Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] German Philosophy: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 3, 2022 In this episode, Alyson and Breht introduce, teach, and discuss the philosphy of two giants in western philosophy: Arthur Schopenhaur and Friedrich Nietzsche.  They discuss their respective philosophies, how they relate, how they differ, the subsequent thinkers and movements they inspired or influened, their relation to politics right, left and center, their connection to eastern philosophies and religions, and much more!  ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. So for today's episode, we're doing something very different than what we've done before, which is diving really into, like, modern philosophy proper. And for this episode, we're going to be covering. Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche. We're going to talk about their contributions to philosophy, their idea of the will, which Schopenhauer sort of creates and Nietzsche takes in new and different directions, their historical context, et cetera. This is fascinating, I think, in its own right. These are two giants of modern philosophy and, you know, regardless of whether or not we can

shoehorn them into a political discourse, I think it's worth knowing what and how they thought because I think a lot of their stuff comes down in the form of culture, if not politics, and really sort of shapes the way a lot of us think, even if we don't know it. But also we're going to be putting these thinkers on the table so that we can move forward. And the next document or text we're going to cover is, is his name Julius Ivola? Yes. Julius Ivola, the famous fascist writer who draws from Nietzsche, who draws from Schopenhauer. So this is a trajectory into a fascist.

just work. What's the work we're going to be covering next month, Allison? Ride the Tiger. Ride the Tiger. So check that one out. If you want to prepare it all. Of course, you don't need to prepare. You can come into these conversations and let us walk you through it, but for some people they like preparing. So this episode's going to be a little different than our normal

structure in that we're just going to do two large scripted parts where I talk about Schopenhauer, Allison talks about Nietzsche, and then we're going to go into a long discussion about their influences, their relationship to, you know, Eastern philosophy and some other things as well. It's going to be a more open-ended organic discussion. And if you stick around past the outro music, we're also going to each of us take a few quotes from our respective thinker, and we're going to just talk about them, why they're important, why we might like them, comment on them for a second.

Do you have anything to say at all up front as a way of introducing this episode, or do you just kind of want to dive into it? Yeah, I can maybe give a little bit of context. So I think just upfront, these are two really fascinating thinkers that have had just an absurd impact on the world, right, in terms of philosophy and politics. And so I think that they're really worth thinking about in this regard. I also think they're both really good writers in their own ways, which I deeply appreciate about them stylistically. But one thing I want to say upfront, right, for our listeners, is as we're pivoting to kind of talking about reactionary philosophy and wrestling with it, is that it's really important that we do this, right? Marxism is, as we know, a ruthless criticism of all that

exists, but criticism that's not grounded in an understanding of what we're criticizing is always going to be weak. It's always going to be easily rebutted, and it's always going to be underdeveloped. So if you're sitting there, like, why are they talking about Nietzsche? Why are they talking about Schopenhauer? Why are they talking about Ebola? If for no other reason, it's so that we can understand how to respond to the movements that have developed out of these thinkers and to really wrestle with the philosophical foundations, to compare and contrast them with materialism and kind of draw that out. These are thinkers who have had profound impacts on even like contradictory political and ideological movements that would not get along with each other

in many ways. And for a Marxist, our job is to wrestle with that, not to just brush it off, but to engage with it, think about its argumentation and understand what goes wrong there in order to demystify things. So I do kind of want to give that as sort of an introductory note for why I think this is a trajectory that is good for us to go down. Yeah, absolutely. And it's also worth noting that, you know, regardless of where these thinkers and their thoughts went, regardless of their sort of inapplicability or even conflict with some of the core tenets of socialism, etc. I think I speak for both Allison and myself when I say that these thinkers are really brilliant people. They have really fascinating insight. And they have a soft spot in both of our

hearts, you know, regardless of our disagreements or critiques of them. Because they really, they give voice to a truly unique way, at least, of envisioning the world, of looking at the world around you, and particularly the will, which Schopenhauer develops and then Nietzsche takes in a new direction, is a particularly interesting way to think about the world around you. And as we'll get into, in the second part, went on to impact many, many thinkers in psychology and philosophy overall. And that's another point is, you know, they are doing philosophy, right? But they're also opening this doorway into psychology, I think, in a unique and novel way. A lot of their philosophy is just psychology, and a lot of their psychology melds with their philosophy.

So it's sort of hard to pull those two things apart. But as we'll get into, you can see why these thinkers went on to heavily influence the development of something like psychoanalysis, for example. So it's the psychology and philosophy mixture that I also think is particularly compelling. Yeah, absolutely. I think that they're doing almost kind of like a therapeutic analysis of how we might relate to the universe in some ways that is very new in philosophy at the time that it's emerging. You don't get a lot of that sense, sort of, even the Greeks, really. Mm-hmm, exactly. All right, well, without further ado, we're going to get into an explanation of each of their philosophies, first and foremost. I'm going to start with a breakdown of Schopenhauer's life and work,

and then Allison will follow up with an exposition of Nietzsche. So without further ado, let's get into that. Follow me into the inky black spider web of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Arthur Schopenhauer was born in February of 1788 to wealthy mercantile parents of German-Dutch descent in Danzig, today called Gondonksk, on the northern Baltic coast of Poland. Neither of his parents were particularly religious, both were supporters of the French Revolution, and they would be what we would call today upper-middle-class liberals. I don't want to spend too much time on his biography because that information is plentiful online for those interested. but I do want to point out two important events in his childhood. At 15 years old, Arthur Schopenhauer went along with his parents on a trip around Europe during the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars.

As he traveled with his parents, he saw firsthand the wreckage, destruction, dissolution, and impoverishment caused by the European conflict, and this had a deep impact on him at a very crucial age. In addition to that, only a few years afterwards, Schopenhauer's father committed suicide by throwing throwing himself off of the roof of their house into an adjacent canal where they found his body. Arthur's dad struggled with anxiety and depression throughout his life, which intensified as he got older, and Arthur believed that he had inherited his gloomy, melancholic orientation from his father. After his father's death, him and his mother were increasingly at loggerheads with one another, which ultimately culminated in them parting ways as Arthur entered adulthood.

And aside from some letters and correspondences, they never saw each other again after a certain point. There is much more to say about Arthur's life, including his relationship with Gerta, but it escapes the parameters of this episode. In any case, he wrote his masterpiece, the world as will and representation, in his late 20s, and that will be the focus of the rest of this introduction. Arthur Schopenhauer was living, thinking, and writing, as all intellectuals of his time and place were, in the shadow of a famous philosopher whom he had nothing but disdain for, Hegel. Hegel dominated German philosophy at the time, and Schopenhauer saw him as more or less a charlatan who hid a lack of substance behind a nearly impenetrable wall of

unreadable obscurantism. Instead, Schopenhauer looked back to another giant of European philosophy at that time, Emmanuel Kant. Schopenhauer used Kant as his starting point, and brought on board Kant's transcendental idealism as well as much of Kant's epistemology, including his essential distinction between phenomena and numina, or the world as we perceive it versus things in themselves. Kant believed that we could never know things in themselves, only our representation of things, or how they appeared to us. When we look out at the cosmos, when we use our scientific tools, when we try to comprehend the universe, we can only look at, study, and comprehend the world of phenomena or representation. Never the world of things in themselves, as they are

external to human perception and literally impossible for us to know. Schopenhauer agreed with this basic distinction, but argued against Kant that we can know the world of things in themselves or the thing in itself, not by trying to look outwardly at the external world, the world of phenomena, but by looking or perhaps more importantly feeling our way inwardly. For example, if I try to understand my hand as a part of the phenomenal world, I hold it up before my eyes, I objectify it as an external object, and I can describe it using language, what it looks like, how it's shaped, what color it is, how it evolved, etc. But can I ever know what my hand is in and of itself as a thing in itself? Kant said no, but Schopenhauer said that we could, and we could do it by feeling or experiencing the hand from the inside, by opening up this internal avenue of investigation, of looking and feeling inwardly in order to,

have access to things in themselves, Schopenhauer made a relatively new and exciting move in the history of modern Western philosophy. By looking inwardly, Schopenhauer argued that what was found was not, as Kant suggested, a plurality of separate things in themselves, but rather a unified oneness, a non-thing that permeated the whole of nature, and he called this mysterious life force the will, or the will to live, or the will to life. In his philosophical masterpiece, the world as will and representation, which he wrote in his 20s and spent the rest of his life shoring up or elaborating on, he laid out the epistemic, metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of this singular will to live that permeated

and animated the whole cosmos. Since the will is the centerpiece of Schopenhauer's philosophy, it deserves some further explanation. When you think of the word will, you probably think of it in terms of an individual's personal will power or free will, a sort of inner agency that a person can exercise in the world to get what they want. For Schopenhauer, however, the will is not something specific to a singular person, though it does manifest through all individuals. Rather, it's a universal force that animates and drives on the whole cosmos. It's in plants as they burst forth from soft, dark soil. It's in animals as they ruthlessly compete within an ecosystem for food, water,

shelter, and reproductive opportunities. It's in the stars as they explode, glow, and burn bright for billions of years. And it's in human beings, just another animal after all, as we go about our lives, growing, changing, pursuing our goals, and reproducing ourselves via sex. The will is infinite. It is blind. It is meaningless, and it is always striving forward with no end goal or point in mind. In fact, it doesn't have a mind. It is not historical, like Hegel's absolute spirit, nor does it teleologically lead anywhere in particular. In its violent indifference to human life, it is terrifying, dark, and in Schopenhauer's estimation, downright evil, not because it seeks to consciously cause suffering, but rather because it's totally indifferent and blind to the suffering

as it causes it. As individual humans, we feel this universal will to life working within us internally as the never-ending succession of desires and cravings that plague us. Once one is met, another arises relentlessly in its place. For example, you can spend years striving for wealth and status in society, only to find that once achieved, there is no respite, no real ability to sit back and simply enjoy what you strove so hard for. Instead, new never-ending desires continue to rise and fall away. More wealth, more status, more security. The game never ends. Internally, we feel this will as a constant, restless striving, a sense that we never quite arrive, that we are never quite content or satisfied. And when we do have a moment of satisfaction,

sexual, hedonistic, vocational, intellectual, or whatever, that satisfaction soon fades and gives rise to boredom, followed by yet more demanding desires. It's this eternal oscillation between desire, a sort of suffering, and boredom, another sort of suffering, that makes up the bulk of human existence, according to Schopenhauer. Moreover, since the will is a unified singular force that unites all of nature into its oneness, it has the added brutality of the recognition that the suffering of others is ultimately our own. You not only suffer as an individual, but when properly understood at least, the suffering of all sentient beings is also yours to bear, because there is no separation from or within the will. The best we can

hope for are fleeting moments of being distracted from all of this, but ultimately there is no escape. Now, on one hand, the will is sort of beautiful, a mysterious animating force that gives rise to the majesty of the eternally unfolding cosmos. But on the other hand, its blindness, its radical indifference to all life, its relentless production of suffering and misery with no end point, is terrifying. Kant introduced, for example, the idea of the sublime into modern philosophy, the dual feeling of awe and terror that strikes someone as they gaze into the enormity of nature and its machinations. For example, looking up at the starry sky on a totally clear night can be both awe-inspiring and gorgeous, while also imbuing you with a sense

of terror at its sheer size and your utter insignificance in the face of all that cosmic enormity and indifference. I think Schopenhauer's will is sublime in this sense, though Schopenhauer definitely emphasizes its terrifyingly indifferent aspects more than its, at least plausible beauty. Standing back a bit, we can now see what Schopenhauer has done. Using, among other things, inward investigation, a unique combination of influences from Plato to Eastern mysticism, Schopenhauer overcame the Kantian prohibition on being able to ever know things in themselves by claiming to come into contact with the ultimate thing in itself, at least according to Schopenhauer, the will to live.

This thing in itself suffuses the entire cosmos. It's totally blind and indifferent to suffering and pain and has no point, no meaning, no end goal. Most humans, Schopenhauer thought, were totally helpless in the face of this will, being thrashed around the stage of their measly, meaningless little life like its demented finger puppet, without ever knowing how or why. Ninety-nine percent of people subject to this will they don't know or understand, simply whittle away their life mindlessly, jumping from desire to desire, never really understanding what's happening and never arriving anywhere but their own grave. This insanely bleak worldview would set Schopenhauer apart from all other philosophers

and mark him as the godfather of philosophical pessimism. Schopenhauer says, quote, It would be better if there was nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

In another instance, he asserts, quote, to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless. we are always living an expectation of better things while at the same time we often repent and long for things that belong to the past we accept the present as something that is only temporary and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim so that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end that they have lived their lifelong at interim

and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life that is to say it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived and so it may be said of man in general that befooled by hope he dances into the arms of death end quote for schopenhauer happiness as something to strive for and be achieved is a bitter illusion what we call happiness is nothing but the temporary absence of that much more permanent background suffering and dissatisfaction nothing is added just momentarily subtracted or at least subdued, only to re-emerge again and again and dissolve whatever momentary sliver of happiness one might have briefly had. Now, before we get into Schopenhauer's advice for how to deal with this horrific state of affairs, I want to talk about something that some of you at least may be thinking. Damn, doesn't this will to life resemble in some interesting ways Darwinian evolution via natural

selection? For the one or two people that actually thought that, you would be quite correct. Schopenhauer's masterpiece was written in 1818, and Darwin's on the origin of species didn't drop until 1859. And while Schopenhauer spent the vast majority of his life with little to know a claim or recognition of his work, in fact, one publisher told him that they had to turn the copies of his first edition of the world as will and representation into pulp because nobody was buying it, he did eventually get noticed, read, and became genuinely famous in the last decade of his life, dying in 1860, only a year after Darwin's groundbreaking work burst onto the scene. Schopenhauer's followers, as one might expect,

immediately seized on the work as profound evidence for Schopenhauer's will. After all, what is evolution via natural selection, if not a blind, indifferent, striving force of nature that permeates all life, drives it on indefinitely without meaning or purpose in a fundamentally uncaring atheistic universe? Interestingly, Marx and Engels also saw Darwin's origin as profound scientific evidence for their idea of dialectical materialism, for what is evolution by natural selection, if not brutally materialist in its red tooth and claw foundations, and intrinsically dialectical in its all-encompassing interrelatedness, in the contradictions between organisms and their environments that drive biological change,

and in its abject historicity. in any case there is a whole world of arguments and interpretations here that will take us too far afield but suffice it to say that the followers of schopenhauer saw the will to live immediately in the pages of darwin's world historical work and i think it helps us grasp the will to think of it in terms of the force behind evolution by natural selection it's also worth noting that schopenhauer like marks and angles was a committed atheist so while the rest of the christian world wrestled with Darwin on that theological level, it seems totally in line with their already existing atheism. In fact, it's been said that in terms of modern philosophy, Schopenhauer's philosophy was

one of the only major philosophies to be deepened by Darwin's discovery, instead of challenged or bypassed as irrelevant. Okay, so now we have grasped the core concept that Schopenhauer introduced to philosophy, the will, and what Nietzsche would later seize on and turn on its head, like Marx seized Hegel's dialectical approach to history while turning it on its head. But before we move on to Nietzsche, let's explore Schopenhauer's solution, if such a word can be used, which is available only to the very rare and very intelligent person who can actually grasp and understand the reality of this will.

As we said earlier, Schopenhauer, ever the misanthrope, believed most people are and would remain utterly clueless to this reality and whittle away their meaningless lives dominated in a constant parade of desire, boredom, dissatisfaction, and suffering. Their best bet was to simply focus on minimizing suffering as much as they can and lower their expectations of what they can ultimately get out of life. But a rare few could rise to the level of the Schopenhawian sage, if you will. The Schopenhawenhawian sage is one who utilizes his or her high-powered intellect to understand how the will to live operates, and with no other choice available to them,

decides to simply resign from the whole game. The sage wages an inner holy war against the will to life, denying all worldly desires for sex and status and wealth, and simply refusing to play along. This sage turns to asceticism, aesthetics, and self-denial. In its ascetic and self-denying aspects, Schopenhauer's sage comes to resemble an austere Buddhist monk. But in its aesthetic dimension,

the sage is unique. to Schopenhauer. Here Schopenhauer argues that in addition to the desire denying asceticism mentioned above, the sage also makes great use of art, music, and literature as a vehicle through which to turn away from the self and its desires altogether, if only temporarily. When one is standing in a museum looking at a gorgeous painting or at a classical music concert immersed totally in the soundscape or entrenched in a work of literary fiction, one can forget oneself. And that feeling of momentary self-transcendence gives art much of its meaning and power. Quote, for Schopenhauer, human willing, desiring, craving, etc., is at the root of suffering.

A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation. In aesthetic contemplation, one no longer perceives an object of perception as something from which one is separated. Rather, it is as if the object alone existed without anyone perceiving it, and one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, the entirety of consciousness entirely filled and occupied by a single perceptual image. Subject and object are no longer distinguishable, and the idea comes to the fore. From this aesthetic immersion, one is no longer an individual who suffers as a result of servitude to one's individual will,

but rather becomes a pure, willless, painless, timeless subject of cognition. The pure willless subject of cognition is cognizant only of ideas, not individual things. This is a kind of cognition that is unconcerned with relations between objects, according to the principle of sufficient reason, time, space, cause, and effect, and instead involves complete absorption in the object, end quote. music in particular was essential to Schopenhauer, as he believed music was the only art form that didn't copy ideas, but actually embodied the will to life itself directly. The famous composer Richard Wagner would be mightily influenced by Schopenhauer on this point in

particular, and would later go on to be friends and then bitter enemies with Frederick Nietzsche, another deep admirer of Schopenhauer. In any case, this focus on the arts was another thing that set Schopenhauer apart, and many argue that he was the first modern philosopher to introduce the philosophical analysis of art as a unique branch of philosophy. Schopenhauer was and remains a truly remarkable and unique thinker in the history of Western philosophy. His dark, pessimistic, and atheistic philosophy is still appealing to modern people, and his work went on to influence many fundamental thinkers of the next century, especially Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Wittgenstein, among many others.

His conception of the will to life would not only be turned into the unconscious by Freud and Jung, but would also prefigure concepts in science like dark energy, that mysterious and hypothetical property and cosmology that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. He also was the first major philosopher in human history to integrate the highest of Western philosophy with the insights of Eastern philosophy in a systematically comprehensive way. In particular, he was deeply influenced by the Upanishads, the ancient scriptures of Hindu philosophy which explore meditation, consciousness, the self, and ontology,

and later came to an awareness of Buddhism. He loved the story of the Buddha in particular. He also had a pet poodle that he loved very much and would be seen walking around town until his death that he named Atma, which is a Hindu term meaning roughly the world soul, And his conception of the sage, as well as his emphasis on suffering, the illusory nature of the self, the role of desire in creating suffering, and more, were obviously imported from his engagement with Eastern philosophy. It's worth noting that translations of Hindu and Buddhist texts were only just beginning to trickle into Europe, though,

and translations were often pretty rough at that time. So while it's safe to say that he was hugely impacted by Eastern philosophy and understood it much better than most of his contemporaries, it's also fair to point out that his understanding was probably limited to some extent by this reality, and I think it shows up most, obviously, in the absence of much of the positive and redemptive spiritual aspects of these traditions. We will dive deeper into the connections to Buddhism and Hinduism as well as the impacts on later thinkers and the discussion part of this episode later on, but for now, suffice it to say that Schopenhauer was a truly brilliant and genuinely unique thinker, and in the pantheon of philosophers east and west, he is up there among my personal favorites. This is not to say that he was above criticism of courts, much less that he was correct in identifying the will as the foundation of the cosmos.

He makes grandiose and unprovable claims about the nature and value of existence. He does not explain the origin of the will, and he does not wrestle with the complexity created by his desire and self-denying sage. for how can the will ever turn against the will if the will is the one doing the turning? Wherever one comes down on the ultimate value of Schopenhauer's philosophy, he was a unique and talented thinker that helped usher in the modern world

and the modern mind, and the world as will and representation is still seen as one of the most interesting works of Western philosophy of the last several hundred years. In fact, one copy of Schopenhauer's masterpiece would eventually find itself in a used bookstore, sitting on a dusty shelf, unperturbed for who knows how long,

until one day a young man by the name of Frederick Nietzsche would stumble into that used bookstore, and as he casually roamed the aisles, aimlessly looking through the books on offer, he would eventually come to rest his eyes and then his hands on this book, the world as will and representation. Reflecting on this moment later in life, Nietzsche said, I took the unfamiliar book in my hands, and began leafing through the pages. I don't know what demon it was

that whispered in my ear, Take this book home. So, breaking my principles of never buying a book too quickly, I did just that. Back home, I threw myself into the corner of the sofa with my new treasure

and began to let that dynamic, gloomy, genius work on my mind. I found myself looking into a mirror which reflected the world, life, and my own nature with terrifying grandeur. Here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, hell in heaven.

All right, so thank you so much, Brett, for that fantastic summary of Schopenhauer. So now we are going to go ahead and turn to Nietzsche real quick. We're going to get a little bit of biographical information about Nietzsche and who he was, and then we are going to dive into his philosophy. So to start, we might ask who was Nietzsche? And the answer is that Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose work has been extremely influential on Western philosophical thought. In many ways, he prefigured a kind of iconoclastic and bombastic approach to philosophy,

and his work really focused on critiquing, analyzing, and even outright attacking ideas, which many people held as unassailable and beyond questioning. To give a little bit of context into Nietzsche's life, I will quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states that, quote, Friedrich William Nietzsche was born October 15, 1844, the son of Karl Ludwig and Franziska Nietzsche, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, Charles Ludwig Nietzsche was a Lutheran minister in the small Prussian town of Rokin near Leipzig. When young Friedrich was not quite five, his father died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving Franziska Friedrich and the three-year-old daughter Elizabeth and an infant son.

Friedrich's brother died unexpectedly shortly thereafter. These events left young Friedrich, the only male in a household that included his mother, sister, paternal grandmother, and an aunt, although Friedrich drew upon paternal guidance of Franziska's father. young Friedrich also enjoyed camaraderie of a few male playmates. Upon the loss of Karl Ludwig, the family took up residence in the relatively urban setting of Naumberg, Saxony. Friedrich gained admittance to prestigious Schultforta, where he pursued, received Prussia's finest preparatory education

in the humanities, theology, and classical language. Outside of school, Nietzsche found a literary and creative society with classmates, including Paul Dawson, who later became a prominent scholar of Sanskrit and Indian Indic studies. In addition, Nietzsche played piano, composed music, and read the works of Emerson and the poet Friedrich Holdren, who was relatively unknown at the time. And quote. So one thing a note about Nietzsche's early life is that it was marked fairly extensively by loss and suffering, and this would end up, I think, having a very major factor on his work. Nietzsche would eventually

go on to study theology and philosophy at the university with the hopes of becoming a minister. This dream was quickly abandoned as he found himself developing an interest in classic Greek philosophy. He eventually moved to the University of Leipzig to focus more intensely on philosophy. It was during this time that Nietzsche left Christianity, an event which would also have really significant impacts on his philosophical works. He credited his shifting views and increasing interest to the work of Schopenhauer, actually, which is quite interesting. He eventually became a professor himself at the University of Basel, where he studied and taught classical philosophy. And during the beginning of this period, he remembered.

remained pretty primarily focused on Greek philosophy. He also briefly left teaching to serve in the military during the Franco-Prussian War. He operated as a medic and was once again exposed to violence, trauma, and suffering in a very extremely in acute manner. After the war, he returned to teaching and published his first major text, The Birth of Tragedy, which analyzed the form and philosophy of classic Greek tragedy. Finally, in 1879, Nietzsche's health seriously declined and he retired from his position at the University of Basel. This led to a period of time when Nietzsche continued to publish philosophy outside the university. During this time, he published some of his most influential works, Beyond Good and Evil, on the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, the Antichrist,

Eke Homo, and the Gay Sciences. And it is these ideas that occur in these texts, which we are going to wrestle with today. So let's go ahead and think a little bit then about how we could get started with Nietzsche. First, I think that we really need to wrestle with that one of his texts called on the genealogy of morality. In my opinion, this is a good starting point because it lays a foundation which the rest of Nietzsche can be contextualized by, and we can kind of understand a lot of his ideas as emerging from the work he does in this text. So, the text is important also because it kind of lays the groundwork for some of his central criticisms of Christianity that will also run really kind of throughout all of his different writings.

Nietzsche begins this text by delineating between two views of morality, which have existed, in Western history. And these systems, they operate according to two different dichotomies, a good and bad dichotomy and a good and evil dichotomy. While these sound superficially simple and similar, they actually have very big differences. Nietzsche associates the good bad dichotomy with sort of aristocratic forms and morality that dominated much of Greek and Roman society. So now that we kind of have the historical context, let's go ahead and take a moment to analyze these dichotomies. The good-bad dichotomy is based upon a notion of goodness which equates goodness with strength, nobility, good birth, aristocratic virtue. This is often referred to as master morality.

Good in this context means to be strong, proud, capable of overcoming, individualistic, self-reliant, and virtuous. Likewise, bad was understood to represent weakness, poverty, reliance upon others, pitiability, humility, and meekness. This master morality emerged in cultures of conquest such as Rome, where those in power enshrined the categories that they understood is enabling their own power into a moral system. So that is the first dichotomy there. The next dichotomy is the good and evil dichotomy. This dichotomy is in many ways an inversion of the good bad dichotomy. Good becomes associated with humility, meekness, poverty, weakness, and making oneself small in the service of others. Likewise, evil becomes associated with power, pride,

arrogance and self-aggrandizement and self-sufficiency. As you may have noticed, this is in a sense a flipping of the good, bad distinction on its head. Nietzsche attributes this morality originally to Judaism, arguing that it emerged as a strategy of resistance and subversion to the Roman rule by the Jewish people. But Nietzsche is also most interested, however, in the way that this ideal gets taken up by Christianity, which embodies it clearly in the teachings of Jesus and in the sermon on the Mount. This moral system is commonly referred to as priest-list. morality or slave morality by Nietzsche and those who study him. So because the good evil dichotomy, which defines slave morality, emerges as a rebellion against classical

master morality and the political system from which it emerged, there's kind of a strange transformation of morality which takes place. Under master morality, bad was something that was certainly looked down upon, perhaps with kind of disdain, but it wasn't something that needed to be destroyed. After all, the good were the powerful, and that could only ever be the few. Most people would be weak, and therefore bad was just a fact of life. There was no need to eliminate badness from the universe. And yet in the transformation to the good evil dichotomy, Nietzsche argues that this changes. Evil becomes a thing which must be combated, it must be purged. Christianity clearly embodies this drive, according to Nietzsche, which sees evil as an

internal disorder which must be purged. Christian ethics demands that one give up power and wealth in favor of meekness and servitude, and thus insist that the internal evil within everyone must be purged and overcome. Socially, there's also a demand for a toppling of those in power who are now seen and conceptualized as evil and also needing to be overcome. So according to Nietzsche, this slave morality originates from and perpetuates a state which he calls Rizantamont. Rizantamont is similar to resentment, but represents kind of a psychic state of hatred, which manifests in a specific way. And here we can quote Nietzsche at length, who writes, quote, it is a fundamental truth of human nature that man is incapable of remaining permanently

on the heights, of continuing to admire everything. Human nature needs variety. Even in the most enthusiastic age, people have always liked to joke enviously about their superiors. That is perfectly in order and is entirely justifiable, so long as after having laughed at the great they once more look upon themselves with admiration. Otherwise, the game is not worth the candle. In that way, Rizontamont finds an outlet, even in an enthusiastic age. And as long as an age, even though less enthusiastic, has the strength to give Rizantamont's proper character, and has made up its mind what its expression signifies, Rizantamont has its own, though dangerous importance. The more reflection gets the upper hand,

and thus makes people indolent, the more dangerous Rizantamont becomes, because it no longer has sufficient character to make it conscious of its own significance. Breath of that character, reflection is cowardly and vacillating, and according to circumstance, interprets the same thing in a variety of ways. It treats it as a joke and it fails to regard it as an insult. And when it fails to dismiss it as nothing at all, or else it will treat the thing as a witticism. And if that fails, then say that it was meant as a moral satire deserving attention. And if that does not succeed, add that it was not worth bothering about. Resontamont becomes the constituent principle of want of character, which from utter wretchedness tries to sneak itself a position all

the time safeguarding itself by conceding that it is less than nothing. So this is kind of the idea of Rizantamont that emerges from Nica, and it's this which we need to avoid. And thus, for Nica, although slave morality may sound appealing in some ways, flipping this old system of order and power on its head, it actually traps its adherence and sort of psychic cycle of hatred. There's also a self-hatred, which comes from Rizantamant, because it turns inward, and we see the evil or sin within ourselves, and then have to be. to drive it out of us. We become caught in relations of guilt and hatred, which ultimately inspire violence and destruction, both inwardly and outwardly, according to Nietzsche. So, now that

we understand the Nietzsche view of the origins of humanity, we can wrestle with another concept that emerges in Nietzsche's writing, the eternal recurrence or the eternal return. It is a very strange concept, and so we are going to read, again, a little bit at length from Nietzsche. In the gay science, he offers a pretty concise explanation. He writes that, quote, what if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliest, and to say to you, this life as you now lived it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new, but every pain and every joy, and every thought and every sigh, and everything unutterably small or great

in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke to you? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God, and never have I heard anything more divine. End quote. So thus, the question that is posed to each and every person in this concept of eternal recurrence is whether or not we would choose to live our life over and over and over again forever without changing a single thing. This concept brings to light some key concepts for Nietzsche, the idea of life affirmation and life denial. The question of repeating one's life unchanged indefinitely causes us to consider whether or not we truly love

life. This is in a sense both for our personal lives, but also in a broader philosophical sense of whether or not we love life itself. Life, according to Nietzsche, really building on Schopenhauer here, is inherently composed of suffering alongside joy, pain alongside pleasure, and boredom alongside amusement. So for Nietzsche to truly love life, one must embrace all of these aspects of it. To reject the offer of eternal recurrence is to deny the value of life itself. It's to loathe reality for what it is and demand that it be otherwise. Nietzsche associates this stance with slave morality, which hates the existence of suffering and inequity, and seeks to flatten out reality. And furthermore, Christianity is sort of the epitome of slave morality for Nietzsche,

demands that one deny life in the present in exchange for an eternal life in the afterlife. Christianity teaches that if one becomes meek, humble, and a servant of others, they will be given an eternal reward after this life. And for Nietzsche, this is ultimately a form of nihilism. Life becomes loathed and contemptible and despised, all in the hopes of some eternal reward in the hereafter. Humans are told to be small and placid, instead of being told to love life and embrace hardship and suffering

as inherent aspects of life which strengthen us and give us meaning through overcoming. In a sense, eternal recurrence is the answer to the Christian promise of the afterlife. It throws out the idea of eternal rewards and asks, if assuming no reward exists, would you still live the life? that you've chosen to live. Nietzsche's bet is that if you've invested in slave morality, you would say no. And in this sense, you are caught in a life-denying nihilism, which hates life for what it is and lashes out to purge life of evil and suffering in a cycle of Rizantamont. And this for Nietzsche is the incorrect answer to the challenge of

eternal recurrence. But before we can examine the correct answer to eternal recurrence, we must wrestle one more challenge that Nietzsche poses in his philosophy, which is the notion of the death of God, which I'm willing to bet most of you have heard of before, but you may not really understand what the idea is. In the gay science, Nietzsche offers us this notion of the death of God through a parable about a madman who walks into a marketplace or town square and announces the death of God. We're going to read this parable quite at length here so that you can get all the details. So quoting from Nietzsche directly here. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried in

I seek God, I seek God. As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he gotten lost? One asked, did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage, immigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced with his eyes. Wither is God, he cried. I will tell you, we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we? How could we? How could he cried? I will tell you. We have killed him. You and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How did we do this? How did we? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually, backwards, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning. Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet that divine decomposition? God's two decompose.

God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves? The murderer of all murderers. What was holiest and mightiest of all the world has yet owned, has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off of us? What water is there that we can use to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Most we ourselves not become God simply to appear worthy of it. There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed, will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. End quote. Now, many of people have heard of the idea of the death of God, and often in kind of

the common understanding of it, people think of the death of God is something that Nietzsche is celebrating. But the parable of the madman really shows the opposite. God's death isn't a joyous thing necessarily. It has plunged humanity into meaninglessness and nihilism. It's upended a natural order. It's scint us spiraling through an infinite and meaningless cosmos. The madman doesn't celebrate the death of God, but rather poses the question of how we might comfort ourselves in the face of it. The death of God, like eternal recurrence, poses a horrific prospect and a challenge to us. It challenges us to decide how we will live after his death, how we can become worthy of the action that we have done. It demands a response from us. And yet, at the end of the

parable, the madman concludes that the world is not ready for this response and that he has come too soon. So now that we stand here reading this text, we might ask, what is this response? What is the correct answer to eternal recurrence and to the death of God? Because according to Nietzsche, it is the same answer. And in a certain sense, this answer is simple. It is to embrace life and to explain that one would happily live it over and over and over again, and to insist that life is meaning enough in itself to fill the void left by God's death. But Nietzsche embodies this example in a particular figure, and thus smokes Arthustra, Nietzsche introduces another concept which offers us an answer to the problem of eternal recurrence, the ubermensch. And there are various

translation of the term ubermensch, but most people translate it as Superman or as overman. In thus Spokes Arthustra, Nietzsche invokes the notion when he writes that, quote, man is a rope fastened between animal and ubermensch, a rope over an abyss. Dead are all the gods. Now do we desire the Superman to live. Let this be our final will at the great noontide, end quote. The stylistic framing of thus spake Zarathustra makes parsing the meaning of this a little bit difficult, but if we can say the quotation carefully, we can see that the ubermensch is presented as a state above humanity, and the animal is presented as a state below. The ubermich is also presented as being birthed at a specific moment now that the gods are dead. Now is the time that we can

see the necessity of the ubermich, according to Nietzsche. And the ubermich, I think, is quite well understood as the overman, the higher order, which the madman in the parable of the madman suggests must exist now in the wake of the death of God. So what exactly is the Ubermich then? Well, in one sense, he is the answer to the death of God. The Ubermich is man becoming more than man and being able to fill the gap left by God's death. The Ubermich is a person who can affirm eternal recurrence because he's internalized love for life as the fundamental aspect of his being, as his anchor in the universe. The Ubermich acts not out of a desire for eternal reward, but out of a love for reality itself. He gives because he loves life, not out

a pity or moral demand. He is honest because lying denies reality in life, not because it is a sin or it is evil. He is beyond good and evil. He has escaped morality and loves this life and everything else. This love for life allows man to ascend to the level of God and assert that the now decaying deity isn't needed for life to have meaning. Life's meaning exists in the affirmation of life, the affirmation of all of its suffering and banality, along with all of its happiness and pleasure, life and the love of it is meaningful enough. Life and the love of it are the solutions to nihilism left in the wake of God. To live life unchanged over and over again forever on end, according to Nietzsche, is enough. Okay, now we're going to get into our

discussion part of this episode. Now, after listening to Alison and I, you have to, you have a basic understanding of their philosophies, where they fit in history, et cetera. And now we're going to kind of pull out some threads, reflect on, criticize, and discuss some of these ideas and how they're connected with the rest of the world, with the rest of modernity, et cetera. And I think a good place to start is, it's very clear to anybody who just listened to the last part of this episode that Nietzsche follows in line with Schopenhauer. So Schopenhauer opens up this idea of the will. Nietzsche takes it and runs with it. But as with every sort of, you know, acolyte of a philosopher or a thinker or a psychologist or a writer or whatever, there is a taking on board some of the things that the previous person put on the table while rejecting others.

So with that in mind, how is Nietzsche expanding on and rejecting certain aspects of the philosophy of Schopenhauer? Yeah. So I think both of us in our summary touched a little bit on Nietzsche's affinity for Schopenhauer, right? So you talked a little bit about his experience of discovering Schopenhauer. And throughout his life, he kind of said that Schopenhauer was the only philosopher he ever respected. So that should give you a sense of kind of his orientation towards Schopenhauer. And he's definitely building on him. Will exists in both of them.

But in Nietzsche, we see kind of almost a critique of the idea of the will to life, or at least the centrality of the will to life, which is the first thing that I want us to think about. So Nietzsche doesn't deny that the will to life exists, right? And in fact, I think a very central part of Nietzsche's idea is that the sort of suffering and dissatisfaction that Schopenhauer attributes to that onward progress of the will to life does exist, and it's an inherent part of life, and it's a thing that we are caught up in and have to learn to relate to. And so in that sense, I think that Nietzsche is taking a lot of Schopenhauer's ideas on face as a starting point and working from there. But in Nietzsche's work,

we also get this concept of the will to power, which comes up a little bit. And I want to be very careful here, because Nietzsche talks pretty broadly about the will to power in his work, what he means by it is not always clear, and the term was appropriated later on by the Nazis to apply a meaning to it that maybe is not super clearly found in Nietzsche's work. But the will to power, if we want to think about it simply, is a will which exists within all living things, not just to continue their life, but to achieve and attain power. And Nietzsche says that this exists alongside the will to life, but it supersedes it, because Nietzsche says these heroic figures will risk their lives for the sake of power or greatness, which indicates that it is a

more fundamental will that can overcome the will to life and is a larger thing. And for Nietzsche, the will to power is really important because it kind of helps us understand how people relate to the world and relate to morality. If we think back to the genealogy of morality, what Nietzsche is suggesting is that both master morality and slave morality were plays of power, right? Master morality was created by an aristocratic class in power to justify their position in power, and slave morality, according to Nietzsche, was created by an oppressed minority group within Rome to seize power by subverting the ideas of master morality. And so in both cases, we can understand the formation of values, the formation of ideas as an expression not just of life, but of the will to power as its

own independent and external idea. So this is a concept which builds on Schopenhauer, but also kind of circumvents Schopenhauer a little bit by denying the idea that the will to life is the universal thing which drives all action and decision in the universe. It can sometimes be overridden, according to Nietzsche. So that's the first place that I think he really builds and then begins to differ from Schopenhauer. And the second is kind of in his orientation towards suffering, right? Schopenhauer is much more willing to kind of accept the Buddhist or Hindu approach to suffering in which one is trying to achieve some sort of liberation from suffering through a form of asceticism, you know, as a way of living. And obviously, within Schopenhauer,

this isn't quite identical to the Buddhist or the Hindu view, but there's a lot of similarity there. And Nietzsche's rejecting this. Nietzsche has this interesting orientation towards suffering, where it's not something that we might achieve liberation or indifference towards, but it's actually something we almost have to learn to love and affirm, which is a very sort of strange turning of Schopenhauer on his head. For Nietzsche, the existence of suffering in the universe, the fact that happiness and fulfillment are temporary are things which spur us to power. They spur us to overcome. They spur us to become stronger and to develop into greater beings. And again, the idea of the eternal return asks us to look at all of that suffering

and affirm its value and to see value in it and to understand it as a positive force of transformation in our lives. And so in terms of how we relate to suffering, Nietzsche does kind of invert Schopenhauer, right? He is super impacted by Schopenhauer's pessimism and by Schopenhauer's view of the universe, but Nietzsche suggests that we need to learn to affirm life, and that means all aspects of it, and does seem to suggest that Schopenhauer falls into a sort of nihilism and a life denial that needs to be escaped. So those are the two kind of core ways that I see Nietzsche as really clearly building on Schopenhauer while also doing an inversion of Schopenhauer's ideas. Yeah, very well said, and I would even add an analogy that I really like, which is,

you know, Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer's will and sort of turns it on its. head in the same or a similar fashion that Marx took Hegel's dialectic of history and turned it on its head, right, turned it from idealist into materialist. So you see these people coming after these major thinkers taking the core aspect of their work, but then in so many ways, inverting it to its complete opposite. And so that's interesting. And one of the ways I think, one of the very interesting ways I think you can see the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, particularly with regards to their take on suffering.

is to look at the sort of ideal person that they both put forward, right? So you have the Schopenhauer and Sage, you know, the sort of self-denial renunciate ascetic, and you have the Nietzschean Superman, Ubermensch. And those two archetypes, I think, are direct results of their differences of in the face of the inevitability of suffering. And so I really like that sage and Superman dynamic as an explanatory. tool here. And then the question becomes, and I think we might get into this a little bit more with our Buddhism question is, you know, is there possibly a synthesis between these two ways of looking

at suffering? Is there some way that we can take a little bit from Schopenhauer and a little bit from Nietzsche? I think something like that comes out in Buddhism, which we can get to in a second. But yeah, that sage Superman dynamic is important and thinking of Nietzsche, you know, turning Schopenhauer's will on its head like Marx turned Hegel's dialectic on its head, I think can be helpful there as well. I don't have too much to add with regards to differences because all the other stuff that makes Nietzsche's philosophy different than Schopenhauer is really him taking other ideas and developing things in new direction.

It was this will and their relationship to it that is the core of their similarity and thus ultimately their differences. Do you have anything else to say on that front? I don't think so. I'm really interested to jump into the next step, actually, because I think you're right that this is where we might get some resolution to some of this. So I'll pose this one to you, which is how are both of these thinkers influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, right? So they both admitted this influence very clearly.

Could you expand a little bit on it and how you see that at play in their work? Totally. Of course I have a lot to say on this. I'll start with Schopenhauer. I'm not as familiar with Nietzsche's direct contact with these texts, but as I said in my scripted part, it's also worth knowing that around the time that Schopenhauer is working heavily influenced by Kant, by Plato, but also the Hindu Upanishads, he has this translation of a translation of a translation because these Eastern works are only just beginning to be imported into Europe. So while it's very clear that Schopenhauer had pretty good knowledge of the Upanishads and thus Hinduism

and some basic knowledge of Buddhism, it's also worth noting that that understanding probably isn't super deep if for no other reason than the limitations that he had with regards to. the work he could wrestle with. But having said that, Schopenhauer is the first major philosopher to integrate the best of Western philosophy with Eastern philosophy in a particularly systematic, comprehensive way. It's one thing to just, in the modern world, especially, this sort of a centric grab bag of different ideas from all over the world. But this stuff was really new in the West at the time. And the systematic way that Schopenhauer went by putting these things together is very different. It's like the content.

or Higalian or Marxian level of deep, comprehensive, almost system or world-building philosophy. And he was one of the first to do that. I came up with this term as I was reading Schopenhauer as sort of a black forest Buddhism because obviously there's the black forest in Germany, there's this Eastern influence, but there's this pessimism. I think Buddhism allows a way to escape the suffering through, you know, not asceticism, which the Buddha himself denied, but, you know, the Buddha says the middle way, the middle path, between asceticism and hedonism, not going too far off into either direction. And while it is true that life is suffering in Buddhism and this suffering is a result of the innate constant craving and desiring inherent to human nature, you know, the Buddha gives a way out through systematic meditation that isn't a resignation or asceticism, but is rather, I think, a more. more spiritually fulfilling, blossoming sort of coming into your full, as it were.

And in that way, I think there's this interesting synthesis between the sage of Schopenhauer and the Superman of Nietzsche that already exists in Buddhism. And maybe neither of them fully understood Buddhism to be able to put these things together. But not that Uber mentioned this hyper individualistic way, but just that through the transformation of your being by Buddhism, you come out the other side, not a nihilist or somebody just seeking temporary relief from suffering, but as a totally transformed consciousness. And so in that way, I think it differs from both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's understanding of these things. Like I said, Schopenhauer takes on board that life is fundamentally suffering,

takes on board the importance of examining and transcending desire, and takes on board the illusion of the individual self. Schopenhauer interestingly had a little poodle that he used to walk around with, named Atman, which is the Hindu word for the world's soul. So it's kind of funny to think of, you know, Schopenhauer, like walking around his neighborhood, talking to himself with his little poodle, the world's soul trotting behind him. It's very funny. Another element that comes in from Buddhism is this compassion that arises from seeing the interconnectedness of all life. So with Schopenhauer's will comes a deep interconnectedness. of all things, right? The will is a unifying force that permeates everything in nature,

everything in the cosmos. And by this reality, nothing is really separate. There aren't separate individuals. It's, you know, you happen to be an individual node of this much larger fabric. And in that sense, a lot of Schopenhauer's ethics come out of this interconnectedness. And in fact, interestingly, Schopenhauer, the, you know, archetypal curmudgeon, also was one of the first people in Europe to get very serious about animal rights. You know, think about the Cartesian notion of an animal as an automaton. You know, they actually don't have anything inside. There's no qualitative experience internally.

Well, you could easily take that Cartesian notion and build factory fucking farms with it. But Schopenhauer saw that as inherently wrong and was one of the leading figures of trying to, you know, advocate for animal rights and their protections, which I think is very interesting. The sage, obviously, as I said, modeled after Hindu aesthetic or a Buddhist monk. This idea of looking and feeling inward as a productive direction for investigation into truth is pretty interesting and pretty novel with Schopenhauer. Later, I think phenomenology develops, and we can talk about the Western engagement with that idea, but the way that Schopenhauer broke the Kantian prohibition on knowing things in themselves,

is by turning inward and, you know, feeling inward into the thing. That was his idea, right? That by turning inward, I can see how the will particularly activates within myself. I can then elaborate that the will is a broader thing. It doesn't really care about my individual happiness and actually doesn't belong to me as an individual at all, blah, blah, blah. So it's this directing of the attention and the philosophical investigation inward as well as outward. That's very interesting and very in line with these Eastern forms of philosophy and religion. One more thing, the present moment, the absorption in the present moment is very, very clear in Schopenhauer,

whether it is getting lost in art or music or nature, whatever it may be, there is this explicit talking about the collapse of subject-object dualism. And that comes, I mean, that is at the heart of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy in a lot of ways. So those are all the similarities, and I have some, I have one important difference really quick, and I'll bounce it back over to you, Allison, which is a core difference here, and there are plenty, but a core difference is that where Schopenhauer sees the will as infusing and irradiating everything in nature in the cosmos, in Buddhism, that there is no such thing. The will is, that is not even a concept in Buddhism in particular. Now, in Hinduism, it gets much closer. You know, the particular souls partake in the Atman, the world soul, the grand soul, and your individual manifestation is but one of the manifestations of the whole.

And so you bow to the other because you see the God in them, et cetera, right? So coming out of his more heavily influenced Hinduism, you can see where the will would take root. But in Buddhism, that is completely replaced by emptiness, by the realization that if you really, in meditative practice and concentration, watch your moment by moment experience deeply, internally, you see that actually there is no abiding substance in anything, that all there is is constant, relentless change. And that to try to have an essence in something, whether that's a self in my body, in my individual person, or a will in the cosmos. is automatically sort of disregarded in Buddhism. There is just this emptiness. Now, that emptiness is not nihilism. That emptiness turns out to be loving, compassionate awareness,

but it is still emptiness, and that is a fundamental difference between Buddhism and perhaps Hinduism, but definitely between Buddhism and Schopenhauerian philosophy. So those are some of my main thoughts on that. But what about you specifically with Nietzsche? Because I do not know much about Nietzsche's personal engagement with these philosophies.

Yeah, so not as much is recorded about how much he read of Hinduism and Buddhism, unfortunately, but a lot is recorded about his thoughts about them because he wrote about it in his journals, which makes it interesting. So one thing to note is the later period of Nietzsche's life when much of his writing was taking place did see greater translation. Now, a lot of it wasn't more accurate, right? But a lot more texts were being translated from Hinduism and Buddhism, especially in Germany. Theosophy was kind of a growing movement that had a very large interest.

in Eastern philosophy and was actually kind of using some of that philosophy to lay the foundations for Nazism, unfortunately. But within Germany, there was kind of this trend towards being very interested in these things. So we know that Nietzsche engaged with both Hinduism and Buddhism. His commentary on Hinduism is a lot more minimalistic, which I think is not surprising. It seems like Buddhism is more the kind of thing he would want to engage with. And his statements on Buddhism are somewhat interesting. He wrote in his journal that he believed that he could become the European Buddha, but then he stated afterwards that that would of course have to be an inversion of Buddha, right? So he would be sort of Buddha turned on

his head as well. And Nietzsche considered Buddhism to be very much a profound philosophy that was on the right track that he saw as slipping into nihilism ultimately. And Nietzsche put that nihilism in the concept of nirvana, right? So obviously in Hinduism, you could also locate that in Moksha, liberation. But he saw nirvana as essentially a way of escaping suffering, and he felt that ultimately Buddhism could slip into the ascetic lifestyle, even if Buddha rejected asceticism, right? Which he clearly did. The classic story of Buddha's life is that he tried asceticism, and he saw the failure of it and the middle path developed as a response to that. But Nija thought that it could lend itself

towards that in a way that was somewhat problematic. So Nisha has this strange orientation towards Buddhism, where again, similar to how he feels about Schopenhauer, I think he really appreciates it, but he also is highly critical of it. it. At the same time, I think it's interesting to think about some of the formal relatedness that we could have here. If we think about the four noble truths, right, and try to figure out how Nietzsche would feel about those four noble truths, I think we can tease out some distinctions. So Nietzsche, I think, would agree with the first noble truth that existence inherently implies suffering and pain, right? That is a statement that I think Nietzsche is absolutely on board with,

even if he's pulling it from Schopenhauer. But it's actually pretty much after the first noble truth, that I think the differences start to appear. Because I don't think that Nietzsche would assert that the source of suffering comes from desire, right? That seems to be something that Nietzsche is not really focusing on as much in his text. He definitely notes it, but he also points out the way that suffering is inherent in terms of sometimes you just get beat up in a war. Sometimes you just suffer a terrible disease, drawing on these experiences that he had in his life, which in his writing, I don't see him as clearly relating to desire itself.

So I do worry that there might be a distinction there about what the source of suffering is. And then, you know, moving into the idea that suffering can be escaped or that suffering can cease if we can quell and distinguish desire itself, I think Nietzsche would not agree with that, right? Nietzsche is making this fundamental claim that suffering is an inevitability, and that inevitability is kind of the project which humanity has to wrestle with, right? It is making our lives in the face of that inevitability. That is Nietzsche's whole thing. So a lot of similarities there, but also a lot of differences that I do think are important to note. At the same time, I also think that, you know, if we really focus on, like, Buddhist conceptions of right being and how we ought to behave in the world, they are not strictly

speaking moral conceptions in a way that I think that Nietzsche would find interesting. The eightfold path isn't so much about having a system of morality so much as existing in the right way, both in your consciousness, your being in your action with the universe, which I think is somewhat distinct from the moral systems that Nietzsche talks about. And Nietzsche did state that he did feel that Buddhism had escaped good and evil. It had gotten out of that particular dichotomy, at least, which obviously I think is one of the reasons that he praises it. At the same time, if enlightenment implies nirvana, I think Nietzsche finds it somewhat untenable. One question that I have, though, is whether or not the figure of the Bodhisattva might be more interesting to

Nietzsche within Buddhism, namely because the Bodhisattva denies themselves the escape from life, right and the escape from the same saric cycle, and expresses out of compassion and love for the world, the message of liberation, which sounds a little bit more like the Ubermensch, and almost like the madman and the parable of the madman a little bit. So I do wonder if that's a figure that Nietzsche would be interested in. It is a little hard to tease that out, because again, we don't know quite how much he knew about the more complicated topics of Buddhism at the time, and also Nietzsche's individualism might push back against the Bodhisattva a little bit as a figure of intense compassion towards the world around him. It's debated how much the

uberminch as a figure is a compassionate figure, right, that cares about the world. I definitely take the reading of Nietzsche that the ubermich would be compassionate and would be, you know, behaving in ways that are largely kind to others out of an expression of love for the universe, right, rather than out of pity or morality. But there are definitely those such as the Nazis who read the uberminch in the opposite direction. So the ability to construe the ubermanch mentioned line with the Bodhisattva, I think is somewhat difficult, but that might be the place where there's an impulse in Buddhism, I think, that Nietzsche could find interesting. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

That's really interesting, because when you think of the Bodhisattva, you think of, yeah, like a life of compassionate service to others, you know, but as you said, like, this holding back of entering enlightenment or samsar in order to help others, or, I mean, this is a very complicated, long tradition, so there's other ways of talking about that. but the dismantling of the individual sense of self and the desires that go along with it is an interesting tension point. There's an individualism in both Schopenhauer and in Nietzsche, and that individual, that sense of being an individual is stripped away, but it gets very subtle at that point. The other thing I wanted to mention is I think you're right about not having a full understanding, trying your best. These are brilliant people, but they have limited resources.

Because with the suffering in Buddhism or the craving and desire and attachment, it's not to say that you will never suffer again. Like you're going to suffer physical pain, for example, right? No amount of non-clinging or the cultivation of non-desire or even not even experiencing your existence as like centered around a sense of self doesn't mean you can't get punched in the face and feel pain or go to war and get physically injured. But in Buddhism there is this concept sort of like two arrows. is the arrow of suffering, the slings and arrows, of just living a life in bodily form and the suffering that comes with that. But there's the extra added arrow of the fear and the writhing and the trying to escape the pain or the identification with that suffering. That's the second arrow of suffering that Buddhism really seeks to dismantle. So those are interesting.

And again, these could be like entire books and diving into these concepts because they're so nuanced. And it's really important that people on the West that might not have a lot of understanding of. of the East don't fall into this orientalist trap, that these philosophers and thinkers weren't just as brilliant, just as deep, just as probing as the best that the West has to offer. They were, and those philosophical disagreements continue in very deep ways. There's also this very knee-jerkie idea that Buddhism is some form of nihilism, and I even recently heard Jordan Peterson, yeah, replicate this lie that, you know, Nirvana or enlightenment is synonymous with nihilism, when it clearly.

clearly isn't. And on Rev. Left, I've had on some people who credibly reached at least some stages of what is enlightenment within Buddhism, and none of them report anything like a nihilism, a non-caring or non-valuing of things and others. If anything, it brings you closer to the living beings around you. And, you know, there's a whole new sort of meaning in the present moment that's non-conceptual, right? That isn't like an abstract intellectual. of like meaning in your life. So again, these things get very complicated, but I don't know if you have anything else to say on the Buddhism and Hinduism thing.

I think it's a fascinating aspect for sure. Yeah. I mean, I will say that it is historically tricky, I think, because, you know, if we end to the Orientalism angle, Buddhism is not a comprehensive whole in so many ways, nor is Hinduism, right? And we don't know exactly which glimpses of it Nietzsche was able to see, and there are varying traditions in Buddhism that I actually think really do differ in their view towards life itself, right, in the present life and that orientation. And so how much of that,

you know, Nietzsche would have known about or been able to wrestle with is really hard to establish, I think. But I do think that what's interesting is that, like, he is treating Buddhism seriously, right? He is taking it very seriously as something to be wrestling with. And he's giving it credit for escaping good and evil, which he doesn't really give credit to anyone else for doing. So I do think there is a respect there in spite of his ultimate rejection of it. Yeah. The last thing I'll say about that as well, which I agree with you entirely. On the nihilism point, there is a sort of dead end or a detour that one can make when they're very deeply engaged in meditation, which is this, when you first get introduced to emptiness internally, like viscerally experiencing emptiness, it can feel like nihilism. And so a lot of like Buddhist teachers will talk about a phase. that people go through when they get their first taste of emptiness

their real first enlightened taste of emptiness and then they sort of some people call it a dark night of the soul like they don't know where to go next they feel as if since there's no internal agency that they just kind of want they're just like floating in nothing like there's nothing to do

there's no one here to do anything right and this is obvious like a in Buddhism has talked about it's like a half developed enlightenment and there needs to be this out this you have to keep going Don't get stuck there. But it is a path that it's a detour in the path that can be a dead end for some people.

But the goal is to keep going not to stop there and think that you've got it. But in that one moment of really dark soul, dark night of the soul, there can be a sort of very terrifying nihilism that can emerge. But that is ultimately overcome and transcended with more meditative work. Right. Yeah. Which is interesting. That's a concept that exists in Christian mysticism. very thoroughly too, which is interesting. It comes from it, yeah. Yeah, and in Eastern Orthodoxy,

in particular, in kind of the monastic tradition, there is also the idea that when one begins to sort of experience the Dark Night of the Soul, they can hyper fixate in a narcissistic way on it, right, in a way where they're almost finding a pleasure in it. And that can lead, in Orthodoxy, actually, there's an idea that it can lead to madness, right, instead of to the enlightenment of, yeah, theosophy that your face trying to hunt down. So it is interesting how we find that in other traditions as well. Absolutely. There must be something to it.

All right. Let's move on to the next question. Now, this question is deeply historically loaded and is very annoying. I hope you talk about Nietzsche's sister. But was Nietzsche an anti-Semite and can his work be separated from the Nazi appropriation of it? Yeah. So let's deal with this. So I'm going to try to get into was Nietzsche an anti-Semite and was his work anti-Semite and was his work

anti-Semitic maybe is two distinct things, perhaps. Because the answer to the first question, I think is shockingly simple, which is that no, at least he wasn't politically anti-Semitic. So a couple of things that we know about Nietzsche is that Nietzsche really reviled the anti-Semitism that was dominating German politics at the time. This sort of hatred for it was expressed in his journals. It was expressed in his writings. He saw it as essentially another form of and slave morality and a hatred and a displacing of blame onto another group of people rather than dealing with one's own suffering and finding strength in it. So one could understand why he would reject that kind of political anti-Semitism. And really fascinatingly,

Nietzsche, you know, had maintained a long friendship with the composer Wagner, and he broke up that friendship over the question of anti-Semitism, actually. Nietzsche was infuriated by Wagner's anti-Semitism and saw it as absolutely unacceptable and was willing to throw away a very rich relationship because of that. So on a personal level, no, I don't think Nietzsche was invested in political anti-Semitism. I think he was very much a vocal critic of it. And yet, we have to wrestle with the fact that his work was appropriated by the Nazis, partially due to editing of his work, but I will suggest also partially due to things that were in his work, right? And it's a difficult line to walk. On the genealogy and morality, which I think is a fascinating text,

tells us a story about how the Jewish people built a value system to spiritually subvert the Roman Empire, right? And there's no getting around the fact that that has clear parallels and echoes to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in Europe, right? And Judaism itself as a corroding force on civilization, which would be taken up by the Nazis. So despite Nietzsche's personal views on anti-Semitism, there are parallels, at least in on the genealogy of morality to anti-Semitism that are there, and that were easy for anti-Semites to latch onto, despite Nietzsche's own sort of opposition to anti-Semitism. The other thing that we have to deal with is that Nietzsche's sister was just a fucking

piece of shit, was a Nazi supporter, and who in Nietzsche's later life, when he was not well and was probably dealing with essentially syphilis-induced dementia and could not think reasonably. His sister took over his estate, and she edited his works intensely to remove the condemnations of anti-Semitism and to emphasize a certain reading of the will to power that would become very popular among the Nazis. And unfortunately, she, in many ways, succeeded in leading to the popularization of Nietzsche's work among the Nazis, something that I think Nietzsche interpersonally would have fucking hated been horrified at. He hated the precursors to the Nazis and the figures which preceded them. He hated populism. He hated anti-Semitism. These are all the

opposite of the kind of politics that Nietzsche would suggest. And yet, they took up his politics. Hitler famously actually sent Nietzsche's sister a wreath to place on Nietzsche's grave. So Hitler, you know, admired Nietzsche in some sense. There's this famous image of him staring into a bust of Nietzsche. And many of the Nazis saw themselves as building on the ideas of Nietzsche and embracing this sort of heroic overcoming through war and violence. So it is difficult. The Nazis definitely appropriated Nietzsche in a way that, on the one hand, required lying about what Nietzsche said and modifying what Nietzsche said, but on the other hand did draw on some real things that were already present in Nietzsche. And it's a little difficult to disentangle. Can Nietzsche be separated for the Nazi appropriation is a question to which I don't think there's a clear answer. I think philosophy is still wrestling with this in a similar way to which philosophy is wrestled with it with Heidegger, right? Who we see. I think it's much less complicated with Heidegger. Guy was a fucking Nazi. but it's the similar kind of wrestling that's going on there. And we do have to work through that. There's no way to get around the fact that the Nazis latched onto some things which were really there. But I do think as a historical figure, we should insist. Nietzsche did not believe in political anti-Semitism. He was extremely opposed to it. And he would have been horrified by that appropriation. Is that enough? No, not really. But that is kind of how I think we have to view it. Yeah. Yeah, I think you hit on all the major points there. I think it's worth pointing out that, as you said, like, he does talk about this stuff. And I think, like, he mentions, like, the need for the homogenization of the European man, which stands in stark contrast of, like, German Aryans being the master race. I think he would have both disdained and hated, I think, what his sister did do his work and what the Nazis did do his work. And he also would have mercilessly mocked the fascist and the Nazis.

on various scores for various reasons. But as you say, that's partly as well the way that he wrote, whereas like Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Kant were very systematic in the way that they wrote out their philosophy, he was much looser and much more aphoristic, and that lends itself to be nitpicked from. And people all the time, you see, even in popular culture, just taking a view that they think that Nietzsche had

that was the exact opposite. Like, sometimes he'll be, he'll be heralded as, like, a nihilist. It's like, no, he was warning against the rise of nihilism, right? Right. That one little, like, I forget the movie, that Miss Sunshine or... A little Miss Sunshine, yeah. Where she has the brother who's like a Nietzschean, but he's just an angsty teen. Right.

So there's like lots of degrading of his work, but this association with Nazism and fascism, I mean, it really scarred his work for the first half of the 20th century. A lot of people uncritically accepted Nietzsche. as a more or less Nazi or fascist thinker. And as we're going to do next month, clearly fascist pick him up and still find something in his work that gives them inspiration. So you can't say that he was,

there's nothing in his work that could be used to that end. But I think it is fair to say, as you said, he was against political anti-Semitism and would have hated the Nazi appropriation of his work, hands down. Yeah, I think absolutely. And if you're interested in this, definitely go check out some pictures.

of like Hitler visiting Nietzsche's sister and shit. Like, it is fucking surreal. And I wish, I wish that Nietzsche had, you know, ideally even a couple more decades of clarity to be able to point this shit out, to prevent the co-option of his work, and to rail directly against it. Because I think that would have been very interesting.

Right. Yeah, I mean, it strikes me that had he lived to see that, he is one of the people the Nazis would have killed, right? I mean, he just would have been in opposition to that. Absolutely. All right. Let's go ahead and get into the next one then, which, again, is kind of related to his legacy, but in a different direction. So what's kind of the philosophical legacy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer? And what has emerged in their wake, right? What is kind of developed out of their ideas and philosophy?

So there's a lot of directions that we can take this question. And, you know, I would mention, you know, Camus absurdism and Camus talk about suffering and this idea that we're naturally inclined to search for meaning in the world, but none exist. and this puts us in a fundamentally absurd position, right? Camus read Schopenhauer and was influenced by him, and Camus' absurdism can be traced back to Schopenhauer's pessimism. Spinoza, for example, was way before Schopenhauer, but I do, Spinoza, as you know, might be one of another philosopher that has a soft spot in my heart. They did both stress the oneness of all of nature in a very interesting way,

although in very different ways. Spinoza was a pantheist. He thought everything was God. Obviously, Schopenhauer was a bitter atheist, and there was nothing redeeming about this will whatsoever. But that is an interesting little parallel, obviously I'm going to point that out because I love both of them. But I think a big one, my main one that I want to focus on, and you can do whatever you want afterwards, is the influence on psychoanalysis. And I kind of really want to unpack this a little bit because Freud directly read Schopenhauer and was deeply influenced him, began reading Nietzsche, and then it famously said, he had to stop reading Nietzsche because he was worried if he kept reading him, that he would

realize that Nietzsche said everything that he wanted to say first. So, you know, that is a direct and complete connection. And then Carl Jung, right, the, the protege of Freud, who went in a different direction with psychoanalysis, also owes a lot to Schopenhauer. Jung said of Schopenhauer, quote, he was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion and passion and evil, all those things which the others, hardly seem to notice and always tried to resolve into an all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. So you can see that they're both directly reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and directly being influenced by it. But what is this, what is this influence? Well, what is the will? The will

in both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is this force that is the animating driving force behind all of life and it's in the individual you are driven to pursue your desires sort of by this force that is above and beyond your conscious understanding or control. So in short, what did Freud do with it and Jung do with it? Well, they turn the will into the unconscious. You know, the unconscious forces and drives behind our behavior. So they don't actually take on board the will as it is in Schopenhauer Nietzsche, right? But they do internalize it into the human psyche and turn it into the unconscious. And then, of course, they elaborate on that extensively. Or in Jung's case, you know, he did the, he was behind the idea of the collective unconscious.

Well, if the will in Schopenhauer's estimation connects all life forms and all of life in itself, and in fact, he talks about seeing another suffering as being your own suffering because of this deep, deep connection, well, once you move in the Freudian direction of turning this into a psychological unconscious, you can see how Jung would take that and then collectivize it. Like, there's actually a collective unconscious, and then we get into archetypes, etc. So this is a deep and intense influence that is absolutely direct, and it has shaped the way all of us think about our own minds. Even if you're not a Freudian, even if you're not a Jungian, you think and talk about the mind

in Freudian and Jungian terms, even when you don't know you're doing it. And this is a direct result, a direct ancestor, if you will. of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and like I said earlier they're psychologizing in their philosophizing and even today I read Freud and Young not as scientific psychologists necessarily

but as almost like psychological philosophers and you know because in like hard science Freudian and Jungian psychology don't quite hold up right so there's lots of skepticism about what they're actually doing but if you read them it reads less like science

although Freud definitely thought of himself as doing science, but it reads a lot like philosophy. And I think these things cannot be separate. So we can look at the huge impact psychoanalysis has had on society and trace it directly back through Nietzsche to Schopenhauer and the creation of the will, which I think is absolutely fascinating. And then as a side note, psychoanalysis and Buddhism overlap in interesting ways. When Zen Buddhism was brought into the West, specifically the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, D.T. Suzuki, which was a popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the West, talked about psychoanalysis, and Eric Fromm, a psychoanalysis, talked about Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and how they overlap and their insights into the human mind and our drives and whatnot.

So it's interesting to see Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as sort of a common ancestor of psychoanalysis, and then we looked later when psychoanalysis was being compared to Buddhism, and we've already talked about their connections to Buddhism and Hinduism. So it's a very, very interesting, and I think profound and beautiful sort of lineage of thought. And so for that, I think that is the biggest one. But of course, there are many other, especially in literature, Wittgenstein, for example, was deeply, in philosophy, was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, etc. But that would be my main philosophical, psychological, psychological legacy. But there's many more.

Do you have anything else to add to that? Yeah. So there's two that I can kind of think of with Nietzsche that I think are. worth talking about. I think in a lot of ways, a lot of philosophers took the idea of the death of God and ran with it to kind of try to make their own answer to it. And one of the schools of thought that I think is very influenced by Nietzsche, while also, I think, ultimately rejecting Nietzsche is existentialism, right? I think that existentialism really is confronting that problem of the death of God in the same way that Nietzsche was confronting it, right? This idea

that this old system of value, which could exist externally to us, is gone. now and that we have to find some sort of value, even though that value might not be immediately obvious, evident, or preordained in the universe around us, right? It's sort of the thing that existentialism is wrestling with. And in many ways, I think it is a response to Nietzsche in some manners, just as Camus in many ways was responding to Nietzsche as well. He famously was somewhat critical of Nietzsche, and I think we would see that same critical orientation in Sart and Beauvoir's work as well. But I think they're influenced by him, and as much as they both kind of start with the idea of, well, there is no God who's giving us an objective morality or an anchoring in

the world. And this implies this kind of horrifying human freedom, right? This fundamental freedom that is found within our very being and our relationship to the universe around us. And I guess where they differ with Nietzsche is that they then follow up that idea of freedom with, I would say, sort of its dialectical counterpart, which is responsibility, right? And there's this intensive focus in existentialism on how freedom and responsibility imply each other, and about how that absolute freedom which we experience from what appears as an inherent meaninglessness of the universe imposes a responsibility to develop meaning in our lives. And even, you know, if we follow Beauvoir especially, imposes responsibility onto ourselves in terms of how we relate to other

people. And yet this isn't like classical morality, right? This is not a classical moral system in which moral edicts are handed down by some force in the universe. It's kind of almost like a post-moral notion of responsibility that can guide our action. And in that sense, I think existentialism ends up being very, very much a product of the sort of line of inquiry that Mitya opened up. Obviously, the death of God is not the only thing. The other thing that existentialism has to wrestle with is World War II in the Holocaust as kind of these traumatic, horrific experiences. But in many ways, what those events reinforced for the existentialists was the reality of the death of God, right? That we are this planet unmoored from order floating through the

darkness of the universe. And anything can happen, even the Holocaust. And that is a thing which has to be wrestled with. So I think existentialism is responding to an idea that sort of develops as a germ within Nietzsche. But the other school of thought that definitely ends up being a profound legacy of Nietzsche's is post-structuralism and postmodernism. And this is largely because of Foucault. So Foucault has some interesting work, but he, more or less in his essay, Nietzsche genealogy and morality, argues that he is a Nietzsche. and he says that Nietzsche's method of genealogy developed and on the genealogy of morality is the same method that Foucault is using throughout much of his work like the history of sexuality as an

example. Foucault saw genealogy as this method that Nietzsche developed, which looked into history to see the emergence of social phenomena, but explained them not like the Marxists in terms of class struggle or in terms of a single point of material reality, but rather as historical accidents that emerged from kind of these strange plays of power. For Nietzsche, the development of slave morality, yes, served the purpose of kind of subverting Roman power, but it was also accidental in a way, just these different value systems developed from the different positions of people's lives and emerged into these forces that would eventually become Christianity and predominant social phenomena. And so Foucault saw Nietzsche as sort of developing a way of

looking at the history of social phenomena that didn't insist on an origin point. them. That didn't insist on a single starting point, and that wasn't governed by a logic of necessity. And in many ways for Foucault, this was about rejecting Marxism, right? Because Marxism is grounded in a logic of necessity. It is grounded in a specific starting point. And so Nietzsche kind of is juxtaposed against Marxism by Foucault as this more loose, ungrounded historicization, which then gets taken up by other post-structuralist philosophers in their approach to history as well. And so we definitely also see Nietzsche's legacy in sort of the entire train of thought that Foucault established and in the social constructivism of postmodernism

as well. Nietzsche is very much a constructivist about morality and postmodernism expanded that notion very broadly to think about, you know, the construction of subjectivity itself and of language and all these other phenomena. So those are kind of the two places where I think we can pretty clearly see Nietzsche's ongoing legacy within philosophy today. Yeah, those are great. And, you know, we're going to have to read some Foucault at some point for this show. I look forward to that. You know, people always credit Nietzsche with the, and this is neither here nor there, just funny, always credit him

with the saying God is dead. It actually comes from Hegel. You know, Hegel was the first one to say, and Nietzsche only popularized it and took it in this different direction, which is at least worth noting. We did an episode on Rev. Left recently with Corey from Existential Comics on the Life and Legacy of Dostoevsky.

And both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard are seen as the godfathers, if you will, of existentialism. They're seen as proto existentialist. Now, they're both also, interestingly, Christians. Right. And later existentialists would be explicitly atheistic, but that explicit atheism is certainly present in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And so to think of those two things as sort of melding together in some ways and then producing existentialism is incredibly interesting. And I urge people

at all interested in that lineage to go check out that episode on Dostoevsky. I would love to do an episode on Kierkegaard as well. But what they also both did to get back to my psychology point, right, is they explored human psychology. I mean, Kierkegaard is talking about despair, fear and trembling, anxiety, and he's relating that to our religion, to God, to the world around us, to meaning, et cetera. And Dastoyevsky's literature was so, and still is, so penetrating and so readable and so relevant, precisely because it is so modern in its analysis of psychology and psychological positions and states. So again, this psychologistism comes very much into play and is woven into the fabric of this entire trajectory, which is, which is

fascinating. And, you know, again, beautiful. I like making these connections between thinkers and seeing historically how certain lines of thought develop and how they are always dependent on the sort of thinkers that came before them, that previous generation. And then you can look back and trace a whole line of thought like existentialism or psychoanalysis back to thinkers who didn't even know what those words meant. And it's an endlessly fascinating thing for me. But yeah, I don't have too much to add to that. Do you have anything else? Yeah. I mean, the one thing I will say with the existentialism connection that I think is interesting is that I don't think it's just that the atheism is shared. I think Nietzsche and the existentialists share a kind of horror at atheism at the same

time, which is what's so interesting about both of them. It's not a joyful atheism in a lot of ways, right? It's an atheism that one has been forced to confront and then has to generate a response to. And that's kind of what I see as a big part of the connection, is I think Beauvoir and Sart, you know, freedom is terrifying to them. The freedom that atheism implies, you know, there are ways to celebrate it, but it also is this weight that has to be wrestled with. And I kind of see that as in the Nietzsche tradition of starting with these things that we often might think of as liberatory, like God's death, for example, and actually saying, no, this confronts everything we believe, and it unmoors us, and it imposes this horrible project that we have to adopt to live

with it. So I think there's kind of a similar orientation just attitudinally there as well. Totally. Yeah. And that and that prefiguration of the crises of the 20th and 21st century of this threat of nihilism, of this lack of mooring of all the things traditionally that have given people a sense of meaning and a sense of morality and they can orient themselves to is being sort of disintegrated. And we're living in the wake of that. We are living right now in the wake of that. And we can see how even on the individual level, we struggle with these things because we're human, because we're part of the modern world. So, you know, I started off teenage going to Catholic school. I was a Christian, et cetera, right? And then I had my radical

sort of dialectical opposite reaction to that through new atheism in the early aughts. And now people that actually follow my show, as you can see that there's this attempt on my part individually to sort of synthesize the religious impulse with the scientific understanding, with spirituality, with Buddhism. And that, I think, is a broader human project that we're trying to figure out. It's like what comes next. And Nietzsche, you know, really, really in a premonition sort of way, saw that with the death of God, with the death of these traditional ways of orienting ourselves to the cosmos, that impulse, that religious impulse isn't going to go away, but the object that it was usually tethered to is going away. And one of the consequences of that is that politics then

takes on the fervor that religion used to have. And with the 20th century, we see with communism, with capitalism, with capitalism, with World War II, and even today, even the way that I sometimes see myself as oriented to my politics, it very much can take the feel of Protestant versus Catholicism, fervor, and zealotry, you know, and I don't know quite what to make of that, because it's still very important. Political struggle is still essential, but is there a way maybe to engage in politics in a way that does? doesn't necessarily use that as the object through which to funnel your religious impulse, you know? I'm not exactly sure. I don't have those questions, but we are all living in the

wreckage left by these thinkers. And in our individual lives, as well as our collective lives, we have not fully found the way through, but you can see that we're groping for that. Right. All right. I have one more question. Is there anything else you want to say on that? Are you ready for this? I think let's go for this next one. Okay. Now, this one is a little tough, but I mean, we're a Marxist's fucking podcast. to try. So what impacts have they had on politics? And importantly, if anything, can the left learn from them? Yeah. So this is a tough one. The first part I can do fairly easily, I think, which is that fucking everyone has been impacted by Nietzsche and Schovenauer, in a way that's

really bizarre, especially thinking about Nietzsche. Obviously, we've talked about the Nazi and the fascist used to Nietzsche. But there's also, even there were like kind of more socialist figures who really embraced Nietzsche. Batai is kind of an interesting example of someone who embraced Nija and kind of pushed for a socialist-style politics. And within anarchism, right, especially sort of more post-anarchistic perspectives,

you see a lot of influence of Nica as well developed there. I also would argue that, you know, there are parallels between a lot of Emma Goldman's ideas and some of Nisha's ideas within anarchism, too. So, you know, Nietzsche has impacted everyone. The other side of it, too, is you'll see hyper-capitalists

citing Nisha in support of their perspective. And Randy and objectivists. Right. Exactly. Yeah. There are definitely ways that you can see that too. And it's this weird thing where all these people who are completely at odds with each other all kind of see themselves as taking on the legacy of Nietzsche in really fascinating ways. It is difficult to wrestle with. Again, I think part of that is what you got at Brett, which is sort of the aphoristic style of Nietzsche really lends itself to picking and choosing if you want to and to reading Nietzsche in line with whatever your prerogative is. He's not a super-sistic. He's not a super-sistic style. systematic thinker in a certain sense. He's almost more of a poet, really, at times. So I think that has a big part to do with it. But in addition to that, I would just suggest also that, you know, Nietzsche was expressing contradictory ideas as well at his time, because like you said, he was living at the end of an epoch, right? He really did see kind of European society collapsing in a way as we transitioned into this new period. And it makes sense that there would be contradictory impulses within his own writing. So the political influence of Nietzsche is all fucking over the place in ways that are hard

to wrestle with. Now, in terms of what the left can learn from Nietzsche, this is probably the hardest question of them all, because I'm tempted to say not much. To be very clear, I think Nietzsche is a fascinating philosopher. I've read his works over and over again. He's probably one of the non-Marxist philosophers I've spent the most time studying. Part of that is I just really personally like his style of polemic. I think he's a very, very good writer. And part of of that is, as someone who was raised, fundamentalist Christian, there's a little bit of like, okay, vibing with what he has to say about that sort of perspective, I think. But ultimately, it is tricky because to try to find things in Nietzsche, which might lend themselves to a

Marxist analysis is hard. Nietzsche was, at the end of the day, the individualist's individualist, right? Really taking that idea to its most extreme possible extent in a way that definitely isn't reconcilable with our political outlook. And at the same time, Nietzsche is, also really was happy to reject the idea of fighting oppression, right? Fighting oppression for Nietzsche could easily become this sort of system of leveling. But I'm going to try to suggest two things that we might be able to take from Nietzsche very carefully. So the first is I think we can take Nietzsche's irreverence for predominating social dogma and run with that, right? So one thing that I think is clear about Nietzsche is the fact that most people believed something and believed it very strongly was not

a reason that it had to be taken as a given. Nietzsche went right for the heart of a lot of Christian values by attacking Christianity directly, right? The text that Antichrist does this in a fascinating way. And Nietzsche also tried to think about these social values and phenomena as products of historical movements. And that is something that is related to Marxism, at least. Obviously, within Marxism, we are not using genealogy. We are using historical materialism, which is a more, I would say refined kind of way of understanding history. But that goal to historicize and to try to demystify where social phenomena come from is a point of convergence potentially between the two.

And then the second one, I think maybe is on a more personal level. But I think that Nietzsche is not totally wrong when he says that if we are not careful, our zeal to fight oppression can turn into something like Rizantamont. and that that Rizantamont can be very damaging to ourselves and to people around us, and it can turn into a kind of zealotry that really can transform into violence, both interpersonally and politically. And obviously, I'm no pacifist. There is a defense of violence to be made.

But at the same time, violence shouldn't be a thing, which is a sort of rash impulse and expression of intense internal Rizantamont. And so I think Nita can at least remind us to think, about the fact that when we are talking about fighting oppression, when we are talking about the people who we need to overcome, that that is motivated by an actual desire to see life expressed in the most beautiful possible way, not by an impulsive hatred towards other people. And so there's something to tease out there that I think in terms of our personal orientation, Nietzsche can maybe call attention to. Yeah, that's really, really good. It's a very hard question. I think

Schopenhauer has even less to offer politically. Some reasons why, some things about Schopenhauer that are just, you know, politically oriented is that, you know, of course Schopenhauer was an idealist. So right away, you're going to have some conflict with the materialism of Marxism. His conception of the will is

a historical, right? Unlike Hegel's absolute spirit, it is not teleological and it's not historical in any way. There's no point to it. There's no direction particularly that it's heading in. There's no relevance to what happened before humanity. Humanity

itself is sort of in Schopenhauer's bleak worldview, more or less an accident, an irrelevancy. And so there's this a historical element to the will that it just does not lend itself to historical materialist analysis whatsoever. I think with both Nietzsche

and Schopenhauer, there is a general disdain for the masses, for the herd, if you will. You know, not, especially in Schopenhauer, there is just this view, this misanthropy that permeates his work. And, you know, the Schopenhauer sage is a 0.01% of humanity, right? The rest of the people are just hopeless.

So just writing off 99% of humanity right out of the gate is pretty anti-Marxist, if you will. They're both individualist to the core. So their entire philosophies are more centered around the individual and their experiences in the world, which make it even more difficult to carry over to collective struggle. and Schopenhauer in particular was like a rich privileged kid when his dad committed suicide at a young age which is certainly fucking hard to deal with emotionally he was given a lifelong inheritance that he lived on so he never had to work he never had he lived with his little poodle alone

lived a bachelor life his entire life so that that class basis also made him even more misanthropic and he really hated the far right and the far right and the far left of his time, right? The far left egalitarian revolutionaries who threatened his wealth and the commercial machinations

that gave rights to it, right? Because his dad had started businesses that continued to produce money for Schopenhauer throughout his life, but also hated the authoritarianism and the myopia of the far right. And Schopenhauer was basically a Hobbesian. And he says this explicitly.

His view of the state is very Hobbesian, and it's really like, you know, people are animalistic, they're dumb, the will makes them pursue their desires blindly and there's desires come into conflict with everybody else's desires and the state is an apparatus that is imposed on these people to make sure that they don't completely fuck everything up so in that sense Schopenhauer's misanthropy

his sort of Hobbesian reactionary belief in the state as like a muffling force on the animalistic impulses of humanity and for all the other reasons I mentioned make him very hard to bring to the left. This is somebody that you read, not from a political perspective, but from a, as you said, existentialist, psychological, you know, how do I orient myself

to the world sort of perspective? And I think when it comes to his positive view of like the sage and particularly his view of like art and music and aesthetics, it's beautiful, it's interesting. It has something to say to the individual but not politically. I think if you really stretched it,

I don't think either of them would fucking be very happy with modern capitalism, I think they would both be sort of repulsed by the empty consumerism. I mean, Schopenhauer's sage is an aesthetic. He's somebody that is denying desires. And what is capitalism, if not, the hyper acceleration of desire? You know, buy this, buy this. And when you don't have an already inbuilt desire for this product, we're going to market to you to give you that impulse so you can go out and buy these things, right? Like, you can see how capitalism voraciously feeds on this desiring machine that Schopenhauer points out is that the

core of the will and of human existence. So in that sense, to do away with that desire machinery would also be to do away with the consumerism and being hounded by capitalism everywhere you go, the billboards and the ads everywhere. And then very lastly, would be just as a positive point, just this interconnectedness, especially in a time of ecological catastrophe, this interconnectedness that gave rise to Schopenhauer's ethics and compassion and animal rights. position can easily be applied to the environmental crisis and how we are deeply, deeply related,

not only to other human beings or to other animals, but to plant life and to all life on earth. I don't think that would, Schopen Howard find that as a deviation from his philosophy. But again, all these points about consumerism being bad, about desire in its relationship to capitalism and the interconnectedness and its relevance to the environment are all points made much better and much clear by others. So, you know, if you're really looking to, to hone in on those things, there's a million other people you'd read before you came to Schopenhauer. So, yeah, there's really not much to say on Schopenhauer.

Yeah, I mean, I think that summarizes it well. There are these thinkers that, you know, again, have had this massive impact, but mostly in a negative direction, probably, but that I don't think there's really an excuse for, you know, not interacting with, right? The impact has been so extensive that there is really a necessity of at least thinking through the challenges that they post. Absolutely. And so that about wraps it up. Do you have anything else to say? And if not, you want to take us out?

No, I think that about covers it for me. Thank you so much to everybody for listening. I hope that this has been helpful. I think you can tell that Brett and I both really enjoy talking about these figures coming from that philosophical background. So I hope that this brings to light some interesting concepts and helps you wrestle with some of the ideas that are still shaping the world around us. So next month, like we said, we will be looking at Evolas Ride the Tiger, which is a rather horrifying sort of take up of Nietzsche for fascist politics that, you know, I think we will find connects to the world as we live it in some interesting ways. So if you are interested, you can look that up ahead of time and dive into it, or you can just

go ahead and go along with us on that journey next month, but we're looking forward to it. Thank you so much for listening to the episode for our patrons. Thank you so much for your support. It really just makes this doable for us, and it means a lot to us. If you are interested in supporting us, we are on Patreon. you can look up Red Menace podcast on Patreon, and you can also find us on Twitter, and we will talk to you all next month. So the passage that I wanted to read at length from Nietzsche comes from Thus Spakzar Thustra. It is a section called The Bestowing Virtue, and in it is that line that we quoted earlier about the Ubermich.

And I wanted to go ahead and kind of read the context of it so that you can see a little bit more what Nietzsche is developing here. Thus Spok Zarathustra is written in a kind of very old-fashioned style. It can be a little difficult to parse, but let's go ahead and dive right into it. So, the bestowing virtue. When Zarathustra had taken leave of the town to which his heart was attached, the name of which was the pied cow, there followed him many people who called themselves his disciples and kept him company. Thus came they to a crossroad.

Then Zarathustra told them that he now wanted to go alone, for he was fond of going alone. His disciples, however, presented him as his departure with a staff and a golden handle, of which a serpent twined around the sun. Zarathustra rejoiced on account of the staff and supported himself thereon. Then he spig thus to his disciples. Tell me pray, how came gold to have the highest value? Because it is uncommon, unprofiting, and beaming, and soft and lustre, it is always bestoweth itself.

Only as image of the highest virtue came gold to the highest value. Godlike beemeth the glance of the bestower. God lustre maketh peace between moon and sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and unprofiting, beaming is it, and soft of lustre, a bestowing virtue. Verily I define you well, my disciples, you strive like me for the bestowing virtue. What should you have in common with cats and wolves? It is your thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourself, and therefore have you the thirst to accumulate all the riches in your soul. Insatiably striveeth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.

You constrain all things to flow towards you and into you so that you shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love. Barely an appropriator of all, values must such bestowing love become, but healthy and holy, I call this selfishness. Another selfishness is there, an all too poor and hungry kind, which would steal the selfishness of the sick and the sickly selfishness. With the eyes of the thief that look upon all that is lustrous, with the craving of hunger, and measureth him, who hath abundance, and ever doth it prowl round the tables of bestowers. Sickness speaketh in such craving, and investable degeneration of a sickly body, speaketh the larcenous cravings of the selfishness. Tell me, my brothers, what do we think bad and worst of all? Is it not degeneration? And we always suspect degeneration when the bestowing soul is lacking. Upward go with our course

from genera to super genera, but a horror to us is the degenerating sense, which sayeth all for myself. Upward soareth our sense. Thus, it is simile of our bodies, a simile of elevation. A simile of elevations are the names of the virtues. Thus goeth the body through history, a becomeer, and fighter. And the spirit, what is it to the body? It fights its victories, herald, its champions, and echo. Similes are the names of good and evil. They do not speak out. They only hint, a fool who seeketh knowledge from them. Give heed, my brethren, to every hour when your spirit would speak in similes, there is origin in your virtue. When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river,

a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders, there is the origin of your virtue. When you are exalted above praise and blame and you will command all things as loving ones will, there is the origin of your virtue. When you despise pleasant things and the effeminate couch and cannot couch far enough from the effeminate, there is the origin of your virtue.

When you are willers of one man's will, and when that change of every need is needful to you, there is the origin of your virtue. Verily a new good and evil is it, verily a deep murmuring and a voice of a new fountain. Power is it, this new virtue. A ruling, though, is it? And around it a subtle soul, a golden sun with the serpent of knowledge around it. Here paused Zarathustra a while and looked lovingly at his disciples. Then he continued to speak, and his voice had changed. Remain true to earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue. Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to the meaning of the earth.

Thus do I pray and conjure you. Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. Ah, there hath always been so much flown away virtue. Lead like me, the flown away virtue, back to earth. Ye back to the body and life, that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning. A hundred times hitherto hath spirit as well as virtue flown away and blundered. Alas, in our body dwelleth still, all the delethe. and blundering, body and will hath it there become.

A hundred times hitherto, hath spirit as well as virtue, attempted and erred. Yea, an attempt hath man been, alas, much ignorance and error hath embodied in us. Not only the rationality of millenniums, also their madness breaketh out in us. Dangerous is it to be an heir. Still, fight we step and step with the giant chance, and over all mankind has hitherto ruled nonsense, the lack of sense. Let your spirit and your virtue be devoted to the sense of the earth, my brethren. Let the value of everything be determined and new by you.

Therefore shall ye be fighters. Intelligently doth the body purify itself. Attempting with intelligence, it exalteth itself. To the discerners, all impulses sanctify themselves to be exalted and become joyful. Physician heal thyself. Then wilt thou also heal thy patient? Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes, him who maketh himself whole. A thousand paths are there, which I've never yet been trod in.

A thousand salupridies and hidden lives, islands of life. Unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world. Awaken and hearken, ye lonesome ones, from the future comes winds with stealthy opinions, and to fine ears, good tidings are proclaimed. Ye lonesome one of today, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people, of you who have chosen yourselves shall a chosen people arrive, and out of it the Superman. Verily, a place of the healing shall the earth become, and already it is a new odor diffused around it, a salvation-bringing-opening odor, and a new hope.

When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he paused, like one who had not said his last word, and long did he balance the staff doubtfully in his hands. At last he spake thus, and his voice had changed. I go alone, my disciples, ye also now go, away and alone, so will I have it. Verily, I advise you, depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra, and better still be ashamed of him. Perhaps he hath deceived you. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemy, but also to hate his friends. One requireeth a teacher badly, one remain merely a scholar, and why will ye not pluck at my wreath? You venerate me, but what if your veneration should someday collapse?

Take heed lest a statue crush you. Ye say you believe in Zarathustra, but of what account is Zarathustra? You are my believers, but of what account are all believers? Ye had not yet sought yourselves, then did ye find me. So do all believers, therefore all belief is of so little account. Now, I bid you to lose me and find yourselves, and only when you have all denied me will I return to you. Verily, with other eyes, my brethren, shall I then seek my lost ones, with another love, then I shall love you. And once again, ye have become friends unto me, and children of one hope. Then I will be with

you for the third time and celebrate the great noontide with you. And it is the great new tide when man is in the middle of his course between animal and Superman, and celebrateeth his advance in the evening as his highest hope, for it is the advance to a new morning. And such will the downgoer bless himself, and he should be an overgoer, and the son of his knowledge will be at noon tide. dead are all the gods. Now we desire the Superman to live. Let this be our final will at the great noontide. Thus spake Zarathustra. So, what do we make of this? I think that this section really gives us more context for what the Overman or the Ubermensch or the Superman is. Here we see Nietzsche really isolate a lot of his views. The greatness of the Ubermich, he tells us, is a selfishness

that pours out as love on the other side. It is the want to know and to feel the whole world so that that love can pour out around us. And in that sense, the Uberminch is not just an evil, all-powerful, hateful figure who disdains that around him. He's one who loves it in a certain sense. And yet Nietzsche's own sort of aristocratic,

reactionary snidness seeps in as kind of a form of hatred in this text towards the effeminate, towards the sick, towards the weak. But supposedly, he tells us, the ubermensch would overcome all of this. The ubermensch could be born when man moves beyond man and fills the place of God. And the core teaching of Zarathustra in this text is that you shouldn't follow Zarathustra or Nietzsche necessarily.

You can start by following them, but then you have to go and find yourself. And in finding yourself, find that selfish impulse, which might become the germ of the Superman, which could then answer the questions of eternal recurrence and answer the questions of the death of God. I think this passage is interesting, because it shows very clearly what is at play here. Nietzsche is not just imagining the rugged individual of capitalism, I think. That is not really what the Ubermich is. The Uberminch would despise that individual for still being so invested in kind of these social systems of desire. But the Ubermich isn't a progressive concept either.

It's an aristocratic concept. Most people cannot be the Ubermich, according to this passage. And the Ubermich stands out by his power over the week in many ways. And I think we can see here how there are these kind of beautiful readings of Nietzsche you can do, but how ultimately they're still kind of grounded in reaction. And that's why I think this is an important passage to work with. Nietzsche kind of has this like double-edged sword where sometimes it really seems like he's cutting down things that need to be cut down. But his response to them is still reactionary.

And I think we see that very clearly here. Okay, let's get into some quotes from Schopenhauer. The first one is, quote, there is only one inborn error and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy so long as we persist in this inborn error the world seems to us full of contradictions for at every step in things great and small

we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons where the expression of what is called disappointment quote when I was 17 without any proper schooling I was affected by the misery and wretchedness of life as was the Buddha when in his youth he caught sight of sickness old age pain and death the destiny of suffering is written all over human existence it is deeply immersed in suffering never escapes this suffering and its continuation and termination are always tragic here a certain deliberateness is unmistakable quote we can also regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

At all events, the person who has fared tolerably well becomes more clearly aware, the longer they live, that life on the whole is a disappointment, even a cheat. In other words, it bears the character of a great mystification, or even a fraud.

On the will, he says, quote, we recognize that same will, not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to our own in human beings and animals as its innermost nature. But continued reflection will lead us to recognize the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant. Indeed, the force by which the crystal is formed.

The force that turns the magnet to the north pole. The force whose shock we encounter from the contact of metals of different kinds. The force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravity itself, which acts so powerfully in all matters, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun. All these we recognize as different only in the phenomena, but the same according to their inner nature. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature,

and also in the deliberate conduct of human beings, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested. Quote, the will now turns away from life. It shudders at the pleasures in which it recognizes the affirmation of life. We attain to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete willlessness. Quote, we now look back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world,

which was once able to move and agonize even our minds, but now stands before us as indifferently as chess pieces at the end of a game, or as fancy costumes cast up. off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us in the carnival night. Quote, if what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of non-existence, we should necessarily think with equal horror of the time when as yet we did not exist, for it is irrefutably certain that non-existence after death cannot be different from non-existence before birth. An entire infinity ran its course when we did not yet exist.

but this in no way disturbs us quote the old man stricken in years totters about or rests in a corner now only a shadow a ghost of his former self the moment of dying may be similar to that of waking from a heavy nightmare quote death is for the species what sleep is for the individual quote work worry toil and trouble are certainly the lot of almost all throughout their lives. But if all desires were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how then would people occupy their lives and spend their time? Suppose the human race were removed to a utopia, where everything grew automatically, and pigeons flew about ready, roasted. Then people would die of boredom or hang themselves, or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another, and so caused themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature. Thus, for such a species, no other scene, no other existence is even suitable.

Quote, The misery of life never appears in a clearer light than when a thinking person has quite plainly seen with horror its hazards and uncertainties and the total darkness in which they live. And this, quote, philosophy is a

high mountain road which is reached only by a steep path covered with sharp stones and prickly thorns. It is an isolated road and becomes ever more desolate the higher we ascend. quote as soon as I began to think I found myself at odds with the world when I was young I was often very worried about this for I imagined that the majority would be in the right then after every fresh conflict the world lost more and I gained more after I had already reached my fortieth year it appeared to me that that I had won my case in the last instance and I found myself more highly placed than I had ever dared to presume but for me the world became empty and desolate Throughout my whole life, I have felt terribly lonely, and have always sighed from the depths of my heart. Now give me a human being, but alas, in vain.

I have remained in solitude, but I can honestly and sincerely say that it has not been my fault, for I have not turned away, have not shunned anyone who in their heart and mind was a real human being. I have found none but miserable wretches of limited intelligence, bad heart, and mean disposition. quote If we picture to ourselves Roughly as far as we can The sum total of misery, pain, and suffering Of every kind

On which the sun shines in its course We shall admit that it would have been much better If it had been just as impossible For the sun to produce the phenomena of life on Earth As on the moon And the surface of the earth Like that of the moon Had still been in a crystalline state

Quote The assumption that animals are without rights And the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western cruelty and barbarism universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality

quote they tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice that suicide is wrong when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man and woman has a more unassailable title than to their own life in person quote

compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. Quote, if children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate, not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

quote what disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life from this arises constantly diluted hope and also dissatisfaction deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams and we search in vain for their original much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that this world has a great deal to offer them at all. Quote, the cheapest sort of pride is national pride. For if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud. Otherwise, he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellow countrymen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to

see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he was born. He is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies, tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority, end quote. Quote, life swings like a pendulum, backward and forward between pain and boredom. Quote, no rose without a thorn, but many thorn without a rose. bones.