2: Wandering Through Ice & Mountain Peaks

Philosophy as I have understood it hitherto is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain peaks. the seeking out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which hitherto morality has set its ban. Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country i acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable of the causes which hitherto have led to men's moralizing and idealizing

End quote. That was from H.A. Homo, one of Nietzsche's last books from the third part of the preface. Welcome back to the Nietzsche podcast. This is Essential Salts, a.k.a. Keegan, a.k.a. your eternally recurring host. And we're here today to talk about wandering. And that's the description.

of what philosophy is to nietzsche that he just gives their nature homo and so i decided to do an episode talking about that the description of what the uh activity of philosophy is that nietzsche gives in that passage is very different from a description that we might give of the view of a plato or a kant philosophy for nietzsche is not about striving for goodness or striving to know the truth so that one may do the good or embody the truth

um you know something of that nature in the platonic sense it's also not an exercise in system building um in the kantian sense um it's not nietzsche's not doing philosophy out of a Cartesian attempt to banish doubts, or rather, as Descartes did, to subject every proposition that he held to doubt in order to find that which is...

unable to be doubted, after which one secures a foundation upon which to build knowledge. None of this is what Nietzsche here describes. He says in Twilight of Idols, for example, He also says in Beyond Good and Evil that the...

goal of philosophy cannot really be for the philosopher to prove something or to prove himself or his theories right. Nietzsche says that no philosopher up to this point has ever been proven right. So Nietzsche, therefore, In other places in his work, he distinguishes himself from the academic conception of the activity of philosophy or from the obsession with system building that had arisen in German philosophy after Kant.

We could say we see some of these same tendencies in existence within philosophy even today. and i should note you know that this this rejection of other ways of doing philosophy this even applies to the greeks whom nietzsche loved and had a great admiration for he says in beyond good and evil There's a passage that discusses the type of person who claims to seek the truth only to do the good. And Nietzsche writes, I'll bet he finds nothing. So, I just wanted to outline that...

The rejection of many of the traditional attitudes towards philosophy are included in Nietzsche's writings, but understand what we're talking about here is an attitude. These considerations may seem to be... merely subjective, but I would argue that one's underlying attitude towards philosophy is actually of supreme importance, and that all of these questions which one must ask of themselves, that it might be, you know, what am I doing?

when I'm doing philosophy? What do I aim to get out of philosophy? What is the proper role of philosophy in one's life? And so on. These questions are far more important than anything that can be proved by rigorous logic. Because again, as Nietzsche says, the chances that in doing philosophy you'll discover some sort of ironclad logical proof that unlocks the truth for you.

The chances of that are close to zero. So how does Nietzsche describe philosophy instead? Well, what he says above in the passage I read at the start is the activity of philosophy is wandering. which is something that Nietzsche engaged in both mentally and physically. You know, he means wandering in the sense of hiking, exploring. And he adds that it is wandering in places that are forbidden.

So philosophy for Nietzsche is an adventure. It's a dangerous, exciting adventure. It's a voluntary retirement from the world into seclusion. But it's not, you know, this isn't entering a benign state of, you know, hermitage, but it's constantly seeking and being on the move. It's a sojourn. Seeking everything strange and questionable in existence, too. So how does the idea of wandering figure into Nietzsche's writing stylistically? Well...

Part of how Wandering appears in the Nietzschean style is in the fact that he introduced a character that he called the Wanderer, who appears over and over again across multiple books. And I would argue that this figure was a...

early stand-in character for nietzsche himself and you'll notice as we continue that there are quite a few characters people think stand in for nietzsche such as zarathustra or um you know like even the madman who announces the death of god um there are all sorts of characters we could see nietzsche

maybe being, you know, they're a cipher for Nietzsche. But the idea of the Wanderer came before Zarathustra or even the Madman. And I would argue that the Wanderer is more explicitly identified by Nietzsche himself as his stand-in. And so philosophy for Nietzsche is wandering, and therefore it makes it kind of sense that he is the wanderer because he's a philosopher.

Why would Nietzsche take up his view of philosophy as wandering, and why would he see himself as a wanderer? And to answer this, we'll have to delve a bit into Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche... suffered from migraine headaches his entire life. His first one was at nine years old. And there's debate on what exactly Nietzsche's illness was. which is something I plan to cover more fully in a future episode. But it was likely either a brain tumor or a congenital stroke disorder.

When Nietzsche was an adult teaching at Basel University, these headaches were obviously still with him, and they had gotten worse and worse, and eventually he decided to leave Basel and stop teaching. This was a turning point for Nietzsche.

As depressing as this all may sound. Because around the time when he published Human All Too Human, you know, so this wasn't his first book. Nietzsche had written a book. called Birth of Tragedy, and he'd written several essays by that point, but Human All Too Human was an attempt at an early opus. It covered all of Nietzsche's concerns across the philosophical discipline of language.

ethics religion politics art and so on and the book also signified a departure from the ideas of one of nietzsche's mentors who was the famous composer richard wagner And around when the book was published, the two men broke off their friendship. So Nietzsche publishes his first truly bold, all-encompassing philosophical opus in the year 1878, and then he leaves Basel.

by 1879 and so that's what i mean when i say this time was a turning point for him and so after this he traveled frequently i mean he visited france uh switzerland austria italy And what Nietzsche was looking for after he left the university, among other things, was some place with the right climate, air pressure, the right amount of sunshine, humidity.

This total confluence of factors that would best suit him, because if everything was not exactly right, he could find himself regularly laid out for days at a time, in some cases with migraines and vomiting. That was just simply the nature of his condition. And so it seems he found something at least close to acceptable at a place called Silsmaria in Switzerland.

And in 1881, that was the first year that he visited there. And he began to summer in Silsmaria, spent his summers up there in the Alps. And he kept returning from 1883. all the way through 1888 and you know for those of you who are new to nietzsche or need a refresher on the dates 1888 is nietzsche's last productive year before his mental breakdown so whereas the publication of human alter human in 1878 that was the turning point it was the first year of a decade-long period up until 1888

During that time, during those 10 years, Nietzsche would write at least one book every single year. And for much of this time, he was spending a great deal of his time up in the mountains of Switzerland. Silsmaria... It was basically just a small village hidden up in the Alps. So in addition to the right air pressure and all these things that Nietzsche wrote about in his journals, it also had beautiful scenery, and it was relatively isolated.

He was mostly withdrawn from the social life, especially in comparison to the hustle and bustle of teaching at a major university. And every day, Nietzsche wrote, walked, had lunch.

And then he walked or hiked some more, and then he wrote some more. And I mean every single day. This was his routine. And so this is from Curtis Cate's book on Nietzsche. And I quote, With a spartan rigor which never ceased to amaze his landlord grocer Nietzsche would get up every morning when the faintly dawning sky was still gray and after washing himself with cold water from the pitcher

and china basin in his bedroom and drinking some warm milk he would when not felled by headaches and vomiting work uninterruptedly until eleven in the morning he then went for a brisk two-hour walk through the nearby forest or along the edge of lake silvaplana to the northeast or of lake sills to the southwest stopping every now and then to jot down his latest thoughts and the notebook he always carried with him

So after, you know, his lunch, which he would have after this, he would take even longer walks in the mountains and sometimes not returning until four or five in the evening. kate writes he that he says nietzsche he usually dressed in a long and somewhat threadbare brown jacket and armed as usual with notebook pencil and a large green gray parasol to shade his eyes

he would stride off again on an even longer walk, which sometimes took him up to the Fextal, as far as its majestic glacier." When he returned to his home, Nietzsche would read and write into the evening. And actually, eventually, Nietzsche's doctor told him he needed to stop or at least limit the amount of reading that he did by candlelight because it was ruining his eyes. He already had problems with his vision because of his illness.

eventually became functionally blind in his right eye after a certain point. I forget the exact date or the year when that happened. So he was already straining to read sometimes, and reading in low light was an even greater strain. And in this environment, Nietzsche was also lonely, which is only natural because he had chosen an environment of solitude. He still corresponded with his friends and family via letters, but...

It's not quite the same as the level of interconnectivity we have today. And so his friends at that time, in some sense, are the great thinkers whose books he has to absorb himself into. um but over time something else begins to happen as well nietzsche begins to write characters into his work or to address himself to an audience which did not exist at the time

The perfect way of explaining this is the example of the free spirit. The free spirit is Nietzsche's model for a thinker who is truly unbounded from any cultural, religious, or metaphysical... fetters. The free spirit is also who Nietzsche is writing to. He often addresses himself to his fellow free spirits as if this is a real community, when in fact No such community really existed. And Nietzsche, therefore, he predicted that free spirits would arrive in the future.

But I, you know, I've even heard some people go so far as to call these imaginary friends for Nietzsche. I'm not sure if I would go quite that far. It is a literary conceit, but, you know, maybe, you know, his writings are a form of...

They were therapeutic for him. So, I mean, who knows? But he wrote in Human All Too Human that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. But Nietzsche also holds... that one cannot live without convictions. So the free spirit is not without convictions. That would be absurd. We must always keep in mind with Nietzsche that he believes the truth to be hard to swallow, even dangerous.

It could even be called harmful to life at times. And so naturally convictions, which are something which is required for life, are themselves hostile to the truth.

And so the Nietzschean pursuit of knowledge, therefore, involves repeated challenges to one's own convictions by exposure of those convictions to inquiry. And he describes how the free spirit by holding... many convictions one after the other and overcoming each of them in turn and in by thoroughly learning their convictions learning their ideologies they they

become so familiar with their ideals so completely that they can even perceive all of the internal contradictions and flaws. The free spirit becomes able... through this process to stand outside of all presuppositions and behold the relativity of all human values and In Human All to Human, he describes this process of learning as taking place at a tortoise pace, I believe is the phrase that he uses.

He distinguishes the free spirit in Beyond Good and Evil. He directly rejects the idea that it has anything to do with being a Freidanker. You'll soon learn my German pronunciations are probably not much better than my French, but Freidenker is freethinker, as we would say in English, which has mostly the same connotations that would have held for Nietzsche.

It's a sort of individualist intellectual. They consider themselves unbounded from any tradition or dogma, but without having first done the work of passing through many sincerely held convictions. and you know perhaps not even understanding that holding convictions is necessary for living and this is the kind of person who thinks you know what what is the cliche like the truth shall set you free

which is not how the free spirit feels about the truth. The free spirit is freed from any dogmatism about the nature of truth in the first place.

He also, you know, recognizes the inherent danger in challenging all convictions. This is not a benign, this is not a purely beneficial process. It requires strength. And so Nietzsche introduces this character of the free spirit and human all to human, which came out in three volumes. And that was in 1878, 1879 and 1880. There are three different books. They all have different.

titles as well and each one of them you know it's usually just considered the same work but i would consider it three books because um you know wandering at shadow which is volume three is at least as long as you know it's longer than like the antichrist or um other books that are considered full works so um in any case um i thought it was important to introduce the idea of what the free spirit is because this lays the groundwork for understanding

how Nietzsche was thinking about philosophy and the pursuit of truth when he moved up into the Alps in the 1880s. And Nietzsche wrote of the feeling of freedom. of liberation that he felt all up in the mountains, above the rest of human society, closer to nature, closer to heaven, closer to himself. I mean, heaven in a metaphorical sense, obviously, but...

And we should note that being closer to oneself is not without its dangers, because deeper self-knowledge can reveal terrifying things, and solitude can certainly bring that out. Anyway... roughly coinciding with niches wandering throughout europe and eventually settling on the alps as his semi-permanent place of residence

It's the increasing importance of this other metaphorical figure who I've mentioned, who is the wanderer. It's related to the free spirit, but not exactly the same, because again, the free spirit is sort of a general type, right? He's... As we said, Nietzsche's intended audience, he's a certain type of person, but the Wanderer is a real character. And as we discussed, he's the stand-in for Nietzsche, in my opinion.

and he's introduced also in human all to human and this is in aphorism 638 and uh this section's called the wanderer quote He who has attained intellectual emancipation to any extent cannot for a long time regard himself otherwise than a wanderer on the face of the earth, and not even as a traveler towards a final goal.

for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world. Therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual. He must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure and change and transitoriness. So the wanderer has fully realized his intellectual emancipation.

as Nietzsche puts it. And having stood outside all the moral and cultural perspectives, he no longer has any home to return to. And so Nietzsche elaborates further.

in this passage that the wanderer you know when he occasionally does grow tired of wandering and he goes enters the gates of the city to rejoin the crowds of men he no longer feels at home among them so you know when nietzsche when he summers and sills maria he still periodically has to interact with human beings um you know he still has to interact with human society he has to engage in social life and whenever the summer ends and he goes and you know sees his family or

sees his friends or goes into the city or so on he still has to go back to the social life but the wanderer as Nietzsche says now he quote sees perhaps in the faces of the dwellers therein this is the city dwellers still more desert, uncleanliness, deceit, and insecurity than outside the gates." So having questioned the common morality and the stories that a culture tells about itself. One finds himself alienated from those who still believe.

You feel different from everyone else. And he cannot, for example, after departing from Christianity and recognizing it as a man-made religion, come to the conclusion that Christianity is the best way of life and then will himself into believing the fables of the Bible. Once one perceives the hollowness of an idol, there's no going back to worshiping that idol. And once that applies,

Once you've stepped outside of all perspectives, one must now live, intellectually at least, outside of the boundaries of any law or country. You become a disreputable figure.

mysterious, maybe even feared. And so the wanderer is that representation of free-spiritedness as an entire way of life. And so in some sense, he is an ideal for Nietzsche, shaped after Nietzsche's own image. And students of German history and religion will assuredly start to recognize here the figure of Odin or Wotan. but uh we'll return to this a bit later on but um we'll go through some of the other references to the wanderer and nietzsche's work in volume two of human all to human

the Wanderer returns again. And there's something increasingly autobiographical in the way that Nietzsche describes the Wanderer. You know, he first describes him as traveling through like a barren desert. um but he begins in the second volume uh to place the wanderer instead and up into the high mountains you know above society and modernity this is in the second volume of human ultra human aphorism 237.

a section called The Wanderer in the Mountains to Himself. Quote, There are certain signs that you have gone farther and higher. There is a freer, wider prospect before you. The air blows cooler yet milder in your face. You have unlearned the folly of confounding mildness with warmth. Your gait is more firm and vigorous. Courage and discretion have waxed together. On all these grounds, your journey may now be more lonely, and in any case more perilous than heretofore.

if indeed not to the extent believed by those who from the misty valley see you the roamer striding on the mountains end quote i think this passage is nietzsche reveling in the adventurous aspect of the wanderer. The wanderer's life is admittedly lonely, just as Nietzsche's was, and certainly it's perilous to question the deepest values of one's own culture.

But again, we should really embrace the metaphor that Nietzsche is using here and appreciate how much work metaphor does for him in explicating his thinking on this. And this is part of Nietzsche's style. He is excellent when it comes to employing metaphor. So the metaphor here is...

One takes a steep path up the mountains. It's taxing. It's physically and emotionally taxing. But the air up in the mountains above all that is wildly free and refreshingly cold. And it's not as terrifying as the common person thinks. Or it's not as terrifying for the truly free wanderer as it maybe would be for the common person. So it's a metaphor about stepping out of safety.

out of all of the cultural assumptions and values. And these are not mere trifles, I feel I should emphasize. It's the safety of your city walls. It's the power of your culture to enchant the world, as can... uh games is fond of saying about nietzsche and and it's not about just stepping outside your society we must remember um but going above it it's traveling a hard and difficult path to go above

The culture. And from above, not only are you in solitude because you're no longer, you know, you no longer have the voice of the community whispering in your ear all the time.

dictating your behavior and your outward affect and all of that. But you also, you're now from the highest vantage point. So, you know, this is... the wanderer which is to say the philosopher which is to say nietzsche experiences the search for knowledge as these forays upward into these dangerous realms of abstraction and the highest perspectives that escape any provincial attitude, where one can only rely on oneself.

And again, the Nietzschean sketch of the activity of philosophy runs counter to the entire analytical model, which would rise up and take hold in the decades after Nietzsche's death. Nietzsche is calling from up on the ridge. um down to the perspective free spirits you know inviting us all to come up it's a call to adventure volume three of human all to human as I mentioned is entitled uh

The Wanderer and His Shadow. Der Wanderer und sein Schatten. This came out in 1880. So remember, now the Wanderer has taken the stage as the...

the titular character of the story now. His name, The Wanderer in His Shadow, is the title of the work. And this is just as Nietzsche's moving to Sils Maria is around when this book is published. So the work begins with a dialogue. between the wanderer and the wanderer's own shadow and this is literally the wanderer's own shadow this is a very enigmatic dialogue it's and it's an unusual scene in nietzsche so he was sort of

It's interesting. He settled on Sils Maria after traveling around in Europe, and he continued to wander a bit. And even in Sils Maria, he's wandering around and hiking and exploring. He likes being there so that he can go and wander the mountains. And then he's also stylistically wandering at the same time and trying many different things. And this is, it's an interesting passage because it's written.

much the same way that Plato's dialogues wouldn't be written. You simply have one speaker and then another speaker. It's just pure dialogue. And it's a very brief section to begin the book, and the rest of it is aphoristic, like the rest of Nietzsche's work. It's a very enigmatic dialogue, and I haven't really been able to find much commentary on it. And there's some oblique references in the dialogue. I will admit, I don't fully understand.

That being said, I wanted to just take a piece of this dialogue and read it for you so you get a taste of what the exchange is like and what the relationship is between these two characters, the wanderer and his shadow.

and um yes keep in mind this is literally the wanderer's own shadow that has suddenly decided to speak with him and he's initially very surprised that his shadow is speaking but eventually they begin talking and so i'll quote and i'll say who's speaking at the beginning of each statement so the wanderer speaks you must know that i love shadows even as i love light for the existence of beauty of face clearness of speech

Kindliness and firmness of character, the shadow is as necessary as the light. They are not opponents, rather do they hold each other's hands like good friends. And when the light vanishes, the shadow glides after it. The shadow responds. Says, yes, and I hate the same thing that you hate. Night. I love men because they are votaries of life.

I rejoice in the gleam of their eyes when they recognize and discover, they who never weary of recognizing and discovering. That shadow which all things cast when the sunshine of knowledge falls upon, that shadow too am I. The Wanderer. I think I understand you, although you have expressed yourself in somewhat shadowy terms. You are right. Good friends give to each other here and there as a sign of mutual understanding.

an obscure phrase which to any third party is meant to be a riddle. And we are good friends, you and I. So it goes on from there, but that's enough to include for our purposes, just a little piece of that dialogue. But... Basically, the wanderer assures his shadow, who's quite shy, that he will not reveal every last detail, every last word spoken between them. He'll only convey the points they elucidate together in the dialogue.

And so this is very fascinating to me, because if there is any accusation that Nietzsche was creating imaginary friends, he at least flirted with it here, because if the Wanderer, as he appears in the text, is a stand-in for Nietzsche.

He's at least a sort of imaginary stand-in. He's a fictionalized version of Nietzsche. But here we have an imaginary friend for the wanderer who is a fictionalized Nietzsche, which means that even the stand-in is here to... depicted speaking to a imaginary friend you know an incorporeal entity it's just his own shadow

And so perhaps this is a bit of a meta passage from Nietzsche, that in order to fully represent himself in the text, Nietzsche has to show himself doing the act of representing himself, if that makes sense. But the shadow is still its own character, and so we can analyze it on those terms. I think the answer to this is found in the text itself, and I would argue we should avoid looking at this through the lens of Carl Jung.

mainly because he was five years old when this was written. And here the shadow represents something very different from Jung's shadow, even though I'm sure this work did influence Jung. So rather than representing a malevolent or animalian... dark side to the human psyche. As the shadow represents in the Jungian sense, Nietzsche's shadow represents the self-consciousness.

That's what I would argue. So in Jung, the shadow is correlated with the unconscious. Here I think it is the conscious self-reflection. It is intellect as the companion to the id's wanderlust.

So it's the mental reflection of what the self is. The shadow should be seen, I think, more akin to the way Plato, in his famous allegory of the cave, described the shadows on the walls of the cave so the shadow is it's the representation of something which is itself material so in this case the body and its drives but it's being represented by the mind

to itself and so the shadow is the self narrative that we craft it's the story that we tell about ourselves we're always accompanied by our shadow and it's only through the perception of the shadow or or the through representation that men understand themselves and the world the shadow is also not a thing of the night but of daylight one can only see one shadow in daylight

or with some sort of light source. This is made very clear at the end of the book, where the coming of night signals that the shadow must disappear. Light, obviously, in the Western tradition, in the Enlightenment tradition, symbolizes knowledge. especially self-knowledge and nietzsche is showing that this enlightenment the self-knowledge um it you know it's like the brightest light cast the darkest shadow so

This means every man is now accompanied by a shadow, by the representation created by the self-reflective process. And so Nietzsche locates the real person in the body. But as enlightened people... We are all accompanied by our shadow, and thus the shadow, as it appears as the counterpart to the wanderer, is one half of Nietzsche. Perhaps, you know, to put it in oversimplified terms, the intellectual half, you know.

a large project of niches around this time was to to reconcile the arts and sciences or the passions and reason for man to somehow continue the project of civilization without destroying, without civilization destroying what is natural in man. And that's a large part of the meaning behind the name of the book, The Gay Science.

You know, could there be a science, a unification of the arts and the sciences was sort of what Nietzsche was aiming at. And in that book, he continued to explore these characters so that in that... The subsequent book, The Gay Science, The Wanderer and The Free Spirit both appear. And it was in The Gay Science that many of the most significant and subversive ideas of Nietzsche's began to emerge, such as the death of God, for example.

or we might consider eternal recurrence according to nietzsche writing in ecce homo again it was while walking by lake silvaplana near silsmaria It was then that one of his most famous ideas, that of the eternal recurrence of the same events, struck him 6,000 feet above man and time, as Nietzsche writes.

But Nietzsche never rested on any of these ideas. I think this is important to emphasize. He never wanted to build the foundation of a new philosophical system. While he arguably did take some steps towards constructing, say, a political or ethical project, he was first and foremost driven not to settle, but to continue moving. And thus much of the work...

towards creating like a coherent Nietzschean political or ethical philosophy was carried on by others writing after Nietzsche. And this has frustrated some later philosophers who see Nietzsche's project as unfinished. And it wasn't, I should point out again, you know, this is not trivial for Nietzsche himself either. He describes the difficulty that this driving force of wanderlust imposed on him.

uh book four of the gay science and it's aphorism 309 and this section's called out of the seventh solitude quote one day the wanderer shut a door behind him stood still and wept and then he said oh this inclination and impulse towards the true the real the non-apparent the certain how i detest it Why does this gloomy and passionate taskmaster follow just me? I should like to rest, but it does not permit me to do so. Are there not a host of things seducing me to tarry?

everywhere there are gardens of armida for me and therefore there will always be fresh separations and fresh bitterness of heart i must set my foot forward my weary wounded foot And because I feel I must do this, I often cast grim glances back at the most beautiful things which could not detain me. Because they could not detain me.

That's a very powerful passage, but the reference to the Gardens of Armida requires some explanation for modern audiences, because it is another metaphor which is packed with meaning. Armida is a character in the epic Jerusalem Liberata by the Renaissance poet Tarquato Tasso. And in the poem, the warrior Ronaldo, he's distracted from a heroic quest that he's on by Armida, who she first comes to kill Ronaldo, but instead she falls in love with him.

and so they she then creates a magical dreamlike garden for rinaldo where the two can live together and rinaldo is then seduced by armida's beauty and enchanted by the majesty of her garden and so he remains with her in the garden And he forgets himself. He forgets who he is. And eventually, so Ronaldo's Christian compatriots arrive, and he's completely enchanted. And so they hold a shield up to his face.

that is mirror-like and shows him his own reflection and so they remind rinaldo who he really is and that's what's able to wake him up and allow him to not be seduced by the garden or to break free of the enchantment of the Garden of Armida. And so I think what this passage raises for me here... For Nietzsche, the adventure of philosophy allured because he actually stood in the same kind of relationship to abstract ideas that an ordinary person might feel for another human being.

Nietzsche could actually fall in love with a thought or fight a literal battle within his soul or find himself pushed. in one direction or the other by a strong mood, that Nietzsche's wanderlust required him to continually have to confront this whole panoply of human thoughts and feelings. And so, even where he found these interpolations upon reality to be beautiful... these philosophical interpolations that is to say so when he would fall in love with an idea a beautiful idea

Nietzsche still felt he had to resist becoming enchanted with it, because that would just mean he would be remaining in some Armida's Garden of the Spirit. And this was genuinely difficult for Nietzsche, but for him...

It was important because it represented true independence. And so Nietzsche records one such moment of a, you know, what he's calling a departure from an Armida's garden. This is also from... This is going back a little bit to the wanderer in his shadow. He doesn't mention the wanderer as a character in this passage, but I wanted to include it. It's aphorism 295, and it's almost akin to a journal entry.

And the passage is called Et in Arcadia Ego. Quote, rocky crags of all shapes about me the soil gay with flowers and grasses a herd of cattle moved stretched and expanded itself before me single cows and groups in the distance and the clearest evening light hard by the forest of the pines others nearer and darker all in calm and even tide contentment my watch pointed to half past six

The bull of the herd had stepped into the white foaming brook and went forward slowly, now striving against, now giving to his tempestuous course. Thus, no doubt, he took his sort of fierce pleasure. Two dark brown beings of... bergamask origin tended the herd the girl dressed almost like a boy on the left overhanging cliffs and fields of snow above the broad belts of woodland to the right two enormous ice-covered peaks high above me

shimmering in the veil of the sunny haze all large silent and bright the beauty of the whole was awe inspiring and conducive to a mute worship of the moment and its revelation Unconsciously, as if nothing could be more natural, you peopled this pure, clear world of light which had no trace of yearning, of expectancy, of looking forward or backward with Greek heroes. So individual men too have lived, constantly feeling themselves in the world and the world in themselves. End quote.

And so to disentangle that a bit, as we mentioned before, Nietzsche loved the Greeks. He was a teacher of all things Greek for almost his whole career at Basel. And, you know, he lectured on the pre-Platonic philosophers, on Greek tragedy, and, you know, he taught courses on how to speak ancient Greek and Latin. And he was very at home among the classics and the classical thinkers.

And he felt the Greek heroes to be much healthier, much more worldly ideals for people to believe in and try to live up to, at least compared to a figure like Christ, for example. And so he had praised the aesthetic triumph of this, what he called the elevated dream world of the Greek Olympians. He praised this in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

But he had seen that the world that men live in was a reflection of themselves. How in our deepest metaphysical assumptions or our most... sincerely held religious beliefs all the most cherished doctrines we have we had merely painted the contents of the human mind under the very firmament of the cosmos thus Nietzsche does not

lament or reject the world of greek heroes in this passage it's not really what he's saying but he's he's wandered very far and wide and he now sees man's stories about the world as incredible as ersatz, as phantasmagoria. This is all these stories can be any longer to him. And thus, it's around this time where Nietzsche repudiated, or rather, he updated his views on...

Romanticism. He thought that we needed to recover some of the strength of pagan, the old pagan past of Europe. But he... clarified around this time that he was certainly not a romantic pagan, as in the case of the British romantic pagans like Shelley or Keats or people who really poured out libations to old pagan gods.

So, speaking of paganism, though, this is perhaps where we can bring Wotan back into the story. So Wotan, or Odin, is, of course, a central figure in the pantheon of the Germanic pagans.

And he's also a god of the Vikings. So he's probably better known as Odin, but many people tend to think of Odin as the victorious, conquering king. Whereas the Odin in the stories... you know the old stories he went through many trials and perhaps the most famous of this was when he was hanged uh upside down from the world tree yggdrasil um before you know rising again and

So I bring Wotan up because Wotan is also known as the Wanderer, or sometimes as the Gray Wanderer. And this is because for a time, Wotan wandered the Earth, appearing as a gray-haired old man. And, you know, with one eye missing. He's sort of in the image of this, you know, like an itinerant wizard or something of the like. And so, you know, Richard Wagner, the celebrated composer and Nietzsche's early mentor, he had...

depicted Wotan in the form of the Grey Wanderer in his operas. And, you know, one can even see the cultural influence of the Grey Wanderer in popular culture today in the form of Gandalf the Grey in Tolkien's novels. I would argue that the image of the powerful wizard who travels alone through the wilderness provided this ready blueprint for Nietzsche's image of the independent and intellectually itinerant.

Thinker is a good way to put it, I think. And so we might consider the figure of the wanderer again through another lens. He also appeared in... There's that famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. There's this figure that stands with his back to us, surveying this mountainous world from on high. These valleys below are shrouded in mist.

separating the wanderer from this below world as by this cloudy veil and the wanderer stands triumphantly above it all he's you know at once exhausted and at leisure having earned for himself this beautiful vantage point that few others will ever have or know. And so this popular image of the wanderer above the sea of fog has long been associated with Nietzsche. I've seen his...

I've seen the Caspar David Friedrich painting on the cover. That was on the cover of Thus Spook Zarathustra on the Barnes & Noble Classics edition, for example. So it's not uncommon to see... The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog sort of related to Nietzsche or associated with Nietzsche. Carlos Hedrobo, I'm not really familiar with him, but I found...

I was kind of searching to see if anyone had made this connection. He wrote an essay exploring this long-standing connection, apparently, between Nietzsche's ideas and the images in his writing with the famous Caspar David Friedrich painting. and so i'll just quote here from a drobo's essay it's from the abstract actually he says the wanderer motif played an important role during the 19th century german art literature and philosophy mostly because of its capacity

for embodiment and for connecting places, discourses, and related motifs, like the summit experience and man before a borderline situation." And so, you know, one of the... the concepts that a drobo mentions that he considers in the essay is they this is a there's a compositional device and painting known as a rook and figure which i hope i'm pronouncing correctly but

It's common in German Romantic painting, in which the figure depicted is seen from behind. So in Friedrich's painting, Caspar David Friedrich, the composition allows us to take in the whole visual experience of what the wanderer is seeing. But by placing us just behind the figure, we're looking out at the world along with him. And so we're associating ourselves with the figure to some extent, but we're not eliminating the figure.

You know, but which we would be if we were doing a first person perspective where we're just seeing it from someone's point of view. So we include the central figure, but we also identify with that figure's perspective. And so... The common ideas within the German culture of Wotan, I think, provide the sort of the raw material for what Caspar David Friedrich and Friedrich Nietzsche with the image of the wanderer in both painting and literature.

both lead the audience to powerfully identify with the wanderer, which is, I think, the intention in Friedrich Nietzsche's work as well. In Friedrich's painting, it's through the technique of Rückenfigur.

this is the the allure of the the mystery of the wanderer's mountain vantage point and we sort of feel that yearn for adventure In Nietzsche's writing, it's through the language of philosophy as an act of wandering, and Nietzsche's own example as the wanderer philosopher, and his call to us to come with him on his adventure.

And so maybe that's why the painting and the works of the philosopher, they're not directly related. They've always been seen as sort of artistic kith and kin. I almost said autistic. That's what's known as a Freudian slip.

Revealing myself here. I joke, but... So, you know, to move towards the conclusion, I suppose, what we now have is the story of Nietzsche.

possibly inspired by Wagner and his operas, finding this identification with this wandering figure. We can see how he would find that to resonate as a result of... the kind of life he led you know this idea of becoming this wandering mysterious figure self in a self-imposed exile from the rest of society traveling the mountains alone with his thoughts to himself

And so then the picture that Nietzsche gives us of philosophy and that emerges across the course of his work is a very different kind of philosophy, as we said. at the outset from a plato or a kant or a descartes or a wittgenstein or a pauper for that matter This affects Nietzsche's style and his writing because it affects the nature of his whole project. He's taking us on an adventure through ideas, through emotion, through history.

by asking dangerous questions and raising terrifying possibilities or speaking more poetically or artistically and so and as he says um in one of the passages we quoted his quest is not to get somewhere Not exactly. I mean, there's no final resting place, as he says. And during the period where the Wanderer features most heavily, which is in this sort of early period of that main ten years of Nietzsche's work,

after Basel. During this period, I don't think we can even be sure that Nietzsche knows where he's going. So, because it's very experimental in many ways. And so the result is that Nietzsche, because of the attitude that he took to philosophy,

He becomes very hard to pin down or put in a box. People from Marxists to liberals to Nazis to postmodernists to feminists to nationalists to anarchists virtually everyone claims some sort of influence from nietzsche these days and because he was so against system building it's very hard to give a straightforward or step-by-step account of his ideas And so rather his big ideas take the form of a few, you know, there are these big poetic pronouncements or declarations. And oftentimes they were...

You could see them as, what would you call it? Metaphorical or layered with many meanings or Nietzsche's attempt to...

elucidate something to us, but it's like they almost all belie any straightforward explanation. One of Nietzsche's big points in his career is that philosophers often attempt to make universalized rules and proclamations but are actually only telling us about themselves and their own culture and their own psychology and you know that the truths that will be relevant relevant to you

will change based on where you are. And so a lot of people, especially the modernists, the Peterson types, Jordan Peterson types, the traditionalists, they may bristle when they hear me say, all that that nietzsche is in a very real sense a relativist and that he acknowledges and embraces relativity even when it comes to himself in his own position that's

really the big difference between him and a lot of these other figures is that he he includes himself in his own relativism but he's different from many other relativists in that he will still argue wholeheartedly for the set of values that he feels is the best, because it's, you know, the strongest or what have you. And, you know, we'll get into that more as we go along, but he's more than willing to acknowledge the relativity of all human values.

The relativity of all perspectives, right? Every vantage point, you only see a certain, you only see some of the picture.

from a given vantage point. But you have to stand somewhere. I want to conclude with a reading from Stefan Zweig. And this passage was shown to me a long time ago. actually about a year ago, maybe a little longer. This is shown to me by TheVoluntaryBegger on the Nietzsche subreddit. He's also the one who drew my attention to the connection between The Wanderer and Wotan.

which I felt I had to include in this episode just for the sake of completionism, because I think it was a major influence on Nietzsche. But... Yeah, he one time showed me this passage from Stefan Zweig. It's a beautiful, powerful passage from his book. His book is entitled Struggle with the Demon. It's about Nietzsche, Holderlin, and von Kleist.

And Zweig, he describes not quite the mountaineering Nietzsche that we've been examining in this episode. That Nietzsche is a blend of the philosophical and the biographical. person of who Nietzsche actually was. What Zweig gives, however, is a description of Nietzsche's philosophy that totally fits with the idea of a wanderer, but it gives Nietzsche's wandering a harder edge.

Because the wandering is described here as more akin to what we might call marauding. And so here it is, quote. And this is going to be a long one, so strap in. Quote.

for the first time on the ocean of german philosophy the black flag was hoisted upon a pirate ship nietzsche was a man of a different species of another race of a novel type of heroism his philosophy was not clad in professorial robes but was harnessed for the fray like a knight in shining armor others before him hardy navigators of the spiritual world

discovered continents and founded empires. They were animated to a certain degree by a civilizing and utilitarian intent, hoping to win those unknown lands to the profit of mankind.

to complete the map of the philosophic world by penetrating farther and ever farther into the terra incognita of thought they set up the standard of god or of the mind in these newfound lands they built cities and temples planned out streets and avenues in the unknown while governors and administrators followed in their steps in order to reap the harvest of the pioneers labors commentators dons

men of culture and the like but the aim of these forerunners in the philosophical universe was repose was peace and security they desired to increase terrestrial possessions

to promulgate norms and laws, to inaugurate a superior kind of order. Just as the filibusters invaded the Spanish world towards the close of the 16th century, a lawless gang of desperados lacking restraint acknowledging no king men without a flag and without a home so nietzsche made an eruption into the philosophical world conquering nothing either for himself

or for those who should come after his victories were not achieved for the sake of a monarch or dedicated to the greater glory of god but purely for the intrinsic joy of conquest since he did not wish to possess or to acquire or to conquer he was a disturber of the peace his one desire being to plunder to destroy property relationships to trouble the repose of his fellow mortals

with fire and sword he went forth to awaken the minds of men an awakening as precious to him as is a fusty sleep to the vast majority of mankind in his wake as in the wake of the filibusters of old Churches were desecrated, altars were overturned, feelings injured, convictions assassinated, moral sheepfolds sacked, every horizon blazed with incendiary fires, monstrous beacons of daring and violence.

never did he look back to gloat over his acquisitions or to appropriate his conquests he strove everlastingly towards what had never been explored and conquered his one and only pleasure was to try out his strength and to rouse up those who slumbered he was a member of no creed had never sworn allegiance to any country with the black flag at his masthead and steering into the unknown into incertitude which he felt to be the mate of his soul

he sailed forward to ever renewed and perilous adventures sword in hand and powder barrel at his feet he left the shores of the known behind him and sang his pirate song as he went Yes, I know from where I came, hungrily burning like a flame. All I touch turns to light as I flare bright fueled by mind. Ashes are all I leave behind. Oh, yes. I'm aflame, all right. End quote. Well, that's all, everyone.

I think that's a wonderful note to end on, much better than anything else I could have said to put a pin in this particular episode. I think Zweig knocked it out of the park, so it's always good to let other people do your work for you whenever you can manage that, of course. So whether you're sailing the high seas or looking to fire upon any empire of the mind that you find out there, or simply hiking in the ice and mountain peaks,

looking down upon the world below. I wish you all good wandering. This is Keegan, signing off.