Episode 212 - Transcript

So I want to continue where we left off last episode. Which means you might need to LISTEN to that one before THIS one– just FAIR WARNING…I’m talking from HERE on as though you’ve listened to it, with little explanation…it’s called Nietzsche returns with a hammer!

Now I want to talk more about this life-affirming perspective that Nietzsche’s bringing up in his later work: what would it look like if someone woke up in the morning…and STARTED their day from a place where they were AFFIRMING all aspects of life as they were…RATHER than renouncing them…rather than that OVERLY rational, OVERLY idealistic way of living that just recreates a classic Christian RENUNCIATIVE way of looking at the world, that in HIS eyes is responsible for the decay of western society.

What would that world of life-AFFIRMATION look like? What would a morality STRUCTURED around affirmation like that…even BE like? 

I mean these are questions that really captivated Nietzsche for a lot of his later career. They’re tough questions to answer…and we’ll get to what he had to SAY about them, but first REAL quick: if ON this episode we’re GOING to be trying to LOOK at the world, THROUGH this life-affirming lens…if you’re trying to SEE things in a new way, and if you’re someone who’s INTRIGUED by this STORY Nietzsche’s telling of him SMASHING the idols from the history of western thought with a hammer. Real quick…can we just take a second to appreciate…what Socrates LOOKS like from Nietzsche’s perspective if he’s right here? 

I mean you KNOW that he doesn’t LIKE Socrates, I get it…but just THINK about who this guy really is… if Nietzsche’s right. Think of his whole game. He DENIES the whole Dionysian side of what reality is…the chaos, the passions, the emergent, CONTEXT dependent side of reality…and then he says NO what we’re gonna do is steer HARD into the Apollo side of this: the RATIONAL…and MY little game that we’re gonna play today is you can ONLY use rationality…but you gotta try to NAIL down the TRUTH about everything in FULL. Give me the ESSENCES of everything.

So then this guy GOES OUT into the public square…starts harassing people. Says hey uh, YOU over there…you think you’re WISE? Well then why don’t you give me a definition of what JUSTICE is…no, no, no, TELL ME in SIMPLE, RATIONAL terms what Justice TRULY is, it’s a VERY easy question? 

Then you GIVE him a definition of Justice…he picks it apart, point out the limitations of it, that can’t be ALL of what justice is…you give ‘em another definition, he picks it apart again…he’s like look: I can keep doing this all day…you guys just keep making these mistakes…I mean eventually you’re ALL gonna have to realize that the Oracle was probably right! I AM the wisest one of ALL…because I… can at least admit that I don’t know ANYTHING! God bless ya though kids, thanks for coming out you guys TRIED hard. Thanks for being a contestant on the Socrates rationality game.

But to Nietzsche: this guy is a…a terrible person– you know whatever I can say on a family friendly show like this. 

There is NO MORE of a clear indicator of a simple mind that hasn’t thought about the complexity of things than someone who demands a rigid definition for something…and then says we can’t have a conversation until you give me a PERFECT definition of it. Definitions, RATIONAL REPRESENTATION more GENERALLY as it’s gone on throughout the ENTIRE history of philosophy…is FUNDAMENTALLY for Nietzsche a process of taking the emergent CHAOS of reality in full…and then TRYING to turn it into something that human minds can comprehend and work with. Now, maybe you can do that with something simple like a triangle. But with CONCEPTS like Justice? Beauty? Temperance? 

OF COURSE rational categorization is going to fall short, and we’ll get into examples of WHY it always does more in this episode. 

But from NIETZSCHE’s perspective when it comes to Socrates: YOU set up the rules of this GAME SHOW Mr. Socrates. You’re the one that said TRUTH has to come PURELY from Rationality. You gave people an IMPOSSIBLE task…and then sat around patting yourself on the back…for what? Noticing how stupid your entire approach was? Pointing out where reason comes up short? You guys don’t KNOW anything DO you?

Listen just to be clear I went kind of hard last episode: Nietzsche did respect SOME things about Socrates. But again this episode is about looking at things from the perspective of life-affirmation…okay? It’s about getting AWAY from this life-DENYING, RENUNCIATIVE perspective that a lot of people have inherited, and then smuggle it into basically every moment of their LIFE without even REALIZING it.

And as we talked about last episode: even ONE CHANGE…INTO this more life-affirming direction… can have a MONUMENTAL SHIFT on someone’s entire life, on the ENTIRE way they see the world. 

TONS of examples out there of people REPORTING this kind of paradigm shift…obviously not JUST with Nietzsche’s work…but people will TALK about this. Take SUFFERING or DISCOMFORT like we talked about last time just as one INITIAL example.

The IDEA is: if you RENOUNCE suffering…if you live life seeing COMFORT as the DEFAULT state of life…and then ANY DISCOMFORT you feel you have to RATION it or JUSTIFY it to yourself…if you’re always thinking in terms of I WANT this thing…but HOW much discomfort do I have to PAY to be able to GET the comfort and security on the other SIDE of it…if you’re ALWAYS THINKING in terms of MINIMIZING or REMOVING discomfort…then NO WONDER discomfort is so difficult to BE in– you’re APPROACHING the whole thing from a place where you’re RENOUNCING…a necessary part of life. 

But see from this OTHER perspective though: discomfort…again, is just a part of life. It’s not something to STEER INTO. It’s not something to STEER AWAY from. The point for Nietzsche becomes if you WANT something…if you HAVE that voice inside of you that WON’T shut up about it…sometimes discomfort is the set of sensations you are IN… if you want to get there. Why not AFFIRM that journey then?

So from THAT perspective: discomfort… is not some SACRIFICE you have to pay in a very religious sense…you know it’s a SACRIFICE of BLOOD so you can GET to the PROMISED land across the scorching desert. No if you AFFIRM discomfort…then it becomes more like, just the set of directions for how to GET somewhere you want to be. 

Point is: there ISN’T… this MISERY inducing, PESSIMISTIC outlook towards a fundamental piece of what it is to be alive…life ISN’T something you’re always RENOUNCING and at WAR with. No, to Nietzsche: you just SAY YES to it, you AFFIRM that which is necessary: amor fati as we talked about in episode #159. 

Now people talk about going through this kind of shift… and then seeing life in a COMPLETELY different way on the other side of it. So one question that naturally FOLLOWS from this is…is the ELIMINATION of SUFFERING…the ONLY one of these THINGS that we might be smuggling in from a renunciative tradition, where if you were to NOTICE it, and then to AFFIRM it…it COULD LEAD to a PRETTY substantial shift in your perspective on the world?

And the fact I’m even TALKING to you about this right now should PROBABLY make you GUESS…that yes there’s in fact…A LOT of differences it turns out when you AFFIRM life rather than renounce it. We’re gonna talk about MANY of them today, taking this concept of Amor Fati to a DIFFERENT kind of level. And again this is one of the things Nietzsche was really INTERESTED in towards the middle and later parts of his work…what would a morality LOOK like…if someone AFFIRMED life instead? 

And when he FIRST starts TALKING about it in his work…he’s QUICK to say look, I don’t got all the answers here. Not like I have some book for you to read 12 rules for affirming life. The thinking is, you know, LOT of this work may have to be done by YOU personally or someone else in the future. 

But that said: he DOESN’T give up…he DOES spend QUITE a bit of effort coming up with EXAMPLES of what it MIGHT look like. And it’s IN this CONTEXT…that you can understand his concepts of the Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence and the transvaluation of all values…all things we’ve TALKED about in earlier Nietzsche episodes: well it’s in THIS is the CONTEXT that these ideas make SENSE in. This is what he’s UP to when he creates them.

So KNOWING that, and again KNOWING that he thinks there’s a lot more work to be DONE here…he DOES say that despite our history being dominated by MOSTLY people… that come from this renunciative tradition…there ARE a couple places we CAN look, throughout HISTORY… if we wanted to get some insight into what it was like to be a person that was NOT so captured by Socratic and Christian ideals…ONE is gonna be the people that lived during the time of the Renaissance. The OTHER, the one we’re gonna focus on TODAY is going to be… what he thought was maybe the GREATEST culture to ever EXIST…and that is the GREEK societies that lived… BEFORE the corruption of Socrates came along. Pre-socratic, Greek culture.

He has a telling line from his book the Twilight of the Idols…he says “My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.”

What he means is: Thucydides was a Greek HISTORIAN from these VERY pre-socratic Greek societies…Nietzsche’s a big fan of his work…he’s a FAN of him because UNLIKE OTHER historians of his time and MOST people AFTER the influence of Plato and Socrates…Thucydides DOESN’T tell the story of human history…from a place where he’s constantly trying to MORALIZE about it, or attributing VALUE to the events that happened. 

Just as a point of contrast here: for example Herodotus…another FAMOUS Greek historian…he tells the STORY of the Persian war and it was COMMON, even EXPECTED at the time… for him to describe the STUFF that went on… as though it happened BECAUSE of divine retribution, you know this was the PRIDE of the PERSIANS, the HUBRIS of them, that lead to them getting beaten in this particular battle. 

Nietzsche RESPECTS the fact that Thucydides didn’t do ANY of this. Instead he focuses on power dynamics of the time, pragmatic moves that are made by cultures, and he doesn’t SHY AWAY from TALKING about the harsh reality of what it was to be someone caught up in the macro-level political events that were brutal. In other words: there’s NO attempt at moral justification, this war WASN’T the will of the gods, obviously to Nietzsche…and Thucydides seemed to accept that much better than OTHER historians. 

But if Thucydides is just a HISTORIAN from around this time… a time where people OVERALL seemed to be thinking differently than we do today…where can we get an even DEEPER insight into this culture…and what it was like to LOOK at the world like THEY did? 

Well for Nietzsche: an absolute TREASURE TROVE when it comes to this…is gonna be the ARTWORK that was produced at the time…PARTICULARLY… in Presocratic, ancient greek… tragedies. Tragic plays, as they were written. If you WANTED to see artwork… that depicts the world in a more life-affirming way…to Nietzsche you should READ GREEK TRAGEDY.

You’ve no doubt HEARD of some of the more famous ones: Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Hecuba, The Trojan Women…well there’s 31 of these ancient Greek tragedies in total…and to understand why Nietzsche thought they were so useful for seeing a more life-affirming perspective…it’s HELPFUL I think to CONTRAST THIS art…with a lot of the artwork we have to watch today. What was so DIFFERENT about it back then?

Well think of the average MOVIE that gets made today. So many of the RECURRING THEMES in an average movie…MIRROR… the life-denial, or the recurring themes in people’s thinking, that overly simplified, socratic, christian DECADENCE… that Nietzsche thinks has decayed western culture. 

In a TYPICAL movie for example…there’s always a PROTAGONIST and an ANTAGONIST…good character and a bad character. Then there’s a linear, predictable story line…with TONS of plot development spelling out EXACTLY who these characters are and the choices they face. Then some CONFLICT inevitably comes up…this is a PROBLEM for the GOOD character…but the good character KNOWS what they must DO…they must find a way to do SOMETHING to FIGHT against the BAD character…kick em in the face at the Karate tournament, whatever it is…then after they destroy their enemy the good character holds the trophy up over their head, the janitor of the school comes over says I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you *sobs* and then it fades to black and everyone lives happily ever after, the whole storyline being RESOLVED. 

Now if you GREW UP in a society where this is the type of story you had crammed into your head day after day from the MOMENT you were BORN…then OF COURSE it’s going to be EASIER for you to THINK of your life in terms of YOU being a main character that’s the morally GOOD person…that your LIFE is a predictable, linear story line, that the obstacles in your way are the work of BAD forces or EVIL people, and many MORE life-denying assumptions that we will talk about on the rest of this episode. 

The POINT for right now is: Greek tragedies from around this era…don’t REFLECT this same IDEALISTIC version of reality. And to read…and to spend some time ON Greek tragedy…is to immerse yourself into an entirely DIFFERENT way of orienting yourself towards the world, one that CELEBRATES the true ambiguity of existence and the fragility of the events of our lives. 

And it’s at THIS point that I want to bring in the work of ANOTHER great philosopher whose DECADES of interest in Greek Tragedy can really help to MAKE this point more deeply. He’s kind of PERFECT for it because he’s someone who’s INSPIRED by Nietzsche, but much MORE inspired by OTHER thinkers. So this allows him to appreciate some of the genius of the points Nietzsche made… but NOT necessarily have to turn so radically into the individual side of existence. His name is Simon Critchley– I guess I should tell you his name. 

Simon Critchley, he’s alive today, he’s written TONS of books at this point…and they’re written in a style that makes his ideas as a philosopher… pretty widely accessible. Not the easiest…but if you listen to this podcast regularly you’re probably gonna be able to get a lot out of them. And ONE of those books that he wrote in 2019 that was particularly accessible…was called Tragedy, The Greeks and Us— talking about the very thing we’re discussing today…Greek Tragedy and what it has to TEACH us as modern people. 

So Simon Critchley represents someone… who has DONE this WORK of reading tragedy…that Nietzsche definitely would have appreciated for anyone trying to find this more life-affirming direction moving forward. 

We’re gonna GO through some of his ANALYSIS of tragedy as a genre…and for EACH ONE of these WAYS where tragedy LOOKS at life through a SLIGHTLY different lens than WE do…we can ask: DO any of these represent a potential SHIFT in someone’s whole view to reality… on the LEVEL, of that affirmation of discomfort that we talked about before. 

For Simon Critchley…the end of the story here is, that the tragic perspective…is a philosophical orientation that when applied to modern life…has an INCREDIBLE amount that it can teach people. So I guess let me take a few minutes, give you some of the highlights…of what a fan of tragedy like Simon Critchley, loves about it after ALL his years of doing the work to study it. 

The FIRST misconception he might want to correct if we’re STARTING a conversation about tragedy to someone that’s never read them before…is probably to say that when we call these plays TRAGEDIES…that does NOT always mean that something HORRIBLE has happened, and we’re all gonna sit around like a bunch of emo kids wallowing in how TRAGIC it is. 

No, Greek Tragedy…if you PAY ATTENTION to the themes across the 31 of them that we have…Tragedy he says…is LESS about that kind of sadness and is MORE about WAR. And NOT LITERAL war, although that is part of SOME of them. 

EXACTLY what he MEANS by war will become more clear the deeper we get IN to his thoughts on tragedy: But FIRST of let’s just all understand…that to Simon Critchley…the world around us is ALWAYS in a state of becoming. Things and people are always changing, circumstances are always developing…and AS these THINGS develop and CHANGE…we as people are met with a CONSTANT TENSION… on MANY different levels…as we’re called to RESPOND to those changes. He says the FRAME of our world is war. 

And he says: “Tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, and how we might become cognizant of that suffering, and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action.”

Meaning, and this is the FIRST point of many…but the EXPECTATION someone might have…that life is EVER going to be some static, unchanging, peaceful thing where you’re meditating on a boulder next to some beavers and a waterfall: no, you DENY the constant TENSION of life ONLY at your own convenience. 

And of course Nietzsche would see the life-denial that’s going on here, as an IMPORTANT piece of what you get when you become a member of the herd. You take on a passive, REACTIVE approach towards the changing world around you…circumstances keep developing until one day they’ve changed enough for them to cause you PROBLEMS…at which point you cower back into the group and rely on strength in numbers. 

But IF you were to DO this…it structures your life around a DENIAL of an IMPORTANT and NECESSARY piece of what life is. Life is ALWAYS in a state of movement and tension. 

Well, Greek tragedies…are always WRITTEN from a place where it ASSUMES this constant tension. There is no happily ever after. There is no “we find the protagonist where everything is sunshine and rainbows in their life”. No we’re ALWAYS in a sense… when we READ a tragedy…BROUGHT into the breach of an ongoing WAR. 

Now something important to consider about what a tragedy IS… is when you create a piece of artwork…that STARTS from a place where you’re AFFIRMING this WARLIKE aspect of our lives…to Simon Critchley, what you notice when you READ them is that Tragedy… is never trying SOLVE the PROBLEMS of the world. It’s A LOT like what Nietzsche respected about the work of Thucydides. It’s never trying to moralize. It’s never trying to say THIS is the way the world SHOULD be and here’s how we MAKE it more that way, like a lot of modern MOVIES might.

No tragedy just… SITS in it…sits in what the world IS, WITHOUT some higher ideal, in a way that can come off as annoying to people that are USED to being prompted on how they should be FEELING about things. 

And this is ultimately to Critchley a TENDENCY people have…because they ALWAYS have an expectation of there being SOME sort of philosophical ORDER to things.

See, this is what PHILOSOPHY has typically DONE all throughout history– and Nietzsche would agree with this point. 

Philosophy, beyond the work of Socrates and Plato, is always trying to NAIL reality DOWN in some way…it’s trying to come up with SOME set of ORDERING PRINCIPLES that EVERYTHING can be filtered through…and then all of a sudden the PROBLEMS of the world are SOLVED, the WAR is over, nothing’s MOVING anymore, EVERYTHING makes SENSE now, RATIONALLY.

But just like Nietzsche he thinks there’s something BIG that we miss out on…when we remove the emergent, chaotic, AMBIGUOUS pieces of reality… that are IMPOSSIBLE to rationally predict and categorize. 

I mean you can TRY to DO…that thing we were recently talking about on the Peter Singer episodes where you come up with the EXACT KIND of moral strategy that YOU think is best. And you can DO your due diligence and you can say you know, after CAREFUL deliberation I’ve ARRIVED at my ULTIMATE moral approach: I am a Non-cognitivist, Utilitarian, meta-realist with zebra stripes and a party hat on…and you just TRY throwing me ANY moral dilemma you got and this RATIONAL approach of mine is going to nail down what the right thing to DO is…you can DO that…but what you’ll PROBABLY ALWAYS find is that it’s fighting a losing battle. You will ALWAYS run into the limitations of reason when you try to use it to tie DOWN something that’s as ambiguous and ever changing as LIFE is. 

Now should that stop us from using rationality altogether? Well no, again this isn’t dualism, this isn’t an argument for the OPPOSITE. 

The point is: reason will ALWAYS be something that comes up SHORT to you…if your EXPECTATION of it…is IDEALIZED…that it’s going to SOLVE human conflict ENTIRELY, or that it’s gonna provide a UNIVERSAL morality for all situations– this is yet ANOTHER, COMMON, life-denying TENDENCY of the modern world…that Tragedy is NEVER going to be assuming. And again, REALIZING this could BE for someone…yet ANOTHER one of those life-affirming perspective shifts. 

Tragedy then, to Simon Critchley, is ALWAYS a direct CHALLENGE… to this ATTEMPT at having a neat, philosophical ordering of any given situation. 

Philosophy DONE in this way…. is ALWAYS aiming for an IDEAL of noncontradiction. See, contradictions in the world of classical philosophy…USUALLY meant that something is seriously WRONG with your philosophy, you better go and FIX it, until then… get away from my desk. 

LIFE on the other hand…our psychological EXPERIENCE of it…is FILLED with contradictions. We lie to ourselves all the time…or we feel two SEEMINGLY opposite ways at the same time, or we THINK we’re one person, rationally…until the chaos of the moment is actually there and then we’re all of a sudden a DIFFERENT kind of person. Well tragedy doesn’t RUN from these sorts of contradictions…it AFFIRMS them, even SHOWCASES them, because WITHIN a tragedy this is an important piece of what a human life is. 

So what that MEANS is: if you FEEL like you’re someone who's CAPABLE of living your life…believing that YOU are the main character and that CHOOSING the RIGHT thing to DO in a situation usually comes very EASY to me, because I just stick to my moral principles…what’s MORE likely you think, that you’ve arrived at an objective view of morality? Or that you’re just IGNORING a lot of the DETAILS of the world… that would make you aware of how MESSY the situations you’re involved in really are.

See from the tragic perspective…Human conflict…moral decision making…is a complicated thing. And again it would be NICE if life was a modern MOVIE and there was a CLEAR good side and a CLEAR evil side…and a CLEAR right ANSWER that POINTS to a moral IDEAL that ANY reasonable person would AGREE with. 

But in the TRAGEDIES of these earlier Greek societies it was NEVER this clear cut. The main CHARACTER of the story in a tragedy… is usually a DEEPLY, deeply flawed individual. 

Think of Oedipus from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Think of the lack of self awareness, how hasty and destructive he is when trying to DO what he thinks is right. Think of how he believes he’s SMARTER than the very plague that is ruining his city JUST because he solved some riddle before that. 

Think of Agamemnon from the play by Aeschylus. Think of the disregard for his family and the other. Think of the vanity…think of how blind he is to the impacts of his actions…that end up LEADING to the events of the play. 

In other words: there’s no HERO in a tragedy that’s GLOWING and perfect sitting up on a pedestal…in a TRAGEDY…people are MORE presented as these multidimensional, complex characters where EVERYBODY…is both good AND bad. 

You never IDEALIZE a person in a tragedy: there just SEEMS to be an acknowledgement that EVERYBODY is capable of GREAT things sometimes…and horrible things at OTHER times. And that our judgments ABOUT a person ALWAYS LIVE within this MESSINESS whether we’re denying it or not. 

That CONTRARY to the way a modern movie might depict it…if you SEE someone in the world who EVERYONE’S saying is GREAT, or everyone’s saying is TERRIBLE…AFFIRMING life means knowing…that there’s no doubt MORE to that story you could FIND in EITHER of those cases…that would make that sort of judgment not as clear cut as it might seem. 

But here’s the point: IMAGINE someone LIVING… in an expectation that it IS that clear cut. I mean FORGET for a second how much that would ABSOLUTELY affect their views on things when it comes to politics or relationships…but MORE than that: this person would no doubt eventually TURN that DENIAL of the complexity of people…INTERNAL onto THEMSELVES.

Think about the person LIVING in this place of expecting themselves to always be doing things that are GOOD…where every time they do ANYTHING where there was even a GLIMMER that there may have been something WRONG with it…they feel the need to JUSTIFY themselves…they have to EXPLAIN their DECISION making…FORGET all the CONSEQUENCES…y’all gotta know that my INTENTIONS here were good even if the OUTCOME wasn’t good at all. 

This is a person who's been CONVINCED at some level that they can’t make mistakes, that they HAVE to be this ideal of the GOOD…or else what does that mean, does that mean I’m evil? This tragic perspective can be LIBERATING from that kind of DUALISM about yourself. 

Staying on the MORALITY side of this: Critchley says ANOTHER thing the TRAGIC perspective shows us… is that there ISN’T ALWAYS… some clear cut, CORRECT moral DECISION to made. 

I mean again if you were operating in the mindset that there’s some IDEAL that we’re striving for…then maybe that kind of THINKING makes sense. 

But in TRAGEDIES…the stories often mirror something MORE along the lines of what our lives are ACTUALLY like when we have a problem to solve: we’re often FACED with a situation that is ambiguous…we don’t HAVE all the information…often times ALL of the options are suboptimal, there’s no RIGHT answer…SOMEBODY is going to get hurt here…and our job is to MAKE the best decision we can WITHIN those messy parameters. 

THAT’S more…similar to what LIFE is like to Simon Critchley…not the idealistic nonsense you see in movies. And again THINK of the numbers of PEOPLE that would RESENT something about themselves for YEARS maybe…for not being able to FIND some perfect solution, as though one even EXISTS. 

Simon Critchley has a moment in the book… where he talks as generally as possible about what he thinks is BETTER about the tragic perspective. He says this:

"What is preferable about the world of Greek tragedy is that it is a polytheistic world with a diversity of conflicting and deeply flawed gods and rival conceptions of the good. It is my conviction, ... that the lesson of the adversarial reasoning of tragedy is that it is prudent to abandon any notion of monotheism whether it is either of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, a Platonic monotheism rooted in the metaphysical primacy of the Good, or indeed the secular monotheism of liberal democracy and human rights that still circles around a weak, deistic conception of God. The motto on the back of the dollar bill might be slightly improved if it read In Gods we trust (and sometimes distrust). Admittedly, this is not very catchy."

So you can get the FEEL of the way he writes his books there. Now the POINT he’s making just to briefly restate it…is to notice the MONOTHEISM, PRESENT in our thinking that relies on that renunciative tradition that Nietzsche thinks is the decay of society. 

We’re ALWAYS STRIVING for that monotheistic, life-denying, IDEAL… whether that’s moral idealism in philosophy, religious ideals, or liberal democracies. 

But as FAR as we can tell, when it comes to the way people looked at things in presocratic Greece… people MORE saw themselves as being caught up in the middle… of a BUNCH of different messed up gods, ALL with competing interests and ideas of what the GOOD is. 

Now that picture… is CERTAINLY a MUCH MESSIER picture…but it’s maybe MUCH more AFFIRMING to what the world IS that we actually EXIST in. 

One of the most OBVIOUS examples you can FIND of this difference, again just comparing artwork here…is the visibility of the concept of FATE in Greek Tragedies. 

You know it feels wonderful when you’re watching a modern movie to see a HERO…and it doesn’t matter WHAT’S thrown their way…it could be an alien species invading with LASER cannons and there’s this theme that if that hero just BEWEEVES in themselves…and KEEP practicing, they will eventually beat the BAD GUY!

And it’s like in tragedy…and in LIFE…that’s just not how it actually works. 

There’s always a BASELINE in tragedy that there are deterministic FORCES out there that are just BEYOND anything you can possibly control. Usually MANY of them competing with each other. Now there’s of course ALSO the fact that you are making choices from WITHIN those parameters, again this ISN’T dualism. 

But this PICTURE of a human life starts to look MORE like one we’d see in compatibilism. Now… when you START from this place in a tragedy…turns out there are TONS of INTERESTING themes that you can explore… that just don’t make SENSE in the typical MONOTHEISTIC way of viewing things. 

Like for Simon Critchley: ONE question that you can see looking at the example of Oedipus is to ask…HOW am I…and how are WE as people…often COMPLICIT IN our own FATE? 

What he means is: sometimes BAD things happen in our lives…and when you LOOK BACK the things that led UP to that event…you REALIZE that there were ACTIVE choices that you made, that felt ENTIRELY FREE to you in the moment…that nonetheless were the ONLY things… that made it POSSIBLE for THIS PARTICULAR FATE… to unfold in the way that it DID in your life. Meaning in our lives…it’s not JUST the bonds of FATE that have their hand up you like a puppet, DANCING you around all the time. 

We are often times PARTICIPANTS, CATALYSTS in our fate, that BRING ON things like SUFFERING into our lives, in ways that might not always be obvious unless if we’re taking the time to reflect on them. ALSO we are ALWAYS…from a TRAGIC perspective…operating from within this SOUP of competing forces…that WE are ALSO a competing force in as well. 

And if this is starting to sound like a dialectical view of reality to you…well that’s well spotted: Critchley says EXPLICITLY in the book that tragedy is in PART…what he calls a dialectical invitation. It’s an invitation to CELEBRATE… the TRUE ambiguity of life. Just KEEP in mind that I think HE would see dialectics…along a similar line that Nietzsche would have. 

If DIALECTICS is presented as AIMING for the ULTIMATE TRUTH about things…in other words: if dialectics becomes yet ANOTHER way to rationally order the CHAOS of reality into this complicated network of oppositions…where the ULTIMATE goal of DOING dialectics is to get to the ULTIMATE TRUTH about things…well, it’s the expectation of TRUTH that becomes problematic about that…this starts to look like just another delusional attempt at using rationality to arrive at the IDEAL. 

However, with MANY more MODERN ways that dialectics have been interpreted: there ISN’T any sort of hope for arriving at a destination like that. 

And if we’re talking along THOSE lines…then while Nietzsche certainly had a SPECIAL ax to grind against basically ANY form of methodology…obviously Simon Critchley doesn’t share that level of skepticism– he thinks dialectics can be EXTREMELY useful, ESPECIALLY when it comes to getting us OUT of these life-denying ways of seeing things that we often default into.

Keep in mind: we ALSO have the BENEFIT of over a hundred years of philosophers CRITIQUING Nietzsche’s work showing the methodologies even HE was using when he MADE this critique. But anyway: that’s just the nature of philosophy. 

Something ELSE that tragedy AFFIRMS about life that it’s VERY common to live life in denial of…is how FRAGILE our lives and relationships, truly are. For example one of those philosophers that CRITIQUED Nietzsche heavily was Martin Heidegger…and he has the FAMOUS concept in his work of being unto death. 

His POINT is that in modern society we CORDON OFF DEATH and ILLNESS… into these distant buildings we call HOSPITALS…or these tucked away plots of grass we call GRAVEYARDS– we HIDE them away. That it’s possible to live your ENTIRE life NEVER ENCOUNTERING the REALITY of death…until it shows up on your front porch and rings the doorbell. 

Well death is just ONE form of what we fear more broadly: which is irreversible loss. And basically NOBODY wants to LIVE their life considering the fact that these things we SET UP in our lives that we’d LIKE to think are very STABLE…the friendships, your health, the career, the marriage…no one wants to live in consideration of the fact that THESE things can be gone in an INSTANT. And that it’s not just a possibility: This HAPPENS to people EVERY single DAY.

And then MORE than that when people have LIVED in the idealistic place DENYING the ever present REALITY of that…when all of a sudden one day ONE of these things HITS them…it can TRAUMATIZE them and STICK with them… for YEARS. This shouldn’t have HAPPENED, this isn’t RIGHT. That person shouldn’t have DONE that, this is EVIL. People are CRUSHED by these moments. 

But to Simon Critchley…in a Greek tragedy…the story always BEGINS from a place where how FRAGILE our LIVES are…is a fact that’s ALWAYS LOOMING over the story. 

Now…to get back to the picture of the modern MOVIE from before. We’ve contrasted a lot of the perspectives from THIS cultures artwork…to OUR culture’s artwork…but what ELSE is different that might ALSO illuminate the totally different EXPECTATIONS we have of things?

Well one of them for Simon Critchley is this expectation we have for STURDY, DURABLE KNOWLEDGE about the characters and the situations they’re in. I mean if YOU walked into a movie theater and sat down. And the MOVIE started playing and there was NO explanation at all as to what was going on, no in your face plot development, and you were left to just make INFERENCES about WHO the characters were…LOT of people would probably say that’s a horrible MOVIE. I mean you haven’t told me WHY I should CARE about any of these characters. How am I supposed to LIKE it?

But often times in a tragedy…this is EXACTLY what the beginning of the play is like. And the ENDING by the way…there’s no expectation in a tragedy that there needs to BE some clean cut, final RESOLUTION to the story…where we know what happened to the characters AFTERWARDS. 

This is a point Nietzsche actually spent some time on in HIS work. He thought when you look at the 31 Greek Tragedies that we have…there is an OBVIOUS DECLINE in the QUALITY of the writing…during the work of the LAST of these people who wrote tragedies during this time…Euripides. He thought it’s OBVIOUS when you LOOK at the way he wrote…that he was starting to become CORRUPTED by that Socrates and Plato IDEAL that KNOWLEDGE is necessary for determining the moral CONTENT of something. So in his work…you start seeing PLOT development, you start seeing BACK stories about the characters, you start seeing God’s coming down at the END of the play letting everyone know what the resolution to the STORY was.

Now this KIND of resolution… is just COMMON in OUR artwork today. But earlier tragedies didn’t DO it this way and if you think about it: it really does MIRROR and AFFIRM the way life FEELS to us as we’re LIVING it. 

Think of some WORLD event you care about… that may or may not happen… in the next year or so. You got one? You LIVE most of your life…NOT KNOWING what’s going to happen there. Even when you’re IN it…you’re never making DECISIONS from a place where you have perfect knowledge either. EVEN when it comes to knowledge of YOURSELF…you’d LIKE to believe well if this thing went down: I’d like to think I know who I am and how I would ACT in that scenario…but as Simon Critchley says… VIEWING things from the tragic perspective… sometimes…we DON’T KNOW what’s going on…but we have to MAKE CHOICES in our lives anyway…and JUST like the character of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex…sometimes… we both know and don’t know at the same time…and then end up DESTROYING ourselves in the process. 

LAST thing I’ll say about the differences in tragedy is to point out that often times in the movie scenario…JUSTICE is something that comes swift and decisive. This is COMMON in a movie. There’s a bad person. They get their punishment. They’re left to sit and really THINK about the bad things that they’ve done for a long, long time. And the GOOD guys have TRIUMPHED eternally. 

But by this point it should be obvious: this is a DENIAL of how the world actually works. Simon Critchley says justice is NEVER as FINAL…as when it’s portrayed like that. 

For example I’ve had the opportunity when I was a kid… to live in multiple places in my life where if someone has a problem with you…they just say we’re FIGHTING. Meet me here at THIS time. Violence is GOING to happen, there’s nothing you can DO about it except participate in it. 

So then you FIGHT this person and the expectation can be that that’s just gonna SETTLE it. But then what OFTEN happens is that… the conflict just gets DELAYED to a later date. Often times somebody LOSES a fight they come back with a bat. Or with their friends. Then the OTHER person has to come back with THEIR friends. Then it may escalate into more SEVERE weapons. The POINT is: LIVING in a modern society we can think that when a judge bangs a gavel or when a treaty is signed for a war…that THAT just settles it. The WHOLE conflict is RESOLVED and now everybody can go on back to their LIVES. 

But often times in tragedy…prior events or mistakes…will come up and HAUNT people in the present. Often times there IS no CONCEPT in these plays of ultimate justice coming down on people…there’s just cycles of violence, that WE, as people, get caught up in. And that justice, as we call it, is JUST something that turns the wheel…to the NEXT iteration of things that will end up affecting us in a slightly new way. 

Anyway, I haven’t even scratched the surface here of the explanations Critchley gives in the book, his ANALYSIS of Greek Tragedy and where these ideas COME from. 

Ultimately to him…in a world where people are completely CAPTURED by fast moving, surface level media that CONFIRM this monotheistic bias, this moral idealism…TRAGEDY in that world…can serve as an emergency brake he says. It can get us to stop, reflect, and it can GUIDE us when we READ it…to THINK of the world in a totally different way. In other words: Tragedy can TRICK people…into THINKING about things more deeply. 

And to be clear here…for Simon Critchley… it’s not about LIVING every second of your LIFE in the tragic perspective…it’s about recognizing the very unique type of WISDOM… that can ONLY come from EMBRACING the contradictions we live in…a type of wisdom that the tragic perspective can help you shine a light on. 

Now, to SHIFT here to more of the perspective of Friedrich Nietzsche: CONSIDER all the different ways we’ve talked about on this episode that you could be LOOKING at reality… that might ESCAPE someone if they just mindlessly internalized media created by people projecting a set of Socratic, Christian ideals. Consider the discomfort…that might come up when NOTICING these pieces of life. And now consider what it might BE like…to say YES…to all of them. To this WHOLE MESSY PICTURE of what life is– IN it’s ENTIRETY. Imagine you were to say YES to all that.

Well consider the question: Would your life be different…if you AFFIRMED these things instead of denying them? To Nietzsche…Plato…was ultimately a COWARD. He was a man that FACED this reality of the world we’re talking about, AS it ACTUALLY is…and then he RETREATED, TERRIFIED into an abstract IDEAL that made him feel better about it. 

And that take from Nietzsche is an interesting one considering the fact that to someone like Simon Critchley…the tragic perspective HE says… is a type of COURAGE that someone uses to FACE the reality of the world head on. 

Whether this comes down to courage and fear… I’ll leave YOU to think about this week. I hope you enjoyed this one, taking a DEEPER look at the implications of this Amor Fati concept than we’ve done before.