Episode 178: Nietzsche as Social Critic: “Twilight of the Idols” (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So maybe we should keep going with the idea of judging life as a whole. That seems to be the place where Nietzsche diverged from Schopenhauer, right? That they both had this picture, at least early in Nietzsche's career. And in the part of Schopenhauer that we read of, the world is a chaotic, conflicted place, a picture of the will, the world as will. It's thrashing about and that's underlyingly what reality is. And while Schopenhauer then wanted to escape from that right, his, his idea of what art should provide for us is it sort of a rest, a haven away from that conflict.

Ultimately, ethics is going to be renunciation. And we saw this, you know, very recently in our Buddhism episode that there are all these things that were sort of. Of programmed with. A lot of the instincts are irrational, they steer us wrong. We need to not tamp them down with the force of our will, but we need to somehow overcome them. We need to observe them, kind of rise above them and no longer let them control us. Which of course maybe has the possibility of leaving us not strongly wanting anything. Which according to Robert Wright in our recent Buddhism episode was maybe not so bad, at least it keeps you from being a horrible person.

But Nietzsche seems like he wants to say, no, life is conflict, but that's good and we can embrace that in this work. He's giving that a little more subtlety, that strictly speaking you can't judge positively or negatively regarding life as a whole. Like those kind of sentiments just don't make any sense.

1:38 Wes: There are three places where he kind of reiterates this. I think it's worth just reading them really quickly. The first one is in the problem of Socrates, Section 2, where he says, these wisest men agreed in some physiological respect and hence adopted the same negative attitude to life, had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value concerning life, for it or against it can in the end never be true. They have value only as symptoms. They are worthy of consideration only as symptoms. In themselves, such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one's fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated not by the living, for they are an Interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges, not by the dead, for a different reason.

Ha ha ha. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning wisdom and unwisdom. The second place is in morality is anti nature. Section 5, where he says, a condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life. The question whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would require position outside of life and yet have to know it as well as one, as many as all who have lived it in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life.

When we speak of values, we speak with the inspiration, with the way of looking at things which is part of life. Life itself forces us to posit values. Life itself values through us when we posit values. And then. So the kind of morality he's objecting to is the way the declining, weakened life values through us. And then finally, in the four great errors, section eight, I think I already read some of this. But one is necessary. One is a piece of faithfulness. One belongs to the whole. One is in the whole. There is nothing which could judge, measure, compare or sentence our being.

For that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there's nothing besides the whole. So that's the three places where he advances this thesis, which I think is a really interesting, philosophically complex thesis about whether we can actually render value judgments which run against life, which run against our instincts. And of course, we have to keep in mind, since he's engaged in a reevaluation or a reevaluation of values, he is taking a critical stance, at least towards a certain kind of value system. I don't know if there's a contradiction there or not, but again, the primary thesis here is that we can't judge life.

4:36 Dylan: You can't judge life. But the act of judging is part of being alive. There's a kind of tension which is sort of audible, I think, but it's that we can't sit in judgment, but we have to sit in judgment. It's like having values and making value judgments is part of what we are as human beings.

4:55 Wes: Let me put this maybe a little more precisely, because I think it'll. I think the idea is we can't take any given instinct and say, well, that's bad, that impulse is bad, because our whole conception of what's good and bad simply arises out of the instincts. There's an equation between each of life and instinct. So we actually have to take our guidance from instinct in some sense. We can't just stand above it and make a wholesale rejection of any given instinct.

5:24 Mark: That doesn't sound right. It's any given instinct. I mean, there are lots of instincts that are stupid. And the way that we know that and we can marshal forces against them is other instincts. So basically we have conflicting desires. And so I don't think he has a even, well, impulse.

5:41 Wes: You're talking about impulses now. I think we probably think of instincts as more basic, like the instinct, you know, what he talks about later, sensuality and hostility. But specific impulses. Yeah, could be all sorts of things.

5:53 Seth: So I want to bring this part of the conversation back to his discussion of Socrates. So to that section, you were talking about the problem of Socrates, Wes, Because I think it's interesting and illuminating on this point. So at the beginning of the problem, Socrates, he says, this is a quote from section one about life. The wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion. It is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sounds from their mouth. A sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness, of life, full of resistance to life. And he talks about Socrates, by the

6:27 Wes: way, that is just one of the great beginnings of any philosophical text.

6:30 Seth: Yeah, no, no, there's no doubt whatsoever. So basically what Nietzsche says here is that Socrates, and really he means Plato. And there are other parts in the text where he clarifies that he's hostile to Plato, but he says they're anti Greek because they're hostile to life. And of course, if you go back to Genealogy of Morals, he believes that traditional historical Homeric Greeks were like saying yes to life. They were affirmative of life. And this can be summed up in the notion that Greek society at the time of Socrates was declining. And Socrates proposed as a cure the notion of reason, of dialectic as a substitute for the physical and other kinds political contests that used to characterize Greek society.

At least this is Nietzsche's interpretation, right? That if you think of the Homeric society where there were contests both physical and spiritual, that were happening all the time, Socrates substitutes dialectic and reasoning as a contest to try to reinvigorate the Greek spirit of contest and struggle in an age when that kind of notion of physical struggle or individual political struggle was no longer possible. So he presents himself as the cure with reason. And he then presents the equation, you know, this reason plus virtuous action will end up equaling Happiness.

And so the connection to instinct, for Nietzsche, is to say, no, we have to invert this, that in fact, people who are disposed to be happy who ultimately act virtuously. And again, Socrates is the first one who does the inversion. And in fact, this is the place, at least in my reading of Nietzsche, which is limited, the first place, or the only place that I know of, where he explicitly connects Plato with an inversion of values which then gets absorbed by Christianity. And I believe he actually says in this section, even now, Plato was talking about the good as this, you know, transcendent, and connecting it to the notion of God.

So the instinct is not necessarily this manifold of instincts, Mark, like you're talking about. You have to judge. Some instincts are good or some instincts are bad. It's the notion that somebody whose instincts are to be joyful, are to be happy, or to be a Dionysian will act virtuously. And to say that you can dictate somebody's instincts through action and reason is an inversion and a perversion of the actual order of causality. And this is how it connects to the section on the four errors or the four causes of error.

9:12 Wes: Yeah, we should say that the way dialectic and reason are supposed to work is that we use them to rule instinct. And that's what makes us virtuous, and that's what makes us happy under this model. So what does reason do? That? I just want to bring it back to this whole idea of not being able to stand outside of life, to judge it. Well, it sets up this other world, right? It sets up a standard of value which is not within this world, this other world, in which there are souls and God and things in themselves. All these metaphysical objects which are somehow supposed to amount to a standard of value, one that rules over instinct and life, but is completely outside of life.

And I think that's the objection when he wants a more naturalistic account of values where we, again, we have to take our guidance from something within life, from instinct in some way or another. It's not. And again, as Mark pointed out, it's not that instincts can't be stupid, as Nietzsche later on says, or stupid making. It's not that they can't be unruly and chaotic and bad for us ultimately. It's just that in figuring out what to do with them, we have to take our guidance from them in some way, you know, in a weird bootstrapping process. We can't simply erect this world outside of life, this metaphysical world or an afterlife even, and even telos at some point he objects to.

In order to tell us what we ought to do.

10:36 Seth: Yeah. So, Dylan, I think you were interested in the notion of becoming and what it means for Nietzsche. And I think what Wes just hit on is precisely that. So he says this idea, that reason. And it's in the next section, reason and philosophy. Right. So, as you ask me, which of the philosopher's traits are most characteristic, for example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming. Their Egyptian. They think that when they show their respect for a subject, when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni, when they turn it into a mummy. And so reason, which creates a quote, unquote true world, which is somehow, as Wes said, abstract, transcendent, dehistoricized, static, not

11:21 Wes: temporal, not alive, not growing, not procreating.

11:23 Seth: Yes. Empty. And then they contrast that to the quote, unquote apparent world, which is the world of the senses that's actually becoming. Right. That this is the great error in. In the history of philosophy and the great error in the history of Western thought, which gets first concretized by Plato and then taken into Christianity. So I don't know that throughout the book we get a strong sense of what it would mean to embrace the senses and the history and embrace becoming. But his criticism of substance, ontology, if you will, is two things. One is it's ahistoricizing and abstracting from lived experience that we get from senses, which is also connected to our instinctual reaction, our being in the world, if you will.

And then simultaneously that. That then sets up this dichotomy between the apparent and the real, which is false, which causes a whole host of other problems, like. Like prioritizing the good, the true, the perfect. Right? And they're so empty, the emptiest of which is God, the last, the thinnest and the emptiest notion.

12:27 Wes: I just wanted to bookmark something you said for later conversation because you asked what it would look like to embrace becoming. And I think we've seen in previous Nietzsche episodes that in some sense it means to embrace the aesthetic as a standard of value. So he'll even say in this section that the world of becoming, an appearance is the true one. And the. And the concepts of philosophers, thinghood, substance, permanence, unity, identity, causality, those are the things that falsify it. Part of his positive account, and he'll talk about aesthetics later on, is modifying our system of values so that it's appearance based and becoming based and life based rather than static, other world based. And to do that, I think critically involves a sort of aesthetic attitude.

13:10 Dylan: So I get the criticism of reason, especially reason as being the leveraged, as the only deciding factor, or trumping all forms of appearance and instinct as being deadening and also trying to determine value outside of life and outside of becoming. I understand that criticism. What I find a little bit strange, and maybe this is partly unfair, is the notion that our instincts don't include reason, that what we are in becoming human beings doesn't involve that activity as well.

13:46 Seth: Okay.

13:46 Dylan: And maybe it's really reason is a pejorative in this case. And you would want to use a word like thinking and not sully it with the baggage of the history of terrible philosophers and call it reason. But that activity of becoming and its organic nature born out of us unequivocally includes that activity as being of our thinking and our reason and our figuring things out. And yes, it may be a kind of corruption of it, where reason is taken to be an external judge rather than being something that comes out of us, ourselves and is part of our activity, evaluation and part of our aesthetic.

But it rings kind of strange to glorify the apparent when what is actually the apparent gets refined over time by our thinking about it. Let me put it this way. What is the apparent isn't plainly apparent. What is the apparent gets filtered through our reason and our thinking about it. And it doesn't come to us pure as something that just arises out of the world. Right. It's not that simple. It's more complicated than that. And it's more sophisticated than that. And to me, it's part of our actual activity of becoming involves it. And so that's part of the tension that I have.

I understand the criticism of the deadness of a life dominated by reason that Nietzsche's pointing to in the way which it's a kind of a decadence. On the other hand, the glorification of the apparent and the instinctual, unless it's meant to be sort of hyperbolic, seems to remove the part of our souls and our being attached to our reason and thinking that makes that becoming possible in a way that isn't true for other kinds of creatures.

15:37 Seth: I think there is an answer for you in the text. Whether it's satisfying to you, I don't know. But if we go to the section where he talks about the Apollonian versus the Dionysian.

15:48 Dylan: Sure.

15:49 Seth: What is the meaning of the conceptual opposites which I have introduced into aesthetics? Apollonian and Dionysian, both conceived as a kind of frenzy. The Apollonian frenzy excites the eye above all. So that it gains the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole affective system is excited and enhanced. So that it discharges all its means of expression at once. And drives forth simultaneously the power of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transformation.

And every kind of mimicking and acting. Now, he's talking here about arts. So he's trying to contrast arts. But I think this gives an answer to you, Dylan, about the criticism of reason and the notion of reason as we know that in other things we've seen, right. There's this association of the philosophical gaze. With the power of vision versus the other senses. And I think you could import this distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. Into this notion of what does it mean to take reason and to create this static, transcendent. It's to hold something up in front of your gaze.

And there are other parts in the text where he talks about the projection of ego onto the world. That one of the errors, the error of false causality. In the four great Errors, he says the will as cause, the ego as cause. Then you interpret the world as a series of causes. Whereas this notion of what it would mean to embrace instincts and embrace the Dionysian and to embrace becoming. Would be that the whole affective system would be, as he says, excited and enhanced. You wouldn't fetishize vision. Vision is about this experience of things not in time, but as substances, as these eternal objects.

And so I don't know that this is satisfying. But to me, this is where he was pointing with that particular criticism. This is where you would go with it. And then he tries to link this Dionysian up to music. And, you know, then that connects to Schopenhauer, of course, too. But this idea that there's a way to. It's not conceptualized, but there's a way to experience the world which transcends these static categories and isn't. Well, you get what I'm saying.

18:05 Mark: There's also the section called Reason in Philosophy with reason in Quotes, which is where he talks about Heraclitus. So he definitely doesn't mean. By Dylan, you were using kind of reason and thinking interchangeably. Or, you know, say reason or thinking.

18:18 Wes: Or we might distinguish Dianoia or, you know, calculation and then noesis or reason at a higher level. But go ahead.

18:26 Mark: Yeah, clearly he doesn't think that there's any problem with thinking. And has A whole diatribe on how education doesn't teach people how to think anymore. And so I, you know, I brought to mind the whole Heidegger essay, what is thinking? And I want to impose Heidegger's views on Nietzsche, but he definitely has some very definite ideas of what constitutes legitimate and deep thinking. And, you know, to get into that is to talk about his whole philosophical method. On the other hand, reason we use with a capital R, and in quotes, he's clearly talking about the pretentious Enlightenment view of reason.

So in Reason and Philosophy, section two, here, he's talking about reason versus the senses. The senses don't lie. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies. For example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanent reason, is the reason we falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away in change, they do not lie. There's reason as Kant uses the term, versus understanding as Kant uses the term. So, as you were saying, Dylan, that just perceiving something in the first place is a matter of putting it in a category, is a matter of imposing causality on it.

It's a matter of all these sorts of things that Kant just calls the understand. And he wants to distinguish that from reason, which is a more pretentious kind

19:44 Wes: of right, when we get to the antinomies of reason. Right. So this is actually really interesting because some of this Kant acknowledges, right, in the antinomies of reason, the extent if we reify the field of experience as a substance of ego, we've made an error, and we can misuse the categories that sort of stamp themselves onto the raw data of sensuality and create experience. We can misuse them in various ways at the level of reason. But Nietzsche seems to be making a more radical claim, which is that the categories of the understanding, even the ways in which they shape experience, have a falsifying effect.

He talks about unity and causality, causality. For Nietzsche falsifies, and it sounds like he accepts in a way the Humean skepticism, the thing that Kant, in a way, is trying to rebut, right? There is no such thing as causality. He basically says at some point there's just sort of one thing accompanying another. He's not just agreeing with Kant about the misuse of reason and that creates the antinomies and bad metaphysical ideas like a substantive ego or soul. He's objecting to the more lukewarm stuff that Kant is trying to use to save the concept of objectivity.

To say that causality can be objective because the understanding imprints that on experience. Before we analyze that out of experience. Nietzsche is criticizing even that low level stuff as in the sense that we created our appearances, we're creating lies. He's just, he's taking a sort of intuitive critique of idealism, an intuitive objection to idealism, that it's sort of falsifying and seemingly accepting that.

21:34 Mark: But I just think that the whole thing is underdeveloped here. Like I shouldn't even credit Nietzsche with a good knowledge of Kant's distinction between reason and the understanding.

21:42 Wes: No, he's very well versed in Kant. It's pretty clear on truth and lie and other places where he's constantly making little quips about Kant. He even does it in this about us getting back out. He makes a joke, which he also makes in the gay science. The same joke about us getting back out of things, what we put in them. That's Kant and he thinks that's absurd as an explanation of objectivity. For listeners I would recommend and sorry to name drop, but if you want to understand Nietzsche's relationship with Kant and also with ancient skepticism. Well, for ancient skepticism you could read or our former guest Jessica Berry's book. But for his relationship to Kant, read Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy by Maudemarie Clark.

22:25 Mark: Yeah, I think we probably should not try to take time in our discussion here today to say any more about.

22:31 Wes: Yeah, we can move on from that

22:32 Mark: take on the thing in itself and his differences with Kant because I feel like that is ground that we've gone over. And there's sort of more interesting stuff that I want to make sure we get to in our short left.

22:42 Wes: But I think what Dylan was getting at that was important, which is that not just the reason, this reason sort of is that fashion or even thought, is that fashioned out of the clay of instinct? How do we account for all that? Which is interesting, but I think the more fundamental problem is how does something anti natural. How does anti natural morality arise within life? How does something that's so hostile to life and to instinct arise within a framework that's sort of set by whose agenda is kind of set by instinct?

23:17 Dylan: How is it that we flourish to destroy our flourishing?

23:22 Mark: It's because you're already sick, right? These things are symptoms.

23:25 Wes: Well, it's because life can decline. It's because of becoming. Life can decay, life can decline. The paradox is that the decline of life happens within life. So the value system, that's a manifestation of. Of decadence, of the decline of life, of Decay of, you know, life on its way out, on its way towards death. That's how I think the paradox arises of something anti life, anti natural arising within nature, within life.

23:53 Mark: So I'd like to transition from this. I think I have a segue to talking a little more about kind of. Is Nietzsche a nice person?

24:02 Seth: Does he.

24:03 Mark: Which is the. We had the idea that you can't step out of. You can't judge life. You can't even say life is good or life is bad really, since there's no possible epistemic standpoint in which we could be to make that judgment objectively. And even if we were sort of God standing outside human life, well then we have no interest like we have likewise no justification for making judgment about that. So those. But you can. However he uses this phrase, it's a very modern phrase. You can say yes to to life, or you can say no to these various things.

And so that's what you know as a symptom. These despisers of life, they're saying no to the instincts, they're saying no to life, you know, as a whole. And it's in its various manifestations we can seemingly. I don't know if we can exactly choose to say yes, but certainly it seems that's an easy thing to at least the fact that we're using the metaphor of saying right. It's not merely okay, if you're a healthy and thriving, then you can say yes, sure, but can't you? That sounds like something you could give as a piece of advice, you know, say yes to life.

That there's sort of nothing that because life does not give us sufficient data to judge whether it's good or bad, to determine whether we should say yes or should say no. So it sounds like we have the existentialist sort of freedom to just say yes to it and sort of. So the transition from that is how open are you going to be to individual things in the world? Are you going to be a crusty old Schopenhauerian critic who is just saying no to lots of individual things? Or are you going to be patient and open and really be willing to consider strange ideas and things that seem objectionable to you?

And I think Nietzsche jumps back and forth between those two things that he. At the end, in this what I owe to the ancients, he says his taste is actually to say no to most things, to be very particular. But in other places he clearly the overall lesson is to say the more you can say yes to that sort of even shows the More overflowing a person you are, the more patient you can tamp down your instinct to immediately become distracted and object and fight back and what. So there's this dynamic that I thought was an interesting way to talk about whether Nietzsche is the kind of person you would want to hang around with or not.

Would he be saying no to you?

26:37 Wes: Nietzsche, you want to get a beer? Yes to beer, yes to life. Though he has some negative things to say about in this book. Right? The narcotic along with Christianity.

26:48 Mark: Those goddamn Germans and their beards.

26:51 Seth: I don't think I would want to hang out with Nietzsche.

26:54 Dylan: Nietzsche seems like the kind of guy who would be very challenging to be around. But if you were his friend, he would be a good friend to you, actually.

27:07 Wes: So in his the recommendation he was like one of the youngest before he even got a degree. He was recommended to be chair of the philology department at Basel. The person who wrote him the recommendation talks a lot about Nietzsche's character and what a great guy he is, what a nice guy he is, how much he cares about his friends, how courageous he is. He apparently was a really great. You know, he was in the military at one point and he was a really great horse rider as well. That's one of the ways he injured himself that sort of plagued him for the rest of his life.

Is he. The pommel of his saddle hit him in the chest. But anyway. So I think it sounds so different from the tone of what he writes. It's brilliant, but at the same time it's a little scary. And it makes you think of him as someone who's not necessarily the most empathetic or sympathetic person. But from the little bit I've read about him, reading him may not be a good clue to what he was like as a person.

28:06 Seth: There's a section in section 36 in skirmishes. The latter part of it. Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth, but we can correct this mistake. For in some cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one does the most estimable thing possible. One almost earns the right to live. Pessimism is proved only by the self refutation of our dear pessimists. One must advance a step further in its logic and not only negate life with the will and representation as Schopenhauer did, one must first of all negate Schopenhauer.

So he has a section in here on Schopenhauer where he says he likes the fact that Schopenhauer called out Christianity and how Christianity negated the will and negated life, but he ultimately fell prey to pessimism and that Nietzsche characterizes himself as an optimist. But his path to optimism in many respects is through. Well, he's, you know, a master rhetorician. It's through ridicule and criticism and aphorisms. He doesn't want to argue. He doesn't want to adopt Socrates's strategy of dialect to try to criticize this, what he sees as negating life, because that strategy is in itself a negation that will end up accomplishing nothing.

He's trying to. To celebrate. There's a kind of jouissance. Right. He wants to get away from ressentiment. Right. And from these things. But the thing is, he did it all theoretically in books because the way he lived his life, he was not Hemingway or Picasso. If you think about the artist who consumed life, who was a bigger than life picture, who went out and did things and acted and embraced instinct and fought with their own instinct, that's the kind of person that Nietzsche idolized. But it's not the kind of person he was.

30:10 Wes: Well, he was very sick. He had to quit his professorship in part because he was sick and in part because he didn't want to be an academic. And then he spent a lot of time in Italy and Switzerland.

30:23 Seth: Right. But if we take Nietzsche seriously, the reason he was sick was a function of his, of his instincts and not the, the other way around. He wasn't. Not the Ubermensch because he was sick.

30:38 Wes: Right.

30:38 Seth: He was sick because he wasn't the Ubermensch.

30:40 Wes: Right. We could read much of his stuff as self critique. I mean, his talk of sickness and convalescence and all that. He was a permanent convalescent.

30:48 Mark: So what are we going to make of this? We read this quote before, of one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one cause, not excluding oneself. It was very hard for me this week not to be thinking of all these scandals involving people in the entertainment industry doing obnoxious things to women. So when I was originally taught Nietzsche this idea of the system of weights, that value is not something that is univocal across somebody's characteristics, that it is perfectly fine. The idea that somebody can be a brilliant artist and in that way an estimable human being, and yet be obnoxious, you know, that they're historical figures who we would still want to praise their work even though they were scumbags in terms of the way that they treated Other people.

And I could read Nietzsche in this whole being prepared to sacrifice oneself for one cause, somebody who is a great artist, Nietzsche might excuse their scummy behavior towards individuals, especially if it was kind of a contempt behavior, because. Right. Part of being the Ubermensch is not being very respectful of everyone's feelings. Like that's the slave morality that's trying to tear you down. So I was trying to think, you know, really what would. So Louis CK being the example that hurts the most inconsiderate, was able to rationalize that he had consent or whatever.

You know, I don't want us to get lost in the details here, but that was somebody who, you know, had the keen insight, like, seems like he fits Nietzsche's example of a genius. But yet when you're talking about somebody who exists right now in the social sphere, and we have an environment where entertainment is basically democratic in that you do have to please the masses in order to get projects funded, et cetera, et cetera, it's a very different thing than judging somebody like Tolstoy or something,

32:44 Wes: I think pretty obviously being a great genius, which I think Louis CK is, and I thought about him too. Reading this doesn't mean you're going to be a perfect person or a great person or even a good person. I mean, I think in Louis CK's case, part of what hurts is he seems particularly self aware. And I don't think that's changed by any of this. I don't think people's compulsive behavior, even their. If it turned out he had done something criminal, if he had turned out he had gotten into a fight at some point in his life previously and maybe had committed manslaughter, even terrible things that people do or we might do. That's just part of the mix. That's part of a mix of a lot of different conflicting good stuff and bad stuff. And sometimes the bad stuff is very bad. But I think we can hold together all those things in one bundle. It's all too human. Right?

33:36 Mark: You think that's what Nisha would say about this?

33:38 Dylan: Part of the mix. And the problem on this is that the judgment of a whole person isn't a simple thing and that the ability to judge them as being a great artist versus a personal scumbag, there's that kind of dichotomy. But part of it is also the problem of accolades, particularly when someone is alive. And that to the extent that their success is either predicated on or facilitated by their horrible behavior, that's part of what's in the mix here, right. Is that people who are either incidentally abusive in their power or on their way up, and they're sort of excused from that, or they are abusive in their power, and that's part of how they do what they do.

34:23 Wes: And then there are the corrupting effects of power.

34:25 Mark: Right.

34:25 Wes: Many of us don't know how we would behave if we had as much power and fame as some people.

34:33 Mark: Situationism.

34:34 Wes: Yeah. But I think as far as what Nietzsche, I mean, it's hard to say, Right. He does talk about a different system of morality for applying to a Napoleon, for instance. And. And maybe the suggestion is you can be a murderer if you're a great man.

34:48 Mark: Well, I don't even want to go to the murder place. But like in this particular circumstance in which when I was looking at responses by feminists, you know, there's an article in Slate, you know, responses to his apology of saying no, that what he's overlooking is that the reason that you would do that kind of stuff is not just because you're incontinent, that you can't help yourself. It's because you get off on humiliating, on exerting power. It's not just that these people are in a position of power and so they are pursuing their sex drive, but that they're actually gaining some pleasure out of using the power. And that seems like something that Nietzsche can't uniformly disapprove of, given his.

35:29 Wes: Well, I just want to say those critiques are by people who have not spent one minute of their life thinking about the psychological motivations behind exhibitionism. That's one thing. But as far as whether, I don't know, your claim is that Nietzsche might not disapprove. Right. Precisely because it's an abuse of power.

35:49 Mark: I guess that's the question. Like, it seems like we have to take him a little bit at his word, that exerting power, including not just power in a very abstract sense, in convincing other people. And even if we're ruling out, you know, physically overpowering someone, but the idea that power over other people is part of, you know, a notion of power. It's not just functions, lust. It's not just being able to run fast like a cheetah or, you know, do whatever the equivalent for you is, but that dominating other people is in some way good. Can we not say that Nietzsche has that somewhere in his doctrine here?

36:25 Wes: Yes, but wouldn't we acknowledge, all of us acknowledge that wielding power is good, at least in some forms? Is it good in all forms? I mean, the wielding of power and the existence of hierarchical structures is what makes more complex forms possible biologically and socially. That's the sense in which one would praise power. But you could think of the misuse of power as analogous to something that causes decay. So like a cell, for instance, that no longer knows its place within the body, just expands willy nilly like a cancer or someone in a position of power within a hierarchy, in a company who is so abusive of their power that the company simply doesn't function.

So I think we have to think about hierarchy and power almost in an Aristotelian way, in the context of the functioning of the whole. We could still formulate, I think, even as if we were full blown Nietzscheans, formulate a critique of power by his own lights. I don't know. Am I wrong about that?

37:27 Dylan: No. The praising of power doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a degradation of it or misuse of it.

37:34 Wes: Right, that's what I would say. I mean, I don't know, Mark, is that satisfying to you or do you think.

37:39 Mark: Well, I want to hear what Seth has to.

37:42 Seth: Well, so he has three paradigms of power in the text that he refers to Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Napoleon. And if you think about what he means in those circumstances, he's talking about, let's call it great individuals who exercise their will against the dominant paradigm for the purposes of political control. And they're not people who exercise their will. I mean, they might very well have, I don't know. But they didn't exercise their will for the purposes of personal gain against individuals. One of the things that I struggle with in this text, but in other texts of Nietzsche as well, is that he's not articulating an ethics of the one on one or a morality of the one on one.

And I don't think that Nietzsche would be explicitly in favor of just violent exploitation of people who are less powerful on the basis of their lack of power versus saying okay, I have vision, I have power, you don't. And so I'm going to somehow articulate a social structure or political structure or an economic structure in which I drive things forward. I make great art, I make institutions, I make industry, I manufacture things. And you are subordinate to that versus kind of like a personal subjugation. I mean, as misogynistic as Nietzsche is and comes across, it's misogyny that's based out of a stereotype of the feminine against the masculine.

And it's not the misogyny of violence. Against women for the sake of emboldening masculinity, which is kind of what we're used to seeing. I have a hard time putting him in that same camp.

39:34 Mark: So I did, as we were going through, highlight the various aphorisms about women. I don't think we have time to really go into it, but I became satisfied with a way of responding to his really terrible attitudes with regard to women by saying that it's kind of like his attitudes towards Christianity in that he's giving a. And this is just repeating the way I characterize this in our very first Nietzsche episode on him, but he's characterizing Christianity in a certain way. So if you are a Christian, but you can understand. And like Ricoeur, we read since then, gives this say, hey, I'm Ricoeur, I'm a Christian.

And I think we have to take Nietzsche seriously and make sure that our kind of Christianity is not a life despising Christianity. So I think there's a way to still remain a Christian. And so the same thing, I think when he even is complaining about women, one can charitably try to interpret that as he's complaining about a certain model of femininity.

40:30 Wes: Right.

40:31 Mark: And he even explicitly says, much like in our recent Vertigo episode, that men created this version of femininity.

40:38 Wes: Woman is created out of man's ideal, sort of reversing the Adam and Eve story.

40:42 Mark: Yep.

40:43 Unknown speaker: Right.

40:43 Mark: So if man has created this stunted creature, then it is right for him to rip on how it's a stunted creature and to want women, biological women, to no longer fall into that stereotype. So it would be a very different thing, I mean, if he were still saying that about women now, and especially about. About women who have a sense of self possession, maybe are Nietzsche influenced feminists, like, it would be a whole different thing. But I don't think we know enough about him to really say what he would have to say about those people. So again, I'm kind of turning to, you know, on the one hand, it shows a great amount of strength to be able to really listen to what the other has to say, to admit that you don't already know everything, to push your ideas out on everybody else.

And so this is exactly what the whole dynamic, you know, the way that Louis responded to the scandal is I need to do. And this is, you know, the battle cry of feminists in this area, or the same with our privilege episode is our voices have been silenced. I want to be listened to. So it seems like it would be virtuous from A Nietzsche perspective. To be able to entertain things like that, to not just dismiss anything coming from that direction as a bunch of malarkey, to, you know, really listen carefully to it. On the other hand, you gotta call it like you see it.

You wouldn't want to let it overwhelm you. You wouldn't want to completely surrender in listening to somebody else. You would not want to surrender and let values that they're trying to impose dictate what your values are going to be. Right. That would be accepting the slave morality. So there has to be some balancing act, you know, maybe again, you're kind of taking on a case by case basis and doing some detailed analysis of the ideas being presented and of your own reactions to carefully navigate that dilemma.

42:35 Wes: I think it's a good last word on that subject.

42:38 Mark: Just this whole idea of sacrificing other people to your causes, it just kind of brings to mind an anecdote. So like the very first time I put together a band, this is like sometime in high school and we tried out on this song that I wrote for the Variety and I was trying to get different people from the school involved. And one of the guys that I, he was in choir and so he was gonna sing one of the backing parts and it became clear as we were rehearsing it that, like, he just could not sing for shit. So I fired him from the variety show act. And then when I was talking to this other friend of mine, this woman who is now an actual artist, professional body artist, I was comparing this idea of in trying to make something artistic, you kind of have to do what you have to do to make the art good.

It's not about the people. Like if the people in that way have to be sacrificed, if you have to piss somebody off a little bit, then that should be fine. And she said that is exactly the opposite way of the way she looks at art. That art is supposed to serve people, it's supposed to be nurturing. And so the ends do not justify the means based on this. And that little interaction between two high school students, men and women, seems to capture the Nietzschean position I think I was holding there versus a more compassionate alternative.

43:52 Wes: Wait, so art as self expression versus art is something altruistic? Is that the.

43:57 Dylan: Not altruistic, I took it. But art as validating and nurturing of those participating in the art as well as those experiencing the art?

44:07 Mark: Yes, ideally you'd of course have both, but artists are notorious for being bastards,

44:13 Dylan: firing someone for the sake of the glory of the art itself. So he fired the guy because he sucked at what he did. And his participation would degrade the art that Mark was creating. And Mark, as the ubermensch for the creation of that art, exactly, was the one in charge. And wielding his power with the appropriate sense of power. He fired that guy's sorry ass and got somebody in there so that they could have the property high school demonstration.

44:43 Seth: Well, the question becomes for me, like, how do you distinguish and draw the line between quote, capital A art and capital G God, unquote? Does art function? Does the concept of art, the abstract, transcendent notion of art, the Platonic notion of art that Mark was striving towards, function in the same sense here as. As the notion of God? Is that the empty and thin concept of art at the end? It's only if you inhabit that art as lived experience. The actual notes, the actual. It's not art abstract. It's this song, Mark, you needed this song, this performance in front of this audience at this time. That is what's important.

45:27 Mark: Yeah. Artists are notoriously bastards. They treat their families like crap often. Nietzsche, I think, is going to justify that, even though he has this section on arts for art's sake, which is a little more measured than what we're saying here.

45:42 Wes: Well, he objects to that idea, but in skirmishes, the large part of that is about aesthetics and art.

45:47 Mark: In the beginning, we could read that section.

45:50 Wes: So he argues in that section. Well, he says nature estimated Artistically is no model. And the being an artist, it's not about being a mirror to nature, which he interprets as being sort of subservient to nature in some sense, but it's working from the inside out. You work from instinct, you work from a knowledge of who you are. And part of that is that's why the Dionysian frenzy is indispensable. The essence of it is this increased feeling of strength that you can then lend to things. You feel this fullness. And artistically, you enrich the world with that.

So he says things like, in the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection. Nothing is beautiful except man alone. Nothing is ugly except degenerating man. So he's countering the Schopenhauerian interpretation, which comes out of Kant as the aesthetic being, this relief from this negation of the will or being relieved from will or appetite. Right. If you remember from the Kant episode, the whole idea of. Of our feeling of appetite towards an actual apple versus the aesthetic experience of the apple as something beautiful and something that therefore transcends Appetite for Schopenhauer.

We get rid of the will in that moment when we asceticize. Nietzsche wants art to be more like the Platonic erotic contest. He appeals to Plato's notion that art is inherently sexual in some way and that it always incites procreation. The lesson of all that is that he's against any moralizing tendency in art. He's against putting messages in art. But that doesn't mean it's simply aimless. Art should be a stimulus to life. It should glorify it. It should strengthen life, affirming valuations, even when the subject matter is tragic. So when it's tragic, and this is also a really interesting thing that I hope we follow up on in future episodes, the aesthetics and especially the tragic.

But the significance to him is that in tragedy, which seems like it's, you know, how does that glorify life when it's about the bad things? For Nietzsche, it glorifies courage and freedom in the face of calamity, in the face of powerful enemies, and celebrates our resilience to that celebrates what is our willingness to suffer in the face of that. And go on. So now I'm trying to think about how to connect it back to what you were saying.

48:23 Mark: Well, maybe we'll have to finally read Dewey's book on art or something. But I think we're kind of getting at the distinction between art for arts. It could be kind of a form of religion. And that is kind of, I think the native way that I might have been thinking about it at age 16 is that like this is the glorious thing. Not that I really think it's going to persist through all eternity. Not that I really that pretentious about what I was creating, but just that when you are doing art you kind of go to a special place and it kind of has a realm of its own and strictly sociological matter should be kept out of it.

Like it doesn't really matter ultimately who gets to contribute. The whole idea of we're doing art as a classroom and everybody gets, you know, we're, let's put on a play as a classroom and we'll attribute the roles by lot because we don't want anybody to feel left out. These kind of things that are done educationally to make art fun for kids say that that is totally against the purpose of art at all.

49:18 Wes: So it's not a retreat from the will, but it is a retreat from having to be a nice person.

49:22 Mark: I think at least Nietzsche would sign on for that, even though he might have in Common with Dewey, something where we can't have art as something comparable to God. It has to be a lived experience, but still.

49:35 Unknown speaker: Right.

49:35 Mark: That's sort of a separate issue from. As a lived experience, does it have to be inclusive to everyone? Does it have to be never offensive? You know, these other things that would go into whether your art, in the way it is created and in the qualities of the product itself, be maximally, socially useful.

49:53 Wes: So I do want to add too, that. So Nietzsche is willing to use this word spiritualize. Right. And spiritualizing the instincts. That's what art does. Ultimately, the sublimation aspect is really one of the most important parts of it. So we could still have something spiritual that's not religious in the sense in which he objects, in the sense that it brings in all this otherworldly stuff, the stuff that exists outside of life and lies underneath appearance, but rather embraces appearance, embraces these things.

50:25 Dylan: Prophetic.

50:26 Seth: Yeah.

50:27 Dylan: And to me, this makes me think about the title Twilight of the Idols as being the end of God, the end of the things that we worship. But also back to the foreword, last paragraph. This little work is a great declaration of war. And as far as sounding out idols is concerned, this time it is not contemporary idols, but eternal idols that are being touched here with a hammer, as if with a tuning force. And at the end of the book, Nietzsche calls himself the hammer. But I think we need to understand that not simply in the terms of a hammer being something that could be used to wreck or destroy, but in the case of a hammer striking a tuning fork and a hammer being something that causes something to sing, an exploratory

51:15 Mark: instrument that we're hammering on the idol to see if it's hollow, to see if it. It makes a squelchy sound.

51:20 Dylan: Yep.

51:21 Mark: I'm trying to remember what the quote is, the intestinal.

51:24 Wes: About what?

51:25 Mark: Oh, yeah, this is the beginning. Finally, to pose questions with a hammer and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails. Seth, what's still on your mind here?

51:38 Seth: Well, we just touched on the notion of subjugation by taming versus subjugation by breeding, the law of Manu and what he was talking about, the Indian caste system. We didn't really get to that because in there he brings up the idea in the section on what Germans lack about culture versus state, and the idea that there's an antagonism between you can have great culture or you can have all your energy expended in politics, but you can't have both. He also has a theory of education in this book, what he sees as the function of the educator to be, and his section in the Skirmishes of an Untimely man, where he talks about all the various people that he does or does not admire, mostly does not, and why, I think would be worthy of a whole second podcast.

That's also where he talks about what Wes mentioned earlier, but art for art's sake. Anyway, I'll just reiterate it's an immensely rich book made richer by your previous reading of other Nietzsche works, as well as an understanding of particularly Plato, Schopenhauer. I don't think you need to know what is it Goncourt and some of the other folks that he criticizes to be able to get a lot out of this book. But you know, I think there are key themes that are very Nietzschean themes that show up here that I think in some sense, when I compare this to the aphoristic style of Beyond Good and Evil, it's more difficult to.

Again, I'll go back to this idea that he ironically comes across in some sense as a systematizer, or at least trying to systematize his own thought from his other works and bring some kind of themes to bear. And that in that sense it makes him less prone to misinterpretation and citation the way that his aphoristic style in some of his early books is, but at the same time perhaps exposes him somewhat as a hypocrite. And there is a whole section in here where he says hypocrisy is dead because nobody stands for anything anyway, so you can't actually be a true hypocrite anymore.

53:51 Wes: The good old days, because they're lying to themselves as well. So.

53:55 Seth: Yeah, so that's kind of my summary there.

53:58 Mark: Yeah, many of those topics you brought up would have been more interesting than my little story about my band, so I'm glad I took 10 minutes of our time for that. I don't feel like you guys took the bait or were as interested as I was and what what he would have to say about things now. Maybe a good next step with Nietzsche is to read the Will to Power. I mean, I know that's just a bunch of notes that were cobbled together by his sister after he was dead in a way that he probably wouldn't have even approved of. But still, I think some of what we were skirting on the edge of here was how the idea of the Will to Power adds to what we were talking about in terms of Spiritualizing the instincts.

And maybe talk a little more in light of that about him as a social critic. It was hard to tell. I think one thing we didn't really get it completely into. We talked about how you can't really condemn individuals because they're all determined because of determinism. Well, in the same way, right. He was saying degeneracy is inevitable. Decadence is inevitable. It is a progress, in fact. And so it seems like, in the same way, critiquing that you can't tell the German people be more vigorous. That doesn't do anything in the same way you can't tell an individual to imitate Christ or imitate Nietzsche or anything you want.

So he's just a very different sort of social criticism, since he's so fatalistic in this way than anybody that I see on the modern scene now. And I think I would find it very unpleasant and unhelpful, you know, if somebody, like, put out a newspaper article, like, you know, just think of specific things. He talks about political parties in this way. It's not that the. The political party made this mistake, and therefore it is in disarray. It's. It made this mistake because it's in disarray. You know, people have been saying that about both the Republican and the Democratic parties of late.

Like the only reason they produce those candidates is because they're already screwed. But that is a very unhelpful thing to put in a political editorial say, and it frustrates me immensely. I don't like that approach. I like something a little more constructive. And I don't know if Nietzsche, given his worldview, can be much more constructive than he actually is. Dylan, anything else?

56:10 Dylan: I don't have a lot more. I mean, just your comments made me think of something we didn't talk a lot about, which is I'm not sure that Nietzsche himself is at his best politically and that maybe there's something about the way he thinks about us as individuals and his focus on our own psychology, that is insight into our political lives and maybe even into our social lives as a social Christian critic is not as astute as his insight into us as individuals.

56:42 Mark: Yeah, I think that's a good point. And maybe that's why he. We cannot figure out exactly what he would say about Louis CK Acting that way about the women. Because, first of all, he wasn't writing an advice column like that. He's not making that kind of judgment about moral actions at that level of granularity. But also, just because he's socially Inept and didn't think about these things in that level of detail. That's just not sort of where his interests lay that he has some dismissive things to say about. Oh yeah, the more that a society emphasizes politics, the less they're going to emphasize culture.

Is that really even true? I feel like he's, as you're saying, he doesn't have a special insight when he's discussing this specifically political in that way. I mean, I think he probably was reacting appropriately to what counted as political in his day, which is, as he says, Deutschland, Deutschland alles. Like if that's what the politics is, just these people chanting this drivel, then like, yeah, you should just want nothing to do with it.

57:39 Wes: Well, he's criticizing, yeah, the German focus on power and power politics, economics, world trade parliamentarism, military interests, that sort of, he thinks, crowds out culture. And I'm not sure that he's wrong about that. If the function of your society becomes to produce. I mean, look at the meritocracy in America today and then how culturally shallow we are. At least I think, I think the whole focus on success and producing meritocrats inevitably leads to a kind of shallowness. People go to school to get good jobs, they don't go to school to become noble spirits, as Nietzsche would put it.

And something is lost in that. But I think the whole German thing, I think Nietzsche called him the most important anti nationalist philosopher in history. And I mean nationalism in Orwell's broad sense, to take another great anti nationalist of a kind of chauvinistic identification with any group. And I think what's important about his critique of morality is that morality is the mechanism of that chauvinistic identification. You simply have to point to other groups as uncivilized, as animal, as immoral. That's the way you can induce people, for instance, into mass violence.

You create the sense of one's own group being morally superior and the other group being subhuman in a way that doesn't even make them worthy of moral consideration. And in many cases they've earned that subhumanity supposedly by being inherently immoral beings, by being rapacious or greedy or undermining of the state, unpatriotic, all those things. So morality can be a really, really terrible weapon. And that's why I think Nietzsche's critique is tremendously important. And it's tremendously important to anyone who is a foe of nationalism in the broad sense and to all of the things to which it leads.

Spinoza, by the way, I think is in that same club. I think what we saw in his Tractatus was a critique of the ways in which religious doctrine and doctrinal disputes are used for power politics and for all the terrible violence and the sorts of things that result from that. Beyond that, I have one more I just want to read that part of the letter, the recommendation letter that I read earlier about his character, so written by a professor as a recommendation for this professorship. Here's a little excerpt. He's now 24 years old, strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous, physically and morally so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature.

On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks, skillfully and clearly. He is the idol and without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig, who, and they are rather numerous, cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon well, that is just what he is, and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here. So of course it's a recommendation letter, right? So it could be overblown, could be hyperbolic.

It's the kind of thing that I was just actually surprised by reading. I think of him as that guy who's really sick, writing his books isolated, and then ultimately who went nuts and was incapacitated for 10 years until he finally died.

1:01:15 Mark: Yeah, part of this being socially maladjusted is just kind of being shy. I don't know from what you read that he's actually shy, but unleashing a fury in his writing that is not there in the way he's talking to people. So even if I'm asking, is he a jerk, I'm not really asking is he a jerk personally, I'm asking is this writer Persona that's deigning to judge the world and everything around him is that too snarky for its own good? And I think it's just snarky enough. All right, next time we are going to talk about William James psychology. We're going to be focusing on the briefer course, though that is a distillation of his Principles of Psychology from 1890.

Please tell us what you want us to talk about. Email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com if you really enjoy this. We could use your rating or review on the itunes store or at Stitcher or wherever you listen to this and by all means spread the words. Send a link to this episode or other ones that you might enjoy to your friends. I think they're gonna. Maybe they'll fall in love with philosophy. You can make it happen. You can exert your will on others to make that happen them. Make them more subtle thinkers. Hey, folks, don't forget the Partially Examined Life 2018 wall calendar is available for purchase at partiallyexaminedlife.com store.

Our closing song today is called Oblivion. It's again by our chief editor, Tyler Hislop, also known as Sacrifice, interviewed on Nakedly examined music episode 24. And it was written specifically for this episode. Hope you like it. All right. Good night, everybody.

1:02:50 Wes: Good night.

1:02:51 Seth: Good night.

1:03:34 Unknown speaker: Even if more is to come it's truly fortunate to have a piece of the horror? Succumb to the sorceress? She's a genius? A force to discern? A muse who repeats her consortium of terms? I sit alone Reporting to her Confiding I'm slowly dying? The more that I learn? Scripted though her skin Exposed to the scorch of the earth? And this is known the abyss approaches? It doesn't make excuses for your fickle hopes? And if the dream isn't realized? If your piece isn't real life? Convene with the real God? He is revealed right? Or did he for real die? Traveled the cause way and battled a strong faith?

Enough to keep me from the wrath of the cons? But not enough? Enough to escape the passage of time? So travel the causeway and battle the strong faith? But not enough to escape the passage of time? Cause oblivion's a stone's throw away? But if they give you a phone home Then you take it? If you have to admit all the blackness within? Would you say it? Cause oblivion's a stone's throw away? But if they give you a phone home do you take it? If you have to admit all the blackness within your destiny? Savage abyss There could have been nothing? I guess there should have been that something just doesn't connect?

Do we trust in the head or trust in the flesh? The dreams wrap me up I confess I wasn't impressed we discussed it and yet the scene was disgusting A mess Something no one could expect One to the chest the need to jump from the ledge I understand though without your demons you can't grow? But with your demons just strangled? I paint the master on the canvas the parts with the slaves in the dark in the cage at least I left my mark in the cave? But understand this Some things don't belong on the page and mirrors get you lost in the maze we're off to the race the cost is insane?

So nothing fancy just what I saw in your gaze so travel the causeway no restraints needed All I ask is you stay seated? Cause oblivion's a stone's throw away but if they give you a phone home Then you take it? If you have to admit all the blackness within Would you say it? Could you save it? Cause oblivion's a stone's throw away but if they give you a phone home do you take it? If you have to admit all the blackness and things that you sad but you're bliss cuz oblivion's a stone's throw away but if they give you a phone home should you take it?

Could you take it? Will you take it? You should take it Would you make it. Rip jm.