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Nietzsche Overdose *UNLOCKED* · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:09
  This. Guys, do you know this is a patron episode? No?
• 0:13
  I did not know that. Oh this is gonna be our second most valuable
• 0:17
  Patrot episode, I think, after the phenomenal what did we do phenomenology spirit?
• 0:22
  Yeah, all right, hey, big spenders, my nips are rock
• 0:26
  had. No, this is gonna be extremely relevant no matter what you study,
• 0:32
  read, think, kept that. Okay, today history's most famous in
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  cell. In fact, he's more successful than all other in cells combined,
• 0:45
  and the best thing to happen to twenty year old's at least until fight Club.
• 0:50
  Do you want us to clap? I am, of course talking about
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  the esteemed source of the quotes. God is dead. When you stare into
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  the abyss, the abyss stares back. And what doesn't kill you makes you
• 1:00
  stronger? A ke Homo, Freed, Nietzsche, friedrichnich Fried, and Niche.
• 1:11
  You may have seen him in television shows as The Sopranos and such movies
• 1:18
  as what was that movie? I said, little miss, little Miss Sunshine,
• 1:22
  which is one of my favorites. And yeah, so, uh,
• 1:26
  what do we have? Not planned this at all? Yeah? Because but
• 1:32
  it's gonna be epic, because I think all of us know because Niets is
• 1:34
  so obvious, it's so obvious to interpret him that we didn't need to prepare.
• 1:38
  Yeah, I also feel it's appropriate to a jump by the way,
• 1:42
  you don't plan things systematically. You just whip out aphorisms one after another,
• 1:47
  throwing a little bit of woman hatred and you know you're good, Yeah,
• 1:49
  throwing some something about how you miss you missed the cast system. Oh yeah,
• 1:55
  of course, can't forget that. Yes, something about waterfall. And
• 2:00
  I guess he wasn't technically an in silk if he died of syphilis. I
• 2:04
  think it's a conspiracy that he died of syphilis and he actually God just destroyed
• 2:08
  his mind because he didn't want Christians to hear what he had to say.
• 2:12
  Well, tragic. What do you think about What do you think about Nietzsche
• 2:15
  being twenty year old's favorite philosopher? Though, I think that that's accurate.
• 2:19
  Yeah, I think he's Yeah, it's like the last ten years of his
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  life. I think a lot of people just read him in when they're twenty
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  and then they get really excited, and then if they're they'll either move on
• 2:29
  and end up following a more pragmatic career or they just move on to like
• 2:31
  other philosophers, or they become Richard Spencer and just stay at Nietzsche. Yeah,
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  he did go back to live with his mother for the last ten years
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  of his life, but then she died. No, I think I can
• 2:44
  understand why, though. I mean, like, if you think about pretty
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  much any of the other major philosophers except for Plato and handful of others,
• 2:50
  reading them isn't exactly a lot of fun, right, I mean, nobody's
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  going to go through the Critique of pure Reason and think like God, I
• 2:54
  feel deeply inspired by this. It's mostly going to be like, what the
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  fuck is this saying? Whereas you read Nietzsche and he almost creates a compact
• 3:00
  with you, saying, you know, my readers have not yet come,
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  and they're gonna be fantastic people. And it's accessible and violent and filled with
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  like stuff that seemed superficially easy to understand, Like I totally get it right,
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  and it covers like a lot of the existential issues twenty year olds deal
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  with right exactly. You can sort of you can tell he's been propped up.
• 3:20
  You guys don't know this about me, but I was an adamant radical,
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  not a radical an Adamant Kantian before I read Nietzsche and then really like
• 3:30
  really had a crisis as a twenty year old. First, Oh yeah,
• 3:36
  I was. I was just eating that ship up, like Critique of Practical
• 3:39
  Reason. I viewed this thing as the Bible as a twenty year old.
• 3:43
  So you can't really trust twenty year olds because they believe everything they read.
• 3:46
  Yeah, but I think it was Twilight of the Idols are the Gay Science
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  that I read, which I have right here actually, but I read that
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  and it just shattered my world. I was like, morality is not real,
• 3:58
  you can't trust. I had an aj Sopran moment. Yeah. Yeah,
• 4:00
  so that was like your gateway drug to post structuralism, because then you
• 4:04
  became like a Derridian a language philosopher guy after that. Yeah, I've had
• 4:10
  my I've had my Nietzsche phase, my heidigraphase, my darra Dea phase.
• 4:14
  We should also be pretty think I feel like we should be a little bit
• 4:15
  more precise to when we talk about twenty year olds, we're really talking about
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  twenty year old men specifically. I think it's a specific Yeah, what did
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  you say in the Spolkes are thirst or the spake there thrister, depending on
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  how you translate it. There's that one woman who says to zero Thurristra like
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  ghost out a woman, make sure you bring a whip. And I found
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  out later on that he wrote the book after his lover of sorts, not
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  even really because she had ditched him. I just dumped him to go off
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  on a vacation with their with their mutual buddy. And I was like,
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  oh, yeah, this is where like the insultent comes out strong. That
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  wasn't Wagner's wife, was it? Well, that was the That was a
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  tragic That's like another tragic thing that so many twenty year old men go through,
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  right, being in the friend zone with some hick that he's hanging out
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  with all the time but doesn't know what she want to be with him.
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  Those are dumped getting friend zoned? Was it lou Salome or well? I
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  read like some article about her where she was describing Nietzsche like years later because
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  she went and became a very successful person herself, right, particularly influenced by
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  psychoanalysis. But somebody used to ask her like, so what was it like
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  spending time with Nietzsche And the sense that you got from her she was like
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  smart guy, but like I was twenty years old and I wanted to go
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  out and have a party and basically engage in like kinky activities across of Europe.
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  And this guy was like, no, we need to stay up,
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  not drink, not do all that. The important thing is to talk about
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  philosophy all the time. Yeah, he was an ascetic. I think no
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  alcohol or drugs. Yeah. Oh, that's like the opposite of Nietzsche.
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  And then lou Salome, when she was way older, became a groomer and
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  started philandering with real Ke the poet. Really Heidegger said he was like the
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  best poet. And this might this is all coming from my memory, so
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  I haven't checked. It might be full of shit, but no, she
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  moved around the intellectual crowds in Germany for sure. Yeah, did you do
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  writing as well, Matt. I'm not sure. Famous, but I'm not
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  sure. Here's in the chat. Here's that famous photo of Luce alaman Nietschen.
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  She's holding a whip for some reason. There you go. She wanted
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  to get kank and he was. He was exactly this is it, and
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  he's looking a little bit after he was in the mountain. Yeah, anyway,
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  he got spurned by her, and then that's why we call him an
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  in cell in jest. Although dying from syphilis, he probably contracted it during
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  the Franco Prussian War, I think is the theory that I heard either died
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  of syphilis or God destroyed his brain the Jersey. I think pretty much for
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  the whole eighteen nineties he was out because his last bit books came out in
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  what like the eighteen eighties, and then he went back to live with his
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  mother, and then his mother died and his sister Elizabeth took over caring for
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  him, and she was like a big anti Semitic like Wagner, so she
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  like basically made his work into what would be taken up by the Nazi Party
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  in national socialism. There's actually a video of Nietzsche in his brain dead state,
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  so it's creepy. It's probably the first philosopher on video. It's just
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  him like ten pounds of mustache and he's just like looking off into the void.
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  The void's probably looking back at him, but we don't know, and
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  he's just, oh my god, he's brain dead. He looks like he
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  looks like someone you just have to like spoon yogurt into his open mouth for
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  the rest of his life. Have you guys heard this other bit of hearsay,
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  and then we'll get to it. But all this hearsay is fun.
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  I don't know if this is true or not. It sounds like American propaganda.
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  But I heard from somewhere sometime along the line that whereas American soldiers carried
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  the Bible or they were all given a Bible as part of their like service
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  kit, meanwhile, the German soldiers were given a copy of the Spake Therethustra.
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  That's a good question. I don't know really. I mean, this
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  sounds like it's like the forces of good against the I feel like we could
• 8:20
  easily verify that by doing a quick Google search. Yeah, that's a little
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  too nice. I almost don't want to know the answer, though, I
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  just want to like believe in this American propaganda, like we're the moral ones
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  and they read Nietzsche a little too nice. Yeah, we had we gave
• 8:35
  our soldiers morphine and they gave their soldiers Nietzsche. And if you get addicted,
• 8:46
  fuck you deal with the boy. But the fact, like just the
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  thought that every German every like Vermoch's German soldier is like thinking of themselves as
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  this triumphing over man conquering the world. The ubermen sh in the name of
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  Nazism, which Nietzsche is associated with because of his bitch sister. But yeah,
• 9:09
  that's an important concept. We'll definitely have to uber mention that one.
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  I'm becoming a dad. It's not really, but I'm practicing. All right,
• 9:22
  Where do we want to start? That's a good question, like we
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  should separate. There's two interpretations here, at least because we're making fun of
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  him for being the twenty year old's favorite philosopher, which is legit because he's
• 9:33
  so accessible. Butcha is multiple But Heideger, like Heidegger's longest book is on
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  Nietzsche, Delz writes on Nietzsche. Fuco's entire method is modeled after Nietzsche's Dairy
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  does into Nietzsche, especially that earlier work on the on the truth and morality,
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  On truth and lying in a non moral sense was a major That's the
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  one where he delivered his truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonomies,
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  and anthropomorphisms. That was a big one. Yeah, His storiography, religious
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  studies, theology, environmentalism, there's an environmentalist Nietzsche, there's a queer should
• 10:13
  start all kind, there's a far right Nietzsche. Here, I'll i'll start,
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  I'll start, reading the beginning of Deluze's book on Nietzsche, the concept
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  of Genealogy. Nietzsche's most general project is the introduction of the concepts of sense
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  and value into philosophy. It is clear that modern philosophy has largely lived off
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  Nietzsche, but not perhaps in the way in which you would have wished.
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  Nietzsche made no secret of the fact that philosophy of sense and values had to
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  be a critique. One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche's work is that Kant
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  had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the
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  problem of critique in terms of values. And what has happened in modern philosophy
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  is that the theory of values has given rise to new conformism and new forms
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  of submission. So for what's he's saying, there's something like like for need
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  for for cont critique is oriented towards what we can know about the world,
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  and truth and morality is just one of those sorts of transcendental truths as if
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  we're operating. Well, when he says values, I don't think he's talking
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  about moral values specifically. Well, it's increat moral values in the slave morality
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  and ethics like that's all sort of tied up in values like what we what
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  we hold dear right, and truth becomes a value in a sense. I
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  think I have a different interpretation. I'm not sure if he means values in
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  terms of morality precisely alone, like that's the subject of the transvaluation of values
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  or whatever. But for him, the notion of values is more generally historical
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  or historicist, I should say, in interpreting history, and that values don't
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  are like everything's of value. There are no facts really, because everything has
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  to be placed in its historical hermeneutic. I think, so everything's interpreted,
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  is Nietzsche's line, whereas Kant's value system is saying there's things that are not
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  interpreted, like there are also no truths separate from human perception. That's another
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  thing. He's a big esthetics guy, aesthetics in the old sense. He's
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  a radical historicist. Well the way I see it, actually, because he
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  sometimes characterize himself as an anti platonist, right and detegrated Christianity is Platonism for
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  the masses. Right. But if one way to interpret Plato, and I
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  think this is the way Nietzsche does, that is Plato has this very interesting
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  theory, which is that all good things, and I mean good colloquially go
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  together. Right. Truth is related to justice, which is related to beauty,
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  which is related to eternity, which is related to God, and all
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  these things can kind of be synthesized together, right, And the course of
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  Western philosophy is essentially been to show that these things don't not only don't go
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  together, but they all might be empty or self justifying. Right. And
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  so the Modernist revolution from Hume onward basically says, well, actually, there's
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  this stark distinction between facts and values, and you might be able to know
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  facts, but value judgments are independent of that, and they're primary based on
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  it's like subjective orientations, affect and so on and so forth. And Nietzsche's
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  total critique seems to be saying that actually, even the notion of truth,
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  now that we've abandoned our platonism, needs to come inder scrutiny. And he
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  actually refers to this kind of platonic language of values as being together. I
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  think to kind of highlight how far we've come from this original idea that all
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  good things are a kind of unity. Yeah, truth, morality, aesthetics,
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  goodness. All of this is a conceit that comes out of history,
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  and a particular history. It's the thesis of the genealogy of morals. So
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  just to give our listeners a I guess a mental template here, Nietzsche has
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  long shit list. Judeo Christianity, if you want to lump those two together,
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  are on the shit list. Liberalism is on the shit list. Any
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  philosophy that is after Plato is on the shit list. Democracy democracy is on
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  the shit list. Social science, and so what's the problem with all this
• 14:20
  stuff? Yeah, Socialism's on the shit list, Yeah, communism, science,
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  everybody except for like Homeric heroes, like Achilles. He likes the Samurai,
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  he likes the Vikings, he likes the Roman, Napoleon, he likes
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  the He likes Napoleon, he likes Homer, and he likes the old Greek
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  tragedies. He liked Wagner, but then he started hating Wagner. But he
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  fell in love with Wagner's wife. So I think I I yeah. I
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  mean it seems like a lot of these critiques come from this place that Nietzsch
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  always wants to invoke this category of like life life affirming, like some sort
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  of instincts for life, some sort of vitality. I don't know, like
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  how would you guys, Like it's it's a bit ambiguous, but that's often
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  what he invokes. He says that these other things, like morality, they're
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  like suppressing like the true instinct for life, or this vitality or this kind
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  of like I guess, ability for the human to achieve a kind of self
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  mastery or and overcoming. That's where the idea of the overman, I think
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  comes from. It is it's a little bit like stoicism and nihilism put together.
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  Like it's a it's a it's acknowledging that suffering is inevitable and we shouldn't
• 15:33
  base our worldview on trying to avoid suffering. And on the other hand,
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  that it's a celebration, a sensual celebration of the sort of living life to
• 15:43
  its fullest. Yeah, I'll talk about like the wild man in that sense,
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  true human instincts. That's why I think twenty year old's like this is
• 15:50
  actually I think the part where like the twenty year olds get attracted to them,
• 15:52
  right, because I think everything we set up to this point it's like
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  maybe not necessarily clear, like well why would twenty year olds like it?
• 15:58
  But it's because of this claim, right, that all these things that you're
• 16:00
  being told are bullshit and they're like hiding and suppressing our true potential to be
• 16:06
  these like self overcoming like fucking awesome, Like I don't know, like like
• 16:11
  alpha alpha males, like alpha male. Don's exactly like three hundred. Every
• 16:15
  Zack Snyder movie is like acting out this impulse to be Nietzschean. Oh yeah,
• 16:23
  twenty year old like that movie three hundred or all these stupid Batman They're
• 16:26
  like, no, this is a movie. It's so gritty, it's dark.
• 16:30
  It's for like real men or even Batman versus Superman, right, I
• 16:33
  mean the whole thing that they go through, and that in this really cheesy
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  way is like what does it mean for a superman to be on Earth?
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  Right? Somebody who's just batter I look at everything than everybody. Nietzsche was
• 16:45
  kind of like an atheist too, Like he gave this voice to atheism,
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  and that's what I felt like a lot of people feel like they when they
• 16:52
  pick up someone like Christopher Hitchens, and they get this sort of secularist worldview
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  that is against religion. Like that was one of the things that attracted me,
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  Like Nietzsche could articulate a worldview that was completely separate, like not even
• 17:06
  when you read German idealism you get the sense that it's just Christianity disguised as
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  philosophy. But when you read Nietzsche, you get the sense that he's really
• 17:15
  trying to articulate something that's completely separate from Christian values and has nothing to do
• 17:21
  with it, and is in many ways against it. And I think one
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  of the distinct things about it is also how he doesn't just historicize a lot
• 17:29
  of value systems, whatever those happened to be, but he also psychologizes them.
• 17:33
  And I think this speaks to Eric's point, right where the only time
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  when he seems to make value judgments, if you even want to call it,
• 17:38
  that are aesthetic judgments about health and sickness, and it's always related back
• 17:44
  to biological metaphors. Right, So he tends to evaluate moral philosophies not in
• 17:49
  the way that we would do it by saying that this philosophy is sick.
• 17:53
  Right, it's a kind of pathology that would be adopted by unhealthy or weak
• 17:57
  people. Right, were unable to deal with the resentment through aggression, so
• 18:03
  they do it by adopting a slave mentality. Right. But incidentally, incidentally,
• 18:08
  he was a very sick man himself too, debilitating this. He was
• 18:15
  ill, he had to quit university, his post, and he went on
• 18:18
  disability. He got a disability pension after he left his university post. Back
• 18:25
  to Eric's point about this, uh, secularism or atheism or it's self proclaimed
• 18:33
  anti Christ. The way the way that we have this like Sam Harris that
• 18:37
  crew, they say, oh, we just don't need God, and then
• 18:40
  like everything's fine, we can just like be moral, rational, intelligent,
• 18:45
  et cetera. As the end, like atheism is just fine. But Nietzsche's
• 18:48
  very good at understanding psychologically, No, atheism is traumatic. Atheism means you
• 18:52
  can only create values. History is not going anywhere. It's this eternal recurrence.
• 18:56
  Everything is only what you mean, and one hundred percent of the responsibility
• 19:00
  for that is on you. So it's not a happy atheism. It's not
• 19:04
  like, oh we got rid of God. The Tyrant is dead. It's
• 19:07
  like, now you're fucking alone on this rock, you little monkey. But
• 19:11
  there is a logic bro. Either is a Nietzsche is not a logic bro.
• 19:17
  He's not saying we don't need theism, we just need reason. He's
• 19:21
  not saying that either, because that's what those that's what like the Hitchins,
• 19:23
  Dawkins, Sam Harris types are like reason logic, right. Nietzsche's not for
• 19:27
  that reason. For Nietzsche comes from the same place that Christianity comes from.
• 19:33
  It has that ascetic self denying core so denying the reason. It's simply objective
• 19:40
  reason. I got to keep my feelings out of it. And for Christianity
• 19:42
  it's more obvious. I think you're exactly right, Eric, And I think
• 19:47
  if you're alive today and he saw the logic Bros. Or the radical skeptics
• 19:52
  or YouTube atheist right, he'd probably find them just as annoying as he found
• 19:56
  people like John Stuart mill right, because his mind that they want to do
• 19:59
  is keep the trappings of Christian culture. It's emphasis on reason, it's emphasis
• 20:03
  on logic, it's emphasis on the moral and value of everybody, or at
• 20:10
  least value, you know, advancing human welfare and they want to just check
• 20:15
  the theology and secularize it. Would say, you can't do that. You
• 20:18
  know, if you say that there's no God and there's no value to human
• 20:22
  life, why the fuck do you think that it's important to actually advance human
• 20:26
  welfare right on what basis do you make that kind of claim? Victor,
• 20:30
  You've been trying to talk. Yeah, I was just gonna say, like,
• 20:33
  so is it the case that there's like a kind of like there is
• 20:37
  a kind of self denial, But I also see it there being actually like
• 20:41
  quite a joyful and hopeful aspect to Nietzsche, which is not so, which
• 20:45
  is that we don't have to deny anymore, like we can just be.
• 20:47
  We can like let loose and uncover these true instincts for life and that like
• 20:55
  only like a true culture with the right kind of values can can reveal.
• 20:57
  So like in some ways, there's like he's he's kind of like I often
• 21:03
  read him as kind of like sneaking in values through like almost an empirical human
• 21:07
  nature claim about like like you know that the human beings are an organism,
• 21:12
  that there is the best there is like a state of the human animal that
• 21:18
  is the exhibitive state of like the best version of a human being and all
• 21:22
  these things that we use to try to suppress and like lie to ourselves and
• 21:26
  have this morality that's supposed to be like reasonable. It's just a way of
• 21:30
  like hiding what we are, which is an instantiation of this like will to
• 21:34
  power or something. This this process, this like mindless, godless process.
• 21:40
  But but like when we try to deny it and lie to us, we
• 21:42
  get sick, right, we get sick. A culture that makes us deny
• 21:47
  this, we become a sick culture. And the goal is supposed to be
• 21:49
  to uncover and let loose this energy, this vitality that is like our true
• 21:55
  instincts for life as an animal. So there's kind of like a so the
• 21:59
  values from this like empirical claim almost of like the what the universe is and
• 22:04
  that the animal has its best version where its instincts are being unleashed, if
• 22:07
  that makes sense. I just want to add to this by saying that I'm
• 22:11
  now picturing like George Batar or michell E Puco in the middle of like some
• 22:14
  hardcore BDSM and like just ramming every kind of thing into every conceivable orifice,
• 22:18
  like covered and like bodily fluids and like they're fucking that person is like is
• 22:23
  it right, and they're like, that's a fucking matter. God is dead.
• 22:26
  Okay, there's no roll, just give in to you. There's a
• 22:30
  joyfulness to it, right, Like that's why the gay science, right,
• 22:33
  like the joyful science. I mean there is like there's like a joyfulness too,
• 22:36
  unleashing. We can let go of this now and we can just be
• 22:37
  ourselves we want. There's a relief. There's a relief now that pictures is
• 22:42
  now, that pictures in all of our heads, so thanks for that.
• 22:47
  He wants us to get there. He wants us to understand that morality and
• 22:51
  values are historical and that truth is well, on the one hand, it's
• 22:56
  a lie, but on it's a useful lie. Yeah, truth is.
• 23:00
  Understand that then we can be gay about it. We can have a gay
• 23:03
  science. We can be cheerful, we can be happy, go lucky.
• 23:07
  And this is in a way like the noble values, right, as opposed
• 23:11
  to the slave values. The nobles are happy, go lucky. They live
• 23:14
  in the moment. They don't sacrifice the now to the future. Well,
• 23:18
  yeah, they don't sacrifice the future to the now I think they just go
• 23:23
  for it gay homo. I think that actually points to another really interesting feature
• 23:29
  of Nietzche's work that you don't actually see in many philosophers, although you do
• 23:32
  see it all the time and a lot of the authors that Nietzsche was influenced,
• 23:37
  like people like Dostoevsky, And it's also President Heideger, which is that
• 23:40
  Nietzsche is a moody motherfucker. Right. Some days he writes up and he's
• 23:44
  talking about the joyful science or the gay science, and how it is that
• 23:48
  now that we're liberated from God, we can allow our instincts to take over
• 23:52
  without needing to fall into resentment and pathological dissociation like we did before. But
• 23:56
  the other days he wakes up and it's exactly the way Victor describes. He
• 24:00
  feels nihilistic, and he feels upset, and he says, you know,
• 24:03
  there's no meaning to anything, And this is captured in Thus books are thirsty,
• 24:07
  I think, very nicely, because their thirstry basically goes on all these
• 24:10
  weird odyssees and yiatchs. It must have been one of the very first philosophers
• 24:14
  in the Western tradition that I can think of at least who really takes the
• 24:17
  idea of mood seriously, you know what I mean? He says, you
• 24:19
  know, every other philosopher likes to characterize is this way or that way,
• 24:23
  when really, you know, we have multitudes within us, as Walt Whitman
• 24:26
  would say, right, you know, some days I want to go destroy
• 24:30
  things. Other days I want to be a pleasant person and get along with
• 24:33
  others. Other days I just feel like shit and I want to like say,
• 24:37
  get the fuck away, and I want the world to leave me alone.
• 24:38
  Right, There's a good case to be made that he was like severely
• 24:44
  manic depressive, because you can see his mania and his depression both in his
• 24:48
  work. And then there's like the book Eka Homo, and all the chapter
• 24:51
  titles are like why I am so wise? Why I write such good books?
• 24:56
  Why? His first interpreters, his first interpret took him more as like
• 25:02
  a stance, an attitude, or a disposition, rather than a philosopher too.
• 25:07
  His first like the modernists, because Ze Nietzsche died in nineteen hundred and
• 25:11
  that's the big that's sort of you're into modernism now, they read him as
• 25:15
  an attitude. They didn't look at him as a philosopher, and he was
• 25:18
  one of those philosophers who well he wrote poetically, right, there's an aesthetic
• 25:22
  pleasure to just reading his books. It's not like Kant, where it's very
• 25:26
  dry and very logical and everything is sort of constructed in this nice, neat
• 25:33
  way. No way, he's poetic. He's outrageous, funny. He's like,
• 25:37
  one second he's like tickling your balls, the next second he's kicking you
• 25:41
  in the teeth. It's it's it's kind of a ride just reading him,
• 25:45
  and he really like reproduces what he wants to get in that esthetic experience of
• 25:51
  just reading this sort of beautiful, weird philosophy and this aphoristic style that was
• 25:56
  not taken seriously at the time. First interesting stuff. Just just to give
• 26:03
  an example, because we're talking about his aphorisms. I just this is at
• 26:07
  random. I opened it up. But it's a nice punctuation. What matters
• 26:11
  is whether I am acknowledged to be right. I am much too right.
• 26:15
  And he who laughs best today will also laugh last. Yeah, that's fine,
• 26:22
  there you go. Laughter is a big thing in his but every book
• 26:26
  there's something about laughter in it, and it's some kind of abstract laughter like
• 26:30
  the I don't know the fate's laughing at us. I think it's like an
• 26:33
  absurdist sort of laughter. It's not like it's like the laughter and rap videos
• 26:37
  when they start and they're like, nothing funny happened. It's just like I'm
• 26:42
  so confident and rich that I just laugh. I think you laugh in the
• 26:45
  face of fate would be a big thing for him. He's a he's very
• 26:48
  fatalistic, but he embraces it. He tries to get us to embrace the
• 26:53
  slings and arrows, right. He doesn't want us to sort of get into
• 26:56
  this Christian mode of thinking where like, if I just endure this, everything
• 27:00
  will be better, the judgment, they'll I'll have eternity and all the wealth
• 27:04
  and riches in heaven. Like he thinks that that's a cop out, and
• 27:07
  you're not living your life if you're if you're thinking of the world is fallen
• 27:12
  and disastrous and the shadow of the Valley of Death type approach to life's kind
• 27:18
  of refreshing though, and again I think testifies to his appeal to particularly young
• 27:22
  people, right, because when you read a lot of these philosophers, they
• 27:26
  don't write like people and the sense of being a complete human alter human being,
• 27:30
  right, you know, can't kind of rich sits there and he's like,
• 27:33
  these are my thoughts about the subject matter. Here's counter argument ABC No.
• 27:38
  Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are like, here's proposition one scolium blah blah blah
• 27:44
  blah. And if you read d you do get kind of a sense,
• 27:45
  like if you read Kirk of Guard, or for that matter, if you
• 27:48
  read Tolstoy or Dostiski or whoever happens to be that you kind of get a
• 27:52
  sense for his personality, right, Like you can almost imagine what it'd be
• 27:55
  like if you were at a bar anywhere to walk in and sit down and
• 27:57
  be like, I'm not owning any drinks. You shouldn't either, and be
• 28:00
  like fuck off brow And then you'd have like a long conversation with him,
• 28:03
  and you never know which Nietzsche you were gonna get, because maybe he'd storm
• 28:07
  in and be like, I had a fantastic day to day, you know,
• 28:10
  I have climbed mountains that none of before, or maybe he'd really depressed,
• 28:14
  and I think that's refreshing, right, Like you kind of get a
• 28:15
  sense for who he was as a person. I think he would be a
• 28:18
  nightmare to actually be friends with. Though probably he's angsty as fuck probably and
• 28:25
  arrogant megalomaniac as fuck. No, arrogant is fuck yeah, yep, talent
• 28:29
  for making friends into enemies, right, Like, there's no doubt about it.
• 28:32
  I think he I think he wrote. I think maybe he kind of
• 28:34
  wrote in a way. I was just thinking about this when you were talking,
• 28:37
  Matt, like like maybe he like the style of writing is almost maybe
• 28:41
  analogous to the way he thinks you should like live life that what like a
• 28:45
  true life is where it's like the contient way of writing. It's like,
• 28:48
  so, I was going to make a comment before, but how I think
• 28:49
  another thing at play in his sort of like ontology is this this relationship he
• 28:55
  has to like distance to the way things keep you away from your true instincts
• 28:59
  for life, and one of those is the way like science it like trust
• 29:02
  to formalize things and like to divide things up. And he's like, now
• 29:06
  you're like distanced from the thing. You're not like united. There's like this
• 29:08
  whole thing where there's also supposed to be a relationship. There's like an like
• 29:11
  when you're in the world, you have like this horizon of meaning that's only
• 29:15
  possible when you're like engaged in the world and in touch with like your instincts.
• 29:19
  And I think I wonder if to some extent, like the style of
• 29:22
  writing speaks to the way he thinks your life should be experienced as this,
• 29:26
  like this vitality, this this like this ride of like of eruptions of emotion
• 29:33
  and feeling, and it's like these other formalistic ways they're just keeping you from
• 29:36
  that truth of like what human life should be. No, I think if
• 29:40
  you look at the kind of authors that he admired, right, dosty Eskui,
• 29:44
  Voltaire, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, right, I mean, all of them
• 29:48
  have that kind of vitality to their writing. Uh, and you know,
• 29:52
  express a kind of panoramic vision of the human personality that's less judgmental, shall
• 29:56
  we say, people's idiosyncresies, or they're fairly to live up to their own
• 30:00
  standards, no more willing to take dollars, the hypocrisies and so on.
• 30:04
  And maybe in some senses we could say that a lot of his philosophy or
• 30:08
  the way that he wrote as an attempt to react against this, because there
• 30:12
  was nobody who was better at put downs than Neetsche, Right. I remember
• 30:15
  he was talking about Hegel. I think it was in one of his pieces
• 30:19
  on Vagner where he was talking about the birth of tragedy. And he said,
• 30:22
  my earlier books to me read as offensively Hegelian. And when I say
• 30:26
  offensively Hegelian, I mean the rowt of it just like comes up into my
• 30:30
  nose and the stench of it like makes me feel sick to my stomach.
• 30:34
  And you're just like, man, he clearly wrote that, just like sitting
• 30:37
  down, He's like, this is a perfect chance just to get like a
• 30:41
  fucking sick dig at Hegel because you know Hegel and body is exactly this also
• 30:45
  a rationalistic method, and he means the dialectic too, is thinking was too
• 30:49
  dialectical, which if you go back to one of our earlier episodes you can
• 30:53
  learn all about that. Yeah, But I mean if you look at the
• 30:56
  figures that he admired, right, that's the point. You know. He
• 30:59
  doesn't like people who sit there and try to rationalize or dissociate themselves from their
• 31:06
  own vitalist vital impulses, right, even when they're they push people in different
• 31:11
  direction, right, And I think there's a kind of virtue for that also
• 31:15
  right, because you do get a more complete vision of the uglier sides of
• 31:18
  human beings as well as the more noble sides in his work, that's the
• 31:22
  core of asceticism is self denial. You deny yourself, these pleasures you deny,
• 31:29
  Like, what does it mean to be ascetic? It kind of means
• 31:33
  like it means like this is his bad kind of morality is the ascetic kind
• 31:37
  of morality. But he was a he was an asthetic. I think it
• 31:41
  matters why you are doing that action, not what you're doing. Right,
• 31:48
  But like the noble and the ascetic are a kind of opposite in his work,
• 31:52
  Like the noble kind of you just kind of do what you want.
• 31:56
  He talks about nobility as as like good and bad, and good is you
• 32:05
  know, like going out and conquering somebody and bringing back a whole load of
• 32:07
  treasure and booty and slaves and whatever, and bad is just derivative of that.
• 32:14
  You don't you fail to do that, whereas the other kind of morality,
• 32:17
  that ascetic morality, where the good is being weak. But yeah,
• 32:24
  he was an asthetic in his life, as like not drinking and all this
• 32:29
  stuff and not taking medicine for his headaches. But what he hates is that
• 32:35
  the ascetic moralizes to everybody else and says, you have to give up everything
• 32:38
  good too, like Christianity is the worst offender. You have to give up
• 32:44
  sexy, and you have to be married, you have to follow all these
• 32:45
  institutions, but you have to do it to yourself and then enjoy it.
• 32:50
  And to him, this is just like really disgusting that you're compelled to follow
• 32:55
  these rules that make your life worse and then be celebrate for that. You're
• 33:00
  celebrating mediocrity because you're a wimp. Also, I think that his form of
• 33:06
  asceticism rights those things that he's denying himself, alcohol, medicine. It makes
• 33:10
  sense because those are things that are interfering with, like with the inner vitality
• 33:15
  that he has as a human being. So like to me, it makes
• 33:16
  sense that he'd be like, don't do those things, just like the way
• 33:19
  Christianity masks the truth of like the human, the vital human. It's like
• 33:25
  also, I could imagine him saying alcohol and medicine does the same thing.
• 33:30
  I think actually has a really Freudian insight. Just rip off the pills for
• 33:32
  a second. He often claims that when people pathologically try to dissociate from their
• 33:38
  seemingly baser instincts, they're not actually going to disappear. They're just going to
• 33:45
  take on a new and more idolatrous form. Right, And I think one
• 33:47
  of the most pregnant passages in his entire work when he's analyzing Tartulli in Whose
• 33:52
  Christian State, and Tartullian describes how it is that after a life of sitting
• 33:58
  there living in a world of sin where bad people seem to get ahead,
• 34:01
  denying yourself all your pleasures, one of the great joys that's going to exist
• 34:06
  in heaven is all the righteous are going to live with God and they're gonna
• 34:09
  be able to stare down into hell and enjoy the suffering of the people in
• 34:15
  the hell, which is probably gonn include a lot of the people who marked
• 34:17
  the Christians in real life, right, and know that justice has been done.
• 34:22
  And you know, Nietscha points to this and says, well, there
• 34:23
  you go. This is what your love and compassion and dissociating from your base
• 34:29
  or instincts does to you. They're not gone, You've now just projected them
• 34:31
  into a cosmology and said that God is now going to punish people for you,
• 34:37
  and you're gonna sit there and be able to take satisfaction from knowing that
• 34:39
  their suffering is going to be a journal. And it's a pretty interesting insight,
• 34:44
  right, Yeah, that's it. It's based in h It's based in
• 34:50
  he calls it. He says things like, well, it's translated as rancor
• 34:53
  or vitriol, like the slave ethic is based on hating, basically, like
• 34:59
  the haters. That's what he basically thinks. The entire Judeo Christian tradition is
• 35:07
  Hannah Swift was the best eaching in the world. Down with their whole like
• 35:09
  hater's gonna hate hate, hate, hate, hate, you know, because
• 35:13
  like you're you're like, let's pretend we are the aristocracy and we are subduing
• 35:19
  these people. And eventually this priestly class breaks off from us and goes to
• 35:24
  the people and starts to convince them like, hey, isn't what they're doing
• 35:29
  kind of wrong? Isn't what they're doing like, isn't their strength and their
• 35:32
  dominance over you kind of an evil thing? And he is this sort of
• 35:37
  example of like the hawk comes and takes the lamb and the and the Lambs
• 35:44
  think the hawk is evil because the hawk, and he says, no,
• 35:47
  the hawk is just being the hawk. But the slave morality is about making
• 35:52
  this whole hateful cosmology of why your your your enemies are bad and you are
• 35:59
  good good because you're weak and you don't hurt other people and you're just meek
• 36:04
  and humble, and that's like, that's his whole thing. And really all
• 36:08
  of that sort of Christian goodness is disguised vitriol. For I mean, this
• 36:15
  is him, not me. I'm sounding passionate, but that's what he said,
• 36:19
  Like the whole Judeo Christian tradition is based on hatred and wanting to see
• 36:24
  the other people we're talking about like the blessed of the meek, for they
• 36:27
  showing her at the earth. So now the week instead of just being weak,
• 36:30
  little little like losers, now they're the blessed. Now they have their
• 36:36
  reward coming to them. And he was not. He was extremely I mean,
• 36:39
  he speaks against it because he thinks that this version has taken over.
• 36:43
  But he said this invention, like this Christian or Judeo Christian invention was the
• 36:47
  most impressive example of will to power in history because the Week actually took over
• 36:55
  the entire world, which is exactly the opposite of what you'd say, expect.
• 37:00
  I mean, in the Antichrist, he used he says, and I
• 37:01
  think this is a remarkable quote, right, that Jesus was the only foe
• 37:06
  who was actually worthy of him, which is pretty impressive when you think of
• 37:08
  the fact that Nietzsche did not like a lot of people. Right. But
• 37:12
  he did also really argue that you want good enemies or powerful enemies, since
• 37:16
  it's only by testing yourself against them that you can become stronger. And I
• 37:19
  think his admiration for Jesus, if you want to call it, that is
• 37:22
  precisely because of what you're talking about, Right, Jesus had a message,
• 37:25
  he was killed, and yet despite the fact that he was killed and everyone
• 37:28
  thought he's gone, billions of people rose up in his name, and the
• 37:32
  Week overcame the strong fer a time. And he has this remarkable passage somewhere
• 37:37
  I think I might have been in Antichrist, but I'm not sure where he
• 37:38
  talks about pity in the kind of way that Eric was describing. Right where
• 37:43
  he said, think about how good it feels to pity someone else? Right,
• 37:46
  you can sit there and not only do you feel morally superior, but
• 37:50
  you can also sit there and think, thank god, I'm not them.
• 37:52
  Right. Not only am I better for them because I feel bad for them,
• 37:57
  but I'm also not them, and that demonstrates my own superior already.
• 38:00
  Right. And he says, when you think about this, this goes to
• 38:02
  show you just how the life denying instinct of Christianity was able to create all
• 38:07
  of these weird pathological propensities, right, And sometimes he almost seems to admire
• 38:13
  them. I mean, he has this amazing comment and the genealogy of Gnarls
• 38:15
  where he says, yeah, Christianity fucked a lot of people up by giving
• 38:19
  them all these weird pathologies, but these mythologies also deepen the human soul,
• 38:23
  right, because now we have to deal with all these neuroses about guilt and
• 38:28
  pity and do I actually genuinely feel bad for this person? And you know,
• 38:32
  you can look at a Dostolevsky novel and there's all kinds of interesting things
• 38:37
  in there, and that's the reason why, right, And like you gotta,
• 38:43
  we're saying that Nietzsche is against juday of Christianity, and I think we
• 38:45
  should qualify that because yeah, he's got nothing but good things to say for
• 38:51
  Jesus, because Jesus was like one hundred percent committed to his cause until death,
• 38:55
  and that's an admirable quality. What he really hates are the priests.
• 39:00
  He also speaks his other hero is King David from the Old Testament because are
• 39:05
  the what's the right word for that Hebrew Bible anyway, but King David was
• 39:09
  a warrior and a poet, so he's like the most beautiful person in history
• 39:13
  because he's an artist and like a conqueror. So he's not like opposed to
• 39:17
  the whole tradition. He's really opposed to the priests and what priests do with
• 39:22
  it and how priests like manage people, and as Eric was saying, they
• 39:28
  sow this discontent, this discontentment. Yeah, I think I think, well,
• 39:32
  I think what's interesting is I is the way the way like he talks
• 39:38
  about how the like Christianity is an expression of will to power, right,
• 39:42
  So like that's kind of interesting because he condemns like the way it's directed,
• 39:47
  but he also in other places values the will to power as being like the
• 39:52
  guide to the truth. So there's like almost it almost seems like there's like
• 39:53
  a contradiction between, well, Christianity is an expression of the world to power,
• 39:58
  then you should like it because it's the will to power like expressing itself.
• 40:00
  But you're saying that that's like a worse will to power than the will
• 40:04
  to power that I guess it's like so I don't know if anyone wanted to
• 40:07
  like pick up on that, right. So he'll never say like this is
• 40:12
  bad, Christianity is bad. He will just say I don't like Christianity.
• 40:15
  He's an iconoclast, and he's saying, like, we lost this beautiful Greek
• 40:20
  world where of tragedy and heroes because of these like weak people took over.
• 40:24
  But he respects that it took over, right, He's he's, he's but
• 40:29
  he does make but he does make like value claims about like like the you
• 40:31
  know, the vitality of the organism of the human that like Christianity by and
• 40:36
  large is like somehow like doing even though it is an expression of will to
• 40:39
  power, it's also somehow suppressing some aspect of of of of the human animal.
• 40:45
  That that he doesn't seem to like. Hill says this, and he
• 40:47
  doesn't say Christianity's bad. In the moral sense, right, since of course
• 40:51
  we're supposed to let beyond good and evil. But there are other passages where
• 40:53
  he does say, particularly in the Genealogy Morals, that look, we have
• 40:57
  to look at his Christianity from historical stamp point and recognized not just that it's
• 41:01
  admirable in some sense because the week overcame the strong, but again because the
• 41:06
  contributions of Christianity and it's best deepened the human psyche or the human soul,
• 41:10
  right by forcing it to deal with problems and inclinations that weren't explicit before.
• 41:17
  Right. And now we're in a crisis because sometimes he almost seems to write
• 41:22
  and this goes to show you to the moody Disuvenetzsche like we've fallen from an
• 41:25
  authentic Christian impulse where people really had to wrestle with these problems back in the
• 41:30
  days of Christ. And now what we get is watered down Christianity aled democracy
• 41:35
  and socialism and Kantianism, right, where people just want, you know,
• 41:38
  to be Christian without having to buy into all the kind of hard, difficult
• 41:43
  stuff about God that people had to deal with back in the ancient world.
• 41:47
  Well, he was a great he was a very great admirer of Saint Augustine,
• 41:52
  and I think he said something like Augustine was the first psychologist. I
• 41:54
  might be I'm misremembering that, But no, he's not against christian He's against
• 42:00
  again, I mean, like thoughtful Christianity. He's against this rule herd Christianity.
• 42:07
  Yeah. Well, he does have some pretty harsh things to say in
• 42:10
  the Genealogy of Morality, Like he does say that Jesus was basically like a
• 42:16
  trap planned by the Jews to get everyone onto their side. He does say
• 42:22
  He does say that in the first essay, and he also clarifies in the
• 42:27
  first essay because the first essay is called of good and Bad and good and
• 42:30
  evil, and good and evil is what he's trying to get. Beyond good
• 42:36
  and bad is what the aristocratic nobility class had. Bad was derivative of good.
• 42:42
  But in beyond good and evil, the good and evil part is the
• 42:45
  Christian morality because evil is derivative of good. Right, because everything that's good
• 42:52
  for the aristocrats becomes evil for the Christians and well for the priestly class.
• 42:59
  And the Jews invent Christianity in order to get everybody on their side and give
• 43:05
  this sort of he calls it a trap. Really, he just said like
• 43:07
  he respects it all, Like this is that placating move right, Like even
• 43:10
  when we read Walter Benjamine where like the Death of the Aura, he really
• 43:15
  respects the aura and stuff, but he never really says that. He just
• 43:17
  says, this is what's happening. It's failing, it's fading away. And
• 43:22
  really Christianity is like an extension of Judaism, and it was this symbol of
• 43:28
  the cross, this monstrous concept of a dead God was a powerful symbol that
• 43:35
  they use because the priests of class is one, there's no worse enemies to
• 43:38
  have than the priests. They are the biggest haters in history. And they
• 43:43
  are also craftier than the nobility. So their hatred they're nursing their wounds,
• 43:49
  will always win out over the cheerful, happy, go lucky gay nobility.
• 43:53
  Right who whoo. They respect their enemies, they respect bad things and respect
• 44:00
  act is already a bridge to love. But the Christians they hate and they
• 44:04
  disguise it as love. And that's the difference. He has amazing passions though
• 44:07
  about Jesus right and Christianity, says, think of how powerful this gesture was
• 44:10
  because if you think about the Greek world, the gods occasionally did suffer in
• 44:15
  the Greek world, but they were immortal and kind of operating an eternal realm
• 44:19
  beyond human suffering. Right, Whereas what the Christian myth did so poignantly is
• 44:24
  precisely it kind of made God into a loser. Right. You know,
• 44:28
  if you think about the story of Us, Jesus is a loser, right.
• 44:30
  You know, he's born, he preaches, he gets a few followers,
• 44:34
  then the Romans turn him in. Everyone decides that they don't like Jesus
• 44:37
  anymore since the authority has said that he's failed. Then he gets crucified,
• 44:42
  and there's only a few people who bother to go to his funeral. Right.
• 44:45
  And the accomplishment historically of Christianity in some senses is by recognizing that this
• 44:50
  guy, even though he is a loser, is a powerful symbol to all
• 44:53
  the weak everywhere, right, because it says that eventually he will rise again,
• 44:58
  and he will inherit the earth, and so too will you. And
• 45:00
  any number of Greek philosophers would look at that and be bewildered by this,
• 45:05
  because they'd be like, well, this isn't a powerful symbol it doesn't have
• 45:07
  a kind of noble bearing to it. But for you know, the millions
• 45:10
  of disenfranchised people across the globe, obviously that's not what they're looking for,
• 45:14
  since a life of nobility is so far removed from them. And yet this
• 45:17
  big year, you know, it looks an acts exactly like them. Right,
• 45:22
  And this thing about poisoning values, I just want to explain in case
• 45:24
  any of our listeners are not with us here, but in Christianity, you
• 45:29
  can just look at what are the sins gluttony, avarice, pride, and
• 45:35
  these are values for the aristocracy because you're not You're pride is just, you
• 45:39
  know, I'm stronger than everybody else, and I know that Gluttony is just
• 45:44
  you have enough food to eat and no one else does, and the priests
• 45:47
  want you to share it. Avarice is like, you're you're greedy. But
• 45:52
  if you're if you were the you know, king on the hill, why
• 45:55
  should you not be greedy? You won, you're winning. So this turning
• 46:00
  of all aristocratic goodness, you know, greed, avarice, now it becomes
• 46:06
  a sin to be those things. And yeah, that's his objection. Yeah,
• 46:10
  also less you know, it's worthic, you know, because yeah,
• 46:14
  you can't get laid, No one can get laid. Now, Yeah,
• 46:17
  I think that's exactly right. It's really difficult to actually hind down what he
• 46:22
  has to say on any given matter canonically, I think for exactly this reason.
• 46:25
  Right. You know, Nietzsche's not a dialectician, like you know I
• 46:29
  said. He seems to have this kind of idea that Hegelianism is wayfish and
• 46:34
  kind of cuckle the cuckish, and you know, everybody's trying to have everything
• 46:37
  both ways, right, But he does seem to seem to say things like
• 46:40
  Wow. On the one hand, you know, I'm offended by this because
• 46:45
  it doesn't have a kind of normal aura to it. On the other hand,
• 46:47
  you do have to admire the fact that these people came to inherit the
• 46:52
  earth and they were able to overcome the strong, despite the fact that the
• 46:54
  strong by definition are stronger than the weak. Right, Nisianism is epic and
• 47:01
  the rest of it is cuted. So why don't we shift here and talk
• 47:04
  a little bit about how did he influence philosophy so strongly? And we can
• 47:09
  talk about people like Freud or Fucaut. Heidegger obviously wrote his longest book on
• 47:17
  Nietzsche. How does this get applied? Richard Spencer existentialism too, existentialism,
• 47:25
  Yeah, we have this, like, how did his method and specifically his
• 47:30
  historicity saying everything is in history and history is not going anywhere? How did
• 47:35
  that play out in the twentieth century? So he's also lumped in with Marx
• 47:39
  and Freud in this Hermoneuticts of suspicion, Like, these guys are the inventors
• 47:45
  of hermanuticts of suspicion, which is essentially like an academic way of saying,
• 47:50
  don't take things at face value. That's one of those things, right,
• 47:53
  like goodness as a moral virtue is something that we should be suspicious of because
• 47:59
  you're saying, well, what is goodness good for? Who does it work
• 48:02
  for? And we have to look at it historically and do this sort of
• 48:07
  genealogical approach. Right, where did it come from? It came from the
• 48:10
  ancient world and was passed down through all the transformations we've been talking about,
• 48:15
  where originally it referred to class, and then it came to refer to something
• 48:21
  more like like being good is something about being weak and being dominated, and
• 48:29
  then it came to be completely detached from its historical point and it became something
• 48:36
  metaphysical, and he doesn't like that because metaphysics kind of spells this detachment from
• 48:42
  reality for him. Yeah, I know, I think that's exactly right.
• 48:45
  I mean, I don't think I could really put it better, right,
• 48:47
  this notion that morality and value systems aren't eternal and they don't exist in some
• 48:53
  kind of metaphysical heaven the way that played a conceived of them, but they're
• 48:57
  embedded into life practices and the kind of down history of nat kind. It
• 49:01
  actually seem I think that kind of common sensical to us now, so so
• 49:05
  many people have internalized this idea, right, But at the time, certainly
• 49:08
  in the nineteenth century, this is a radical notion. Right, What do
• 49:12
  you mean that our values don't come from heaven, or they're not eternal,
• 49:15
  or they're not universally valued, and they're still we're still in the midst of
• 49:19
  these kind of debates today, right, So I would say, yeah that
• 49:21
  I think that that's a good place to to flag the influence that Nietzsche had
• 49:27
  on existentialism, right, because I think he I think existentialism kind of takes
• 49:30
  that claim and runs with it. Right that like, okay, like values
• 49:34
  aren't like divined from above, right, and in some ways like we kind
• 49:37
  of have to figure them out on our own. We have to we have
• 49:39
  to like and of course, Nietzsche had something different than what a lot of
• 49:43
  the existentialists had in mind, which is that you know, there's going to
• 49:45
  be some u, these great philosophers of the future who are going to come
• 49:50
  and like determine these great values for everybody. But I think existentialism is sort
• 49:52
  of picked up on that idea and and said, you know, we have
• 49:55
  to figure these things out on our on our own, and make the values
• 49:59
  that make sense for us. Sartra, you know, the Marxist revolution will
• 50:02
  say that, and and like and also like the anxiety of life and like
• 50:06
  that we're not going to have anybody who hold our hand that like life is
• 50:08
  like a difficult and a contingent and a and imbued with specificities that we can't
• 50:15
  subsume under some moral system. Existentialism, I think is picking up on that
• 50:19
  and saying we have to like live in that and be okay with you.
• 50:22
  Yeah, I think we mentioned it before, But the mantra of existentialism is
• 50:28
  existence precedes essence, right, And for Nietzsche, there is no sort of
• 50:35
  neutral subject behind the actions when we act, when we do things, when
• 50:38
  we think things. And even this is he actually links this to science too.
• 50:44
  He'll say, He'll say, like, it's energy that moves things,
• 50:47
  and he says, no, there's no distinction between the energy that moves things
• 50:51
  and the thing being moved, just like there's no neutral agent behind the willing
• 50:55
  or the doing right, like to do is to be. It's the same
• 51:00
  thing for Nietzsche. I always found he's a little bit problematic though, because
• 51:04
  that almost seems like metaphysics. Though. I mean, I think this is
• 51:07
  where we get into an escape of the problem with him, right, which
• 51:08
  is that if you say I have a post metaphysical philosopher, but then you
• 51:13
  say ultimately all existences, energy are all existence as well to power, It's
• 51:17
  like, wow, it's hard to think about more grandiose metaphysical statement than that,
• 51:22
  right, metaphysics for sure, he's saying, he's saying science he's a
• 51:25
  philologist, right, So he's saying when science talks this way, they are
• 51:29
  a dupe of linguistic habits. That's what he's going to say. We are
• 51:32
  treating the grammatical subject as something metaphysical and real and behind existence. But he's
• 51:39
  saying these are He's a philologist, right, and all through his works he's
• 51:44
  tracing terms back to their origin. He's bringing up what is good in French,
• 51:47
  what is good in this language, what is good in that language?
• 51:51
  Then they all have this common sort of root in class consciousness, right,
• 51:54
  the good the good are the upper class and the bad or the common class.
• 51:59
  But they make that, they reverse that, they turn that around.
• 52:02
  So for him, like doing and the subject of the doing, if we
• 52:07
  regard the subject of the doing as something separate from the doing, then what
• 52:12
  we're doing is we're falling prey to our language habits. Basically, we're reifying,
• 52:17
  we're hyposthesizing all those fancy words. But that's the I think that's the
• 52:22
  thrust of existentialism, is that you exist and you do things before essences emerge,
• 52:29
  before things are what they are, they just have to be for a
• 52:31
  little while. You know. One of my favorite quotes of all time by
• 52:35
  him is we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in
• 52:38
  grammar. Yeah, like holds the rest of the world together that we still
• 52:45
  believe in. And then yeah, yeah, his attention to language is actually
• 52:51
  quite surprising when you look at it and look at how many of his arguments
• 52:54
  are grounded in language. Right, And this is one of the really influential
• 53:00
  things about him. You're gonna see this comeback in Hideger in a big way,
• 53:04
  taking words and then looking at their Greek origins. So what is presence
• 53:09
  for Heidieger, Presence is perusia. Where does that come from? That comes
• 53:13
  from the Greek metaphysical tradition, right, Like, this is a huge thing,
• 53:17
  and we get into this sort of language determines reality kind of arguments.
• 53:23
  But what Nietzsche and Heideger and some of those guys are trying to do is
• 53:28
  is weird. Like it's strange. It's using etymologies and philology in order to
• 53:35
  like sort of explode the taken for grantedness of these terms. We use truth
• 53:40
  and the subject and what is good and bad? And he's using the philological
• 53:45
  argument like in a way almost like more than we probably should be, because
• 53:51
  like maybe maybe words and etymologies don't make that good at the basis They're not
• 53:57
  so good at the basis of our arguments. But and this is called historicism,
• 54:01
  right, And it's turned into what's called an archaeology of knowledge by Fuco.
• 54:07
  Fuco, I think grounds a little bit more in practice than just language,
• 54:10
  as a Nietzsche does. But for instance, Heidegger and dered A following
• 54:15
  Heideger adopt this method and use this method in order to like Nietzsche precursor deconstruction
• 54:22
  by doing his philology. That's what I was gonna say, actually, because
• 54:28
  one of the ways that you can interpret Dreda, particularly like the early Dereda
• 54:30
  of the nineteen sixties and seventies as was that like reacting precisely against the kind
• 54:36
  of patonic conceit that you would sometimes see in say, positivistic approaches to language,
• 54:43
  right, which is that basically whatever word that you say you talk about
• 54:46
  has some kind of real object that is twenty two in the external world.
• 54:53
  Right, So you can draw one point comparison between the kind of platonic essence
• 54:58
  of a thing in anguish with this kind of material instantiation in the empirical world.
• 55:02
  Right, And he says, no, that's not true, right,
• 55:06
  I mean, we can't have to get past the idea that there's some kind
• 55:09
  of transcendent sign that tells you the way that the world really is and recognize
• 55:14
  that there's just a collection of different signs that are essentially all relating to one
• 55:17
  another, and we play with them, right, and we play with them
• 55:22
  in a variety of ways. Sometimes when I say apple, it means one
• 55:24
  thing. Sometimes when I say apple, it means you know the company?
• 55:29
  Right, my iPad or where my iPhone or whatever happens to be right,
• 55:32
  And all of this is legitimate, and we should stop trying to suggest that
• 55:37
  all things need to be tied up neatly with a bow. They point to
• 55:42
  values, everything's values, and they have a history, and they have an
• 55:47
  actual history of usage and our thought, right, like when he says that
• 55:53
  the first metaphor is when we name something right, In that naming, we
• 56:00
  introduce a gap. And that gap is the subject object gap, right,
• 56:04
  Because when we take something into our language, then it can become the subjects
• 56:08
  of a sentence or the object of a sentence. Right. The apple the
• 56:13
  apple I threw an apple, right, So I'm the subject and the apple
• 56:16
  is the object. Right, we introduce that gap. That's that gap that
• 56:21
  Kant could never solve the problem of right between the subject and the object,
• 56:25
  and Nietzsche's whole argument is, yeah, that's because it's a reified grammatical construct.
• 56:30
  And then the second metaphor for him is when we use these words and
• 56:36
  we forget originally where they come from, what their experiential grounding was, where
• 56:40
  we first encountered that thing that we named, it becomes second metaphor. Right,
• 56:45
  truth, Then just a second, because we're talking a little bit abstractly.
• 56:47
  But oh, by the way, we have a patron who's a linguist
• 56:52
  and she always fact checks our etymology studies, so shout out to her.
• 56:58
  I'm going to try and do this right. But we're talking about truth as
• 57:00
  like this origin word of metaphysics, and you think of true, you think
• 57:05
  of truth as something abstract, something that is out there, and we can
• 57:09
  talk about how we understand and get to the truth. But if you trace
• 57:12
  the etymology of the word true back to Old English and prior it means tree,
• 57:20
  and tree becomes the word for like firmness or whatever, the adjective for
• 57:22
  firmness, but it means or drew is the word, and we have the
• 57:29
  word druid that comes from the same word for oak tree. But yeah,
• 57:32
  so it's showing that you can have this whole apparatus and this abstraction. But
• 57:38
  if you trace the words, they don't begin in something abstract. Obviously,
• 57:45
  it's not like they begin with God. They actually begin with a phenomenal interaction
• 57:51
  with the world, and then through language becomes something much more abstract that can
• 57:54
  be put to use in something like metaphysics. That's basically the beginning of metaphysics
• 58:01
  when we're at the second metaphor level, when when it loses its origin,
• 58:07
  and that's the obsession with these origins and chasing things back, right, we
• 58:10
  put them back where they belong almost. Yeah, And I would even talk
• 58:15
  about just to move away from language for a second, even though it's really
• 58:16
  an interesting topic. Somebody who wasn't afraid of metaphysics, someone like gild Deluz,
• 58:21
  right, I think he actually tries to give a metaphysical interpretation at some
• 58:24
  point of what Nietzsche was talking about. Albeit, you know, with Bergson
• 58:29
  and Spinoza's thrown in because one of the things that you know, Louz says
• 58:32
  is there's always been this temptation in Western metaphysics and even a Western practice to
• 58:38
  want to eliminate difference, right and eliminate the particularity that we find in existence
• 58:43
  by suggesting that ultimately all things are God. Right if you think about like
• 58:46
  Platonist, right, are ultimately all things exist in this kind of platonic heaven?
• 58:52
  And Aliuz says, no, you know, we should sit there and
• 58:54
  appreciate difference in and of itself. Right, What each thing is are each
• 59:00
  process is in its specificity without trying to subsume it under some kind of higher
• 59:06
  metaphysical into some kind of higher metaphysical system. Yeah, exactly. I know
• 59:09
  you haven't listened to my podcast with Chris Right. It's it's really funny that
• 59:16
  you're bringing this up because it was on exactly this topic. So there's a
• 59:20
  previous podcast that's on process metaphysics. As you're saying, shielded, is Nietzsche
• 59:25
  have a process based metaphysics whereas most of Western metaphysics And why Heidegger Drred Nietzsche
• 59:32
  rejects Western metaphysics is because it's too based on substances, and particularly these special
• 59:38
  invisible substances. It's static. Right. Yeah, that's like what post structuralism
• 59:44
  does is it says it hides the difference. Right when we come we wake
• 59:47
  up one day, we say there's a dog. We wake up the next
• 59:51
  day we say there's a dog. It introduces this sort of false continuity and
• 59:55
  we lose the differences, and where post structure is focused on difference, and
• 1:00:01
  so when you get into the metaphysics where things have labels, things have names,
• 1:00:07
  you sort of forget the difference because each thing is what it is.
• 1:00:13
  It is what we called it yesterday and it will be tomorrow. And that's
• 1:00:15
  that sort of linguistic argument revolves around this, this kind of ned By the
• 1:00:21
  way, can we talked about that for just a second longer, because one
• 1:00:23
  of my or one of our I should say, one of our patrons asked
• 1:00:28
  me in the message, how do you define the distinction between structuralism and post
• 1:00:32
  structuralism? And we're almost there, so if anyone wants to take that,
• 1:00:37
  yeah, post structuralism is really about the So the structure is a static structure
• 1:00:45
  and it produces phenomenon, and the structure is what's behind the phenomenon, and
• 1:00:49
  the structure doesn't change. Right, So when you have, say a linguistic
• 1:00:54
  structuralism, you have a series of words connected with a series of conn and
• 1:01:00
  those concepts become part of binaries, right, good and bad, man and
• 1:01:06
  woman, nature and culture, subject and object, and they don't change,
• 1:01:10
  but the surface affects change. But that's what we want to get away from
• 1:01:15
  in post structuralism. We don't want to just say that the surface is what's
• 1:01:19
  changing, but the deeper structure is always the same. This is like this
• 1:01:23
  is Dairy da in nineteen sixty six saying I think there's something like an event
• 1:01:31
  has happened in structuralism, and the event is something new. And structuralism can
• 1:01:37
  never account for something new because the structure isn't allowed to change. It's a
• 1:01:40
  series of cross sections. And how you get from A to B is a
• 1:01:45
  mystery. We just know that A is one way, B is another way.
• 1:01:50
  And maybe that's a bad maybe that's a bad way of explaining it,
• 1:01:52
  but that was my understand Well. Structuralism is just basically, how do we
• 1:01:57
  get from this sound that out of your mouth? How do you get that
• 1:02:01
  to the world? How does the sound of your mouth saying like tree?
• 1:02:06
  Obviously we always use an example of tree, But how does tree mean tree
• 1:02:10
  to your to your mind, to the tree outside? What is the connection
• 1:02:15
  there? It's arbitrary, right, So they make they make a structure out
• 1:02:20
  of this and develop a linguistic in this way. But if you want to
• 1:02:23
  to get into that gap, this is what post structuralism is going to look
• 1:02:28
  for. Where the gaps exist in what we think knowledge is, for example,
• 1:02:32
  or what we think history is, or what we think God is,
• 1:02:35
  You're gonna find where that gap is like a little bit covered over instead of
• 1:02:39
  dealt with properly. Yeah. Like, another big quote from Nietzsche is every
• 1:02:45
  concept makes something that is not equivalent equivalent, right, right, That's that's
• 1:02:52
  one of his big quotes, and that's sort of one of the major drivers
• 1:02:54
  behind post structuralist I don't know that that sounds really good. Difference is everywhere,
• 1:03:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know if that's from Nietzsche or
• 1:03:04
  if that's just a quote I'm reading from from somebody like explaining something important about
• 1:03:09
  post structuralism, but yeah, every every concept hides the differences, and the
• 1:03:15
  post structuralists are all about the differences. I a different way though, because
• 1:03:20
  like just come back to like Nietzsche's historicity, right, and particularly it's influenced
• 1:03:22
  on somebody like the co right. One of the ways that I interpret structuralism
• 1:03:28
  looking at it very broadly rather than just as a linguistic theory pioneered by so
• 1:03:31
  Serve. Right. You know, the phenomenal world that we apprehend can be
• 1:03:37
  understood with reference to deeper structures that can be unmasked through say, dialectical analysis
• 1:03:45
  right via Hegel right, or so Surian analysis of the wholeism are of our
• 1:03:50
  linguistic life worlds. Right. And one of the things that the post structuralists
• 1:03:53
  do, like for co and following from Nietzsche, they say no, because
• 1:03:58
  the problem is that you're still trying to eliminate difference in the world by saying
• 1:04:01
  that while it appears that there's difference, this can all be explained by the
• 1:04:06
  structure. And one example of this that I think NEETs you picked up on
• 1:04:11
  is there can be this temptation and Marxist theory to say that, yes,
• 1:04:15
  there are different historical epochs, different ways of organizing the economy, different ways
• 1:04:19
  that people have produced things, but ultimately they all will wind up in a
• 1:04:24
  capitalist society because there's a kind of motion of history, or there's a movement
• 1:04:29
  to history, and in the end we're gonna all wind up in a communist
• 1:04:32
  society. Right. That's putting in the way that post structuralists undertood Marx right
• 1:04:39
  progress argument. Yeah, and I think there are people who argue it's more,
• 1:04:42
  who argue that Marx is more complicated, and we can come back to
• 1:04:45
  that, right, but you know, the post structures is really push against
• 1:04:46
  that by saying, no, don't sit there and say that earlier societies are
• 1:04:51
  just some kind of way station on the way to who we are right now,
• 1:04:56
  Right, you should look at these independent societies, understand the logics behind
• 1:05:00
  their thinking, and recognize that they're discrete and interesting in and of themselves,
• 1:05:05
  not just as kind of waystations on the way to understanding modernity. Right.
• 1:05:12
  If you think that history has a purpose like any program, if you believe
• 1:05:15
  in any kind of progress, if you think history has a purpose, then
• 1:05:18
  Nietzscha wants to have words with you because it's random. I mean, the
• 1:05:23
  whole the Death of God thing has a lot of meanings, and one of
• 1:05:27
  them you should connect this listener in this Patreon episode, so we're talking to
• 1:05:31
  the nobles, not the unwashed mask clebs. So you'll probably know about the
• 1:05:38
  Bart's death of the author paper and death of the Author is an echo in
• 1:05:45
  the transition to post structuralism of the death of God. Right, it's the
• 1:05:49
  thing that's outside of history that guarantees history's movement towards some fantastic conclusion, whatever
• 1:05:57
  it is they're nailing. So the death of the God is that that position
• 1:06:02
  no longer exists outside of the rules of the system. Right, it's the
• 1:06:06
  thing that guides the system but isn't subject to the rules of the system.
• 1:06:12
  It's also what we call the Archimedean point. Right, Archimedes says, give
• 1:06:16
  me one solid point, now'll lift the whole world. Well, the death
• 1:06:19
  of God is also a kind of denial of that third person objectivity. There
• 1:06:25
  is none of that when we're talking about language and history. Everything's relative to
• 1:06:30
  these things. There's nothing that sits outside of it but also determines it.
• 1:06:36
  And that's also Dary does argument in a much more sort of i'd say,
• 1:06:40
  a sophisticated way. I don't find Nietzsche very sophisticated poetically, he's brilliant,
• 1:06:45
  but like in terms of his thinking, I think Heidegger immediately runs right past
• 1:06:50
  it. That's what I was going to say about Dari did, though,
• 1:06:51
  I mean, one of the things that he picks up on brecton other people
• 1:06:56
  who are right about the death of the author, right, is precisely that
• 1:06:59
  the problem with structuralism, in some ways part sorry is that you know,
• 1:07:04
  there's this insistence that we can still formalize the meaning of a given term,
• 1:07:10
  and that's by looking at to certainly say, it's historically determined the historically given
• 1:07:15
  word role of a term in a system of science, right, And once
• 1:07:18
  we understand the system, we understand what that word means. And I think
• 1:07:23
  it's important to note that dered it never sits there and says there shouldn't be
• 1:07:26
  things like canonical interpretations that help inform our disparate interpretations of a given term.
• 1:07:32
  He's very expressed. Doesn't say there shouldn't be centers, he doesn't say there
• 1:07:35
  are no sense that's exactly it. He's very expressive about that in his nineteen
• 1:07:39
  sixty seven paper. Right, in some stances you need a canonical interpretation of
• 1:07:43
  a term in order to come up with idiosyncratic interpretations of it. Right.
• 1:07:46
  But he also does insist that just because there might be canonical or more better
• 1:07:51
  or more well established interpretations of a word, that doesn't mean that that interpretation
• 1:07:57
  isn't repressing alternative and interpretations or possibilities that this sign could be used for.
• 1:08:02
  And he says, in a very niche event, you can look back at
• 1:08:05
  the history of the way this world has been used as a kind of I'll
• 1:08:10
  use the Praconian term here because I think it's more down to like archive of
• 1:08:14
  different possible meanings that might have had that we could theoretically resurrect, or we
• 1:08:16
  could be appropriate or we could play with, depending on if we're interested in
• 1:08:20
  doing that. And he has a whole host of examples that are very interesting.
• 1:08:25
  Right, I want to just stress and stress because I think we're talking
• 1:08:29
  because we're getting really excited about this. This is like the most important point,
• 1:08:32
  the part where like old philosophy is finished. Hegel's like the last classical
• 1:08:39
  philosopher, and this is where all of the critical theory stuff comes in.
• 1:08:43
  So I just want to say again how important this is, because we were
• 1:08:46
  talking about Hagel and Hegel's got a history, and this history has a purpose.
• 1:08:51
  The history is to realize freedom. But to have history have a purpose
• 1:08:59
  that requires this position what Eric called the Archimedian point. You need to have
• 1:09:02
  a position outside of history that's able to judge it to be moral about history,
• 1:09:08
  and Marxism too, and the same thing with a book, like if
• 1:09:12
  you're gonna say this book has authorial intention, you have to assume there's a
• 1:09:15
  position outside the book that is giving it that purpose. But as soon as
• 1:09:20
  you get rid of God, history is over because history never started. You're
• 1:09:26
  outside of history, and then it's only these little minor stories that matter anymore.
• 1:09:30
  There's no grand narrative, if we can call postmodernism the end of grand
• 1:09:33
  narratives, and that's precisely because God is dead. You can't look at history
• 1:09:38
  from outside of it because you're always in it, and there's no God to
• 1:09:42
  like give you his like super all seeing eye from eternity so that you're not
• 1:09:45
  stuck in this problem. So all of twentieth century philosophy is just this problem
• 1:09:51
  over and over again in sociology, psychology, linguistics, and people like the
• 1:09:58
  people that we shot on all the time, positives positivists or Jordan Peterson,
• 1:10:02
  they don't want to they don't want to think this way. They don't want
• 1:10:05
  to think that this actually happened. It did happen, Nietzsche said it did,
• 1:10:09
  and it's over. You can't posit these grand narratives anymore or just.
• 1:10:15
  But there is loves Nietzsche though. Yeah, I was gonna say Victor is
• 1:10:18
  right. I mean, Jordan Peterson absolutely adores Nietzsche. In fact, one
• 1:10:23
  of the weirdest things about him is he's one of those people who says,
• 1:10:26
  well, you know, we can have our Nietzsche and our grandiose people,
• 1:10:29
  but we can also have our Christian values too, Right, we can have
• 1:10:32
  can have Nietzsche, but trans people don't real individualism, right, that's the
• 1:10:39
  he's interpreting. He's falling into this individualist interpretation of Nietzsche. Yeah, that
• 1:10:45
  Nietzsche is an ardent individualist, a heroic individualist. He likes Nietzsche because emphasizes
• 1:10:50
  the suffering of life, like the ship that that guy says about language.
• 1:10:55
  Man, he's like, you can't just invent words like fuck man, you
• 1:10:58
  read Nietzsche, you idiot. Wow, that's harsh. But yeah, no,
• 1:11:01
  I was gonna say, I think we're all getting this idiot about this
• 1:11:04
  because of the kind of historical significance of this moment that I think we're all
• 1:11:09
  acknowledging in a different way, right, And I think just to kind of
• 1:11:13
  bring it back down to Earth because we kind of went a little bit of
• 1:11:15
  field into some very different fields. This just really testifies to the fact that
• 1:11:19
  Nietzsche, as much as Marx, and probably more than Freud by this point,
• 1:11:24
  right, as had just a profound impact on so many different fields.
• 1:11:28
  Right. It's really he's one of the really one of those figures where if
• 1:11:30
  you were to ask, you know, explain to me what is significance would
• 1:11:33
  be, would be almost impossible, just because so many different people have picked
• 1:11:36
  up on these threads. Right. He invented sociology basically like Weber directly drew
• 1:11:43
  from Nietzsche, from this historicist argument he invented. He invented psychology because Freud
• 1:11:47
  develops the unconscious from this wil to power of like urges he invented. He
• 1:11:54
  invented linguistic analysis, at least in the in the Continental version, because you
• 1:12:00
  know, Heiderger goes back to all these terms, and I think Heideger was
• 1:12:02
  a worse philologist than Nietzsche, but you know, he just kicked off.
• 1:12:05
  It's hard to understate the gravity of this event. It's pretty impressive for an
• 1:12:12
  insult. Yeah, I think I think Fuko just like to really simplify his
• 1:12:17
  Fuco's kind of he takes on like like, so Nietzsche does good and evil,
• 1:12:23
  Fuko does in the history of sexuality, he does male and female in
• 1:12:28
  the history of his in his prison book, right, Discipline and punish,
• 1:12:32
  he does civilian and criminal and yeah, yeah, sane and insane. Right,
• 1:12:42
  Like, he takes that sort of idea that these binaries have like a
• 1:12:45
  history, and he just applies them to different things, right the hospital,
• 1:12:49
  the prison, and like discourses of the body and sexual Well, Matt,
• 1:12:54
  did you say not bad for an inceel, because that's an underrated, underrated
• 1:12:58
  joke. Yeah, no, no, no, But like I was gonna
• 1:13:00
  say, I mean, this is what I find really helpful about Fuco,
• 1:13:04
  right, And I don't always have nice things to say about him, but
• 1:13:06
  right, like, he really does take this project forward and run with it.
• 1:13:12
  And I think it was an eight nineteen eighty somebody asked him and he's
• 1:13:15
  like, I am a Nietzschean, right, And you can really see that
• 1:13:18
  right where he shows a lot of fidelity to this project. But this is
• 1:13:21
  actually where I think we should maybe shift towards a more political dimension, just
• 1:13:26
  because I know that we have buyer who's coming on in being two weeks?
• 1:13:30
  Beaner, Sorry, why do I say that Being is coming on in two
• 1:13:35
  weeks? To talk about Nietzschean politics? And one of the interesting things about
• 1:13:42
  Nietzsche is precisely that you see people on very different ends of the political spectrum
• 1:13:45
  finding him appealing. Right, People like Michelle Fuco find him appealing. There
• 1:13:49
  are any number of Nietzsche or sorry Marxist like Terry Eagleton to find him appealing,
• 1:13:54
  but so do an awful lot of fascists, right, Yeah, that
• 1:13:57
  Spencer guy Richards hear the Nazi Party loved him even though he was he would
• 1:14:01
  certainly not be a Nazi. By the way, listener, what Matt's referencing
• 1:14:04
  is the reason we're doing Nietzsche and and Heidiger first is because we're interviewing an
• 1:14:11
  expert in those areas. But we wanted to establish I guess our take on
• 1:14:15
  it is that what we're doing, I guess. So it's kind of a
• 1:14:18
  preparatory episode, I guess, but only for the patrons. So and it's
• 1:14:21
  yeah, Professor Ronald Diener at the University of Ronald, thank you picture I
• 1:14:26
  fucked up? So, but yeah, why how how could you appropriate this
• 1:14:31
  for for right wing perspectives. I mean, it's not impossible. It's a
• 1:14:35
  lot more easy to appropriate Nietzsche for right wing purposes than someone like I don't
• 1:14:41
  know, Ron Sierra. Yeah, or I mean I did. I did
• 1:14:45
  read some. I went back to the genealogy of morals and I was like,
• 1:14:48
  what of those right wing ship And then I read it and I was
• 1:14:51
  like, he said some pretty fucked up things in this, like because he
• 1:14:56
  talked he talks about Jews and dark haired people quite a bit, and he
• 1:15:01
  has some like things to say about that that would not be acceptable. Well,
• 1:15:04
  I mean, okay, here's here's he's willfully ignored that part. Because
• 1:15:09
  I don't remember it. I always say he was talking about Jews. It's
• 1:15:12
  like the judaist our Judas and kind of paradigm world paradigm. I kind of
• 1:15:18
  I do the same thing I do when I like, I'm like, oh,
• 1:15:20
  Heidegger wasn't all that like, because he's kind of saying like Jewish and
• 1:15:26
  Christian are the same. That part. I don't think that that part's really
• 1:15:29
  the problematic part. If you if you call like being like right wing problematic,
• 1:15:33
  Like I think the problematic part is that Nietzsche is blatantly an anti egalitarian,
• 1:15:39
  and like the fact that his whole value system is about like. So
• 1:15:43
  I would say, like if I was to sum up like Nietzsche's political vision,
• 1:15:45
  and like if I was to simplified, I would say, to some
• 1:15:48
  extent, he's like, the cultural values of society have to be those that
• 1:15:54
  that that uncover are the vitalic, the vitalistic, like instincts for life.
• 1:15:59
  In like so the the best souls can be raised to the top. And
• 1:16:03
  if that's at the cost of the week, so be it. The week
• 1:16:06
  should suffer, because the strong should be the ones. Because the greatness of
• 1:16:13
  humanity can only be properly instantiated if the instincts of the culture is life affirming
• 1:16:20
  in such a way that those souls who have the best ability to overcome to
• 1:16:25
  self overcome in accordance with the will to power, he may are raised up
• 1:16:29
  so that the weak he so he says it in a few places he talks
• 1:16:32
  about how like the like the spirit of a people have to be such that
• 1:16:38
  they like that, they like rate that they they push the the the values
• 1:16:45
  that can create life affirming horizons, and life affirming horizons are those kinds of
• 1:16:50
  things that can like allow that like deny the weak and like you know,
• 1:16:55
  don't like we don't care about the week and we care about the ones who
• 1:16:57
  are going to be the noble souls of the future. At the same time
• 1:17:00
  time, though he was also an ardent anti nationalist. He said, like
• 1:17:02
  being proud of your being proud of your country is like the stupidest thing you
• 1:17:05
  can do. Yeah, Like, I think the the anti egalitarian thing is
• 1:17:11
  debatable. I don't think there's any debate about that. I mean, I
• 1:17:15
  think it's extremely debatable. Like where like where does he say that he is
• 1:17:24
  four hierarchies, that he is for inequality, that he thinks inequality is good.
• 1:17:30
  Like what he seems to be saying is that the morality that the weak
• 1:17:34
  created creates a worse kind of enmity in society than if we just sort of
• 1:17:39
  let the aristocratic values be the dominant kind of thing. Because he's going to
• 1:17:44
  say, like, okay, I'll say his horrible ship. He's gonna say
• 1:17:47
  that like Jews are the worst enemies to have because they hold a grudge and
• 1:17:53
  they're smart about it. Whereas he's gonna say he's gonna say it's a sign
• 1:17:58
  of the strong that they cannot for long take serious their enemies. They're going
• 1:18:02
  to forgive respect your enemies because respect is a bridge to love, whereas with
• 1:18:09
  enemies of the say Judeo Christian tradition, those enemies are evil and evil people
• 1:18:15
  are dan to hell. And there's like he's he's almost saying that they are
• 1:18:19
  more in egalitarian. Then if we could just take on a more like if
• 1:18:24
  you just wake up. Remember at the beginning, we were saying, like
• 1:18:28
  his philosophy is shocking, Like he wants to shock you out of your sort
• 1:18:32
  of complacency and get you thinking, and it's to say, these values you're
• 1:18:36
  holding are creating terrible problems in our society. And if you just look at
• 1:18:44
  them and realize that that's what they're doing, you can actually wake up and
• 1:18:48
  be life affirming and say, fuck your enemies. They're my enemies today,
• 1:18:53
  but tomorrow they'll be my friends because I fucking respect them. Right, Like,
• 1:18:57
  he's not like the anti egalitarian in Nietzsche. Okay, it seems that
• 1:19:01
  way if you take things out of context and put certain things together. But
• 1:19:04
  I don't think that's the upshot. I don't think it's like inegalitarian. Right
• 1:19:12
  where he says, I want to add something to this rebuttal too. Okay,
• 1:19:15
  yet, so let me just read this quote here. This is good.
• 1:19:18
  You're cheating. You can't use quotes, No, no, no,
• 1:19:21
  come on, no no, But I mean this is really telling. Right
• 1:19:24
  where he says the great majority of men have no right to life and serve
• 1:19:27
  only to discontactcert the elect among our race. I do not grant the unfit
• 1:19:31
  that right. There are even unfit peoples, right, And there are volumes
• 1:19:36
  of quotes to this effect, right where he says things like the twentieth century
• 1:19:40
  will be marked by wars with horror yet unseen upon the earth. And I
• 1:19:44
  look forward to it because this will at least like expipiate the kind of morality
• 1:19:49
  of the slave by demonstrating how banal and evil communism is, amongst other things.
• 1:19:55
  Right, So let me just add one more thing to that too.
• 1:19:57
  I want to add one more thing to that which is just that, So
• 1:19:59
  I to give us some sort of an olive branch, maybe to the worry
• 1:20:01
  of like what maybe what Eric is getting at is like So I also think
• 1:20:06
  that Nietzsche would condemn any like any existing fascist movement that has happened in human
• 1:20:13
  history. Like I think he would look at I don't know, Nazism and
• 1:20:16
  any of these things and be like, you guys became followers and peasants,
• 1:20:19
  and like you weren't really you weren't really being a people and a culture that
• 1:20:25
  was life affirming, like you were being some other shit like he. So
• 1:20:28
  he would be very critical. So I'm not saying he's like a Nazi in
• 1:20:30
  that or like an anti egalitarian in a way that resembles any like existing political
• 1:20:35
  ideology. It just means that ultimately he doesn't care about equality or like or
• 1:20:41
  like making sure that we can have the best society for the most number of
• 1:20:44
  people. Quite the opposite. In fact, I would say that he wants
• 1:20:45
  the best to rise up and fuck everybody else who's not contributing to like good
• 1:20:49
  life affirming values. And when one thing that I want to add to that,
• 1:20:53
  because it builds right off, is the he he doesn't think that inequality
• 1:20:59
  needs to be like fixed, because he's he actually thinks the inequality is better
• 1:21:03
  for the people who are oppressed, because when you're oppressed, you create better
• 1:21:08
  art. Basically, you invent dance, you invent literatures. Delze picks up
• 1:21:12
  on this. You you you are, you can laugh more, you sing
• 1:21:15
  more, and all the This is back to the master slave dialectic. The
• 1:21:20
  people who are oppressed create better stuff, right, And he's he's especially he's
• 1:21:29
  he loves art, all kinds of art, dance, music, et cetera.
• 1:21:32
  And he says, if you're the the or the inegalitarian system is better
• 1:21:36
  for everybody because the poor make better art and the rich get to you know,
• 1:21:41
  have this mutual and the best, the best souls can rise up.
• 1:21:44
  But either way, like he's, either way, you're going to have inequality.
• 1:21:49
  You're not going to be egalitarian in the sense of like not everyone's going
• 1:21:54
  to be equal. But when you, guys, I'll just play Devil's advocate
• 1:21:57
  a little bit and say, well, you guys are saying, is that
• 1:22:00
  he is anti woke and therefore he is in egalitarian. Well, yes,
• 1:22:04
  he is anti woke. He thinks that silly, that it's a bad thing
• 1:22:13
  when you claim the massive people, the great majority of humankind, has no
• 1:22:16
  right to life. I mean, that's not anti woke, right, that's
• 1:22:19
  anti liberal, that's anti communists. Rights. He thinks rights are just a
• 1:22:25
  tool to strength and that's what I mean. I mean, I'm just saying
• 1:22:29
  he would be against any left wing like any left wing project for like for
• 1:22:32
  social transformation, he would be against. Yeah, but then he would also
• 1:22:36
  be against any right wing project of like I don't think he would be a
• 1:22:41
  supporter of Donald Trump. Well, that's that's what that was. Either against
• 1:22:45
  the alt right, he would be against the like woke left. He would
• 1:22:48
  be he would almost be a centrist in that sense, but he would also
• 1:22:54
  be very radical in any different way political system that would against well, but
• 1:22:59
  he but he very much what he wants to like it's but we can't lose
• 1:23:01
  sight of like what he does say that he wants, which is for like
• 1:23:05
  life aff ring values that privilege the best souls the soul and like that is
• 1:23:11
  an idea that is contrary to any left wing perspective ultimately, And yeah,
• 1:23:14
  I should also add its consistent with his genealogy also right, because he says
• 1:23:17
  that the notion of moral equality and the universal equality of douguman beings came into
• 1:23:23
  the world with Christianity, right, the triumph of the week over the strong,
• 1:23:26
  and he sometimes it's very explicit about what he wants is a return to
• 1:23:30
  complete prepatonic thinking and this notion that some people are better. You know,
• 1:23:35
  they're proud Achilles who sit there and they tyrannize, you know, the weak
• 1:23:41
  who are their prey. Now they're the hawks, as you put it.
• 1:23:44
  So I think it's and I don't think there's any way you can give this
• 1:23:46
  a kind of egalitarian spece. I don't think you can. I agree,
• 1:23:49
  But the point of Achilles and respect is that he doesn't even know he's oppressing,
• 1:23:55
  Like he doesn't even have enough attention to pay exactly poor people. Yeah,
• 1:23:58
  because he's too busy like being great and conquering people and fighting age or
• 1:24:03
  what. Absolutely, he's too busy killing hector to care that someone has to
• 1:24:08
  carry his armor for him. Right, Like he has this whole argument about
• 1:24:12
  like, look at how these aristocrats have such a nuanced language when it comes
• 1:24:16
  to the pitiful, when it comes to the down trod, and when it
• 1:24:19
  comes to people like like Achilles or like the people you see in Homer,
• 1:24:25
  Right, they have this very rich language of pity in a way, and
• 1:24:30
  they see people struggles as I don't know, he has this weird philological linguistic
• 1:24:38
  argument that says, well, look how rich their language for the pitiful is.
• 1:24:42
  And look how simple the languages of the Judeo Christian herd make example,
• 1:24:49
  are there. I was looking for the quote. I can't find it right
• 1:24:54
  now. If I find it, I know I've been hard. I have
• 1:25:00
  a great quote, which is which is just him describing I mean, it's
• 1:25:03
  it doesn't exactly speak to this, but it's just him describing the highest kind
• 1:25:08
  of person in the gay science. So he says, a person whose horizon
• 1:25:13
  encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir to all air,
• 1:25:17
  of all nobility, of all past spirit and air, with a sense of
• 1:25:21
  obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles, and at the same time the
• 1:25:27
  first of a new nobility, the likes of which no age has yet seen
• 1:25:30
  or dreamed of. If one can burden one soul with all of this,
• 1:25:33
  the oldest, the newest losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of
• 1:25:38
  humanity, if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowded into
• 1:25:42
  a single feeling, this would surely have the results in a happiness that humanity
• 1:25:45
  has not known so far. That's pretty impressive, but that does definitely make
• 1:25:49
  the point that what he's looking for us like an aristocratic Yeah, cast are
• 1:25:55
  cabal whatever you want the best. It's definitely it's definitely not a nastalistic vision.
• 1:26:00
  I completely. It certainly doesn't resemble any right wing movements that exist today.
• 1:26:03
  Like he'd be he's against like peasant, like like idiots and so like,
• 1:26:08
  I think he'd be a But my only claim would just be, like
• 1:26:12
  to to try to co opt him for as like on the left is just
• 1:26:15
  wrong because like in so far as the left entails some form of egalitarianism.
• 1:26:19
  If you compare this to Hagel, because both of them, both of them
• 1:26:23
  speak favorably of someone like Napoleon, right, but Hegel's reasons for extolling Napoleon
• 1:26:30
  is he's bringing reason, he's bringing law, he's bringing uniformity, he's creating
• 1:26:34
  a state, whereas Nietzsche's reasons for loving Napoleon are like Napoleon wakes up and
• 1:26:41
  because he's so powerful, he is this drive in him he just got to
• 1:26:44
  go conquer shit. He's he's doing this as like an artistic process. His
• 1:26:48
  art is battle and conquest. Whereas yeah, that's why he was a he
• 1:26:55
  was a throwback to the old Roman and Greek arison, and then you put
• 1:26:59
  him on prison, and then he gets out of prison and he does it
• 1:27:00
  one more time. He just he can't be held back. So we haven't
• 1:27:04
  really touched on this term yet, but resentment resent him all right in Nietzsche
• 1:27:10
  right, And what he's saying is that if we lived in a society where
• 1:27:13
  noble values were dominant, there wouldn't be groups of people resenting one another.
• 1:27:17
  He says that the nobleman feels resentment, but it's absorbed in his instant reaction
• 1:27:23
  to it, and it doesn't poison him, as in, he doesn't nurse
• 1:27:28
  this grudge against some other group of people. But the slave morality, the
• 1:27:33
  so called egalitarians, they look at people who are inegalitarian and they say,
• 1:27:39
  these people are evil, these people are wrong, and these people need to
• 1:27:43
  die, and they nurse this grudge. They don't have this immediate release because
• 1:27:46
  they go to their secret places and their secret gardens that are just their own
• 1:27:50
  worlds, and they nurse these sorts of feelings or they try to get away
• 1:27:55
  from them, and then they come back to the real world and they come
• 1:27:58
  back to these feelings because they have no respect for the people they don't like,
• 1:28:02
  like you were talking about compassion, Compassion would be having respect for the
• 1:28:08
  person that you're arguing against. Like what is a woke person screaming racist,
• 1:28:14
  screaming misogynists screaming you're oppressing me? Like, where's the respect in that way
• 1:28:18
  of arguing with somebody? Where's the compassion? It's gone because it's absorbed in
• 1:28:24
  the poison of the slave morality, which just erases all respect for your enemies.
• 1:28:31
  Wendy Brown has a really good critique of this in her book in The
• 1:28:35
  Ruins of Neoliberalism, Right when she's talking about the kind of alt right interpretation
• 1:28:39
  of Nietzsche, and she's very fond of Nietzsche, I should say, like
• 1:28:43
  I am, and like I think all of us are in a certain stanse,
• 1:28:45
  right, But one of the things that she points out is that if
• 1:28:47
  you look at the kind of example as Nietzsche gives, it's almost always about
• 1:28:51
  a resentment, right. He's almost always talking of the resentment of the week
• 1:28:55
  against the strong, and he never actually talks of the kind of resentment that
• 1:29:00
  the strong can feel towards the weak. Accept to downplay it in the way
• 1:29:02
  you just described, And one of the things she says is if you look
• 1:29:05
  at politics in the contemporary era, people like Donald Trump, how can you
• 1:29:10
  describe that except as the resentment of the strong towards the weak. Right,
• 1:29:13
  the idea that this is my society, people like me belt it. I
• 1:29:17
  have all kinds of money and power associated with me, and how dare all
• 1:29:21
  of you think that you are entitled to any of that? Right? And
• 1:29:27
  I think this is a really pretty compelling argument. And one of the things
• 1:29:29
  she cassegates Nietzsche for is not taking into account the idea that sometimes the nobility,
• 1:29:33
  especially when they're looking at the downtrodden, and when the downtrodden are trying
• 1:29:38
  to stand up to them, it can be very easy for them to feel
• 1:29:41
  resentment also and say, well, no, I earned this. All of
• 1:29:44
  you are just a bunch of layabouts who are only the beneficiaries of the values
• 1:29:47
  and the wealth and what the civilization I created, and you should all just
• 1:29:51
  shut up and go back to your place, right. And I think that's
• 1:29:55
  something that he doesn't really talk about that much. I think that's right,
• 1:29:58
  And I'm just I'm getting passionate and trying to make Nietzsche seriously, but I
• 1:30:02
  think you're right that. Yeah, obviously Nietzsche isn't taking seriously how much it
• 1:30:06
  sucks to be the downtrodden, and how like psychologically fucking that would be to
• 1:30:12
  the point where like how can you really respect the people who are keeping you
• 1:30:16
  in this position? But let me let me just cheat again, and I'll
• 1:30:20
  say, like, here's the two versions. Here's the aristocratic bad, and
• 1:30:25
  here is the Here is the evil of the slave morality, he says.
• 1:30:30
  He says, the bad of the aristocrats is just a byproduct, a complementary
• 1:30:35
  color, almost an afterthought, whereas the evil of the slaves is the beginning,
• 1:30:42
  the original creative act of slave ethics, he says. Saying no is
• 1:30:48
  the original creative act of the slave. It's saying no to another. Whereas
• 1:30:54
  it's almost like he's saying the yes and thing about the nobles. The nobles
• 1:30:57
  are always like yes and like yes, yes, good, but I disagree
• 1:31:02
  with you, Like he's almost giving it like that's the original act. Like
• 1:31:08
  that's like this is almost I take this almost as a fiction, and I
• 1:31:12
  don't. I think it's complete bullshit. It's almost metaphysical in itself. But
• 1:31:15
  just taking it seriously for a second, and saying that the evil of slave
• 1:31:20
  morality, the one that we're dealing with today in our society, which is
• 1:31:25
  so degenerate and horrible, is that it's against other people. It's a primary,
• 1:31:33
  originary thing, whereas the bad of someone who's got an aristocratic mind and
• 1:31:40
  a great temperament, the bad there is just sort of an afterthought. It's
• 1:31:43
  like, oh shit, I failed to be good, So I guess that
• 1:31:45
  was bad, and I guess I'll try again later. I don't know,
• 1:31:49
  but Brown has a really poignant example in a book that I found very resident
• 1:31:54
  because I was let me in Mexico at the time, when you know,
• 1:31:57
  I read this and she said, if you don't believe that the power perful
• 1:32:00
  can have resentment towards the poor, just be a relatively privileged person, not
• 1:32:04
  even a very powerful person. Go walk in the street in a poor area
• 1:32:09
  of the city and look at a beggar, and when the beggar asks you
• 1:32:12
  for money, ask yourself, what feeling is it that I have? Right,
• 1:32:16
  Because probably the instinctible thing that you'll have when the beggar asks you for
• 1:32:19
  money is revulsion, followed by why do I have to bother during my day?
• 1:32:25
  I didn't do anything that means this person is poor, I worked hard
• 1:32:29
  for my money, and all these kinds of feelings, right, And she
• 1:32:31
  says, this is the kind of resentment that we feel towards the week if
• 1:32:35
  we're in a privileged position all the time, because we don't like be being
• 1:32:40
  reminded of the frailty of human existence, and we don't like being reminded of
• 1:32:44
  the fact that there but for the grace of God would I go. And
• 1:32:46
  so we hate the people that expose us to this reality quite consistently. And
• 1:32:51
  one of the things that she says about Nietzsche is Nietzsche had a lot of
• 1:32:55
  very insightful things to say about the problems with how it is that the wounded
• 1:32:59
  or the victor of eyes can feel resentment and create bad and malicious systems on
• 1:33:02
  that basis, and she wrote a whole book on that called rounded Attachments.
• 1:33:05
  But he seems to have very little sympathy for, as you know, pointed
• 1:33:10
  out, you know, the downtrodden, right, and the resentment that they
• 1:33:12
  might justifiably sorry, and the resentment that they might be the victims of continuously
• 1:33:17
  from the people who appointed themselves their betters. Right, Yeah, It's it's
• 1:33:21
  hard to separate the sort of idea that like slave morality is a whole metaphysical
• 1:33:27
  system of ethics versus like just being in that moment and feeling pity for somebody,
• 1:33:32
  or even like being in that moment and you're the privileged one and just
• 1:33:36
  being sort of generally annoyed that they exist. I mean, it's hard to
• 1:33:42
  separate. You're right, it is like Nietzsche is giving us a kind of
• 1:33:45
  convincing fiction here that there's a lot of holes in and yeah, like where
• 1:33:50
  does okay? So maybe maybe nobility is doomed and slave morality is just going
• 1:33:57
  to be the new norm. So then where where does compassion fit in there?
• 1:34:01
  And Nietzsch is pretty pretty pretty pessimistic about there being like a true sense
• 1:34:06
  of morality in a society that we're in today, because we're again we're splintered
• 1:34:13
  into these groups and we think everyone else is evil. And you can see
• 1:34:16
  it online. When someone disagrees with you, they become the enemy immediately,
• 1:34:20
  and not the enemy that you have respect for, that you want to fight,
• 1:34:25
  that you want to that you want to be your enemy, but the
• 1:34:28
  enemy that needs to be destroyed, The enemy that is the real, the
• 1:34:32
  evil one in all caps. No, yeah, I think that's one hundred
• 1:34:36
  percent true, right, And I actually I've never thought about applying that kind
• 1:34:40
  of nietzsche and analysis to online discourse. So well, we we're recording for
• 1:34:44
  over an hour and a half. Now, by the way, I have
• 1:34:45
  a winding thought and I think it ends up there. But I think I'm
• 1:34:48
  just going to start talking and see if it gets me there. So the
• 1:34:51
  objection that the the the aristocratic values are not reflective, like they don't they
• 1:34:58
  don't have compassion, they don't put themselves in someone else's mind and go,
• 1:35:01
  oh, you're suffering, because they're too busy doing their own thing. So
• 1:35:05
  they don't resent the poor because they're reminded of like human frailty. They just
• 1:35:11
  don't like the poor because of the poor are dirty. It's like completely esthetic
• 1:35:15
  and affective to them. The reason that they don't like seeing weakness and grossness,
• 1:35:20
  it's just like you're gross. I'm not even gonna think about what you're
• 1:35:24
  thinking. So I think in that case you don't think about them at all.
• 1:35:26
  Yeah, in that sense, In that sense, like Trump has nothing
• 1:35:30
  like aristocratic values because he's a resentful bitch, and like he's just demanding affirmation
• 1:35:35
  all the time, whereas the aristocratic value person never needs affirmation from anybody because
• 1:35:42
  they know their strength and they know their worth. So without bringing this into
• 1:35:46
  like a class thing, just the way that you argue with people, I
• 1:35:51
  think you probably can point to people in your lives, or all of us
• 1:35:55
  could. There's this kind of like water off the back, people that don't
• 1:36:00
  need to store up resentment and they don't need to destroy because they're too busy
• 1:36:04
  creating and too busy being life affirming, as Nietzsche says, rather than life
• 1:36:10
  denying. And then there's also that cast of people, whether or not it
• 1:36:14
  has to do with class or or not, that want to punish others and
• 1:36:17
  want them to feel that pain and punishment, and they're gonna keep going at
• 1:36:20
  whatever they're going at until someone else feels that way. There might be there
• 1:36:27
  might be some truth to that, but I I think you're right that that's
• 1:36:30
  how I read Nietzsche too. Like I remember that whole analogy with a hawk
• 1:36:33
  eating the mouse or whatever. It's like, it's not that the hawk feels
• 1:36:36
  no resentment. It's just like this is just I'm just doing me I'm being
• 1:36:40
  mean. It's like I'm not thinking about you at all. It doesn't have
• 1:36:42
  anything, it doesn't hate the mouse. It's just like it's just like I'm
• 1:36:45
  just being a fucking badass that I am, and like not thinking about anything
• 1:36:48
  else, right, And I think that's true. But like this is kind
• 1:36:51
  of where like when I think about like the highest values, you know,
• 1:36:55
  where I feel like like Nietzsche's maybe like in celism comes in because it's just
• 1:37:00
  like he's thinking about these these these artistic, creative souls who are up there
• 1:37:05
  not thinking about anybody else, And like this is just my own personal like
• 1:37:09
  reaction, right, Whereas like I think when I think of like the best
• 1:37:12
  people, I think of someone who's like magnanimous, who like is doing cool
• 1:37:14
  stuff but is also like in touch and connects with other human beings. I
• 1:37:17
  think that's like an aspect that somehow like Nietzsche because he's such an insult like
• 1:37:21
  forgets about like like the value of being like a magnanimous. The paradox here
• 1:37:26
  is everything Nietzsche talks about he does the opposite. He spends all of his
• 1:37:30
  books whining about Christianity, whining about democracy, whining about communism, whining about
• 1:37:33
  the week, like whatever he's pointing to is not him, because an aristocratic
• 1:37:38
  value person would not sit there writing those books. They would just go do
• 1:37:42
  the stuff that they're talking about. Exactly. I have a fun I have
• 1:37:45
  a fun quote. All right, you go first, Matt, Then I've
• 1:37:48
  got I've got it. Well, I was gonna say, uh, this
• 1:37:50
  is actually a kind of interesting point where I jump in with like a these
• 1:37:55
  kind of weird Christian interpretations of Nietzsche, right, because there have been actually
• 1:37:58
  intelligent Christian authors who to respond to him by pointing out the kind of distinctive
• 1:38:03
  characteristics of Jesus, right, And they said that in the Gay Science,
• 1:38:06
  you know, Nietzsche talks about this person who can kind of combine all history
• 1:38:10
  in his being probably almost invariably he right and will noble values. And one
• 1:38:16
  of the things that are pointed out by people like Nikos Cosantakis and the Last
• 1:38:18
  Impatient of Crisis, Well, think about Jesus, right, here's somebody who
• 1:38:21
  took all human suffering on his shoulders, understood it, empathized with it,
• 1:38:27
  and nonetheless was able to carry on in a very heroic way in spite of
• 1:38:30
  bearing everyone's soul Jesus isn't a Yeah, well, this is the kind of
• 1:38:35
  argument they make, Like doesn't this have a kind of heroism and a kind
• 1:38:40
  of glory to it, that it's undervalued by somebody like Nietzsche doesn't also link
• 1:38:45
  Jesus in some way holistically with the rest of the world in a sense that
• 1:38:48
  Nietzsche would be disconnected, or the Nietzsche and Superman would be disconnected, since
• 1:38:53
  he doesn't have any kind of sense for what's going on in the mind of
• 1:38:56
  the sheep, right, he's only concerned with doing him being a badass.
• 1:39:00
  And I think there's a lot to that argument, even if we secularize it.
• 1:39:04
  Well, like there's a problem with saying that like Nietzsche, Like here's
• 1:39:11
  here's a quote. I'll say, what was Jesus but temptation in its most
• 1:39:15
  sinister form and irresistible form, bringing men by a roundabout way to precisely those
• 1:39:21
  Jewish values and renovations of the ideal. That's what he says about Jesus too,
• 1:39:27
  So he clearly doesn't have an unambiguously positive view of Jesus. Again,
• 1:39:31
  it goes back he thinks he's a trap. But I also have a fun
• 1:39:34
  quote Okay, so you have slave morality and aristocratic morality. Let's change that
• 1:39:39
  to wokeness, slave morality and privilege aristocratic. So what happens? Okay,
• 1:39:46
  so here's here's Nietzsche. Let's articulate this new claim. We need a critique
• 1:39:50
  of all wokeness. The intrinsic worth of wokeness must first of all be called
• 1:39:57
  into question. To this end, we know that can editions from which those
• 1:40:00
  values have sprung, and how they develop and have changed. Hitherto, such
• 1:40:05
  knowledge has been a decision point. The intrinsic worth of wokeness was taken for
• 1:40:13
  granted as a fact of experience and put beyond question. Nobody up to now
• 1:40:17
  has doubted that wokeness represents a higher value in that privilege in terms of promoting
• 1:40:24
  and benefiting mankind generally. Even taking the long view is evil. But suppose
• 1:40:30
  that the exact opposite were true. What if wokeness represents not merely a retrogression,
• 1:40:34
  but even a danger, a temptation and narcotic, a drug enabling the
• 1:40:40
  present to live at the expense of the future, more comfortable, less hazardous,
• 1:40:45
  perhaps, but also baser, more petty. So that wokeness itself would
• 1:40:49
  be responsible for man as a species failing to reach the peak of magnificence for
• 1:40:55
  which he is capable. Isn't that a cool way to read Nietzsche or just
• 1:40:59
  read them in terms of like that was amazing? Could you actually do me
• 1:41:02
  a favor and like transcribe that quote and like like give me a page reference
• 1:41:06
  And I don't know if you don't mind, like like just because I'd love
• 1:41:10
  to just have that. I want to, like, I want to share
• 1:41:12
  that if you take a picture of section six of the of section six of
• 1:41:17
  the preface to Genealogy of Morals, could you just like take a photo of
• 1:41:21
  it and or something anyway, So there is this like there is this critique,
• 1:41:26
  right, the critique is fair and how much does it apply? I
• 1:41:29
  don't think we have really time to get into that, but like we're way
• 1:41:32
  over time here. I think kind of well, it's it's good for a
• 1:41:35
  long one. This is Nieche has got to be long. But this is
• 1:41:42
  just just so twitter right that it's punish and publicly punish and publicly bring down.
• 1:41:50
  And that's not all a wokeness is obviously, there's like good intentions as
• 1:41:55
  well, and critiquing privilege and things that are valuable, but like the public
• 1:42:00
  flogging kind of thing, cancel culture kind of thing, what we were we
• 1:42:03
  have an episode on that and this I think it's just Nietzsche's system if we're
• 1:42:12
  gonna just clean it out, is saying like, don't be so concerned with
• 1:42:17
  everybody else, get concerned with yourself, rise above, like praying, punishing.
• 1:42:25
  That might sound like Peterson, but I mean it's a good, just
• 1:42:30
  piece of like life advice, right, get get get out of trying to
• 1:42:35
  clean your room before you go in and critique the world. I guess that's
• 1:42:40
  what he's just saying. That's got to be it. Yeah, this is
• 1:42:45
  like you can go through You can go through Marxist text and replace replace oh
• 1:42:53
  fuck, I forget. You can go through his text and replace yeah proletariat
• 1:42:58
  with uh Western European values, and you can and it reads differently. You
• 1:43:04
  can do the same with Nietzsche. Replace replace all the words where he says
• 1:43:10
  like good but where he's talking about what's good from the perspective of the slave,
• 1:43:14
  replace that with woke, and replace bad with privilege. And it's a
• 1:43:17
  completely different text and it makes like weird sense to well, you could apply
• 1:43:24
  this slave morality to something like white nationalism also, which is just as infantile
• 1:43:29
  and resentful of you know. Oh yeah, yeah people that people seem to
• 1:43:34
  be getting something that you're not getting, right, Yeah, that's the hard
• 1:43:39
  part. They would need another thing. It wouldn't be like wokeness and privilege
• 1:43:45
  for them. It would be like, yeah, it would be like a
• 1:43:46
  galitarian. They'd be like, fuck these egalitarians. You think goodness is a
• 1:43:50
  galitarian or diversity be it'd be like white nationalism and diversity, diversity with cultural
• 1:43:58
  diversity would be there. Bad the diversities or strength good would be good,
• 1:44:03
  would be nationalist, yeah for them, but it might work the same way.
• 1:44:09
  And it's interesting to read, very very interesting anyway, guys, So
• 1:44:13
  we wrapped us up for final thoughts, sure, well, oh my god.
• 1:44:18
  Yeah. I just want to say I think that he is sometimes to
• 1:44:23
  characterize himself as an untimely person right that his time might get to come.
• 1:44:28
  And I think our conversation here, if nothing else, has shown that while
• 1:44:31
  over one hundred years after his death, his time very well may have come.
• 1:44:34
  Since all of us have very different takes on what's valuable in his work,
• 1:44:39
  but we all seem to think that he's a super interesting guy. Because
• 1:44:43
  we're now one hundred and forty five minutes into this, or sorry, now
• 1:44:45
  we're forty five minutes into this, and there's no stopping. There's still a
• 1:44:48
  lot to say for sure. Yeah, I guess I'll just say that this
• 1:44:54
  is I want to reiterate, like I think maybe now by the end of
• 1:44:57
  the episode, patrons, you can see why twenty year old would be so
• 1:45:00
  attracted to this figure of this figure. Yeah, I know even that just
• 1:45:05
  as we finished saying how much we respect him. But yeah, obviously you
• 1:45:08
  can see all the aspects of him that make him so attractive. I mean,
• 1:45:11
  it's in some ways I feel like Nietzsche is like very punk rock.
• 1:45:15
  It's like a punk rock philosopher, fucking badasses and like not sticking to a
• 1:45:19
  very masculine too, right, He like, what about what about a mother?
• 1:45:26
  Is like will to power? Or he calls truth because you can't fucking
• 1:45:30
  understand it. He calls truth a woman that needs to be dominated. It
• 1:45:35
  is kind of the shock rock Well yeah, truth, Well that's that's a
• 1:45:39
  Machiavelli quote. Actually, Fortuna is a woman and she needs to be beaten.
• 1:45:45
  Here he said no, he says, he says, Prince, Actually,
• 1:45:48
  no, you're right, You're right. My mistake says that truth is
• 1:45:51
  a woman, and every philosopher who thinks he's been able to get her is
• 1:45:56
  an idiot, and she's gonna like get she's gonna escape his grasp every time
• 1:46:00
  there's a little bit of projection there. Yeast is like very much keeping with
• 1:46:05
  like a Nietzsche and aesthetics, because I just want to point out that it's
• 1:46:08
  had like gigantic cause and huge lows like about a one hour and we're basically
• 1:46:13
  talking about Nietzsche. Is if he was like the greatest guy ever being like
• 1:46:15
  any pioneered this an he pioneered that, and you know this one didn't have
• 1:46:19
  existed without him. And then like twenty minutes later that we were like,
• 1:46:23
  he's a fucking Nazi and you know what I mean, he's in egalitarian agent.
• 1:46:27
  It's just a so and it really testifies to the fact that whatever else
• 1:46:30
  you want to say, he was a complicated guy and he wanted to get
• 1:46:31
  a rise out of people like a punk rock worker would and he did.
• 1:46:35
  Right. Yeah, I think I think looking forward to where we maybe evaluate
• 1:46:43
  whether or not Nietzsche is a so called like dangerous mind or dangerous author.
• 1:46:48
  I mean, I think after reading Genealogy of Morals again, I think,
• 1:46:54
  like, I agree, you shouldn't read him without some kind of guidance about
• 1:47:00
  like from your priest. You shouldn't but don't believe Yeah, I don't know,
• 1:47:05
  guidance from a religious leader, maybe just a philosopher, Like you shouldn't
• 1:47:10
  believe him too much at first until you get more of a picture of the
• 1:47:15
  whole. I mean, yeah, I can see how the things he says
• 1:47:19
  are very inflammatory and can be construed in very horrible ways. But I mean,
• 1:47:29
  ultimately, I don't think there's an easy thing like what did Nietzsche think?
• 1:47:32
  I don't know. It's not an easy question to answer, but yeah,
• 1:47:36
  I think there are some dangers to the ways that nietzscha and just the
• 1:47:41
  appeal his sort of poetic style has, like everybody wants to read someone who
• 1:47:45
  says truth but also in the most beautiful way possible in the Yeah, Nietzsche
• 1:47:51
  does that very well. It's kind of like if you say I'm being Nietzschean
• 1:47:56
  because I'm being so epic, then just by saying that you're not being nichean
• 1:48:00
  because the actual, the actual overman would never even know that he's an overman.
• 1:48:04
  Everyone else would know it. It's kind of like it's like that paradox
• 1:48:09
  with hipster dom. It's like, as soon as you admit you're a hipster,
• 1:48:12
  you're not a hipster. That's true. Yea. All right, listeners,
• 1:48:15
  Well, thanks for taking this ride with us. I would be impressed
• 1:48:19
  if you finished the whole thing, and we'll see how you edit it down.
• 1:48:24
  I think it was pretty like coherent on on its own. It was
• 1:48:29
  quite coherent, think you so much. But anyway, thank you for being
• 1:48:31
  patrons. We hope you appreciate this uh extension of our will to power,
• 1:48:38
  and I hope you don't resent us for anything we may have said. Well
• 1:48:44
  as we as as Eric already said, you guys are the are the aristocrat,
• 1:48:47
  the aristocracy in our in our nobles. Anyway, I love you,
• 1:48:54
  bunch of eagles. I think basket. I've had a couple of beers,
• 1:49:02
  so I'm gonna go indulge my will to piss so I will be back.
• 1:49:06
  Okay, all right, thanks for coming. Thanks