Episode #090 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! On the off-chance you enjoy the show and whatever it is that it does for you, check out the Patreon page, patreon.com/philosophizethis, and check out the Amazon banner located on the front page of the website, philosophizethis.org.

Today’s episode is the first in a pretty big series on Friedrich Nietzsche, a series that’ll give us a solid foundation to talk about some other existentialists, the ultimate goal being that we circle back around and have the perspective necessary to understand the genius of Simone de Beauvoir in her work The Ethics of Ambiguity. I hope you love the show today.

So I think the best place to begin this series is to talk about an observation that Nietzsche made about what it’s like to be a human being. But, to understand where he’s coming from, let’s all just agree on one thing: there are certain things about your existence, my existence, everyone’s existence that nobody really gets that confused about, certain things that the average person doesn’t really lose sleep over because, well, there’s an answer that’s reinforced by the default, every-day existence that they were born into. For example, the average person’s probably not sitting around agonizing until one in the morning about why they have eyeballs, right? “Why!? Why do I have these eyeballs, these marbles coated in this viscous fluid embedded into my scull. Why!? Why must I blink incessantly?” Well, it’s to keep your eyes from drying out, silly. You got to keep them moist. “You fool! Don’t you understand? What are we keeping them moist for? What purpose? Why?”

Nobody’s doing that. But the interesting thing to think about is that this isn’t the only thing that we just sort of take for granted about our existence, why we have ears, why we have hands, why we breathe. For the average person, there’s a very obvious function that each of these things serve. And when they find themselves doing a personal inventory, they see that their eyes create a crude map of the world that helps them navigate it. They see that their ears help them stay balanced. They help them hear predatory buffalo sneaking up behind them. The obvious function that these things serve makes these sorts of questions not really something the average person is desperately searching for an answer to.

But Nietzsche would ask, “What is a question that people are often searching for an answer to?” What’s a question that it seems like practically everybody asks at some point in their life? Well, “What’s the meaning of my life? What’s the meaning of the universe? What role does my life play in the grand scheme of things?” Everyone asks these things. And just that fact that there are so many people out there that find themselves asking this question, that just goes to show that there isn’t some easy or obvious answer to that question that the average person can quickly harness like when they question what the purpose of their eyeballs are.

Nietzsche would say it’s not like we’re born with some sort of innate knowledge that gives us the answer to these questions. It’s not like God put up a billboard along the 405 that makes the answer to this stuff perfectly clear. And, with so many people born into this condition where there is no obvious answer, Nietzsche would ask, “Shouldn’t you expect to see the vast, vast majority of people with a nihilistic outlook on the universe just by default?” Why is it not that way? Why is it practically the inverse, where the vast majority of people do believe that their life has some sort of pre-ordained purpose? And the nihilists -- nihilists are just this sad, depressing group of people in the corner of the cafeteria. Black nail polish seems to be a big part of their life.

It's an interesting question, isn’t it? Now, luckily, Nietzsche thought he had an answer to it. He said that the reason why most people are not nihilistic is because when you come of age in this world, when you start asking these questions about what the purpose of your life is, historically speaking, people have always had another choice. When you find yourself a contestant on this game show, and you’re thinking about the nature of existence, “door number one” is nihilism. Nietzsche would say that, historically, you’ve always had “door number two” or some variation of the hundreds and hundreds of what he calls “true world theories” that are out there.

Let’s talk about these “true world theories.” What are they? Well, we’ve seen them before in philosophy. Remember Plato and his transcendent world of forms that he describes? Quick recap. Basically, Plato’s studying geometry one day and he realizes something: in the world of mathematics, it is possible to imagine the idea of a perfect triangle, the concept of a perfect triangle, a perfect three-sided figure that has internal angles that all add up to 180 degrees, right, the absolute, perfect representation of what it means to be a triangle. We can all picture that perfect triangle in our minds. In other words, we can use our capacity to reason to grasp the idea of that perfect triangle. But does that triangle actually exist anywhere out there in the world? We certainly don’t see that perfect triangle all around us. What if some explorer led an expedition deep into the jungle? Would they come across some glowing, perfect, ideal triangle like it’s the Ark of the Covenant? No. What really happens is we see things that are triangles all around us all the time -- you know, roof of a house, piece of pizza -- but these things aren’t perfect triangles. They just sort of resemble what it means to be a triangle. They are imperfect representations of that ideal concept of “triangle.”

Plato thought everything in the world was this way. For example, for some reason, you can look at a bonsai tree, and then right after that you can look at a giant redwood tree; and, even though the two of them look extremely different from each other, for some reason, there’s something similar about them that you’re communicating with. You’re recognizing something that makes them both trees. It’s “tree-ness,” some essential property that makes both of those things trees despite looking so different. The same way there’s an ideal, perfect form of a triangle that a piece of pizza is a flawed reflection of, a bonsai tree is a flawed reflection of an ideal form of what it means to be a tree.

Now, what follows from that, if you’re Plato, is that everything in the world is a crude reflection. Everything is an imperfect representation of some ideal form of that thing. Plato thought why not encapsulate all of these forms into a hypothetical realm that he called “the world of forms.” It seemed like a pretty good name at the time. But think of what Plato’s implying here. He’s saying that the world that we live in is really just a world of appearances. It’s a cacophony of crude, flawed reflections of these ideal forms. This world is but an earthly shadow of a more real world that can be accessed by reason called “the world of forms.”

Now, here’s the point. This “world of forms” is what Nietzsche would call the “true world” of this particular “true world theory.” So the other world that we live in, this earthly, physical world of appearances, that becomes secondary. Now, remember that as a point of comparison.

Let’s talk about another example of one of these “true world theories” that Nietzsche mentions. Let’s do one that we’re all a little bit more practically familiar with, the worldview ascribed by the New Testament and dozens of modern interpretations of Christianity.

Now, comparable to Plato, Christianity also talks about there being two distinct worlds that exist. There’s the world of the flesh, this earthly realm that’s sort of like an ethical obstacle course. You know, your behavior when navigating these slings and arrows of this mortal existence and whether you can convince yourself to believe that Jesus cured the lepers, that ultimately determines your fate in this other world that exists, the world that’s much more important, the one we’re all trying to earn a spot in, heaven. I mean, think about the relationship between these two worlds. You are, in actuality, an eternal spirit, an eternal spirit that is just temporarily inhabiting this body as a test, only to inevitably pass on to that other world. You spend 70, 80 years tops, if you’re lucky, in this world and an eternity in the other world. This temporary, earthly world is filled with all sorts of stuff you don’t like: suffering, death, temptation, anxiety, depression. Those things don’t even exist in this other world.

One thing’s for certain. Nothing you experience in this earthly world could ever compare to the majesty of God that awaits you in this other world if you’re able to earn your spot in it. Heaven is ultimately the world that we should be focusing on, despite all the apparent shortcomings of this physical world. Heaven is the “true world” in this “true world theory” to Nietzsche.

Let’s look at one more of these, Hinduism or certain types of Buddhism. In the same way that a single wave is just a temporary manifestation of the ocean and that it would be wrong for someone to classify a wave as being separate from the ocean, somehow -- no, it is the ocean -- in that sense, we too as individuals are kind of like waves, temporary manifestations of something else, of Brahman or of the totality of the universe or the spirit realm, whichever particular one you may subscribe to. Bottom line is the individual self is an illusion. Everyone and everything in the universe is ultimately one. We’re just different manifestations of this larger ocean.

Now, Nietzsche would say, just like in the heaven of Christianity, just like in the Platonic world of forms, the same motifs begin to emerge in this worldview. Right? There are two distinct realities. One is inferior; one is an illusion. And it’s our job in this life to transcend this world of appearances and access this other reality, where we can grab hold of our true self. Now, in that world, the problems of the ego become secondary. They’re things that we need to overcome. To rise above the world of illusions that you were born into is to access the “true world” of this particular “true world theory.”

Now, there are hundreds if not thousands of these “true world theories” that have been created throughout history. And, by the way, it’s not just philosophy and religion that are guilty of creating them. You could do it by looking to some Marxist utopia that you want to bring about, some racist utopia, really anything. The deeper point is that Nietzsche would say that it’s not at all a coincidence that there are so many fundamental similarities between all of these true world theories. It’s almost like a formula. There’s something about this world that we’re actually living in that we don’t like. So, to make us feel better about it, we manufacture one of these “true world theories” that say that this world is only temporary or this world is only an illusion, that there’s some other world out there that we should really be focusing our attention on. Don’t worry about this world. It’s messed up anyway.

To Nietzsche, these “true world theories” are human inventions. They’re a common tactic that people use to satisfy various psychological needs that human beings often have. Now, some people would say back to this, “Really, Nietzsche? Really? Thousands of different people throughout history have just manufactured these to fill a psychological void? They all happen to have arrived at the exact same idea?” Well, Nietzsche would say, “Yeah. They have. This is a universal problem that all human beings face.”

Think of any other universal problem that people face. Think of a universal problem that we’ve manufactured some invention to solve. What’s an example of that? Carrying a lot of heavy stuff around, right? It seems clear. No matter where your particular ancestors decided to hunker down and try to survive for a few thousand years, chances are they didn’t like carrying around a bunch of heavy stuff all the time. So what did they do? Well, each group of people came up with their own, creative way of solving that problem: the wheel, rolling things on top of logs, carts, wagons, rickshaws, animals, you name it. The point is having to carry around a bunch of heavy stuff was a universal human problem, and every culture came up with their own, slightly-different way of dealing with it. Here’s Nietzsche saying, “What’s another universal human problem? Oh, yeah! ‘What is the meaning of my life?’” These “true world theories” are kind of like carts and wagons. They’re clever human inventions that solve a universal problem that we’re all faced with.

Now, Nietzsche says being able to recognize that that’s the case, it’s nothing new really. I mean, people have obviously known long before him that these “true world theories” are pretty much all the same thing. He says the reason it’s been able to go on for so long is because scientists and philosophers haven’t always had the best strategy when it comes to refuting these true world theories. He says what typically happens is somebody will come out with a “proof of God’s existence,” right? Anselm or Aquinas will come out with some proof and, in the past, philosophers would just point out all the assumptions they’re making; they would illustrate that it’s not, in fact, a knock-down argument that God exists. And then, once they did that, they were done. They certainly didn’t go in the opposite direction. They don’t prove that God doesn’t exist. It’s not really what science or philosophy is in the business of doing anyway. With the problem of induction, I don’t know if you can prove that God doesn’t exist. What Nietzsche’s saying is that, in the past, this has always allowed someone who believes in these “true world theories” to say, “Okay. Well, Anselm’s proof of God’s existence didn’t hold up, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t another proof out there that justifies my worldview. They certainly haven’t disproven what I believe.”

This is Nietzsche taking a slightly different approach to the same problem. He’s not in the business of proving that God doesn’t exist. He’s not even in the business of saying that it’s impossible for one of these “true world theories” to be true. All he’s saying is, “Understand the very real incentive that people have for inventing a story that makes them feel better about certain unfortunate realities.” He says that, once you’re made aware of this fact, once more and more people become aware of this fact, something happens that is inevitable. He says it in one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy.

He says: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderer of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Now, just listen to the tone there, not what most people expect when they first hear it. It doesn’t sound like Nietzsche’s sitting around, you know, gleefully clapping his hands, “Hehe, look what I did.” No. He’s saying this stuff regretfully. He’s not literally talking about the death of some deity. He’s talking about the death of humanity’s pursuit for some objective morality.

He says, “Look in the past, whenever you’ve had questions about what the meaning of your life is or how you should be acting. Throughout history, you’ve always had one of these stock, ready-made answers to all of life’s agonizing questions.” But with the world becoming more scientifically literate, with the average person having better access to education, better critical thinking skills, with people becoming more and more aware of advancements in psychology that show these “true world theories” to be what they are, we have created a world, in effect, where it has become next to impossible to be a reasonable person while also believing in one of these “true world theories.” He’s saying it’s becoming harder and harder for somebody to be able to use these inventions that solve this human problem. It’s becoming harder and harder for somebody to be able to convince themselves that it’s a reasonable proposition to just decide to believe that a guy walked on water, died, and came back three days later. And Nietzsche is terrified about what this means for the future of humanity. I’m sure we can all understand where he’s coming from.

I mean, just imagine if you woke up one day and all of the things that we have that carry heavy stuff for us stopped working. Imagine if those inventions just stopped working, no more cars, no more trucks, wagons, trains. Nothing worked anymore. Now, imagine for some reason we were incapable of inventing something new that deals with this problem. Well, in that world, we would all have to come to accept that carrying around all this heavy stuff all the time is just an unfortunate reality of our life. Well, similar to this hypothetical world, here's an existential heavy burden that all of us have to carry around now, something we all need to learn to accept. Easier said than done.

Now, Nietzsche ultimately thought that someone who accepts the reality of their existence is much better off than someone who can manage to convince themselves of one of these “true world theories,” not only on a personal level but also just because he thinks that these theories by their very nature breed complacency about what’s going on in the world you live in. For example, somebody might commit some horrible crime and get away with it. They might do something terrible. And a believer in one of these “true world theories” might say, “Well, Lord’ll take care of ‘em eventually,” and then move on about their day. Now, certainly that makes you feel better in the moment, but just think of what you’re doing if you’re wrong about the Lord taking care of ‘em one day. Think of what’s happening. Somebody is being wronged or taken advantage of right in front of you and, instead of standing up for what you believe in and potentially making the world a much better place, you just kind of throw your hands up in the air. “Oh, well. Forget this world. Lord works in mysterious ways, I guess. Ha. I’ll just kick back and wait to get beamed up into heaven one day.” By good ol’ Captain Kirk up there, right? Not the best recipe for progress, he’s saying.

Now, when you’re reading that quote, you know, “God is dead. God remains dead. We have killed him,” one thing that you might think is that Nietzsche is unfairly picking on the God of the Abrahamic religions, you know, the patriarchal “God is a man. We have killed him.” It may seem that way, but it’s really just his way of articulating the point. Make no mistake. He takes issue with all of these “true world theories” that have been laid out. In fact, you could possibly say that he’s even more scared of the secular “true world theories” because often times they aren’t grounded with any sort of moral agenda. What I’m saying is he’s not picking on Christianity exclusively in that quote, but let’s just say Christianity in particular has a very special place in Nietzsche’s heart.

He sees Christianity as this exclusive club that people like to join that gives its members all these fringe benefits. For one, you get to walk around with a sense of moral superiority over everyone you meet. That’s pretty great. You get to look down at the ground, frown, and shake your head slowly back and forth, “No. No.” You can do that whenever somebody acts in a way that you wouldn’t act. But Nietzsche would say, “Look at this moral code that they think is so great. What is it really?” Nietzsche calls it “slave morality.” He says that becoming a Christian means you become a member of a herd. They all become the same sort of well-meaning, quiet, “don’t want to rock the boat too much,” “I’m confidently optimistic about the situation that I’m in” person with the same sort of glazed-over look in their eyes. But Nietzsche thinks it’s the code that they follow that ultimately removes them of most of their individuality and turns them into members of this herd. All the while, it justifies every shortcoming they have as people and deems it to be virtuous behavior.

Let me explain what he means. Nietzsche says that one of the most powerful forces you can every have on your side, when it comes to being the person you truly want to be or living your dream life, is envy. Envy is a powerful force to Nietzsche. What envy is is you looking at somebody else and realizing that they have something that you don’t have. “I want that. Why does he get to have that, and I don’t?” Nietzsche would say, “Why do we typically think of envy as such a bad thing? It’s one of the most powerful tools we have if we want to become the best version of ourselves that we can.”

Think of what envy is. When you feel envious, that is an instantaneous spotlight cast on something that you really want and don’t currently have. It’s a contrast between the person you would most like to be and the person you are right now. When you look on the TV and you envy somebody else’s body -- you look at their stomach and it looks like the Baltic sea, ripples everywhere -- when you do that, Nietzsche would say, you don’t have to hate that person. You could admire them. You can use that feeling of envy as guidance, guidance to direct you towards what areas you should be focusing on if you want to improve as a person. If you envy some really fancy car that a rich person has, you don’t got to throw a brick through the window just because they have something you don’t. You can use that envy as motivation, motivation to work as hard as you possibly can to turn that car into a reality for you.

See, envy’s really cool because it’s highly personalized. You created yours. You never envy someone for something you don’t want. It’s always the discrepancy between the person you’d most like to be and the person you are right now. And, in that sense, what we’re envious about can teach us a lot about who we are.

Now, Nietzsche says let’s give credit where credit’s due. One thing Christianity is really, really good at is teaching you to reject all these natural feelings of envy and get you to believe that weakness and passivity is a virtue. Nietzsche would say Christians are human beings just like everyone else, right? They feel the same urges everybody else feels; they just don’t act on them. They too want to go out and be super rich and successful and live in excess. They too want to hook up with people they think are amazing and gorgeous. They too want to be well-liked and have tons of friends and admirers. But instead of acknowledging all the urges they have and admitting that the reason they don’t have them is because they were lazy or weren’t clever enough or just got unlucky in life, instead of acknowledging those urges, their strategy is to reject them, make them evil, and then make it into a virtue to be the kind of person that doesn’t go out there and try to do these things.

He points out all sorts of various ways that Christianity turns what he sees as weak character traits into being a good Christian. If you aren’t that courageous and you have a really hard time mustering up the courage to talk to someone new or to put your ideas out there, don’t worry. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” If you want to be more rich and successful than you are now, don’t worry. “It is more likely for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” If you want tons of friends and admirers, don’t worry. “Those who stand in opposition to their fellow man but in alignment with God will be rewarded sevenfold.” Nietzsche would say these virtues of forgiveness and humility and obedience and all the rest of them, all they are is a way to justify passivity and turn you into a member of a herd rather than an individual.

Now, some of you might be saying, “Okay, Nietzsche. You sure are doing a lot of yammering about how everyone else is living their life. What are you doing? What should I be doing? What should I do, just sink down into a nihilistic depression, constantly think about how meaningless everything is? Is that what you want me to do, forcing myself to cry every day so that guyliner rivers down my pasty white cheeks? Is that what you want from me?” Well, the short answer to that is no. The long answer is in the form of the entire next episode.

But I think a really interesting thing to talk about is not what Nietzsche thinks we should be doing but something he thinks we shouldn’t be doing. If we truly want to be happy in this world, one thing Nietzsche thinks we should never do is drink alcohol. Now, to understand him, let’s talk for a second about the pros and cons of drinking alcohol. Picture a Venn diagram, two lists. How long would each of those lists be? Let’s think about it. What are the pros of drinking? And, by the way, when I say drinking, I’m not talking about, you know, half a glass of chardonnay at dinner and then you curl up by the fire, and you sleep for 12 hours. No. You are not human. Okay? You don’t get to have this conversation. I’m talking about the way most people have a relationship with alcohol. You drink to feel buzzed or to get drunk. There’s a reason you’re not drinking orange juice, right?

So what are the pros? Well, for about an hour, hour and a half you feel really good. You feel euphoric, confident, silly. Maybe if you’re some sort of prolific, legendary alcoholic, you can get about four hours of this really great feeling. Now, I’m trying to think. Is there anything else we can really put on the pro column? I mean, even that hour and a half is just borrowing happiness from the next day. You feel miserable the next day.

Tons of different cons you can point to. Alcohol is horrible for your liver and your nervous system and your brain, really everything. It’s super calorie dense. So, I mean, unless you’re bulking up to play the comic relief in a movie, it’s probably not working towards your fitness goals. There’s the opportunity cost of what you could have been doing with the time you’re drinking or recovering from drinking. There’s the actual monetary cost of it. I mean, even if you’re going down to Costco and getting a 55-gallon drum of the stuff, it’s still a lot more expensive than water. Consider for a second the fact that we’re in a culture where it’s not just socially acceptable to drink; you’re the weird one if you don’t drink. I mean, people think something’s wrong with you. It’s scary to them like your parents were crazy alcoholics; you have some sort of condition.

When you look at the sheer prevalence of the behavior, how many people are doing it, there can’t just be one pro in the pro column, right? Well, Nietzsche would say no, of course not. There’s another pro. It’s a big pro, probably one of the greatest pros you could ever have in a pro column. Here it is. Drinking alcohol instantly solves all of your problems. Except it doesn’t actually solve them; it just makes you feel like all your problems are solved, right?

Nietzsche has a famous quote. He says, “There have been two great narcotics in the history of Europe, Christianity and alcohol.” And what he means when he says that is that he sees people all around him all the time that they’re denouncing Christians, you know, “Oh, these are just weak people. Oh, these are just people that want all their problems solved. They want answers to all of life’s unanswerable questions. They’re far too weak to ever face the reality of their existence like I do, brazen.” They say this as they throw back another pint of beer.

Nietzsche would say, “How is what you’re doing any different from what they’re doing?” You’re numbing yourself from all the pain that comes along with looking at your place in the world and realizing any shortcomings that you may have. This alcohol tells you that everything’s great the way that it is but, in reality, tons of things are wrong. You wish that you could be more confident in social situations. You wish you were more capable of framing your experience in a way where sports games are more interesting to you. You wish you could take yourself less seriously and see the comedy in things and laugh more. Whatever alcohol’s doing for you, you’re human; you most likely have problems that it’s masking. And, if you were truly interested in being the best person you can possibly be and being as happy as you can possibly be, Nietzsche says that you should see all of these negative emotional states as opportunities for growth.

Every single time something comes up in your head like, “Man, I feel really self-conscious. I really wish I could feel comfortable opening myself up to my coworkers,” instead of drowning that feeling in alcohol and giving yourself instant relief from your problems, sharing everything about yourself to your coworkers, realize that that inner monologue is a tremendous catalyst for becoming the best person you can possibly be. All you’re doing is running away from an opportunity to grow. He says an alluring trap to fall into is to use alcohol in the same way he sees people using Christianity, as a means of convincing ourselves that our problems don’t actually exist and spending the rest of your life running from the pain of becoming a better person instead of facing your problems head-on.

You know, I don’t think Nietzsche would have been surprised seeing something like Alcoholics Anonymous and how highly effective that program is for people, considering how it’s just saturated with the Christian God. I don’t think he’d be surprised by that at all. I mean, I know what people say. Listen. Look. I get it. Step three: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him,” as you understand him. We’ll say your higher power could be anything. It could be a doorknob. It could be a tree, whatever works best for you. Read the rest of the 12 steps. I mean, good luck making conscious contact with your doorknob, praying that it carry out its will for you and remove you of all your shortcomings. It’s the Christian God, all right? And I think it’s interesting to think about the fact that Nietzsche probably could have predicted that over a hundred years ago.

I guess this is what I’m saying: when you look at our culture, you know, you turn on the TV, you can’t go five minutes without seeing commercials of people laughing and trying to convince you to drink, people laughing with friends, “Hahahahaha, look at me. I’m a happy, fulfilled person. You want to be like me? Drink some Coors Light!” You look at how our culture manufactures these excuses for drinking in basically every situation, you know. “Hey! I got a job! Time to celebrate. Let’s drink!” “Hey. I lost my job. Let’s drink.” “Hey. I got married. Let’s drink!” “Hey. I got divorced. Let’s drink.” You look at our relationship with alcohol; you look at the happiness index of the Western world, and you can’t help but wonder if maybe Nietzsche was on to something.

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