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Nate Anderson on Applying Nietzsche in the Digital Age (Episode 22)
513 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Caleb Ontiveros speaks with Nate Anderson, the deputy editor at Condé Nast’s Ars Technica. Nate is also the author of In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World.
We cover the philosophy of Nietzsche and how he challenges us to do better in this digital age.
(00:27) Intro
(01:19) Nate and Nietzsche
(12:08) Role Models for Nietzsche
(15:49) The Life of Reason vs the Life of Passion
(18:45) The Last Man
(25:29) Nietzsche on the Information Age
(34:05) Egalitarianism
(40:02) Amor Fati
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
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Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Gadgets, Comfort, and Nietzsche
00:00:00
Speaker
the sort of comfort, secure life promised by our gadgets and our devices is very appealing. But I think reflecting on this with Nietzsche can help us to see the limits of some of these things and some of the human qualities that we're leaving on the table, as it were, by spending too much time with our devices, too much time being entertained, too much time being kept safe. And these things for Nietzsche are not ultimate
Introduction to Stowe Conversations
00:00:27
Speaker
values.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:45
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Nate Anderson. Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. He also wrote an emergency break glass, what Nietzsche can teach us about joyful living in a tech saturated world.
Nate Anderson's Encounter with Nietzsche
00:01:01
Speaker
We cover the basics of Nietzsche and how he challenges us to do better in this digital age. Here is Nate Anderson.
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. Welcome to Stoa. Today I'm speaking with Nate Anderson. Thanks for joining, Nate. Hey, thanks for having me. So what's your story and how does that connect with Nietzsche?
00:01:23
Speaker
I first discovered Nietzsche as a undergraduate in college as a philosophy major, and I was fascinated by his writing, which really stood out to me from the Kant and Hegel and other German philosophy I was reading at the time. Nietzsche was far more vigorous and vibrant and passionate in what he wrote. He was much more concerned with
00:01:48
Speaker
really basic questions of meaning and value in the world. And well, he can be disturbing and I wasn't sure what to make of everything he said. I knew this was a figure I wanted to know more about and wanted to read his works. Of course, life intervenes. I ended up working as a technology journalist and editor. I still hold and eventually came back to Nietzsche many years later. So a few years ago and
00:02:16
Speaker
was struck by those same qualities in Nietzsche again.
Nietzsche's Philosophy and Modern Tech
00:02:20
Speaker
Just what a compelling figure he is and the way in which his works still feel particularly relevant. So with all the time I'd spent in the world of technology,
00:02:32
Speaker
Coming to Nietzsche again, I was really struck by the way in which the things he said and the way he lived his life was relevant to the problems and issues and conversations we were having today about technology, about screen time, about the nature of our bodies and the world. Nietzsche felt a lot of those things
00:02:53
Speaker
early at the sort of beginning of the industrial revolution in Germany. And so he had a lot to say that I thought was relevant and he was a different voice that is not often brought into this kind of conversation. So with the book, I saw an opportunity to bring that voice into dialogue with other people who have been writing and thinking about this issue more recently. So that's how I got started.
00:03:18
Speaker
It was a great chance. It was fun to read everything Nietzsche wrote and to spend time with him and to write the book. And if that introduces more people to his world and his thought and helps them reflect on technology use in their own lives, then I think that's what I set out
The Energy of Nietzsche's Writing
00:03:36
Speaker
to do.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yes, it is noteworthy how electrifying of a writer Nietzsche is. He's probably simply one of the best aphorists that have ever existed. Yeah, and there are certainly downsides to the energy that comes through in his prose. Sometimes he loses
00:03:56
Speaker
There's sometimes not very much that's subtle about the things he says and sometimes his sentiments can feel a bit juvenile or simplistic in his search for the perfect aphorism. But at other times, it's profound and it's disturbing and it's electrifying. And the fact that so few writers can do that, I think speaks to his skill.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. For those who are maybe less familiar with some of the—or that writing style, rather—one phrase that has always stuck out to me that struck me as characteristic is something like, to live alone, one has to be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. But there's a third case. One needs to be both a philosopher.
00:04:42
Speaker
which is the sort of phrase that can really grab one and challenges you to make sense of what's been claimed. Are there any particular aphorisms that stuck out to you? One of my favorite phrases that he uses is that we should build our lives like cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.
00:05:05
Speaker
It's just such a great image for the risk taking kind of danger that in many ways he advocated as an approach to life that saying yes to the world requires saying yes to danger in a way.
Living with Risk: Nietzsche's Metaphors
00:05:24
Speaker
But that's the only way we're also going to have the most fulfilling and meaningful experiences and that attempts to keep ourselves
00:05:31
Speaker
safe from that danger by avoiding it, removing ourselves from it, walling things around us to protect us from it, are ultimately things that pull us from the world that are in some way a no-saying to the world, and that he can encapsulate all that in a phrase like, building your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius. Such a great image. It's not just a didactic discussion.
00:05:57
Speaker
that image of being right there on the slope of the mountain that could explode at any time is a great one and has really stuck with me and I think is a call to
00:06:09
Speaker
take more risky action in the world. Yeah, so that's a good segue to another broad question, which is, how do you see Nietzsche's philosophy generally, if you had to boil it down to a few of the concrete ideas he has? Of course, there's always the question of interpretation and so on, but the specific kind of Nietzsche that you developed, how would you explain that?
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, Nietzsche himself all over the place as he ages and as what appears to have been some sort of mental illness or disease takes its toll on him. You can really see some of his stylistic shifts, but also some of his concerns.
00:06:52
Speaker
shifting. So it's very hard to sum up someone like Nietzsche, but one of the big themes in his work that incorporates a lot of different aspects that stretches across a lot of his different works is this idea of saying yes to life.
00:07:11
Speaker
rather than saying no. And it plays itself out in all sorts of ways. So Nietzsche is very against asceticism, especially Christian forms of it, because he regards it as a no-saying approach to life. You're saying, the world is not good enough for me. I will resist it. I will not put food in my body. I will fast and give up sleep, because the world itself is a bad thing. And he wants to say that's not the right.
00:07:41
Speaker
approach, and he often calls himself a critic of religion. He calls himself a great immoralist, but this is all very tongue in cheek. If you read him carefully, it's clear that he has a very strong moral sense, but one that's built on saying yes to the world. Nietzsche talks a lot about the need to have a philosophy that draws us forward in life with goals,
00:08:08
Speaker
rather than with nose. And I touch on this in the book in different ways. One of the ways this comes out is Nietzsche's recognition that we just don't have the willpower to do some of these things we might want to do. So for instance,
00:08:27
Speaker
screen time. Maybe we're feeling addicted to our devices. Maybe we feel like we're not getting enough real life out of the time that we give them. One response is simply to say, I'm going to say no to that. I'm going to put my phone down.
00:08:42
Speaker
But willpower gets us only so far, especially when we're tired, cranky, hungry, or anything else. And I think Nietzsche realized that in this as in so many areas of life, what we need to affect real change and growth is a yes. Something that pulls us forward, something positive that we want more.
00:09:05
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Because anything that just requires us to sit there and say no is unlikely to be enough, is unlikely to be satisfying, and is unlikely to take us as people
00:09:15
Speaker
toward this concept of the Ubermensch, the sort of over person, the one who goes beyond both personally and for the human species as a whole. And that's Nietzsche's, I think, great concern is that human life be creative and a constant overtopping of where we were at personally and as a species. And it's the yes that draws us forward. It's not the no to the things that we don't like.
Nietzsche's Personal Struggles and Ideals
00:09:45
Speaker
And how do you see that idea playing out in Nietzsche's life? So he was on a constant, I think he was on a long journey to try to find the meaning that he advocated to be the Ubermensch that he talked about. And I think he was much less confident if you read his letters and things that he presents himself, especially in some of the later works.
00:10:09
Speaker
He gave up most of the things that were associated with the good life. He gave up a tenured professorship in Switzerland that he got when he was just 24 and wandered around Europe without a job on a very small pension with significant health problems until he eventually broke down and was committed to an asylum.
00:10:33
Speaker
And I think that experience showed him that if life is just about comfort, ease, security, he was not going to have a very good life. If those were the things that gave life meaning and they were out of reach for him, what was left? And so he was on this quest to find something meaningful, to make meaning, if he could, through struggle and in his own way.
00:11:02
Speaker
So that's an intense, he has this thing that he's looking for, this profound quest for meaning that he says yes to and was willing to suffer for, was willing to give up a job for, was willing to ditch most of the trappings of polite civilization for because he had this thing in front of him and he knew that to pursue it, he would have to give things up. He talks in his books that the importance of having a philosophy and rags.
00:11:32
Speaker
that we have accustomed ourselves to many wants, but that we can unlearn some of them. And he did that. But again, not just because he looked at his society and said no to some of the things he saw there, it's because he had a yes that was in front of him that drew him forward. And I think that difference is actually quite profound. He sums it up in one kind of aphorism in one of his last books by saying that
00:11:59
Speaker
What is needed in life is a yes, a no, a straight line and a goal. And I think that sums up what he was looking for and the way he tried to live his life.
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, what an excellent line. And might serve as role models for Nietzsche at different times in his life. Who are the people either living at his time or in the past who he thought were people who said yes to life and got close to his vision of what a good life could look like.
00:12:32
Speaker
Early on, he is a passionate follower of Schopenhauer, a fairly pessimistic philosopher. But Nietzsche absorbed this as a young man and thought this was the real deal. This is what life's about.
00:12:48
Speaker
But he turned on Schopenhauer over the course of his life and came to see this as a no-saying philosophy. It's not that a yes-saying philosophy means that life is positive or I overlook the negative, but it says yes to what life gives you, that this is important and interesting enough for me to do something with, not to wall myself off from. And I think he saw Schopenhauer as somebody who gave up on moving forward.
00:13:14
Speaker
So his great heroes become the ancient Greeks. Now, how accurate nature's depiction of ancient Greek society and culture was is certainly a product of discussion, but he was an expert in that period. It's one of the things he taught at Basel.
00:13:33
Speaker
And he looked to the ancient Greeks, who at least in his telling were masters of this kind of yes-saying approach to life that did not get hung up on avoiding pain, right? The quality of struggle, the agon.
00:13:49
Speaker
The search for excellence was a key part of Greek culture, and he really seizes on that as being a model of what he wants for his life. He comes to see Greek ideas like Apollo and Dionysus as important ways of thinking about our own lives because the Greeks have seen these different aspects of life.
00:14:12
Speaker
For him, for much of his life, it seems like the ancient Greeks become his big heroes. I think he shapes the texts and the plays and the things he discusses into an image that he wants for his own. Perhaps that's more important than what they even meant in their context for him. But regardless, they were his real models and he keeps coming back to them over and over and rejects much of the contemporary philosophy
00:14:39
Speaker
that he found dour, depressing or just lifeless and technical.
Ancient Greek Influence on Nietzsche
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, my understanding is that one source of role models for Nietzsche, where he found these accounts of ancient Greeks was Butark and his biographies of different statesmen, generals, and the conflicts and excellences that they managed to, or not in some cases, that they managed to express in their life.
00:15:10
Speaker
He usually, he talks about a lot of primary texts, especially plays and things, so he draws heavily on theatrical culture.
00:15:18
Speaker
But again, I think there's a lot of difficulty with knowing how critical he was toward understanding what this culture was like in relation to actual day-to-day Greek life, perhaps especially not among the elite. He doesn't always show those sorts of awarenesses, but he certainly has shaped his understanding from a literary rather than a sort of
00:15:44
Speaker
archaeological or deeply sociological approach to ancient Greek culture. And I think it would be useful to explain a bit exactly what he means when he talks about the Apollonian and Dionysian modes of living.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, so this comes in one of his first publications, The Birth of Tragedy. When he was young, when he was still at the university in Basel, his colleagues had no idea what to do with this. They did not think this was the sort of thing that a classics professor should be writing.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's a very strange book in a lot of ways, but Nietzsche holds up two models from ancient Greece. One is that of Apollo, sun god, who represents order, reason, structure, control, perhaps even detachment. So Nietzsche is telling, it represents the force of rationality. That can be a good thing. It can exert shaping form on art.
00:16:49
Speaker
Things like sculpture are fairly
The Apollonian and Dionysian Dichotomy
00:16:51
Speaker
Apollonian, shaped and created over long periods of time. You have to apply the mind to do this.
00:16:59
Speaker
At the end, you're left with a big block of marble, and it's perfection. That is the Apollonian force in life. The Dionysian force, Dionysus being a god of wine and celebration, represents those parts of human life that are more in the moment, almost orgiastic, that are physical, passionate, sensual, that are less controlled by the force's reason, that are more emotional.
00:17:28
Speaker
In the birth of tragedy, he argues that we really need a balance of these forces. Nietzsche thinks that Western culture, of which he's a part, he is an academic as he writes this. He says that we are far too Apollonian.
00:17:44
Speaker
And that's one of the things that I draw on in the book because it's such a perfect connection, I think, to our technology today that technology promises us the promises of Apollo, perhaps detachment from the world, safety from the vagaries of existence.
00:18:04
Speaker
Even a disconnection from most physical realities. Think of how much we can do sitting on a sofa, touching a screen, or watching a screen. We're disconnected from most of our physical processes, and we're certainly not pitting them against the world. We're sitting there swiping on screens. I think you can read Nietzsche's critique here, even though it was targeted at a society that might feel alien in many ways to us.
The Last Man and Modern Technology
00:18:30
Speaker
really hits home on this account in particular, and that we need a bit more of the Dionysian, the connection to the physical world, the senses, the emotions, being in the moment, not living just in our heads. I think that is related to one of his critiques of this philosophy of stoicism, which he argues that stoicism is a kind of self-tyranny.
00:18:58
Speaker
one way to see that is a tyranny of the Apollonian over the Dionysian element. So it's certainly a challenge we're thinking about for those who are committed to the historic picture. And one part that I think that you pick out really well, a very useful concept, is this concept of the last man. And I think
00:19:22
Speaker
It's particularly useful when you think about move to these questions of technology that the book focuses on, this idea of the last man and how does that relate to our place in the technological world.
00:19:35
Speaker
So one of Nietzsche's strange books is Thus Spake Zarathustra, and in it this prophetic figure Zarathustra, who is the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, same person, comes down from the mountain and gives these sort of aphoristic, almost New Testament style
00:19:57
Speaker
oracles to dumb villagers down below. He offers them his wisdom and things and he comes down and he speaks to them about the last man and he warns them about the last man and who is the last man? The last man is Zarathustra's description of a person who is living a life that is easy, that is comfortable, that is safe,
00:20:24
Speaker
And who enjoys that? And who has, you picture someone who has settled on their couch, the ultimate couch potato, but who doesn't have a problem with that, right? They are actually safe. They have plenty of food. They have entertainment. Everything, when looked at from that perspective, is going well for them. But Nietzsche compares this, living the life of the last man is like being a beetle.
00:20:51
Speaker
Safe, Beatles, it could be hard to kill. They're productive. They keep reproducing. The human race wouldn't die out if people lived this way. It's not the last man in a literal sense. It's the last man in a metaphorical sense because for Nietzsche, this is the end of humanity in a real sense. If people give up on struggle, striving against and with the world,
00:21:19
Speaker
trying to better themselves and the human species, artistically and creatively seeking to transcend what has been created in the past. To give up on those things is really for him to give up on the best parts of being human.
00:21:34
Speaker
And when Zarathustra talks about the last man, it's clearly intended as a critique of contemporary culture. But the villagers hear this and they say, oh, Zarathustra, give us this last man. Tell us more. This sounds amazing. We can lay around and be peaceful and well fed. And that's enough for us.
00:21:55
Speaker
Nietzsche was never big on the herd, the common humanity, and often comes across fairly elitist in his disdain for this sort of thing. So he's very negative towards them here again.
00:22:11
Speaker
I think we can apply this in thinking about our own technological moment because, again, it seems to be a description of what technology promises us, which are not bad things, especially if you're coming from a place of insecurity.
00:22:28
Speaker
the sort of comfort, secure life promised by our gadgets and our devices is very appealing. But I think reflecting on this with Nietzsche can help us to see the limits of some of these things and some of the human qualities that we're leaving on the table, as it were, by spending too much time with our devices, too much time being entertained, too much time being kept safe. And these things for Nietzsche are not ultimate values.
00:22:57
Speaker
It makes it very easy these days to simply consume different products of their food products, digital entertainment, and leave out some of the aspects that Nietzsche and of course many other philosophers would find valuable in a life related to production and cultivating ones as a character in a particular way.
00:23:20
Speaker
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00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, Nietzsche is a great critic of unthinking consumption in all its forms, including some very interesting things, I think, to say about applying this to information as well.
Critique of Unthinking Consumption
00:24:19
Speaker
You might think, oh, it's far more virtuous for me to sit and read 100 books this year, right? I'm not the last man. I'm out there reading. I'm bettering myself in my mind. But for Nietzsche, he offers a criticism of this sort of
00:24:34
Speaker
consumptive model as well. Really calls people in an age of overwhelming information, which was true even 150 years ago, to take a very different approach to restrict our information intake, to read slowly so that we bring our own processing and our own thoughts and our own creative voice to bear on what we're reading
00:25:00
Speaker
to reread so that we really use our principles of selection to choose what matters to us and reengage with it more deeply rather than just trying to get through content, which of course we'll never get to the end of.
00:25:14
Speaker
And in the end, to really forget that which doesn't serve him. And so he really is against consumptive, unthinking consumption in all its forms, whether it's food or whether it's information. And how do you think Nietzsche would counsel us to relate to information then?
00:25:35
Speaker
I suppose we agree that often we consume too much information. We do it for reasons that are dubious.
00:25:45
Speaker
What's next? What should drive us forward in how we think about reading books, consuming the news, and so on? I think we can go back to something we were talking about earlier, which is this goal-driven yes-say to life and thinking about what that is for us and whether we have that. Maybe we don't. Maybe we need to spend some time there. But when we do, if we do,
00:26:10
Speaker
asking, what does this information I'm attempting to, to what use will it be put? Because there's a way in which I'm more guilty of this than probably most people. I love to know things and know things about the world so that I can comment on them during a party discussions or at dinner or if a conversation comes up about Moldova, I can talk about an article I read last week about Moldova. But if I really think about
00:26:39
Speaker
the limited time we have on this earth, why I'm reading this, it's essentially to show off, to present a picture of myself in a certain way to other people. And Nietzsche really calls for setting a lot of that aside, focusing on the real creative struggle
00:26:58
Speaker
that is set before you in your own life, your art, however you want to make yourself in the world, really using that to guide your principles of what you're going to read and then what you're going to reread and to keep narrowing that down and to go deeper into works rather than to gain this sort of surface understanding of popular topics.
00:27:21
Speaker
He compares it often to the process of digestion. And just as we have to pick out the foods that will keep us healthy and that go with our current mood and our current feelings, but won't make us sick through eating too many sweets and things. Same thing with information.
00:27:40
Speaker
And then just as a cow or a ruminant choose the cud and processes this material over and over, so should we with this information to really take it from the head. Maybe I know this, but to really bring it down art as wisdom, as something that's really embedded in your life and in your consciousness. So rereading, rethinking,
00:28:03
Speaker
And then really forgetting in almost an active process that helps cleanse us of the things that don't serve us just as digestion ends with getting rid of what doesn't serve us. Because if you don't, you will literally die. Information in the same way can pile up in your mind like garbage, drowning out everything else that you might want to do and think about.
00:28:26
Speaker
And how do you have these principles of selection? They all go back to these sort of Nietzschean goals and the search for meaning that Nietzsche advocates. So I think he would really start there. At the start, philosopher Epictetus has a similar line where he says, look, even sheep don't vomit up their grass just to show the shepherds how much they've eaten.
00:28:52
Speaker
When they have digested the pasture, they'll produce goods like wool and milk. So I think that's the exact same frame that Nietzsche is challenging us to apply. Yeah, and at an age of almost unlimited content, just unfathomable content that you will never get through in your life, no matter how much you read.
00:29:15
Speaker
I think it's really important to take this message to heart and think about how we're going to approach it. This information diet or regimen becomes actually a quite important tool in an era where information is almost everywhere and you could essentially lose your life in it and give your life to it. Sometimes you might wonder, what did I get from that bargain? I think that's what Nietzsche really encourages us to think about.
00:29:43
Speaker
And again, I think it's fascinating to see how this is tied to his physical condition, to the hand that life dealt him. He had real trouble reading later in life. His eyes really bothered him. He had all sorts of strange ailments. He talks about how people have to read to him for months at a time.
00:30:00
Speaker
And so he really used that to think about, I have very limited amounts of information I can consume. And so what is it going to be? And so I think they give physical circumstances that he lived with, give his reflections on information a real poignancy because he was living this increasingly restricted life when it came to information.
00:30:25
Speaker
And so to see just how deeply it moves him to get to reread his favorite authors or occasionally to serendipitously stumble on somebody new. He mentioned Stendhal in particular. He stumbles across him in a bookshop or something and feels like this was an amazing addition to his life.
00:30:44
Speaker
It has so much power to it just because of the circumstances in which he's living and how little reading and consumption he can do. He had no audio books. He had no iPhone. So it was all based on reading. And as he lost the ability to do that, it became even more precious to him.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, so Anicha challenges a number of our ideas around comfort, happiness, the value of pleasure, and then also speed versus slowness, breadth versus depth. Another aspect that we've touched on a little bit
00:31:17
Speaker
But I think it's worth spending some more time on is his views about how the mind is just embodied and the importance of walking or the physical and how we might be lacking some of that very important part of our life.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this is a way in which Nietzsche really helped anticipate some of the modern conversations because there's a lot of discussion today about rediscovering our connection to the body, to the emotions, to embodied cognition, the ways in which we think through our emotions and we learn through movement and by testing ourselves against the world in different ways, right?
00:32:01
Speaker
sort of rational calculation, but we intuitively learn things like how gravity works, principles of physics, by getting out there with shovels, digging in the dirt, cutting down tree limbs, doing real work in the world. There are all these ways of thinking, processing, learning that are not just about
00:32:24
Speaker
reason in the head doing rational things. Nietzsche was very early to that and is very big on that. And again, it comes out of his own experience. He took to doing probably long walks whenever his health allowed it, especially in the Swiss mountains, hours, days at a time, he'd be gone and he'd take these little cards with him and he would jot down these aphorisms as they occurred to him.
00:32:48
Speaker
while he was out walking and he'd keep them in his pocket. When he came back, he would type them up or write them into a book. So he composed some of his aphoristic books this way, and he felt so strongly about this connection between the way he thought and the physical movement of his body that he had a great aphorism about only ideas won by walking have any value. And he lived that.
00:33:15
Speaker
And I think he was really onto something.
Embodied Cognition and Physical Movement
00:33:17
Speaker
So he stresses that our emotions and these other parts of us beside our rationality are actually part of our great reason, right? That the brain, that sort of reasoning, rational faculty in the mind is your little reason. And he argues that these kind of instincts and emotions and other things that we experience are actually more important
00:33:43
Speaker
And I think you can see him really trying to process in many ways, unlearn the lessons he'd been taught about what was valuable as a young academic. And he spends another 10 or 15 years after getting out of the academy, trying to unlearn those lessons and find these different connections with the body and with the emotions and with the instincts.
00:34:06
Speaker
Another idea that Nietzsche challenges that we hold today is egalitarianism. So he has a number of lines that seem explicitly elitist, as you mentioned earlier. The sorts of person he values is a person who is maybe plausibly more on the powerful side, the
00:34:28
Speaker
excellent side. You have ideas of greatness involved with them. And maybe it's a little bit less than what you might contrast with and what Nietzsche contrasts with a Christian or a universalist view of people as equal in a deep, fundamental sense of view that the Stoics also held, of course. So how do you think about those ideas today?
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah. One of the points I make in the book is that Nietzsche is a powerful and provocative thinker to really work with. He's a guide for me and not a guru. So there's certainly, when you get into some of this aspect of his thought, much of what he has to say is provocative, interesting and worth engaging in.
00:35:14
Speaker
Other bits of it, I would say not so much. I think you really do have to start picking and choosing when you start thinking about his discussions of male and female relationships, equality, et cetera. At the same time, I would say that a lot of the criticisms about him and how he viewed people are overblown.
00:35:37
Speaker
He was throughout his life, he styled himself a good European. He was opposed to the wars that the German state of 1860s and 70s was waging. He really holds himself out as a member of kind of a common humanity.
00:35:54
Speaker
He resists violently his sister, who marries a sort of proto-Nazi guy, and they move to South America to start some racist colony called New Germany. Nietzsche wants nothing to do with this and basically stops talking with her, doesn't go to their wedding. He makes plenty of comments about how stupid antisemitism was.
00:36:20
Speaker
So he does have a strong sense that humans are not all equal in a sort of simple democratic or perhaps Christian sense.
00:36:31
Speaker
But I think we can take that a little too far. I think his dominant interest in those discussions seems to be encouraging people to live this excellent lifestyle that surpasses what they think they're capable of, that lives out the full
00:36:50
Speaker
goes to the full extent of what humans are capable of. And he sees a lot of people not doing that. And so his words can be extremely critical about people like that. He calls them the herd. And he certainly does sound like he's looking down on them. I think we should have a lot more compassion for people, even those who aren't living the way we think they should. I think Nietzsche even at the time should have given his own
00:37:15
Speaker
health struggles and some of the problems he had, you'd think perhaps there could have been a bit more compassion for people who didn't quite measure up to what he came to feel was important in life. So I guess I would just say I take a lot of that stuff with a pretty critical eye. I think it's one of those real areas where there's no real need to go too far with Nietzsche. Like his work can be provocative, but does not always convince
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I think it's a good approach to many philosophers is that their work should be taken seriously, the archives should be dealt with, but one needn't treat them as a guru of any sort.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah. One thing interesting when you get into Nietzsche's biography, and I think you can see this in many thinkers and philosophers too, is that, of course, their ideas as we read them in books feel very universal. They're often rooted in very particular
00:38:16
Speaker
life situations. Nietzsche was somebody who had a very difficult life situation that got progressively worse until he literally went insane and was put in asylum and then lived for a decade above his mother's house where he was sometimes shown off to guests who came over because this is when he started to get famous and he could no longer speak and
00:38:39
Speaker
He had a very difficult and painful life. He was personally not this kind of world spanning colossus figure. He really admired Richard Wagner, who was much more in this mold personally, but he came to turn on him and to think that this was not the way forward.
00:39:01
Speaker
what Nietzsche says about the Uber mansion, about success, and about being one of these people who's not a member of the herd, who goes their own way. This is reflected in, it's coming out of his own isolation, his attempt to make meaning out of a painful and fairly isolated existence. So that doesn't excuse some of the more objectionable things he says, but I think it renders them more
00:39:28
Speaker
understandable. And I think we can see perhaps a bit of projection here. When Nietzsche talks about this kind of stuff, we compare it to his personal life. This is how he would like to be. This is how he would like other people to be. But I think he did not measure up to a lot of the things he says on some of these topics.
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I think we can have a little bit of compassion just for him and the difficulties he went through. Also understanding that this was a bit of projection for him about how he wished life would be.
00:40:02
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, last idea I think it's important to touch on is this idea of amor vati, which is a notion that contemporary Stoics have latched on to this idea of fully embracing fate and saying yes to it, not resisting reality.
Embracing Fate: Amor Fati
00:40:24
Speaker
How did Nietzsche write about this idea?
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, he talks a lot about this, especially as we get into his later works, the amorphotty, the love of fate. He says that he cultivates and he has it. Very few people, in his view, do. And I think the real trick here is
00:40:43
Speaker
How has this differed from an uncritical acceptance of all the evils that life dishes out? How many social reformers are we going to have in this world who haven't amor fati? This is always the difficulty in Nietzsche because he seems to live his life on this mission to find and really to create
00:41:09
Speaker
meaning that will give his life structure and will validate his existence. So in that sense, is he really accepting fate or is he really trying to create the future that he wants? So I think it's always a struggle to know exactly what he meant by that. Nietzsche was not a systemic thinker. He even says explicitly, he distrusts systematizers, right? That the will to a system
00:41:38
Speaker
is basically a will to lying about things because any system will distort. So I'm not sure we should look for incredible consistency
00:41:49
Speaker
from him on some of these points, but I think what he was trying to say with this idea of al-Marfati is, as you mentioned, I'm saying yes to life, not in a sense that I won't seek to change my circumstances, not in the sense that I'm saying yes to evil and injustice.
00:42:10
Speaker
But at the same time, there is some way in which I say yes to all the struggles that come with life, with being human, and I don't look at them as being outliers to the human experience, things that I should not have to experience. It's that strong sense of resistance to what the world will offer.
00:42:32
Speaker
both good and bad, that Nietzsche really hates, that he thinks of as a no-saying, and that he despises in people who make ease and comfort the basis of their existence.
00:42:44
Speaker
So I think with this Amor Fati, he's really trying to stress an ideal for himself of accepting all that comes to him, in a sense, not pushing it away, not trying to deny it, not trying to distract himself from it, which I think is one of our great modern preoccupations and something that digital tools have made very easy to do, but to look at it squarely and say, yes, this is happening. I'm experiencing this now.
00:43:12
Speaker
But then also to seek to change it. And that's part of being the Uber mesh. That's part of the creative struggle and exertion to take your circumstances. And when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So I think that's where he's going with that, but it is sometimes difficult to reconcile that with this acceptance of fate with his call to creative exertion and struggle.
00:43:38
Speaker
But I think as with so much in Nietzsche, what he does is provoke and gets you thinking about these forces in your own life and in human life in general, rather than providing an answer. And I'm not sure he even found one for himself, but he explicitly says that whatever answers he does come up with are not for others, that he's not looking for disciples.
00:44:01
Speaker
that he wants people to take what he says and what he thinks and apply it to their life. And I think that applies here as well. Excellent. Is there anything else you want to add or touch on? I think that's good. I would just encourage people who are at all interested in this conversation to dig into Nietzsche a little bit, especially if you haven't in a while or haven't at all. Really a fascinating figure despite his many flaws. Excellent. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.
00:44:32
Speaker
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00:44:48
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.