Episode 213: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 213 is something like what is wisdom? And we read the first two books of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Originally published in 1883. For more information and a link to the text, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer coming to you in the morning zoo with my pals the Eagle and the Snake in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:24 Seth: Oh, you practiced that one. This is Seth Paskin trying to understand if he's willing to truth or to power in Austin, Texas.

0:31 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to be your best frenemy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey dodging the adder's bite in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Mark: At last we have reached this text, which many would think we would have done years ago. But for me, this was never the most straightforward or therefore enlightening of his texts. There always seemed to be something else that was better to do than this one.

0:57 Dylan: I had never read it and had always wanted to, and then I wasn't sure that I did.

1:02 Seth: I feel exactly like Dylan.

1:06 Dylan: I find it a very, very challenging book.

1:08 Seth: Exceptionally so.

1:10 Mark: We had some secondary sources on the table that we could use. I didn't really take that much advantage of them. There's this one by Douglas Burnham, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra Edinburgh Philosophical Guides Series that was a little bit helpful. And we're using the translation by Walter Kaufman, who is always helpful as far as I'm concerned.

1:29 Wes: Yep, Kaufman is great.

1:31 Dylan: Yep.

1:31 Wes: I just barely got done with my multi step process of trying to summarize and I am exhausted.

1:39 Dylan: You're gonna have to write your own book called the Alwan Method.

1:42 Wes: Probably the most inefficient, exhausting way of doing things.

1:45 Seth: But you should have a bunch of disciples following you around. Wes.

1:49 Mark: Yeah, we should describe for the folks what this involved.

1:52 Wes: I read the text, you know, underlining and doing all that, and then I reread it while taking notes. From my notes I try to construct a summary in my own words and then from that I might try to construct higher level summaries. I will say I have a lot of these for podcasts we've done going way, way back and it's very, very useful when you want to review or when you want to use something for writing. But it's very, very inefficient and I find it very good for actually achieving A certain level of comprehension. It's just very time consuming.

2:24 Dylan: We should also mention that was Wes's birthday this weekend.

2:27 Mark: Zarathustra gave you the gift of his wisdom.

2:32 Wes: This book in particular doesn't lend itself to a higher level synopsis. And Nietzsche, that's hard anyway, because of his aphoristic style. I will say, as my sort of general introduction to this, this is a book that I had sort of was romanticized in my f. As weird as that sounds. Like, among the things that were romanticized, you know, Plato and St. John's College, Nietzsche, and especially Thus Spake Zarathustra were romanticized. And it's something I grew up listening to my older brother. He's like 10 years older than me and my mom occasionally talking about.

And I knew it was weird, you know, I knew vaguely that it was sort of had a quasi religious tone to it. And so it had that significance. In a way. It's interesting because Nietzsche, right, in some ways it's sort of a parody of the Bible and other religious texts. It's written as a religious text in that style and with lots of allusions. And in a way, I grew up having this sort of reverence for it and also being terrified of ever trying to tackle it. Just reading the beginning of it, it's immediately intimidating. And also it's like, oh, God,

3:41 Dylan: yes, you have both those experiences, don't you?

3:43 Wes: You're like tightrope walker. And the symbolism. Like, I'm not interested in allegory. But as you get into it, it becomes pretty much the Nietzsche that you're used to. Plus the additive of the sort of manic religious stuff. But still the same sort of aphoristic stuff is going on, and it's great. And if you can just relate it back to other stuff you've read in Nietzsche, then you can make sense of it. So I was pleasantly surprised by how interpretable it ended up being.

4:14 Mark: So I like the style. I especially like the beginning, just getting it off the ground. So it's telling this story in the prologue, when he was 30 years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. So he's there for 10 years, and then he decides to go back to the world and preach the wisdom that he's gained in the cave. So it's this very. It's, you know, to me, it's kind of like reading Lord of the Rings. Like, it's something that I read before

4:39 Wes: I thought of the Silmarillion, actually.

4:41 Mark: Yeah, sure.

4:42 Wes: Which is sort of Tolkien's Bible.

4:44 Mark: Yeah, I'm kind of used to surrendering myself to the style when encountered by this sort of thing and not maybe thinking so hard about the individual sentences which we assigned ourselves. We're going to spend two episodes on this. It's four books. They were published independently originally in succession. So we assigned ourselves the first two here. So it's about 140 pages, about 20 sections, plus the prologue, which is another seven or eight sections. And the section is not necessarily one aphorism. It's probably a couple pages, but we could definitely fill a whole episode.

Just talking about, you know, like Jesus's parables, where we picked four of them and just concentrated on that for the whole episode. Like, we could easily do that here. And I think it was just. I felt like I want to read the whole book, whether we get around talking about a lot of it or not. Luckily, he does pack a lot of the good stuff right near the beginning. So we will. We can talk about the Overman, the Ubermensch, right away. The Last man, which was important for that. That by itself, which comes up in the prologue, is giving us some kind of outline of what he thinks the point of philosophy is the point of wisdom.

The goal of virtue is to overcome human nature, Something like that. Overcome yourself, overcome your society.

5:56 Wes: Should we say who Zarathustra is? See, Zarathustra is really Nietzsche, by the way, just to give it away.

6:02 Seth: Spoiler alert.

6:03 Dylan: But why call himself Zarathustra?

6:05 Wes: But, yeah, why is this Persona. Why is this character called Zarathustra?

6:09 Mark: I did look up the historical Zarathustra, which is the English version, is Zoroaster. And I think it was just because he's one of the oldest philosophers, the oldest religious figures that people still talk about. There's a great difference in what dates they think he was alive, but it's on the order of a couple thousand years, potentially before Plato.

6:30 Seth: I thought it was because he was a Manichaean.

6:32 Mark: Yes. So that's. As the maybe inventor of religion. He was in Iran, the inventor of the thing that eventually evolved into biblical religion and Platonism and European culture and philosophy. He was the one that came up with the idea, according to something Nietzsche wrote somewhere, that good and evil are written into nature. So I guess Nietzsche thought that since he was the guy that came up with that tremendous mistake, he should be the guy who would be wise enough to figure it out and fix it in his later teachings to get us back to an earthly existence that is more honest.

7:07 Wes: Yeah. Apparently Nietzsche had a friend who was a Persian studies scholar. I think I'm remembering this vaguely from one of the secondary sources. And he also was a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And in his edition of the German translation of Emerson's essays, there's an essay called the Oversoul. And there's a sentence about Zoroaster in that essay. And Nietzsche writes in the margin of that, das ist es. That's it. So that seems to be part of the germ of the idea for this. Zarathustra is going to be a representative of the first esteemer, let's say the first creator of values. And where it all starts to go wrong. And this is a revisionist history in which Zarathustra comes to his senses and undergoes this journey, or refers to a kind of spiritual journey that in a lot of ways very clearly mirrors Nietzsche's own intellectual journey.

8:01 Dylan: Just in terms of comments about the book itself. What is being said rather than how it's being said is what we'll do. But it doesn't seem incidental that it's written the way it is to what he's trying to do. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. I don't have an interpretation of it, how it's working. But the style isn't just incidental. Oh, I happen to write it this way. If you read later works of his like Ecce Homo and other things that refer to this, he considers it to be the most important thing that he wrote, at least his own self, understanding why it might be important that it's written the way it is and not just merely rhetorical, not just for atmospheric sake. It seems like it is important.

8:46 Wes: We've seen what Nietzsche has done in our previous episodes on various of his works, including the Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols. We've seen the basic gist of things, which is that he's giving us this critique of morality, specifically Judeo, Christian and Western morals, the morals he associates with European society of the time. His style obviously is not typical of philosophers. It's not scholarly and it's somewhat overwrought and it's great. This is something that is even more overwrought and it's different. It's not just critique.

I mean, a lot of what's in here is just a repetition of the critiques that he's given that we've read before in a different way. But there's also this positive element. And I think the critical thing here is traditionally the esteem ers, the people who are the value creators have been the priests, or it's been done culturally by way of religious texts or philosophers

9:42 Dylan: that become religified to the Platonists.

9:44 Wes: Right. I mean, yeah, the value creation is everywhere. It's not just in religion, but the paradigmatic, most powerful case is the case of the religious text. In the same way that he's taking Zarathustra as this proto value creator, as the original. And so, yeah, it makes sense. If he's going to do a allegorical or fictional project, which he's advocating value creation, ultimately it makes sense to do it as a religious text.

10:11 Dylan: In that act of value creation, there's something about it that doesn't admit of a treatise, both in rhetorical effect or in instantiation. It's like trying to talk about why Plato wrote in dialogues. It's not incidental, but it's also hard to articulate.

10:27 Mark: Yeah, I was trying to look at that in particular in the stylistic aspects and the fact that he not only says things, but he says them often to an audience. And you can see how the audience reacts. And sometimes Zarathustra kind of rethinks what he was saying based on the way the audience reacts or changes his views through the book a little bit. Not just because what he says here is inconsistent with what he says later, but he specifically says, like, okay, now I'm going to go and preach to the people. I love the people. Oh, now I'm kind of tired of myself.

He has these self descriptions. I was trying not to just see this as a literary version of what I've read elsewhere, although a lot of that is that. But the basic new element that I saw here is this detailed picture of the journey of the spirit, which is certainly related to the journey toward the overman, overcoming yourself. But just as a philosopher, your patterns of energy, what energy you get out of other people you're talking to, versus when you have to go, be by yourself, how you overcome yourself, how you want your followers to react to you.

Just all these dynamics of being a philosopher and being ensconced in your own thoughts and how that carries forward over time.

11:37 Dylan: Zarathustra is changing, actually, from book to book. He's on a journey in the story that's worth paying attention to.

11:45 Seth: The thing that I feel like Dylan can't quite put his finger on, and that I didn't feel was sufficiently addressed in the Kaufman attempt to systematize Nietzsche via Zarathustra, or the will to power anyway, is the idea of creativity. So the will to power, ultimately is an act of creativity. As opposed to the will to truth. Many other expressions of the will which are reactive. And Zarathustra represents an artistic creation more so than anything else he did, which is reacting to and commenting. What's desperately needed is an annotated version of this that explains.

When he says like of the sages, of the truth seekers, of the priests who he's talking about, he, I think thought this was his most important work because it was his most creative. And there's a sense in which when you get to the end of the second book and Zarathustra lays down his wand and gives in, he's a wizard. His staff, whatever his staff, the point is he throws in the towel and says, I just wasn't up to the task. I think it's a reflection on Nietzsche thinking I wasn't up to the task of creating the way I needed to create. I couldn't create values, I could only will to truth or whatever.

But. All right, let's get started.

13:00 Wes: Should we start from the beginning? Yeah. I think it's important to keep in mind will to power means a lot of things because it's at the basis of everything for him psychologically. But the sense that he wants to endorse ultimately is one associated with what we saw in Twilight of the Idols as spiritualization of instinct. Right. Not just to repress instincts, but to give them their due and to actually incorporate them into the spiritual. Not to create this opposition between the spiritual and the instinctual or the bodily. I think of that as sublimation, which is ultimately this creative act. Although in this case it's not just any sort of artistic activity. Although in a more mundane sense it could be that. But it is value creation and self creation, creation of one's own particular virtues, for instance. Some of that should emerge in more detail as we read this.

13:52 Mark: This is his creative project and he's talking about the dynamics of creativity. I didn't feel like he was also chiefly talking about the producing of this book of this character lauding himself or his failures as he's going. It seemed extremely self referential in that sense to me.

14:09 Wes: He starts out talking about Zarathustra going under, having to come down from the mountain to share his wisdom after being over full with that ever turned to

14:18 Dylan: the cave going down to the Piraeus.

14:20 Wes: Yeah, exactly. You can see Nietzsche thinking about himself autobiographically. It's so thin. I was a professor of philosophy and now I'm not. Some of his talk about scholars is a veiled reference to all that I used to be among the scholars, and they didn't think I was good enough. They hated Birth of Tragedy. And then I went out on my own and lived on a pension. And none of that, he says, obviously. But it's all there underneath the allegory.

14:47 Mark: Dylan, you just used Plato's cave allegory so we could just read the beginning and see how he inverts that. When Zarathustra was 30 years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit in his solitude, and for 10 years did not tire of it. But at last a change came over his heart, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun and spoke to it. Great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine? For 10 years you have climbed to my cave. You would have tired of your light and of your journey, had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent.

But we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you and blessed you for it. Behold, I am weary of my wisdom. Like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands outstretched to receive it I would give away and distribute until the wise among men find joy once again in their folly and the poor in their riches. For that I must descend to the depths, as you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld. You overrich star. Like you, I must go under, go down, as it is said by man to whom I wanted to send.

So bless me then, you quiet eye that can look even upon an all too great happiness without envy. Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the water may flow from it golden and carry everywhere the reflection of your delight. Behold, this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become man again. Thus Zarathustra began to go under. So he's actually leaving the cave, even though, in Plato's metaphor, he'd be going back into the cave. But literally, he actually gained enlightenment in a cave.

16:14 Seth: Well, but he's not in a cave. He's at the top of the mountain.

16:17 Wes: It's both.

16:18 Dylan: Yeah, he's living in a cave out there, but he's speaking to the sun.

16:21 Seth: He's living in a cave on the top of a mountain that gets a lot of sunlight, which really means it's not a cave.

16:27 Wes: It's a very spacious cave in a good neighborhood, good sun, three, two, cave walk up.

16:39 Mark: And we also get the picture there of what virtue is about for him, in some ways, is overfulness that is forever. If you're wondering, like, oh, is Ayn Rand right? Is it about selfishness or something? Well, sort of. He talks about this specifically later, but it's a special kind of selfishness. It is overfullness that then enables you to give and give and give and in fact of relief to give and give and give. So it's neither pure selfishness, but neither is it pure altruism. Like you're not just giving until you're an empty husk, you're giving out of your fullness. And that's how wisdom and joy and all that should work. Ideally, hopefully you're healthy enough to pull that off. That's the trick.

17:15 Dylan: But you're a continual source in that respect, your continual fountain of spirit.

17:21 Wes: Also, the giving is not sacrificial and therefore it doesn't create a debt on the part of the person who is given to. That's one of the normal problems of giving. If you're not over full and it's not done by virtue of commandment, it's not giving because you're altruistic and must love thy neighbor. It's something that can be done freely. Yep, that's the importance of this overfullness. Having something that is just, you're going to naturally want to share.

17:46 Dylan: But in that respect, especially after having read the first two books, if he's at that point of being overfull, you would think that he's already become the overman. And why would he need to go descend again?

18:00 Seth: Well, he hasn't overcome. He has wisdom, he's over full, but he hasn't overcome. Let's not overlook the metaphors. He's up on the mountain, in solitude, isolated, ascetic, and he needs hands outstretched to receive the wisdom, the solitary, the few who are willing to brave the privation in order to be able to inform the many already. In here is inherent the power dynamic of the ascetic or the spiritual, the prophetic. And this notion that he's going to very explicitly talk about later of the many, the unwashed, great souls. And there's great souls and then there's the rest of us who are just desperate looking around for somebody to just shower me in their overfulness.

18:50 Wes: Wow, sorry. The great souls, great men are also not overman. Nietzsche's not an overman. Zarathustra is not an overman. The great souls are his audience and Zarathustra's audience. And he's trying to spur people onto the project of creating the overman, which who knows exactly what that means? Is that moral reform by way of influence of these ideas, or is it something that takes generations of breeding or. It's unclear, but there's a lot of work to be done between Zarathustra and the Overman. I think Zarathustra calls himself a bridge to the Overman, and he must go under in order to get the over.

19:28 Mark: Yeah, we're about to get to the Overman in section three of the Prelude here. Just briefly, I would skip over section two, except he throws at the very end of it, God is dead. I guess it was in the gay science as well, but just throwing that in here. So he's coming down from the mountain, he meets a saint. It sounds like the saint is the same kind of person that he was being. Right.

19:46 Seth: Wait, a saint or a hermit?

19:48 Wes: Both.

19:49 Mark: Yeah.

19:50 Dylan: Yes.

19:51 Seth: Oh, okay.

19:52 Wes: He calls them both.

19:53 Mark: Yeah, they use both interchangeably here.

19:55 Seth: Yep.

19:55 Mark: And it's kind of like, why would you go back into the world and Zarathustra says, I love man, and the hermit says, love of man would kill me because man is too imperfect a thing. I love God instead. So that's maybe why you would want to go and be by yourself, because there is some sort of transcendent reality God that you could connect with. And Zarathustra doesn't disillusion him. He doesn't tell him God is dead. There is no God. In fact, he says he bade the saint farewell. Said, what could I have to give you? Let me go quickly, lest I take something from you.

So he's respecting that. The saint is in his ascetic mode right now, and maybe that's all he's ever going to be. He's going to just be ascetic, communing with his God. But for somebody who realizes, who has heard that God is dead, you can't really do that forever. Like, that would be, in essence, embracing nihilism. That would be an escape from actual life.

20:49 Dylan: He wonders to himself, could it be possible this old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this? That God is dead? Maybe not a question mark at the end.

20:58 Seth: Yeah.

20:58 Wes: If God weren't dead, there'd be nothing for Zarathustra to do here.

21:01 Dylan: Yeah. And he's kind of wondering, how is it that he doesn't get this?

21:05 Wes: Yeah, the saint is the foil here and is the status quo.

21:09 Mark: And having dropped that, he doesn't. Then in the next section, elaborate why God is dead or what that means. That God is dead. Like, I know he's Kind of referencing something that's in a previous book. But that's not the point here. You don't argue for something like that. It's just that the age of religion, where religion is tenable, has kind of passed. And if you are awake and aware and not off in a forest somewhere, then you would kind of realize the call of the earth, let's say.

21:36 Wes: In other words, the word he'll use a lot in this book is weariness. But the synonym would be nihilism has taken root. People no longer believe as widely and as strongly as would be required to make life meaningful to stave off the problem of nihilism.

21:52 Dylan: So in that way, it's a double badness, right? You have the badness of being a mere herd animal and following.

21:59 Mark: Right.

21:59 Dylan: But then you have the problem of nihilism when you're not creating that value yourself, but you're merely acting as a cow, following around with it. That it becomes clear that as God dies, then you are faced with nihilism and nothing to replace it, because you're not actually actively creating your own value.

22:20 Seth: Well, I think there's also something even less abstruse at work at this. In that same section, he says, and what is the saint doing in the forest? Asked Zarathustra. The saint answered, I make songs and sing them. And when I make songs, I laugh, I cry, and I hum. Thus I praise God with singing, crying, laughing and humming. I praise the God who is my God. But what do you bring us as a gift? And Zarathustra, when he had heard these words, bade the saint farewell and said, what could I have to give you? But let me go quickly, lest I take something from you. The idea that if God had not died, then the saint would not be in the forest, the saint would be bringing the good Word to the people. Although he lionizes the aesthetic. And it's just one of the many things that's frustrating and infuriating about this text. He goes from one to the other in terms of his valuation of things.

23:15 Mark: So were you trying to say aesthetic or ascetic? I'm just trying to understand, is he lionizing the aesthetic here, or is he lionizing the aesthetic, the singing, the ascetic.

23:25 Seth: Okay, sorry, did I misspeak?

23:27 Mark: Yeah, but he does both, so it's worth.

23:31 Seth: I'm focusing on the idea of asceticism, where the saint is in the forest. Instead of bringing the Word of God to man, instead of bringing the Good Word and trying to change people's souls, he's Lionizing God at man's expense is an indication that God is dead. That's why Zarathustra says, oh, God. Sorry, that pun was not intended. He's like, oh, man, I gotta get out of here.

23:53 Wes: Jesus.

23:56 Seth: Yeah, I gotta get out of here.

23:58 Wes: Because it's the Mel Brooks version of.

24:02 Seth: Yeah, Stand up, philosopher. So does somebody else want to read

24:09 Mark: the Overman parts of section three here?

24:12 Wes: Okay. When Zarathustra came into the next town, which lies on the edge of the forest, he found many people gathered together in the marketplace, for it had been promised that there would be a tightrope walker. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. And do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment? And man shall be just that for the Overman, a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.

24:52 Mark: The next sentence is great.

24:53 Wes: Keep going.

24:53 Mark: A little more.

24:54 Wes: All right. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too. Man is more ape than any ape. Behold, I teach you the Overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say, the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth. I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes. This is the kind of stuff, right, we're used to seeing in Nietzsche. He's giving a critique of Christian and other sorts of values that laud a heaven or a thing in itself, this unknown thing that is not of this world and the earth will be representative of the empirical and of the self in a more embodied sense and the instinctual, and so on and so on, and then down a little bit.

Once the sin against God was the greatest sin. But God died and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth. Again, the whole metaphysical apparatus that comes with religion and philosophy and associated systems of value, things in themselves God, substantial souls, these things that are not objects of empirical experience but become the objects of esteem for the religious and philosophical. That now is the sin for Zarathustra.

26:19 Mark: I like again how he just throws in, oh, but God died, and these sinners died with it. And he doesn't bring this up anymore. And this was making me remember. So I just pulled up the quote, I'm not going to read the whole thing. But in the Gay Science, where it's the madman, this is like he's figuring out the style he's going to use in Zarathustra. In this one little part of the Gay Science, there's a madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours and ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, I seek God. People ask, is he God, lost? Did he lose his way like a child?

Is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? And the madman says, wither is God. He cried, I will tell you, we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. And goes on, you know, how did we do this? So there's another four paragraphs there that kind of explain what this is about. It just seems weird in a literary form that he's just kind of assuming that you already read Gay Science and can unpack this already.

27:09 Dylan: He tells you later that you have to have read all of his books carefully in order. In order to understand them.

27:15 Wes: Yeah. Ecce Homo says, what's the problem? Just, you know, read all my other stuff, then read Zarathustra. Yeah.

27:22 Dylan: Appropriately, carefully. And putting all the time. Yep.

27:26 Mark: So, yeah, it's shocking enough when you read it in the Gay Science, but if this was your introduction to Nietzsche and it's just, oh, yeah, God's dead. Hadn't you heard? God's dead. Okay, let's move on. I can imagine that would be unsatisfying to someone who actually cares about the topic, who is a stake in God not being dead.

27:41 Dylan: Let's say I have to put myself a little bit purposefully in the time to feel something, like the strength of it. Or maybe put myself in a different kind of community where saying that God is dead and writing those words down would by some significant numbers of people be considered blasphemous in a way that would significantly rile them up.

28:03 Mark: Have we gotten the point of section three here? Oh, this wretched contentment. So he's kind of already getting to the last man idea. He doesn't. I don't think he used that word quite yet. At the bottom of page 13 here, the hour, when you say, what matters my happiness? Is it poverty and filth and wretched contentment? But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.

28:21 Seth: It's a catalog. What is the greatest experience that you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt And I say, well, what matters? My happiness? It ought to justify existence. What matters reason? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. What about virtue? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. What about justice, flames and fuel? What about pity? Pity is the cross on which he is nailed who loves man. Pity is no crucifixion. Have you spoken thus? Have you cried thus? Have you recognized that all of these things do not satisfy the desires that they claim to satisfy? There is no justice, there is no happiness. Your reason cannot elevate you, your virtue cannot save you.

29:05 Wes: Yeah, these are all historical attempts at creating standards of valuation. How do I determine what is ethical? I use my happiness as my guide point. Whether I mean that in an Aristotelian sense or mean that in a utilitarian sense, say, yes, human rationality. Reason is critical in understanding what is good, and so on and so forth. Some people obviously, and I think this is very popular today, they mistake their pity for what is ethical. And Nietzsche is enormous critic of that. So, yeah, he's telling us these various standards evaluation don't work. And that's. These are corollaries to the idea that to say God is dead is to say that God no longer really performs that function of undergirding a certain system of values.

29:49 Mark: So he's appealing. What does your body proclaim of your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and wretched contentment? I'm just trying to get, you know, what kind of ethical argumentation is he engaging in? And I think it's more, you know, you think that these standards of value that have been foisted upon you in the past are, you know, self evident truths or based on something objective in nature or something like that. And if you really look on what you really want, what your body proclaims of your soul, the greatest experience you can have is the contempt for these things.

I'm seeing this as a, the hour of your contempt. It's not necessarily that I want you to just reject all these things and say, screw happiness, screw reason. Like, no, these will all end up actually being goods. It's just they're not the unconditional goods that you might have thought they are. They are not categorical imperatives, they are hypothetical imperatives. And because there is ought distinction, what you want is not necessitated by the state of the universe, then you can experience an hour of great contempt. And that is one of the ways you can overcome these past virtues in quotes, to think for yourself more thoroughly to and think from your Body.

31:07 Wes: We know that there is a standard of valuation that he endorses. And we saw this in various texts, including the Twilight of the Idols. And that is life. Life is the thing, and that includes the body and instinct. Ultimately, that is the value creator. And we can only buck that trend for so long, which is what something like Christianity tries to do. Ultimately, it contains the seeds of nihilism. Even though it's a solution to nihilism, it's a temporary one because it never truly overcomes it. It's sort of predicated upon it.

31:38 Seth: He says earlier in the same section, beware, do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes. Despisers of life are they? And then what you get is, okay, what have the despisers of life offered you? Oh, happiness. Happiness is your greatest value. Reason is the path. Virtue, justice, pity, all of these things are otherworldly and they're presented by people who despise life, who despise the body, the embodied experience of life that Zarathustra is ultimately trying to promote.

32:14 Wes: I don't know if you remember from Twilight of the Idols where he says happiness equals instinct. He's being critical of happiness and reason and virtue as these things which are basically anti instinct, as basically these horrible repressions of the instinctual, which is something he associates with life.

32:32 Dylan: This makes me think of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.

32:36 Wes: Jeff Goldblum's character, life will find a

32:38 Dylan: way, life will find a way.

32:41 Mark: He can't be universally saying virtue is bad or something like that. It's virtue as foisted upon you by these despisers of life. Like, he's going to want to use the term virtue. He's going to want to use the term happiness, just like what you just quoted their west, that happiness can equal what the body wants, basically. But what has been described by the utilitarian, for instance, might not ultimately be the thing that upon deeper reflection you will find that you want, and I would say even life itself, just to look forward. I had a lot of trouble with these songs in book two, and there's one called the dancing song.

It's number seven in book two. So this is 108 pages in which he's talking about what is life. And he's singing to life deeply, I love life. And verily, most of all, when I hate life, life is telling him, you will, you want, you love. That is the only reason why you praise life. I bring this up now because this notion of the overman and the moment of contempt, this is something That I got out of this text that I did not see as clearly in other Nietzsche texts, that really any standard, even the standard of life itself, like this is kind of his is not a really a bedrock.

Like you can't become a health nut or something based on this. I don't know. It's. That's why virtue becomes so individualized for Nietzsche, because there's a lot of parts where he says you have to risk life. Like that's part of it. If you really love life so much, it doesn't seem like you would risk it. Some places where he makes it clear that the pursuit of health by itself, like if you become a health nut, if you diet and exercise all the time. This is. I think we discussed in our gay science episode that that would not necessarily be pursuit of life in the way he has in mind.

It's a very slippery thing, this life.

34:19 Wes: So this idea of despising life, he loves life most of all when he hates life. So, right, life is reproductive or it's a becoming. And there's always that element of destruction and incorporation and will to power and domination. That's what life is. And so to hate it, to want to overcome some previous form of life is really just what it means to love it, which is to say, to procreate, you destroy in order to create. I'm not so certain that life isn't still a bedrock in this for Nietzsche, but maybe it's just a matter of what we mean by life.

34:54 Mark: Ultimately, you could say the word virtue. You know that here he's saying reject virtue. But of course, he's a virtue ethicist. And so in specific places he could say, hate life is a good thing. Even though, you know, 99% of the time he says hating life is the definition of vice. But if you identify life as a particular mode of life and overcoming means overcoming that mode of life, then, well, in that sense you've changed the definition of life for that context.

35:19 Wes: Well, hating life there is context dependent. You know, hating life for the ascetic or the priest is not the same as what he means by hating life. There it's hating life in the good sense of hating life.

35:30 Dylan: You have to hold in the idea of life with living as an activity. When we were using words like becoming or overcoming of progression of growing. And west said procreating, you have to hold that in when you say life is the bedrock, is the value creator. When you have, say in someone like a health nut, they're not having life be an activity in that respect they're making it precious in a way that denies it its activity. Put it in a gilded cage kind of thing.

36:01 Wes: He will say that despisers of the body despise it out of too much respect for the body. The idea is that the despising of the body, that valuation, actually ultimately comes from the body, as everything comes from the body. And so, paradoxically, it's a sign of respect for the body, but too much respect in the sense that it collapses back into the body. It doesn't go higher. To use a metaphor that he often uses, it doesn't create beyond itself. And if you don't create beyond yourself, you want to go under.

36:30 Dylan: Mark mentioned virtue ethics, but there's a sense of the capability of becoming more than you were before. This is sort of a trivial example, but of just training, right? You're hating life in the sense that it's a struggle to be at your limit, to be pushing as hard as you can in whatever activity you're doing. But it's only out of that straining that you actually become more than you were before.

36:54 Mark: The next two sections here in the prologue are going to lay that out on section four. This is like his version of. Well, Burnham Secondary Source is saying this is his version of the Sermon on the Mount. It's a list of I love those who. Blah, blah, blah. I love him who makes his virtue, his addiction. I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. I love him. Him whose soul squanders itself.

37:15 Seth: Blessed are the cheese makers.

37:18 Dylan: But set it up at the beginning, this idea, because we said earlier that Zarathustra was in between as well. So Zarathustra, however, beheld the people and was amazed. And he spoke thus. Man is a rope tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss, a dangerous across, a dangerous on the way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. What can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

37:51 Mark: And it seems like this list is not outlining what the Ubermensch is. It's outlining people who are making some step in the right direction. I love those who do not know how to live except by going under, for they are those who cross over. I love the great despisers because they are the great reverers and arrows of longing for the other shore everywhere else in here. He does not like despisers. Being a despiser of life is again one of the chief errors here. But if you're a despiser, that means at least there's some form of life that you are pushing forward and overcoming or wanting to overcome. And maybe the error is that you then just stay a despiser, that you need to get moving. You need to have the hour of your despising and then get past it.

38:37 Wes: Do we have an idea of what going under?

38:39 Dylan: I was just going to ask that.

38:40 Wes: What do we think going under is so far?

38:43 Mark: Yeah. He talks about a lot about sacrifice in here. I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none. For he always gives away and does not want to preserve himself. It says at the very beginning that he's up in his mountain and he decides, I need to give my wisdom to the people. And he goes under. It's somehow giving out of your fullness, lowering yourself to actual social interaction. It seems like it's an abstraction of a bunch of different things count as going under. Like that's one of them. But what do you think?

39:14 Wes: I think, you know, everything you said is right. I feel like I still don't fully grasp all the connotations. There's something about the sacrifice of the current iteration of humanity. And on behalf of the next iteration. The one thing about having a set of Judeo Christian values or being a serious philosophical scholar or something like that, you have something that gives meaning to your life and you cling to that. That is you not creating room for the next step. You are basically an impediment. And to go under is to realize that you have to give all of that up, even if you don't really.

For you yourself have a way of defining something, something meaningful that makes life worth living. Except that you are making way for the next iteration of humanity, making way for the overman. The overman becomes the meaning of life, so to speak. Not God, not this or that. And in that sense you sacrifice yourself. You can't get the same sort of satisfaction from the idea of the overman. I think that you would get from. Or wretched contentment, as he calls it, that you would get from religion or something more static like that.

40:25 Seth: Trying to get back to my kind of intro point that it's because those things are given to you, you're not creating something for yourself. It's more complicated, obviously, in the sense that you may reject the things that are given, but not be able to create something out of yourself. But ultimately that's why I think this notion of value creation and with the emphasis on creation not on value, is what's really important, the going under to

40:54 Dylan: me is related to that, that I thought of going under as a kind of submission where you would be giving up the COVID the structure, as Wes was talking about it, say, of a Judeo Christian world, submitting yourself to the world itself and the environment as a kind of source. And then that is being a environment, a place where you can be a value creator.

41:21 Wes: Going under is like the step of destroying the previous set of values. So, yes, like commentators make, much of the fact that the German word that's being translated here is going under, which also means the setting of the sun, also means to perish or to die. So it's an act of creation, but it's also an act of self destruction for the sake of creation.

41:43 Dylan: Yeah, so that's a little different than what I was describing.

41:45 Wes: Right.

41:45 Dylan: That what I was describing is the kind of submission would come after that kind of thing.

41:50 Wes: Right.

41:51 Dylan: If going under is that act of destruction, that is at least concurrent, if not actually preceding the act of creation, that makes more sense.

42:02 Seth: What's the metaphor here? I mean, if we're going to take Nietzsche seriously and his aphoristic style in this book, the notion of going under. Going under, what?

42:12 Mark: So according to Burnham, right from the beginning, he's talking about the sun. And so the sun goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. So going under is just part of the cycle that moves you forward. And I think that's clearly part of it. But I even liked what Dylan was saying about the fact that he's talking about Nietzsche as deigning to share his wisdom with the world. It does mean to some extent, submitting to the critical appraisal of others, of these very imperfect people. You know, there's something pure when your thought is just for you, when you're up on your mountaintop spinning your webs or whatever.

But for it to actually connect to other people, the social thing necessarily involves a dissent. He ultimately says, I am writing for it's a book for all and none. So it's. It's for everyone. In that sense, he's lowering himself. But maybe nobody will understand it. Maybe it's only the philosophers of the future, which is the term that he uses in later books instead of Overman, like this Overman thing disappears. I'm not sure whether he is by writing, we like to think of virtue for Nietzsche, as you're over full. Wes was saying that when you help other people through your overfulness, it's not a sacrifice on your part.

You're Just letting some of this overfullness out. In fact, maybe it's good for you. But this whole talk here about sacrifice and, and destroying yourself to make way to the overman. I think maybe there's kind of a double edged sword if you think of the artist as the hero. Yes, he does create out of overfullness. And strictly speaking, making a symphony does not hollow you out. That, oh, I had that symphony in my head and now it's out in the world. So it's not in my head like, but also in a way that you are, you do end up sacrificing. Certainly Nietzsche would write until he had terrible headaches and you know, he sacrificed himself very literally for his art.

43:59 Wes: I would think about Zarathustra's parallel role to Nietzsche who's trying to communicate with people, right? And like Zarathustra is being rejected and ignored at this point and only becomes famous, you know, right after he goes insane. Can't know that he's reached people. But I think a going under reflects the ability to accept those critiques, accept the destruction of these sets of values which are so important to people. There's a real sacrifice there to be made by anyone who wants to understand this stuff. It can be enormously anxiety producing, you know, and it doesn't have to be, oh, I'm a Christian.

It could, you know, his critique of morality and moralism. I think if you unpacked it, if more people were aware of it, broadly right, Apart from the vague associations between Nietzsche and the Third Reich, that people. I think that's still part of the public imagination. If they seriously understood his critique, I think a lot of people would be extremely threatened by it. The ability to go under, the ability to accept the destruction of the old standards of value in making way for the new standards.

45:10 Mark: Let's get section five here. This is the he gets the last man really important concept right here still in the prologue. So page 17.

45:19 Dylan: Let me then address their pride. Let me speak to them of what is most contemptible. But that is the last man. And thus Zarathustra spoke to the people. The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated and no tall tree will be able to grow in it. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of, of his longing beyond man and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir I say unto you, one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you, you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming. He that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.

46:16 Wes: One of the things he seems to emphasize in this section, this inability to be able to despise oneself. At some point he says, the last man is proud because of education. And he talks about their mockery, their derision, their cleverness, the idea that they know everything, their desire to make everything small. I associate this with people who are sort of proudly cynical, proudly nihilistic, and treat the crisis of nihilism as if it were nothing and secretly, covertly, right. They have their own ways of dealing with it and their own sets of values that Nietzsche will critique as well, right?

So someone might retreat into atheism or into scientism and make those sorts of things their gods in some sense and reassure themselves of all that stuff. So they're no longer in that sort of Christian state of self despising, but they're complacent and they don't take the crisis of nihilism seriously. They wouldn't understand Nietzsche's project of saying, oh shit, we have to do something about this.

47:22 Mark: Yeah, this really fills out, you know, when we first read Genealogy of Morals, and of course we understand that the goal is not to be the master, but it still sounds like the master is mostly right as compared to the slave morality, that the master is strong and healthy, there's naturalness about what he values. And the slave, the currently dominant morality, has inverted that naturalness and has become despisers of life. And then we qualify that and say, well, of course we're not advocating going back to being a master because the master is basically dumb and unreflective.

Like we want to incorporate into this artistic Socrates into this what the next step is something that takes the good parts of both sides, but still, the picture that I get of what a virtuous person is out of that is still something that is pretty healthy and stable. Which kind of runs against what I was just saying before about what going under might involve about sacrificing yourself and being the kind of crazily sick artistic creator that Nietzsche himself was. So contrasting the Last Man. Complacency in any form, you know, as soon as you stop self overcoming, then that's bad.

Whether you are the slave morality that is triumphant, which I think is what this last man thing is describing literally. Or even if it's kind of the version of the master morality that has become triumphant and we are so self satisfied with ourselves. None of that would be having internal chaos.

48:49 Seth: Yeah, I don't think it's either. Either. Let's go back to the idea that these people have despised life. By presenting these things which supposedly transcend or overcome, they're devaluing the suffering of life, the experience of life. And what he's saying here is the last man is the one who somehow embraces neither the suffering of life, but also not. The last man is not even embracing some kind of transcendent value that we talked about before.

49:25 Wes: And there's no striving.

49:27 Seth: No, we have invented happiness, says the last man. And they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live. For one needs warmth and one still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him. For one needs warmth. Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them. One proceeds carefully. A little poison now and then that makes for agreeable dreams and much poison in the end for an agreeable death. One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful, lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich. Both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule, who obey. Both require too much exertion. No shepherd in one herd. Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same. Whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. That's not the aesthetic.

50:21 Mark: So this would be a later elaboration of the slave morality that the slave morality itself. The whole reason of describing it in this story in Genealogy of Morals is to say that it actually is an exertion of the will to power. It's just a ressentiment, it's an unhealthy. Whereas these guys, they have gotten beyond that. They're no longer exerting at all.

50:40 Seth: The last man doesn't even have ressentiment, right.

50:44 Wes: The religious person is still right, has transcendent values. And there's still striving, there's still attention. The last man is just comforting themselves with, you know, it's modern society where religion has kind of died. But it's those people for whom meaningless of life is not a problem because they can be comfortable, they can distract themselves with pleasure and being busy and all that other stuff.

51:10 Mark: If you want to just say this describes modern life like we at least ostensibly believe in diversity, that we don't say we want everybody to be the same. That's like a huge thing in our culture, is that, no, everybody is unique. And you might just want to criticize this and say, well, everybody's unique in a very shallow way. Right. That we're all buying. We use uniqueness as a commodity and we're still, you know, being one herd. But the fact is that we don't have in the way, probably the direct subjects of his critique at the time, an official, like the democratic spirit that really does say, no shepherd in one herd in this way, the way we're going to get explicitly into in Brave New World.