Episode #159 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Hope you love the show today.

So, this series has been called “The Creation of Meaning” so far. And the hope has been that we might be able to get some sort of insight into how to go about doing that by looking at the work of various different thinkers. But if there’s anything from last time that it’s important to reiterate from the very outset here, it’s that when it comes to Nietzsche in particular, it was not his ambition, nor is it the ambition of this podcast for that matter, to relay to you some high-resolution image of which system of values you should be constructing in your life. Nobody wants to give you all the colors and all the details of the picture that you’re going to paint. Nietzsche wasn’t even trying to give you a paint-by-numbers in his work.

To many of the existentialists, it is your responsibility to paint your own canvas. And while no doubt you are going to take inspiration from the paintings of other people around you—other famous paintings that have been created throughout history—while you’ll no doubt take inspiration, you should see it as an immediate red flag if someone’s ever trying to sell you that high-resolution image of what kind of person you should be. In many ways, it might be a good strategy to proceed with the mindset that the more detailed of a picture someone is trying to get you to buy, the more skepticism you should have towards that whole transaction overall.

See, Nietzsche thought there wasn’t a field manual or rules for life. And by the way, even if there was, as someone that listens to this kind of show, are you really the kind of person that’s going to follow all the rules given to you anyway? All we can do is try to learn to navigate our own subjective, internal experience. Nietzsche thought it was obvious that different values at different levels of intensity would favor different people facing different resistance points in the world. It’s our job to create them. So, knowing this, what can Nietzsche even do for you if you’re someone trying to navigate this whole meaning-creation process?

Well, I think the best description of what he does is to lead by example in his work. You know, over the course of his entire career, you won’t get much in the way of specific high-resolution advice. But what you will get are lines of thought, thought experiments, tools, and a recurring emphasis placed on certain themes that can serve as an example of inspiration for developing your own system of values. To continue the metaphor, what you’ll get are different techniques in how to use the brushes and the paints and the canvas to start creating the picture that you actually want to look at every day. I’ll try to point out these takeaways as we go along this journey. But let’s just jump into one line of thought from his work that might prove to be useful to some people.

See, because any conversation about this creation of meaning process has to start somewhere. And as we know, Nietzsche’s not interested in providing some stable foundation or aspect of the universe from which we’re going to build a system of values. But for the sake of us being able to have a conversation about anything at all in this area, can we all agree on one thing that seems to be pretty uncontroversial? That regardless of how we got here, where we should be going, how we should all be getting there, at a very general level, we seem to be some sort of creature that looks at the world around us, wants things, and then desires and strives towards getting them. Then along the way we’re often met with resistance towards getting what we want. And the overcoming of that resistance in our path usually involves some level of suffering that we have to endure. This could be as simple as getting your next meal. This could be as complicated as running for political office.

The point is, rooted within us seems to be some sort of engine that generates desires. And it doesn’t seem to matter who it is. Like, have you ever talked to a five-year-old kid? One second they’re talking about Teddy Grahams; ten seconds after that it’s paper airplanes; ten seconds after that they’re telling you something that cuts to the core of your being and your deepest insecurities. This is not malicious. This is a very human experience this kid is having. Because we all know what it feels like to have thousands upon thousands of desires, many of these desires mutually exclusive. Like, it would defy the laws of physics to get everything this desiring machine convinces you is so important in the moment.

And part of getting older is finding ways to govern this chaotic influx of fleeting desires and emotional states. And when it comes to creating a system of meaning to live by, picking and choosing which of these desires means something to you, learning to focus on them and learning to let go of the small desires that don’t mean as much to you—this seems like it would be a pretty important part of this whole process. So, beginning from this baseline might give us some inspiration into what kind of relationship we want to create surrounding the management of desire.

So, starting from this place, understand that this aspect of ourselves has been well documented all throughout the history of religious, historical, and philosophical interpretations of the human condition. And what’s interesting is that there’s a number of different ways you can look at this situation we find ourselves in as desiring machines. One way of looking at it is through the lens of a sort of rational pessimism. On the popular philosophical side of this, there’s probably no bigger poster child out there than one of the guys Nietzsche’s directly responding to in his work, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. We heard his whole story on the episodes we already did on him. And many people seem to relate, that there is a pessimistic way we can be looking at all this stuff going on around us.

I mean, think of what it’s like to be you for a second. You are condemned to a life of restlessly striving for things. Then you suffer at different levels throughout this process of striving with no guarantee you’re ever going to actually get what it is you’re striving for. Then, even if you actually do get what you want, the absolute best-case scenario for you is that you get a temporary alleviation of this otherwise constant state of suffering that you exist in. For Schopenhauer in particular, you can’t even call the state of getting what you want “happiness.” All we ever have access to is just a very short-term, temporary respite from suffering, only to have the new state of affairs become normalized within your experience of the world, at which point you find something else that you desire, strive towards that, and begin the whole process of suffering all over again.

So, through the eyes of someone with a rational-pessimistic outlook, they might believe that to exist is to exist in an almost constant state of dissatisfaction about where you’re currently at. To a pessimist, this desiring engine inside of us effectively becomes an engine for dissatisfaction and suffering that we can’t escape. This engine of desire becomes your enemy. So, unless you want your inner thoughts to sound like those dark parts of Twitter where people just endlessly complain about nothing, the only way to achieve any level of peace is, you have to find a way to develop some level of mastery over this voice that’s constantly desiring things. So, how do we do that?

Well, one common strategy for doing this is to approach these desires with an attitude of negation. We see it in religion. We see it in philosophy. We talked about it last time, so I’ll keep it short here. The idea is you have a bunch of fleeting desires moment to moment, and some of those desires are good; some of those desires are bad or evil. Your job as a moral agent approaching things through an attitude of negation is to negate certain specific desires that you have that you see as the worst or the weakest or the most evil parts of yourself. Pick whatever adjective you want there. The point is that there is a piece of yourself that you are at war with constantly.

And you can fight this war in any way that works for you. You can push these desires down and silence them. You can live in spite of them, clenching your fists your entire life. You can live in denial of these desires, live in embarrassment of them, feeling guilty, punishing yourself for having them. It doesn’t really matter how you accomplish it: the ultimate goal is to abstain from these weak, evil behaviors through a system of self-condemnation and self-punishment. To be able to win a daily battle against this force of evil desires within you is by some accounts what it even is to be a strong person. This is why the practice of asceticism is such a common lane that people end up in along their path of spiritual development. Asceticism is the basic training of negation.

Digging deeper into the ontological side of this though—the attitude present at the core of this thinking is one of counter-naturalism, that life in its natural form as it is needs to be transcended through renunciation to give you access to some higher plane of being. Applied to your internal experience, this reads as a feeling that you as you exist right now are flawed. You need to be saved or forgiven somehow for your weakness or evil. There’s an ideal version of yourself that exists up in your head somewhere. And you fight against the weak parts of yourself every day to hopefully get to this ideal self. Applied to the political realm: the world as it exists is not good enough and needs to be transcended. It is infected by evil forces. Your life becomes a war campaign against this evil that exists in the world to hopefully bring into existence a more ideal world where less evil is out there.

Both religious and secular approaches use this strategy of negation. And it’s important to note here, one of the reasons this attitude is so popular historically is because it works. Guilt, shame, fear, feeling like you’re fighting against forces of evil—these are all very effective motivators in a universe where nothing really means anything on an objective level.

But something Nietzsche would want to point out here is that one of the big strengths of there not being any sort of objective meaning is that you can look at the universe any way you want to. Kind of inspiring actually. Because if a God truly did create this universe, programming you with evil desires that it’s your job to perpetually fight against until you die, you would have to see the universe more or less in that way. But if there really is no meaning to anything, then you’re not living under some celestial mandate. And if desiring stuff is a part of life, and in order to get that stuff you’re often met with resistance that requires suffering—these two facts of life being necessary and unavoidable—then why would you be mad at them?

Nietzsche’s going to take a different approach towards all this renunciation that’s going on. He’s talking about adopting a new kind of strategy in life. He says, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

As you heard, he sums up this attitude he’s talking about there with two Latin words: amor fati, which translates to “love of fate.” And Nietzsche certainly meant it in terms of loving your own fate. Nietzsche thought this was one of the most important contributions he was making to the philosophy of his time because he thought he was one of the only people in history to offer a serious alternative to this rational-pessimistic outlook that’s poisoned the history of how we frame our own existence. The idea is this, what would happen if we looked at our existence and affirmed everything about it instead of negating select parts of it?

Now, on the off-chance you’re thinking here that Nietzsche’s essentially saying that you just need the power of positive thinking in your life or that you should just start saying yes to everything—you know, when your friends ask you to go bowling and you’d usually say no, go bowling this time! Then you’ll actually have friends. No. That’s not what he’s saying here. He’s not even necessarily talking about a change in any of your potential behavior or impact on the world. All that he’s talking about really is a psychological shift. It’s a shift that, as we’ll see, will have huge consequences when it’s actually executed well. But Nietzsche would probably say that when creating your own system of meaning, you shouldn’t feel trapped in this attitude of negation just because that’s how your great-grandpa thought of things when he was shoveling coal in the steam engine.

Let’s go back to the question at hand though. Why not affirm everything that is necessary about yourself and the world around you? What would happen? Once again, you are a desiring machine. And just as one example, short-term desires are often completely incompatible with long-term desires. Okay. Nietzsche would say that you don’t have to deny either of those desires. You can affirm the fact that you want both of these things simultaneously. In fact, you can affirm every desire that you have; you just don’t act on all of them.

Which is just to say, to not act on the specific desires that don’t correspond with the values you want to promote in your life, you don’t necessarily have to see them as evil. You don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed of them. You don’t have to see yourself as condemned to a life of pushing a boulder up a hill under the magnifying glass of God or the government or insert whatever group you want. In terms of your behavior or the impact you’re going to have on the world, you can live two identical lives: one where you see yourself as a condemned victim struggling and suffering against evil all the time; and the other as a type of creature that affirms and embraces that there is something that is naturally a part of them that desires, that has values they want to instate in the world, a creature that affirms suffering—because if any change they want to bring about for the better is actually a meaningful change, it will require overcoming resistance in the existing world. They understand that these counterforces in their way are evidence of the fact that they’re actually changing something meaningful.

So, through the lens of a sort of rational affirmation this time, the fate of being a creature that wants things and then has to suffer and strive to get them—this wouldn’t be viewed as some sort of torturous obstacle course. This universe, turns out, is actually a pretty amazing playground for a creature like that. The practitioner of asceticism traditionally will sit out in the cold. They’ll lay on a bed of nails. They’ll abstain from every type of earthly pleasure you can imagine. They’ll strengthen the will to become a strong enough person to overcome the weakness written into them by the universe. Whereas a practitioner of a Nietzschean asceticism, if there was one, could engage in more or less the exact same set of behaviors, but they would frame it more as an affirmation of values, an affirmation of a lack, an expression of the will to power, the overcoming of resistance for the sake of shaping the world to your desires.

The thinking is, yeah, I want stuff in this world. Why spend all the time that I have renouncing the fact that I want stuff? What if taking action towards what you want is good for you? What does the meaning of the universe even matter at that point? This is a quote from Nietzsche’s work The Antichrist. And notice how different it feels when you read it from an attitude of negation versus an attitude of affirmation. He says, “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”

And what Nietzsche is saying is that if this overcoming of resistance—of constant desiring, striving, and suffering—is a necessary part of life, why can’t you in theory, as he says, learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things? Why, as he says, wage war against what is ugly? To affirm life is to affirm all of life: the beautiful parts and the ugly parts, the good days and the bad. Through the lens of affirmation, both of these are part of the absolute privilege that we possess to be alive. And as Nietzsche suggests, amor fati, let that be my love henceforth.

This is an alternative way to frame this desiring portion of what it is to exist. So, the bigger question here to answer is, when creating your own system of meaning, what story are you going to choose to tell yourself in a disinterested universe? Why carry around historical baggage that you don’t necessarily have to? Remember, in the first section of the genealogy of morality, he describes that slave morality that we inherit from societies of the past and how it’d be very easy to just assume that altruism and self-sacrifice is a moral absolute. Well, it is just as easy to assume that a counter-naturalist, pessimistic, self-condemning, victim-centered existence is the place that we just all have to start from by virtue of being born. Pick whatever approach you want, but once again, the higher the resolution, the higher the level of skepticism you might want to be bringing.

Now, even beginning from a seemingly innocent basic premise like this—that we desire things, that we should affirm life as it is—notice while building your own approach how easily other values start to creep in simply by implication. Think of what’s implied by committing yourself to the affirmation of life. Well, let’s see. If you’re going to affirm life, then you need to affirm life as it actually is, not a set of lies, not some random story you’ve been given. So, if you’re going to affirm life as it is, it creates an almost built-in commitment towards the pursuit of truth.

Truth was, without question, one of the values Nietzsche talked about the most, and it was extremely important to him. And this may seem a little confusing at first because, wait a second, last time didn’t Nietzsche talk about this will to truth, this constant pursuit towards objectivity as being one of the things that has poisoned the minds of people since practically the beginning of recorded history? Didn’t he talk about a dynamic perspectivism? I mean, I don’t know. Seems like when it comes to pursuing the truth, Nietzsche didn’t think getting there was even possible. How can you say he really even cared that much? One way to think about it is that Nietzsche cared so much about truth as a value that he didn’t want his love for it to undermine what he was even trying to accomplish by pursuing truth in the first place.

Let me explain this. See, Nietzsche believed that any value taken to the extreme almost always starts to undermine itself. And in the cases where it doesn’t directly undermine itself, it always at least begins to mess with other values that you’re trying to instate, or it destroys other parts of your life that are definitely important to you as well. Let’s take a look at an example of what he’s talking about here for the sake of inspiration.

How about the value of honesty? Who doesn’t like honesty? Seems tempting to say honesty certainly is going to be a cornerstone in my personal system of values. Well, cool, but how much honesty are we talking about here? Because it doesn’t really take too much creativity to come up with examples of when honesty is not necessarily the best policy as it pertains to the maintenance of your life overall.

The axe-murderer dilemma is obviously the cliché example here. Do you lie to the axe murderer when they come to your door and ask where your kids are? But it should be said that the examples really don’t need to be this extreme to make Nietzsche’s overall point. How about living under authoritarian rule where bad stuff will happen if you say the wrong thing? It might be better to pick your spots there when it comes to honesty. How about even less than that?

How about just, you’re working for a company and your boss is absolutely clueless about some upcoming project you’re working on. Like, he has no idea what he’s talking about. And he comes up to you with his mid-level management confidence and his coffee cup, and he leans in. He says, “Hey, you see my proposal? What do you think about my plans for moving forward, Johnson?” Sips his coffee. “Sir, sir, I got to be honest with you because honesty is my thing. Nietzsche told me to do it. But with all due respect, you are one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever laid eyes on. Your male-pattern baldness is a metaphor for the progressive lack of coverage you have over major aspects of this organization. God is dead, and your cringe has killed him. Congratulations.”

Now, if you spoke to people in this way, there is no doubt everyone would think of you as a really honest person. But they’d also think of you as a couple other things, things that would have some very real impacts on other areas of your life that you want to preserve. And people do this, by the way. We’ve all at least seen them. Some people go throughout their life thinking of themselves as some kind of moral exemplar for acting this way. “Yeah, I’m honest to a fault. You’re going to have to learn to love that about me. I tell it how it is. All these other people just lie to each other’s faces because they’re fake and scared.” And this person might look at themselves in the mirror at other areas of their life that are empty, and they justify it to themselves by clinging to this ultimate value of honesty as though there’s no other considerations to be made in the world about how to talk to people.

Let’s be entirely clear. The problem here was not with the value of honesty itself. The problem was with people trying to oversimplify morality into a system of monism—something philosophers have tried to do for thousands of years, where they try to take one ultimate value and subordinate all the other values to it. You’ll hear them. “If only you were more rational, then you’d overcome all your irrational fears, and you’d be more courageous.” “If only you valued freedom as the most important virtue in the world, then you’d value truth because you’d want to free yourself from the shackles of ignorance,” or whatever story they came up with today. The ultimate point is to simplify the complexity of human values into a monistic hierarchy.

Nietzsche’s not buying any of this. He views human values more through the lens of a moral pluralism, where many different values are all accomplishing something important. None of these values are subordinate to any others, and we try our best to keep them working together to perform a complex function. At one point in his work he offers the loose metaphor of a tree. He says, “For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we may neither err nor hit upon the truth singly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yes’s and no’s and if’s and whether’s—the whole lot related and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will, one health, one earthly kingdom, one sun.”

Looking at values from this perspective, values within a functioning system are often interconnected. They work together. The importance of one value emerges and is implied by another value. Think of how naturally a commitment to the pursuit of truth emerged out of a commitment to the affirmation of life. But again, none of these values are subordinate to some super value out there. When you over-index on a single value for the sake of simplicity, you do so at the expense of other values. You may over-index on the pursuit of truth at the expense of justice along the way. You may over-index on justice at the expense of truth along the way. The problem is not found in the values of truth or justice in themselves. No doubt you should be valuing both of these. The problem always starts to arise when you lean too far in the direction of monism.

So, we can see how the pursuit of truth, to Nietzsche, taken to the absolute extreme, begins to undermine itself. It begins to mess with other values that we want to promote in our lives, and it potentially sabotages all the undeniable good that truth could otherwise do for us when it’s not taken to an extreme. Well, so too with honesty; so too with patience; so too with freedom or any other value we want to promote. An exercise Nietzsche suggests that can be useful is to run a series of experiments in your life. Paraphrasing here, but he essentially says, see how much of a particular value your life can endure before it starts to have negative effects on the whole pluralistic operation that’s going on.

In other words, if honesty seems like something that you value, try it out. Try telling a kid that you don’t think they’re really going to become an astronaut because honestly, if I’m betting, statistically it’s probably not going to work out for you. Try that out. Because the exact point in your life that honesty or any value becomes toxic will vary from person to person. Which values and at what level of intensity will serve you and your culture and time period is an experiment that you have to run.

And this calibration and recalibration of the values that serve you is something that needs to go on as the circumstances in your life change. And if you think about it, living during a time where these circumstances of our lives change at a rate even faster than during the time of Nietzsche, I think this exercise of asking ourselves “How much of this thing my spirit can endure before it starts to become toxic in my life?” is something to be considering almost every single day.

Something else to think about when it comes to values and how they connect together—we’ll stick with the value of truth here as an example because it’s what we’ve been exploring so far. One recurring theme in Nietzsche’s work is that he asks us to consider the relationship between truth and art. Now, to understand why he even cares about this, we have to look at life through the lens of affirmation rather than negation. Remember that amor fati quote from earlier. Nietzsche says that he wants to learn to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. Well, think of that as a skill. And if you wanted to get better at that skill, what kind of person would you want as a teacher? Who would you ask for tips on how to see the beauty in things better?

Well, there’s probably a ton of different answers here, but one place you might want to start is by asking a great artist. One part of the skill of a great artist is that they’ve essentially hacked and mastered the process of taking pieces of the universe and, as Nietzsche says, cutting them out and framing them in a way that is beautiful or desirable to us. In a meaningless world where part of our responsibility is to create meaning, art is the realm where people have mastered the creation of appearances or illusions that become meaningful to us. And this is a very important part of life to Nietzsche.

But wait a second, doesn’t Nietzsche also think that the pursuit of truth emerges out of an affirmation of life? Because we have to affirm things as they truly are—right?—not just mere appearances or illusions. Fair question, Nietzsche. Doesn’t that seem to be a bit contradictory to you? And Nietzsche would no doubt say yes, exactly. Now you’re starting to understand. The pursuit of truth is not valuable because it provides us with objectivity. The pursuit of truth is valuable because it gives us a closer approximation of truth than we had yesterday. And more importantly, it rescues us from living in a world of pure illusion and appearances.

On the other hand though, art is not valuable because our goal in life is to live in pure fantasy all the time. Art is valuable because you are a human being, and illusions and appearances are an undeniable piece of your existence as well. To deny illusions and appearances simply because you’re such a huge fan of the truth is to negate a part of life to your detriment. Art is a value worth preserving to Nietzsche because, if for no other reason, it rescues us from succumbing to this monistic, oversimplified will to truth as though truth was the only consideration to be had in the universe.

Art and truth both provide very valuable services. The intensity of either of these services in your particular life is an experiment you’re going to have to run. But understand why Nietzsche wants us to look at the relationship between the two of them. Consider the point that part of what makes either of these values important lies in their opposition to each other. Truth rescues us from pure illusion, and illusion rescues us from pure truth, the pitfalls of either. They are counterforces in the world. They counterbalance one another. And in many ways, if either side of this counterbalance cease to exist, well, we already know what happens when you over-index on a value and it’s left unbridled. It begins to undermine and sabotage all the good stuff we were even trying to bring about in the first place.

I mean, you can imagine, if a single way of thinking had a total monopoly over all the seats in public office somewhere, how quickly that society might dissolve. In this way, part of what makes a value even meaningful or even effective is the fact that it’s met with a counterforce in the world. Whether it’s desires within your own internal experience, whether it’s people in the political realm that have different values than you do, maybe this is a good place to just pause and reflect on the fact that you can tell a lot about somebody by looking at who their enemies are. And oftentimes your enemies can teach you a lot more about yourself than your friends ever can.

Think of the college education we stand to gain if we just listen to what the counterforces in our life have to say rather than just labeling them as evil or dumb. When it comes to your internal desires, when we don’t negate the short-term desire that’s not in keeping with the values we want to live by, think of the lessons we can learn about ourselves. Think of how much more pleasant it might be to exist instead of just boiling in your own soup all the time. When it’s other people—family, career, political realm—when we don’t silence or hate or seek to eliminate the people that hold values contrary to our own, think of all there is to learn.

When these people no longer are seen as evil demons in your field of view, when their existence as a counterforce in the world is viewed through the lens of affirmation, these people basically become your personal employees that are working for you. They show you the strengths and weaknesses in your own positions. They help you calibrate which values and at what intensity actually serve yourself and society. They essentially train you in some crazy Nietzschean Rocky montage on how to beat them, how to overcome resistance, how to exert your will to power and be the values you want to promote, better.

So, Nietzsche’s not going to tell you which values to have. He’s not going to tell you how to live your life. The task at hand here that we’re all assigned at birth is to find a way to navigate your own subjective, internal experience. There’s no rulebook. And all that Nietzsche can offer is his own perspective, a set of values, a will to power dead set on overcoming resistance points within himself and within the world.

And rather than renouncing the nature of the world—spending every day of his life as a mercenary against evil enslaved from the other side—the strategy he wanted to explore in his life when he encountered people he strongly disagreed with was to focus harder on his own values, to become stronger, to shine brighter as a human being. As he says, to quote, “Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account.”

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