Ep. 214: More 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. Episode 214 continues our look at Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, examining his conception of wisdom. We read books three and four of that work for this discussion, written in 1883 through 1885. For more information, a link to the text, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer saying once more in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:28 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, joyful in Eternity in Austin, Texas.

0:33 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:36 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey speaking with my Animals in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Wes: Oh, I like that.

0:42 Mark: I think we had left the door open for anything really remaining from books one and two that people want to bring up. I personally don't remember those that much. A couple weeks later. Now, I did note one thing, book two on poetry that I want to make sure we talk about why he's writing in this style. Because I think the latter two books, more so than the first two books, are not just sermons that are giving his philosophical ideas. There are parts of those in both these books, but there's a lot more. You could call it narrative, him traveling around.

Or in book four especially, is this whole parade of characters representing versions of the Higher man or potential higher men, people who are at least higher than the hoi polloi and his interactions with those folks. So what do folks want to make sure to cover today? I know Eternal Recurrence is a big thing. That's probably the big famous Nietzsche topic area that is brought up in here and covered, I guess, more thoroughly than in any other work.

1:40 Dylan: I'd like to figure out something about Eternal Recurrence. I found myself the more I thought about it, the more befuddled but also irritated I got about it.

1:51 Wes: I would say to listeners my very opinionated take on what's worth reading in parts three and four. If you're short on time, I don't know if you guys agree, but I wouldn't bother with part four. For me, it's just everything that irritates me, the overwrought narrative. And I have trouble with it. I'm more interested in when Zarathustra is actually sermonizing and kind of making Nietzsche esque points. I'm more connected. I don't think there's really any of that in part four and then in part three. I think things really don't get going until around section 5, but the sort of core sections are from 11 on the Spirit of Gravity to 12 on Old and new tablets, which is probably the most important thing and includes the part on the overman and then 13, the convalescent, which talks about the eternal return.

And it's sort of the climax of the whole section. There's a lot more in 12 that we can talk about, but the two things, you know, as Mark said, that we should focus on are the Overman and eternal recurrence.

2:54 Dylan: I confess, I barely got through four.

2:57 Wes: Did anyone have a different experience with that?

2:59 Seth: No. Yeah, I pretty much agree with Wes and had the same experience as Dylan. I mean, obviously the Overman and eternal recurrence are the two big themes, but I think we hopefully will at least get to talking a little bit about what the relationship is between the two and why eternal recurrence is important for the overcoming itself and kind of what that might mean or what that might look like. Because there's an aspect of the bodily creative that I'm struggling with. And I'm hoping you guys will enlighten me.

3:30 Dylan: I also want to add, we talked a little bit about this. Maybe this is a book one and two kind of related thing. But again, the call to be good and the call to be evil and the language associated with that, I found myself wondering if my generous interpretation about it is satisfactory. I actually found myself more irritated in book three than I had been before about the book itself. And so that was another aspect where I was finding myself being less generous than I have been in the past. And so maybe I can be talked out of that.

4:03 Seth: You weren't as irritated by the first two parts.

4:06 Dylan: I came into our discussion more irritated than I've ever been about Nietzsche. And then in our discussion of it, I felt like I understood things better and that I was much less irritated. And my irritation came to the fore again in reading these sections.

4:24 Wes: So by killing off God, Nietzsche puts himself in a difficult spot. And that's part of what I think ultimately leads to irritation, because all the critiques are great. The critiques of morality and him exploding the hypocrisy and the pretenses of moralists and analyzing Western societies and their values. All that stuff is great. But he has a project, which is to overcome nihilism, to find a cure for the thing that he sort of brilliantly diagnoses. And the cure, unfortunately, is the weak spot, because it requires, once you've done away with God, you have to start talking about ultimately these over men and get into a very unsatisfying, implausible, and frankly, it's an implausible and unsatisfying story that there's not really a lot of content to.

It's kind of vague what all of it means. And you can give a more milquetoast version of all of that. Which is to say we should become ourselves and we should create and sublimate. And I think there's a very sophisticated account to be given of all that. And that Nietzsche does a great job with that stuff. But a lot of people would think that's not enough. It's not enough to tell people that they have to aestheticize, you know, their perception of the world and themselves. Once God is gone, they need something more. And Nietzsche seems to be trying to give us that.

But the positive account is where my irritation starts to come in. And it's also where Nietzsche is at his most elitist sounding. Which is just naturally grating.

6:00 Mark: So would you indulge me and have us look at that on Poets section from number two first? Because this is where I would want us to look to try to address your various irritations over the form. I actually enjoyed book four from reading Kaufman's introduction. I knew that book four was supposed to be more wholly comic than the other parts. So I just kind of went in with that in mind. So it's all these disciples come one by one. And they each have a form, funny story about them. And they're some form of very flawed, but at least unique type of creature.

And he does give a speech to them eventually. So that they can call it the Last Supper, where he does reiterate some of this, you know, be cruel. I'm sure the themes we're gonna see throughout the rest of the book. There might not be anything particularly unique in there. And then there's a funny thing where he leaves and they're all worshiping an ass. Just like in the Bible where Moses leaves and everybody's worshiping a golden calf when they comes back. I think part of that is talking about how he's relating to his disciples in that section.

And having them worship the ass who says, yeah, yeah, to everything. Whereas one of the earlier things he was saying is say yes to everything. Say yes to the earth, say yes to the past. There's some sort of fundamental positivity. So he's talking about ways in which he can be misinterpreted. You know, why is he right this way if he doesn't want to be misinterpreted? Some of it has to do with his elitism. That if you try to say things in a plain and simple way, then the stupid people are going to understand it too well. They're going to take it out of context.

They're going to get the literal words and think they understand it, but they're still going to screw it up. So you might as well say it in a difficult way. So they're just confused. Maybe that's one of the things. But anyway, let's look at On Poets here. So this is section 14 in book 2, page 126 in my version. In the second paragraph, one of his disciples. These are unnamed disciples in this section. The poets lie too much. I heard you say once before. He's talking to Zarathustra. The disciple replied at the time you added, but the poets lie too much.

Why did you say that the poets lie too much.

8:01 Seth: Why?

8:01 Mark: Says Zarathustra. You ask why. I'm not one of those whom one may ask about their why is my experience, but of yesterday it was long ago that I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Would I not have to be a barrel of memory if I wanted to carry my reasons around with me? It is already too much for me to remember my own opinions. And many a bird flies away. And now and then I also find a stray in my dovecot that is strange to me and trembles when I place my hand on it. But what was, as Zarathustra once said to you, that poets lie too much. But Zarathustra too is a poet.

Do you now believe he spoke the truth here? Why do you believe that? What do you think about this whole? I don't have to give arguments for things. I came to these conclusions intuitively over time. Don't expect me to reconstruct my learning process because it's not going to mirror something you would identify with anyway. What do you make of this?

8:50 Seth: It's a question of did the disciples see Zarathustra as a teacher? And if so, they're seeking lessons. And he says, don't ask me why I say the things that I say. I'm not a teacher, I'm a poet. And poets lie too much. Maybe not all the time. And so the secret is to pay close attention so that you can figure out for yourself when they're not lying. Or maybe it's pay close attention to the way they are speaking.

9:14 Dylan: I also take it as an argument about presentness where he isn't going to remember his account, because it's not that reasoned argument that is going to make you believe what he's saying.

9:28 Mark: I want to Carry my reasons around with me.

9:30 Dylan: Barrel of memory when we're going to

9:32 Mark: talk about eternal recurrence in a second, I think he does, at least between the secondary literature I was looking at it, and what's actually in the text, it's quite drawn out that he's really recreating this experience that he had where he realizes the truth of eternal recurrence. It's not something that he just, you know, was an idea that's floating around and he is coming up with logical arguments for it. But he does kind of give us a phenomenological account poetically how this blazed through him and how he couldn't face it at first. So we get a lot of details like that that. That's different than reasons.

10:05 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, and that whole thing about a turnover, I mean, when we get to it, you're gonna have to convince me that it's anything other than a kind of drawn out, painful desc of the fact that he had a hard time dealing with it. And then I want to understand why he's having a hard time dealing with something anyway, I have a hard time having any patience with that incredibly drawn out, painful thing that he has before he realizes, oh my God, eternal recurrence, it's the greatest idea in the world. So you're thinking that that's lined up or aligned with this.

10:35 Mark: Let's keep going in here a little farther. In the page 127, somebody said in all seriousness, the poets lie too much. Of course he's talking about Plato. He would be right. We do lie too much. We also know too little and we are bad learners. So we simply have to lie. And who among us poets has not adulterated his wine? Many a poisonous hodge podge has been contrived in our cellars. Much that is indescribable was accomplished there. And because we know so little, the poor in spirit please us heartily, particularly when they are young females, okay?

And we are covetous even of those things which the old females tell each other in the evening. That is what we ourselves call the eternal feminine in us. And as if there were a special secret access to knowledge buried for those who learn something. We believe in the people and their wisdom. The people and their wisdom. I did want to revisit. I brought up that when we were talking about the state last time, I said, he actually does have some respect for the sort of natural folk wisdom that comes out of a people here. I think he's kind of explaining we think these things like eternal recurrence but we don't really know even entirely why we think them.

In some ways it's not just that we've forgotten our trains of reasoning, but that the way that intuition works is we don't even really know where these ideas came from. And so in some degree I would think that we don't even know necessarily. They kind of flit away from us, they escape us. We don't know if they were expressing them right. So this is why he's just trying throughout this book to just express these things in slightly different ways. In several places he's kind of. His aphoristic style we've described in other episodes as experimental.

And then here, this whole, you know, we even like to look at the folk people and their wisdom or a little down low. He's talking about basically old wives tales that when you're not so sure of yourself, when you're not a dogmatist, then you're kind of open to suggestion. You know, it's not that you just say yes to everything, but there's a danger that you will entertain this eternal feminine in us, this receptivity. And I think this is very much related to what he's going to call pity later. I'm not so sure of. You know, if you're Aristotle and you have an argument for everything and you have your whole system worked out, then somebody comes along with some cockamamie idea and puts it in your head.

Like you're going to be resistant to that. But Nietzsche says part of his method is I can't be that suspicious. I will entertain, not ultimately accept almost anything. And so I think this is part of what his poetry is, is this experimental method of. Let me just try to throw some shit out there. What do you think of this? What do I think of this? I just need to let it mull around, you know, in order to see what's going to stick and what's not.

13:13 Dylan: You mean as part of being the activity of the poet and the activity of Zarathustra at some other time?

13:19 Mark: Yeah. This is something to ask you, like if he's saying that he's a poet and poets lie too much. In other words, he's saying basically, I am bullshitting at least part of the time. You know, I'm kind of pulling stuff out of my ass. First of all, do you accept that interpretation of why he's saying he's a poet here and poets lie too much?

13:35 Dylan: Is he saying he's a poet?

13:37 Wes: Yes, he does.

13:38 Seth: Explicitly, frequently.

13:41 Wes: I think Mark just read the passage. But suppose Somebody said, in all seriousness, the poets lie too much. He would be right. We do lie too much. We also know too little, and we are bad learners. So we simply have to lie.

13:53 Dylan: Though there's two places here that at the beginning, at the end, that make me think about ways in which he's distancing himself from poets. At the beginning of what Mark says is, faith does not make me blessed, he said, especially not faith in me. And then at the end, he gives his little speech. And then he waits quietly and then gives another version of his speech to his disciple. At the end of that, he says he has this parable about a peacock. He says, their spirit itself, the poets. And is the peacock of peacocks and a sea of vanity. The spirit of the poet craves spectators, even if only buffaloes.

That's the part, I think, that he's wanting to distance himself from. Is this merely entertaining portion of poets. And somehow the idea that believing what they say makes them blessed or right. And in a funny way, in this section, he seems to be pointing against people being his followers. Which in one way is perfectly concert with his attitude that he doesn't want to have followers. On the other hand, there seems to be, of course, Zarthu's just going around talking to all kinds of people. And I guess I would say there's a tension in that. And he's not wanting to have followers, but wanting to have people understand him.

15:17 Seth: I didn't take notes when I read the Kaufman. I think this is in chapter 11. And Kaufman alludes to earlier works where Nietzsche says that the three types of overmen. Maybe it's gay science or something like that. Are philosophers, poets and saints. And he's not a saint. I think he knows that, and I think we know why. That would not be something he identifies with. But he's tried to be a philosopher, and so it's clear that he doesn't think. Even though I have to say, in translation, this does not come across as poetry. It's not rhythmic. And the Kaufman translation we read was not in any way, shape or form poetic, at least to my eye.

But it's possible that what Nietzsche's thinking here is, I've written treatises, I've written the books. You know, he started off with prose, with, you know, the typical discursive, scholarly ochsen style. And then he moved to an aphoristic style. And now he's, you know, essentially saying, and this is not alien to us with other philosophers, that poetry is the form that's needed to get these truths Across. And you don't question the poet. Why, that's not what poetry is.

16:31 Wes: I have trouble getting that out of this section. I think I'm closer to Dylan, I guess, because despite the admission of counting himself as a poet, I don't think that means he's endorsing poetry. I think he's seeing the prevarication of poetry as something to be overcome. And the way this section ends, Dylan read the part about the buffaloes and peacocks. But at the very end he says, but I have grown weary of this spirit. And I foresee that it will grow weary of itself. I have already seen the poets changed with their glances turned back on themselves.

I saw ascetics of the spirit approach. They grew out of the poets. So this idea of the ascetics of the spirit growing out of the poets. It's something we saw in Birth of Tragedy. Right. We had early Dionysian playwrights. And they were replaced by the ascetic playwrights that he didn't like. And then. And then by Socrates. So I don't know. But I have trouble getting a. Out of this section. A commentary on what Nietzsche is trying to do. Methodologically, maybe. That's right. But I just. I have trouble just getting it out of this particular section.

17:39 Mark: Let me read just a little bit more in between. So the bottom of page 127 and 128, a little bit. There are so many sections in here, like in book three, where it's like he's standing on a mountaintop and he's looking around and just reflecting on height and depth. And just these very symbolic things and kind of psalms to himself. You know, it's very hard to see, like, what actual idea came out of there. So this is what's frustrating, because I think what he's trying to do is some kind of poetry at the bottom. Page 127 here. This. However, all poets believe that whoever pricks up his ears as he lies in the grass or on lonely slopes will find out something about those things that are between heaven and earth.

And when they feel tender sentiments stirring, the poets always fancy that nature herself is in love with them. And that she is creeping to their ears to tell them secrets and amorous flatteries. And of this they brag and boast before all mortals. So that actually really sounds like those kind of sections I was describing.

18:33 Wes: This sounds like he's really making fun of poets there.

18:36 Mark: He is. He's saying he's a poet, but he's also a humorist. I'm having trouble balancing these two Things he's definitely. If he's a poet, he's not a serious poet. Like he's using poetry as an ironic form, just like he's using this fake biblical stuff as an ironic form. But I don't know if the irony entirely undermines. You know, that's the funny thing about irony is you're doing it ironically, but you're still doing it. Like he's still delivering up these odes to various things throughout this book. And that's a lot of directly what was annoying you guys.

19:05 Wes: This is complicated by the. I mean, really, as Seth was getting at, this is prose that we're reading. I mean, I think it's fair to say that it's poetic in the sense that the writing, it's very elusive. You could call it very poetic writing, but essentially it's prose. And I'm not sure that when he talks about the poets here, it's legitimately applicable to what Nietzsche has done in writing Zarathustra.

19:32 Mark: Even in the sections he calls songs. It doesn't matter what the meter is.

19:36 Wes: There are some poems in here later on.

19:38 Dylan: See, I took this section to be like on scholars before it and other sections that he has here and in other books as a kind of picking on someone who he disagrees with. And it's not quite as scorched earth as something like a scholar's one is. But I took him as being saying what he defines a problematic with poets. And not as much as saying what he is doing as a poet. But maybe it's implicit in there that it must be that insofar as he claims himself to be a poet, that he's doing something different. I don't know.

20:15 Mark: Well, he's self criticizing. I think that this is what's interesting about this format and the length that he goes to is that it is kind of like a philosophical diary in certain ways. Even though it seems like this is the most formal thing he ever did. It's not like the aphorism books where he's just sitting down and writing a little aphorism here and there. He's using this whole narrative structure, not very heavy on the plot, but nonetheless, I think that despite his choice of that form, he's using Zarathustra. While sometimes it represents him, but sometimes it's not him because it's this fictional character that is satirizing old time biblical stuff.

Just that main structural element, that main conceit of his narrative structure here means that he can play with himself. He can criticize himself by talking about the disciples of Zarathustra. He can be, in some ways maybe talking about his own experiences with his own disciples, his own followers, but not even committing to that. Like, I think in some ways in book four, he's so many different types of people that come to him that have found something interesting about him, but yet who are still seriously flawed. In a way, it's almost like he's giving a logical taxonomy of here's all the possible ways I can be misunderstood or only partially grasped.

That's gotta exceed his actual experience of real people. I'd be really surprised.

21:35 Wes: There's lots of evidence in here that Nietzsche's criticisms are also self critiques and that Nietzsche strongly identified with Zarathustra. So Nietzsche was a scholar. Nietzsche was an expert on ancient Greek poetry, a classicist. Nietzsche was a lot of things. And those are different moments in his development. And you can see him, I think the word diary, as Mark put it, is a good one. You can see him basically telling you the story of how he moved from one position to the next, or he had some realization about the shortcomings of his position.

There's even stuff in here which is manifestly about the fact that he left academia, even though it's not directly stated. But this poet thing, I still think it means he's highly critical of that moment. And it's unclear to me that he's endorsing a poetic language or figurative language as a means of better communication. I just don't know. I have trouble getting that out of this.

22:32 Dylan: I would align it, though. I mean, I think I understand Mark, your instinct to go to it. And it's also the case that he continually points back to Zarathustra as the book that you have to read for him, which makes it even more frustrating given that it's in some ways just feels so different.

22:50 Mark: Less ideas per page than almost anything else we've read by him.

22:54 Wes: Yes. Lots of filler, lots of fluff. Yeah.

22:57 Dylan: And so it makes you want to go either one or two directions. It makes you either want to feel like it's filler and fluff or say that there's something that he's doing maybe successfully or unsuccessfully with those narratives. You know, those scenes of, like we talked about it for a while last recording of the guy walking the tightrope between the two towers and he gets jumped over. And it wasn't so hard to sort out the symbolism. But why tell that story in that way? It seems a little weak to say it's just for dramatic effect or because he wanted to be entertaining or something. That there's something about that way of writing that got more to the truth. I mean, if you take him seriously, then that's what you'd say, that there's something about the way he wrote it that is more manifesting what he's trying to say.

23:45 Wes: Yeah. And I think, again, we should see this as an attempt to sort of write a parody of a religious text. That is largely the style that we're talking about, including the poetic components of the Bible.

23:58 Mark: Well, and it's interesting even in Plato. Right. Plato is the one he's referring to who is criticizing poets and contrasting philosophy with poetry. But he himself uses these images, like in the Phaedrus, this whole chariot, the allegory of the cave, like he uses literary devices. And of course, Plato himself is using Socrates in the same way that Nietzsche is using Zarathustra here. So this is not an accident. There's a self critiquing, self overcoming. What Plato really doesn't like is people using poetry poorly. Right. To deceive, to use it as a sophist, to pull one over on you.

So here Zarathustra is saying on page 128 that poetry always lifts us higher, specifically to the realm of the clouds. How weary I am of all the imperfection which must at all costs become event. Ah, how weary I am of poets. A little lower. I have grown weary of the poets. The old and the new, the superficial they all seem to me. And shallow seas. Their thoughts have not penetrated deeply enough, therefore their feelings did not touch bottom. This is not objecting to them because of their form. It's objecting because he doesn't think they're good enough thinkers.

25:03 Dylan: They're entertainers. I mean, that's why I take the spirit of the poet craves spectators, even if only buffaloes. Right. They're minstrels.

25:11 Mark: All right, so we can just keep that in mind as we're going forward. Want to look a little bit at the beginning of part three? I mean, if people want examples of the kind of stuff that I was just talking about, these navel gazing or gazing from the top of a big mountain, there's a lot of that here. I think the vision in the riddle is the first one where he's starting to talk about eternal recurrence. But he's kind of just edging toward that way.

25:37 Dylan: Well, he has that image there at the beginning, in the second part of. Of that. At the vision in the riddle, I sort of thought the beginning of the wanderer Read some. So at the beginning, on the wanderer, first section of book three, he's going back home. And he says, I am a wanderer and a mountain climber. He said to his heart, I am not like the plains. And it seems I cannot sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as destiny and experience will include some wandering and mountain climbing. In the end, one experiences only oneself.

The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me. But what could still come to me now that it was not mine already, what returns, what finally comes home to me is my own self. And what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered all among things in accidents. Maybe because I was already expecting eternal recurrence. But this notion of in the end one experiences only oneself and that what could still come to me now that was not mine already, what returns and is in my own self. All of that is to me foreshadowing more details about eternal recurrence.

That might be kind of weak for the beginning.

26:47 Mark: I mean, I did have notes in there. I especially like Stoicism. This whole the time has gone when mere accidents could still happen to me. One experience is only one self. These sound like the only thing that is real is my own reactions to things. You know, it sounds like Stoic philosophy. And I guess at some point, maybe it was. In Kaufman, he referred to himself as the last Stoic.

27:08 Dylan: Yeah. He says, praise be what hardens. And he says, now I must face my hardest path, begin my loneliest walk.

27:15 Wes: So when he says accidents can no longer happen to him. Right. That means there is no more contingency. There's nothing that is not embraced by him. So in other words, he owns everything. I mean, it sounds very existentialist to me in the end, rather than stoic. But you look at yourself not as the product of all these formative forces around you, all of this contingency, but you sort of. You take responsibility for all of it.

27:43 Dylan: Heads by thinking of eternal recurrence.

27:45 Seth: Yeah, I mean, I'm with Wes the way that the connection here is if you move ahead a little bit to section. I'm sorry my version doesn't have the numbers, but it's before sunrise, two sections beyond that, 164 in our okay. For all things have been baptized in the well of eternity and are beyond good and evil. And good and evil themselves are but intervening shadows and damp depressions and drifting clouds. Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach over all things stand the heaven accident, the Heaven innocence, the heaven chance, the heaven prankishness by chance, that is the most ancient nobility of the world.

And this I restored to all things. I delivered them from their bondage under purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell. When I taught that over them and through them no eternal will, unquote, wills. This prankish folly I've put in the place of that will when I taught in every one thing an impossible rationality. The freedom from bondage under purpose is the freedom from the idea of an eternal. A transcendent eternal value, right? A good beyond the world. So chance is exactly. What Wes said earlier is he's essentially making the point that the world is just a series of accidents.

There is no purpose to it. But when you own it and when he owns it and he wills it to be as it was and as it will be, and, you know, gathers together his impulses, then the accident becomes essentially necessity and there is no more contingency.

29:22 Mark: The accident becomes necessity and there's no more contingency. I guess I have a hard time. Maybe we should just make a little clear that the connection between, you know, the fact that the world actually is ruled by chance as opposed to ruled by God, but yet we've said that no accidents can happen to me because of his stoic. Like what we're going to see is eternal recurrence, embrace of destiny.

29:42 Seth: The connection here is the idea that if there's a purpose, the purpose is to suffer this life for the sake of the eternal afterlife. Right? That would be the big one. But as several of the secondary literature points out too, that Hegel is present here with the onward march of progress, that what Nietzsche is trying to say here is there is no purpose in life, there is no progress, there's no external value that's shaping the world. The world simply is what it is and it's come together by a series of chance encounters between things. That doesn't mean that all possibilities, that there's all possible worlds.

And later on in the section he talks about, takes a potshot, I think, at Leibniz. Somewhere in here I made a note of it. But it's the idea that the world is what it is and it's not moving in a linear guided by something external in a linear progression. It just simply is the world the way it is. But that doesn't mean that everything's possible. What you have to do is let go of the idea that there's some external meaning guiding the world and just embrace the life that you have lived and will yourself into the future. And when you do that, you'll realize that the chance formation of the world, it's chance that it happens to be the way it is.

But that doesn't mean it's contingent, it means it's necessary. And you embrace that necessity. You embrace the fact that you're in this world in which you create your own good and evil.

31:07 Mark: So it's worth looking back. That's section four of book three. This section two is where he's kind of introducing in a long way, the eternal recurrence. For the first time, I interpret this dwarf on his shoulder who's criticizing him as being like he's describing his own self. Doubt perhaps. Although what the dwarf is saying to him is a little vague in terms of O Zarathustra, you philosopher's stone, you threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall. O Zarathustra, you philosopher's stone, you slingstone, you star crusher, you threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentence to yourself and to your own stoning. O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself. There's no obvious way for me to translate that into actual self critique.

31:52 Seth: The secondary literature, one of the things I think it was in Stern suggested that throwing the stone up and it dropping is a reference to Schopenhauer. The world is suffering eternal pessimism. But I connected the dwarf who's weighing heavily on him, and this idea of the stone coming up and falling is what he refers to elsewhere as the spirit of gravity, which I took to be Christianity.

32:14 Wes: He will later on. I think it's in that section on the spirit of gravity. The dwarf is the one who utters that there is a good and evil for all, as opposed to my good and evil, which is precisely that spirit of gravity.

32:27 Mark: Just trying to translate this again into the language of self critique. There's a lot of imagery about. You want to be like the eagle who is flying. You don't want to be weighed down by the spirit of gravity.

32:37 Unknown speaker: And.

32:38 Mark: And I think you just started to cash out what that means. But why he would have self doubt about. I think I'm free, I guess. Okay, I'm answering my own question. I think that I'm free of conventional morality, of the slog of tradition, of universal good and evil, this thing that would paralyze me and make it so that I couldn't be actually creative. But maybe I'm just Fooling myself. I think I've broken out of this all, but maybe I'm just playing another iteration of the same old game. Maybe I'm. I am one of these mistakes that he then points to as attempted higher men that don't quite make it.

He basically yells at the dwarf and starts to praise courage. And he calls in the spirit of gravity. And this is where. So158, you, spirit of gravity, do not make things too easy for yourself, or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lame foot. And it was I that carried you to this height. Behold, I continue this moment from this gateway. Moment, capital M. Moment. A long eternal lane leads backward behind us. An eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before?

And if everything has been there before, what do you think, dwarf of this moment? Must not this gateway too, have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws out after it all that is to come, therefore, itself too? For whatever can walk in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. And this little spider which crawls in the moonlight and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things, must not all of us have been there before and return and walk in that other lane out there before us in this long, dreadful lane, must we not eternally return?

He's whispering it at this point. It's like he hasn't thought out the implications. It's something that is too lofty to speak of openly.

34:30 Seth: So the story that he's telling, the dwarf is sitting on his shoulder as he's trying to climb up, right? He's trying to ascend. And it's the weight of gravity that's dragging him down from the peak, and he's struggling against it. And this is the epiphany to which you referred at the beginning, right, Dylan? This is the moment.

34:50 Dylan: Well, I guess it's moment in two ways, right? Because he's speaking of these paths that cross and that you reside at a moment. And then, of course, in the story, this is a moment, this interaction with

35:00 Mark: the dwarf, this is the first half of it. The end of the book is when he actually yells like, yes, I affirm eternal recurrence, and I am the teacher of eternal recurrence, and that is my function. Whereas here, it's just something he's lightly touching, he's exploring. And as soon as he throws this out, he introduces this other. It's like he's describing a dream. Here among wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone in the bleakest moonlight. But there lay a man and there the dog jumping, bristling, whining. Now he saw me coming. And verily what I saw I had never seen alike a young shepherd I saw writhing, gagging in spasms, his face distorted and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth.

Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep and the snake crawled in his throat and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain. It did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me, bite. Bite its head off, bite. Thus it cried out of me my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out with a single cry.

35:59 Dylan: He ends up biting off the snake at the end.

36:01 Seth: Right, Right. Well, the shepherd, however, bit, as my cry counseled him. He bit with a good bite, far away he spewed the head of the snake and. And he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human, one changed, radiant laughing and laughter in many other places is pointed out as. It's a sign essentially of the controlling of the passions, the mastering of the self. It's the sign of the overman who gets joy out of their mastery of themselves. So one of the secondary literature has an account of this. The climbing the peak with the dwarf is Nietzsche's struggle with Christian value.

We know how he felt about it. He's not been able to come up with an alternative. He's not been able to understand how to articulate a non transcendent metaphysical concept that would validate and justify overcoming the overman. And this vision where he sees the two roads, infinite roads, leading in different ways. And you're at this moment where you look forward and you look back and you're looking towards the future and the eternal. In the future you're looking towards the past and you come to this realization. He's working with a concept of finite space and matter and infinite time.

He comes with this idea that everything that has happened, if it happens now, it must have happened before and it will happen again. And you know he's dumbfounded. It's terrifying for all the reasons that we'll talk about subsequently. So the vision of the shepherd with the snake in his mouth, the snake, snake, is the notion. It's the idea of eternal recurrence. It's the horror, the grotesque idea that, oh my God, not only am I living this now, but I'M going to be living it over and over again for eternity. The snake can either eat you, in which case you just retreat back to Christianity or maybe you commit suicide or something like that.

But biting off the head of the snake is turning and accepting, embracing eternal recurrence. And that's why the shepherd afterwards is laughing and is no longer human.

38:13 Mark: Would it make sense for us to hit the other places where he talks about eternal recurrence, which I think the next One is section 13, the convalescent or we obviously need to talk about the tablets and stuff like that. Do you feel like that stuff is necessary? The question is, do you need that intervening stuff to actually motivate the final steps on eternal recurrence?

38:33 Wes: Maybe we should just work our way through 12 and. Or we could even start with 11 on the Spirit of gravity and then work our way up to the convalescent. The eternal recurrent stuff is, like I said, the climax of everything. I think 13 would be the last section we would really have to discuss, so that's essential. So I would say, yeah, 11 through 13 is how we should approach it

38:53 Dylan: just before we jump into 11, which is fine. The problem of infinity here started to get to me because I felt like everything turns on the fact that time is infinite. So there's a kind of extrapolation and enrapturement with infinity that allows him to get to and sort of, for him, forces the notion that time is infinite and it's infinite behind me, and if it in front of me, and therefore everything must have happened and it has a kind of pseudo mathematical characteristic to it because of that. But it really does rely on the notion of infinity being unending in a kind of character of its own altogether. To me it brings in this sort of religious character to it, which in some ways is fitting for a book that's a parody of a sacred text. But on the other hand, he seems to take with utter seriousness, he seems to really mean it, that eternal recurrence is a. Isn't a parody of an idea?

39:53 Seth: Oh no, I don't think so.

39:56 Dylan: But it relies on a notion of the eternal and the infinite opening up the infinite and therefore immediately, as soon as you do that, as soon as you cross over that boundary from the finite to the infinite, all kinds of crazy things happen because the infinite is bigger than any other finite thing and therefore pinning it down and you have to allow for anything to happen. And I found that his enrapturement with it, he fell in love with the idea and that it kind of came upon him in a blaze. But it seems idealistic isn't the right word either. But it's a kind of deep abstraction that there's this infinity of time before and after us. It's deeply non observational.

40:36 Seth: Right.

40:37 Dylan: So often things are rooted in our experience. Right. We have no experience of the infinite. And if he's having an experience of the infinite here, that is a kind of enrapturement, a kind of mysticism.

40:51 Mark: Yeah. It seems like he should be off limits to him.

40:54 Dylan: And that's the only way you're going to get it. You're going to get that version of eternal recurrence rather than something that was rooted in contingency, that wasn't teleological. Right. You can have motion without having progress. You don't have to have everything eternally recur. He's super adding that on there.

41:12 Seth: And let me see if I can touch base with this. And maybe again in Kaufman he gives a quote where Nietzsche actually thought this was the most scientific super added thing that's ever been offered. Certainly much more than the idea of a single monotheistic God or reason in history or whatever the case may be. So he might have been working with some understanding of what was current science of his time at the day. I don't know. But it raises the point which for me is the critical question. Given that this is not clearly spelled out. Is he positing an actual metaphysical principle?

Is it more of, you know, like Camus absurd? Is it something existential that to overcome you have to embrace the idea that this life is not only the only life you ever get, but it's live it as if you would live it over and over and over again. Or is it not existential? Is it somehow psychological like you have to. This is where there's a comparison to Kant's categorical imperative act as if you would will that what you do, you would do over and over again in eternity and turn it into more of a psychological kind of moral principle. And I think it's an open question as to what, if any or all of those things that it could be doing.

42:28 Mark: I certainly like his formulation of it in the Gay Science better, where he really just brings it up as a thought experiment pretty much runs the way you just described it. Imagine that this is the case. What would you then choose to do? What kind of person would you choose to be? I like that.

42:45 Seth: It's the Nietzsche TED Talk.

42:47 Mark: Yeah. And there's no metaphysical claims being made there. It seems very much in line with the kind of poetry that Nietzsche is engaged in. It sounds like an existential coping, you know, interpretive strategy. Just like Sartre would come up with of what are ways that I can spin the facticity of my situation in order to have a reaction to it, of the kind that I ultimately want to have, that I would, on the deepest thought, this would lead me to behave like, for Nietzsche, the Overman. For Sartre, it's authenticity or. But even the quote that it's the most scientific of hypotheses is from an unpublished note.

So he never came up, according to Kaufman, with something that was convincing enough that he bothered to include that in any published work. This justification, it's not just that quote. He has some further justifications of why this would be the case scientifically. I can't help but think because he didn't publish that, that it is rather beside the point.

43:42 Seth: Well, maybe that's why he's saying it as a poet.

43:44 Mark: Yes, yes.

43:45 Seth: See, Dylan, if you were just reading it as poetry and not in your scientifically minded prose brain, you're not ready to hear what Zarathustra has to say anyway, that much is obvious.

43:57 Dylan: I think that is pretty obvious.

43:58 Mark: I just think of the orders of infinity, right? Even if what I'm about to do now is going to happen infinitely many more times, well, how much time between this time and next time is going to happen? An order of magnitude greater of infinity, right? So if everything you're about to do, imagine that the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, of the infinite time before and after, does not involve this repeating. Like it will repeat, and it will repeat it infinitely many times. But that level of infinity is so small compared to the overall level of infinity as to be practically nothing but

44:36 Dylan: there you seem to be dodging the whole point of eternal recurrence.

44:40 Mark: And besides which, I'm not going to remember next time. So really, you know, by any good account of personal identity where you have to have a continuity of consciousness, it's not even going to be me doing it next time. I think Nietzsche kind of gets this because he thinks like, oh, the small man is going to recur. It's not just reflecting on your own existence, but everything around you, everything that you witness that's also going to recur, right? A lot of it is kind of coming to terms not just with your own fate, with your amor fati, about yourself, coming to terms with your own character, but being okay with the mediocrity, nearly unavoidable mediocrity in his eyes of Everything else.

45:19 Dylan: This is where I get really impatient with the idea because, okay, so let's pick the mediocre man. Oh, I'm so oppressed by the mediocre man having to live his life around me over and over and over again. Let's pick out stuff that you really don't want to have happen. Like you're being broken on the wheel in the Middle Ages, over and over and over again for eternity, right? Or, you know, you're in the middle of Verdun and you're being shelled over and over while you're laying on top of corpses of people and you're sitting in front of a trench and you're following another group, the third group of people to, like, go on to their deaths just because some general told you to do so.

Or you can get pretty freaking horrible, right? So picking something like, oh, the small man, the small souled guy, you know, the really stupid guy who sits next to me, he's going to eternally recur. And that weighs down upon my soul. That's just such complete horseshit.

46:18 Mark: I just.

46:20 Dylan: There are things way more horrible than that. Even Nietzsche's own suffering, right? Which was pretty horrible. Pretty, pretty bad, right? There are things way more horrible than his suffering. To imagine that there's no beginning and end to that.

46:33 Mark: So to come to terms with all that, because he does say, like, even in, you know, in any individual case, kind of like a stoic, he's going to say, it's great to have pleasure, but don't seek pleasure. Suffering ends up being good, right? Whatever doesn't kill me, make me stronger. That's. I need to quote. So it seems like to really come to terms with eternal recurrence, with the whole existence of the universe having spilled out the way it is, you're kind of doing equivalently to what he's criticizing in this section somewhere about Leibniz, that you're having to say, all that suffering on the wheel, it was kind of the best it could be.

It's not the best of all possible worlds, because that means there are infinitely many worlds and this is one of them. And it's the best. No, this is the only world. It includes that stuff. So by definition, it is the best. I'm going to say yes to the eternal recurrence by affirming all that, even the horrible suffering.

47:22 Seth: I don't think Nietzsche is saying this is the best of all possible worlds. He's just saying this is the world, this is it. And there's no afterlife and there's no progress. And anybody that gives you values is either pulling one over on you, or they're just expressing their own opinion. And they probably haven't even earned the right to claim those values. To the extent that there's a similarity to Stoicism, to me anyway, it's accepting that this is the way the world is and there are going to be hardships and suffering, and appealing to some external value system to try to make sense of those is a lost cause.

I mean, that's essentially the message of Stoicism. But Nietzsche is going far beyond that in what he thinks your response should be. Your response should not be resignation and a turn inward to saying, well, all I can control is my thoughts and my responses. It's like you should run towards that, run towards your fate. Eternal recurrence is just the mechanism by which you can overcome the horror of this realization. It's not resignation to overcome it, you have to actively embrace it. And I think he thinks eternal recurrence is the mechanism by which that's possible because it's like a transcendent value, but it's not transcendent.

48:38 Mark: So it looks like we've gotten into evaluation of this, even though we haven't uncovered all the quotes about it.