Episode #158 - Transcript

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

So, in keeping with last episode, let’s continue this discussion beginning from a place that we’re all very familiar with, that nothing you care about actually matters on any objective level. You don’t matter. Your dreams don’t matter. Your pet guinea pig named Clarence, he doesn’t matter. But lucky for you and Clarence, there are these superheroes out there named philosophers, and they’ve flown in to save the day for you. You’re born into a disinterested universe, feeling a little crumby; philosopher’s going to take out their stethoscope and diagnose you with some sort of nihilism flu. But don’t worry. Don’t worry. They got the antidote. They’re going to prescribe you 100ccs of meaning, teach you how to create that meaning at home, fix you up a bit. And isn’t it wonderful that we had these meaning-creation experts on hand right when we needed them the most?

But a totally valid question somebody might ask about this entire state of affairs is to ask the question, why in the first place do we just assume that we need a philosopher to diagnose and prescribe meaning to things anyway? Like, who are any of these people? Who died and appointed them the moral arbiters of humanity? And why do we need them to give a sermon on a mount telling us all the reasons why things matter? I mean, to be honest with you, this person might say, sometimes it doesn’t exactly feel like we need an expert technician on this morality stuff. It kind of feels sometimes like these philosophers are just overthinking things. Times are tough out there. Maybe it’s a job security thing. Because fact is, look, we know that things matter to us. That’s far from a mystery. We know a good person when we see one. And not a surprise that throughout my life when I feel like I’m doing something meaningful, I’m not pulling out my field manual and citing paragraph 12, verse 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics as the philosophical justification for why I feel that way.

Couldn’t it be that there’s some sort of normative ethical compass imbued into our DNA—the source of intense feelings like jealousy, revenge, guilt, envy, compassion; things that seem like just a natural response rather than a response based on any sort of rational abstraction? The big question is this, are the latent values that produce these kinds of feelings something written into our biology, or could it be that they are learned somehow? The reason this answer is important is because, think about it, if feeling good or bad about certain behaviors was truly something embedded into our nature as human beings and we are a part of the universe, couldn’t someone make a case that there’s some sort of value system written into the universe? Then again, for someone to say that these things are entirely learned behaviors, they better have a pretty good answer as to where these things even come from.

But whether these values are written or they’re learned, the information we’re seeking is only going to come if we take a deeper look at some of these seemingly natural behaviors and try to figure them out better. We’ll take a look at a few of them through the eyes of Nietzsche’s work. But first I want to talk about one of them through the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Just personally, this is one of my favorite essays exploring the concept of revenge—her earlier essay titled “An Eye for an Eye.” And it should be said, she later writes in her autobiography among other places that she doesn’t agree with everything she wrote in this essay when she was so much younger. I mean, what person doesn’t evolve in their thinking over the years? But the general point remains. To set the stage though, some thoughts on revenge overall.

Once again, on the surface, revenge seems to be pretty natural. And it can be easy to think about it in a very straightforward way. Somebody does something deliberately just to mess with you, and you want them to feel the pain or inconvenience that they caused you. There’s a part of you that wants to correct the wrong that’s been committed, to balance the scales. You know, when somebody comes over and starts messing with the stuff you got going on, sometimes you want to knock the ice cream cone out of their hands a little bit, see their face scrunch up, teach them a lesson. So, right off the bat here, notice the fact that in a meaningless universe—where “Why do anything if nothing really matters?”—revenge, revenge is something that gets people out of bed in the morning. Revenge can be a powerful motivator to someone otherwise in the trenches of an existential crisis where nothing seems to matter.

What exactly are we trying to accomplish with revenge? Is it about making things right for the victim in the situation? Well, consider some other aspects of revenge. Consider the fact that we not only seek revenge for ourselves as victims. We often seek revenge on behalf of other people who were victims. We seek revenge when there isn’t a clear victim or even when the victims are dead and no longer with us capable of witnessing the revenge. Simone de Beauvoir, cutting down to the core of it, explores the more specific question: What function is revenge truly serving as a psychological or social phenomenon? Specifically in the essay, she was examining whether or not it was morally justifiable to commit acts of political violence as a means of society getting revenge towards someone who has done something horrible to other people—let’s say, enslaving or killing people.

Now, within the context of her philosophy of ambiguity that we talked about last time where willing the freedom of others is going to be the ultimate goal, the desire to seek revenge on this kind of a person makes total sense. This person has robbed people of their subjectivity. They’ve turned a person or a group of people into merely an object as fodder for their own purposes. And we feel a strong desire to correct that wrong and balance the scales. We want to lock this person up. We want to remove their subjectivity, even publicly harm or kill this person: the thinking being that we want them to feel what it’s like to be made into merely an object like they made other people feel. More than that though, she says, it’s important to recognize that we want something else from this act of revenge. We want the person to feel bad about what they’ve done. We want them to sit there and have a long time to reflect on the fact that they are reaping what they sowed.

The problem for Simone de Beauvoir in this essay is that we can never control another person’s subjectivity. And because of that, we can never make someone feel any specific way about anything they did. We can’t force someone to feel the pain the victim felt. Look, even if someone’s enslaving or killing people, they can see their crimes in any light they choose to see them. They could truly believe they’re a fallen hero in this situation, trying to make the world a better place. They could say that they’re just being silenced by counter-fascists out there, that they’re dying for a greater cause—many different options here.

So, if there’s some sort of natural desire we have to get even with this person, to make them feel what the victim of the situation felt, we can’t ever guarantee that. There’s a sense in which the victim oftentimes has very little to do with our selfish desires towards vengeance. So, for Simone de Beauvoir, if the goal through acts of violence for the sake of revenge is to balance the scales of wrongdoing, we’re not really correcting anything there with violence. To be clear, she’s not saying that we shouldn’t punish people that turn other people into objects. On the contrary, it’s very important that we do punish people. But the greater philosophical point that she’s making is that we should understand the function of what it is we’re trying to do with acts of revenge. We are not forcing someone to feel the pain the victim felt. Revenge is about something else.

We are making a statement symbolically as a person, as a society, that we aren’t going to put up with people denying the subjectivity of others and treating them like they’re less than human. So, on one hand, revenge can seem like a sort of natural inclination to get back at someone or balance the cosmic scales. And on the other hand, it can look like it has almost nothing to do with paying reparations to the victim. It can seem more like a symbolic gesture in the interest of governing future behavior through punishment. Now, remember this point.

Let’s move over to the work of Nietzsche for a little, and let’s talk about another example of one of these intense feelings that we have that seems to be natural. This is a close second cousin of something like revenge—the concept of guilt. When it comes to guilt, same sort of thing. We do something. That something has a negative impact on a victim. And when you look back, you wish you had done something different. It seems pretty natural at that point to feel guilty about what you’ve done towards that victim. Just like with revenge, guilt can be pretty easy think about in a straightforward way.

Let’s start with the question, what is the function of guilt as a social or psychological phenomenon? Do we feel guilty in consideration of the victim? Well, let’s consider some more aspects of guilt for a second. Consider the fact that people feel guilty for things whether or not there even is a victim or whether anyone feels slighted by what they did at all. People feel guilty when they’ve never done anything or for not doing enough. People feel guilty for loosely being associated to some process that victimized people. Nietzsche would want us to notice that the feeling of guilt does next to nothing in terms of reparations on behalf of whoever the victim was. You can feel guilty about something and then do things that help the victim, sure. But notice that you can do that whether you feel guilty about something or not.

Guilt is a very self-centered, self-directed feeling. Guilt is a feeling that you have towards yourself and about yourself. Guilt, Nietzsche says, when you really look at it, starts to look a lot like self-punishment. And similar to revenge in the early essay by Simone de Beauvoir, this feeling of guilt, this lingering feeling and self-punishment, is not something that is done to correct any sort of moral imbalance or pay reparations. Guilt doesn’t actually solve the problem that supposedly caused it. It seems to resemble an internal form of self-punishment that we administer and ultimately become something that’s a governor of future behavior in our lives.

Now, so far, we’ve taken a look at revenge, guilt—these feelings that seem to be just a part of human nature at its core. And we said earlier that if anyone’s going to make a case that these sorts of universal human emotions are somehow learned, they’re going to need a pretty good story as to how all that happened. There’s shades of Darwin going on here. In a world where it could seem like natural things about ourselves—our very human nature—was created to correspond with the environment that we’re in, natural selection provides an alternative explanation for how our traits were actually inherited, passed down to us generation by generation.

Well, if this is a genealogy of our physical nature as human beings, then this is the reason Nietzsche titles the book we’re talking about today The Genealogy of Morality. This is the alternative explanation for how these latent values can seem entirely a part of human nature, when in reality, they’ve been inherited like any other tradition from our cultural past. In the same way certain collections of physical traits survive and propagate in certain environments, certain collections of moral intuitions survive and propagate within specific social environments.

The ones contemporary Western society had inherited during the time of Nietzsche came primarily from Judeo-Christian values. So, it makes sense that if he’s going to start telling the story of the genealogy of morality, the story begins in the first treatise of the book talking about the differences in moral intuitions of societies that predate Judeo-Christian values. What did the idea of goodness or virtue look like in these cultures? Well, typically in these cultures being virtuous did not mean that you appealed to a select group of behaviors predetermined for you chiseled into stone somewhere. Usually, Nietzsche says, the virtues people embodied corresponded with whatever social class they found themselves in and which virtues served them within it.

Now, simultaneously there was a hierarchical structure to society that oppressed most of the people. The higher social classes were made up of people that embodied virtues that served them in their social positions. If you were a warrior, maybe you embodied the virtue of courage or pride. If you were in the political realm, maybe you were power-seeking or cunning. If you were a king, maybe you were greedy or strong. The point is, just notice that all three of these at the very least are willing to undermine the interests of others for the sake of their own desires. Meanwhile, on the other side of this hierarchical structure were people that were oppressed and had very little ability to do anything about it.

So, on this side you see people mainly adopting the virtues of self-sacrifice. They are humble, meek, grateful for whatever they have. They don’t need anything else in life. And as a result, being strong or powerful isn’t really something these people care too much about. They care more about helping their neighbor, altruism. And hierarchies haven’t exactly been very kind to someone in this place, so they’re usually proponents of egalitarianism. These virtues make up what Nietzsche refers to as a slave morality. They are exactly the kind of things you’d expect someone to value if they were embedded into this social structure. Now, given enough time, Nietzsche says, what you’d also expect them to do is to start hating their oppressors and the people that embodied virtues that served them in the higher social classes.

So, if we think of this dynamic as a sort of battlefield of moral intuitions, the oppressed social class, in the interest of identifying their enemy, created a new moral category that encapsulated the primary virtues of the people that occupied positions of power. This is the creation of the concept of evil. Evil as a counterpoint to goodness didn’t exist in societies until a recent, specific point in history. To get what you want by undermining the preferences or well-being of other people was now starting to be seen as evil. A new binary was created where people thought of conduct in terms of this interplay between good versus evil.

So, instead of the way it had been at points in the past where there was a large population of just ordinary people—just people with certain exceptionally virtuous people being heralded as good people that you can look up to—in this new world, practically everybody is a good person so long as they embody that slave morality where they value self-sacrifice, humility, and make sure they’re not too powerful or dangerous. In this new world, to say to someone else, “You are not a good person,” is an insult. To say that is not taken as saying that you’re just an ordinary person like me, like all the rest of us. No, being a good person is the standard. And then goodness is defined by this cult of self-sacrifice for others. And anything power-seeking for the sake of having control, any greediness, any desire for strength so that you might use it to take what you want in the world—these behaviors are typically seen as evil, or at the very least viewed with a heavy, heavy skepticism.

I mean, it can start to feel kind of like the beginning of the episode. Like, this is not rocket science. The person that sacrifices their time to help somebody else who’s going through a rough time is just far and away a better person than someone who spends their time working towards gaining power over people. This can seem like such a solid moral truism that it’s almost treated as though it’s some sort of moral absolute, chiseled into stone tablets, if you will.

But this is where Nietzsche’s going to do the most Nietzsche thing in the world. See, if there was ever a hallmark of his work, it’s that he loves to take something that’s widely accepted by people as true and then present it from a different perspective and show how the obvious, initial take on the thing is not even close to the full story—the point being mostly to take a little wind out of the sails of anyone who has full confidence in some oversimplified take on reality. We saw an example of this in part four of our Nietzsche series on love. We looked at the idea of envy—actually one of the seven deadly sins, typically thought of by most to be horrible; certainly not an effective use of your time to sit around being envious of other people and what they have.

But Nietzsche talks about how, when you view envy from a different perspective, it actually can be a useful tool—a personalized, custom-made directive for anyone who feels a little bit lost on what to do with their life. Because if you’re one of those people sitting around, feeling like you don’t really know what you want to do because it honestly doesn’t feel like there’s anything in this world that you really want, well, maybe a useful place to start, Nietzsche says, is to try to notice the things and qualities you envy in other people at the very least as something to get your thoughts inspired in the right direction.

Well, envy is one example of Nietzsche being Nietzsche. But not immune to this treatment are these generally accepted moral truisms that are inherited from the past. He thought the people of his time were supremely confident in this over-simplified, binary take on morality of good and evil. And he wasn’t going to have any of that. He was going to show them how basic their thinking was, one false moral absolute at a time.

So, let’s start with compassion today. Who doesn’t like compassion? I mean, what kind of a sick person would you have to be to have a problem with someone living their life with the attitude that we should have as much compassion as possible towards people who are suffering? Why not have compassion? Once again, Nietzsche would want us to look at this from a slightly different perspective. How about this whole idea that we should feel sympathetic pity for anybody experiencing any level of suffering? Before we get too sold on that idea, let’s make sure to remember the fact that suffering is built into life itself. There’s no escaping it. And for every desperate, helpless victim out there, there are 10,000 people suffering in less extreme ways, where having pity for them might actually do more harm than good. It might just prolong their suffering or even make suffering contagious, as he says in one passage. We’ve all met people like this in our lives.

More than that, though, he’d want us to ask, what is the natural next step when we’re being compassionate towards someone’s plight in life? Well, it’s usually to try to actually do something in an attempt to help that person. Nietzsche would probably want to ask that isn’t it a bit arrogant in most cases for you to assume that you are the one to help this person, not only the possibly condescending assumption that you know what’s best for this person, but also that you are qualified to even help them? Just because somebody is suffering and needs help doesn’t mean that you’re the best one for the job.

Like, if someone’s appendix bursts and they need surgery and they’re lying on the ground, doesn’t mean that you throw on a COVID mask, grab a steak knife from your kitchen and get to work—what, just because that makes you feel better? “I had to at least try,” they would say. No, sometimes trying to help someone who’s suffering when you’re not qualified for the job can just end up hurting them more or hurt you or hurt the people around you. Not to mention, Nietzsche says, it may rob them of an opportunity to turn something seemingly negative into skills that will help them in the future. Maybe it robs them of the satisfaction they might otherwise have had if they solved the problem themselves.

Now, somebody might say back to this, “Well, that’s not compassion. I mean, I agree with almost everything Nietzsche’s saying there, but that’s not my kind of compassion. Compassion is much more than that. Compassion isn’t just pity or whatever Nietzsche’s talking about there.” Well, let’s see. Google defines compassion: sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. So, if you’re one of these people coming to the defense of compassion as some sort of moral absolute, don’t be ashamed, but that is exactly the sensibility Nietzsche is saying is the problem with how we think about morality in contemporary Western society, where our minds have been practically poisoned to be in a constant pursuit towards this false ideal of objective morality or objective truth.

This attitude, where when you hear Nietzsche say anything critical of compassion—“Oh, he must be trying to refute compassion. He must be trying to argue for something else.” No, he’s operating in a much more nuanced place than that. He’s not trying to offer a new dogma to replace people’s old dogmas. He’s not interested in piling onto this attitude that there are a million wrong answers in the world and a single correct answer that I have access to—this attitude that reality itself is somehow stable enough to categorize and define in a binary way. To Nietzsche, it’s not. And he’s not interested in offering you a counter-system so that we can all pretend like it is. That’s the entire problem.

You may remember in our episode on being and becoming that Nietzsche is extremely skeptical of any attempt to create a system that claims to grab ahold of and quantify some stable, grounded depiction of reality. Remember the visual of the sand dune as a process and how momentary snapshots of any aspect of that sand dune can never capture the sand dune in its entirety, blowing in the wind, constantly changing. The reality of the universe and of morality is that they are not stable, to Nietzsche. They can never be understood in terms of absolutes. The fact is, there are examples of how compassion can hurt people more than help them. And there are examples of how undermining the interests or wellbeing of other people would not be a moral absolute of evil. If you doubt this, just think of anyone who seeks power in the world for the sake of overthrowing a corrupt system; think of anyone who takes a promotion from somebody else and makes the world a better place with that position. The reality of this universe is that it is unstable.

To Nietzsche, this is the natural state of affairs. But people for many reasons don’t like the idea that truth and morality are unstable. So, they’ve created all sorts of counter-natural—that’s the word—counter-natural attempts to transcend this natural instability of things. These are the various religious, philosophical, cultural, rational constructions that we come up with to try to give us an illusion of stability. But in the sense that they deny the true unstable nature of reality, they are life denying by definition. They are counter-natural. The entire ideal that they’re striving towards is a denial of the sort of dynamic perspectivism that Nietzsche’s channeling here.

Bottom line is, you don’t like the way the world is, so you live your life in a constant state of denial about it—denial about the feelings and desires you have, denial about the level of confidence you have in your understanding of the world. And one of Nietzsche’s main concerns is to think of where this constant state of denial psychologically leaves the average citizen of modernity facing a new kind of existential crisis—this thing we’ve been talking about on this series—that there’s no meaning to anything. God is dead. I mean, for lack of a better phrase, you’re really preaching to the choir with Nietzsche there. This new metaphysical framework that we operate within changes the experience of the modern individual psychologically.

For example, the way that it used to be—this counter-naturalism, this attempt to transcend the natural state of things—think of how this presents itself in the mind of a Christian. The Bible gives a Christian an explanation that allows them to transcend the natural instability of truth, and it provides them an objective moral code they’re commanded to follow, which then allows them to transcend the natural instability of morality. To live a moral life is to steer towards certain good behaviors and to steer away from certain bad behaviors. Now, another way to say that is to say that they are to affirm and act on certain internal feelings and desires they have and to deny and not act on certain evil feelings and desires. Now, within the metaphysical framework of Christianity, this makes total sense. When you act on these evil desires and deadly sins and you feel guilty about it, you are going against the will of God. You should feel guilty. There’s a God that’s disappointed in you. There is real meaning attached to this process of renouncing these large pieces of yourself.

But think of what happens when we make just a slight metaphysical shift, and now we’re born into a disinterested universe. Well, we still culturally inherit the moral absolutes and cult of self-sacrifice, but now there’s no will or decree of a God to give a legitimate meaning to having this guilt. Now you’re born into a universe where you’re just a subspecies of primate, and these desires and feelings that you have are not evil—it’s not evil bubbling up inside of you—now these feelings that you’re having, they’re just a part of what it is to be you: the part of you that most people judge you for, the part of you that you have to feel bad about every day and deny, the part of you that you eventually start to hate in yourself.

You start to ask questions. Why am I so weak? Why am I such a bad person? Why don’t I feel the way I’m supposed to feel? You’re reading books, watching videos, trying to understand why you’re such a piece of human garbage. But what if these things are not something to deny but just another piece of the complex process that is you, not simple or stable enough to be defined by binaries or categories? And then you feel guilty that you’re not that simple, so you punish yourself. You hold onto that resentment towards yourself because, hey, that’s what a God would do if it actually existed. Where does all this leave you psychologically almost by default?

Then, on top of it all, when the primary social cue you face on a day-to-day basis is that you earn respect from people when you abide by the altruistic, egalitarian, self-sacrificial moral approach—you are applauded when you sacrifice your feelings and dreams and put them on the back burner for the sake of the greater good or everyone else around you—not a surprise, Nietzsche would say, that this tends to leave the average person living in modernity a bit disoriented. To be a reasonable person is to be born on a crash course into nihilism and self-denial. Religious, philosophical, scientific approaches systematize this denial of certain evil parts of ourselves. Guilt is used as an internal mechanism to keep this the status quo. And we live in a constant state of self-condemnation that we become the judge, jury, and executioner of. Guilt almost starts to look like debt that we carry around with us, Nietzsche says. And then through self-punishment, we earn salvation from this part of ourselves that we hate.

We see this tendency towards self-condemnation show up in various religious practices through the ritual of asceticism. Google defines asceticism as severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons—in other words, a systematized form of self-denial that then becomes pathological. See, because here’s the thing, Nietzsche was concerned that there’s no guarantee that these historically inherited traditions of self-denial will ever lead to an end game for the modern individual that’s psychologically healthy. Many Westerners still to this day live their lives in this pathology that Nietzsche refers to as the ascetic ideal, characterized by this binary thinking and desire to transcend the natural instability of the world through categories like good versus evil, true versus false, the type of thinking that can lead otherwise perfectly reasonable people into a hatred of themselves for feeling the wrong way or a hatred of their neighbor for believing the wrong thing.

The point of this episode is obviously not to agonize over whether morality is grounded in nature or culture. We’ve talked enough about that on this show. The point is that if we’re going to have any serious discussion about creating meaning in your life in a disinterested universe, it may not be a mystery to you that you care about things or what you care about. But where and how those values were created can be extremely helpful because these are the origins of a moral approach that’s already managed to captivate you at some level. Ultimately, if you’re going to try to create your own values, you better make sure they at least serve you in the world you’re currently living rather than just taking them from the past arbitrarily, doing an impression of what your great-great-grandpa thought a good life was. I mean, at that point, why not just dress up like the guy, get some overalls and pretend like you’re on a steam engine?

But moving forward into the creative process, with all this talk of guilt, what is Nietzsche saying about the creation of meaning here? Is he saying that we shouldn’t be disciplined and renounce certain behaviors and desires that hurt us or other people? No. Is he saying that truth is entirely relative, that it’s all a matter of perspective and there’s no way to delineate between which perspectives are more legitimate than others? Definitely not what he’s saying. Once again, if your tendency was to instantly think that Nietzsche was arguing for the opposite, notice that binary, polarized way of thinking it’s easy to fall into that requires there to be a million different wrong answers, one correct answer, and lives in constant denial of the true instability and nuance that we have to contend with.

The larger question is this. In a post-God-is-dead world, we’re told a couple things as people: that when it comes to truth, don’t worry, we’re working on it; we have science. When it comes to morality, don’t worry, we have philosophy. But are these two field the grand liberators from the religious, counter-natural chains of the past, or are these just the most recent manifestations of this ascetic ideal, this will to truth or objectivity as being the final goal? Next episode, we’ll talk about this built-in crisis of epistemology in a world where people get their depictions of reality from a series of moving pictures on a screen. We’ll talk about the creation of meaning through the eyes of Nietzsche, passages from his book The Antichrist, and what an observer of him might take away from a lifetime of his writing as someone who was never in the business of creating some systematized method for people to follow.

But maybe a good question to leave you with here today that will get us thinking in that direction is something Nietzsche talks about only very briefly. He mentions how he plans to expand on this in depth in the future in another book. But ultimately, he never does, leaving a lot of people to speculate about where he would have taken this. And who knows, maybe somebody out there listening to this will be the one to write about it. But the point is, if what we’ve been talking about here so far has any validity, Nietzsche at one point talks about how it’s this will to truth or this imperative towards objectivity that’s leading to all these potential problems. And that if anybody’s going to try to offer up an alternative system—which again, he is not trying to do—but if someone did try to subvert the dominant narrative of the ascetic ideal, they would have to call into question one of the most fundamental things that people just blindly accept: the value of truth as an end goal in our social systems.

Seems kind of difficult to imagine a system that calls into question the value of truth. But what Nietzsche invites us to do is to just consider the fact that we already have things in place that do this in other realms. He gives the example of art. And here’s what he’s getting at. When Kanye West comes out with a new album, that album is not released as a refutation of Cardi B’s work. When a new TV show comes out, you don’t sit there and say, “Okay, okay, yeah. That show is true. I was wrong before about last season. And don’t get me started on that other show—totally false now as far as I’m concerned.”

Nietzsche is saying that art is a forum where meaningful human expression is currently being made depicting reality from a particular perspective to be appreciated on grounds that have nothing to do with staking a claim to the truth. You don’t hate yourself for liking the music you listen to, and you don’t hate other people around you for thinking other music is better. Look, if the legitimacy or the meaning of a belief really came down to whether or not it were actually true, then most people wouldn’t believe anything in this world.

So, what are we actually trying to accomplish in our social systems? And is this old ideal of a stable truth and a dissatisfaction with the natural world, where people see themselves, as Nietzsche says, in the world but not of the world—we feel almost too good for this world; we have to transcend it in some way—is this false ideal just continuing to make people self-hating, disoriented, stagnant, and miserable where they actually are? And if it is, what he’s asking is, could there be a counter-ideal out there? Can we imagine a system built on a foundation of accepting the fact that reality is unstable? And rather than living in denial of that fact, could we ask the question that fascinated Nietzsche all throughout his work: What kind of natural philosophy might we be able to create that’s an affirmation of life and not a renunciation of it?

Much more on that in a week. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.