Transcription
In one of Nietzsche's untimely meditations, entitled "Schopenhauer as Educator," he outlines three archetypes as potential ideals for the man of the 1800s. The contemporary man, in Nietzsche's time, is faced with a great problem. Nietzsche's problem with the 19th century is, in a sense, modernity itself. What he sees is the superficiality of modernity, the fact that we no longer feel ourselves initiated into unquestionable truth.
Truths, to Nietzsche, are one of the functions of culture. We all have personal problems or challenges throughout life, but there are a series of impersonal problems or challenges. That is to say, those problems or challenges that do not belong to any one person but belong to everyone, that we might say characterize the human condition. We might say being born, coming of age, facing death, dealing with the deaths of your loved ones, or even just how we understand the many sacrifices that we make in life, the things that we have to part with, and what is that all for? Culture answers that question for us and it provides us with an answer to those impersonal questions, or at least some form of guide for confronting them. That's what culture provides to its constituent members, as Nietzsche sees it at this time.
But culture is no longer fulfilling that function. That is its superficiality. It doesn't descend into the depths of those impersonal challenges, which might be the deep problems of the human condition. Culture, uh, you know, at its worst, just degenerates into a form of mere entertainment, or a series of, uh, codes of etiquette or aesthetics, or it might be a number of lines in a book that you memorize to quote at parties. This is the superficiality of culture, as Nietzsche sees it.
In addition to this, we have the leveling tendencies of modernity. This tendency to blur all differences and distinctions, which there are many explanations for within our society today. But we can just broadly say that post-industrial man, in this new form of economy and economic relation, has been made more homogeneous, more cooperative. And that Nietzsche certainly, especially by the time he's writing *Human, All Too Human*, sees this aspect of culture. And in a sense, part of the, the great problem of culture in Nietzsche's time is the loss of even the understanding of what a culture is or does. That in education, for example, one of Nietzsche's great targets during his period of cultural criticism, we are not even educating our young people into the understanding that this is the function of culture. Because after all, if we did that, they would immediately see how deficient our culture is. So, so these are the sorts of problems that Nietzsche is thinking about, that were his primary focus during this time.
Just to contextualize this work, Nietzsche argues that these problems of modern culture will soon begin to make themselves felt in the Zeitgeist, and therefore the Zeitgeist will begin to reach for an exemplar, a guide, someone to provide some sort of image or blueprint for how he is to live in the collapse of modern culture, or in this crisis of modern culture. Nietzsche suggests three exemplars that he sees as viable models for providing the modern man with an image of life that is, in some sense, apart from modernity. Nietzsche suggests Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer.
The Rousseau man, he is willing to cast aside the arts and sciences and the accomplishments of civilization in the name of seeking a more naive, innocent type of happiness. Of course, in Rousseau's theory, this is a more natural happiness that man is supposed to have possessed at an earlier time in history. And the general sentimentality, the general feeling behind the Rousseauan man, that makes Rousseau appealing to him as an exemplar, is that he is this romantic type, a very common type of person in Nietzsche's day, who is faced with the advancing logic, the progressing logic of industrial capitalism and leveling modernity, and then therefore looks back and says, "Where did we go wrong?" and tries to reach back for some earlier period where things must have been better.
The Goethean individual, meanwhile, is the one who contains that romantic admiration for nature, but within a sort of classical rationalist framework. So Goethe, in Nietzsche's view, as he would articulate later, is famously a man of Dionysian passion who disciplines himself to an Apollonian wholeness. He's the emotional man who is nonetheless master of his emotions. He's the modern-day aristocrat, the man who rejects the modern world without making war on it. He's an artist, a contemplative, a gentleman, the man who lives in modernity, but whose mind is liberated from it, who acknowledges the technological and scientific power of modernity, and even celebrates this fact at times, while being unwilling to part with the natural, the irrational, and the passionate, even as our mental tendencies toward mechanism in the modern world tend to alienate all of those types of aspects from the human soul. The Goethean, we might say, has a foot in both worlds.
Finally, Nietzsche says, there is the Schopenhauerian man. And this is the path of true heroism, true sincerity, the rejection of modernity without the idealization of a pure Mother Nature, nor the half-conciliatory gesture to live within it, but not as part of it. The Schopenhauerian man, as Nietzsche describes him here in this essay, rejects the Rousseauan way of life because happiness is not to be found any more in pure Mother Nature than it is in technologically advanced modernity, because happiness is not a meaningful or realistic goal for one's life. The Goethean is perhaps more admirable than the Rousseauan. He lives aesthetically, passionately, and yet simultaneously contemplatively. But ultimately, this is still part of his seeking to find some sort of worldly happiness, some sort of comprehensible place in the world, perhaps his way of ceaselessly striving for it, even if he never quite attains it, is the noblest way to seek happiness on Earth. You know, seeking it in the manner of Faust. It's an active search, a full investment into the acquisition of knowledge and experience. This is how Goethe depicts Faust. And Faust is many things, of course, but we would never call Faust a hero. And he is, in fact, far from heroic in many ways. That is the main difference between the Goethean man and the Schopenhauerian man, and why the Schopenhauerian man, to Nietzsche, stands a considerable degree above even the Goethean man. He's the best archetype for the modern individual. And the reason for this, for Nietzsche, is quite simple and proudly arbitrary: the best life is the life of heroism. And Schopenhauer is the only one of those three who has provided us with a way of life that fully makes war on modernity and its promise of happiness. He makes war on the utilitarian possibility of creating the greatest good for the greatest many, just as much as he makes war upon the romanticism of seeking the good and holy Mother Nature, which in itself may simply be a reflection of the promise of happiness that comes to us from the modern world and from modern culture, or whatever passes for culture in the modern world.
Nietzsche says that by rejecting the possibility of a happy human life, Schopenhauer's sincerity and his radicalism creates this heroic approach to life in which one does the opposite of seeking for happiness. One does the opposite of seeking for utilitarian contentment, or, uh, you know, idyllic absorption into nature. Rather, one makes their own happiness into an enemy. Nietzsche writes in that essay, "Everything that can be denied deserves to be denied, and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning; it can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life. It is in the deepest sense an affirmation, even if everything that he does seems utterly opposed to the laws of our present life. It must lead, therefore, to constant suffering, but he knows, as Meister Eckhart did, that the quickest beast that will carry you to perfection is suffering. Everyone, I should think, who has such an ideal before him must feel a wider sympathy, and he will have a burning desire to become a Schopenhauer man, pure and wonderfully patient on his intellectual side, full of a devouring fire, and far removed from the cold and contemptuous neutrality of the so-called scientific man, so high above any warped and morose outlook on life as to offer himself as the first victim of the truth he has won, with a deep consciousness of the sufferings that must spring from his sincerity. His courage will destroy his happiness on Earth. He must be an enemy to the men he loves and the institutions in which he grew up. He must spare neither person nor thing, however it may hurt him. He will be misunderstood and thought an ally of forces that he abhors. In his search for righteousness, he will seem unrighteous by human standards, but he must comfort himself with the words that his teacher Schopenhauer once used."
And then Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer here: "A happy life is impossible. The highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life, such as a man lives who is always fighting against unequal odds for the good of others, and wins in the end without any thanks after the battle is over. He stands like the Prince and the Roro of Gosi with dignity and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. His memory remains and will be revered as a hero's. His will, that has been mortified all his life by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and ingratitude, is absorbed into Nirvana."
So, as a product of the early Nietzsche, this essay expresses many ideas which later Nietzsche would have called life-denying. This essay is, in some sense, the last gasp of Nietzsche's Schopenhauerianism. And it was a few years after its publication that Nietzsche began to take a critical eye to Schopenhauer's philosophy, and a critical eye to what he called Schopenhauer's resignationism, his will to deny the very will, the will to live, as Schopenhauer sees the fundamental will undergirding all life and all phenomena. The Schopenhauerian valuation that life was not worth living, which Nietzsche praises in this excerpt that we just read, is the very thing that Nietzsche would later come to reject. And eventually designate as the main symptom of the sickliness of philosophers. That in the long traditions of the Western canon, when it comes right down to it, most philosophers have concluded that life is not worth living. For a long, long time, that viewpoint was bound up with the religious education of Europe, provided by the Church, which emphasized the inherent wickedness of the world and presented material existence as fundamentally a sin-cursed existence. The Church held the religious dogma, held that true happiness, true justice, true redemption, is all found beyond this world. But even as philosophy ventured away from medieval scholasticism, and as part of the movement known as the Enlightenment, challenged the religious dogmas of Europe, it still maintained, perhaps insensibly, that aesthetic perspective, uh, that life is ultimately not worth living. Uh, the philosopher always sort of stands in opposition to and in rejection of the world, and especially, we might say, the world of ordinary desires and material incentives. The philosophers are always coming along to tell us why we shouldn't pay attention to those, and that the true pursuits of life are the ones of the mind, or what have you. And Schopenhauer is the highest exemplar of that perspective in a fully secularized form. He is the ascetic value system, completely washed of any religious superstition. Even though Schopenhauer discusses many different religions, he sees those religions as attempts to grasp for the truth from people who hadn't fully developed their philosophical or metaphysical capacities yet. So they're still doing so within the language of myth and superstition.
Now, Nietzsche comes to understand that this is a deeply unhealthy view of life. It's indicative of a degenerating, declining vitality. The view that death is preferable to life, in so many words. That's a view of life that could only be embraced by the sick and by the dying. But even as Nietzsche came to reject those valuations of Schopenhauer in his later years, and as Nietzsche's main project came to be to combat what he felt to be this inevitably surging climate of nihilism, this overall meaninglessness that would be brought on by the modern world, we cannot ignore that it was precisely Schopenhauer's willingness to deny the value of life and deny the possibility of happiness in life that Nietzsche found most instructive for the modern man, and indeed a path to the heroic, at least during this time.
What is the meaning of this apparent paradox? I think it's actually rather straightforward. Nietzsche was a perspectivist, even here. Which means that Nietzsche is the type of person who can step outside of his particular set of valuations and compare and contrast it with others. He can pick up and put down moral perspectives, including those which completely oppose his own, and attempt to understand the origin and function of such a perspective. He asks himself, not, "How could someone be so wrong as to believe this?" but, "What is the appeal of believing such an erroneous idea, supposing that it is erroneous?" In other words, if beliefs don't apprehend over the human mind as what might be a result of a dispassionate attempt to discern the truth, Nietzsche certainly doesn't believe that, but rather that beliefs succeed or fail in the Zeitgeist according to other factors, other than the, you know, dispassionate search for the truth. What are those other factors? And so Nietzsche perceives something incredibly powerful about Schopenhauer's great "no" to life. That first and foremost, it is a rejection of modernity. If Schopenhauer's "no" to life is taken seriously, it completely obliterates the lying, timid morality of the progressive, or the naive, ineffectual traditionalism of the conservative. It is destructive of both the classical and the romantic view. Schopenhauer's "no" rejects the possibility of reaching some goal through the striving of life, either in the past or in the future. The goal that we have been told can be found through material pursuits in life can neither be discovered in the state of nature, nor at the end of the long life of, you know, striving for the zenith of human fulfillment, say, in the style of Faust. Schopenhauer's "no" therefore creates some possibility for heroism. Because once you reject that possibility, that you're living for your own happiness, or to to reach some goal of happiness or contentment, then what do you do with your life? And if you really take that seriously, that, well, okay, happiness is impossible, what is the the best use of my life? There is something heroic about that, if somebody actually takes that knowledge and uses it to live an extraordinary life. And perhaps we could even say that Nietzsche saw some of that spirit of the pagan religions of old, particularly the Hellenic Greeks, within this Schopenhauerian heroism. That there's no progress to be found, and that the Golden Age of humanity can never be reached again. But of course, this doesn't exactly solve the problem that Nietzsche had set for himself during the time when he writes *Untimely Meditations*, because it just simply moves the problem up a level. Because now the question is, how does one create a spirit of heroism, a new one, in such a placid, superficial world? How does one, uh, how can one justify going to look for courage in the land of cowards, when those around you have no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to feel, feel no blood pumping in their veins? What possible remedy can one find to wake them out of this state?
And Nietzsche writes in *Ecce Homo*: "After all, no one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access." And so Nietzsche's problem is simply that if the solution is to rekindle a desire for the heroic, his raw material are a mass of people who have never experienced the heroic. How then could Nietzsche teach them?
Well, for the entirety of his career, Nietzsche always praised the value of destroying. He conceived of his critical philosophy, in some sense, as a creative act of destruction. All of Nietzsche's extensive arguments criticizing the Western philosophical tradition and its pretensions to having communed directly with the truth, or to have sought the truth out of a pure, disinterested drive for knowledge, that he doesn't undertake those critiques simply in order to destroy our old truths and then salt the earth so that nothing can grow again. Nietzsche is quite clear in his intentions. We can see it in the famous parable of the camel, the lion, and the child. The lion in this allegory is the Nietzschean destructive, critical spirit. "To create new values, that even the lion cannot yet accomplish, but to create itself freedom for new creating, that the might of the lion can do. To create itself freedom, and to give a holy nay, even unto duty, for that, my brethren, there is the need of the lion." The Schopenhauerian "no" therefore is valuable as the "no" of the lion. That's how it continues to appear in Nietzsche's philosophy. That's the power of destruction, the power of critique. But destruction itself is not an end. It wasn't so much important to Nietzsche during the time of *Untimely Meditations* to consider what Schopenhauer's philosophy would lead to, what that whole way of being would lead to. What was important to him then was the effect that Schopenhauer's philosophy might have in order to bring about that sense of the heroic, stripping away all of those cheap moralistic platitudes. Schopenhauer pitches us straight into the abyss, where you can only rely upon yourself, can only rely upon your own will, your own strength. Later, Nietzsche, of course, discovers that this heroic significance of Schopenhauer's "no" to life is not its only significance. It is only the significance that Nietzsche first experienced, and that he wished in this early essay to harness. That's what he latched onto because it was very useful for him in his project. But in truth, however, its full meaning is nihilism. That is where this resolute "no" saying leads, and that's what becomes of you when you treat that "no" saying as an end.
Perhaps another profound change in Nietzsche's perspective, and the reason why his focus shifts away from culture in his later writings, is precisely because he sees that the vast majority of people will not need, want, nor benefit from such a call to heroism. That in the freefall of the abyss, they will not answer that call. They will simply descend into nihilistic self-destruction. They will not take the opportunity to assert or create their own values. They simply don't have that vitality within them. And so Nietzsche therefore stops writing as a physician to culture, stops writing to everyone, and begins writing only to his free spirits. And Nietzsche quite literally, if we look at the trajectory of his life, he begins as a teacher, as a professor, someone whose task is to educate the whole world, or I guess anyone who has a tuition at, who pays their tuition at Basel, but you get the point. Whereas he later becomes a philosopher writing these obscure books, not trying to, uh, communicate his ideas to the, make them accessible to, uh, as easily as possible to any student, but in many ways tries to make his ideas inaccessible. He says he does his best to be difficult to understand himself.
And so another bit of context for the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator" is that Nietzsche writes it when he himself is quite literally an educator. And I always, uh, think of one of his recollections in *Ecce Homo*, where he writes of that time: "I tame every bear, I can make even clowns behave decently. During the seven years in which I taught Greek to the sixth form of the college at Basel, I never had occasion to administer a punishment. The laziest youths were were diligent in my class." I've compared this in the past to the genius of the heart that Nietzsche describes in his prose poem found near the end of *Beyond Good and Evil*. That like that figure, Nietzsche feels he can draw the gold out of any soul. And Nietzsche saw that as his task, in his role as an educator.
And so we return to Nietzsche's great problem that he wishes above all things to draw the heroic out of us. That's the gold that he's seeking, uh, you know, buried under the muck of modernity, that's caked on all of our souls. And so he wants to draw that aspiration for freedom out of the modern man. And that is, in some sense, Nietzsche's great tragedy. He finds that in most cases, it isn't even there. That vital fire, that spark of life, that desire to strive, to fight, to create oneself, create oneself by actively separating from the orthodox proxies of modern thought. It's sometimes absent altogether, or it's so weak that it's not really like a fire at all. It's like cold, smoldering ashes. The extreme pessimism of Schopenhauer is so shocking that it had that profound effect on Nietzsche. But he begins to suspect that Schopenhauer, far from affecting everybody in the same way, is once again only showing Nietzsche what Nietzsche already knew. And thus we have this curious admission again from *Ecce Homo* on this particular text, "Schopenhauer as Educator," in which Nietzsche offers a rather candid explanation of what was going on within him psychologically when he wrote "Schopenhauer as Educator": "My most secret history, my development, is written down in 'Schopenhauer as Educator,' but above all, the vow I made. What I am today, the place I now hold, at a height from which I speak no longer with words, but with thunderbolts. Oh, how far I was from all this in those days! But I saw the land; I did not deceive myself for one moment as to the way, the sea, the danger and success, the great calm and promising this happy prospect of a future which must not remain only a promise. In this book, every word has been lived profoundly and intimately. The most painful things are not lacking in it. It contains words which are positively running with blood. But a great wind of freedom blows over the whole. Even its wounds do not constitute an objection as to what I understand by being a philosopher, that is to say, a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger. As to how I sever my idea of the philosopher by miles from that other idea of him which includes even a Kant, not to speak of the academic ruminators and other professors of philosophy, concerning all these things, this essay provides invaluable information, even granting that at bottom it is not Schopenhauer as educator, but Nietzsche as educator who speaks his sentiments in it. Considering that in those days my trade was that of a scholar, and perhaps also that I understood my trade, the piece of austere scholar psychology which suddenly makes its appearance in this essay is not without importance. It expresses is the feeling of distance and my profound certainty regarding what was my real life task and what were merely means, intervals, and accessory work to me. My wisdom consists in having been many things and in many places in order to become one thing, in order to be able to attain to one thing. It was part of my fate to be a scholar for a while."
There are many narratives about Nietzsche that exist out there, many interpretations that attempt to reduce him to one of those many things that he happened to be, rather than attempting to comprehend the full significance of his life and work, the one willful thing that he became, the who you are that Nietzsche became. Right? These false or incomplete narratives would have us understand Nietzsche only as the son of a pastor, or the son of a man who died young, or as a disciple of Wagner, or as a scorned disciple of Wagner, or as a scorned admirer of Lou Andreas-Salomé, or as a man with a brain disease, or a scholar, or a hermit, or a prophet, or so on and so forth. Um, I could elaborate upon any of these narratives, and you would certainly recognize them. And so we should ask ourselves then, if we don't want to fall into one of these oversimplifications, what is the one thing that Nietzsche tried to attain to? If we look at this passage in *Ecce Homo* and consider what he says in that text more broadly, consider what he says in connection with "Schopenhauer as Educator," the phrase that stands out to me is that a great and terrible wind of freedom blows across the whole work. A new understanding of the philosopher, not just Schopenhauer, but the philosopher himself. The type of the philosopher is attained in the course of this work, and it's opposed to the type, uh, given to us by Kant. And ultimately, it was not even the real Schopenhauer who offered Nietzsche this instruction, but Nietzsche's Schopenhauer. We might say, what Nietzsche found that was of value in Schopenhauer, the need that Schopenhauer fulfilled for him at that place, at that time, which was a rather capricious and arbitrary reading or use for Schopenhauer, not the full man Schopenhauer, right? Nietzsche saw this is the value of Schopenhauer's great "no" saying, and it's almost his entire career to fully understand the way in which he seized upon that one thing and didn't see the entire man. It's not until these final reflections in *Ecce Homo* where he sees that, oh, that wasn't even Schopenhauer at all. That was me. That was Nietzsche as educator. The education that Nietzsche received is an education in something that almost can't be put into words. We could call it independence, but I don't think that quite gets it across. These words like freedom and independence, they become repeated again and again as platitudes and become so sedate and declawed and, uh, you know, it's something that most people would probably think that they have to some extent, that Nietzsche would say that they've never even experienced. We might say that the real value of Nietzsche's work, the thing, the one thing that he was educated in and that he's trying to educate us to, we could say, we could phrase it as something like the courage to oppose the valuations of the many, the willingness to be brave and fight for what you know to be true, even when all the world tells you that this knowledge is forbidden or immoral. And it's not necessarily that you have to always be critical, or that one always has to be solitary, or necessarily must place oneself in opposition to the collective. Rather, any one of these approaches may be appropriate at a given time or place, at the necessary cost of retaining one's individuality. The point is knowing for yourself what is is true, and reserving for yourself the sole right of judgment, the sole right to determine those truths, or the sole right to to say who you will accept judgment from. This doesn't mean truth decided via arbitrary whim, but rather that going all the way back to Heraclitus, the philosopher is a type of person who trusted in his own discernment. Heraclitus is another important figure to consider in this respect of looking at Nietzsche's education and what he wants to teach all of us. Heraclitus is solitary, set apart from his fellow citizens. He left the political and social life, he didn't participate in any religious or philosophical traditions. He he thumbed his nose just as much at the Dionysian revelers as he did at the men of civic virtue, or anyone who sought truth in the words and thoughts of others. For Heraclitus, the logos, the enduring principle, is easily perceptible by all, if only they had the eyes to see it. This is something he directly discerns. It's clear as day to him. It's not an arbitrary whim that he decided it. He perceives it. And he writes that, "Although this logos is eternally valid, nevertheless men are unable to understand it, though all things come to pass in accordance with this logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it."
So, in the perception of Heraclitus, the only authority he can trust is his own discernment of the truth. Whatever that is, what whatever faculty that is, whatever name we give it, whether it's the intellect, the spirit, the soul, really, I think Nietzsche would say it is the *nous*, the mind. But not the rationally discursive mind. Rationality might be one of the mind's most important attributes, but *nous* is what Nietzsche describes in *Philosophy and the Tragic Age of the Greeks* as an authentically Greek concept, which is almost untranslatable into English. It means, Nietzsche says, a direct sensation or an unmistakable apprehension. That is what the philosopher looks to, his *nous*, his unmistakable apprehension of the world. And the philosopher is only worthy of holding that name, a philosopher, if he is able to hold on to that perception and follow that perception, that almost pre-rational discernment, as his own final and ultimate authority. He can only find this ultimate authority within himself. And he will almost always find that this discernment is at variance with the thoughts of the many. This could be for any number of psychological or social reasons. Perhaps certain thoughts, or certain ideas, are ultimately more powerful than the individual *nous* when they apprehend over the minds of an entire collective. There might be an idea that upon logical examination, uh, seems to fall apart, uh, rather easily. But when it apprehends over the minds of an entire crowd, no one, uh, applies their logic, their discernment to this idea, because it simply, uh, takes on a life of its own. Perhaps we might just say that the *nous*, this capacity for discernment, is poorly developed in most people, or that for most, the social cost, the disadvantage to following one's own discernment, is too great. Perhaps we might even say the advantage to following the ideas of the many is too great. It's not all sticks, there are some carrots, right?
Over the years, I have offered many potential keys to Nietzsche's philosophy. That is the beauty of Nietzsche. You can begin with many different starting points. Ideas that originate in Nietzsche's writing, such as his position of anti-metaphysics, the affirmation of our earthly existence, the idea of life as Will to Power. From whatever starting point, you can use that as a sort of lens to understand and link together all the other ideas. And there's certainly no single correct lens to begin with in understanding Nietzsche. There are many possible paths to take. But here, for the last episode of the season, in the interest of answering that question, what one would call the one great thing that Nietzsche's philosophy represents, I will offer perhaps the final such key. And that is that Nietzsche wishes to nourish is our courage to stand by one's own discernment. This does not mean courage of conviction. Nietzsche writes in *Human, All Too Human* that this is a very popular error. Conviction is something that one attaches to an idea, something one attaches to their idols. In fact, one's discernment is the very thing that will often conflict with one's own convictions, and in that case, one should follow their discernment and not the conviction. In other words, "It is a matter of having courage for an attack on one's conviction."
What I mean when I call this a key to understanding Nietzsche's philosophy is that we can see the way that this opens up new interpretive frameworks for understanding Nietzsche's other ideas. For example, this courage in one's discernment is not evenly distributed among the population. This is one of the reasons for the order of rank, the basic inequality of human beings. Because most people don't have this discernment, or they have it to far lesser degrees, they sort themselves into a position in the collective, and they will willingly embrace the ideology of the many, because that ideology is stronger, it has greater power than their individual *nous*. For whatever reason, their unmistakable apprehension of reality is something that they learn to doubt because of the dictates of conscience, or the outward, uh, overt social pressures that they face. They will deny that reality in thrall to the collective ideas, especially collective moral ideas. This is not really a mystery at all that people do this. It's not even remarkable. It's funny that our public intellectuals today still marvel at it, because, uh, maybe because we now all believe in that post-Socratic vision of a world governed by universal logic, to which all have equal access. If you believe in that kind of thing, yes, it must be quite astounding to witness the foolishness of the crowd. But for the ancients, this was simply a foregone conclusion. And it's perhaps the greatest problem with the Socratic view, in Nietzsche's perspective. All do not have equal access to reason. The foundation of reason is not the voluntary adoption of a logical, theoretical approach to the world. The foundation of reason is, in fact, this pre-rational discernment. What is given to us by the senses, what is directly felt and unmistakably felt within the senses, within the impulses, within experience. This is how this idea of courage in one's discernment ties into and connects to another one of Nietzsche's great ideas, the primacy of the body and its drives. Nietzsche advocates for trusting in what is given by the senses, trusting in what is felt as one's pre-rational valuation, trusting in the world as appearance, the world as we sense it, and as as we experience it. This is how this idea of courage in one's discernment, that courage to follow one's *nous*, uh, also ties into the critique of metaphysics in a way. So this is the wisdom that would characterize perhaps a pre-Socratic approach to life and thought, not that of the post-Socratic theoretical man, but a kind of wisdom or discernment, whatever we want to call it, that seems forgotten today, but was exemplified in those single-minded sages, the natural philosophers, who were willing to make artistic leaps to create an image of the world, which is an act that requires some degree of artistry in addition to what we might call rational scientific thought. And so this is a kind of wisdom that incorporates the pre-rational, which does not have to be justified by reason. And it's this mistake of placing reason at the top of the hierarchy, whether of the Platonic tripartite self, or the Platonic Republic, uh, as the judge and ultimate arbiter of everything, that is the great mistake, as Nietzsche sees it. It's why many people confuse Nietzsche for an irrationalist. They think he's against reason, just, uh, in its totality, when really he wants to place reason in its proper place, as a subordinate, not the master. And so this central message, the central thrust of Nietzsche's philosophy, I think, is easily discernible. But putting a single word or label on it is rather difficult for the reasons I've already brought up. You could call it freedom or independence, but those terms are so nebulous, they mean everything and nothing. And that's why I have belabored explaining this core aspect of Nietzsche's thought, because even though I would be personally content to say that Nietzsche's central message is freedom, it's very important to define what we mean by that. What we mean is the willingness to trust in the unmistakable discernment of one's *nous*, especially when that discernment is in conflict with the ideas or idols of the collective, as it almost always is. And so what is needed above logic, or commitment to universalist ideas of reason, or notions of, um, the scientific method obtaining over all things, something of that nature, what's needed in Nietzsche's view is bravery. Bravery, courage. This is what is needed above logic, above morality, above all of these Platonic metaphysical religious ideas of, uh, what it is that constitutes, as they call it, the good life. And so if it were possible to glean only one thing from the entirety of Nietzsche's philosophy, from the entirety of his life example, I would say the spirit of freedom persists throughout his entire life in this very specific conception, which is based on bravery. And so not much changes from the time when he writes a letter to his sister when he's very young, newly parted from the Lutheran faith of his family, where he says, "If you wish to strive for happiness and peace of the soul, then believe. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire."
And so we return to "Schopenhauer as Educator," or to speak more accurately, Nietzsche as Educator. Philosophy is not aimed at happiness or peace of the soul. The path of the true philosopher, the man of discernment, is not an attempt to reach for the Sabbath of Sabbaths, like the path of the ascetic is. That's been the great sidetrack, the great dead end of all philosophy so far. The true philosopher is not aimed at this kind of release of the tension, or a reprieve from life. If the man of knowledge is to follow his discernment, he will realize that tension is life, and that a release or reprieve from that tension is therefore a release from life itself, which can mean nothing other than death. This is the real tragedy of philosophy. Most philosophers up to this point have been nothing other than priests, or more precisely, the philosopher has been a subspecies of priest, because they've all expounded that same ascetic ideal, which is ultimately the goal of release from life. The true philosopher, a philosopher who might arrive perhaps at someday in the future, Nietzsche says, will be a creator, will be a commander, will be a self-legislator. He will be an immoralist. He will wander in a landscape of concepts and valuations that are considered forbidden. He will dare to recreate the world in his own image with his philosophy. He will have the kind of pride needed to do this, the pride of an artist, as well as the discernment of a philosopher. A Nietzschean hope, a Socrates who practices music, in other words, a new style of philosophy is what Nietzsche hopes to create. And this can only be created by the true man of the intellect, the true man of discernment, liberated from the life-denying values that have been imposed upon the philosophers by the priestly morality and the morality of the collective, which most of the time the philosopher just goes along with. That's one of Kant's great problems. He simply impresses or presses the common formulations of moral ideas into philosophical formulas. Philosophy up to this point, in other words, has not been powerful enough. The *nous* has not been powerful enough to break free of those, uh, collective moral fetters, the spirit of guilt, the spirit of revenge, the spirit of life denial. And because of the very fact that life is this tension, so long as life continues, conflict will continue. And people with different discernments, which are themselves sincere and unmistakable to them, will then inevitably hold different valuations, sometimes which will be conflicting. There's no final objective correct discernment for us to reach. And Nietzsche's view, he retains this from Schopenhauer, at least, uh, in the context of Schopenhauer's disagreement with Hegel. There's no end to history. Our lives now are not the means towards some conclusion. As Nietzsche writes in *The Antichrist*, "Man is an end." And this is only seemingly contradictory with Zarathustra's proclamation that, "Man is a bridge and not a goal," because on a bit of further reflection, we find that the supposed goals which Zarathustra provides, such as the Overman and the *amor fati*, are themselves created for the end of mankind. Now, because the life as we live it now is to be regarded as ever the thing of ultimate value, that's the meaning of the eternal return, which is Zarathustra's central teaching. Even the notion of the Overman, a goal beyond ourselves, this eternal ideal is for our good in the here and now. It is not to our benefit to try and preserve ourselves as we are. It is our good as a living thing to grow and transform. Life is something moving. And therefore, to say that man is an end is to say that something which grows and changes is an end. And so our aim is not goodness in a frozen, dead, conceptual sense. It's an embodied good, which means a movement towards something better, something healthier, something livelier than before. That is our greatest good. It's only found in movement. It's never found in a fixed, Parmenidean ideal, a bloodless ideal. So we can't fall into this trap of regarding our lives now as merely a means. This is what every religion and philosophy up to this point has done. And yet, at the same time, we can't regard our lives in the here and now as something towards which we have to be content and attempt to preserve exactly as it is forever, because that's not what life is either. And so to return to the important point, Nietzsche's task isn't to establish, in the Hegelian fashion, some ideal or goal that we can then regard as the point of human existence, and after we've attained this goal, we've attained the end of history, or something of that nature. No, in Nietzsche's perspectivism, the conflict is eternal. And so this is how the central task of nourishing our bravery so that we might become free ties into Nietzsche's perspectivism. Unlike the Christian conception of the logos that would be taken from figures like Heraclitus and developed under the influence of Socrates and Plato, and these notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true in a disembodied sense, accessible by the use of reason, Nietzsche doesn't believe that your discernment will lead you to anything universal. That doesn't mean it's less, quote unquote, true. In fact, the most direct, unmistakable truth that one can experience is one's perspectival discernment. But you can never hope to universalize this experience and make it into the absolute. In some sense, that very act is what falsifies one's discernment. One, in fact, never draws closer to some notion of the absolute or the universal through the use of their intellect. That's why Nietzsche stands with the Sophists instead of the dialecticians. He stands with the man who follows the *nous*. That's the culture of the Sophists. These men lived in a world of appearance, and they taught themselves above all to speak beautifully, to make their ideas appear as beautifully in their words as they possibly could. There is no Socratic conception of truth in their minds that through the intellect one draws closer to this truth. It is this very notion of the dialectic that has led man further and further into these falsifications of the world, into the realm of abstraction. We've been taught that by the use of reason, especially in concert with other minds, in dialogue with them, we experience a realer world than we could ever hope to experience through our own senses. And this is therefore the great difference between Nietzsche and someone like Hegel. As Deleuze points out, the Hegelian really believed in the dialectic, and they took that idea through to its ultimate conclusion, that if the negative work of the concept were to continue indefinitely, one would eventually reach a universal dawning of the absolute truth in the minds of men. Nietzsche does not enroll in this project. He sees the conceptual as already a kind of error. It is the use of the intellect toward the communication of what is directly discerned, and which is therefore totally uncommunicated by language, which means that it is demarcated, it's delimited by the social, moral, and metaphysical prejudices that, uh, him in the ideas of the collective, him in the thinking of the collective. Dialectic therefore cannot get us closer to the truth. For Nietzsche, it only multiplies our errors, it compounds oversimplifications, it carries us further and further from the project of a direct, given apprehension of the world. In other words, experience, sensation, knowing in the most immediate sense of the word. This is why Nietzsche advocates for the side of the wicked individual. He argues for the value of militaristic figures such as Napoleon, or ambitious upward climbers such as Cesare Borgia, those like Caesar who acquired power by opposing the powers that be, violating the sacred traditions of society. Nietzsche even finds something admirable in the common criminal or murderer, uh, such as when he says that when Dostoevsky found himself in a Siberian prison, he found he was, uh, had been placed inadvertently with the best stock grown on Russian soil. They're criminals. What endears him to these figures is that they set themselves at odds with with the collective. Quite to the contrary of such essentialist morality as we have been taught throughout the ages, having an opposer or an enemy, a combatant, is actually of a great benefit. This is another thing that Nietzsche learned from the Greeks, and it's why he says it's not the good cause that justifies the war, it's the good war that justifies the cause. It is the conflict, the test of ideas, their combat, their contrast, that creates a productive relationship of tension. This is where everything good and worthwhile comes from. This is antithetical to the notion of the good as we think about it in the abstract, simply as this eternally existing moral dictate that descended from the lap of being. This has nothing to do with reality whatsoever. All good things come out of combat. And so Nietzsche argues in *The Gay Science*, in its very first aphorism, "Even the most harmful man is still perhaps, in respect to the conservation of the species, the most useful of all, for he conserves in himself, or by his effect on others, impulses without which mankind might long ago have languished or decayed. Hatred, delight and mischief, rapacity and ambition, and whatever else is called evil, belong to the marvelous economy of the conservation of the species. To be sure, a costly, lavish, and on the whole very foolish economy, which has hitherto, however, preserved our species."
This is Nietzsche's most unpopular and troublesome stand, but it once again has a clear meaning and value when we consider this position in light of his.
Advocacy for freedom and independence, as we have defined it in our very specific way. The evil individual has note, he doesn't say more, but as much value for the whole of the species as you know, the whole of the species being the factory-produced, mass-produced, average type of human being. The exception has value to the rule, and vice versa.
Such a type who goes against that mental and moral framework, that even goes against the legal circumscriptions of the community, is not only a value in and of himself as a sort of rare, extraordinary type of human life, one which expresses that strength and independence, but is also of value to the community too. It strengthens the community. It continues the need for those, uh, we might say, more savage instincts that are always excised by a strictly communal, peaceful, uh, harmonious state of society.
Within the framework of a community, we want pure cooperation. But what does this create? It creates a species of animals that is dependent on one another, that is cooperative rather than combative, that lives as much as possible without struggle. And in this state, because everything good comes out of struggle, the species degenerates. The Napoleons of the world, the hardened criminals of the world, the wicked people, they prevent this degeneration by forcing the community to maintain its combative instincts. They keep us on our toes, so to speak.
But naturally, because of the great power of the collective, the great power of the herd, of all the individuals who have ever existed who choose to follow that path of independence, most will end up botched. They will not turn out well. Their life circumstances will not line up like that of a Napoleon. They'll end up more likely in the position of Dostoevsky's cellmates. Or perhaps one is a great artist but finds himself born as a Raphael without hands. Or suppose that you are Ludwig Wittgenstein, fighting in World War I, a mathematical genius and philosophical innovator of the first rank, placed into this highly dangerous environment. And let's say instead of being taken prisoner, as Wittgenstein was, you're simply killed by a piece of shrapnel or a flying bullet or by artillery, as countless young men were. That can happen so easily that we must assume it has happened countless times, perhaps thousands or millions of times, that a potential genius is simply botched or destroyed.
And this is because, as Nietzsche argues, nature squanders. Nature is indifferent. Nietzsche says to imagine indifference itself as power. That is nature, barren and abundant, and preserving and wasteful, and nurturing and harrowing, all at the same time. Nature, the whole of nature, defies all conception of it because it contains multitudes. And it's very likely that anyone who strives for independence will be in some way or another crushed down and destroyed.
And this is what Zarathustra perceives near the end of the novel, a thought which makes him nauseous. And yet, he ultimately overcomes this pity for the higher man near the end of the text. That is its final revelation. That even this fact that the individual is nearly always swallowed up by the mass, this is the person to whom Nietzsche is preaching, this is the person of greatest value. They are always destroyed. Even this, Nietzsche must accept as something his discernment tells him is the unmistakable truth. It's a fact of life.
And so, as a man who affirms life, Nietzsche also affirms this fact that the independent man is fated to be destroyed. This is yet another tragic aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, and it is reflected in his own life as well as in his thought. Nietzsche himself was fated to be destroyed. That fate was probably sealed before Nietzsche was even born, if we are to accept the very likely hypothesis that his illness was congenital, inherited from his father, who also died an early death.
More to the point, however, his intellectual fate was also sealed. Even though he was fated to be a scholar for a while, fated to be a vagabond for a while, he was always destined to rebel against such ways of being and strike out on his own. In his solitary existence, he forged his own philosophical position, standing apart from everyone else in his time, and found that no one else understood him. No one else was willing to follow him on this path. He writes in *Ecce Homo*, "I should regard it as a complete contradiction of myself if I expected to find ears and eyes for my truths today. The fact that no one listens to me, that no one knows how to receive at my hands today, is not only comprehensible; it seems to me quite the proper thing."
And thus, even though *Ecce Homo* is full of Nietzsche questioning whether he will truly be understood, he tells us here quite straightforwardly: he knows no one will understand him. It is his destiny to be misunderstood. And perhaps that's the worst possible fate for a philosopher to endure: to have your ideas, your contribution to the world of philosophy, your only children in some sense, twisted and corrupted by men of lesser discernment. To have your ideas taken by those who want to use them for some sort of political or moral agenda, who want to warp your ideas for some sort of psychological reason, or those who simply just don't have the intellect to comprehend you.
Nietzsche accepts all of this too. He says that he knows this will be his fate. He knows he will become a prophet to some, the central thinker of some new religion, that his words will be aped, that there are those who will seek to turn his philosophy into a dogma to be adhered to. He leaves for the discerning mind the central philosophical message: Dionysus versus the Crucified. It is a concept we have already discussed at length. But importantly, he trusts that those few people who are destined for him will find and understand that real core of his philosophy, the counterposing of the morality of antiquity, the life affirmation of antiquity, against the aesthetic ideal of Christianity. But he does this with the acceptance that his core philosophical truth, straightforward as it is, will remain opaque to the vast majority.
And so he only wishes that he not be made holy. It would not be some great revelation from me or some unique insight. To return to that passage at the end of Book One of *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, that is so often quoted, especially when somebody is making an argument against the very concept of "Nietzscheanism," which is to say, Nietzsche's philosophy codified into some sort of ideological position. Personally, I think there are perfectly sensible, comprehensible uses of the word "Nietzschean" or "Nietzscheanism" that don't have to indicate such a thing. But it is useful to have this passage to combat that sort of attempt to create a Nietzschean orthodoxy or a Nietzschean dogmatism. It's a very funny contradiction in terms. But in any case, Nietzsche tells us here straight out that this isn't what he wants. He tells us, "Here is my way; where is yours? As for the right way, the correct way, it does not exist."
Nietzsche's philosophy is by its very nature antithetical to any kind of conformity. And so Zarathustra says the following to his disciples: "Now I go alone, my disciples. You too go now alone. Thus I want it. Verily, I counsel you: go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies; he must also be able to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me, but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you! You say you believe in Zarathustra, but what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you: lose me and find yourselves! And only when you have denied me will I return to you."
This is what Nietzsche teaches us. This is his role as educator. He teaches us, his disciples, to deny him, to know for ourselves. His sole task is to stir our bravery, the bravery to become disciples of truth rather than disciples of Nietzsche. His only hope is that he might have taught us a thing or two about truth and what it means to seek her, to court her. How this entire task is so starkly different from anything the theoretical men have convinced us of. If one can really live and think in this way, this is infinitely more valuable than any of the opinions or beliefs of Nietzsche himself.
And so, if there is a final word that I might utter about the significance of Nietzsche, the way in which Nietzsche must change your life if you really sincerely read him, it is this: lose Nietzsche, become who you are, know for yourself. This is the spirit of Nietzsche's philosophy. It is so much easier said than done. If one adopts this approach to life heroically and with full understanding of all that it means, even if one goes on to reject every last one of Nietzsche's opinions, then such a person is a free spirit. Those are the only people to whom Nietzsche writes. Those are the only ones he is concerned with.
To all listeners of the Nietzsche podcast, all you great philosophers and free spirits and madmen and hermits and godless anti-metaphysicians, Dionysians, whoever you might be, lose me and find yourselves! And only when you have denied me will I return to you. That's all for this season, everyone. Signing off.
How the True World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error
1. The true world, attainable for a man who is wise, pious, virtuous. He lives in it; he is it. Oldest form of the idea, relatively coherent, simple, convincing paraphrase of the proposition: "I, Plato, am the truth."
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the man who is wise, pious, virtuous; to the sinner who repents. Progress of the idea: it gets trickier, subtler, less comprehensible. It becomes female, it becomes Christian.
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromised. It is a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. Basically the old sun, but through fog and skepticism. The idea becomes elusive, pale, Nordic, Kantian.
4. The true world, unattainable at any rate, unattained and as unattained also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, obligating either. How could we have obligations to something unknown? Gray mourning, first yawn of reason, cock-crow of positivism.
5. The true world, an idea that is of no further use, not even an obligation now, an obsolete, superfluous idea. Consequently, a refuted idea. Let's get rid of it. Bright day, breakfast, return of Bacchus and cheerfulness. Plato blushes with shame. Pandemonium of all free spirits.
6. The true world is gone. Which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? But no, we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one. Noon, moment of shortest shadow, end of longest error, high point of humanity. *Incipit Zarathustra*.
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