00:03:01.440But that critique has been greatly misunderstood
00:03:04.460because while he does, in fact, critique Socrates,
00:03:09.640he also makes it perfectly clear that he has strong affinities for Socrates now we also have to
00:03:17.880make an important caveat here it's not always clear whether he's talking about Socrates or
00:03:25.640Plato because he often conflates the two right and so that's something to keep in mind but
00:03:33.120one thing as well just as a kind of sidebar that you had mentioned in in your your segue there
00:03:39.480is that there's this tendency today for people to just want to dismiss people who otherwise take
00:03:48.340seriously the thought of previous thinkers and Nietzsche of course being one that everyone
00:03:53.560demands you know someone denounce now the reason that this is so poisonous is because it was in
00:04:01.400fact the academics uh the left not not simply the academics but the left and also and especially
00:04:09.100the academics who were in the schools of theology who brought nietzsche to america and in many
00:04:18.440respects into europe and the reason that they did this is because they recognized that there
00:04:25.680was something fundamentally i have to be careful saying this because it's not necessarily i'm
00:04:32.120agreeing with this i'm just saying this was what they believed right was that there was something
00:04:37.220fundamentally outdated regarding traditional Christianity, and it needed a defense against
00:04:46.320what Nietzsche was proclaiming against Christianity. And the reason I mention that is
00:04:53.340because what Nietzsche says very explicitly in one of his notebook entries is he says,
00:05:00.720no plato no aristotle no christianity he says christianity is fundamentally unthinkable
00:05:08.860without plato and aristotle and that's going to that's going to really in a condensed way
00:05:16.740summarize nietzsche's critique of plato or socrates because he says that uh nietzsche says
00:05:24.160that plato or socrates made philosophy too easily appropriable for religion and now this is going to
00:05:36.580be the so-called good right the good in plato or something to this effect right uh with aristotle
00:05:43.080gets a little more tricky but uh plato most especially platonism right for the masses or
00:05:49.060something like that that's going to be the thing um but i also want to be careful here i don't want
00:05:55.760to go on these monologues so is there anything is there anything else you want to add or sort of
00:06:00.000yeah no problem well it might be helpful for listeners who are unfamiliar with some of the
00:06:05.400background because you made the distinction that in some cases he is going after plato or is he
00:06:12.100going after socrates you know what would even be the difference so perhaps for people who are
00:06:17.040unfamiliar with kind of this delineation. When we talk about Socrates and then we talk about
00:06:22.740Plato's Socrates, these can be very different things. And this also means, of course, famous
00:06:28.580figures like Xenophon who use Socrates. That could be a different Socrates as well. So maybe you
00:06:34.520could explain what the difference is between what we know of Socrates, the historical figure at some
00:06:40.400level, and then how those differences play out when it comes to Plato or Xenophon. And what does
00:06:46.320Nietzsche really driving at? Is he going after directly Socrates as we know him, or is he going
00:06:51.960after Plato's Socrates and really Platonism, as you say, the underlying kind of structure,
00:06:58.640perhaps philosophically for many later Christian traditions? Yeah, that's a really good question.
00:07:03.700I'm glad you brought that up, because for all of his criticisms of Plato slash Socrates,
00:07:11.580Nietzsche never provides any kind of sustained, or we could say explicitly sustained,
00:07:19.920commentary on a single dialogue. It's absolutely hilarious. But that being said,
00:07:28.080many of his works parallel platonic dialogues. You have to look real closely. Alex Priot, a good
00:07:35.820friend of mine, has done a good bit of work on this, and he makes a pretty persuasive account
00:07:39.720that Twilight of the Idols is mirrored as a kind of commentary on both Plato's Symposium
00:07:48.460and Plato's Phaedo. Now, about the historical Socrates, the primary sources of our information
00:07:57.160about him come from a very, very small group of people. There's simply Plato, he tells us about
00:08:05.580Socrates. There is Xenophon. He tells us about Socrates. And then there's, well, I was going
00:08:13.220to say Aristotle, but Aristotle was a student of Plato, so it's one remove away. Then there's
00:08:18.880Aristophanes. So we have Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon. Those are our primary, and I mean by
00:08:28.140far our primary sources of information about the historical Socrates. And interestingly enough,
00:08:36.780this is something that many people don't realize. At one point, I thought that I was the one who
00:08:42.600had discovered it. I sent it off to this famous professor that I know, and he responded back with
00:08:49.740some good comments. And then next thing I know, he published a book, and he was talking all about it,
00:08:55.220never credited me but whatever uh maybe i'm wrong um what what nietzsche says at one point
00:09:03.380is he says if all goes well more people will be reading xenophon's memorabilia in the future now
00:09:14.660the word memor memorabilia in german is a very rare word uh and so nietzsche is clearly from
00:09:22.580the german talking about xenophon's text the memorabilia he's not talking about xenophon in
00:09:28.100general now the full title to that work is we could say reflections on socrates xenophon's
00:09:35.380memorabilia is xenophon's book entirely about socrates and so that's something worth pointing
00:09:43.380out now just to finish that thought of what he says which is scandalous and hilarious at the
00:09:49.060the same time as he says if all goes well in the future people will be
00:09:54.300reading Xenophon's memorabilia instead of the Bible now that's something to
00:10:00.400think about right there now you could write an entire PhD dissertation on
00:10:05.740something like that but that being said the third
00:10:11.020Aristophanes Nietzsche flatly says the simple fact that someone like
00:10:18.180aristophanes lived justifies life that's how much great esteem he had for aristophanes so of our
00:10:26.980primary sources about knowledge of the historical socrates nietzsche has enormous criticism
00:10:35.540but also surprisingly praise for plato and then with respect to xenophon and aristophanes the
00:10:43.140other two he has the greatest of praise absolutely the greatest of praise um and that never changes
00:10:51.140throughout uh anything uh that he writes now the reason i say that there is a kind of subtle
00:10:58.500praise of plato is he flatly does say at one point in one of his books uh dawn uh he says
00:11:07.380he says despite the fact that i'm constantly criticizing plato he says plato is still
00:11:14.740twice the man of european man today so he has that much of a esteem for him now secondly
00:11:24.340nietzsche is at pains over and over and over again to say that one's enemies says more about oneself
00:11:34.260than anything else and he says to take as enemies people who are unworthy of you
00:11:42.140says more about you than it says your enemies and so that's extremely powerful because what
00:11:50.140that means is the simple fact that Nietzsche is constantly critiquing Plato means that he
00:11:56.400understands plato as a worthy opponent and in fact in a notebook entry right after he finished
00:12:05.680his first text the birth of tragedy where that's where he says in no uncertain terms that plato
00:12:13.600or socrates is the turn he the phrase he uses is the the vortex and turning point of all so-called
00:12:22.640world history now the so-called part is important because nietzsche does not believe in history
00:12:28.320but this is what he says in a notebook entry and the editor here where that i'm reading this from
00:12:34.960uh is he's been polite and he's gotten rid of one of the words because nietzsche actually uses
00:12:40.080a vulgar word in in the german he says he says socrates just to acknowledge it
00:12:46.960stands so close to me that i'm almost always fighting with him so he's always always engaged
00:12:53.900with socrates because he sees a a similar spirit of what he's done now ultimately what this is
00:13:01.980going to come down to is that nietzsche has the greatest respect for in greek what's referred to
00:13:08.240as the agon which means contest and he finds that as the most helpful glue we could say
00:13:20.320of flourishing human society and his fundamental critique we could say of socrates is that
00:13:29.760socrates replaces the agon of might makes right in homer with this new agon of socratic dialectics
00:13:41.280in other words the debate me bros right and nietzsche sees that as fundamentally the
00:13:47.680effeminization of man because now and and and this is uh now nietzsche doesn't say this but i'll
00:13:54.960say this uh hobbes understood this and hob and hobbes is getting this from the same source that
00:14:01.200nietzsche gets it from this is from thucydides the two people that nietzsche has the greatest respect
00:14:05.840for are aristophanes and thucydides the reason that hobbes translates uh thucydides is peloponnesian
00:14:14.960war and in conjunction with that translation what many people don't realize is he also translated
00:14:21.040aristotle's rhetoric and the reason that he did he can and he flatly says that he understands the
00:14:27.200rhetoric as a supplement to his leviathan and the reason he says that is because in modernity what
00:14:34.160is now being lost is there is no more war like we find in thucydides it has been replaced by
00:14:43.040speaking eloquence right what john locke refers to as the virtue of civility and that's a very
00:14:49.280bad virtue, by the way, because Locke explicitly says civility is the ability to speak in mixed
00:14:56.040company without upsetting anybody else. I mean, think about that the next time you hear politicians
00:15:01.100say, oh, look, we can disagree, but we got to be civil. Really? Should we? But that's what's going
00:15:08.100on there. Yeah, it's a fascinating moment because at some level, again, we think of Socrates and
00:15:16.320the socratic tradition uh all of his students plato aristotle as you say we think of these
00:15:21.860people as kind of the basis of western thought we think of them ultimately as uh these guys who
00:15:28.040are critical to what we think of as civilized society we should be able to reason through
00:15:32.300issues we should be able to debate issues the marketplace of ideas is what rules us you know
00:15:37.340especially in this kind of liberal tradition the idea that uh you know the the best idea is going
00:15:42.640to work through uh that this debate process and that's what we're going to instantiate
00:15:47.700this is very much something that he is drawing back to plato or plato socrates but it's seeing
00:15:55.320as a negative as you say you know in the birth of tragedy he is looking at these two aspects of
00:16:00.960greek culture the apollonian and the dionysian and he's saying that ultimately uh socrates is
00:16:07.460removing the dionysium that he is replacing it with something else that life is no longer about
00:16:13.980tragically burying these things of course as uh you know socrates points out many times he uh in
00:16:20.800plato's work he finds the gods of the city he finds uh the gods of homer to be um immoral to
00:16:28.960to not be a good source of morality that uh teaching the young uh you know kind of the
00:16:34.160lessons from homer's gods is is deleterious to them and so in uh in the birth of tragedy
00:16:40.540nietzsche talks about how basically socrates change changes the paradigm of what is good
00:16:46.880in greek society because it shifts it from kind of that tragic character that that man who's
00:16:52.360ultimately kind of bearing destiny in you know in in hardship and moving forward into this moment
00:16:59.020where the the good man the virtuous man is he who justifies himself logically he's the man who can
00:17:04.680through rhetoric bring the force of his arguments and justify his existence and this is a very very
00:17:11.340big shift that if you follow it long enough does kind of lead us to the moment we have now yeah as
00:17:18.100we say uh often there are people endlessly debating political issues online uh you know
00:17:24.160between friends yelling at each other on Facebook, you know, all TV programs, podcasts, all these
00:17:29.940things. But what does it actually bear? What fruit does it bear? If our society rots from within
00:17:35.460as we debate its decline, then have we proven Nietzsche right, that ultimately this Socratic
00:17:42.840understanding of what a virtuous man should be ultimately dooms us to a life of inaction that
00:17:48.280then dooms our wider society yeah what what what Nietzsche flatly says in Twilight of the Idols
00:17:56.480this many people consider Twilight of the Idols to be the best book to begin reading Nietzsche
00:18:02.880now I disagree with that only because it certainly is Nietzsche refers to that text is
00:18:09.000Nietzsche in a nutshell so it's all there this is him it is greatest it is it is most mature
00:18:14.140it's got everything however Nietzsche at his greatest is very difficult to read
00:18:19.240despite not using any kind of philosophical jargon or anything like that he does employ
00:18:27.380the aphoristic style he's he does not want to make philosophy accessible to everyone that's
00:18:33.520why he uses these brief aphoristic styles because he doesn't think that you know democratizing
00:18:40.240knowledge is a good thing a little bit of knowledge for people who are not all that
00:18:44.920competent they become more dangerous than people who don't know anything because then they then
00:18:51.040they use that little bit of knowledge which is as we could say uh partial but not fully correct
00:18:59.840they use that as the patina for their own convictions and that's very dangerous and but
00:19:06.700But nonetheless, what Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols is he says that truly aristocratic men don't carry around in their back pocket reasons for why they believe what they believe.
00:19:19.640As if somehow we're expected to give a justification for why we think certain things are right and certain things are wrong.
00:19:27.700And Nietzsche says that is fundamentally decadent.
00:19:31.580That is what Socrates introduced into the Western tradition.
00:19:36.700And he said, prior to that, this notion of the agon in Homer, for instance, the opening line of the Iliad.
00:19:49.140And Agamemnon says, you know, I'm going to take your bride or whatever, your war bride.
00:19:54.200And Achilles flatly says, look, you're holding this little wooden scepter over here because it's supposed to give you power by convention.
00:20:02.300Every single one of you are lucky that I don't rip that little wooden scepter from your hand and bludgeon you all to death and then drag all your carcasses to the tree where this little wooden scepter was made.
00:20:14.300I'll show you what real right is, right?
00:20:16.580Natural right being might makes right, as opposed to you guys' little reliance upon convention.
00:20:23.440Achilles is not in the business of giving arguments.
00:20:27.400You don't talk that way to someone who could end you.
00:20:31.440and odysseus by the way is the same but something else you said0.96
00:20:38.320it's often said that nietzsche is a romantic that's that's horseshit most people who talk
00:20:42.400about romanticism don't know what they're talking about they think of it as this kind
00:20:46.560of longing for a return right let's all go back to the old days let's let's remake uh you know
00:20:53.440america in a kind of charlemagne realm uh or let's re remake america in terms of the greek polis
00:21:01.280that is not at all what the deepest thinkers ever believed and they're explicit about it
00:21:06.960now that's what facile thinkers believe when they read these silly textbooks
00:21:10.720but here's the problem about all of it and this gets to the niche's fundamental critique for
00:21:17.360instance, of history, etc., why he calls Socrates the turning point and vortex of so-called world
00:21:23.700history. I stay on top of these, all the latest conferences about things, for instance, that have
00:21:32.080to do with the so-called, we've spoken of the historical Socrates, but what about the historical
00:21:37.460Jesus or the historical Moses or the historical Plato, right, or these kinds of things? And one
00:21:44.740of the largest conferences recently it's 2017 on the Gospels this is what was
00:21:52.900said see history is so most people don't understand Jesus Nietzsche flatly says
00:21:58.540I stand outside of my time because I'm a student of an earlier time and he says
00:22:04.120that he's a philologist most people don't even know what philology is it got
00:22:07.480replaced by what's known as classics but set that aside this is what was said at
00:22:14.080that conference and it gained wide traction regarding the book of matthew this is what the
00:22:22.000scholar says he says what does it even mean to talk about a true original text he said or a final
00:22:30.800text he says in the ancient world he says is such a category productive he says is textual finality
00:22:38.720something a scholar of antiquity can reasonably presuppose because what is the original or final
00:22:44.740text he goes whatever it is it was not only practically impossible to recover but also
00:22:50.720theoretically a bit of chimera now this is important because of all the talk of homer recently
00:22:56.760right people are saying oh you know we don't even know who homer was all the various texts comes
00:23:01.720from these different traditions see all we have are these bits and fragments of various manuscripts
00:23:06.860And it's the job of the philologist or the classicist to try to put these things together and figure out what they really are.
00:23:14.480That's what Nietzsche understood as so problematic about the entire history of the West.
00:23:20.900And that's why he's always looking forward to the, well, as I said, he's looking forward.
00:23:27.880He says looking backward is kind of, it's irrelevant.
00:23:31.080He says if you blow up all the sacred truths, the texts of the Gospels or what have you, he says it's like taking away the atmosphere of a planet, right?
00:23:46.100And so his whole project fundamentally is how do we move forward now that modern science has given us these powerful tools of things like scientific archaeology, scientific history?0.70
00:23:59.740because now all these bug men academics they take a kind of sick glee in saying stuff like0.80
00:24:06.880this man says about the book of matthew they're happy to blow it all up but they don't replace
00:24:12.820it with anything and nietzsche was fundamentally concerned with what do we replace it with because
00:24:17.240if you take those things away from man he has no motivation whatsoever to live for greatness
00:24:22.620anymore right what does it all matter this is the condition of nihilism so so in many respects that's
00:24:28.400the prognostic effect of Nietzsche's teaching the diagnostic effect is how we got here how we got
00:24:35.740here is what he says Socrates he flatly says Socrates is it's really kind of funny he says
00:24:42.720Socrates created cause and effect right that's the whole point of the dialectic right the question
00:24:49.360answer right where did this come from and so then he associates Socrates as the person who
00:24:54.140establishes logic your listeners might not know but the first official case of the principle of
00:25:02.920non-contradiction occurs in plato's republic uh so but anyway that's i've talked a lot there so
00:25:11.240i'll shut up now yeah i think it's an interesting struggle because so much of what we're trying to
00:25:19.440understand right now i think is this eternal kind of battle between being and becoming you know
00:25:24.920should we be uh understanding uh the world as something abstract that we can grasp in its
00:25:31.300totality if we you know perfectly understand the systems from afar are we locked into this pattern
00:25:37.840forever is there some level of determination that occurs once we have this figured out or is the
00:25:43.620world eternally, you know, happening around us and that we ultimately can't have true knowledge
00:25:49.000of anything and that we have to kind of understand things on the ground as they develop and we could
00:25:54.180get lost too deeply in, you know, the idea of that abstract understanding to kind of miss
00:26:01.140what's happening right in front of our eyes. I think that this is really more of a continuum
00:26:07.700that we're moving along in a regular situation you know the more complex societies uh get the
00:26:14.320more they want to understand everything they want a grand unifying theory of things they want
00:26:18.900everything to be logically justified um and when they become less complex they're more willing to
00:26:25.220kind of work in that idea that uh it is that constant action those great men uh the the
00:26:31.580the aristocratic kind of imposition of will that kind of drives things.
00:26:36.480And so I think that in many ways, you know, I don't want to be entirely materialistic about this.
00:26:44.560I don't think that we derive, you know, that philosophical understanding from wherever we are in social development solely.
00:26:52.720But I don't think these things are entirely unconnected.
00:26:56.480And so I think that these critiques come around from one side or the other. When things are a little too driven from passion in the moment activity, we start to see the power of kind of that abstract understanding emerge. And when things are too abstract, too complex, too kind of removed and locked in, then we start to see people yearning for that more spontaneous, direct assertion of will.
00:27:21.740And so I think that's kind of where, you know, I think part of what we see from Nietzsche is really the moment he finds himself in rather than perhaps maybe the final truth about kind of where society should rest or ultimately what is going to best create the, I guess, not for Nietzsche, the best for all humans, but the elevation of at least a class of people beyond where humanity is at that given moment.
00:27:49.460yeah one of the things you said there just nails it and it gets directly to
00:27:54.180just the very title of this discussion um what nietzsche says in twilight of the idols
00:28:00.520is he even he even states it in terms of a mathematical equation he puts equal signs
00:28:07.820uh he says the problem with socrates now it's it's curious though because the title the the
00:28:14.560chapter title is called the problem of socrates but he only said he only mentions the problem
00:28:18.580of Socrates once in the whole thing. And the reason for that is because his critique of the
00:28:24.660Western tradition is Socrates is, he's just, he doesn't quite fit into it. And Nietzsche can't
00:28:33.620really, Nietzsche knows there's more to Socrates than the rhetoric that he's using to trash him,
00:28:39.220right? But what he says is, he says, with Socrates, what we have is this claim that virtue
00:28:46.020equals knowledge equals happiness and so there you have exactly what you just mentioned there
00:28:53.400that now what has happened in life what has happened in the world is that people live in
00:29:01.220the service of knowing instead of wanting to know things simply to better improve their life
00:29:10.240right that and he said he says the fundamental transition that socrates brings about and he
00:29:16.040really hammers it away on the scholastics about this he says the scholastics took this and just
00:29:21.480that's why he has just there are two the greatest critique that nietzsche has for anyone where he
00:29:29.120never tires of just absolutely trashing them are socialists uh and scholastics because he says what
00:29:36.220has happened is that the newest thing under the sun is that we have turned knowledge the pursuit
00:29:44.780of knowledge itself into a passion it has somehow become ingrained in our souls now and so you have
00:29:53.580people who live only to be these kind of fear cells that just want to just keep learning and
00:30:00.140learning it's it's the library posting on x right it's people that have got these massive libraries
00:30:05.980And it's like, dude, you couldn't read all those if you spent 18 hours a day for your entire life reading them.
00:30:11.460And what kind of what kind of human type would that produce? Right.
00:30:14.980You pale. You've never walked into a gym. Right. You probably don't have a kids or a family.
00:30:19.860And if you do, you're a bad father. Right. And this is the question that Nietzsche thinks is truly existential.
00:30:27.100We've reached that moment in time where it's very possible there might be no going back.
00:30:33.480Right. This is the question of the last man is where people simply assume that you have to just keep learning for the sake of learning while while genuine life and enjoyment and happiness just passes you by.
00:30:48.160Right. And that's why they blink. Right. That's why the last man blinks.
00:30:51.360sister we invented happiness let me know what happiness is right that's and so and and this
00:30:56.960is why i think it the greatest error that any christian could make and in fact all the see
00:31:05.760it was the social gospel people but also the catholics as well i mean i could cite over i
00:31:11.520mean i could an avalanche of citations in the early 20th century who were saying we need to
00:31:17.600read nietzsche because he has made some very good points about how it is that we no longer live in
00:31:26.080a kind of robust manly way and they and what what had happened in the meantime is world war one for
00:31:33.360god's sake uh and they knew that what is needed going forward is that people had become comfortable
00:31:40.960and the world just exploded and it's like we need strong men now and the the christians at the time
00:31:46.560recognize that and they said okay Nietzsche has Nietzsche has said that this is what's going to
00:31:51.580happen to us so we need to have a powerful response to all this and that's the great
00:31:56.940error that you see for instance on social media when people just trash Nietzsche and say oh Nietzsche
00:32:03.740would cry his way back to you know Germany if he told you know Francis of Assisi that you know it1.00
00:32:11.180was a slave morality or something like that uh that's just so silly and stupid it's unbecoming0.99
00:32:17.020of anyone who's thoughtful right and i think thoughtful christians should be deeply concerned0.98
00:32:22.060with nietzsche's critique of their faith because it was so it was so visceral and i'll simply say
00:32:28.120this uh remember the critique that nietzsche makes of socrates part of it is that socrates
00:32:36.580wanted to escape the world right there's the world of the ideas now that's not the real teaching in
00:32:41.940plato it's not you know some ideas that somehow have to participate uh in the world of whatever
00:32:47.920but that's how it was interpreted and that's what made it so easily appropriable for christians
00:32:54.400because there's the other world and what nietzsche's fundamental criticism of christianity is
00:32:59.720as platonism for the masses is that christianity emphasizes every single human being is equal
00:33:08.920before god in death and so the logical throughout time the logical working out of that is that you
00:33:18.240end up with radical democracy and that's the world we live in today because it's very very
00:33:23.600difficult for a pious christian most pious christians to justify something like in any
00:33:31.020kind of an aristocracy because it's like well we're all going to be equal in front of god so
00:33:34.980why are we not equal here on earth right and and that's a serious problem that has to be dealt with
00:33:39.380yeah i mean it's very obvious that though i don't think it's true ultimately at the core of
00:33:45.440christianity this radically this radical leveling impulse has always been uh you know christian
00:33:51.740heresy right there's always been uh this different movements inside of christianity that tried to
00:33:58.160kind of annihilate the distinction between peoples or you know aristocracies or you know
00:34:04.400hierarchies of any kind uh they are often shouted down or crushed or forced to move somewhere else
00:34:10.900but but they always pop up they see it seems inevitable that somewhere in this you know is
00:34:16.220always the case and you know to to your point about um you know Nietzsche you know looking at
00:34:22.460these uh you know men who you know have the books and they have the education uh this is something
00:34:28.120that kind of reiterates itself in all of these thinkers I like to of course collect prophets of
00:34:33.880doom uh so I've talked about uh you know Oswald Spangler and and John Globb and both of these guys
00:34:40.320come to similar conclusions when it comes to the fall of civilizations that whether it's you know
00:34:47.420Spangler's academic who captures the truth of the civilization only as it dies or whether it's
00:34:55.300Glove's assertion that the age of intellectualism kind of spells doom for society because it starts
00:35:01.060to over-index for that you know that the intellect it starts to value that over everything and that
00:35:08.560Either way, it's that the paralysis of inaction that comes from academic pursuits ultimately drives the civilization into a death spiral.
00:35:20.380And that has to speak to people today because when we look at what's going on, pretty much everyone is paralyzed by this, right?
00:35:27.380Like the true reason that we don't reform anything, like for, you know, not to make this like vulgar and modern at the moment,
00:35:34.880But there's this constant debate right now on the internet about whether or not young people should be able to buy burritos, right? And as dumb as that conversation really is, underlying that is a bunch of people running out and throwing a bunch of charts and graphs and saying, look, no, everything's fine. Things are cheap, blah, blah, blah. You don't need to worry about that.
00:35:55.300now there's a lot of manipulation of data but ultimately the point is like everyone is paralyzed
00:36:00.640because they're busy trading graphs rather than recognizing that well young people aren't having
00:36:06.540kids they aren't having families they aren't doing these necessary vital things that ultimately
00:36:12.320allow a civilization to continue or expand become great these things and so whether or not you think
00:36:19.520that the exact numbers on you know the price of lettuce is correct like that is not the issue
00:36:25.980the underlying issue is that lack of vitality that lack of ability to to see why you should
00:36:31.920continue your bloodline and i think that is something that nietzsche is ultimately speaking
00:36:36.620to is the paralysis that is created by this analytic sort of man the desire to know everything
00:36:43.620in the abstract to justify everything in the abstract creates an inability to act in a practical
00:36:49.320way. And what should we judge a society by? Should we judge a society by the amount of data
00:36:54.840it accumulates, the amount of theories that it creates for physics, or should we judge it by
00:37:01.160the fact that it's having children and carrying its values into the future? Which of these is the
00:37:06.140true measure of a healthy society? And if Christianity has put you in a position where0.90
00:37:11.820more and more people are no longer seeing the value of continuing their civilization,
00:37:17.400well then something terrible has happened to your christianity because i'm very very sure
00:37:21.960that was not the intention of christ uh you know when he founded uh you know this yeah one thing
00:37:28.820to your point here um so in 1872 uh nietzsche has he's he's he's a young professor uh in fact he
00:37:41.400was the youngest professor ever granted tenure in germany when germany had established the greatest
00:37:46.720universities the world has ever seen. That's how talented he was. And he taught a course on the
00:37:52.460pre-Socratics. And let me just read this to you because it's going to say exactly what you just
00:37:58.580said, where he's warning against this with respect to the problem of Socrates. These are his notes
00:38:05.740for a course on the pre-Socratics. Now, Nietzsche is the one who comes up. Nietzsche is the first0.86
00:38:14.660person who comes up with the word the pre platonics in other words there's
00:38:20.840everyone before Plato and then there's Plato and beyond right and this is what
00:38:25.520he says he's talking about the pre Socrates he says if all of them were
00:38:31.220spectators at a tragedy the first three would see it as a reflection of the
00:38:35.720wretchedness of existence says Parmenides would see it as a
00:38:39.740transitorious semblance. He says Heraclitus and Anaxagoras as artistic constructs and likeness
00:38:47.180of the laws of the world. He says Democritus would see it as produced by machines.
00:38:53.080And then he underlines, this is in his class notes, he underlines, he says,
00:38:57.360optimism begins with Socrates. See, that's the whole point of Socratic dialectic,
00:39:03.940is that you are presuming that you are going to get to an answer, right? You are going to
00:39:09.600clarify this right he says optimism begins with socrates he says but it is no longer artistic
00:39:18.080he says it has teleology and the belief in a beneficent deity he says the belief in the
00:39:25.760knowing the good human being he says dissolution of the instincts that's the fundamental thing there
00:39:33.680is what reason itself is for nietzsche as he understands based upon because he nietzsche is
00:39:43.560not an enemy of science he he accepts that he accepts the truths of modern science in fact i
00:39:49.000could read them to you he'd list them in his his essay on history uh but what he said what what he
00:39:56.220says is that reason is really just a kind of see this is the critique of cause and effect
00:40:00.900we always posit an effect and then we associate it with the cause of our own creation we don't
00:40:07.640really know these things now some people will say he's getting that from Hume some slightly yes but
00:40:13.300Nietzsche is no human he's far deeper thinker than that but what you have with Plato and this
00:40:21.000is in the dialogues the imagery is always the hunting of the beings right that's what following
00:40:27.500the logos is well following the logos is just socratic dialectic right you're trying to shake
00:40:33.580the opinion of someone's shake someone's tree of opinion see what falls out and then let's let's
00:40:39.180examine it let's let's impose rigorous inquiry upon it and then hopefully we will be able to come
00:40:44.940to an understanding of what the natures of these things are and what nietzsche is seeing is that's
00:40:50.460the destruction of art altogether that's the whole point of birth of tragedy when he's sitting in the0.61
00:40:54.620theater and he said he says that he says that socrates killed tragedy uh because he couldn't
00:41:02.220understand it he's like now where's the logical reasoning and all this um but but that that's the
00:41:08.380key is that is is that something about logos is optimistic and so what nietzsche is wanting to
00:41:16.060fundamentally do and he says this in the birth of tragedy he says what we need is a music making
00:41:21.900socrates and so you see right away prefigured is zarathustra right the music making socrates is
00:41:29.920going to be the zarathustra of much later now whether that's the overman or not let's sort of
00:41:35.580hang a question mark over that all this talk that people always say about nietzsche having the
00:41:40.960solution of the overman uh to all of that i say phooey uh they've only read the first couple pages
00:41:47.240of zarathustra because you never judge a book by where it starts you judge it by where it ends
00:41:51.780What's the status of the overman at the very end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
00:41:56.660Nietzsche himself is not at all clear.
00:41:59.280He's not at all certain himself that there is a solution out of this.
00:42:03.580Because remember, his Zarathustra has been up in the cave for 10 years.
00:42:07.820His answer, the overman, it might be 10 years too late.
00:42:14.920And so the text of Zarathustra itself is more of an education of Zarathustra,
00:42:19.320not so much an education of the reader but of course it is but but in any case but but but see
00:42:27.020that's the thing see nietzsche is always providing these histories of the entirety of the western
00:42:33.260tradition because he's trying to figure out how did we get here and what he sees most definitive
00:42:39.420of it all is this notion of cause and effect that he associates with socrates which ultimately turns
00:42:47.200into modern science as we understand it which further and this is extremely important turns
00:42:54.800into what we now understand is history see history is very new under the sun history was not even
00:43:01.040understood as its own field of study until night uh 1810 1809 with the founding of the university
00:43:07.680of berlin i mean and this is also by the way what nietzsche is trying to bring back
00:43:12.400history was always understood as a part of the noble art of rhetoric we read things like xenophon
00:43:19.680we read things like plutarch because they give us access to experiences of greatness that we might
00:43:26.160not otherwise have in our own life and we can learn from that hobbes flatly says this is why
00:43:31.920he translates thucydides because thucydides takes us into the battlefields takes us into the
00:43:37.660deliberations. It's not history in the scientific sense, because Nietzsche sees history in the
00:43:43.640scientific sense as the great problem that's destroying everything about the world in which
00:43:49.040we live. Because if you pursue these academic scientific historians and their historiography,
00:43:56.500what you're going to end up with is nothing more than an acid bath for every single sacred truth
00:44:00.560that's ever existed. And the most amazing and scandalous thing about it is not a single one
00:44:05.560of these people offers anything else to replace it. Nietzsche's in the business of offering
00:44:10.360something to replace it without doing away with science. Well, and I think we see that bear itself
00:44:17.560out pretty much everywhere, right? In fact, if there's, you know, well, obviously science has
00:44:22.540done all kinds of amazing things. A lot of people are alive, you know, now because of science, but
00:44:26.940a lot of people aren't alive now because of science, which people often don't seem to take
00:44:31.020into account when they think about the idea of progress in general uh however uh i mean Nietzsche
00:44:35.620is absolutely right that this scientific mindset infecting everything ultimately just dissolves it
00:44:42.760all and that you know what what now is a historian but someone who runs around doing their very best
00:44:47.800to dissolve the identities and uh traditions of people right like what what other look at what
00:44:55.320these academics look at what all these academics on x are saying about about homer simply because1.00
00:45:01.740people on the right like homer they just trash the shit out of it and say all these morons homer0.97
00:45:07.560wasn't even a real person the text itself isn't even real there's nothing it's all fake uh some1.00
00:45:13.360dumb ass uh from the university of michigan actually accused somebody else who was holding0.92
00:45:19.240up polybius he said he said your god writes fables and it's like okay well you don't understand the0.99
00:45:26.000first thing about polybius you don't understand that understanding of history that's how that's
00:45:31.160how pathetic these people are anyway sorry i get very angry about it because these are the people
00:45:37.640who otherwise well-intentioned parents send their children off to be educated by well and they think0.99
00:45:45.260they're doing the right thing right like what else would a modern person do and this is i think
00:45:49.700in many ways maybe a critique that nietzsche would really bring against modern christians
00:45:54.580is you don't believe in your christianity enough to tell your kids not to go to college
00:45:58.400right like you don't believe in christianity enough to tell them that to not you know pursue
00:46:04.700this thing that will uh you know uh disassemble their faith in front of them because you need to
00:46:10.860go chase a status or something uh or or employment or uh you know income these kind of things and
00:46:16.820ultimately they are uh you know sending their children directly into a blender uh for their
00:46:21.600own belief system because they don't have the force that the faith the uh you know the real
00:46:27.360drive to stand against this kind of thing and the fact that this is what all history has become what
00:46:33.100all academia has become from culture you know to music to art to movies to you know science history
00:46:40.440Whatever the discipline is, it all at this point just exists to, you know, go ahead and disassemble history as we know it or culture as we know it.
00:46:51.960And funny enough, this is the moment where like C.S. Lewis and Nietzsche agree, right?
00:46:55.820Like this is this is what the abolition of man is about.
00:46:58.420The fact that you take these, you know, these professors take these children and they strip all of the beauty and humanity out of literature and they teach them to, you know, go ahead and destroy the meaning by overanalyzing and trying to reduce every belief, every feeling, every passion into this like thing of mockery.
00:47:21.720that the only things that really exist are that which you can you know write down on a piece of
00:47:25.440paper on a spreadsheet and anything else that's implied in beautiful stories or uh you know
00:47:30.520thoughtful poetry those are all sentimental things that should be ultimately discarded by the
00:47:35.060intellectual what does that do well it it ends man it it destroys man as he understands it and
00:47:40.940if you are able to completely destroy every aspect of the humanity then i think in many ways you know
00:47:46.880the men without chest and the bug man are one in the same whether it's nietzsche or c.s lewis they
00:47:51.200are both actually recognizing a very serious problem in modernity yeah let me i would be
00:47:57.680remiss if i didn't include uh what's considered to be at least uh in academic circles the most
00:48:05.560important statement ever made by nietzsche and this directly concerns nietzsche's concern with
00:48:12.900history because remember what i said about so-called ancient texts right i mean these
00:48:17.520we don't in in many cases even the manuscripts that we have of all of these ancient texts
00:48:25.160don't even start showing up until the sixth and seventh and eighth century of our era right i mean
00:48:32.060that's that's how and they're all fragments and everything but this is what and so what was going
00:48:38.260on by the way in germany was the so-called historical quest for jesus david's tross was
00:48:46.140the first one ever to apply the full infrastructure of modern science to the Gospels to determine
00:48:54.960whether or not there was a historical Jesus. And he came to the conclusion that we simply
00:48:59.660do not have enough historical evidence to persuasively say that there was in fact a
00:49:06.380historical Jesus. Nietzsche read that book and he writes an entire essay about it. It's the first
00:49:12.480essay in his book, The Untimely Meditations. And here's the conclusion that Strauss comes to in
00:49:20.420that book. Strauss says, is our faith in Christianity that of our fathers? No. He says,
00:49:28.520but we still can hold to faith. It's just going to be something that doesn't really rely upon
00:49:35.360the text of the Bible. This is what Nietzsche has to say, which is considered his most powerful
00:49:41.160statement in all of this thought this comes from twilight of the idols this is 1889
00:49:46.600he says they have got rid of the christian god and now they feel obliged to cling all the more
00:49:55.000firmly to christian morality and he says but when one gives up christian belief
00:50:00.920one thereby deprives oneself of the right to christian morality and so that's that's that's
00:50:08.420the question, right? The question is, what do you believe about divine revelation insofar as you
00:50:16.420understand divine revelation to be the text of the New Testament? And that's going to determine
00:50:23.420whether or not you have a right to even claim these Christian virtues. In fact, what Nietzsche
00:50:30.780is going to say on two separate occasions is he says what has happened is that Christianity has
00:50:36.880now turned into just residual christianity which he then calls a gentle moralism right this is
00:50:45.120auguste comte right august is hilarious what comp does uh live for others nietzsche never tires of
00:50:53.840mocking comp's phrase live for others right because comp converts to a kind of catholicism
00:50:59.680but it's not really catholicism and it's just it it's compassion it's it's what we would refer to
00:51:04.960is humanitarianism uh humanitarianism is a very bad word don't ever use it right because it's
00:51:12.140exactly what hollowed out christianity is love other people just because they're other people
00:51:16.420right this is eleanor roosevelt's human rights right that's it right so
00:51:23.600spangler has a passage that has always stayed with me where he talks about how at the end of
00:51:32.140every civilization the animating religion of that civilization creates its opposite
00:51:39.140atheistic version um and it's just the it's all of the moralization of the religion without any
00:51:49.260of the animating metaphysical belief um and i can't think of any truer point uh than you know
00:51:57.260when we look at wokeness, because what is wokeness if not a Christian heresy, right?
00:52:02.260Christianity, Christian morals stripped of all of the transcendent truth and twisted into the0.79
00:52:08.120most horrific form that you can imagine. And so even as, you know, I think both of us ultimately1.00
00:52:14.220do, even if you disagree vehemently with Nietzsche on the truth of Christianity, you need to recognize
00:52:22.380that his observations prefigured exactly the society we find around us today and so if you
00:52:29.960are not addressing the questions he raises even if you think ultimately he's wrong if you're not
00:52:34.720addressing the questions that he raises then you simply are not addressing the problems that
00:52:40.540the world is facing today that our culture is facing today and if we do not address those
00:52:45.180then we will meet the fate of every other civilization that fails to you know overcome
00:52:50.820those challenges to its tradition uh all traditions must be lived and if your tradition is not lived
00:52:57.280if your tradition is not uh you know vital if it is something that is slowly dying in the halls of
00:53:03.040academia or dusty churches somewhere uh then your civilization is heading for the decline and the
00:53:10.440end and i don't think that's what any of us are looking for and so that means we need to take
00:53:14.320um the the criticisms of someone like nietzsche seriously because i think they do help us to
00:53:19.740address the biggest problems we are facing today but that said uh we could do this for several
00:53:25.360several hours um but uh we do not have time to do so uh so it's been an absolute pleasure speaking
00:53:31.060with you we do have a couple questions from the audience so we should get to those but before we
00:53:35.100do a thingy and stranger where should people find your great work um so i've i've slowed down on a
00:53:41.440lot of the stuff that i do on x and i've just started teaching courses uh on substack so find
00:53:46.760me find me on subsec and everyone's free to enter into my my I guess it's called their little chat
00:53:54.800there or something like that and there they can find all the information they want about you know
00:54:00.540the various courses that I teach and things like that so that's that's the best way to get a hold
00:54:06.440of me fantastic guys I'll just take a second and I you know I don't want to make Athenian stranger
00:54:12.060blush here it's it's about him but it's also about a lot of other people but you have an embarrassment
00:54:17.120of riches available to you online today you can do graduate level uh philosophy um for free or for
00:54:25.380very little cost uh with people who have done amazing work and are usually so good that they're
00:54:32.740too good for academia um i hear this actually from people in academia all the time all the
00:54:37.260interesting philosophy all the interesting political science is being done online none of
00:54:41.540it's being done in universities. So if you're looking to, you know, whether it's Athenian
00:54:47.100Stranger, guys like Michael Millerman, there are so many people out there right now who
00:54:51.500have high level courses that you can engage with. And not only are you going to be bettering
00:54:57.000yourself, but you can also patronize people who are doing important work who otherwise
00:55:01.260would not have, you know, the ability to kind of sustain themselves while doing this.
00:55:06.320So I encourage you to do so. There's just no excuse in the modern day to hand your money
00:55:10.060to some you know university that hates you when instead you can learn at the feet of people who
00:55:15.160are doing fantastic work and often for pennies on the dollar so uh just just make sure you're
00:55:20.340taking time to uh seek out those sources because i think they're fantastic that said uh let's go to
00:55:25.620the questions of the people here principled uncertainty says i can't watch this live but
00:55:29.440thanks for the show i will catch up on it later unless it's bad in which case i expect a small
00:55:34.520refund. Well, thank you very much for your faith in preemptively donating. I think that this was
00:55:40.580a fantastic conversation. And remember, guys, we have a lot of different series on different
00:55:46.000thinkers in different playlists. In fact, I'll be building a Nietzsche playlist as soon as we're
00:55:50.480done this, since we've done a couple episodes on it. But there's all kinds of people that you can
00:55:55.420take a look at. So if you can't watch these things live, totally understand. We love the live
00:55:59.540audience, but I know so many people have to watch it later or catch on the podcast, that kind of
00:56:03.380thing. And of course, those are all there for you if you want to go back through the archives and
00:56:07.800find them. And then Ian Briggs says, Plato's prescient critique of Nietzsche's will to power
00:56:14.420at the end of the Gorgias and beginning of the laws remains undefeated. If the stronger should
00:56:20.540rule others, what should rule in the self? Wisdom is the only valid answer. I'm sure we can go a
00:56:30.620lot on that but stranger do you want to touch briefly on uh kind of that uh preemptive dialogue
00:56:35.900of plato's when it comes to this idea of will the power dominating all yes i i i it would be
00:56:43.760difficult for me to disagree stronger with the claim that was just made there in fact uh in
00:56:50.600plato's laws you have the most powerful and enlightening discussion of the principle of
00:57:00.360might makes right and the principle of mind I could go on and on about this but
00:57:08.640all I will simply say is that the Athenian stranger is perfectly clear
00:57:14.940that there are in fact seven natural titles to rule of which Pindar's might
00:57:23.280makes right is one as well as the right of mind and what the athenian stranger flatly says is that
00:57:32.160the task of the true legislator the true statesman the true founder is to weave these seven worthy
00:57:42.000titles to rule together because the difficulty is he flatly says a number of them are contradictory
00:57:50.720But you cannot have flourishing political community without all of them.
00:57:54.560And so you have to find a way to weave them together.
00:57:57.600And so to say that, look, I'll simply say this.
00:58:01.040You will find nothing in either Machiavelli or Nietzsche that you don't already find in Plato and Aristotle.
00:58:09.500They have understood it, but that's not to say that they have dismissed it.
00:58:14.020They fully recognize the power and the strength in all of the claims being made.
00:58:19.020I do. I do love finding that in Aristotle over and over again. And yeah, just another reason to
00:58:25.900reread laws as soon as I'm done with with the city and man, just in case I needed another one.
00:58:33.000But all right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up again. Always a pleasure speaking
00:58:37.260with Athenian Stranger. Make sure that you're checking out his work. And if it's your first
00:58:40.980time on this channel, you need to subscribe, click the bell notifications, leave some kind
00:58:45.720of comment. Tell us what you think about the battle between Socrates and Nietzsche. If you
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00:58:54.400on your favorite podcast platform. And when you do, leave a rating or review. It really helps
00:58:58.300with the algorithm magic. Thank you, everybody, for watching. And as always, I will talk to you