Ep. 263: Lise Van Boxel’s “Warspeak” on Strategies for Valuing (Part One)

0:07 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 263 is something like, what does it look like to overcome nihilism? For this discussion, we read the last two chapters of Warspeak, Nietzsche's Victory Over Nihilism by Lise Van Boxel. For this discussion, Seth and I are joined by Michael Grenke, who wrote the introduction to Warspeak, and Jeff Black, co host of the Combat and Classics podcast that Lise was co founder of. This is Dylan Casey, striving for superabundant vitality in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

0:44 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, not yet poet philosopher, but hopefully warrior philosopher in Austin, Texas.

0:50 Jeff: Well, thank you guys for having us. I'm Jeff Black and I'm in Annapolis, Maryland.

0:55 Michael: I'm Michael Grenke, and I'm also in Annapolis.

0:58 Dylan: Well, welcome to the podcast, guys. I feel a little bit like we're teaming up on Seth because seth now has three current or former tutors at St. John's on the podcast with him.

1:11 Seth: Let me allay those concerns. Annapolis is my de facto adopted hometown. I went to school in Severna park and my mom was there, the controller for Historic Annapolis. I worked at the Maryland Inn. I've lived in Eastport, and I, in my day hung out around the campus and knew many Johnny's at Little Campus Inn. To give you an idea of the time frame we're talking about, I knew none of that.

1:38 Dylan: How did I not know any of that?

1:39 Seth: I don't know. I don't know. Plus, you know, I've been to Santa Fe a million times and we've had an ongoing relationship for advertising, so I feel very close. I went to read so spiritually not too far off from the Johnny experience, so I feel quite comfortable.

1:53 Jeff: Yeah. Well, welcome home, if only virtually.

1:56 Seth: Yeah, thank you.

1:57 Dylan: Before we sort of dive in, I thought it'd be nice, maybe Jeff or Michael or both of you could say some things about. So Lise. I was on the podcast Combat Classics with Lise, and Lise was a tutor at St John's but say a little bit about Warspeak and its path and maybe a little bit about Lise herself.

2:16 Michael: Well, this book was a work that Lise put a lot of years into, actually, although it also emerged probably in the last few years. It was originally intended, I think, as a revision of her dissertation, but it transformed considerably as it went along, and it's really a substantially independent work. It is a close reading of Nietzsche's on the Genealogy of Morals. It picks at very small details and makes a great deal of those details in the reading. And it's quite a complicated book to read, I would say, both in terms of its argumentation and in terms of a certain kind of subtlety of reading.

The last two chapters that we read together for today are really a presentation of the reading of the last book of the Genealogy of Morals, and a presentation, I think, of what Lise presents as the victory that Nietzsche offers, which is really an evolving of a counter ideal to what Nietzsche and Lies present as the reigning and single ideal that has oriented human thought and human life as a consequence for more than 2000 years. This ideal that's referred to as the ascetic ideal by Nietzsche is essentially an ideal that grounds all human orientation, I would say, in a notion of a world other than the world we experience in our daily lives and perceive which with our senses.

That is, it's a world that is populated by static beings that are eternal and never change, by truth that is understood to be similarly stable. And that world has been used, I think, to contrast with the everyday experiences we have of things that come into being and pass away, of things that are intensely contextual and not absolutely, and of things that leave us facing necessarily, I think, the passing away of the things we care about. That's the world, I think, that Nietzsche and Lise present as the world we live in. And that's the world that has been both implicitly and explicitly judged from the standpoint of this other stable world of eternal beings and absolute beings.

And that judgment has led, I think, over the course of time, to a devaluation of everything that we do in fact experience in this world. Everything looks like it's less than what it is because it's compared to a standard that we don't really encounter and can't achieve that has led to a persistent weariness with the world and especially with the human possibilities within the world. I think that's the crisis of nihilism that Nietzsche faces, and at least this book really highlights, is that we find ourselves no longer capable of any genuine hope for a human future.

And it threatens to become, I think, permanent in our situation if we lose some of the capacities that might generate such a future. So that's the genealogical thread, I think. So the last two chapters are to present an achieving and a conceiving of a counter ideal to the ascetic ideal, something that would be this worldly, full of hope about our human possibilities of taking that world that changes and guiding those changes in a way that would make us fulfilled and satisfied without becoming complacent. Maybe that's enough to start.

5:40 Jeff: I don't know.

5:40 Michael: If Jeff wants to add a few

5:41 Jeff: things, I can probably add a couple short things about Lise's own genealogy. So she did her undergraduate work at the University of Toronto in political science, chiefly political theory and English, and her studies in English show up in Warspeak, as well as her studies of Nietzsche, with some concern for the form of the book and the kind of language she uses. There's something novelistic about the book, there's something narrative about it, but it also tries out a new kind of language, a language of imperative verbs that are designed to be more than just a kind of appeal to abstract entities for the reader.

So there's a real attempt to try to think about how to help the reader go through an experience that Lise herself went through and also that Nietzsche himself went through. And the other aspect of her genealogy that I think is relevant is not only was she a tutor at St. John's for a couple of decades, both in Santa Fe and in Annapolis, but she was also one of the co founders of Combat and Classics, and she had a lifelong concern with and devotion to military excellence. And that also comes out in Warspeak in the form of seriousness about war warrior courage in the beginning parts of the book, seriousness about the warrior philosopher as a human type in the first chapter that we're looking at, and then a kind of lifting of that seriousness in the new ideal that comes in the last chapter, Psyche Airborne.

But there is a kind of overriding concern too, or a thoroughgoing concern with the excellence of military human beings in this book.

7:13 Dylan: Seth, did you have initial impressions or Seth. That you wanted to.

7:18 Seth: When I received the book, it was prior to actually understanding what we were going to be doing. So I was kind of like, oh, what's this? For a book that's contra nihilism. It has a very interesting cover, which is black with a silhouetted figure looking at stars, but the stars are very dim, so, you know, it doesn't seem. Anyway, I just started reading from the beginning just to get a feel for it. And I really enjoyed the, I guess it's called exegetical or expository part of the first, where she's talking about the moral theological prejudice. And she does a really great job of setting the stage.

And actually I found that it served me well in reading the last two chapters to have read that which you would expect of A book. You shouldn't just read the last two chapters of every book you get. You're likely to miss something. Stylistically, she leans heavily on Nietzsche, so textually, she uses extensive citations, so there's no discontinuity where you feel like, you know, do I buy that interpretation or. No, no. She's deeply, deeply entrenched in Nietzsche text, which means she talks a lot like Nietzsche, which can become a little frustrating at times.

But I guess I'm anxious to get to, like, I'm ready for the last 30 minutes of our conversation, because I want to know what's up with that fucking conclusion. So that's. That's kind of where I'm at.

8:35 Dylan: Our regular listeners will know that we preceded this recording with actually concluding Pel's recording on Genealogy Morals, by going through last episode, chapter three on what is the Ascetic ideal. Really, in preparation for this, and I think in part because it is such a close reading, we'll be covering some of that ground as well and reminding ourselves about both what Nietzsche said, but also seeing some of the exegesis that Lise brings to the front. So I think inevitably we'll be talking about seven types of people and one more. I think that'll be important for us to talk about that she brings up.

I opened the question about what is to overcome nihilism, which I agree with Seth, that that's where we're going to end up. But I think a good place to start is trying to answer what the title of the second to last chapter, the Warrior's Riddle, that whole chapter is really trying to understand and articulate what the Warrior's Riddle is. And so maybe if we could just start with trying to say what that is and then work through that chapter, which really just works through book three itself. But I found myself honestly having to go back and forth just trying to figure out what the heck is the Warrior's Riddle.

And why would you say it that way?

9:49 Jeff: Yeah, I guess I can take a stab at that. There are a number of pieces, and we can kind of try to put them together in order. But maybe the first thing to notice, and I do this all the time in my speech, it's easy to remember that the title of the third essay is what is Asceticism? Or what Are Ascetic Ideals? But it's not the title. The title is what is the Meaning of the Ascetic Ideal. Right. So that contrast already says something. Right. This is not a Socratic project about some being that is out there, like Michael said in his overview of the argument of the book, some kind of thing called ascetic ideals that are existing in another world and are eternal or permanent.

Were interested in the meaning of the ideals. And that immediately makes you say, meaning for what? And one of Lise's first moves in kind of framing and setting up the chapter is just to look how Nietzsche frames and sets up the third essay. And she almost immediately notes this juxtaposition between that title for the third essay and the epigraph, the quotation from Zarathustra from On Reading and Writing that introduces it. And she also notices that Nietzsche elsewhere presents this third essay as a kind of exegesis of a section of On Reading and Writing from Zarathustra.

So these are some of the bits and pieces. There are more, but some of the bits and pieces that go towards the idea that there's a riddle here. Maybe the first pass of the riddle would be, why start an essay of the genealogy with this kind of juxtaposition? The other essays don't start that way.

11:21 Dylan: She says, in the language of more familiar to our investigation, what is the value for life of the moral theological prejudice? So one way of getting at this question of what is the meaning of the ascetic ideal is why the heck would you have one? One of the things that's confusing both about that chapter of the book for Nietzsche, and I think also it's one of the things that makes it maybe a riddle, and also one of the things that makes a little bit of the exegesis itself confusing, is this way in which you feel like the ascetic ideal at the beginning is going to be sort of wholly bad.

And in a way, in the end it becomes wholly bad. But that's much more complicated than that. And there's a kind of genealogical inevitability about the ascetic ideal that has to be overcome. So that fact that when I started realizing, oh, this is going to be all about how the ascetic ideal is terrible, but it's not.

12:13 Seth: We should probably be more specific in the way that we say that, just that it's not that the ascetic ideal is good or bad, it's that through the genealogical investigation of how we came to. To have the idea, we discover that what it motivates us to do can be good or bad. There are elements of it. And that's one of the pieces of the latter half of Lise's book that's awesome, where she pulls in all of the various positive aspects of each of the personalities and how they contribute. I think the ascetic ideal is bad. It does need to be reevaluated. We do have to overcome, you know, and revalue all values, whatever. But as an impetus to human development and growth and becoming, it's a very powerful, if potentially toxic thing.

12:57 Michael: Ultimately, Nietzsche seems to have the opinion that everything that comes into existence will need to be overcome at some point, unless it somehow overcomes itself or does away with itself. And I think the meaning of that in part is of overcoming is not that something be removed from existence or from our life, but that it be transformed. It's fundamental to this sort of genealogical thinking that we have to work with we as living beings and every being has to work with what is already there. Those are the only powers or tools that are available to us in our lives and our efforts to do whatever might fulfill us.

That means that whatever comes into being both has its own intrinsic tendencies. And it offers an opportunity to every being that might want to make use of whatever it has caused to come into being, into being, or whatever. It tends to be itself. So revaluation, for instance, one might have, as this is the name of Nietzsche's project that's sort of announced in the third essay, the revaluation of values doesn't present itself as starting from a clean slate. It's taking what is there and remaking it. By the way, a lot of the focus on language in Lise's book is based upon that.

It's not inventing a new language, it's transforming old ways of thinking, speaking and thinking.

14:19 Dylan: This is where reminding ourselves, reminding myself about both the word in project of genealogy and becoming become important. Both those words remind us what you were saying, Michael. Both the contextuality and the notion of forward motion, but also that you have something intrinsic there that you're working with, that there's a history there. So it's in that way it's complicated because it's not as if it's one thing that is or one motion that is becoming refined to some clear endpoint. But there is this simultaneous embeddedness in the past and forward lookingness in the activity and intrinsic force moving along that is that source of becoming. And so it makes it complicated. In some ways it makes it more complicated than being is. And which may be one of the reasons why the aesthetic ideal gets more traction in the story, in the genealogical story. Is there something easier about it?

15:18 Jeff: I guess I can add a piece just about the word riddle that I find helpful to think about Nietzsche from Time to time will refer to the riddle of the Sphinx, the riddle that Oedipus confronts. The question whose answer is the human being? And this confrontation with the riddle of the Sphinx is a life or death issue. So if you fail to answer the riddle, I take it the Sphinx eats you. If you succeed, you become a different kind of being and you survive to fight another day. And I think how we've been characterizing the stakes of this chapter. The Warrior's Riddle is correct.

We see both the gravity of the situation. I think this is the place where Lise uses the phrase death spiral to refer to humanity's current condition. And we see at least the hope for. Or maybe that's even too strong. We recognize the need for an alternative ideal. And the question is, where is it? And so the riddle has those two forms. Are you going to survive? Right. It's comparable to the riddle of the Sphinx that way. And where is this ideal? Where is it in the book? Why doesn't Nietzsche offer it? That gives us the cliffhanger that's at the ending of six.

That launches us into Psyche. Airborne in seven.

16:27 Dylan: Yeah, maybe we should get into the beginning of Warrior's Riddle. Just like in the beginning of the third chapter of Genealogy is going through the seven different human types. And, you know, I think there's some, you know, going through that with her. That's important. But I also really want to get to her discussion of the absence of discussing of the seducer woman as the ascetic. And I think that's. That was both very interesting and I. Both in terms of interpretive move, but also how that fits into the final conclusion about the nature of becoming.

But maybe at the beginning here, as we start off with these seven types and we're working on the artist philosopher, the seven types just remind us are artists, philosophers, scholars, women, the psychologically deformed and deranged priests and saints. And she says that Nietzsche discovers that all these human beings venerate the ascetic ideal because they find in it a means to maximizing the expression of their will to power or life. How they each of these end up maximizing expression of their will to power, to life. And then maybe ultimately how we get to that becoming nihilism, ultimately for each of those, that's sort of the problem.

17:40 Seth: I'd like to expand that selection you just mentioned. Dylan, just read. So you have the seven types. This is a quote, page 137. For each of these human types, the ascetic ideal has a specific and different value for life in no case is its value derived from the transcendent world of absolute or pure, unchanging being. To the extent any of these human beings believe or proclaim that its value consists in transcendence of the actual world, they misunderstand themselves. They are lying, or both. In lieu of the believed or proclaimed value of this transcendence.

Nietzsche discovers that all these human beings venerate the ascetic ideal because they find in it a means to maximizing the expression of their will to power in life. The recognition of this commonality is insightful. But since all living entities act to maximize the expression of their will to power, this answer is too general to resolve the question of the value of the ascetic ideal. Specifically, why is the ascetic ideal in particular means perhaps the most important means for these human beings to maximize the expression of their vitality?

I think that's the riddle that's being articulated. And this also then goes back to what I was, you know, saying about the ideal itself having kind of a neutral value. It's in the sense that he wants to overcome it. But you see, what he's really interested in is why does it motivate people to act the way that they do, to create these Personas and will in the way that they will?

19:01 Jeff: Is this a way to understand it? It would be a real problem for Nietzsche's argument and for Lise's account of Nietzsche's argument. If it turned out that there was an independent principle or a second principle in another world that the ascetic ideal could draw on or appeal to. And so part of the project has to be to analyze these human beings who are devoted to the ascetic ideal. And to find that the basis of their activity is not, in fact, devotion to another world, but devotion to superabundant vitality. But then you get this puzzle. If you're devoted to superabundant vitality, how can your activity end up sapping your own vitality.

And the vitality of the human race more generally? And that, I think, is where the account of humanity rather willing nothing than not willing is important. And so we get a kind of structural solution to that difficulty. That willing nothing still follows from the principle of being devoted to maximum superabundant vitality, right? It still follows from the general account of the will to power as the most comprehensive account of human life and all life. But it also explains why you could have human beings who have turned against themselves. And for all their efforts, they are just worsening their own situations almost entirely.

Then the second step Is to find within their activity certain things that in fact might from time to time enhance life. So the exceptions to the general rule that their own activity of these ascetics is making their situation worse.

20:36 Dylan: Well, it reminds me of what Seth just quoted about. They're either lying to themselves or they're lying on purpose. And you get both of those. There's a way in which these personality types are examples of superabundant vitalities that are willing themselves, exercising that will to power that gets channeled into a permanent view towards a permanent static, overarching objectivity, for instance. And that on the one hand sort of works. But ultimately in fact, in some ways, because of their activity as superabundant vitalities, it becomes either a lie that they're telling themselves that they don't really acknowledge, and they end up willing nothing.

Even if they feel like they're willing something. Or in some cases, I think the priests are end up being a case like this is that they actually are actively disingenuous about it. There isn't an authenticity about a dishonest lying that's going on. And for me, actually in those kinds of sections it turns into actually a kind of not a becoming of themselves, but an exercise of power and annihilation over other people in a kind of distinctness with maybe something like an artist or even a scientist. There's a kind of vital impotence he calls of the scientists that they can't found themselves, but they sort of keep doing this.

And so there's a different kind of line that's going on.

21:56 Jeff: In that case, looking at particulars or trying to imagine particulars might be helpful because I know this language is very general and it kind of sounds plausible. So we could imagine a scientist who prides himself on not making judgments about moral questions because he thinks that these moral questions are outside of the scope of science. You can't really know them. I can't do an experiment that's going to tell me whether I ought to do this or that. So I do not make judgments. And that scientist is also faced, as we all are in his life or her life, by all sorts of moral questions that have to be decided.

And he or she acts on the basis of some decisions, but with a bad conscience, feeling guilty. And maybe they lie awake at night and say I understand, I don't know what they studied the brain of the leech. I understand the brain of the leech really well, but I couldn't figure out who to vote for in the election or I couldn't Persuade myself that the person I voted for, I did because I had really good reason, reasons because I knew. And so they're kind of being hollowed out inside by this thought. And maybe we could iterate examples, but that for me seems like a plausible human type that we could maybe run into today.

23:11 Seth: I think there is that aspect of it that you're connecting more to. Let's call it social or moral activity. Like how does scientific activity help you be a better moral person or make decisions in your life? But there's also just the question of, like scientists can't answer the question of why doing science is good or why science itself is good. They can give you a utilitarian explanation, a practical, oh well, if I figure this out, then we can make better widgets or we can have safer chemicals. But the utility reason is not a sufficient reason to ground the activity.

And he actually distinguishes between different types of scientists in the account. The scholar scientist who just turn the crank. Those are the ones we're talking about right now and the ones who champion science as a counterpoint to religion, who he thinks are just noble but totally misguided. Right. And it's precisely for the reason you just mentioned. It's like science is, as I like to say, it's all about coulda, not shoulda. Science doesn't create values, it inherits values. And it inherits values from someplace that it does not understand and cannot justify.

And as such it's in no position to posit alternative values to the values that are presented by religion, even though it thinks that it can.

24:23 Dylan: Having a long standing scientific background, I end up thinking about this a lot.

24:28 Seth: This happens all the time when we talk about this. Dylan always gets his hackles up because he's the only real scientist.

24:33 Dylan: There are no hackles here. So the first thing that came to mind I was just trying to imagine like building the collider to solve the problem of why we do science or whatever, which is sort of one way of formulating or sort of giving an image of why that's absurd. Right. You would not expect that I could figure out which set of test tubes that I could combine their contents together and solve that problem or solve that question. But one way in which I read it is that there's a kind of lack of courage often on the case of science that it wouldn't be from a.

I'll call it wouldn't be from the scientific method, so to speak, or the means that science uses to answer questions about the world, that it would answer the questions about itself, but it's still within the activity of the scientists that they're making those judgments. And there's a kind of lying about what the status of their judgments about the activity of doing science is already the way someone in philosophy of science might say it, or even amongst themselves, you say, well, your preference for the simple over the complex, or a particular kind of simplicity, or a particular kind of complexity, those are value choices.

Those aren't scientific choices. Those are decisions about the way in which you choose to have answers that satisfy what amounts to being good. What is good science? It satisfies certain kinds of criteria. What are the plausible answers? And for me, that activity, it doesn't take very long for me to reflect on that activity, to find something that's very much in alignment with what this notion of becoming is for Nietzsche, and what Lise is referring to, that I see in science all the time, that they're embedded in the activity of science is a kind of radical desire to hold the current conception as provisional.

And if you're going to engage in science really as a scientist, do both those things at the same time, that you have principles of operating, that you're holding onto that genealogy about how you got to where you're at using the conceptions that you have before you. But you have to be willing and open to the idea that you're actually going to have to turn the whole thing around or you're going to have to evolve it in a radically new way. And arguably, that's the most exciting thing. I mean, in fact, in some ways the most authentic, super abundantly vital scientists, that's what they most want to do, is actually transform the way we think about the world in some new way.

And so in that way, I think there is embedded in the activity of science, particularly experimental science, this aspect of becoming in terms of engaging with the world, even if it isn't the result of scientific activity. You know, scientists aren't coming up with theories about the becoming of science in that way, but their activity is embodying it.

27:17 Jeff: That seems really good to me, Dylan. In other words, that's the kind of approach where we find the devotion to the ascetic ideal that in isolation looks like it doesn't contribute to greater vitality. Right? It looks like it jeopardizes the scientists in isolation. But in the right context, in the right combination, which I think is what the seventh chapter is about, in part, that becomes essential. And in fact, it looks to me like Lise's account of Nietzsche's whole strategy in the psychological War against nihilism, which is itself a psychological war.

A lot of weight gets put on the thought that the ascetic ideal contains an internal contradiction. In other words, a lot of weight gets put on the rationalistic side of the promising combination for human beings. And it does look like it's science and it's intellectual honesty or probity that is making future possibilities more susceptible to contradictions like that that would make the counterattack effective. You're right to underline not only that there is something valuable in the scientists that is going to be retained, but that it might in some ways be a more valuable piece than the contributions of the other types.

28:27 Michael: I thought the kind of science that Dylan described, I mean, it's probably modern, maybe it was pre, ancient also, that is, that had an openness to progress and therefore a provisional character to its attention that is willing to regard the things it studies as under a state of ongoing change or becoming. And I think that's more and more oppressive, dominant modern science by what we just call it physics, which is beginning to subsume everything in some ways. It's very hard, I think, to find the presentation of that science willing to really embrace the provisional care that is experiment by experiment.

It wants to announce it's decided certain things once and for all, and that's how it is. And then one builds up on the past. But probably true experimentation and really, I think what Goethe called ironic science would be willing to uproot the past and really reconceive it again and again as new approaches seem more. More promising or more powerful or even just better for living. The science, I think, that Nietzsche was so very worried about under the influence of the ascetic, had as its model the divorce between spectator and object. That is, science had evolved a sense of wanting to establish the independence of the things studied from the being that studies it.

And that's where you get these people who could be the scholars. You could pick them up, Nietzsche would say, and put them in some other field, and they would be perfectly content to be switched so that their life's work could be uprooted without disturbing them. And what he was really concerned with, I think this maybe goes with what Seth was saying about values. To be a living being is to be a being that does things. And to do things you have to be committed on one side or the other, even if it's just the commitment to do the thing rather than not to do that stems from values.

That is, I think Nietzsche has a sense that you can't be alive without being on the side of something. And with respect to this notion of the pristine spectator who's really not on the side of an experiment coming out one way or another, not on the side of any one phenomenon showing itself rather than another that's not a picture of a living being. And pursued to its extreme, which, you know, the scientist who complains about your biases is pressing you to try to clean up your act and stop bringing your humanity and your vitality into your scientific activity, is pressing you to become a being that wouldn't even be interested in its own life.

And I think that's the ultimate way in which that particular kind of pressure would align science with an ascetic ideal, which the ascetic ideal, amongst other things, tries to dim down everything that reflects this life and focus everything on some other realm which is not really the realm of living beings. It's the promised realm that you'll live in, you'll live in after you're dead, although you won't do anything that a living being does.

31:20 Seth: Yep, that was well put. This is a perfect time to bring the concept of becoming, to reintroduce it into the conversation that ultimately you can characterize. The ascetic ideal is it's a movement that manifests in many ways towards something that is not of this life, but not of this life in a particular way. It's transcendent, it's static, it's stable. So in the case of the theological prejudice, right, it's God, it's the eternal afterlife. In the case of philosophy, the philosopher, it's truth. So if you're talking about Nietzsche saying, look, the true value in life is in becoming.

It's your story, it's your constant growth, it's your becoming, constantly overcoming and becoming. Which is why genealogy is the appropriate method for understanding a life than interpreting it in terms of some kind of transcendent value. You have this opposition of becoming versus being, movement and change versus static. So when we look at the personalities, the philosopher, the priest, the saint, the scientist and so forth, to what extent do their activities define, enhance or suppress or negate? Becoming makes it much easier to understand why the priest is way at the bottom and the scientist is closer to the top.

And then he has the historiographer, right, that he talks about the couple types of historiographers who are at least pointing towards valuing the more important part, but unfortunately, just like Wagner, reinterpreting it in terms of transcendent ideals, we're not going to have time, by the way, if we do get into the whole Kant, Schopenhauer and Stendhal. That will be fun. My wife was asking me, you know, what the topic was for this podcast, and I was like, well, you know, like, how do you start explaining the genealogy of Morals and beyond good and evil to.

But what I did say was, you know, Nietzsche's the kind of philosopher that you just return to again and again as you mature as a thinker and you start off in college or maybe some precocious in high school, and you're like, all about beyond good and evil and aphorisms and all that kind of stuff. And then you start to learn about systematic philosophy, and you sort of fade away from him, and then you come back and if you're smart, you get into, you know, the Genealogy of Morals, which I think is one of the great books in philosophy of all time, and then you get kind of tired of his ranting and his style and whatever, and you kind of go away and then you study a bunch of Kant and Hegel and you start reading all of the modern stuff and you're like, oh, God, I gotta go back.

Right? And then you kind of finally get up the courage to touch Zarathustra and then you just get defeated and come away. And fortunately, Lise has written this book which does a great job of making Zarathustra, at least in my reckoning, much more valuable and relevant and much less annoying stylistically as a connection to Nietzsche's overall project. So this is now my fourth decade doing philosophy, something like that, and I have yet another appreciation and a new way of looking at Nietzsche's project that not only recharacterizes it, this terms of becoming versus being, which I think is a central counter narrative in philosophy, for you can take the being root and just try to figure out what's the best being.

Right. Which is kind of the straight mainline philosophical history of the Western world. And then you have this counter narrative that's got you into people like Nietzsche and Whitehead.

34:48 Dylan: You could also start with Heraclitus, but.

34:50 Seth: And Heraclitus. Heraclitus. You could start with Heraclitus, but anyway, I think it's fascinating and I love that. Sorry, I just got excited and I just wanted to express some enthusiasm there. Not much of a point being made, but you get what I'm saying?

35:03 Jeff: Yeah, I do. Having just studied Zarathustra with some undergraduates at St. John's I have this thought about the style that you mentioned a couple times. Right. You know, as something that kind of pushes people away from Nietzsche, from time to time, there is, I think, a sense that when you encounter it, this might be an indication of some limitation on Nietzsche's part, that he writes the way he does, right? Like he just can't get over some mood that he's in, in. But Lise's book at least raises the possibility, and it's a very intriguing possibility, that Nietzsche is very much in command.

He's making a deliberate choice. He could have written otherwise, and that he makes the choice to write the way he does because words are causes of changes in the people that read them. And that these words, however initially maybe repulsive or concerning, they might say seem, are also somehow energized. And that is at least, you know, aside from whatever the content, whatever the argument is there, the energizing character of the language itself is part of the point, I think, both for Lise and for Nietzsche. So one of the things that I like very much about Lise's account is how it helps frame that sense that we get from time to time that maybe there's something excessive about the language.

But look at what is being attempted in this language and look at why it's being tried, and you'll be won over, definitely.

36:24 Dylan: There's a section that I really want to give, because when you brought up becoming, it made me want to talk about the section starting on 140. Remember, in these seven types, one of them is women. And in the book, Nietzsche's book, as she notes, he seems kind of perfunctory about women. She makes a big deal about this, and she makes a big deal about the power of the absence of what he's talking about. I think because she has so much to say about this being about becoming, I think we ought to spend a little bit of time with it. So if I were to pick a place, I guess it's at the bottom of 139 where she starts formulating it.

She's summarizing a little bit, and then the scantiness of the discussion of some of the characters, and she says the discussion of women is similarly scanty. What they are at best with regard to the meaning of ascetic ideals, namely seducers, is not discussed at, or at least not explicitly. Rather, Nietzsche speaks overtly only of the majority of women. Since the best are by definition the exceptional few, the majority cannot include those women whose employment of the ascetic ideal is best. While remaining silent about these seducers, Nietzsche folds the bulk of women into his account of the priest's dealings with the mass of men.

Whom he depicts as either sufferers of the lower classes or work slaves or prisoners. He adds women to this context with the passing parenthetical account of why it is legitimate to do so. Most women are simultaneously both work slaves and prisoners. And then she goes on and she says, what is the meaning of Nietzsche's silence about those women who use the ascetic ideal for seduction? It's not credible that his seeming inattention to them is an oversight. He is a writer whose skill is arguably unsurpassed, and he chooses to include women as a category in the first section, which he clearly crafts to both sufficient and succinct.

Since he aims at concisely articulating in a single section an answer he judges to be completely adequate, he would not have included women if they were unnecessary to this answer. I'm not just going to read the whole thing, but she says, silent. Speaking about these seducers accords with Nietzsche's teaching of the type women. He aligns woman per se, or the feminine, with the principle of becoming, in contrast to the principle of being, which he associates with the man or the masculine. This alliance between woman and becoming reflects the fact that within the larger category of the human being, woman has a preeminently supple soul.

She's akin to the excellent actor, that she can fill a multitude of diverse roles. And then she says, just as the actor not in his role, and to this extent is unlike woman, so too the artist is not his artifact. Woman, by contrast, is simultaneously the artist of herself and artifact of her artistry, nothing of her as woman stands apart from her various self affected transfigurations. In sum, woman is maximally self creating, becoming within the type or shared general shape that is the human being. Okay, so right there she's basically saying that this type that Nietzsche has not spoken explicitly about is basically in some important way the answer to her question.

39:29 Seth: So here's the critical question for me that I brought up at the beginning of the podcast. Why is this on page 140 instead of page 201? I thought that was the big denouement of this book. She does say that the artist philosopher who becomes the poet philosopher, the historiographer poet philosopher, is really the feminine, masculine philosopher, somebody who incorporates the feminine aspect. But I really feel violently that this is a much more powerful articulation of that thesis than what comes later in the book. Like, I really missed out. And I think it opens a potential inquiry into that which, by the way, many, many, many Nietzsche scholars in the 20th century, at least the ones I was familiar with, like Luce Irigaray and Kristeva and all these, you know, they've all explored Nietzsche's treatment of the feminine and woman and how that.

But it's a stark in articulation. And by the way, it has parallels in the mythical roots, too. Right. Where the feminine element is chaos or nature, the masculine element is order or structure or law. There's always this balance between the two things.

40:33 Dylan: You might say Dionysian and Apollonian.

40:35 Seth: There you go. It's all mirrored. And he's making a very explicit call to recognize, which he does when he talks about Dionysus and Apollo, too.

40:44 Dylan: This is a good place for us to take a short break for all you pal. Citizens, please continue listening to part two of episode 263 of the partially Examined Life.