Rev Left Radio - Philosophy Series: Nietzsche and the Death of God

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Breht listens to, reflects on, and critically engages with a public lecture by the late philosopher Michael Sugrue entitled "Nietzsche and the Death of God". He discusses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the politics of modern day Nietzscheans, the death of god and consumer capitalism as a form a nihilism, the ongoing nature of human civilizational and spiritual evolution, the biography of Nietzsche, what the next step of human evolution might be, the synthesis of religion and science,  scientific and ontological materialism, the limits of atheism, the importance of spiritual struggle, and much more.  Professor Sugrue passed away last year, and Breht has always found his free, public lectures on philosophy to be helpful and really well done. In the spirit of free and open access to education, Breht offers his knowledge of philosophy alongside this offering by Professor Sugrue. The use of this lecture series falls under the protections of the Fair Use doctrine.  Outro Music: "Temple Grandin Too" by AJJ Check out all our other episodes on Nietzsche HERE Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, today I'm doing the second installment of our brand new philosophy series in which I listen to and respond to a lecture by the late professor Michael Sooghru is how I believe you pronounce his name. He passed away in 2024, but he put a bunch of his, I mean really classic lectures. on philosophy, on YouTube for free, and I've always got a lot out of them. You may be familiar with him if you listen to our somewhat recent episode a month or so ago where I, you know, responded to, listened, critiqued, analyzed, expounded upon his lecture on Marx. So obviously that is much more down the center of Rev Leff's, you know, alley of interests, if you will, but Reveleft has

always been, because I host it, and I'm a philosophy nerd, um, rooted in. in philosophy. We've always had episodes on philosophy. We always will. But throughout the years, and we are coming up on the eighth year of Rev Left next month, throughout the years, people have, you know, always asked for sometimes introductions to philosophy or more philosophy because they sometimes feel lost with the more complex stuff that we've done on like Alfred North Whitehead or, you know, even Hegel, stuff like that can get very complicated, particularly for people, I mean, for philosophers, for people engaged in philosophy, let alone for people who have not studied or dovet dived into philosophy very deeply. So this philosophy series, I think, is on one hand

just fun and educational. On the second point is a good introduction to, you know, crucial thinkers, but also is a fun way to bring the really impressive lectures of Professor Michael Sugru to more people. like I said he passed away he put all of his stuff out for free I found them very useful and hopefully my commentary alongside his lecture can you know make things more applicable can be more interesting could put interesting twists on it and then whenever there's a political point to be made hopefully I can do that as well and if you listen to the Marx app you know that Sue grew is by no means of Marxist or communist or socialist he's just a really well-spoken philosopher and so you know his politics when they appear, if they appear at all, are not going to be aligned with ours, but that should never, ever be a roadblock to engaging with a thinker or a philosopher or anybody. And in general, I think it's really important for people, if you're listening to this, to be readers and to be thinkers, particularly in an age of, you know, mass media, of constant distraction, of attention destroying dopamine casinos in our pockets,

wherein the ability to think deeply is compromised, and the ability to read deeply is compromised. I think we need to fight against that by doing things that encourage and deepen our ability to think deeply, reading, writing, meditating, spending time alone in nature without podcasts, without earphones, trying to center and ground ourselves, because amongst many other things, we're going to need that for what's coming in the coming years and decades.

You know, this century, to get a little off track, this century is the last century for this system of capitalism, imperialism, one way or the other. Just look over at the wildfires, the apocalyptic wildfires happening right now in L.A., but we could point to genocides, we could point to biodiversity loss, the six mass extinction, the exponential growth of technology that we are not mature enough as a species to handle. And we can see that centuries of contradictions are coming to ahead this century. And we have two choices. We have the ability to organize and act as a bridge to a new way of being, a new mode of being,

the next level of human maturation civilizationally. Or this system is going to create apocalyptic collapse and unprecedented. mass suffering. You know, we're talking about a billion climate refugees in the next 10 to 20 years, right, combined. And we just saw a couple, you know, tens of thousands or 100,000, hundreds of thousands of refugees in something like the Syrian Civil War, creating brutal blowback, the rise of fascism, anti-immigrant sentiment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, issues that we're still dealing with today. So we're living in a crucial, crucial century. becoming online of technologies that can keep us in a constant state of distraction and shallow

entertainment are awash. We are awash in them, right? We are completely surrounded on all sides by that stuff. And it behooves those of us who want to do something meaningful with our life, especially at this critical juncture in history, to solidify and improve on that capacity, which is becoming rare in today's world of deep thinking. of concentrated attention, of focus, and of engaging with high-minded thinking and history and science and all of these things. And to be a person that is fluent in many fields of knowledge and study, right? It's as dialyticians, we understand everything is intimately interconnected. So we want our knowledge to be as broad as possible. We want to be able to engage with

science, with religion, with philosophy, with art, with psychology, with ecology, right, with politics, with economics. And engaging with philosophy, in reading philosophy in particular, can be very helpful with that. And so, you know, it's a part of Rev Leff and my identity to always have philosophy on here. But I also think there's a deeper thing that, a deeper responsibility that we all have to engage with the history of human thought, in part to understand how we got here, but in part to improve our own faculty of deep thinking and groundedness and focus and concentration, which is going to become increasingly rare in the world. It already is, but increasingly necessary. So that's kind of a highfalutin introduction here. Let's go ahead and get into

the lecture here. It's about 45 minutes. This falls under fair use. I'm putting this out for free. It's not behind a paywall. He put his stuff out for free. I'm doing it in a spirit of being a fan of of his work broadly. Obviously, he's passed away, so he has nothing to lose or gain by this, except that more people hear his contributions to human thought and his, really his contributions to pedagogy when it comes to philosophy, because philosophy can be hard, and he has a really great way of explaining it in accessible ways for people, and hopefully I can add something of value as well, and my adding and my critiquing and my reflecting upon and my extrapolations

are what constitute fair use. So I don't even know if that needs to be said, but there you go. one last thing i want to say um everybody that supports the show on patreon deeply grateful in exchange for only five dollars a month you get multiple hours of bonus content every single month um and i'm really grateful to everybody who does that but i've also been asked over the last couple years bret i don't want to sign up for patreon for whatever reason um maybe i don't have the continuity of income to depend on a membership you know where i can monthly have something taken out of my account or maybe i just don't want to you know put my card on file or whatever it may be

And so I finally got around to creating an opportunity for people who just want to make a one-time donation. You know, maybe you listen to an episode and you like it. You don't want to join Patreon, but you want to toss us a few dollars as a show of gratitude or appreciation if you have the disposable income. And so for that, there's, I created a buy me a coffee.com link. Buy me a coffee forward slash rev left radio, I believe. But I'll put that link in the show notes. If you're so inclined, it's hard times for everybody, including us and our families. almost everybody I know has debt

groceries and just the cost of living is increasingly getting higher and higher and I know it's hard for people out there so if you don't have the money of course just listen and this is a free episode just take it for what it is but if you do have some extra disposable income and you want to support the show we are and always will be 100% listener funded no corporations are advertising on Rev Left

and I wouldn't accept them even if they asked we will always be you know smaller in that regard in some sense we will be underground indie if you will because of just what we are what we talk about our critique of the predominant society etc so and i'm no hasan piker i just don't have the looks so i can't i can't get that big either um but yeah so thank you to everybody supports the show in any way possible really appreciate it our families are deeply grateful for the assistance and it means the world to us All right. Let's go ahead and get into it. So I recently read, just as a little prelude to this,

I recently read the biography I Am Dynamite, the biography of Nietzsche. And so obviously a lot of the ideas and his background story are, you know, moving around in my head. And so I figured it would be a good time while that content is still fresh in my mind after reading that book, which I do highly recommend if you're at all interested in Nietzsche. While that's all swimming in my mind, I wanted to do this series on Nietzsche. But people like the last one on Marx. Let's see if they still like this one on Nietzsche.

And if they do, I'll continue this philosophy series. So let me know pretty much on Patreon in the comment section is where I read and respond to people's input. So if you happen to be on Patreon and you want to give any feedback if you like this series or not, please find a way to let me know just so I can kind of gauge people's interest in this stuff because it's not precisely political. So take that for what it's worth. But let's get into it. No philosopher has had a greater influence on the 20th century than Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a remarkably original thinker who extrapolates some of the main tendencies of late 19th century Western thought and derives certain extreme and disturbing

conclusions from his analysis of the history of Western thought. And he takes a position with regard to religion and theology that is in many respects the inverse of Soren Kierkegaard. Nietzsche is an existentialist thinker, often regarded as one of the seminal thinkers among the existentialists, but he decided to make the other half of the Kierkegaardian choice. He decided not to abandon all to religion, but rather to abandon religion to the tradition of pagan, Greco-Roman antiquity. He was the most important thinker in the undermining of theology, particularly in the last hundred years.

There is no one who has had a greater influence on the path of Western religion. Now, there are people in the history of the West with whom we might compare him, but fewer as radical as Nietzsche. In some respects, you might compare him with Machiavelli because he is strictly amoral. He thinks that morality is an impediment to superior men and the superior activities they might undertake.

He is also utterly incapable of pity, it would seem, like, say, Calicles and the Gorgias. He wants power. Power is the center of Nietzsche's conception of the world. When we lose theological orientation, when theological insight is denied us, and we are marooned in this world of space and time, they're only greater and lesser quanta of power.

We have a greater or lesser capacity to do the things that are truly within the human domain. Nietzsche wants to provoke us to a sort of atheistic heroism which replaces religion with art. It is very clear that this set of philosophical problems is going to be very influential in helping Joyce develop his aesthetic philosophy when he breaks away from religion and intends to substitute art in its place.

So just to stop there, I just want to say, first of all, I have no notes. I'm just kind of freestyling these philosophy series. I like coming in here with no preordained points to make and just kind of going with what pops up in my head. But a thing to remember about Nietzsche is to situate him in his time, right? He's a figure of the 1800s of the 19th century. His life overlaps a bit with Marx. Actually, let me think, quite a bit with Marx,

although I'm not sure their level of engagement whatsoever. But he's living at that time, 1800s. You know, the critique of organized religion and Christianity has fully taken hold. You get figures like Darwin, right, who overthrows the idea of creationism. We get figures like Freud, who overthrows the idea that the mind is wholly accessible to us, right?

That there's actually an unconsciousness that drives, influences, shapes, and molds our consciousness that we don't have direct access to, right? So that brings us down two steps, right? Darwin says that we're not the center of the universe. We're not created by God. Here's how we came about. Freud is operating a little later, of course, in the early 1900s. I'm just putting them together temporally to make a point. Freud is talking about how we don't even understand our own minds. We can think about our own impulses or instincts or why we do what we do. You can think of Marx in this tradition as well, this ruthless criticism of all

that exists, this criticism, this world historical criticism of political economy and the making sense of what capitalism actually is and delivering a blow to the way that, you know, Western societies at this time are organizing themselves politically and economically. And you can think of Nietzsche as being in there as, you know, driving a final stake, as it were, through the heart of God, but also thinking about the implications of what it means for God to die. And we'll get into that. He's not saying that he's the one that killed him necessarily. He's saying we, Western civilization broadly conceived, have, you know, with our inventions of science, with our theories of evolution, with our ruthless criticism of all that exists, we have undermined the idea

of God such that it's harder and harder and harder for more and more people to truly believe. And this is no small point. We'll return to it in a second, but we'll return to this point here in a little bit as the lecture goes on, but just to front-load it a little bit. You know, it can't be overstated how much Christianity shaped the minds, the worldview, the moral intuitions of Western culture for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And to have that particular rug, right, pulled out from underneath us, there's an aspect of it being liberatory. We all know the negative sides of organized religion, right? But there's a sight of it that is deeply disorienting.

And I think whether you consider yourself a believer or not in today's world, we don't believe like they used to believe. Even somebody who says that they're a Christian today, most of them, they don't believe it in the firm, unquestionable way that people 500,000 years, believed it, unquestionably, right? It wasn't even something that's up for debate. Now it's up for debate. The Christian believer is surrounded by a secular world, increasingly that does not believe in its God. And even those people that do believe in the Christian God do so in a much more wishy-washy way. But what happens when that moral ballast, that worldview that we all shared shatters? What happens in some sense when the training wheels come off of the bike?

and humanity now doesn't have that thing to lean on, right? That thing that said we're special, that we're created for a purpose, that if we're good when we die, we go to heaven, right? This is how you should treat one another. This is what the creator of the universe wants you to do in this life. That's very convenient to have. And, you know, I can't imagine humanity without organized religion going through, you know, our middle and late childhood into our adolescence without having. that ballast. Once it's pulled away, disorientation occurs, and various forms of what Nietzsche

would call nihilism begin to flourish. We can talk a bit more, I think, as this goes on, about the various forms of nihilism, but I make an argument that are empty, financialized, consumerist, capitalist societies today are a form of nihilism. I think the worship of the self, the dogged pursuit of money, of status, of fame, the notion that you express yourself through your consumption habits, the more, more, more, more mentality of a hyper materialistic society, not materialistic in the Marxist sense, but materialistic in the all we care about is obtaining things, commodities, that that's a form of nihilism. And it leaves us feeling very empty. There are, of course, many other forms of nihilism, and perhaps we'll get into it, but

to think about our modern society as a deeply nihilistic one, a one that is in part prophesied by Nietzsche, you know, he was simultaneously celebrating the death of God, because in a sense it is a growing up of humanity, while also warning us deeply about, you know, the existential shatterings that come with it. And we're Whatever you believe, whatever you think you believe, the truth is as modern human beings, when we think about our lives, it's very hard to keep the wolves of emptiness away. It's very hard to think of your life as having any cosmic meaning. There's a lot of existential anxiety that crops up around the idea of your total obliteration, having lived a purposeless, meaningless life in the eyes of the cosmos, the cold, indifferent cosmos. that life is more or less about watching everybody you love die until it's your turn and there's

no redemption on the other side of that whether that's true or not it's a gnawing feeling that modern human has and then who am i in that world in that cold and different cosmos who am i what is my life all about right you ever woke up at 2 a.m. in the morning with your heart pounding having existential dread about being obliterated at death? You ever have the annihilist, the annihilation fear? What does it all mean? What the fuck is the purpose? I'm just suffering, I'm struggling, it's hard to make rent.

The world is literally on fire. Nobody seems to be coming to save us. There's no heaven when I die. What the fuck is all this about it? seems kind of like a torture chamber you know consciousness is nature's nightmare as some rather cynical people might put it now that's not the whole story i can make an argument against that story but you'd be lying i'd be lying if i said that many of us don't feel that gnawing disorientation from time to time and we seek meaning in other things we seek selfhood in other

things and what's on offer from the dominant society is a sort of hedonistic consumption as a way of life that's not sustainable for the biosphere that's not sustainable for our souls we need an element of the sacred whatever that may be we need to return to the sacred dialectically speaking at a higher level right clearly this nihilism of consumerist capitalism is leading us only to literally the flames of hell on earth though it's not a place we go when we die. Hell is either a mind state you have when you're alive or the state of the world as a whole. So it's literally unsustainable. It's obliterating the idea of even a future to have. And so not having God a set morality, a concrete worldview that everybody around you agrees on and believes in, the

social cohesion that falls apart from that, the hyper-adamization, the destruction of communities. there's a good argument that we need to leave that behind that the old ways of organized religion were stifling were ossified were sort of adolescent in their belief too simplistic we just can't believe and I've been in the position I'm talking way too much I'll get back to the lecture here in a second

I've been in the position and perhaps you have too of being in such immense suffering psycho-emotional or material that you kind of some you know but mostly spiritual and existential that you would like to believe i found myself in moments of suffering deep suffering kind of begging to believe i wish i could i wish i could because of the comfort that that would that would possibly provide but trying to make your self-believe is actually impossible even if you want to you can't do it

so there is no going back right the only way out is through and Nietzsche's death of God is pointing to that reality and pondering its implications and there's many more parts to Nietzsche in philosophy which we'll get into and for an overview of his policy

I've done an episode called Aristocratic Radicalism. He is not a friend to our politics whatsoever. We make no bones about that. I have that whole episode on Nietzsche. I have a couple episodes on Nietzsche in the back catalog with guests, especially if you're particularly interested in Nietzsche's political content, insofar as there is any. You can go, aristocratic radicalism really sums it up. And we'll see why here in a bit. But that episode is available if you want a more political spin on Nietzsche. But this is going to be more of a, you know, rest of a wrestling with Nietzsche's philosophy overall. Now, Nietzsche is often kind of criticized and sometimes praised for being the source of a great deal of 20th century atheism and existentialism. And he's sometimes connected with the Nazi movement. And that, I think, is dicey. It's hard to say whether he was adequately represented as a proto-Nazi or not. All right, let's get into that. I mean, the Nietzsche Nazi thing, you've probably heard some things about it, something about a sister, taking his,

his, you know, work afterwards and pushing it in that direction. Certainly she did do that, Elizabeth, Nietzsche. She actually married before the guy fucking committed suicide, a guy name, I forget his first name, but Forster, who was a rabid anti-Semite and reading the biography of Nietzsche. It's very, very clear that Nietzsche is disdainful, outright disdainful of anti-Semites and even of German nationalism. Nietzsche really considered himself a European and was thinking in pan-European terms. I mean, his philosophy is so deeply rooted in ancient Greece and, you know, even Roman philosophy

that it's not surprising that he breaks out of a mere nationalism to kind of think of himself as pan-European. But on the other hand, so those two things would count against him being associated with Nazism. And certainly, I think, Nietzsche would see Nazism as, I mean, because it's a populist movement, a sort of herd mentality to it he would see a vulgarity to it an anti-intellectualism to it he would be i think disdainful of a demagogue like hitler and so that's all true on the other hand

and you know Hitler was Hitler's not reading nietzsche okay Hitler didn't read nietzsche Hitler and the Nazis and perhaps there were other Nazis who did read nietzsche extracted aspects of Nietzsche's work that edified and uplifted the idea of German uniqueness right look at this great philosopher he's German he represents the German spirit and there are aspects as you'll hear throughout this lecture of the overman the ubermensch

the will to power the transcendence of Christian morality and of even a conscience at all that could easily be hijacked by any authoritarian movement, but definitely a fascistic one and utilized in those terms. So, you know, there is, Nietzsche himself would have been overtly and directly disdainful of Nazism, but there are aspects of his work, like a bastardized understanding of will to power, or, you know, an Aryan inflected. idea of the ubermensch and a couple throwaway lines where you know Nietzsche's just trying to paint

imagery and talking about blonde beasts that you know gets hijacked into this Aryan racial mythology of the Nazis um and his sister of course did a lot of work i mean she was a she was a sick fuck like his sister is like the most annoying person you've ever met the most self-serving person you've ever met increase incredibly underhanded um pathetic uh You know, if you read the book, I Am Dynamite, Elizabeth Nietzsche, and for long stretches of his life, Nietzsche himself was openly disdainful of her and wanted to cut off himself from his sister and his mom, but, you know, ultimately couldn't. And they took care of him when he mentally collapsed. But, yeah, she's a real cynical fuck, a real gross figure, a real

egomaniac in a lot of ways. And reading I Am Dynamite really brings that dimension of her out. So it's not surprising that she was a Nazi. I mean, she was the wife of an anti-Semite who tried to start a German colony in South America. It failed. But he had tried to create a German colony of just Germans because, you know, he thought Jews were taking over Europe, all this shit. So it's a complicated thing, but worth kind of noting up front. This is a passing part of the lecture. But, you know, people do talk about Nietzsche's relationship with Nazism.

and, you know, Hitler was front and center at Nietzsche's sister's funeral. And I think even when Nietzsche died, he brought over, you know, he made a whole show of coming over and paying homage to the great German philosopher, et cetera. So the connections historically are certainly there, but it was the deceitful, cunning, and honestly ignorant Elizabeth Nietzsche who didn't understand her brother's work, right? She didn't have the intellectual firepower to understand her brother's work, but she knew how to use it, shape it, mold it, edit it in such a way that it could feed into her already existing political biases, of which anti-Semitism was central. But it is certainly the case that he was a hyper-sensitive individual, and he was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts. He was a professor of philology who had a tremendous grasp of the classical languages and had them early. He was appointed to his first position as a professor at 24, and in the German-speaking world where there's only one professor of a given discipline in a university, that is a remarkable and extraordinary achievement. People could not speak highly enough of Friedrich Nietzsche in his early days.

Now, while it is true that he was a remarkable scholar, he was, in addition to that, a ferociously, honest individual. He did his best, like Kierkegaard, to be an individual. He did his best to sense tremors in the foundation of Western culture that other people couldn't feel. He wasn't perhaps like a seismograph. He could see that there were continental shifts occurring, which would eventually result in an overall arching conflagration, which would generate a sort of intellectual earthquake. He didn't cause this intellectual earthquake any more than a seismograph does. but because he was a particularly poetic and particularly sensitive individual and because he had an uncannily large and voluminous grasp of the Western tradition,

he was able to see the implications of the development of Western thought and the crisis that Western thought had entered into after Darwin. So Nietzsche is in some ways not the cause of what he's talking about. He is the messenger. He doesn't send us the message. He just delivers it to us. And the message that he intends to deliver it to us is the following. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. We should not blame Nietzsche for killing God.

What he is trying to say is that Western culture has already killed God by the time he writes that in his book, The Gay Science. In fact, God was killed by the rise of modern natural science and by the progress of people from a barbaric state of mythological interpretations of the world to the more sophisticated state in which they find themselves. This sophisticated state is an advancing culture, but it is a danger to people's moral orientation. As a matter of fact, all moral orientations will be radically changed now because when God dies, all of our constructs of right and wrong, all of our conceptions of ethics and metaphysics are now thrown by the board. If I would change the analogy slightly, you could say that Nietzsche was like a canary in a coal mine. We put the canary down there to see if there's poisonous gas,

because it is affected by the gas long before people are. Well, Nietzsche, singing at the end of the 19th century, is singing the song of the end of theology, and that means the end of metaphysics, and that means the end of the whole tradition of Western philosophy. In books like Beyond Good and Evil, now there's a title, or the genealogy of morals, or the Antichrist, he tried specifically to undermine faith in the Western religious tradition,

and in addition to that, he tried to shake up the order orientation of Western philosophy and move it away from metaphysics towards this world. He had the same intellectual goal to make people live in this world and to deprive them of religious illusions which previously had sustained society. He said, look, these are hollow illusions now. If we are going to have illusions, we'll have to make up new ones. The old illusions will not work. So you can see, you know, this is the only world that exists. You know, anybody talking about metaphysics is nonsense. We live in this world, we should focus just on this world. You can see Nietzsche, you can see Freud, you can see

Marx. I put these thinkers together because they happen temporally at a right time and they are all in different fields of knowledge representing a similar shift in Western mentality, a materialist shift, right? Away from metaphysics, away from talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, away from talking about the structure of the cosmos created by God and what he wants for us and toward what's actually here down in the mud and the dirt of earth. That's where we should keep our gaze. That's materialism, right? That's anti-metaphysics.

Metaphysics is metaphysics. Something beyond the physical world. Supranational. These are things that can only be speculation, right? And Hume talked about this century or two before these figures even mentioned it. You know, he would talk about casting any work of metaphysics into the fire. It's useless. It's pure speculation.

It has nothing to do with the real world. It's radical skepticism and epistemic humility of hume. And so this is a tradition within Western philosophy. And Nietzsche is sort of coming to the culmination of it. And I love that metaphor of a canary in the coal mine, of a particularly sensitive sort of individual sensing these seismic shifts in an entire culture. and so yeah I do think that's interesting but yes Nietzsche is operating in that world he is against religion he's against metaphysics he is a naturalist he's bringing us back down to the actual world

and he's thinking through philosophy in very naturalistic um terms right not at all in metaphysical or supernatural terms whatsoever and in fact that's what he means by the death of god right there is nobody up there nobody's watching out for us nobody's giving us purpose we have to create it ourselves we have to create our own identity we have to create our own morality we have to create our own values how in the fuck are we supposed to do that us little complicated apes

as he'll later say you know how are we supposed to do that and another thing I love about Nietzsche this quote just came to mind is he talks about us as a transitional creature and that's kind of where a lot of our suffering comes from it feels as if we're suspended between you know

animals and gods that we have this consciousness this self-reflective ability, this ability to impact our biosphere in our world in an unprecedented way, our self-reflection, the ability to split the atom, the ability to build a quantum computer now, right? Maybe even artificial general intelligence. We might be giving birth to the next stage of intelligence. I don't know. I'm skeptical of that, right? But it's not off the table as a possibility. But we're still animalistic in so many ways. We still need to fuck, shit, piss, eat, we still get sick, we still die, we still go to war, right? And so

there is a certain human hubris that regardless of what you believe is sort of implicitly accepted that we're the pinnacle of evolution, that evolution on earth has resulted in us. But that betrays the very idea of evolution, that it's a constant ever-evolving process, as everything is in the cosmos. And so we, too, are in process, you know? And it's kind of wild to think about ourselves as a bridge to another bridge to another bridge. And that evolutionary process, it doesn't stop. So, you know, we, there is, that's part of our disorientation as human beings, especially in the wake of the death of God, is that we're not a complete being. We're not the pinnacle of anything. We're a bridge between animals and gods.

and that's an uncomfortable place to be. Now, this by itself would not have attracted much intellectual attention had Nietzsche not been at the same time the greatest prose poet of the German language. Nietzsche has remarkable poetic gifts as well as remarkable philosophical gifts. That confluence is a very rare thing. And when it is incorporated in a man like Nietzsche, whose will to truth is as ferocious and as tenacious as any of the philosophers we have studied, we will certainly find that the results, like the results for Kierkegaard, are quite volatile and quite dangerous.

Nietzsche is at his best when he is sharpening little daggers that he's going to throw at his reader, and he's such a wonderful poet. He says in Section 126 of the Gay Science. You may want to turn to that, first, if you ever get a chance to look at the book. It says in Section 126, 126, mystical explanations are thought to be profound. In fact, they are not even superficial. Oh, my. Oh, my, I had to spend a great deal of time removing that from my brain. That was one of the greatest one-liners in the history of philosophy. It's devastating.

Whole libraries of theology crumble under the force of that blow. It is a remarkably sharp and pointed and barbed instrument of war. Nietzsche is at war with his readers. He says, no compromise. You must take things seriously for once. Can you see why spiritually he's very much like Kierkegaard? It's just that he's the alter ego of Kierkegaard. He's willing to take one idea the whole way and refuses to make any kind of compromise. I believe that he probably would have liked Kiergaard's work either or. He just would have taken the other alternative. I'll do Kierkegaard soon as well. So to understand that idea of like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as dark inverted mirrors of one another is an interesting, certainly an interesting idea. Kierkegaard goes in the opposite direction with regards to God and religion, of course, but both are sort of forerunners to existentialism in different ways. And existentialism ultimately took on a much more atheistic inflection, right?

It got away from Christianity altogether. But thinking about those two thinkers together is, I think, important. And I like Kierkegaard. I still struggle to understand aspects of Kierkegaard. But I'll do a lecture, a philosophy series lecture on Kierkegaard this year for sure. sort of philosophical, radical, and the same sort of spiritual, I don't know, ferocity, spiritual power motivates both men. Now, it may be easier for you to read Nietzsche. If we stop, step back a little bit, to think about the kind of writing he does. And the best way to do

that is to compare Nietzsche with his great philosophical opponent and his great intellectual opponent, Socrates. Nietzsche hated Socrates. He had great respect for Socrates. He said, finally, someone worth talking about and talking to. The problem with Socrates is in many ways the same as the problem with Jesus. The problem with both men is that they generated a metaphysics which led the tradition of Western culture out of the world of space and time. Socrates in the Republic invents the world of the forms, right, where we keep perfect beauty and perfect truth. Jesus has heaven where we keep God and the Holy Spirit and the saints and the martyrs and all that. Nietzsche says in both cases the problem here is not the particular dog.

that's involved, but rather the whole idea of metaphysics. He says, I have an idea. The world we're in, this is the world. And there's no other world to be in. So let's not talk about metaphysics of the Greek kind or of the Christian kind anymore. And Marx would agree with that. Many thinkers would agree with that. But obviously you know what he means when he talks about Jesus and the Christian heaven and God.

But for those that aren't as well-versed in Greek philosophy, the platonic ideals, right? That there's a platonic ideal of everything, of love, of God. goodness. There's a platonic ideal of a horse. There's a platonic ideal of a man. And we are in down here in the worldly realm in which the individual instances of a tree or a man or a horse are mere murky reflections of the platonic ideal. And there actually is a realm somewhere outside of space and time that we can't access of the platonic ideals. And then they're kind of projected down into the world in their varied individual iterations. But in both cases, there is, again, this appeal to something else beyond the physical world that we are in relation to,

but we can't fully, never will be able to fully access. And of course, I mean, Greek philosophy and platonic ideals and Aristotelianism had deep impacts on the development later on of Christianity. So, you know, they really are part of a kind of singular process. Instead, we should adopt a new position. We will love the earth. We will find what is best in this world. And we will do what we can to improve and perfect human possibilities here and now. It's obvious how this is going to be very influential in helping Joyce develop his aesthetic philosophy.

Now, the comparison of Socrates goes actually quite a bit deeper than merely professional jealousy. And God knows there's a tremendous amount of that in his world. railing about Socrates. Socrates characteristic locusion, his characteristic way of communicating to other people is called irony. Socrates is not remarkable for his literal speech. In fact, he is constantly and opaquely ironic, and many times there are levels to his irony, which is what makes his work inexhaustible, which is why we still read it 25 centuries later. Well, Nietzsche has figured out a similar... 25 centuries later. I don't know. When I hear shit like that, it just really makes me pause, 25

full centuries. And that just gets us back to fucking Socrates. Crazy. Me trick. Imagine being so, having such an impact on the world that people 25 centuries later talk about you. You go to any intro to philosophy

class, you know, across the world and you're going to eventually bump into Plato and Aristotle and Socrates to say nothing of Jesus. And some of these other figures like the Buddha, you know, Mohammed, Moses. It's just absolutely, absolutely fascinating to have that much cultural staying power.

Not irony, but oxymoron. My argument is that Nietzsche uses oxymoron in the way that Socrates uses irony. Now, for those of you who have forgotten what an oxymoron is, it's a turn of phrase like cold fire or hot ice. The idea is that we attribute an adjective to a thing that doesn't have, of that property, has the opposite property. Let me give you some examples from Nietzsche's works. He once said,

What are mankind's truths, but his irrefutable errors? Irrefutable errors? What would that be? Well, that's an oxymoron. The point is that the tradition of Western rationalism has never led us to certainty, has never really led us to anything that could approximate the canons of platonic knowledge.

In fact, the best we can come to knowledge at all, since God is not around to validate our knowledge and the realm of the forms that Plato invented is no longer around to validate our knowledge. The best we're ever going to get is a series of perspectives about the world. And for that reason, what we call truth is, in fact, the errors we haven't refuted yet.

Do you see a little prelude to postmodernism here? Knowing all the baggage that comes along with that term. A multiplicity of perspectives. No final truth, right? Foucault, operating deeply in the Nietzschean, tradition. I think it's always interesting to excavate those lines of historical development where you can see, you know, Nietzschean influence in, you know, post-structuralism and post-modernism. You can see Nietzschean influence and psychoanalysis, right? Freud talked about, you know,

Nietzsche and people talk about Nietzsche as a sort of psychologist more than anything. And Freud had that famous quote where he was like, I had to stop reading Nietzsche because I was scared that if I kept reading him, he would say everything I ever wanted to say. I don't know if that's apocryphal or not, but it's an interesting thought, and it just does show the connections between Nietzsche as this sort of primordial psychologist leading into psychoanalysis and Nietzsche as this primordial post-structuralist, in a way, that leads on to thinkers like Foucault and beyond. it means that the drive towards knowledge that we've gotten from both Greece and from Christianity

is now being undermined and being devalued. Part of Nietzsche's program, he calls the revaluation of all values, changing the entire tablet of good and evil that had been handed down from generation and generation throughout the Western tradition. He says, I'm going to destroy that tablet and construct a new one. He intends to replace the tradition of Western. religion with his own thought. He also, at the same time, intends to abolish the tradition of Western philosophy because he thinks that it needs metaphysics, and once he gets rid of metaphysics, then there will be no more tradition of Western philosophy. In other words, he seriously and literally and honestly thinks that Western philosophy and religion end with

him. Now, this is no small estimation of oneself, right? And for a man who, in print, refers to himself as the Antichrist. You may perhaps get the idea that megalomania has set in somewhere along the line here, and in fact, there's a considerable justice in that sort of a criticism. On the one hand, he is dealing with the greatest of philosophical problems, and in all honesty, and in fairness, he is a superior man, a man of superior intellectual merit, and a man of great courage. It is not an easy, it's easy to ignore a religion. It is very hard to abolish it. They're quite different. It is one thing to be indifferent. to religious questions and another thing to decide to torch them all? This is a very different

set of expectations. He is not at all a prosaic writer and no one reads his books without one way or another being affected. I remember... Yeah, and this megalomania really, you know, it increased in intensity as he got closer and closer to his mental collapse. His father died at the age of, I believe, 35 from, he was a pastor, a preacher, and his dad died at the age of 35 when Nietzsche was a child due to what they would call back then softening of the brain. But basically a collapse of physical and mental well-being that ultimately resulted in his death. And Nietzsche lived his whole life concerned and very worried that he too was going to follow in that exact sort of footsteps as his father did going crazy right and he eventually did and as he approached

the mental collapse that you know is sort of hallmarked by his public outbursts somebody that's so against pity breaking out and weeping in tears at the sight of seeing a horse beaten by by its rider and ran and threw his arms around the horse weeping and trying to protect it and that was the that was the final break but leading up to that um his friends his family everybody was increasingly concerned as he would become increasingly you know ego maniacal in his in his writings calling himself yeah you know the antichrist the uber mensch zarathustra himself right um and many other many other names that he gave for himself and he would write you know essays which we might get into later about, you know, why I am so smart, why I write better than everybody else,

you know, sort of things like this that were nuanced and had value in them, but also indicated this growing, I mean, insanity. And then he spent the last 10 years of his life in a state of bewilderment, of dementia, of catatonia. You know, there's those famous images you can Google of old Nietzsche in his last 10 years, just, you know, sitting in a a chair just like blank stared um deeply disturbed his friends when they came over and saw him like that he was basically reduced to a child before his mother died he was in his mother's care this is a 50 year old man in his mother's care being kind of treated like a little boy because he acted like that um you know he would just do crazy shit irrational shit he would have outbursts he would

take off running um he would you know be in his room by himself just making wailing noises and throwing himself around. And then at the end of his life, he just kind of weakened to a state of yeah, catatonic non-existence in a way and slowly shriveled up and died. So, you know, people speculate on that. You know, did he break his own brain through his attempt to push through to a whole new way of being and creating his own values? Did his philosophy itself drive him mad? Was it merely just syphilis catching up with him? There is a bit of a question mark. around exactly what caused it, but there's the genetic predisposition to profound mental illness

all throughout his family tree, including his father. And, you know, that probably seems like the modern-day clinical diagnosis would be something along those lines like, you know, syphilis-induced dementia or something like that. But prior to that, before his mental collapse, you have to understand, and I'll get into this a bit more, when we talk about Nietzsche and ideas of power, and the irony of it, is that,

Nietzsche suffered through, I don't know, chronic ailment, chronic pain, chronic migraines, chronic health problems that would have him sidelined or literally bedridden for weeks or months at a time. And part of his aphoristic style of writing was because he had these brief periods of lucidity between, you know, literally like blinding migraines, like literally blinding where he could not see. When ever he went outside into the sun, he had to wear these deep green tinted glasses and this green tinted visor to protect his eyes from the overstimulation of too much light.

But he spent, yeah, I mean, months at a time of his life, completely bedridden, unable to even get out of bed. And so, you know, and he lived his whole life not being, I mean, until the very, kind of towards the end of his conscious life before, the mental health totally destroyed his mind. He was getting some fame and stuff like that. But there was a period of his life when he was after he had dropped out of being a very young professor at Basel University or whatever and before his work really started making an impact where he was kind of written off and seen as just kind of not an important figure. His books

didn't particularly sell well, et cetera. He did live to see his star rise as it were. But this was a man who for big chunks of his life couldn't get a girl was bedridden and weak and you know as an invalid in some in some respects who whose work was not getting the respect and admiration and attention he thought it deserved and so for somebody like that to fetishize these ideas of power and overcoming and the ubermensch it's it's ironic and you also understand the psychological, you know, soil from which those ideas and the fetishizing of them would come. It's an interesting psychological case for damn sure, but maybe we'll get into that a bit more here in a bit. When I first read the gay science and I read the passage about God being dead, I had to read it again and again and again.

It was one of the most difficult passages I read when I was in college, and to this day, I have never completely made my peace with it. It will repay a very close reading on your part if you ever get to the gay science. science. In the process of reading his works, the gay science and the others, always keep in mind this idea of oxymoron, it will make your life so much easier. Instead of trying to tease out some sense out of irrefutable errors, remember that this is Nietzsche's stock in trade. This is what he's good at, because it gives you something provocative to think about without committing him to any logical position. If you go back and try and figure out exactly what Nietzsche does believe, it is not entirely easy to put together. Like many other philosophers, he is better at explaining, or if I explain, I explain, I attacking the things he does not like than in articulating a defense for the things that he does approve of. He does say that ethics, because it had been previously based upon Christian religion

or because it had been based upon metaphysical philosophy, that ethics is over. In the sense that the traditions of right and wrong that have been handed down for the previous 15 or 20 or 25 centuries in the West are now gone. Ethics turns out to be one of these irrefutable errors.

And it would seem that for an error that's irrefutable, he is trying very hard to refute it. Remember, though, that Nietzsche, because he is not a philosopher, he thinks philosophy is over, and is primarily a poet, not a logician, doesn't care if he contradicts himself. Remember that the essence of an oxymoron is a contradictory utterance. Hot fire or hot ice doesn't make any sense. Cold fire doesn't make sense, but it is a very moving kind of locution that pushes you in a poetic rather than a logical way. this is what Nietzsche is good at now yeah Nietzsche was not a structural thinker so when you think of a structural thinker you think of somebody who is or a systematic thinker system building thinker you think of a Hegel you can think of an Emmanuel Kant you can think of a Karl Marx right as figures who are trying to um at least in one terrain of knowledge or sometimes in the entire worldview trying to systematically build a way of understanding the world right through rigor and systematic analysis and logical unfolding of this argument leads into this argument and this is how I'm using this word and this is the basis of being and blah blah and Nietzsche is aphoristic poetic contradictory on purpose and that also I think leads into

his being able to be taken up by so many different types of people right from Nazis who could take part of his work to anarchists on the left who take part of his work to hyper individualists who take part of his work there's left nietzians who take you know from a left wing socialist perspective who take nietzsche somewhat seriously in some regards and it's because of in part this aphoristic style it's not systematic right there's no there's no fascistism there's no liberal Marxism it's it's so systematic that it excludes what it is not right And for a figure like Nietzsche, who is kind of Socratic in this way. Of course, Plato is the one writing about Socrates, but Socrates himself is not doing what Plato and Aristotle attempted to do, which is kind of build up understanding in many domains and try to make broad ontological or epistemological arguments about the nature of reality.

You know, Socrates is using irony and questioning people and trying to get them to articulate what they actually believe in that process, showing them that they don't actually understand, what they're saying. And in that process, making everybody watching and reading him, think deeply about these issues. But it's hard to say what Socrates's system is. Like, you know, it's impossible to say that. Like, it is impossible to say, what is Nietzsche's system? What, you know, what positive program? What, what worldview can we put on? You know, you can construct one out of Nietzsche's work, for sure. And people do. People call themselves Nietzians and kind of use it as the primary lens through which they understand and interpret their own lives. but you know you have you have to do work yourself to kind of bring all these threads together

and because of the contradictions because of the aphorisms you know there'll always be somebody to say well what if he meant this i'm not sure you understand what you're saying yeah he did say that but over here he said this so how do you how do you make that sense how do you integrate that statement into your understanding of nietzsche right so i think that's also an important thing to think about with regards to to nietzsche and his popularity and his continued relevant and how people engage with him and how he differs from other thinkers that we might be more familiar with.

In abolishing morality, in destroying ethics, he is taking a position very much like that of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's great novel, Crime and Punishment. If any of you know that piece, you will know that early in the novel before Raskolnikov comes back to the Christian fold, he commits a murder because he has the theory

of the exceptional man, that the usual norms of right and wrong, which we expect to be universal, are only partially complete. There are certain superior individuals, according to Raskolnikov, for whom the traditions of morality do not apply. That's the idea of the exceptional man. Well, Nietzsche, in fact, makes an argument along these lines that the great world historical individuals,

that superior men, do not have to be bound by the constraints of traditional notions of right and wrong. They are the great artists. They are the great creators. They may be artists in the sense of painters or artists in the sense of literary men, but they are creative in things like politics or things like science as well. From this perspective, from the perspective of Nietzsche, all superior men in every discipline that are breaking the bounds of inherited forms.

They are what he means by an artist. So we'll get more into that. This Uber-mentioned idea, this artist idea broadly conceived. It just doesn't mean an artist like a painter or literary giant, although it could. it means anybody who, you know, breaks the bounds of convention to do something world historical, right? Napoleon, for example, is certainly a figure that Nietzsche would see as, you know, an artist in this way. And Napoleon wasn't an artist in the traditional way we think about it. So he's using that word a little differently. But also, it's worth noting the connections between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. They're both these sort of proto-psychologists in a lot of ways. They both, they both, you know, Dostoevsky through literature and Nietzsche through his unique type of poetic philosophy came to kind of similar conclusions and went on to influence psychology and psychoanalysis more broadly later down the line. And the reason why Dostoevsky's novels are so penetrating and so

relevant and so cherished is because of the, in part, the deep psychological insight that Dostoevsky has to the human condition and Nietzsche had a similar thing and in fact they met so they met let me read this really quick in 1886 to 1887 Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky's

book in a bookshop in France Nietzsche was immediately enthusiastic about the book comparing his discovery to his earlier encounter with Schopenhauer so Nietzsche a seminal moment in Nietzsche's

intellectual life was going into a used bookstore with no intention of a book to find and stumbling upon the will as world in representation by Schopenhauer. Allison and I did a whole episode on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, so if you're interested in those connections, they're deep and they're profound, and they diverge in certain ways, of course, but there is no Nietzsche without Schopenhauer. And so the fact that Nietzsche would say that after reading Dostoevsky, it was a similar experience to his having read Schopenhauer, is incredibly high praise.

But, you know, like Jung and Freud, there was at once a relationship, a mentorship, and then a divergence and a breaking up of that relationship. And so Nietzsche heavily, profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer. I mean, the will to power is a sort of a Nietzschean twist on the Schopenhauerian will to life, the will to live, which they both see as this insatiable striving within nature that found in animals and plight. plants and the sun and all aspects of the cosmos, the thing that pushes them forward is this will with a capital W, you know, this blind will, like a Darwinian will. It's not God. It's not metaphysical. These are both atheists, right? But this striving, and that's why in part, you know, I don't want to get too off track here, but humans like Schopenhauer, we're talking about the desire, the desire machinery within us, that satisfying a desire doesn't end to the, doesn't

lead to the end of desire. We are never, ever quite satisfied. There's always more. There's always striving. You fulfill one desire, another one crops up more and more and more. And we're always leaning into life, pursuing, chasing, yearning, never getting, never completing, never reaching a point where we're finally happy, where we're finally satisfied with how things are, right? And that that inexorable drive forward causes misery and suffering in us as self-reflective creatures and his solution to it was to kind of, in as much as a human being can, opt out with a Buddhist influence of transcending desire altogether and finding soulless in art. And so you can see aspects of that philosophy being taken up in Nietzsche, but also shifted and moved. So, but again, Allison and I have

an episode. I believe it's on Red Menace. It might even be on Rev. Left a few years back where we covered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I kind of did an explanation of Schopenhauer. Allison did an explanation of Nietzsche and then we had a really fun discussion about the two so check it out if you're interested the second encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky they met again around the same time and Nietzsche described Dostoevsky as quote the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn end quote Nietzsche also said he was grateful to Dostoevsky in a remarkable way however much he goes against my deepest instincts Dostoevsky was inspired to write the brother's Karamazov after his conversation with Nietzsche and based the character Ivan on Nietzsche I didn't even know

that that's fascinating both nietzsche and dostoievsky were raised in christian households but later questioned the idea of god they both grappled with the threats of nihilism and tried to find a plausible answer so these two thinkers one russian one german very much overlapping lives very much on similar paths both of them conservatives even reactionaries i would say dastoyevsky we've had an episode on him too if you want to go check it out with existential comics Dostoevsky, a conservative. Nietzsche, more of, you know, as we said in that episode, aristocratic radical, but, you know, more of a reactionary even in some ways, but both on the right.

And then if you kind of look forward and see how they played out with regards to the development of psychoanalysis and the two predominant figures in that field of study, which is Freud and Jung, they too both or socially, politically pretty conservative. So I don't know what to make of that necessarily more than just stating it and letting you kind of just think and ponder about what that might mean. But it is interesting. And of course you look at a modern figure like Jordan Peterson, not putting him intellectually in the same wrong as these other thinkers by any means, but he is deeply and profoundly influenced by all four of them. And he has full lectures on all of them. And, you know, even before his fame, his work and his lectures online centered often around Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky.

So, who is also a conservative, right? A reactionary. So interesting, interesting things to think about. But back to the lecture. The artist is the creative human being. And the creative human being can create in any domain. It doesn't have to be a sculpture or literature or something like that. What he is saying is that that art and that capacity to create is more important than any moral judgment we might make about an artist.

An artist may be a wicked man, but if he writes well, then he is a superior individual. It doesn't make any difference whether he obeys the usual rules that we like to oppose upon all people. What makes a man great is his willingness to give up that herd morality, as Nietzsche calls it. Nietzsche says that all of our moral systems have been made to satisfy lowest common sense. denominator needs. He looks, for example, at the history of Christianity and says, look, the reason why Christianity was a religion of slaves is because it serves the interests of slaves. If you are a Roman master, as Nietzsche kind of likes and sympathizes with, well, then you can do all kinds of cruel and wicked stuff, and because you were superior, you never felt bad

about it. You didn't have this nasty religious guilt. What kind of a superior heroic man would do that? Nietzsche said that all of Western heroism was poisoned by the advent of Christianity, because it made superior people develop what he called a conscience. And he thought that was a very bad development because that truncated their ability to act. Who knows what great figures would have done if they had not been kept back and held back by these arbitrary strictures of Christian morality?

He once wrote a very telling line, he said, I will never forgive Christianity for what it did to Pascal. Now, if you know Blaise Pascal and his agony over religious questions, he says, look, here we have a superior, man. He was a great mathematician and the great scientist. What did you do? You set his own mind against his rational abilities and you destroyed that man. I would give a million Christians who think that they're going to be saved for one more blaze Pascal. And then I'd be able to tell him that you need to be liberated from these Christian myths. And when you are, then you will truly be the

heroic man you could become. So he has an axe to grind against the entire tradition of Western Christianity. He thinks that it inhibits the growth of individuality and it prevents the growth of heroism. And heroism is what he's all about. He says, look, I don't care about the mass of human beings. He thinks that the mass of human beings, in opposition to Christianity, he thinks that the mass of human beings have no value whatever. The only people who are worth anything are superior people. And I have a strong suspicion that Nietzsche thought he was one of those superior people. Okay, so you see the dark, ugly side of Nietzschean philosophy.

You can see how it's profoundly reactionary in a lot of ways. This idea that most people are the herd, their cattle, their mere followers. A great man can step and crush and destroy them, annihilate them. At will, they are pawns on a chessboard and the king and queen can move in whatever directions they want and obliterate those pawns. They are not worth very much. Now, there's a contradiction here. In Nietzsche's personal life, almost every single person that came across him, whether they

liked him or not, they said he was incredibly polite. He treated everybody with the utmost respect. He was mild-mannered, reserved, right? And so he didn't live a life like the one. that he kind of advocates in his philosophy. He wasn't a cruel, domineering tyrant over others, even interpersonally. He could be seen as in his own ideas, a great man given his philosophy, but again, the way he lived his life, it's not a life of overcoming, or it is an over, a personal overcoming. And that's kind of the Nietzschean thing is like, there's two ways to take Nietzsche.

you can take all this ubermensch stuff and this overcoming stuff and this will to power stuff and put it inward psychologically so i'm a nietzschean because i'm overcoming my own internal suffering i'm i'm blazing my own values for myself um i'm an ubermensch with regards to whatever even saying that is dorky as fuck but you get my point it can be psychologized and internalized or it can be externalized it can be turned into a sort of social political philosophy And there's a lot of modern Nietzscheans that do just that. And they're all hardcore reactionaries. We can think of the Royek Nationalist or Bronze Age Pervert to point out some particularly popular figures on Twitter who kind of represent this reactionary Nietzschean trend.

Even Curtis Yarvin with his belief in a sort of modern aristocracy, anti-democracy, anti-democracy, anti-agalitarianism, to some extent of Peter Theodore. fits into this mold as well, at least to some extent. It's sort of disdainful towards Christianity. It often has a pagan or a neo-pagan spiritualist bent. Many of them, though, certainly not Curtis Jarvich, are into like bodybuilding and the aesthetics of beauty. These are the guys that you'll see with the Roman statue as their profile pick. They're anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-Marxist to the hilt. They often buy into this class of civilizations narrative, again, with a strong identitarian and pan-Europeanist outlook.

And so there's a real strain of modern politics that is a direct descendant from Nietzsche that takes these ideas and really brings them to the forefront of their own. politics. And so it is still relevant politically. Again, we called Nietzsche's politics in that episode, aristocratic radicalism, right? And that's what we mean by aristocratic, these great men of history that because they are so great, they are so superior to others, that they have every right to not be tethered by morality, conscience, this internal quabbling over what is right and wrong to do is just this pathetic inheritance from Christianity that can be completely done away with. And you can do anything to anyone in service of your own will to power, right? And this is seen as a laudable figure by Nietzsche and by Nietzscheans insofar as there

are any. I mean, you know, like insofar as you can be a Nietzschean. And we'll get into that point in a little bit. But sure, I think you can be a Nietzschean philosophically. And that's what it looks like in modern political context, and it's grotesque. And, yeah, anti-egalitarian to the core. Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is his critique of socialism. This idea that what we're trying to do is level everything out. I believe I even heard an interview with, I think it was Bronze Age Pervert, where he says that the utopia of Marxism is a resting home.

This idea that this flawed, I don't know. idea that what Marxists want to do is just level everybody and all we're concerned about is material comfort. So everybody's equal. There are no superior or inferior human beings and the goal is just to create a super comfortable society and of course these guys are like fuck comfort you know we want war we want we want conflict we want to conquer we want a rule you know they think of themselves as fucking gangis con or something um many of these guys of course have never actually been to war you talk to somebody who's actually had to fucking go to war they don't have this these romantic fetishistic ideas of how beautiful war is and how it's a form of self-expression and

you know i love to conquer and go to war they come back shaking with the thousand yards stare being like let's do everything we can to prevent anything like this happening again you know um so there's a there's contradictions abound but um this is this is a philosophy that is actively hostile to what we believe in now do we want a world that just turns out to be a resting home no um do we want a world where everybody's exactly the same doesn't even make sense wouldn't even happen that's like going into a forest and saying i want all these trees to be the exact same it's this 1984 anti-communist view of communism right that what we're trying to do is make everybody equal as i've argued many times

I won't go into too much detail here. What we say is difference, diversity, totally fine, beautiful even. Somebody's going to be funnier than the next guy. Somebody's going to be able to throw a football farther than the other guy. Somebody able is going to invent a machine better than the next guy or girl, right? Those differences is what makes the variety of human life beautiful. And in fact, I think one of our critiques of capitalism is that it does have this culturally leveling effect where consumer capitalism becomes this overarching

empty fucking cultural parasite that infiltrates every corner of the globe so that you kind of lose some of the beautiful diversity of human life and human culture. Which I think we want to keep. We want to retain

the beauty of the different flourishings of human life and modes of being. But we also want to progress and move humans into a new epoch. But the point is here that differences between human beings are natural and inevitable. The only thing we disagree with is that those differences should cash out in the form of disproportionate economic and political power. Right? Just because you created

fucking Amazon doesn't mean you should have a billion dollars in access to political power. And just because one of us didn't doesn't mean that we should live our entire lives toiling for you. And you can be a Nietzschean. You can be this guy that says, fuck you, you are the herd, you're the plebs. You're the little ants that great men crush. And what we say is, okay, ants together can take down an elephant. So we're going to come at you. We have numbers. We don't believe you're superior to us in any way, shape, or form. And really, by a stroke of luck and a corrupt economic system, you've been able to amass billions of dollars on the backs of our brothers and sisters around the world, the proletariat, we're coming together to come at your

motherfucking throat. It's okay. So be a Nietzschean. We're Marxists. Let's have the conflict. You think you're a great man of history. You think we're nothing but stepping stones on your path to greatness. Bring it the fuck on. That's when we pull out our knives and we're ready for the fight. No more arguing at that point. So, you know, they don't understand Marxism and they don't understand socialism and communism. We should have a swagger to our shit. We should have a defiance to our politics of fuck you mentality to our politics yeah we don't have all the money

and we don't have all the power you know we are the peasants of techno feudal capitalism but we're not any less than you and we're coming for you so be prepared something you should consider in the history of philosophy

whenever someone makes an argument for aristocracy they always think that they're aristocrats you never see plebeians making arguments in favor of philosophical aristocracy If you see an argument in favor of elitism, the speaker thinks he is part of that leap. Without fail, it always works.

And they almost never are. You know, look at these fucking people who claim to be Nietzscheans, these world historical conquerors, these Uber mentioned, and they're fucking dorks. They're fucking dorks. Which is always a deep irony in all of this stuff. We talked about Julius Evela

and his, what he called, aristocrat of the soul, right? And this idea that when you read Nietzsche from a reactionary perspective or you read Julius Evolo from a reactionary perspective, you're being flattered. It's being presented to you as you're being led in on a secret. The mere fact that you're here means you very well might be one of these superior people. That flatters the ego. But bring it, being these motherfuckers into reality, they're not so impressive. Neither were the thinkers themselves, Nietzsche, Evela, whatever.

These, they're, Nietzsche's impressive in his intellectual capacity, but unimpressive in a million other ways. And so this whole idea that their superior is almost always undermined by their actual existence. Now Nietzsche, strangely enough, would not feel bad about that. He said, yes, of course I'm a member of an elite. I don't buy this Christian equality of all souls. Look, there's no God to all to be equal in front of. And big fish eat little fish. Some people are better and more capable than others. We just live in the domain of nature. Stop trying to even things out and help the feeble and the incapable and the incapacitated, help the great people do great things

and to hell with the rest of humanity. Smells like eugenics, doesn't it? It's a radical, courageous, but also slightly immoral. Actually, you're in a slightly more, greatly immoral stance. In some ways, what's heroic about Nietzsche is that his immorality is done at the level of Milton Satan. He will not serve. and there's something strangely attractive about him for that reason.

There are times when he comes up with all sorts of repulsive stuff, but I cannot eliminate from my mind a certain sort of admiration for Nietzsche. I would not be a Nietzschean follower. Nietzsche is the sort of philosopher that if you follow him, you are not at all a Nietzschean. Nietzsche wants no followers, as he says, be a man and follow me not. I found my path, you find yours. Anyone who reads all of Nietzsche's books and says,

I believe everything Nietzsche told me, understood nothing that he read. The whole point is that he says, go think these problems through for yourself. Like Kierkegaard, he forces you to become an individual. I think it is a good and necessary tonic, but I would worry if anyone came to me and said, after reading this, it seems to me that almost all this is correct. Well, I do like that aspect of it, of, you know, even in thus spoke Zarathustra, he makes this point very clear that I'm not a leader to call yourself a Nietzsche and to agree with everything I say is to abandon your own path and to subordinate yourself to somebody else.

It's the least Nietzschean thing you could do. And there's something that resonates there with, you know, spiritual paths, for example, that if you're walking a sincere spiritual path, that you can have teachers, you can have influences, you can have a community of people that help you along the way, but you've got to walk through the fire yourself. There can be no real growth unless you take that path for yourself, as hard and as arduous as it is

and as much suffering as it necessarily will bring to walk a spiritual path authentically is to have to walk it alone at some parts of it at least because it's getting down to the core of who you think you are and overcoming that, transcending that.

So nobody can give you that. Nobody can hold your hand and walk you to whatever, enlightenment, right? that in order to get there, it means taking radical responsibility yourself and that you have a radically unique path to walk as every person does. And to walk it with your chin up and bravely with courage and independence and authenticity. That's the only way forward. There are no training wheels. There is nobody to walk the path for you. There is no magical book you can read as a shortcut.

You've got to walk through the fire yourself. There is something admirable about that. that in general and something true about it, if you're going to the depths of your being on any real spiritual existential journey of self-knowledge and ultimately of self-overcoming. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the point is it is stimulating and provocative will give you interesting questions to ask, if not satisfactory answers to those questions. Now, in a piece called The Use in Abuse of History, he gave his conception of what human life was like, and he gave his conception of the value of human life, and, amazingly enough, it's not very high. Remember, he is living in the age of Darwin. Darwin is published the origin of species,

and there's been a great to do about it, and some people were trying to find some way of splicing Darwin together with the tradition of Western Christianity, and others were trying to say, well, look, we can accept Darwin, but there's no real big change. We can hold onto the essence of Christianity and just give up those silly myths. Nietzsche says, nay, you can do nothing of the kind. Darwin has fundamentally changed our understanding of ourselves, and we can never go back. Darwin has conclusively proven that human beings are a part of nature. They are not part of God's providential plan. There was no such thing as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

In fact, all we are are complicated apes. He looks at the whole history of human beings and at the status of history and says, we're going to have to rewrite our history. And in the future, the universal historian will not start, say, in ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt certainly won't start in the Garden of Eden. In the future, the universal historian will start with something on the order of ponds' scum. That green one-celled stuff that grows on stagnant water? Said, in fact, Darwin has shown that that's what our ancestors are.

Like it or not, we're a really complicated version of that green stuff that grows on ponds. Now, the difference between us and that green stuff is that we've somehow gotten the bizarre idea that the entire universe revolves around us. He says, I have an idea. No, it doesn't. a really complicated and really arrogant pawn scum that has an entire misapprehension of the nature of the world around you. And once Darwin comes, we can never go back. God is dead. It's just that none of you people have figured that out. And the way in which he introduces that is quite

remarkable. He says, look, if we're pond scum, then what are we going to do to find some value here in the world? We have to make choices. We have to make decisions if we can't do it on the basis of ancient religious myths, what will we do? Even Ponscomb has to do something. And his answer is the will to power. Nietzsche thinks that he's found a natural motive within all living things. He thinks it's an exercise in biology. He says, the reason why things reproduce and take over a domain or take over a territory, why they compete with other species, is because all of living things, all of organic life, is in fact motivated by the will to power. The will to power and very complicated organic beings like human beings is sublimated and twisted and distorted,

but it's the will to power that makes everyone do things. A general conquers a city, it's an expression of the will to power. A scientist finds out about a particular phenomenon when he does that. That's his will to power. When we organize to fight for socialism or when our comrades engage in revolution, that's a will to power. And again, I talk about Schopenhauer's will to life and Nietzsche's twist on it as the will to power. These are the animating principles of all life in the cosmos, from plant life to microbial life to complicated intelligent life, that this is this endogenous force operating within and through us that pushes us forward, that is the propulsion system of all life, yearning, striving, you know, in dark Schopenhaueri in terms

to nothing, you know, blindly and without purpose. And Nietzsche probably picks up on that as well and agrees more or less with that. But that that is core to both of their thinking. That is sort of the animating principle of movement and dynamism in life. And it manifests itself in our lives. But you also hear how he talks about in more complicated self-reflective life, this kind of this will to power gets sublimated into other things. whereas in a previous era it would be maybe just forced to yeah gangus con style just conquer shit take over shit will to literal power it gets more refined as the human gets more refined and sophisticated intellectually and morally and then gets sublimated a term into other forms right so into the form of your career to the form of writing the next great novel in the form of being the best athlete you can be in the form of you know whatever any

little thing, me making this podcast, you know, you having children, this yearning, this moving forward, this doing, this creating, that impulse that's within us, that is the will to power, and it comes out in different ways. But you can see

here that this leads into Freudian psychoanalysis and the idea of the unconscious, that there are these deep instincts within us that we are pretty much blind to, that are by definition unconscious, that are propelling us forward and those instincts kind of get sublimated into culturally, ideally culturally acceptable

ways of going about and pursuing that. You know, what was an acceptable will to power 2,000 years ago is no, that shit will get you arrested today. You got to be a little bit more refined, a little bit more sophisticated about it. But that's the Nietzschean, you know, force. That's the locomotion of human movement is this will to power, which permeates the entire cosmos. Engages in fasting and mortification of the flesh and discipline of the senses. That is the saint's will to power. Your will to power can be extended to the outside world, but can also be imposed on oneself. So what he says is that the will to power is the one skeleton key to all of human motivation now that we know what we really are, just complicated

animals. Nobody here but just us natural things. Now, this leads us to consider the problem of how Christianity relates to science, which has been a vexing problem throughout the history of Christianity, but particularly as we come to more contemporary authors, it comes more and more to the fore. Strangely enough, Nietzsche adopts a very odd perspective. What he says is that rather than an antagonism between Christianity and science, he says that antagonism is actually quite late. In fact, modern natural science is the intellectual product of Christianity. And that's a remarkable idea. He says that if you look to the roots of

modern natural science, you will find that they are to be, that they are contained within biblical religion. Think about the idea, for example, in Genesis chapter 26, verse 28, when human beings are given dominion over the birds and the beasts and the fishes, God told us that we're supposed to push nature around and it's supposed to serve our ends. That is not intuitive and that is not obvious to every religious tradition. Try explaining to a Buddhist why you want to dominate nature. And they'll just look at you and say, well, why would you want to do that to nature? We want to harmonize ourselves with nature. That strikes us as being sensible. It is not intrinsic to human beings that they should want to push nature around. That is one of the legacies of biblical

religion. When we have been given dominion over the heaven and the earth, we have been given a particular intellectual legacy. It takes many centuries to play it out. Many centuries to play it out. It's like putting a toddler in the fucking driver's seat of a Mack truck. And so we've been given dominion over nature. And look what we've done points towards Los Angeles, points towards the Amazon, points towards the bucking plastic at the bottom of the ocean, points towards all of our landfills, points towards the, you know, increasing amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the six mass extinction event, you know, this dominion over nature idea. I'm sorry, I'm with the Buddhists on this one. It is a, it is a aspect of the things

that Western culture has done, you know, this, this, this mindset. that we are fundamentally separate from nature, we have dominion over it, and we are here to subordinate it to our wishes and will. That mindset is certainly behind certain things that we take for granted today, and that we would probably not want to live without, but it is also at the core of the profoundly destructive relationship we have with the natural world. And I think part of the bringing in, this is part of a broader civilizational process and perhaps of globalization, not neoliberal globalization, but globalization in its civilizational sense, that we are coming closer and closer with one another, that there is now at this crucial period of human history

in the West, an increasing interest in the philosophies, spirituality of the East, right, which take a diametrically different approach to the natural. world. But this is also found within dialectical thinking within the Western tradition and the Eastern tradition, wherein we are embedded within these inexorable relationships with the natural

world, that we are not something separate from it, that we do not have dominion over it, but in fact we have to live in harmony with it. We have to see it as ourselves and not as something that is separate from us and something in the way of what we want, but something that is

literally us. And that shift in perspective is a spiritual and existential shift, which needs to happen to more and more people if we're going to grow out of this adolescent phase before it's too fucking late, civilizational. That we have to take responsibility for the natural world, to love the natural world, and the only way you can truly love it, to truly take responsibility for it, is to not feel yourself separate from it. And not just intellectually. You know, all of us can sit here and be like, okay, I understand that I came from the earth and that the earth is a part of me and that, you know, what happens to the water and the air and the land impacts me and my family even deeper than that, viscerally, in your bones, in your heart, to feel yourself deeply and

profoundly connected with nature, to not be separate from it, that ultimately this culminates in the spiritual process of what we would call enlightenment or non-duality or the collapse between subject and object dualism, wherein you literally see yourself as expanded beyond your skin, not in an egomaniacal way, in a no-self way. You know, whether, you know, this is the sort of irony of mysticism and of these spiritual paths. No self and big self, the same thing, right? In certain religious traditions, you're trying to transcend your small self to identify

with the big self. to become one with God, or the Atman, right? Or in Buddhism, you're trying to see through the lack of substantiality within the self. But both paths lead to the same thing, which is to no longer see yourself as separate from the other. The other person, the other thing, the other place. When you look up in the sky in the cosmos, you no longer feel. I'm an insignificant little aunt peering out of these two windows in my head. head looking out of the cosmos that is not me that makes me feel scared that makes me feel small

that makes me feel insignificant but the enlightened person looks out of the cosmos and sees themselves which is to feel love right when you see yourself and the other jesus said love your neighbor as yourself that feels impossible how could i love my fucking neighbor as much as i love myself and even people who hate themselves that's an inverted inverted form of loving yourself because you're obsessed with yourself. You see yourself as fundamentally separate and whether you aim egotomaniacal love and pride and boastfulness

or insecurity and self-loathing, you're still orbiting around the idea of a separate self. And when that is transcended and you truly feel yourself to be everything in a non-dual sense, love naturally emerges. And I've talked about spiritual experiences that I've had,

whatever you want to call them, mystical experiences or whatever and the last two that i had over the last several years they came at the end of prolonged periods of spiritual and emotional suffering and they took the form of profound selfless love for others the one that happened a couple years ago at this point i've told the story in many places many times i'll be quick just after months and months of a deep suffering of emotional, mental, spiritual, existential suffering. I was driving in a parking lot out front of a Target store at night to go do some errands or something, and everything broke open. My whole heart broke open. And I looked at every stranger walking in front of my car because when you're

pulling in front of a store, there's the parking lot, there's a little area where cars drive through and then there's a store. So when people are walking with their groceries out of the store, you wait in your car until they pass, and I saw people, you know, going in different directions from the parking lot or from the store. And I wept out of joy and love for these beings. And I love them. I said as much as my children, I loved them like they were my own children, totally strangers. And what I felt in that moment, if I can even put it into words, which is already a bastardization of the experience, it felt that so much love was flowing. through me there was no room for me it wasn't that I was standing here looking at them

loving them it was that I was obliterated and all there was was love there was no separation and that profound spiritual experience kind of and it only lasted for a handful of moments but for me it pulled back the veil and it showed me what is possible that if we human beings loved one another and we loved the earth and all sentient beings on it like I loved every sentient being in that moment without an orientation to a me that is trying to get something out of it

or that has a possession over a feeling or anything like that that spoke to me as like this is what's possible humanity as a whole can move in this direction and my god would that be the end of war of exploitation of genocide of racism all those things would be seen for precisely how fucking stupid and myopic they are and if i could just pull back

the veil from everyone's eyes for five minutes the world would be radically transformed coming out of that so that is what it means to really love something else as yourself, to be it, to see yourself as it, to no longer know where you start and they begin, where you stop and they start. And looking out of the natural world, having that feeling,

we literally are the earth become conscious. We literally are the earth become conscious. The earth becomes conscious through us. The earth is a living being. and we are its conscious nodes we are the vehicles through which it expresses its consciousness because how could it be any different?

How could you be separate from the earth you came from? That's like saying the apple can be separated from the apple tree. You bubbled up out of this fucking thing we call Earth. It's alive. You're it. So somebody's like, well, no, the Earth's not alive. The Earth is a dead rock and yeah, there's life on it. Okay, well, that's telling me that you still live in this world of separation. And I do, too, 99.9% of the time.

I mean, this is the default mode network of the human fucking existence. It always has been. But there's a prospect, the possibility of us growing out of that ego-centrism, which isn't that so much at the core of our civilizational problems? This egocentrism, that I am separate from everyone else. I need to get what's mine. And to get what's mine, well, shit, I could exploit other people. I could hurt other people.

I could subordinate other people. Because I'm trying to get what's mine for me and mine. I mean, that's the worm at the apple of human consciousness, the ego-centrism. So it is precisely in transcending that individually, or as far as we can down that road, that we contribute our lives to that unfolding at the civilizational and species level, which so clearly has to if we're going to live on this fucking planet in a sustainable way

we cannot take the same mentality that we've had for millennia that got us here the same egocentrism the same desire desire desire power power power me me money money money give me give me give me we can't take the mentality that produced slave societies

and feudal monarchies and capitalism imperialism take that same mentality and create that same mentality and create a happy, sustainable world for everybody. It's literally impossible. So we're bumping up against planetary and natural limits, and that is precisely how nature is telling us we have to grow.

That is precisely how nature is telling us we have to grow the fuck up, or this shit is coming to an end. Because if we never bumped up against any limits, what would be the impetus for change? If in your personal life, you never had hardship, The way that you were doing things for a while, if that continued to work forever, if you were always comfortable, what impetus would there be for change? It's precisely when life puts a brick wall in front of you and you slam into it, spiritually, emotionally, existentially, physically, that you have to think about taking a new approach, that you are forced to grow through pain.

And that's the service that suffering and pain gives to us. that's the gift of suffering and pain when it's navigated correctly it forces you to grow and so if that's true on the individual level it's also true on the collective species level and I think that's what's being

demanded of us by nature and yes you can go back to the Bible and say in the Bible it said we have dominion and that creates an intellectual legacy but that idea is already there in the people that wrote the Bible right so by definition it predates the Bible because the person who wrote that into the Bible already had that mentality. And that mentality is an egocentric mentality, which humans have had and evolved with for millennia.

And that's reaching its limits. And the emptiness you feel with consumer capitalism, the yearning for something sacred, the meaninglessness of contemporary life, those are all brick walls saying, okay, you've exhausted. this. What's next? Time to grow. So then that poses a question for Nietzsche. What's beyond atheism? What's beyond the nihilism that the death of God

creates? What's beyond the vulgar ontological materialism of science? Is this the pinnacle? Well, we already said earlier that evolution never stops. So just like the people who say, hey, capitalism and liberal democracy, this is the end of history, we've gotten here, this is the pinnacle of species

achievement, all of us sit back and mock that idea. All of human history is evolving from one mode of production to another, and you're sitting here telling me the one that you were born into, that's the final one. We figured it out, guys. Laffable. But wouldn't that also be the case for atheism? And a crude scientist, scientism, and a crude scientific material. materialism? Could there not be something beyond atheism? We had to go through animism and then like mythological. You think of like ancient Greek and Roman gods, right? And then you go into Christianity, a development from that that is much more based around love and these high ideals of brotherhood and equality now come in through, in part, Christianity. But then we develop industrial revolution

and we develop scientific method and there's the enlightenment okay now we're living in a world that feels a lot like there's no God well there certainly isn't of the type that we thought before just like Zeus and Hermes and fucking Apollo are definitely not true you know those are ways that humans oriented themselves for a time and then they evolved past it

well the old Christian daddy in the sky idea I'm sorry to tell you it's not true it's served a purpose It served a role for us. Now humanity as a whole has shifted forward. It's not to say there's no God, just that conception of God, the judgeer, the guy who's standing up there, being the harsh disciplinarian, sending you to hell, telling you not to be gay, that daddy in the sky, clearly the product of a childish mind. I need a daddy.

Even as an adult, I need a father figure up there telling me what to do and keeping me in check and spanking my ass when I get out of line. so it served a role okay now we're past that just as before that let's say like Greek and Roman gods what did they do well they were they were stand-ins

for an attempt to understand the natural world human emotions like jealousy rage wrath but also natural forces like the ocean civilizational forces like war right

aries the god of war Poseidon the god of the sea Zeus These are anthropomorphizing natural and emotional forces that we couldn't fully grapple with, comprehend, wrestle with at that time. So we put these stand-ins, we anthroposize them and turn them into these gods that dictate over us, right? Jealousy and the storms and the tsunami that just hit this thing, you know, we must have pissed off Poseidon. And then we move into Christianity. That plays itself out.

then we've moved into the era that we live in now materialist atheism there is no god there's no metaphysical world nothing happens after we die we're just an accident of the cosmos we're just pawns scum that became conscious

we're just fucking monkeys you know there's nothing more to any of this okay so then you're saying it ends there no no no no no that's the narcissism of your own time The person who's like a capitalist atheist, right, a rational guy, he's a product of his motherfucking time.

And because he's a product of his time, he thinks that his time is the pinnacle. We figured it out. There's no damn God. There's nothing sacred. It's all just mud and dirt and blood. We live meaningless lives. Might as well get money, money, money. Make this life as comfortable as I can before I'm erasing.

off the face of this earth. Okay. Nothing comes after that. That's the pinnacle. Don't fucking be silly. We're dialecticians. We're evolutionists. We understand.

The phenomenon of the world as processes. Those processes have never ended in the past. They've never reached an end goal and just stayed there. Any processie. Any process. So what makes you think the one you're clinging to is going to be the final one. Even Marxism, because it's dialectical,

allows for its own transcendence. Right? The workers of the world unite to overcome classes themselves. And then we're in a new terrain. Marxism can't really touch on it. We can speculate, but that's beyond the fog of our ability to see. But within Marxism,

there is built in the idea that it is a process for a period of time that once completed is no longer needed in Buddhism they say Buddhism is a raft you use to get across the river to enlightenment

once you're there there's no need for Buddhism so both of these traditions deeply dialectical process philosophies built within themselves their own transcendence because they understand the evolutionary and process

nature of reality and all phenomena within it. So I went through my Christian phase. I converted to Christianity at 13. I was a very annoying kid. I lived in a secular, a religious family. There's no religion was brought up. Nobody said anything about anything.

One way or the other. I converted to Christianity at 13. I lost my faith by 17. Then I went into my new atheist phase, 17 to 22 whatever 23 you guys are so stupid fucking religion is dumb like come on don't you understand this is all stupid

we're just fucking dumb monkeys and we're all going to die and nothing matters and then as my spiritual practices and my life experience continue it gets more sophisticated it gets more nuanced I transcend even atheism agnosticism for now

epistemological humility open to the sacred realizing the need for the sacred opening to this spiritual journey beyond or organized religion so even in our individual lives we chart out the path that humans have already traced when you're young you're superstitious

right you believe in magic you believe in ghosts and things under your bed and things that go bump in the night just like our ancestors a long long time ago did in the jungles you know everything's magical everything has a spirit everything's animated you see how in our individual lives from the time we were born up to our present day we kind of go through the stages that our whole species has gone through so within each of us is the whole history of our species and it manifests itself through us and then we reach the limits if you go far enough you can stop at any part along that train there are people today that are stuck at various parts of that

And, you know, they're 65, 75 years old. There's no change in their mind. They stopped there. That's fine. We don't need any one individual. This is a collective project. There are always going to be some that get a little further ahead. Plunge a little deeper into the depths.

Push things a little further. And then you bump into a bunch of confusion because now you're out of your element. You've gotten over your skis a little bit. Your species isn't quite there. So you have no reference points. And that's disorienting. And that's kind of scary. but it's part of this

evolutionary process. Wow, I talked for a long time. I hope you got something out of that. The is realized, our dominion over heaven over the earth comes in the form of modern natural science. Well, something most ironic and peculiar happens. The truth turns out not to set us free. The truth, in fact, brings us into bondage to nature. We had hoped at the end of our inquiry into nature,

we would get some glyph of God's plan. We would hope that we would be able to discern the hand of God in the design of nature's patterns. Alas, once we get to Darwin, all we find out is that the world is a big, blind, arbitrary mechanism. Natural selection isn't the product of God's design, it's just the way things work out. In other words, we lose teleology. Nothing has any purpose anymore. We are no longer what we used to be.

Once that happens, we are in the contemporary world. May I suggest that Nietzsche is the first of our contemporaries? that Nietzsche is one of us because the world in which we live is saturated in these Nietzschean themes. I would be tempted to call this the end of the Xanderstelung. In German, zonderstelung means other position. And what that means is that for a great deal of time, we had thought that there was nature as it was created by God, trees and bugs and fishes and birds. And then there's a special group of things, people, which have a little spark of the divinity in which have been made in God's image,

And that makes them totally different from all the other things. It gives to human beings a value that no codfish has. Elk are not nearly as important as human beings because they don't have souls. Human beings have both body and soul. Human beings are made in the image of God, and that's what makes us different. And Nietzsche says, no. He says, we're not made in God's image because there's no God for us to be made in the image of. It turns out that we're really complicated pondscomb.

Not only we're not made in God's image, but there's no purpose to life. and anyone who thinks that they have discerned a purpose to life are just mistaken. Their imagination is carrying them away. Also, the idea that we could find solace in nature is going to be vacuous. There's no solace here. It's a big booming, buzzing confusion. Even Hume had said that there might be some attenuated justice to the argument from design. Nietzsche said, no design, no teleology, no purpose.

As he says in Section 125, the section in which Madman announces the death of God. He says, are we not falling in all directions at once? Have we not lost our orientation? Who is that that made us capable of wiping away the horizon? Isn't that a beautiful image wiping away the horizon? And that is, in fact, what happens with the death of God. When we lose our cosmic orientation, when we are no longer able to distinguish between good and evil in some authoritative way, then we are left with a plurality of perspectives, none of which can be necessarily linked up together, and none of which is necessarily wrong. There is no one authoritative God's eye view by which we can judge, true and false, accurate and inaccurate. There is just

a wilderness of mirrors. There is just a series of perspectives, all of which are equally arbitrary. Hegel once said that at night all cows are black. Well, I would be tempted to say that Nietzsche has turned out the lights, and now not all the cows and everything else. It's all black. Nietzsche revels in this because he says, look, you want to pin this on me and you want to offer a refutation of my work and such like stuff, you are being foolish. I did not cause this. I am not a titan. I couldn't kill God. You killed God. Not you as individuals, but you're a culture killed God. And it killed God with this Faustian bargain, this Faustian connection that's been made between Christianity and science. Initially, the will to truth and the will to dominate nature, helped Christianity support the rise of modern natural science. But, unfortunately, they kept on doing research until they got to Darwin. And Darwin is the beginning of the end for science and the beginning of the end for Christianity, because if Darwin is right and we are conclusively part of nature,

then the Zunderstelling is over. And what that means is that we are now in a different position. We have as much importance as birds or fishes or pond scum. Whatever value we have will be value that we create as individuals, not that is revealed to us from on high. And the best we can do then is some sort of heroism in which we create a domain of value rather than inheriting one.

Can you see how these are contemporary themes? In some ways, he's the other important source of contemporary existentialism? Well, what he says is that once we are in this state, we can never go back. Religion is dead forever. As he says, God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.

What he means by God remains dead, is that he's not getting up on the third day, not on the 30th day, not ever. God is dead for good. And now we're stuck here. So do not blame Nietzsche for this set of circumstances. He says, look, we did this because Christianity was a snake that ate its own tail. It generated science, and science bit into Christianity. But once science eliminated Christianity, it also eliminated the will to truth

and this dominion over nature that had been generating the force and the impetus of science. So now science is starting to undermine itself. Science eliminates religion, but it also eliminates metaphysics. And in the process of eliminating metaphysics, Nietzsche believes that we have eliminated truth. Isn't truth a metaphysical concept? Nietzsche believes that it is. If truth is a metaphysical concept,

and science has eliminated all of metaphysics, what truth is there left for science to get? It's nighttime, and all cows are black. All of Western culture is self-destructing. We are imploding here. He is teasing out the consequences of the Darwinian revolution. He's willing to face something that most people couldn't stand to look at. Well, he kills God, or he announces the death of God in 125, that important section of the gay science.

And the way in which he illuminates this is quite intriguing. He gives us the image of the madman. There's a madman in the city, and he's walking around in the daytime with a lamp, a lighted lamp. Why? well because nobody else knows that it's night time now and all cows are black number one but two if you know the classical illusion to diogenes the cynic he carried a lamp around in daytime and said i'm looking for an honest man never found one well apparently nietzsche didn't find one either and the search for an honest man is surely madness because that's the kind of thing the madman would undertake how poetic how poignant it's so great well the madman looks around and says where is and the people ask what are you doing carrying this around he's not looking for an honest man he says i'm searching for god where is he And people start to jeer at him and laugh and say, you are a foolish fellow.

What a foolish and mad creature you are. Where is God? Has he left town? Is he hiding? What has happened to God? The people in the crowd are laughing at this. And when the madman hears it, he is shocked. He picks up his lantern and throws it down.

And he said, I have come too early. These people do not realize what they have done. They think that the death of God is humorous. And in fact, it is the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world. old. Keep laughing. Sooner or later, the news will come to you of what you have done, and you are not big enough for the job. How can you bear the responsibility for this? After he throws down his lantern, he goes to the various churches in the city and sings the Te deum, the mass for the dead. He says, all our churches are now the whitened sepulchres of God. The stone, which was rolled away for

Jesus will not be rolled away a second time. These are the tombs of religion, and yet people still have recourse to them every Sunday. He has decided to sing the requiem for God. And people, of course, think he's crazy, but unfortunately he's crazy like a fox. He is the first one to realize the momentous occasion we are presented with. This particular passive is one of the most moving and important in Nietzsche's works. And Nietzsche being the unsystematic fellow that he is, is likely to move from theme to theme without developing any one of these themes completely. These little vignettes, on the other hand, are carefully calculated, a to wound. They're supposed to hurt you mentally and intellectually. He is at war with his readers.

He is trying to drive you out of your complacency. On the other hand, not always is driving you out of your complacency, but he is, in addition, trying to generate something new. His idea of something new of a way out of this is not the leap of faith. He says, that's hopeless. You leap of faith, you're going to fall because there's nothing that'll leap onto. He says, let's not even talk about that. He says, the way in which we get out of this is called the Ubermensch. Now, in English, it translates into Superman or Overman. And since there are too many resonances to Clark Kent with Superman, I'll stick with the German Ubermensch. The Ubermensch will be a superior thing that will arise out of the muck of humanity. The Ubermensch will relate to regular human beings

like you and I, the way we relate to the great apes. And in the same way that it is no moral transgression for us to kill an animal, it would be no moral transgression for an ubermensch to kill one human being or a million. This is a superiority that has no moral limitations. You can see here how Nietzsche is a great diagnoser of a problem, but his solution to the problem, I'm sorry, bonkers. there's a way in which you can psychologize it and you can internalize it and it's not about conquering other people or doing those things but it's about self-overcoming and you can kind of make it more spiritually sophisticated and there's an element of that truly in the original Nietzschean works right that he had that spiritual um i won't call it maybe mystical but yeah this sort of spiritual inflection to everything he did and in those moments when he was able to be up and moving around he would go on these long walks and the mountains by himself and sort of have these epiphanies and these revelations, you know,

almost mystical in nature. So there is that way of looking at it. And I think, you know, that's the kind of more refined, sophisticated way of doing it. And it's not even a real genuine departure from some true aspects of Nietzsche's thought, right? It's not like a total bastardization of what he was saying. But if you try to turn it into a politic, if you try to turn it into a, you try to turn it into a comprehensive worldview, if you try to turn it into an interpersonal mode of being,

this ubermensch is a noxious, horrific sort of idea, right? And that's the reactionary Nietzscheans politically do precisely that. And so, I think there are two ways to look at it, a charitable way that internalizes this struggle. You're an ubermension relationship to your own self and your own self-overcoming. But there's a social and political way. of interpreting this which is more literal which is yeah I mean literally a great man can fucking commit genocide because he's just killing cattle

and he's doing it for his own will to power that is higher and more noble and more superior than what all of those lives together could ever amount to that's fucking grotesque is to take the tradition of heroism in Western literature and culture things like Homer which is of course

is a great favorite of his or things like Shakespeare's tragic heroes and say these are excellent people at least they live on the proper scale. What Nietzsche has tried to do is say, if we can no longer have the possibility of sanctification and blessedness, perhaps here in this world, we will be able to create a domain of value. And this creation of value will be the titanic aesthetic task. Writing poems by comparison is light work in creation compared to creating the tablets of good and evil that will sustain a culture for 20 or 30 or 50 centuries. That's the kind of

of ambition that Nietzsche has. And that's why this easily verges or verges crosses the line into megalomania. Now, this megalomania is partially the product of Nietzsche's Promethean stance. In other words, if there's anyone who hates Job in the Western tradition, it's got to be Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the inverse of Job. He is the new Prometheus. He shakes his fist at God and saying, if you were alive, I'd beat you up. But as you're dead, I'm just going to tell everybody about it. He is not willing to serve. He is a satanic. For what it's worth, I think I could beat Nietzsche, for what it's worth. Miltonic figure, and he is saying, not only will I not serve, but I will create and help

generate the Ubermensch down here, and he will be at least an improvement on the inferior and incompetent people that we have now. There, in that case, there might be some point to human life. We might get some teleology there. Well, this end of metaphysics, this rise of the Ubermensch is very, very intimidating and also very, very moving. You can't help but be impressed and repelled at the same time with Nietzsche's work. And in addition to criticizing religion and philosophy and offering a program for the future, he also hates virtually everything in the culture around him, as you might expect. And the things that he connects to Christianity, you would not think to initially connect. But perhaps if we're willing to accept his connection

between science and Christianity, I think that that's a plausible connection. Perhaps the other connections he make will work as well. For example, he thinks that socialism, feminism, democracy, romanticism are all the products of excessive Christian pity and Christian sentimentality. He says, socialism is a bad idea because it helps weak people and it hurts strong people. I don't like socialism. I'm not interested in pitying people. I don't care what happens to them.

Same sort of thing with feminism. Men should oppress women if they're tough and capable. That's a very fine thing. Women are intrinsically inferior, and he just has no interest in helping out intrinsically inferior beings. He's a radical aristocrat and says that he has no inclination to try and democratize people. Remember that the reason why Christianity was so influential in bringing the idea of equality into Western political thought is because all souls were equal in the sight of God. We were all sinners, and none of us were justified in God's sight.

Well, what happens to that idea when God gets lifted out? Well, then there's no way of making all souls equal, and then Nietzsche says, says the fact of the matter is, some souls are bigger than others. Don't tell me that Gerta is the same thing as the peasants that's lived around him. No, Gertre was a superior man. So was Beethoven. So was any of the great artists

or religious leaders. They couldn't have existed without the people doing the actual work and the fucking toil that created a society and the life that they could sit back and find leisure and luxury and pursue their own self-actualization within. So dialectically, those things are profoundly connected. It's not pitted

against one another. But hey, this is Nietzsche in politics. This is when you turn it into politics, this is what it looks like. Anti-feminist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, egomaniacal, completely open to any sort of human atrocity as long as it's done by a superior man, an Ubermensch. And that's why we all got a fucking team up and stuff this nerd in a locker. It's insane. Philosophers. Now what Nietzsche's saying is that although some men have been superior in the past, their superiority was inadequate to the present day, and we will have to invent a new kind of superiority, a new degree of superiority, which will carry us through this age of nihilism into which we are entering.

Nietzsche, besides that he's going to help us get through this age of nihilism, by writing a book called Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche literally and seriously intends this to supersede the Bible. That's not a joke, and it sounds like a joke, as though a man in the late 19th century should actually take it upon himself to get rid of Jesus and take his place in Western culture. Well, he thinks that thus spake Zarathustra can replace the Bible as a scripture for the rest, for the rest, and that it will give us a life-affirming anti-metaphysical stands towards the world. Zarathustra enjoins his readers to love the earth, love this world, stop making up metaphysical constructs that aren't real. Nietzsche thinks that he's going to take the place of Jesus

and that his books are going to take the place of the Bible and that he can fill in for the collapse of Western culture. I do love Zen Buddhism for its embeddedness within nature. Its poetry is all about nature. So much of its imagery is about nature. It's a simple, if austere, sort of Buddhist school that brings you right back into direct experience of what's happening now, right? That instead of intellectualizing and conceptualizing and talking to yourself all day,

you're brought back into the present moment with what, is the wind blowing through the leaves the rain pounding on your roof the soap on your hands when you're doing dishes brings you into the present moment and it naturally loves the natural world and sees itself as a part of it as inseparable from it because what zen buddhism does is authentic spirituality which transcends the self and what so much right-wing pseudo spirituality Nietzschean, quote unquote, spirituality, aborted spirituality does, in my opinion, is that it makes the fatal error of egoism

where you can have a genuine spiritual insight but that immediately gets co-opted and funneled into the ego inflating the individual ego instead of completely deflating and transcending it. For example, this is weird shit and this is micro community shit but you know I have my finger on the pulse of the right

I watch their fucking YouTube videos I know all their little beefs I know their little you know niches in their culture niche like a niche not like Nietzsche you get what I'm saying and there's this fucking super annoying fucking reactionary dumbass YouTuber

called what if I'll hissed and he makes these fucking pathetic Dunning Kruger ass history videos but he has a huge following hundreds of thousands of views on his shit and you know whatever but recently and you can look this up you can go he deleted this from twitter but you can find it online um he was blasting himself with ayahuasca this is like a 20 it's like a 20 something like a 23 year old guy so right away you know if you're 23 and you feel like you know so much that you can come out in the world

start teaching other people about world history start handing down people your wisdom from your quote unquote lived experience of a 23 year old dumbass that should already be red red alert humble yourself i mean i was not humble when i was 23 but most 23s aren't but once you get older life humbles the fuck out of you and you look back on your early 20s and like jesus christ i was so grandiose i was so egoic i thought i had so much control you know life will beat you over the head with a stick and make you realize that you know you are nothing It will humble you. But there's always been something that has been like grotesquely amusing to me about a 21, 22, 23 year old

opining on all the world's issues and pretending to have solutions and making predictions. One of his famous predictions was if there was going to be an in-cell revolution, like all the incels would get together and do a revolution in the U.S. So stupid shit like that. I shouldn't even know this stuff. The fucking internet is a curse. It makes me know things I don't want to know. anyways he took a bunch of ayahuasca and you know when you take that level when you take deep psychedelics

you're going to have i don't know if you want to call it spiritual i'll just use that term broadly with you know caveats implicit spiritual mystical existential experiences you you can right the crescendo of that is what people call ego death and that can happen but anyways this dude does ayahuasca um i guess more than once, comes back and does this 10-hour fucking video on YouTube in three parts or whatever about his whole life. He's basically like, I'm not going to write a memoir. This is my memoir. A 23-year-old kid putting a memoir out, a 10-hour memoir on YouTube. As if he, like, he has to convince himself he has all this life experience that he can, that he can learn from and draw from. That makes him wise and all this shit. Anyways, he has these crazy ayahuasca

experiences. But what happens? His ego co-op. it he's too immature he has no clue about authentic spirituality he has no humility he doesn't understand the goal of spirituality is the transcendence of the separate self of the ego right and so those psychedelic existential and perhaps spiritual experiences immediately and voraciously get co-opted into maglomania so if you can find his initial tweet where he announced to the world that he is an advanced mystic and he speaks with the spirit world and he's talked to god and satan and hermes and mother nature and the tree of life and they've given him the duty to come save humanity from itself this is spirituality or mystical insights gone wrong this is what happens

when the ego co-ops you can see that element in nietzsche where there is real spiritual existential diagnoses of real fucking issues, but the solutions are funneled through maglomania, which automatically eradicates them as actual solutions. The idea that we're going to have a bunch of ubermensch running around, conquering, slaughtering, raping, and pillaging, because they've transcended beyond good and evil, and they've gotten past the nihilism that happened in the wake of the death of God is infantile. It's absurd. But it shows a mind incapable of transcending self.

And so whatever insights and intelligence that he might have gets funneled and thus distorted through the prism of egoism. And the what-off, what-if alt-hist guy, that nerd, he, a reactionary nerd, he did the very same thing. And so people are saying, like, this is a psychotic break. He has schizophrenia. And he very well might have an underlying condition exaggerated or exacerbated, aggravated by psychedelics. These, you know, big dose psychedelics, especially ones as powerful as ayahuasca, are not to be tinkered with lightly, right? They're not just for any normie fucking person with no clue what they're doing to go and get their brains blown the fuck out. There's real risks and danger involved, just like there's real risks in danger if all of a sudden I were to take you and put you in a three-week intensive meditation retreat.

It would break your fucking brain. Let's start with 10 minutes. Follow your breath. Let's ease into this shit. Same with psychedelic use. You know, first time you do fucking psychedelics, you don't want to be way too much ayahuasca or 10 grams of mushrooms. You're going to fucking, you're running the risk of genuinely hurting yourself. And so I just thought it was an interesting recent example because it was all over Twitter and shit and people making YouTube videos and reaction to it.

Of exactly what happens when you have psychedelic, spiritual, existential, or mystical. experiences that are immediately and profoundly co-opted by the ego, that all authentic spiritual insight and spiritual practice is precisely about the ultimate transcendence of duality, the transcendence of the egoic separate self, and loving, wise, compassionate union with the whole. And at any point along that process, they can go off the rails. and the ego is a master at co-op and kind of like the Democrats are a master of co-opping left-wing energy the ego is a master of co-opping spiritual metaphysical or not metaphysical mystical mystical existential

insight and I think you can see it here and you can see it in these reactionaries and so much of right-wing spirituality is that abortion if you will of the actual authentic spirituality and a co-option and a distortion of it by ego which if you have ego that's when conquering and some people are superior to others and they have every right to use and abuse you and dominate you and there's all these weak people and women are inferior

and fuck them and we're not equal fuck you that's pure childish ego really megalomania is going as far as it can possibly go here now is worth noting that what we have here are certain resonances of the megalomania that you may see when you read German philosophy when you get to Hegel. Hegel thought that he had a sort of omniscient kind of skeleton key to all philosophical problems. Nietzsche thinks that he's just abolished all philosophical problems, but the effect is very much the same. He understands something that

the rest of us puny intellectual dwarves are not quite capable of absorbing. And I'd be tempted to say that what Nietzsche forces us towards is the domain of art, religion, and philosophy. Because those are the greatest human achievements, but religion is over. We can't believe in that anymore. And the important part of philosophy that was religious, the metaphysics, that's over as well. So there's a tiny fragment of philosophy left, but it wasn't what philosophy used to be. And then what still is puissant and serious and worthwhile, art. So art now emerges as the domain, not of transcendence, but of salvation. Secular, this worldly salvation. And Stephen Deadless is going to take this path to. salvation. Nietzsche is certainly the greatest and most important of the theological thinkers of the last hundred years. When he abolishes religion and truncates philosophy art, and thus the artist achieves consummate importance. Now it is funny for someone with such great emphasis on aesthetics and for someone who's arguably the greatest prose poet in the German language, that Nietzsche, and it's somehow ironic, maybe God is standing in the wings laughing at Nietzsche, forcing him to do these

things, but Nietzsche has absolutely no capacity to criticize his own poetry. At the beginning and at the end, there's an appendix and an introduction in the gay science. It's a prelude in rhymes and an appendix in songs. And it is absolutely the worst doll girl ever written in the German language. It is so hilariously bad that it is hard to understand how Nietzsche could possibly allow this to be the introduction to what is arguably the greatest prose poetry in German, perhaps even in any language. The problem here is that although he was capable of philosophizing about aesthetics, it is one thing to be able to construct an aesthetic theory and another thing to be able to make aesthetic writings. And it turns out that Nietzsche is

incapable of doing that. I've heard arguments to the effect that Friedrich Nietzsche is best understood as being an intellectual dandy. He is no more dandy than I am. He has no capacity to write German poetry, and one gets the sense of a sort of frustrated, invalid, trying to act heroic more than a truly heroic individual. In fact, he's a hero of the soul or of the spirit, not a hero in his actual career in life. He died as an invalid. He died as syphilis, actually, and he died insane in the sanitarium. Now, I'll have to leave out some of the things that I hope to get to in the gay science because they're coming to the end, but I do want to finish with Nietzsche's autobiography. I must confess that I'm an affectionate of autobiography. It's one of the most

interesting genres of literature. Honestly, me too. I actually haven't heard this part. I only watched, like, the first 20 minutes of this lecture before I came in here and started opining on it. But absolutely. I fucking love biographies, in particular, intellectual biographies. Because I love understanding a thinker or an artist or a philosopher or a scientist or an activist or revolutionary. And in the context of their human life, you know, it's one thing to, like, read about Nietzsche, read about Marx or any other. person that you know from history that has contributed something but to to read their actual work like

you know reading capital or reading the gay science it's a whole other thing to read an intellectual biography in which their their intellectual developments and contributions are understood and explained to you right it's not mere biography it's not just like we're going to talk about nietzsche as a human being and leave out all of his actual substance of his work like a good intellectual biographer can go deep into the work of the person so you understand Marx's work and you weave that in through the narrative of his actual

human life so that his ideas become embedded in his humanness. I love that shit. It's actually probably one of my favorite genres hands down of any book is the intellectual biography. And, you know, I am dynamite. The Nietzsche's biography that I

just read is exactly that. The Carl Marx in 19th century life, which I'm about to read, read is exactly that. And I'm going to read the Kierkegaard intellectual biography. I think it's philosopher of the heart or something like that. Because it really, I think it really helps me understand them and their ideas to situate them in their human lives. Much more than just reading their work alone, absent their cultural, historical, familial, interpersonal relationships, much more than that would help me understand their ideas. So if you're ever struggling with

somebody where you want to you want an accessible way into a difficult person a difficult thinker um like nietzsche or like hagel or like marks or whatever reading a really good intellectual biography of them is a great fucking way to do it and it just makes you it makes you connect with their humanness right for all my disagreements with nietzsche and philosophy and they are many i mean he really strikes at the heart of so many things that i believe in um and he's hostile to as a human being even despite my differences with him as a human being you know um just knowing his full story it makes me feel connected to him in some way and same with marks like when i started reading marks biographies it really deepened my understanding of Marxism of where this stuff

comes from of the cultural historical ferment in which it emerged and it can be incredibly exhilarating humanizing educational and accessible to enter into a thinker by going into a really has to be well done right it can't be hagiography it can't be tearing down like there are marks biographies that are ostensibly biographies of marks but are their main point is to grind an intellectual acts right that that that tries to bring out the ugly parts of him as a person and use those to explain why his ideas are so terrible i've read those too and they're just disgusting they're dishonest they're grotesque they're not respectable works but you also don't need over-flattery right you don't need to turn a very human person into a hero

they're just human beings right like nietzsche fucking shit himself and had to have his mom and sister wipe his ass or fucking marks drank way too much in it like and he had like health issues and boils popping on his ass in his back and you know fucking Kant was almost certainly and i say this with deep love in my heart an autistic man at a time when autism wasn't even known or you know and it made him socially kind of off kilter and he was a he was an eccentric fellow um there's lots of figures like that spinoza right um kofka is a hypochondriac and you know constantly thinking that he's sick and and at war with himself all the fucking time and he dies at 40 from tuberculosis right i think before his work was even respected so he lived his whole life as like

a failure and a hypochondriac and then he produces this work. Now, reading about Kafka the man makes me want to read about, you know, read Kafka's work. And this is true for, you know, anyone. Emily Dickinson, that's a fascinating story of a tortured soul, but a beautiful soul. And we can go on down the line. The autobiography of Frederick Douglas is one that I read many years ago, and I highly recommend people check out that biography. I don't know, lots of them. Crooked cucumber for Shinru Suzuki of Zen Buddhism. Ram Dass's biography that came out the last few years is fascinating and gives a huge overview of fucking American culture from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60, 70s, and 80s that I find

fascinating along with the wisdom of Ram Dass and his experiences in India and all that stuff. So, yeah, I fucking love biography. And I didn't know he said that because I didn't watch this whole video yet. But sorry, I kind of went off on a little tangent there, but highly recommend? Hard to think about this as a whole, but... One last thing I just read a biography, I think it's called Lincoln's Melancholy. It was about Abraham Lincoln.

It was a biography of him, a political biography, so it talked about his whole presidency, his position on slavery, you know, this sort of liberal, trying to find the middle way between two extremes, you know. So, like, politically it really highlights, for me, the failures of Lincoln, right? I'm on the radical abolitionist side of that debate, right?

Not in the middle, trying to maneuver so that everybody's happy sort of thing. But it focused on his lifelong clinical depression. And that made me have deep human sympathy for Lincoln, you know, when he loses his sister, when he loses his young son and the fucking melancholic, deep depressions, the grief that he went through, the way that he used humor as a way to overcome his profound. lifelong to like he was a very very pessimistic sad man but he was also hilarious because he had to be and the way that he died getting fucking shot in the back of the head next to his wife and his wife's own mental health issues okay whatever you think about lincoln that makes me

understand his political relevance and his political position as well as the human being behind it um and so some people might not want to humanize these figures but i fucking i'll even read a humanizing humanizing not glorifying humanizing biography of Hitler Hitler in Vienna is a book that I haven't got

all the way through but I've read a couple chapters of and it really explains where his ideology comes from his disgusting fucking ideology his own pathologies

but also his day-to-day life and that just brings my understanding of Hitler as a human being and his cultural and his history to much sharper relief and I understand the history more

through the lens of a biography of a figure of that time, even one that I absolutely motherfucking detest. So that's just worth no-do. Nietzsche's autobiography has to catch your eye. I do strongly recommend it to you. The title of it

is ECHA. Homo. Those of you that are familiar with Latin know that Ech-Homo means behold the man and that this is the phrase used about Jesus on the cross So this is no small dose of megalomania here that he should title his autobiography, Eche Homo. And it doesn't stop there.

Eche Homo is made up of four chapters. And these chapters each correspond to a question. And these four questions are the only things that Nietzsche thinks are worth telling you about himself, which, again, tells you more about himself than perhaps he intended to say. The first question is, why I am so clever. question two why i am so wise question three why i write such good books and question four why i am a destiny now this of course has gone off the chart with regard to philosophical aspiration and ambition and in some respects it is easy to send up nietzsche's excessive autobiography because

Because if any intellectual or spiritual ambition is excessive, this is excessive. And the title of one's autobiography, Behold the Man, and offers a choice between himself and Jesus, and actually expect us to choose him, means that he's really lost touch with the rest of the world. Perhaps the spirochetes of syphilis are setting in. But I'd like to turn this in another direction. In my conclusion about Nietzsche, I'm going to wrap him up now,

I'd like to try and answer those four questions and explain what it is, I think, the right answer to these is. perhaps this will help make sense of Nietzsche for you. Why I am so clever? I would say the reason why Nietzsche is so clever is because he is the great poet philosopher of the modern age. He is a combination of poet and philosopher that has not been seen with such intensity since Plato.

The reason why he hates Plato and why he constantly rails against him is the same reason that Plato rails against Homer. Professional jealousy. He's too good and has been influential in the wrong way. So that's why he's so clever. He's a great poet philosopher. Why I am so wise? Well, to be honest, I am not, as I was convinced at one time, that Nietzsche is so wise.

I think perhaps he is seriously mistaken. But I won't take that up. I would say to give the devil his due, if that's the way we would understand him, I'd say that he is so wise, if he is wise, because he was the first one to see the implication of God's death. He was the one that said, yes, our culture has killed God, and we must face up to that. it may well be the case that insofar as he is a wise man that his wisdom lies there. The question, why I write such good books? I think that is relatively accessible.

The reason why Nietzsche writes such good books is he has mastered the art of oxymoron. The Nietzschean oxymor is the modern sacratic analog or the modern analog of Socratic irony. It is the skeleton key to all of Nietzsche's works. And when you go back and look through it, if you constantly look at the paradoxical passages and realizing that oxymoron is not the problem, it's the solution. Then you will be able to appreciate Nietzsche in a way that perhaps will not drive you crazy as it did me in an earlier part of my life. And I'll close with the final question.

Why I am a destiny. I believe that Friedrich Nietzsche was a destiny because he was the first person to be willing to face squarely the implications of the rise of modern natural science. The physical world of space and time is real, like it or not. must find some way of making our moral intuitions and our religious commitments consistent with the best of our rational activities. Any attempt to abdicate our responsibility to our rational faculties is ultimately doomed to failure. And because Darwin is real and because our best

understanding of the biological history of the world is through natural selection, we are forced to face the fact that science is here to stay. And the reason why he is a destiny is because he was the first man to squarely state that science and religion have to be melded into something that we can all participate in. If we have to sacrifice one or the other, we can do that. But the point is that science presents a challenge to Western religion that cannot be met by any sort of minor repair. You are going to have to make a radical either-or sort of choice, and Nietzsche forces us to that. I think that if he had not done that for us, someone else would have. And for that reason, I feel that Nietzsche is correct in seeing himself as a destiny

because it is the destiny of the West to be forced to confront their rational capacities. All right, there it is. Another great lecture. You know why Michael Sugru is so fascinating, the way that he speaks, the way that he walks you through a philosopher's core ideas, it's exhilarating and it's well done and it's accessible.

And hopefully my commentary on top of it has added a different dimension to it that, you know, you'll find useful. As I said in the episode, we have multiple episodes on Nietzsche. We have an episode with Matt McManus, I believe, on aristocratic radicalism, so just really diving into the politics of Nietzsche. We have that episode with Allison on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which I'll link to in the show notes. And I think we even have an older episode with the partially examined life host from early,

early Revel F days. I'll link to all those in the show notes. So if you really want to continue diving into Nietzsche and really understand, this thinker you can do that through our work and then you can branch out and check out other things including that biography that I just read I am dynamite which if you're interested I recommend all right well that is the second installment of our philosophy theory series I hope people like this they really like the first one but it was on Marx this one's on Nietzsche so maybe people won't like it as much but I hope some of you find it useful and let me know if you

can what your feelings are on this philosophy series and I'll keep going because there's a lot little many many more lectures and I unfortunately have many many more thoughts so thank you to everybody that supports the show thank you to everybody that leaves a positive review you can follow us on Instagram official Rev Left radio I post a lot of stuff on the story there and I post my episodes on the on the public facing page on Instagram you can support us on Patreon or go buy me a coffee links to both of those are in the show notes deeply appreciate everybody. Love and solidarity. Talk to you soon. is given no other choice than to be a Jesus

Understanding life is meaningfully worthless The world was born to kill All the Jesus is There's something big and powerful and wise And it's begging us to end its worthless life So let's be Temple Grandin for the night And find a friendly way to make it die On an empty street in a neighborhood that used to be better

In an empty house once filled with heavy shit In a nearly empty bed inside a nearly empty room I learned it There's something big and powerful and wise And it's begging us to end its tragic life So let's be temple grandin for the night A hug without a human is all right we'll find a friendly way to make it die

A hug without a human is all right We'll find a friendly way to make it die