Beyond Good and Evil #3: One Ruling Thought (I.17 - II.25)

Continuing with Beyond Good and Evil, we're on section 17 in part one on the prejudices of philosophers. And Nietzsche begins this section With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede. namely that a thought comes when it wishes, and not when I wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject I is the condition of the predicate think.

it thinks, but that this it is precisely the famous old ego is to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate certainty. After all, one has even gone too far with this it thinks. Even the it contains an interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself. one infers here according to the grammatical habits quote thinking is an activity, every activity requires an agent, consequently. End quote.

and in quote of the passage. So that last sentence Nietzsche put in quotation marks that he's describing our old grammatical habit, which is to extrapolate a subject or an agent from any activity or process or action. In other words, to create a doer as a means of essentializing the deed.

um in order to take something which is moving and dynamic and which is a process and turn it into a a thing. This is simply a habit of our thinking and it's tied in with what Nietzsche calls at the beginning of this Passage the superstitions of logicians.

So uh you know, again, in this whole passage, this whole first division of the text on the prejudices of philosophers, he said that philosophy is something akin to what is done by the mystics, to mystical inspiration. He's compared it somewhat implicitly to art, and he said that it is something that comes out of the instincts or the impulses. And so a lot of what he says here should follow rather neatly from that, that in some sense we're not permitted to posit a thinker that does the thinking.

And part of the reason for this, Nietzsche elaborates on what he's saying here in The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols, and it's going to play in with his critique of causality, which we're going to get into in the following um sections. But right here he's pointing out what I think is an empirical fact. that We don't have control over the thoughts that we have.

We don't decide what thoughts we're going to think, if that makes sense. We can't attribute the agency behind what sort of thoughts we're going to think to the ego consciousness, to the rational observer and supposed governor over the self.

And this is, I mean, it's clear by empirical experience to anyone who does any meditation, but if you try and take control over your thoughts and decide, I'm not going to think this particular thought, or I'm going to only think about this and only focus on this. what you will find is that the process of thinking

very strangely enough, is not necessarily within your control. It's not necessarily in your control what your attention is directed at, or what your will is directed at. So why would it be within and when I say your control here, I mean your in quotation marks referring to the old ego consciousness superstition that Nietzsche has already criticized in the earlier uh sections of the text that we've already gone over.

So if that is the case, that the thought comes when the thought wants to come, right? That would actually I think Nietzsche is making a rather cogent argument that the facts as they stand without any interpretive um you know, elaborations upon the facts wouldn't seem to give us any means of claiming the existence of this subject, or more importantly, the arbitrary sovereignty of this thinking subject.

but that rather we have mistaken what the process of thinking is, as if b because it's often sort of assumed in our culture that you are in control of your own thoughts. Right. Um if uh this was sort of like a cliche, but I remember in in grade school I would see posters that were like

Watch your thoughts because your thoughts lead to, you know, your actions and then what w watch your actions because your actions determine what kind of person you become, right? And it's just a statement of that old superstition, as Nietzsche calls it here, that Nietzsche also talks about in Human Ulti Human, the Fable of Intelligible Freedom, that section at the beginning, the first division of that book, where he's talking about um

The fact that he thinks Schopenhauer was correct to say that man's not responsible for his actions, but incorrect to say that man is responsible for his nature. That Schopenhauer just sort of kicked it up a level with his philosophy and said, Yeah True, in this uh deterministic universe we're not responsible for our actions, but we are responsible for the kind of person that we are.

and uh Nietzsche thinks this is completely incorrect. Uh we're not responsible for our nature either. At least not responsible in terms of being a rationally governing ego consciousness that could make the arbitrary decision to be this way or that way. And so similarly, I mean I mean Nietzsche even says in this passage that even to call the thought an it, right, to to call the thought a form of being, you can't even say that we're made up of like a tapestry of all these various thoughts.

Because even to essentialize the thought as something with being, as a thing, an object, is to fall into the same grammatical habit. And so to tie it back into what I was sort of uh trying to invoke earlier with the superstitions of logicians. He's pointing out how again, what we have here is just a grammatical convention of the structure of our thinking. Of certain prejudices, prejudgments that we have in this essentializing function that our language has.

And that is nothing more than a prejudgment, a pre supposition, a superstition, if you will. And so to take the logicians, right, people who we would think of as the most cold, analytical, dispassionate sort of person, the kind of person who wants to go study, you know, mathematical formal logic, I mean How rigid and boring and unemotional can you get, right? And yet even here their entire premises by which they approach

Just the structure of thinking, right? We're just we're not even talking about metaphysics here. We're just talking about the philosophy of cognition. that we bring to bear these prejudices of language, which are no more than superstition.

And so in the next paragraph down, he says it was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism sought, besides the operating power, that lump of matter in which it resides and out of which it operates, the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learned at last to get along without this earth residuum, and perhaps someday we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little itch. which is all that is left of the honest little old ego. End quote.

And so not only do it in this passage in the the first paragraph that Kaufman broke it into Do we have sort of almost a more straightforward attack on the ego superstition and the I think therefore I am reasoning that um supposedly provides this intuitive immediate certainty of the existence Of the ego. Nietzsche more directly attacks it here in this first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph, he also in some way summarizes.

Another one of those critiques he was making in the sections we covered last week of atomism. He calls it Earth Residuum. I didn't really focus in on that uh last time, but this uh relates to Parmenides, right? So Heraclitus is the philosopher of change who believes in a reality as becoming.

that only the appearance, only the phenomenal world is how being partakes of existence at all, and that the dynamic, uh flowing reality of constant change And so accordingly, Heraclitus Uh that you know, it's the only true reality because even though we can come up with these abstractions of like static, eternalized being, Heraclitus basically rejects those insofar as his metaphysics is premised on this.

uh eternity of change in some sense, unchanging change, right? The unchanging principle of change. And so Heraclitus is this philosopher who then likens the world to fire. Well Parmenides believes that motion is an illusion. and that Uh what truly is is what is, not what was or what will be. and therefore everything that truly is is eternal, and therefore all of existence is one in some sense, and all of the change in motion that we perceive

is in some way an illusion. The world of the senses is an illusion. And so Parmenides likens the true character of reality to earth. Like metaphorically, the fabric of existence is more like earth. It's unchanging, enduring um solid unit y uh a unity, something unified, right? So Earth residuum is the atom. It's our Never-ending quest to find something in the material world which partakes of this being in the Parmenidean sense.

of something the atom is something which is unchanging, you know, the preservation or the conservation of matter, um, and it is individual, that there is some unchanging, individual, enduring substance upon which Uh all of reality rests. And that's what we're looking for in Atomism. Um and so It's very interesting, but we would never think of these things as li as linked in some sense. But at the end of this passage it's very clear.

That Parmenidean view of the world, which we might say, from which Plato is somewhat influenced and inherits his view of the world. and the ego superstition inherited from the soul superstition. and the atomistic materialist f world philosophy. and even our doctrines of causation or causality as a sort of objective fact of the cosmos. All of these things are linked together for Nietzsche as prejudices that are all in some sense demanding the same thing, which is being, unchanging being.

So that's what our thought is seems to often the thought of philosophers is often directed t uh at. So then we'll move on to eighteen.

When Nietzsche says quote, it is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable. It is pri precisely thereby that it attracts subtler minds. It seems that the hundred times refuted theory of free will owes its persistence to this charm alone. Again and again someone comes along who feels he is strong enough to refute it. End quote. This is um it's

Interesting because he seems to flip your expectations at the end there as to what he's saying. Because at the beginning of this little passage, Um it seems to suggest that the charm of the theory is attracting people to adopt that theory. But at the end it almost suggests that he's saying the charm of the theory is the charm of attacking the theory. The theory that's been refuted a hundred times.

is charming to people because of the very fact that it has been refuted a hundred times but is still endures as this intuitive belief, right? And It's like a test of your your own personal strength of the intellect or will to come in and refute in your own way this hundred times refuted theory because you recognize that all of those hundred refutations were not enough.

uh it's still believed. And perhaps that's part of the charm for the theory um on the other side of that coin as well, that there is something intuitive, like free will, the example he gives, is something that people have always been looking for, right?

that it's something that we really want to be true, even if it isn't. And so it will always persist in the minds of people like looking for a a means of bringing about a utopia in a political sense or of quote unquote solving morality in the field of ethics. or, um, you know, coming up with a rock solid epistemology. Like free will is one of those things that it seems as though it would be difficult, if not impossible, to quote unquote prove.

Um you'd almost have to prove a negative in order to prove it uh to be correct. But and on the other hand, it seems like there's always a there's an inexhaustible mine of evidence and arguments against the idea. And yet we still keep looking for it, right? It doesn't make it any less charming. To many people it makes it more charming. It's like a familiar contest or arena of competition.

So after that short aphorism we'll move on to Uh number nineteen, where Nietzsche writes Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as if it were the best known thing in the world. Indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us, absolutely and completely known, without subtraction, or addition, end quote. And so again, this is where this is Schopenhauer's starting place and his own inquiry.

of uh the world as will and representation, at least in in the book uh concerning the will, concerning that side of things, because there's a whole the first two books. The first half of Schopenhauer's text is the world as will and the world as representation, and when he begins talking about the world as will, he says that this is the immediate certainty which he knows to be the inner essence of who he is.

that we ourselves are both phenomena and numena, in so far as we know ourselves subjectively, as the subject, as the inner content And we also understand that we are phenomena. We can perceive our body as alike to other bodies around us. We're not just, you know, the locus of sense organs, but we can also sense what we ourselves are and look like.

and see that we are phenomena among other phenomena. And yet we also know that we have an inner character and we know what that inner character is, and it's the will. So Schopenhauer basically, for whatever argument he goes on to make after that, The starting place, I think, is very sound that he says the will alone is the most fundamental thing that we know and all these other sort of subjective inner faces.

uh descriptions of our subjective inner content are secondary experiences to that of the will. that thinking is something what would you say that springs out of willing. That desiring springs out of willing. That pain and pleasure spring out of willing. That will is the fundamental operation of what we are as subjects.

So, um Nietzsche continues with the passage quote, but again and again it seems to me that in this case too, Schopenhauer only did what philosophers are in the habit of doing. He adopted a popular prejudice prejudice and exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word. And it is precisely in this one word that the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated the always inadequate caution of philosophers.

So let us for once more be cautious, let us be unphilosophical. Let us say that in all willing there is first a plurality of sensations, namely the sensation of the state away from which The sensation of the state towards which the sensation of this from and towards themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting into motion arms and legs, begins its action by force of habit,

as soon as we will anything. End quote. There's a lot of things in scare quotes in that passage, such as away from which and towards which, and he even puts uh the will there used as a verb and scare quotes at the end. And so what philosophers do is they take the popular prejudice and exaggerate it. And I think there is some truth to that, insofar as Philosophers have to work with what is in our t intuition.

to some extent, I mean this is one of the critiques of philosophy that Nietzsche brings out as early as Human All to Human, that we for one, are going to prefer beliefs that are pleasurable to those which are not. Furthermore, around the period of the Dawn and the Gay Science, Nietzsche spends a great deal of time talking about how the community sort of sets a moral ban on certain kinds of beliefs, and therefore

uh sort of inculcates this into the even the intuition, right? The moral intuition of its uh constituent subjects, the conscience in other words. So we can't even really trust our own intuition because our intuition can be enculturated.

would be the argument there. And so philosophers have to work within in order if f their go if their ideas are going to find any purchase at all, they have to work within the framework of the fact that their ideas have to give some sort of pleasure and they have to um at least speak to the intuition to some extent, and that to the extent that they are counterintuitive.

the philosopher in some sense counterbalances this by drawing even more strongly on some other intuition. And so I guess what I'm trying to get across here is that oftentimes What philosophers will do is take something like you could say in Plato and Socrates, they take a popular prejudice, say, about the ability of a man with a cool head, w of with reason, to conquer his own

passions which may lead him astray or into trouble or cause him to act immorally or unvirtuously. And we might say that anyone with just some common sense, a modicum of common sense, would understand that if you take a step back when you're angry and consider the consequences, apply reason to your situation, it's very difficult to stay angry or at least to act impulsively upon that anger. That might just be some common folk wisdom, right?

But we might then say that Plato and Socrates take that popular uh idea and exaggerate it to in enormous degree, to a monstrous degree, right, where the intellect is the only real thing and the passions along with the sensations in the entire physical world

is sort of uh thrown out, right? Uh and we might say then, so the analogy here to Schopenhauer is that he's taking a popular prejudice, so the prejudice of the will. He's taking The idea of the will, the conception of the will, which has been oversimplified in the po uh popular consciousness, and why is this?

Well, precisely because of the free will doctrine, right? Schopenhauer doesn't believe in free will, but the I the way he's using the term will Is something which has that unitary character, that character of conflating v a multiplicity. of in many cases competing or contrasting or mutually exclusive things under one label.

and making it all the will. Just like as we do with the self, right? And so in some sense you could say the conception of the will and the conception of the ego consciousness in most people's minds has become blurred together insofar as yourself is defined as that which has free will, which has this willing character, which has been reduced to this simple sort of uh what might we call it?

Arbitrary force brought to bear against the world, right? Arbitrary decision making of how one's power or in what direction one's energy will be uh manifested. Nietzsche breaks down the will here, both in the fact that it not only pushes us toward things, in the case of seeking pleasure, but it pushes us away from uh pain or displeasure. And Schopenhauer, that was something he tried to Reduce out of the equation.

was this uh two sided or m what would we say, bi directional character of the will, by simply defining happiness as a negative and saying that all of the positive pleasure seeking was in fact just a way to rid oneself of the discomfort of boredom or of from want. Right. Happiness for Schopenhauer is satiety, is freedom from want, right? Uh a negative um a removal of displeasure in some sense.

So he tries to define that away. Nietzsche is bringing it back. He's saying this from and this towards um you know, the will pushing me from things and towards things are actually two separate operations. of what we have conflated under the will. And then thirdly, the accompanying muscular sensation. So he's saying there i in some mysterious way

We will something and then our muscles follow after that thing, right? But Nietzsche doesn't believe in this as a causal relationship, right? He's already called that into question in previous aphorisms. um that, you know, it is the conscious thought of willing something that then compels one's muscles in order to move towards that thing.

But that this may be I mean, he's kind of approaching this from a very agnostic skeptical lens that perhaps this is simply a different category of w the will's operation that we've again conflated under a single uh label. And his what you might call sort of evidentiary statement for this is that our muscles will operate by habit without having to consciously will anything. Like when you just walk down the street.

you don't have to think about, you know, I'm going to raise my knee here and then plant my foot precisely on that, you know, uh that many inches away from where I'm currently standing now, you're not having to do that calculation as you're walking. It just happens automatically. There are so many things that you do that are just habituated muscle movements without having to think about it at all. And you will act even in instinctual or impulsive ways according to those habitual muscle movements.

Um, you know, if you're startled or frightened, right, and you've had any training and like martial arts or combat training, you might immediately without having to think about it. go into the proper, you know, stance and deflect, you know somebody suddenly attacks you, you might go into that automatically without having to think of it. In fact, that's the entire point of habituating, you know, those uh maneuvers, uh, those moves over and over and over again, right, in training.

It's not so that you learn it on a conscious level. It's so you learn it on an unconscious level.

So we'll go continue with the passage here. Nietzsche says quote, therefore just as sensations and indeed many kinds of sensations are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, So secondly, should thinking also in every act of the will there is a ruling thought, let us not imagine it is possible to sever this thought from the willing, as if any will would then remain over. End quote.

And so Nietzsche I think is being rather subversive here in two different directions, because on the one hand He's undermining the old faith that we've been outlining in this entire section. or this t entire division of the text on the prejudices of philosopher philosophers and and the preface of the will to truth as this dispassioned dispassionate, disinterested thing. Excuse me. So the will to truth

Conscious thought, rational thought, cognition, pursuit of knowledge. This is inseparable from willing. Which means that it's not a disinterested process. But on the other side of that coin, as perhaps by implication Schopenhauer does. Let us not imagine it's possible to separate this thought from the willing, as if any will would then remain over. What does this mean?

In some sense this relates to the way Nietzsche talks about every drive having its own form of logic, or its the own shape or patterns of its thoughts. And I think Carl Jung is helpful here in so far as his idea of complexes or subpersonalities. The idea that an individual drive within you. Something which springs from your impulses, right? It's physiological.

um this produces an entire sub personality within you. So if you have an addiction to a particular substance, like say smoking, Or if you have a habit of overeating. I mean I'm I'm picking pathological things because these are very easy to sort of demonstrate by example. You might have a whole subpersonality that is the smoker subpersonality, right? Very narrowly focused in its attention and what th the type of thinking that it does. But its thinking is all oriented a around

Um, how do I get into a place where I'm having a cigarette? Where I'm getting that nicotine hit that I've developed a craving for, right? And so you need uh you as a living organism like all organisms that have m perhaps more complex goals

than simply following and reacting to sensations. I mean Nietzsche would say, I I'm very I'm be trying to be very careful with my words here, and I I do I should clarify that because Nietzsche would say in some sense, even your thinking is just this impulse of reacting to sensation in that way. But again, he's not trying to make that something more simple. In some sense, he's trying to make it more complicated in this passage in nineteen, this critique of the will.

by saying that it's not as simple as saying that, well, oh, thinking is just uh it's just the same as an unconscious impulse. In some sense, what this passage is saying is that the thinking is an inseparable reflection on the conscious level to ourselves of what the logic of this unconscious subpersonality is.

And in the same way that we employ our logic as primarily a means to problem solve, as something instrumental to gain power over the world, Nietzsche thinks that's the origin of our entire pursuit of truth in some sense. Each little drive or subpersonality has its own logic because it has its own goal that it's pursuing and it's trying to problem solve to get itself to that goal.

And so the ruling thought that he's referring to could be something as simple as I want a cigarette, right? Or I want junk food. Again in the pathological sense. Or The ruling thought of a subpersonality could be something more positive and creative, like I w have the higher order goal of having a family. I want to then, you know, I also have a sub personality that's very career oriented. Maybe that's the part of me that is

uh, what would we say? Driven by ambition and by accomplishment and constantly trying to self-improve or something like that. And then you have the other part that is more concerned with my legacy and having a family and having some sort of community and touching the lives of others, right? And maybe those two sub personalities would conflict and contrast, but ultimately they're going to rank order themselves in the individual

in either a harmonious or a chaotic way. Um and uh you know, for many people it's it's chaotic at least to some extent, because in to some level it is a war for Nietzsche.

But each one of those has their ruling thought. And in some sense what Nietzsche's saying is that this is the same even down to the simplest organism as it is for human beings. Or at least that's like the working theory we could work off of. That every drive that it's simply a matter of scale or degrees, the complexity or the sophistication of what its thought is going to be, what this ruling thought is going to be, but that even the most basic sensation, the most basic willing

uh which is sensation and reaction to it, from or towards, right? Pleasure or pain, seeking or fleeing, and the musk accompanying muscular sensations. has a thought behind it, to the whatever degree that we are perceiving reality and pursuing something within it and trying attempting to overcome obstacles in order to get it, that that is in some sense Nietzsche's

giving us a hypothetical structure of thinking that is flows out of quote unquote willing. But by doing so he's pointing out how willing can't be even considered separately from thinking. To the extent that there is anything that wills, that is alive, that perceives reality and acts within it, it has at least on a rudimentary level, some ruling thought. Right, some way that it's representing to itself the world and its pursuit of its goals within that world.

Okay, so to move on, Nietzsche says, quote, third, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an effect, and specifically the effect of the command. That which is termed freedom of the will is essentially the effect of superiority in relation to him who must obey.

I am free, he must obey. This consciousness is inherent in every will, and equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look that fixes itself exclusively on one aim, the unconditional evaluation that this and nothing else is necessary now, the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered, and whatever else belongs to this and whatever else, excuse me, belongs to the position of the commander.

A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience. So the will to Nietzsche is not free but Again, as we were talking about it before, stimulus in response to stimulus. This is the commanding and obeying structure of the will. And the way that Nietzsche talks about in the Zarathustra passage.

on the despisers of the body, that the body is the spirit, that your true self is the body, and what it does is say, feel pain here, and the self feels pain. Uh where it says, Feel pleasure here and the self feels pleasure. This is the nature of the obedience and command of the will that is not arbitrary or detached or quote unquote free in that sense that we normally conceive of the free will.

Um it's obedience and command because you don't have any choice over whether to respond to a stimulus, and you don't have any choice over what it is that you desire. As Schopenhauer says, a man chooses uh a man wills what he wills, but he doesn't choose what he wills. And so uh w you mostly gives a description of kind of what I was uh

trying to elucidate as well. He or he he h also helps explain this. The idea of the ruling thought being uh summarized by the th the phrase, this and nothing else is necessary now. Um And so we'll move on to the next chunk of this text in 19 quote.

But now let us notice what is strangest about the will, this manifold thing for which the people have only one word, inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties, and the obeying party we know And as the obeying party, excuse me, we know the sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually begin immediately after the act of will.

inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic concept I, A whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false evaluations of the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing, to such a degree that he who wills believes sincerely that willing suffices for action.

Since in the great majority of cases there has been exercise of will only when the effective command, that is obedience, that is the action, was to be expected. The appearance has translated itself into the feeling, as if there were a necessity of effect. In short, he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one.

he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success. And so We're going to get to this in some of the next passages as well, this idea, but The entire notion of free will, the illusion of free will. comes from the feeling of command that one has. And so i in a sense

the free will prejudice comes from what Nietzsche will call later in genealogy of morals the master morality, the noble or aristocratic morality. This is what produces the idea of the free will. And Nietzsche therefore doesn't necessarily see free will as like an unhealthy illusion. He sees it as perhaps a very

Life affirming illusion, the illusion of the kind of person who feels as though, like, you know, they they create this synthetic concept I out of a whole series of erroneous conclusions, right? False evaluations of the will itself. But um and he takes he takes the appearance of the right, the appearance has translated itself into a feeling. And so those who feel what they want, what they desire, translated into uh w what we might call Potent action toward that end.

have an accompanying feeling of power. Right. And so this all makes sense within the sort of s the psychology that Nietzsche's been building up in this passage. But we can see how that feeling of power produces these erroneous conclusions. that uh we are mistaking we're drawing some conclusions from mere appearances that are not permitted by a truly sceptical application of the will to truth. But to return to something Nietzsche said earlier that willing is an effect.

And he brings up sort of the prickly nature of that uh that insight. in this paragraph that we just looked at when he points out that we're both the commander and the obeyer. Right. I insofar as will the entire prejudice of the will in some sense splits the human being into two.

And I think just to cut to the chase, a large part of what Nietzsche is doing in this passage is actually attempting a reductio ad absurdum. Of the entire idea of essentializing the self into something with being. Because if we're going to say that the self is a thing, it's something static and unitary, it is the the the ego, right? The old ego superstition that he's been attacking throughout this.

a series of passages, well we can't be satisfied with simply one because we would have to be both commander and obeyer. Right. But if will is if we don't create an interpretive fiction on top of the effect of the will, right? Just treating the will simply as an effect. something moving, something happening in the realm of a verb rather than a noun. then the splitting I don't think is necessary into commander and obeyer. because there is no

There is no subject that receives the stimulus and then is forced to react to it. There is just the experience of the stimulus. There is just the action or reaction. Will is just process and movement. not an activity, an operation on the part of some sort of agent, right? And so I think that's Somewhat to some extent the meaning of this paragraph or the intention behind this paragraph is to deconstruct what it would actually look like if we make ourselves into agents or subjects.

that uh we can't be a unitary thing simply according to the premises upon which we're already operating. That we and that this is an issue that Alan Watts talks about in the lecture Mind Over Mind. I highly recommend listening to. It would actually be a great accompaniment to

um this book, the the the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, is that what Watts talks about is sort of sort of like the intractability of the will. The experience of know wanting something and knowing that you want something, but being unable to do it. Either because you don't know how, or because you simply can't find the will within you to do it, right? And what does that mean then? For you to say, I really wanted to quit smoking, but I just couldn't.

What does that mean? Like you couldn't obey your own will. Um and so who is who was it that couldn't obey? Who was it that was giving the command? What really was the command? Was it really a command? These are all the kinds of questions that could be raised from

calling into question the essential nature of the self, or the the idea of the self as an agent. And so we'll finish out this passage where Nietzsche says, quote, Freedom of the will, that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order. Who as such enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it really was his will itself that overcame them?

In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwheels or under souls, indeed our body is but a social structure composed of many souls. him to his feelings of delight as a commander. Lefect ses moi, which means I am the effect. What happens here is what happens in every well constructed and happy commonwealth, namely the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the Commonwealth.

In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many souls. Hence a philosopher should claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morals. morals being understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of life comes to be. End quote. And so in many ways, Nietzsche is simply summarizing everything that has gone before of

The point I was making earlier of freedom of the will coming from that feeling, from that illusion, which may be erroneous, but again, that's no strike against it. In that way our new language may sound the strangest, right? That the falseness of a judgment is not an argument against it. And that what is it? He says that we the body is but a social structure composed of many souls. So again, this is the the self is complex a complex and rank ordered structure of drives.

How is this different from the ego? Well, it's not one. It's many. It contains mutually exclusive concepts or mutually exclusive forces, we might say. mutually exclusive wills, different t uh towards and away froms within ourselves, right? And then, you know, the the wills that we might say, the expressions of will within ourselves that are come out of habit.

either within our on the very basic physiological level of our musc muscular structure or our habits of thought. Because of course thinking and willing can't be separated any longer. And it it's interesting because Nietzsche even seems to call into question like his he he represents here

a criticism or skepticism towards even his own value judgments of the value of the aristocracy, right? Because in some sense he's admitting here it's like, well the ruling class or the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth, but The undertone here is we all know that that's actually not true.

that the commonwealth is like the sum total of all of these individually striving um beings, and that the uh to use being in a rather loose sense here, and that the governing or the ruling class is taking credit for the power or the uh productivity of the entire community as a result of their own feeling of power and their feeling that they're it's from them that uh

you know, they they bear all of the responsibility for all the good or ill that uh comes out of their commonwealth, right? This is incredibly common belief, you know, if we look at the emperors of China, you know, under the Confucian Minchian approach to things. The emperor is like the

Uh, he's the top of the pyramid, yes, but don't think about it necessarily he's also the he's like the center of like this web, uh the entire social structure of Chinese society. It's all oriented around the emperor. He is the Um not just like an ideal or an exemplar of virtue, but he's during some sense directly morally responsible for all the good or the ill that comes to the empire because he's at the center of it, in a spiritual way, a moral way, a political way.

And so these are all erroneous feelings, right? They're based on superstitions. But that's where we perhaps derive the idea of free will and then derive the idea of the will itself. And even though the will itself conflates so many things, this multiplicity into a simplified unity. Now Nietzsche is by applying this critique Attempting to give us a more naturalistic, complete, complex, sophisticated view of the will.

and how the will and the structure of thinking are interlinked. Okay, we'll continue to section twenty. Quote That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection or relationship with each other that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent,

Is betrayed in the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell they always revolve once more in the same orbit. However independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other, to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts.

Their thinking is in fact far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul. out of which those concepts grew originally. Philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order. And so Again, the subversion at the end, that's philosophy is a kind of atavism. So we have a another comparison that Nietzsche has made or another metaphor he's used to describe the activity of philosophizing.

that we might compare to him calling it mystical inspiration, right? It's completely contrary to the way that philosophy is thought of broadly and the way that philosophers think of themselves. that, in fact, they do think that they have these philosophical concepts which are capricious or autonomously evolving, right? That they could have thoughts detached from

what would we say? The interconnected reality of nature, the interconnected reality of their own impulses and drives that live in sort of a social structure of the body, that thinking could be something capricious or autonomous, something, again, detached or dispassionate. But instead and and so that would imply, right? Thank you.

as many philosophers have thought of themselves, that they could be through this world of abstraction or through their intellect, they could in some sense advance mankind out of antiquated social or moral structures. structures of thinking or structures of uh being or ways of life. um you know that uh e if they don't even strictly adopt like a Whig historical progressive view that, you know, throughout time, going all the way back to Plato with his ideal republic.

or uh we might consider, you know, Hegel and the historical revelation of the absolute mind. So often philosophers believe what they're doing is transcending what what w might we say? Vulgar uh belief in sensation, transcending human nature as animals, and making ourselves into something you know, something which is set apart from all of the animal kingdom by bringing our rational intellect to bear against the operation and activity of our impulses, we become something more.

Nietzsche is saying philosophy is an ativism. What does atavism mean? It's a throwback. It's actually a regression to uh nature, a uh retreat into an earlier mode of being or existence, a resurgence, a sudden resurgence. And so what does he mean by this? We basically in so many words Nietzsche's argument is philosophers keep treading over the same ground over and over again.

the structures of their thought, the inner connected nature of their thought, the way that they always uh every philosophy springs it's a plant grown from the germ of a the single moral or immoral intention, right? So this r uh moral or immoral end, this drive within the philosopher, is the real thing doing philosophy because all drives have a ruling thought.

they all have their own form of logic, and some central thought of the philosopher, upon which every other thought is connected, springs up into being. And they always seem to repeat one after the other the same patterns of thought. I mean I I've brought up before the domination of the passions by the intellect, common theme in philosophy. See how again and again and again philosophers revisit the same question. How do I make the will obey itself?

How do I um become the commander and and uh learn to obey my own commands, right? uh they always revisit these same uh these same problems that have beguiled mankind since ancient Indian philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, you know, in the time the centuries before Christ. So at the very beginnings of civilization, right, of large organized, complex societies.

Um we've been mostly just talking about the same thing over and over again. It's like that Whitehead quote that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, right? The same things concern us.

And so this is Nietzsche's evidence that philosophers aren't just pulling these thoughts out of the ether or the lap of being, or that thinking isn't this disinterested, detached process. It's clearly the evidence of this is the fact that Philosophers are predictable in some sense, that their human beings, as animals, have a predictable range of instincts or impulses. and philosophy that we produce out of that range of impulses or instincts.

I mean it's gonna shift according to like which drive is strongest in a given person. But it's always there's a certain range of territory. He says it's like a continent of different fauna and flora, right? And so it's all from the same ecosystem, the drives of man, the same ecosystem of our own inner drives. of what's possible of the like within the horizons of our own little valley of mankind, right? Within that continent of all life. We always repeat the same pattern.

And so Nietzsche elaborates on this quote The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough, where there is affinity of languages I it cannot fail owing to the common ph philosophy of grammar.

I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world im interpretation,

It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Euroaltaic languages Where the concept of the subject is least developed, look otherwise into the world and will be found on paths of thought different from those of Indo Germanic peoples and the Muslims. The spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions, so much by the way of rejecting Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas.

And so Yeah, so much of this text is a rejection of the the English rejection. way of regarding the origin of ideas, which is very much locked into that idea of a subject or agent. uh which h has or produces or creates thoughts and has some intentionality and conscious direction or control over this process, at least to some degree.

And Nietzsche is pointing out here, I mean, we we we spoke earlier about uh just sort of the the m more broad concerns that could apply to any style of philosophy from anywhere. Um but sp specifically we were talking about like Indo Germanic of you know, peoples who do share a common root civilization and a common root language.

um from which they're all descended, will have certain grammatical prejudices baked into the way that they think. And so he speculates that you might have see, I don't know anything about Altaic Ural languages. Um, which I believe he says that's where the the concept of the subject is least developed. But we might say in ancient China there was a very only loosely developed idea of the individual s uh subject as this ego, you know, that sort of superstition. And they do, um

they did produce very different philosophical ideas, which operate off of different starting premises than Western thought. There is overlap that what's interesting is they do return to some of those same Like you can sort of see the concentric circles of like the

what would you say? The drives that are common to all mankind. And remember so he says that that language, the spell of certain grammatical functions, is ultim ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions. And so what does that mean? Well a value Evaluation is a physiological demand for the preservation of a certain way of life. So he's pointing out that this is.

uh physiological valuations, so the the origin of all moral valuations is physiological, and racial conditions, which we might consider f more from the angle of ethnicity at this point in time. of the historical geographic realities that premised your survival. So for example, we might look at all the ways that uh, you know, a people growing up in a desert climate uh might have to hmm, what what would we say?

the valuations that they make might make about t certain things might be very different from a people that existed on like the Great Plains or at a rainforest. Right? Their mode of survival is different. Their culture is going to inculcate different things into their intuitions.

And their language as a result, the structure of their thinking, the grammatical prejudices or premises upon which their thinking is based, and upon which therefore their philosophy will be based, is going to be different. But they're all human beings, right? So that might be their little valley on the continent of philosophical flora and fauna, but the whole continent is mankind because there are certain physiological realities. um that are going to premise any human life, right?

Th that that are transcend cultural differences or racial or ethnic d differences. And so we can look to language as one of the things that patterns our thought and creates these prejudices, but there is there are going to be even more fundamental prejudices that are just simply physiological demands. created by the nature of human life itself.

And so moving on to uh section twenty-one. And I'm not going to read from this section, I'm going to gloss over it because we discussed this section in the episode on free will from season one. But to give a brief summary, um, you know, if you y you want more than a summary, you can go listen to that episode. But The brief summary is that Nietzsche begins by saying that the causa sui, the cause unto itself, is the b best self contradiction that has been conceived so far, a perversion of logic.

And that this sort of comes out of the desire for freedom of the will and what he calls the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway. And, you know, i the desire to bear the ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and he says with Munchausen's daring to pull oneself up into existence by the hair out of the swamps of nothingness, that's where we get the somewhat

uh what would you say? Apocryphal saying, Buy your own bootstraps, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and the original story, Munchausen pulls himself out of the swamp by his own hair. But we can understand the metaphor is the same either way. He's a cause unto himself doing something which is physically impossible, pulling himself up by his own hair. And Such a good image for why Nietzsche is saying the self caused cause.

is such a uh absurd idea, an idea that's obviously erroneous or rife with falsehood. But notice again the self-caused cause. Just saying the words you should be able to see the underlying premises that there is such a thing as cause and effect. that um every cause requires an effect, that uh there is a self, right? That there are

uh what would you say, subjects or beings, which are essentialized, that there is a doer separate from the deed. Um, that's the only reason why we have a need to come up with this idea of the causa sui at all. Because we've created the entire notion of the self out of this r earth residuum of the ego.

And Nietzsche begs us in this passage, basically. Um, he he says there are those who have seen through the simplicity of this simple idea of free will of the absurdity of the uncaused cause, the self caused cause, but says, you know, carry your enlightenment a step further and get rid of this unfree will idea. And why? Because that's still premised on the same prejudice of cause and effect as objective governing facts in the world. And in some sense.

The Nietzsche's problem with cause and effect is its atomistic character. What do I mean by that? Breaking reality into these individual or undividable, indivisible pieces. causes and effects, right? which are sort of like quantifiable little snapshots of moments in time.

which, you know, i it's sort of like the difference between I talked about this in the episode on the uh time atomism fragment with uh Quinn Williams, but it's a very useful metaphor for thinking about this, that uh the art of filmmaking, right, is twenty-three frames per second. It's twenty three photographs and so and uh so many words shown every second. And that's how you get the illusion of movement on film. is capturing a freeze frame, right? But life itself doesn't have frames.

Right, th there are no frames in reality w within time. Time is infinitely divisible, as we all learned when we first encountered Zeno's paradox. There are an infinite number of ways you could break down the units of time. So uh that division of time doesn't actually, quote unquote, happen. That's something which is a It's a result of our bringing to bear our consciousness or our representation of reality.

Because our memory is essentially that series of freeze frames and that's how we can sort of hold multiple images of past events and experiences in our mind. snapshots of sensation, right? Whether it be visual, auditory, smells, or whatever, that we've like represented to ourselves in the form of a scene or happening or an event in our lives.

And we can sort of like hold them as a frozen dead state, that we think in terms of being, in terms of these frozen dead states, but that in actual reality, becoming is not a series of frozen dead states. It's not a series of frames uh in a movie picture, there are no frames at all. It's an infinite uh acceleration. It's a flow, right? A continuum. Um none of these words really capture it because we're trying to use language which

in some sense is premised on the idea of freezing becoming into these frozen dead states of being, right? Into word concepts in order to be able to convey or communicate information. And so that's what we're sort of up against. But This is all to say cause and effect in the sense that is used to quote unquote disprove free will from a deterministic or mechanistic stance. is still subjecting the world to this state of frozen dead being.

Of saying, you know, it's like the the example we often hear is like the universe is like a bunch of billiard balls. clacking into one another. And so you have, you know, the eight ball is the cause or the cue ball is the cause and the eight ball is the affected object. And so you have this i distinct object which is a cause and the other which is the effect, right?

But that in actuality there are no quote unquote causes and effects. There's just this flowing. There's just this movement, this process, this dynamic reality of life. Heraclitus's river, right? Um and that in actuality what you are is not th this separate ego consciousness which is burdened with this body that has all these drives and impulse.

that you then are unable to, you know, obey the dictates of your own will because they're overrided by your uh, you know, wayward passions or something of that uh fashion. That in fact We do away with this concept of the unitary, indivisible self, of the soul atomism, and recognize the self as a multiplicity and a social structure.

And what this multiplicity is made of is drives the this this movement, right, the way Nietzsche describes it, to or from, and movement in the physical sense, in the sense of our physiology. and these moving things are processes of which it's not permitted to say that they indicate a subject or agent. What they are is, again, a a process with its own

form of thought or its own ruling thought that accompanies that process. And so there's no there's no you to have unfree will, if that makes sense. Because the very thing that is doing the willing or the acting Uh is you because what you are is a multiplicity.

And so to divide yourself atomically and then imagine yourself like this you in the abstract sense, as being enslaved by your physiological drives and demands, which you didn't get a rational choice over, is to consciously or unconsciously self-identify with this ego superstition. rather than comprehending the self based on the actual realities of sensation and willing as we experience it.

that and this is why we don't have the intuition of being unfree beings, right? Um, at least insofar we do have that intuition when we feel ourselves obstructed or oppressed or blocked from our aims. then we do feel unfree in a very real and physical sense. But that in so far as we are actually pursuing what it is that we want, even though we didn't choose what we wanted, we still feel quote unquote free.

And that as much as it's a mistake to say, Well, I pulled myself up by my bootstrap, I am choosing to be what I am, right? because I have some sort of choice over my own nature, and the way that Schopenhauer perhaps thought of it, is just as silly as saying, Well, I'm enchained by my passions and I am unable to act upon what I believe to be morally or intellectually right because of my, you know, wayward drives. Both are mistakes.

Now again, I don't wanna downplay this because Nietzsche does also believe He writes numerous times and I think his view maybe changed on this because he does seem to increasingly reject mechanistic causality as he uh continues in in his career for all the things that we've talked about. Nietzsche ultimately, if you want to ask whether he's a f in favor of free will or determinism. He is not in favor of free will or determinism.

But it's not a compatibilist view. He doesn't believe that we get both. He believes that neither are in abs a quote unquote objective description of what reality is, that they're all incorrect models. But this doesn't mean that the will I mean, o the thing that people are trying to always get with the free will debate, right? The the thing that they're always um What would you say? Pursuing in this a hundred times refuted idea.

is to get that sense of agency or that sense of being an arbitrarily, voluntarily governing ego consciousness. And Nietzsche will not give you that. He does disagree that that is something, that that's not a thing for Nietzsche. Right, so that is quote unquote closer to the deterministic position, but it's not because he thinks our will is overwhelmed with mechanistic causality. Again, a lot of this might be uh better explained in the free will episode.

But that's my attempt at explaining these ideas at a glance. And the important thing at the end of twenty one Uh I'll just give a short quote here. He says it's almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every causal connection and psychological necessity something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure and unfreedom. It is suspicious to have such feelings, the person betrays himself. Well, I mean, there you go.

Whether what we believe about our freedom or unfreedom of the will is based on how we feel about the effectiveness of our will in the world. and that it sort of speaks to whether you're a strong or a weak person, or a strong or a weak soul, we might say, if we want to kind of rarify the situation a little more.

uh whether you're going to feel you have free or unfree will. But neither one is actually you discovering anything objective about the world. It's you discovering something about yourself, which has been in some sense Nietzsche's entire critique of philosophy generally in this passage.

All right, so twenty two Nature writes quote Forgive me, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation. But nature's conformity to law of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though why it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad philology.

It is no matter of fact, no text, but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul. Everywhere equality before the law, nature is no different in that respect, no better off than we are.

A fine instance of ulterior motivation, in which the plebeian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic, as well as second and more refined as well as a second and more refined atheism are dis are disguised once more. ni Dieu ni Metre, which means no gods, no masters, that is what you two want, and therefore cheers for the law of nature. Is it not so? But as said above, that is interpretation, not text.

and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same nature, and with regard to the same phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power,

An interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all will to power so vividly that almost every word, even the word tyranny itself would eventually seem unsuitable, or a weakening and attenuating metaphor, being too human.

But he might nevertheless end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely that it has a necessary and calculable course to the Not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. Supposing that this also is only interpretation, and you will be eager enough to make this objection, well, so much the better. End quote.

It Nietzsche almost gets ahead of his own skeptics. He enter he anticipates the counter argument so clearly. brilliantly there, right? Well what you're saying is only an interpretation too, right? And he's saying, Yeah, I know that. So much the better. That you actually comprehend that All of our what would you say? Attempts to create something like a law of nature is always a our own derivation of the patterns of nature, which therefore cannot be teased out from ourselves.

that our conception of nature exists at our particular scale and our particular position and place within it. And the conceptions, the conceptual net by which we attempt to grab nature has been shaped by human considerations and value judgments. All of this is is rather I would say obvious given everything that we've put forward so far. But

Okay, so w just a couple of interesting observations that the modern soul wants to make everything into law, right? Because of this prejudice that you could have equality under the law. And this goes all the way back to the Roman idea. That they were ruled by laws and not men, and that that's what a republic is, is a system whereby Things run according to the Constitution. You have a series of rules that everyone follows. No man is above the law, right?

And that this in many respects we could see how this has been nurtured by Christianity. All are equal before the eyes of God, all are equal before the eyes of the Lord. Um all men are under the laws of God, even the highest king to the lowliest peasant. Right. Um, you know, it's the the sort of the great equalizer of all men. All are subject to death and mortality and the um all of these things and uh have the same moral laws and demands upon them made from on high.

And The transformation that occurs under the democratic spirit is sort of maybe the utopianism of Rousseau, um in in some sense, that we could because the the Christian idea of all being equal under the eyes of the Lord sort of presupposes that uh we're all equal For something that is independent of who and what we are and our you know, morality or immorality relative to other human beings, that no man is equal to the example of, for example, Jesus Christ, right, in the Christian tradition.

And so uh you have this element of like forgiveness for man's sins. and this sort of like universal entry point into the faith of being like, Well, I'm, you know, just a wretched sinner like everyone else. You can't be good enough to to to live the Christian life, right? Um whereas

You know, so so the Christian conception of the world, there you have God's moral law, but there's never an expectation that people are going to live according to that. That's not reflected in the world that people live according to God's moral law. And you could say that perhaps the utopianism of the democratic political spirit is to imagine that we could all live according to a series of rules, and that the rules could actually guide all of our lives.

and that people could be made uh or shaped or reshaped according to the demands of the environment in order to live in accord with those rules. And that you could create a stable, self maintaining system where all are managed according to the same rules. And the rules in some sense are like respected at least to

a large degree enough that they can sustain themselves. And that the reflection of this new social reality in the sciences is to begin to r is the mechanistic universe in so many words, right? Um that so many the the the rise of deism, right, among figures like the founding fathers. and the rise of mechanism and these new understandings of like how nature operates according to what they did call begin to call laws, like the law of gravity, law of conservation of mass and matter.

That, you know, there's something about the deistic worldview of the God that just sort of sets all these laws in place, puts a system in place. And then steps away and lets it just work according to the logic of that system. And Nietzsche says how.

this is sort of it's a you might say this is an interpretation of reality that is anathema to the idea of autocracy, right? Of the ideas that you might have about reality that could be patterned living under an absolute monarch, where the will or the apparent free will of this one person, this one personality, this central personality their moral example or their actions can arbitrarily

shape or reshape. That might be perhaps the view of the world that was uh more amenable to things like miracles, right? That God just can do something. Like there's no the laws of nature when it comes to the creator of the universe. If God wants to make a statue weep or turn water into wine, God can do that.

it's only once we have this idea that there are laws of nature that you might see y that you we begin to see miracles lose their capital, right? No one believes in miracles anymore because that doesn't fit with our mechanistic view of things. So it's like the shift from autocracy to a more democratic approach to life. And the reconception of the world is governed by a system, by a deistic God who does not actively intercede or break the rules that he has set, right?

And Nietzsche points out, because you might say, like, well, you know, Nietzsche, if you're so in favour of commanding and obeying, what's wrong with conceiving of these laws as governing reality? And he, you know, to his credit, sort of admits this at the end of the passage. But that, you know, he sees necessity and calculation and everything in nature as well. But that it is a form of tyranny, and that the word tyranny is perhaps even too weak To really

an interpreter would picture picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all will to power so vividly that almost every word, even the word tyranny itself, would eventually seem unsuitable. A weakening metaphor, right? it that tyranny is not strong enough a word for The absolute domineering ca character of all life as Nietzsche sees it existing. Pure stimulus and response, pure command and obedience, pure force against force.

Right? Every power drawing its ultimate consequences at every moment. And so, yes, this is only Nietzsche's interpretation, as he himself points out. But by contrasting this harsh interpretation of reality that emphasizes this domineering, commanding, obeying aspect that's completely absent of anything like equality or individuality. He is doing something to our certainties about things like equality and individuality. He's challenging them in a very important way. Uh and by

Us, the humanitarian modern version of the free spirit, raise being so quick to raise this objection that it's only an interpretation. Nietzsche's pointing out, what you're doing is undermining yourself. Um, you're undermining your own intellectual certainties and your attempt to undermine uh the interpretation that I'm putting forward. What's driving you is what's driving all philosophers some moral or immoral end.

you know, in l in light of the weight of all the arguments that Nietzsche has presented thus far. What you want is no gods and no masters, just a universe run like clockwork by a series of physical impersonal physical laws, like a sort of constitution. a republic of reality where we're governed by laws and not men, right? Not by, you know, tyrannical domineering will.

Uh whereas Nietzsche is presenting this countervision for the precise reason not of you to accept it as an objective fact, but to make all such interpretations of reality. Laid bare for what they are, which is just such a moral or f at bottom physiological demand for the preservation of a certain way of life. That's what you're doing in your world interpretation. Um and so d take that as the thrust of this entire division of the text, if nothing else.

And so w we end with twenty-three where Nietzsche uh basically sort of christens what he's doing here, which is psychologizing, applying psychology to philosophy. And at this time What that means, I mean, it it again, as I've already mentioned, psychology in the modern understanding of the discipline is very much influenced by what Nietzsche is doing here.

that he is tackling psychology in a new and powerful way and bringing it uh He he's using it in order to attack and critique philosophy in a way that I don't think had really been done before. And so this is the final section of On the Prejudices of Philosophers, and I'm just going to read it straight through and then we'll talk about it. Number twenty three, quote All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears. It has it has not dared to descend into the depths.

To understand it as morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power as I do. But nobody has yet come close to doing this even in thought, insofar as it is permissible to recognize in what has been written so far a symptom of what has so far been kept silent.

The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most spiritual world, which would seem to be the coldest and most devoid of presuppositions, and has obviously operated in an injurious, inhibiting, binding, and distorting manner. A proper physiopsychology has to contend with unconscious resistance in the heart of the investigator. It has the heart against it.

Even a doctrine of the reciprocal dependence of the good and the wicked drives, causes, as refined immorality, distress and aversion in a still hail and hearty conscience. Still more a doctrine of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones. If, however, a person should regard even the effects of hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule as conditions of life, as factors which, fundamentally and essentially, must be present in the general economy of life.

and must therefore be further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced. He will suffer from such a view of things as from seasickness. And yet, even this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost new domain of dangerous insights, and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why everyone should keep away from it who can. On the other hand, if one has drifted there with one's bark, well, all right, let us clinch our teeth.

Let us open our eyes and keep our hand firm on the helm. We sail right over morality. We crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there.

But what matter are we? Never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus makes a sacrifice it is not the sacrificio del intelleto, on the contrary, will at least be entitled to demand in return that all psychology shall be recognized again as the queen of the sciences. them for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist, for psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems. End quote.

uh a brilliant end to this first division of the text on the prejudices of philosophers. That um defines Nietzsche's project as psychologizing, as I've said. It brings back the faith in opposite values as the fundamental prejudice that Nietzsche is attacking, as he sort of brings up as one of his dangerous considerations, the reciprocal dependence of the good and the wicked drives. The derivation of good impulses from wicked ones?

Uh he brings in hatred, envy, coveted covetousness, and the lust to rule as conditions of life. factors which have to be present in the general economy of life. So looking back at the previous aphorism, again, I often have stated how, in many ways, Nietzsche goes too far intentionally or he is gives unqualified statements completely from one perspective, from his harsh perspective, from his completely harsh skepticism towards any of our moral prejudices or interpretations added onto the world.

In order to stand as a contrast um to the common inherited prejudices that we all hold, and that if you were to hedge or qualify his statements or try to mediate between what, you know, the common prejudice is and his, you know, harsh insights here. you know, in some sense, everyone's speaking for the morality of the herd, right? So let Nietzsche be the one guy to speak for this morality, uh, you know, his beyond good and evil morality, and then

we can make that contrast or that synthesis or reconciliation, however we want to do it, we can make that ourselves, right? As the readers. Nietzsche can trust us to be intelligent enough to sort that out. But here in twenty three he almost is uncharacteristically conciliatory because I think just a nugget of insight there is him pointing out like, look, all of these things that you think are rather ugly are natural things to the human existence and how we've made

Even the word human, when we say you're only human, we're we're we're saying something negative, right? You're well, you're only a flawed sort of failed being in a sin cursed world. And y you know, we we don't like to think about that, that we still inherit the judgment that we passed upon man from Christianity, the condemnation of mankind as something f flawed and frail and, you know, all of these things. And and we look at

Natural aspects of the human animal that if we were to look at it in the case of any other organism, we wouldn't pass the same judgment, right? But or capacity for aggression or physical lust or the lust for rule and power, right? We'll we'll look at these things and be like, oh, that's just the story of humanity. We're always doing the same evil things, right? And really there's something really powerful here of Nietzsche seeing those evil aspects of ourselves.

as from a higher order consideration, something good. That the naturalness of it does make it good. That the The fact that it is our nature means it's something that we have to accept. And that by Deciding consciously or unconsciously to look away from those things, we have failed to understand ourselves. We've let our psychology, our understanding of the human psyche, get stuck in moral prejudices.

And so that's why we're sailing right over morality on this voyage, right? This is and so in we get the impression now getting into part two, the free spirit, that this is This entire thing has been almost like a preferatory or preliminary step in this journey, or merely a first step, we might say. And that Nietzsche hasn't really advanced many positive or unqualified hypotheses here, he has mostly raised questions or presented things as thought experiments.

But what he has done is basically called into question every presupposition or prejudice of logical or philosophical thinking that we have. And by doing this, he's prepared us for considerations that might lead us into areas upon which the community has set its ban. thoughts which are uh you know, uh not permitted within the framework of good and evil. And that's why we sail right over our own morality and perhaps crush or destroy it on this voyage.

But Nietzsche says, you know, what matter are we? So Ha ha He's sort of enticing us, inviting us to say, So what if you're immoral for thinking these thoughts? What mat what matter your morality, right? Um The and that there is a sacrifice being made here. That is the sacrifice you're making, but it's not the sacrifice of the intellect. The sa sacrificio del intellecto. Why does Nietzsche bring this up? Well, the sacrifice of the intellect. That's the that's part of the mystical journey, right?

And so all philosophy up to this point has been mystical. It's been like mystical inspiration. where some sort of sacrifice of the intellect has taken place, in which we've falsified what the will to truth is, or our own understanding of what the will to truth is. in order to obtain our moral or immoral ends, the germ out of which our entire philosophy has grown. Um but on the contrary here, through his methodology of psychology, of recognizing this first and foremost.

Nietzsche thinks in a way his philosophical project is the first by going on sailing off on this journey that's beyond good and evil with the method on the ship of psychology, right? We're not making that sacrifice. That paradoxically, this is the true will to truth is a perspectival understanding of human thinking.

meaning a psychological understanding of human thinking, beginning with where the thinker is coming from, what they're grounded in, what their morality is, what are their physiological demands. that they've uh attempted to impose upon life. uh that's where we begin in our philosophical inquiry, having freed ourselves from all of these other past prejudices. And so with that we'll move on to part two, the free spirit, and look at the first aphorisms there.

Nietzsche begins Part two, The Free Spirit, with uh aphorism or section twenty four. Which begins like this: quote, O sanctas simplicitas, in what strange simplification and falsification man lives. One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel, how we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple. How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences.

How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple in caution, hardiness and gaiety of life, in order to enjoy life. And only now this solid granite foundation of ignorance

Sorry, and only on this now solid granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far. The will to knowledge and the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance to the uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement. Even if language here is elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation,

Even if the inveterate Tartufery of morals which now belongs to our unconquerable flesh and blood, infects the words even of those of us who know better. Here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed, and suitably falsified world. At the way in which, willy nilly, it loves error, because being alive it loves life. End quote.

So this is the dynamics of how Nietzsche thinks about truth and falsehood, or th how he thinks about the human condition In the wake of all of those considerations of part one of the prejudices of philosophers. And so we live in a strange simplification and falsification. So again, this like constant falsification of the world by means of numbers. This equation of unequal things.

It's not an objective truth in the world, these sets and categories that we've drawn, but they're indispensable to beings just such as we are. We've made these wanton leaps of logic to the ego, to the freedom of the will, and so on and so forth.

Um and he doesn't condemn this. It's he says this is like almost comes from an inconceivable freedom and lack of scruple and caution, right? Living dangerously, right? That's what the intellect has done. It's like created these big, dangerous, crazy ideas that are completely erroneous or completely unrelated to any sort of hard-nosed attempt at getting at the truth. Um but we've done this in order to enjoy life because uh ourselves as living beings, right, and therefore thinking beings, which

Nietzsche has now blurred the lines between because willing and thinking kind of are suffused with one another. They can't be made into an opposition, at least not in some sort of strict objective sense. Um being alive, it loves life, right? That uh d and the what it what is the it there? Science at its best. seeks to keep us in the simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed, and suitably falsified world. So science, we might say in a more broad extended sense of the term science.

So the will to truth, the desire to know, to possess true knowledge, right? That is sort of the what Nietzsche thinks is the essence of science, is something alive. Something that loves life. And because life itself is served by falsehood and error. Right. That's why our truth is built on this foundation of falsehood.

not as opposites but as a refinement. That truth is a more refined version of our vulgar metaphysical or mythological lies about reality, into something mathematical and abstract and more technically and what would you say, physically powerful for controlling and understanding the world. And all of these errors, all of these strange simplifications and fabrications.

have served life through their through these falsifications of the world. So in many ways, this first uh section, Osancta simplicitas, which means holy sim simplicity, divine simplicity. Right. Um that is what mankind lives in, and it's been to our advantage. To live in this divine simplicity in so many ways. And so that's the danger of Nietzsche's project, but it shows you that.

He's not attacking falsehood in the way that perhaps previous philosophers have done. In another very real sense, This passage reads like You know, remember the beginning of Heraclitus' record, or his fragments, where he talks about how though this logos, this universal principle is common to all men choose to live in ignorance of it, so many philosophers also begin their projects by

you know, lamenting the ignorance of all men around them, and if only the mankind at large knew their truths and their insights. right, they could be delivered from this foolishness, this error. And so Nietzsche, in some sense, as he says in the previous uh division of the text,

is revisiting the same philosophical territory that so many others have visited before him. But in another way, remember the central task of beyond good and evil, the immoralist in opposition to the moralist approach to philosophy, to see truth and falsehood as refinements or gradations of one another, rather than mutually opposed essences.

So we'll move on to twenty five, where Nietzsche says After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would like to be heard. It appeals to the most serious. Take care, philosophers, and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom, of suffering for the truth's sake. Even of defending yourself. It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience and

It makes you headstrong against objections and red rags. It stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of hostility. You have to pose as protectors of truth upon earth, as though the truth were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors, and you of all people, unites of the most sorrowful countenance. Dear loafers and cobweb spinners of the spirit.

After all, you know well enough that it cannot be of any consequence if you of all people are proved right, you know that no philosopher so far has been proved right, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark that you place after your special words and favorite doctrines, and occasionally after yourselves. than in all the solemn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts. Rather go away.

Flee into concealment, and have your masks in subtlety that you may be mistaken for what you are not, or feared a little, and don't forget the garden, the garden with the golden trellis work. And have people around you who are as a garden, or as music on the waters in the evening, when the day is turning into memory. Choose the good solitude, the free, playful light solitude that gives you too the right to remain good in some sense.

How poisonous, how crafty, how bad does every long war make one that cannot be waged openly by means of force? How personal does a long fear make one? A long watching of enemies, of possible enemies? These outcasts of society, these long pursued, wickedly persecuted ones, also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas, or Jar Giordano Brunos, always become in the end, even under the most spiritual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it.

Sophisticated vengeance seekers and poison brewers. Let someone lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology, not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that his philosophical sense of humor has left him.

the martyrdom of the philosopher, his sacrifice for the sake of the truth, Forces into light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him, and if one has so far contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, With regard to many a philosopher, it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his degeneration. degenerated into a martyr, into a stage and platform baller. Only that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case,

merely a satyr play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long real tragedy is at an end, assuming that every philosophy was in its genesis a long tragedy. End quote. There is a great deal in this passage, but I wanted to read it all the way through because

uh twenty five just has such a flow to it and it's a great example of Nietzschean prose. And so what does Nietzsche begin by talking about? Beware of martyrdom. Don't martyr yourself for the truth. The truth does not need you to defend her. in so many words. So, you know, the truth, your your palace Athena and male in mask, what does she need? You you most solemn knights of the spirit, right? And cobweb spinners and whatever other epithets Nietzsche

Tosses at us. And it so once once again There's an undertone throughout this entire section about good humor versus this sort of dour solemnity, which he's brought up in the previous division of the text as well.

in part one of what we might call it appears in Zarathostra as the spirit of gravity, right? The solemn seriousness Um which is I mean It's one of the the toughest things to maybe get in Nietzsche if you're approaching him strictly from trying to discover what rigorous philosophical arguments he's making, because he's making an argument about temperament and character.

But given that he just told us, psychology is the route to the deepest problems, right? For all the reasons that we talked about having to do with part one. And so here in part two In some sense, what he's warning us against, if we want to be free spirits and philosophers of the future, is to maintain our good humor.

and to see the value, one of the ways that he's giving us a sort of magical boon in the hands of the hero and his journey here is the question mark. He's saying learning to see the value in your questions above all of your solemn sort of gestures and expressions about the truth. And the question marks that we place even behind ourselves, behind our own character and who we are and what we're doing. Uh insofar as we're pursuing philosophy or pursuing the truth.

And so and I love the line, don't be concerned with whether you'll be proved right, because no philosopher so far has been proved right. And we have to ask ourselves what it would even really mean for a philosopher to be proved right. proven right, you know, um, when it comes to metaphysical speculation. In some sense you would need like a mystical experience in order to prove a philosopher correct.

um if it comes to, you know, metaphysics or something of that nature. Or like mor morality. What are we going to have a cosmic moral judge come down and say, Yeah, no, it turns out Kant was right. You know? Or the utilitarians were actually correct. There's that show The Good Place, right? Where um it's a long show. It's like about the afterlife. Uh it's not a terribly long show, but there's a lot of things that happen. I don't want to like

d diverged too heavily into describing everything in that show. At one point the characters learn that in the afterlife everyone goes to hell because they're uh the judges, the moral judges who determine or that the formula that they're using to determine whether somebody deserves heaven or hell or not at the end of their life has been based on a sort of like uh I guess Peter Singer model of like you have a moral obligation to reduce suffering and not to cause suffering, regardless of

how directly or indirectly your actions do cause suffering and how far away in space or time that may be. And so with the advent of like, international industrial capitalism, right? That everyone participates in through, you know, this worldwide system of trade and finance. And like, you know, when you buy your smartphone, you're like paying money to people who are like exploiting children, having them mine by hand in order to get the

you know, materials to make such an advanced, sophisticated gadget for you that you don't technically need to survive, right? All of these things basically have compounded to mean that everyone's complicit in the entire world with this evil system of domination and exploitation, so everyone goes to hell, right? And so I guess what I'm my point here is.

that shy of going to the afterlife and meeting God or, you know, being told like, you know, what the what's inscribed on the tablets of the cosmos of, you know, what the moral commandments over mankind are. No philosopher, no moral philosopher is going to be quote unquote proven right. There's no um there's no experiment you can run in the philosophical realm. even when it comes to the sciences, right? Uh every new discovery opens up a

a a whole chasm, you know, of like uh of of complications and new uh new questions that are raised, right? That if you continue following your methodology of doubt with the truly Cartesian uh you know, a true adherence to the Cartesian dictum of all is to be doubted, what you're going to find is that every new certainty opens up a series of uncertainties. of questions that you didn't even know to ask yet. And so

uh in order to be a true truth seeker, you have to have sort of an exuberant good humor about things being questionable and being made questionable. And enjoy the uncertainty and the the possibility and the What would you say? The adventure that raising questions is. in and of itself, right? This passage really mu very much reminds me of the passage in the gay science in in Media Vita, where Nietzsche says, From now on let knowledge for me

Uh what he says, let let knife life be a means to knowledge and let knowledge be whatever it is for other people, a bed to rest on or a something certain and stable, a stable foundation to stand on. But for for me it's going to be an adventure and a challenge. and uh, you know, sort of my my quest of exploration, my hero's journey, right? That's what the pursuit of knowledge is to me. And so in some sense this paragraph is simply a restatement of this.

that the attitude of wanting to be martyred for your truth. Is the attitude of the old dogmatic philosophers. It's not for the new immoralist free spirit. And he's not making a refutation on a logical basis. He's making a psychological analysis of the old dogmatists as these solemn, dour, serious Schopenhauer types.

And in contrast, he gives us the figure of the dancing, life-loving Zarathustra, or Nietzsche saying life can be a mean to knowledge, and knowledge as an adventure and not a bed to rest on.

And so he advises us what he really means by being, you know, martyred for our truth, he talks about in terms of Sort of like going to war with the prejudices of your society, or going to war against intellectual or ideological opponents, and that there's something very you might say, well what what would be wrong with that because Nietzsche's all in favor of war? But this is why he has the line that whenever there's a war that is not what does he say, how personal does a long fear make one?

How poisonous, how crafty, how bad does every long war make one that cannot be waged openly by means of force? What does that mean? Well, if it's an intellectual war, a war of ideas, it becomes sort of like a sham in a farce. it becomes a debate. It becomes, you know, where you're attempting to use these tricks of rhetoric where you'll play into the deceptions of language. You'll y you use the ways that language actually misleads us into error.

in order to, you know, conjure an emotional reaction or conjure pathos or something of the other, where you'll become a falsifier of reality. Um more to the point though, I mean, because in some sense uh the fault again, the falseness of a judgment is not an argument against that judgment, right? So it's not simply

that, uh, you know, in the r rhetorical realm that you won't be pure seekers of the truth because of course, why would you? You're both trying to win, but it's the fact that the the contest is not physical and it's not one of actual

bringing to bear physical force, the contest can't ever win, or you can't ever win. The contest can't ever end, in some sense. What that means is, you know, When you have a debate with somebody, a longstanding debate, i if it's not a formal debate with a moderator where you keep score at the end

There is no winner because both sides can continually claim victory and never admit that the other side is technically you know, whenever they have a uh something on which they're technically correct. No one is ever compelling you to do this.

And Um, you know, a a really good saying I've heard recently as regards politics is that the impulse to point out the hypocrisy of your enemy implies that there is some sort of judge that is above your enemy that will like hold them to account for their hypocrisy.

But in actuality, this is not the truth that you know, um your opponent does something hypocritical or they make a disingenuous argument, and you say, hey, that's disingenuous. Well they probably will just fire back with, no, your arguments are disingenuous. And it can go on forever. And so the contest is never settled because it's not actually a contest. That's really the the the secret, is that it's not actually a war. Because a war involves

you know, uh an actual physical contest of force between two beings is actually settled. Whether one or both sides become injured and decide to break off the struggle or one kills the other or they make peace or reconcile or whatever the case may be. In a debate. You know, um there's no ultimate deciding factor or force in whose ideas are correct. No philosopher will ever be proven right, so it can go on forever.

And what this can do is breed resentment in the sense that Nisha talks about in the genealogy of morals, turn you into a poison brewer, as he says here. Because all there is is this self-perpetuating hatred of one side for the other that is never given its due. It's never given the ability to express itself, to to settle the matter, right? To lay all joking aside. And Put real stakes on the line and settle the matter in some way.

you can always continue to think that the other person is wrong and that you were right, and that it's in fact in human nature. And so if the way that you're settling it is this contest of debate or rhetoric, it never ends. And you continue to make more and more resentful, cruel, malicious, um you know, sort of m you try to continue to hurt your opponent through these rhetorical means, but it never gets the conflict anywhere closer to ending. So it just becomes more malicious and more hateful.

That's at least my reading of this, and that again another shot at Spinoza. Um we might recall his discussion of Epicurus in the previous section, that perhaps he wrote these three hundred books all from rage and envy against the ambition and the grand style of Plato. But it's funnily enough, or perhaps a bit ironically, because, you know, Epicurus is the philosopher who advocates for the hidden life, the quiet life, out away in one's garden, which is exactly what Nietzsche recommends here.

that um it's it's better not to become, you know, a lawyer posturing trying to be proven right in a law court, because that's folly, right? that the I mean, you might actually be jud there might actually be a judge, right? But who would it be? The court of public opinion, right? As we often like to say. And we all know what Nietzsche would say about that. That that's not

That doesn't actually satisfy the issue. It just tells you which ideas are most popular, which are going to be the ideas that give the people the most pleasure and speak most strongly to their preconceived notions and moral intuitions. So this whole passage is about the uselessness of debate, of proving your philosophical uh point of view on the world correct through argumentation.

and advocating instead for quietism and saying and uh not even to be You know, he sort of compares it the compulsory recluses, the Giordano Brunos and the Spinoza. people who are forced into exile because they made themselves place themselves into a position of being ideologically at war. with their society at large and the moral prejudices of their society at large, which becomes a sort of solemn, serious solitude, right?

Whereas Nietzsche is advocating for a voluntary solitude, a voluntary withdrawal from all these debates and competitions of ideology, because it's better for you to have your masks and subtlety. To be willing to to um deceive people or to just play play off like you know don't don't feel the need to instill your dangerous insight into the I you know the psyche of the masses.

Be willing to be subtle, be d Nietzsche's basically saying to lie, dissemble. Tell don't tell people what you really think. Just, you know, they give you their their stock opinion about some political thing and you just kinda nod along and say, Oh yeah, interesting. Uh yeah. You know, it's like uh you know, don't get there's no need. There's d you're not getting anything out of this. I mean this is in some so many ways the flies of the marketplace.

uh metaphor that is in thus books Arthurstra. That's what we get here. But again Nietzsche is speaking to Things which are psychological in nature in this passage. What the war of ideas that is never settled does to you psychologically. how it is totally negative and not productive or creative.

something that might be place you in a productive or creative circumstance might be to remove yourself from this ideological competition, right? Place yourself in a garden, either actually or m metaphorically in some sense, right?

And to get rid of these ideas of being, you know, sacrificing for the sake of the truth and whatever, because it's just going to make you a a brawler or, you know, a lawyer, an advocate, a a showman. Um, it's going to put you into this You know, this circumstance of being like a clown before the masses trying to like uh win them over in some sort of popularity contest and

It's not going to get you anywhere. It's not going to prove your truths any more right than they were, right? Um, and it's ultimately the dispute will never be ended. And w ultimately what it all springs from is having the good humor to Even be willing to question yourself and to see your own foolishness, your own tartuffery, as Nietzsche never uh tires of using that term.

to see the ways in which you can place a question mark behind yourself and which you don't understand yourself or where you have your own uncertainties and doubts and come to enjoy that uncertainty and doubt. uh that naturally arises in the course of inquiry and to see that as an adventure and something valuable and life affirming in and of itself.

And so that's really the difference between the free spirit, the immoralist free spirit, and the philosophers of the past. They're solemn dogmatists because their quest for the truth is uncompromising, which is to understand misunderstand, rather, the very nature of truth is a thing built on falsehood. But because we understand this and see that the falseness of a judgment is no strike against it, we're able to take the truth less seriously. And ironically then,

Do a more adequate job of winning a woman's heart of winning over the truth, of seducing the truth over to our side, of maybe not seducing, but chasing after the truth, right? And enjoying the chase for what it is. Um this all speaks to psychological temperament and a reimagining of what philosophy is, right? An enjoyment of uncertainty rather than an attempt to grasp universal and changing truth.

Um and this is why every philosophy is in its genesis along tragedy. Because The philosopher never gets what he wants, because we think in these frozen dead categories of static being, we attempt to impose. this moral or immoral end that we're attempting to serve with our philosophy onto the world, and that doesn't actually happen. It only happens within our abstract philosophical realm.

And it's never ultimately settled because it's simply our philosophical conception of the world or metaphysics or morality is simply a reflection of ourselves and our perspective, and it will always clash with other perspectives. in this never ending war. And so every philosophy has a tragic end.

be Plato's utopia is not realized. Hegel's revolution of the absolute mind, you know, Hegel is not the pinnacle of all philosophy. Philosophy continues grinding along without Hegel, continuing to revisit the same subject. the same family resemblance of the same flora and fauna on the same continent long after Hegel's gone. Uh and so there is something tragic always about the philosopher, but that's

Nietzsche is both completely embodying that and sublating it and attempting to overcome it and move on to something else by the very act of not being these martyrs for truth. Martyr, something, you know. of supreme seriousness and holiness and You know, I am not worthy before you, you know, um the everything, life and death.

the holy life, morality, everything solemn and serious is contained within the figure of the martyr, and that's what philosophers have been. Nietzsche's offering the opportunity to turn philosophy into something completely opposite of that. And um it's part and parcel with his project of discovering the gay science. making you know, again, science in that broad extended sense of the the application of the will to truth done gaily, carefree, right? Uh not

um d b in the clutches of these moral prejudices and the clutches of the spirit of gravity. So I think I've spun enough of a yarn today on this, and we're going to pick it up again next week with uh twenty six, continuing in this uh book. Two of Beyond Good and Evil or Part Two, the Free Spirit, which the overall thrust is.

this new i you know, if everything in the first part, prejudices of philosophers, was to sort of point out the errors or the ways in which philosophy of the dogmatic moralistic style was against life in some sense. The free spirit is then an attempt to show a perspectival, psychologically grounded philosophy which is for life, and which, by that token,

achieves that ends of actually taking us on a journey that is closer to the truth or more um it's it's more honest than the dogmatic philosophy was. This is the great irony about it. That's all for this week, everyone. Thank you for tuning in. See you next time. Signing off. If you enjoyed the Nietzsche podcast or found it helpful, Visit us and support the show at Patreon D. The link is in the description. Or just share the show with any of your friends.

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