes that he is making mention of?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, two others, and they're both uh Greeks. Uh one uh is Heraclitus and uh Heraclitus the the process philosopher, as we we come to call him. And uh Plato casts him as the anti-Parmenides, the anti-Plato. So one of the big divides in philosophy. I think this is a false alternative, but nonetheless it's been an extraordinarily powerful dichotomy, is between those who emphasize the particularity and the changeability of reality, that reality is a number of things that are constantly in process and in motion and in change, uh, to the point where, you know, as Heraclitus would say famously, it's the one we all learn in our school years, you can't step into the same river twice, or a man can't step into the same river twice, because between the two different times, the river has changed and the man himself has changed. So it's not the same river, it's not the same man. And so what that aphorism is suggesting is that somehow talking about the river is already an artificial use of language, you know, that we are imposing a word on something that is itself not constant over time. And we're not, you know, river at T1 and river at T2 and river at T3. We don't do that. And the same thing for the concept of the man, you know, to suppose that there is such a thing as a human being who has a stable identity, perhaps an essence that is unchanging across time. So you are Ryan Hogg in uh Faulkner-Hogg in 2022, and you're still the same Ryan Faulkner-Hogg as you were in 2012, 10 years ago. Of course, there's some superficial changes, but the the core Ryan Faulkner-Hoggness is still there. So uh Nietzsche is very much a process philosopher, attacking the notions of identity, causality, permanence, essences, and so Heraclitus he sees as accurate but also brave. And then all of those philosophers like Parmenides and uh uh Plato, who want to say, no, no, no, no, all of the uh the true nature of reality is these permanent essences or these absolutes. Uh so things are what they are, and they have identities that are real and fixed. And so as a result of that, change and uh particularity are the things that are illusions. So someone like Plato will then say, no, we have to just say, you know, humans and all the particular humans, they're only kind of sort of human. There is this abstract essence, humanity, that is unchanged across time. And so, you know, individual humans will come and go, but humanity remains in existence. And so the evidence of your senses that gives you, that says that there are these individual things and that they are real, that's uh that's just just an illusion. So uh Plato uh from Nietzsche's perspective then is one of the villains. Reality really is process change, uh, not these eternal forms, and the idea that you want to have this perfect eternal world is uh is a flight from reality. So Heraclitus is uh is one of his heroes. Uh interestingly, also Aristotle gets a plug, but it's for a fairly narrow point. In the Nicomychian ethics, Aristotle has his portrait of his ideal man, the uh the the magna animus in the Latin translation, but uh the megalosucchia in Greek, the original Greek, the great souled man. And it's an enormously powerful portrait of an ideal human type. Actually, I wrote my uh my master's thesis in philosophy on this. Uh and so uh here what we find is uh is Nietzsche hearkening to Aristotle's portrait of a man of what we would now call great self-esteem or enormous pride and dignity, who has a great sense of his own self-worth and knows that he has a great sense of his own great self-worth, that all of the other great Aristotelian virtues of courage and uh uh liberality and uh knowing one's own mind and having powerfully developed one's mind and one's body. And you know that you are something pretty magnificent, particularly in contrast to all of the weak-willed, uh mealy-mouthed, cowardly types of human beings who just want to get on uh with the day and not uh not make waves with their neighbors or get on the wrong side of their mother-in-law, you know, that sort of semi-contemptible human being. So there is this powerful uh portrait uh in Aristotle of this great souled man that Nietzsche resonates and he he uh he uh uh in uh Twilight of the Idols, I think he is singles out uh Aristotle as one of the heroes as well.

SPEAKER_00

Mealy mouthed is good foreshadowing for something that hopefully we touch upon later. Um and I realize we're operating within time constraints, but I do want to I do want to pull on one uh I don't know what'd you say, thread, cliche podcasting term that you sort of said there. Um I love that anecdote of a man never stepped in the same river twice. Uh very interesting as well to think about. You know, apparently every seven years every cell in our body is actually has been replicated. Each additional experience we have technically makes us different than from the person we were the second before. What even is your identity? We barely understand consciousness. So that's a really fascinating um aphorism that I'd never heard before. I'd like you to just comment on where uh that is reflected directly in Nietzsche's work.

SPEAKER_01

Well, uh, I know we are getting toward uh the will to power, and uh particularly in the the third part of the will to power where Nietzsche lays out his metaphysics and his epistemological themes quite quite richly. Uh you know, he's very clear that he does not believe in causality, in cause and effect. He doesn't even believe in the concept of identity, you know, that things are what they are. Uh that uh that that process and change he sees as undercutting the notion of identity. So either you stick with the notion of identity, things are what they are, and there's a then on the basis of that some causality and some stability to cause and effect processes operative in reality, or you make change fundamental. But then the idea here from his perspective is if there is change, then what that means is the identity of what a thing at one instant isn't the same as the identity at the next instant, so it makes no sense to talk about identity across time. So you have to just give up on the concept of identity. And that takes you in the direction of a kind of flux or a kind of uh chaos as underlying the structure of reality. So Nietzsche is uh clearly much more on the flux, anti-identity uh side of reality, and he uh is going to go hammer and tongs after that. Much of the the uh the third part of Will to Power is focused exactly on those themes. Now, we mentioned Heraclitus a little bit earlier. Uh probably the most immediate connection would be to Schopenhauer in the earlier generation. So if you go back to the early 1800s, you have the big duel, say, we can put it dramatically between, say, Hegel and Schopenhauer. You know, and Hegel is arguing that all of history is going in a certain direction, there are these causal processes. You know, he's got this strange dialectical metaphysics that he's trying to work out, but nonetheless, there is a causality at work, and history is going in a certain direction and is going to reach a certain endpoint, a certain, a certain telos. So, you know, the will, uh the divine providence is operating in the world, and we should be able to read off what that causal process is in self-conscious fashion. That's what philosophers are supposed to be doing. And the direct antipode of that is someone like Schopenhauer who wants to argue there is no plan in nature, there is no intentionality in nature. Nature is not just going anywhere, instead, uh it's all just chaos. There's just will, but will is blind and seething and contradictory to itself and constantly devouring uh itself and uh and so on. So we just have a kind of a an ongoing chaotic will. So Nietzsche is much more sympathetic to uh to uh to sympath uh to Schopenhauer rather in in that duel.

SPEAKER_00

So it seems like the implications of that flux you said it comes out in will to power. Um let's introduce the book, it was unpublished and I suppose written when he was diagnosed as being mad. So there is a lot of controversy, I suppose, over um how seriously it should be taken. I don't know if that's my own um yeah you know misunderstanding of it or understanding of it.

SPEAKER_01

But I read it the controversies there, yes. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00

I read it described as best understood as an irrational force found in all individuals that can be channelled towards different ends. So I wonder whether that interpretation maps onto your interpretation at all.

SPEAKER_01

And if you could what what's what's the it? Is it uh the will to power or the book, the will to power? The the The Will to Power.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And then is this so I does that map onto yours? And then as well, tag on, is this a looted work? Or is this in fact, you know, the writings of someone who's lost touch?

SPEAKER_01

Hmm. Yes, uh, I don't think it's the writings of someone who lost touch, because he did write it. There's I believe 1,067 sections in the book, and it's quite a substantial project. And uh uh it's now traditionally organized into four parts, and that more or less maps onto I'm gonna start talking about the book itself rather than the the content of the book, uh on a sort of set of themes. So part one is about nihilism in Europe, and so it's somewhat intellectual journalism about the sad state of European psychological affairs, intellectual affairs, religious affairs. Nietzsche sees the culmination of the Western philosophical tradition as reaching a kind of nihilism by the time we get to the 1800s. Uh and then he is starting to suggest uh uh uh what he wants to call a transvaluation of all values. So we take all of the value systems that have been developed in the West, most notably the Judeo-Christian tradition, and then much of the second part is a critique of Christianity again, and these are themes that we're familiar with if we've read Beyond Good and Evil, and then Genealogy of Morals. So he's recapitulating a lot of those themes. Although there are some interesting uh new sub-angles that are emerging here as well. And then uh the third book is heavy duty metaphysics and epistemology, underlying that, some of the process stuff, the anti-identity that we're talking about, and then the uh the final part. Now, all of this Nietzsche worked on uh for years. You know, these are things that are in his notebooks. And after he had published a genealogy of morals, he announced that he was working on what was going to be his next great work. It would be his capstone work uh integrating all of the major themes, and that it would be in more philosophical form instead of being in the more literary form that we find in, say, say, Zarathustra. So all of it was written while he was lucid. And he had tried out different titles, and The Will to Power was one of the titles that he tried out in, I think it was like the Second last iteration of what he was thinking about publishing. But then he crossed that one out and then had another title toward the transvaluation of all values and so on. And that's sometimes put in now as the subtitle for the various editions that are coming out right now. And he had played around with saying, you know, there's a thousand sixty-seven sections, you know, sometimes having this chunk of sections here and this chunk of sections here. So he had tried different organizational schemes, but this four-part organizational scheme that is now mostly used was one of the ones that he tried out toward the end. So I think the status of the book then is okay, I see you want to say something, so I'll pause right there. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00

Could you just put on the timeline where towards the end is? Is this last year of his life or last years of him being lucid?

SPEAKER_01

No, last years of his being lucid. So yeah, when we're talking about Nietzsche as a thinker, we we will end in 1889. So uh so all of this is uh you know he has his notebooks as active thinkers do. And uh so he's finished Zarathustra, he's finished Beyond Good and Evil, he's finished uh and and many of the themes that he is working on actively, he decides to carve them out and put them in Twilight of the Idols, uh the Antichrist, and so on. So he's all actively working on these themes. Uh but then he wants to take many of them and then put them into a great a great work. So all of this is being worked on 1888, 1889. And he's also even going back to some of his earlier notebooks and reworking some of those themes and some of the aphorisms uh uh work their way into his his final set of notebooks as well. So, yes, all of this, he's lucid, he's on top of his game, and uh uh that's the status of the work at the point where he uh collapses in the streets of Turin.

SPEAKER_00

Well then, um what is the will to power beyond it being an irrational force that can be channeled in various directions? Could you explain what what what is this?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. Well, it's kind of an UR. Metaphysically, he would say it is the fundamental force or it's the fundamental whatever. Uh you know, the the language becomes difficult here because almost all of the words we use have baggage over the century. So uh but it was the the difference is going to be that it is uh semi-intentional, right? So when we introspect in ourselves and we feel an urge welling up, and sometimes it's going to be in the form of a desire or or or or or perhaps even an emotion, this impetus toward doing something. That's what Nietzsche is going to mean by the will to power. Now again, perhaps a contrast to Schopenhauer. So we would say we all are familiar with this idea of a will, you know, that I that I want something or I will something, and what you do internally, uh putting all of these words in quotation marks, is you just I'm going to do something, right? And then some sort of action follows from that. Whereas in Schopenhauer, it is not consistent from moment to moment. It has no particular goals, it has no particular directions, and it's in contradiction with itself and all of the other wills that are that are out there. So it's a kind of seething chaos that is nonetheless semi-intentional in Schopenhauer. What Nietzsche is adding is this idea of power, and power is necessarily directional. So to the extent that I want power or that there is this power will, it necessarily has to incorporate or overpower or be in tension with other power centers that are out there as well. And so it has a kind of goal or it has a kind of purpose. It wants to express itself, it wants to augment itself. And so, on the result of this, then this is not just a biological power struggle between predators and prey or predators amongst themselves. It's the basic stuff of reality. It's just power manifesting itself, wanting to organize itself into larger and larger centers of power. And this is the eternal story of the universe.

SPEAKER_00

Is it just because fundamentally he's talking about one's energy, one's intention, that it makes the um it makes the articulation of the point quite difficult? Like you had to express it through a grunt, for example. Um are there any better ways that have been written about this or um people talking about the same concept in a different way that you're familiar with, just as a way to understand what he's talking about?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, there is that you know Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche line of development, and some of the postmodernists, uh most famously Foucault, are going to pick up on this and run with it. Uh but yes, uh but part of the danger here is this is where we get into the materials in part three, where we have to resort to grunt, or we have to resort to just pointing, because part of Nietzsche's philosophy is that reason, rationality, abstraction, conceptualization, all of those are artificial and false to reality processes. So anytime we take a word and we say this is, say, my will to power, in contrast to your will to power, then uh I'm using this word I, and this I then is that I'm trying to pick out a certain entity, you know, a certain chunk of stuff out there in reality, and I am saying that it has some sort of stable hanging togetherness that makes me me, and that it persists across time, and all of that goes into the idea of an I. But uh, or we might then you know go back to the example of a river, or I want to drive my car really fast. So I'm starting to put labels on reality and to try to make reality fit into a conceptual scheme. But this conceptual scheme, uh, Nietzsche wants to argue, is a subjective imposition on what is itself not stable and fitting into nice, neat parcels. So we're trying to describe it by means of words, but Nietzsche's basic thesis is that words are inadequate to the task. And that's in large part why rhetorically he will say he's using his words not uh to capture truths about reality. Truth is another word that he thinks we have to set aside, uh, or to give you formulas, right, or give you laws of nature, or anything like that. Uh, that all of that is uh is the wrong way to think about what we're doing when we're conceptualizing. Rather, words are just another force, uh, and they do have a kind of power on people, but he wants uh them to uh to uh just to go back to the earlier works. He uses this uh this very rich metaphor of the philosophizing with a hammer, by which he means a kind of hammer that a piano tuner would use. So the piano tuner comes in and he presses the keys and taps on the strings with his hammer, and what he's trying to do is see which ones are in tune and which ones are out of tune, which ones are a false note. Uh, and then you will tighten or or loosen the strings, right, and so on. So he sees words by analogy to that sort of hammer, a tuning fork. Uh and they're gonna play on you. But what he wants to do is see what kind of reaction, and what you want is to see what kind of reaction they have on you. Uh so the point is not the words, the point is the subjective psychophysiological reaction they stimulate in you. So, for example, if I lay some words on you, some big heavy-duty words like God is dead, right? Uh the question is not, you know, is that true or not, but what does that do to you? Does that make you kind of shrink up inside and go, oh no, right, there's no more heavenly father looking after me? And that is kind of revelatory about what kind of a being you are, what your the nature of your power is, whether you have an internal locus of power, whether you have your act together and are able to take on the world. Uh or uh, you know, it might be the case that I lay those exact same words on you, God is dead, and you feel this, say, enormous sense of liberation. You know, finally I can be my own master in the world. I don't need to have to worry about the eyes of God looking at me and so on. And that then is revelatory, not about some metaphysical truth out there about reality, but about something inward. I am a center of power, and now I'm more likely, as a result of those words, to go out and manifest my power in the world, in contrast to someone else who's going to shrink and then be afraid of the world as a result of those words.

SPEAKER_00

And is it a um is it a decent interpretation of will to power that according to Nietzsche, um, you know, we all have it, but it's just the case that very few of us ever actually engage with it and uh maybe fulfill the potential that that has. Um so you can then say, where does it fit into his you know, mass-sled morality? Where does it fit into his idea of struggle being absolutely centered to being a human being and so forth?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. You know, speak colloquially. We we all are familiar with the phrase, you know, there are people who never quite get their act together. You know, they say, you know, I'm really interested in this, or wouldn't that be cool? And they they do have all kinds of drives and urges and desires, and they have declared intentions and purposes. And sometimes they try to get their act together and say, okay, now I'm really going to do it. You know, it's January 1st, I'm going to go to the gym five times a week, but then they'll call kind of Peters out by January the 4th, and uh, and they're back to the same sort of person they are. Uh and the contrast is to another person for whom it seems, and I'll put it again in quotation mark, natural that they they know who they are, they know what they are about, and they set goals for themselves, and they consistently act to achieve those goals, and then they achieve them, and then they set higher goals for themselves. So, just descriptively, there are all of these different kinds of people out there in the world. So, what to come back to Nietzschean language, he would say is the human being, uh, you know, I'll put that in quotation marks again, what we call a human being is a bundle of urges and drives and manifestations. And Nietzsche would say there are in the human being any number of power centers that are manifesting. It might be at the physiological level, at the psychological level, all of those things are the different aspects of us, each with its own goals, needs, drives, agendas, right, and so on. But what Nietzsche wants to do as a diagnosis is that, say, for the vast majority of people, they have all of these contradictory drives and centers. And they're always struggling with themselves, and no one of them is ever able to dominate any one of them. But what's different in some other people physiologically is they will have one drive, one center of power, one need that is dominant, and it will then succeed in overpowering the other internal drives and marshalling the power of those other drives for its own purposes. And that will be the purpose, the person who gets it together. So, yes, we are all power centers, and we all come in with dozens or hundreds of different sub-aspects of us, all of which are power drives, but some of us have merely diffuse ones, and some of us have ones that are able to get more concentrated and uh and get it together. So everybody has the wills to power initially.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. On the uh question of struggle, uh I took this quote out of the book, uh and it's not entirely clear to me why it's in there. So it it connects it to uh you know one of Nietzsche's uh uh perennial themes of struggle being absolutely necessary. Um, but I'll just read it to you and then see what you make of it. And it's on his loved ones. So to those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish not I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not that one endures. So in the context of world of power, can you make sense of that?

SPEAKER_01

Well, sure. Um I mean in some ways this is cliche, right? That you you have to go through hell before you can get to heaven. And uh and what's now a cliche for us, but was not cliche for Nietzsche, you know, that which does not kill us, you know, it makes us stronger, and so on. So, you know, in one sense, uh you you point out that he's directing this toward his loved ones. And so if you think of, say, a parenting analogy, you know, he is going to be the kind of parent who does not want to uh keep the child in a protective bubble and always be helicoptering and making sure that the child never uh gets cold, never goes hungry, never falls off his or her bike, and so on. So that the over-protective parent. Instead, he's going to be the kind of parent who wants his kid to be rough and tumble with lots of skinned knees, lots of bruised feelings from social encounters, and so on. And that it is through all of that physical distress, physical, sometimes exhaustion, uh, emotional stress, emotional failure and disappointment, that your character and your physical hardiness is going to be built. And so the idea then is if you are going to become the strongest kind of person, you are going to need the strongest kinds of adversaries and the strongest kinds of struggles and challenges to rise up to them, to overcome them in order to become the best human being that you can be.

SPEAKER_00

It uh it it echoes so much of Nassim Taleb and his book Anti-Fragile. I uh I don't know if he ever directly attributes that idea to uh Nietzsche being a big influence or not, but to just to uh to hammer home that that question that I really wanted to get from you, what does that have to do with will to power? Is that a way to sort of engage one's will to power, maybe make it more stronger, ambitious? Um maybe again it's a qu it's a problem of language, but yeah, is that making sense?

SPEAKER_01

Well, yes. So uh we put it in uh humanistic language when we were talking about the two my loved ones uh quotation, but ultimately uh Nietzsche's metaphysics is that the universe is power manifesting itself in more and more concentrated forms. And the human being, as we call it, that has been developed so far, has evolved out of millennia of increasing concentrations of power. And so this is the direction of the universe. And so the next stage he thinks, since he describes human beings as a transitional species in this law.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that was a fascinating uh take from the last episode.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's right. So we are just part of this ongoing process, and so there will be uh a species that comes into existence that is yet more powerful than we. That is to say, has greater capacities in all dimensions, sets greater goals for itself, is able to overcome greater challenges, and ultimately. So then, you know, how far we go into the future with this, I mean, Nietzsche does not does not say, you know, but you know, ultimately does the entire universe become concentrated into one single form of power, you know, at which point, who knows, maybe it becomes stable or at some point it just kind of explodes and uh uh the process starts over again. Okay, well, it would be a turn or return.

SPEAKER_00

It now uh brings us to, I think, uh, is the question that I initially wanted to ask you when we initially started out this three-episode project over about a year ago. Um and so I'll just set it up quickly. Um finally, Nietzsche passes away on the 15th of October in the year 1900. He's 55 years old when he dies. Now there's a whole 10 podcast series on what happens after he dies with his sister, the Nazis, etc. But you wrote a book on that subject. So we're going to encourage people to look at that. And there's also a free audiobook on YouTube as well, I believe. So to hear about that, you know, there's already uh great original text there. So the question, is modernity the hell that Nietzsche predicted it would be from the consequence of the death of God? And I just want to um quote Bethany Hughes, who I think I I took this directly from a presentation she did on the BBC um because she asked this question and this is how she presented it, and I thought it was so good. So the crisis of the murder of God may seem exaggerated today. The modern world hasn't collapsed. God, as the unchallengeable source of moral values, seems to have stepped aside. But maybe that's because we lack Nietzsche's wild imagination. If we choose to wear the very blinkers of the herd, could it be that we stare with unseeing eyes into the very abyss that he predicted? Nietzsche believed that what would fill the void of this death of God was a chaos of cultural preferences, a mess, an overload of personal choices. Pernicious in Nietzsche's eyes because they perpetuated the empty values of the herd that he so despised. And perhaps Nietzsche's most chilling version, vision, was the types of people that would populate this post-Christian world. He called these people the last men, and for them he held the highest contempt. These were men and women who turned their backs on challenging ideals, who fell that they were, felt that they were content, they had a banal existence, they did everything in their powers to limit joy and sorrow. Their concern was for the trivial and narcissistic, and so they lived lives of timid mediocrity, fooling themselves that they were happy. They bought into what Nietzsche described as the religion of comfortableness. Could this be a devastating description of the modern world? A world that shies from the risk of striving for greatness, that shuns higher values and celebrates the mundane. The last men are Nietzsche's greatest fear. They look at a star by which he means a fiery potential of beautiful lives fully lived, the meaning of all existence, and they have not even the desire to pursue it. They merely blink.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, that's uh beautifully written and uh very Nietzschean in tone and aspiration. So I see why you why you uh uh excerpted that and read it. So uh yeah, thanks. Uh I I'm I'm not familiar with that that author, but uh now I want to know to know more. So there's two questions there. One is what what were Nietzsche's predictions for the modern world? And it is somewhat poetically lovely that he died in 1900. So it's uh at least numerologically a nice transition. So we can then look at the 20th century and then say, well, you know, how uh you know, we what were Nietzsche's predictions for the 20th century and how much did they did they uh they come true? And uh then we uh now having the advantage of hindsight from the early 21st century, we can uh you know assess Nietzsche as prognosticator, and that will then tell us, at least point us back in the direction of uh of uh evaluating his his philosophical works as well. So uh clearly Nietzsche is disturbed by what he sees as this uh weakness, right? That uh if for him the fundamental ontology is of power and the growth to power and the manifestation of the growth to power, then it follows that the opposite of that is going to be powerlessness, and that is going to be the kind of being or or or or person that he's going to despise. And then, even more so, he's going to despise those who, in their philosophies, are rationalizing weakness and powerlessness and perhaps even glorifying it. And then culturally, uh, all of those movements that he sees as manifestations of powerlessness in varying degrees, people herding together in various types of groups, Christian religious groups, socialist uh political groups, and so forth for various types of herd-like comfort. And then what they're doing is not only being weak, but buying into a philosophy that celebrates weakness, but then also organizing themselves institutionally into groups of individuals who are weak themselves, but in a group, nonetheless, have a certain amount of power, and so they can do a great deal of cultural damage. So, uh the kinds of groups that Nietzsche did not know about that came to power in the 20th century. So we look at the various types of socialism. So we have the communist version of socialism, and it comes to prominence in the Soviet Union first. And pretty clear that Nietzsche would say, you know, that's an that's an absolute disaster. Uh not only just the gray quality of human beings' lives, but the outright destruction of, no doubt, thousands or tens of thousands of human beings who could have had some potential to advance humanity. Or we can look at the more nationalistic versions of socialism, the ones that we find in fascist Italy, and then of course National Socialism in Germany. And uh, you know, as you mentioned, I've written on this. I think Nietzsche would have a split decision about each of those, but nonetheless, the collectivizing the socialistic elements of those he would have he would have despised. Uh the movements in the broader Western world toward democracy, extending the franchise to uh you know all human beings equally, extending the vote to women. You know, Nietzsche was a bit of a uh a misogynist. Uh you know, he was not not uh you know whole hogged down that road, but uh he he certainly had some misogynistic elements. And uh and clearly even when you're talking about males, he thinks the vast majority of males are not the kind of people who should have any sort of political power. Yeah, even though it's a very difficult time. He believes in a in a very real hierarchy between the yeah, he wants to reinstitute some sort of uh some uh new uh new aristocracy of uh of some new modern form. So all of those movements he would be uh uh opposed to. Now, at the same time, though, you do have to say what what would Nietzsche say about someone like Stalin as an individual, or Mussolini as an individual, or Adolf Hitler as an individual, and we look back at all of his earlier writings and he has valorized individuals like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Napoleon and so on. So, why wouldn't we just say that these are uh modern uh instantiations of that same sort of will to power? That what you had in the case of, say, Julius Caesar, was someone who surveyed where things were in a decaying Roman republic and came in with a new form of power politics and was extraordinarily successful at taking Rome where he wanted to go and creating a kind of uh blueprint for a new kind of Rome. Uh and so he is a guy with a very strong will to power. He's got his act together and he was successful. Why not say something similar to that in the case of, say, Stalin? You know, Stalin is surveying what's going on in Russia at the time, right along with Lenin. And it turns out that there is an ideology that will serve very well his aspirations for becoming a kind of a new a new Caesar. So Marx, for example, had spoken explicitly about the need for a vanguard of the proletariat, and the vanguard of the proletariat were going to be certain special individuals who were going to be able to take the process to the next stage, and that there was going to be a dictatorship of the proletariat. So one way of reading Stalin and Lenin, for that matter, would just be to say, you know, these are guys who have the will to power in classic Nietzschean sense, and they're using the available ideological tools at their disposal. And one of the ideological tools is one that's going to get large numbers of, you know, admittedly not very admirable individuals. The proletariat are not particularly admirable, but nonetheless, you are the individual who's going to weld them into a formidable political force and use them for your own will-to-power ends. And Mussolini doing the same and Hitler doing the same. So why not from Nietzsche's perspective? So, on the one hand, you could say these are various forms of socialism, which he discussed it. Nonetheless, these are forms of socialism that were co-opted by individuals who arguably had a large amount of Nietzschean will to power.

SPEAKER_00

But isn't that reading of Nietzsche, Mussolini, uh Stalin, throwing maybe Mao as well, of them achieving absolute power isn't necessarily the I don't know, the purpose or the fulfilled potential that Nietzsche uh expresses in his will to power? Forgive me, you know I've just tried to answer that questi answer that question two or three times. But I think I think you know what I'm on about.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I don't see why Nietzsche would have a problem with absolute power. What we mean by absolute just is uh kind of total and all-encompassing in whatever domain that that we are talking about. So if your ambition is for total political power or absolute political power, there's nothing I can see in Nietzsche that would rule that out as one possible vehicle. Now we are focusing on political examples, and Nietzsche, as as we know, wants to say this also can happen in the sphere of music, in the sphere of arts, uh, possibly in the spheres of science, though he speaks less of the spheres of science, the will to knowledge, uh, and possibly even in entrepreneurial and uh and business domains as well. So I would just say any form of power uh would be fair game and the sky's the limit, uh all the way up to absoluteness. Now, at the same time, though, um we should look at other domains. I mean, it is one thing to say, yes, there are millions of people who are attracted to socialism in the 20th century, and they're pretty pathetic. Democracy has had its way with much of the 20th century, and from Nietzsche's perspective, that is quite pathetic as well. Uh the mass market, the large number of people who uh settle for an easy life. They, you know, they go to the job in the insurance office every day and they do what the boss tells them, and they go to their little homes, and you know, they uh you know they watch whatever's on television and they drive their nice little car to the places and hang out with thousands of other people who are just like them. So that kind of comfort um uh mentality, or the kind of person who says, you know, I'm really looking forward to retirement, you know, and you know, they're 25 years old when I when I when I don't have to do anything. So this person who then is pretty much completely ambitious with respect to their life. And he does want to say modernity has enabled huge, huge numbers of people to do that sort of thing. And I think that is extraordinarily distressing for him. But I think he thinks the more the great danger is not the number of people who are naturally that way, not particularly ambitious, but the people who perhaps are going to be in the middle, who have some ambition, some potential, but they are going to be seduced away by one of these ideologies that lead them to give up on their potential or misdirect their potential in towards something that's really not advancing the species as he possibly sees it. He does uh perhaps from his elitist perspective, you know, sound a kind of optimistic note where he says, you know, there are people, it's always going to be perhaps one in 10,000 or one in a million, whatever the number, who, no matter what the system is, they've they've so got their act together and they are so driven, fresh from the womb, that no matter what the system is, they are going to go out and make their mark on their world. They can be in poverty, they can have uh negligent parents or the opposite, they can have brutal parents, but nonetheless, they don't give up. They are the fighters from day one, and you can put them in any kind of social environment, any kind of political system, and they will find a way to claw their way to the top. And uh there's one point at which he says, this is also in the Will to Power, where he says, you know, in one sense, he doesn't really worry about what the official political forms the various nations take, whether they're democratic, whether they're constitutional republics, whether they are monarchies and so on. He says his kind of man, and there is still the sexist element there, his kind of man will use any form of political system for his own ends. Uh so political systems will just be a tool for that kind of person. And uh if you extend that then to other domains, music and art, in one sense it doesn't really matter what the official rules are, what your art teachers tell us, there's always going to be the genius who comes along and finds a way to break the rules or to use the the rules in a way that's not intended by the rulemaker, but to uh transform that rule and to use it in a way that fits that individual genius' perspective. So in that sense, uh there's a kind of optimism. It's just going to be same old, same old. I know we're at the hour, but can you afford five or ten minutes more?

SPEAKER_00

Let's do yeah, let's do one more round. Yeah, this is five. Amazing. Okay. So that's a very broad 20th century, the giant political movement. Could you give a word to now where we are in the 21st century and the myriad cultural phenomena that you could pull on that Nietzsche would be able to look at and say, wait a minute, this is actually you know, this is the religion of comfort that I'm referring to. This is this is the last man that I despised. Um could you make a quick commentary on that? I do have one in mind if you want to prompt, but otherwise I'll leave it with you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, I uh I think the the political examples are are pretty much the uh the easiest ones to go for. So if we look at the you know the semi-far right and the semi-far left, I think both Nietzsche would say that both of them are pathetic manifestations of uh what he describes as the last man. And they're not going to be the totally apathetic schmoo that we were describing earlier, who just goes to work in the cubicle farm and is a little bit afraid of his wife and mother-in-law, you know, that kind of mousey beta or gamma type of human being. But uh the ones who are a little more energetic, so they're the kind of people who will hang out in the chat rooms and be arguing in very uh uh you know angry tones and announcing their ideology and so on. And of course, 99.9% of the time they don't use their real name, they've got some sort of fake name and some sort of fake avatar. So that sort of that sort of person. And they manifest on the left and they manifest on the right. But I think Nietzsche would say that they are both versions of the last man. So if we take, for example, the ones on the right, you know, the uh the kind of guy, you know, thinking of the stereotype who you know lives in his mom's basement, but is kind of a warrior on the on the uh on the internet chat rooms and and flirts with you know racist politics and in his own being has not accomplished anything politically, financially, artistically, scientifically, has not started his or her own business, but nonetheless is just out there certain or manifesting certainty that he is one of the special human beings because he happened to be born in a certain ethnic group or into a certain racial group, and then just automatically he's part of a collective that is superior to all of the other collectives out there. And Nietzsche would diagnose that as you know, obviously a pseudo kind of self-esteem, but a very pathetic way of trying to acquire some self-esteem. To think of yourself as special, not because of anything that you have done, but because you happen to be born into a certain racial or or ethnic group, and that the only way you can feel good about yourself is by taking whole swathes of other people and saying that they are inferior in some particular respect.

SPEAKER_00

And that's just instinctually contemptible, you know, as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, that's right. Yep, for sure. And then uh you know the variation on the left would be the kind of aggressive, woke person now, or the aggressive, politically correct person now who uh who does the same sort of thing. They want to say, you know, I am special, again, not because I have accomplished anything, but rather because I am a member of a certain group, and my group has been beat up on by the bad people in the world. It might be my ethnic group or my religious group or my racial group, but what they're doing is uh saying that I have some specialness because of that, my my victim status. And really what's going on there is uh Nietzsche would uh clearly say that you have someone who knows himself or herself to be a kind of pathetic dweeb who's not been able to accomplish very much in life. But what they're looking for is a rationalization for why they are so pathetic in their personal lives, and they're looking for a kind of consolation where you know you are, uh we kind of know this, you know, if you are on the losing end of some sort of social encounter, and then you go away and you're saying to yourself, I should have done this or I should have said that, I should have stood up for myself more, but all the time you know that other person beat you and humiliated you in that particular social conduct, but then you dwell on it and it just becomes kind of poisonous inside. But what you want to do is get a kind of revenge against that person. And a really easy and cheap way of getting revenge against that person or that kind of person uh is to go on again online and you know insult that person with all kinds of passive events.

SPEAKER_00

Well, hiding behind pseudonymity, not being accountable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's exactly right. So we're familiar with those two manifestations. And so, really, in both cases, the politics is not really what it's about. It's about a diseased psychology, the last man psychology uh manifesting itself in a political guise.

SPEAKER_00

You know, he he respected the individual, and everyone should strive to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01

We'll have to have another conversation about that. Very mixed record in uh in Nietzsche. Again, just one more thing from uh from Will to Power. He quite explicitly says that his philosophy is not an individualistic philosophy. Uh let me see. Uh he well, I'll just uh g give you a remote quotation where he says my my philosophy is not individualistic, it is about the order of rank. Okay. Yeah. All right. And uh, if you want, we can put that quotation in the uh the notes for the program as well. So individualism classically is the idea that you know individual, every individual has value, has worth. We should respect each individual's own path in life and so forth. And Nietzsche very clearly says that's not what he is about. Some people are better, some people are worth some people are worse. Some people have value, some people have little value. And so his individualism does not expend, extend rather to at least 99% of the species. And even that 1% that he thinks some have have some potential, remember, part of individualism is saying you're an end in yourself. Your life is what it's all about. Nietzsche says even of that 1% that is special, there's still a means to an end, a development of a new and better human species. Remember, species language is more collectivistic than individuals. So I know what you mean uh in Nietzsche's individualism, but uh his text record is much more uh complicated.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting. And clearly it is something that um you could uh really open up on in a much larger series. But we're gonna round out this three-episode biography touching Nietzsche's life, influences, philosophy, uh, right here. I'll just leave you with one final thing that uh in my uh interpretation, the popularity of Nietzsche these days just comes from his message, which is which is uh it was it was you it was uh original to me when I first heard it, that in fact an expression of ambition and energy in the face of absolute persistence and repeated failure is actually the point of life and is actually where the value it will accrue, uh more or less. I probably should have written something down and say that a bit better. But on the on that thing, finally, question for you. Uh Nietzsche wrote that I know no better life purpose than to perish in pursuing the great and impossible. So it's a rather unfair question, but I want to ask you what is the great and impossible?

SPEAKER_01

The vast majority of us uh who are when we are young, especially reading Nietzsche for the first time and we are attracted to him, it's prefice precisely for those those reasons that uh rhetorically and in much of the content of Nietzsche's ideas, there is this sense of life that's that's highly romantic. Uh life is and should be this great adventure. And that what you need to do is channel your inner sense of adventure and find the most romantic, uh not in the erotic love sense of romantic, but just your life as this great romantic, whatever that is for you, pursue it with all of your being, and also embrace the struggles that are necessarily going to go with that. But as you point out in uh his quotation that you read, there is a darker element to that. That you know, the expectation is that you will fail, that you will die, right? You are a great mountain climber and you will get swept away by an avalanche at some point or some great disaster will have. So there is a kind of fatalistic element as well. To perish in the midst of this great struggle is the great, the uh the great ambition, rather than to succeed in the great struggle and then set again some some further goals as well. So my shorthand tag for Nietzsche on those two is to see him as a kind of romantic fatalist. So there is a that darker element combined with the uh the sometimes over-the-top romanticism.

SPEAKER_00

And if you can say, what is your great and impossible?

SPEAKER_01

Mine for me? Yes. I am a philosopher by training, so right now I'm uh working on what I hope will be uh a series of integrated essays on all of the key issues in philosophers that we've been wrestling with for two and a half thousand years.

SPEAKER_00

Is this like a magnum opus type document?

SPEAKER_01

Something like that, although Magnum Opus is a bit too uh magnum at this point. Grandiose, okay. Yes. Well, Mr.

SPEAKER_00

Hicks, Stephen, uh can't thank you enough, mate. You've been so generous now on three occasions with your time and uh Yeah, a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01

A lot of uh fun issues, and of course, Nietzsche is always worth spending time with.

SPEAKER_00

And uh I think as my understanding of him matures in a several years, perhaps it might be really interesting to revisit him and and linger further on that last point on whether modernity is the the hell that he predicted.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. And and uh I don't think it is, but uh, I'm not a Nietzschean fundamentally. Uh but yeah, let's do that in a few years and then we'll have even more data.

SPEAKER_00

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much, Stephen.

SPEAKER_00

All right, bye, Ryan. Thanks again. Well, thank you again, Stephen. Uh, it was a real privilege to get to create this content with you. My hope is that it can live on the internet as a pretty decent introduction to the life and philosophy of this great philosopher. So, um, to all of you, I'm going to repurpose these three episodes and combine it into one full, you know, three and a half hour episode. And I'm thinking that that's going to be released on episode 100. I I really couldn't think of a better uh way to celebrate 100 episodes of the podcast with what is probably the best content I might ever get a chance to create. Um doing it alongside Hicks, I've felt a huge um inferiority complex the entire time. But such is life, and so be it. That's how it goes. Um if this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, then I want to thank you very much for uh tuning in. It's uh really cool that I get the chance to uh speak directly to you. And typically what I'll do at the end of the podcast is uh leave the promotion and the shilling to the final moments. So if anyone knocks off too early, it's not gonna bother them too much. But if you've listened this far and I am speaking to you right now, then thank you very much. I will just quickly explain what my ambition for this podcast is. My hope is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is that you're listening in from. So that genre, eclectic curiosities, doesn't necessarily exist, but basically what it means is just it's a reflection of my own curiosities. And so here we're listening to Hicks talk about Nietzsche. The next episode will be with Ben Burgess talking about Christopher Hitchens. The episode most previous was speaking with John Redfern, the CEO of EverTechnology speaking about geothermal energy. So it is just a reflection of my own interest, but I hope one in five, one in ten, one in twenty episodes also align with your interest. I'm going to assume that we have more interests in common than we do not. So uh do subscribe and uh do leave juicy, shiny, girthy reviews because there is no way for these podcast distributors, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple, Overcast, whatever podcast addict, to rank, list, and understand podcasts without reviews because they're not plugged into a sort of um central data collection center where they know that certain episodes get played more than others, that they can that there aren't recommendation features built into these systems. So the really one thing they're looking at, these these algorithms, these systems are completely in the Stone Age, but the one thing they're looking at is reviews. So I want to ask you if you've listened this far, then do me a do me a solid. Swipe up on Spotify, give it five stars, swipe up on Apple, give it five stars, and leave a really long, healthy comment. And anywhere you're listening to it, like, subscribe, review, five stars, all the rest. That's me, shilling. Thank you again to Hicks. Um can't wait to release this as a full episode. Ciao.