Nietzsche's Warnings for Modern Man | UChicago's Robert Pippin

Summary

Philosopher Robert Pippin converses with YouTube creator Johnathan Bi on Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism and the modern existential crisis. They explore Nietzsche’s belief that traditional sources of meaning have failed, leading to a hollow life experience exacerbated by low-level aspirations in modern projects like tech and space travel. Pippin shifts focus from philosophy to literature, echoing Nietzsche’s stance that art might hold the answers to these profound crises. Together, they suggest seeking new depths in meaning through artistic and existential exploration.

Highlights

• 🎥 Johnathan Bi discusses nihilism and the challenges of finding meaning with philosopher Robert Pippin.
• 🎯 Nihilism is likened to 'erectile dysfunction of the soul'—it's about the inability to desire or commit.
• 🎭 Nietzsche was critical of the traditional sources of meaning and saw a collapse in moral values and religious beliefs in modernity.
• 🛠️ Traditional philosophy failed Nietzsche; he saw greater potential in literature and art as sources of meaning.
• 🌌 Going to Mars isn't seen as ambitious enough—it's merely the sustenance of the species.
• 📚 Pippin has turned to literature over philosophy, seeing it more aligned with Nietzsche's vision of meaning.
• 🎭 Nietzsche's ideals are compared to tragic Greek culture, which emphasized beauty in striving, even in failure.
• 💡 Modern pursuits often lack deeper aspirations and commitments, leading to a sense of emptiness.
• ⚖️ Modern ambition is driven by low-minded goals for security and prosperity rather than greatness.
• 🔍 The internet age contributes to the challenge of creating and sustaining meaningful dialogue and commitments.

Key Takeaways

• 🎙️ Robert Pippin explores Nietzsche's critique of modern nihilism and the struggle to find meaning.
• 💡 Modern man faces a crisis of meaning—where traditional values no longer guide civilizational projects.
• 🎭 Nietzsche suggests looking to art and literature for deeper meaning, as philosophy alone lacks the power to inspire.
• 📉 The problem of nihilism isn't merely intellectual; it's an existential crisis worsened by superficial aspirations.
• 🚀 Nietzsche viewed grand technological ambitions as lacking in depth and unable to satisfy deeper existential needs.
• 📚 Pippin finds inspiration in literature over philosophy, aligning with Nietzsche's mistrust of traditional moral values.
• 🌍 Modern culture's mishmash has weakened its ability to provide coherent life guidance.
• 🧠 Embracing conflict and challenging societal norms are necessary for new value creation.
• 📅 Nietzsche’s perspective offers a lens to examine modernity's inadequacies in fostering true greatness.
• 🔄 The cyclical nature of history calls for adaptive interpretation and creation of values that transcend transient truths.

Overview

In this engaging dialogue, Johnathan Bi converses with UChicago philosopher Robert Pippin about Nietzsche's ominous take on modern man's existential plights. The focus hovers over how Nietzsche’s insights into nihilism reveal a hollowing of traditional sources of meaning, such as religion and cultural values, and point towards an urgent need for reorientation. 🤔

Pippin delves into the inadequacies of philosophy in addressing these deep questions of life and meaning, which have driven him to explore literature and the arts as alternative pathways to truth. This shift mirrors Nietzsche’s own movement away from disillusioned philosophical norms towards a more creative and artistic engagement with existence. 🎭

The conversation also stretches into modernity’s love affair with technology and grandiose projects like space exploration, critiquing them for their shallow aspirations. Through this critical lens, both Bi and Pippin unpack Nietzsche’s belief that profound meaning cannot reside in surface-level endeavors but needs a reinvigoration of core values and commitments. 🚀

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction The chapter explores the notion that going to Mars is not ambitious enough and should not be considered as an example of greatness. It questions what actions will be taken once on Mars, regarding regulations and aspirations, and contrasts this with the idea of going to Venus. The text argues that meaning cannot be sought directly; instead, it should be reflected through our experiences within the world. Projects like sending humans to Mars or creating AI, such as ChatGPT, are criticized as naive and lacking genuine greatness.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Nietzsche's Discontent with Philosophy The chapter discusses Nietzsche's dissatisfaction with mainstream philosophical views, likening them to superficial societal standards such as material wealth and social status. It emphasizes the idea that many are merely 'herd animals' following ideals shaped by media. The narrative suggests the potential for an upcoming 'Dark Age,' but underscores the importance of preserving the ability to engage with challenging texts thoughtfully and with love, which is seen as a vital task.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Nihilism and Modern Life In this chapter, the focus is on Robert Pippen, a distinguished philosopher, who has shifted his interest from philosophy to literature and film. The discussion revolves around the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had similar concerns about traditional philosophy. Nietzsche's disillusionment stemmed from his belief that academic philosophy was ineffective in addressing significant contemporary issues.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Desire and Meaning The chapter discusses the concept of 'nism,' described as a condition that can deeply affect individuals' well-being, despite outward appearances of success. Despite improvements in societal metrics such as life expectancy, productivity, and representation, many people experience dissatisfaction. This sense of emptiness is explored, particularly noting that it can even affect those in challenging and lucrative careers. The chapter suggests that the primary threat to living a fulfilling life may not be external conditions but internal perceptions and meanings.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Nietzsche's Understanding of Nihilism In the chapter titled 'Nietzsche's Understanding of Nihilism,' the discussion focuses on the shift from external to internal challenges in the 21st century. The main concern is no longer about basic survival, but rather about finding meaning in life. The chapter illustrates how periods of strong desire and emotional engagement, such as falling in love or facing heartbreak, provide orientation and energy, and are preferable to a lack of desire altogether.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Sources of Meaning and Cultural Collapse The chapter explores the concept of 'nalism' and its impact on traditional sources of meaning, which are seen to have diminished over time. It likens this philosophical stance to an emotional and spiritual deficit, comparing it to 'erectile dysfunction of the soul.' The chapter seeks to provide an understanding of 'nism' and discusses a proposed framework to overcome its challenges.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Technology and Low Ambition The chapter 'Technology and Low Ambition' discusses the concept of nihilism, highlighting that in modern times, it implies that nothing is true and everything is permissible. It explores the collapse of confidence in discovering truth and regulating conduct through shared core values. The chapter also touches on the historical roots of nihilism beyond its popularization by theologian and novelist Fred Jacobi, especially in response to the optimism of the Berlin era.
• 20:00 - 25:00: The Erotic Nature of Life The chapter discusses how Enlightenment thinkers like Kant believed that the foundation of Christian Western Society since the Middle Ages was religion. They noted that the guiding principles of life were based on the basic tenets of Christian morality. Kant and others insisted on rational autonomy in human life, which they believed would undermine the inspiring qualities of religious principles.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Philosophy from the Perspective of Life The chapter discusses the significant influence of Protestant religion in Germany and the consequences of its decline. It highlights the impact of losing religious belief—specifically how it would lead to a collapse of confidence in knowing how to live one's life. In contemporary society, the chapter identifies major sources of meaning and fulfillment, such as romantic love and the nuclear family.
• 30:00 - 40:00: Truth, Skepticism, and Tragedy The chapter titled 'Truth, Skepticism, and Tragedy' explores the concept of freedom and the superficial nature of societal commitments. The discussion raises questions about the authenticity of commitments people make, such as those to family, work, and personal beliefs. The chapter suggests that many societal structures, like the nuclear family or professional endeavors, are often abandoned when personal freedom or deeper realizations challenge their worth or purpose.
• 40:00 - 50:00: Economics and Low-mindedness This chapter delves into the intersection of economics and belief systems, specifically focusing on how adherents of organized religions perceive the prevailing global paradigm. It discusses the dissonance believers feel when the world doesn't reflect the sacredness they attribute to their religion, potentially leading to feelings of loss and anger. Furthermore, the text touches upon the ideas of how sources of meaning in life can become depleted, drawing parallels with historical shifts in Greek culture with the decline of the tragic way of life in Greek tragedy.
• 50:00 - 60:00: Too Much Truth and Cultural Paralysis The chapter discusses the parallels between the Greek Enlightenment in Ancient Athens and modern Western society, focusing on the theme of an inability to form life-orienting commitments. This is seen as a core issue, and the text draws personal connections to the author's own experiences in the technology and startup industry post-college graduation.
• 60:00 - 80:00: Exemplars and Aesthetic Imitation The chapter "Exemplars and Aesthetic Imitation" explores the concept of sincerity and dedication in the realm of technology, particularly in ambitious projects like building a Starship to Mars. The narrator contrasts this with other fields such as academia and finance, which they describe as self-critical and cynical, respectively. The desire to immerse oneself fully and work extensively on a grand vision is highlighted as a unique aspect of the technological field.
• 80:00 - 100:00: The Failure of Nietzsche's Project The chapter discusses a personal journey of the speaker who initially engaged in building a tech company with great dedication but after three years, lost the ability to wholeheartedly devote themselves to it. This loss of commitment served as a signal to move on. Despite this, the speaker's passion for philosophy remained strong, leading them to embark on a new project that reignited their sense of commitment and devotion. This new pursuit is so invigorating that it sometimes disrupts their sleep due to excitement about the work ahead. The chapter emphasizes the theme of commitment and the pursuit of passions, paralleling the perceived failure of Nietzsche's project.
• 100:00 - 115:00: Montaine and Cheerfulness The chapter explores the interplay between personal experiences and external influences in shaping individual commitment and orientation within society. It emphasizes that such engagements are not isolated to personal history but are deeply connected to the broader societal contexts, particularly the available enterprises that contribute to a sense of meaningfulness or mattering in late Western modern society. This idea is illustrated through the lens of personal passion and engagement.
• 115:00 - 120:00: Conclusion and Preservationist Task The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Preservationist Task' reflects on the perspective of a critic who considers modern technological pursuits, such as colonizing Mars or developing artificial intelligence like chatbots, as naïve and lacking in true greatness. This viewpoint underscores a critique of modern civilization and culture, suggesting that these efforts fail to achieve genuine civilizational projects. The individual in question, referred to as 'n', emphasizes modernity as a central issue in his works, focusing on it as the chief problem of contemporary times. The chapter draws connections between personal ambitions and broader civilizational goals, implying a need for re-evaluation of what constitutes significant cultural and civilizational achievements.

Nietzsche's Warnings for Modern Man | UChicago's Robert Pippin Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 going to Mars is not ambitious enough it's the mere substenance of the species it's not greatness when we get to Mars what will we do what will we exclude what will we regulate what will we aspire to going to Venus you can't create by looking for it sources of meaning it has to be reflected back to you in the world you live in the project of sending us all to Mars or building chat GPT n would regard that as so naive so low-minded devoid of any kind of genuine Gra
• 00:30 - 01:00 as a civilizational project if you assire nothing more than do a beautiful house with a view of the ocean a very nice car you're need you would call a herd animal nothing but a concatenation of ideals conceived from social media television movies maybe there's a 200 400 year Dark Age coming but what you're doing is preservationist you're you're keeping alive the capacity to read these difficult texts with patience finesse and love that's our task right
• 01:00 - 01:30 now my guest Robert Pippen is one of the great philosophers of our age but you're going to hear why he's turned away from philosophy and towards literature and film for meaning the topic of our discussion today is Frederick nche who expressed very similar discontents about traditional philosophy now nche became disillusioned with academic philosophy because he thought it was impotent in resolving one of the most important challenges of our age age
• 01:30 - 02:00 nism now nism might sound like a merely theoretical problem but it's a disease that can hollow out your life from the inside even if everything externally is going well why are more and more people becoming disillusioned with majority when every measurable metric life expectancy productivity representation are all going up why do many feel empty even in careers that provide challenging and well-paid work it's because the primary threat to living a good life in
• 02:00 - 02:30 the 21st century is no longer external right will I survive will I starve but it's internal what Pursuits will give my life meaning now as an example the best periods of my own life have all been marked by an all consuming desire and the worst periods weren't when that desire was thwarted because that still gives me orientation and energy it's when there's no desire to begin with falling in love and having your heartbroken is preferable to not feeling
• 02:30 - 03:00 anything at all this is what nalism threatens it threatens these life orienting commitments that you can't help but feel pulled by nism then is an inability to desire it's an erectile dysfunction but of the soul in this interview you're going to learn why the traditional sources of meaning have dried up and how n proposed to overcome nism let's begin uh with definition what is n's understanding of nism this thing
• 03:00 - 03:30 that we are uh plagued by in modernity nism means nothing is true everything is allowed um that the confidence we had that we could discover the truth and that we could regulate our conduct in common by commitment to a certain set of core values had collapsed but nihilism actually had a tradition before before just an 18th century word um that was popularized by a philosopher Theologian novelist named Fred yakobi in his an xiety about the optimism of the Berlin
• 03:30 - 04:00 Enlightenment people like Kant uh he believed that the the foundation of Christian Western Society um since since the Middle Ages had been religion um the orienting principle of Life had been basic tenants of Christian morality and that the uh the insistence by people like Kant on uh rational autonomy in human life would succeed in undermining the the sort of inspiring qualities of
• 04:00 - 04:30 of religion especially in Germany the Protestant religion and that the collapse of this belief in religious value would mean the collapse of all confidence that we knew how we should live if you ask yourself what are the major sources of meaning in contemporary life that that uh where people feel their lives potentially fulfilled um of course they have to do with things like romantic love the nuclear family
• 04:30 - 05:00 um security peaceableness and essentially Freedom as people understand it that is freedom to direct the course of my own life as I see fit and nature regards all of those as um incomplete n to thinks most of our commitments are really just surface commitments I mean yeah people are committed to the nuclear family but they get divorced people are committed to their work but then their work exhausts them and they see themselves as working for the profit of of others people are uh some people are still committed to
• 05:00 - 05:30 religion but they see around them a world that does not reflect back to them the significance of their religious lives they get very angry they think they've lost something that we could politically restore all those kind of phenomenon that go back to the question of the sources of meaning and the sources of meaning they've dried up this is a phenomenon NE was interested in from the very beginning of his career with the death of a form of life in Greek culture the the tragic way of life the way in which tragic poetry had
• 05:30 - 06:00 formed the core of the preg Greek Enlightenment uh life of Athens especially he saw the same thing happening in late Western society that he saw happening with the moment of the socratic Enlightenment in Greek culture so what I take nism to be is an inability to form these life orienting commitments that's the core issue and you know maybe to relate this to my own life and share with our audience why I'm so excited to discuss your book with you um when I graduated college I went into the technology industry the startup industry
• 06:00 - 06:30 because I thought it was one of the last Realms of sincerity in the west today that you could say with a straight face I want to build a Starship that takes us to Mars and hire a thousand people who worked a 100 hour weeks in total belief and immersion and so and you know I think most Realms in the west are not like that Academia is very self-critical fin Finance is very cynical what I wanted entering into the technology was that type of ability to to devote myself
• 06:30 - 07:00 to throw myself into something so I did that I went and buil a built a tech company and then for some mysterious reason three years later I lost that ability that that ability to devote myself and that was kind of my sign that I had to move on and so then I started this project I still had the burning passion for philosophy and now I wake up uh you know sometimes in the middle of the night so excited about what I'm going to do um that that I that I can't fall back to sleep but it's it's that sense of commitment and devotion that was chasing is that a good understanding
• 07:00 - 07:30 of of what nism is threatening to take away your personal experience it's it's a very parallel kind of phenomenon but I think what what interests n is that these um this kind of orientation and commitment can't really be understood in kind of isolation as something true only of a personal life history it has something to do with the Enterprises available to you as sources of mattering or meaningfulness in late Western modern society if you would imagine n considering somebody passionately
• 07:30 - 08:00 committed to the project of sending us all to Mars or building a chat box chat GPT or something like that he would regard that as so naive so low-minded uh so devoid of any kind of genuine greatness as a civilizational project not just as a personal project so these two things are interconnected uh the fact that n devotes so much of his attention to Modern culture to modernity as a problem um which he says in many of his books is his Chief problem problem
• 08:00 - 08:30 of modernity means the sources for this dissatisfaction even though they can arise personally in an existential way are are not just isolated to they have to do with what's available as Avenues of meaningfulness so another way to frame your response is uh Jonathan this does manifest obviously in individuals but there's a social cultural component to this about what uh means are about what passions you can fully devote yourself to um you can't be
• 08:30 - 09:00 a sincere Aristocrat anymore because the institution of the aristocracy is is no more um I want to say that is probably why philosophy might be the only uh devotion I could see myself uh devoted to right now is because philosophy promises to to tell me where I can throw myself so I'm devoting to finding a devotion or I'm committing to find to find a commitment if that makes sense let me ask you one question so when n talks about great hisor hisorical Enterprises he has the gerto and the and
• 09:00 - 09:30 the the beethovens in mind and and your claim is that he wouldn't think of our any of our technological Pro progress to be in that category is that right yeah I think n thinks of the modern prophets of progress as he says as athetic priests are still committed to a kind of religious faith in the power of a commitment to something like knowing the truth that that these modern technocrats and medical researchers and
• 09:30 - 10:00 you know computer scientists and so forth believe they found a kind of truth about human life a very kind of low-minded especially in terms of contemporary econom economistic Theory a very low-minded conception of the rationalization of society that they have faith in but n has no hope that will actually sustain a a meaningful commitment over a civilizational project because the the ambition is so low for survivability security Prosperity peace
• 10:00 - 10:30 not being bothered what he called wretched contentment right so the funny conclusion might be that going to Mars is not ambitious enough or what you're aiming for when you're trying to go to Mars is is is is is about your your basic self substenance right it's the mere substenance of the species it's not greatness when we get to Mars what will we do right right what will we read what will we teach our children right what will we exclude what will we regulate what will we aspire to and maybe there
• 10:30 - 11:00 going to Venus and maybe there you actually helped diagnose I said I didn't know why my sort of devotion for technology quickly died out as you said given the ambition the outward ambition of these projects of transhumanism of of space flight of artificial intelligence the reasons that people are pursuing these things are quite like you said low-minded and maybe that's why um I wasn't able to sustain that commitment the most extreme example I can think of here is I have a friend who's a very successful uh fund manager so he's at
• 11:00 - 11:30 the top of the capitalistic pecking order and the thing he wants most is to go to war MH and he doesn't he isn't just hoping for you know a small War he's hoping for a war that's going to threaten the north North America because he can devote himself existentially to it and I think this quote probably uh from n directly is going to tie together a lot of things that we discuss he who has a why can bear with almost any how man does not seek happiness only the English man does that's one of my
• 11:30 - 12:00 favorite lines of N and it ties together not only the first part he who has a y can can can bear with almost anyhow the importance of meaning and the the relatively lack of importance of everything compared to meaning like my friend the fund manager who has everything except for meeting and the second part perhaps gives us a clue of why meaning is lost the Englishman uh for n is this sort of pet petty low-minded uh technocrat right who's interested in calculating utils
• 12:00 - 12:30 the classic utilitarians as he he has in Target here and it's that form of bouis Lem mindedness that is the reason for the loss of meaning well that's an interesting example because I think what your friend meant is he wants to test himself he wants to see you know whether he'll be courageous whether he'll be willing to sacrifice himself whether he'll be willing to take risks that aren't just risks in placing a a bet on a certain turn in the market um but risk
• 12:30 - 13:00 his life so that he he can figure out can test because we can think of ourselves as committed to a whole bunch of things that we actually are committed to only through massive forms of self-deceit a way of convincing ourselves we're satisfied when we know we're not and this expression of your your friend that he's he's worried that what he thinks he's committed to he might not be willing to risk his life for and he'd like to find out is a telling example of the kind it could be the kind of I think n would say right
• 13:00 - 13:30 that's very interesting now I want to help our our audience understand nism in another way another word you use to describe life and life's core commitments is erotic what does it mean to view life as being fundamentally erotic yeah well this this goes back to the right kind of way of reading n nche wants as he says from the very beginning of his career to do Philosophy from the perspective of life and that means what do we need to know in order to live well it's a very very Socratic question and the way he puts that is by asking us
• 13:30 - 14:00 whether the forms of knowledge that we seek what we seek to what we seek to become committed to our passionate to can be analyed incorporated embodied from the perspective of life that is something like a gamble um I mean you've you've taken a gamble you've you've left your your tech company and you're doing you have no idea whether this will turn out to be satisfying or not um but this embodies a kind of perspective of life approach n didn't want to do traditional
• 14:00 - 14:30 philosophy didn't want to have traditional positions he wanted a revolutionary new approach to how to think about ways of living experiments in living like you're undertaking yourself what I'm hearing in your answer is that for life to be erotic or for Life commitments to be erotic it's from a first first person and not third person perspective EXA when I'm erotically attracted to someone it's not because of I don't know listing a series of attributes about the person that makes me attracted to them it's the felt
• 14:30 - 15:00 phenomenological experience of that and I had a friend here who was dating a girl who really ticked all of his boxes but for some reason he didn't have that sort of passionate desire and he kept asking can I work the machine it's in reference to Pascal uh you know if you know that the Christian God is the right one can you work the machine can you habituate yourself into a sort of faith and despite all of his attempts he couldn't work the machine and so that's one of the things that we mean and so when we say that life is erotic or
• 15:00 - 15:30 life's core commitments are erotic are we also saying that they're not grounded on reason in any strong sense yeah I mean lots of people know that things matter to them that they're embarrassed about they would prefer that they don't matter and they could actually take steps not to realize what actually happens to matter to them or they think there are things that should matter to them like your your friend or like somebody who thinks that Opera ought to matter them until they go to the Opera and they read L Bros and they read the history of Opera because want to be a cultured but you know at the end of the
• 15:30 - 16:00 day they go to the Opera but it doesn't matter to them the hidden sources of the things that really matter to us are actually instinctual and uh I circumvent Consciousness reason rationality reflection endorsement so this theory of life's commitments is erotic on one hand it's contrasted against a sort of Arista tilian habituation right the idea that if you just keep doing something you're going to gain a sort of eroic desire to it but it's also against a know platonic Conan reason-based uh form of uh
• 16:00 - 16:30 grounding of commitments right that we could reason to these first principles and that's what justifies our commitments so what is at the ground of life's commitments for n well I don't think nche thinks the idea of giving an answer to that question in kind of propositional terms is is an adequate one we have to look for examples in the past that are inspiring kind of exemplars of civilizational projects people like paricles or thiddies or
• 16:30 - 17:00 escalus or Sophocles or um you know the the great epic poets um n was trained as a as a classicist and so that that led him to a more kind of aesthetic view of life this is a great difficulty of teaching n students thought what know at the end of the course well what should we do I mean if it's all collapsed then we can't rely on the traditional reflective models of endorsement um what are we left with and I think
• 17:00 - 17:30 nature is trying to to to present the situation as exactly the one we have to accept and the things that emerge as kind of Virtues for him are things like courage honesty um straightforwardness authenticity those are not things that be be given a kind of programmatic right I wanted to double click on um what you said about finding exemplars in the past and let me Begin by reading a quote from
• 17:30 - 18:00 your book since nism amounts to this erotic failure not ignorance or delusion addressing it properly becomes quite difficult because as noted one cannot be convinced that one ought to have a desire that desire ought not to fail and thereby acquire it or sustain it the most one might be able to do is offer oneself as an example of such an escape as a jardian when I think about desire and what is at the core of Desire is imitation right Gerard has this idea of mic desire that we imitate those wh we
• 18:00 - 18:30 consider to have a a greater degree of being and that's where that's where the real root of Desire is is n perhaps saying something similar when he talks about offering oneself as as an example or what you were just saying about rescuing uh the paricles of the world back as these cultural models is that instead of the habituation or Reason a potential third ground for how we might uh Inspire eroticism well certainly not habituation because ni considers situation a kind of deadening of the
• 18:30 - 19:00 Spirit uh a kind of a way of going to sleep a way of narcotizing ourselves um and as we've been discussing he doesn't think that our confidence that relying on rational self-reflection will actually get us very far it fragments into contrasting camps now Gerard very interesting example here because as you know uh Gerard's narrative was that once we had sort of the Divine God as a a kind of model model of imitative desire and then
• 19:00 - 19:30 we had the aristocrats and then when aristocratic culture collapsed we we became much more interested in what other people were doing and desire became imitated of any kind of democratized bua way but at the same time we also realized that they weren't worthy of imitation and a certain form of self-hatred occurred that's in a way very similar to what n calls the sort of collapse of society into a herd animal um when one settles on something that is inspiring and once strives to realize that one has a kind of erotic commitment
• 19:30 - 20:00 to a projected way of life is willing to accept the risks we were talking about before the gamble it inevitably conflicts with what others have set themselves on a path to achieve it's agonistic agonistic and the question ni wants to raise is how much conflict are we willing to tolerate in order not to collapse into a reduction of ambition for the the sake of security and
• 20:00 - 20:30 peaceableness um he thinks we're much too willing to compromise to avoid conflictual situations and this gets to the way kind of limitations of naturee for a modern democratic or post-democratic Society n is an elitist he believes that the kind of things we're talking about um are available if they're available only for a small percentage of the population right that's very interesting so let's move to this the second part to talk about the explicit causes of this nalism which again is this historical issue so
• 20:30 - 21:00 when I read your book there seem to be two large causes one is a surplus of Truth and another is a deficiency of self-contempt so let's talk about the first one first I quote to you your book nche seems most interested in the discovery that truth in the platonic sense does not cannot do for us what our hopes had held out end quote what did we hope that truth would do for us and how has truth failed the socratic ideal is
• 21:00 - 21:30 that the only serious question in human life is what is the best human life um and Socrates thought he the answer was trying to find out the the philosophical life is the only serious life worth but Socrates also realizes that that life can be exhausting that there is no resolution most people's experience with philosophy in colleges of an Enterprise that never leads anywhere frustra frustrating that there isn't any set of
• 21:30 - 22:00 answers at the back of the book or something like that um so um in a way there's something deeply nian about the socratic aspiration to be able to live a kind of life that tolerates that dissatisfaction for the journey itself but n doesn't think there's any reason to believe that that doing philosophical debates with each other about the nature of Justice actually can sustain and inspire are alive um he his his
• 22:00 - 22:30 contrasting example is the tragic way of life the way of life presented in the tragedies where people don't argue about they just do it yeah where they have these these commitments that lead to massive failure you know tragic uh failure but the beauty of the attempt he thought in the in the birth of tragedy um could inform in the collective tragic festivals a kind of Life affirmation um and so I think the the basic answer to your question is n
• 22:30 - 23:00 doesn't believe that the original Greek Enlightenment ideal of the discovery of the truth could lead to a kind of Life affirmation that it was actually enervating it actually dissipated energy in skepticism and failure this reminds me of the fedis where Socrates talks about how philosopher is really in some sense a derogatory term because it means the love the lover of wisdom so someone wants to call Socrates a wise man and Socrates says no no no I'm not a wise man I'm merely a filos Sophia I'm merely
• 23:00 - 23:30 a lover of wisdom and you're saying that in some sense this is similar to n's view that you have to embrace the struggle but the issue with the truth seeking life it seems like is that people are too timid you're not really risking anything when we're just sitting here debating truth and justice but the tragic life or or the homeric heroes they're doers they even if they're motivated by lies they're doers is that is that a good way understand that um yeah to some extent I mean um I'm
• 23:30 - 24:00 reminded of this quote by Pascal that n loved the to mock philosophy is really to philosophize you know to to be able to be uh it's really the version of Socratic ignorance the one thing I know is that I I don't know anything it goes back to what you were saying about the difference between a third person point of view and a first person point of view we we we don't know by knowing that we're nothing but biologically evolved animals what a biologically evolved animal
• 24:00 - 24:30 should do we still have to face the course of an alternate future and decide which path to take we can't wait to see what our bodies are going to do however evolutionarily evolved they are if we think that we can figure out what a human life ought to look like by understanding the biomedical properties of human being something like that or the brain um we're living under a kind of delusion that's actually that's actually dangerous because we've sort of convinced ourselves self- deceptively um that because we know that we're you know
• 24:30 - 25:00 complex carbon based measuring devices we should live that way it doesn't follow we have to decide to live that way we have to find that a project that sustains a commitment because we find it valuable here's a Cory um another quote from your book Thomas Carlile commented that economics finds the secret of this universe in supply and demand and reduces the duty of human Governors to that of letting men alone and so a
• 25:00 - 25:30 dreary desolate and indeed quite abject and distressing science what we might call by way of eminence the Dismal science when such Sciences are called dismal in this way the point is not usually to claim that the results of such an investigation makes us gloomy or depressed the point is broader that such an assessment of human conduct and a value itself already reflects a somewhat low-m minded orientation even a skeptical reduction of non-economic value to Market or exchange value value you've brought up this time multiple
• 25:30 - 26:00 times already in your comment right before in your critique of uh the technologist today help us understand what exactly is that issue when we view the world through the lens of Economics of of biom medicine as you described what's the issue here take the the E econom economistic model of rationality um in the original utilitarian calculation it was how to promote by efficient regulation of the market the greatest happiness for the greatest number but people who had that
• 26:00 - 26:30 commitment like mill had some substantive conception of Happiness they had kind of an Aristotelian conception of happiness but you can go a step lower than that and say well I have no idea what happiness is I want a system of distribution and production that satisfies the greatest number of preferences that individuals have and if you ask them well how are these preferences formed are they formed fairly equitably non- ideologically in a non-distorted The Economist I don't care I have no
• 26:30 - 27:00 idea all I'm interested in is a system that allows for Mutual efficient preference satisfaction and you know ni I think any any philosopher would want to know why why should that be the highest aspiration we can have for a collective life I think a perhaps a good example of this is GDP right when politicians try to measure the health of their countries they look at GDP because it's one easily quantifiable metric but for GDP if I sell pornography versus if
• 27:00 - 27:30 I sell I don't books on N that's measures in the same unit so it's really committing a form of violence between different forms of life and drawing this Stark equality through quantification that's the issue right and the I think the larger issue is we can increase the amount of um possible agreement if we lower the ambition is one of nich's great points about herd Society where we're emerging into the of the last men
• 27:30 - 28:00 um by which he means we're we're reducing human ambition and aspiration to such a low level um preference satisfaction so a mutual preference satisfaction um that the idea that we can grain the greatest consensus by aspiring to the least ambitious goals is an extremely tempting one because everyone wants to avoid conflict we we want we want to make sure we live a kind of Peaceable life and we know through
• 28:00 - 28:30 the history of the wars of religion and through all all kinds of Chaos in the early modern period that with the collapse of the consensus of the Holy Roman Empire the Catholic Church the reformation and so forth that the only real solution to This Is War um promotes a kind of anxiety that leads to this diminishment of ambition and the resulting kind of moderation I mean take take for example the word elitism as a kind of negative negative word that in
• 28:30 - 29:00 which we we don't want to Aspire to be better than we are because then somebody has to be in the position of being where we left them behind right so um n thinks we've gotten ourselves into a kind of dilemma in what we're willing to do and the Dilemma leads to this kind of gerardi and conformism you've been talking about right here's another issue that truth presents to us and I'm going to quote you here we moderns do not have a culture our culture is not a living thing it is just the ingestion without
• 29:00 - 29:30 digestion of our own past we are walking encyclopedias not participants in a cultural Enterprise the whole of modern culture looks like a book titled Handbook of subjective culture for outward barbarians the issue isn't that we're not cultured enough it's that we know we don't embody but we know too much about other cultures the example I was going to give is I'm desperately trying to be religious for reasons that I won't go into I'm very interested in the afterlife and what happen to us um the issue I have is that most people aren't
• 29:30 - 30:00 religious now because they don't think any religions are are coherent I think too many of them are coherent so I grew up as a as a protest Protestant from the first person perspective I obviously studied some theology like Augustine aquinus Gerard of course the issue is I had the same experience with Buddhism I also practiced Buddhism for about two or three years and I studied with with its great theologians and it has set up a problem of uh what the
• 30:00 - 30:30 ancient Skeptics called equipollence right that there are two competing and incommensurable theories or or Frameworks um and there's no way for me to choose between those so my problem of religion is very different from the from the regular moderns a problem of not being able to believe right where they don't find anything convincing I almost find too much coherent but the issue is that they're incompatible so is that another way where too much truth can be an issue where even if it is the first person view the embodied view if there's
• 30:30 - 31:00 too much conflicting types of cultures when we look back and we see there's so many different ways of arranging Society we have much less certainty that our way of doing things is the right one is that an issue well it's interesting you put it that way because um you know you're you're almost approaching the problem as as if it's a skeptical problem of EOP poons as if you know one should emerge Superior um and as if there's a kind of foundational question that could be
• 31:00 - 31:30 answered better by one approach why be a Buddhist rather than a Christian as if there's a kind of answer to that question but wouldn't you say that most people um when they express a belief they believe something they take to be true but they don't believe it because they've been convinced in a way that has led them away from another point of view like another another religion what they do is cite their experience they say and you know in the in the Christian tradition it's the experience of Grace that there has to become there has to be
• 31:30 - 32:00 a moment where you've experienced something so powerful you can't really offer it as a reason to somebody to join their faith or to to to to switch allegiances but you to putting it in terms of equip poen is already in a way to frame rational from a third person perspective right what you need to be religious is the experience they have and if you don't have it you can't find it by looking for it so that's a that's a great push back and this is why wanted to preface this by saying um in addition
• 32:00 - 32:30 to engaging both theology I was a practitioner of both so I did have the experience of both and it's an interpretive issue this grace that I've been receiving is that Grace or is it karma and I have experienced both of those experiences internally from those perspectives and of course the explanation is very different so it's a it's a competition of experience as well as a competition of rationality of does that make sense the people I know and respect who are religious um speak of a
• 32:30 - 33:00 kind of overwhelming experience that just can't be denied it's not something they think they can take up right they can interpret one way or the next right yeah they think they've just been they've just they've just fundamentally had something enter their life that they can't deny um and they can't give it to you they can't you can't practice it so I mean going back to the pascalian response to I can't pray which is just do it every machine right do it every day and you'll eventually pray well
• 33:00 - 33:30 that's that's not an inspirational kind of project that's a deadening kind of project the same sort of thing with trying out various I mean I understand your motivation for doing it it's just not something you can do you can't try out a religion right You' you've got to be overwhelmed by something that exceeds the bounds of rational explicability I've never had that experience I don't I think there are limits to rational explicability my sources of meaning come from things like liter and poetry and film they don't and and it used to come
• 33:30 - 34:00 from philosophy I used I used to I used to think there was a source of meaning in Reading philosophical texts and actually this is a really good example of what you're asking about in the first part the sort of the actual meaning of nalism um because you can't create by looking for it sources of meaning it has to be reflected back to you in the world you live in it has to be a worldly thing I sympathize with your problem but um searching for it by trying things out is
• 34:00 - 34:30 I I think something n would find um just impossible given the nature of the phenomenon right I I want to make one last perhaps niichan defense of my position which is um n often says that people who uh single-mindedly buy into one one type of philosophy or religion just shows that they haven't been exposed to enough and I growing up in in the East and then moving to the West perhaps has been exposed to too much let's say I was a Christian in medieval
• 34:30 - 35:00 Europe I think I could much easily make the kardian leap of faith or if I was a a citizen of Hong Dynasty China I can much easier uh leap make the leap of faith to Buddhism and so that brings back to my question about truth in our discussion of what is creating nism is there is even too much firstperson truth is that even threatening to to being able to hold commitments because you see the amount of of uh uh sort of substitutes out there the way you you
• 35:00 - 35:30 phrase it is I think quite right one one can't be a Greek Aristocrat one can't be a medieval monk um one one one can't be a samurai think all these great Cur hour films which are precisely about this what happens when the way of life of the Samurai dies out otherwise you're donkey hot you're laughing stof right right right and in many of these Kurosawa films The Way of the Samurai looks so inac istic and potentially corrupt and that the whole culture of
• 35:30 - 36:00 Honor no longer makes any sense to that's that's kind of an example I think of why n's project has to be looked at within the context of his interpretation of modernity he thought he could be a new kind of Socrates in the way in which after the collapse of the tragic form of love in which the coherence of Greek culture as expressed in tragic affirmation was clearly no longer possible possible in euther um Socrates offered an
• 36:00 - 36:30 alternative and it caught on it grabbed people and the Western rationalist tradition became a kind of dominant so uh it doesn't seem to me that we can answer these questions so much in terms of like responding to the undergraduate answer of what is n you want us to do it's not what he wants us you know any individual to do it's this the world needs to be right his aspiration he had that his life the form of his writing the rhetoric of his writing could both shame us about our lack of self-
• 36:30 - 37:00 knowledge and dishonesty and Inspire us to a form of courage and honesty that he could only give us a kind of picture of in terms of his own dissatisfaction and his own aspiration but that failed it turned out that the most powerful prophetic voice in the late modern tradition was Marx not Nish right who inspired the best Minds the best intellects um all the way through the horrors of the Stalin collapse of this
• 37:00 - 37:30 kind of of confidence but in the 60s nature came back you know began to dominate the imagination of Western European intellectuals again haiger being the most prominent right so let's move to another big cause of of nism and that's a deficiency of of self-contempt so let me let me quote to you your book the most important of the psychological issues n must deal with is what he called called this tension in the bow the way a soul can be said to pull
• 37:30 - 38:00 against itself a tension I suggested was the way n understood the phenomenon of self-consciousness itself the metaphor of the bow is that there's a bow body and that might be the positive ideal but there must be a bow string and that's the self-content and The Wider that you can pull these two things the more tension the more erotic Force there will be in a life yeah is that why self-content is necess to achieve this type of these type of
• 38:00 - 38:30 commitments not not sort of universally as a fact about human nature but now he's trying to say what our Enterprise in the modern world is is to release that tension not to live with that tension and the tension is something like self-contempt as you're intimating that is a dissatisfaction with the low level of our aspirations with the low level of the aspirations of a of a liberal Democratic consumerist Global capitalist culture he wouldn't put it in those terms he talk about herd animals and his terms would
• 38:30 - 39:00 be more jardian than than economistic but um it it does have to do with um being able to generate enough dissatisfaction to generate the tension in the bow and I think part of his rhetoric is meant to do that it's meant to make us ashamed so what you're saying is that the self-contempt needs to be historically contingent to our current sort of value system right I read you a bit differently I read you is saying action itself is negation and so
• 39:00 - 39:30 even if we live in the homeric world for us to really strive to to become someone that's radically different means shedding a part of ourselves which means a self-content so it seems like there needs to be this contingent self-content for our current values but even in the right value system self-content is is necessary is that right let let's distinguish between experiencing a kind of erotic lack and self contempt that notion of an erotic lack
• 39:30 - 40:00 is one manifestation of what makes human life capable of a kind of energetic directedness that nich's psychological approach is interested in to use your own example again uh taking a risk on another kind of project uh that you don't really have any models for I mean how many people are doing what what what you're doing I mean it could turn out you'll finish after three or four years and you know you your YouTube numbers go
• 40:00 - 40:30 down to 15 right crickets a month it's a very valuable thing I think you're doing but if it's not sustained in the world if nobody cares if the world isn't interested in it if this seems to them bookish and nerdy and um you know elitist and unpolitical and ignorant of the suffering in the world out of touch right yeah if all of that happens then it turns out you have to reassess what it meant for you to to do this I mean I think it's great but you know it it it
• 40:30 - 41:00 is true that this aspiration you have has to have some resonance in the world you have to find Partners you have to find a culture that accepts it you you otherwise how do you know you're not insane n's own life is one example it's it's a sad example in a way because he couldn't find any resonance he was in a way trying to do what you're you're doing you know he wandered around the Adriatic Coast going from penson to
• 41:00 - 41:30 penson um whenever the rates change so he could afford it carrying one crate full of a bunch of books and papers and talking to intellectuals looking looking for people to talk to writing letters self-publishing his books 100 200 copies if he was lucky sold most of them returned um think of the think of the courage and the riskiness of that life something he was quite quite conscious of his major the one I love the most is what we need to do is set out on a boat
• 41:30 - 42:00 on a new sea without knowing where we're going we just know we don't want to be where we are so we get in the boat we just start sailing and we we see what we find the possibility of failure seems to be a necessary com component in both the example of the boat you give as well as my my own project yeah for to count as genuine striving why is the possibility of failure necessary well because we we don't live with the usual kind of
• 42:00 - 42:30 guidelines um you know the Northstar or the we we don't have the kind of given a a collapse in a belief that we can determine uh a sort of Eternal objective basis for how human beings ought to live everything we try is an experiment and experiments fail as well as succeed just comes with a territory take uh take social media remember the the the early Arguments for the greatness of social media was that it would democratize
• 42:30 - 43:00 knowledge it would it would uh produce this kind of well-informed uh Lively citizen public sphere and what it's done is destroy political will formation and in fact destroy the public sphere by creating these little silos of often Insanity that don't get integrated or challenged by any other point of view so um we thought that would work work it didn't it's a
• 43:00 - 43:30 catastrophe the the influence of social media on especially the young right it just didn't work it destroyed the possibility of a public discourse about a common good so we got to we got to try something else right so I'm going try to summarize this the second part when we talked about the cause of neoism one thing clearly has to do with the surplus of the wrong type of Truth and um that's the third person type of truth that's the economic view perhaps types of things um another issue seems to be the
• 43:30 - 44:00 wrong type of first-person truth and that's a sort of self-deceit and Nicha if I understand you correctly wants us to feel a specific self-content at our current situation he doesn't want us to feel okay to live in these bgea ideals he wants to motivate the in his own words hire men to create new value systems that can uh Inspire us to enter this this new age so let's move on to the third part of our conversation and talk about what nich's proposed solution is and reading your book I understand
• 44:00 - 44:30 that the ideal of self-overcoming is going to be a central part of n solution can you give us an an Liberation I I think the way to orient ourselves um is not again by a kind of discursive formulation of what we need now but by an immersion in um what are the greatest imaginative poets novelists filmmakers musicians even have shown us about ways
• 44:30 - 45:00 of living that have a kind of integrity and depth to them even in the absence of this sort of fixed hierarchy of values I think of things like uh Henry James's novels about uh about extremely intelligent astute characters who no longer have the rigid European hierarchy of values to rely on and who regard the American experiment in democratization and equality as a disguised version of
• 45:00 - 45:30 conformism and capitalist consumerism and so forth the ambassadors is a good example there you get these beautiful portraits of EX you know people who are trying to figure out how to live with their wits with their interpretive sensibilities the ship that's sailing without knowing where we're going well you need to be a really good sailor and that means to have a kind of vesse trained by exposure to examples that
• 45:30 - 46:00 show you what people are trying to do who have a kind of admirable integrity and honesty about themselves when they do it PR is another example another way of framing what you're saying is this isn't the first time even in just the West that this has happened there are times where there was great shock and change and great uncertainty and someone was able to establish a new model um and the solution that you're keeping pushing me to is aesthetic imitation right to to
• 46:00 - 46:30 observe these great models who did live in historical circumstances similar to our own and who was able to uh create a new system of values I'm going to try to ask you one more discursive question if that's okay which is these new value systems that we create do we have to believe that they are transitory or can should we aspire to create something Eternal let me quote to you your book we live in the first Epoch in which we must admit that we do not know in the traditional objectivist
• 46:30 - 47:00 or religious sense what is worth wanting or aspiring to where the danger of nism is always threatening the prospect of a constantly self-overcoming structure of valuation is what obviously provokes this danger and n's aspiration is that such an age might also allow human beings who are prepared to be constantly over or Beyond themselves Uber MCH they might be called I thought would you were trying to say was that what's unique about modernity is that we have to give
• 47:00 - 47:30 up this idea of establishing uh an eternal system and be okay with one system overcoming uh the next yeah I think that's quite right I don't know that we have to be committed to transitoriness but we have to expect it we have to um I mean I'm an old man now so I've lived through uh assassinations the Vietnam War you know Watergate uh
• 47:30 - 48:00 2001 2008 you know Trump everything I used to rely on that I could count on in being a professor is no longer reliable it's it's no longer the case that you can be a philosophy Professor the way you were 40 years ago or 50 years ago when I started um so uh it's not as if um we have any choice about transitoriness this the situation of M it made his famous quote from Marx all that solid
• 48:00 - 48:30 melts in the air and it gets rebuilt um suppose you were to ask someone what's the most significant and Salient manifestation of the implications of this this collapse I would say we don't want to acknowledge it but we we don't want to acknowledge it not in a in a kind of honest way because we think we have a a a strong Resolute response to
• 48:30 - 49:00 the possibility that it may have happened our response again I want to come back to this this phenomenon of collective self-deceit um we we have narcotized ourselves into thinking it hasn't happened so everything is okay everything is fine we've we've made a great deal of progress um things we've got problems and so forth but the basic uh the basic problems of human existence have been solved by a kind of rational bureaucracy a market economy liberal
• 49:00 - 49:30 Democratic institutions privatization of religion and so forth I I I saw a TV interview where some guy was interviewing somebody had written a book on haiger and collapse of meaningfulness and the guy said quite honestly I don't know what you're talking about I have a good job I love my family I love my wife uh you know I the job I have is interesting I meet interesting people what are you talking about this this failure of me and ABS anything well if you've succeeded in convincing yourself
• 49:30 - 50:00 of something like that how do you break through that what n is trying to do is Shake us up uh that's the first getting us on the track for this more dissatisfied exploratory sailing to new Seas without knowing where we're going risk taking gambling step number honesty the first thing we have to do is awaken everybody right to something that's failed the primary issue is not to think of self- knowledge as a matter of Interest protectionist self-observation it it it's a more a matter of coming
• 50:00 - 50:30 coming to experience what we've done to ourselves I mean one example would be psychoanalysis you if somebody if somebody goes into psychoanalysis and says um you know I don't know some I I I keep dating the same kind of woman and um it's a type of woman I know is going to be a disaster for me um but I keep doing it why do I keep doing it and the p analyst says well because you hate your father and you want to sleep with
• 50:30 - 51:00 your mother doesn't do anything for you the the the therapeutic response has to be to get you to actually live through through in psychoanalysis through transference but in in a more General sense to kind of live out in an experiential way what you've done to yourself there has to be a transformational moment in um coming to terms with what we've hidden from ourselves right and this is a great segue for us to talk about n's form n does not write in an analytical manner
• 51:00 - 51:30 that you're going to see in philosophy today he's trying to have us enter a Gestalt switch right an interpretive interpret transformative moment that reading the books will accomplish right and why is literature or the literary form rather than the philosophical form the way to do that well I mean take the difference between reading decart's meditations than reading Gus F I mean I don't think that there are many people whose lives have been transformed by decart's meditations or Liv's monadology
• 51:30 - 52:00 or or transformed in the in the positive direction yeah right or or lock second tretis or hob leviath John rolls wrote a book called theory of Justice in 1970 that was a very very smart sophisticated book rals thought though that he was doing a kind of foundational work in lending credibility to post-war welfarism in Liberal Democratic cultures and B would have this transformative effect on public
• 52:00 - 52:30 policy it didn't it was a it was a philosophy book and it interested mostly philosophers and political theorists and political in political science departments um so you know you have to ask yourself and I used to ask freshman this teaching in the core um I want you to all write down what book you read that actually changed something in in your life I never got a philosophy book I mean mostly people didn't know what to say so they often just said the Bible I
• 52:30 - 53:00 mean they didn't mean it but they knew they had to say something so they said so they said that and some of them had very you know kind of disappointing answers like slaughterhouse 5 or the the Young Young Person's novel that's by Salinger right or something like something like that right um but I don't I I don't think there's anything all that inspirational about philosophy pretends to be a mode of knowledge of a particular kind truth I mean right now philosophy is limited to what they think of as conceptual analysis what we can do
• 53:00 - 53:30 in philosophy that's valuable is make our Concepts clearer well if you ask somebody why they are willing to die for a government it's not because they've been convinced of a political argument offered by lock or hobs or rouso or RS so why are we providing those arguments to people right well because we need these ideals that we can aspire to but if the ideals don't have any connection goes back to the doing Philosophy from the perspective of life if the ideals don't
• 53:30 - 54:00 have any connection with what it would mean to incorporate it into a life in a way that would actually inspire doing it what's the what's the point right I mean you you could ask yourself what is what is Shakespeare's philosophy you wouldn't be able you wouldn't be able to say it it's so multi-dimensional and sensitive to and appreciative of um the variety of human nature that there's nothing you can summarize about it but you one of the great Geniuses and there's nothing more
• 54:00 - 54:30 affirmatively um inspirational than the fact that there could have been somebody like Shakespeare this negative view this view of the the impotence of philosophy let's put it that way is it something new that you developed because lifelong you've been a philosophy Professor right you you you you've written philosophy books on Hegel yeah yeah well Hagel took seriously his job as a university professor at a public university so did fix so did so did k to a certain extent um that they could uh in their lectures
• 54:30 - 55:00 show people how reason was actually embodied in a life Hegel Hegel said in the preface of the philosophy right the last thing philosophy should try to do is give people ideals of how they ought to live they should help them understand how they are living right and so Hegel was the philosopher I was most interested in because of that aspiration because he didn't think that it's a weaker view of the power of reason phos job is is its own time comprehended in thought we have to understand what's
• 55:00 - 55:30 happening to us there have been moments in philosophy when it really did aspire to have a kind of publicly influential role Hegel wienstein the early Russell the the Bloomsburg group all of that um is a kind of model for what philosophy but I don't think there is anything left of that right right yeah um one of the funniest uh times I had when reading Hegel was when I read that he said he wants to make his writing comprehensible to the public and I'm like okay so this is him reading this is
• 55:30 - 56:00 him writing in a comprehensible way I can't wait to to see his incomprehensible writing um this is going to be reductive but is it fair to summarize the role of literature in philosophy as philosophy is about the diagnosis the justification the the the making the currents transparent whereas literature that is what is going to take us to the Future that is what encourages striving is that right I wouldn't go that far that's that's in a way still too too programmatic you know there are things you can't get by looking to
• 56:00 - 56:30 achieve them right like you can't try to going back you can't try to be religious you can't try to be it it it it's one of those Enterprises that you have to hope there's some kind of moment of inspiration happens to you happens to you in a certain way yeah so I have some hope that in the modern sensibility the ability of sophisticated film um to um serve this role of a kind of vehicle of
• 56:30 - 57:00 self- knowledge of Illumination of overcoming self deceit there are moments of uh cinematic inspiration that I think can also be kind of revelatory I think that's actually more a model of nature than the kind of here's what we've done wrong here I'm going to correct it with these truths that I've now Unearthed about human motivation the animalistic nature of human instincts and so forth there's one last topic I want to explore in terms of the the the prescriptions I know you don't want to be that programmatic when we talk about n um
• 57:00 - 57:30 that n provides us and that's the positive ideal of Montaine so talk to us about Montaine and why he was such a positive role model for n mon had no Illusions about the corruption of human nature about the fragility of the human aspiration to anything worthwhile how fragile that way no Illusions whatsoever I mean he lived a a rich life he was an administrator Soldier writer um uh he really had a wide experience of life and
• 57:30 - 58:00 he wrote with a kind of U wisdom to use an oldfashioned word that wasn't based on any kind of theoretical Enlightenment um it was much more to go back to this issue of what it would be to write Philosophy from the perspective of life trying to figure out what it is to live a life from the what you've been calling the first person quite rightly the first person point of view Mont gives you him as he says I'm just giving you myself as model what it's like to live out a life
• 58:00 - 58:30 that I've experienced I don't claim anything for anybody else I'm but clearly that's that's a kind of guarded comment he is presenting a kind of Ideal Balance in life between skepticism and a certain kind of cheerfulness he found in things like friendship um a consolation for what he also found to be corrupt and weak weak willed self deceived about about human life um so I think n really
• 58:30 - 59:00 admired what he kept calling Hite cheerfulness um it's one of one of the most um affirmative kind of human virtues that nature kept appealing to along with honesty and moot courage these are kind of the virtues he thinks the modern world can Inspire in us as a way of transcending its pathologies and montania turns out to be a perfect example of a kind of cheerfulness that's not naive but it isn't based on a kind
• 59:00 - 59:30 of optimistic theoretical view about history or human progress or it's just a way of exhibiting an attitude towards life um that montania claims no General Universal value of but can provide one if one is inspired in the right way by it so would I take uh the delicate Balancing Act of Montaine to be on the one hand being skeptical of human nature um seeing humans for sometimes the cruel
• 59:30 - 60:00 creatures that they are but on the other hand being able to maintain a cheerfulness despite of that and I think the the the two extremes that one can fall into on one on one side it's the sort of California Mom right it's the you're so awesome you're amazing there's nothing wrong with you on the other side it's the I think like Internet troll Doomer like nothing's going to work out I think it's intuitively why the lack of cheerfulness in this Doomer type perspective is bad what's wrong with the
• 60:00 - 60:30 California mom what's wrong with being a bit naive if that means that you get that cheerfulness well I mean I go back to n's phrase wretched contentment um uh the other the other image he has are cows chewing their cud contentedly chewing their cud would you want to be a cow if you could be happy I don't know that you can give somebody an answer to that um you know there's a high price to pay
• 60:30 - 61:00 your life Narrows down to a level of satisfaction that again is possible because so reduced U if you asire nothing more than to a beautiful house with a view of the ocean you know a very nice car and yeah you could be you could be kind of happy but you're living the life of a you know what n would call a herd animal your life is not your own you know you you you immerse yourself in a kind of life
• 61:00 - 61:30 that is nothing but a concatenation of ideals conceived from social media television movies magazines you you don't have a sense that you're directing your life as but you're you're so ignorant of that you're living in a kind of dream maybe another way to to reframe your answer is that the cheerfulness of the California mom is not the noble cheerfulness of Montaine right it's it's a low-minded cheerfulness that's the
• 61:30 - 62:00 issue that's the issue at heart so let's go to the last part of our interview today and this is the part that I'm most looking forward to in your book you claim that n has failed why do you say that first of all he didn't succeed in uh and he I think he knew he didn't you could tell by the U the anxiety and hysteria of his claims that he did serve as a pivotal moment in Western history someday there will be chairs and universities devoted to the study of
• 62:00 - 62:30 zaru he's right but the issue is that he had to insist it that's what they give away yeah right right you protests too much or brags too much he didn't become a new Socrates um nobody listened to him after he went insane in um 1890 he did become very famous but he became famous in this extraordinarily unpredictable way for left-wing feminist for vegetarians for right-wing Aristocrats for Catholic conservatives for he just
• 62:30 - 63:00 became everybody who had contempt for the low-m mindedness and conformism of the modern worlds seized on nche as a as a hero especially European intellectuals uh in the period leading up to and then after the first world world war but n didn't know any of that because he was catatonic by the time his books began to sell like crazy in the decade that he was insane and under the control of his evil sister um so uh but I think going
• 63:00 - 63:30 back to what you were talking about with montania he realized that he never he never achieved the kind of equilibrium in his life he did say um the one thing he feels about his life is Dunbar gratitude it's like the uh the eternal return of the same kind of thought experiment I mean would you would you want to live your life over and over and over and over and over again and he he basically said yes uh because of the satisfactions of honesty I mean if you
• 63:30 - 64:00 suspect self-deceit in yourself it's very hard to respect yourself if you if you constantly feel that you're running away from something or you're escaping from something um you don't really have a kind of self-dignity that you want you begin to become ashamed you know and nature to sort of the opposite of that the ruthlessness with which he analyzed himself and the culture that he lived in is something that gave him an enormous amount of uh Pride so it sounds like the failure of n
• 64:00 - 64:30 is on two fronts one is on the cultural front he did not create a new Socrates we still in the mity that he detested but he also had a personal failure and maybe to use the three virtues that you said he had honesty he had courage he didn't have cheerfulness yeah obviously the question is why why did n fail in such a spectacular manner well you know as I say in the book you know I think his answer would have been you you take
• 64:30 - 65:00 monia out of the 16th century and you put him in the late 19th century and have him look around at what had happened to um Advanced Western culture in the late 19th century I doubt he'd be cheerful either I mean in other words um the the kind of settledness of the world the aristocratic World pref revolutionary world uh and in a way a world world where the religious wars of the Reformation were only getting started um um and you put him in a world
• 65:00 - 65:30 as Riven by religious dissension by um political dissension by um collapse of the kind of sense of a common pursuit of a common good um I I I think n would have said montania could not have predicted um what this new situation would reveal about human beings You' be even more skeptical about human nature less cheerful right that's the
• 65:30 - 66:00 tradeoff right although if you think of the things that consult monia primarily friendship I wonder I mean you montania had a very strong personality right so obviously that's a very charitable reading of nich's failure in your book you seem to give a less terrible fa reading of nich's failure there's something specifically wrong with his ideas I quote to your a book I must be able to see myself in the deed but also such that what I understand is being being attempted and realized is also what others understand I haven't
• 66:00 - 66:30 performed the action haven't volunteered for the mission if nothing I do is so understood by others as that act this social Dimension is often ignored in n's interpretations in favor of some heroic individualism the concern is a hegelian point that's right if you don't receive recognition that you are in fact the type of person that you think you are you're going to go crazy yeah which is what happens to n and it's so it's a good point since you such as jard fan of making this distinction between conformist mimetic desire and the desire
• 66:30 - 67:00 for recognition U the desire for recognition is not a desire to be thought well of for the sake of being thought well of as elevation as being thought well of especially as better than anyone else it's the desire to have one's sense of one's own life as one wants to lead it reflected in others one doesn't need it just for a kind of confirmation um one needs it to avoid a kind of loneliness and isolation and potential insanity if I take myself to
• 67:00 - 67:30 be on a certain kind of Enterprise that everybody else recognizes as uh worthless or without value if I can't be sustained what else have I got I mean I don't have the consolation of having a kind of rational insight into the truth anymore we rely on each other for balance for I mean recognition the struggle of recognition also means not just to be affirmatively affirmed by others uh but also to be engaged with in a way that is actually potentially a
• 67:30 - 68:00 contestatory that that somebody says corrects to balance our self- understanding by the understanding others have of us in the right way without being either conformist or heroic that's a hegelian ideal of recognition of recognitive equality and very very different from conformism of just doing whatever will be necessary to get myself recognized that's not worth anything it's like pay somebody to recognize you it doesn't it doesn't do anything for you you want there to be a form of life in which the openness of
• 68:00 - 68:30 our exchanges you know resemble something like a philosophical conversation not not saying anything to please the other but not saying anything just to defeat the other um the ideal of a philosophical conversation of as being mutually Illuminating in a way that can be self-correcting as well as self-affirming is I think what n missed he he thought of any kind of compromise with sociality with my depend on others was girardian was mtic in that sense
• 68:30 - 69:00 it's interesting because Gerard is famous for his um critique one could say of mtic desire right mimic desire is to uh desire the things to have the things that the superior model has but Gerard has a often overlooked species of Mimis that he calls negative Mimis and that's the exact opposite logic it's to be distant from the things where you consider the person with a low amount of status being is also a kind of dependence exactly there's a movie I think called The Wild Ones in the 50s
• 69:00 - 69:30 where Marlon Brando is playing this this character exactly rebellion of uh you know really cool being in a biker jacket beautiful women around him and he's asked what are you rebelling against and he says what do you got so he's going to rebel against anything you give him much like the conformist is going to agree with any everything you give him true is that a way to understand ne mean to to make a point for n n didn't find any intellectual Partners um it it was that
• 69:30 - 70:00 he was you know just trying to distance himself for the sake of distancing himself um the the the world he lived in had very few resources for the kind of radical beginning he was trying to initiate um the self-contentment and self deceit he encountered were very very hard for him to over he did everything he could to overcome it he just couldn't I mean the the world was just too Rock Solid resist isted to it so let's say someone were to agree with us that this lacking social Dimension
• 70:00 - 70:30 this lacking hegelian Dimension is the issue a big issue in n's thought is there an easy way to amend that given the individualistic character of his thought is it perhaps we can amend the metaphor of going to Sea of of sailing is it easy as to amend the metaphor and say you need to go with friends so I was I was a sophomore in' 68 was a moment of like the French Revolution or after the first world war something it just SE seemed like everything was falling apart there was a great aspirational hope that the answer to your question was yes that
• 70:30 - 71:00 that there could be a return to local democracy people could control the decisions that affected their own lives and there was this massive failure I and It produced Nixon it's just like 1929 didn't produce what the marxists hoped for the the widespread International collapse of capitalism occurred but instead of a workers Paradise we got fascism in Italy Spain Germany and Japan um so that that led to um a kind of
• 71:00 - 71:30 withdrawal from an aspiration for the public world of many many people of my generation you know many of them became social workers and local local bureaucrats and they they tried to work hard to improve whatever conditions they could improve same kind of thing with environmentalists now where the situation is so globally hopeless but there are still people who are recycling and doing whatever they can being committed but there are many of us who just withdrew into things like academic life philosophy bookwriting um and I
• 71:30 - 72:00 think um we're at a moment where the kind of aspirations that were failed in 68 uh no longer even exist I I don't I don't think there is any aspirational hope and I don't think there should be for any widespread transformation in the power of what I now regard as you know the the more correct category than conformism and global capitalism the manipulation of human life by the power of capital I don't I don't have any hope for a Marxist Revolution either I think
• 72:00 - 72:30 we're basically screwed despite it being screwed are you still cheerful have you managed to sort of brace apocalypse with the sort of cheerfulness yeah it has to do with this kind of personally transformative ethos that you wanted to create for yourself that you would I mean it's like volar encouraging became a local project is what you're saying but I thought you corrected me in the beginning when you said that it can't be a local project for of if you live in a univers you get enough of a social world that reaffirms what you're trying to do you get it from your students local
• 72:30 - 73:00 meaning not personal but there's a small communitarian there's enough recognitive community of like-mindedness to be reassuring enough to be sustaining you know in the ex you know if I if I here at the University of Chicago especially if I announce a course on hegel's phenomenology I won't get as I would at Stanford or princ 9 10 students I get 120 there's still a kind of intellectual excitement here about gramming Columbia the same way there's still a kind of ethos of what's important that I find
• 73:00 - 73:30 important but it's certainly not shared nationally it's not part of the culture anymore you get the it's almost McIntyre made this point in the 70s it's like a a return to a monastic culture our our main task now is preservationist I mean essentially what you're doing is preservationist you're you're keeping alive the capacity to read these difficult texts with patience finesse and love um that's our task right now I mean there maybe there's a 200 400 year
• 73:30 - 74:00 Dark Age coming but if if we can keep alive um some residue of humanity in in books and in the way we read books great Classics of the past great monuments to the human intellect and Imagination we'll be all right so it sounds like you very much agree with nisha's diagnosis but your personal response to this is not as heroic as what probably would have hoped yeah it's a much more reserved preservation like you said
• 74:00 - 74:30 almost waiting for for something else to happen right like waiting for a Vanguard to form or something like that yeah yeah I mean the the the key question is this this heelan question where are the traces of of reason or inspiration in contemporary Society I I I find that in some areas of philosophy in film in some areas of modern poetry uh I I I think there's reason to be relatively optimistic that something about the human Spirit you will will not be crushed will not be extinguished I see
• 74:30 - 75:00 so it's it's a diagnosis of our current historical contingent situation that you think there there is no hope but it doesn't mean that the human Spirit itself is hopeless hence why you need to preserve it no revolutionary trans that's what I I think uh Zar ther came to understand and what one of the meanings of the eternal return of the same there's no revolutionary moment which everything afterwards is going to be different than everything before which is the actually the Christian view of the Incarnation the history is divided between what happened before the
• 75:00 - 75:30 Incarnation what happened afterward French Revolution has the same sense of itself um but I I don't think and I think in Zar future that's part of the the issue of Zar future he had to give up that view the eternal return of the same means not just the return of what is valuable and preserved but also it's failure it's dissolution again into corruption consumerism conformism so right I want to explore one more way that n potentially failed and this mode of failure doesn't come directly from
• 75:30 - 76:00 his theory like the hegelian hegelian failure does but it comes from his life so I quote to you your book The surprising nian turn of that screw would be that the true realization of the will to power has nothing to do with gaining and holding power as traditionally understood except as an indifference to power in this traditional sense I take this as a critique to put it bluntly that n has been a loser for most of his life maybe not in his early life when he was made Professor but that he was so
• 76:00 - 76:30 ignored by society and that's where his resentment was channeled and that's where his lack of power made him Focus way too much on power maybe this ties into what you were saying about n's odd celebrity that he gathered a lot of people who were um who look down upon Modern Age when I meet n nans today it's rarely the blonde Beast right it's rarely the hyper successful type it's usually someone who's like n who's resentful who's somewhat sickly who's really been
• 76:30 - 77:00 marginalized from society yeah that's a good point on the contrapositive when I do meet the blonde beasts today of society in so far as there are any left they're quite content they don't think about power every day right they have that sort of aristocratic indifference that's a good point to make but I don't think I don't think it's totally fair to N I don't think he's a creature of ranti I I think he does have in just writing the books he wrote uh some sort of aspiration to be transformative in a way that isn't just reactive but is life
• 77:00 - 77:30 affirming rather than no saying um I mean you can you can we can both quote passages that confirm one one side of nature rather than the other but he did have another side and it's it's the other side that's more like uh the realism of thus cities rather than the resentment of someone like uh oh I don't know Hobbs or Deitra or any of the conc Carl Schmidt or something like that um more more like the intuitive Insight of
• 77:30 - 78:00 Sophocles of montania than than the skepticism of uh of of someone like schopenhauer I think he overcame that kind of skepticism and life denying impulse and I think his Heroes like Gerta or monia or Shakespeare that's what keeps n going so I I think you're right that there are elements of n that are what he would regard as having fallen onto the dark side um but there
• 78:00 - 78:30 are many many other elements that indicate he kept his balance not perhaps as well as montania but not as unbalanced as someone like Shau I see so maybe to conclude our interview for our audience back home who agrees with a lot of the diagnosis that uh you read into Nicha about the problems of the day and who might not just be cont content in this Pres aist project that you said you and I are are both partaking any word of advice Last
• 78:30 - 79:00 Word of Wisdom no I don't think philosophy uh is in any position to give advice I mean you you can't give someone something what philosophy tries to do ever since Socrates is to remind you of things you actually already know and that you don't know that recalling yeah recollection is perfect image for it so I think um what what you what you try to do is engage I mean it's like the psychoanalyst again you can't give somebody an analysis you can just keep
• 79:00 - 79:30 talking until some light goes on and it's a source of great inspiration that when you're teaching a class when the light goes on you see it you see it happen right that's enough to keep you going thank you Professor I hope this uh makes some of our audien's light go on I appreciate it thank you very much it's been fun thanks for watching my interview if you want to go even deeper into these ideas then go join my email list atre books. you'll not only get lectures and interviews but also transcripts book
• 79:30 - 80:00 summaries and essays all to help you understand the most important ideas in history now if you like this interview and you want to learn more about Nicha then you should definitely check out one of his most important books the genealogy of morality the genealogy's thesis is that everything you've learned to call morality equality altruism compassion moderation are value designed to suffocate greatness if you want to learn why n thought so and how we came
• 80:00 - 80:30 to hold these values in the first place then go check out my lecture on the genealogy you can find links to everything we touched upon today in the description as well as on my website great books. thank you