Exploring Nietzsche's Influence and Philosophy

Well, hello everyone. We're going to talk about Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, essentially. That's what I'm going to attempt to cover in this seminar. And so I subtitled this, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. And that's actually a quote from Nietzsche. What does that mean? I think it refers to two, there are two references implicit in that statement. One is that Nietzsche attempted to break down some of the... implicit axiomatic suppositions that had undergirded philosophy prior to the dawn of his thought. And so it's a technical phrase, even though it's poetic, but it's also a psychological phrase. And I think it does refer to the impact that Nietzsche's thought can have on you if you come upon it unaware. He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. And anyone, any singular individual who has a remarkable impact on thought has gone down very deep into the structure of our presuppositions and moved them around. You know, we have this intuition of depth, right? All of us know that there's a difference between something that's shallow and something that's deep. And if something inside you that's shallow moves, it doesn't move much of you. And if something inside of you that's deep is moved, it moves a lot of you at the same time. And Nietzsche was someone who philosophized in the depths, and so to read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically, because there's a lot of things that you take for granted that orient you in the world, that make you free of anxiety, that unite you with other people, that give you a direction and a purpose, that stabilize you psychologically. And Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who goes down into the foundations and starts to shift them around, and that can be very destructive. Nietzsche himself lost his Christian faith, for example, which is an example of a destruction of axiomatic foundation. Now, he attempted to rebuild something else in its stead, but that's no simple thing, given that the entire edifice of Judeo-Christian thought was a collective endeavor unfolding over thousands and thousands of years to try to replace something like that in a single lifetime. Regardless of your degree of brilliance is one daunting challenge, and it isn't obvious that Nietzsche succeeded, but he did succeed in calling our attention, everyone's attention, to the nature of our unconscious and implicit axiomatic presumptions, and also while taking a hammer to the foundations. I mean, it was Nietzsche, of course, who famously pronounced that God was dead, and that we have killed him, by the way, and that we'll never find enough water. to wash away the blood. It wasn't a triumphalist statement. It isn't reasonable to say that it was Nietzsche himself who produced the death of God that plagues our society at the current times, because no one thinker is responsible for a transformation of that magnitude. But it is the case that he was able to synthesize that, the criticism of... Judeo-Christian ethics and bring it to, what would you say, to express that more trenchantly and explicitly than anyone else, just like Freud, not so long afterwards, was able to formulate and make explicit the idea of the unconscious, even though people had been working towards that realization for centuries. And so, how to philosophize with a hammer is to go down into the depths to look at the axiomatic foundations of philosophic thought, and then to attempt to break that apart. And it's certainly the case that Nietzsche managed that to a great degree. And we're still, all of us, whether we know it or not, are still coping with that consequence. Nietzsche knew, for example, that one of the consequences, that there would be two... consequences of the death of God. And one would be the collapse of a system of meaning that encapsulated people psychologically and socially. The collapse of that system of meaning, Nietzsche believed, would bring about two events. One would be the dawn of a universal nihilism, a sense of rootlessness and hopelessness that would pervade Western culture. provide and result in an intense and pervasive demoralization. That and the dawn of the attraction of totalitarian ideologies that would rise to replace God, and Nietzsche was particularly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, that was one, which is obviously prescient. But more importantly, even than that, was his prophecy that huge swaths of Europe the Western world, for that matter, and as it turned out, the entire world would become enticed by the blandishments of something like a utopian communism, and that the consequence of that would be the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century. It's quite a remarkable piece of prophecy, multidimensional prophecy, because all of those things transpired. And so the popular image of Nietzsche is a triumphant rationalist, let's say, celebrating the death of God, but that's not accurate, a not accurate representation in the least. He was a much wiser man than that. Now, that doesn't mean that Nietzsche was an uncritical admirer, let's say, of the Judeo-Christian ethic, because he also believed that deep within Christianity was a spirit embedded of resentment, slave morality, that would view the world as a battle between, that there was a, what would you say, a stream of... Roughly Christian thought that viewed the world as a battleground between the oppressed and the oppressor, the slave and the master. He believed that Christianity was a manifestation of slave morality that was constantly driven by a form of envy and that that would culminate in something extraordinarily destructive. Now, I think Nietzsche's thought was weak on that part to some degree. I mean, Nietzsche's a very nuanced thinker. There's a difference between criticizing Christianity and criticizing Christ, and Nietzsche is ambivalent on that front. I think it might be fair to say that he criticized institutionalized Christianity for its adoption of slave morality, but didn't go so far as to assume that that was part of the ethos of what was central to Christianity itself. Now, Nietzsche wasn't precisely a systematic philosopher. He wrote aphoristically. He wrote using narrative and... and using poetic tools, which also made him a very strange philosopher and a very strange author and professor, alienated him from his academic community because he didn't write in a dry and academic manner. He had this prophetic and poetic temperament, and so he's a very creative philosopher rather than a rigorous philosopher, and so his thought jumps from place to place. He distrusted systematizers. He was also very ill. for much of his life and couldn't write in long bursts and tended to think for extended periods of time and then to summarize all that thought in very short bursts of poetic prose. And that's also, I would say, in some part why it's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed. He'll offer you something, aphorisms, very short statements, paragraphs that are unbelievably dense. What we're going to do, and I think what will be the most fun in this seminar, is to take a variety of those paragraphs and aphorisms and attempt to unpack them. You can do that endlessly, for example, in a book like Beyond Good and Evil. It's not really a book that you can sit down and read all at once, because there's so much packed into it. And when I read a book, I often earmark a page if there's something that I might want to refer to later. And I've read whole books where I didn't earmark a single page. I don't even bother earmarking a book like Beyond Good and Evil because I end up earmarking both pages of every page. And so Nietzsche famously said of his own books, I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write. And then he says, what other men can't even write in a book? Which is pretty good, eh? Because it's a hell of an egotistical statement right off the bat. And instantly he tops it with an even more egotistical statement, except that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. And so there's whole fields of endeavor embedded inside Nietzschean thought. The whole corpus of psychoanalytic thought is embedded in paragraphs of Nietzsche's thoughts, say, in Beyond Good and Evil. And Jung, for example, was a student of Nietzsche's, not directly an admirer of Nietzsche. He wrote, he published, eventually, a 1,400-page, I believe it was 1,400-page... book on seminar notes on the first one-third of Thus Spake Zarathustra. That's about 40 pages. 1,400 pages of exposition on that, on one-third of what's a very small volume. And so, there's a tremendous amount to unpack in Nietzsche. And so, it's a mustard seed issue. Christ compared the kingdom of God, if I remember correctly, to a mustard seed. This tiny little grain of possibility that can unfold into this remarkable structure. Poetic language in particular, image... Image-laden language has that proclivity to contain much more than you'd expect, given the brevity of the statement. And that's because the meaning isn't just contained in the words, it's contained in the relationship between the words, and the relationship between the phrases and the sentences, and then the poetic relationship of the sentences to the corpus of thought that it refers to. And so it can pack a tremendous amount of information into a very small space. That's particularly true if you write poetically. And Nietzsche was a... A prophetic and revelatory writer, Thus Spake Zarathustra, for example, is written in a kind of intense, emotion-laden Old Testament language. And many people who are flirting with intellectual development fall in love with Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is this poetic work, poetic fairy tale narrative about a prophet who descends back into his community with a revelation at hand. And it's not a good... example of the larger corpus of Nietzsche's work because he's actually a very clear writer and thinker, but it is an example of the degree to which his philosophy wasn't dry, rational cognition, but infused with a sense of creative dynamism and poetic inspiration. And again, that's partly what alienated him from the academic community of his time. And still, in some ways, Nietzsche is still a fringe philosopher because he's got this intense romanticism about him. He makes a dramatic character. He's more like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, which is something that we'll touch on as we move through this, than your, let's say, typical dry-as-dust philosopher. He's a very, very dynamic thinker. And so it's a great adventure intellectually and morally to read Nietzsche. He's a remarkable person, truly a prophetic individual. Jung believed that, Carl Jung believed, you know, that people lived at different times at the same time. There's some people in the world now who are really living a hundred years in what will be the future, right? They're the people who are establishing what the world's going to be far down the road. And there are people now who live hundreds of years in the past, and maybe the bulk of us are somewhere. ensconced in the present. There are a few people out there who are on the edge of what will be, and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were certainly on the edge of what would be in the mid-1800s, and they had some sense of what was going to unfold over the next 200 years, and could see that with a kind of unerring accuracy. I suppose that's because they could, like Jung, there are people who are capable of seeing the deep undercurrents in society, and seeing which way the wind was blowing, or which way the... zeitgeist was shifting the spirit of the times and i think it's often people who are dreamers who are particularly capable of that because the dream tends to inhabit sort of the edge of the knowable and both dosti well all three dostoevsky nietzsche and jung were intensely poetic and imaginative people dreamers and and and their writing is imbued with the spirit of the dream the creative spirit of the dream and that's partly That's partly, I suppose, what distinguishes a prophetic figure from a more programmatic thinker, is that they're more involved in the language and the realm of the image and the dream. And that's a richer realm, although it's more difficult to make explicit, you know, how hard it is when you remember a dream, even to be able to account for it programmatically and systematically, to transform it into words, how much you lose when you do that. The dream gains in... richness what it loses in precision and explicit content and there are geniuses who can stand on the border between the dream and and the word and translate the image and the dream into the word and Nietzsche was definitely one of those figures so let's walk through his we're gonna we're gonna walk through his biography a bit so so you have some understanding of of the the structure of his life and then we're going to position him in his historical context so you have some sense of what's going on in Europe and the rest of the world at this time, and then we're going to turn to the exposition of some of his thoughts from Beyond Good and Evil. So he only lived 56 years from 1844 to 1900, was very ill for much of that time, and so managed to accomplish what he did accomplish, despite the fact that he was working constantly against insuperable odds. He was so ill that He could only work, as I said, for short bursts of time. And, you know, one of the things that's remarkable and admirable about Nietzsche, and worth thinking about from a practical and moral perspective, is that despite the fact that he was extraordinarily ill, one of the villages he lived in in Switzerland, he was regarded as the saint. That was his nickname because he was such a... pleasant person and was so good to everybody he met and was still struggling to wrestle with these deep questions despite the fact that he was so ill that he was half blind and could hardly write and was sick to his stomach all the time and was suffering from some sort of illness that eventually manifested itself as a psychosis and then a series of strokes that killed him at a very early age and you know that's worth thinking about too because you know our you We have this sense that if terrible things happen to you, you'll turn out to be a terrible person, and that that fact is justified by the presence of your unfair suffering. And while you can understand that if you meet someone who's been terribly hurt, who is terribly ill, who isn't behaving properly, you can say, well, maybe if I was in that situation, I would behave the same way. But the problem with that is that you do come across people, and you'll come across them in your own life, and maybe even be one of those to whom terrible things have happened and will happen. That will be the case for all of us, by the way, who are still nonetheless doing everything they can to make the world better rather than worse. And I think that Nietzsche was definitely one of those people. And, you know, I say that with all due care because it's certainly also the case that Nietzsche and his philosophical hammerings did destabilize the entire structure of Western civilization. And you could think of him as someone destructive in that regard. I've always thought of Nietzsche, especially in regard to Christianity, as the kind of critic you really want to have around, you know, because if you're sure of yourself, but your foundations are unsettled and in need of repair, it might be your best friend who comes along and taps on the weakest spots so that you know where they are, and that might be initially very destructive to you because... It might even speed the process of your crumbling, but if the consequence of that is that you can rebuild something out of the ruins that's even stronger, then that's part of the process of creative destruction. And I think that Nietzsche was ironically, I'm pushing it here possibly, ironically an anti-Christian, that he knew perfectly well that the best defense was a rigorous offense and that... If you had respect for something, you could take all the hammers and tongs you had at your disposal and apply it to that. And it's certainly the case that reading Nietzsche helped clarify my understanding of the Christian ethos, for example. And if you subject something to a radical criticism and it remains standing, then that's an indication of its integrity and its utility. Now, whether... The Judeo-Christian ethos can actually withstand the Nietzschean criticism. You combine that with the Freudian criticism and the implicit criticism that emerged out of Darwin and, say, out of the Enlightenment period as well, then perhaps it's not obvious that anything remains at all. Although I think that's a pessimistic overstatement. We're going to find out that there's a lot more there down in the foundations that will withstand any challenge that we ever imagined. And I think if we do discover that, I think we're in the process of that. that we can thank Nietzsche for laying the groundwork for that, because without the questions that he had generated so trenchantly and so devastatingly, then the quality of the answers would have been much lesser. So, for example, Jung, we'll return to Jung for a moment. Jung was very much influenced by Freud, especially in his formulation of the unconscious, but he really spent his entire career trying to answer a question that Nietzsche posed, which was, Well, on what basis should we erect our morality? So when Nietzsche demolished the structure of Western morality by pointing to the death of God, Nietzsche proposed that human beings would henceforth have to create their own values, right? Because Nietzsche also believed, at least as a young man, that God was a human creation rather than the other way around. And he believed once we dispensed with God that we would have to create our own values. And you can understand that, at least on the surface, as a reasonable proposition. If the values that once served us have now vanished, what else are we going to do but create our own values? And Jung took that suggestion extraordinarily seriously, asking, well, is it actually possible for an individual to create his or her own values? Because that's a Nietzschean. presupposition that we could do that. Now Nietzsche believed it would have to be a whole new kind of person that's the overman or the ubermensch, the superman who would be capable of doing that. He knew it was a extraordinarily difficult task. The psychoanalysts starting with Freud showed and also taking a page from Nietzsche that the problem with the idea that you might create your own values is that it's not Obvious at all that you're the master of your own house. So for Freud, for example, you were essentially a collection of loose biological inclinations right id driven Impulses that might serve you as lesser gods and pull you in all sorts of directions for Freud It was lust aggression and the impulse towards death where the price were your primordial gods you and they're instantiated within you at a biological level, and you're their plaything, you're their toy, it isn't obvious that you can be the master of your own values in a manner that would allow you to create them. And Jung took that idea much, much further, because the other question that emerges would be that even if you did create your own values, let's say, what would stop the person sitting beside you from creating their own values, and you creating your own values? Why would you assume that those would have any union? And if they didn't have any union, then why wouldn't you assume that you just devolve into constant conflict? So part of the problem with the idea of generating your own values is, well, what unifies us? And you might say, well, we don't need to be unified. It's like, well, you do if you don't want the Hobbesian state of brutal nature to reign, because if we're not united in our outlook and our values, then... As soon as you want something other than what I want, we are definitely going to be at each other's throats. And so Jung started to delve into that, as did the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, trying to understand how it might be that, how you might understand the boundaries of value construction. Is there a universe within which values have to operate in order for them to unite a given person psychologically, or for them to unite a multitude of people? socially across large spans of time. You might think about that as the question of what constitutes a playable versus a non-playable game. Can it iterate? Can it sustain itself? Can it fortify itself across time? Maybe that's the kind of game you want to play if you ever get married. You want a game that you can continue to play, but also one that improves across time. And maybe those games have a set form or pattern of form that they have to... occupy in order to have those properties. And of course, Nietzsche speculated about that as well, which is something that we'll see very brilliantly. You can see in his own thought, the genesis of ideas that might have been the answer to the question that he posed, and certainly were unraveled by other thinkers like Jung, like Freud, like Piaget, to provide an answer to the questions that he offered. He was born in 1844. At the age of 25, he was offered a full professorship at the University of Basel in classical philology. He didn't even have a PhD at that time. He had to get an honorary PhD from another university. He was awarded an honorary PhD from another university, I believe, as a precondition for taking up that professorial position. It was unheard of at the time, and so it was obvious that Nietzsche's brilliance was recognized. by the academic community at a very young age. And that's quite remarkable because he was a very romantic spirit, not a well-behaved person. The fact that he was recognized by universities as a consequence of his stellar intellectual achievement is even more striking because he was a controversial person, but so brilliant that despite the controversy, he was a hot, a hot intellectual property. And those are relatively rare. So he was a full professor of classical philology at the University of Basel and was devoted himself to the understanding of Latin and Greek texts. That's classical philology. In 1879 he resigned. In 1880 he collapsed with paralysis and his vascular dementia, an emergent psychosis. All sorts of people have speculated on what might have been wrong with Nietzsche and no one really knows. Maybe it was syphilis, maybe it was mercury poisoning from the treatment of syphilis. His father died very young of something that looked... akin to a brain illness, I think at the age of 36, and so maybe there was something hereditary going on. Other people have speculated that his own philosophy drove him to the edge of madness and then beyond. I don't believe that. I read Nietzsche's works in sequence, and I don't believe that there's evidence of an emerging pathology that's a consequence of his thought. I might say that speculation about the death of God took his own foundations out from underneath him, and he collapsed into... you know, a catastrophic and depressive nihilism and then died. And that does happen to people, but I don't think that that fits with the facts. I do think instead that there's a fundamental optimism about Nietzschean thought, which is quite remarkable, that's in keeping with some of his basic propositions, because he believed that we weren't motivated by the will to survive, but by the will to express what he called power. And he had a very particularized definition of that. that life consisted in the attempt to expend ourselves in life. And he tried to live in accordance with that ethos, and I think very successfully. Let's look at the world in the late 1800s, in the time period that he lived, because it's a good idea to get a sense of the dynamism of the times and what sort of revolutionary activities were underway and underfoot in Europe in the West when Nietzsche was formulating his thought. I mean, it's a very dynamic period. It's at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the utter transformation of the world. I mean, in 1865, if I remember correctly, The typical person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar fifty a day in today's terms, right? Just barely clinging to the edge of the margins of hand-to-mouth sustainability. The entire world was poor in a way that we can hardly imagine and that was starting to transform with incredible rapidity in this amazing transformation of the industrial and technological revolution that's raised the whole planet by now out of... abject poverty and continues to do that at an ever-accelerating rate. It's a very, very dynamic time in the late, in the last half of the 1800s. So we'll just, let's just walk through some of the cardinal events. So in 1840, the U.S., in the U.S., the Western expansion is continuing into what eventually becomes California and Oregon. In 1840, I threw this in just because I was Canadian, Upper and Canada, Lower Canada merged into a single province. Canada was... integrated as a state in 1867. We think of Canada as a new country, but it's actually quite an old democracy with an even older history. New Zealand was founded in 1842. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1845. Texas became the 28th state in 1846. America, the U.S. incorporated a huge swath of the Southwest, taking that territory from Mexico. incorporated oregon washington idaho wyoming and montana from the uk in 1847 a physician named semmelweis proposed that surgeons should wash their hands when moving from patient to patient it was an early manifestation of what later became the germ theory of pathogen transmission and of course his colleagues hounded him into insanity and death for his unmitigated gall in proposing such a demented theory at that time surgeons used to pride themselves on the on the filth on their surgical uniforms because that showed how much surgery they had conducted. And so they'd move from patient to patient in a cloud of miasma and death. And women were killed with amazing regularity in hospitals because of the transmission of disease from one to another as a consequence of the filthy physicians who were attending to them in Semmelweis. cottoned on to the fact that perhaps all this dirt and blood was not a very good idea. And he was eventually proved right, although he wasn't around to see that. So 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published. And so that's interesting as well, because as I said, Nietzsche prognosticated that the ideas that came to culmination in the Communist Manifesto would prove extraordinarily attractive to people, motivated, number one, by envy, and number two, lost in the nihilistic chaos that's a consequence of the death of traditional morality. Do you have to orient yourself with some form of systematic thought? And the answer seems to be yes, because otherwise the world's too complex. You have to be able to reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a systematic perspective, or you drown in difficulty. And so if one system of value collapses, then another... is going to beckon to you because you have to do something to organize all the multiplicitous proclivities of your psyche into something approximating a unity. And so what that means maybe is that we're always in the situation of the Israelites in the desert. You know, in the Exodus story, the Israelites leave the tyranny of Egypt. You could draw an analogy and say, well, we left the tyranny of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and where did we end up? Well, In the Promised Land, it's like, well, that isn't how the story goes. You go from the tyranny to the desert, not to the Promised Land. And one of the things that happens in the desert is that you're enticed into the worship of idols. Because you need some centralizing tendency, right, to guide you and to unite you. And so if you lose one, there's going to be a terrible unconscious longing for another. And, well, you see that manifested in the Communist Manifesto. And you all know, or perhaps you know, of the terrible consequences that... arose as a consequence of the formulation of that ethos. It was a new attempt to develop a system of axiomatic presuppositions, right, the basic foundations of a state that was almost entirely derived, at least in principle, from a rational approach. The communists always insisted that they had a scientific materialism at the basis of their system of thought, which I think is a radical overstatement. First of all, it's not that easy to derive an ethic from science. And second, it isn't obvious at all that communism was driven by, say, love of the common man. I would say instead that it was driven to a tremendous degree by an unacknowledged and omnipresent envious resentment. And I would also say the proof of that is in the pudding, which is that while the spirit of envious resentment taken to its logical conclusion would result in the deaths of many, many people, because the spirit of envious resentment is murderous to the core, and that is exactly what happened every time the communist... presuppositions were actually realized in any given state. You know, the radical leftist types say, well, that's not true communism, but the perspicacious analysts of communism, foremost among them Solzhenitsyn, laid out in the early 70s an unassailable argument that the murderousness of the communist regimes was a necessary consequence of the a priori axioms of the philosophical system. Same kind of idea there that... in a phrase as innocuous as, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which sounds extraordinarily compassionate and generous on the surface, has inside of the ethos that if allowed to unfold in the natural environment, produces in the end result something that's indistinguishable from the genocidal murderousness of Stalin and Mao. And you think, well, could that all be embedded in a phrase that innocuous? And perhaps the answer is, well, not all of that in that one phrase, but in the cloud of ideas that surrounds that phrase, certainly. And the proof is, when you planted that seed in various places, the same tree grew and bore the same evil fruits. So, 1848, first women's rights convention in the U.S. at Seneca Falls. 51, Louis Napoleon leads a coup in France. 52, Italy moves towards unification. We think of these countries as so ancient, Italy, for example, but it wasn't unified in 1852. 53 to 86, France and Britain defended the Ottoman Empire and defeated Russia. Commodore Perry, in 1853, brought gunboats into the harbor in Tokyo and forced the opening of Japan. A great shock to the Japanese, who regarded themselves as the center of the world and were radically overpowered by this overwhelming technology that the Americans could bring to bear. That's an amazing story in and of itself. 1855, the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of steel. Of course, that revolutionized the construction of cities and the entire industrial landscape. First oil refinery in 1856 in Romania. A lot of things happening at the same time. 59, the Suez Canal was constructed. The Big Ben was completed. In 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species, which was another death blow to a kind of... a kind of rote Christianity, I would say, because the origin of species was the first account that provided a plausible mechanism whereby life might have generated itself rather than being part of the created order. And that was another bit of philosophizing with a hammer, although this time it occurred on the scientific front. I mean, when I was your age, let's say, I would say that it was likely... Einstein, who was regarded as the foremost scientist of the last 150 years. But I would say it wasn't long after that, before Einstein, as profound as his contributions were, was supplanted by Darwin. I don't think there's a scientist of the last 150 years whose impact has been greater than that of Charles Darwin. The theory of evolution provided a uniting framework for all the sciences above the level of chemistry. So an incredible... work very hard on Darwin himself psychologically because he was a Christian and he knew that there was a tension between the implications of his work, say, and the narrative that had been laid out in the Christian ethos. And it isn't obvious at all that he was able to reconcile that gulf. He was not pleased that his work was... He was not pleased about the fact that there was a contradiction between his work and the faith that he abided by. He knew how useful that faith was in providing people with psychological unity and social purpose and suffered from panic attacks, for example, for much of his life. Now, it's never easy to diagnose someone who's here now when you talk to them, let alone retrospectively, but that's a tremendous amount of psychological tension for someone to... to bear as the first person who bears that. And Darwin really did understand the implications of what he had written as well as understanding what he wrote. 1860, the first recording of human voice, 61 to 65, that was the American Civil War, fought fundamentally over the issue of slavery. 1861, the Russians abolished serfdom, so slavery was rife in Eastern Europe and in Russia up to that point. It's part of the universal heritage of mankind, right? I mean, it's not the existence of slave-free societies that's the human norm. It's the reverse of that. And the miracle, I would say, of the West is that, and perhaps of the Industrial Revolution, but also of the ethos that drove that revolution and distributed its fruits to such a wide range of people that slavery was regarded as intrinsically wrong. And then... And on a wide enough scale and deep enough so that even people who were economically motivated, perhaps to perpetuate slavery, were forced, starting in the UK, to contend with the fact that regardless of its potential short and medium term economic viability, it was unethical to the core. So, 1861, the Russians abolish serfdom. James Clerk Maxwell publishes his famous equations, uniting light and electromagnetism, laying the groundwork for much of modern physics. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation deeming all men to be free in the United States in 1863. Manet exhibited the first Impressionist painting, and those early exhibitions caused riots in Paris because the Impressionists were forcing people or enticing people, inviting people to see the world in a completely new way. When we look at Impressionist paintings now, we think, well, they're kind of classically beautiful, but that's only because we now see like Impressionist painters saw. They literally taught us to see the world in a different way, and that was very hard on people to begin with. So you have no idea how much the way you see the world is a consequence of you mimicking great artists across time. They've literally taught you even to understand what constitutes beautiful, even to note, for example, that there might be such a thing as beauty in the natural world, and then to see that as part parcel of your day-to-day experience, that's all taught to us by great artists who are... geniuses of perception obviously and they can see things where where where other people see just the predictable they see miracles where other people just see the predictable and the familiar robert e lee in 1865 surrenders end of the american civil war slavery is banned in the u.s with the 13th amendment and lincoln is assassinated it's 1865 same year mandel formulated the laws of inheritance 1866 Meiji Restoration in Japan and the beginning of Japanese modernization, which took place at an extraordinarily rapid rate. First transatlantic telegraphy cable, 1867, purchase of Alaska and a devastating famine in Sweden. That's worth noting too, that's not that long ago, right? Sweden's a very modern, rich, industrialized society. We can't even envision something like famine occurring there, but it's not that long ago when the world was poor enough so that... Even in relatively rich and developed nations, the threat of famine was often extremely real. 1869, Tolstoy published War and Peace. 1771, the Franco-Prussian War produced a united Germany and Italy. From 1875 to 1900, 26 million Indians perished from famine, and in 1876, 13 million in China. 1876, the US Gilded Age begins. So that's when the Americans really start to march forward on the world stage. The time of the great industrialists and this immense generation and distribution of wealth in this huge emergent democracy in North America. The beginning of the domination of the world by Americans politically, economically and culturally. 76, of course the UK is still on the top of the world at that point. Queen Victoria is Empress of India. In 77, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria become independent. Commercial telephone exchange in 78 in New Haven, Connecticut. And so that's the dawn of the connected age, right? It's the new internet, the telephone, and well, everyone knows the consequences of that because now you carry that around with you all the time and spend half your life looking at it. 1879, Edison invents the light bulb. 1881. Pogroms wash through Russia in the rise of this terrible flood of anti-semitic propaganda. That's the early manifestation of what of course culminated in the Holocaust and also motivated eventually the establishment of Zionism and the settlement of Israel. 1884, first self-powered machine gun. That's a bigger invention than you might think if you don't think about it, because a machine gun makes one man into an army. That's the end of horses in battle for obvious reasons. It's the ends of phalanxes of soldiers marching forward, because all that means is you die. It's the initiation of an entirely new form of warfare and also of slaughter and mayhem on a scale that was completely unimaginable prior to the... The emergence of the machine gun, you saw that technology really start to make itself manifest in the First World War because it started out with standard battles using cavalry, using horses, and horses were used throughout the entire First World War, but obviously with less and less success. Part of the reason for trench warfare was the presence of the machine gun, hundreds of rounds of munitions in an amazingly short period of time. We have guns now that will fire. tens of thousands of bullets in a second. Just unbelievable, devastating force, the force of an entire army in one machine. 1885, first internal combustion car, and the Singer sewing machine was popularized. 1889, the Eiffel Tower is inaugurated, this new tower of steel, right? And that becomes the archetype, I suppose, of the skyscrapers that now dominate the landscape of the cities. Bicycle sweep Europe in 1890. 92 is the first gasoline tractor. The Olympic Games are revivified in Athens in 1896. A sign of the world coming together as an integrated society. Sports led the way there in some ways. 1898, the first Zeppelin airship. So now people can travel through the sky from place to place. The Exposition Universelle was held in Paris in 1900 featuring the new artistic movement Art Nouveau. All right, so that's a bit of an overview of where we are in history, and you can get a sense of the dynamism of the times, especially the industrial spirit of the times, right? This burgeoning, widespread industrial economy that's lifting immense numbers of people out of sustenance-level living, which we tend to romanticize as fortunate 21st-century city dwellers, but was a pretty damn dismal, difficult, cold... brutal, miserable, ill-fed slog for 95% of people not very long ago.

Well, hello everyone. We're going to talk about Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, essentially. That's what I'm going to attempt to cover in this seminar.

And so I subtitled this, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. And that's actually a quote from Nietzsche. What does that mean?

I think it refers to two, there are two references implicit in that statement. One is that Nietzsche attempted to break down some of the... implicit axiomatic suppositions that had undergirded philosophy prior to the dawn of his thought. And so it's a technical phrase, even though it's poetic, but it's also a psychological phrase. And I think it does refer to the impact that Nietzsche's thought can have on you if you come upon it unaware.

He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. And anyone, any singular individual who has a remarkable impact on thought has gone down very deep into the structure of our presuppositions and moved them around. You know, we have this intuition of depth, right? All of us know that there's a difference between something that's shallow and something that's deep.

And if something inside you that's shallow moves, it doesn't move much of you. And if something inside of you that's deep is moved, it moves a lot of you at the same time. And Nietzsche was someone who philosophized in the depths, and so to read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically, because there's a lot of things that you take for granted that orient you in the world, that make you free of anxiety, that unite you with other people, that give you a direction and a purpose, that stabilize you psychologically.

And Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who goes down into the foundations and starts to shift them around, and that can be very destructive. Nietzsche himself lost his Christian faith, for example, which is an example of a destruction of axiomatic foundation. Now, he attempted to rebuild something else in its stead, but that's no simple thing, given that the entire edifice of Judeo-Christian thought was a collective endeavor unfolding over thousands and thousands of years to try to replace something like that in a single lifetime.

Regardless of your degree of brilliance is one daunting challenge, and it isn't obvious that Nietzsche succeeded, but he did succeed in calling our attention, everyone's attention, to the nature of our unconscious and implicit axiomatic presumptions, and also while taking a hammer to the foundations. I mean, it was Nietzsche, of course, who famously pronounced that God was dead, and that we have killed him, by the way, and that we'll never find enough water. to wash away the blood. It wasn't a triumphalist statement. It isn't reasonable to say that it was Nietzsche himself who produced the death of God that plagues our society at the current times, because no one thinker is responsible for a transformation of that magnitude.

But it is the case that he was able to synthesize that, the criticism of... Judeo-Christian ethics and bring it to, what would you say, to express that more trenchantly and explicitly than anyone else, just like Freud, not so long afterwards, was able to formulate and make explicit the idea of the unconscious, even though people had been working towards that realization for centuries. And so, how to philosophize with a hammer is to go down into the depths to look at the axiomatic foundations of philosophic thought, and then to attempt to break that apart.

And it's certainly the case that Nietzsche managed that to a great degree. And we're still, all of us, whether we know it or not, are still coping with that consequence. Nietzsche knew, for example, that one of the consequences, that there would be two...

consequences of the death of God. And one would be the collapse of a system of meaning that encapsulated people psychologically and socially. The collapse of that system of meaning, Nietzsche believed, would bring about two events. One would be the dawn of a universal nihilism, a sense of rootlessness and hopelessness that would pervade Western culture. provide and result in an intense and pervasive demoralization.

That and the dawn of the attraction of totalitarian ideologies that would rise to replace God, and Nietzsche was particularly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, that was one, which is obviously prescient. But more importantly, even than that, was his prophecy that huge swaths of Europe the Western world, for that matter, and as it turned out, the entire world would become enticed by the blandishments of something like a utopian communism, and that the consequence of that would be the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century. It's quite a remarkable piece of prophecy, multidimensional prophecy, because all of those things transpired.

And so the popular image of Nietzsche is a triumphant rationalist, let's say, celebrating the death of God, but that's not accurate, a not accurate representation in the least. He was a much wiser man than that. Now, that doesn't mean that Nietzsche was an uncritical admirer, let's say, of the Judeo-Christian ethic, because he also believed that deep within Christianity was a spirit embedded of resentment, slave morality, that would view the world as a battle between, that there was a, what would you say, a stream of...

Roughly Christian thought that viewed the world as a battleground between the oppressed and the oppressor, the slave and the master. He believed that Christianity was a manifestation of slave morality that was constantly driven by a form of envy and that that would culminate in something extraordinarily destructive. Now, I think Nietzsche's thought was weak on that part to some degree.

I mean, Nietzsche's a very nuanced thinker. There's a difference between criticizing Christianity and criticizing Christ, and Nietzsche is ambivalent on that front. I think it might be fair to say that he criticized institutionalized Christianity for its adoption of slave morality, but didn't go so far as to assume that that was part of the ethos of what was central to Christianity itself.

Now, Nietzsche wasn't precisely a systematic philosopher. He wrote aphoristically. He wrote using narrative and...

and using poetic tools, which also made him a very strange philosopher and a very strange author and professor, alienated him from his academic community because he didn't write in a dry and academic manner. He had this prophetic and poetic temperament, and so he's a very creative philosopher rather than a rigorous philosopher, and so his thought jumps from place to place. He distrusted systematizers.

He was also very ill. for much of his life and couldn't write in long bursts and tended to think for extended periods of time and then to summarize all that thought in very short bursts of poetic prose. And that's also, I would say, in some part why it's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed. He'll offer you something, aphorisms, very short statements, paragraphs that are unbelievably dense.

What we're going to do, and I think what will be the most fun in this seminar, is to take a variety of those paragraphs and aphorisms and attempt to unpack them. You can do that endlessly, for example, in a book like Beyond Good and Evil. It's not really a book that you can sit down and read all at once, because there's so much packed into it. And when I read a book, I often earmark a page if there's something that I might want to refer to later.

And I've read whole books where I didn't earmark a single page. I don't even bother earmarking a book like Beyond Good and Evil because I end up earmarking both pages of every page. And so Nietzsche famously said of his own books, I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write.

And then he says, what other men can't even write in a book? Which is pretty good, eh? Because it's a hell of an egotistical statement right off the bat. And instantly he tops it with an even more egotistical statement, except that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. And so there's whole fields of endeavor embedded inside Nietzschean thought.

The whole corpus of psychoanalytic thought is embedded in paragraphs of Nietzsche's thoughts, say, in Beyond Good and Evil. And Jung, for example, was a student of Nietzsche's, not directly an admirer of Nietzsche. He wrote, he published, eventually, a 1,400-page, I believe it was 1,400-page... book on seminar notes on the first one-third of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

That's about 40 pages. 1,400 pages of exposition on that, on one-third of what's a very small volume. And so, there's a tremendous amount to unpack in Nietzsche. And so, it's a mustard seed issue.

Christ compared the kingdom of God, if I remember correctly, to a mustard seed. This tiny little grain of possibility that can unfold into this remarkable structure. Poetic language in particular, image...

Image-laden language has that proclivity to contain much more than you'd expect, given the brevity of the statement. And that's because the meaning isn't just contained in the words, it's contained in the relationship between the words, and the relationship between the phrases and the sentences, and then the poetic relationship of the sentences to the corpus of thought that it refers to. And so it can pack a tremendous amount of information into a very small space.

That's particularly true if you write poetically. And Nietzsche was a... A prophetic and revelatory writer, Thus Spake Zarathustra, for example, is written in a kind of intense, emotion-laden Old Testament language. And many people who are flirting with intellectual development fall in love with Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is this poetic work, poetic fairy tale narrative about a prophet who descends back into his community with a revelation at hand.

And it's not a good... example of the larger corpus of Nietzsche's work because he's actually a very clear writer and thinker, but it is an example of the degree to which his philosophy wasn't dry, rational cognition, but infused with a sense of creative dynamism and poetic inspiration. And again, that's partly what alienated him from the academic community of his time. And still, in some ways, Nietzsche is still a fringe philosopher because he's got this intense romanticism about him. He makes a dramatic character.

He's more like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, which is something that we'll touch on as we move through this, than your, let's say, typical dry-as-dust philosopher. He's a very, very dynamic thinker. And so it's a great adventure intellectually and morally to read Nietzsche. He's a remarkable person, truly a prophetic individual.

Jung believed that, Carl Jung believed, you know, that people lived at different times at the same time. There's some people in the world now who are really living a hundred years in what will be the future, right? They're the people who are establishing what the world's going to be far down the road.

And there are people now who live hundreds of years in the past, and maybe the bulk of us are somewhere. ensconced in the present. There are a few people out there who are on the edge of what will be, and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were certainly on the edge of what would be in the mid-1800s, and they had some sense of what was going to unfold over the next 200 years, and could see that with a kind of unerring accuracy. I suppose that's because they could, like Jung, there are people who are capable of seeing the deep undercurrents in society, and seeing which way the wind was blowing, or which way the... zeitgeist was shifting the spirit of the times and i think it's often people who are dreamers who are particularly capable of that because the dream tends to inhabit sort of the edge of the knowable and both dosti well all three dostoevsky nietzsche and jung were intensely poetic and imaginative people dreamers and and and their writing is imbued with the spirit of the dream the creative spirit of the dream and that's partly That's partly, I suppose, what distinguishes a prophetic figure from a more programmatic thinker, is that they're more involved in the language and the realm of the image and the dream.

And that's a richer realm, although it's more difficult to make explicit, you know, how hard it is when you remember a dream, even to be able to account for it programmatically and systematically, to transform it into words, how much you lose when you do that. The dream gains in... richness what it loses in precision and explicit content and there are geniuses who can stand on the border between the dream and and the word and translate the image and the dream into the word and Nietzsche was definitely one of those figures so let's walk through his we're gonna we're gonna walk through his biography a bit so so you have some understanding of of the the structure of his life and then we're going to position him in his historical context so you have some sense of what's going on in Europe and the rest of the world at this time, and then we're going to turn to the exposition of some of his thoughts from Beyond Good and Evil.

So he only lived 56 years from 1844 to 1900, was very ill for much of that time, and so managed to accomplish what he did accomplish, despite the fact that he was working constantly against insuperable odds. He was so ill that He could only work, as I said, for short bursts of time. And, you know, one of the things that's remarkable and admirable about Nietzsche, and worth thinking about from a practical and moral perspective, is that despite the fact that he was extraordinarily ill, one of the villages he lived in in Switzerland, he was regarded as the saint.

That was his nickname because he was such a... pleasant person and was so good to everybody he met and was still struggling to wrestle with these deep questions despite the fact that he was so ill that he was half blind and could hardly write and was sick to his stomach all the time and was suffering from some sort of illness that eventually manifested itself as a psychosis and then a series of strokes that killed him at a very early age and you know that's worth thinking about too because you know our you We have this sense that if terrible things happen to you, you'll turn out to be a terrible person, and that that fact is justified by the presence of your unfair suffering. And while you can understand that if you meet someone who's been terribly hurt, who is terribly ill, who isn't behaving properly, you can say, well, maybe if I was in that situation, I would behave the same way.

But the problem with that is that you do come across people, and you'll come across them in your own life, and maybe even be one of those to whom terrible things have happened and will happen. That will be the case for all of us, by the way, who are still nonetheless doing everything they can to make the world better rather than worse. And I think that Nietzsche was definitely one of those people. And, you know, I say that with all due care because it's certainly also the case that Nietzsche and his philosophical hammerings did destabilize the entire structure of Western civilization. And you could think of him as someone destructive in that regard.

I've always thought of Nietzsche, especially in regard to Christianity, as the kind of critic you really want to have around, you know, because if you're sure of yourself, but your foundations are unsettled and in need of repair, it might be your best friend who comes along and taps on the weakest spots so that you know where they are, and that might be initially very destructive to you because... It might even speed the process of your crumbling, but if the consequence of that is that you can rebuild something out of the ruins that's even stronger, then that's part of the process of creative destruction. And I think that Nietzsche was ironically, I'm pushing it here possibly, ironically an anti-Christian, that he knew perfectly well that the best defense was a rigorous offense and that... If you had respect for something, you could take all the hammers and tongs you had at your disposal and apply it to that. And it's certainly the case that reading Nietzsche helped clarify my understanding of the Christian ethos, for example.

And if you subject something to a radical criticism and it remains standing, then that's an indication of its integrity and its utility. Now, whether... The Judeo-Christian ethos can actually withstand the Nietzschean criticism.

You combine that with the Freudian criticism and the implicit criticism that emerged out of Darwin and, say, out of the Enlightenment period as well, then perhaps it's not obvious that anything remains at all. Although I think that's a pessimistic overstatement. We're going to find out that there's a lot more there down in the foundations that will withstand any challenge that we ever imagined. And I think if we do discover that, I think we're in the process of that.

that we can thank Nietzsche for laying the groundwork for that, because without the questions that he had generated so trenchantly and so devastatingly, then the quality of the answers would have been much lesser. So, for example, Jung, we'll return to Jung for a moment. Jung was very much influenced by Freud, especially in his formulation of the unconscious, but he really spent his entire career trying to answer a question that Nietzsche posed, which was, Well, on what basis should we erect our morality? So when Nietzsche demolished the structure of Western morality by pointing to the death of God, Nietzsche proposed that human beings would henceforth have to create their own values, right? Because Nietzsche also believed, at least as a young man, that God was a human creation rather than the other way around.

And he believed once we dispensed with God that we would have to create our own values. And you can understand that, at least on the surface, as a reasonable proposition. If the values that once served us have now vanished, what else are we going to do but create our own values?

And Jung took that suggestion extraordinarily seriously, asking, well, is it actually possible for an individual to create his or her own values? Because that's a Nietzschean. presupposition that we could do that. Now Nietzsche believed it would have to be a whole new kind of person that's the overman or the ubermensch, the superman who would be capable of doing that.

He knew it was a extraordinarily difficult task. The psychoanalysts starting with Freud showed and also taking a page from Nietzsche that the problem with the idea that you might create your own values is that it's not Obvious at all that you're the master of your own house. So for Freud, for example, you were essentially a collection of loose biological inclinations right id driven Impulses that might serve you as lesser gods and pull you in all sorts of directions for Freud It was lust aggression and the impulse towards death where the price were your primordial gods you and they're instantiated within you at a biological level, and you're their plaything, you're their toy, it isn't obvious that you can be the master of your own values in a manner that would allow you to create them.

And Jung took that idea much, much further, because the other question that emerges would be that even if you did create your own values, let's say, what would stop the person sitting beside you from creating their own values, and you creating your own values? Why would you assume that those would have any union? And if they didn't have any union, then why wouldn't you assume that you just devolve into constant conflict?

So part of the problem with the idea of generating your own values is, well, what unifies us? And you might say, well, we don't need to be unified. It's like, well, you do if you don't want the Hobbesian state of brutal nature to reign, because if we're not united in our outlook and our values, then... As soon as you want something other than what I want, we are definitely going to be at each other's throats. And so Jung started to delve into that, as did the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, trying to understand how it might be that, how you might understand the boundaries of value construction.

Is there a universe within which values have to operate in order for them to unite a given person psychologically, or for them to unite a multitude of people? socially across large spans of time. You might think about that as the question of what constitutes a playable versus a non-playable game.

Can it iterate? Can it sustain itself? Can it fortify itself across time? Maybe that's the kind of game you want to play if you ever get married.

You want a game that you can continue to play, but also one that improves across time. And maybe those games have a set form or pattern of form that they have to... occupy in order to have those properties.

And of course, Nietzsche speculated about that as well, which is something that we'll see very brilliantly. You can see in his own thought, the genesis of ideas that might have been the answer to the question that he posed, and certainly were unraveled by other thinkers like Jung, like Freud, like Piaget, to provide an answer to the questions that he offered. He was born in 1844. At the age of 25, he was offered a full professorship at the University of Basel in classical philology. He didn't even have a PhD at that time.

He had to get an honorary PhD from another university. He was awarded an honorary PhD from another university, I believe, as a precondition for taking up that professorial position. It was unheard of at the time, and so it was obvious that Nietzsche's brilliance was recognized. by the academic community at a very young age.

And that's quite remarkable because he was a very romantic spirit, not a well-behaved person. The fact that he was recognized by universities as a consequence of his stellar intellectual achievement is even more striking because he was a controversial person, but so brilliant that despite the controversy, he was a hot, a hot intellectual property. And those are relatively rare.

So he was a full professor of classical philology at the University of Basel and was devoted himself to the understanding of Latin and Greek texts. That's classical philology. In 1879 he resigned.

In 1880 he collapsed with paralysis and his vascular dementia, an emergent psychosis. All sorts of people have speculated on what might have been wrong with Nietzsche and no one really knows. Maybe it was syphilis, maybe it was mercury poisoning from the treatment of syphilis. His father died very young of something that looked...

akin to a brain illness, I think at the age of 36, and so maybe there was something hereditary going on. Other people have speculated that his own philosophy drove him to the edge of madness and then beyond. I don't believe that.

I read Nietzsche's works in sequence, and I don't believe that there's evidence of an emerging pathology that's a consequence of his thought. I might say that speculation about the death of God took his own foundations out from underneath him, and he collapsed into... you know, a catastrophic and depressive nihilism and then died. And that does happen to people, but I don't think that that fits with the facts.

I do think instead that there's a fundamental optimism about Nietzschean thought, which is quite remarkable, that's in keeping with some of his basic propositions, because he believed that we weren't motivated by the will to survive, but by the will to express what he called power. And he had a very particularized definition of that. that life consisted in the attempt to expend ourselves in life.

And he tried to live in accordance with that ethos, and I think very successfully. Let's look at the world in the late 1800s, in the time period that he lived, because it's a good idea to get a sense of the dynamism of the times and what sort of revolutionary activities were underway and underfoot in Europe in the West when Nietzsche was formulating his thought. I mean, it's a very dynamic period. It's at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the utter transformation of the world. I mean, in 1865, if I remember correctly, The typical person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar fifty a day in today's terms, right?

Just barely clinging to the edge of the margins of hand-to-mouth sustainability. The entire world was poor in a way that we can hardly imagine and that was starting to transform with incredible rapidity in this amazing transformation of the industrial and technological revolution that's raised the whole planet by now out of... abject poverty and continues to do that at an ever-accelerating rate. It's a very, very dynamic time in the late, in the last half of the 1800s. So we'll just, let's just walk through some of the cardinal events.

So in 1840, the U.S., in the U.S., the Western expansion is continuing into what eventually becomes California and Oregon. In 1840, I threw this in just because I was Canadian, Upper and Canada, Lower Canada merged into a single province. Canada was...

integrated as a state in 1867. We think of Canada as a new country, but it's actually quite an old democracy with an even older history. New Zealand was founded in 1842. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1845. Texas became the 28th state in 1846. America, the U.S. incorporated a huge swath of the Southwest, taking that territory from Mexico. incorporated oregon washington idaho wyoming and montana from the uk in 1847 a physician named semmelweis proposed that surgeons should wash their hands when moving from patient to patient it was an early manifestation of what later became the germ theory of pathogen transmission and of course his colleagues hounded him into insanity and death for his unmitigated gall in proposing such a demented theory at that time surgeons used to pride themselves on the on the filth on their surgical uniforms because that showed how much surgery they had conducted. And so they'd move from patient to patient in a cloud of miasma and death.

And women were killed with amazing regularity in hospitals because of the transmission of disease from one to another as a consequence of the filthy physicians who were attending to them in Semmelweis. cottoned on to the fact that perhaps all this dirt and blood was not a very good idea. And he was eventually proved right, although he wasn't around to see that. So 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published. And so that's interesting as well, because as I said, Nietzsche prognosticated that the ideas that came to culmination in the Communist Manifesto would prove extraordinarily attractive to people, motivated, number one, by envy, and number two, lost in the nihilistic chaos that's a consequence of the death of traditional morality.

Do you have to orient yourself with some form of systematic thought? And the answer seems to be yes, because otherwise the world's too complex. You have to be able to reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a systematic perspective, or you drown in difficulty. And so if one system of value collapses, then another... is going to beckon to you because you have to do something to organize all the multiplicitous proclivities of your psyche into something approximating a unity.

And so what that means maybe is that we're always in the situation of the Israelites in the desert. You know, in the Exodus story, the Israelites leave the tyranny of Egypt. You could draw an analogy and say, well, we left the tyranny of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and where did we end up? Well, In the Promised Land, it's like, well, that isn't how the story goes.

You go from the tyranny to the desert, not to the Promised Land. And one of the things that happens in the desert is that you're enticed into the worship of idols. Because you need some centralizing tendency, right, to guide you and to unite you. And so if you lose one, there's going to be a terrible unconscious longing for another. And, well, you see that manifested in the Communist Manifesto.

And you all know, or perhaps you know, of the terrible consequences that... arose as a consequence of the formulation of that ethos. It was a new attempt to develop a system of axiomatic presuppositions, right, the basic foundations of a state that was almost entirely derived, at least in principle, from a rational approach. The communists always insisted that they had a scientific materialism at the basis of their system of thought, which I think is a radical overstatement. First of all, it's not that easy to derive an ethic from science.

And second, it isn't obvious at all that communism was driven by, say, love of the common man. I would say instead that it was driven to a tremendous degree by an unacknowledged and omnipresent envious resentment. And I would also say the proof of that is in the pudding, which is that while the spirit of envious resentment taken to its logical conclusion would result in the deaths of many, many people, because the spirit of envious resentment is murderous to the core, and that is exactly what happened every time the communist... presuppositions were actually realized in any given state. You know, the radical leftist types say, well, that's not true communism, but the perspicacious analysts of communism, foremost among them Solzhenitsyn, laid out in the early 70s an unassailable argument that the murderousness of the communist regimes was a necessary consequence of the a priori axioms of the philosophical system.

Same kind of idea there that... in a phrase as innocuous as, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which sounds extraordinarily compassionate and generous on the surface, has inside of the ethos that if allowed to unfold in the natural environment, produces in the end result something that's indistinguishable from the genocidal murderousness of Stalin and Mao. And you think, well, could that all be embedded in a phrase that innocuous? And perhaps the answer is, well, not all of that in that one phrase, but in the cloud of ideas that surrounds that phrase, certainly. And the proof is, when you planted that seed in various places, the same tree grew and bore the same evil fruits.

So, 1848, first women's rights convention in the U.S. at Seneca Falls. 51, Louis Napoleon leads a coup in France. 52, Italy moves towards unification. We think of these countries as so ancient, Italy, for example, but it wasn't unified in 1852. 53 to 86, France and Britain defended the Ottoman Empire and defeated Russia. Commodore Perry, in 1853, brought gunboats into the harbor in Tokyo and forced the opening of Japan.

A great shock to the Japanese, who regarded themselves as the center of the world and were radically overpowered by this overwhelming technology that the Americans could bring to bear. That's an amazing story in and of itself. 1855, the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of steel.

Of course, that revolutionized the construction of cities and the entire industrial landscape. First oil refinery in 1856 in Romania. A lot of things happening at the same time. 59, the Suez Canal was constructed. The Big Ben was completed.

In 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species, which was another death blow to a kind of... a kind of rote Christianity, I would say, because the origin of species was the first account that provided a plausible mechanism whereby life might have generated itself rather than being part of the created order. And that was another bit of philosophizing with a hammer, although this time it occurred on the scientific front. I mean, when I was your age, let's say, I would say that it was likely... Einstein, who was regarded as the foremost scientist of the last 150 years.

But I would say it wasn't long after that, before Einstein, as profound as his contributions were, was supplanted by Darwin. I don't think there's a scientist of the last 150 years whose impact has been greater than that of Charles Darwin. The theory of evolution provided a uniting framework for all the sciences above the level of chemistry.

So an incredible... work very hard on Darwin himself psychologically because he was a Christian and he knew that there was a tension between the implications of his work, say, and the narrative that had been laid out in the Christian ethos. And it isn't obvious at all that he was able to reconcile that gulf. He was not pleased that his work was... He was not pleased about the fact that there was a contradiction between his work and the faith that he abided by.

He knew how useful that faith was in providing people with psychological unity and social purpose and suffered from panic attacks, for example, for much of his life. Now, it's never easy to diagnose someone who's here now when you talk to them, let alone retrospectively, but that's a tremendous amount of psychological tension for someone to... to bear as the first person who bears that.

And Darwin really did understand the implications of what he had written as well as understanding what he wrote. 1860, the first recording of human voice, 61 to 65, that was the American Civil War, fought fundamentally over the issue of slavery. 1861, the Russians abolished serfdom, so slavery was rife in Eastern Europe and in Russia up to that point.

It's part of the universal heritage of mankind, right? I mean, it's not the existence of slave-free societies that's the human norm. It's the reverse of that.

And the miracle, I would say, of the West is that, and perhaps of the Industrial Revolution, but also of the ethos that drove that revolution and distributed its fruits to such a wide range of people that slavery was regarded as intrinsically wrong. And then... And on a wide enough scale and deep enough so that even people who were economically motivated, perhaps to perpetuate slavery, were forced, starting in the UK, to contend with the fact that regardless of its potential short and medium term economic viability, it was unethical to the core. So, 1861, the Russians abolish serfdom. James Clerk Maxwell publishes his famous equations, uniting light and electromagnetism, laying the groundwork for much of modern physics.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation deeming all men to be free in the United States in 1863. Manet exhibited the first Impressionist painting, and those early exhibitions caused riots in Paris because the Impressionists were forcing people or enticing people, inviting people to see the world in a completely new way. When we look at Impressionist paintings now, we think, well, they're kind of classically beautiful, but that's only because we now see like Impressionist painters saw. They literally taught us to see the world in a different way, and that was very hard on people to begin with.

So you have no idea how much the way you see the world is a consequence of you mimicking great artists across time. They've literally taught you even to understand what constitutes beautiful, even to note, for example, that there might be such a thing as beauty in the natural world, and then to see that as part parcel of your day-to-day experience, that's all taught to us by great artists who are... geniuses of perception obviously and they can see things where where where other people see just the predictable they see miracles where other people just see the predictable and the familiar robert e lee in 1865 surrenders end of the american civil war slavery is banned in the u.s with the 13th amendment and lincoln is assassinated it's 1865 same year mandel formulated the laws of inheritance 1866 Meiji Restoration in Japan and the beginning of Japanese modernization, which took place at an extraordinarily rapid rate. First transatlantic telegraphy cable, 1867, purchase of Alaska and a devastating famine in Sweden. That's worth noting too, that's not that long ago, right?

Sweden's a very modern, rich, industrialized society. We can't even envision something like famine occurring there, but it's not that long ago when the world was poor enough so that... Even in relatively rich and developed nations, the threat of famine was often extremely real. 1869, Tolstoy published War and Peace.

1771, the Franco-Prussian War produced a united Germany and Italy. From 1875 to 1900, 26 million Indians perished from famine, and in 1876, 13 million in China. 1876, the US Gilded Age begins. So that's when the Americans really start to march forward on the world stage. The time of the great industrialists and this immense generation and distribution of wealth in this huge emergent democracy in North America.

The beginning of the domination of the world by Americans politically, economically and culturally. 76, of course the UK is still on the top of the world at that point. Queen Victoria is Empress of India. In 77, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria become independent.

Commercial telephone exchange in 78 in New Haven, Connecticut. And so that's the dawn of the connected age, right? It's the new internet, the telephone, and well, everyone knows the consequences of that because now you carry that around with you all the time and spend half your life looking at it.

1879, Edison invents the light bulb. 1881. Pogroms wash through Russia in the rise of this terrible flood of anti-semitic propaganda. That's the early manifestation of what of course culminated in the Holocaust and also motivated eventually the establishment of Zionism and the settlement of Israel. 1884, first self-powered machine gun.

That's a bigger invention than you might think if you don't think about it, because a machine gun makes one man into an army. That's the end of horses in battle for obvious reasons. It's the ends of phalanxes of soldiers marching forward, because all that means is you die.

It's the initiation of an entirely new form of warfare and also of slaughter and mayhem on a scale that was completely unimaginable prior to the... The emergence of the machine gun, you saw that technology really start to make itself manifest in the First World War because it started out with standard battles using cavalry, using horses, and horses were used throughout the entire First World War, but obviously with less and less success. Part of the reason for trench warfare was the presence of the machine gun, hundreds of rounds of munitions in an amazingly short period of time. We have guns now that will fire.

tens of thousands of bullets in a second. Just unbelievable, devastating force, the force of an entire army in one machine. 1885, first internal combustion car, and the Singer sewing machine was popularized. 1889, the Eiffel Tower is inaugurated, this new tower of steel, right?

And that becomes the archetype, I suppose, of the skyscrapers that now dominate the landscape of the cities. Bicycle sweep Europe in 1890. 92 is the first gasoline tractor. The Olympic Games are revivified in Athens in 1896. A sign of the world coming together as an integrated society.

Sports led the way there in some ways. 1898, the first Zeppelin airship. So now people can travel through the sky from place to place. The Exposition Universelle was held in Paris in 1900 featuring the new artistic movement Art Nouveau.

All right, so that's a bit of an overview of where we are in history, and you can get a sense of the dynamism of the times, especially the industrial spirit of the times, right? This burgeoning, widespread industrial economy that's lifting immense numbers of people out of sustenance-level living, which we tend to romanticize as fortunate 21st-century city dwellers, but was a pretty damn dismal, difficult, cold... brutal, miserable, ill-fed slog for 95% of people not very long ago.

Transcript for:Exploring Nietzsche's Influence and Philosophy

Transcript for:
Exploring Nietzsche's Influence and Philosophy