Nietzsche transcript

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived um he is a powerful prose poet and one of the great authors in the German language uh when I had to prepare to pass my language exams in graduate school I prepared German by reading what I regarded as the best German stylists and there I was given a choice I had a choice pretty much between Gerta and Nietzsche and nature was the one I gravitated towards uh as an undergraduate I read all of nature just because I wanted to which is not a good sign and uh when I was 23 I took a year off between college and graduate school and I Was preparing for my language exams and uh I translated about two-thirds of Nietzsche's gay science uh that's the book we're discussing today and uh I have to say um what I found out was that I was a terrible translator of uh German and Nietzsche in particular and uh Walter Kaufman is the the man to go to not to me but that being said Nietzsche's gay science was written published in 1882 and then modified and republished in 1887. and uh he is going to give us something like the theory of the exceptional man that was so characteristic of raskolnikov and crime and punishment he's going to argue that morality is the interests of the majority what he calls the herd and uh those who are superior not uh exceptional men in raskol in the coast language but those who are Uber mentioned those who are above human uh those human beings who dare to break make and break morality um are the ones that he is most impressed with no in many ways Nietzsche is antithetical to uh philosophical Treatise writer like say uh Aquinas niche's universe is chaotic and for that reason his the form which he chooses is aphorism and these aphorisms are often disconnected from one another and they don't take a theme and fully develop it rather he offers us a sketch of whatever he had been thinking about at the time and we can move from sketch to sketch some of them are connected some of them are not so uh I would call him a great anti-systematic philosopher and I would also say that Nietzsche is probably the greatest prose of uh poet philosopher since Plato part of the reason why Nietzsche so dislikes Plato is the same reason that Plato disliked Homer is a kind of professional jealousy here because both Plato and Nietzsche realize how great the talent of their predecessor was and what uh Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence hangs heavily on each of them um another way of looking at Nietzsche because there are only an infinite number of perspectives another way would be to call them an atheistic version of Kierkegaard if both Kierkegaard and nature management managed to make it into the first circle of Dante's Inferno um I imagine they get along famously because their temperaments are very similar they only disagree about one thing and that's where the God exists or not and everything else uh I imagine they would get along because both of them seem a little shy of uh psychological solidity part of that's that comes from being an exceptionally gifted individual another part of it comes from uh temperamentally pushing an idea as far as it can possibly go uh Nietzsche is a great philosophical extremist uh where I'd be willing to see some someone like uh Hume is not humor is much more common sensible so uh Nietzsche gives us uh the gay science which is which goes back to provincial which is uh the art of poetry and this art is supposed to be a decoration an ornament on life rather than uh the Dismal science of economics so uh the gay science is uh art that renews and revives life itself uh Nietzsche is going to use his voluminous knowledge of the western intellectual tradition to adopt various poses and various guises and speak from various uh perspectives and in so doing I don't think he gives us a completely coherent uh view of the world but rather that's not his point uh Nietzsche is trying to offer us a large number of things that are undeniably interesting to think about that's what I thought is great achievement was when I was in college reading this and uh ever since I have found Nisha um I found him something that I was unable to rid my mind of even if I wanted to so Nietzsche changes the way you think and it also changes the way you write usually for the better nature is the master of the little dagger uh and I I must confess I have committed far too many of the aphorisms in this book there are 400 or so uh to memory and uh the one that I haven't been able to get out of my mind since you know it entered my mind 40 years ago was section 126 where he says mystical explanations are thought to be profound in fact they aren't even superficial which is a nasty little dagger because well mystical explanations don't explain anything I mean people go hmm I wonder what Meister Eckhart is talking about well what if this doesn't explain anything at all what if this just muddies the water still further for people who are who have cloudy vision to begin with so uh he is a beautiful poet and uh even though he has a Prelude in Rhymes and a an appendix at the end in songs one of the one of God's jokes about Nisha is uh the fact that his poetry and his songs are Dreadful in other words if you've read truly great German poet like Schiller or Gerta Nietzsche is not in this league all right and uh it is a bit ironic that a philosopher who places so much weight on the importance of Art and who is both a composer and a poet uh turns out to be a rather second-rate in his poetry and his music and his songs his great ability is the capacity to distill an insight into the smallest number of words as he's writes somewhere I don't think it's in this volume I don't think it's in this book but he says I write in a paragraph what other people write in a book and then he says I write in a paragraph what other people don't write in a book and so Nietzsche is uh very conscious of his capacity uh as a master of German prose uh he is the greatest prose poet in the German language um I also think he's probably the most important philosopher in the last oh a little more than a century right he uh he uh writes in the late 19th century and uh his shadow looms over all of culture uh particularly the west but since the West is to a great extent globalized um he is uh in some ways the maker of the 20th century and to a great extent of the 21st so many uh artistic and intellectual movements are derivations from Nietzsche that it's impossible to list them all right now Nietzsche believes he wrote a book called The Antichrist and that was him in other words he decided that Christianity was over and that we're going to need someone to take Jesus's place and he decided he would do that now understandably that sounds like something that might come from a madhouse but on the other hand Nietzsche knows exactly what he's doing and uh his ability at diagnosing the cultural problems of the of Europe in the late 19th century is unparalleled um here's what Nisha thinks the history of philosophy was like Christianity became the dominant religious belief in the west it survived the collapse of the Roman Empire and then it was dominant in Europe for 1500 years or so okay um he thinks that Christianity with its omnipotent omniscient God reinforced the Greek idea of platonic idea of absolute truth with a capital T and since God if you uh remember our discussion of uh Descartes God guarantees the truth that means that there is not that we can get truth and and accurate perfect knowledge about the world um and that this will be this will be vouch safe for by God himself all right Nietzsche thinks that this belief in truth creates Natural Science and over the centuries in the development of Natural Science um we had a second big uh Scientific Revolution uh it's it's analogous or equivalent to the pre-socratic physicists we had a scientific revolution in the west and it was unique to the West um during the Renaissance and the enlightenment now this Scientific Revolution this new understanding of the physical universe reaches its high point in Newton and Newtonian mechanics and the last great burst of this was roughly contemporary with Nietzsche and that would be darwinian evolution now darwinian evolution by itself was an enormous intellectual earthquake because what it did was show that human beings are perfectly continuous with nature and that rather than being a separate creation created in God's image in fact we're complicated Apes and uh our development our arrival here in the world was not by some Divine Act of Creation but rather the blind uh development of uh responses by living organisms to the environment so instead of a necessity and uh for human beings and uh us being made in the image of God we're not made in any particular image we are the random result of a random blind process what that means uh can be taken in several ways now what many of the people of the educated classes in Western Europe in the second half of the 19th century thought was it was that this is no big deal so Christianity is gone and religion is no longer a topic taken seriously by intellectuals that's no problem we'll be able to skate along as we always have uh with a rather ironic Detachment from religious tradition Nietzsche is far more intelligent and far more penetrating than that he says you fools you don't understand what you've done once you have eliminated God what you've done is also eliminate the truth because you had God uh vouching for the truth if there's no God's eyes synoptic view of the world then there's no universal truth that's just your perspective and my perspective and everybody else's perspective perspectives we have an infinite number of perspectives none of them is perfect none of them is Right none of them is the standard by which we can judge our own what does that mean well since we lose God we lose truth and once we lose truth Nietzsche points out we're also going to necessarily lose science and when we lose science we also lose darwinian Evolution so um there was a uh an artist who during the age of Dada I think this is the 1920s or 1930s who constructed a very elaborate machine and the only function the machine had was to unplug itself that's a good image of what Nietzsche thinks the death of God has done he said you fools you think that this is not going to be a problem you have such shallow Souls if you had any sense at all you would realize that this is a momentous catastrophe and if you think that it's some kind of joke you haven't thought it through Nietzsche is nothing if not deep and he does think things through so this is what it means in section 125 which is the most famous section of Nietzsche's book uh that God is dead God remains dead and we have killed him well if we have killed God we've also killed truth and knowledge and that means religion is dead too the Christianity that sustained us for many centuries that's that's gone but not only is Christianity gone philosophy has gone as well not just science but philosophy is now gone because there's no certain knowledge to have all we have is an infinite number of perspectives none of which has any ultimate grounding which means that at night all cows are black so Nietzsche unlike the other uh intellectuals in the late 19th century sees the implications of the collapse of religion and rather than thinking that well we could be sustained by a kind of naive darwinian belief in progress he says there's no progress to have whatever we do happens next it doesn't mean that it's progressing it's not going in any direction it's all random this connects back to section 109 the world is in all eternity chaos and eventually all hymns have sung to the teeming chaos and chaos in the Greek tradition is compared or refers to Cosmos as the alternative a cosmos is an ordered universe chaos is a disordered universe Cosmos is knowable chaos is not so once we've killed God we've also destroyed knowledge which means science is dead philosophy is dead uh our whole intellectual tradition has suffered an earthquake like disaster and nature says what do we do now how would we be big enough how will we be strong enough to create a culture to create a an intellectual life when everything that we depended on is now gone for good so Nietzsche ruminates on that he said we have killed God um he takes a page from Greek philosophy particularly from uh the cynics and uh diogenes the cynic used to walk around during the daytime in uh Athens and he used to have a lamp that was lit and people would say why would you like light a lamp during the daytime and diogenes would say I'm looking for an honest man right well Nietzsche says the madman is the one who announces that God is dead and he goes to the churches and he sees the people are going through the motions but don't believe this anymore and he talks to other people who have given up on religion and he says don't you read the madman says don't you realize how catastrophic this is that everything is now tumbling down around our heads he describes it as falling in every direction at once imagine being in uh Interstellar space no up no down no front no back where are we what are we um all of this is up for grabs now so that's what the death of God is and so since the Christian God is now dead he's not kidding when he thinks I can replace that because if Christianity was a human Construction well then it's its destruction was equally human and if we need something to fill in the Gap Niche is willing to step up and give us his best shot uh this is what he does when he's when he says Dionysus versus the crucified the Greek god Dionysus the god of wine the god of Brahma the god of intoxication uh the god of sexual desire the god of irrationality it's the mask that he uses to say I have a new religion for you I'm going to revive the religion of Dionysus because the status that rationality previously held it can no longer hold so uh Dionysus versus the crucified he thinks Christianity is dead so he's actually trying to offer us um some way out of this Labyrinth now Hegel uh said in I think it's the phenomenology of mind that the realm of absolute Spirit the highest achievements of humans of human beings are three things because there's three of everything at angle art religion and philosophy well Nietzsche believes that he has shown quite conclusively regardless of whether people believe him or not that religion and philosophy are gone they're dead and that leaves only art Sonica is going to create a philosophy of culture which says art is the only way out of the labyrinth we must construct life-giving illusions that will connect art to religion art to our longing for coherence and which will prevent us from being destroyed and torn apart by the vacuum of meaning that emerges after God dies so Nietzsche has no small uh estimation of his own abilities um Christians used to call someone the Antichrist as a kind of ultimate uh insult Nietzsche says no uh we really need an antichrist now and I'm the only one that could do it because I'm the only one who really understands how deep our problems run so Dionysus is going to be a religious and artistic alternative to both science and to Christianity okay um this leads to all kinds of interesting ruminations about the Greek philosophical tradition about uh Christianity and Judaism also about a German culture and uh many of his writings are quite biting they're very beautiful and very powerful uh and quite arresting for example section 250 he says look in the past judges who believed in witchcraft accused witches who also believed in Witchcraft and condemned them to death on that basis Nisha says not only is there no witchcraft but there's no justice to uh to be uh defended here so the guilt that both the witches and the their accusers thought they had they were bearing that doesn't exist either they haven't transgressed any moral boundary because there aren't any more or more moral boundaries anymore so uh uh the belief in Witchcraft and also the belief in moral guilt are equally superstitious so that's a very powerful kind of an argument now uh he uh he is less able when he is constructing affirmative uh proposals than he is when he is destroying things I would have to say that Nietzsche is the greatest destructive philosopher in the western tradition uh one of the subtitles of another book is how to philosophize with a hammer in other words everything that can be destroyed should be destroyed because it's only on that cleared out area that we can build something new and the only way to renew our culture and to make human life possible is to find some solace in art it's art that is going to take up the Redemptive qualities that religion used to offer us so Nietzsche says that he is an artist which he is and uh that's the only way the philosophy can be done now artistically so instead of writing long treatises like uh say uh a const critique of pure reason Nietzsche writes small poetic aphorisms that and the lack of systematic wholeness of his Works reflects the chaotic lack of systematic wholeness in the universe so uh Cosmos you can write A Treatise about but chaos you can only have this idea about that idea about and try this on and see how this works everything is tentative everything is provisional now uh Nietzsche hopes that a superior man or more than one superior man will emerge and help us overcome the nihilism that results from the end of religion and the end of philosophy and the end of Science in other words knowledge is done what do we do in the absence of knowledge we find some way of reconciling ourselves to a completely meaningless world that's what the world is in all eternity chaos means so he is the philosopher of chaos he is the prophet of Chaos he speaks on behalf of chaos and uh I don't know if this is descriptive or performative I think it's partially both and uh he makes some very very interesting points and again he gives you lots of interesting things to think about let me give you a couple of them um he says maybe we can get uh some foothold On The World by imagining a purely Adam a purely Material World which is finite in its size and what that means is that over Aeons over in almost infinite lengths of time everything repeats itself why well because every permutation will be will happen and then every other permutation will happen again and again and again he calls this the eternal recurrence what he means by that is that possibly we can give some meaning and some stability to the choices we make in life and to the direction we take in life on the basis of the fact that whatever we choose we choose forever and we will be reconstituted at some infinitely distant time from now and we will be forced to live the same life if you choose an inferior life if you choose a life where you avert your eyes from the real condition of human beings well then you will live in that inferior uh condition forever you are stuck in an endless repetition now the problem here is that this isn't at all believable and uh there's no reason to believe that the universe is finite the physical universe and there's no reason to believe that everything happens again and again um Nietzsche is not a very good constructive philosopher in other words when he tries to construct affirmative doctrines he always ends up coming off the worst for it when he attacks other doctrines he is absolutely ferocious and uh his not only is he opposed to Jesus he's also opposed to Socrates because he says look Socrates was the one that said the sophists were wrong and that we shouldn't try to have pleasant lives as active men pushing words around to suit ourselves he said instead we should pursue some ultimate truth we should try and get connected to the form of the good and what nature said uh I'm not I don't think it's in this work but uh what he said is that um platonism is Christianity for the elite and Christianity is platonism for the masses the reason why he thinks that is both Jesus and Socrates tell us to think about some other world heaven or the realm of the forms or something like that and he said nature says look there's no such thing responsible thinkers can't believe in this anymore and since we this is no longer believable we have to find a way to as zarathustra puts it love the Earth now zarathustra is he is another of his uh sock puppets does the talking for him and uh Nietzsche has him uh as the speaker in thus speaks arathustra which is his new scripture why well once God is dead and uh the uh all the New Testaments get put back on the Shelf as just a historical curiosity we're still going to have a big gap and one of the funny things about those that abolish God is that they're always thereafter in a rush to stick something in the Gap that God used to be in so Nietzsche gives us zarathustra and zarathustra says love the Earth what he means by that is no metaphysics no stuff outside the world of space and time no Heaven no hell no Realm of the forms Nothing But Here and Now so you can see how Nietzsche is going to be one of the leading uh influences along with Kierkegaard in what becomes in the 20th century existentialism right uh Foucault used to say that his philosophy was one possible interpretation of Nature and he was he longed all his life to find the uh Reyes himself to that eminent status that Nietzsche had but I don't think he was very successful Nietzsche is sui generous there's nothing like him and in some ways thank God for it but in other ways uh he is so refreshing and so interesting that I can't help but uh admire him even though um I agreed with much more of what Nietzsche wrote when I was a young man than I am now Nietzsche is very much a philosophy for young men with more testosterone than brains right it's very moving it's very powerful but you wonder exactly what you're supposed to do and he says do something important do something exciting don't just sit there don't contemplate act we need a life of action not a life of contemplation start a war end the war it doesn't really make any difference but do something big all right so do something at on a big scale it doesn't matter what the moral valence is because there's no such thing as moral valence anymore there's no good there's no evil one of his books is called Beyond Good and Evil and the problem is the danger is that when you get Beyond Good and Evil you may end up beneath Good and Evil and when the niche and philosophy gets established in German culture because he wasn't much red when he was alive um it did have some very dangerous and some very negative results but I won't go there yet I want to finish I want to talk a little bit more about Socrates um Nietzsche admires Socrates which is why he hates him because he sees how powerful he is and he thinks the Socrates is a great Seducer he takes men who were able to do something and uh achieve something large in life and he turns them into bookworms he turns them into talkers rather than doers and he has a very interesting read of the last words of Socrates uh in the Fado Socrates last words were just before he dies he says uh I owe esclepius a and then he puts the uh the cloth over his face and dies now asclepius is the god of healers all right he's uh he's supposed to be the first of the great healers and doctors were known as sleepy ads in other words followers of asclepius typically you gave a or another uh sacrifice too asclepius when you had been cured of a disease right now Nietzsche interprets Socrates statement as meaning since he has oh sleepy as a that what Socrates is saying there is life is a disease and that's his negation of life that shows just how anti-life he was now that may be the case on the other hand I don't know that it certainly is another reading which will get you a different result is if Socrates was talking about the fear of death here he is he's lived his entire life he's gotten to the brink of death now and he wants to thank sleepius for curing him of A congenital psychological Soul sickness which is the ubiquitous human fear of death he's not afraid of dying at all that's a much more affirmative reading of uh the last words of Socrates but Nietzsche gives it uh this very powerful twist and he might be right for all I know uh one of the things I did do though in my uh yeah you know I I've been sick for a long time so I I made an uh Provisions uh for my funeral and uh the uh Epitaph that I'm gonna have is I don't know a sleepiest jack cock-a-doodle-doo figure that out right I mean look I've been under oncologist treatment for a long time I didn't get cured of anything and uh I let the cop go and there's no reason to kill him because uh you know I don't I haven't run up any debt um Nietzsche has so many interesting ideas that even if you're even or perhaps especially if you're a committed Christian you absolutely have to read this in other words there is no way you can be an intellectually serious religious believer in this age without paying your dues and getting smacked around by Nisha it is good for you um in section 357 he makes a very powerful point that uh I think is well worth considering he said without Hegel there or rather without Hegel there would have been no Darwin because Hegel is the one that historicized philosophy Darwin is the one who restore a size nature and the connection between Hegel and Darwin is often ignored but Nietzsche is acute enough he has the greatest of uh of antenna for picking things up and he sees the connection and is trying to help us understand that these are not uh separate intellectual developments now when Nietzsche kills God when he says God is dead God remains dead and we have killed him um he is not killing God himself in other words we people sometimes read him as the guy who uh promoted atheism and created a new post-religious age that's not so he's much more like uh a seismograph in other words seismographs register and tell geologists about earthquakes they don't cause earthquakes so Nietzsche is very sensitive far more sensitive than most people to intellectual shock waves running through the culture so when he says God is dead he is not the one who killed God actually in the entirety of Western culture led up to uh philosophy and Science and then Darwin and then the machine unplugs itself so Nietzsche is just telling us about something that happened independently of him and prior to him so don't hold them accountable he didn't kill God he just pointed out that God was dead and that the silly superficial uh progressives of his time who thought that we could just carry on without any further uh uh reconstruction of philosophy are hopelessly misguided and I think he was right about that um Nietzsche is a one of my favorite philosophers I have to admit even though I've outgrown much of it um when I was asked by Tom Rollins a long time ago what my favorite philosophers were I said well first was Plato and the second was Nietzsche and the third was dickenstein and all of these figures are men of the greatest philosophical honesty and seriousness and they're also Rebels they're also Renegades they are running against the course of the culture they happen to be in and uh Nietzsche is certainly a rebel and Nietzsche wants us to do something big something interesting something that will fill the time uh and create as a as an artistic process life which is something like an artwork so for Nietzsche uh life and art are going to converge the future thinkers the future cultural achievements will be those that manage to merge lar a life and art together and this is going to be of great significance for the future development of the West think most especially of someone like James Joyce think of portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the end of portrait of the artist he says I go to I go on to encounter reality for the millionth time and to forge within the Smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race Stephen has given up Catholicism in favor of becoming a priest of life and art he leaves home he undergoes a journey because he himself is as we'll see uh when Joyce writes on his next novel uh which is based upon the Odyssey he is on an odyssey as well uh he is on an artistic and spiritual Odyssey to create new value in a world marked by the uh the vacuum of value that was created by the destruction of religion so um Nietzsche is a genuinely powerful genuinely thoughtful writer um I admire his courageous and intelligent philosophy I think it is very important to get Beyond it because in the generation after Nietzsche it began to be taught at German universities and this is something that the German officer Corps brought with them into the first World War and after uh the Treaty of Versailles Nietzsche moved from University circles to a mass uh explosion in German culture he became what Nietzsche would have hated uh uh Bourgeois middle class philosopher and