Ep. 300: Nietzsche on Relating to History (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 300, part 2. This was a special live streamed episode. You can even see video on this at our YouTube page. We're discussing Nietzsche's on the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life from 1874. We had just finished talking about his notion of monumental history and we're moving on to the other ways that he says we can usefully approach the study of history. This is only 3 or 4 out of 9 sections of the text. It does get very repetitive and ranty as it goes. And we've kind of covered a good number of the main. Hartmann.

0:43 Wes: Hartmann, yeah, the Hartmann thing.

0:46 Mark: We can skip these particular. Yeah. Apparently section 9 was added right before publication and is mostly a screed against this book that is not well explained.

0:55 Wes: The Philosophy of the Unconscious, which I think was influential on Nietzsche and Freud. But he's focused on a very Hegelian part of it that he hates.

1:04 Mark: All right, so the antiquarian kind of history. This is the kind of historian that you would expect when you think historian, you know, the bespectacled everything that is old and trying to convert. Well, see if this is part of the antiquarian. Certainly an overall critique that he has against historians is conversion. So the scientific conversion of everything into mere data.

1:25 Wes: Let's keep the positive and the negative characterizations distinct though, because he starts out with more positive and then he tells

1:31 Mark: us, sure, let's give some positives here.

1:33 Dylan: I mean, just at the very beginning, he wants to look back whence he came to where he came into being with love and loyalty and with this piety. He, as it were, give thanks for his existence. He wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him with the conditions under which he himself came into existence. Thus he serves life. So it's looking to the past with A view towards how it informs the present. That's the good thing, with a kind of veneration and a piety towards a respect to it, because the way in which it was the source of the current time.

2:05 Wes: This is about identity and it's about root. This is the past that can help make us feel at home. You know, he talks about contentment in a society of those who are otherwise wretched. Right. They think, oh, I'm part of this particular nation with these customs, and these are good things that I can revere, and they are part of what make me who I am. They're part of my culture, and they make my existence bigger than just my individual, transitory existence. They connect me to a larger and more permanent whole. So whereas, you know, the monumental is also about something, is about a form of permanence, leaving behind things that are influential on others, being that genius, that great person. But in this case, that sense of persistence comes not from doing great things, but just from being part of the culture itself by being influenced by it, by being an exemplar, in some sense of it.

3:02 Mark: Yeah, so he's not all for revolutions. He likes there to be domestic peace, even though a lot of what he writes seems like, oh, we're just heading toward the last man, we're heading toward too much peace. We need to have competition, we need to have striving, we need to have a cheerful contempt for just being safe. But maybe especially for the masses, that he doesn't have a lot of respect for having something that keeps them rooted and feeling content and not as a group, all getting up and moving away in search of something that feels better.

3:34 Wes: Well, yeah, he mentions, like, expansionist aims and wars in particular. Right. So antiquarian history helps to prevent that. If you can't get into the antiquarian mode, you are more likely to be in the nationalist mode, which is one of the bad forms of the monumental. So he'll say on page 74, it can actually help prevent the desire for war and expansion. And then he has this great little line about the antiquarian helping you. It's like the contentment of a tree and its roots quote. The happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary, but grown out of a past as its heir flower and fruit, and that one's existence is thus excused and indeed justified.

You can't mention enough the fact that there's a ton of beautiful, incredible writing in this, even when it's repetitive. He manages to repeat himself at general level without ever repeating himself at a Metaphorical rhetorical level.

4:27 Seth: But, well, you can pretty much always say of Nietzsche, one of the few great writers, history, philosophy. So on page 74 he says, this always produces one very imminent danger. Everything old and past that enters one's field of vision is at all, is in the end blandly taken to be equally worthy of reverence. While everything that does not approach this antiquity with reverence, that is to say, everything new and evolving is rejected and persecuted. So if we're going to get on the Plato, Presocratic or ancient historian bandwagon, it makes me think of the whole theogony, or the gold soul, the bronze soul, all these mythologizing of the past, the great people of the past, the great men of the past.

And in this day and age there shall be none that measure up to that. That's what it put me in mind of now. There is a sense in which probably it's not simply about the greatness of the people of the past, but some kind of sense of, I don't know when I would say simplicity, but with the antiquarian, you're almost always going to get some kind of normative valuation of innocence, simplicity. Things were just better. And they're not better simply because they were more complicated or more diverse, but there's somehow a sense in which life was simpler, that things were more clear, the categories of right and wrong were more clear and easy to understand.

And so it's an interpretation of history which casts the past, I think, against the context of the present, which is complex and diverse and whatever, in a way that simplifies the description of what counts as good, what counts as bad, what values should be honored, what should be challenged, and so on.

6:13 Dylan: That's where this sense of rootedness and piety towards the past and identity come in. I thought Wes called attention to this being about rootedness and identity. And I think it's working very much the way you're describing, Seth.

6:28 Seth: Piety is such a great word to use here, Dylan.

6:30 Wes: One of the dangers is very similar to the monumental danger of being averse to what's new. The antiquarian and the monumental share that problem. And as I'll say, it undervalues becoming so it can paralyze the man of action who might not act because he's worried about offending some piety, right? This is about custom and tradition, and it's a very, maybe even Confucian way of looking at the world. So, you know, it has its positives, but if it dominates everything, you know, if it gets hypertrophied if it dominates the monumental and the critical, it loses the ability to evaluate.

Right? The critical will be able to tell us, maybe our tradition is messed up, maybe it was racist, maybe it was, oh, God forbid, this or that, right? That's what the critical history will help us do. And monumental history will help us make valuations about, hey, was this great or was this mediocre? Antiquarian can't do either of those things. It can just say, hey, it's good because it's tradition. We value our traditions.

7:31 Dylan: One way in which it would cease to be for life would be when you start saying things like, well, you have to tell your neighbor to keep wearing their hat. Why? Because you always wear a hat. You start shunning people because they stopped wearing hats. I'm using a very trivial example. But those kinds of social conventions that are only born out of just this is what we used to do. And somebody starts wearing short pants when everyone was wearing long pants, heaven forbid kind of thing, that's when it's ossified.

8:01 Mark: So it's provincial. He continues, I'm not going to read this quote about the roots, but in the tree is aware of its roots to a greater degree than it is able to see them. But this awareness judges how big they are from the size and strength of its visible branches. And then it continues, the tree knows its own business and doesn't know the rest of the forest. So if you're very into your, the history of your hometown, where you're living right now, and get really into that, that's not going to broaden your perspective. Like it might be really interesting, it might be really rewarding. But of course getting obsessed with it is going to be deleterious to your big picture thinking.

8:36 Wes: Well, it's like when someone comes into your small town with, you know, their foreign ways and how do you evaluate those foreign ways? If you're fully provincial, you just say, that's not the way we do things around here. Or you could fall, get your shotgun out. Or you know, if you had the other forms, you could, if you, if you were a monumentalist or if you're critical, you could possibly expand beyond your little horizon of small town ways.

9:03 Mark: So he had said, in terms of this makes you indifferently affirmative of everything that is past. Of course the past had vigorous debates going on within it and we tend to just paper all that over. Oh, I really like the rationalists and the empiricists, you know, if you're, if you like so called modern philosophy. Whereas Nietzsche feels like no you should have picked a side and kind of let those gripes live on. I don't know, because it does seem like actually a lot of these debates, when you get historically further from them, you see that the people arguing had way more in common.

So two different hockey teams or whatever, like of neighboring towns, you get a generation or two out. Well, maybe you stay provincial and you. I'm from town A and I will always hate the people from town B. And that's just part of your identity. But it seems like more likely like you just get like, oh, wasn't that cool that hockey culture that they had back in the 1980s or whatever time you're trying to venerate and that your particular choice of stream within that. I guess this is presuming that there is nothing really at issue philosophically in which of the streams you pick, which is maybe distorting Nietzsche's point.

10:13 Wes: He doesn't directly address this. You're kind of speculating here. So.

10:17 Mark: Well, he uses the example of the ancient Greeks tolerated the church like parts of their art along with other stuff.

10:23 Wes: Right.

10:24 Mark: Because they indifferently the in the Apollonian stage, in the late stage that he's criticized in this previous essay as being degenerate. Then they should be firmly life, life, life against the stultifying effects of the priestly caste or whatever. But that's not. By that point they just, oh, everything is beautiful. All that ancient stuff is awesome. We got to get the critical out. Somebody start us on the critical.

10:48 Wes: So the critical, interestingly enough, is the shortest of these sections, or at least the notes that I took on it are the shortest. But I think it just runs from 75 to 76, but mainly on page, just one page.

11:00 Dylan: The end of section 3.

11:02 Wes: Critical history, as we've said, helps us condemn the past for its violence, for its weakness. And we can always do that because there's a lot of error and violence in the past. And in fact it's a necessity, according to Nietzsche, because to live and to be unjust are the same thing. We can discuss what that means in a second. The danger of simply going whole hog on critical history and giving up on monumental and the antiquarian. We remember we need all three in the positive sense, ultimately, is that we throw out the baby with the bathwater in the past and we lose sight of the fact that this is a very Crito like argument, by the way.

We are the outcome of the errors and the crimes of previous generations. They are our formative influences. So it's not enough to simply go out and say, hey, man, X, Y and Z in the past was bad. That condemnation doesn't actually do anything for you. You have to develop a new habit, you have to develop a new virtue. You have to be able to live something ultimately. And condemnation does not by itself help you do that.

12:07 Mark: The end point of this about second natures is pretty surprising, right? When this new thing that we're trying to develop, or that you should be trying to develop, as you were just saying, Wes, is you're trying to get a second nature going. But he says second natures are always weaker, but first natures always were previously second natures. Which is a surprising thing to hear from Nietzsche, who I thought was this champion of the instincts. No, what we take to be instinct, what we take to be his comments elsewhere in this essay of people thought they were throwing away formalism and sort of like we want to just all be natural, but actually that just made them lazy, careless. That's not a real creation of something that is still a destructive act. So, yeah, those past people were uptight, but what do you got to be stronger than that? Not just to say, chill out.

12:56 Seth: Yeah. So I think there's a nice passage here on page 75. I think it is. It requires a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget. The extent to which to live and to be unjust is one and the same thing. Sometimes, however, this same life that requires forgetting demands a temporary suspension of this forgetfulness. It wants to be clear as to how unjust the existence of anything, a privilege, a caste, a dynasty, for example, is, and how greatly this thing deserves to perish. So the critic, in judging the past for its unjustness, suggests that it's not unjust to live in the present. It's a form of effacing. He says, forgetfulness. But you would almost rather learn from the injustice of the past and to use that to try to be more just in the present than to simply condemn the past for being unjust because it blinds you to your own injustices.

13:54 Mark: Who's going to make this modern first? This is like the fact that it's so not filled out by Nietzsche makes it just like, oh, let's fill in the whole thing with social justice talk here. And what he would have to say about that.

14:06 Seth: I'm not talking about social justice. It's to condemn the past for being something that it is, and to think that that somehow makes you immune from the same criticism of the present. I think that's ultimately the problem of the critic. I'm not talking about social justice. I'm just talking about to say, like, well, you know, they were less civilized. They had less technology, they had less culture. They had less of this. Or they were unable to this. They didn't have this concept. It's a justification that ultimately puts you in a position of entitlement from the present where you think somehow you have all those things and you're immune.

14:43 Dylan: Yeah, that sounds like part of it. I don't think we should forget that. Another dimension is this throwing the baby out with the bathwater part, that you lose your rootedness, lose the connectedness that was enlivening. And maybe those things go actually hand in hand that you. The way you were saying Seth, is in your critical disposition, you cultivate a we're better than we were kind of contentment that's blind to the fact that we are rooted in the past and also that we're not immune from the faults of the past. They might be different faults or they might be just masked in different ways. That's a slightly different problem than. Well, I would go back and say it's related to also becoming unrooted.

15:29 Seth: What I was trying to say was I appreciate that connection to the rootedness in the past, but what I was trying to say was something more like this. Like, oh, they did human sacrifice. That on our moral scale, that means that we can criticize them. We don't do human sacrifice today, so we can't be criticized by the same rubric. But we still have human trafficking and colonialism and all these various other sorts of things. So it's a way of taking a kind of moral high ground against the past for behaviors which were normalized then or which were at least accepted then. And it makes you turn a blind eye to your own simply because you don't have those same practices or mores or whatever. But it doesn't give you the strength to go and examine your contemporary situation for its own sorts of.

16:16 Wes: I think that's a good critique. I don't know if it's the one he's making here. I think the one he's making here. You know, you would say it's my culture and my civilization that had human sacrifice in the past. And in fact, maybe this country was built on human sacrifice. Therefore, I can't be proud of anything in my culture, in my country, because it's just all built on human sacrifice. It's systemically, humanly sacrificial. Even if actual human sacrifice is not occurring anymore. We know the types of arguments that people make so, in other words, that's the throwing out the baby with bath water.

The idea is that we come to see our a whole social fabric as corrupt and worthy of being thrown away. Because we can always look at the past and say, hey, look at all the violent and terrible things people did to each other and how that causally is connected to where we are today. And even to me, being who I am. These are all formative influences, a part of my culture. They construct me, so to speak. So we, the outcome of these aberrations, these passions, these errors of previous generations, we are the outcome of the crimes. We are constituted by formative influences that are essentially crimes.

And there's no way to free oneself from that chain, as he puts it, from that causal chain. So we can't just abandon the city to think in Socratic terms, right? We can't say, the sentence that's been passed on me is unjust, therefore I can just leave my society, which is a metaphor for saying, I just wholeheartedly condemn everything about my society. We have to be able to try to change it and improve it gradually. He has this great line about knowing the good but not doing it because we know the better and can't do it. It's like the perfect is the enemy of the good.

You lose the ability to change a society progressively. It's hopeless if it's all just corruption all the way down.

18:05 Dylan: Yeah. He says the best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge and through a new stern discipline, combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct. Second nature, so that our first nature withers away, is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate. Always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit to denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than the first. This goes to Marx.

18:40 Mark: Well, and one way of doing that might just be pick different monuments, right? So if history is inevitably constructionist, then it's not necessarily that you're just denying that this stuff happened. And you know, but you could say, who are the chains of human beings that you count yourself at the end of? Which ones are you picking? If you say, I'm a citizen of the world, I'm the descendant of all the oppressed people, of all the peoples that have ever walked the face of the earth, you're going to have a different self conception, while still maybe acknowledging, not emphasizing but acknowledging the same facts,

19:11 Wes: you don't, though, get to entirely choose your monuments in the way you don't get to entirely choose your critical norms. Right. Slavery is wrong. Human sacrifice is wrong, and nothing changes that. Shakespeare is great. So who's great and who's not in the past? That's a real subject of real debate, and there are real norms around it, just in the way there are real norms around human sacrifice and slavery. So this is not a matter of just arbitrary choice.

19:37 Dylan: No. But part of the first nature and second nature is there's definitely a retelling that's going to happen, and it's going to be perfectly reasonable to ask, well, why is Shakespeare great? There's going to be a way in which, in the case of monuments, that if they're going to be part of our living, it's going to have to be rearticulated, why we have it.

19:57 Wes: I hope someone has written a book about that.

20:01 Seth: I think that's a really interesting point. By questioning why the monuments are great, whether we should have them. That's not history.

20:08 Dylan: It's critical history. Yeah.

20:09 Seth: Is it critical history? A critical history would be to say it's bad.

20:13 Dylan: You know, critical is just like the first critique of pure reason is. It's a unearthing, a reflection. It's not necessarily saying it's bad. The critic isn't always about saying, I

20:23 Wes: think you're both right on this. Like, okay, I think human sacrifice is bad, but sometimes it's good.

20:29 Mark: Is that if you don't have enough human sacrifice, maybe you need a little more human sacrifice if people are starving.

20:35 Seth: All right, because we're getting to Q and A section. I won't pursue this line of inquiry, but I think what you were just describing is more of some kind of a critical function. That's not history. It's some kind of criticism, but it's not history. It's an inquiry into the social dynamics of, like, why is this important to whom and why is it not important to others? It's not a simple historical inquiry.

20:58 Dylan: What you just described is exactly what I would have included in, at least as a component of what Nietzsche means by critical history.

21:07 Seth: Interesting.

21:07 Mark: Like everything else in Nietzsche, I feel like the apparatus that we're talking about can be used either way on many of your popular debates. So I think the way that you started to describe Seth, you know, if you just say slavery in the past was bad, that lets you ignore what's going on now. Okay, well, that's what liberals criticize conservatives of doing. And the Way the West put it of, well, you actually do recognize that those injustices in some form or other do persist and therefore you condemn everything and you can't feel any pride. That's exactly the conservative response. And both of them are, I think, legitimately using Nietzsche's terminology here. So it's some nice tools to have at your disposal.

21:46 Seth: Can't we all just get along?

21:48 Mark: No, says Nietzsche. That would be being the last man fading into we're all just getting along.

21:55 Wes: I'm looking at comments here. We have greetings from California, greetings from Sydney, Australia. That's really cool.

22:03 Mark: We had said we were going to prioritize the discord, which is our supporters. Are there people actually in there, Seth? Are there people asking questions?

22:10 Seth: Let's put it that way, yes.

22:12 Mark: Let us answer some of those first. Then we'll turn to the YouTube folks. Folks, yes, if you have questions about what we were just talking about, if you have questions about anything else, maybe we'll get to them. Maybe we'll answer them in a nightcap four months from now. Feel free to put them in the comments to the YouTube or if you're

22:27 Seth: on Discord, do that FX Zane he's got kind of a question and a follow up. So he's struggling to reconcile Nietzsche be the child, be the innocent with There's a right way to use history. And he says that later on when Nietzsche's talking about Apollonian, Dionysian or the arete of Homer heroes, when he makes Zarathustra a new character, he doesn't have a sense that he's all that worried about historical history of any of these things. It feels more like markers that work for the argument that he's making in the present. So his question is in his own works, where does he leverage non critical history, non monumental history himself?

23:07 Mark: You know, when he talks about having an intellectual conscience, he doesn't want you to blatantly deny. And I think, you know, if you want to look at his arguments against anti Semitism and German nationalism, those are clearly abuses of particular monumental ways of taking history or antiquarian ways of taking history.

23:25 Wes: In a way, Nietzsche is one of the great anti nationalist philosophers. That's sort of a recurring theme despite his elitism. So he's noticing rise of German nationalism and objecting to it even to the point of abandoning a close friendship. You know, with Wagner, he takes that very seriously. So that's one bit of critical history that he practices. You know, we could think about what is he doing in the birth of Tragedy. He tells us in this essay that he does want to look to the ancient Greeks for their way of using history in a way that doesn't undermine vitality.

There's something monumental about his approach to the Greeks, but also something critical because the birth of tragedy sort of lionizes certain aspects of Greek culture at certain time periods. And then it really attacks in a strong way other aspects of Greek culture as it develops, especially. Right. Socrates and Plato. And is it Euripides or Aeschylus? I think it's Euripides, the playwright. Where things go wrong.

24:33 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. Euripides is part of the wrong side of the track.

24:36 Wes: Yeah. So that's where things start going wrong and getting too ascetic and getting too sober and Apollonian. So I think, you know, a lot of what he's doing with the ancient Greeks is both critical and monumental. And then if you, you know, I don't know about the antiquarian part, I'd have to think about that.

24:52 Seth: But, yeah, those are two modes of history, so to speak, that he's applying. But it's all in the attempt to recover something, to bring something that he thinks has been lost or hidden into the present. In his characterization of these three modes of history in this work, none of them are attempting to reclaim something from the past for the productive use in the present or to cure an ailment of the present.

25:17 Wes: Well, they can. I think he. That's what.

25:19 Dylan: He's anticarian.

25:22 Wes: That's what he tells us at the very end of the essay. He says, look, these three modes used in the correct way can be in the service of life. And that's the way we should use them.

25:30 Seth: As he describes 1, 2, and 3, that are all sterile and unproductive. We have to turn to the example that he provides in the Birth of Tragedy or whatever as an example of how to use them that way. Because he doesn't lay out a plan for how to do that in this essay.

25:46 Dylan: Yes and no. I mean, you just said he lays out 1, 2 and 3 as monumental, antiquarian and critical, as if they're all bad forms. But we just went exhaustively through how there are good and bad forms of each of them.

26:02 Wes: And he structures the essay. It's very structured. You know, here's the good, here's the bad for each character.

26:07 Mark: And maybe this is the time to just unveil his antidotes to the ill uses of these. One of which I think we've talked about is just being unhistorical, that you have to kind of throw away History, in order to just concentrate and do something great. I think we hit that at the beginning. The other one, which is not well explained in this essay, but is evocative, is this idea of being supra historical. And I think that is to kind of see through history, to find the eternal truths, things that it doesn't even matter if I get some of the individual facts of things that happened wrong.

Because I've gotten this schema of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. To use his own example of his own essay out of that. And that is something fundamental about human nature that is to some extent independent of the particular history. History cannot eat it. It could not be falsified by history. But I think that is maybe where the questioner is coming from, is doesn't he just pull history out of his ass to support whatever philosophical thesis he wants? Maybe Sounds like you don't really see him, you know, in his Phil. In his super philological mode of like.

Well, actually, that is pure pedantry. That that is the way that history interferes with good thinking.

27:16 Wes: We know he can do it because he did a lot of philological work before he published the Birth of Tragedy. And that's what elevated his reputation to what it was before he ruined it. And even the Birth of Tragedy is really obviously informed by his ability to be a pedant. We know that Nietzsche can do that.

27:30 Dylan: He can help pet into the pedants.

27:32 Wes: We know he knows this stuff inside and out, and he's done it. He knows how to do it. But he's also just too good at writing to continue to do that, cannot restrain himself. And so what he's doing here is he's making an argument for being Nietzsche, being the kind of guy who, instead of being a scholar, even though he has these vast scholarly abilities, is going to be a creative writer of sorts, or he's in some kind of hybrid genre where he makes use of the classics, he makes use of scholarship. But he's going to be a philosopher, and not even an academic philosopher, but a. What would take a while to say, a great essayist at the very least.

28:09 Mark: What's another question?

28:10 Seth: There were a couple questions, but I'll just generalize rather than be specific. It's.

28:17 Wes: Are they too long to read or

28:19 Seth: no, I can read them, but a couple people want to know the relationship to Heidegger. Are you willing to veer into a comparison with Heidegger? Specifically? It seems like Nietzsche's making a strong statement about her. Human experience is composed of one's relationship with the past. While my understanding of Heidegger is that he makes a similarly strong statement that the human experience is composed of one's relationship to the future.

28:41 Wes: We mentioned thrown ness, right?

28:43 Seth: Yeah. So let me just give a quick, totally unsatisfactory comparison or characterization of the Heideggerian position. So you are thrown into the historical time flow. You're thrown into an assigned gender, a geography, a social class, a historical period or whatever, and all of the forces of history in the past propel you forward. It's like a wave that you're surfing on. So the past is propelling you forward. And the way in which the past propels you forward and your thrown ness where you landed, all the things that you were assigned at birth, so to speak, the combination of those two things determine your projections in the future.

So you can think about the past as being like this. Then there's you and then there's future projections. So the past is constitutive, not of you. You are not constituted by the past. You are constituted by your thrownness. But your future possibilities are conditioned and controlled by a combination of your thrownness in the past. And I don't know how to reconcile, I don't know quite how to understand Nietzsche's.

29:52 Wes: I can say something about this. This, this tracks a general existentialist distinction between essence and existence, right? Where essence, you know, just corresponds to thrown ness. We are determined by causal influences, social, cultural, historical, all the rest of it. The other side of that is existence, subjectivity and freedom. So Nietzsche is making an argument for the latter. He's making an argument that we can be more than simply essences, more than simply the sum of historical influences, that we can be free in our relationship to history.

30:30 Mark: Right?

30:30 Wes: And the way we do that, one of the ways we do that is artistically, we sublimate, we make use of this material from the past to create something new and not simply to something that's derivative. We don't simply do pale, weak imitations of things. We can actually attain some sort of freedom by making use of influences and the past and necessity and the thing that you might think would just reduce us to the product of deterministic forces.

30:58 Mark: Let's get another question out there.

31:01 Seth: Objections to arguments against particular monumental versions, I assume of history and culture wars at least partly an objection to cancel culture. It's pretense at being truth seeking when it's actually just status seeking and power seeking. A grounded in thumos. Would Nietzsche or Wes with the reasonable concerns about cancel culture. So I think the Question is one objection to monumental history would be what we were talking about, like tearing down monuments. And I think he's trying to say, is it possible that the current vein of cancel culture that's driving to tear down the past in the name of truth, is it really not potentially thumos, Is it not seeking recognition versus being truth seeking?

31:49 Mark: He says for every single one of these that mediocre people are going to take it over and use it for their own ends. So yes, but go ahead West.

31:56 Wes: Yeah, this is like a softball for me. Right? Just like. Yeah, I mean that's the argument. And of course you say that people who are interested in social justice, for instance, are really just engaged in virtue signaling or status seeking behavior. And of course that is Nietzsche's core argument. That is Nietzsche's core ideological argument. Right. When he reduces morality to hypocrisy, he says that really morality is will to power. That's the same sort of reduction. So you can always find that sort of argument in Nietzsche, but it applies to morality in general.

And then you have to say when are we actually being interested in justice and morality? When are we not just hypocrites driven by status and power and recognition? And that's a very complicated question and maybe there is no easy answer to that. Maybe it's always both. And this is, I think I'm writing an essay about doublethink and Orwell. And I think this is really the core of what doublethink is about. It's tricky to actually unravel what it is when we are being power seeking or status seeking and when we are being interested in human well being and morality and justice.

Right.

33:02 Mark: Well, an important quote from later from section six that maybe we'll talk about in third part of this discussion is what a seeker after justice really is, is someone who is not afraid to confidently judge, to be a judge. And I think that means judge independently. There's no courage in if the culture has right now established some pretty severe norms by which we judge the past and we say, oh, that's racist, that's sexist, that's ra. You know, there's no courage in merely pointing out more things because that's what people are doing now. I mean, it depends on the circumstance.

There might be individual situations. You know, if you're part of an organization that is not on board with any of this and you're the person who's, who's getting in there and pointing this out, that still could be, you know, the fact that it might also be status seeking. Doesn't make it bad for Nietzsche, Right? If we're all acting out of the will to power, that might be okay, but it is supposed to be at least an honest judgment, right? An honest and independent judgment. That is the thing that it takes courage. So if you really think that, yes, this is a thing that needs to be taken down and you're willing to voice that, then great on you, I guess.

But also, if you think everybody else is overreacting and you want to point at this particular circumstance and saying this person is being unjustly canceled, then that's also maybe an act of courage.

34:26 Seth: Bringing up those points, Mark, makes me start automatically thinking towards Zarathustra and some of the later works. That it's just this is an early work and he's going to explore the more nuanced interrelationships between the individual and history, the individual and society, later on. These were polemical essays that he's bringing up.

34:51 Wes: What's the next question?

34:52 Seth: I don't have any more on discord.

34:54 Wes: All right, let's look at YouTube. Some of them are just going to read comments because they're funny. Teep points us to a good, really good quote from the essay. Thus for Hegel, the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin. I love that line. A lot of vituperative stuff in this essay, Gary. Seth It's Nietzsche's world. We just live in it. God isn't dead. He just changed his name to money.

35:23 Seth: Here's a good one, Wes. Matthew says how society can become dominated by its deference to and reverence of the past. Reminds me of Emerson's critique of America's relationship to its past and self reliance. Do you see a connection?

35:39 Wes: That's like the tough essay exam. How long has it been since we read that?

35:44 Mark: But yes. Didn't Nietzsche discover Emerson at some point and say, oh, this is a kindred spirit to me?

35:49 Wes: Well actually I think we have a copy of his Emerson and with Nietzsche's notes in the margin if I'm not wrong.

35:56 Seth: I don't know about that.

35:58 Wes: Does anyone remember? Can anyone comment on how many years has it been since we read that self reliance?

36:04 Mark: I just always looked at Emerson as Nietzsche light.

36:07 Wes: The one thing I remember is that you didn't have good things to say.

36:11 Mark: Maybe this is a reason for us.

36:12 Dylan: Well, that was about Thoreau.

36:13 Wes: Oh, that was Thoreau.

36:14 Mark: Emerson was. I was just as disappointed with Emerson.

36:17 Seth: Well, side note on marginalia, if anybody has an opportunity to go visit the Philosophy library at Harvard University in Cambridge. They have a little special section where they have some of the original works, the books that were owned by all those famous philosophers who flew through there. And they have their notes in the margins. And you can look at seeing how. What was it? Santayana, somebody commented. Santayana commenting on Hegel and those kinds of things. It's pretty cool. So make the trip.

36:49 Wes: Lacani and Lifter. This is what finding out what Ira Glass looks like after listening to this American Life for years. So weird.

36:56 Mark: Which one of us looks most discordant with your image of what we should look like?

37:01 Seth: That's a great question.

37:02 Wes: I've seen more than one comment about how they thought I would have looked like Dylan. It was on our advertisement video, and I've also seen it elsewhere in the past. Is it possible for a philosopher to find happiness? Is everyone happy

37:21 Mark: in general? Sure.

37:24 Seth: I'd say the answer is no.

37:26 Wes: Are you a philosopher?

37:28 Seth: Yes, I am. And I'm unhappy. Marina says that Mark looks least like he sounds.

37:34 Mark: What do I. What am I supposed to look like? Much fatter. This is what I expect is they all expected us all to be much fatter.

37:43 Seth: I think they probably all expect us to look a little bit more like Slavoj Zizek.

37:47 Mark: I had more of a beard.

37:49 Wes: You just have to get some drool.

37:51 Mark: Yeah, we've had all four of us have beards on here before. Right.

37:55 Wes: Anyway, not me.

37:57 Seth: Oh, yeah, No, I had a beard for a while.

37:59 Mark: Is it a seasonal thing?

38:00 Wes: Seth looks least like his voice. I see in the YouTube comments.

38:06 Mark: I feel like this is not a very entertaining use of our viewers.

38:12 Dylan: Time we should wrap up.

38:14 Seth: Yeah, I'm enjoying it, but I also have to go to bed. So we have a lot.

38:20 Wes: So we're going to continue talking about this in a third part, only for the supporters.

38:26 Mark: Ha ha.

38:27 Wes: Dylan is the sexiest looking, but Wes is the sexiest sounding.

38:31 Dylan: Well, that's why they thought you looked like me.

38:34 Seth: I would agree with that.

38:35 Wes: Can we trade?

38:38 Seth: We have gotten numerous things. We have gotten numerous comments where people say we should do this more often, the live thing. So maybe it's something to consider.

38:46 Mark: There's no great reason not to. I suppose. I don't like to having this video that is five seconds behind us open at the same time. It's very distracting.

38:56 Wes: Why do you have that open?

38:57 Mark: I was trying to look at the comments.

39:00 Wes: Just pause the video.

39:01 Dylan: Or you could pause the video, watch the comments.

39:04 Mark: I don't know. For some reason, having myself on the zoom screen, that's fine, because then it's like, you know, how do I look right now? But having passed me that, no, sorry, I broke the F rule. We didn't have an F rule.

39:19 Wes: It's one form of technological narcissism. Too many, so too many images of the. Yeah.

39:26 Mark: The sign for me of when we're done with the episode is when I get just loopy. And so I think I just, I just now hit that.

39:33 Dylan: I think you, you crossed the line there.

39:35 Mark: Thank you folks, for watching, for listening. If you're doing this in the future, I hope the past does not weigh upon you. I hope there's a special irony for this when all four of us are dead and you're watching this. But I hope that's a long time from now. There's a lot of hopes packed into this last minute or two of the show, let's put it that way. For next time, we're discussing some papers about abortion. These are widely read, included in many ethics textbooks. One is Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense of abortion from 1971. Also Mary Anne Warren's on the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion from 1973 and why Abortion is Immoral by Don Marquis from 1989.

Please email us at pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or use the contact form on our site to let us know what you would like us to cover or to comment on this episode. You can also seek out the video on our YouTube channel of the live stream discussion you've just heard and put comments on that which we will look at at some point and address as we see fit. Note that there are further issues in this essay that we did not yet address. We will talk about those in a supporter exclusive, Part three, which will be released a week after Part one.

40:43 Seth: Thank you everybody who spent their time with us. It's very much appreciated who spent 13

40:49 Mark: years of your time.

40:51 Seth: Thirteen years, 300 episodes and two hours on Friday night slash Saturday morning. So love you all. Thank you.

40:58 Mark: Bye bye.

40:59 Dylan: Thanks.

40:59 Wes: Thank you.