In this episode, we talk about a guy who thinks that Nietzsche is like a philosopher of incels, and why that's not a bad thing. Also, we discuss the fact that Nietzsche was a loser, and that's a good thing.
00:00:00.000This is sort of just off topic, but I was wondering, Richard, if you have any response or at least saw this kind of like Asian guy critiquing Nietzsche as being like a philosopher of incels.
00:00:14.240It's just this. I think I retweeted like Athenian stranger on this. I just find this guy. I find him annoying. And it's not that it's all bad. But I mean, let's just go to it.
00:00:36.900I'll show you Jonathan by some his last name is by, which is kind of funny in itself. But he's some like student at Columbia who's who's Asian and he's kind of like dressed up the way.
00:00:48.840Yeah, he's dressing and he's dressed up in a very smart kind of Tweety look. And he he's obviously rented out this place. And so he's like, I think this guy probably has money and he's like forcing people to watch his.
00:01:06.260Philosophy lectures. And I sense. Is he from Columbia? If I were just to guess, I would say he went to the committee on social thought at UFC.
00:01:18.840But he didn't. He went to Columbia. His bio says that he's. Yeah. OK.
00:01:26.240It's a math Olympiad. So there you go.
00:01:28.660I mean, I don't want to bash him too hard because, you know, I'm not against like getting this stuff out there.
00:01:39.480There is just this sort of like fake quality to what he's doing, though, where he's not really adding anything to the conversation.
00:01:50.000And Athenian stranger, who's who's much more of a sort of dyed in the wool, Nietzschean, you know, scholar of sorts and things like that.
00:02:00.900He says that he listened to his whole like hour long lecture on Nietzsche.
00:02:05.000And he said he said what I'm saying right here. I'm in a way echoing him.
00:02:08.900It's like I'm very happy that young people are reading Nietzsche.
00:02:12.140But there are just so many errors that it just becomes a little bit unbearable.
00:03:04.640You know, well, the answer to that rhetorical question is the Athenian stranger.
00:03:09.780I, you know, I don't know, Jonathan, you're probably not the best vehicle for this point, which has a sort of kernel of truth to it.
00:03:22.360You know, like there's a bunch of you've seen those images of like BAP meetups and there are these like weird Indians and like Mexican people.
00:03:31.340And they're just like, yeah, it's pretty funny.
00:03:36.100And the gropers are the same way, much worse.
00:03:39.380I've never seen really unattractive or I've never seen certainly an ugly person come to any of our gatherings, although they're, you know, small gatherings.
00:03:49.340But I'll talk a little bit more on this, but let me.
00:04:00.260So let me be clear on what I mean that Nietzsche is a loser.
00:04:03.440I'm not talking about his early years, which seemed fine, except for the early death of his father and brother.
00:04:07.940I'm not talking about his fantastic early philological career, where he was made the youngest professor.
00:04:13.580I'm talking about the mature Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who wrote books like these.
00:04:17.660I'm talking about his chronic sickness that eventually became insanity.
00:04:21.620I'm talking about barely scraping by with a university pension.
00:04:25.580I'm talking about his rejection by multiple women that turned someone who was an early supporter of women's education into a cartoon misogynist.
00:04:32.540I'm talking about a man who conceived of himself as the next Socrates, but had so little recognition in his same years that he had to self-fund the publishing of his books.
00:05:26.760I mean, Nietzsche was the youngest professor appointed at Basel and everyone had great hopes for him and he was too visionary for them, for those like academics.
00:06:00.320It's almost like he had to break free from the chains of academia in order to create visionary philosophy and he suffered in order to produce these amazing works.
00:06:13.820And he also faced down rejection and he published Zarathustra on his own dime and it sold dozens of copies when it began.
00:06:28.200And by the time of his death in 1900, it was a deeply influential book and has been profoundly influential to philosophy, literature, even popular culture.
00:06:40.800I mean, he inspired the Superman comic book, no doubt, to some degree.
00:06:48.740And yeah, it's like the ultimate Chad move.
00:06:53.380And yeah, he had issues with Paul Ray and Lou Salome, but don't we all?
00:07:00.520How many chicks are you banging, Jonathan?
00:07:04.080How many chicks did you bang this week, Jonathan?
00:07:16.340It's like this little monkey in this suit that our people develop speaking our language, surrounded by the intellectual works of our people with this nasty little man resentment at our innovation.
00:07:38.560Like he's like selling it in Times Square or something.
00:07:43.840I mean, I've even heard some of this criticism from like Normie Mutuals of like, you know, well, yeah, a lot of these philosophers were like incels and societal outcasts.
00:07:56.520I mean, yeah, but that doesn't really change the fact that they that they that they also wasn't a billionaire.
00:08:05.420Like last time I checked, he like suffered tremendously and killed himself.
00:08:11.580You know, and also, yeah, what's your fucking point?
00:08:38.920And also, two things that are points that I'll make here.
00:08:44.740So first off, Nietzsche did actually serve in the military and he served honorably, if not triumphantly.
00:08:56.320So are we really is our bar really like you have to be like, oh, like you have to have like killed 20 men to be considered, you know, like heroic or something like how many men have you killed Jonathan?
00:09:20.880And secondly, I mean, to be fair to Jonathan and to say that there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying.
00:09:29.840So in Genealogy and Morality, Nietzsche makes all of these points and he makes an ad hominem argument, you know, at the end of the day about how, you know, could you imagine a philosopher, a married philosopher?
00:09:45.600Could you imagine a philosopher who's a lover?
00:09:47.700And there actually is a sort of resentment in philosophy that is channeled into greatness, a resentment of not getting the girl, of not being successful.
00:10:00.940I mean, what is Plato's Republic, if not, in a way, a sort of conspiracy of people who are out of power?
00:10:10.020In Plato's case, maybe someone who took the other side in the Peloponnesian War, just throwing that out there as speculation.
00:10:22.480But, like, that's, it's a good point, but it's an interesting dynamic point when Nietzsche makes it, as opposed to Jonathan Bayh, because Nietzsche is saying, Nietzsche's point there is that, you know, first off, you have to see the resentment within philosophy itself, because you have to look at the philosopher and not just philosophy.
00:11:14.000So, it's like, Nietzsche's making a productive point, a dynamic point, whereas it seems to me like Jonathan is bashing, like, fans of VAP or something, which, you know, fair enough, I guess, but it's just, ugh.
00:11:34.600Well, it also seems that he's using it to discredit Nietzsche's ideas.
00:11:40.020So, it is, so it is, it's just a kind of classical ad hominem attack, right?
00:12:19.200Nietzsche makes ad hominem attacks against Socrates, of course.
00:12:25.120But, um, nevertheless, it's, you know, and maybe those are kind of the least fair of his attacks, except I think he's getting at something deeper with Socrates, and we go into it in the book.
00:12:51.780If Nietzsche tells us that every philosophy is an intimate confession by their philosopher, what I hear in Nietzsche's confession is seething, unrelenting anger at an unreceptive world.
00:13:05.860And I think that's directly linked to the two ways in which his ideas are actually flawed.
00:13:12.580It's related to this first point, that he exaggerates will to power, because remember, Nietzsche himself tells us, the master does not think about power.
00:13:21.220In fact, the master doesn't really think, period.
00:13:42.340But just to go to what he actually said, it's not the worst thing I've ever heard, but it's actually a misrepresentation of the argument in the genealogy of morality.
00:13:55.500Well, the master, he celebrates his own power.
00:14:00.140I mean, this is the whole division between good and bad and good and evil.
00:14:05.800It's not like the master doesn't think about power.
00:14:08.580The master thinks what is good is, you know, to quote Conan the Barbarian, to, you know, slay your enemies and dance to the lamentations of their women or whatever he said exactly.
00:14:22.420So you're saying that the master contemplates and he's saying the master does not.
00:14:30.380But the whole point, Nietzsche's whole point, is that will to power is everywhere.
00:14:34.780So you have to see the will to power in morality.
00:14:37.820And so that, you know, the the the the mouse that's killed by the hawk or something, it's it will use morality because it can't use physical force.
00:14:51.300So it will say what you're doing, you're killing me, hawk.
00:14:57.520So think about that, hawk, before you kill another mouse.
00:15:01.160That that's the way that morality itself is a weapon.
00:15:04.860And it's in its directed against someone who's physically powerful.
00:15:10.520Well, the other thing is that Nietzsche represents effectively a kind of anti philosopher, right?
00:15:17.000So he is ultimately against his own class of philosophers.
00:15:20.580So the criticisms he's making of Socrates, for example, and of philosophy in general are ultimately criticisms that are implicitly directed back at himself.
00:15:33.800And I think that that's something he must have been fully cognizant of.
00:15:37.360He is ultimately a kind of the anti philosopher.
00:15:41.420He definitely he definitely is an anti philosopher.
00:15:43.700I think that is he's bringing to a close the history of Western philosophy.
00:15:49.040And it's becoming self-conscious finally and sort of ending.
00:16:09.000In order to end philosophy, you have to be the philosopher.
00:16:11.920I totally agree with that characterization.
00:16:15.460The other thing about him, and I went into this again, when we did these lectures on Nietzsche's, we need to return to Nietzsche.
00:16:21.020It's like there's this irony within Nietzsche that I don't think Jonathan Bai is appreciating, which is that, yes, the trans evaluation of all values in the ancient world and the revolution represented by Christianity, it was in a way a sort of disaster.
00:16:46.460I mean, there's no doubt that Nietzsche appreciates the blonde beast and sort of takes the side of the blonde beast.
00:16:56.420It's the master or Arian versus the seething, resentful Jew.
00:17:02.780And we know which side Nietzsche is on.
00:17:06.320That being said, Nietzsche always has a synthetic quality to his thought, and he also says that because of this revolution of morality, we became deeper.
00:17:23.060Whatever the origins of morality might be, and the origins of morality are resentment and punishment and a mental attack where a physical attack is not available, it still was a development of self-consciousness and self-awareness.
00:17:42.840It's like, because we've gone through this history of Christianity, we've been deepened by it.
00:17:51.960And so there's this synthetic turn he has to his philosophy.
00:17:58.100But just to address what Jonathan Bai said right here, Nietzsche has never said that masters don't care about power and that it's only slaves who are conniving.
00:18:08.200That is a mischaracterization, a misreading, a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.
00:18:16.620And you should not be lecturing on Nietzsche if you are off on this really basic point.
00:18:27.040So on this point, my memory may be less strong than yours.
00:18:32.760But to the extent that you're correct, what you're saying is correct, and I trust that it is, he must be taking the error from, because Nietzsche does have this, does have a passage or two about how evil of some type is sort of the origin of intelligence.
00:18:51.880So you have the priestly type, who is physically weak, and his intelligence, its origin is this kind of resentment of the strong physical type that doesn't necessarily require his mind to be dominant and so forth.
00:19:07.820He might be deriving the error from those passages.
00:19:11.900And I think Nietzsche was only such a masterful psychologist of resentment, because he was also a creature of resentment.
00:19:22.240And you hear that through the seething anger, through his work and through his pages.
00:19:27.460So I think the exaggerated emphasis on the world to power tells us perhaps a bit less about the Christian psyche and the psyche of Nietzsche himself.
00:20:25.500Well, but they're sort of emphasizing Nietzsche, I guess.
00:20:28.420But he's saying, okay, this is what I think I just took from those few sentences, which is that Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is that it is all will to power, as if will to power is a bad thing.
00:20:45.220Nietzsche's worldview is that will to power is everywhere.
00:20:52.940He is talking about an essential life force, which is will to overcome, to either subordinate yourself to a higher force and be taken along with it, or to oppose and resist the force, or to, in fact, overcome it, or absorb it within yourself.
00:21:11.200Like, his concept of will to power is universal.
00:21:19.780So he's not using will to power as, like, a critique of Christians.
00:21:25.740So if anything, if this does come from the Teal Network, this is some sneaky way of, like, promoting whatever neo-reactionary Catholicism they're promoting or something.
00:21:37.560It's the most common mistaken assumption, I think, about what the will to power is.
00:21:44.040They just think, oh, it's the desire to wield power over others.
00:22:07.920It's an indirect, disingenuous will to power relative to the Viking, right?
00:22:14.860But I think the other thing, I don't know if he's already made the point in the clip that you've played so far, but he's saying that, you know, Nietzsche, the reason Nietzsche was so obsessed with power is because he lacked power himself, right?
00:22:30.160And then he also uses this to make a criticism of the followers of Nietzsche who are powerless people, and that's why they're obsessed with power.
00:22:39.420Now, as we've already discussed, that's not the reason Nietzsche was obsessed with quotation marks around power.
00:22:51.460But I think, I mean, you could say that people who are, some people who are attracted to the concept of a will to power or people who are interested in power or looking to gain power.
00:23:11.660I mean, if a, if a, if a man, this is like those guys that buy like the, what is it like the 99 rules of power at, in paperback at Barnes and Noble or something.
00:23:21.820They're like, this is how I become an evil CEO and, and like, fuck over my investors and like, screw my secretary.
00:23:29.740No, and I, and I think that there are some, you know, if there is a, like, if there is a good point to tease out of this, I think that there are people who are like that in the dissident, for example, who are looking at Nietzsche as a way of, you know, solving this problem of them not having power.