Ep. 214: More Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: We haven't discussed any of the core reading.

0:03 Mark: So, Wes, why don't you take us to where you actually wanted us to start? What's the spirit of gravity section? Is that where you want to.

0:09 Wes: Yeah. So I think section two on the spirit of gravity. What's interesting about this section is it's a section where Nietzsche will suggest that we replace love of neighbor with love of oneself, which he sees as a kind of grounding of moving from the concept of a good and evil for everyone, which is the spirit of gravity. That is the thing the dwarf says. The thing that the dwarf utters to you is that there's a universal good and evil for all human beings to one's own particular set of bespoke values that are designed for oneself according to one's own taste.

Taste is the word that he uses at the end of the section. The idea in section two is that, here's the way he puts it, but whoever would become light and a bird must love himself. Thus I teach. And here becoming a bird means to sort of escape from being weighed down by a system of transcendent values, like Christian or ascetic values, things like that. So one must learn to love oneself. Thus I teach, with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam. Such roaming baptizes itself love of the neighbor. With this phrase, the best lies and hypocrisies have been perpetrated so far and especially by such as were a grave burden for all the world.

1:35 Mark: Yeah. And this idea of isolation, of why you would want to not get in somebody else's business and be comfortable with yourself, is something that in the narrative is spread especially through these two books, three and four. But really through the whole thing is he's going in these cycles of should I teach people? Should I just withdraw, you know, so much of that. And I think a lot of that has to be just as we spread our values around. You know, it's like every action we do is positing a value and just being with other people, you're going to have that pressure on you.

2:11 Seth: Right.

2:11 Mark: And he was talking before about the common folk and the little old ladies and that as a fundamentally open and generous person, you're apt to be a victim of taking on a lot of poison from others, basically their ill thought out, repressive values, especially the ones that, you know, are these dominant ones in the culture, the Christian values and stuff. You want to be around other full individuals who love themselves. But even that, I think is kind of a mixed blessing.

2:40 Wes: He goes on to say, you know, we are presented with grave words and values almost from the cradle, good and evil. This gift is called for its own sake, we are forgiven for living, which I really like.

2:53 Seth: Yeah.

2:54 Wes: And of course, you know, life is, as we've seen, the standard of value which opposes the anti natural system of values, suggesting that there is a standard for Nietzsche. Then there's this idea that this system of values is alien in a sense. So man is a grave burden for himself because he carries these alien grave words and values. And then he contrasts with that, and verily much that is our own is also a grave burden. So, right, there's the we've been burdened with these alien values that we've incorporated from society. He's saying that this distracts us from things that are particularly just ours, as opposed to stuff we've absorbed, the mores and customs and values we've absorbed from the outside that are still burdensome and ought to be dealt with.

Much that is inside man is like an oyster, nauseating and slippery and hard to grasp, so that a noble shell with a noble embellishment must plead for it. Much hidden graciousness and strength is never guessed. So man is hard to discover, hardest of all for himself. Often the spirit lies about the soul Thus the spirit of gravity orders it. He, however, has discovered himself who says, this is my good and evil. With that, he has reduced to silence the mole and the dwarf who say, good for all, evil for all the burden. So the transcendent system of values is a distraction from us figuring out our own good and our own evil.

4:24 Seth: Well, it's an imposition that devalues life. It's almost a form of alienation. He uses the term in the translation, the word alien, these. These alien things that are on us. But it really alienates us from life, which is a way of saying it alienates us from ourselves.

4:39 Mark: To be alienated from life, he says, you want one must learn to have a shell and shiny sheen and shrewd blindness. You need to actually develop barriers that will keep you from just loading up alien crap on yourself like a camel. You let yourself be well loaded. Especially the strong, reverent spirit would bear much. He loads too many alien grave words and values on himself, and then life seems a desert to him. So you need to strangely separate yourself in some ways in order to be exposed to life.

5:11 Seth: I read those two sections as. And this is typical of this book. So we have one paragraph where there's a metaphor of a camel talking about alien things and camel, and then the next one we're talking about a nauseating and slippery oyster. We're a camel in that we voluntarily submit. We're a beast of burden and we're burdened with values from the spirit of gravity. Right. But he says, invariably, much that is our own is also a great burden. And what I kind of thought he was getting at here was kind of like, you know, this is him as the psychologist talking about attachments.

You may have to unhealthy relationships or having an unhealthy relationship to vanity and, you know, these kinds of things that aren't necessarily the big ticket transcendent values, but are vanities or, you know, social mores or something like that. So that's what I got out of those two paragraphs. And then that's when he says, man is hard to discover, hardest of all for himself, precisely because he has to fight through and cast off or corral, in the case of his internal. Cast off the external and corral the internal. And then be able to say, no, this is my good and evil, and say it from a place where it's not driven by some kind of mania or depression or psychosis or something along those lines.

Not reacting to something that's been given to you externally and not coming out of some Broken psychological motive.

6:41 Wes: Yeah. I see this as him saying, it's hard to figure out what you want. It's hard to reduce it to something so. But it's hard to figure out what one really values. I mean, the end of this is. It's kind of funny because he comes up with this metaphor of how trivial things might make such a big difference in attraction between people. That's the shell part of things. Right. If you're a little overweight, you may miss out on what's beneath all of that. So women know this. The most exquisite. Do a little fatter, a little slimmer. Oh, how much destiny lies in so little.

That's the idea that the shell can be shabby. And so that what's inside, what's deep down inside remains hidden. Which he lines up with this ide man. Being hard to discover because the spirit lies about the soul. Which I take to mean that the spirit is sort of encasing the soul. So, in other words, think of the encasement as consisting of all those values. And they sort of lie over our own tastes, the values that are particular to us. And obscure them in the way fat might obscure the inner beauty of someone that we might otherwise date. That, I think, is actually the analogy.

So the goal is to discover my good and evil as opposed to the spirit of gravity that encases it and obscures it. That's a acute psychological observation. And it is genuinely difficult to disentangle one's own desire. Because I think this is related to desire from the desire of the other. Thinking back to our Lacan style episodes, the desire of the other that we have absorbed.

8:25 Dylan: I really like that. And I'm trying to join this notion of encasement with the kind of. When I was reading Spirit of Gravity, I was imagining it as environmental, but maybe those are sort of the same thing that he has this imagery of trying to become a bird in your own spirit. Not subject to gravity or not as subject to it, at the very least. And as opposed to being weighed down close to the earth. That seemed very much like the environment that we find our spirit in. That is just constantly pulling and weighing on us. And that seemed different to me than the encasement.

9:01 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the way I think of it, the environmental factor, right, Is psychosocial. Well, it's social and cultural. It's just the fact of the existence of other people with certain sets of values. And one's values largely come from that. I mean, a lot of what we do, right, that we've simply absorbed as Children.

9:19 Dylan: Yes.

9:19 Wes: And that's the obscuring, encasing thing. That's the thing that obscures our own actual desire. Right. So the person who, to use a very trivial example, is on the path of becoming a doctor or some other lucrative or practical pursuit, purely because that's what's acceptable and that's what will earn status and that's what the parents approve of, as opposed to pursuing their passion, which is basket weaving, let's say. So that's the idea. But in a larger sense, it's love thy neighbor or other. A value like love thy neighbor or extreme prohibitions against having or acknowledging aggressive and sexual feelings.

It prevents you even from sublimating those feelings. If you can't be aware of your own aggression or other terrible feelings, if that's so prohibited by society that you can't even think about it properly, that has all sorts of implications for one's character, for whether or not one discovers what one really wants to do. There's a warping effect of all those values. It's not like we're endorsing. Yeah, let's. Because he sounds like he endorses that. Right? You know, yay. I will hang out with the murderers and the robbers and all that stuff. In the end, though, I think you really interpret that he's not endorsing, obviously, a return to a state of nature, to the nastiness and the brutishness, but I think he is endorsing the ability to comprehend those urges and those impulses as a means to the spiritualization of instinct, as a means to sublimation and value creation for oneself.

10:57 Mark: So there's a tension here that he's very much aware of, I think, between the yes and amen. So that came up at least earlier in this book, in the Before Sunrise, one of his sort of psalms to his own soul and to the environment around him, which we've seen, which is going to be essential in the why we're using eternal recurrence as a solution for something because you want to say yes to the universe. But Then I think so 194, right after where you stop reading this Is My Good, this Is My Evil is one of these places where he's criticizing what looks like Leibniz.

I also do not like those who consider everything good and this world the best. Such men I call the Omni Satisfied, Omni Satisfaction, which knows how to taste everything that is not the best taste. I honor the recalcitrant, choosy tongues and stomachs which have learned to say aye. And yes and no. But to chew and digest everything that is truly the swine's manner. And to always bray, yeah. That only the ass has learned and whoever is of his spirit.

11:56 Seth: And a little side note here, when you're talking about the ass. You know, one of Kaufmann's points when he published his translations and the philosopher, psychologist Antichrist is that Nietzsche, you know, had a lot of irony and joy and humor in his writing that wasn't picked up on. And when I kind of got fed up with Part four, I started trying to listen to the Librivox version, which is, I'm fairly certain, read by somebody who was institutionalized. It was like flatline. They were just. And so. And so Zarathustra whispered and then fell silent. The other one yelled. And the only time he got out of character to try to add any inflection at all was when he made the noise of the ass. And I thought, well, there's somebody who's definitely missed the point.

12:42 Mark: I actually did listen to the Librivox just book three today, because I read book three longer ago, and I just wanted to get that back in my head. There are several different readers on it, and having already read this version, I was not distracted by the older translation. It was not significantly different, but I'm sure if that was the only version I heard, then there are probably things I would have missed that I'm getting out of here. I think one of the calls the older translators made is that Nietzsche is actually writing in a sort of pseudo biblical style, so they thought we should actually make it read like the King James version of the Bible. We should put doth and things all over the place, which evidently you guys found this irritating enough without that sort of affectation throughout, so we chose correctly.

13:25 Seth: I want to highlight something that I got out of this transition because, Wes, I basically have tons of notes and highlights in this section, too, so it's clear we were picking up on same things. The hundreds of mixed metaphors that are in here. The section Mark just read, he talks about stomach, right? So taste and stomach. Even though I think he's not a great stylist in that respect, there's no accident in the fact that he's bringing it back to the body. The negation of life, that happens when the spirit of gravity gives you external values and says, love thy neighbor.

Is that not just that you're alienated from yourself kind of existentially, but you're alienated from your body. And the bridge there where he talked about the oyster and Then it says how hard it is to discover yourself is. It has to be a remembrance, a fidelity to life. But it's not an abstract, theoretical encounter with yourself or trying to get into your inner self or your soul. It's about connecting with your body in this lived life. So the metaphors that are all associated with the Overman. In the next paragraph, he says it again, too. He brings to it, he says, deep yellow and hot red, thus my taste wants it.

It mixes blood into all colors, for I love blood. And blood becomes one of those tropes that you see frequently in connection with hardship and suffering and the overcoming, because it's the epitome of bodily fluid par excellence. It's, you know, it's the voice of the body in some respects. Yeah.

14:53 Wes: Later on, he'll basically say the spirit just is the stomach. This idea of the stomach and taste and digestion and all that's a recurring theme throughout his work. In fact, we had a listener on Twitter ask us what Nietzsche meant by something in Beyond Good and Evil, where he basically says it's because men have abdomens, that they aren't so as apt to think of themselves as gods. And it's such a rich epigram because it takes something that we know with Nietzsche, which is that his critique of values, it's premised on acknowledgment of the body.

So in the gay science, for instance, he will say our highest values are just cloaks for physiological ailments, cloaks for things that can be reduced, the physiological. But ultimately he's not engaged in this complete reduction. In other works we see, it's not so much like when he actually gives substance to these reductions. It's psychological. He's reducing things to values, to stuff like ressentiment and the body. There's not so much you can say about the body, except that what he's worried about is instinct. And the instinct sort of exists at that juncture between body and mind.

It's bodily and its immediate effects are mental or felt as impulses. And the stomach is a great metaphor for instinct, right, because it's like gut feelings. It's a source of anxiety, it's where viscera are located and entrails. Nietzsche will talk a lot about entrails. And the other thing he talks a lot about is indigestion, where it's clearly a metaphor related to repression, to the inability to digest experiences, to actually comprehend and process them, because they contain elements of the forbidden that make our instincts obscure to us, make us forget them, make them Unknowable.

16:48 Dylan: You make me think about nausea.

16:50 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

16:52 Mark: And just the. The fact that he seems to think that there's an appropriate time for nausea, you know, appropriate for you, at least. There are definitely other places where he just refers to certain classes of people that he's critiquing as being eternally dyspeptic or people who are despisers of life, who are nauseated by life. It seems to follow in that that what you're shooting for as the Overman is to be free of that is to be a font of joy who can love. But you can see in his own story depiction of the dynamics of Zarathustra's hot and cold relationship with other people, there's maybe a little more to it than that, or maybe there's more flexibility in that.

In that what counts as the virtuous ideal for him is multiple. So it's not just that. Yes, being like Santa Claus is what we're aiming for. No, it's being you as an individual. And if that means that you are petulant and moody and depressed and self sacrificing, like, maybe that's part of the deal with you and that's fine, but maybe not. Maybe you're doing that because you have digested inadequate values. There's no clear way to generalize about that.

18:02 Seth: This seems like a pretty clear statement too, of the kind of moral relativism that he's generally accused of. And is that a misreading because we haven't read his entire canon backwards and

18:14 Dylan: forwards in depth, that he's a moral relativist?

18:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Can we choose any, Just any set of values?

18:20 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think this goes to the point Wes was making at the beginning, that the positive part about it is much harder to get out of it than the critique, because his critique is so centered on generating our own values. But he is, let's call it less clear, maybe purposely less clear on what it means to have a positive account at the end of this section. This is my way. Where is yours? Thus I answered those who asked me the way for the way that does not exist. So he resists, even though you can find in there, you know, gestures towards values that seem very much like virtue ethics and his love of nobility and excellence. But you don't really know exactly what that means.

19:07 Mark: So isn't it pluralism, not relativism? So that, first of all, this book is for all and none, like only the cream of the crop, really. He's talking to here that are capable of Authentically having yes and no. You know, that their values are not just some derivative slosh. So it requires great strength of character to self overcome and overcome to get to the point where you are identifying your own yes and no. And then, yeah, I think for people that have, in a way that he would approve of gotten to that point, then there is no overall nature dictated good and evil that can decide conflicts between them. It is subjective to that extent, but it's not just, just relative where you can just pick any old values. Or more importantly, it's not just anybody that can pick them.

20:00 Wes: Obviously it's a complicated question. And for Nietzsche to level the critique he does at Christian and associated values, he does need to have some external standard. And the external standard that he uses is life. And ultimately it's life itself determines what's valuable. And ascetic values are anti natural and they're anti life. And I mean, that's one clue to things, or it's one complication, which is that to level his critique he needs some external standard. But by the time we get to this question of self overcoming and becoming oneself, it's like bespoke virtue ethics where instead of shooting for courage or for any number of other generic virtues associated with being a human being, I am trying to do something related to my own character, my own tastes, my virtues, my own flourishing.

Yeah, where my flourishing is defined not by my humanness, but my being the particular type of person that I am. The problem with that, of course, is just because you're a psychopath whose character is so structured as to not just a psychopath, but a serial murderer who gets sexual thrill out of murdering people, that sort of person, you may be structurally constituted for that to be your highest good. I mean, I don't think there's anything incoherent about that. If someone could be so structured that there's really no other and there's no way to change them and there's nothing for them in life unless they can do that.

That's their version of having relationships and children and meaning that the way other people get their true satisfaction out of life, well, that only comes from murdering people. Do we endorse that or do we say actually we apply this external standard, the same one that Nietzsche uses to critique things like ressentiment and say no, that doesn't work, that's sick. Or something like that? Or to take a more obvious case, do we say the external set of values, maybe that Nietzsche is critiquing, maybe they're good for some people, but not good for the great people.

So right. Ressentiment is fine for the herd. Maybe. Maybe his critique of anti natural values is not meant to say, well, it's bad in and of itself for humanity, but it's just that we don't want to generalize. We don't want anyone saying yes, that's the way everyone has to live according to love thy neighbor. Because there's some people for whom it's not good for them given the way they're constituted.

22:34 Mark: I just think that he has the resources at his disposal for saying I condemn someone else's values, the serial killers, without having to rely on an external, that is objective standard. Right. Based on what I have developed through long self reflection and experience in the world as being my values is incompatible with this serial killing that you were going around and doing. And so that's not going to be very satisfactory to say. It's just so. In other words, if you're the only two people that exist, then there really is no way to decide between them.

It would end up just being the fact that I feel this way about the serial killer and so do you. And so do you. And so do you. So it'd be a matter of power, of efficacious how we could smash down the serial killer. But it's never really a question of justifying ourselves against the serial killer. That is not the game that he's playing, I think.

23:30 Wes: So forget about good and evil in a Christian sense or in some other transcendent sense. We still would want to say that there's something sick about the serial killer, that they're psychologically unhealthy. And then we would have to talk about the grounds for doing that. It's not because there's a Christian table of values. We might appeal to Aristotelian virtue ethics and human nature or something like that.

23:56 Dylan: I really want to appeal to the standard of life that you were talking about that he appeals to. If you start turning that into an ethical claim, it seems like it's going to be hard not to go down a road that he wouldn't approve of.

24:09 Mark: I think the difficulty that we're running into is just between what his ethics is and what his metaethics is. It's an irony of that. His metaethics is maybe relativistic, but his ethics is firmly almost utilitarian. Not such that everybody's interest counts equally. It's not pleasure versus pain so much as life versus anti life, but. But it's as fundamental as utilitarianism in that Sense, that is what his ethic is.

24:37 Dylan: This is a hard one. We should move on.

24:41 Wes: So, yeah, the tablets are where the values are written down. I guess section two is the place to start.

24:47 Mark: Yeah. So we've had these sections that are pretty short throughout most of this book and suddenly like this one just runs on for pages and pages and pages and pages, and it is itself split into many, many shorter aphoristic looking sections.

25:02 Dylan: 30 of them.

25:03 Mark: But it is overall the 12th section in book three.

25:07 Wes: Yeah, so it's old and new tablets and then section two of that, which, and I think most of this, by the way, we can skip over. But anyway, section two and three and then a few others are important. But yeah, on page 196, I disturbed the sleepiness when I taught what is good and evil, no one knows yet unless it be he who creates. He, however, creates man's goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all is good and evil, that is his creation. So this speaks directly to what we were just talking about, this idea of values not being transcendent, not coming down from on high, but being the result of our own creative activity.

25:48 Mark: Isn't it interesting to say there that no one knows them yet. So it could be that there is a ultimately transcendent system of values, but we don't know ourselves, you know, as individuals or as a species well enough to actually spell those out. So something like be not anti life, that's sort of a schematic, that's an outline. But in terms of the details, you know, what would be sufficient to come up with an ethic, a list of things that you would then impose on other people or promote is more difficult.

26:18 Wes: Perhaps the ultimate system of values is just what the overman would choose. It begins to sort of sound like ancient virtue ethics of various sorts. You know, the stoicism where you would talk about the sage. When you want to appeal to an ultimate standard, you actually appeal to the choices that would be made by this particular ideal person. Not endorsing the idea that Nietzsche is actually saying that, but it's kind of reminiscent of that, just this idea. He, however, creates man's goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. This person who is the creator. That does sound less like, oh, I'm going to create my values. You go, create your values. And more like someone comes along, the overman comes along and creates the values. Capital V. But I think it's unclear.

27:05 Mark: Yeah, and I'm going on Kaufmann's interpretation of what the Overman amounts to that he points to, I think again, some unpublished scribblings of Nietzsche's to figure out what the overman is. Kind of imagine what you really admire in your teachers and then kind of extrapolate from that. That's at least your first shot at, you know, the direction an overman would go. So the overman really is something that is, in a sense within you. It is an extrapolation, is an elaboration of virtue that is already in yourself than are looking into what you most admire.

So I think there is supposed to be a connection to people's actual attempts to be virtuous. It's just that when most people actually attempt it, no matter how impressive they are, they end up being some kind of shambling higher man. In other words, some kind of monster that has some of it right but is out of balance. So this is why there's a multiplicity of value systems among actually impressive people. Because they're all on this line of interpretation, getting part of it right. They're extrapolating from some by becoming themselves, they have elaborated some idiosyncratic traits that they have to become this larger than life thing.

But the overman is maybe just a logical construction to sort of of draw that out to infinity. Kind of like the pragmatic view of truth. Truth is what we would agree on if we had all the time in the world to discuss and rationally elaborate. People who self overcome are going to go in different directions. And the Overman, if we want to think of that as a unified thing, is where they would all eventually come to agreement, if that were possible.

28:50 Wes: So for the rest of this section, it's obviously Nietzsche talking about himself. He's like, I came along and I told you to laugh at your great masters of virtue and your saints and your poets and your world redeemers. And ultimately he calls himself a mark. There's some support here for stuff you were saying about poets. And verily I'm ashamed. So he says, into hotter souths I flew, quivering an arrow through sun drunken delight away into distant futures which no dream had yet seen. Into hotter south than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes to speak in parables and to limp and stammer like poets.

And verily I am ashamed that I must still be a poet. And then he gives these interesting sections where he's doing this gay science stuff again, where he's treating gayness and prankishness and frivolity as sort of being something that plays with seriousness. So the dance of the gods is prankishness. Time is a happy mockery of moments, necessity, freedom itself, playing happily with the sting of freedom. These are all very obviously poetic moments here. And where I also found again my old devil and archenemy, the spirit of gravity and all that he created.

Constraint, statute, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil. For must there not be that over which one dances and dances away? In other words, our frivolity and the dancing and all those sorts of things, they're predicated on the existence of all this serious stuff.

30:24 Mark: What do you take about necessity being thrown in there? The spirit of gravity creates necessity. When I think earlier we were saying, in line with amor fati and the eternal recurrence, that no, necessity is what we discover and come to terms with.

30:40 Seth: No, no, this is different. This is something created by the spirit of gravity, constraint, statute, necessity, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil.

30:50 Dylan: But why is necessity not the same thing as the determinism of this is the way the world always is and even will.

30:56 Mark: Why is will there?

30:58 Wes: I think he's thinking of will in this context as a metaphysical concept, like as in free will. Consequence is causality. We're getting a bunch of.

31:08 Dylan: Bunch of philosophy and religion.

31:10 Wes: Yeah, things that can be metaphysicalized, Right? Metaphysicalized.

31:14 Dylan: That's good.

31:16 Wes: So the whole innovation of Hume is to challenge the idea that causality is something that's out there.

31:22 Dylan: You'd almost want to read each of these as capitalized as necessity with a big N. Yeah.

31:32 Wes: When he's talking about the spirit of gravity, I think he's thinking about all, not just values, but all the metaphysical apparatus that goes along with them that we get from philosophy.

31:42 Mark: I just wonder if the self overcoming might not be continual so that at one stage necessity is good, and then another stage you end up needing to overcome that so that if you take that seriously, that there's a slipperiness to most of his teachings here, maybe even eternal recurrence or embracing life or staying true to the earth might be something that in some way, as you progress through your constantly self overcoming life, you will find yourself saying things that are the opposite of those. And that's actually appropriate for you at that point in time. I'm just speculating here.

32:18 Seth: The word he uses is not necessity. It's a different word that's closer to like distress or suffering or travails, that kind of thing. Before we go too far off on that, I just want to say that.

32:31 Mark: Yeah, no, I'll just leave that floating out there. That's fine.

32:33 Seth: I don't.

32:35 Wes: Okay, so need maybe.

32:37 Seth: Yeah. That last sentence though, kind of gets back to when we were talking earlier in the first part about part of the eternal recurrence is also the moles and the dwarves around. He does seem to be saying here because at the last sentence he says, you know, for the sake of the light and the lightest, must there not be moles and grave dwarves? In essence, the concept, I think of overcoming, but since he's going to bring it in in the next section, it's not an abstract overcoming of some, I don't know, that you could overcome if you were the only person on earth or the only individual. You're separating yourself from your animal nature. Yes, but it's having to do with the context in which you're living, which includes all of the other human. All two humans.

33:23 Wes: So section three, the overman. There it was too that I picked up the word overman, by the way. And that man is something that must be overcome. That man is a bridge and no end, proclaiming himself blessed in view of his noon and evening as the way to new dawns. This passage makes me think that when he's talking about man is not an end, I think of Aristotelian teleology. I don't know if that's legitimate, but other words, human development has come to an end. And there are certain standards set by the telos of human beings. And that's a value defining thing.

But if we think of ourselves not as ends but as bridges, then the values aren't set by who we are now. They're set by some hypothetical future version of humanity, let's say, or some hypothetical ideal that I in particular am reaching for. So that's the sense in which the idea of an overman, the idea of something that I'm shooting for outside of myself, can be a value creating or value defining thing.

34:35 Seth: That spirit is. Since we're talking about poet and the open interpretations, I think another meaning here, when he says that man is no end and is a bridge relates to the concept of man being somehow at the top of the pyramid in nature, or being the master and the nature and the earth being the dominion of man. The idea that somehow we have a special place in history to perfect the world or to accomplish something and to. It's not by accident that Zarathustra, in addition to disciples, also has a bunch of animals who speak, you know, with whom. They're not equals, of course, but they're as good as his disciples for what that's worth. And I think there's a sense in which he's trying to break down that distinction as well with this.

35:21 Wes: It turns out later that they're all just things he's drawn onto rocks. They're not actually a deal because he's lonely.

35:28 Mark: But so would be interesting though we've generally characterized the difference between Nietzsche and Aristotle as being. Aristotle has the idea of a fixed telos. You know, this is the state of excellence of man. And we're saying that for Nietzsche that's on an individual level, but it still seems that each individual, you know, once you become who you are, then you have attained your flourishing in a manner comparable to what Aristotle thinks is possible for everybody. But if you think that there's a more cyclical, constant, self overcoming element to Nietzsche's thought, which is very much in line with this picture he inherited from Schopenhauer of you want something, it's fulfilled, you're satisfied for a little while, you want something more.

And the fact that that thing that Stoicism recognized many years ago and, and Brahmanism and all sorts of Buddhism, but they rejected that and Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, unlike all these forerunners, accepted that as human nature. Maybe that's just that cycle of desire and fulfillment and that sort of at a high level of desire it's not getting my next meal. And now I'm fulfilled, now I need another meal, now I need another sexual conquest, but now I need to overcome. He's talking way up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that unlike animals, people can self overcome human nature and need to do so by being authentically creative and do this constantly so that even if you become, you know, an awesome poet at one stage, maybe then at the next stage you're sick of poetry and need to overcome that.

And I guess I'm being sold on this more dynamic vision of something that even using the word teleology would be inappropriate here. It's all in the service of life. But you could still be a temperamental artist and be like Zarathustra is by yourself in the hull of the ship for a week before you come out and are thawed out. You know, you could have all these in your personal journey, some very idiosyncratic ups and downs, and that would all be a reasonable part of yourself.

37:31 Wes: Overcoming it makes me think of, you know, this phrase that Freud used called ego ideal, where you have an ideal version of yourself that your ambitions are always directing you towards. And that ideal self, you know, that includes Everyday ambitions. But it also includes, you know, the ideal you as fulfilling certain values, as being good. So not just status, but goodness. So that can entirely be right as what he means though here. Right? It's not just that we have this ideal towards which we're always progressing but never getting there. Because that's sort of an ordinary way of living that we're all familiar with.

38:10 Mark: It's not an ordinary teleology in that you expect that the average acorn would become an oak tree. That's the ordinary teleology. But what Wes was just describing is having a forever out of reach ideal that then the ways the higher man steps that you then can potentially attain, they're interesting. And maybe it's the point of life according to Nietzsche, but you never actually get to the final thing. And the question is, could that be what he means by the overman? That it's just a motivating ego ideal.

38:39 Dylan: But what you described made me think more mark of adding to that the process of creation and destruction that he keeps referring to, or destruction and creation where to take him seriously. You're destroying where you were at and rebuilding again something new. Not merely kind of doing a squirrel thing and deciding you want something different.

39:01 Seth: I'm not 100% sure about that. That it's a constant cycle of self overcoming, that you continually are overcoming yourself. I think the question is, what would it mean to be the overman? What would the overman do? Well, he wills to power, he corrals all of his instincts, he casts off the spirit of gravity and he wills to power. What is the will to power? It's a creative act. So it could be creating art, it could be creating a state, who knows what. There's lots of different obvious things. But as long as you're alive, you're needing to will to express that will to power. And so it may be that you do one thing, and maybe that one thing is all that you do. And if you're not creating after that, then you're no longer. You essentially have regressed to some extent that it's. You have to constantly be in an act of self creating, at least if not self overcoming.

39:56 Wes: The next paragraph, I think is really one of the most important for trying to explain all of this. I taught them all my creating and striving to create and carry together into one what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident as creator, guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents. I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their Creation all that has been, to redeem what is past in man and to recreate all it was until the will says thus I willed it, thus I shall will it. This I called redemption. And this alone I taught them to call redemption. This is getting at this relationship, I think to eternal recurrence as well. But yeah. So what does it mean to carry into one what is fragment and accident?

40:46 Dylan: Isn't that the process of creating your own values? I mean, one of the things that you're doing when you're creating values is you're joining disparate things into one thing. You're naming something as a value. And in his metaphysics, right, there's no natural way that that happens. There's no way I can appeal to outside of myself that that happens. So you're taking the experience, the world, which is fragmented and chaotic, or accident, and you're creating value in it. And that is what is giving it its organization.

41:22 Wes: So the way I think of this is, if I were just thinking about myself, what is fragment and dreadful accident, I would think of components of my personality. And a lot of it is just accident in the sense of. It's all the things that have happened to me in the past that have created these. I mean, some of it's trauma, but some of it is just influence, right? It's just some of it's all the values that I carry and there's no necessary rhyme or reason to them. They're fragmented, they're accidental. There's no necessary harmony. In fact, there's probably, probably lots of conflicts.

So I think of this creative striving as harmonizing all those sorts of things. It's like taking a bunch of stuff from the junkyard and making an aesthetic object out of it and selling that as art. You take all these sort of scars that you have and all these various components and you try to make a unified, harmonized whole out of them.

42:14 Dylan: I like your psychological take on it better than a kind of metaphysical take. Because I think that in the end, and that's the direction he goes, so much centered on our psychology and our own experience of the world. At some level, he's just deeply anti metaphysical.

42:31 Wes: And in this, you know, when we get to the rest of this. So the redemptive thing about that, right, is if I'm taking even the terrible stuff, right, I can say, thus I willed it, thus I shall will it. Because it's no longer just this shitty thing that happened to me or this shitty aspect of my personality that I, as a result of bad influences Somewhere along in my life. But insofar as it's incorporated into a larger whole, insofar as it's unified into a higher harmony which is what will to power does, it unifies and harmonizes all these disparate elements, then I can will those components and I can say, yeah, that's not just some accident that happened to me that I wish hadn't happened. Because that. That's the material of my aesthetic self creation. I need it. It's completely necessary to the work that I'm doing.

43:22 Dylan: It makes sense. But where I get tripped up on is in the notion of becoming. Right? Because part of becoming is transforming from what you are into something else. And so part of that would mean not being content with what you are. And that could be something as simple and kind of trivial as you want to learn something and you want to, you know, refine your intellect, or you want to become better at playing guitar. It could be that you are suffering from any number of psychological challenges that are causing you pain and difficulty in your life and that you want to not suffer so much from them. Even if part of that is accepting that as where you're at. That's not the same thing as saying that this is what I am. Because if I'm going to go through this process of becoming, I'm going to be transforming myself as well, see?

44:24 Wes: Yeah, but I think it can be both at once. Right. So if it's think of it as just like a personality trait, I'm stubborn. There are lots of things that led me to being that. And one way to think of self transformation is to think I'm going to stop being stubborn. I'm going to cure that in myself and become virtuous in the Aristotelian way by suppose that Aristotle thought that was

44:44 Mark: a bad thing, at least moderating it. Yeah.

44:47 Wes: The other way to approach that is to say I will that stubbornness, but I will it in relation to all these other personality traits that I'm going to harmonize in such a way that it leads to a whole that is greater than the parts that works, that is functional in some sense and creates my particular good and evil, my particular set of values. So I can say, thus I willed it, thus I shall will it, and not try to transform that particular component. But the entire whole is the transformative thing. So this is all very speculative.

45:23 Mark: Obviously it accords very well with what I understood the gay science to be talking about. You know, this whole making your life an art. But there are things in this text in particular that confuse me in this regard. So right in the same section a couple pages later, subsection 6, page 200. My brothers, the firstling is always sacrificed. We, however, are firstlings. So in other words, Zarathustras does not consider himself the Overman, which might have been something you thought, but no, we're firstlings. All of us bleed at secret sacrificial altars.

All of us burn and roast in honor of old idols. What is best in us is still young, that attracts old palates. Our flesh is tender, our hide is a mere lambskin. How could we fail to attract old idol priests even in ourselves? The old idol priest still lives, who roasts what is best for us in his feast. Alas, my brothers, how could firstlings fail to be sacrifices?

46:14 Wes: Yeah, speaking of nausea.

46:18 Mark: So you could take this metaphorically, that, that we have to engage in creative destruction and sacrifice those parts of us that need to be shifted to put ourselves in balance. Like you could still retain the overall model that you're talking about, Wes. But he too often talks about that. It's not even us, that's the Overman. We should be trying to give birth to the Overman. The Overman is the future we should be of our children's country. So in some ways that we are irredeemable in certain ways. Right. We are too infected. And with the spirit of gravity. And with these other things we can become freaks in more interesting freaks. But we're never actually going to make it to the Overman. And in fact, our being overcome is part of the process. Evolutionarily we could say, certainly not necessarily, he's not an optimist about this, but

47:06 Wes: unless Mark, as you've suggested, I think that all of this just represents a certain kind of psychological dynamic where the Overman is not something we actually obtain in the world, but it's just this defining ideal. It's the idea that becomes the standard for valuation. And our behavior is defined by trying to get to that. So the self sacrifice, all this happens internally, right? It doesn't sound like that in a lot of places. It sounds just like over men are real people who will arrive at some

47:37 Dylan: point like gods from Olympus.

47:41 Seth: I don't think he says it here, but it was pointed out again in the secondary literature that Nietzsche thought that they spring up almost by accident at period of times in the past. And he was going through who Nietzsche thought was an example, like Caesar versus Goethe and you know, a couple others, Napoleon. But I'm inclined to take a more organic view of this where, you know, if we take seriously that Nietzsche is putting the figure of Zarathustra as a prophet in the form of, like, the way Jesus was a prophet, that we can't expect that somebody's going to hear the words and suddenly become an overman.

I mean, Christianity didn't come to dominate the world overnight. It took hundreds, if not thousands of years. So he's comparing Zarathustra to Jesus, but in a way he's also kind of a little bit more like John the Baptist, where he's sort of announcing the coming and he's given the aphorisms to his disciples. But it's going to take, you know, years and years of a slow turn away from Christianity until finally somebody's born who's not born under that weight, or who's born under that weight, but sees the possibility of life without it. And none of these people, which I guess is the lesson of the last book, there's too many things weighing all these people down, and each one hears one piece, maybe hears one thing, understands one thing, but they don't get the whole picture.

And Zarathustra has the ideas, but he has them the way that a prophet has them. He's not the Overman, it's just the middleman. He's the middleman. He's the middleman. Exactly.

49:20 Mark: Can we push toward the convalescent and

49:22 Wes: actually, yeah, so I would say actually we could do 29, 30, which are the last two sections of this leading into the convalescent. And then the only thing that I thought we should look at in 29 is it's the fourth paragraph. And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you triumph with me? This idea of becoming a destiny and something that can't be stopped?

49:48 Mark: Well, if you're a destiny, then you might be self overcoming, but you're not, as Dylan was saying before going, squirrel, squirrel. You're not just changing whimsically, you are doing out of an inner necessity, sort of your own personal dialectic.

50:01 Wes: I was also just thinking of it as this concept of destiny where you. It has something to do with being able to will the past or being able to say, I, thus I willed it. You sort of faded to have become who you are. And so to the extent that you will everything that's happened, you want to be a destiny. And like to say you're an inexorable one, that you can't be stopped is sort of like a positive spin on being the product of deterministic forces.

50:31 Mark: I'm just not sure how that goes in this section with become hard. It sounds like, be a badass in some, you know, more definite way. Be a destiny. Be the lightning. Be in a way that is not. Just acknowledge determinism and be okay with that. There's an emotive element that your description was missing there that is all over the section.

50:53 Wes: He's contrasting self denial and asceticism with destiny, with it being some sort of spirit of destiny in oneself.

51:02 Mark: Yeah, let's keep going. 30. O thou my will, Thou cessation of all need, My own necessity keep me from all small victories. Thou, destination of my soul, which I call destiny, Thou in me, over me, keep me and save me for a great destiny and thy last greatness, my will. Save up for thy last feat, that thou mayest be inexorable in thy victory. Alas. Who is not vanquished in his victory. Alas. Whose eye would not darken in this drunken twilight. Alas. Whose foot would not reel in victory and forget how to stand. I mean, this just sounds like Challenge yourself.

51:34 Seth: Now, is this part of his path, or is this part of a prescription for overcoming?

51:40 Wes: He calls the will the over me.

51:43 Seth: Well, I mean, about this. Challenging yourself, becoming hard, subjecting yourself to rarefied elements, and just the idea that you have to steel yourself in order to bear these truths. It seems like a general prescription, but in line with what he's saying earlier about this being my truth and my path, I suppose it's possible to consider that there might be somebody who has. Who can remain soft and become an overman. But I somehow don't think that.

52:12 Wes: What I find curious is just he says, o thou my will, cessation of all need. So what does that mean exactly? But also, he calls it the destination of my soul, which I call destiny. So if we're thinking of free will, we're thinking of something that can run against determinism, run against, which is what I associate with destiny. And he's trying to get us to rethink it as something that involves an embrace of destiny. That's the best I can make of it.

52:42 Mark: I guess I would read this more straightforwardly, romantically, that he's not talking about the problem of free will versus determinism here, though it'll hook up eventually to that in talking about eternal recurrence here, but actually stating the Overman is the over me, in other words, and it's an in me. I mean, this is exactly what, you know, that Kaufmann interpretation of what the overman is, is that it's something in you that you seize upon and you just focus yourself on that and you say, this is my destiny. So you declare it your destiny, and you make it as great a destiny as you can make it.

53:17 Wes: Let's see if this helps us. I thought those two passages were kind of important to the convalescent. So maybe it'll help, maybe it won't. But section two is where we get the eternal return.

53:29 Seth: Can I make one? Just side note, he mentions the last man in section 27. And since that's a topic of recent discussion along with Fukuyama and all that for listeners, it's just a reprise there.

53:45 Mark: You know, since we already talked about it in the very beginning of this whole book. I think that's why a lot of his metaphors and things looks like they're so cobbled together and clunky. Because he's like, you know, when he brings up the camel, it's like. Because I talked about the camel in section 5 of near the beginning of the book. Like this whole section, the tablets, is kind of like a greatest hits from the rest of the. The book. I felt like.

54:06 Dylan: I mean, didn't he write each of these books in a day or like 10 days or something like that?

54:11 Wes: I mean, yeah, a very short period of time.

54:13 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. He blasted through each one.

54:17 Wes: So eternal recurrence. Eternal return.

54:20 Dylan: We'll return to eternal. Sorry.

54:24 Wes: Here we are again for the infinity time.

54:30 Mark: Can I set up the MP3 so it automatically rewinds 20 seconds and just plays that over and over again.

54:38 Dylan: It feels like there must be a Twilight Zone episode that's like this. That isn't just Groundhog Day.

54:44 Wes: Yeah, Groundhog Day.

54:45 Mark: So it's his animals. He's kind of been struck by dead lying down for a week or something. Fell down as one dead and long remain as one dead. Because he's getting this nausea, this sense of eternal recurrence coming forward. And then his animals come to him and say, come on, wake up. You've been lying there for seven days.

55:06 Dylan: He's been creating something.

55:08 Mark: And it's the animals who tell them what eternal recurrence is.

55:13 Wes: So the nausea. By the way, Nietzsche, in other works in gay science, too, thinks of himself as a convalescent, which he also literally was. He was always sick and trying to get better. And it was stomach problems, interestingly enough. But the metaphor here is. I think it's about nihilism, right? So one suffers from the advent of nihilism, and the nausea is associated with that. And to convalesce is to find a way out of that. Any eternal return is going to help.

55:42 Mark: I don't know. Isn't nausea point you in a particular direction? Nihilism is just. There is no direction, there is no meaning. Float, float, float. Whereas nausea is like a violent rejection. In this context, I think it's exactly like the nausea that the shepherd has when the snake, the idea of eternal recurrence, has crawled into his mouth and he's suffering this nausea, nausea, nausea. So the nausea here is. It's not meaninglessness, but it's the idea. Well, I don't know, you can tell me. But how dreadful it is that the world, as you might ordinary see it, is happening eternally.

In other words, with all the being stretched on the rack and all the horrible stuff and the small man and the other things he complains about, all the different people he's been critiquing, the utter mediocrity of everything, that. That is what is nauseating to him before. And then he gets over that in this section basically by saying, but all that will be redeemed by the coming of the overman, which maybe means even in your own life and you living it as an art, you overcome, you redeem the past. And so that's what makes eternal recurrence bearable.

56:48 Wes: So the nausea can be a reaction to the nihilism. Right. The way nihilism is set up, most people aren't aware that even the attempts to defend against nihilism, like Christianity, are for Nietzsche, just manifestations of that nihilism, of some fundamental nihilism. And to the extent that those values are anti natural or anti life, they're just expressions of nihilism. And nausea is not necessarily the effect of nihilism unless one becomes aware of it and wants to. And that's the beginning of wanting to do something about it, to forge new values. And then I think, an awareness of the. The eternal return of the last men, for instance, or the small men. Yeah, I think one confronts the possibility of meaninglessness in that. It doesn't look like there's any progression.

57:37 Mark: We're about to get the bottom of 217. Top of 218 is going to be where the animals actually tell him again the story of eternal recurrence. I want to read the couple paragraphs, just getting into that to see if this matters. 217. Oh, my animals, replied Zarathustra. Chatter on like this and let me listen. It's so refreshing for me to hear you chattering. Where there is chattering there the World lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds are not words and sounds rainbows and elusive bridges between things which are eternally apart.

To every soul there belongs another world for every soul, every other soul is an after world precisely between what is most similar. Illusion lies most beautifully, for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge. For me, how should there be any outside myself? There is no outside. But all sounds make us forget this. How lovely it is that we forget. Have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing? Speaking is beautiful folly. With that man dances over things. How lovely is all talking and the deception of sounds with sounds Our love dances on many hued rainbows.

So this is the preface to him reintroducing eternal recurrence. And I think he's giving a little philosophy of language here to say, kind of like why I was saying that maybe his whole story of recurrence is poetic. Words never actually capture the things they're supposed to. They never actually communicate to somebody else's inner world. Every other person is fundamentally separate from us. So it's this very bleak view of existential separateness between each person. And language is sort of an illusion that makes us forget that it's a beautiful folly.

So here's the best, given that. Here's the story I'm going to tell you about eternal recurrence, and it's actually the animals telling him. So you want to keep reading bottom of page 217 there.

59:22 Dylan: Sure. O Zarathustra, the animals said to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing. They come and offer their hands and laugh and flee and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back Eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. Everything runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew eternally. The same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again eternally. The ring of Being remains faithful to itself in every now being begins round every here rolls the sphere there the center is everywhere bent is the path of eternity.

1:00:07 Mark: So is that just a nicer way of saying what he already said before, kind of stressing different parts of it? It sounds like, yeah, this is the nice part, all the dancing and laughing and then it comes back.

1:00:19 Dylan: Well, but it also, to me, it makes it very. I'll call it actual. It doesn't sound like, oh, think about the world as if you would will everything to have been the same way.

1:00:30 Wes: This is.

1:00:31 Dylan: Everything does happen again. We'll be doing this podcast again and again and again and again. Right. I mean, it's.

1:00:37 Mark: With slight variations.

1:00:39 Dylan: He doesn't emphasize the variations at all.

1:00:41 Mark: No, I. I was just saying some people think that all of our episodes are actually basically the same.

1:00:47 Dylan: Oh, sorry. Okay. I was being too literal.

1:00:52 Mark: Sorry.

1:00:53 Wes: On page 219, he tells the animals what it was that choked him and

1:00:56 Seth: crawled into his throat, and he chastises them for standing by and watching.

1:01:01 Wes: Right. The great disgust with men. This choked me and had crawled into my throat. In what the soothsayer said, all is the same, nothing is worthwhile. Knowledge chokes. A long twilight limped before me. A sadness weary to death, drunken with death, speaking with a yawning mouth, eternally recurs the man of whom you are weary. The small man thus yawned my sadness and dragged its feet and could not go to sleep. Man's earth turned into a cave for me, its chest sunken. All that is living became human mold and bones and musty past. To me, my sighing sat on all human tombs and could no longer get up. My sighing and questioning, croaked and gagged and gnawed and wailed by day and night. Alas, man recurs eternally. The small man recurs eternally.

1:01:51 Mark: And he goes on and on like that.

1:01:54 Wes: And then we get so on. 220, the animals say, behold, you are the teacher of eternal recurrence. That is your destiny, that you, as the first, must teach this doctrine. How could this great destiny not be your greatest danger and sickness too? Behold, we know what you teach, that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too, and that we have already existed an eternal number of times and all things with us. You teach that there is a great year of becoming a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again.

And all these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest. And we ourselves are alike in every great year in what is greatest as in what is smallest. It's very depressing, so that I take as the statement of eternal recurrence. And then in 221, there's a very interesting formulation where he's going to say he himself belongs to is like a cause of himself. Or maybe I'm reading that wrong, but he says, but the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence.

I come again with the sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent. Not to a new life or a better life or a similar life. I come back eternally to this same self, same life, life in what is greatest as in what is smallest. To teach again the eternal recurrence of all things. To speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man to proclaim the overman again to men.

1:03:32 Dylan: You should go to the end of the paragraph.

1:03:33 Wes: I spoke my word, I break of my word. Thus my eternal lot wants it as a proclaimer, I perish. The hour has now come when he who goes under should bless himself. Thus ends. Zarathustra's going under.

1:03:48 Mark: So how does that end, his going under? Doesn't he just say he's gonna go under again and again and again?

1:03:52 Wes: Well, the animals are saying that.

1:03:55 Dylan: I think it means that this is like the end of the story, right? Because we started with him going under at the beginning.

1:04:00 Wes: The animals are putting words into his

1:04:02 Seth: mouth at this point, I thought the animals are trying to encourage him to go back and preach this to man. Going under, I thought meant going down into the masses and going off the mountain. They're trying to convince him to do that. And they're saying, right now you would just say, okay, I'm done, because I've got this eternal life, and I'm just going to come back doing the same thing, so I'm done going under. And they're trying to say, no, you should go back down.

1:04:26 Mark: You might expect that we've reached the end of this, that he's going to state it more positively now, but it still is looking kind of depressing. And it's the animals that are being encouraging. It's really just in these last couple sections, then, of book three, the Other Dancing Song, where he sort of is able to turn his frown upside down, not by additional argument, but by song, literally. Anybody want to explain this? The Other Dancing Song, The. The yes and amen song. Section 16, the seven seals. Those are the two ends. And he starts the last one saying, I love eternity.

How should I not lust after eternity? After the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence. In this song, before that, the Other Dancing Song, he is convincing himself, right? He's having a conversation with his soul. He's having a conversation with life. Life says in this, in section two of it, O Zarathustra, don't crack your wit so frightfully. After all, you know that noise murders thought. And just now such tender thoughts are coming to me. We are both two real good for nothings and evil for nothings. Beyond good and evil we found our island and our green meadow.

We two alone, therefore we had better like each other. And even if we do not love each other from the heart, need we bear each other a grudge if we do not love each other from the heart? And that I like you often too well, that you know. And the reason is that I am jealous of your wisdom. Oh, this mad old fool of a wisdom. If your wisdom ever ran away from you, that my love would quickly run away from you too. How does this fucking resolve itself?

1:05:52 Wes: I'm sorry.

1:05:54 Dylan: He just seems to accept it, right? I mean, the last one, the seven seals. It's seven different aphorisms, each punctuated with the same little hymn at the end about being married to eternity.

1:06:09 Mark: Yes, that is the conclusion. Okay? Yes. So I found. So it's the bottom of page 226, the top page 227. The other dancing song is what this. The whole section is called. So he's been having this conversation with life, that life has been reproaching him. Then life looked back around and thoughtfully and said softly, O Zarathustra, you are not faithful enough to me. You do not love me nearly as much as you say. I know you're thinking of leaving me soon. There is an old heavy grown bell that growls at night all the way up to your cave. When you hear the spell strike the hour at midnight.

You think that between 1 and 12 you think, O Zarathustra, I know it. Of how you want to leave me soon. So in other words, this is nihilism. He's thinking about suicide, thinking about death. Yes, I answered hesitantly, but you also know. And I whispered something to her ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses. You know that, O Zarathustras, nobody knows that. And we looked at each other and gazed on green meadow, over which the cool evening was running just then. And we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was.

And so the secret, obviously, is eternal recurrence. Right. That he's whispering to life. So what justifies your loving life? You know that nobody knows that. I don't know. I feel like this life is him just, you know, talking to himself. So it's all rhetorical.

1:07:22 Seth: There's a place earlier where he talks about joy in eternity, taking joy in eternity. And then the seven songs that Dylan mentioned are joyful refrain that reinforce, like you said, being wedded or bearing a child with eternity. You're not going to get a positive formulation what you're seeing here. Is the result of his joyful embracing of eternal recurrence. But it's not going to help you make the idea any more clear.

1:07:49 Dylan: I don't think it's like the concluding song at the end of a movie that fades to black.

1:07:54 Seth: Yes.

1:07:54 Mark: Yeah. So not being a despiser of life, actually being faithful to the earth, being faithful to life, this gives joy. Being authentically creative, whatever this is what joy is. There can be even joy in suffering and that wants eternity. So once you are acting according to Nietzsche's concept of health or something, if you're really being faithful to the earth, if you're really doing it sincerely, then you will be okay with eternal recurrence, and it will reinforce your love for life. The two will feed upon each other. You're being okay with the eternal recurrence, and you're loving life.

1:08:28 Seth: And sing Speak no More.

1:08:31 Mark: Yep, Just talking about it, as we were just saying in his Prelude to Reintroducing Eternal Recurrence, that words are never actually going to capture anything anyway. This is all about an intuitive experience. And so he's using this poetic language throughout to try to convey this experience that he's had of actually turning away from nihilism and finding life worth living. And he sort of uses a lot of words in doing that. I don't know. Any last thoughts or ways that you want to sum this up with the big lesson that you're getting out of this?

1:09:06 Seth: Well, it was for me, you know, this whole arc was an important education and foundational Nietzsche concepts that have always surrounded me, but I never, not all of them, had I ever seriously studied. So this was helpful. I'll reiterate that whether he fancied himself a poet, if in fact he was being poetic, he was just not being a good poet. And finally, let's take that last thing that you just said, Mark, that, you know, eternal recurrence is somehow the escape from nihilism. Or maybe it is nihilism to take your withdrawal from it or respond to it.

I'll have to think about this, but I'm not sure how superior this is as a solution to an existential view. You know, you don't need to posit eternal recurrence to say that this life is the only one you get and so you should live it like you didn't want to leave it with any regrets. Or you can take a Camus track and say, look, your toil is absurd. There's no meaning, but you don't need to have the mechanism of eternal recurrence. To suggest other strategies for dealing with it. It's hard book to read.

1:10:15 Dylan: I'll say what I said at the end of the last podcast. It makes a difference to read this book with other people and talk about it. I found it a very difficult book to read. I guess of all the Nietzsche I've read, I enjoyed it the least part of it might be is that I still find the eternal recurrence idea. I guess I'm with Seth. It seems to be unnecessary for the task that it's accomplishing. And so I think we got pretty far in trying to, you know, ferret out what he seems to be meaning by it. I don't find it very satisfying. So for me, it's one of the weaker aspects of what we get from him.

1:10:54 Mark: Well, Wes, you wouldn't tell us at the end of part one what you actually thought of eternal recurrence until we read more of the quotes. Can you sum it up now or do you have a strong opinion?

1:11:04 Wes: I was thinking about this just because of. I read the introduction to T.K. Seung's book and he was Mark. Did you and I ta for him together?

1:11:14 Mark: I was aware of him. No, I never had any.

1:11:16 Wes: I think I ta'd for him at ut. He like. Like, he's a really funny guy. Like, he's so animated. But his interpretation of eternal return has something to do with getting outside of time, maybe in a manner of St. Augustine, and thinking of everything that happens within time. Every moment is in some sense eternal when you're standing outside of it, right? It's just this being that's always there. And so every moment is just always there. And you know, I thought, well, perhaps it has something to do with this idea of redeeming the past by willing.

It was because it becomes not just psychological thing. I'm going to will the past as if I had some control over it, but I can actually will these things in some sense. In other words, eternal recurrence means that when I will the past as something that just hasn't happened to me by accident, but is now my will because of recurrence, it actually logically fits together with the willing in some way. And so it makes this attitude actually legitimate or possible.

1:12:21 Mark: I'll have to take a look at that because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me in terms of, yes, I am part of the causal network that gives rise to the next iteration of the past thing that happens, but I'm such a small part of that causal network. It's very, very, very remote. Any power of my will would seem to have been diluted.

1:12:37 Wes: Yeah, but I can't will things that are actually, strictly speaking, in the past. The benefit of saying that it's recurring is that it makes willing more than a metaphor, because there is no such thing as willing the past.

1:12:49 Mark: I found it very difficult to not make eternal recurrence fall into the category of otherworldliness. That is exactly why he doesn't like heaven or anything else that's transcendent. I understand that the current world, the current appearance and everything that is part of your actual life, your facticity, is part of the broad scale view. You know, if you want to say that that's the heaven is the synoptic view of all of history in its repetition, but it's still the line between, yeah, okay, this thing is part of it, but there's so much more behind it.

There's so much more addition to it that again, this part of it is such a small part that I still feel like you're negating this part by stressing any kind of synoptic, higher level view. So I just don't like it as a cosmological principle for that reason for next episode, we will be releasing our recording of Partially Examined Life live in New York City where we covered Brave New World. I wanted to call your attention to our blog page where as the featured post you will find three episodes of a potential new short form philosophy podcast called A Glimpse Into Philosophy that would run in parallel to Partially Examined Life, designed largely to pull in people that maybe would be intimidated by the longer discussions.

But we would of course like to please you as well. So take a look there, Send us an email or comment on that post to tell us what you think of this new thing that we might potentially do a lot of. Our closing song today is not the Overman, but Upright man by Portland singer Rachel Taylor Brown, whom I interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music Episode 91. Check it out at nakedly examine music.com well thanks guys for getting through this. Yeah, folks should let us know what they think. @PartiallyExaminedLife.com you can comment on the blog post associated with this episode.

There's a Facebook group you can comment there. You can shoot something at us through Twitter or email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com thanks so much for listening. Good night everybody.

1:14:46 Wes: Good night.

1:14:47 Seth: Good night.

1:14:47 Dylan: Good night.

1:15:02 Unknown speaker: He takes a step and misses. And on his back he notices that all the people people walking on are walking on him. He sees the souls. He sees the soul and tells the future. He sings and stinks and whispers

1:16:04 Wes: I'm

1:16:04 Unknown speaker: under you I'm under you But I'm a good man I'm an upright man I'm a good man I'm an upright man I'm a good man I'm an upright man I'm a good man. The traffic never slows to let him walk he catches rain and clouds. He finds that he can move but by degrees the winter comes in they're walking on his frozen knees they're driving shit and car keys and it's too cold to cry. Oh, God I'm a good man I'm an upright man I'm a good man I'm an upright man I'm a good nail Bright man I'm a good man. One lonely labor in the square. Of eyes I know you don't believe me but it's there I know you don't believe me I know you don't believe me I know you don't believe me.