Curious Worldview

100: Stephen Hicks | The Life & Philosophy Of Friedrich Nietzsche

• Stephen Hicks • Episode 100

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Who better to celebrate the 100th episode of The Curious Worldview Podcast than Stephen Hicks. 

This audio thing only became a podcast after Stephen agreed to sit down with me back in the trailing months of 2020. That was episode 3 - and now, 97 episodes and 2 years later, here we are. 

This podcast is a linear tour of Nietzsche's life and work guided by the philosopher, professor, and author of Nietzsche and the Nazis, Stephen Hicks. 

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Time Stamps With Stephen Hicks On Nietzsche

  • 00:00 – Introduction.
  • 02:27 – Nietzsche’s Early Days & Context For The 19th Century.
  • 14:35 – Timeline & The Influence Of Schopenhauer
  • 21:00 – Timeline & Introducing The Birth Of Tragedy.
  • 32:03 – Nietzsche As A Vagabond & His Time As An Academic.
  • 37:14 – Switzerland & Embracing Suffering.
  • 47:01 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  • 01:25:53 – Connecting Zarathustra, Jung & Joseph Campbell.
  • 01:39:49 – Timeline & Nietzsche’s Most Productive, Beyond Good & Evil, The Genealogy Of Morality & Slave Morality.
  • 02:05:42 – Nietzsche’s Heros & Final Productive Years In Turin.
  • 02:22:21 – Will To Power.
  • 02:44:15 – Nietzsche On Modernity.
  • 03:07:15 – What Is Stephen Hicks Great & Impossible?
  • 03:11:15 - Announcements & Ambition For The Podcast!

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Episodes Of The Curious Worldview Podcast Mentioned.

Links To Stephen Hicks

SPEAKER_00

Who better to celebrate the hundredth episode of this podcast with than Stephen Higgs? This audio thing only became a podcast after Steven agreed to sit down with me back in the trailing months of 2020. That was episode three, and now, 97 episodes in two years later, here we are. This podcast is a linear tour of Nietzsche's life and work guided by the philosopher, professor, and author of Nietzsche and the Nazis Stephen Higgs. Among other things, this podcast covers Nietzsche's upbringing and early religious influence. Nietzsche is a professor, his relation to females appears, and his vagabond years travelling throughout Europe. His work, Thusburg Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morality, The Master Slave Morality, Will to Power, and of course all the rest as well. And then finally, to round it off, it is Nietzsche's final years in Turin, and then as well, his descent into madness. This podcast was recorded over three separate occasions across an 18-month time span. The plan was to do Nietzsche's life along a linear timeline, noticing and observing along the way the changing context of the time. What is affecting Nietzsche? What is affecting society? How are these forces shaping his worldview? So 100 episodes. Thanks again, Mr. Higgs, for doing this and preparing for and producing these episodes have been an absolute highlight for me on this podcasting journey so far. But most of all, thank you to you, my dear and generous listeners. Whether this is your debut episode or your 100 ep veteran, thank you so much for parting with some of your hard-earned time and making the decision to tune into these episodes. I think you're all absolute legends, and I'm so stoked to see as well from the analytics just how dispersed across the globe you all are. There is a big community embedded into the listenership of this Curious Worldview podcast. And relating to that, there will be announcements. So do stick around to the end of the episode to hear those and as well for me to explain my ambition for this podcast. But alas, with no further ado, 100 episodes deep and just beginning to scratch the surface. Here is the life and philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers and mustaches of all time. The great Friedrich Nietzsche presented by Stephen Hicks. So just to start, Friedrich Nietzsche, we all know him, very famous uh philosopher. He supported one of the best mustaches in history, most likely. He was born into 1844 Germany, and he later became the one of the most prominent atheist or at least anti-religious voices in history. He was born into a very religious house with a Lutheran pastor as a father. When Nietzsche was four, his father became mentally ill, a little bit of foreshadowing for Nietzsche's own life. He went blind and mad, and an autopsy revealed he lost as much as a quarter of his brain to some terrible degenerative disease. He loved his father, and he also therefore loved God. I mean he was indoctrinated into it as it is in a very religious house. Age 20, Nietzsche arrives in Bonn and he's contemplating to study to be a pastor. It was here he he discovered the first criticism of religion in his life. So now he's got this intellectual questioning of religion as well as the emotional questioning, because he asked himself how could a god uh uh allow one of his uh one of his worshippers, one of his observants more or less to go through this much pain. And so as he's coming into his intellectual understanding of the world, he's just in his early twenties now, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution comes along uh to double down on Nietzsche's developing belief that all this religion stuff might be a little bit of an elaborate ruse and maybe everyone's being taken for a ride. And this is where I want you to initially come in, please, Steve. Can you comment on the mid-19th century and how there's this sort of cultural swelling for objective truths, just how radical some of the ideas are that's influencing Nietzsche here to justify his questioning of God?

SPEAKER_01

Well, yeah, the uh 1800s are an extraordinary era of uh intellectual ferment and cultural transformation. Uh so you have the industrial revolution, the great battle against slavery, rising wealth, rising life expectancy, uh, development of all of the modern sciences as we now understand them, and certainly uh biology is coming into its own in the the middle part of the 19th century. So Nietzsche is born into uh extraordinary, extraordinary times. And at the same time, he's uh he's a precociously brilliant individual, uh, you know, so very well read for a teenager, just plus the power of his mind means that he's uh he's going to penetrate to the deepest issues and as we know uh extraordinarily courageous. He's not one of these blinkered people who uh uh who's just going to ignore certain things if they if they uh if they make him uncomfortable. Also packs into your your preamble there is a very interesting question that uh we come back to uh for all of us personally, but also for the great minds, is how much of their resulting intellectual product, so Nietzsche is a great philosopher, how much of that uh is autobiographical or to be explained by the the events that he experienced, and then a generalization on his particular experience to more grand cosmological claims, and then how much of it comes from intellectual sources, you know, his readings of the great minds, the great poets, his experience of uh of uh of reading Greek history, and you know, as you as you know, he was a great uh classicist as well. So uh but yes, to focus on just a couple of the themes that are going to be important for Nietzsche. One is going to be this idea of evolution. And I think Darwinian evolution is a little narrow uh for explaining Nietzsche's intellectual context. I mean, evolutionary ideas are everywhere in the in the 19th century. We now typically, because of the dominance of evolutionary biology, immediately think first to biological explanations for things and Darwin and Mendel and genetics and all of that. But evolutionary ideas were not uh simply uh biological in the 19th century. There's a question then about whether cosmologically, you know, the entire universe is going through an evolutionary stage. Uh, and so Hegelian ideas uh are being developed, and Marxist ideas, and both of those are kinds of evolutionary theories, but they're not at all informed by Darwinian biology. Uh, so it's a it's a broader metaphysical concept. And what's important here is uh getting away from the idea cosmologically or even metaphysically that the universe uh is kind of fixed in terms of its broad sweeps, that there are laws of nature or laws of supernature that are fixed and eternal, and that those are unchanging across however long the universe has been around. The idea that the laws of the universe themselves change over the course of eons. So what's true perhaps in uh in primitive times and then in tribal times and then in medieval times and now into modern times, uh what's true uh metaphysically, even the laws of science, the laws of uh human nature, the laws of ethics, and so on are themselves subject to uh to evolution. Uh just as uh you know we we think of it more narrowly biologically, biological species come and go, and what's true and good for any given biological species is not fixed for all time, but rather might adapt to circumstances that if we generalize that the same thing is going to be true. Now it's also then going to be the case that uh uh if we uh uh think of not only the the evolutionary theme, and certainly in uh uh Nietzsche is an evolutionist in his, small e evolutionist in his thinking. Uh, what does this then imply for uh uh not only the absolute truths of moral pronouncements, but where we get these moral pronouncements from? And again, uh with the rise of science over the course of the previous now really three centuries, uh there's much less belief among the intellectuals that there's a God who kind of delivered once and for all a certain set of fundamental truths about the world, about human obligations, about what the good life is, and in effect, we don't really have much intellectual work to do at that fundamental level. The package has already been delivered to us by an authoritative source, and we just accept and and uh and act on the basis of that. Uh the rise of science means that by the time we get to the 1800s, uh most intellectuals are uh agnostic uh at best, outright atheists, uh, and even the the people who are still theistic in their thinking have largely abandoned the idea that we can have any sort of rational basis for our book.

SPEAKER_00

Is that the case? Uh I didn't realize it was that um sort of persuasive even in the early 1800s. I didn't think those ideas were mainstream until the 1900s.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I would say, yeah, if you take by the time we get to the early 1800s, uh you know, David Hume had died a generation earlier. Emmanuel Kant died in 1804. Uh uh Schopenhauer is uh a dominant thinker of the teens and twenties and on into the 30s. And Soren Kierkegaard uh uh doing his major writings in the 1840s. Now, you know, Kant is a kind of theist. Uh Schopenhauer is an atheist. Uh uh uh uh Kierkegaard is a kind of theist again as well. So the issue here is you have some people who are believing in the existence of God and some who are not believing in the existence of God. But what all of those guys believe is that you cannot prove the existence of a God, that if you're going to believe in the existence of God, it's going to be non-rational. So a lot of that work had been done for the that's right. It's going to be faith-based, and it's going to be explicitly irrationalist, as in the case of uh in the case of Kierkegaard, for example. Or if it if it at all you have any sort of intellectual, rational integrity, you're just going to believe that uh all of the traditional stories about gods and so on are just myths and that they're there to just serve various psychological functions, but an intellectually honest person has to be an atheist, and then you're going down the going down the Schopenhauer road. So it really had been the 1700s where all of the major arguments for and against the existence of God were subjected to rational scrutiny. And by the time we get to the death of Kant, early 1800s, most intellectuals, I think, don't think that any of the arguments for the existence of God work, the arguments against are actually stronger. And you choose uh either you are going to be an atheist or you're going to be uh some sort of non-rational theist, and it's just going to be a Kierkegaardian or existentialist or proto-existentialist type of type of commitment. So this is the uh the world that Nietzsche is born into, uh, and it's then going to be, as you're suggesting, these evolutionary ideas are in the air, uh, but cognitively cognitively we're not able to uh rely on a God telling us what to do, or even the authoritative religious institutions to tell us what to do. To a large extent, we are on our own cognitively. Uh and so someone like Nietzsche who says, okay, I'm not afraid of that, he's going to take that up, uh take that up as a challenge. But at the same time, uh that uh the the traditional beliefs and comfortable beliefs that there's a there's a benevolent God looking out for us, that has all been exploded. But also there's been significant attack on our cognitive faculties. This is also uh outside of the hard sciences an extraordinarily skeptical time philosophically. So uh Kantianism has uh this might be something we need to talk to about more as background. Kantianism uh um has kind of swept the German intellectual world, and uh you know Nietzsche himself is very well read in Kant and says several times that he thinks Kant is essentially right, but what Kant is uh Kant's being essentially right means that to the extent that we believe in Kantianism, we have to be skeptics, we have to be relativistic, we have to understand that our rational faculty is just this superficial uh imposing structure on a kind of a seething, unknowable world, right, and so forth. If you then combine that with the evolutionism, then what you get is this idea that we were animals for a lot longer than we were rational animals, that our entire higher cognitive set of faculties is you know, it's come along just in the last blink of an eye in evolutionary time, and it's overlaying all of these animalistic drives and instincts and and and so forth. And so uh really reason is just this after-the-fact rationalizing function, it's not really something that can probe deeply into the into the nature of the world. So something like that would be a very quick thumbnail sketch of uh the the world that uh that Nietzsche.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, very, very comprehensive. Actually, interesting. I uh was more under the impression that um Nietzsche didn't necessarily have too many intellectual heavyweights to to sort of fall back on that might have been thinking similarly to him, and he was almost rather radical in his idea of taking it uh where he did, just just within the context of the time. Um and he obviously didn't need permission from anyone or didn't need anyone else's acceptance. This is like a very Nietzscheism truism throughout his entire life that only becomes more emboldened and bolden and embolden, foreshadowing to the point where he's labelling himself as the antichrist. But um that is a very, very good uh explanation of what is the context for the world that's been born into, and now he's becoming an intellectual, he's developing his intellectual chops into. So he's in his early twenties and he's decided that uh yeah, he's going to dedicate himself to finding new meaning in a godless universe. And so he uh becomes a student of philology, which is the study of ancient civilizations. He walks into a bookshop and reads a Schopenhauer book, comes across a Schopenhauer book who you just uh introduced. Um, and if you could say very quickly what uh Schopenhauer's influence was on Nietzsche, that would be fascinating. Because I think this is a fun anecdote in you know, you think of like the serendipitous occasions of life. This was someone who uh you know really excited Nietzsche.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, the the very quickly part of your question, that's the that's the trick, and that's actually the impossible. Let's let's let's try it. Yeah, I I think uh yeah, Nietzsche on the intellectual journey that he was on as a young man, he would have come across Schopenhauer at some point. So yeah, whether he came across them at age 19 or 23, that's that's to some extent accidental. But Schopenhauer is uh is a giant in the landscape and he's going to he's going to get there. Uh you know, any number of uh hugely important intellectuals in the late 1800s and on into the early 19 uh hundreds, you know, Albert Einstein among them have uh you know engaged with Schopenhauer, and so he's he's he's incredibly important. So I think uh the question then is going to be um Schopenhauer, of course, has a reputation for being one of the great pessimists of the world. You know, lines like uh you know, it's better not to have been born than to to endless be a deep thinker and realize the ultimate, not only just uh painful uh sorry, emptiness of the world, but the the utter uh misery and senselessness and suffering that is at the at the heart of the death hanging around about as pessimistic as one can get. And it's not just kind of this grand metaphysical thing, you know, that life is suffering, life is pain, and our bodies betray us, our friends betray us, and then we all die. Uh uh it's this point that you know there is no redemption to be found anywhere. Perhaps some minor consolations occasionally in music, but even in music, uh Schopenhauer thinks the best music is ultimately uh ultimately ultimately tragic. So the point is going to be that uh you know, if you if you see Schopenhauer as an early 1800s guy, what he is uh is is is is putting together is kind of the ultimate anti-enlightenment package of beliefs. So by the time we get to the Enlightenment, you've got lots of thinkers who are saying, okay, maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't a God. Uh but what we can say is that there is a natural world. The natural world uh is uh is a place of cause and effect, it's intelligible. By doing science, we can figure stuff out, it's an orderly universe. On the basis of that, we can make predictions. Ultimately, since we're pretty smart, we can engage in controlling and bending the world to fit our needs, and so we can progress and solve all of the problems of ignorance and poverty and so on. And so it's a very optimistic, optimistic era. Maybe there's a God behind the scenes who designed the universe and kind of underwrites the causality of the universe, and maybe the universe is this grand self-organizing system and there and there is no God. But nonetheless, it's a benevolent causal world that is hospitable to human design, human values, and we can we can make progress and we can celebrate the fact that we are rational beings and we have a strong measure of autonomy over forming our characters and taking control of our lives and happiness. You know, the pursuit of happiness really is the human birthright. So by the time though we get to Schopenhauer, we have an intellectual current where all of that has just been exploded, right? There is no God underwriting the universe. And not only that, this so-called causal universe where everything is orderly and intelligible, that's also been exploded. Schopenhauer believes when we have our best possible understanding of the way the universe is, and this is not actually something that we can do very well, we realize that the universe is not at all orderly. It's just this seething, irrational, unpredictable will. And rather than us having control over that, we are just flotsam and jetsum, pushed around by forces beyond our control, including our own internal controls. And so we're out of control, the universe is out of control, and to the extent that there's anything dominant in us, it's these seething, uh conflictual desires that lead us to have self-loathing, to see other people as enemies, not to trust them, uh, and so on. And then ultimately we're just going to die, and life is ultimately meaningless. And so your realization of that as a rational human being, to the extent that you're rational, that's not a source of delight. That's a source of pain, right? So a dog or some animal might lead a miserable existence and that get eaten by a crocodile and it's all pointless and so forth. But we are realizations, right? We have the realization, right, that we are ultimately going to be eaten by crocodiles or some other horrible thing that is just going to take us down, and that makes existence horrifying ultimately. So that's where we are. Uh and uh to the extent that you read that, as a as a very smart teenager, well, uh, you can project what the what the uh the psychological manifestations of that are going to be. Most of us go through some some teenage self-doubts and senses of alienation and uh and and and and and you know not uh having great relationships with our parents and our peers and wondering about what our lives are going to need and so forth. So just take all of that and put it on steroids. Then you will have Nietzsche's intellectual context uh by the time we get to the feature. So that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so he's absorbed Schopenhauer and he's sort of in agreement, but he wants to find meaning within it. He he sort of despises the fact that Schopenhauer was this sort of ultimate pessimist and almost nothing matters, you know, which leads into nihilism, which is obviously uh from Nietzsche as well. But um Nietzsche sort of starts off with this idea that perhaps rather than finding meaning in God and this sort of worship of religion, perhaps we could find meaning in art. And his way to this sort of conclusion is through the famous uh composer Wagner. And he's referred to the sort of great book is produced, uh The Birth of Tragedy. So again, I'm asking into the hard things here, but we're gonna try through Nietzsche in an hour. So can you introduce the birth of tragedy to us um and maybe a little bit on him and Wagner's relationship?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, so it's another uh interesting uh intellectual context thing. So if if we then ask the the big Philosophical question, right? What is the meaning of life? And then we say that by the time we get to say early 1800, generation before Nietzsche is blown, in the intellectual currents that Nietzsche is going to swim in, if I can use that metaphor, two of the big answers have been exploded. The meaning of life is to be found ultimately in an afterlife in which there's a benevolent God or perhaps a somewhat angry, just God, but ultimately there's going to be a reckoning. The good people will go to heaven, the bad people will go to hell. And then that's right. And so the meaning of life is to be found in religion. And that can be for many people a kind of consolation prize. If your life here on earth sucks, you are poor, you are meek, uh, you don't think that you are you're going to be able to achieve a good life here. The idea that you have a life in in the afterlife is a consolation prize. Or if your life here on earth is still pretty good, then it's just uh whatever you know good stuff you project is going on here on earth, you're just going to get more of that good stuff in in the afterlife. But all of that's exploded. We don't have the religious answer to the meaning of life anymore. So then it seems like you know we're left with the natural world. But then we've got the optimistic enlightenment picture that you know the meaning of life uh is and can be to take charge of your own destiny, to look after your needs, right, to have a productive career, to figure out the way the world works, and to be a scientist, to enjoy genuine love and friendship and so on, and all of the ingredients that go into a happy life. Uh, and then of course it's a little bit sad that you're going to die, but at least by the time you die, you will have the satisfaction of a life well lived. That's right. You have created meaning according to your your your needs as a human being in an ultimately, ultimately benevolent world. So that though is going to get exploded and then say, well, you know, basically, and now we're getting into proto-existentialist kinds of thinking. So if you take the question of mortality, if you're all going, if we're all just going to die, uh what's the point actually of doing anything at all, right? Uh and it's not simply, you know, just say, I'm going to build up uh you know the fortune, say, for example. Well, yeah, what's the point of that? You can't take it with you into the grave. What's the point of uh you know falling in love with someone and having a you know a wonderful romantic life if you realize you're just gonna see this person get older and older and then die? They might die before you, and you're gonna have to put them in the ground. And isn't that going to be depressing? And they say, well, maybe I'll live on through my children, but then you have to realize as a smart person that your children are going to grow up. Some of them are gonna get diseases, and others are gonna get you know eaten by crocodile. I don't know, I am obsessed with that today, but but ultimately they are going to uh to you know that they're going to wither and die, right? And and there's nothing more horrible for a parent than to realize that their cherr children are going to die and so forth. So, how can we find meaning in this naturalistic world and so forth? And so then what we find is people finding, well, maybe you know, art can be a kind of consolation prize in some ways. And so we have the familiar thesis, you know, art as an escape from reality. You know, so reality is pretty nasty and brutal, and you don't want to think about reality too uh too too deeply. But what you can do is escape into an artificial reality and live in that illusory world as much as you possibly can, until of course you die, but then at least you've had as less, a little as little pain and suffering in your life as as you possibly can. For most of us, that's going to mean uh uh being consumers, but for the more am consumers of art, but for the more ambitious of uh of this this approach here, the idea then is uh rather than waiting for God to create meaning for us or for the scientists to tell us what nature has decreed is meaning for us, we can ourselves become creative beings. We can become godlike, we can become artists and create our own worlds, and that's going to be the most satisfying of meaning, and so on. So Nietzsche is aware of that thesis, and uh uh in large part he's going to accept parts of it, but then he's going to extend that uh uh and so on. So he is engaged with uh thinkers like Wagner, and uh you know partly uh Wagner has uh somewhat of a tragic sense of life that you can see in his music, but also there are some formal things in uh in Wagner that are important to Nietzsche. So uh, you know, uh I don't want to get too uh much into the technical stuff of music, partly because I get out of my my technical depth pretty quickly here, but I do have some knowledge in this area. Uh but the idea is in Wagner you don't have uh let's tie it to evolution, the idea that there's a there's an endpoint to the to the song, right? So the the music is going in this direction, and then it's going to kind of evolve over in this direction for a while, and it might go back to the same stream, the initial stream, but then it might branch out again, and you don't have the sense that there's a definite telos or a definite endpoint to it, and that it's open-ended exploration of a universe, and then on the content side there are some tragic themes that are built into. But what that is, is interestingly is to give a metaphysical interpretation of music in a certain direction. So if we go back, for example, to say an 1800s piece of music, a kind of sonata, the idea is that you're you have a certain kind of theme that's announced and uh and it's developed over the course of a certain number of bars, and then it reaches an end. And so it's gone through a little cycle, and you know what that theme is. And then what you do is you take that same theme and you transpose it, or you introduce a variation on it, but then you come back to the same ending point, the same tonic, right, ultimately. And so you have the sense that the universe is going in cycles, and going in cycles, and there might be some variations here and some variations here, but ultimately it's going to a definite endpoint, and then when you reach that end point, you know you've reached the end point, and that's when you clap, right? Or that's when you feel a certain amount of revolution. So what you have then met musically is a closed universe that you can understand the themes and you know where it's going and you know where you've reached the end. Uh, and all of that then is set aside by the time you get to the Wagner generation of music. So it's a much more open-ended evolution exploration kind of music. And then instead of the happy ever after ending of the tonic, you have this open-ended sense of ultimate doom or dissolution uh that's going to happen, happen in the world. So, yes, musically, uh, and this is a very much a Schopenhauerian theme, uh, the argument is that Nietzsche is taking up is that music is not just, you know, this superficial brain candy that we have, but rather music is a way of doing metaphysics. And it might be, in fact, uh a better way of doing music, or doing metaphysics, because, uh, at least again, this is a Schopenhauerian theme, what music is doing is bypassing the rational parts of our consciousness. So a lot of us, of course, when we're listening to music, we will try to put uh things to images and we'll try to put into words, and we're trying to say, you know, this is what this is about, and so forth. And it's a very difficult and frustrating exercise to do, and the strong Schopenhauerian theme is going to be that that, in fact, is to miss the point of music, that what music is doing is that it's directly playing on your passions, on your desires, on your instincts, and that's that it's really shutting down your rational capacity, your your ability to verbalize and conceptualize and put in propositional form what things are about. That gets shut down, and in a much more direct and immediate way, your your resulting uh conscious capacities are confronting uh uh an understanding of the way the the universe is or experiencing of the way the universe is.

SPEAKER_00

And it does go beyond music as well, doesn't it? Um and Nietzsche also finds that this this meaning of life through art can also be through a beautiful scenery, you know, through a piece of uh physical art. It's not exclusively music, is it?

SPEAKER_01

Well, no, no. So uh to to come back to your theme of the birth of tragedy, you know, much of his reflection in that work is on literary versions of uh of tragedy. And there it's not so much the formal aspects that we were just talking about in in music, but the content aspects that uh kind of the genuine metaphysical understanding of the universe is ultimately going to be kind of at best tragic and and and at worst ultimately nihilistic, uh even at worst though at still truest, ultimately nihilistic, and uh that the best art, whether music or literary or uh sculpture and painting, is going to be ultimately uh ultimately in that form. So, all of that by way of uh of preamble, uh you introduced right Nietzsche's uh uh first mature work published in the 1870s, the The Birth of Tragedy. So we can uh plunge into that one if that's the best use of our time right now.

SPEAKER_00

I don't think it is, but let's just bookmark it as um your your description of what Nietzsche's idea of finding meaning through art is uh will definitely suffice because that is essentially the birth of um of tragedy. Because now we get into, I think, you know, this is when things start to really take off in Nietzsche. This is when things become very interesting. Um he begins to hate university and the oh, I think I skipped something. No, did I? No. So he is 24, I believe, and he becomes a professor at the University of Bonn, and this is a remarkable achievement. And this is a remarkable achievement, he's the youngest professor ever. He's clearly a genius, but for some reason no one takes his classes, and he finds the academics very stuffy, and he sort of hates bureaucrats because Nietzsche wanted to live dangerously. And so he resigns his professorship, which is this uh you know guarantee back in the day, guaranteed wealth and titles of data and and whatever. Um he resigns it and he goes on a bit of a vagabonding journey through Europe, more or less. Um, and it also coincides with a bad run of health, and this was the foreshadowing from earlier. Nietzsche does have health problems. Just as a fun anecdote on the side, uh, that's why he writes in short verse and short aphorisms. He could supposedly only concentrate for so long at a time. And so he couldn't write lengthy paragraphs, he would just write a punchy statement, which obviously is uh also a big part of why he's so romanticized. Um before we move to Switzerland, I just wanted to see if you had any good anecdotes from this travel period in his life. And if you don't, we can move on, but I just wanted to check.

SPEAKER_01

Uh no, but I would want to say just a little bit more about the uh experience at the University of Basel. You know, by by the reports that I've seen, Nietzsche was a terrible lecturer.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So, you know, it in part it is justified why none of the students wanted to take take his classes. Part of it was that Nietzsche is an original iconoclastic thinker, and already by the 19th century, particularly in German, Swiss, Austrian universities and so forth, things had become highly bureaucratized, and original iconoclastic thinkers always struggle in uh in those sorts of sorts of environments. The birth of tragedy, which we just uh decided we're not going to plunge into, though, did not at all fit the mode of what a professor of classics was supposed to be writing upon. You know, it was an original thesis, but it's not at all clear that it's uh, at least from the standard of uh a standard classically educated uh intellectual of that period, of what a good understanding of uh of Greek culture is all about. And it's also he's uh he's actually doing philosophy in that work, uh uh, even though it's officially or semi-officially, you know, marked as a work in classics. Uh and so the philosophers look at this and say, we don't recognize this, we think this is crap. The classicists are looking at this, we don't recognize this, this this is crap. Uh he's not a particularly good uh dynamic professor, and so on top of that, you've got the uh the uh the administration and so on. So I think it was you know uh a parting of the ways that was uh mutually uh beneficial on on both sides. Although I think the obviously in hindsight the the University of Basel would have been much better in the long run, doing whatever they could to keep Nietzsche and uh and put up with him.

SPEAKER_00

Um from your research of Nietzsche, did you get to uh understand his character quite well? Because my my thinking is he wasn't a necessarily very charismatic person, and although maybe a fascinating person, maybe not that fun to be around. Um is there any evidence to back that up? Or because that's just an intuition I have.

SPEAKER_01

No, I no, I think that's that that's right. You know, obviously someone who is suffering physically uh lots, you know, that that's it's hard to be around someone like that, even if that person is basically sweet-natured and and good-natured. And there was a lot of sweetness and and goodness in in Nietzsche once you got past uh sometimes the uh the the initial brusqueness uh as well. But also he was uh you know someone who prized his solitariness in order to be able to do to do his life. So he's not uh unless he thinks that you are special yourself, going to go out of his way to be warm and welcoming and making time for you as well. But once uh he thought you were a special person, uh Wagner in the in the early in the early days, uh Peter Gast, uh uh uh Um Lou Solomet, right, and and and others, then he could be uh you know very sweet and and charming with those those people as well. But uh uh but no, he was uh the the the prototypical romantically vagabondish, living in his own world uh intellectually. Okay. Uh so leave that biographical thing by that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and obviously maybe also he's he becomes more cynical to a degree the older he gets, whether it's an actual cynicism as the word is defined, or whether it's just these hyper-independence that he doesn't depend or care about anyone except his own values. As he gets older, I think this uh this idea sort of compounds on itself to the point where you know once he's written sort of the genealogy of morality, he might just be like a completely repulsive man to sort of interact with because of his super high standards and judgmentalness and whatever. But we're gonna get into that. Um so he settles in Switzerland after being told on the train that this is a beautiful place and in a quiet and tiny farming village called Hills Maria. And it is here where Nietzsche writes down his legacy with the creation of the book for which he is best remembered today. And so it's 1881, he's between 35 and 36 years old. Uh and the beauty of this place reaffirms his belief in an almost artistic meaning for life. And as he's taken a control one day, his verse a big idea is that, or not his verse a big idea, but a massive idea comes from him, which really shakes him at the core. And it's that suffering should be embraced and not avoided. Schopenhauer wants to avoid it, religion wants you to uh redeem for it. Nietzsche thinks we should embrace a suffering. And this is also, you know, uh a quite a sexy romanticized message, which is partly why Jordan Peterson has guided so much attention and popularity for um saying the exact same uh message. And uh Nietzsche is uh yeah, so I wanted to ask you is Nietzsche the first philosopher to ever make this point specifically that uh it is good to suffer and it it is good to embrace the suffering.

SPEAKER_01

Uh well, no and yes, I I think not uh in the in the way you formulated the question, but he does represent an original variation right on on that question. So I think we we have to uh kind of back up one step. Uh so the the place of suffering in life, I mean, one kind of question is going to be uh when you think about life in general, how much suffering is it uh that you take as the norm? Do you take suffering to be uh something that happens occasionally, but basically life is pretty good, in which case you have a more benevolent understanding uh uh of life. You know, you're gonna have some suffering in your life, but that's not going to be the dominating uh thing that you're going to point out to explain what your life is all about and what's meaningful about it. So you have a benevolent, optimistic understanding of life. Or you can make the judgment call that overall the suffering dominates in one's life and that moments of uh satisfaction and happiness are relatively minor. Uh uh you know, you you you you'll you'll occasionally have a picnic day and things will seem pretty good, but ultimately uh suffering is the thing that that uh that dominates one's life. So there's an initial judgment call about the predominance of suffering in one's life. Now, overlaying all of that, there still is uh a difference between a philosophical assessment of suffering and a particular uh biographical assessment of suffering. So I can, for example, be someone whom life deals or gives me a raw deal. You know, maybe I'm born into grinding poverty and I'm born with some sort of physical deformity that makes it very difficult, and I'm born in a uh you know an oppressively political environment and so forth. But nonetheless, my uh I say, even though those are the biographical circumstances or autobiographical circumstances of my life, I don't think that those say what life can and should be. And I so even though my life has a lot of suffering in it, intellectually or cognitively, I'm still committed to the idea that life is pretty good. And that can cut the other way. There are lots of people who are in their autobiographical circumstances, they're born into prosperous economic circumstances, they have very good health, uh, they live in a very free society, nonetheless, they are convinced psychologically that philosophically life is pointless and meaningless, right, and and and uh and full of suffering and so forth. So uh I think all of that would need to be teased out. Uh so where we get though in the Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and I think not quite as strongly, but to a significant extent uh in Jordan Peterson, whom you whom you mentioned along the way, is a fundamentalist, uh, not in any religious sense, but a fundamentalist tragic sense of life in which suffering is the dominant feature of one's life, and that also in suffering, uh not only in your personal autobiographical assessment, but that suffering is in some sense the most philosophically important and or philosophically revelatory aspect of one's life that one needs to attend to. And then one's reaction in that context to uh what your philosophy and your ethics of life is going to be more specifically is uh is to be sorted out. So we can say, for example, you know, by contrast to religious views of life, you mentioned those along the way. You might say, you know, this life in the physical world is dominated by physical suffering, physical disappointments, social disappointments, moral disappointments in my own self. But nonetheless, uh there is a possibility of an ultimately benevolent, beautiful place in heaven. And so ultimately that person then metaphysically is still an optimist because they believe that the final story is going to be an optimistic one. It's just that this is dominated by so that's right. And they also then, to get more close to your your specific question here, will then say that there is a value in suffering, that partly suffering is to teach you a lesson that this life is not really the important realm. And so uh, you know, to the extent that you expect to find value in this world, you're going to be frustrated, but that's teaching you the point that you're looking in the wrong place to find value. And so suffering is a useful corrective to try to direct your energies in the in the proper direction. And then more strongly, uh, the the people who live an ascetic life for religious reasons. You know, think of extreme nuns and extreme uh monks, and those who go and live in the desert and practice mortification of the flesh. The idea there is that what you're doing is going to war against the natural world, which is ultimately the source of suffering, and to the extent that you can uh suffer as much as possible, in some sense, you will break your earthly bounds, and also at the same time, you will prove your worthiness to be redeemed to the higher world ultimately. So you will get a you'll get a breakthrough by going through as much suffering as you possibly can. That's a kind of religious redemptive understanding of suffering. Now, Schopenhauer, of course, is a little bit is different there because he doesn't believe that there is any sort of supernatural redemption that is possible. Instead, he does think that there's an imperative to intellectual honesty, to recognize the world as it actually is, but at the same time, he believes that to the extent that you are intellectually honest and you realize just how tragic and ultimately meaningful the world actually is, it is intolerable. Human beings cannot bear that. And so your choice really is to wish that you had never been born, or given that you had been born, to try perhaps to summon the courage to commit suicide and to end your suffering. And then if you can't quite bring yourself to do that, then all you can do is find some sort of uh you know escapes from it, perhaps, and this is back to the art thesis as well, or the music thesis as well. Find some sort of releases where you are uh uh you know you're in an alternative reality that is still giving you hints of the way reality is ultimately, but uh is making it at least uh tolerable. It's a kind of palliative uh along the way. Now, Nietzsche wants to resist both of those temptations to uh, you know, the the flights to the supernatural uh as a redemption for suffering and any sort of ultimately just giving into suffering and wishing for suicide. And so what he wants to argue is that suffering and uh people being able to embrace suffering and endure a certain amount of suffering can uh strengthen you, uh that it can bring with you not only a physical discipline. So, you know, right now I'm thinking of the no pain, no gain physicalist uh understanding, right? The more pain you endure physically, the stronger your body is going to get. But the same thing on the psychological side, the more suffering and pain that you can train yourself to take on and endure, and then ultimately transcend, that's going to make you into the kind of person who can uh ultimately become creative in some positive sense.

SPEAKER_00

Which um is perfectly that last uh um the that that closing inflection you had to that explanation, which is perfectly summarized by his um what doesn't kill me only makes me stronger aphorism. Um and I wonder if that moved in from there as well. Um okay, so I was very afraid this was gonna happen, but obviously we haven't gotten into the chops yet, and we've got 15 minutes left. So I'm just thinking between you and I, how should we strategize uh the rest of this? Is it like is it worth like getting into uh the big works after thus spoke Zarathustra? Because we're not gonna be able to do it justice, I don't think. So what do you think? What do you reckon?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think uh we can spend a little bit of time on Zarathustra uh because it uh it brings through a lot of these uh themes that we've just been talking about, suffering and then uh having uh through the developments of suffering, it's not only suffering in in Nietzsche, uh uh, become transformed in a way that you can become a genuinely positively creative kind of person. And uh the figure of Zarathustra is meant to be uh kind of a signpost or a herald in that direction. I don't think Nietzsche saw himself yet as the creative person uh who has achieved that, or even his fictional creation is the person who is doing that, but rather he sees himself as uh someone who is pointing in a certain direction. And what he wants is for those of us, other human beings, who have some creative potential in us, uh, not to give in to mediocrity, not to give in to uh this sense of meaninglessness and suffering, and not to give in to just fantastical hopes that in somehow uh you know after we die there's going to be Valhalla or heaven and so forth, but rather to uh to uh to find whatever germ of creative potential we have within ourselves, and then do whatever it takes to develop that as much as we as we possibly can. So he uh uh he uses the uh philosophizing with a hammer metaphor here. That's one of those things that gets uh gets misinterpreted. He doesn't mean you know going around like a sledgehammer and smashing things, although he's quite iconic and not afraid of smashing things. But it's more like uh to use this uh the musical metaphor as well. The hammer is uh is really the tuning fork that uh piano tuners will use. So piano tuner will come in and will be tweaking the strings on your piano, I need to move over a little bit, tweaking the strings on your piano and then tapping them a little bit to see whether they're ringing true or whether they're off pitch, right, and so forth. And so Nietzsche's writings are like that, you know, the the the chords in your in your soul that he's playing on them, tapping them. And he's trying to get you to resolve respond. And oh, that's a clear note in me, or that part is m muddied. But to find what your clear notes are and then do something with them, uh, become the the creative musician who creates some sort of uh you know piece of music in your soul. So we're all on this evolutionary journey to tie back to our first theme, and human beings, he thinks, will become transitioned. He thinks human beings as we are right now, we're just this uh relatively minor transitional uh feature. He's uh disgusted with most human beings and thinks they're kind of a waste of space, a waste of resources. But he does think within the vast number of human beings, there are a few human beings who have some creative potential, and those are the ones he's trying to reach, those are the ones who will go in a Zarathustra direction, and it's through them that the future uh hopes for the overman, the the the greater, more developed human humanity will uh come into existence.

SPEAKER_00

Um there's so much there, Stephen. I I I just want to make one comment because I'd love to ask you about how you think the Ubermensch um has been misinterpreted uh today. Um, because I mean you make it you you wrote an entire book about how the Nazis misinterpreted the Ubermensch, but then also I think today there's a lot of misinterpretation of what he meant by the Ubermensch as well. But what I what I meant to what I what I was saying before was how I can strategically do this because we've got 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_01

Let me just say uh to some extent, to a large extent, yes, the Nazis did inter misinterpret, but I think do think Nietzsche is not entirely off the hook there. Uh so that is at least as an aside for now. So what does becoming a what does becoming a Zarathustra mean for us? Yeah, I'm unloading. Okay, good. Okay, good. Now, I I think uh you know Nietzsche's uh inspirational writing is and the thing I think the vast majority of people who read Nietzsche and respond positively to him are responding to the kind of summary that I that I just gave there. Because, you know, especially when we are young, we uh we we all feel that we are special, and we should feel that we are special, that we have so much potential and so much creative uh openness that that's possible to us. And Nietzsche is uh about one of the strongest voices in all of history saying don't ever lose that, don't betray that. And and and that's thrilling to us as young people. Yeah. Such a seductive idea is that most people lose that by the time they are in their middle twenties and and so forth, but don't don't ever give up on uh uh the hero potentially inside inside your soul. So uh where though I think Nietzsche opens the door uh to uh lots of so-called misinterpretations that I don't think in many cases are misinterpretations, is that because of uh Nietzsche's philosophical assumptions, he cannot say with any degree of specificity what the new creative geniuses are going to be like, like the post-Zarathustras. What he is going to say is nature is not telling us what it is properly to be a human being. God is not telling us what it is. We are totally uh uh autonomous in that sense, creative agents. And different creative agents are going to go in very different directions. So if we just think about musicians or artists, right now we can be generally encouraging of young people who've got artistic potential to do their own thing, but there's no way for us to predict what direction great creative music is going to go in 10 years or 20 years. And it would be totally inappropriate for us right now to say to a young music, young musician, here are the themes that you have to develop, and here are the you know the proper forms that you can use, right, and so forth. We can suggest all of those things, but it is ultimately has to be up to the creative genius himself, or even if we're not a creative genius, the creatively talented person to make our own decisions and go off in our in our own direction. But it's not just in music because the creative people are not necessarily going to be artists. They might be politicians, they might go into the military, they might go into uh to business, although Nietzsche's a little more suspicious of that one. They might go into any walk of life, and the point is that from our currently limited human perspective, we cannot predict or tell them what direction things ought to go. It's completely open-ended. Now, that then is, if it's completely open-ended, uh what's uh wrong with saying that to some young creative person, my goal is to be the next Napoleon, or my goal is to be the next Alexander the Great, or the next Julius Caesar. Uh and you, you know, that I'm going to pour my creative genius into being the next generation, you know, world historical uh military conqueror, right, and so forth. Uh the same way, you know, Beethoven and then Wagner conquered the music world, uh, and the way in various other domains of human possibility one might choose to be a, choose to be a conqueror. So it's completely open-ended, and there's no value standard in Nietzsche from which we can say, oh, certain things are just wrong, right? Uh certain things are violating fundamental moral principles or absolute moral principles because all of that has been exploded. We really are going beyond good and evil, and we're also going to go beyond good and bad because good and bad are undefined until the new creative geniuses define themselves what that good and bad is going to be. Now, at the same time, Nietzsche is not going to be off the hook because he is openly celebrating uh people who are using other people as means to their creative ends. So, you know, the fact of slaveries, Nietzsche has no problem with slavery, both in the psychological sense and in the physical sense.

SPEAKER_00

Uh and the physical sense. Is that a fact? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and this is from his youthful writings. Uh just read the Greek state, it will uh open your eyes hugely. And then uh on all sorts of uh all sorts of yeah, uh possible. You know, if the vast majority of human beings aren't going to do anything significant with their lives, Nietzsche says uh they might as well be fodder for the creative geniuses, their economic resources, their time resources, even their very lives, as long as it's going to bring forth something that is in fact special. So all of his line, all of his predator metaphors, all of his valorizing of uh of existential slavery, and figures like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and so forth. He's still on the book for those who, and now of course, the Nazis become important here, who come along and say, Well, yeah, um, you know, Nietzsche has opened this door. He did open that door. Sure.

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Okay. That's uh that's that's very interesting. I've always thought it was a mischaracterization of Nietzsche to take the herd literally, to take the idea of the people who could who don't have what it takes to strive to become you know individuated or the ubermensch that it's okay to physically use them as slaves. I have always just thought it was this idea that they were to just be uh not thought about and ignored. And for instance, if if any sort of criticism came from their direction, it was to be absolutely ignored because the herd um cannot that they they they cannot understand where I'm coming from as this overload, but it is a more physical sense. He he he he condoned the ownership of them. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

It's perfectly fine for the wolves to eat the sheep.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01

But it's also on the other perfectly fine for the shepherd to use the sheep as a mass weapon for whatever he has. And to go back to his where he does say explicitly, mankind, this is almost a direct quote, mankind in the mass sacrificed to create a higher species, is perfectly fine. Mankind in the mass, mass sacrifice. He's fine with it.

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Okay, so uh maybe a touch genocidal as well, old Nietzsche back in the day. Um, okay, well, look, absolutely uh brilliant, Stephen. I'm I'm I'm over the moon that you're willing to do a part two because obviously we the great part about Nietzsche is we haven't even gotten to the crazy stuff yet. Uh just to like tease um, you know, his his his disdain of religion. I love this yeah, but I mean like I love this quote. Um uh his favorite character from the New Testament was Pontius Pilate. Um it's just like this idea that he despises religion, and then obviously we're gonna get into slave morality, which he did a fantastic episode on your open college podcast, which I'll link people to. Um, but yeah, we'll be able to cover all of that. But just to round out this episode, because I know you've got to go, um, as some context for where thus spoke Tharas Dustra came from. Uh, you know, he's bo this is before he's written this. His books aren't selling, he'd walked away from his career, he was getting into his forties, he was nickly, he was even a little bit suicidal, but from the depths of his misery came this book which had just totally turned his life around, you know, the parable on self-overcoming um and becoming the Ubermensch, someone who's no longer aligned with society standards, but only one's own goals. Um, and I think we can leave it there if you want, or if you've got a few minutes or two. Perfect. Then let's do it then. Well, let's pick up exactly where we left off in the last chat. So we're at a point in Nietzsche's life where his books weren't selling, and he walked away from a career of a certain pompous and security and wealth, and women rejected him. He was getting into his forties, and he was sickly, and he was at and and even at his lowest, he was suicidal as well. But in the depths of his misery, that spoke of Zarathustra. And so could you please explain the meaning of this book and the significance of the parable and self-overcoming when he introduces the Uber mentioned when you contrast that to just how low he was in his life.

SPEAKER_01

Uh I suppose the quick answer to that question is no. I I can't explain it in uh in one hour. That was an extraordinarily rich work, uh, philosophically and and literarily. No, that's that's actually a cheap answer. We can say some some of the important things about the book, but yes. Uh you know, as you as you mentioned, one of the interesting things is uh where Nietzsche was in his life personally. So there always is this broader question about the the relationship between philosophy and one's personal life, so abstract uh uh philosophy and and and autobiography. Uh but at the same time it's not too uh parochial or unique to a human being because in one sense uh Nietzsche wants to argue that we all need to go on a hero's journey. Uh actually I think the whole point of the species as a whole is a kind of hero's journey that we should we should be embarking upon. And just as with uh with heroes' journeys, you have ups and downs that you go into the bowels of hell before you uh emerge into uh the sunlight again and hopefully find your mountain to uh to climb or whatever the metaphor is. But what's what's interesting uh about uh uh uh Zarathustra is it it marks a departure for nature because uh he was on a standard academic path. Obviously, as a young man, he was brilliant, uh well educated, reading all of the great works in philosophy, literature, history, and so on, and uh mastering classical languages as as well. Uh while his reputation is mostly as a as a philosopher, his uh PhD was in in philology, love of love of languages, and particularly ancient languages. And then he was appointed uh uh uh to to being a professor at a uh kind of a German, even though it was in Switzerland, a German-style university uh and uh uh uh academic life is professionalizing itself in the 1800s and so on. And so for a lot of reasons, he breaks away from that, he resigns from his position, he goes off and uh and and starts a new phase in his life, but it's a radically different style. So rather than being in the cloistered in a nice, safe academic position and all of the formats uh for how you write and how you publish and so on are all are all worked out, he's now a free spirit, a free agent, and he's wandering around uh Europe and uh finding his voice and outcomes Zarathustra. Uh so uh not only in terms of the content of Zarathustra, but also the form of Zarathustra is original for him. And one of the very interesting things about uh Nietzsche, at least the reactions to Nietzsche, is how difficult it is for many people uh to get past not only the content of Nietzsche's work, but also the form in which he he presents his work. One of the occupational hazards we philosophers have, actually most of the smart people, is once uh you get used to doing philosophy a certain way, uh it's hard for you to recognize philosophy when it's being done a different way. And that's on top of all of the usual obstacles of, you know, I sense that this person is taking a position or making arguments that I don't like, they're going in a in a dire in a direction I don't want it to go or I think is false. And so one uh especially if one's a second rate or third rate, is kind of looking for excuses not to have to read a person. And so you just well, this person's wrong, so I don't know, I don't need to read them. And Nietzsche, because of the uh uniqueness and iconoclastic nature of most of his work, uh he re he evokes that reaction in huge numbers of people. But then on the top of that, uh uh the the form in which Zarathustra is presented as a as a series of parables in a somewhat literary form, uh, with a number of kind of speeches and dialogues and so on. It's not a way of doing philosophy that is recognizable to much of academic philosophy, and it's it's hard work. But uh uh it's another reason why people who don't like Nietzsche uh will will dismiss him as not being really a really a philosopher or uh just as you know say that he's uh he's not worth our attention for for various reasons. Now, uh you know, we can get to into the particular metaphors as you know, many beautiful inspirational lines in there, you know, no matter what your what your views are, or something in in Zarathustra for you. Uh but also it is carefully calculated. It's not just a brilliant thinker working out and presenting a philosophy of life, but he also is doing it in a way where he's being highly attentive to rhetoric. You know, one of the other occupational hazards philosophers have is you know, we're so uh focused on truth and clear argument and so on. So we're trying to be very Rigorous, but it becomes dry and lifeless and deathly. There's this kind of funny line that says, uh, you know, with uh with analytic philosophy of a certain sort, right, uh uh rigor comes, but also, unfortunately, mortise. So you get rigor mortis, and so it's like death to read certain sorts of things. So Nietzsche is attentive to this, and he's aware that not only does he need to uh have a original philosophy that is well worked out and is going to be appealing to intellectually the smartest people who are willing to stick with it, but also that it needs to be inspirational, that rhetorically, right, human beings are not just desiccated premise and conclusion kinds of beings, that we want uh things to be to be vital, we want to be involved, we want to have a sense of purpose and meaning, and you know, to go back to the language of heroes' journey, that I am a hero or a potential hero, and I want to go on my journey, and partly what Nietzsche is presenting is a philosophical and a rhetorical journey that we that we can go on. So he's got a fictional character, Zarathustra, Zarathustra. Uh uh as uh at this point, he's 40 years old when uh when the book begins. Uh he's been away isolated for 10 years on his mountaintop. Prior to that, presumably, he had 30 years of living that was uh somewhat formative. And now he comes back and then he encounters all sorts of bizarre characters and interesting characters and pathetic characters, and we uh see a great panoply of different kinds of individuals presented in literary form. And we see how they react to Zarathustra, we see how Zarathustra reacts to them. So all of the things that make literature, fiction literature, rhetorically powerful, Nietzsche is trying to incorporate them into this philosophical, philosophical work. So uh the point is going to be then, I think, that you have to be uh uh very good, or at least willing to go on a journey to try to become very good philosophically, uh, if you're going to get anything out of Nietzsche, but also you have to be willing to uh go on a literary journey and uh to be willing to do all of the hard work that first-rate literary interpretation takes if you are going to get something out of out of Nietzsche. And then another theme, uh, you know, we talk about philosophy as autobiography, and we we can come back to that one, how much of Nietzsche is in this, and how much he's just saying this is the human condition. Uh, but also there is this theme that Nietzsche is always insisting on, that philosophy uh is a do-it-yourself enterprise, that it really doesn't do you any good uh to just have it all laid out to you by even a you know a smart professor who presents views clearly and objectively, but kind of just delivers everything to you on a platter, and you can just absorb it more or less passively. Uh Nietzsche's one of his themes is that that's not how philosophy works. You have to you have to do it. You have to uh he he you know, another kind of metaphor, you know, he might point in a direction, but you have to travel in that direction, right? Or he might offer some signposts, but you have to read the signposts and decide which of the many possible journeys you are going to go on. And so in that way, Zarathustra is an invitation to some hard but hopefully deeply human work.

SPEAKER_00

That's what kind of the one of the problems of Nietzsche, right? The fact that he's so hyperbolic and so much, like you said, so much of the uh inspiration in his work in most other philosophy might be lost because of caveats and qualifiers, but instead Nietzsche will say very provocative things that could be interpreted differently, but you have to sort of understand it in the as a contrast to the greater body of work to sort of know maybe what he was getting at. But you said that you could go into some of the specific metaphors of Zarathustra. I think that would be very, very applicable because the context of Nietzsche's life as he wrote that book is so worthwhile. I think you you're asking the question how much a philosophy should be autobiographical. I think in this book particularly, it's extremely autobiographical because he's sort of painting the person that he wishes he could be. He sort of knows deep down that he could aspire to be, but in his life around him, in his waking hours, he's not living out that life. He's sickly, he's depressed, women don't like him, his books aren't selling. So um I think it would be really uh yeah, great to go into some of the specific metaphors of Zarathustra.

SPEAKER_01

One of the interesting things is the choice of the name. So thus spoke Zarathustra. So who is Zarathustra? It's not uh it's not Bob and it's not Dave or Jose. It's not like a common name, it's an extraordinarily unusual name. So right off the bat, you uh you have to do some work to figure out who this guy this guy is. And then uh, you know, we don't actually don't know a huge amount about the original Zoroaster. It's uh you know an early religious figure. I'm not even sure what his dates are, maybe 2,800 years ago, maybe as long as uh you know 3,000 years ago in what is now you know uh uh Iran.

SPEAKER_00

Mesopotamia or something.

SPEAKER_01

No, even yeah, a little further further uh east than that. I think uh I think he was he was Persian or he came out of the people who we now think of as as the Persians. And uh a kind of uh religious prophet who uh had standard religious training, but then also uh had a kind of experience when he was older, around 30 years old perhaps, and a new vision of what proper uh religionslash philosophy question life should be, had a certain amount of charisma and so attracted a following, including some people who were quite quite high up. And uh, you know, so Nietzsche is choosing this guy, you know, in part because you know, so some of the themes are that he is more of a um kind of a prophet figure, um, not in the sense of there just being a whole bunch of gods and goddesses out there, but seeking a more unifying principle and a more systematic worked-out understanding of the place of human beings in the cosmos. But uh again, we don't know a huge amount. One of the uh the interesting things about Zoroaster, though, is the extent to which the uh the Abrahamic religions, you know, further to the West, so uh by which we mean Hebrew and then the breakaway version that is Christianity, and then the later breakaway version that is uh that is Islam, that many of the core themes that you find in those three religions are already anticipated by Zoroaster or Zarathustra. And then, you know, an interesting question is to the extent to which those religions are independently founded or whether they are uh borrowing heavily from yet earlier religious traditions such as Zoroasteranism. So that that's one interesting theme. So there's something about Zoroaster and his journey and his way of doing uh religion and philosophy that Nietzsche is picking up on and wanting to revive for contemporary times. Uh it's also clear that Nietzsche has read all of the major Greeks, and you see reflections on those, often in allegorical form or metaphorical form. But also uh there's a later work that Nietzsche calls the Anti-Christ, and uh that's anticipated significantly in uh spoke Zarathustra. So you can see that the same uh literary form that Hebrew scriptures and then the New Testament are written in being echoed, in some cases uh played with, in some cases turned on their heads or mirror image, all of the literary things that people are doing. So Zoroaster is to a large extent meant to be uh sorry, Zarathustra, Nietzsche's version of Zarathustra is meant to be put in direct contrast to someone like Jesus, who went on his own journey and uh interacted with people of various sorts, and uh, and there are lessons, and he spoke in parables, and we need to interpret the parables, and out of that you can get something more systematic if that's uh how you are how you are inclined. So, one way then of reading this then is to just uh read the book and ask yourself to what extent is Zoroaster or Zarathustra meant to be a counter to Jesus in terms of all of the major doctrines of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And remember that morality. Yeah, partly a lot of it's going to be focused on morality for sure, but uh you know that the for Nietzsche, Christianity is uh really just a purified form of Judaism. So can we extract to the extent that we are analytic in this way and say Christianity stands for you know these top 12 points, and we list them, can we find then the counter to all 12 of those points represented in Zarathustra? And and we do know shortly after Zarathustra returns to writing a little more systematically, writing Beyond Good and Evil, and then Genealogy of Morals, which is you know explicitly an essay format. Yeah. Um and there, you know, clearly he is hammer and tongs going after the Judeo-Christian tradition and kind of saying, you know, if you didn't get the parable version in Zarathustra, I'm going to lay it out for you. Explicitly. Yes, yes, for sure. So that's that's an interesting, uh interesting point there. Um then I think uh at some point, given the short amount of time that we have here, given that we're not doing a course on this, maybe the best way to do it would be just to pick a few favorite uh aphorisms or a few uh favorite parables from it and uh and and speak to those.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, sure. Could I tee you up then? Uh to do that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Unless you have if some specific on hand that you want to really.

SPEAKER_01

Well, no, I I do have my favorites, but this is your show, so why don't you uh start us with it?

SPEAKER_00

Please deliver your favorites um and then I'd love to um just tee you up for one specific that I'd love to hear you answer.

SPEAKER_01

Sure, sure. Uh well one uh one hobby horse of mine, um I might as well put a plug in for my for my uh my book, right? Nietzsche and the Nazis. The angle is a little bit different there, but I do spend a lot of time talking about Nietzsche. Uh and uh the title. Well, yeah, that's right. And then I have another major journal article, it's almost a mini book itself called uh Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand. And in that one, uh uh it's a it's a scholarly piece published in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. I take up this issue in which, because often Nietzsche and Rand are conflated or they're seen as being working the same territory. So I focus on their views on altruism and egoism, both of which are central to their moral theories, and contrast them. The differences between the two are much more important than the uh the smaller number of similarities between the two. But one of the things uh uh that I think is important to me as a philosopher is Nietzsche's reputation for being an individualist. And I think uh my view is that that's a superficial reading of Nietzsche, that Nietzsche is much more of a collectivist, excuse me, than he is an individualist. So we take the uh the concept of the uh the overman that is introduced in uh in Zarathustra. So God is dead, also uh introduced in in Zarathustra. And so God was conceived of as the great creator and the great lawgiver, and human beings are in a subordinate status. We're supposed to receive and obey and act according to this great puppet master in the sky, right, and all of that sort of stuff. So with the death of God, uh Nietzsche then is saying that really God was just a projection by human beings of our potential that we have. So we created God, and in God we uh we put all of our aspirations for what is possible. So what we need to do, in effect, is reclaim that creative power and see that we really are the creators of ourselves, of our lives, and we then need to uh be creators of of uh of new values. But uh quite early uh in the in the uh in the first part, uh in introducing the concept of the death of God and then pointing toward the overman, uh what Nietzsche quite explicitly says is we human beings right now, the human being, or in the older translations, man or mankind, he's talking about the species, uh is a way station on this evolutionary path. So what he's quite explicitly saying is you as an individual are not that important. What is important is you and your contribution to the development of the overman. So, and then he makes this very explicit evolutionary um uh comparison. Uh of course, this is the uh the early 1880s now as he's composing this. So it's uh 23 or 24 years after the publication of Origin of Species by Darwin. So this evolutionary matter. So what he uh wants to argue, though, is human beings in relation to the overman will be what now the ape is to human beings. So uh with all of these aspirations to be your best, to become creative, and so on, it's not that you are an end in yourself. Your value is going to be to the extent that you contribute toward the creation of the overman, which is going to be a new species that exists at a higher level. So just as the ape, uh this is not very good evolutionary theory, but the ape has evolved into human beings, human beings will evolve into the overman. And so that's uh that's that's the end. And he's uh full of praise for people who will sacrifice themselves, who will bear all sorts of privations, and be even be willing to die for this cause. And the cause is not the old traditional, you know, die for the king or die for your gods. It's not even you know, die for your family, it's die, right, or be sacrificed for the sake of this uh this further species. So that uh that very rich metaphor of evolution from ape to human to overman, I take that one very seriously. And he comes back to it over and over again. So uh those of you who are attracted to Nietzsche because of the uh the individualistic themes, and there are some in Nietzsche. He's very inspirational if if you take him that way, but that's not the best philosophical reading of Nietzsche. Let me see if I can call it up. Oh, actually, this is just in the in the prologue section number four, so I'll read along.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, go for it, go for it.

SPEAKER_01

What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose.

SPEAKER_00

That's amazing. Yeah, literally defining the evolution to the overman. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's right, that's right. So human beings are not the purpose. And I hear he's talking about the species as a whole, and you as an individual, you are not the purpose, right? You are a bridge, right? And you know, we know that bridges are you know, something that is a stage along the way, a crossing over to something else. So the purpose is somewhere, somewhere beyond. So I would uh tee that one up for special attention and read uh uh everything else that comes up in Nietzsche in the light of that one.

SPEAKER_00

Nice, that's amazing. I've never um heard that interpretation of it before, but it does add so much flavor to the unbelievable ambition that he has, you know, because like we'll foreshadow for later, you know, he tries to usurp the morality of the Bible, right? But then again, you have here that's right, he's actually trying to evolve the species. I mean, that that is at least.

SPEAKER_01

So the important thing there is rather than sacrificing yourself for these mythic, uh, you know, otherworldly beings who you've never met, never spoken to, exactly. Yeah. Let me just just read one one more uh from that same section. Uh I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go sorry, behind the stars for a reason to go under. So behind the stars, the gods or God, right, is out there. So why should I go under? A metaphor for sacrifice. Uh I'm looking for some reason behind the stars and be a sacrifice, who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth one day may become the overman's. So he's not opposed to sacrificing individuals, and he does want you to sacrifice yourself, but not for the gods, but for the future overman, whoever those beings might be. So um, and then one more section from this uh uh where he is a different metaphor here that we're like a raindrop in a in a storm cloud, waiting for the lightning to come along. So you're just a raindrop. And how important is the raindrop?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, inconsequential, exactly.

SPEAKER_01

That's right, and the raindrop is going to fall and splatter itself on on the earth. I love all those who are like heavy drops falling individually from the dark cloud that hangs over humanity. They herald the coming of lightning, and as heralds, they perish. So your job is, yeah, you will perish. But your job in your perishing is that you are part of this mass that is going to signal or herald the coming of the lightning. And it's really the lightning that we are we are waiting for.

SPEAKER_00

And that's the lightning is going to be the value you derive rather than that's right.

SPEAKER_01

And that will be the overman, right, or some sort of Zeus-like being who has the capacity to uh to make things happen. So that one uh that that that I think is important. Now, yeah, I've published on this, and uh I do get a lot of grief on this. Okay. Uh because you know there are a lot of people are very wedded to Nietzsche being an arch individualist and individualist all the way down and so forth. Uh but I caution against that interpretation.

SPEAKER_00

And that's you teasing out uh in comparison to Rand, the individualist side of things. You're saying they're not in fact in place. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Right. So I think Rand is properly interpreted as an as an individualist, and Nietzsche, with some qualifications, is not actually much of an individualist philosophy.

SPEAKER_00

Um I before we move on from Zarathustra, I would love to just hear you comment on the large metaphor of it all, which you already have, in other words, but just again to like nail the um, just to double down completely, uh, to speak more about the metaphor of becoming who you are, because you've mentioned the hero's journey several times, which is obviously the work of Joseph Campbell, who uh built that off the work of Carl Jung, who built that immediately after the death of Nietzsche. Carl Jung came except exactly after him and ended up at the point of individuation. Carl Jung's idea was this is the ultimate purpose of any person. If they can, in Nietzsche's idea, become an Uber an Ubermensch, Carl Jung's idea is that they become individuated, they become themselves, they fulfill all of their potential and more without an end goal, necessarily just knowing that the entire journey is the value of it. Um, with that as the context, you know, tying in Jung's individuation, you've mentioned the hero's journey. Uh can you speak more about Nietzsche's metaphor that he really wants to hammer home here on a person becoming who they are, fulfilling whatever the potential might be, irrespective, and that's obviously a little bit separate, probably, from what you've just said about them being a bridge to an evolution of the species. If if we if we if we don't include that, what yeah, do you what do you think?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, the uh the the who you are is uh is a potentiality. And you know, Nietzsche's view is that you know he's not the overman, and he doesn't think any of us really are the are the overman. You know, some of us, you know, perhaps you know one in ten million will will have some serious potential to to shake things up and do some sort of creating new value. So this language of of being a herald of some future development and evolution works in in long time, I think he does take that that seriously. So largely what he is doing is you know, after you set aside the 99% of the population whom he thinks are sheep, uh uh uh but but uh even worse because they are they are human beings who failed. Up to live or fail to live up even to a minimal human level and have declined to the level of sheep. And then you have the 1% of us who have some creative potential and actually are willing to go out and do something, something amazing. And then out of that million, 999,000 will fail significantly, but at least they tried. And then there will be that tiny sliver of humanity that does something significant that takes the human being a little bit further down the path to the overman. So what I think Nietzsche is doing is trying to be inspirational to that part in us, those of us who have something in us that is some potential worth developing. And without being at all programmatic about what form or even what direction that will take, whether it will uh happen in the in the entrepreneurial business sector, whether it will be in the scientific sector or in the artistic sector or the music sector or just becoming a great explorer of the of the earth and the universe sector. He doesn't want to say what that's going to be. It's just going to be something that uh that that you will do. Uh and uh uh I like also his metaphor of the um uh the the the thirst the three stages, the three metamorphoses, which I think is also very rich about becoming who you are. Here he's a little bit programmatic about it. So he says we go through three stages uh as long as we're willing to go on this journal, like a camel stage, a lion stage, and then the final stage is uh becoming a child again. Uh and that latter is a uh to go back to our first point, uh, kind of interestingly, in parallel to the born again theme, right? That's in Christianity, that after going through a certain process, one can be born again, and you find that picked up in Nietzsche, this third stage of being a child. So let's just say, uh, for human beings who are willing to take on the great project, the first stage is this camel stage. And so we you know, you imagine a camel is going to go off on a on a long desert journey into a kind of a wilderness where everything is barren. And in order to prepare for that journey, what you need to do like a camel does is drink a lot of water. So you soak it up, you soak it up. And uh the parallel here might be, I'm used to word might be, to young people who, preparing for their life, they become alive intellectually and open to the broad world. And you become a kind of sponge. You're just hungry and open to all sorts of new experiences. Uh, and you have this great thirst for knowledge. So you read everything that you can, and you just take it in, you take it in to try to fill yourself up. And it also can uh, again, might be interpreted as that kind of alienated teen stage, precocious teenager stage, where you feel like you're you're in a desert landscape, socially, culturally, and so forth. You are alienated and so on. So the camel, you soak everything up, but also you want to test yourself, you want to take on challenges. And so the camel gets loaded with very heavy burdens, and it's very impressive how much uh how much a camel can dig. So you'll take on great challenges and great responsibilities, and then go out and and see what you can what you can do. All right, so that's a very rich metaphor, and uh I'm not going to be too programmatic about it, but Nietzsche puts it out there and he has his own description. So uh uh start with that one. But then he says the next stage is the lion stage, and uh the lion stage is uh uh where you become a fighter. So the the camel is in one sense passive, just absorbing uh stuff from the environment, uh reacting to what it sees as a kind of desert environment that it's alienated to, but it's also accepting burdens and it's allowing lots of burdens to be placed on it. But most of the time, the birds that are put on the camel are put on by the camel's owner. Someone else is making decisions what those burdens should be. That the lion stage is when you have realized the fullness of your strength and your aspiration not to be uh bearing burdens and doing things because other people said you were supposed to bear these burdens and do these responsibilities. So you become, you become a fighter, you become a predator, you'd be willing to, you go out and you attack and you want to uh to tear down and destroy any potential enemies, partly to uh assert your own strength, but then also to signal to yourself and to everybody else that you are not a beast of burden any longer. Now, to some extent, this is still reactive to the world. Other people are are putting these burdens upon me, and I need to be adversarial and attacking with respect to other people. But then the third stage, uh, Nietzsche then says, once you've got that out of your system, as you become a child again. And uh you're then able to approach the world the way a child approaches it, with innocence and with wonder, and this uh the sense of uh I can go out and do whatever it is that I that I want. And Nietzsche leaves it there. So, yes, we need to go through these various stages. Yes, we need to test ourselves in various ways. Yes, we need to be reactive against the uh the world, but that should not be uh defining you and ultimately be where you end up. And a lot of people, uh, you know, depending on the limits of their strength, they get stuck at those various stages or they get crushed by those various stages. That ultimately one should strive again to be a child. And I think all of us can remember, no matter how bitter or jaded or tired we are now in uh in middle age or near middle age or wherever we are right now, to remember what it was like to be a child at the best, that sense of openness and benevolence and sunlit skies uh uh and to be able to go forth and do what you want in the world. Now, Nietzsche leaves it at that point. He doesn't then say the child then needs to be trained in this particular way and in this particular direction. He just wants us to uh find again that childlike state of uh doing life, but as an adult. Uh so I think that one's very important. Now, another one uh before we make a transition here is Nietzsche steering away from anything that's too programmatic is uh is uh the point at which Zarathustra has attracted a certain number of followers, people who are listening to him. But he then says uh you know, the great danger here is the danger that all disciples have. And again, there's going to be a parable to uh to Jesus, once Jesus has attracted his uh his followers and so on, where disciples become uh uh uh subordinate. They're willing to hang on every word the master says and to take the words of the master and the the master's way of dressing and the master's way of behaving in the world, and and just to copy that. And so they become emulators. And Nietzsche says that's a that's a great danger, and I do not want people to follow me in that sense. Uh, and so he goes out of his way to say, uh, and this is another favorite line that you still will see often quote, is that one repays a teacher badly if one always remains a student. So, yes, you are under someone else's tutelage for a while, but your goal is not just to be a disciple of the master. And so he explicitly urges all of his disciples to say, go away from me now. You know, you've absorbed some things from me, go away. Don't be a follower of me anymore. In fact, what I want you to do is uh be suspicious of me. Maybe everything I have told you is nonsense. You can never challenge me who you are in the shadow of somebody else. Exactly. That's right. So go off and follow. So uh in you know, in a way, that's uh an anti-Jesus point, uh, to the extent that Christianity is interpreted as you are a follower and you are always going to be subordinate and uh uh and so on. So uh I, as your teacher, I can help prepare you, but only you can find your own voice, find your own way, find your own passions, find your own strengths. Then you have to break away with me or from me and go off and do it, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_00

If you can try keep this to a minute or two. But as you were describing those stages, I was just thinking is there something instinctual to what he's saying here? Is there anything is it like almost an inherent mode of being to go through those stages or at least long for those stages? Or without someone imposing them on us, would they just be missed? Does that question make sense? Like what is is Nietzsche happy in this instinct here, or is it totally separated from them?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think I want to jump ahead from Zarathustra. The way he speaks in Zarathustra, he's often you know condemnatory of various sorts of people, but there is an overarching benevolence that even the people who don't listen to Zarathustra, who mock him, who don't recognize him for what he is, uh kind of the misunderstood prophet uh trope, uh Zarathustra's reaction often is this uh well, they're just not ready for me yet. So he's not then entirely dismissive of them to say, you know, these people are scum, it's hopeless, uh, et cetera, et cetera. There's this idea that uh he is he's a prophet, and there's some people are ready to listen to him, but the rest of the population is not ready to listen yet. And that leaves open the possibility that still they're on their evolutionary path, and maybe just the instincts are are a little more muted in them or or slower in development and then and so on. In his later works, though, I think he does become much more condemnatory. And uh my reading of the the the later Nietzsche is that he does think that it is largely uh biological uh to use this instinct language, and the vast majority of people just don't have what it takes. Uh and it's only a tiny percentage of the human population that has the right kinds of instincts, and those instincts are fiery enough to uh to go out and do something.

SPEAKER_00

And that type of language is obviously rife to be manipulated with, which obviously it does after his death, like the notion that there is, you know, a genetic or biological difference between the potential of certain people, and that metaphor should be clear um to anybody listening. Um look right.

SPEAKER_01

So by the time we get uh shortly thereafter into Beyond Good and Evil and uh and and genealogy of morals, uh uh his tone is much, much partial. Well, look, so there are predators and prey, and uh that is within human beings as well.

SPEAKER_00

We we've totally blown the timer, but that's okay. I think it's better to embellish a question rather than sort of rush it just for the sake of um of a time limit.

SPEAKER_01

But we're gonna spend the whole time just on Zarathustra.

SPEAKER_00

Well, let's see if we can transition it. Um I was thinking Okay, go ahead then um to because you've now teed up his future work, I think, well enough that we can then introduce it and the metaphor of Dustberg Daristutra hopefully is understood. So it seems Nietzsche has propelled himself onto a role. Um, after he uh gets this book out, Dustbirth Aristotra, he returns to the road and also turns in another Western canon classic, Beyond Good and Evil, and also the genealogy of morality, which is an ever-present testament to the random taste of publishers because uh neither of them are uh successful, they're self-published, no one thought they were good, they're just trash. Nietzsche here tirades against what he thought was pathetic and despicable at the top of the list, worship and religion. Um, I just want to give you some space to decompress these two books. Obviously, slave morality is a big part of this as well. Um to you.

SPEAKER_01

Well, uh yes. Uh these books do become increasingly uh didactic uh after Zarathustra. So Zarathustra is a literary and philosophical masterpiece. Uh that's not to downgrade at all the accomplishments of Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals, but they are written in a much more accessible style. That is to say, there are literary elements and parables and so on, uh, but uh you don't have as much literary working uh unpacking them. So uh you know Beyond Good and Evil is quite hefty, it's long, I believe it's divided into about nine different books, and each of them in varying length has a whole number of aphorisms. And there the the idea is uh uh that uh once we have this idea that we uh have the potential to be more than we are, that we're not going to uh be stuck in a kind of authoritarian life model uh morally or even metaphysically. You know, there are some more powerful beings or beings that made us, that own us, that tell us what to do, that are watching what we are doing, and we have to follow along. So we we are we're able to break all of that and then go off and find our true humanity as uh as creative human beings. Uh why are so many people not willing to do that or able to do that? And so here we find Nietzsche also exploring not only the history of religion and the history of morality, but also getting much more deeply into psychology and biology. So the theme beyond good and evil uh uh is meant to give a typology of morals. You say that if we look then at the history of human beings thinking about philosophy and the good life and the bad life and what the meaning of life is, we have this one kind of moral code that centers around the concepts of good and evil. And uh here the idea is that there is a source of good, and that good is pure and absolute, and it might be otherworldly, it usually is in the religious forms, and that everything is a falling away from that, uh, and the opposite of that, and that is evil. And what's interesting about the concept of evil is that it's a knowing rejection of the good. So it's not just that, you know, I don't know, you you have uh you know you're you're you're at you're having a picnic and some raccoon comes along and and snatches your sandwich, right? And you would say bad raccoon. But the raccoon is not evil, right? Because the uh the raccoon is just doing, yeah, it doesn't know any better. And so this beyond good and evil is an upgrade to that, the idea that we human beings know that we're supposed to be obedient and following these commands and so forth, but we are in rebellion against these commands, and so we are doing bad things, but we're knowingly doing those bad things, and so therefore we are evil. And then, on the basis of that, uh to the extent that we uh um try to conceptualize and rationalize our our willingness to do evil, we just become more and more evil and we get further and further away from God. And then the most extreme versions of that are the strong forms of original sin that say human beings are just thoroughly corrupt and thoroughly evil all of the way through. And uh and so we have this very polarized notion: human beings, everything that they do by themselves is evil, and God is at the other end of the spectrum, and everything that God is is entirely pure and good. So, what evil uh uh Nietzsche wants to do is explode that notion. We have to get beyond entirely that way of thinking about morality. Now, what he then wants to do is not then to say that therefore there is no such thing as good, and there is no such thing as bad, it's that they have been misconceptualized by a certain sort of person. And so this is partly where we get into the psychological and the biological territory. And what Nietzsche does for his genealogical perspective, and you know, the fact that he's studied uh you know so many cultures, modern and ancient and so on, is realize how many different moral codes there are out there. Uh, so this idea that there is one understanding of good and bad, and we all kind of know what that is, Nietzsche does not think that that's true. Just as a historical fact, what is prized as good in some cultures is the exact opposite of what is prized as good in various other cultures. And this includes, you know, killing and lying and how many wives you're allowed to take, right, and so forth. There is no such thing as the good that we all recognize uh and that uh some of us just are in rebellion from. We have these dramatically different understandings of what good and and and the bad are. So this Judeo-Christian uh approach that has a kind of monopoly on Western culture, even in slightly more secularized forms, among which he would name the socialists and most people who are in favor of democracy, but that's a that's a sidebar for later. Uh uh that entire approach is not, in fact, a historical monopoly, but rather just one version of morality that for various reasons has come to dominate Western culture. And so partly his uh his uh his training as a philologist, that is a studier of language and an expert in language, uh, gives him a lot of clues toward this. So he goes back into various ancient languages and says, you know, their uh their pro words or or success words or positive words, and all of the traits that they are prizing, you know, strength and assertiveness and pride and dignity and so on. Yeah, that's right. All of these are the things that are good for them, and all of the things that are bad in that moral vocabulary, like humble or being humble and patient and uh obsequious and obedient and so on, from that perspective, right, uh, all of those traits are quite negative. And so the point is, uh, you know, historically there have been lots of moral cultures that have praised as good the various things that the Jews and the Christians have come to see as bad and therefore labeled as evil. So Nietzsche's question then is uh how is it that this, and he calls it at various points, this more aristocratic moral code, where you are praising hierarchy and strength and assertiveness and the willingness to engage in the martial arts and to conquer and to enjoy your riches, uh, and and in some cases, of course, to uh to think of yourself as uh metaphorically God's gift to humankind and everybody else's dirt beneath your feet? If that has been widespread in human history and so many different cultures around the world, in the ancient Arabs, in the ancient uh samurai, in the Homeric heroes, and so forth, how on earth could this uh moral code that praises humility and washing the feet of beggars and saying, I'm so unworthy, and uh, you know, this willingness to lower yourself and and and prostrate yourself on the on the ground and press your forehead to the dirt uh and be ashamed of your body and feel guilty whenever you want to have sex and so on. How on earth could a moral code like that is so pathetic, uh, uh, have any sort of attraction, not only some sort of attraction, but come to be the dominant moral code in uh in Western civilization? So that's his great question. He calls that the inversion of morality. So this uh this old master aristocratic knightly uh code of morality, uh in contrast to what he then calls a moral code fit for slaves who have to be humble and obedient and and uh and so forth, uh, how is it that this inversion has has occurred? And you see him playing around sometimes with cultural explanations, sometimes with psychological explanations, and sometimes with with uh with uh biological explanations. So if we take a biological explanation, it could just be that uh you know, we look out in in uh in other animal species. And we see on an some animal species are hawks and lions and wolves and their natural predators and only purpose is to be fodder for other animals. And that's right. And other animals are squirrels and rabbits and uh and chipmunks. And that's just the way they are biologically. And so built into nature is this strong versus weak dynamic, and this predatory ethic is going to be natural for the predators, and this uh kind of more fearful and uh stay in the herd, and I hope that the big dangerous beings leave. Um yeah, that that's right. It's going to be now now. What happens then if we just transpose that into human beings? And then say biologically, some human beings are more like predators, and some are more like more like uh like uh like herd animals or or or bunny rabbits.

SPEAKER_00

And and as a metaphor, it's very seductive to think about. But then once it is taken literally, is where the problems start to arise, eh?

SPEAKER_01

Well, of course. Well, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So uh, but then sometimes he's playing around with more psychological uh explanations. Not necessarily biological, but that uh it's just uh uh perhaps all human beings have a certain potential to uh live up to a certain standard of what it is to be a good human being. Just like, say, you know, all baby lion cubs or young lions have a potential as lions to aspire to some level of dignity and majesty as lions. Not all of them are going to be the alphas, but nonetheless, all of them can be a pretty pretty uh healthy and admirable specimen of what it is to be to be a lion. So maybe all human beings have this, but then the question is going to be why some fail to do so. And here you'll find Nietzsche using his moralistic language, where you say, really, it's a failure of cow uh uh of courage. Uh you have the potential there, but you're a little bit afraid, and you let that fear dominate you, and you shouldn't. And so many times this is you'll see this in uh in Zarathustra, but it gets uh fleshed out more in being beyond good and evil. It's uh it's people uh failing to live up to the power or and potential that they have, and it's a it is a moral failing on their part. And the one that he most often signals is uh is a kind of cowardice. So I know that I can you know go out and and and seek women, right? And I really want to go out and seek women. And as a male, my my my my biological urge is to go out and and and and and and and relate to women a certain way, but then I'm afraid, right? What if she says no? Right? What if her friends laugh at me and I let that dominate in me? Well, that's uh that's a betrayal uh uh on my part, right? Or I have this business idea and I could go out and and start, I could quit this crummy job that I'm in, uh, but I I'm afraid, and so I don't do it. And so then I I turn myself into a more corrupt being, and I kind of actually start to hate myself because I know it's my my failure to take the risk, to take the plunge, to go out and pursue my dream. And so I'll pretend that, oh, the world didn't give me a chance, and and then and that all the rich capitalists held me back, but I really know that it's a that it's a that it's a fault of mine. So he plays around a lot with those courage, uh sorry, with those uh psychological explanations as well. And then one other big explanation that he puts out is a is a uh kind of a historical and cultural conditioning uh uh uh explanation that uh you know so he will point out uh in the case of Jews, for example, so if you actually go back into the history of the Jews, they were one of many of many of many tribes kicking around in Middle Eastern Basin.

SPEAKER_00

In ancient Egypt, right?

SPEAKER_01

That's right. And then they ended up becoming slaves under under the Egyptians, and then the question is going to be given that historical circumstance, how do you survive as uh as a slave under more power? How do you keep your your your cultural identity and your cultural traditions together? And so what he argues here is you know the the Jews were biologically and psychologically just like human beings anywhere are, but they were smart about reacting to their existential situation of being slaves and realized, well, if I try to act as a human being as a slave, I'm just going to get killed. And so what I need to do is inculcate patience. And if you know if the master strikes me and beats me, well, I have to kind of shrug it off and forgive and uh and and be humble and be silent and be willing to wait for a long time and to be obedient and so on. So those become survival values in that particular historical context, but then you teach your children those survival values because you want them to grow up, and then it just becomes more conditioned cultural values over.

SPEAKER_00

Because a slave who stands up to his master will not get a chance to reproduce himself into the next line. Yeah, exactly. And then on the other side of the coin as well, the master who is uh weak in answering whatever call to adventure that is required uh will also fail to sort of reproduce his line. And so they sort of converge out separate parts.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely. Nice, nicely put. So in uh uh Beyond Good and Evil, and then more systematically in the three essays of uh of genealogy of morals, you see Nietzsche uh working out these uh these lines. And what I think uh uh my my reading of Nietzsche is that uh ultimately it's the uh the biological explanation that is going to be the deepest with him. That's the one that he returns to uh returns to the uh to the most, particularly in his uh his later works.

SPEAKER_00

That also that explanation you just gave of slave morality, in other words, um I urge people to do in the last podcast, but I'll do it again. In your open college podcast, uh the episode on slave morality is terrific, you know. It really does um I I think, at least for for myself, uh, you know, really help me understand what what he meant by this, because you know, there's so many ways to interpret uh such a like kind of ambiguous metaphor and as you've just fleshed out.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, right. So we have this slave morality that's you know praising forgiveness and and mercy and meekness and and you know the the meek will inherit the earth, which is basically saying just be meek and somebody's going to deliver the goods to you at some point in the distant future, right? And so and be afraid of the big bad world. But that morality he thinks uh is just an expression of a certain psychological type. That uh you know some people are just meek and by nature and afraid of the big bad world. And so it's uh it's a subjective codification or expression of a certain psychological type. But then ultimately he wants to say even that psychological type is uh just an expression of a biological uh state of being, that some people just uh they don't have what it takes. Uh so the so the the mind is an expression of underlying physical things, that they have conflicting and weak drives and so on, and uh uh so ultimately he reduces it to biological inheritance.

SPEAKER_00

And how did Nietzsche explain the how slave morality managed to conquer over master morality in the as as to become the dominant morality of Western civilization? According to Nietzsche, obviously.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's yeah, yeah, that that's a really hard question in in Nietzsche, and I think Nietzsche is still scratching his head about that uh because from his perspective, if you go back to the ancient world, you have the uh you know the Greeks who are magnificent and he admired right the Greeks, and the then uh you know the Greeks are conquered by the Romans, but a lot of Greek culture is absorbed into the Romans, and so you've got this great master culture, the Romans, and the Romans are basically awesome at everything. He loves them, and so on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, right? So uh, and they are the dominant power in the Middle East, and in the Middle East at that time, you know, there's you know dozens, if not hundreds, of little religions kicking around. Uh, and the the the Romans are totally dominating uh them. You know, they could wipe out any of them that they want, and to some extent, you know, the Romans you know, they did their persecutions, but they're by and large tolerant, you know, just revere our gods and do what we tell you, follow the law, and you can you know have your own silly little gods, and we're fine, fine with that as well. So, how could this uh you know, to to to put it bluntly, this obscure, somewhat pathetic, uh semi-organized desert dwellers, a lot of them pretty ill illiterate, with this rather meek moral code, how could they prevail over the Romans? And how could they then not only prevail over the Romans but then sweep all of Europe and then become the dominant the dominant uh moral code in uh in the world? And I don't think Nietzsche has a good explanation for that. By the time we even we get into genealogy of morals, he's still uh diagnosing the uh the historical decline. So he he presents a a kind of historical uh saga. So Rome is great, but then Rome declines, you know, the the emperor converts to Christianity, and then following that the upper classes largely convert to Christianity, and Christianity becomes the uh the dominant uh religion. But then it continues to climb. We get into the the the the dark ages, another uh controversial topic, but there are things really were dark for about five centuries in in Europe. But then we start to get some resurgences of master morality in the Renaissance, uh, and then we have a the reformation as a reaction right against that, but then we do start to see figures uh you know like Frederick the Great and then Napoleon and so on rising up, so a resurgence of master morality. But even so, by the time we get to to the 19th century in uh in in Europe where where Nietzsche is uh reflecting on the culture, uh he sees the people who have the master morality potential in them as still a tiny minor minority surrounded by this uh this field of uh uh mediocrity. So even people, you know, there's a huge religious revival that goes on in in Germany in the early part of the 1800s. So people rejecting modernity and not like all the new science and industry and the whole course of the modern world and be a free agent and go off and seek your own artistic and world adventures. Huge swaths of people saying, no, we don't want any of that. We want to go back into our synagogues and go back into our churches and have the the priests and the ministers tell us what to do. Right. So why on earth is this going on? You have this increasingly rich and free society, but most people don't want it. They want their safe little religion, they want their safe little house where they can uh you know be comfortable and you know have their tea at the end of the day or whatever. They don't want the great adventure. Why the hell is this happening even in the in the 1900s? Even those who are willing to break away from their traditional religious model uh and to become secular and to become naturalistic, Nietzsche is aghast that a huge number of them turn to socialism. You know, from his perspective, you know, this idea, everybody is equal, and we all need to work together, right? And and and and we don't like those rich people uh who've got so much well, that's just you know, smacks of envy and herd morality, right? And and and so on. Uh and you know, and instead of you know the the God and the church looking after you, they just want the government to look after them. Just give me my nice little welfare check, and uh and I'm gonna stay in my herd. And that's the the great socialist ideal. How pathetic is that, right? Nietzsche, Nietzsche is saying, and in even in uh in other uh you know political expressions, the idea that we should be democratic, you know, that we should uh say everybody should be able to run for political office, and everybody should be able to vote on all of these complicated and high matters. Yeah, that's right. Everybody's vote is equal, right? And and everybody's voice should be heard. When it's obvious, particularly from Nietzsche's perspective, that most people are idiots, most people are clueless, right, uh, and most people are just mirrors for other people's opinions about various sorts of things and so on. So he sees the 19th century as dominated by religious revival, by socialism, by democracy, and it's still a big mystery, I think, to him why this is the why this is the case. So uh I think he's increasingly at that point saying, yeah, a lot of people are culturally conditioned to uh to to to to uh to believe those sorts of things. But then the question still for him is going to be uh why would this cultural conditioning work? Right? Because you know, you take a you know you take a baby wolf, and you you can't train a baby wolf to become a house pet. The the wolf is still there. And if if there is some sort of being that you can, through cultural conditioning, train to be a house pet, well, that's something that was basically just fit for being a house pet in the first place. So I think he's uh uh at that point not fully satisfied with this explanation, but I think he wants to say somehow the the slave types, the people who are attracted to religion, attracted to socialism, attracted to democracy, they have just outbred, and this is the the um the uh the biological language coming for uh the the vast majority of people, and then the evolutionary lines that occasionally pop up with someone with their act together and great instinctual energy and vigor and the and then and the chutzpah to to go out and do something, is uh they've uh they're just a minority genetically, uh although the genetics language we can't quite use that yet. That's still a bit anachronistic for Nietzsche's time.

SPEAKER_00

We've done an hour and five minutes, which means I'm afraid that I have probably exhausted all your time. That we pick up uh with a part three where we can do will to power and then how uh Nietzsche's been interpreted after his death.

SPEAKER_01

Maybe we can turn to the the last phase of Nietzsche's.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, what we have to be excited for is obviously the will to power and all of the implications of that, whether it is, you know, the work of a madman or whether it was still written when he was lucid, and then obviously how he's been interpreted since his death. And then finally, something I would love to hear you comment on is you know, what would he think of modernity? Basically, is it the hell that he thought would be the consequence of the death of God? So a lot of interesting stuff. And I have a question that I really want to ask you, but it deserves time, so I won't ask it now. So with that, uh Steven, thank you so much again for giving me your time. I'm very grateful to uh receive it.

SPEAKER_01

A real pleasure, Ryan.

SPEAKER_00

All right, and uh we'll see you in a few months. But 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 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 hawks scene, 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 former self. 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. So Nietzsche always has a reputation for being a powerful writing writer, uh, but he he he upset 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. 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. 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 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 uh 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 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 uh quite a sign of sickness. So uh all of those themes are uh articulated. Uh he revisits a number of his works and uh you know says what was going on in his mind. Some of them are semi-autobiographiographical, uh, 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 his uh his formulations are grandiose, uh, but we might also at the same time say that they are actually quite accurate. We here we are over a century later, and 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. In some cases, there are some innovations in there, his uh his overall philosophy of of life. He's now in his mid forties, he uh uh he is he's mature, he knows he's mature, uh, but then as you point out, he collapses. uh some uh brain problem, brain disease.

SPEAKER_00

And uh at that point he in effect uh descends into psychological the uh vegetative state although he doesn't die for another uh eleven years so how's that amazing um could you comment apart from dionysus maybe some of the other heroes that he is uh making mention of yeah two others and they're both uh Greeks uh one uh is Heraclitus and uh Heraclitus the the the process philosopher as we we come to call him and uh Plato casts him as the 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 to the point where as Heraclitus would say famously it's the the one we all learn in our 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.

SPEAKER_01

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 you know 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 hogness is still is still is still there. So Nietzsche is very much a process philosopher attacking the notions of identity, causality, permanence, essences, and so Heraclitus he sees as accurate but also also brave and then all of those philosophers like Parmenides and Plato who want to say no no no all of the the the the true nature of reality is these permanent essences or these absolutes so things are what they are and they have identities that are real and fixed. And so as a result of that change and particularity are the things that are 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 there are there are these individual things and that they are real that's uh that's just just an illusion. So Plato from Nietzsche's perspective then is one of the villains reality really is process change not these eternal forms and the idea that you want to have this perfect eternal world is a is a flight from from reality. So Heraclitus is uh is one of his heroes. Interestingly also Aristotle gets a plug but it's for a fairly narrow point.

SPEAKER_00

In the Nicomican ethics Aristotle has his portrait of his ideal man the uh the the the magna animus in from in the Latin translation but the Megalosuccia 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 of a man of what we would now call you know 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 you know and liberality and uh you know 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 you know get a 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 the heroes as well meal-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 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 he's very clear that he does not believe in a uh in causality in in cause and effect he doesn't even believe in the concept of identity you know that 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 one 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 chaos as underlying the the structure of reality. So Nietzsche is clearly much more on the flux, anti-identity side of reality and he is going to go hammer and tongs after that. Much of the the the the third part of Will to power is focused exactly on those themes. Now we mentioned Heraclitus a little bit earlier 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 and Hegel is arguing that all of history is going in a certain direction. There are these causal processes 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 it's going to reach a certain endpoint, a certain a certain telos so you know the will uh the the 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 it's all just chaos there's just will but will is blind and seething and contradictory to itself and constantly devouring itself and and so on. So we just have a a kind of a an ongoing chaotic will.

SPEAKER_00

So Nietzsche is much more sympathetic to uh to uh to sympath to Schopenhauer rather in in that duel so it seems like the implications of that flux you said it comes out in will to power um let's introduce it to 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. But I read it the controversies there, yes go ahead. I read it described as best understood as an irrational force found in all individuals that can be channeled towards different ends. So I wonder whether that interpretation maps onto your interpretation at all. And if you could what what's what's the it is it the will to power or the book the will to power the the the will to power yeah and then is this and 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

Yes 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 it's now traditionally organized into four parts and that more or less maps onto I'm going to start talking about the book itself rather than the the content of the the book 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 to the to the 1800s. And then he is starting to suggest 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 new sub angles that are are are emerging here as well and then 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 the final part now all of this Nietzsche worked on for years. These are things that are in his notebooks and after he had published 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 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 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 sometimes having you know 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 toward the end. So I think the status of the book then is um 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 years 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 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 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 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 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 yes well it's kind of an an uh metaphysically he would say it is the 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 for uh over the century so uh but it was the the difference is going to be that it is uh uh semi-intentional right so when we introspect in ourselves and we feel an 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 nature 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 a will you know that I that I want something or I will something and what you do internally putting all of these words in quotation marks is you just I'm going to you know do something right and then some sort of action follows right from that. Whereas in Schopenhauer it is not consistent from moment to moment it has no particular goals 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 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.

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 and and run with it uh but yes uh but part of the danger here is this is where we get into the 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 I'm using this word I and this I then is then I'm trying to pick out a certain entity, a 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 or we might then you know go back to the example of a 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 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 to capture truths about reality. Truth is another word that he thinks we have to have to set aside or to give you formulas right or give you laws of nature or anything like that. 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 and they do have a kind of power on people but he wants them to to just go back to the earlier works he uses this this very rich metaphor of the the philosophizing with a hammer by which he means a kind of hammer that a piano tuner would use. So the 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. 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. And they're going to 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. 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? 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. 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, master slave 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 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 you know, 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 Nasim Taleb and his book anti-fragile. I uh I don't know if he ever directly attributes that idea to uh 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, return. Yeah.

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 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. Penicheus in Nietzsche's eyes because they perpetuated the empty valleys of the herd that he so despised. And perhaps Nietzsche's most chilling 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 that 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 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 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 uh 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.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, even he believes in a in a very real hierarchy between.

SPEAKER_01

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, at 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 expresses in his will to power? Forgive me, you know I've just tried to answer that question too, 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 per pathetic as well. 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 you know, they drive their nice little car to 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, and they're 25 years old when I when I when I don't have to do anything. So this person who then is you know 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, 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 uh 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 you know 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 movements. 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 despise. 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 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 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 the kind of guy, you know, thinking of the stereotype, uh, 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 is 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 was you know diagnose that as uh you know obviously a pseudo uh 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 you know taking whole swathes of other people and saying that they are inferior uh in some particular respect.

SPEAKER_00

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

SPEAKER_01

Yes, that's right. Yeah, 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 advantage.

SPEAKER_00

Whilst hiding behind pseudonymity, not being accountable.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, 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

Nietzsche just wanted us to be individuals. You know, he he respected the individual, and everyone should strive to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01

Well, 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 rebound 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. And 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 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 interpretation, the popularity of Nietzsche these days just comes from his message, which is which is uh it was it was you it was 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 your 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 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 the 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. Uh so uh 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? Well, 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, it's the ambition.

SPEAKER_00

Mr. Hicks, Stephen, uh can't thank you enough, mate. You've been so generous now on three occasions with your time and uh Yeah, 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. Wow, thank you again, Stephen, and thank you to you as well, my dear listener. So, these announcements. I launched a patron today, and I've kept it really simple. The tiers are mates, good mates, and best mates. At the mates level is the price of a coffee per month, good mates is a glass of wine, and then best mates is a round of beers. There isn't exclusive content or anything like that. However, I will reach out to all of the top tier patrons directly, and then over time, as more people join, I will create platforms for us to communicate together on as a community. But for now, the Patreon is just a good gesture of support because I've spent a couple thousand euros and as well as thousands of man hours putting this podcast together to the point where it is at. And despite a few reaching out, I've decided that there are no sponsors so far who've been worth it. So instead, it was time for a Patreon. So you'll see the link for that Patreon at the top of the podcast description. Check it out. I would be thrilled to be able to start expensing coffees and beers to the podcast tab. That would be really, really cool. And as well, my ambition for this podcast. So again, if you're a hundred ed veteran, you've heard this before. I'll see you next week. But if you're new to the podcast, if this is your debut listen, then please I want to explain to you what my hope is to do with this podcast, what my ambition is for the podcast. My ambition is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is that you're listening in from. And unfortunately, within the podcast distributions, there is no sort of genre for eclectic curiosities. It's either education or entertainment or comedy or business or investing or society and culture, but there is an eclectic curiosities. So therefore, it's very difficult to send the right signals into these podcast distributions. They only measure one thing, and that is reviews. So I would ask you all, please, to help me meet my ambition for this podcast to leave the nicest, fattest, healthiest review that you can possibly master. Typically that comes in the in the shape in the form of five stars, and if it allows, Apple Podcast allows, some others do as well, a nice written review as well. So say something nice, leave five stars. That puts as much energy as possible into these various algorithms to now start indexing the curious worldview. And hopefully, maybe one day, I can realize the ambition of cornering the podcast market for eclectic curiosities. Because it is eclectic. We just did three hours on Nietzsche. Next week is going to be uh Christopher Turner, a 25-year veteran at the CIA, talking about cover, deep cover, languages. Really one of my favorite episodes so far. The week after that will be John Perkins, the economic hitman. And then you go back in the library and you'll see there is a lot of different stuff happening. Therefore, the eclectic or eclecticity, I don't know if that's a word, but please leave your nicest, juiciest reviews. If you're keen, jump on that Patreon and buy me a coffee or a beer or a wine. And until next time, thank you so much for listening this far. You're a legend.