Episode #092 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is on Nietzsche and what many consider to be his seminal work entitled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I hope you love the show today.

Alright, so, whenever you’re talking to somebody about Nietzsche’s philosophy—well, I guess, more specifically, the six or seven books that make up the main body of his philosophy—a common way that people like to sort of package it all together and break it down is to say that what Nietzsche’s trying to do all throughout his work is he’s trying to get us to rethink all the fundamental assumptions that we’re making about three major parts of our thinking. Number one, our thoughts about God and religion—talked about that on Nietzsche part one when we talked about these true world theories and how they are ultimately, to Nietzsche, clever human inventions to fill an intrinsic psychological void for meaning. Number two, our thoughts about human nature. That was Nietzsche part two when we talked about the will to power, what it means to be a human being, and why we do what we do.

Well, the third and final area that people commonly say Nietzsche’s trying to get us to think about is a concept that we’re actually all very familiar with. It’s the idea that everything in the universe can ultimately be classified as being part of one of two extremely broad categories that we like to call good and evil. Something is either good or it’s evil. Every thing, every event, every example of human behavior that you can point to, if we look at it closely enough, we can determine which one of these two columns it falls under: good or evil.

So, it’s only fitting that when Nietzsche’s looking for the main character for what many consider to be his seminal work, he gets the guy that invented the concept of good versus evil. That’s right. There was a guy, a single guy. And needless to say, he lived a very long, long time ago. Some historians say as early as 9,000 BC. Some say he lived a lot more recently. But either way, he was a Persian profit that went by the name of Zoroaster, or as his friends like to call him, Zarathustra.

Now, Zarathustra, contrary to almost everyone else living around this time in history—instead of just looking out at stuff that happens in the world and, whether it’s the god of the sea or the god of war, instead of just attributing whatever happened as being the will of whichever god in the pantheon of gods corresponds to the action—Zarathustra, he simplified the whole system down into a battle between what he called Ahura Mazda, or the Lord of wisdom and goodness, and Angra Mainyu, or the spirit of destruction and evil. And it should be said that like anything from this long ago, there’s a lot of different theories about the dates and the readings of all this stuff. But as far as most historians are concerned, Zarathustra is the first person to ever articulate this famous dichotomy of good versus evil.

Now, Nietzsche’s book that we’re talking about today is called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And there’s a lot of people that would say that what Nietzsche thinks he’s doing when he’s writing this book is, he’s writing the continuation of Zarathustra’s work. You know, if only Zarathustra had been born just a few thousand years later, if only Zarathustra had been born into the time of Nietzsche when better information was available, the natural conclusion that he would have arrived at eventually is that these concepts of good and evil are nothing more than an invention by human beings to simplify things and that there is no such thing as a cosmically ordained good or evil. In other words, Nietzsche, just like he thinks Plato did through the mouth of Socrates, just like he thinks Paul and the authors of the New Testament did through the mouth of Jesus, Nietzsche’s writing a book through the mouth of Zarathustra. And much like the other two examples, he’s trying to get the people of his time to question the way they lived their life and hopefully move on to something better.

But to get the whole picture that Nietzsche’s painting, I think it’d be useful for us to at least briefly talk about what happens at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here it goes. Story begins with Zarathustra—main character of the book, voice of Friedrich Nietzsche, and an all-around great guy. We find Zarathustra at the beginning of the story on top of a mountain. He’s on top of a mountain because he just spent the last 10 years of his life there. The story goes that when Zarathustra turned 30 years old, he—well, he did what any self-respecting person would have done. He decided to live in a cave on top of a mountain in complete solitude contemplating the meaning of life.

Now, the good news is, this 10 years was far from a waste of time. When it came to Zarathustra understanding the world better, his strategy of moving up to the mountains and thinking about stuff for 10 years actually worked pretty well. In fact, it worked so well—he makes it clear in the book—all this wisdom that he had acquired over the years, it began to burden Zarathustra. It starts to become too much for him. So, one day he decides that instead of bogarting all the wisdom on top of this mountain of his, he’s going to hike down the mountain and try to spread it around to some of his fellow human beings that live in the town at the base of the mountain, a town in the story that’s called Motley Cow.

Now, at first glance, that may sound like some sort of bovine hair metal band, but there’s actually a double meaning to the name. Motley is a translation of a word used in Plato’s Republic to denounce the democratic state, which Nietzsche’s not exactly a huge fan of. And cow is referring to how Nietzsche sees the vast majority of people, as members of a herd. Combine the two and you get Motley Cow.

So, he descends down the mountain; he gets to the town. He sees crowds of people standing around watching all different kinds of street performers, you know, essentially Netflix for their generation. He homes in on a particular crowd of people that are watching this tightrope walker. And before the performer can get up and actually do his act, it’s quiet; there’s a crowd of people standing around waiting for a show. Zarathustra thinks, well, here’s a captive audience. What a fantastic opportunity for me to tell my fellow human beings all the great stuff I learned on top of the mountain.

So, he gets up in front of the crowd and he says, “Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go…

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.”

So, Zarathustra stands up before his fellow human beings. He gives them this halftime locker room motivational speech. And what do they do to him? They laugh at him. They laugh at him. They actually think the whole thing is some kind of elaborate act that he’s putting on. You know, they think he’s a street performer just like the tightrope walker, and he’s just doing some kind of comedy show for them.

Now, remember, Nietzsche’s writing this as a work of fiction. He chose for the audience to not have any idea what Zarathustra’s talking about. And the reason he did it this way is because he’s sort of foreshadowing how he thinks his philosophy’s going to go over to just your run-of-the-mill person living in Motley Cow, Nebraska. Meaning, they’re probably not going to get it very much, probably not going to take it seriously. Much like the people living in Athens during the time of Socrates, much like the people living during the time of Jesus, sometimes ideas are just so far ahead of their time, most people out there probably aren’t going to get it.

This is what Nietzsche’s anticipating. And that’s fine. But on the other hand, let’s be fair to the people, alright? Can you really blame them for not understanding what Zarathustra’s talking about in that quote? I mean, he’s not exactly using plain English to describe his point. I mean, look, I read philosophy every day. Some dude comes up to me on the street and starts talking about an overman, what does that even mean? He’s throwing around this word “overman” like everybody’s heard it, like I should have learned it from Kermit the Frog 20 years ago. I seriously wouldn’t even know what he was talking about if I hadn’t heard of it before.

So, I guess my goal right now is to try to do a little bit better job of unpacking Zarathustra’s worldview than he did in that moment on the spot, when he really wasn’t that far removed from talking to himself on top of a mountain for the last 10 years. I mean, makes sense. Charles Manson probably isn’t the greatest public speaker. So, let’s talk about the overman. I guess a good place to start is to say that, to Nietzsche, life is a constant pursuit—actually, a constant struggle towards a state of being that he calls the overman. Some people say übermensch. Some people say superman. Some people say higher man. I like to refer to it as the ascended, completely gender fluid bipedal primate. Though I would never be so insensitive as to infer your species, man. But I understand. To be as progressive as I takes far too much time for a little podcast like this. So, let’s all just be adults. Let’s call it the overman and understand the sentiment behind what Nietzsche’s talking about.

So, what is this constant pursuit towards becoming the overman? Well, Nietzsche thinks that every single one of you—every single person that’s ever been born, for that matter—if you continually progress as a human being, you’re going to go through three big stages of development throughout your life. The first stage is being a camel. The second stage is being a lion. And the third stage is being a child. Let’s talk about these three stages of life. All of us are born camels, and to Nietzsche, 99.9% of people are going to die camels. They’re going to spend their entire lives stagnant, locked in this stage of being a camel. And the reason he refers to the first stage of life as resembling a camel is because, when you take a close look at most people and the way they interact with the world, they carry themselves as though they are willful beasts of burden.

Think of a day in the life of your average, friendly neighborhood camel. What do they do all day? Well, people come up to them. They put a bunch of heavy stuff on their backs, and they tell them not to complain about it very much. They say, “Look, forget what you want to do, camel. I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to carry all this weight for me exactly where I tell you to carry it. Got it?” *whap* When it comes down to it, this is the basic life of a camel. It doesn’t matter how good you have it. Look, I don’t care if you have 20 years of camel seniority, you got that cushy job down at the petting zoo. You’re still walking around in a circle with 7-year-old kids on your back. Your job is still to carry this burden, don’t complain; you behave the way I tell you to behave.

So, obviously, this camel is a metaphor. So, let’s try to think about how this camel’s life is similar to the life of the average person. If we are in fact all born camels, what sorts of heavy burdens are, figuratively speaking, tied to our backs by other human beings? Well, Nietzsche would say, everything you’ve ever been told to do by somebody else. Any time you’ve ever been told that this is how you should be living your life, or this is how you should be feeling about this stuff, this is how you should be acting—that stuff, like—look, from the moment you said “goo goo ga ga” for the very first time, you’ve been getting weight after weight tied to your camel back, telling you all the stuff that should be important to you and all the ways that you need to be living your life. And Nietzsche would say that these weights tied to your back are lies that need to be shed if we truly ever want to be free.

These weights could be anything. It could be that you need to put your napkin on your lap before you eat. It could be the way that a respectable gentleman dresses: “Take that off right now!” It could be bigger than that. It could be that you need to go into this box on Sunday and tell this 80-year-old virgin priest all the stuff you did wrong this week so he can tell you to do a few hand gestures and then absolve you of all your sins. These weights could be anything. Think about it. Every single thing that you do down to the tiniest minutiae, if the only reason you’re doing it is because somebody at some point in your life told you that that’s how you’re supposed to do it, it could very well be one of these weights that you carry around with you throughout your life as a camel.

Now, some of you may be asking—perfectly reasonable objection— “Well, look, what’s wrong with taking a little advice from how to do things from people around us, Nietzsche? Why are you so against that? Do I really have to know everything? Can’t I yield to people that are more experienced than I am?” And he would say, of course you can. But understand the criteria for what makes these things a weight on your back as a camel. It’s not that these things are burdens to you simply by virtue of the fact that you got them from somebody else. Any one of these things could easily be the best thing you can do. It’s the intentions behind why you’re doing it that matters.

He’d say, look around you. How many people really are having a good day when they engage in that disingenuous conversation with the guy at 7/11? “How are you today?” “Good. How about you?” “Good.” How many people really are having that exchange because they’ve thought about it, they’ve looked within themselves, they’ve considered what’s important to them—how they can best spend their time; person they ultimately want to be—and they’ve come to the conclusion that the response “Good. How about you?” was the quickest succession of words that accomplishes what they want out of that exchange? How many people are doing it for those reasons, and how many people are doing it because it’s just what everybody else does or because their mom told them it was a polite thing to do or because they were told by their grandpappy that they owe people that respect?

Again, it’s not that being nice and saying, “Good. How about you?” is wrong, necessarily. It’s the reasons behind why you’re doing it. Because, yeah, the cost of saying, “Good. How about you?” for the wrong reasons might just be a couple seconds, no big deal. But think about the potential cost if you do something else, something bigger, for the wrong reasons. For example, if you had to just take a guess, how many people in the history of our modern world have had this exact conversation with themselves or at least some variation of it? “I’m 18 years old. I’m graduating high school. My guidance counselor is blowing up my phone like he’s a collections agency, trying to get me to declare what I want to do for the rest of my life. But I don’t know what I want to do. Actually, you know what I really want to do? Backpack across Europe. I was thinking about that the other day. Man, what a transformational, fun experience that would be. Might even help me figure out what I want to do with my life. Aw, I can’t do that, though. I got to stay here and go to school. That’s what people do. I got to go to school so I can get a job, so I can get a house, so I can get married and have kids. I can’t do that.”

This is a perfect example of how one of these weights on our back, one of these ways that people have told you how you need to live your life—this is an example of how these weights that we carry around might cost us everything. What if that trip across Europe would have been transformational? What if it would have changed the entire course of your life? Again, there’s nothing wrong with going to college right out of high school, but the only reason this person is doing it is because they’ve been told that’s the way it has to be by their parents and their guidance counselor their whole life. Why are you trusting these people more than what you actually want?

Nietzsche says, so often we adhere to one of these weights. We tell ourselves this is how we have to be living our lives. And so often in the process these things that we define as “the right thing to do” deny ourselves of life and what we actually want to be doing. Why does it have to be this way? Nietzsche says that at a certain point, a lucky few people take a look at all these weights that have been conferred onto them since birth as camels, and they understand them for what they truly are, not the right way to do things necessarily, not the only way to do things, but the way other people have done things in the past—tradition. And the thing about tradition is, you don’t necessarily need to follow it. No, you can say no to tradition.

And the moment you’ve reached the level of maturity to be able to say no to all these ways people have told you you need to be living your life, that’s the moment you’ve moved onto the second phase of life. You’ve transformed into the lion. Now, the lion—the lion is in this strange limbo stage of self-awareness. All these ways that you’re told you’re supposed to think, feel, act—the lion recognizes them for what they are, arbitrary traditions, but the lion has a long and daunting road ahead of it when it comes to understanding the true extent to which these things influence our behavior. In other words, if you’re in this lion stage of life, you may realize that the only reason you’re going to church is because your parents told you it was the right thing to do when you were a kid, but you may not realize hundreds of other things you’re doing for just about the same reason.

The ultimate task of the lion, to Nietzsche, is to slay a giant fire-breathing dragon that keeps the lion under its control. This dragon’s name is Thou Shalt. On each and every scale of this dragon’s skin, inscribed on it is some thing that you must do, some way that you must behave. One scale will say something like, “Thou shalt not stare at strangers.” Another will say, “Thou shalt cover thy mouth when thy sneezeth.” The lion, through rigorous introspection and honesty, if it ever wants to move onto the third stage of life, it has to muster the courage and the strength to slay that dragon named Thou Shalt, therein understanding these traditions for what they are, respecting these traditions. And if in the future you choose to behave in accordance with one of them—you know, if you choose to cover your mouth when you sneeze—now you’re doing it because you freely chose to, not because you’re under the control of some dragon.

I guess a succinct way you could put these first two stages of life is, there’s two types of people in the world: people that know they’re enslaved and people that don’t know they’re enslaved. Well, here’s Nietzsche saying, no, there’s a third type of person in the world, what he would call the child. See, think of what the lion’s doing all throughout the second stage of life. You’re really just saying no to everything. “No, I’m not going to go to college just because you told me that’s what people do.” “No, Mom, I’m not going to wear those weird Crocs sandals just because you do.” But think about it. If all you ever do is say no to everything, what are you ultimately left with at the end? Nothing.

This is a place in life that Nietzsche says people oftentimes get a little stuck. See, because the thing about slaying that dragon and all the ways people are telling you how to live is that a lot of the scales that were on that dragon that you just slayed are all of these true world theories that we talked about in episode one of this series. So, what often happens is, people work really hard, and they rigorously analyze their behavior. And they slay that dragon, and they come out on the other side having lost what they always told themselves was the meaning of their life.

I’m sure we can all imagine something like this. Someone grows up in a religious home. Maybe they get a little older; they start thinking about things. They come to the conclusion that maybe this religion isn’t some cosmically ordained meaning to my life. Maybe it’s a tradition that my family participates in that helps us feel better about certain questions that, let’s be honest, we’re probably never going to get an answer to. That person may come out on the other side of that thought with complete peace about that tradition and slaying the dragon, but they’ve lost what they’ve always told themselves is the meaning of their life.

And Nietzsche would have expected this. Remember, it was the first thing we talked about on episode one. Nietzsche says, given the fact that there is no obvious billboard up in the sky of some cosmically ordained meaning to our lives, it makes sense that what you’d expect to see as the vast majority of people with a nihilistic outlook on the universe just by default. But in practice, what actually happens is, we’re born into the world camels, beasts of burden; we have all these true world theories loaded onto our backs among other things, true world theories that give us a message that something out there has prescribed meaning to our lives. And after years of development of becoming the lion and slaying the dragon, we don’t have those true world theories anymore. And Nietzsche says, a huge mistake that people make when they get to this place, the place where there is no obvious meaning to their lives, is they think that they’ve arrived at some sort of destination.

You know, “I used to believe in this really great meaning to my life. I thought about it for a while, and pretty sure it’s not true. Therefore, there must be no meaning to my life or anything in the universe for that matter.” People get stuck here. It’s really common. People think it’s a reasonable thing to say that because they used to believe in a meaning and that meaning ended up not being true, that means that there can’t be a meaning at all. It’s a little bit like having a bad experience at a restaurant. And you go home and go on yelp, and you make a post: “There are no good restaurants out there! They don’t exist!” No, Nietzsche would say, it's not that there’s no meaning out there, that there’s not a good restaurant out there. You’re just looking for it in the wrong places.

Let’s do a thought experiment. What if Zarathustra was wrong? What if there is no cosmically ordained good versus evil in the universe? What if we’re not all just sort of renting space in some terrarium, a terrarium that belongs to something else, some cosmic force that we somehow need to get into contact with so we can find out what the meaning of our lives are? What if that notion that this universe belongs to something else, what if that notion is just another weight that has been tied to your back from the moment you were born? What if it doesn’t need to be that way? What if the idea of good versus evil is the same way? How about this, what if the universe isn’t something else’s property; what if it’s yours? What if instead of a camel in the desert, you are the master of your own desert, and you can build an oasis wherever you want?

You know, a lot of people think that Nietzsche is a nihilist. It’s actually kind of a funny misconception because nothing could be further from the truth. His entire body of work is a refutation of nihilism. It’s a recipe for making our lives as meaningful as possible. Nietzsche would say that the state of nihilism is where we should have begun by default if it weren’t for all these weights being tied to us from such an early age. It’s a transitional period. We should experience it and certainly learn the lessons it has to teach us. But then we have to move on.

He says that inside of everyone is the potential to be the best, happiest, most powerful person you can be, whatever that means to you. Look inside of yourself. You know the person you want to be. You know the things that you desire out of life. Nietzsche would say that inside of you is a seed, a seed that if only you were to nurture it, it would allow you to grow into that very person. Nietzsche says, when you tell people this, it’s not exactly a shock to them. Everybody knows they have this inside of them. They’re just terrified of their higher self, he says. Because when you’re in your own head staring your potential straight in the face and it tells you what you should be doing that you’re not doing, he says, “They fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly.”

Nietzsche thinks a crucial part of realizing your potential and becoming the person you truly want to be deep down is setting calculated goals, but not just any goals, ambitious, difficult goals, goals that exert your mind and body on a daily basis. The thinking being, the harder the goal, the better you’re going to have to become to achieve it. Life should be a process of surmounting these difficult goals that you’ve set for yourself. And when you’re done with those ones, you set new ones.

Now, there’s a caveat here, of course. Nietzsche realized that not everybody’s going to know what their goal should be. Not everybody’s going to know what direction to head in. There’s a lot of people that would say, look, I obviously know that I could be better, but I honestly don’t know what’s even worth striving for. I mean, everything seems equally meaningless to me. How can I decide whether my goal’s going to be summiting Mount Everest or joining the circus? I can’t ever get started because I don’t know how to find a goal. Nietzsche has a strategy for this person, the strategy for finding that thing inside of you that you care about the most.

He says, “Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self.” In other words, if you’re lost in terms of how to choose a goal that’s meaningful to you, ask yourself, what have you loved up until this point in your life? What’s meant the world to you up until now? Nietzsche would say, the answer’s been inside of you all along. And I think he’d say that this is at least a pretty good place to start looking for whatever that is.

Now, some of you may be asking, “Okay, I was born a camel. I’ve shed the weight off my back; I’ve become a lion. I’ve slain the dragon Thou Shalt. I have this difficult goal that’s going to make me feel exerted and have meaning every day. Whatever happened to the third stage of life?” Well, the third stage of life is what we start to become when we get past this passive nihilism that so many people get trapped in. Again, the third stage of life is what Nietzsche calls the child, and he describes the difference between the child and the lion here. “But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”

Remember, when you’re the lion, all you’re doing is saying no to everything other people are telling you to do. When you’re the child, it requires you to say yes to some things. Remember the example from before of the high school student that wants to go backpacking across Europe and he denies himself of life by sticking to what his guidance counselor told him to do? Truly being in this third state of life is the opposite of that. It’s to live in a state of near-constant life affirmation. Nietzsche calls this stage the child because he thinks when we’re in it, because we don’t have all these weights on our back telling us how things are, we almost resemble children at play, children that are discovering the world for the first time.

Think of what children look like when they’re playing. They’re little bundles of energy. They’re all over the place. They’re not thinking about what’s happening later that day. They’re not thinking about, you know, what parameters I must operate within. They are just pure life affirmation. They’re present, enjoying this game that they’re playing right now. And when that game’s over, they move on to the next game. Nietzsche thinks, ironically enough, practically no one that’s ever been alive has ever reached the level of human maturity where they begin to resemble a child at play again.

But this is what we should be striving for. And it’s only in this place, this place of being excited about finding new games to play or finding new ways to look at things, this place of not just living the same day over and over again but to live a life where you aren’t afraid to take risks. This place of wanting something, and instead of running from it and telling yourself you can’t do it, you affirm life. You’d be willing to risk your life to get the things you want out of this world. It’s only in this place that we can truly be masters of our own desert and start to create our own values.

You know, Nietzsche thinks that this process of not denying yourself of the things you want but affirming life and even being able to take big risks to get the things you want, this is how you get the most happiness out of life. He says, people tell themselves all kinds of stories about how happy of a person they are. He talks about somebody called the last man. The last man is sort of the quintessential person that never ventures out of their comfort zone. They don’t challenge themselves. They don’t exercise. They don’t have any desires in life. They just kind of sit around and do nothing. They do nothing, yet if you asked this person if they’re happy, they’d say, “Yeah, I’m a happy person. Yeah, sure.”

But what is happiness, really? Come on. Happiness isn’t this objectively quantifiable state where everybody says that they’re happy and they’re feeling the exact same thing. No, it’s not crazy to think that one person that describes themselves as happy is much happier than somebody else that describes themselves as happy. It’s not crazy to think that somebody who has summited mountains—they’ve been through intense pain and hardship achieving these goals that mean so much to them—it’s not crazy to think that they might just be a little bit happier than somebody that sits on the couch all day and is never uncomfortable.

Nietzsche would say, what kind of life is that, really, never being uncomfortable? He’d say, this person has certainly convinced themselves that they’re happy but, make no mistake, it is a fragile, shallow happiness that this person has. It’s a view from on top of a boulder as opposed to the beautiful view from on top of a mountain that they could have. Nietzsche says, we should always strive to be the opposite of this person that just sits on the couch all day with no goals.

And the opposite of the last man—you guessed it—is the overman. See, because if you’re one of the lucky few people that reaches this third stage of life, the child, a really tempting thing to do once you get there may be to say, “Well, I did it! I arrived at the destination. I made it to the third stage of life. Now I don’t have to try anymore.” But as you can probably guess by now, Nietzsche’s not really a huge fan of final destinations, including the movies. Remember at the beginning of the episode when Zarathustra asked the crowd, “What is the ape to man? It’s a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman,” he says.

What he’s referring to there is, when it comes to our evolutionary past, what is a chimpanzee’s relationship to you? Well, if you think about it, that chimpanzee is really just your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That chimpanzee is where you came from. Now, just for a second, compare the way your brain thinks, plans, and interacts with the world to the way a chimpanzee interacts with the world. It’s very different. You can do a lot of things that that chimpanzee could never do in its wildest dreams. Nietzsche would say, look, it’s not like human beings in their current form are at some sort of evolutionary end point. No, we’re going to continue to grow and change and become capable of even greater things.

Well, if we’re going to eventually get there, it’s interesting to ask, what is that next level going to look like? On the off chance we don’t nuke ourselves into oblivion, what’s a human being going to look like in 10,000 years, 100,000 years, 1,000,000 years? Whatever it looks like, maybe we will look to it like the chimpanzee looks to us now. This hypothetical next level of human being is what Nietzsche refers to as the overman. Once we’ve removed the weights of the camel, slain the dragon as a lion, and lived our life as a child, our goal should be to constantly think about what this overman may be like and strive to become it.

Now, of course Nietzsche had his own ideas of what this overman would look like. But I think the idea of the overman to Nietzsche is more of an ideal to strive for rather than something you’re actually going to be able to become. The overman is a reminder to us that there is always room for growth. It’s where we’re going. It’s a reminder that we should embrace the fact that we will never arrive at a destination in our lives when it comes to our development. And Nietzsche thinks, ultimately, that’s a good thing, because consider the alternative.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.