The Charlie Kirk Show - Is God Dead? Making Sense of Nietzsche with Dr. Khalil Habib

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Saturday.

00:00:02.000 You know what Saturday means.

00:00:03.000 We dive deep into ideas while other podcasts just talk about right versus left and Republican good, Democrat bad.

00:00:08.000 Let's get into the ideas.

00:00:09.000 Is God dead?

00:00:11.000 That's a very important question.

00:00:13.000 That might be something that might be mildly offensive to you, but that's a really interesting question.

00:00:18.000 Friedrich Nietzsche, who was German, wrote in Beyond Good and Evil and in many other places that the West was falling apart.

00:00:28.000 A lot of what we are living through right now is downstream from Nietzsche. 1.00

00:00:33.000 He was right about a lot.

00:00:35.000 He was dreadfully wrong about a lot.

00:00:38.000 I talk with Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College about the existential crisis facing the West.

00:00:44.000 This is a thoughtful conversation that you might want to listen to once or twice or three times.

00:00:49.000 And it's all made possible thanks to the beacon of the North, Hillsdale College.

00:00:54.000 I was just in Hillsdale, Michigan, broadcasting live from Hillsdale College.

00:00:58.000 And I could tell you, this college is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

00:01:01.000 The students were all incredibly wise, polite, magnanimous, curious, willing to discuss big ideas.

00:01:10.000 I sat in on Dr. Larry Arn's Aristotle course, and I learned more in one hour of Dr. Larry Arn's Hillsdale course than I think I learned in my entire four years in high school.

00:01:20.000 Good teachers matter and good ideas matter.

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00:01:43.000 So a lot of the alma mater that maybe you support, they probably take government money.

00:01:47.000 Hillsdale, zero.

00:01:49.000 And I personally take their online courses.

00:01:52.000 Their online courses are exceptional.

00:01:55.000 In the online courses, you are able to dive deep into these ideas, get a better understanding of where we come from, who we are as human beings.

00:02:03.000 What is our country?

00:02:03.000 What is the proper way to govern people?

00:02:08.000 Here are the courses I have completed.

00:02:09.000 Introduction to Western Philosophy.

00:02:11.000 In there, we dove into Nietzsche, which we talk about today.

00:02:15.000 Immanuel Kant.

00:02:17.000 We talked about David Hume.

00:02:18.000 We talked about Aristotle, Socrates, and many more.

00:02:22.000 I finished the Introduction to the Constitution, which might be the greatest course that I have had a chance to take when it comes to why the Constitution is written the way it was.

00:02:32.000 Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, How to Lead a Good Life.

00:02:35.000 Constitution 201, the Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism.

00:02:40.000 And Constitution 101.

00:02:41.000 And I just finished the Winston Churchill Statesmanship course.

00:02:45.000 And by the way, all this can be found at charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:02:48.000 And here are the couple of courses I'm working through right now.

00:02:50.000 It's going to take some work.

00:02:51.000 You got to put your work boots on.

00:02:53.000 This stuff does not come easy.

00:02:54.000 You know, people say, Charlie, how are you able to cover such a wide range of topics?

00:02:58.000 I spend two hours a day trying to learn.

00:03:01.000 I learn like people work out.

00:03:03.000 And I do work out four or five times a week.

00:03:05.000 I take it very seriously.

00:03:06.000 But I want you to think about what matters to you.

00:03:08.000 Do you spend time doing it?

00:03:10.000 For me, learning matters.

00:03:11.000 Learning is very important.

00:03:13.000 Pursuing truth, diving into the ideas and understanding where we come from.

00:03:17.000 So right now, I'm 23% of the way completed with Western heritage from the book of Genesis to John Locke.

00:03:24.000 I'm 17% of the way through the Genesis story reading biblical narratives.

00:03:28.000 Phenomenal course.

00:03:29.000 I want to tell you, for those of you that are Christians, it is one of the greatest courses I've ever taken.

00:03:34.000 And so when you go to charlie4hillsdale.com, charlieforhillsdale.com, you'll see other courses as well.

00:03:40.000 And I'm sure some will resonate with you and some of you are like, yeah, I'm not that interested.

00:03:44.000 They have Theology 101, the Western Theological Tradition, American Heritage from Colonial Settlement to Current Declaration, Athens and Sparta, the U.S. Supreme Court, a proper understanding of K-12 education theory and practice.

00:03:55.000 And guess what?

00:03:56.000 I am going to finish every single online course.

00:03:59.000 It's going to take some work and do it alongside me and email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:04:05.000 I think it's important that people dive deep into the ideas.

00:04:07.000 People say, Charlie, what can I do?

00:04:09.000 If you want to know how to save the country, spend some time learning.

00:04:12.000 Things will start to make more sense.

00:04:13.000 They'll start to open up.

00:04:15.000 And all of a sudden, you'll say, wow, because of what I learned in that course, I now see an opportunity to act, to do something.

00:04:22.000 Strength rejoices in the challenge, which is why I'm so thrilled to be partnering with the Beacon of the North, the college that all of you should send your kids to, everybody, Hillsdale College.

00:04:30.000 And maybe it's not for you.

00:04:31.000 I didn't go to college.

00:04:32.000 College was not right for me for a variety of different reasons.

00:04:34.000 And Dr. Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, gives me a hard time for that.

00:04:38.000 But he also said, hey, he is taking the online courses and he deserves points for that.

00:04:42.000 And it's true.

00:04:42.000 No one should be given an excuse and say, I don't want to learn.

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00:04:47.000 Take it.

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00:05:02.000 There's such a beautiful world out there.

00:05:04.000 And let's learn about it together.

00:05:06.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.

00:05:08.000 Is God dead?

00:05:10.000 If that gets your interest, you will love this conversation.

00:05:13.000 Dr. Khalil Habib, buckle up.

00:05:15.000 Here we go.

00:05:16.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:05:18.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:05:20.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:05:23.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:05:26.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:05:28.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:05:36.000 Turning point USA.

00:05:37.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:05:46.000 That's why we are here.

00:05:48.000 Hey, everybody.

00:05:49.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, backed by Popular Demand, Dr. Khalil Habib from The Beacon of the North, the last college, how college is meant to be, Hillsdale College.

00:05:58.000 You guys can find all things Hillsdale, charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:06:02.000 Doctor, great to see you again.

00:06:04.000 Likewise, Charlie, how are you doing?

00:06:06.000 I'm doing great.

00:06:07.000 So I asked you this question right before we got started, which actually is a perfect segue into the type of philosophy that Nietzsche helped advance or birth, which is, who knows what the truth actually is.

00:06:20.000 How do you pronounce Nietzsche?

00:06:22.000 I pronounce him Nietzsche, but my teachers always refer to him as Nietzsche.

00:06:26.000 Well, that's, I guess it's the truth isn't that's the point.

00:06:31.000 That's what I was getting to is what difference does it make, right?

00:06:34.000 It's whoever has more power determines how to pronounce his hard to understand German name.

00:06:39.000 So let's start with it.

00:06:40.000 Is God dead, Professor?

00:06:42.000 And where did that question come from?

00:06:44.000 Well, it's meant to be a paradox because as anyone knows, God, by any reasonable definition, is eternal.

00:06:50.000 So the idea that God is dead is just a paradoxical statement.

00:06:54.000 And I think Nietzsche is intending to get us to reflect on what he means by that.

00:06:59.000 And what he means by that is he's dead in the hearts and the minds of Europeans. 0.66

00:07:04.000 And what that essentially suggests is that the belief in God or the existence of God rests on the opinions of the faithful.

00:07:11.000 And in the same context in which you see that phrase uttered, Nietzsche says that God has been replaced by the newspaper.

00:07:19.000 And if you want to think about what that means, when you contrast God, who is eternal, who gives us a transcendent ideal toward which we can aim and be dutiful towards, with the newspaper, which is essentially ephemeral, what he's essentially saying is that the modern world has shifted away from a longing for eternity and greatness in some capacity to the here and now, the immediacy of one's sensations and to the to just newspapers, to the ephemeral.

00:07:50.000 And he thinks that that diminishes man's longing for greatness and ultimately impoverishes civil society.

00:07:56.000 And let's dive into that.

00:07:57.000 So, what was he seeing that made him say this?

00:08:01.000 And I want to also ask you this question.

00:08:03.000 I think we touched on this in the prior episode.

00:08:05.000 He wasn't celebrating the death of God, was he?

00:08:09.000 Well, it was mixed.

00:08:10.000 On the one hand, what he was mourning was man's capacity to long for something beyond the here and now.

00:08:17.000 Nietzsche is very famous for always thinking about the future, beyond good and evil, a prelude to a philosophy of the future.

00:08:24.000 Zarathustra thinks about things in terms of the future.

00:08:27.000 The present for Nietzsche, especially at the time he's writing, he felt was the land of the last man, a phrase that he coins to describe modern Europe, the commercial man, a human being who's essentially middle class, concerned with comfort, preservation.

00:08:43.000 And so, to go back to your first question, what he was observing was man's incapacity to think beyond just comfort, safety, security, commercial enterprises.

00:08:55.000 And he thought that these were an impoverishment of what man once was and could be.

00:09:00.000 So, he does appreciate certain aspects of the past where he thinks that we had great heroes that we could look up to.

00:09:07.000 There was a hierarchy in society that established what he calls a pathos of distance, meaning an inequality that allowed opportunity for greatness to shine.

00:09:17.000 And what's happening is this diminishing expectation of any kind of ambition.

00:09:22.000 So, talk for a second here about the significance of these writings.

00:09:28.000 This is not just a one-off guy that happened to write a book or two and is cited in a mixture of many other philosophers.

00:09:37.000 He really influenced the modern world as we know it, did he not?

00:09:43.000 Incredibly so.

00:09:44.000 Some would argue that he was an inspiration to the Nazis and National Socialism.

00:09:49.000 Stephen Hicks, for example, has a documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was based upon a book that he wrote.

00:09:55.000 Some, of course, denied that Nietzsche would have anything to do with such a movement.

00:09:59.000 Then there are those who can just simply identify our easygoing nihilism or relativism as ultimately derivative of Nietzsche's thinking.

00:10:09.000 For example, in The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom describes the certain kind of relativism and an openness to any idea has actually closed our capacity or even incentive to search for any meaning beyond just one's own perspectival vision.

00:10:26.000 So he's quite influential.

00:10:30.000 And so, just two points on the Nazi thing: every soldier that was deployed in World War I was actually given Nietzsche on the German front.

00:10:40.000 And so, they read this idea of the importance of the will, which we're going to get into, and this idea of becoming the Superman or the Overman or the Übermensch. 0.59

00:10:50.000 And then they come back to kind of war-torn Germany, and these ideas kind of laid the philosophical foundation for Hitler's most popular speech, The Triumph of the Will.

00:11:03.000 And if you read that speech, it sounds a lot like Nietzsche's ideas.

00:11:07.000 So, let's work our way backwards from there.

00:11:10.000 And so, can you just give us some biographical context of who this guy was and how he was able, why he published ideas at the time that were so different than some of the metaphysics and philosophy that was considered to be the consensus?

00:11:27.000 Well, he was a prodigy.

00:11:28.000 He was obviously a German philosopher.

00:11:30.000 He died in 1900 and at a very young age was teaching philosophy.

00:11:35.000 He was trained as a philologist, which means essentially somebody who studies languages and tries to think about their meaning.

00:11:42.000 And in one of his works, Eke Homo, he tells us that he essentially abandoned his post as a professor so that he can become a god.

00:11:49.000 And what he meant by that is that he was horrified by what he describes as Buddhism for Europe, which is just code for a certain kind of nihilism.

00:11:57.000 He believed that Europe in particular has lost its capacity and meaning and any kind of sense of identity.

00:12:04.000 And he was looking to try to inspire certain aspects of European instincts that he thought could still breed some kind of idealism or transcendent, that was transcendence that was just essentially close to being buried.

00:12:19.000 For example, in Dasbek Zarathustra, in a very famous speech entitled The Last Man Speech, his character Zarathustra mentions that, you know, our soil is still thick enough to perhaps plant a grand tree, some kind of ideal, but it's getting increasingly more difficult to find anyone in the world who's interested in anything beyond just the here and now.

00:12:44.000 So what motivated him to do that was to inspire a taste for greatness in an age of what he believed was mediocrity and egalitarianism.

00:12:54.000 So the reason why he goes against the metaphysics of his time, which he believes is already on its last legs anyway, is a series of prejudices in the West, beginning with philosophy.

00:13:06.000 So Beyond Good and Evil, for example, the first chapter is entitled On the Prejudices of the Philosophers.

00:13:11.000 So part of the meaning of that title, Beyond Good and Evil, is to go beyond ideas of some kind of notion of the good, like Socrates claims to have discovered the good life, a life according to nature.

00:13:24.000 Evil, which he associates with Christian morality and the impulse to want to punish that which you are resentful toward.

00:13:32.000 And so it's a combination of a critique of Christianity, Platonism, philosophy, and religion.

00:13:40.000 But it's also a critique of nationalism, because if you remember in Plato's Republic, there's an interlocutor with Socrates named Polemicus, and he defines friends and enemies essentially in terms of who is born into your country and who isn't.

00:13:52.000 And a good man punishes his enemies and does good to his friends.

00:13:57.000 And so you can see towards the end of the work in Beyond Good and Evil, there's an attempt to move away from nationalism, which he's often associated with.

00:14:05.000 That's why it's a bit tricky to say that he inspired the Nazis.

00:14:10.000 Of course, there's clearly very vivid images that the Nazis appropriated.

00:14:15.000 For example, in Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche does talk about the blonde Aryan beast, this uncaged beast of prey, this primordial pre-social impulse for destruction and domination, which he never criticizes. 0.72

00:14:28.000 In fact, he thinks underneath what he calls a master morality is this desire to have the will triumph over one's enemies and to essentially establish dominance. 0.76

00:14:40.000 And he gives us several names of cultures or races that he believed had this.

00:14:45.000 He says the Arabs, the Japanese, the Aryans, for example.

00:14:49.000 And so you could see how in certain hands that could be used as very powerful propaganda.

00:14:54.000 So he is somewhat responsible, at least in a sense of just being reckless.

00:14:58.000 Well, yeah, and then one of his most famous phrases is, I think in German, it's the Will Ze Macht, which means the will to power, right?

00:15:09.000 Which is this idea that if we do not have objective metaphysics and objective truth, then we must use the will of the being to get into a place of power or power dynamics.

00:15:22.000 And so as Nietzsche realized that God is dead, and he did say, and we have murdered him, that was part of his quote, too, that people forget.

00:15:29.000 Before I go any further, can you comment on that?

00:15:31.000 What is the significance of that?

00:15:33.000 As Nietzsche said, not only is God dead, but we have murdered him.

00:15:37.000 Well, some would argue that for Nietzsche, God essentially died in modernity.

00:15:42.000 The combination of science, sort of a crass materialism, the belief that what is real is what is empirical.

00:15:49.000 Well, you know, for Nietzsche, God is really an ideal, among other things.

00:15:54.000 And also democracy, this idea that there really is no higher authority beyond just merely human beings, because all our views are just simply equal to one another.

00:16:03.000 And so he sees this confluence between science and democracy, which he believes go hand in hand as conspiring against any belief in an eternal authority, you know, or any kind of hierarchical structure.

00:16:16.000 And so as you can imagine, what makes him so dangerous and what makes him also so interesting is he's essentially running up against and very critical of our so, you know, so to speak, our sacred cows.

00:16:28.000 Science and democracy are our two real authorities now, and Nietzsche's going after them with gusto.

00:16:34.000 In some ways, he wasn't wrong because religion has struggled since the advent of modernity.

00:16:43.000 I'm not saying that it's failed.

00:16:45.000 Can you comment on that?

00:16:46.000 That he actually might have saw something coming.

00:16:49.000 I couldn't hear you.

00:16:50.000 No, that's okay.

00:16:50.000 I'm sorry, Troy.

00:16:51.000 Just that in some ways, Nietzsche was not wrong in pinpointing this idea that once modernity started to get up and running, you know, post-Bacon and Newton, we talked about Machiavelli, and then you have Darwin.

00:17:07.000 What is the logical endpoint of that?

00:17:10.000 He was onto something.

00:17:11.000 He was.

00:17:12.000 And I think what he's really good at is psychology.

00:17:14.000 I mean, I think Nietzsche would probably argue that he's a psychologist first and foremost.

00:17:19.000 And what I mean by that is he doesn't take metaphysics or any moral ideal on its face, on its face value.

00:17:25.000 He wants to know who is the person behind this morality.

00:17:30.000 So if it's true that morality is relative and it's subjective, then there's no rational reason to choose one morality over another.

00:17:38.000 So the question that he then wants to raise is, well, why choose, for example, toleration as a value as opposed to intoleration?

00:17:45.000 And what he ultimately does is he wants to reduce the world to this binary between a master morality and a slave morality.

00:17:53.000 So a slave instinct would embrace the idea of toleration, for example, because they would want someone, especially someone with the power and the ability to dominate them, to be, quote, tolerant.

00:18:07.000 But if you're a master, why would you embrace that?

00:18:09.000 Because embracing it would essentially mean crippling your desire to have a triumph of the will.

00:18:14.000 So why not intoleration?

00:18:16.000 So what often happens in our day is when we're taught in school that we should all be tolerant of our views because all views are essentially equal.

00:18:25.000 Well, Nietzsche wants to remind you that that doesn't follow.

00:18:28.000 If they're all equal, why not choose intoleration?

00:18:30.000 It's just as equal as toleration.

00:18:33.000 So what he wants us to do is look past good and evil.

00:18:37.000 He wants us to look past that and to look at what he believes ultimately motivates it.

00:18:41.000 And it's always a human person who, unknown to themselves, is writing their secret confession onto the world in the form of morality.

00:18:50.000 So what this really translates into is all morality is warfare.

00:18:55.000 No matter how simple it looks and how pious or how generous or how beneficent, he thinks behind it is a secret desire to dominate and to preserve its existence. 0.65

00:19:07.000 And so a slave morality could only exist in a world that's quote tolerant, egalitarian, recognizes the meek as opposed to the strong.

00:19:18.000 And this is where he gets pretty tricky to really unpack, because as you noted, on the one hand, when he declares that God is dead, it's not necessarily in a note of triumph.

00:19:26.000 But on the other hand, there are passages in his work, Beyond, I'm sorry, genealogy of morals, in which he says, well, let us look at, for example, the Christian heaven.

00:19:35.000 What is the delight there?

00:19:36.000 And he quotes passages in which those who go to heaven get to witness the eternal damnation of those who oppress them in this life.

00:19:46.000 And so for him, this is exhibit A of all morality, including religion, as secretly cloaking, masking a desire to have the will triumph.

00:19:56.000 And so he wants us to look past morality and, in particular, modern morality and modern science.

00:20:02.000 Even science, by the way, he ultimately argues, is a prejudice.

00:20:06.000 Now you're thinking, how can that be?

00:20:08.000 It's objective.

00:20:09.000 And he gives us an example from physics.

00:20:12.000 He says, in physics, you have these laws of gravity.

00:20:15.000 He says, well, there's two ways to interpret them.

00:20:17.000 Most people say all objects have to obey the laws of gravity.

00:20:21.000 He says, well, that's a slave interpretation.

00:20:24.000 Why obey?

00:20:24.000 Why not look at it the other way around and say all objects need to be commanded?

00:20:31.000 That's just as valid.

00:20:32.000 And so everything we look at doesn't have an essential objectivity behind it.

00:20:39.000 What it has is an interpretation that emerges from us and its value is essentially perspectival.

00:20:45.000 It tells us more about us than it does about the world.

00:20:48.000 And he didn't stop there.

00:20:50.000 He then went further and said, well, now we have to create our own values.

00:20:54.000 And one thing that he proposed is one of his most controversial yet longest-lasting contributions to the Zeitgeist or not the Zeitgeist, that would be more timely spirit of the times, just kind of how people view themselves.

00:21:10.000 And that would be the Übermensch.

00:21:12.000 What is the Übermensch?

00:21:14.000 And what was Nietzsche trying to say here?

00:21:17.000 So the Übermensch is a character in his work, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

00:21:22.000 And the way to really look at Nietzsche's works is in sort of two categories.

00:21:26.000 He's got some that I would call sort of a wrecking ball approach.

00:21:30.000 They're really designed to clear the deck, so to speak.

00:21:32.000 Beyond Good and Evil would be an example.

00:21:34.000 It's a very destructive book.

00:21:35.000 Its primary focus is on destroying the prejudices of the philosophers, you know, trying to push nationalism out and make way for some new horizon.

00:21:45.000 Zarathustra would be sort of more of a constructive work.

00:21:48.000 Okay, so it necessarily follows his other works.

00:21:52.000 And in Zarathustra, what he essentially wants, the Übermensch simply means the overman.

00:21:57.000 It can be translated as Superman, but it's more accurately overman.

00:22:02.000 And the question is over what?

00:22:05.000 And essentially, in that work, over the nihilism that has engulfed Europe.

00:22:10.000 And so he has this image of a tightrope walker who stretches a rope across an abyss.

00:22:15.000 And he wants to cross it, meaning he wants to carry civilization over this abyss, but he falls and dies.

00:22:21.000 He doesn't have the spirit necessary to lift Europe up.

00:22:26.000 And so what the Übermensch is designed to invoke or inspire are men who see the problem of modern Europe as essentially nihilism.

00:22:37.000 There's nothing meaningful left in man's life anymore.

00:22:40.000 I mean, when you think about how pop culture most likely has more influence over most people's lives today than, say, God or family or country, you can see Nietzsche's point.

00:22:50.000 The three things that had historically always been the portal through which human beings can gain some sense of continuity or meaning have been replaced essentially by just the market.

00:23:01.000 And so the overman is designed to connect a link between this world and something over the nihilism of contemporary Europe and sort of serve as a bridge to some kind of ideal.

00:23:14.000 And so how would this idea of the Übermensch apply to kind of our life today?

00:23:20.000 Who would be trying to believe that we need to create the overman?

00:23:24.000 Are these the people that are playing in scientific experiments or is it just more of a thought exercise?

00:23:31.000 It's not a thought exercise for him.

00:23:33.000 I mean, he really sought what he calls a transvaluation of values, which is a very clunky phrase that essentially means an attempt to overcome democracy.

00:23:43.000 He was not an egalitarian.

00:23:44.000 He did not want liberalism.

00:23:47.000 He didn't want anything like a traditional aristocracy or monarchy.

00:23:51.000 He wanted a new form of aristocracy that was built upon the insights of his philosophy, that what you're ultimately celebrating is human greatness.

00:24:02.000 You're not celebrating so much the ideals because he says in the past, human beings would mistake those ideals as just simply an objective rather than celebrating the true source of them.

00:24:11.000 And that is the great man, the poet philosopher, who's somewhat like a legislator.

00:24:18.000 And so that's, so his vision is not just simply poetry, but it does appeal to people who are frustrated in democracy, who feel alienated from it, who are searching for meaning or longing for some kind of eternity in their lives.

00:24:32.000 And the modern world just simply doesn't offer that for them.

00:24:35.000 He appeals to them.

00:24:36.000 And that's why in your earlier comment, that you would often find Nazis who are dead in a battlefield with copies of Thusbek Zarathustra.

00:24:45.000 You could sense what that was about and what was that.

00:24:48.000 They were fighting sort of the forces of nihilism and materialism and destruction in the name of some greater Germany, you know. 0.97

00:24:57.000 And it was very effective. 0.87

00:24:59.000 And I mean, Nietzsche, well before anyone else realized it, he said, this thing's fallen apart.

00:25:05.000 And therefore we have to create our new values and create something new.

00:25:10.000 And I want to really focus on this word, the will.

00:25:13.000 Can you just take a moment?

00:25:15.000 Because this is something we've been talking about on our program, just kind of how conservatives don't always have the will to win.

00:25:20.000 Are we willing to act?

00:25:22.000 You know, on our program, we say, are we willing to enforce the southern border as a state?

00:25:26.000 Are we willing to do what's necessary?

00:25:29.000 Now, we might be dealing with different definitions of the same word, but can you talk about just generally in political philosophy, how charged that word, that phrase, the will is?

00:25:41.000 Well, it's extremely charged.

00:25:43.000 I mean, depending on which philosopher you're thinking about, it means different things to different people.

00:25:48.000 For Nietzsche, the will doesn't ultimately seek the truth.

00:25:53.000 It doesn't seek objectivity.

00:25:55.000 That is the mistake of previous philosophers.

00:25:58.000 The will isn't an instrument of reason that is designed to condition the passions towards some kind of moderation.

00:26:05.000 That assumes a certain kind of order of the soul, for example, moral virtue.

00:26:10.000 For Nietzsche, the will, he says, is essentially an irrational appetite for power.

00:26:16.000 So the will to power suggests that the will lacks power.

00:26:20.000 And what its natural inclination is, is to seek power.

00:26:24.000 So what it does is it orients our reason and our passions toward some sense of domination or power.

00:26:30.000 So for example, he even interprets somebody like Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who placed a great emphasis on the categorical imperative.

00:26:39.000 There you go.

00:26:39.000 Always had it the same way.

00:26:40.000 I don't mean to trigger any bad experience you may have had reading Kant.

00:26:44.000 No, thankfully, I've never read it.

00:26:46.000 I only took the Hillsdale online course, and that was more than enough for me.

00:26:50.000 You've had enough of Kant.

00:26:51.000 But I did remember that part.

00:26:53.000 So in Kant's case, for example, the will could assist our desire for a moral universe.

00:26:53.000 So there you go.

00:27:00.000 It can will a categorical or universal imperative, thou shalt not lie.

00:27:04.000 Nietzsche looks at that and says the will is not seeking any kind of objectivity like Kant is claiming or some kind of universal moral compass or direction.

00:27:15.000 What it's actually seeking is a kind of power.

00:27:17.000 So something like thou shalt not lie, Nietzsche again would apply the master slave instinct and ask the question, who would say such a thing, the master or the slave?

00:27:28.000 It's complicated because in genealogy of morals, he does associate lying with sort of a base soul because what it does is it reveals that you're operating from a position of weakness.

00:27:40.000 You only lie when somebody has power over you.

00:27:43.000 And you're honest when you can be autonomous.

00:27:46.000 And so he celebrates honesty as, again, as a measure of power and dishonesty as a measure of the lack of power, as opposed to merely seeking some kind of objective standard by which to judge human beings.

00:28:00.000 For Nietzsche, it always comes down to the position of the will.

00:28:03.000 Do you have power or do you not have power?

00:28:06.000 And that really is how many people in the modern American left and some people on the right, but mostly on the left, view their existence.

00:28:16.000 Are we in power?

00:28:18.000 Are we in control?

00:28:19.000 We know what we want.

00:28:20.000 Why don't we get it?

00:28:22.000 Can you try to connect the thread?

00:28:24.000 Maybe it's not there between Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

00:28:27.000 No, there is a thread.

00:28:28.000 And I'm glad you brought up the modern left because Nietzsche has the peculiar distinction of inspiring both the left and the right.

00:28:38.000 In the left, for example, the emphasis on power does come from Nietzsche.

00:28:43.000 Machiavelli never talks about power.

00:28:45.000 He talks about mastery.

00:28:47.000 He talks about ruling.

00:28:49.000 He talks about law and order.

00:28:50.000 Nietzsche is the one who makes power the central idea of morality.

00:28:55.000 So when people say, for example, that we have institutional racism and what those institutions are are an attempt to create a victim class and to dominate.

00:29:07.000 That's very Nietzschean.

00:29:08.000 I'm not saying that Nietzsche would agree with that, but you can see how it's derivative of this idea.

00:29:13.000 Totally.

00:29:14.000 And, you know, whereas Machiavelli, that's not really, that wouldn't even be a question.

00:29:19.000 The question is, does it produce law and order?

00:29:21.000 Does it produce acquisition?

00:29:22.000 Does it produce a good effect in war?

00:29:28.000 And new lands and like, you know, a good harvest.

00:29:33.000 He's not thinking in terms of these abstractions.

00:29:35.000 I mean, he's thinking in terms of what's good for the regime.

00:29:39.000 Whereas Nietzsche wants us to think in terms of, well, what are these moralities?

00:29:42.000 And all of them are a form of morality, including science or how we interpret science.

00:29:47.000 What are they actually saying about the authorities of our day?

00:29:50.000 Are we under a master morality or are we under a slave morality?

00:29:55.000 And he thinks that the slave morality is what's dominant in Europe.

00:29:59.000 And the problem with it, again, this is going back to genealogy of morals, is according to Nietzsche, slave morality has a secret source in resentment.

00:30:07.000 All of its morality is nothing more than resentment being vented through a moral outlet. 0.52

00:30:15.000 So the meek and shall inherit the earth.

00:30:17.000 Well, where did the strong and noble go? 0.99

00:30:18.000 Well, they go to hell.

00:30:20.000 So for Nietzsche, well, what then happens if the slave morality is victorious and manages then to essentially destroy the aristocracy, destroy pagan heroism? 0.77

00:30:29.000 If it's only negative, if it only emerges, in other words, in reaction to something that it hates, well, what happens when there's an absence of that?

00:30:38.000 He says the slave instinct can no longer be creative, and that's where you end up with this last man, this mediocrity with no real purpose or meaning anymore in its life because its entire existence and its morality rested on some kind of opposition of evil that it needed to destroy.

00:30:55.000 Well, once it's successful, it essentially brings about a state of just nihilism.

00:31:00.000 It's literally a kind of a nothingness.

00:31:03.000 And maybe you did this earlier, but can you just reinforce the best definition of nihilism?

00:31:08.000 Because I think that is too widely used sometimes.

00:31:12.000 So nihilism is this idea that there really is no meaning.

00:31:16.000 There's no meaning in nation.

00:31:17.000 There's no meaning in God.

00:31:19.000 That everything that human beings had always oriented themselves, all the tablets of good and evil of any people have been drained of any kind of meaning.

00:31:29.000 It's the idea that nothing really has any integrity, that love is not really real.

00:31:34.000 It's a power relation.

00:31:36.000 And so, for him, nihilism is not a condition that can breed any kind of longing, any kind of desire or any kind of incentive for something beyond just a here and now.

00:31:49.000 It's fundamentally rooted in an idea that there is no cosmic meaning in human existence at all.

00:31:55.000 And the difference with Nietzsche is, of course, that meaning can be generated from somebody like an Übermensch, a very rare, special person.

00:32:05.000 So, if there is no meaning, therefore, we need to try and create our own values and lift ourselves up to be superhuman.

00:32:14.000 And so, can you draw that connection then?

00:32:17.000 And as this is, you know, wonderfully, we're partnered with Hillsdale College, Charlie for Hillsdale.com.

00:32:23.000 Everyone should send their kids to college or at the very least take the online courses.

00:32:26.000 How the predominant view of the academy, not Hillsdale College, is deconstructionism, postmodernism.

00:32:33.000 Can you kind of walk us through how Nietzsche really led some of this along?

00:32:40.000 So, prior to this revolution, this transvaluation of values, to use Nietzsche's phrase, there was a belief that the humanities were a broad set of disciplines that have various portals through which a human being can enter and discover something objective about human life.

00:32:56.000 And we can be enriched by a wide variety of courses and disciplines.

00:33:01.000 But if you were suddenly told that there is no light at the end of any of those tunnels, that what you're essentially studying is just the power structures that produce those, as opposed to the paths towards some kind of self-knowledge, well, then you've essentially hollowed out the humanities.

00:33:20.000 So, if there's really no text out there in the world to read and to study, but only interpretations, well, then the humanities have nothing to tell us about what it means to be human.

00:33:30.000 And what the humanities have done for centuries now is essentially saw the branch off that they were sitting on.

00:33:37.000 And now they're, of course, scratching their heads, wondering why they are the ones who are getting gutted from the curriculum.

00:33:41.000 Well, by their own admission, there's nothing there to read other than just the peculiar hobby of their instructor.

00:33:48.000 So, once you lose this goal of reaching some kind of objectivity or, say, salvation, any incentive that would mark a genuine progress in your intellectual journey, what incentive is left for you to pursue it?

00:34:03.000 And so, you see, the decline of the humanities works in tandem with this sense, this, this, the onset of this nihilism.

00:34:12.000 And at Hillsdale, I learned when I was visiting, and I also heard this before, that wonder is the beginning of philosophy.

00:34:18.000 But if you believe it, there's nothing to anything, why even wonder?

00:34:21.000 Why even consideration?

00:34:23.000 That's right.

00:34:23.000 And wonder gets replaced with existential dread, because wonder at least presupposes that there's what do you mean by existential dread?

00:34:33.000 So, if there, if wisdom begins in wonder, the implication is that that wonder has some place to go.

00:34:40.000 It can have a guide and mentors.

00:34:42.000 So, what Virgil was to say, Dante in the divine comedy.

00:34:45.000 But if there is no objectivity, if there's nothing beyond wonder, then wonder can quickly become a sense of dread, anxiety.

00:34:53.000 All you've done is essentially liberated yourself from a set of prejudices and maybe national horizons that used to define your life.

00:35:01.000 But if there's nothing beyond them, what position are you in other than one of just existential anxiety?

00:35:08.000 You've lost whatever meaning.

00:35:10.000 And even though the previous prejudices may have just been illusions, well, now what do you have?

00:35:17.000 Do you see more and more American young people kind of suffering under a Nietzschean framework?

00:35:28.000 Do you see the damage that this has done?

00:35:30.000 I'm just talking non-academically, just generally.

00:35:33.000 I do.

00:35:34.000 I think this idea that you can reduce human relationships to just simply power is destructive because what you're essentially saying is that all institutions, whether they're marriage or whether like citizenship, Aristotle goes out of his way to define what a citizen is and he connects it ultimately to an activity of participating in government with real virtue. 0.93

00:35:58.000 But if you have this idea that everything is just power, well, then you can easily say, well, you just closed the door behind the last immigrant because it's all just about power. 0.70

00:36:07.000 So in other words, there's no real meaningful definition, say, for example, of what a citizen is. 0.98

00:36:11.000 It's just those who got in first got to define it and at the exclusion of everybody else.

00:36:16.000 Marriage, traditional marriage, doesn't have any real sacredness to it.

00:36:20.000 It's just the power of what was previously traditional.

00:36:24.000 But we've now redefined what is a traditional marriage.

00:36:26.000 And if you were to exclude people from that, that's also an expression of the reigning power structure.

00:36:33.000 And so it's deadly in the sense that there's not an institution or ideal that you couldn't apply it to.

00:36:42.000 And at the end of the day, just simply reduce it to some empty, hollow sort of moral halo that you've placed upon a power structure that you're just incentivized to keep in its place.

00:36:54.000 I see it with a lot of young people, students in high school and college, that they are not exposed to Nietzsche all the time, but his ideas are everywhere.

00:37:03.000 There is no meaning.

00:37:05.000 There is no truth.

00:37:07.000 Got to create it for yourself.

00:37:08.000 Puts a lot of burden on a 16-year-old to kind of do that.

00:37:13.000 I'm still growing up.

00:37:14.000 What was Nietzsche doing?

00:37:15.000 Not even the teens.

00:37:17.000 I mean, adults.

00:37:18.000 Many people are extremely uncomfortable saying that there is an actual wrong or right way of life, that the good life is something that's even objective.

00:37:26.000 Who am I to judge?

00:37:28.000 That relativism isn't just simply in young people.

00:37:31.000 Those young people become adults.

00:37:33.000 And in many ways, you lose cultural wars and battles when you don't have anything that you firmly believe in.

00:37:40.000 Totally.

00:37:42.000 But the left believes in power.

00:37:44.000 And so at least they can galvanize behind that and then go after whatever perceived or real institution that they believe is creating some kind of injustice.

00:37:53.000 It's everybody else who's sort of willy-nilly about it.

00:37:58.000 I don't know what the right way of life is.

00:38:00.000 Who am I to judge?

00:38:01.000 And that creates, it saps the spiritedness necessary to defend any way of life.

00:38:07.000 And just from a personal level, it makes your existence less enjoyable and more confusing and chaotic.

00:38:15.000 I have a couple remaining questions.

00:38:17.000 What was Nietzsche's view of pleasure?

00:38:20.000 Because would he say that that is a desirable outcome?

00:38:26.000 Or is power higher in whatever hierarchy he designed than pleasure?

00:38:30.000 Creativity for Nietzsche is higher than power.

00:38:32.000 The ultimate manifestation of power ought to be creativity.

00:38:36.000 In other words, the human being who steps into the fray, steps into the nihilistic culture and has the creativity and the will behind it to be able to create meaning for modern man where there isn't one.

00:38:49.000 Pleasure, he's quite critical of.

00:38:50.000 He's also critical of, say, Rousseau's sentimentalism and romanticism.

00:38:54.000 He thinks that pleasure is the way in which modernity saps the will and the strength of people.

00:39:01.000 It's somewhat like Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus lands in the land of the lotus eaters.

00:39:06.000 They're very peaceful people.

00:39:08.000 They don't harm you physically, but what they do is they give you an opium-like kind of drug, and it looks harmless because it just looks like you're just experiencing a pleasant sensation.

00:39:18.000 But it turns out, according to Homer, that that's the most dangerous place his men landed at because they started to forget about home.

00:39:25.000 They lost the capacity to think about the future and to think about their families and to think about their duties as soldiers and to live in the inebriation of their senses.

00:39:34.000 Nietzsche is very much Homeric in that regard, that pleasure is the secret drug.

00:39:39.000 It's the opiate of the masses in an age of egalitarianism.

00:39:43.000 It's a way of keeping people emasculated and disincentivized from wanting to do anything beyond just the immediacy of their sensations.

00:39:52.000 One example of Nietzschean philosophy that shocked America to the core, I think it was in the 1920s when two University of Chicago students, Leopold and Loeb, studied Nietzsche.

00:40:04.000 And how did it end?

00:40:06.000 I think they wanted to see if they were beyond good and evil.

00:40:06.000 Not well.

00:40:09.000 And I believe that the passage that really inspired them was the pale criminal and thus big Zarathustra.

00:40:16.000 In that work, there's a criminal who hangs his head in shame of having been caught.

00:40:21.000 There and in other places in Nietzsche's work, Machieu, sorry, Freudian's lip, Nietzsche, criticizes the criminal who can't go beyond his deed, meaning to kill with a complete clear conscience, like the beast of prey that he talks about in Genealogy of Morals.

00:40:37.000 And so you have, for example, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Rostolnikov, he wants to kill a pawnbroker that nobody likes to see if he can actually kill and go beyond the pang of the conscience.

00:40:50.000 He's testing to see to what extent there really is a law written across the heart.

00:40:55.000 And so he does this thought experiment.

00:40:57.000 At first, he justifies it on utilitarian grounds.

00:40:59.000 He says, well, nobody likes her anyway.

00:41:01.000 I can be a hero for all of those who are oppressed by this poor, unlikable pawnbroker.

00:41:06.000 But then his conscience gets the better of him.

00:41:08.000 Whereas Dostoevsky looks at that as a sign of health, that that shows that there really is that the conscience isn't some kind of artificial experience we feel when we trespass.

00:41:21.000 Nietzsche is quite critical of that view and says, no, the conscience shows that the criminal was not able to go beyond good and evil, because the conscience, for Nietzsche, is the secret weapon the weak use to punish the strong who are willing by nature to want to dominate.

00:41:36.000 Let me give you an example.

00:41:37.000 It's kind of complicated.

00:41:39.000 Imagine, for example, if you can't physically defend yourself against someone stronger than you, you can't harm them physically.

00:41:46.000 You can harm, you can get them to harm themselves by turning their own power against them.

00:41:51.000 How so?

00:41:52.000 If you teach them power is bad and all they can know is this impulse to be powerful, what are they going to think about themselves?

00:41:59.000 They're going to have guilt.

00:42:01.000 They're going to have a bad conscience about the very thing that they are.

00:42:04.000 You can't punish the rich.

00:42:07.000 You can get them to punish themselves by telling them it's a privilege.

00:42:07.000 They're powerful.

00:42:11.000 And so what you have is so what ends up happening is I can get you to punish yourself.

00:42:17.000 I don't have to lift a finger.

00:42:18.000 I just have to repeat enough that wealth is bad, that privilege is bad.

00:42:23.000 So what the pale criminal and what the psychology of the criminal is in Nietzsche is what is really the status of the conscience?

00:42:30.000 Is it real or not?

00:42:31.000 For Dostoevsky, it is.

00:42:32.000 And Raskolnikov wasn't able to go beyond it.

00:42:35.000 And he had to come to terms with a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a human being. 0.64

00:42:40.000 In Nietzsche's case, the conscience is just an artificial invention of a slave morality designed to put that blonde beast of prey back into his cage where he will then lacerate himself with the sense of guilt about his power or whatever perceived privilege. 0.82

00:42:57.000 And that's how you get a dominant class to harm itself. 0.93

00:43:01.000 That would explain a lot if he was right.

00:43:06.000 But he's definitely onto something because I see that it perplexes me when I see people that seemingly enjoy like the scene.

00:43:14.000 So take a power, label it as bad, and those who have that power will now can only wield it with a really bad, guilty conscience.

00:43:24.000 And it has to go somewhere, according to Nietzsche.

00:43:26.000 And where it's going to go, since it can't go outwards anymore with a clear conscience, it's going to be internalized and turned inward where you're going to start punishing yourself.

00:43:35.000 And every time you punish yourself, you think you're actually making progress because you're harming what you believe is evil.

00:43:40.000 So it's essentially a form of self-inflicted suicide, harm.

00:43:43.000 So it's a kind of psychological suicide.

00:43:47.000 You ever see the Da Vinci Code, the guy that beats himself, is an example of that, I think, far too often.

00:43:53.000 Let me ask you, what would Nietzsche say if someone says, well, what's the point in living?

00:43:59.000 That's a great question.

00:44:01.000 Well, many philosophers have raised that question, Camus being one of them.

00:44:04.000 Why not commit suicide?

00:44:06.000 I think for Nietzsche, there's too much opportunity for the right kind of soul.

00:44:12.000 Well, actually, in Tuspik Zarathustra, he said most people simply could, and we wouldn't miss out on anything, and they wouldn't miss out on any meaning in their lives anyway.

00:44:21.000 Their lives are a walking death anyway.

00:44:24.000 For Nietzsche, though, there are rare, increasingly rare opportunities for great-souled men to actually lift human beings from this state of nihilism.

00:44:35.000 And the only thing that would make life worth living, according to him, where he has a passage in Thusbek Zarathustra, who deserves to have a true monument upon their death?

00:44:43.000 Those who've actually achieved some kind of greatness.

00:44:45.000 Everybody else, he says, were just a footnote in history.

00:44:49.000 So it is a good question.

00:44:50.000 But he would say that if you have the capacity and longing for greatness and you have the psychological and philosophical tools that he thinks he's providing, then life is worth living because it gives you the tableau upon which you can paint a new horizon for our civilization.

00:45:05.000 That's what he thinks ultimately is the root of life.

00:45:09.000 This is where this is why you get school shooters that are saying, I'm either going to kill myself or kill others. 0.72

00:45:17.000 Or bring everyone else down with me.

00:45:18.000 And that's Nietzsche would say that is a classic example of nihilism, the sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness.

00:45:25.000 Now, Nietzsche, of course, doesn't think he's creating a culture of hopelessness.

00:45:31.000 In his mind, he's thinking that Zarathustra, a work like Zarathustra, can inspire perhaps a generation and ultimately a leader that can create this new hierarchy, this new aristocracy that recognizes that the threats to greatness, science, democracy, sensuality and whatnot, and wage a war against it in the name of greatness.

00:45:55.000 In the name of greatness.

00:45:57.000 Let's close with this.

00:45:59.000 Did he die sane?

00:46:01.000 You know, apparently not.

00:46:03.000 I mean, apparently he had contracted syphilis, but I've even read some people say that that actually never happened.

00:46:09.000 That was essentially something that someone invented to discredit him.

00:46:13.000 I don't have an opinion on it.

00:46:15.000 But I don't think he wrote any of his books in an insane capacity.

00:46:19.000 I mean, I think there's serious probity in his work.

00:46:22.000 Well, at the end of his life, maybe you can help unpack me the multiverse theory that he put forward, where he said that you might have multiple existences.

00:46:33.000 I'm not very well versed in this, but I've heard critics saying he was basically losing his mind at the last couple of years of his life.

00:46:41.000 That might be true. 1.00

00:46:42.000 That might be true.

00:46:43.000 I mean, my knowledge of Nietzsche is essentially limited to his works.

00:46:48.000 And I never detected as hairy and scary as some of his ideas can be, I always detected a mind probing, feeling his way through certain problems and not simply just the ravings of a lunatic or something like that.

00:47:02.000 He's too powerful to just simply be dismissed as insane.

00:47:06.000 At the end of the day, his philosophy might just completely be wrong, but that certainly wouldn't make him the caricature of a madman that you often hear about.

00:47:16.000 That is, definitely hear a lot about that.

00:47:18.000 The last, last question is applied to today, 2021.

00:47:23.000 What the good, the bad, the ugly, how do we apply all of this to what we're living through right now?

00:47:29.000 I think where he can be helpful is if people can see that when they're under attack by the media, by popular culture, quite often they just want to get along and they'll take it at face value.

00:47:41.000 What Nietzsche is really good at is get you to look past the morality and say, who gains from this?

00:47:48.000 What's the instinct behind this that wants me to inflict a wound on myself?

00:47:53.000 What do I get out of it?

00:47:54.000 How is that good for me?

00:47:56.000 And so where I think he can be liberating in an age that he ironically helped to shape in an odd way is to turn it against those who want to attack you and get you to attack whatever perceived privilege you might have or what have you and turn the tables and say, well, if morality, as you claim, is really just subjective, what does that tell me about what your morality is about me?

00:48:18.000 And there you can kind of defang it, so to speak.

00:48:22.000 I think that's really wise.

00:48:24.000 When I tell people all the time, when the New York Times comes after you or someone comes after you, it's not a debate.

00:48:30.000 It's a power conflict.

00:48:32.000 It's war.

00:48:33.000 That's right.

00:48:35.000 And that is when we are building civil society amongst people that share a rights-based view of existence, that's a different deal, but not if the other side...

00:48:45.000 The rights-based alternative isn't about power.

00:48:47.000 It's about recognizing that we have fundamental rights and there's no legitimate argument for coercion.

00:48:55.000 So that would be the alternative.

00:48:57.000 I mean, in many ways, Locke would be a moderate middle ground between, say, what we are experiencing today and someone like, say, Machiavelli.

00:49:06.000 So I think you're right to close on that remark about natural right.

00:49:09.000 Very good.

00:49:10.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com, Charlie FRHillsdale.com.

00:49:10.000 Thank you, my friend.

00:49:13.000 We're glad to have you back.

00:49:14.000 Dr. Abib, really appreciate it.

00:49:15.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:49:16.000 Have a good weekend.

00:49:16.000 Take care.

00:49:17.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:49:18.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.

00:49:21.000 God bless you guys and get involved with Turning Point USA, TPUSA.com.

00:49:24.000 Thanks so much.

00:49:28.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 09, 2021

Is God Dead? Making Sense of Nietzsche with Dr. Khalil Habib

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