[0:04]So I'm going to read something that Nietzsche wrote in the first part of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a section called the prejudices of philosophers.
[0:17]And it's a really good example of the density of this book.
[0:23]One of the ways of conceptualizing Beyond Good and Evil, and I think this is true for most great works of it's true of most great works is that
[0:36]the author of the work collects, unconsciously collects patterns from his or her interaction with the world.
[0:49]And then gives them an initial formulation.
[0:55]And the patterns can be deep and multi-level.
[1:01]And the initial formulation translates them into not so much ideas as into the seeds of future ideas.
[1:09]And the more poetic the author happens to be, the more the case that his or her writings contain within it the seeds of future ideas.
[1:21]And the romantic philosophers or authors, and I think Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are are in some sense foremost among them are particularly uh notable for their ability to do exactly that.
[1:34]Now in this particular paragraph this particular paragraph not only serves as an example of that, but it also serves as a self-conscious reflection on that, because Nietzsche is writing a paragraph here that is full of the seeds of of ideas that will actually bloom and flower to a great degree in the 20th century.
[1:57]But while he's simultaneously revealing these those ideas, he's also telling you exactly how he's doing it and how it is that philosophers do it.
[2:05]So it's a a spectacular accomplishment.
[2:10]I'm going to read it probably phrase by phrase and then take it apart because it's so dense and beyond good and evil is like that.
[2:18]It's Nietzsche, when Nietzsche was writing Beyond Good and Evil, he wasn't very well.
[2:24]And because of that, he had to spend a lot of time thinking and not very much time writing.
[2:29]And because he was also brilliant beyond comprehension, his ability to distill what he was thinking into incredibly rich phrases is, I think in some sense, it's beyond parallel.
[2:43]I mean, often if I'm reading a book, if it has any utility at all, I'll mark it.
[2:49]Usually, I fold over the top of the page or sometimes put a yellow sticky note on it if if I find a place where there's an idea that's worth returning to that that's um, that's particularly worth understanding.
[3:02]And you can't do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil, because what ends up happening is you have to mark every sentence.
[3:08]And obviously, marking every sentence isn't any better than not marking any sentences at all.
[3:17]So, I guess I also might as well tell you why it is worth bothering with a book like this at all.
[3:30]Because it's a very difficult book, and it it's also the sort of book that will rattle you up.
[3:36]So, Nietzsche is is very interested in the problem of value.
[3:40]And the problem of value fundamentally is not the problem of what is the world made of, or even how does the world function, which are more in some sense, more specifically scientific questions, but how is it that you should conduct yourself in the world?
[3:59]How should you act? And people act towards aims in a sense, because we're active creatures and we're moving from one point to another.
[4:10]We're moving towards things that we want, and that means that we're guided by our desires.
[4:17]And we're not only guided by desires in so far as we have individual desires, we're guided by the structure that consists of how those desires are related to one another.
[4:30]So for example, if you have a room full of people, say a room full of children, they're active and they're each pursuing their individual desires, but at some point, they may choose to organize themselves into a game.
[4:45]And if they organize themselves into a game, what they're doing for all intents and purposes is producing a little society, a little micro society.
[4:56]And within that micro society, they're deciding what desires will be currently expressed and how they'll exist in relationship to one another, and that means that they can cooperate without too much conflict.
[5:07]And that they can jointly move towards a joint aim without, and and and gather all the benefits that might be associated with that.
[5:22]And that might be the accomplishment of the aim, whatever it is, but it also might be just the enjoyment that's to be had in the pursuit of that activity.
[5:30]Now, people do that socially, because we have to do that in order to get along with other people, because our desires have to be melded with those of other people.
[5:42]But we also do it psychologically, and those two things exist in a dance, because as I'm interacting with other people, the demands of the fact that we're interacting make require each of us to arrange our desires in a way that's acceptable to everyone else.
[6:01]But at the same time, while we're doing that, we're also observing the process by which those desires are ordered, and then we internalize that process and use that to order our own desires.
[6:14]And then so there's a constant mutually informative dance between the individual and the group, and the culmination of that is the organization of society and the simultaneous organization of the psyche.
[6:27]And it's that process that Nietzsche is talking about in these paragraphs.
[6:33]Now, you might ask yourself, well, what's the utility of articulating such things and conceptualizing them and understanding them?
[6:44]And the answer in some ways is straightforward.
[6:49]If you don't want to run a fowl of your own desires, you have to organize them, because some of them are short-term and some of them are medium-term and some of them are long-term.
[6:59]And some of them aim at this, and some of them aim at that, and it isn't necessarily the case that those desires allow for mutual fulfillment.
[7:08]So for example, maybe you're very interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with someone, but you're also very interested in having a family and some stability in your life.
[7:17]Or maybe you're interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with a whole sequence of people, but you're also interested in having a family and stabilizing your life.
[7:26]It's not obvious that those desires can exist in the same universe without producing what you might think about as a war.
[7:35]And some of that might be a psychological war, but some of it's also going to be a war that actually occurs in existence, well you're fighting through the contradictory consequences of wanting to pursue many people and formerly a stable relationship with one person.
[7:54]Now, part of the reason that you want to think about these sorts of things is because if you think about them and get your thoughts and your value system intelligently and coherently and cogently laid out, then when you act out that value system in the world, you're going to run into less conflict and less uncertainty and less misery, and you're going to have a higher probability of getting what it is that you want.
[8:24]But you're also going to have a higher probability of getting what you want in a way that allows you to cooperate with other people without entering into too much conflict with them.
[8:35]And so, in some sense, the purpose that you think, the reason that you think, or the purpose of thinking is so that you can sort out how you're going to move forward in the world without having to directly run headlong into all the obstacles that you might run into if you were doing such a thing blindly.
[8:56]And so then you might ask yourself, why would you bother reading philosophy or the philosophy written by someone who's great?
[9:04]And the answer to that is that they can help you think these things through in a manner that you would not be capable of doing on your own, you know, because Nietzsche, I mean, it's it's difficult to estimate how intelligent Nietzsche was, but I suspect he was perhaps one in a billion, which would put him far beyond the 99.999th percentile.
[9:30]And there's a massive difference between the ability of people to think as you move farther and farther out into the extremes of intelligence.
[9:41]And when you have the writings of someone who's one in a billion, then you can interact with those writings in a way that enables you if you'll put the time in to benefit from the spectacular fact of that intelligence.
[9:56]Nietzsche was a full professor by the time he was 24, at a time when that when that even have to write his dissertation.
[10:02]They just made him a full professor at a time where that was that never happened.
[10:14]So this is what he has to say in The Prejudices of Philosophers, which is the first chapter of the book Beyond Good and Evil.
[10:23]It is gradually become clear to me.
[10:27]What every great philosophy up till now has consisted of, namely the confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
[10:40]Well, that's a deceptive. That's a deceptively simple sentence, even though it's not a particularly simple sentence, because it it stands on its head what people generally assume about the process of thinking.
[10:57]You generally think that when you're thinking, you're thinking about, as I mentioned before, the structure of the objective world, but Nietzsche is is making an entirely different point here.
[11:06]And what he's fundamentally doing is treating the philosopher not as a rational being, but as a living being.
[11:14]And there's a big difference between being a rational being and being a living being, because if you're a living being, your primary goal is to do whatever it is that furthers your life.
[11:22]And if you're a rational being, then your primary goal is to do whatever it is that a rational being might do.
[11:30]And you could say that a living being should first and foremost be a rational being, and in some sense, that's the message of the of the Western Enlightenment.
[11:38]But it's by no means self-evident that that's the case, and it's certainly not something that Nietzsche Nietzsche doesn't believe that people are rational beings, not certainly not primarily.
[11:51]And more importantly, he isn't exactly convinced that they should be. So, so for example, one of Nietzsche's most famous maxims is that truth serves life.
[11:59]And that's a very different different idea than the purpose of truth says the accurate representation of the objective world.
[12:07]Those aren't the same thing at all. Now, you could ask, well, what does it mean for truth to serve life, and if you construe truth that way, what would truth look like?
[12:15]And, you know, the mere statement that truth should serve life doesn't offer you the answers to those questions, but, but it it's the beginning of a different metaphysics.
[12:28]And in some sense, a metaphysics, which is say, the universe within which a philosopher might operate, a metaphysics is the initial structure of presuppositions within which a view of the world is organized.
[12:47]One presupposition might be human beings are rational and that we're attempting to formulate and improve our sense of the objective world, our formulation of the objective world.
[12:58]And another would be that human beings aren't rational, we're irrational, and that we're what we're motivated to do is to live, whatever that means, and that the purpose of our thinking and our philosophy should be to facilitate our living.
[13:11]And that's Nietzsche's that's one of the foundation blocks of Nietzsche's philosophy.
[13:20]So he's a moral philosopher fundamentally, because morality is about values, and values essentially, values are you could say values are what you aim for, but it's more complicated than that.
[13:31]Values actually constitute the lens through which you view the world.
[13:37]So it's partly what you're aiming at, but it's also partly your conception of who you are now and where you are, and it's also partly your conception of how you're going to get to where it is that you want to be.
[13:48]And it's also partly the psychological system that you use to parse up the world so that it reveals to you the pathway that you could take to get to what you want.
[14:00]Value is all of that, and then it's more than that, because you could say that you have a value, which contains all of that, but then you can say that you have a set of values, which is the arrangement of all of that, and then you could say that you have a set of values, that's the arrangement of all of that that you have to arrange with other people.
[14:17]And then you could say that you have all that, and you have to arrange it with other people, and you have to arrange it across different spans of time, because what you want today and what you want next week, and what you want next month are not necessarily the same thing, and one does not necessarily lead into the other.
[14:34]So to be a moral philosopher is to examine how that, what that system is and how it operates, and how it came about.
[14:41]Now, one of the things that Nietzsche says is it is gradually become clear to me, what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of, namely the confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
[14:54]So his claim fundamentally is that no matter what the philosopher thinks he's doing, well, he's writing philosophy, what he's actually doing is revealing and articulating his being.
[15:08]And then you might say, well, where did that being come from?
[15:11]And the answer to that is, well, partly it's, you could consider it a biological function in so far as that we have value structures that are built into us, that are the process, we would say the process of a very long evolutionary history.
[15:25]But because you're also a cultural phenomena and because the manner in which you've arranged your values and your desires has been conditioned to the last degree by the process of enculturation that you were subjected to, when you confess in an autobiographical manner and articulate that, what you're also doing is recapitulating the entire structure of your culture.
[15:53]It's in you. And you might say, well, where is it in you, and that that and what does in you mean?
[15:58]Part of it means is that you act out a pattern of behavior, and that pattern of behavior is like a a dance that someone is manifesting to a symphonic score.
[16:07]It's unbelievably complicated.
[16:10]And it has its psychological elements, and some of those are conscious, and some of them aren't.
[16:15]Some of them are just implicit and embedded in the way you act and the way you perceive, and what the philosopher is attempting to do is to reveal those to himself and to articulate them so that the entire structure can be analyzed.
[16:28]Well, so Nietzsche's first proposition is that when a philosopher is thinking, that what he's doing is not thinking, it's revealing himself in an autobiographical sense under the guise of rational thinking.
[16:42]And so then it becomes something more like a story.
[16:45]And well, and he covers all that in the first two phrases.
[16:50]So that gives you some example, some indication of what this book is like.
[16:56]A species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
[17:03]Well, that's a more complicated idea, too, because you might say, well, why would someone be driven in an involuntary way, and an unconscious way to describe their autobiography?
[17:15]And that's a very complicated question. It might be that one of the reasons that people value one another is because we engage in the process of sharing deeply autobiographical information.
[17:30]You tell me your story, and I tell you my story, and you might say, well, why why do we even bother with such things?
[17:36]And the answer to that is, well, if you can tell me about the pain and tragedy that you've encountered, then that gives me a better way of that gives me a better vision of the dangers of the world without actually having to expose myself to those dangers except in simulation.
[17:51]I might feel sorry for you, I might feel bad about your tragic experiences, but I'm not bleeding for them.
[17:57]And then there's always the possibility that you'll also tell me how you solved your problem, in which case I can either avoid that problem entirely, or if I do encounter it, I can solve it without having to go through maybe it took you decades to formulate your solution to that problem.
[18:10]And you can tell me your story, and then I have the information.
[18:14]And so that's part of what human beings are always trading. That's why we talk to each other. That's why we can communicate.
[18:20]And so Nietzsche would say, well, it's it's involuntary unconscious, involuntary and unconscious, he's alluding to the fact that that proclivity is so deeply embedded in people that that that desire to to make an autobiographical recounting, that it serves as the kind of motivation that we don't question for doing almost everything that we do.
[18:45]So, you know, I mean, people do such things as attend movies and plays, and they usually do that happily, especially if the movie or the play is of a high quality.
[18:56]And the same thing happens when people are reading novels.
[19:00]They're attracted to such things. They have a built-in value, and it's very rarely the case that people will ever question why it is that they're doing such things.
[19:07]In fact, you see this quite commonly with students who are first introduced to the study of literature.
[19:13]The the introduction of the idea that you should analyze what it is that you're engaged in when you're reading, actually comes as unwelcome news to most people who are inclined towards fiction, because they don't want to interfere with the process of engagement, you know, automatic, unconscious engagement with the material by detaching themselves and having to think about what they're doing.
[19:39]So that's why it's involuntary and unconscious.
[19:43]It's it's it's one of the things within which thought operates, rather than one of the things on which thought operates.
[19:53]Then he says, the moral or immoral purpose in which every philosophy has constituted, sorry, the moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ, out of which the entire plant has always grown.
[20:09]Well, that's a hell of a thing to say, too, because what Nietzsche is alluding to there, in some sense, is that
[20:22]the philosopher can't help but tell you what they're up to.
[20:32]Even though they might not know.
[20:35]And this is something that Jung, because Jung was a Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, was a great student of Nietzsche.
[20:43]And Jung came to believe that we all inhabited stories, that the stories were the stories we inhabited were actually the structures of value within which we lived.
[20:52]And that those stories essentially had an ethic or a moral, and then you you can start thinking about what the ethics and the morals might be.
[21:02]And you kind of have some sense of that because there's there's comedic stories and tragic stories, and there's evil characters and good characters and so forth.
[21:08]Those are archetypal characters, but part of the point that Nietzsche is attempting to make here is that the philosopher is in fact aiming at something with his life.
[21:17]With all of his actions, he might not even know what it is.
[21:22]But partly what he's doing in his attempt to philosophize is to articulate that and reveal it to himself and to other people.
[21:31]So then the question becomes, well, what is it that the person is up to?
[21:35]And I would say, in some sense, that's the ultimate question, and so Nietzsche here in this paragraph, it is also dealing with the with the ultimate question in life, which might be, well, to what is your life aimed?
[21:49]And you might say, well, it's not aimed at anything. It's I don't know. I don't seem to have any coherent set of beliefs. I don't know what I believe. I don't believe in anything even.
[21:56]But that's not the case, because if you didn't believe in anything, you couldn't see.
[22:01]You have to believe in something to be able to see, because you point your eyes at things, and you can't organize your vision without having an aim.
[22:08]And so the very act of interacting with the world presupposes an ethic.
[22:12]And then all those micro ethics that you contain within you are organized into some sort of structure, either badly or well, and that structure roughly has an aim.
[22:24]And you might know it, and you might not, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
[22:27]So, so another thing that Nietzsche is alluding to is that you believe things, whether or not you think you believe them.
[22:34]In fact, believing them and knowing you believe them aren't even the same thing.
[22:38]And so that people believe all sorts of things that they don't know about, and that partly what they're doing when they're doing philosophy is to try to figure out what those things are.
[22:48]And you know, and you can also ask yourself, well, where did they come from? Well, they partly came from you, but you you're an old thing.
[22:55]Your physical form is three and a half billion years old, and you're the process of all that.
[23:01]All the death and struggling that went along the entire course of that three and a half billion years is you carry that with you.
[23:10]And then on top of that, inside you is the consequence of the entire cultural history of complex life.
[23:17]That's all inside you, too. And then on top of that, some of that's articulated more or less.
[23:23]Some of it's acted out, dramatized, represented in fiction and that sort of thing.
[23:27]And then some of it's articulated. But there's way more at the bottom than is fully articulated.
[23:33]And so God only knows what you're up to.
[23:37]And then you might say, well, who cares? Well, the problem with that is that you care because first of all, that's the definition of carrying, and second of all, that determines the the way that you'll move through your life.
[23:50]And everything that happens to you that's good or evil, or good or bad, is going to be a consequence of the manifestation of that ethic in the world.
[24:00]So, and now Nietzsche's saying something else, too, when he says, the moral or immoral purpose in which every philosophy has constituted, sorry, the moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ, out of which the entire plant has always grown.
[25:27]That's another like Beyond Good and Evil, to think of it as a book is a really foolish framework.
[25:39]You know, because this is what a book is when people think about a book.
[25:43]You know, it's like a material entity, it's it's 8 in high and 6 in wide and 2 in thick, and weighs a pound, and it's made out of paper, and it's between two two covers.
[25:57]You know, and that's a materialist, that's the a priori sort of axiomatic view of a book.
[26:03]But Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil isn't a book at all.
[26:07]It's a series of bombs, and each sentence is a bomb, and each sentence blows things up that people don't even know exist.
[26:16]And so one of the things with this sentence, for example, here's how he's conceptualizing human being.
[26:21]So the first thing he talks about is that the there are fundamental impulses of human beings.
[26:28]Okay, so the that brings a question is, what do you mean by impulse?
[26:31]And what do you mean by fundamental?
[26:35]And both of those are extraordinarily complicated problems.
[26:39]So an impulse, you can think of an impulse as a drive, you can think about it as a biological instinct.
[26:46]You could think about it as an aim or a goal.
[26:49]You could think about it as an active will, like there's there's endless questions that that hang off that question.
[26:56]But we could start with the idea that we perhaps can't define it, but we are willing to go with the proposition that people do have impulses.
[27:05]And I think maybe that's manifest to you more most particularly when you're attempting to do something voluntarily, and something involuntarily interferes with that.
[27:10]You know, so maybe you're sitting down to to try to get some work done, and the work is not of any particular intrinsic interest, but you regard it as necessary, you know, necessary element in some higher order scheme.
[27:26]And so you're attempting to organize yourself so you will, in fact, concentrate on that particular relatively mundane activity.
[27:37]But what you find when you sit down to actually engage in that is you can't do it.
[27:42]You have to go do the dishes, or you have to clean under the bed, or you have to have a sexual fantasy, or you or or there's some other thing that you could do that's useful, but that you wouldn't normally do, that you'll go do instead, or that you fall asleep, or that you get hungry.
[27:56]Or like there's an endless number of that's called impulses that might arise to interfere with your conscious movement forward.
[28:04]Well, exactly what are those things?
[28:09]Well, Nietzsche certainly conceptualizes the human being as a place where those things live.
[28:16]And he does mean live, too, because it wouldn't refer to them as demons or or genies, without introducing the metaphorical conception of something that lives.
[28:26]And so partly what Nietzsche reveals in those sentences is that he conceptualizes a human being as the the dwelling place of spirits.
[28:36]And some of them are genie, let's say, that's the root word of genius, that's the terribly powerful thing that exists in the terribly small compartment, right, that you have to call forth.
[28:47]And some of them are demons, and demons are things that have their own autonomous will and that generally aren't aiming for the good.
[28:55]So then, so those are all things Nietzsche just lays out as implicit parts of the sentence.
[28:59]So he activates all those ideas, whether you know it or not, in your mind to the degree that you process the sentence, and those things start to take on life of her own, those ideas.
[29:11]And so then the that still doesn't answer one of the most fundamental questions is that power in relationship to what?
[29:19]Because that's the question.
[29:50]Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy. But that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge and mistaken knowledge as an instrument.
[29:56]All right, so let's take that apart. Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy.
[30:04]So one of the claims, I suppose this would be an enlightenment claim, is that people do have a drive to knowledge, and that that drive is, in fact, what underlies the production of such things as philosophy.
[30:19]But Nietzsche questions that because he's trying to bring us back to consideration of the fact that you can't separate the philosopher's mind from the philosopher's being.
[30:31]He's first and foremost a living creature, and he's up to something, and the question is, what is it that he's up to?
[30:38]And so, you can see the earliest manifestations in a paragraph like this, of what later developed into deconstructionist thought.
[30:46]And that that was mostly French continental philosophers who pursued that particular line of reasoning.
[30:55]And it it is derived exactly from this kind of statement by Nietzsche.
[31:01]So for example, someone like Derrida would say, it doesn't matter what the content of a text is.
[31:08]What matters is that the text can be used as a tool for power.
[31:12]And that whether the person who wrote the text knew it or not, that's what they were doing.
[31:17]And they were doing it in a way to privilege themselves above other people.
[31:20]And that's really, I would say, the fundamental deconstructionist claim.
[31:24]And it's a powerful claim, it's an utterly corrupt claim, but it's a really powerful claim, and it's related directly to the sorts of things that Nietzsche was referring to in this paragraph.
[31:36]What is it that the person's truly up to? Now, the problem with the deconstructionist claim is that it's an it's an open invitation to cynicism, to thoughtless cynicism.
[31:45]I can just make the presupposition that whatever it is that you're telling me, you're you're telling me merely to dominate, regardless of what it is that you claim to be doing.
[31:56]Well, the problem with that approach is that it's predicated on the implicit assumption that the only value that people actually have is the value to is the desire to dominate.
[32:00]And of course, that's a purely like that could be the case, and I also think that it's even reasonable to posit that to some degree that it is the case, but to take that from a contributing factor and to make that the highest God, because that's essentially what the deconstructionists are doing.
[32:28]Those are entirely different things, and you have to be aware of people who take a single causal element and elevate it to the stature of single comprehensive cause.
[32:41]You know, it's more reasonable to assume that people are complex in their motivations, and that many different strands of biological and cultural motivation are in some sense primary, and that what happens is that they come together to weave a kind of tapestry rather than to make the automatic assumption that you can reduce the entire set of human motivations to a single principle, like that of power.
[33:04]Now, you know, I would say Nietzsche is also responsible to some degree for the deconstructionist claim that it's power, because one of his most famous utterances was that the fundamental motivating force in life is the will to power.
[33:17]But he wasn't so much, because Nietzsche is a subtle thinker, he wasn't so much attempting to reduce human motivation to power, he was attempting to redefine what it was that we conceptualized as power.
[33:34]Whereas that is not what the deconstructionists are doing at all, because fundamentally, they're Marxists, and they believe that, you know, they've ensconced themselves within an economic viewpoint, where within a philosophical viewpoint where economics is paramount, and where all that matters is power construed as socio-economic domination, fundamentally.
[33:57]You know, and that's in in turn is embedded in a metaphysics that's even deeper, which is a metaphysics that presumes that people are fundamentally materialist.
[34:06]And all of those things are quick, you know, all of those things are highly questionable.
[34:27]For every impulse is imperious, and as such attempts to philosophize.
[34:36]That's part of that sort of Nietzsche's idea of will to power in in its nascent form.
[34:44]Like all of these unconscious entities that inhabit the human psyche are all alive, and they're trying to live, they're trying to they're trying to climb up the dominance hierarchy and dominate.
[34:55]Because of course, that's partly what life does. Because let's say, from an evolutionary perspective, and this is probably more true for males, because they're less effective in their attempts to replicate the distinction between climbing up a dominance hierarchy, whatever that might happen to be, and success is there may be no distinction at all.
[35:20]And then you might say, well, that just shows that there's nothing but will to power, but that still doesn't answer one of the most fundamental questions is that power in relationship to what?
