Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College joins me to talk about the existential crisis facing the West and why God is dead. This is a thoughtful conversation that you might want to listen to once, twice, or three times.
00:00:38.000I talk with Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College about the existential crisis facing the West.
00:00:44.000This is a thoughtful conversation that you might want to listen to once or twice or three times.
00:00:49.000And it's all made possible thanks to the beacon of the North, Hillsdale College.
00:00:54.000I was just in Hillsdale, Michigan, broadcasting live from Hillsdale College.
00:00:58.000And I could tell you, this college is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
00:01:01.000The students were all incredibly wise, polite, magnanimous, curious, willing to discuss big ideas.
00:01:10.000I 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.
00:01:20.000Good teachers matter and good ideas matter.
00:01:23.000Hillsdale College is all about preserving the American idea, preserving the American nation, defending truth, and it's what college is meant to be.
00:01:55.000In 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.
00:02:18.000We talked about Aristotle, Socrates, and many more.
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00:02:32.000Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, How to Lead a Good Life.
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00:05:49.000Welcome 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.
00:05:58.000You guys can find all things Hillsdale, charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:06:07.000So 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.
00:06:42.000And where did that question come from?
00:06:44.000Well, it's meant to be a paradox because as anyone knows, God, by any reasonable definition, is eternal.
00:06:50.000So the idea that God is dead is just a paradoxical statement.
00:06:54.000And I think Nietzsche is intending to get us to reflect on what he means by that.
00:06:59.000And what he means by that is he's dead in the hearts and the minds of Europeans.
00:07:04.000And what that essentially suggests is that the belief in God or the existence of God rests on the opinions of the faithful.
00:07:11.000And in the same context in which you see that phrase uttered, Nietzsche says that God has been replaced by the newspaper.
00:07:19.000And 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.
00:07:50.000And he thinks that that diminishes man's longing for greatness and ultimately impoverishes civil society.
00:08:10.000On the one hand, what he was mourning was man's capacity to long for something beyond the here and now.
00:08:17.000Nietzsche is very famous for always thinking about the future, beyond good and evil, a prelude to a philosophy of the future.
00:08:24.000Zarathustra thinks about things in terms of the future.
00:08:27.000The 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.
00:08:43.000And 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.
00:08:55.000And he thought that these were an impoverishment of what man once was and could be.
00:09:00.000So, he does appreciate certain aspects of the past where he thinks that we had great heroes that we could look up to.
00:09:07.000There was a hierarchy in society that established what he calls a pathos of distance, meaning an inequality that allowed opportunity for greatness to shine.
00:09:17.000And what's happening is this diminishing expectation of any kind of ambition.
00:09:22.000So, talk for a second here about the significance of these writings.
00:09:28.000This 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.
00:09:37.000He really influenced the modern world as we know it, did he not?
00:09:44.000Some would argue that he was an inspiration to the Nazis and National Socialism.
00:09:49.000Stephen Hicks, for example, has a documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was based upon a book that he wrote.
00:09:55.000Some, of course, denied that Nietzsche would have anything to do with such a movement.
00:09:59.000Then there are those who can just simply identify our easygoing nihilism or relativism as ultimately derivative of Nietzsche's thinking.
00:10:09.000For 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.
00:10:30.000And 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.
00:10:40.000And 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 Ãœbermensch.
00:10:50.000And 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.
00:11:03.000And if you read that speech, it sounds a lot like Nietzsche's ideas.
00:11:07.000So, let's work our way backwards from there.
00:11:10.000And 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?
00:11:28.000He was obviously a German philosopher.
00:11:30.000He died in 1900 and at a very young age was teaching philosophy.
00:11:35.000He was trained as a philologist, which means essentially somebody who studies languages and tries to think about their meaning.
00:11:42.000And 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.
00:11:49.000And 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.
00:11:57.000He believed that Europe in particular has lost its capacity and meaning and any kind of sense of identity.
00:12:04.000And 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.
00:12:19.000For 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.
00:12:44.000So what motivated him to do that was to inspire a taste for greatness in an age of what he believed was mediocrity and egalitarianism.
00:12:54.000So 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.
00:13:06.000So Beyond Good and Evil, for example, the first chapter is entitled On the Prejudices of the Philosophers.
00:13:11.000So 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.
00:13:24.000Evil, which he associates with Christian morality and the impulse to want to punish that which you are resentful toward.
00:13:32.000And so it's a combination of a critique of Christianity, Platonism, philosophy, and religion.
00:13:40.000But 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.
00:13:52.000And a good man punishes his enemies and does good to his friends.
00:13:57.000And 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.
00:14:05.000That's why it's a bit tricky to say that he inspired the Nazis.
00:14:10.000Of course, there's clearly very vivid images that the Nazis appropriated.
00:14:15.000For 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.
00:14:28.000In 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.
00:14:40.000And he gives us several names of cultures or races that he believed had this.
00:14:45.000He says the Arabs, the Japanese, the Aryans, for example.
00:14:49.000And so you could see how in certain hands that could be used as very powerful propaganda.
00:14:54.000So he is somewhat responsible, at least in a sense of just being reckless.
00:14:58.000Well, 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?
00:15:09.000Which 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.
00:15:22.000And 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.
00:15:29.000Before I go any further, can you comment on that?
00:15:33.000As Nietzsche said, not only is God dead, but we have murdered him.
00:15:37.000Well, some would argue that for Nietzsche, God essentially died in modernity.
00:15:42.000The combination of science, sort of a crass materialism, the belief that what is real is what is empirical.
00:15:49.000Well, you know, for Nietzsche, God is really an ideal, among other things.
00:15:54.000And 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.
00:16:03.000And 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.
00:16:16.000And 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.
00:16:28.000Science and democracy are our two real authorities now, and Nietzsche's going after them with gusto.
00:16:34.000In some ways, he wasn't wrong because religion has struggled since the advent of modernity.
00:16:51.000Just 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.
00:17:12.000And I think what he's really good at is psychology.
00:17:14.000I mean, I think Nietzsche would probably argue that he's a psychologist first and foremost.
00:17:19.000And what I mean by that is he doesn't take metaphysics or any moral ideal on its face, on its face value.
00:17:25.000He wants to know who is the person behind this morality.
00:17:30.000So if it's true that morality is relative and it's subjective, then there's no rational reason to choose one morality over another.
00:17:38.000So the question that he then wants to raise is, well, why choose, for example, toleration as a value as opposed to intoleration?
00:17:45.000And what he ultimately does is he wants to reduce the world to this binary between a master morality and a slave morality.
00:17:53.000So 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.
00:18:07.000But if you're a master, why would you embrace that?
00:18:09.000Because embracing it would essentially mean crippling your desire to have a triumph of the will.
00:18:16.000So 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.
00:18:25.000Well, Nietzsche wants to remind you that that doesn't follow.
00:18:28.000If they're all equal, why not choose intoleration?
00:18:33.000So what he wants us to do is look past good and evil.
00:18:37.000He wants us to look past that and to look at what he believes ultimately motivates it.
00:18:41.000And it's always a human person who, unknown to themselves, is writing their secret confession onto the world in the form of morality.
00:18:50.000So what this really translates into is all morality is warfare.
00:18:55.000No 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.
00:19:07.000And so a slave morality could only exist in a world that's quote tolerant, egalitarian, recognizes the meek as opposed to the strong.
00:19:18.000And 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.
00:19:26.000But 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.
00:20:50.000He then went further and said, well, now we have to create our own values.
00:20:54.000And 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.
00:21:35.000Its primary focus is on destroying the prejudices of the philosophers, you know, trying to push nationalism out and make way for some new horizon.
00:21:45.000Zarathustra would be sort of more of a constructive work.
00:21:48.000Okay, so it necessarily follows his other works.
00:21:52.000And in Zarathustra, what he essentially wants, the Ãœbermensch simply means the overman.
00:21:57.000It can be translated as Superman, but it's more accurately overman.
00:22:05.000And essentially, in that work, over the nihilism that has engulfed Europe.
00:22:10.000And so he has this image of a tightrope walker who stretches a rope across an abyss.
00:22:15.000And he wants to cross it, meaning he wants to carry civilization over this abyss, but he falls and dies.
00:22:21.000He doesn't have the spirit necessary to lift Europe up.
00:22:26.000And so what the Ãœbermensch is designed to invoke or inspire are men who see the problem of modern Europe as essentially nihilism.
00:22:37.000There's nothing meaningful left in man's life anymore.
00:22:40.000I 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.
00:22:50.000The 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.
00:23:01.000And 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.
00:23:14.000And so how would this idea of the Ãœbermensch apply to kind of our life today?
00:23:20.000Who would be trying to believe that we need to create the overman?
00:23:24.000Are these the people that are playing in scientific experiments or is it just more of a thought exercise?
00:23:33.000I 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.
00:23:47.000He didn't want anything like a traditional aristocracy or monarchy.
00:23:51.000He wanted a new form of aristocracy that was built upon the insights of his philosophy, that what you're ultimately celebrating is human greatness.
00:24:02.000You'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.
00:24:11.000And that is the great man, the poet philosopher, who's somewhat like a legislator.
00:24:18.000And 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.
00:24:32.000And the modern world just simply doesn't offer that for them.
00:25:22.000You know, on our program, we say, are we willing to enforce the southern border as a state?
00:25:26.000Are we willing to do what's necessary?
00:25:29.000Now, 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?
00:25:55.000That is the mistake of previous philosophers.
00:25:58.000The will isn't an instrument of reason that is designed to condition the passions towards some kind of moderation.
00:26:05.000That assumes a certain kind of order of the soul, for example, moral virtue.
00:26:10.000For Nietzsche, the will, he says, is essentially an irrational appetite for power.
00:26:16.000So the will to power suggests that the will lacks power.
00:26:20.000And what its natural inclination is, is to seek power.
00:26:24.000So what it does is it orients our reason and our passions toward some sense of domination or power.
00:26:30.000So for example, he even interprets somebody like Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who placed a great emphasis on the categorical imperative.
00:27:00.000It can will a categorical or universal imperative, thou shalt not lie.
00:27:04.000Nietzsche 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.
00:27:15.000What it's actually seeking is a kind of power.
00:27:17.000So 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?
00:27:28.000It'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.
00:27:40.000You only lie when somebody has power over you.
00:27:43.000And you're honest when you can be autonomous.
00:27:46.000And 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.
00:28:00.000For Nietzsche, it always comes down to the position of the will.
00:28:03.000Do you have power or do you not have power?
00:28:06.000And 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.
00:28:50.000Nietzsche is the one who makes power the central idea of morality.
00:28:55.000So 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.
00:29:28.000And new lands and like, you know, a good harvest.
00:29:33.000He's not thinking in terms of these abstractions.
00:29:35.000I mean, he's thinking in terms of what's good for the regime.
00:29:39.000Whereas Nietzsche wants us to think in terms of, well, what are these moralities?
00:29:42.000And all of them are a form of morality, including science or how we interpret science.
00:29:47.000What are they actually saying about the authorities of our day?
00:29:50.000Are we under a master morality or are we under a slave morality?
00:29:55.000And he thinks that the slave morality is what's dominant in Europe.
00:29:59.000And 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.
00:30:07.000All of its morality is nothing more than resentment being vented through a moral outlet.
00:30:15.000So the meek and shall inherit the earth.
00:30:17.000Well, where did the strong and noble go?
00:30:20.000So for Nietzsche, well, what then happens if the slave morality is victorious and manages then to essentially destroy the aristocracy, destroy pagan heroism?
00:30:29.000If 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?
00:30:38.000He 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.
00:30:55.000Well, once it's successful, it essentially brings about a state of just nihilism.
00:31:00.000It's literally a kind of a nothingness.
00:31:03.000And maybe you did this earlier, but can you just reinforce the best definition of nihilism?
00:31:08.000Because I think that is too widely used sometimes.
00:31:12.000So nihilism is this idea that there really is no meaning.
00:31:19.000That 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.
00:31:29.000It's the idea that nothing really has any integrity, that love is not really real.
00:31:36.000And 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.
00:31:49.000It's fundamentally rooted in an idea that there is no cosmic meaning in human existence at all.
00:31:55.000And the difference with Nietzsche is, of course, that meaning can be generated from somebody like an Ãœbermensch, a very rare, special person.
00:32:05.000So, if there is no meaning, therefore, we need to try and create our own values and lift ourselves up to be superhuman.
00:32:14.000And so, can you draw that connection then?
00:32:17.000And as this is, you know, wonderfully, we're partnered with Hillsdale College, Charlie for Hillsdale.com.
00:32:23.000Everyone should send their kids to college or at the very least take the online courses.
00:32:26.000How the predominant view of the academy, not Hillsdale College, is deconstructionism, postmodernism.
00:32:33.000Can you kind of walk us through how Nietzsche really led some of this along?
00:32:40.000So, 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.
00:32:56.000And we can be enriched by a wide variety of courses and disciplines.
00:33:01.000But 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.
00:33:20.000So, 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.
00:33:30.000And what the humanities have done for centuries now is essentially saw the branch off that they were sitting on.
00:33:37.000And now they're, of course, scratching their heads, wondering why they are the ones who are getting gutted from the curriculum.
00:33:41.000Well, by their own admission, there's nothing there to read other than just the peculiar hobby of their instructor.
00:33:48.000So, 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?
00:34:03.000And so, you see, the decline of the humanities works in tandem with this sense, this, this, the onset of this nihilism.
00:34:12.000And at Hillsdale, I learned when I was visiting, and I also heard this before, that wonder is the beginning of philosophy.
00:34:18.000But if you believe it, there's nothing to anything, why even wonder?
00:35:34.000I 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.
00:35:58.000But 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.
00:36:07.000So in other words, there's no real meaningful definition, say, for example, of what a citizen is.
00:36:11.000It's just those who got in first got to define it and at the exclusion of everybody else.
00:36:16.000Marriage, traditional marriage, doesn't have any real sacredness to it.
00:36:20.000It's just the power of what was previously traditional.
00:36:24.000But we've now redefined what is a traditional marriage.
00:36:26.000And if you were to exclude people from that, that's also an expression of the reigning power structure.
00:36:33.000And so it's deadly in the sense that there's not an institution or ideal that you couldn't apply it to.
00:36:42.000And 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.
00:36:54.000I 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.
00:37:18.000Many 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.
00:37:44.000And 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.
00:37:53.000It's everybody else who's sort of willy-nilly about it.
00:37:58.000I don't know what the right way of life is.
00:38:17.000What was Nietzsche's view of pleasure?
00:38:20.000Because would he say that that is a desirable outcome?
00:38:26.000Or is power higher in whatever hierarchy he designed than pleasure?
00:38:30.000Creativity for Nietzsche is higher than power.
00:38:32.000The ultimate manifestation of power ought to be creativity.
00:38:36.000In 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.
00:39:08.000They 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.
00:39:18.000But it turns out, according to Homer, that that's the most dangerous place his men landed at because they started to forget about home.
00:39:25.000They 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.
00:39:34.000Nietzsche is very much Homeric in that regard, that pleasure is the secret drug.
00:39:39.000It's the opiate of the masses in an age of egalitarianism.
00:39:43.000It's a way of keeping people emasculated and disincentivized from wanting to do anything beyond just the immediacy of their sensations.
00:39:52.000One 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.
00:40:09.000And I believe that the passage that really inspired them was the pale criminal and thus big Zarathustra.
00:40:16.000In that work, there's a criminal who hangs his head in shame of having been caught.
00:40:21.000There 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.
00:40:37.000And 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.
00:40:50.000He's testing to see to what extent there really is a law written across the heart.
00:40:55.000And so he does this thought experiment.
00:40:57.000At first, he justifies it on utilitarian grounds.
00:40:59.000He says, well, nobody likes her anyway.
00:41:01.000I can be a hero for all of those who are oppressed by this poor, unlikable pawnbroker.
00:41:06.000But then his conscience gets the better of him.
00:41:08.000Whereas 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.
00:41:21.000Nietzsche 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.
00:42:32.000And Raskolnikov wasn't able to go beyond it.
00:42:35.000And he had to come to terms with a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a human being.
00:42:40.000In 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.
00:42:57.000And that's how you get a dominant class to harm itself.
00:43:01.000That would explain a lot if he was right.
00:43:06.000But he's definitely onto something because I see that it perplexes me when I see people that seemingly enjoy like the scene.
00:43:14.000So 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.
00:43:24.000And it has to go somewhere, according to Nietzsche.
00:43:26.000And 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.
00:43:35.000And every time you punish yourself, you think you're actually making progress because you're harming what you believe is evil.
00:43:40.000So it's essentially a form of self-inflicted suicide, harm.
00:43:43.000So it's a kind of psychological suicide.
00:43:47.000You ever see the Da Vinci Code, the guy that beats himself, is an example of that, I think, far too often.
00:43:53.000Let me ask you, what would Nietzsche say if someone says, well, what's the point in living?
00:44:06.000I think for Nietzsche, there's too much opportunity for the right kind of soul.
00:44:12.000Well, 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.
00:44:21.000Their lives are a walking death anyway.
00:44:24.000For Nietzsche, though, there are rare, increasingly rare opportunities for great-souled men to actually lift human beings from this state of nihilism.
00:44:35.000And 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?
00:44:43.000Those who've actually achieved some kind of greatness.
00:44:45.000Everybody else, he says, were just a footnote in history.
00:44:50.000But 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.
00:45:05.000That's what he thinks ultimately is the root of life.
00:45:09.000This is where this is why you get school shooters that are saying, I'm either going to kill myself or kill others.
00:45:18.000And that's Nietzsche would say that is a classic example of nihilism, the sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness.
00:45:25.000Now, Nietzsche, of course, doesn't think he's creating a culture of hopelessness.
00:45:31.000In 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.
00:46:15.000But I don't think he wrote any of his books in an insane capacity.
00:46:19.000I mean, I think there's serious probity in his work.
00:46:22.000Well, 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.
00:46:33.000I'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.
00:46:43.000I mean, my knowledge of Nietzsche is essentially limited to his works.
00:46:48.000And 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.
00:47:02.000He's too powerful to just simply be dismissed as insane.
00:47:06.000At 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.
00:47:16.000That is, definitely hear a lot about that.
00:47:18.000The last, last question is applied to today, 2021.
00:47:23.000What the good, the bad, the ugly, how do we apply all of this to what we're living through right now?
00:47:29.000I 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.
00:47:41.000What Nietzsche is really good at is get you to look past the morality and say, who gains from this?
00:47:48.000What's the instinct behind this that wants me to inflict a wound on myself?
00:47:56.000And 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?
00:48:18.000And there you can kind of defang it, so to speak.
00:48:35.000And 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...
00:48:45.000The rights-based alternative isn't about power.
00:48:47.000It's about recognizing that we have fundamental rights and there's no legitimate argument for coercion.
00:48:57.000I mean, in many ways, Locke would be a moderate middle ground between, say, what we are experiencing today and someone like, say, Machiavelli.
00:49:06.000So I think you're right to close on that remark about natural right.