Rev Left Radio - The Politics of Friedrich Nietzsche: German Idealism, Nazism, and Freud

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

Wes Alwan is one fourth of The Partially Examined Life, a podcast and blog dedicated to studying and teaching philosophy. Wes is a writer and researcher living in Boston who studied ancient philosophy, Kant and Nietzsche in graduate school.  Wes joins Brett to discuss the political relevance of the famous 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Follow, support and listen to The Partially Examined Life here: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/ Follow Wes on Twitter @wesalwan Outro music by Father John Misty - Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution : Pure Comedy https://www.fatherjohnmisty.com Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! Revolution Revolution Revolution Revolutionary left the radio now

Oppose the system Any way you know how Unite the left against the capitalist lies And liberate the proletarianist mind Five for the working class Five for equality Against the right free Fascist ideology

Turned it in and turn it out loud. Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Wes Allwin from The Partially Examined Life to talk about the political relevance of Frederick Nietzsche. Wes, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background for anyone who doesn't know who you are?

Sure, yeah. So I'm one of four panelists on the partially examined life. philosophy podcasts that we've been doing since 2009, I think, as the year. I always get confused whether it's 2008 or nine. So I went to undergrad at St. John's College, which is a small great books, liberal arts school. And then I went to grad school, University of Texas at Austin, and ended up doing a master's thesis on Nietzsche and Marx, which does not make me an expert in either necessarily. but we've talked a lot about Nietzsche on my podcast, and I do have a lot to say about him. Yeah, so currently I'm also have studied a lot of psychoanalysis, and I'm currently finishing

a doctorate in psychoanalysis, and I'll be a practicing therapist, basically, and I'm already kind of working in that field now as well. That's extremely interesting, and for a lot of our listeners know that I have a degree in philosophy, and I'm a philosophy graduate school dropout, but I've been a huge. huge fan of the partially examined life for years and years. I used to listen to them as an undergrad and a graduate philosophy student and learn from them. And I've always really had an extra sort of appreciation for Wes's input precisely because some of what you focus on, especially around psychoanalysis, I've always found extremely illuminating and interesting.

So I'm just extremely happy to have you on the podcast and to delve into this topic because I think Nietzsche is sort of largely misunderstood. He's taken up by a lot of different sorts of people and that kind of muddies the water around what his thoughts are. He kind of becomes a pop culture symbol in some ways. So people kind of seen his image or might have heard his name but have very little idea about who he is. And I think he is a foundational thinker. And I think a lot of ways the 20th century in some ways was shaped by some of his philosophical contributions. But before we get into all the history and the philosophy, maybe just let our listeners know how you identify politically and sort of the orientation that you come at political questions

from? Sure. At this point, I tend to think of myself as a libertarian socialist that may not be the right phrase or the best phrase. And it's interesting, even though I have so much to say about politics, how difficult I find that question. I'm more of an agnostic in general. But when I say libertarian socialists, I sort of mean in the tradition of someone like Orwell, who was a socialist, but he was also concerned about Stalinism and the betrayal of the revolution essentially by people interested in power, essentially by what he called nationalists who are sort of devoted to the power of their own particular party or unit at the expense of the well-being of everyone. So that said, I think of the socialist part. I think like Orwell,

I see hierarchy as inherently unjust, which is not to say that there are benefits to it or that it can necessarily be completely done away with, but for instance, this is something, you know, if I say to even my left-leaning friends, well, I don't think a busboy should make less than I do. People are usually actually surprised by that, and I'm surprised that they're surprised since they call themselves progressives or liberals. The terminology is obviously changed. And so I do believe that. And people will have all kinds of the sort of meritocracy or meritocratic minded society we live in. People will usually have explanations around hard work and other sorts of what I think of as rationalizations of why they should make more than the busboy.

But I simply, I don't think there's, you know, I don't think that's a just situation. As far as Socialism and practice, you know, the libertarian part, I put there not just because I'm wary of any infringement on rights for the sake of the collective good, just like Orwell, but because I don't think that simply seizing control of the means of production is a good solution historically. In reading marks, I think the sort of historical progression part of it is important and the role of technology is very important. So I think a lot of Marx is a thought experiment around what happens when technology becomes so powerful that essentially it's possible not to work or not to work so much and to do what we like, but still have a very

high standard of living. According to Marx, you know, there would be a phase where there is pauperization where essentially the ruling class will be able to be able to monopolize all the wealth produced by the leverage of technology, but that ultimately historical forces will demand that the result of that productivity be shared. And I think that's a compelling idea, but I think we sort of wait upon the right stage of technological development before it becomes a possibility. Yeah. Our last episode, we interviewed the daughter of Murray Bookchin, who was a famous sort of libertarian socialist thinker, and he kind of had a synthesis of some of the best of Marx and the best of anarchism and called it libertarian

municipalism or communalism. So I think it kind of fits in the general political area that you sit in. But let's go ahead and dive into Nietzsche and the history and the philosophy there. We have a lot of ground to cover. So can you maybe give a quick summary of Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy for those who may not know anything about him? Sure. So German idealism became a big deal during the 19th century. So it began in the 18th century with Kant and epistemological theories, which acknowledge the role of consciousness and constructing reality, although some people would dispute that formulation, but ultimately with Hegel and other German idealists, you get sort of epistemological view, which might lead sort of as on the edge of, well, it stands precariously between a kind, well, I don't know. I don't know how to describe idealism. But anyway, I see Nietzsche as sort of a response to German idealism. Most directly to Schopenhauer, who Nietzsche was a big fan of, but also, you know, Schopenhauer, of course,

is heavily influenced by Kant and Hegel. So at an epistemological level, Nietzsche, I think, is sort of impressed by this distinction between appearance and things in themselves, which come up, comes up a lot in his writing and which he critiques in a way, but he also relies on or his, the idea is very influential with Nietzsche. And ultimately, what Nietzsche is focused on is the moral implications, the moral and psychological implications of that sort of epistemology. So he's, he's developed a critique of Western civilization and Christianity and ancient philosophy and idealism. It's sort of a radical universal critique.

But I think what he's most known for is the critique of morality as having its origin ironically in nihilism and a hostility to life. And I think if you want to really think about Nietzsche's place in the history of philosophy, you have to see him as a response to the threat of nihilism. So as society, as religion becomes a less prominent in Western society, and it becomes less a source of meaning for people, I think there's a vacuum opened up where the question is, well, what's going to fill that void? And then ironically, it turns out that Christianity, even though it's sort of a attempt

of the solution to Nealism is also at its core a form of Nealism for Nietzsche. Ultimately, his solution has something to do with the aesthetic and, you know, another idea he's, of course, well known for is the Ubermensch, and what that means is also a big subject of dispute, but in the context of his philosophy, it might mean something like a person who has fully synthesized their rational or ascetic side with their, you know, what you might call their Dionysian or artistic side, a kind of fusion. And we'll talk more about Freud, but the sort of the similar idea that you see with Freud and psychoanalysis where the solution to the problems of civilization, which amount to a repression of our instincts, is to

redirect those instincts towards something constructive. All right. So that was kind of a mess, but it's a huge question. And so that's kind of my fault for throwing that huge of a question at you. But I mean, I would just add that you touched on it a little bit. The popular understanding of Nietzsche, and I think it gets reflected in like popular culture shows like Little Miss Sunshine where Nietzsche is portrayed as a nihilist. I think it's important for people to understand that he was kind of diagnosing the problem of nihilism before it really became a. large, societal wide problem, and he was trying to find a way to overcome it or to get through it and past it, because in the wake of the death of God, there would be a total lack of sort of anchoring to what humans have depended on for centuries. Is that a fair way of kind of thinking about? Yeah, exactly. He's an extreme anti-nihilist. And also ironically, you know, that he's associated with fascism and even Nazism, but Nietzsche was also an anti-national. and an anti-Semite, and the way in which that fits with his philosophy is just that

he saw those as the sorts of things that might arise, the very dangerous things that might arise to fill in the gaps when you, you know, with the death of God and the decline of Christianity and so on, the sort of the failure of the West's prior solutions to nihilism. He's watching those solutions fail because they're also, they're, they're simply covertly manifestations of nihilism themselves. And I think there are hints in Nietzsche that he sees that the consequences of that could be quite dire and nationalism and fascism are two of those possible consequences. And I think it's pretty clear that he adamantly is opposed to them.

Absolutely. And we'll get it more into that in a bit. But why just kind of baseline, why does Nietzsche, in your opinion, have such a broad appeal from the fascist right to liberal individualists like Anne Randi and capitalist and even to many strains of anarchism on the far left. Why is he so easily taken up by such a diverse range of political philosophies, in your opinion? I think because he has such a sweeping critique of institutions and society and, you know, regardless of where you stand politically, all of those political philosophies you've mentioned, have their own critiques. A lot of his critique is centered on the ways in which societies can ruin the individual through conformism and through a kind of warped set of values can deprive people of the ability to flourish.

So that idea, I think, appeals to a lot of people, but their definition of flourishing, of course, will be different and their definition of what society is doing wrong will be different. And so with a liberal individualist, the focus might be on limiting the, you know, the ways in which a society might impinge upon one's rights or even one's property and things like that. Whereas with a Marxist, it might be a critique of the, you know, the capitalist system and the ideology that associated with that system. And then later on with neo-Marxists and critical theorists, it's a critique of the capitalist. the culture associated with capitalism, and those cultural critiques, as it turns out, will actually have some influence, you know, some Nietzsche influence as well. So I think that's the, that's my basic view on that. You probably have quite a bit to add to that.

I mean, yeah, I think there's a lot in Nietzsche, especially with his sort of fly-by-the-handle writing style that pops up in a lot of his works, sort of aphoristic or hyperbolic way that he speaks. It can kind of lend itself to many sorts of interpretations, whereas, somebody more concrete like Kant, you know, you can't read, like you have to follow him syllable for syllable and really think about what he's saying in such a way that you don't have to necessarily do with Nietzsche. And so I think that you can kind of pick from a bunch of different parts of Nietzsche and kind of compile something to justify whatever you happen to believe.

I think that plays into it too. Right. And there's a lot of internal conflict in his writing as well. Sure. And I would also add on the anarchist side of things, you have some, you know, insurrectionary anarchists or nihilist anarchist or egoist anarchist and there's a heavy individualist strain of sort of overcoming as an individual the sort of constraints that a capitalist society or a state a statist sort of situation and places on the individual so I think there's yeah I think it's just you can pull from a lot of different directions so Nietzsche had had something negatives to say about virtually everyone including socialists and anarchists and nationalists and liberals and but you can find bits and pieces including for liberalism where there's a um there's something in there which

will you know where nietzsche some of his thought will actually provide some support for liberalism so for instance or for any of those other positions right so it's not just it's not just people reading the tea leaves in whatever ways they want there's there actually are i think real tensions in his philosophy and and if you isolate one little bit here or there you can find something that supports your your political position, whatever it is. And I think that's a great segue into this segment about fascism, because whether we like it or not, the fact is Nietzsche was used by the Nazis as sort of their philosopher of choice, and a lot of it was because of his sister. So can you talk about how Nietzsche spent the last decade of his life and how his sister took his

writings and helped shape them for consumption by German Nazis? And also, like, what would you think he would have thought of this had he lived long enough to see it? So yeah, I don't know a great deal about the details of this. But in 1889, he basically went insane and essentially lived out the last decade of his life for 11 years, suffering from severe dementia. So he was really completely incoherent for those 10 years. And during that time, his sister, who was a notorious anti-Semite and married to a notorious anti-Semite, compiled the remaining parts of Nietzsche's papers and put them together in a book called Will to Power. So this is the part, I don't know a lot of detail about how this was done.

So there's a lot of little bits and pieces, little, it's the way Nietzsche writes anyway, and these aphorisms. But the way she's compiled them, I think some of them, the authenticity of them is questionable. And then otherwise, just the ordering of them and the framing of them so that they can be taken out of context. And then just the way she sold them. So ultimately, I think it's the way she sold it, and it's the way the Nazis ended up using Nietzsche. And then they did this very consciously, from what I understand. They very actively boulderized his works so that the anti-nationalist stuff and the pro-Semitic stuff was just not there.

And then used the pieces that they wanted to make it look like he was a, you know, the sort of philosophical father of a Nazi party. Yeah, and after he died in 1900, his sister Elizabeth kind of constructed the house into a Nietzschean shrine or sort of a Nietzschean museum. And there's actually a photograph of Adolf Hitler going to that location and doing a walkthrough and meeting Nietzsche's sister. That's very surreal to see that those photographs disturbing, really. Yeah, he gave her a wreath for Nietzsche's grave calling and something calling Nietzsche a fighter or something like that. it's really not clear that Hitler ever really even read Nietzsche, although Nietzsche was very widely read at that point. And so it's the kind of thing you would hear people talk about. But from what I've read, it's pretty likely that Hitler wasn't sitting around reading Nietzsche

thinking about it. But as far as what Nietzsche would think, I think Nietzsche, of course, would be unhappy with his appropriation pretty much by anyone. There'd be no circumstance in which he'd be happy with how. he was being used, but the Nazis in particular, because they represent the culmination of a trend that he was railing against, this sort of romanticization of the German Volk and the German tradition, which he was highly critical of, and the nationalist element. And he saw some of this, you know, in the gay science and elsewhere, you see him predicting some of this stuff and the negative way it's affecting Germany and just hints of that, you know, that no good will come

of this. And so I think it's extremely ironic that the culmination of this, this trend to which he was essentially opposed, that the leaders of that, that movement would, would use him in the way that they do. It's, you know, based purely on these, much of it, very superficial resemblance to their own ideology around will and things like that. But some of it, of course, because Nietzsche was, in fact, an elitist in some ways. And, well, you know, there's a strong elitist. element to his philosophy and a harshness and lots of places where he can be misinterpreted as well. And I also think he would have been sort of appalled at sort of the collective, the collectivist nature of Nazism and of fascism generally. And then of sort of the sort of nihilistic unleashing

of violence that was inherent to fascism and to Nazism specifically is sort of like what he was warning about. He was warning about trying to replace, you know, after the death of God, the sort of replacing, they're trying to fill that vacuum with something. And in some respects, you know, the Nazis did that. But very specifically with political movements, yes, but filling that vacuum. And I, yeah, I just want to say that the politics of this stuff is something he thought about. Certainly there were aspects of his philosophy that if isolated from the whole could be leveraged in a fascist direction, especially with regards to certain notions surrounding power, degeneracy, decadence, et cetera. Can you talk about what aspects of his thought can

and have legitimately been embraced by fascist and what aspects of his thought also oppose fascism and Nazism, which we've touched on a little bit. Nietzsche's critique of morality is, you know, what he calls slave morality, which includes Christianity, with their elements of it that he sees in ancient Greek philosophy

and the later ancient Greek playwrights. And in Western society in general, even not just in Christianity, but in the way that science is sort of used as a quasi-religious way, Scientism, let's say. The critique of those things, a lot of it sounds very harsh. He talks about the herd and herd animals and lower sorts of types of human beings. And it seems like, by contrast, he's talking about a master morality that predates slave morality. And if you're not careful,

you might think that he's actually talking that up and praising it is something that we ought to return to. He also calls it a morality of breeding. So, for example, a Hindu caste system is one example of that morality of breeding or sort of pre-Christian pagan hierarchies where the strong ruled the weak and so on, including Rome and all of that stuff. And that's definitively not the case. It's not the case that he's, and he also talks about, so for instance, in the context of master morality, talks about the blonde beast, the Germanic blonde beast. And you might think it's the type the thing that he's calling for a return to. So this rule of this sort of a ethos of might makes right and the rule of the stronger and all that sort of stuff. I don't think that's the case.

One of the things he says actually in Twilight of the Idols is that as brutal as master morality is, and it is very brutal, slave morality actually carries on that brutality. So it's sort of, even though it's slave morality sort of seems to rebel against that and to put the interests of the weak above the strong, and, you know, as Christianity does, the meek shall inherit the earth and all of that, it is actually something equally as brutal and worse in a way because it's hidden behind this ideology of loving thy neighbor and all that stuff, when really it's a doctrine, a doctrine of hate. And then this, you know, there's all the elitism and the, with this critique of the average human being and talk about an ubermensch, a Superman, who will transcend that, you might take

that, and especially in light of his talk about the morality reading, you might think of that as an argument for a certain kind of racism, the superiority, for instance, of people, maybe the Aryans or something like that. Again, I don't think that's the case. The elitism part, you know, the thing I don't think you can get rid of with Nietzsche is that he is thinking of a higher type of human being, a genius or a great artist slash scientist, someone who fuses those two things. For me, it's actually quite hard to decipher and figure out, and I think it's the weakest part of his account. But that tone of elitism and contempt for the broad swath of humanity and his focus on the good of the individual over the good of the collective is where, of course, you can start

to make ill-use of him, so politically. Right. And in a lot of Nietzsche's work, there's a lot of talk about conflict and overcoming and war. And part of the notion of Ubermensch is this very notion of sort of overcoming. But you've talked about how you can sort of interpret that in a more literal and sort of crude physical way as an actual call to arms in a sort of way. Or you can interpret it more subtly as a psychological metaphor of sorts. Can you flesh out this idea for us touching on his ideas regarding those subjects in the process? Yeah, he talks a lot about war and the utility of having enemies and praises struggle, praises agonism and victory and defeat and all those things, which, again, it's pretty clear in the context of what he's writing about that

he's thinking of these now at a spiritual level. So it's one thing to have peace on earth in the sense of abolishing war, but peace of spirit, I think, he doesn't think is a good thing. He thinks that that's sort of the moment at which we become these passive herd animals who are no longer fully actualizing themselves, no longer flourishing. Because to flourish and to be fully actualized, you have to be struggling, including to overcome oneself is the way he puts it. And, you know, I can't find a place where he's literally praising war itself. Yeah, I think this, there's something here when it talks about a sort of, if you live, if you have a life of too much comfort, of no need for struggle, there is a certain sort of, it's almost antithetical to our nature as social apes, as, you know, descendants of chimps

in some way. When you have, for example, maybe this will clarify a little bit, but when you talk to military veterans who come back from brutal war zones, and they see some of their best friends get blown up and killed, they come back to civilian life, and a lot of times they will talk about wanting to go back, wanting to go back into the fray, not because they enjoyed the violence or the conflict or watching their friends die, but because they enjoyed the sort of collective struggle of being inside a military platoon, fighting against enemies, in some ways, coming back to civilian life is a meaningless sort of endeavor.

You come back to just grocery stores and gas stations and going to work and coming back every day, and there's a sort of meaninglessness there. So I think Nietzsche might be onto something when he talks about the need for a psychological struggle or some sort of, I don't really know how to phrase it. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's right. So I think this goes back to the question of status, which I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.

And I've thought about this with respect to Orwell, because he emphasizes in his definition of nationalism, this focus on power and status, or prestige, as he calls it. And it's a problem because I think it's a problem for social. as well, because even if you equalized everyone's material conditions, that in and of itself is not an abolition of the hierarchy. It could be the case that in a future society, everyone is essentially wealthy and doesn't have to work to have a high standard of living. And you could even completely equalize material conditions between people, but it's still conceivable that in that society, say a doctor, someone who wanted to do that, although it could be done my machines,

I guess theoretically in the future, but, you know, that that person would have much greater status than, say, a, someone who wanted to be a janitor. You could still have those sorts of hierarchies and those sorts of differences in status, even once you've equalized material conditions. So Orwell saw this and, you know, he went to Catalonia to the fight in the, you know, Spanish Civil War. And what he saw was that the revolution, initially workers had control. And then it was taken away by communist party bosses and by bureaucratic organizations where status was very important. And so that's the one thing that, you know, a meritocratic, and it's something that's really important to a meritocratic society with a large middle class,

because the rat race becomes essentially about status. A lot of work is about establishing your your worth in the in the eyes of others climbing to the top of an organization getting power in that way and that tendency to focus on status and power can undermine the revolution as it did with Stalin according to orwell's the flip side of that is it's not entirely clear how you would get rid of status and then that there are elements to status that are actually quite useful we work a lot harder with it with the idea of obtaining some sort of recognition or glory there are ways in which it's possible that that actually transforms us for the better, makes us harder workers, makes us want to achieve great things, pushes us, you know,

again, is more akin to Nietzsche's idea of agonism and struggle and self-overcoming and truly becoming who we are through that struggle. So if there's some way in which you could abolish the external structures of status and hierarchy and power and internalize them, psychologically, I think that would be ideal. And that may be what he's on to with the ubermensch, right, an individual who doesn't need to rise in middle management or even be the head of a country or an army to have some sense of power and to have some sense of status. It's sort of status and power unmoored from those structures. That's the way in which I see its relevance here.

Does that make, does that actually speak to the question? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fascinating sort of set of ideas and to struggle with struggle with as no matter what your politics are but obviously we're talking to a left-leaning audience to struggle with some of the implications of achieving the goals of socialism of creating that material equality or on the anarchist side of things destroying unjust hierarchies there's still something about the human being that's going to be left over that you're going to have to contend with and I think it serves us well to think really deeply and hard about what those are and what we can separate out about the human animal from the social conditioning of that human animal and try to try to wrestle with some of those

implications. So yeah, I think it's extremely important. And it's something I struggle with a lot too. I don't have the answers, obviously. But I would like to move on to sort of his thoughts on liberalism and maybe democracy. He was living in the mid to late 1800s, clearly the rise of industrial capitalism and the sort of overarching ideology of capital, which liberalism and bourgeois democracy? What were Nietzsche's sort of critiques of liberalism and democracy? And how do you think we should understand his views in relations to today's so-called liberal democracies? The basic critique is he thought that it essentially elevates the herd and the society's sort of lowest common denominator to a position of the highest. So democracies can have

the effect of a cultural level limiting individual potential. And he's thinking about about how potential geniuses or how truly potential, you know, Uber mentioned people or, or anyone who might achieve self-actualization is going to do that in the context of democracy and the sort of bourgeois culture associated with that, which sort of undermines the spirit and tends to focus more on the material and turns us into people who are concerned more about money and our jobs and things like that, than the development of our spirits. And to the extent that, you know, the democratic impulse is to make everyone alike or to level things out, again, that's something that he's not so happy about. There's a sort of hostility to, again, these

potential great human beings who are handicapped by that sort of society. Right. And it kind of extends, that critique extends a bit into his critiques of Christianity and slave morality. and then also into socialism. So can you maybe talk about some of the critiques of Christianity and socialism and how they overlap in Nietzsche's thought? So for Christianity, he critiques Christianity as a sort of reaction to what he calls master morality and the morality of might makes right or what he calls a premoral set of values in which what's celebrated is strength and beauty and power and ascendancy and all that stuff.

And the reaction to it is to say, well, those people, the winners, the more powerful ones, they're just evil. So we have to do something about that. And so you get a whole set of morals in which it's evil to exert power. And in a way, it's almost evil to be in a higher place within the hierarchy. And the impulse is to say the ideals that we're all equal and we all love one another and so on and so forth. Underneath that is concealed what Nietzsche calls Rizantamah, which is essentially, unconscious revenge fantasy. So the Christian, the supposed religion of love, there's a lot in it about heaven and hell and the ways in which the faithful will be rewarded with heaven, and then

all the bad people will be in hell. So that's the sort of fantasy of revenge against those who are more powerful. And what I think he does at a psychological level, it's sort of an extension of what civilization does anyway, which is it has us repress and feel guilty about and feel ashamed of our instincts. And I think the result of that is to curtail people's chances at happiness. So Christianity is just a larger manifestation of these sort of internally, psychologically repressive mechanisms that ultimately make people sick. And this is one another place where Nietzsche is prefiguring some of what Freud will have to say. So I think his idea is just that that sort of way of thinking is simply not good for us psychologically. It doesn't really allow us to flourish.

Even if we want a society where, of course, people aren't just running around killing each other and being unjust to each other, that sort of ideology can be damaging to us. And socialism, you know, there's enough overlap between socialist ideals and Christian ideals as far as the recognition, for instance, of the problems with hierarchy and inequality. Well, Nietzsche is, here to say that actually, at least at a spiritual level, we need hierarchy and we need inequality, even if that's just a structure within ourselves. And he uses biological metaphors a lot. So the ways in which the body is essentially a hierarchy where different organs serve the larger purpose of the whole, I think at a very fundamental level, he thinks we can't do without

that. We can't do without that physiologically. We can't do without that psychologically. And I'm not so sure what he thinks about, strangely enough, even though he's one of the greatest, the great political philosophers, it's unclear, it's always unclear what he thinks we should do about that at a social political level. And so it's conceivable that there's a socialist, you know, it's conceivable that there's no society that really is in harmony with that. That's why Nietzsche can be, you know, used by people of so many different political persuasions. It's also conceivable that there's a socialist society that's consistent with Nietzsche's way of thinking as long as one's comportment towards the socialist ideal doesn't go too far or doesn't become so extreme that it fails to acknowledge the reality of the necessity of, say, things like hierarchy and striving and struggle and all of that stuff. Yeah, so that's interesting because it makes me think about a sort of view that I have that might be conducive to Nietzsche's idea because you're talking about he doesn't really give a sort of positive idea of the exact sort of society he would want.

He just kind of critiques societies as they are and you have to kind of take the implications of what that means. And I think you touched on it a little bit, but in my view, I think self-actualization is a goal that most liberationists on the left today aim for. And in some sense, it's a goal that Nietzsche himself lauded, though not in those terms. terms, could not an egalitarian society based on democratic and socialist principles provide a social context in which individuals could more easily flourish and self-actualize, or maybe put another way, compared to, like, repressive fascist regimes which slaughter people and oppressive capitalist regimes which coerced most of us into spending the vast majority of our lives, toiling away of meaningless jobs for wages?

Wouldn't a system dedicated to ensuring everyone had their basic needs met in which employees maybe automation technology to free people from the drudgery of wage labor, provide a better chance for more people to rise to their highest potential in a way that Nietzsche would approve of? What do you think of that argument? I think that's true. I think, in fact, that's the best, you know, best chance for a society that's amenable to individual flourishing and even for, you know, if you take the elitist route, even for those who are society's geniuses, what kind of society would they flourish best in? I think, yeah, a society where you could follow one's passions rather than be chained to unsatisfying work that doesn't

actually pay all your bills. Yeah, I think that you'd be way better off. On the other hand, a lot depends on the kind of culture and ways of thinking that go along with such a society. So, know if that society is also is simply hostile for instance to those who stand out or are different because it's conceivable right that an egalitarian society might might embrace difference but it's also conceivable that it would want to make everyone the same so i think uh you know it's hard to you'd have to figure out what's going on at a at a at a cultural level i think certainly yes if you'd have the best chance socialist society yeah and then There's that famous Einstein quote where he talks about he's not so much impressed with the geniuses that have come before him,

but he thinks more about all the people that have toiled away in fields and factories that could have been, you know, even bigger geniuses than the people that made the biggest impacts in science and philosophy. And so that kind of reminded me of that. There is a historicity in Nietzsche's writings and thought that echoes, in some ways at least, the historicity of Marxism. How does he view history with regards to its shaping the present and the future? And how does that sort of echo some of the historicity in Marxism? Nietzsche is famous for genealogy. So in the genealogy of morals, his critique of Christian morality and more broadly of Western morality

depends on tracing its origins of looking at its history. And the history, again, that he identifies is this sort of reaction among Roman Christian slaves to a master morality. that was being used to oppress them. And unfortunately, it was a reaction that incorporated the worst of the master morality and let it fester and sicken society. So it's a different way of analyzing morality. It's not like an approach in which he's going to analyze along the lines of a Kant or a more systematic philosopher.

He's not going to start with some analysis or some first principle and try and derive abstractly. what it is we ought to do in order to, whether it's in order to flourish or in order to fulfill basic obligations, he's taking a negative route, he's taking an existing system of values and identifying its sort of its pernicious origins and using that as an argument, using that as a way of pointing to its perniciousness, which by the way doesn't necessarily follow. Philosophers call this the genetic fallacy, just looking at the saying that, well, Christianity arose because of, um, out of X undesirable motives, certain undesirable motives means that

Christian morality is wrong. It's actually not the case. It could have, you know, we could still accidentally be right. Um, but at the, at a deeper level, uh, the, the genealogy is psychological. So the genealogy has implications for the actual structure of that morality. So it's not just that historically Christian morality has its origin. in this, what he calls Rizantamah, this revenge fantasy against those who are stronger. It's that it incorporates that revenge fantasy and that it's essentially dishonest. It essentially cloaks itself in the opposite of what it actually is. So it presents itself as this religion of love when it's really a religion of hate.

And that structural conflict, that tension makes us sick. It's at a psychological level. the genealogical tension, you know, at a historical level, it gets internalized, and it's bad for us. So as far as the resemblance to Marx and historicity there, you know, I think so for Marx, so if you look at his critique of class ideology, right, it's that the tendency in a capitalist society is to make capitalism look like it's sort of the natural order of things. Or let's just say more generally, whatever kind of hierarchy you have in the society, the ideology of the ruling class is to say, well, look, some people belong in this class and other people belong at this level of the hierarchy, and that's just the way things are and it can't change. Whereas for Marx, it's actually something contingent and part of a historical process that actually not only can change, but necessarily will change. you need the historical account in the same way that Nietzsche uses the historical account or the genealogical kind of morality to cast doubt on a certain system of values.

With Marx, I think it's the same thing. For him, if you expand to this sort of historical account, the development of history and specifically economic conditions, you will see that the ideology is just a product of certain material conditions, those material conditions will necessarily change, and it makes one less prone to simply buy into that ideology. I mean, I think that's perfectly said, and I also want to draw another parallel between, in the same way that for Nietzsche, you know, Christian morality gives rise to sort of deceitfulness that gives rise to a broader sickness, the parallel in Marx would be the sort of alienation that arises out of the capitalist system and, you know,

the psychological suffering that that causes. There's a deep parallel there. Right. Yep. Well, that leads very well into what I know you care a lot about, and I find very fascinating. I don't get a lot of opportunities to talk about it, but that's Freud and Freudism, you know, Nietzsche influenced Sigmund Freud heavily, and then Freud went on to influence a whole host of leftist intellectuals, perhaps most notably those out of the Frankfurt School, but also thinkers like Zhijek and others. Therefore, you can draw a straight line from Nietzsche to many Marxist intellectuals of the 50s and 60s and beyond through Freud. Can you talk about Nietzsche's influence on Freud and highlight some of Freud's primary ideas which he inherited or kind of took from Nietzsche?

So Freud himself would deny that he took anything from Nietzsche. Freud denied reading Nietzsche. And there are some accounts that he said he didn't want to read Nietzsche because he didn't want to be confronted with the fact that someone had thought of a lot of these things before he did. But apparently he also had a lot of praise worthy, you know, he had a lot of praise for Nietzsche, just from what he had heard about Nietzsche, despite the fact that he claimed not to have read him. There are subtle, subtler ways that someone can be influenced by someone than reading them, of course, and Nietzsche was very widely read among German intellectuals, and Freud would certainly have heard Nietzsche being discussed. You know, beyond that, it's just possible that

they're just converging on the same sorts of insights in different ways. You know, Nietzsche calls himself a psychologist. That's precisely the turn that he's taking and the turn that Freud is taking. I think the most obvious thing, the most obvious parallel is that they are both focused on the sickness producing elements of civilization, the ways in which civilization affects instincts by leading to their repression and leading to guilt and shame and things like that and the negative effects of that.

So they're both, I see them as both sort of, you know, in the history of thinkers, they're the first lawyers that the instincts ever really had. I mean, they're, you know, there are, of course, philosophers that come before who are their hints of this. But really, it's reaction against the simple repression and disavow of instincts

that even those that would be destructive if they were you know we simply let them have sway there are elements of nietzsche where you you see him talking about what's what's unconscious and forgotten his talk about bad conscience is sort of parallel to freud's talk about the super ego and you can even think of nietzsche's ubermensch as sort of the person who has succeeded in achieving freedom by reconciling instinctual urges with the necessity of functioning socially and in a society. So the parallel as far as the solution goes is that Freud will talk a lot about sublimation and the redirection of instinctual urges, including both libidinal urges and destructive urges into something constructive, so into work, even into love in one's relationships, into

arts and science and all of that stuff. And I think Freud, you know, in a way, is more of a pessimist than Nietzsche. I think that for him is a solution, but it's not an ideal solution. We're all bound to sort of be unhappy, but you can minimize the suffering and unhappiness, and you can have moments of transcendence, let's say, through sublimation. I think for Nietzsche, there's, strangely enough, there's more of an idealism there. There's more of the sense that one might truly perfect oneself by becoming this ubermensch. a lot of people today kind of dismiss Freud as of an older time maybe he contributed some good things some even go so far as to say he's he wasn't a psychologist he was a philosopher in your opinion

what does Freud still offer today what what what did Freud give us as a way of thinking about the human mind that is still as relevant as ever and has not been displaced by advancements in certain fields of science that are relevant to to his field yeah so if you go into the average psychology program, you will read very little Freud, if any Freud, and there's a lot of contempt for Freud. You'll read a lot more Freud if you go study literature, let's say. And you'll be reading lots of Freud in an English department. But on the other hand, the way a lot of therapists work these days, they'll call themselves psychodynamic or eclectic. They might use cognitive therapy and psychodynamic therapy.

When they talk about psychodynamic therapy, they really are talking about something that's basically predicated and on a Freudian conception of the psyche and what ails the psyche and how one solves that problem. So most critical here is the concept of the unconscious mind, the idea that there is an unconscious

and that we repress taboo or forbidden or just dangerous, frightening ideas and disconnect them from our emotions and that that disconnection can create symptoms and that the solution to those symptoms is to help reconnect those ideas and those feelings and to become more conscious of what's been made made unconscious so and the average therapist will at least to some extent even if they think of themselves as as antifroidian or even anti-psychic analytic will be doing some of that. So they will, in a very rough way, function as if they buy into some of these very, very basic ideas,

even if they don't read all the sorts of stuff that I read at a psychoanalytic Institute. Personally, I think, you know, I read a lot of psychoanalytic literature. I find it insightful and perceptive. And I think Freud himself is someone everyone should read, even if you just want to read him as a philosopher. If you read him carefully and honestly, his brilliance and even his artistry, his just his greatness as a writer will be very clear. But yeah, psychoanalysis is not dead. There are still a lot of psychoanalytic institutes, especially outside of America.

You know, there are countries like, I think it's Argentina, where virtually everyone still has a psychoanalyst, where psychoanalysis is very popular. In general, regardless of what you think about Freud and psychonelysis specifically, talk therapy is still enormously popular at this point insurance companies pretty much are required to allow people to do as much of it as they want and many studies have come out to show that it's just as effective as medication and so on so there's something there and i think if you think talk therapy works if you really want to explain why it works you have to at least appeal to uh to some sort of psychodynamic idea that has its origins in Freudian ideas Freudian innovation

around the unconscious mind and repression and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I honestly couldn't agree more. I totally agree with you. One thing we do on this podcast is we analyze film and sort of, especially when it comes to the horror genre, analyzing horror films as a way of sort of understanding societal subconscious fears as they manifest themselves in popular culture. And I think that that draws a very clear cut line

from the Freudian notions of the individual mind. And do you think that that jump from individual neuroses and individual subconscious to collective neuroses or collective subconscious is a legitimate one? Or is that, I mean, how do you think about that? I think it is legitimate. So for Freud, the point of conflict is essentially is between collective societal values and then one's own personal impulses and one's makeup and even one's character. You know, that's something that he thought a little bit about. But psychoanalysts have thought a lot more about since then. It's a concept of personality and character and individuality and the way.

way societal values might conflict with that. So at an internal level, at a psychodynamic level, the thing that's doing the repressing right is in part the superego, and that depends upon these identifications, not just with ones where the super ego essentially consists of identifications, not just with one's parents, but with societal values and authority figures within society, teachers and even political figures and so on. So that's one way of, that's one way of thinking about it. You were talking about looking at films. So for instance, I wrote about Back to the Future on our blog. It's a piece called Back to the Father. And I, you know, it's a film that very explicitly includes this theme of incest. This is one of the things that people find so unsavory

about psychoanalysis is, and Freud is this focus on, focus on the idea of incest. And so when I wrote that a lot of the reaction I got well was you know well this is crazy you're just reading into this as a psychoanalyst even though it's explicitly a film about a guy who goes back to a time where his mother starts hitting on him and where he's not going to be born unless he can rebuff his mother's connections and get him to like his father right it's pretty obvious and it's pretty obvious it you know in that film but in also more subtly in other films that that at some level The incest taboo, whether we'd like to admit it or not, it's something that plays an important role in structuring our psyche.

And if you pay attention, you will see that our cultural artifacts and including films reflect that preoccupation, even if it's become completely unconscious and other sorts of similar preoccupations. So, yes, I think you can interpret any text, including a film, in terms of those basic fears and so on. Yeah, and I think incest as the content of dreams, incestuous dreams, are the most uncomfortable dreams, but I think they're more widespread than people like to admit, and that also I think hints at some truth there. Well, I was being a little indulgent on the Freud question because why I had you here, I kind of wanted to go down that alley, but thank you for talking to me about that.

Let's go ahead and wrap it up. Maybe the last question I could ask is just what, in your opinion, can modern-day progressives or revolutionaries who seek to create a better world ultimately learn and take from Nietzsche? I think the most powerful lesson in Nietzsche is the anti-nationalism. I think of him in a way, and this is, although it might sound strange, to people who are unfamiliar with Nietzsche, but I think of him as one of history's most important anti-nationalist philosophers, and I think any movement can fall into that trap. So, in other words, and so this is something Orwell talks about in his notes on nationalism.

No matter how well-meaning and aligned with the correct ideals, one's movement is, it can serve as a psychological and social function. It can really serve the impulse to power and status. And again, for Orwell, he learned the hard way. He saw the revolution in Spain betrayed by people who were simply grabbing at power. And he saw, you know, the revolution in Russia betrayed in the same way by Stalin. In his notes on nationalism, he treats sort of any group identification or identification with a political position as a potential form of nationalism. So he talks about pacifist nationalism,

for instance, strange as it sounds. One could be a nationalist on behalf of the idea of pacifism or even, which is to say one's identification with one with that group of pacifists might become chauvinistic. It might become focused on the idea of the superiority of my pacifist group to those people about me, those despicables who are not pacifists. And then all I care about is the prestige and power of my group. And I might still give lip service to the ideals, but really it's sort of degenerated into that concern for power and prestige and status. So I think that's a, you know, that's a danger for for any movement no matter how well meaning no matter how aligned with the right ideals so internal critique is always necessary one must and and by the way orwell applied

this and to himself he essentially said even this essay notes on nationalism it's just anti-nationalist nationalism same way you can be a pacifist nationalist you can be an anti-nationalist nationalist And the reason why he says is because, you know, he was generalizing about broad groups of people. He was sort of asserting his own superiority of his way to theirs. And inevitably, at a psychological level, it's just almost impossible to not become tribal about it. And that's the thing we have to guard against. And the way to do that is to try to maintain some sort of internal critique and work against the tendency to demonize others. and try to examine oneself to see if am I still really focused on the good of whether it's

my group or society as a whole or has this become about power struggle and um establishing my my superior already to others so if you look at so for instance a lot of it goes on twitter which I think of as you know the the telescreen of uh you know sort of 1980s for till 1984's telescreen Twitter is a lot like that because it allows people to have these moments of triumph over the over their enemies that allows them to really fully engage in that fantasy by one upping someone so someone who claims to be for you know anti injustice and blah blah blah they might spend a lot of their time just insulting people essentially so that they can feel superior to them so that that's an example of what I what I mean absolutely yeah

Yeah, well said, and I think that's extremely important. I would also say before we end, to be aware of liberals and progressives and Democrats, they're not often explicit with their negative nationalism, like attacking other countries because they're not Americans, but by propping up a sort of positive nationalism and echoing nationalist myths about being the city on the hill and we're the freest, most democratic country in the world, that is a covert form of nationalism that liberals and Democrats embrace all the time.

So be aware of that. Yep, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on, West. It's been a fascinating conversation. I really, really appreciate it. Before I let you go, can you maybe give some recommendations for anyone who wants to learn more about Nietzsche

and then point listeners to where they can find your work and your podcast? I think listeners could start with Walter Kaufman's Nietzsche, a philosopher, psychologist, Antichrist, the sort of philosophical biography of Nietzsche. So you get a biography, and then you get an explanation of a lot of his ideas.

And Kaufman is a great translator of Nietzsche and really was sort of the guy, one of the people who rehabilitated Nietzsche from the sort of cartoonish idea of him as a, you know, as a fascist philosopher. So, yeah, so that's one place to look. If you're looking for more analytical stuff, if you're interested in Nietzsche's epistemology,

Moe-Marie Clark's, Nietzsche on truth and philosophy is really great. or an analytic explication of his morality, Brian Leiders, Nietzsche on morality. There's a book called Introductions to Nietzsche by Robert Pippen. He's at the University of Chicago. He's really great. He writes about Hegel and German idealism in general as well. So it's just a book of introductions to various Nietzsche's texts. I'll just give one more.

Kathy Higgins and Robert C. Solomon or Nietzsche scholars, they're actually husband and wife, and they're at the University of Texas when I was there. They wrote a book called What Nietzsche Really Said, which might be helpful for beginners. And where can listeners find your work? Oh, the small amount of work I've done is available at the, it's partially examined life.com.

And I would really encourage anyone to go listen to partially examine life. If you're interested in philosophy, if you want to learn more about these things, they're a great way to get into this topic. Even if you don't know anything about philosophy, it's a really interesting way to get into a lot of these ideas and a lot of these thinkers and the whole history of thought that comes with it. So thanks again, Wes, for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

I really appreciate it. Let's keep in touch, and maybe I can have you back on one day to do a whole episode on Freud. Sure. Thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun. And so we overthrew the system Because there's no place for human existence, like right here On this bright blue marble orbited by trash

Man, there's no been that There's no big thing to give up the way of life we have. My social life is now quite a bit less hectic The nightlife and the protests are pretty scarce Now mostly spend the long days Walking through the city Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain, but what a perfect afternoon. common

Top of their knees The gears of progress haunted Underclass set free The super-ego shatters With our ideologies You've seen injunction To enjoy life Disappears as in a dream

And as we reach up To our native state To our planet's Temperature it started dropping, the ice flows began to freeze. From time to time we all get a bit of rest. we all get a bit restless with no one advertising to us constantly the tribe at the phone airport some nights has me to dancing if you don't mind gathering and hunting we're all still pretty good at eating on the run

Things it would have been helpful to know before the revolution. Though I'll admit some degree of resentment for the sudden lack of convenience around here, But there are some visionaries among us Developing some products To aid us in our struggle to survive On this godless rock that refuses to die Thank you.