Hi everyone, thank you for watching this. In August 1881, while taking a walk nearby a woods, Nietzsche was suddenly struck with an idea, so struck that he spent the next 10 days feverishly writing. The result is Dust Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's philosophical novel.
In fact his only novel, which is also his most popular book. Many novelists and artists have this experience when you are flooded with ideas. If you are writing a novel, words just flow. If you are a painter, your brush just glide.
If you are religious, you might call it divine revelation. But if you are secular, you might call it artistic flow. Nietzsche's experience was somewhat similar to a shamanistic experience when ideas, words, images flood in and you have no control over it.
Kind of epiphany. It's also important to note that Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra in response to the death of God, in which he offers his solution to nihilism. That everything is meaningless. Humans have lost purpose. Life has no inherent meaning anymore.
In this video, I will try to set the record straight by arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra explains how art can liberate us from nihilism after the death of God. In other words, Nietzsche tries to replace God with human artists, whom he called Übermensch. I will also explain the three main concepts in the novel, eternal recurrence, will to power, and Obermensch, which is translated as overman, overhuman or even superman. I'll also discuss why Nietzsche's answer to nihilism is art and how artists like Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski fit into Nietzsche's notion of Obermensch, artists who transcended themselves. At the end I'll respond to Jordan Peterson's criticisms of Nietzsche.
God is dead. For thousands of years, God or gods provided us human psychological protection. protection, spiritual and emotional comfort, and a set of robust moral values and a clear path for life and afterlife.
When there was a divine power above, humans didn't have to worry about meaning or purpose. Everything was set and we all had to do was follow these instructions and everything was fine. But during Renaissance, starting in 15th century Europe, with the help of discoveries made by science and technology. people explored the world and the cosmos to realise that it was too simplistic to believe in God. The old stories of Earth being at the centre of the universe didn't hold anymore.
The European Enlightenment of the 18th century that followed brought forward a set of robust and reasonable philosophical arguments against the existence of God in favour of humans who could replace God if they were rational enough. Humanism or a human-centred philosophy was born. Then in the 19th century Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection further damaged the idea of God and posited that humans were no longer special, but just another species of animal. Nietzsche was bold enough to announce that God was truly dead and we killed him.
Quote, Thus spoke the devil to me once upon a time, Even God has his hell, it is his love for man. And lately I hear him say these words, God is dead, of his pity for man has God died. died. Now the father being dead, there is a power vacuum where the sons and daughters have to work out a new set of values to guide them in life. Without a chaperon, humans would either destroy themselves or get lost in the wilderness.
Without God telling us what's right and wrong, we humans have to re-evaluate values such as happiness, reason, virtue, righteousness and pity. Nietzsche is aware that European philosophers have replaced God with rationality and put rational humans on the pedestals. Just a side note, the solitude that came after the death of God is beautifully depicted in 100 years of solitude, a novel by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which a group of people move into a new town and start everything over, but after a few generations destroy themselves. However, Nietzsche says there is a problem with rationality. Two things can happen, it either leads to authoritarianism in which the leaders create their own values and rules and subject everyone else to those rules in a kind of self-referential way as if they have replaced gods.
This idea of a self-referential being is brilliantly depicted in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in which the protagonist thinks he is beyond all laws and morality. What does he do? He murders an old but rich woman to use her money to build himself so that he can change the world. Of course, Dostoevsky was also against nihilism, so Raskolnikov ends up in Siberia to repent for his crime and seek salvation inside the bible. Nietzsche however doesn't seek answer in religion.
That story is dead. You cannot revive a dead body, instead you have to find a new answer. So neither religion nor rationality Rationality is the answer to nihilism.
Rationality according to Nietzsche also leads us to utilitarianism, meaning promoting action, rules, policies and values that benefit the greatest number of people. A good example is the concept of democracy in which the majority rules, at least on paper. Nietzsche has a very low opinion of the majority or crowd, because for him the crowd is dull and lacks excellence, refinement and greatness. Instead of promoting the best, rational utilitarianism promotes the most.
Instead of nourishing the brightest, it holds back until the stupidest can catch them. Quantity over quality. Plato also had a similar problem with the Athenian democracy, akin to mob rule that killed one of the greatest minds of ancient Greece, Socrates.
So Nietzsche and Plato both saw the majority rule as something negative for a culture to flourish. Quantity also produces conformity. everyone thinking, behaving and feeling the same way. If you are a weird, strange outsider or think outside the box, or you stick out as most artists do in some way, you are a hammer. Artists are weird, often terrible people in person.
There are many more examples. So rationality replaces a single god with a single rational truth. Be it a scientific truth or a political truth.
But the idea is that nobody can challenge it. A kind of perfectionist rational utopia. Very similar to totalitarianism like fascism in Germany or Stalinism in Russia. Both were the products of rationality and the belief to level the world in order to create their own rational utopia based on a perfectionist vision of a single race in the case of Nazi Germany or a single ideology in the case of Soviet socialism. In essence, rationality is nothing but a tool to achieve whatever your goal is.
It could be something great and it could also be something terrible. Nietzsche's criticism is that rationality is a crude tool when it comes to human excellence or greatness. So to sum up, God is dead and the European Enlightenment offered reason as a replacement for God and Nietzsche objected to that.
Rationality is a tool, it is not an end in of itself. It needs something else to give us humans a purpose. Just like Dostoevsky did a few decades before Nietzsche. So what is Nietzsche's solution to the problem of nihilism and the absence of God?
if rationality is an inadequate answer. Tostovsky returned to religion, a sort of modified Christianity with some eastern flavour and peasant wisdom as an answer to nihilism. Nietzsche thinks that boat has sailed. Religion is an old story so humans understand the world through the prism of science. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.
If you are exposed to science, it is hard to convince yourself to return to religion. So what do you do? He instead offers art as a solution to the death of God and nihilism.
Okay, for the rest of this video, I will explain how Nietzsche thinks art can replace God as well as counterbalance rationality to keep humanity from going mad, and how art can give humans a genuine purpose in life. Zarathustra Thus spoke Zarathustra is a fictional story of a man called Zarathustra, based on an ancient Persian prophet, who is credited to be the founder of the first monotheistic religion called Zoroastrianism, which divided the world into good and evil. Later on Judaism, Christianity and Islam all adopted monotheism from Zoroastrianism in the Middle East. For Nietzsche, the single god idea coupled with binary notions of good and evil were in essence created to enslave humanity through uniform thinking.
You are either good or evil. You are either with us or against us. Nietzsche also sees a parallel between monotheistic religions and western philosophical tradition all the way back to Socrates, who put emphasis on reason alone.
Rationality is good and passion is evil. Pre-Socratic Greeks had great literary tragedies in which reason always went hand in hand with passion. Apollo, the god of reason, was counterbalanced by Dionysus, the god of wine and passion.
But Socrates and later Aristotle in particular particular, introduced truth or a single truth, which later fit perfectly in line with a Christian's notion of a single God to steer Western philosophy in the wrong direction, according to Nietzsche. Instead of promoting free thinking, it stifled artistic creativity by suppressing human nature and passion as ugly and animalistic. Only rationality and faith in God were the correct way of understanding the world.
So in this novel, which is an act of literary revenge, Nietzsche takes Zarathustra, the man who founded monotheism, single god and single truth, and good and evil, and transforms him into his own antithesis, or his own enemy. Instead of believing in a single god, God and good old moral values of good and evil, Zaratustra in this novel believes that God is dead and he is being replaced by a new kind of humans, which he calls Übermensch or Overman who is capable of creating his own values. But Übermensch, unlike being a self-referential rationalist, is an artist or very close to an artist. Zaratustra too goes through a kind of spiritual transformation.
It's important to note that Zarathustra is 40 years old. We see countless of novels and stories of men turning 40 and suddenly they have an existential or midlife crisis. Dostoevsky wrote notes from underground at the age of 42 or 43. Nietzsche wrote this when he was about 37. It's a precarious time in a man's life when existential angst comes to a very sharp focus and people reflect on life.
So Zarathustra spends 10 years in a mountain cave to gain wisdom. Solitude was quite important for Nietzsche. Also for many novelists and artists, solitude is immensely valuable in their creation.
Charles Bukowski who was massively influenced by Nietzsche loved his solitude. The same story with Kafka and Proust. Both spent hours and hours sitting alone to make their artistic creation.
Nietzsche didn't believe in crowd wisdom in the city. Instead he sends his protagonist, Mr. Zarathustra to the mountains to be alone inside a cave. As I said earlier, this idea came to Nietzsche in the woods, not on a city street. So it all makes sense.
One Zarathustra is overflowing with wisdom, he descends to the city. He tells people that God is dead. He also tells them about Übermensch, but as expected everyone laughs at him, thinking he is some mad dude talking bollocks. It's important because Nietzsche says great men are always laughed at by the stupid crowd. Disappointed, Zarathustra retreats to his cave, back to nature.
For Nietzsche, nature is the source of wisdom, not cities or crowd. Elitist? You bet.
Nietzsche didn't hide his elitism. In Western Christian tradition, humans have descended from the Garden of Eden to earth. Therefore, nature is often considered as ugly, chaotic and even dirty.
Christians see themselves as temporary guests on this terrible planet, like exiled on an island. and waiting to return to heaven. Nietzsche however, more in line with eastern philosophy, thinks not only we are from nature but we are nature ourselves. Therefore, should derive meaning not from the heavens but from nature. Life is full of suffering but also joy.
Nietzsche also criticised eastern religions. For example, he rejected Buddhism for trying to tame human desire. According to Buddhism, our desires are the root causes of our suffering.
In order to be content, one must temper their desire. Nietzsche says our desires allow us to take risks, grow and overcome obstacles. Without desires, we would not do much.
Nietzsche also criticised Taoism and its idea of non-resistance. According to Taoism, you should go with the flow of nature. Instead of going against the current, you should flow with the current.
Don't move obstacles but avoid it, like water goes around the rock. Nietzsche says to overcome and grow, hurdles are necessary. Nothing grows without resisting.
For Nietzsche, one must grow and increase power, which may come at the cost of pain and discomfort. Once Zarathustra returns to the cave, Nietzsche introduces two important doctrines based on the law of nature in order to teach Zarathustra. The first doctrine is also the most misunderstood.
It's will to power. This will to power was used by the Nazis to promote violence and repression of the weaker races as they called. The second idea is eternal recurrence.
So in the next parts of this video I'll explain each in more details. Will to power. Nietzsche was influenced by the German philosopher of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that every living being has a will to live, but life itself is nothing but suffering. Nietzsche was also aware of Darwin's theory of revolution by natural selection, which also stated that there is an innate will to survive in every living being. Nietzsche however thought that a will to live or a will to survive is too weak, too passive, and too cowardly.
To make matters worse, Nietzsche didn't like the pessimism of Schopenhauer that life is nothing but suffering. Sure, life has its suffering, but also triumphs, achievements, excellence and artistic beauty. It's important to note that author Schopenhauer was perhaps the most influential philosopher on 19th century literature. Novelists like Tolstoy, Torgene and Flaubert were hugely influenced by Schopenhauer.
Nietzsche was the most influential philosopher on the 20th century literature. Novelists like Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musial, Joyce, Marcel Proust and Bukowski all were highly influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche argued that the most important law of nature is not the will to live or survive but to grow and expand.
So will to power in essence is to make the most of one's life, not to cry about suffering and pain but to thrive despite the pain and suffering in order to achieve greatness in any field, be it in art, writing or science. All living beings instinctively want to dominate others. This is by no means a positive or negative thing, but how nature functions as it's amoral. I think power for nature was not equal to physical force.
A piece of music or a novel or watching some skillful person performing something in and of itself is powerful as it moves you when you listen to, read or watch it. It doesn't have the repressive consequences of let's say political power. but it is psychologically and emotionally powerful nonetheless. For Nietzsche, will to power can be channelled in creative way that promotes human greatness. For example, an artist producing great works of art is channelling his lust for power in the shape of a great painting, a piece of music, or a literary work like a novel.
Nietzsche calls such people Übermensch, who is not a selfish man seeking power to suppress others, instead to elevate others. Quote The creator seeks companions, not corpses, and not herds or believers either. The creator seeks fellow creators.
In other words, the will to power is not to destroy others but to bring them up and inspire them. That's what a great piece of art does, be it a painting or a novel. That's why Nietzsche centres his vision on art, not politics, because politicians want to control others like an authoritarian parent.
And artists try to inspire others to grow beyond themselves like a nourishing pairing. Eternal Recurrence The second doctrine Nietzsche teaches Zarathustra is eternal recurrence. This is much harder for Zarathustra to accept.
To understand eternal recurrence, we need to think of time and matter in the universe. We understand that time is infinite. In the universe, time never ends.
Matter, however, is finite. So what happens when you have a finite amount of one thing and infinite amount of another? The finite thing has to repeat itself over and over to make up for being limited.
Since time is infinite, but matter and the universe is finite, everything is repeated forever like a hamster wheel. That's Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, which is very similar to Eastern cyclical notion of the world. This means the sublime, the good, the bad and the terrible are repeated endlessly in the universe. Of course, the cycles are rare and happens after millions and billions of years, so to speak. This thought is incredibly depressing for Zarathustra.
How could it be that the terrible things are repeated again and again? If you believe in a linear notion of time, you think everything is getting better and you are moving towards perfection. But according to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, That is not so.
In the grand scheme of things, everything is repeated. Zaratustra finally comes to terms and accepts it. And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. So the two laws of nature are will to power, meaning every being wants to grow and dominate their fields, be it an artist or scientist or even a bricklayer.
Nietzsche would define human not as human being but human becoming. Being is too passive. The second law is eternal recurrence, that everything is repeated perpetually.
Now let me explain the journey of Übermensch, or the hero's journey so to speak. Ubermensch. Nietzsche says humans are a rope between apes and ubermensch.
Quote, Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. So Nietzsche believes in the dynamic of change and growth.
Being a human is a precariously dangerous place to be, so there is every incentive to overcome this situation. For Nietzsche, great things don't come out of serenity or peace, which religions tend to promote, but out of chaos and conflict, which is nature. Quote, I tell you, one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
I tell you, you still have chaos in you. To become Übermensch, he has to go through three stages. First, Übermensch is a human with a free spirit.
You could say he has some artistic sensibilities for beauty because in the first step he is charmed by a beautiful dragon, which starts off the transformation process. Quote, Three metamorphoses of spirit have I designated to you, how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. In the camel stage he has to carry the burden of others and most crucially learn the discipline of being a slave to the societal norms and traditions.
It's like becoming an apprentice to learn a craft from a master. Perhaps I should give you a little cultural context. Apprenticeship is hugely important in Germany.
Without some experience as an apprentice, it's very hard to find a job in the country. So even today, the value of learning on the job from someone with superior skills is an essential step in someone's career in any field. So being an apprentice is like being a camel.
You listen to your superior. You leave your ego and listen. It's like a wolf turning into a team. obedient dog.
But as time passes and he learns more, he wants to be free and have the freedom to say no to others. He then turns into a lion, which allows him to say no to the social norms and traditions. On the one hand, he is liberated from his social burdens, but on the other hand, there is a danger that he might turn nihilistic in rejecting everything, or hedonistic and only seeking his own pleasures and indulgences. To quote Spiderman's uncle, with great power of the lion comes a great responsibility. There is another character in the novel called the last man who is stuck in a vicious circle of seeking more and more pleasures and self-indulgence.
He doesn't exercise self-control. This is similar to today's consumerist madness, you work to buy and work more to buy more which is a vicious cycle that never ends. So the last man only wants pleasure for himself but not give joy to others.
To overcome the lion stage, Übermensch goes through another metamorphosis and becomes a child, symbolising creativity and innocence. At this stage, he has the freedom to be creative. Quote, In a real man there is a child hidden, it wants to play.
This childish creativity allows him to be artistic and create new values for him. I read somewhere that the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud thought, fiction writers in writing novels and stories in fact are mimicking how children play. So the process of creating a piece of fiction or art is quite similar to how children play.
So once he has achieved the level of creativity and created new values for himself, he becomes Übermensch, often translated in English as overman, overhuman or even superman, who is capable of creating his own values, but most crucially, he is also capable of sacrificing himself for others. I think the Nazis ignored the sacrifice part, instead, focused on growth only. Why is self-sacrifice important for Nietzsche?
The answer is in nature. Nietzsche, not Nietzsche, but nature. Mother nature. Nietzsche uses many elements of nature such as the sun, the seas throughout the novel to symbolise the ideal metaphor for how to become ubermensch. He is not created by God or some other divine power, but he is from nature.
and he is nature in itself. For example, he uses the sun here. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes? The idea of overcoming is in fact a way of destroying the old self in order to rise again and anew.
Nietzsche also clarifies Übermensch as an unselfish man, just like the sun who gives away light. Good. I love those who do not know how to live except by going under, but they are those who cross over. Again, the sun sets by going under by a little Nija thinks man is so contaminated with old ideas, values and behaviours, often religious, that it needs a complete transformation. He says, In truth, man is a polluted river.
One must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled. I bring you the Ubermensch. He is that sea.
In him your great contempt can be submerged. When Zarathustra talks about Übermensch, everyone laughs at him. This is expected because the sun looks small to us down on earth. In other words, great men are often misunderstood by the crowd because they cannot understand them as they are too far apart.
Quote, the higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. So great artists are sometimes not appreciated by most people around them, just as we see the sun as a small circle in the sky. The fact that it is over a million times bigger than earth is hard to imagine.
So the sun is a perfect metaphor for Nietzsche to describe his idea of Übermensch or ideal artist and philosopher. Most religions, particularly western religions, tend to see the human body, natural instinct and desires as animalistic, therefore bad or even evil. Übermensch however reverses all that. By overcoming his human or religious qualities, he no longer shuns life, but celebrates life. celebrates the body, flesh and blood, and no longer avoids danger but confronts it.
Quote, there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. Übermensch rejects the soul, pity, meekness and the divine because those values do not exist in nature. Übermensch artist. So to sum up, Nietzsche's Übermensch is in fact an artist who spends years perfecting his craft in the camel stage where he learns from past masters, sociocultural norms and values, but he is also bound by all those traditions. Then he breaks out of those boundaries and traditions and becomes a kind of wild lion, who roars.
But in the loneliest desert happens the second metamorphosis. Here, the spirit becomes a lion. He will seize his freedom and be master in his own wilderness.
In religion, you are punished if you defy religious doctrine. In rational world, you are punished if you transgress his values. But Nietzsche seeks the total freedom to be creative.
Then his final phase is to be a child again so that he can be creative. Now he has learned his craft in the camel stage. He has learned to say no to traditions in the lion stage.
Now he has to learn to be truly creative by creating new values. Since he has done those things, he is truly an artist. Nietzsche says that all religions valued soul, the divine, afterlife, but condemned power, sex, selfishness, and looked down on life, especially the human body, and earth as ugly and base.
Nietzsche argues that religious people are too weak to embrace the raw nature, so they invented soft cushioning ideas to shield themselves. Quote, It was the sick and the decaying who despised the body and earth and invented the heavenly realm. and the redemptive drops of blood, but they took even these sweet and gloomy poisons from body and earth. They wanted to escape their own misery and the stars were too far for them.
Nietzsche speculates that founders of religious beliefs are those who are physically or psychologically weaker individuals in their social circles. Therefore invented stories about gods or relied on something divine to empower themselves in this life or in the afterlife. Sort of manifesting extra prestige for themselves, which promoted being weak as something good, and supporting the weak was the greatest virtue.
Nietzsche says that's why most religions tend to condemn physical side of human existence such as sex, brute force and physical competition. Because those religious founders lack those natural qualities themselves. As a somewhat physically weak person myself, mainly my height and strength, I'm drawn to stories and fiction instead of competing in the real world or accepting the harsh reality of life. So I think Nietzsche has a point here.
Nietzsche's philosophy puts life, human body and earth above all else. Humanism or democracy according to Nietzsche also promotes equality and a weak mentality in which people are coddled and insulated from risks and danger. So Übermensch is someone who lives dangerously, dances, creates his own values and loves body and life.
This is beautifully depicted in Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba is like a beautiful soul who plays his instrument and dances his way through life. The perfect definition of a true artist.
Not only an artist who creates art or writes novel, but he is also an artist of life itself. He is spontaneous, a combination of the Apollon rationality and a Dionysian passion. Nietzsche himself had an example of ubermensch in mind.
His close friend and a brilliant composer Richard Wagner though later he criticised him for his anti-artistic sentiments, mistaken religious beliefs and his rough music later on. I agree with Nietzsche, sometimes it's hard to listen to Wagner's music. Germans are blessed with so many amazing musicians and composers, and music sits very well with science, especially mathematics. I am no expert in music as an art form, so here I'll talk about literature, fiction in particular, which is an art form. I'll discuss one of the greatest archetypal Nietzschean ubermensch artists, the French novelist Marcel Proust.
I've spoken about him in two of my previous videos, so I will not talk too much here. But I'll say this, Proust believed exactly as Nietzsche outlined in his novel. Proust spent decades trying to be an artist.
To bring it full circle, Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, which I think is the greatest novel in the whole world, is about childhood, creativity and artistic legacy. Proust spent his entire life in pursuit of artistic excellence, a sacrifice for humanity. Proust did something so wonderful in his novel, his protagonist managed to discover something magical to defeat the decaying power of time.
Involuntary memory is triggered when you hear a sound, taste, touch or smell something from your past and that's when your past self and your present self melt into one and time stands still. The way Proust presents this is magical, powerful and un- eye-opening. Another two novelists that I think came close to Nietzsche's idea of Ubermensch or Franz Kafka who was incidentally born in the same year as Das Spogesortus-Strauss published in 1883. And the other author I can think of is Charles Bukowski. Just like Bruce, they dedicated their lives to creating art, often ridiculed and lived tough lives because they went against the current. I've discussed all these three novelists extensively in separate videos.
Also important to note that all these three novelists were influenced by the philosopher Nietzsche. In fact, I am going so far as to say that Nietzsche is perhaps the most influential philosopher among novelists and literature as a whole, especially in the 20th century. Nietzsche's own style of writing is closer to literature than philosophy.
I think he was the most artistic philosopher, which on the one hand makes him incredibly creative but on the other hand makes him quite frustrating because he is open to all kinds of interpretations. A good example is how the Nazis used his writings to promote fascism in Germany. Thus Spock's Zarathustra itself is a beautiful piece of German literature. Nietzsche's use of German language is incredible. It's also seen as a novel that resembles a piece of music, with its rhythm and tempo mimicking an opera.
So Nietzsche not only was a great admirer of music, here he also deployed music in his writing. Another example I think is Gustave Flaubert who similarly used words as if they were musical notes. There are also many word plays such as the use of over and under which is hard to translate into other languages. That's why we have many versions of Übermensch in English as overman, overhuman and even superman. Jordan Peterson's criticism.
Jordan Peterson in a video puts forward a few points of contention with Nietzsche's Übermensch. He argues that Freud and Jung's psychoanalytical works expose a few holes in Nietzsche's philosophy. First, Jung's multiple personalities mean each individual hosts many personalities which manifest themselves at different times. This also creates internal contradiction as you can hold contradictory views, values and so forth.
I think Nietzsche agrees with internal contradictions because he didn't regard order as fundamental. He in fact criticizes religions and rationality for focusing too much on order and conformity. For Nietzsche, chaos creates stars, so contradictions are necessary conditions for Übermensch to transform from.
Übermensch is not the result of happiness or containment, but the result of chaos and contradictions within an artist. If you compare artists and novelists with the general public, you will find more artists who have great many personality flaws, and in some cases you might term it as madness. Peterson's second point is that human values are not created but discovered. I think Nietzsche agrees with that.
To explain this, let me give you an example. Many great artists and novelists talk about a kind of revelation when it comes to their creative works. In fact, Nietzsche himself got the idea of this novel, thus spoke Zarathustra, somewhat suddenly and almost struck him like some kind of moment of magic. Many fiction writers go into their own den without knowing much what they might write about. We call it discovery writing.
So fiction writing in itself is discovering. This is partly conscious and partly subconscious. Art is partly created and partly discovered in the subconscious. In fact, Übermensch goes through a journey of self-discovery and self-actualization.
Quote, You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than ever. any of the apes. Nietzsche says apes came down the trees and turned into humans and now humans turn to the mountains for some solitude to discover what's underneath the conscious mind.
So we have inherited most of what makes us human from apes and worms. And those qualities are still present in our deep subconscious, which once discovered, artists turn them into a beautiful piece of art or a painting or a novel or whatever else. If we evaluate today's world, to some extent we live in a kind of Nietzschean world. We admire great artists, artisans, scientists, craftspeople who excel in their fields so much so that their creation or process of creation itself is powerful and artistic.
But we value those creations based on good and bad. Certain arts are good, thus promoted. Certain arts are bad, therefore ignored or even banned. Nietzsche had issues with these morality of good and bad.
So the moral value of society is like a box that allows certain excellence to flourish and certain arts to be condemned and censored. Like growing a watermelon inside a square box, it takes the shape of the box, therefore morality itself restricts artistic creativity. Nature wanted a natural freedom or instinctive or impulsive freedom, letting nature take its own course without religious punishment or moral outrage. Societal values of good and evil shouldn't limit human possibilities.
Today our dominant value is equality. We are born with certain physical aspects, such as height, looks, cognitive ability, physical specifications, health and so on, which determine our ability to excel in certain areas. So our belief in equality is not genuine and somewhat superficial. So for Nietzsche, humans should be able to freely prove probe like tendrils of a climbing plant, without the fear of religious punishment or moral punishment.
Of course, Nietzsche was aware that individuals were not equal and not everyone is capable of becoming ubermensch. Only a select few were capable of creating art that transcends themselves. For Nietzsche, there is room for those who return to religion, and of course he calls them as weaker humans, but there is room for them nonetheless.
So not everyone can become great in their fields, be it music, literature, Only a handful are able to create something sublime. So Nietzsche is an elitist in his views and he wants artists to have the freedom to move beyond good and evil in morality of his age. That way they can truly create genuine, profound and great art that stands the test of time. I guess this idea of greatness can apply to any field, be it cooking or YouTube.
You can achieve greatness by aiming high. So to conclude this video, in the absence of God, Nietzsche offers art and philosophy as a solution to the nihilistic tendencies of modernity. The reason for that is that rationality alone cannot give our lives meaning. But rationality combined with human passion that can give our life a deeper meaning and a purpose.
Reason and science provide us with physical comfort. But they cannot provide us with the same solid existential or psychological anchor. But art and passion can.
Great artists like Proust, Kafka and Bukowski symbolized Nietzsche's Übermensch who overcame themselves to dedicate their lives through pain and suffering to the service of art that benefited and inspired millions of their readers around the world. In other words, we use their novels as a mirror to see ourselves. And some even find themselves through these artists'work which also inspire them to follow in their footsteps.
Thank you for watching.