Episode #093 - Transcript

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

I hope you love the show today.

So, by now you’re probably realizing something about Nietzsche. You’re probably realizing—well, if for no other reason, just because I’ve needlessly rambled about it over the course of this entire series—but what you probably realized by now is that Nietzsche’s not writing his philosophy so that each and every single person in the world can write it down and take a little something from it. He’s writing his philosophy for a select few people that are actually going to try it existence. He’s writing it for a small handful of people that aren’t interested in feeling like they know everything about the world, but people that are actually going to try to understand things deeper than they’ve been led to believe about things over the course of their life. I mean, at any stage of life, it’s very easy to be coaxed into complacency about how you look at the world.

I mean, I’m sure we can all imagine some 45-year-old person, and they’re listening to some passionate 21/22-year-old person, and they have strong, reinforced convictions about how people are and how the world works and all kinds of things like that. And the 45-year-old may say to themselves, “Look, kid, I’ve been where you are before. I too used to think I knew everything about the world. But you know what happens? Here’s what happens. You live a couple years longer, a few failed marriages later, a few heated discussions at a PTA meeting—eventually you’re going to wake up and realize how the world actually works like I do. Believe me, I’ve been where you are before.”

Whenever I read Nietzsche’s philosophy, I always see him as like this 120-year-old guy, and he’s talking to that 45-year-old. And he’s saying, “You know what, Sonny? I’ve been where you are before. But you know what happens? You see a few more presidential elections, play some badminton down at the YMCA, watch a few more seasons of The Price is Right like I have. Then! Then you’ll understand how the world actually works.” Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll come to terms with the fact that this whole life thing is actually much bigger than that; that maybe 100 years is just not enough time to become as well-versed in things as you want to believe you are.

Well, there are certain subjects out there that people like to tell themselves they’ve arrived at a destination about. Some subjects are more common than others. And one of the most common ones is the concept of love. We all feel like we know what love is. We all felt it before, right? Powerful concept, love. Probably not a big surprise that so many philosophers over the years have tried to take a closer look at it and understand it better. And given how good it feels to experience love, probably not a big surprise that so many people build their lives around feeling it or giving it or spending time with the people they love the most.

Some people even take this to the extreme. Some people say that all you need is love. They look around them at the world, understandably, and they think, “Man, there’s people stealing from each other. People are killing each other. Cyberbullying is the pandemic scourge of our time. Look, all these philosophers try to complicate things. It’s actually very simple. Everyone just needs to love each other. If only we could show everyone in the world how great it is to love people.” These people say, “Love is some sort of panacea for all of the world’s problems. Instead of dropping nukes, we should be dropping giant canisters of DVDs of When Harry Met Sally. If only the whole world understood love like I do, then everything would be fixed.”

But the way that you treat somebody that you love hasn’t always been the way that Harry treated Sally. No, the things we do in the name of love have changed drastically over the course of history and could easily change in the future. You know, 100 years ago my kid could have—I mean, I don't know. Let’s say they went down to the grocery store and got an ice cream cone without permission, for 4/10ths of a cent back then. And when he comes home and I see all the chocolate on his face, at that point I may say to myself, “You know what? I love this kid. I love him dearly. And I am not going to allow him to become a person who doesn’t understand the value of discipline for the rest of his life. I don’t want to. Lord knows, I don’t want to! But I have to beat him. In the name of love, I have to beat him.”

Tons of other examples of this. But the point is, the way people treat the ones they love is highly influenced by the cultural backdrop that they were born into. Saint Augustine’s man burning in a building comes to mind. In other words, even if everyone in the world loved each other, people might still steal from people they love in the name of feeding others that they love. They may still assault people that they love in the name of love. Maybe love is actually a pretty complex thing that needs to be unpacked.

I mean, love is far from a static thing, right? We use the word “love” to describe any number of different emotional states. We say things like, “I love my dog,” “I love my children,” “I love my parents,” “I love my domestic life partner,” “I love this pizza that I just ate from Chuck E. Cheese.” In all these different contexts, the same word is being used to describe emotional states that are very different from each other. So, what exactly do we mean when we say “love?” Maybe there’s something similar about all these different situations that we’re touching on.

You know, I think when somebody says that all people need to do is love each other, it’s one of those statements that most philosophers would hear and they’d say, yeah, that sounds great. But they probably wouldn’t think it’s a very useful synopsis when it comes to actually getting to the bottom of the cause of these problems or how to actually solve them. In other words, in practice, how do you actually get everyone in the world to love each other? It’s a little bit like walking into a hospital; you see all the different kinds of pain and suffering in a hospital—you know, you see people in the cardiac ward, see a guy with a broken leg; you see someone with hypertension. You say, “You know what, these doctors, these doctors try to complicate things all the time, but in reality, it’s actually very simple. I got you a solution. All these people need are drugs.” Yeah, but what kinds of drugs? How high of a dose of these drugs? When do they need these drugs? Is giving them drugs really a solution or is it just temporarily masking the problem? There’s more to it than just saying, “Drugs! Case closed.”

Well, the point of this episode today is to eventually talk about how Nietzsche sees love. But I think it’ll give his views some context if we take a look at some other notable philosophers throughout history and how they viewed love. And when it comes to philosophers writing about love, by far the most famous account of love ever written has to be Plato in his work the Symposium. Now, we talked a little bit about this on the Plato episode. But, I mean, come on, that was three years ago, people. I was horrible at doing this back then. I’ll make it quick, alright?

The Symposium was a fictional book written by the Greek philosopher Plato about a dinner party. It’s a dinner party where various noteworthy figures from Athens at the time all meet up to talk about a particular subject. Apparently, they did that kind of stuff back then. And the subject of this particular nice dinner party is love. Everybody takes turns getting up in front of the group giving their thoughts on love. Now, barring the funny, pretty ridiculous theory given by Aristophanes, which is really probably just Plato getting back at him for slandering Socrates in one of his plays—besides that, in terms of philosophy, the book’s pretty slow up until we start hearing what Socrates has to say about what he heard about love from a philosopher named Diotima.

Now, Diotima, nobody knows for sure whether she actually existed. But it’s one of those things like, everyone else in the Symposium existed; why wouldn’t this be a real person? But Diotima told Socrates about how she sees love as sort of a progression. It’s a progression ascending up rungs of a ladder where, throughout your various experiences with love in your life, you go through a number of phases. Each one of these phases is a rung on the ladder where you become more and more aware of what love truly is. And seeing as how this is one of the most famous accounts of love ever given, let’s talk about these rungs a little.

So, Diotima would say that when you come of age in this world and you enter into a romantic relationship of some sort, the first type of love that you’re going to experience—the first rung on this ladder—is what she calls bodily love. Now, bodily love is exactly what you’d expect it to be: a love of someone’s body, an infatuation with another person. Maybe they make you smile a lot. Maybe you have this uncontrollable desire to touch the person when you’re around them. But either way, we all know about this one, right? We’ve all seen this one before. I’m not going to waste your time giving a ton of examples of it. But the interesting thing is that Diotima says, once you’re in this place where you love someone for their body, if you start to look closer at that feeling that you have towards this person—in other words, if you think about what exactly it is that you love about their body—what inevitably happens is that you start to notice, the things you like about this person’s body are not exclusive to them in any way. There’s a lot of other bodies out there that have these exact same qualities. You eventually realize, there are thousands if not millions of bodies out there that you might potentially love.

Now, much like Socrates does, where he goes into the public square, he asks people for their definition of, say, courage, and he looks at all the different definitions and tries to find what’s similar about them to hopefully arrive at a better understanding of what courage is. In the same way, maybe you take a look at all these millions of bodies that you love and try to find out what’s similar between them. And at the end of that process, what you’re left with is a certain type of person. You know, I like people with brown hair and blue eyes, for example—a type. But remember, this is only the first rung on this ladder.

Diotima says that once you get to this place, then what happens is this person whose body you’re in love with, well, it’s inevitable, you’re probably going to be spending a considerable amount of time around them, right? Eventually, if you spend enough time with them, what you have to realize is that this person is more than just their body. This person’s more than just a piece of meat. No, they’re a person. They have feelings inside. We realize that we can have conversations with them about all their really interesting thoughts, opinions, and ideas on things. Diotima says that what eventually happens after we’ve had enough of these conversations with them, you start to realize that love is not as shallow as you first thought it was. Sure, you love their body. That body that you love, yeah, okay, it looks good now. But look, I don’t care if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, okay? In 50 years, your body’s going to look like a sun-dried tomato like the rest of us. Diotima says, what you realize is that there’s a deeper form of love available to you by loving someone’s personality, or as she refers to it, the soul.

Now, it’s in these first two stages that most people spend their entire lives. I mean, you think about the progression of the average person’s love life. Maybe throughout their 20s they have a few debaucherous relationships. Maybe they’re with the wrong people personality-wise, but they tend to overlook it because they think they’re attractive. Maybe eventually they want someone more mature than that. Maybe they end up finding someone whose personality they admire, and they decide to get married to that person. But that doesn’t put you on the second rung of the ladder, necessarily. I mean, even if you find yourself admiring something about the personality of someone you’re married to, when it comes to most people’s relationships, you still have one foot in the door of this bodily love, right? I mean, I don’t care if somebody has the best personality in the world, most people aren’t going to marry them if they look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Most people sort of settle into a mixture between bodily love and love of the soul.

Now, an important thing to note, I think, is that getting stuck in any of these rungs on this ladder for your entire life doesn’t make you a bad person. Plato would say, it’s still love. Love is a good thing. All this love is good. The question just becomes how much of a good thing do you experience throughout your life? Because what happens once you love this collection of personality traits that somebody has is that just like in the case of the bodily love, what you realize is that these characteristics that you love about someone aren’t somehow exclusive to them. No, you realize there are thousands of other people out there that embody these very same characteristics.

Now, the greater implication of realizing this, to Diotima, is that it removes this visage that’s been clouding your ability to move on to the third rung of the ladder—that to truly understand love is to understand that love is not this interpersonal exchange between two people that can only exist between two people. What you realize is that what you love about this other person really has nothing to do with them as a human being. What you love are concepts that they embody. Now, again, to Diotima, once you realize this, the next step is to realize, that person you love was not born in a vacuum. This person was not floated down the river Nile in a basket and raised as one of their own by a pack of hippos, okay? This person was born into a very specific cultural context by a very specific group of people who all had ideas of their own. And what you realize at this point is that everything about this personality that you love so much really was forged by certain aspects of culture, laws and institutions that cultivated these personality traits that this person embodies that you love.

The ultimate point is, the next few rungs in the ladder are as follows: loving the laws and institutions that create the people or things that you love, then a love of knowledge of those laws and institutions; that turns into a love of knowledge itself, finally culminating in a love of the platonic form of beauty or the good itself. Tons of interesting conversations to be had about these last three rungs. I’m sure you’re all clamoring for them. But I think what’s most important to say is that—look, let’s say you never get to the top rung of this ladder where you understand the form of beauty itself. That doesn’t make you a dumb person. That doesn’t make you a bad person. Diotima’s just saying that the good feelings you feel when you’re experiencing love greatly increase with each successive rung that you move up on this ladder, and that much like a dog—a dog that’s gotten a little taste of human blood for the first time, once they’ve tasted it, they can never go back to lamb and rice Alpo—that once you’ve tasted that forbidden fruit on the next rung of the ladder, all the other forms of love sort of just lose their appeal. They’re not as good as what you’ve already experienced.

I’m sure we can all imagine that, right? Like, if for your whole life all you did was love people for their body, and then all of a sudden you get together with some pelican-looking podcaster dude and he dies in some tragic podcasting-related incident—after experiencing that higher level of love on this ladder, it stands to reason that if you went back and had a relationship that was just for the body, it would probably feel like something’s missing there. At least that’s what I tell myself every day.

So, as you know if you’ve listened to this podcast from the beginning, this hierarchical conception of love that’s laid out in the Symposium, it paved the way for love as it was laid out in the middle ages. Love in its most basic, flawed form is love of the body. Some people would even say that we shouldn’t consider that love. It’s considered lust. That moves on to a love of your fellow human beings. That moves on to a love of the truth. All of which is inferior to the ultimate love, the love of God. And this became the dominant perception for what love is for quite some time.

And although there was work done sporadically on love before this, something very interesting happens to the concept of love right about the mid-19th century—more specifically with the way that you treat somebody that you love. What happened was—well, romanticism happened. Romanticism as we talked about before is a cultural movement. Some would even say it’s a codified doctrine of ideas about the way human beings should be interacting with various aspects of the world that they live in. Falling underneath that umbrella, of course, is the way that we treat people that we love. Romanticism is oftentimes seen as a pushback to an era that came just before it where there was a lot of emphasis put on reason as the way to arrive at conclusions about things. Too much reason—there’s got to be a better way.

Maybe the best place to start is to say that, historically speaking, being in a relationship with somebody or getting married hasn’t always been about what we would often call today romantic feelings that you have towards this other person. People used to get married for all kinds of practical reasons: because it was financially prudent to do so, because they had a relative that could help you greatly advance your career, any number of reasons. Now, in today’s world, if you got married to somebody simply because it was a good financial move for you, people wouldn’t really take too kindly to that. They’d tell you you’re getting married for all the wrong reasons, that something’s missing there. Well, where did that come from? A big part of it comes from this movement of romanticism in the mid-1700s.

Romanticism pushes the idea that it’s possible and even expected to meet someone; you get to know them. You feel these intense romantic feelings that you often feel in the beginning of a relationship. And you should expect this heightened emotional state to persist indefinitely all throughout the course of your lives together—a life-long love story, as it’s often put. That the litmus test for who you should love or who you should marry shouldn’t be based on practical considerations like how good it is for your career or something like that, but that these initial feelings that we have, they’re going to decide for us.

When you meet someone and they make you feel this way, you’ve done it. You have now found your soulmate. You’ve found the one and only someone for you. From this point forward, you and your soulmate are going to be enjoying an all-expenses-paid vacation where every day of your lives you fall deeper and deeper in love with them with each passing day. Any boredom within the relationship, any longings for somebody else or novelty within that relationship, that’s not something that should be expected in a long-term relationship. That’s something to be avoided. We need to prevent that. It’s a sign that the relationship’s not going well. It’s a demon that’s tormenting the relationship that needs to be exorcised.

Now, in many traditional conceptions of romanticism—and there are some variants here because we’re talking about a very large period of time. But the general idea is that, when you love someone deeply enough, deeply, if you can’t accept them at their worst, you don’t deserve them at their best, that to truly love someone is to be tolerant of all their shortcomings as people. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is understanding, Corinthians 13. If someone comes home from work, and a lot of the times they’re in a bad mood and they’re not really reciprocating that love every night, some people might say, “You know what? I love this person. I understand this isn’t the entirety of who they are. I understand this isn’t about me right now. Sure, the way they’re treating me in this moment makes me feel bad. But I’m going to go find something else to do while they work through these emotions.”

Another example, if someone quits their job and they pursue their dream of becoming a street performer, a mime. And let’s say they go out miming the streets for three years, and people just don’t seem to like their act that much. You know, what kind of box is that? That’s horrible. Someone might say, “Well, you know what? We may not have that much money. And, yes, they could easily go back to their other job and help out. But I don’t care if we have to live in squalor for the rest of our lives, at least we’ll be together with these strong feelings that we have.”

What’s interesting to think about is that many of these romantic ideas of love ask you to be totally tolerant about some things but totally intolerant about other selective things. I mean, if the person you love has romantic feelings for somebody else or if they’re telling you tons of things you need to change about yourself or if they’re not fornicating with you on a regular basis, these are all signs that there’s something deeply wrong with the relationship, not things you need to be tolerant of. Again, love should be this highly intuitive thing, this feeling that you got. You know, you spent six years of your life at the university learning to become a dentist, but when it comes to asking how to love or who to love or why to love or anything like that, that stuff, “Ah, I’ll just kind of wing it. I’ll figure it out.”

Now, if this sounds strange, remember, romanticism is a movement that was the antithesis to a world where they thought we were reasoning way too much about the ways we behave. No, forget reasoning. What really matters is how you feel about this person. Like, have you ever seen The Bachelor, the show The Bachelor? I haven’t, of course. But if I ever had I would have to say, “Man, look at what that show has become in the last few years. Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” I would say. First episode: “I think I could potentially fall in love with this guy.” Third episode: “I think I might be falling for him right now.” Fifth episode: “Okay, now, I’ve definitely started the falling process. I tripped on something. I’m off balance. Gravity is definitely pulling my trajectory in the downward motion, but I haven’t quite fallen yet.” What are these people even talking about? This is what you get when you fully eradicate reason from this process—vague emotional states waiting for some other vague emotional state to arise, and people honestly can’t even tell you whether they’re actually in them or not.

But here’s the thing, if that sounds critical—it sounds to me like it came off critical—this is not their fault at all. This is just what they’ve been told to expect when it comes to finding a long-term relationship by every TV show, romcom, and Disney movie they’ve ever come across from the moment they were born. Nobody should feel bad about having this expectation. It’s not their fault. It’s culture’s fault. And even on that note, there’s nothing wrong with bringing this expectation into your relationships, really. I just think a lot of modern commentators would say that if you do choose to bring in these expectations, barring a level of luck comparable to winning the lottery, you’re probably going to end up being largely disappointed by your relationships. It’s such a tall order to fill.

Most people, if you look at the discography of their love life, most people are probably going to stick it out in a relationship far too long, telling themselves this person is their soulmate, and then one day when it all goes up in flames, they’ll tell themselves, “Well, you know what? Looking back, the signs were there all along. Maybe this next person’s my one and only someone. Where’s my Ryan Gosling?” Either that or they’ll find themselves six months in saying, “Man, I just don’t get those butterflies I used to get. Maybe they’re not the one for me.” And they spend their whole lives looking for this sixty-year love affair that might not ever come.

Now, it’s because of this fact that when most modern thinkers talk about love, they usually start from this point in the discussion. You know, one of the most famous accounts of love ever was by a guy named Arthur Schopenhauer. He has this parable where he compares marriage to two porcupines trying to huddle together to keep warm, and that the art of being with somebody that you love is trying to find the right distance where you’re still keeping each other warm, but you’re not so close that your porcupine spikes are stabbing each other. You know, to Schopenhauer, everything is about this survival-oriented will to life. And that when we get married and we have these romantic relationships, what we’re attracted to in someone else are really what we see as our shortcomings, the hope being, subconsciously, that if your counterpart makes up for these areas that you’re a little bit weaker in, that those weaknesses are probably going to be less likely to prevent you from prospering. As a unit, you guys are better off together.

Now, this brings us to the great Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s view on love—there’s multiple layers to it. On one hand, just like he tries to do with everything else we tell ourselves we have these strong convictions about, he’s trying to get us to question how selfless we’re actually being when we love someone. But on the other hand, he’s not denouncing anyone for being in love, and he’s certainly not saying that nobody should be in love. See, Nietzsche, as we’ve talked about before, huge fan of Heraclitus, loves the idea of looking at two things that we commonly think of as opposites and finding ways that they’re actually the same thing manifesting itself in two different ways. For example, day and night. Are these two different things that are opposites, or are we talking about the same thing that’s just in two different states? Same thing goes when he breaks down the psychology of love. Oftentimes people, when they talk about loving someone, they’ll say things like, “Love is caring about somebody more than you care about yourself. I love this person. I would sacrifice anything for them. I’m completely, selflessly committed to this other being.”

Now, Nietzsche would say, how convenient that this person is trying so hard to paint themselves as such a selfless person. Because you know what love truly is? When you look at it closely enough, love starts to strongly resemble greed. He says, “Greed and love: what different feeling these two terms evoke! Nevertheless it could be the same instinct that has two names—once deprecated by those who have, in whom the instinct has calmed down to some extent, and who are afraid for their ‘possessions’ and the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty and who therefore glorify the instinct as ‘good.’”

In other words, we love to pat ourselves on the back, tell ourselves how great we are for doing things in the name of loving this other person. And we oftentimes think of somebody who’s greedy in a negative light. But what if love and greed are the same instinct manifesting itself in different ways? That at the root of either of these words is this instinct or this desire that something will be ours, or as he puts it, to change something new into ourselves. He says love and greed are actually the same thing. The only difference between whether we classify it as love or greed in the moment comes down to how satisfied somebody is with what they already have.

For example, let’s say you’re a huge fan of Italian sports cars. And you save up; you finally get one. It’s sitting in the driveway out there. Look at it. Wow! Somebody else comes along. Maybe he likes Italian sports cars too. Maybe he wants that Italian sports car, yours sitting in the driveway. Let’s say there’s nothing he wants more in the entire world than to have your Italian sports car sitting in his half-vacant warehouse where it will live out the rest of its sports car days with this guy. But you say, no, no, you love that car. You don’t want it to go anywhere. Let’s say this guy doesn’t give up. Let’s say he persists. He’s going to write a persuasive essay to the car, begging it to come live in his warehouse. This guy’s going to do whatever it takes to make it his. Maybe he’s going to try to find some way to convince the state to take your sports car away from you so that he can have it. Not crazy to think you might feel like the guy was being a little bit greedy. Yet, being a lover of cars yourself, if in your travels you came across the very same car, you would certainly want it. And in that context, you’d just think about how much you wanted the car as your love of cars, not you being greedy.

Now, replace an Italian sports car with your significant other, and take note of the similarities. Now, here’s the interesting part. Even if we can agree upon the idea that love is greed—let’s just say that it is—Nietzsche’s not judging you for that. He’s not saying this makes you a bad person for loving someone. He thinks that love, just like everything else, is a will to power. And in this case love is sort of a mutually beneficial will to power. When two people are in love, yes, to Nietzsche they are just both greedily desiring to change something new into themselves but, greed or no greed, Nietzsche thinks love and friendship are some of the most amazing things life has to offer. He says you should find someone, love them, enjoy all the very real benefits of loving someone; just take a closer look at why it is you’re actually doing these things. And don’t try to justify your actions with a nice-sounding story that you like to tell yourself about how it’s really all about this other person.

Now, the reason I chose love as the topic of today’s episode—well, two parts to it. One is that this is a perfect example of one of these concepts that everyone comes into the episode having strong opinions on that Nietzsche loves to try to get us to question our deepest assumptions about. And number two is, this is also a perfect example of one of Nietzsche’s ideas that if you just heard the first line of it—you know, you just heard “Love is greed”—you might react negatively to that. You might think Nietzsche’s just this empty, joyless “become powerful, take advantage of everyone” kind of guy. But then when you understand where he’s coming from, though admittedly it’s still abrasive, his point is a lot more nuanced than you might first think. And there’s actually something powerful there.

I honestly think this is the reason why so many people misunderstand Nietzsche. They read a single line out of context, and they make tons of sweeping generalizations about the guy as a person. I seriously think this is the reason, as we talked about before, why his work could be so easily distorted by his sister after his death when she was bumping elbows with Hitler in the Third Reich. But one of the most chilling passages I’ve ever read from Nietzsche is not from any of his philosophy. It’s a line out of his autobiography. It’s a line where he seems to foreshadow exactly what happened with his work after he died. He seems to predict how impactful his work was going to be.

He says, “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man. I am dynamite.”

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