Ep. 213: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: Shall we talk about the jester scene and leaping over the tightrope walker and what that's all about?

0:07 Mark: The people are expecting to see a tightrope walker. When he gives his first speech, he describes the Overman. And at the end of that, it says, oh, the tightwalker thought Zarathustra was talking about him. And the audience did, too, like they thought he was actually introducing a literal

0:19 Seth: tightrope walker, not somebody who's metaphorically stretched between beast and overman.

0:24 Mark: Yes.

0:25 Wes: So, yeah, this jester emerges, jumps over the tightrope walker, who then falls down right next to Zarathustra. Or the intimation seems to be that maybe he even jumps.

0:36 Seth: So the tightrope walker is above, stretched between these two towers. And when he's right in the middle, a jester, a motley fool, jumps out of one of the towers and starts running along the tightrope, and he starts mocking the tightrope walker. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Right. Or I'll kick you in the ass. Right. What are you doing here? You should not be out in the middle here. You're blocking the way for one who is better than you. And when he gets close to him, he jumps over him and the tightrope walker. And this is what Nietzsche says. This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope tossed away his pole and plunged into the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs the marketplace became as the sea when a tempest pierces it.

The people rushed apart and over one another, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground. Zarathustra, however, did not move. It was right next to him that the body fell, badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. And while the shattered man recovered consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. What are you doing here? He asked at last. I have long known that the devil would trip me now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent him? By my honor, friend, answered Zarathustra, all of which you speak does not exist.

There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead ever before your body. Fear nothing further. So he's been talking about the last man. The tightrope walker, I suppose, is the last man who's strong, is maybe aware of this abyss over which he stands, but not challenged from one end or the other, simply stands in the middle. And then when he's challenged by this. In my reading, the fool or the Jester is Zarathustra, who's challenging his. Why are you out here in the middle of the rope? You should be either over or under. And he says, ah, I don't know, and just gives up the ghost.

2:42 Wes: I think I would have a different interpretation. The word motley I do associate, given the way it's used elsewhere, with a motley assemblage of values that sort of inform all of us and make us sort of a hodgepodge of different sorts of values that we've inherited. So I think of the jester as the impediment, as the representative of that and maybe even of the last man. Then I would put the tightrope walker as the one who's trying to be a bridge. And that's why Zarathustra seems to have so much affection for him and carries his body for hours.

3:19 Dylan: In fact, when the man looks up him just before he dies, after Zarathustra tells him that his soul will be dead even before his body, he says, if you speak to me the truth, I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meager morsels. By no means, said Zarathustra, you have made danger your vocation. There is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation, and for that, I will bury you with my own hands.

3:50 Mark: So he's not the last man. Definitely not.

3:52 Wes: Yeah. I would see the jester as the last man and the tightrope walker as

3:57 Dylan: an example of man. Right.

4:00 Wes: Someone trying to go under. Or someone trying to be the bridge.

4:02 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly. Especially when Zarathustra says they perished from the danger of his vocation. That sounds like about as much praise as you could get out of Nietzsche.

4:14 Mark: So the conclusion of the prologue is just that. He decides that he needs to talk to disciples, as opposed to just going out in the public square and talking to everyone. He needs to find people that can actually Listen to him not speak to dead people. Like the tightrope walker that he's now been carrying around in the last part of the prologue.

4:33 Wes: Just to mention the symbolism of him beholding an eagle in the sky with a serpent hung around it and associating the eagle with pride and the serpent with wisdom. I think might bear on some things later on.

4:46 Mark: I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day, alas, it loves to fly away. Let my pride then fly with my folly. Yes, the whole thing is him bemoaning that I might be wiser, that I might be wise through and through, like my serpent. So there you go. So the next book one here is on the three metamorphoses, the three metamorphoses of the spirit. I tell you how the spirit becomes a camel, camel, a lion, the lion a child. So what is the path to the overman? How do you intellectually develop? So the camel idea here is that you're taking on difficult tasks.

You're being weighed down like a camel, a lion is. You're able to slay the dragon, that is thou shalt. You're actually able to do the destructive part of the creation of values. And then a child, you have to be innocent in order to actually create new values. You have to kind of wipe from your mind all the stuff that came before and create in an authentic way. So those are the three steps. Take on the difficult philosophical problems. But don't just be a scholar. No, you gotta be destructive and innovator and then get over your own destructiveness and create in an honest way.

5:53 Wes: Yeah. He uses the phrase facing ugly truths as part of the camel stage. So it is more than a typical scholar. It sounds more like something that Nietzsche has been doing and loving those who despise and so on. That all happens before going into the desert and becoming the lion.

6:11 Mark: Yeah. I think the recurrent image to take away from this is the child part of why you would think that you have to sort of regain your innocence in order to be an actual creator.

6:22 Dylan: The phrase when he combines it is why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting. A new beginning. A game, a self propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred yes. And especially those last ones. It's not. I mean, innocence is sort of the classic thing about it. And that would be the openness. But the self propelled wheel, a first movement and a sacred yes. That for the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred yes is needed. The spirit now wills his own will. And he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

6:58 Wes: I think the use of the word game there is really important too, because ultimately playfulness is going to play a big role in what it means to achieve what Nietzsche wants to achieve.

7:08 Dylan: Yeah. And a kind of engagement and an activity within a set of rules, I guess. Structure.

7:16 Wes: Yeah. And also to the extent that Nietzsche is leading us towards a set of values that are an expression of life by way of the sublimation of instinct. So it's not that we just simply revert to the body and revert to instinct, but that something is. Is done with them, that they're spiritualized, which is the word he uses again in the Twilight of the Idols. Yeah, the playfulness, the idea of a game, and also the idea of an aesthetic or artistic relationship to things, I think that is captured in the child and innocence.

7:52 Mark: So I think we can dispense with trying to go chronologically and where appropriate and talk topically. So just since we're bringing up innocence, I wanted to bring up book two, section 12 on immaculate perception is where he talks about innocence and he rails against Kant on aesthetics. So the idea is that we're talking about being an artistic person. And of course, if you remember Kant's take on aesthetics, it's that you want to be a pure perceiver, you appreciate things. He doesn't actually mention Kant here. He brings up innocence in this context.

He says innocence where there is a will to procreate. And he who wants to create beyond himself has the purest will. Where is beauty? Where I must will with all my will, Where I want to love and perish. That an image may not remain a mere image, loving and perishing, that has rhyme for eternities. The will to love that is to be willing also to die. Thus I speak to you cowards. So we're going to have cowardice be strangely the opposite of innocence. Going through here. That to be an actual creator. Sort of the child phase of this. You're not really getting rid of the lion and the camel part, just like you wouldn't want us to revert to the master morality.

He's not actually asking us to revert to childlike behavior. It's you're innocent in purifying your will in a certain way so that you want to procreate. And that's what beauty is about. Beauty is not about desireless contemplation of an object or something. It is about getting yourself in there to be willing to die for your Creation.

9:21 Wes: Even so, in the gay science, we saw him elaborate a Schopenhauerian idea. Schopenhauer, part of his idea of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judgment pivots off of Kant. And so it's a withdrawal, right from desire, from that form of willing. But with music we saw that in a weird way, there can be an aesthetic experience which harnesses the will. And that that's our only way of having contact with things in themselves, with the world as it is beyond mere representation, is through willing. And in the gay science, Nietzsche will talk about what he calls goodwill to appearance.

So this idea that aesthetic experience can be not just a retreat from will, but can involve willing. And I think that's really important. This goes back to what Seth was saying about will to power ultimately being this creative and unifying thing. The will should play a critical role in aesthetic experience and in creativity and in our experience of beauty. This section I thought was really important because this distinction between the moon's leering contemplation from afar, pure perceivers. As opposed to what?

10:34 Mark: As opposed to putting some stake in the game, embracing some risk in your creation, even in your appreciation of beauty, that you're extending yourself somehow.

10:41 Wes: Beauty is where I must will with all my will. So, yeah.

10:45 Mark: So does it seem accurate characterization of really these first two books almost in their entirety is that there are a few positive things like the will to power we can talk about, but a lot of it is just critiques of various groups. And so some of the positive stuff he does have to say has to do with why he thinks scholars are screwed up, why he thinks in this next section here, page 28, on the teachers of virtue, on the despisers of life, on the Kantians, on the et cetera. So it's a little repetitive, though, very fruitful. And even when he's talking about the same topic in multiple places, it to me seems ideally you'd want to read it all. I would recommend to the listener, because we're not going to talk about it all.

11:26 Seth: If we're going to take seriously his aphoristic style, and if we're going to take seriously that his claim that this was his most important work. And if we're going to take seriously all the secondary literature that's been written about it and all that, to say that the first two books are predominantly just weird, alliterative, semi veiled criticism of various points of view, I think does them a disservice. Although to be fair, you know, every time I read one of these sections on the teachers of Virtue on the afterworldly, on the despisers of the body.

You know, I kept trying to figure out, okay, well, who is he going after in this one? Right. But the style of Zarathustra was introduced to somebody who was supposed to know this or supposed to know that or supposed to be good at this or supposed to be that or Zarathustra spoke of the people who claimed this. I mean, mindful of the fact that stylistically he's trying to. This is supposed to be somewhat biblical, but also, I suppose he's also paying tribute in a weird way or in an obtuse way to Socrates and Plato's dialogues, that it's not simply that he's setting up straw men in order to knock them down in some sort of systematic negation of all these different things.

It's that this is rhetorically trying to build up. I kept thinking of this. He talks about himself as a poet in parts of this. And I thought of Mark, you had mentioned, like, maybe with Sartre on literature. I'm talking about Heidegger on poetry is like, Heidegger is the worst kind of poet. He's the worst poet. And Nietzsche's not much of a poet here. He's an. What he's doing is not poetry, but he's trying to use a certain kind of aphoristic style to make you question these various figures to lead up to the point he's trying to make. It's that I can't show you the way.

It's kind of like a Zen koan, right? I can't make you enlightened. I have to just keep beating you about the head and shoulders and slapping you in the back of the neck. If you're the right kind of person, you'll eventually transcend. You'll eventually gain enlightenment. That's what this feels like to me.

13:43 Wes: Yeah. I mean, to me, it feels like these are pretty in keeping with many of the aphorisms we've seen before and the same targets of critique. So in the teachers of virtues, he's basically saying that virtues in the pejorative sense as they've been understood, are sort of an opiate for bad conscience. And then in the afterworldly, he's going to rail against truth or an approach to values and the being that is oriented towards this disembodied, heavenly other world. And he wants to see valuation rooted in a creating and willing, valuing body and earth, let's say, which is something he associates with the body.

So we get that same sort of picture. Cashed out in these various ways. And then there are lots of substantive assertions. So for instance, on friendship, which I think maybe that's one of the ones, we should talk about friendship requiring an enemy, A paradoxical way of understanding friendship in this agonistic way where we recognize the enemy and the other and we're a good enemy to them and so on. You know, I would pick the next one if we're going to discuss only a few of these on the new idol, because I think this is one of those places. It interests me because I see it as an anti nationalist rant, basically where he's talking about the state.

It gives you an idea of how broad his critique is. It's not just Christianity per se, but it's people who. Their slave morality takes the form of the idolization of the state as equivalent to a people as in a folk or Volk.

15:16 Mark: Yeah, I think this is a good strategy to kind of characterize what are the main topics of these various critiques and read a few samples of those and then see what positive we can get out of it from the sections about poetry, about self overcoming, et cetera. But let's get some of this negative stuff out. So that one against the state is great.

15:32 Wes: Yeah, like I said, an anti nationalist rant. The idea of using the state as one's idol, as one's way out of contemporary nihilism and a replacement for religion. And then he gives a kind of analytical description of the way in which it's presented as a means to life, something that gives meaning to life. And it's basically through status, Whether the status comes from military honors, whether it comes from identification with the accomplishments of one's highest cultural representatives, great artists, thinkers, but also leaders, and then more commonly, just the pursuit of money and political power.

So we've seen ideas like this before, right? In Epicurus and his critique of the way people use the pursuit of power, for instance. Or in Orwell's critique of nationalism. I think it's very similar. But the critical link that he's making is that this is one of these many ways in which people try to escape nihilism and give meaning to life. And he ends by basically saying, great souls should avoid this trap. You can only really become free and human if you renounce possession of the state as a kind of idol. And this is a broader theme, right. In Nietzsche's writings, him being against German nationalism and nationalism in general, which was on the rise, and he detested it.

16:53 Seth: Wes, I totally agree with everything you're saying, but there's another element to it, and this is, I think, where there's this association with the concept of folk in a kind of unhealthy way. Let me read from just the first couple of sentences. Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers. Here there are states. State. What is that? Well then open your ears to me for now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too, and this lie crawls out of its mouth.

I, the state, am the people. This is a lie. It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them. They served life. It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them State. They hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them where there is still a people. It does not understand the state and it hates it as an evil eye and a sin against customs and rights.

18:01 Mark: Yeah, so this sounds like that thing I think was attributed to Herder, this whole emphasizing. Yes, so while strictly speaking you could say this is against Nazism as the state, but like the rhetoric of Nazism was all about. No, no, forget about the formal state. It's about the people. The German people, like you could see how this could be used in favor of that.

18:21 Dylan: In the next paragraph though, he points out that every people speaks its tongue of good and evil. It has invented its own language of customs and rights. So you see there his notion of let's call it a healthy community is one that has its own creative aspect as opposed to being the state, which is signifying the will to death.

18:42 Wes: What I see him saying here is that the idea of a folk can't form the basis of a state. Yeah, that's the anti national settlement. What he's critiquing is the people who say to you, the basis of the nation is this particular peoplehood, this particular cultural essence. That's what I see him as repudiating.

19:01 Dylan: So you say it's not even going as far as saying that the state is a kind of corrupt version of a people, but in fact it's actually something completely different that is not a community as a people, but is a separate kind of entity. I have in my note about it, especially in this line where he says the sign of the state is the will to death, is that the state

19:25 Seth: is like the church, a people creates its own values, it defines its own good and evil. But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil. So in a sense what the state does is efface the differences between peoples. And it's the same mechanism that whatever drives the last man, the urge to conform erases or effaces the individual value creation of particular people. So he's kind of articulating here the political version of the struggle of the individual against the mass. Mass opinion or whatever. Except that the state is, of course, the producer of mass opinion.

20:10 Mark: So, right in that paragraph, confusion of tongues of good and evil, this, the sign I give you, is the sign of the state. It seems like what the state is doing wrong inevitably, I guess. But, you know, it sort of begs the question. It makes you think, well, is there a good kind of state that would line up exactly with the Volk? And maybe that's what the Nazis wanted to be trying to do.

20:30 Seth: Sure, if it eliminated all of the various versions of good and evil and just selected one of them to prioritize over others. Right.

20:37 Mark: That cultural purity of a state. Like that's what fascism was trying to do.

20:41 Seth: Yes.

20:41 Mark: Whereas it seems like it's the democratic state that he's objecting to here that has a melting pot and is trying to, in a Rawlsian way, mediate between different tongues of good and evil. There are these communities that organically give rise to value systems and the state, by necessity, because we all have to live together, confuses them, smushes them together. And he doesn't seem to like that, I guess, because it doesn't just smush them together, it smushes them together with, you know, demands that you sing the central patriotic song and you join the army and you fight for this state. And in fact, you sacrifice the better part of you to service to the state. Like, I think that's what he's really objecting to. It's not just the coexistence of diverse cultures.

21:25 Seth: I don't know. That's a good question.

21:27 Dylan: I found myself in this section thinking about a contrasting opinion about how we become full human beings in Aristotle, that humans are political animals and making the political as central to the full. Well, maybe in Nietzsche language, becoming more than yourself. For Aristotle requires the political, and that, in fact, is the avenue by which that happens. And Nietzsche seems pretty clearly to disagree with that. Maybe not just in the notion of a state here, but even in the notion of that happening through other people and that the political interaction of human beings is in fact fundamental to us becoming more than our mere selves. That notion of self overcoming that Nietzsche has would be a direct conflict with that notion of the importance of Community in Aristotle.

22:27 Seth: Yeah.

22:27 Mark: So it's interesting to think for Nietzsche to become the overman, do you need other people at all or is it fundamentally an individual thing? And I had guessed in this whole story of here is, you know, he's by himself in his cave, he is developing that way. So there are stages of self overcoming that you can do by yourself. And in fact you need isolation, but that to kind of finish the job, you know, it was important for him to go and talk to the people. That's different than joining a state as a citizen among many.

22:57 Dylan: It's important, but it seems sort of instrumental. Whereas with Aristotle it's fundamental. You aren't a full human being unless you're doing that.

23:08 Mark: Yeah. And just even the next sentence of this very section that we're reading, all too many are born for the superfluous. The state was invented. And this follows like he's starting in the story by trying to preach to everybody and nobody listens to him. Only a few listen to him. And then by book one here, he says, no, I need to seek out specific disciples, people who are worthy of my teachings. And I think that's maybe how he sees, you know, he has some good things to say about friendship. A friend is somebody who challenges you. A friend is somebody who helps you go forward on the way to the overman and respecting your enemies.

Like having good enemies is just as important as having good friends. Maybe the frenemy is the fundamental social relation. I'm not sure we can go that far. But definitely you don't need everybody. You don't need participation as a citizen in a state that includes everybody that happens to live there. It's a matter of having individual interactions with other near geniuses or people that you can otherwise actually get something from.

24:08 Wes: You guys have convinced me as far as your reading of that section of the State. I think I had a different reading, but I'm convinced.

24:16 Mark: I think the essence of what you were arguing is still very much on par here. State I call where all drink poison the good and the wicked state, where all lose themselves. The good and the wicked state, where the slow suicide of all is called life.

24:31 Wes: I'm not so sure this is an anti nationalist rant anymore, but I'd have to think about it because the way you guys were describing it, he did seem to be contrasting states with peoples and talking about the submersion of peoples within the state. And so, yeah, it sounded more like a basis for nationalism than anti nationalist.

24:50 Dylan: Yeah. To me, this kind of section raises the question of the relative political sophistication of Nietzsche, sometimes the part about the peoples smacks of a kind of agro romanticism. And the anti state part clearly is a reaction against someone like Bismarck and the state of the 1860s, 1870s, you know, the rise of Prussia. Yeah, and in that way I think you're completely on point, Wes, in that it's certainly that kind of nationalism that he opposes. What's not clear is if there isn't a kind of door open for a different kind of rhetoric of nationalism that has to do with this kind of classic Volk kind of thing, the door is open for it. Even if he would ultimately still disagree with it.

25:37 Wes: Well, he's very anti that in other parts of his writing. So I was just reading it through that lens. Now I'm more confused by it.

25:45 Mark: I think he has a fascination with the opinion of the many. Why he might be attracted to a Volk sounds like that you care about in Aristotle's words. Let us investigate something by looking at the opinions of the wise and the many that it sounds like. Nietzsche mostly just cares about the wise. And even the wise that are really confused might be confused in an interesting way. And you can sort of use the different intellectuals, you know, you should have your cup open to accept even the dirty water that comes from them so that you can use them to grow beyond them.

But, you know, most of the time he's here talking about the superfluous. He's talking about just the masses he has no use for. But there are some places, like I saw right toward the end, book two, number 14 on poets, where they do look for page 127, they look for wisdom in the opinions of the many, as if there were a special secret access to knowledge buried for those who learn something. We believe in the people and their quotes. Wisdom, maybe that's just trying to learn, just like you learn from a philosopher, learn from the Geist of a people.

Is that what that means? That even the mass of stupid people there could be some genius in their collective beliefs. Like, not that we want, you know, it could be deeply corrupt, but it's something that we should at least listen to and at least maybe something authentic. Whereas the state is by contrast something entirely imposed and inauthentic.

27:09 Seth: Maybe it's the case that if you're a part of a folk, good and evil are imposed upon you in the sense of. But it's one system of good and evil, and you're still a part of a homogenous group. So being able to differentiate and Disambiguate and respond to that, it's one thing. But when you're part of the state, which is this collection of heterogeneous cultures, and think about what it's like to legislate people who here in the United States, where we have so many competing paradigms, so many competing value systems. He was living in Germany at the time. He didn't have a sense of a kind of democratic. He hated democracy. But the state needs to enforce its will more strongly to crowd out all of these other. It speaks in all the voices. Right. I am the voice of good and evil over all of the various options that are subsumed underneath my borders.

28:09 Mark: All right, yeah, that sounds like a nice anti nationalist rant, but there's just a little subtlety in it.

28:16 Wes: What do we want to do next?

28:18 Dylan: You want to move to 1001 goals?

28:20 Wes: Yeah, that's an important one.

28:22 Mark: Page 58. It's section 15 in book 1001 goals.

28:27 Dylan: Will to power.

28:28 Mark: Yay. Is will to power actually mentioned in this?

28:31 Dylan: Yes.

28:31 Mark: Okay.

28:33 Dylan: Zarathustra saw many lands and many peoples. Thus he discovered the good and evil of many peoples. And Zarathustra found no greater power on earth than good and evil. No people could live without first esteeming. But if they want to preserve themselves, then they must not esteem as the neighbor esteems. Much that was good to one people was scorn and infamy to another. Thus I found it. Much I found, called evil here and decked out with purple honors there. Never did one neighbor understand the other. Ever was his soul amazed at the neighbor's delusion and wickedness. A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings. Behold, it is the voice of their will to power.

29:15 Wes: So this sounds like his version of the Tower of Babel.

29:19 Dylan: And you get the different communities, the Greeks, the Persians, the Jews and the Germans.

29:25 Wes: Right. Honesty and archery are the values for Persians, excellence for the Greeks. He doesn't say this directly, but these are inferences.

29:32 Seth: Honor thy father and mother for the

29:35 Dylan: Jews, and loyalty and risk of honor and blood even for evil and dangerous things for the Germans.

29:42 Wes: And ultimately he will say man. The very word man means the esteemer. It's a way of creating values.

29:49 Dylan: The valuer in some ways.

29:52 Wes: Right? And that's the only way things come to have value. So another one of the points of this section so is through man's esteeming. It's not this thing that transcends humanity and that they can discover they are creators and they are Also annihilators in the sense of to create values, you have to annihilate what comes before. And the end of this section, he's articulating the need for a yoke for the thousand goals. So these various different systems evaluation and what unifies them. And overall, he says one goal is still lacking for humanity. So he poses this problem to which ultimately the solution will be an embrace of the will to power itself as will to power.

30:36 Mark: I hadn't even noticed it was in this section. I was thinking that it didn't come until the end of our reading this on self overcoming thing where he talks about it more explicitly. But in the secondary, the Burnham that I was looking at, Will to power is already talked about as a way of analyzing right back to the three metamorphoses. The child willing its own will, the child creating values. Burnham says this is a beautifully concise first description in the text of the will to power. So I just think this whole thing is kind of telling us will to power is not just this weird what we all fundamentally, as a metaphysical property, want to conquer everything else.

No, it's this creation of values and that you need innocence in a way to do that. But that growth necessarily means you're overcoming, which means you're destroying something and replacing it with something else, which might even be sacrificing yourself and replacing it with the overman, the thing of the future. This is what will to power is about. It's not about individuals necessarily bashing each other over the head.

31:38 Dylan: Yeah. It's about esteeming and valuing.

31:40 Mark: Yep.

31:41 Seth: Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man places values in things. To preserve himself, he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself man, which means the esteemer. To esteem is to create. Hear this, you creators.

32:10 Mark: Esteeming itself is the value is of all esteemed things, the most estimable treasure. Crazy.

32:16 Wes: And I think when we think about power, it's helpful to think about because this is the way he will describe it in many places as the unifying force. So the creative element to power is just that. It organizes all these disparate lower things into one higher totality.

32:34 Dylan: You can see the piece of that that is metaphysical and ontological. Right. The very activ of a human being naming the animals of the world or separating this from that. That's an act of the will to power.

32:50 Wes: Absolutely. Actually, this all goes Back to. And I know you guys are going to hate this Kant, where the idea is that because I went back and looked at my truth and lie notes as well, where he's really kind of pivoting off of Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemology to there's something inherently creative. He says, right. Just about our cognition of the world. Our perceptions of things are copies of nerve impulses. And the way we use language is simply metaphorical. The only real relationship to things in themselves is ultimately metaphorical and falsifying.

We construct the world. The appearances are these things that we actually create. And ultimately he's going to expand that idea to the realm of the aesthetic and incorporate the idea of the will being involved in all of this. Right. For Kant, it was just the understanding, doing all this stuff behind the scenes, constructing the world. But here it's valuation, and here will is the proper faculty, let's say.

33:52 Dylan: And for Nietzsche, that will has that fundamentally creative and claiming aspect to it. I think you're right in calling the kind of construction happening with Kant, but I've always understood it as being a kind of bringing color to the black and white photograph or something like that.

34:11 Wes: Or think of it as organizing the data. And that's the way power is imprinted. It's an organizing principle of something that is by itself chaotic and just. Data gives form to it. And that's what power does. It is form giving.

34:25 Dylan: So do you think in that way that it's a step past Kant in this respect? Or is it really re emphasizing something that Kant is already saying?

34:36 Wes: No, I think he's going way beyond that. The idea, I think for him actually originates in Kant, probably by way of Schopenhauer. But yeah, he's moved beyond onto the Critique of Judgment. Right. And then Schopenhauer's modification of that and the idea of the will and withdrawal of the will. Or maybe no, there is a place for the will and experience of music. And then Nietzsche's big idea in the gay science is that aesthetic experience is goodwill to appearance. When we create values, we're replacing Kant's goodwill, this idea of a goodwill according to rational universalization and this orientation towards a beyond, to a goodwill towards the surfaces of things, to appearance itself. And that becomes the basis of one's values. It becomes not just aesthetic, but ethical morality.

35:25 Dylan: The way which create value.

35:27 Wes: Yeah, I think he sort of ends it right. Just by posing this problem of a yoke. Yep. Humanity still has no goal, but then

35:36 Dylan: it feels like there's a kind of Continuation. Not in the next section, actually, but in the section after that, on the Way of the Creator. I guess I was just thinking of this whole section as being about being free for something. So I'm thinking about halfway through. You call yourself free, your dominant thought. I want to hear not what you've escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra. But your eyes should tell me brightly, free for what?

36:10 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Let's just keep going. Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible is to be alone and the judge and avenger of one's own law. This is kind of like the burden for Sartre of being free. That that's what being free amounts to, is esteeming according to standards that you invent.

36:34 Wes: Exactly.

36:35 Mark: Except adding to that. Well, I don't know if it's adding to that. Maybe this is in Sartre's notion of responsibility with that is comparable to this. Being the judge and avenger of your own law. Hang it over yourself as a law that you're not just being fancy free with what you esteem. I esteem this. I change my mind. I esteem something else now. I esteem this. But to create a value is not just to erupt in unpredictable ways like that, but to actually create yourself as a coherent work of art. To be a law is to be consistent. Right.

37:10 Wes: I'm thinking here the contrast, right, between for Kant and for deontology, we are lawgivers to ourselves as well. It's just that we don't have any real choice about what laws we give ourselves because they're just a product of our rational nature. We can't do it on whim.

37:26 Dylan: Yeah. They're discovered in some important way.

37:28 Wes: Yeah. And then we think with Aristotle, the sort of guideposts are. It's also our rational nature ultimately. But it's about what counts as virtue. And our guidepost is the end or the telos of the human being.

37:42 Seth: Here.

37:42 Wes: I think he's pointing us to our particular virtues for our particular character. So this is relativizing, applies not to human nature, but to Mark's nature or Seth's nature and so on, what those particular values will be. So it's the laws that you're going to give yourself have to be based on your particular individual personality and being. So it's not arbitrary. It doesn't come from human nature or from universalized laws that you give yourself. But also it's not arbitrary. It's still based on the reality of who you are. That sort of value creation.

38:21 Seth: Yeah.

38:21 Mark: I'm really interested in this progression from Kant to Nietzsche to Sartre. And I had kind of seen Sartre as slipping back toward Kant from Nietzsche by having that very categorical imperative kind of thing that Sartre has. Where. Well, it's not that there's a pre existent categorical imperative. It is in some sense very open ended. Which way? How you define the law. But however you define it, you still have to kind of. There's something comparable to the categorical imperative that you're. You're willing it to be a law of nature still, and I'm thinking that still might actually be how Nietzsche thinks of it, is that when you create a value, you're making yourself the judge and avenger of your law. You're willing it to be an objective thing in the world. Not necessarily that everyone should follow it, but it's definitely ethical.

39:11 Dylan: Burnham tries to argue against this, but there is a way of thinking about eternal recurrence as being a mechanism for that kind of instantiation. Categorical imperative like that is your willing being eternally recurrent. Burnham wants to not give it the force of being future looking in that way that whatever you're willing, you ought to will such that it is eternally recurrent. Therefore that gives you the structure for what sort of values are, let's call them good values.

39:47 Seth: Right.

39:48 Dylan: What's the right kind of valuing to do?

39:50 Mark: Yeah, so that's a good point. Or to talk about that more next time when we explicitly talk about the eternal recurrence parts of this book in the second half. So we can maybe table the rest of that. Seth, did you have something?

40:01 Seth: Kaufman does not agree with that interpretation?

40:03 Wes: Yeah, which one?

40:05 Seth: Eternal recurrence? Kind of.

40:08 Wes: Yeah. Dylan was saying Burnham doesn't like that and Kaufman doesn't either, so.

40:12 Seth: Oh, Burnham doesn't like it. I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I didn't read the Burnham.

40:16 Dylan: So Kaufman doesn't like it either.

40:19 Seth: Okay, good. All right. Well, good for both of them.

40:23 Mark: So it's more about will to power. Since we're on this tack. What was that other section?

40:30 Dylan: Section two on overcoming in book two or second part, it's called On Self Overcoming.

40:35 Mark: On Self Overcoming. It's actually the ninth section in there for me. It's page 113.

40:44 Dylan: Yeah. Along the lines of what we were talking about here. He talks about the. That is your whole will, you who are wisest, a will to power. When you speak of good and evil too, and evaluations, you still want to create the world before which you can kneel. That is your ultimate hope and intoxication. That is a really interesting and provocative way to put it. Right. Because you would create the thing that you would prostrate yourself to, which is

41:13 Mark: not how I normally think about Nietzsche's Overman. That you're beyond good and evil. You're beyond these confining things that you would kneel to. You're no longer a kneeler, to put it in Game of Thrones terms.

41:27 Wes: Yeah. Although in our creative act in relation to the overman is something we're creating. Going under is like that in general. Yeah. To create a set of valuations is to create something that we're bound by.

41:43 Dylan: He who cannot obey himself is commanded. I mean, this whole section is about your will to power also being about obeying your own commands.

41:53 Mark: Right. Because it's will to power over yourself as much as will to power over anything else.

41:58 Dylan: Yeah. What you were talking about Sartre made me is right in line with this. There's responsibility that comes along with your value creation. And not responsibility in a sense, necessarily to other people, but in sense that you obey your own commands.

42:12 Seth: Right, yeah.

42:13 Mark: Whatever. I page 114 of mine, wherever I found the living, there I also heard the speech on obedience. Whatever lives obeys. And he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of living. Nietzsche is the last place I would have expected to see the Bob Dylan you gotta serve somebody sentiment. But the out is you could serve yourself, which is not part of the Bob Dylan song.

42:38 Dylan: Yeah. This paragraph is good. That commanding is harder than obeying, and not only because he who commands must carry the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him. An experiment in hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding. And whenever the living commands, it hazards itself. Indeed, when it commands itself, it must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge, the avenger, and the victim of its own law. How does this happen, I asked myself. What persuades the living to obey and command and to practice obedience even when it commands you?

43:15 Mark: Put it that way, I'd rather be the last man.

43:17 Wes: And the answer is the will to power.

43:19 Dylan: Yeah. And life confided this secret to me. Behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself. I will teach you the will to power.

43:30 Wes: So where I found the living, there I found will to power. And then that the weaker should serve the stronger to that it is persuaded by its own will, which would be master over what is weaker still. This is the one pleasure it does not want to renounce. So yeah, when we talk about will to power, right, we should always remember that this is the alternative hypothesis to the idea that the fundamental psychological principle is the pleasure principle, that people just seek pleasure and that's it. Which by the way, in our Fukuyama episode, right, we were exploring an alternative to that as well, which is that it's not just about pleasure, it's about spirit, spiritedness, Thomas pride.

And I see these will to power as intimately related to that. And so he's saying here there are things that he'll say at some point in this section, that there are lots of things that life esteems more than life itself or. Well, that's confusing though, to bring that up in that context.

44:32 Mark: Yeah, no, we were talking about that earlier, that risking your life is part of not being anti life. I think you explained why that was okay. Because life is, as Schopenhauer characterizes it, this endless struggle. Like you can recognize that Schopenhauer picture, but yet not like Schopenhauer say, screw that, I don't want to be a part of that. You need to engage it. So it's very paradoxical that by embracing life you are. You're not making life itself the value toward which you point, you're making the overcoming the value toward which you point. The overman.

45:04 Wes: Yeah. Or in other words, he'll say, so this is on 1:15. Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the will to existence that does not exist. So. Or the self preservative instincts, let's say. For what does not exist cannot will. But what is an existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will, not will to life. But thus I teach you will to power. There's much more that life esteems more highly than life itself. But out of the esteeming itself speaks the will to power. So to say life is fundamental is not to say that things are trying to stay alive or anything like that. It's just that the fundamental thing that keeps life going is. I think he associates this with the

45:55 Dylan: procreative and he kind of doubles down on that. Right. Just at the very end here from where you read on, where he raises that this process of the will to power of overcoming oneself, this Creative aspect goes right down to the notion that as a result, good and evil that are not transitory do not exist. And you get that beyond good and evil kind of thing here, but here it's that there's this process of annihilating and creating. And he even goes. I mean, this is like Nietzsche. Ed is pithy, quotable, out of context, right? Where he says, and whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily he must first be an annihilator and break values. And here's the great pithy quote, thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness. But this is creative.

46:52 Mark: One of the things, I think this was from Burnham, where he just kind of reminded me that the notion of will to power does have something to do with Schopenhauer's notion of will in that will was not something that was primarily personal. So if we can see will to power or will in the general sense as an individual psychological explanation, but really as a metaphysical principle, it applies to life in general. So Nietzsche is not as individualistic as he seems 90% of the time, even just that, that the weaker should serve the stronger. To that it is persuaded by its own will, which would be master over what is weaker.

Still. Like, that doesn't sound necessarily like what an individual psychology would do. Right? If you say I'm weaker than these other people, well then according to what Nietzsche says most of the time, then I would try to surreptitiously exert my will to power. And through ressentiment I would not recognize, oh, someone is stronger than me, I should serve them. But sort of, if you take this as a general thing about how things work in nature, then, yeah, the weaker end up serving the stronger. I don't know, maybe even when I put it that way, it seems problematic.

Is there an issue here? Does this solve the problem by saying that's why you could be serving the will to power even by sacrificing yourself. Right, by making way for the overman. Because it's sort of the will to power of the universe is still going forward and becoming more awesome and toward the overman.

48:22 Dylan: Yeah, but that phrase serving the will to power doesn't sound right. Will to power is the activity of

48:26 Wes: life also, I think it is a fundamental psychological principle. His analysis of Christian saints, for instance, and their self sacrifice was that there is no such thing as self sacrifice in our ordinary, purely selfless sense. Self sacrifice is will to power. It is the idea of there's the fantasy of what that sacrifice attains that motivates one to do it. And it's a power thing.

48:56 Dylan: Yeah, but you wouldn't say that you were serving will to power, sacrificing. It is an instantiation of that. It's that activity of the human life.

49:07 Mark: Yeah.

49:07 Wes: I mean, there's a lot of controversy of whether this is a fundamental metaphysical principle or psychological principle or both. Obviously we can't discuss that. But to me it seems like at the very least it's a fundamental psychological principle and arguably some sort of metaphysical principle. But. Yeah, go ahead.

49:24 Mark: Yeah. Could part of the dynamic of the psychological principle be that you, through imaginative identification can try to serve the power of something that is in fact beyond your individual organism? So that you say the saint is sacrificing himself for the glory of God. Well, that is like an ego extension, that he is setting the seat of values in this larger entity, God. But that's really kind of where he's pushing his ego out to. To butcher the psychoanalytic language so that he's creating an imaginative version of his ego, but that is identified with some larger metaphysical unit. So you can still say he's doing something that is exerting his own will to power. He's being selfish in that sense. But the action does not look selfish to us because we're thinking, of course, the self is just you, that animal. And according to the logic of the psychic act, it is not is something larger.

50:21 Wes: I mean, the saint is glorified by the act. Right. And it becomes a path to glory. And sacrifice also creates a debt on the part of those who you sacrificed yourself for. And there are lots of other factors like that. The fact that you're not going to be around to enjoy all that. If you make the ultimate sacrifice, I think that's overcome by, in this case by God. But I don't even think you need religion to overcome that. That's one of the things we sort of got into in our suicide episode. The sort of psychotic idea that one's self sacrifice, one might actually survive beyond that. But yeah, for the saint there's an afterlife, there's another world, you get your reward in heaven, the evil ones get their punishment. So there's a lot of lot to be motivated for. Even if you're willing to lay down your life.

51:11 Mark: Well, can Nietzsche use that too? I mean, the way you're describing it, it is clearly pathological and Nietzsche doesn't like the despisers of life and the other people that make those moves. But it seems like what we were talking about earlier, that you can have this law the will to power is putting the law over yourself, which could be self sacrificing yourself for the sake of your highest hope, which is the overman. So in the same way, just like the saint, you can squander all of your artistic energy and basically kill yourself, drive yourself insane for the surface of some future higher goal. But in a way that Nietzsche is

51:47 Wes: okay with, yeah, a lot of this, right, is everything is will to power. And his critique of slave morality and Christianity is that it's subversive will to power. It's sort of tortured, twisted will to power. So you get ressentiment, which is unconscious revenge fantasy. It's will to power that doesn't know that it's will to power and dresses itself, cloaks itself as something else, as neighborly love. And then you get all the metaphysical concepts and all that stuff. So the will to power that he's advocating knows its will to power. Nothing is unconscious here.

It's completely conscious of itself as such. Therefore it's not done in bad conscience. There's nothing to feel guilty about. It's not advancing anti natural values. It's not done for the sake of opposing the body and saying that life is terrible and we must slowly kill ourselves and get to heaven and repress and all that stuff. So. So I think it's the purpose to which you've put will to power and how conscious you are of its role that are critical here in distinguishing what he's doing from. From its manifestation and the pejorative forms, the forms he doesn't like.

53:00 Mark: Yeah, it seems a fine line of doing it right and doing it wrong. And he does, I think this section on redemption, that's the 17th section of book two, maybe characterizes that. So he starts that section by, like we've already had earlier in this text, the idea, and maybe this is also from the gay science of making virtues of your vices, right, that you should not just try to discount these parts of yourself, but sort of make them fight it out in some useful way. But here he talks about inverse cripples. Sorry, in the, in these earlier sections he seems to be rejoicing in the fact that even just excess is not bad because excess is like, at least there's some energy going on there.

At least even if you're being self flagellating, if you're really being energetic about it, that's still better than being the last man. But here he's emphasizing the other part of it, this inverse cripples. And he gives this great quote about somebody who just is basically one big eye or one big ear. They call this person the great man.

53:59 Wes: Instead of missing some body part, they have too much of it. They have too much of a particular body part.

54:04 Mark: It was an inverse cripple, had too little of everything and too much of one thing. And he talks about this is I'm walking through fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents, but no human beings that he thinks people are just being a scholar, for instance, just makes you out of balance. This is why you'd want to pursue the partially examined life and not enter academia full on. Yeah. So what's the solution? To redeem those who lived in the past, who recreated. Sorry, sorry. Yeah. So it seems like what the problem with these people, like these scholars are, as he's outlined in other sections of here that we haven't talked about, is that kind of like we were just saying in our Sartre episode with the scholars being grave tenders.

Gravediggers. Like. Yeah, that's what these scholars are just mouthing the words of dead people. They're not really living. They're certainly not overcoming themselves. And Nietzsche diagnoses the problem with these people is that they can't. What is this thing about the fundamental dissatisfaction with changing the past.

55:02 Dylan: Yeah. So at the bottom of the paragraph you started the will cannot will backwards and that he cannot break time. And time's covetousness, that is the will's loneliness melancholy. But what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? It was. That is the name of the will's gnashing teeth and most secret melancholy. So the past has this shadow on the will about the way it was before and it's the part that you have to annihilate. Right. That's why have this destructive aspect of it that you. You have to destroy the past.

55:30 Wes: Well, he will say that you have to turn it was into I willed it, which hints at the eternal recurrence. Yeah.

55:39 Mark: Right. So that's the dialectical story I'm trying to tell is that you've got the scholars who just know everything the way it was. Let's just mouth things out of the past. They're basically dead. They're basically. They're this artificial stasis. There's some form of the last man. And in reaction to that you might say screw the past, stomp on the past. Like that's what the will to power should push you to do by creating, by annihilating. But you have to redeem by moving one dialectical step beyond that and get Rid of this discomfort with the past. Get rid of the whole notion of revenge.

56:13 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting that he. He defines revenge just as the will's ill will against time and against it was. Which I think is great. And it's something we haven't really talked about a lot when we've talked about Nietzsche and the will to power. Right. The will in relation to the past is completely impotent, completely helpless. That is a huge problem. And the idea that everything that is behind us, that we can no longer change, that has gone wrong, that we tend to be motivated by wanting to take. Take revenge for that is, I think, really interesting.

56:49 Mark: So the end of that section, all it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident. Until the creative will says to it, but thus I willed it. Until the creative will says to it, but thus I will it, thus shall I will it. So that sounds like, again, like Sartre, that you're taking your facticity, you're taking your situation and you're interpreting it. So this is slightly different than just the amor fati. I mean, it's a variation of the. That we've talked about in other contexts with Nietzsche, of just taking what is inevitable and willing it as your fate. Like that sounds kind of weird and stoic. But this idea that, no, that's actually a creative will, that you're not just lying to yourself, that like, yeah, that bad thing is actually fine, but you're creating a value out of it, you're actually transmuting it in some way and not just being okay with it.

57:41 Dylan: You do want to ask the question about how bad does it get before that doesn't work anymore. Maybe for Nietzsche there just comes a point where the will to power just fails, right? And you just acknowledge that you become kind of a crippled version of a human being. And that might be true because of your circumstance, it no longer faces up to the world anymore. It's not hard to spin out circumstances in which that would be a human being breaks.

58:06 Mark: Yeah, I was trying to spin that out. So it didn't sound like stoicism, but. But it ended up sounding like stoicism. And you just gave exactly the response that we gave to Ryan on our stoicism episode.

58:16 Wes: So it occurs to me that there's one way to cash this out in terms of. If we think of all these past things that have happened to us, and they are also formative influences, right? They go into. Part of our situation is our character and our dispositions and our virtues and our vices to do certain things. And part of Sartre's whole thing is sort of endorsing all of that, interpreting all of that, I guess, taking responsibility for all of that. And I think one. One way to think about it is just that to say I willed it is to acknowledge the fact that in more common terms, someone might say, well, I don't regret anything, because then I'd be a different person today and I wouldn't even be here.

Right. So one might say that. That my willing is the way it is, is structured by all of that stuff that's happened. Its articulations have to happen according to who I am. And to will anything successfully is to. So for Kant, to will anything successfully or autonomously is to will it according to a universal maxim that leads to some sort of consistency here. To will something successfully must involve willing everything that's come before. So that's one way that's me thinking a lot about how to try to make sense of all that.

59:41 Mark: Yeah, just kind of as a. As my wrap up here. I was very much looking as I went through this since we've done Epicureanism and stoicism, and Nussbaum recently was looking for this as another form of, not virtue ethics, but as a therapeutic advice for how to live healthily. And of course, the obvious difference is just that you don't want to attain ataraxia, Right? This on the Teachers of Virtue section earlier that we referred to, he's specifically talking about. He sounds like he's arguing against Epicurus in particular, that the point of living is not so that you can.

The point of being awake is not so that you can sleep well. Which maybe sounds like, like, doesn't it sound like in this discussion we've just been having about being at peace with the past, that you're trying to calm the will, that you're trying to enter a state of ataraxia. And maybe the way to interpret him out of this sounding like a stoic is to say, well, we don't want to end up with ressentiment. We don't want to end up punishing the past, but we also don't have to end up at peace with anything. I mean, that's the way he even says it here until the creative says to it, but thus I will it, thus I shall will it.

So the fact that there's this future tense thing there, there's still a challenge to be met. I'm not merely resting at peace with the world in a way that the Epicurean might like, that's My best guess on how to get him out of there, and I'm not sure if it works. Any other closing thoughts? For the moment, I actually just have

1:01:09 Dylan: a comment about our discussion because I confess that this was the hardest processing I had for reading Nietzsche in a long time. But I just was reminded how much fun it is to do the podcast. I learned a lot talking about it. This is the reason why you should read books like this with other people.

1:01:28 Seth: That is definitely true. This is one of the hardest things I think we've read. And it has a mystique and it has a buildup associated with it. Nietzsche's own identification of this as his most important work. And then you get into it and you're like, oh God, what if I. And you feel like you need to have a dictionary of philosophy next to you. There's many works in philosophy that are like that. Sort of unacknowledged straw men and sources and so forth. But the style makes this particularly difficult. And I'm on the edge of feeling like I should.

Like the Nietzsche studies and the Kaufman dedication are really what Nietzsche deserves and that we should put him up in the pantheon and spend most of our time working through. And then there's also the part of me that's like, oh God, there's so many challenges, so many difficulties, so many polemics, and so many other great authors and writers. I don't know. He vexes me.

1:02:32 Mark: Well, it seems, Seth, that you saw this book as sort of a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident. And I'm trying to figure out if you can retroactively will it.

1:02:41 Seth: Well, I'll tell you this. I'm not willing to RUK und Vorlesen. I'm not willing to spend the rest of my life plowing through all that came before and all that came after and Nietzsche's canon to try to understand it. It's big enough.

1:02:55 Wes: He only had 18 years to write this stuff down. I was looking at some other, like, untimely meditations are great and different. That's. I think that's right after the birth of tragedy is early stuff, folks.

1:03:06 Mark: Come back. Hopefully this whetted your appetite for diving into the book yourself. And we'll get into eternal recurrence and some of the other famous themes in this work next time in books three and four here. And of course, any of the parts of books one and two that we didn't get to here are fair game.

1:03:19 Wes: I think four we can neglect somewhat since that has a bad reputation with sort of an add on. So it's really the first three parts are the most important.

1:03:28 Dylan: Part four is he calls like an interlude or something like that, because there

1:03:33 Mark: were supposed to be six parts.

1:03:34 Dylan: Yeah.

1:03:35 Mark: And four was the interlude, and he only distributed it.

1:03:42 Dylan: Recapitulation of parts one, two and three.

1:03:45 Seth: Yeah.

1:03:45 Mark: It's for the animated Clone wars movie

1:03:49 Seth: or Being and Time.

1:03:53 Mark: Our closing song is Sacrilecious, a 2016 track from Head Flux, aka Steve Young, whom I interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 92. Check it out at nakedly examined examinedmusic.com Good night.

1:04:06 Seth: Good night. Sa. It,

1:09:38 Wes: Sam. It.