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Ep 82 - Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
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Benjamin McAvoy
Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime. With Hardcore Literature. Reading the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is like accessing the dark arts. It's like black magic, sorcery for the mind and soul, dangerous in the wrong hands, hazardous when misinterpreted and misunderstood. And I would contest that there is no writer more consistently and drastically misunderstood than Nietzsche. His philosophy can be fatal when abused or confused. But in the right hands, it is a powerful source of strength. His writings can offer liberation. They can help you forge your way heroically in a wild and chaotic world. A world in which the old systems of meaning have fallen into the abyss. But armed with Nietzsche's philosophizing, we can tightrope, walk or indeed dance over that abyss. We can reach the highest summit and in a time when everyone is saying no, we can let out a life affirming. Yes. Nietzsche teaches us how to look into that abyss, warning us that as we do so, the abyss looks back into us. Nietzsche teaches us how to fight monsters, whilst also warning us in doing so, not to become a monster ourselves. Nietzsche teaches us that whatever doesn't kill us only makes us stronger. He puts a sword in our hands and he sharpens it against his own, calling us his friend and his enemy in a single breath. And he sends us out on our hero's journey, giving us the courage and fortitude to accept our call to adventure. Today we're talking about Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. And we are very lucky to have this work as just four years later, in 1889. Nietzsche, who had suffered from sickliness, ill health and relentless intermittent mental afflictions all of his life, though indeed when he penned his master works, he was always enormously and fully looted. Nietzsche, four years later, would collapse and descend into madness. It's perhaps one of the first things people who know the name of Nietzsche, but not much else about him, might think of when they hear his name. Indeed, when one says Nietzsche, you probably envision a man with a very bushy moustache and a noble, pensive look on his face. And if you know a little bit of the substance of his writings, you likely think of the concept of the Ubermensch, the Overman or the Superman. You almost certainly think of the iconic phrase God is dead. And perhaps you think of the will to power. Some may even think of the idea of eternal recurrence. We will be discussing all of those concepts today. But you probably also think of the famous, potentially apocryphal anecdote of his breakdown in Turin, Italy. The story goes that Nietzsche, at the age of 44, after a life spent thinking through the darkest elements of human nature and the nature of the world, the problems of existence and meaning, in about as rigorous and ruthless a way as any philosopher ever has done or will do. Nietzsche witnessed a horse being whipped in the street and after throwing his arms around the animal in order to protect it, collapsed. After this event, his correspondence, his letters became incoherent and his cognitive abilities rapidly declined, such that he needed to spend the remaining 11 years of his life under the care of his mother and his sister. He was completely mentally incapacitated until his death in 1900. There's much mystery and speculation surrounding Nietzsche's collapse, and I'm not here to go into academic gossip or rumour, as it is his philosophy that we're concerned with. And there's nothing mad about his philosophy, though he knew that people would consider it so and he embraced that. But suffice it to say, theories range from Nietzsche having been a syphilitic, and perhaps that was the cause of his mental decline and collapse, to having a neurological condition inherited from his father. Many think he had a brain tumour. Some believe he could have suffered from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and he wouldn't have been the first deep thinker and creative to suffer from that, whilst others believe that overwork and exhaustion and a lifetime spent grappling with the deepest concerns of the human condition is what sent him over the edge. Of course, it could well have been a combination of all of those things, but when he was penning Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his genius and his joy and his faculties were fully there. Nietzsche wrote this work in a flourishing of joy, in a burst of creative artistic inspiration. There are four parts to this work, and the first three exploded across the page in 10 day bursts. This was his favourite of all of his works because of how much fun he had writing it. And if you read it, I think you can tell, subtitled, A book for everybody and nobody. Nietzsche would refer to Zara Zarathustra as both a work of poetry and a fifth Gospel or something for which there is as yet no name. He said it was far and away the most serious and also the gayest of my products and accessible to everyone. He said this to his publisher to alleviate some of his concerns, because the publisher had said that his works weren't written for the general public. And anyone who knows Nietzsche knows well. Yes, that's certainly true. And Thus Spoke Zarathustra, despite Nietzsche's assertion, was not written for the general public either. He had previously been mentally unwell, but he had a period of recovery in which he sublimated his artistic and philosophic will into this lyrical prose poem. Philosophic prophecy. Not only that, but his major thoughts all came together and were represented powerfully in a work of extraordinary unity. And this is why I believe that this work is a great one for those starting with Nietzsche. Now, not everyone would agree with that. However, Nietzsche himself said that readers would necessarily have to go to the rest of his works in order to understand this one. I see Thus Spoke Zarathustra as like a map or a distillation. It contains his most important beliefs, but they are not elaborated fully in the way one would expect of a philosopher. They are rather clothed in fiction. It is imaginative literature that carries the message Nietzsche would pen his tracts Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals right after Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to expound upon the philosophies contained within it. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is also deeply symbolic and deliberately difficult and obscure and open to misinterpretation. But as we have read poetry together deeply, and we have learned to wrangle with symbolism and analogy and allegory, parable and metaphor over the course of our reading of the great books. Then I think, what's stopping us from drinking deep from this work? I think we're up to the task. But if this is your first reading of this work, you may find that after our discussion today, going to the book and reading it at your own pace really opens up the philosophy of Nietzsche in an exciting way. I hope our discussion today will make this book break open for you. What I've always loved about Nietzsche is that which would easily get him banned off social media if he were alive today. The most controversial rhetoricians and orators and influencers of today have Nothing on this 19th century professor of philology. I'll preface and caveat this discussion by saying that I personally diverge with Nietzsche's beliefs on many things, like with our Machiavelli discussion. You're Going to hear some wild things in this discussion, so don't shoot the messenger, Take what you like, reject what you don't. You know my opinions on most things already, so you can likely already see where I align and where I diverge. But. But this is not about me, this is about Nietzsche. And if Nietzsche had been alive in the age of tweets, he would be one of the most censored and controversial men. He's a great troll. And remember, when you read him, he is writing in the 19th century, and if what he says sounds controversial today, then I assure you it would have been even more so when he was writing. Although what was controversial and what wasn't has definitely flipped. Some things are even more controversial today, like his thoughts on men and women, whilst other things, like how he takes Christianity apart, would have definitely ruffled quite a few more feathers back in the day. I first read Nietzsche when I was very young. I devoured his works. His works like Beyond Good and Evil, Human, All Too Human, the Genealogy of Morals, the Gay Science, the Birth of Tragedy, and of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And though at a young age I wasn't going to understand even a fraction of what he was saying, and indeed there are many, perhaps most, who don't understand him, even at an old age, I still felt a lot of resonance. But the thing about Nietzsche is, with most of his works, he writes in an incredibly lucid way, and yet he is still very difficult to understand unless you have lived a little. One needs to live in order to understand Nietzsche. One needs to have been knocked about a bit. My developing relationship with Nietzsche in that regards was very similar to my friendship with Shakespeare. Yeah, like with Shakespeare, you need to live in order to access the resonance. Now, you can feel the resonance even before you've matured a little bit, but it takes on a whole new quality later in one's life. And Nietzsche himself was a very deep reader and lover of the Bard. He was as much an artist himself as he was a philosopher. He was a great aesthete. And he himself learnt as much from Richard Wagner, the sublime composer of the Ring Cycle, who was his personal friend. Though it was a complex relationship that ultimately deteriorated with Nietzsche becoming disillusioned with and critical of the man and his work. He learnt as much from him as he did from his philosophic precursor, Arthur Schopenhauer. The thing that first intoxicated me about Nietzsche was his writings on the Birth of tragedy and his deep understanding and infectious passion for Greek drama and his observation of the agonistic nature of all things, but particularly in the aesthetic world, all things in nature compete for supremacy. There's a constant war. And when Nietzsche says war, he often means strife. There is a constant strife. There is a battle between all. And Nietzsche drew this strain of thought out from the pre Socratics like Heraclitus. Nietzsche would say that art is agon competition. And literally that was and continues to be true. But that was definitely true in the ancient world. At the city Dionysia in ancient Athens, the annual theatre celebration in worship of the God Dionysus would attract playwrights like Aeschylus, like Sophocles, who would Olympics like in their writing, literally compete for top prize. The plays were judged by a panel, and only one playwright could reign supreme. The greatest art was born out of agonistic wrestling. And Nietzsche would teach us that art could be primarily Apollonian, and that means measure and form and control. Apollo being representative of the plastic arts, like painting and sculpture. Or art could be in the mode of Dionysus, otherwise known as Bacchus. And that meant drunken revelry and ecstasy, overflowing the measure. And what art form is that? Why, that's music. And the greatest art arises from an agonistic vying for supremacy that actually leads to a harmony and a balance, an agonistic vying between measure and control and chaos and overflowing feeling. The Apollonian Dionysian duality, the fusion of these powerful forces births the most sublime art in the world, though wrangling with this goes far beyond aesthetics and informs our understanding of our psyche, the broader human condition, and our ability to reconcile order and chaos in our lives. What I always loved about Nietzsche is his ability to write paradoxically, and his vehement rhetoric, whether one agrees with it or not. I always loved his provocative style. Indeed, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who Nietzsche read voraciously, and his personal copies of his essays were lovingly thumbed. Emerson would say, that which I can give you is not instruction or inspiration, but only provocation. And that is true for Nietzsche, too. I always loved Nietzsche's aphoristic style. Yeah, he writes brilliant and powerful aphorisms. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we see he can be a lyrical master of the visual and the poetic and the allegorical. But I always loved when Nietzsche delivered a one line that packed a punch so powerful you wouldn't even realize you've been hit until you're on the ground reeling and fighting for breath of aphorisms. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche would say, of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood and you will discover that blood is spirit. And that everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run. Not only writing, but thinking too. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob. He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read. He wants to be learned by heart. And in the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature. He could deliver single lines, maxims and aphorisms, one after the other that come crashing down like mighty hammer blows upon an anvil. And that's what Nietzsche said he was there to do. He wanted to philosophize with a hammer. And you can do a lot of damage with a hammer. You can destroy with a hammer and you can shatter an entire culture if you have a hammer big enough. And if you're strong enough to wield it. And why would you want to do that? Because Nietzsche believed you must destroy in order to create. He said he was setting out to smash the tables of values, the tables of virtues. And he knew that those who smash the pre established traditional set down taken for granted rules will be hated, they will be despised and shunned. And Nietzsche would talk of striking his philosophic hammer as though it were a tuning fork. So there's something dramatic, there's something tragic and something musical and Greek and aesthetic about what he is doing. Life for Nietzsche was an artistic experiment. It was an essay, to borrow a term from Montaigne, an attempt. And he wasn't just some Thor like figure striking and smashing things apart with his hand hammer. Of course, he's that too. Nietzsche is a warrior poet of a philosopher, and he would say that his essays are a great declaration of war. But he was a musician too. Indeed, one thinks of the hammers falling inverdis il trovatore. He was an artist chipping the stone away and revealing something beautiful and noble beneath. Nietzsche also liked the analogy of a philosopher being like a doctor, a physician or a surgeon who with precision would locate the area of disease in order to expunge it and cure us of it. And you can't find a cure if you don't know what the malady is. And unfortunately, many will get angry at the doctor for the diagnosis, even though he's trying to help you, not hurt you. And the great malady of Nietzsche's age was hypocrisy lack of meaning, nihilism and a degradation of values. And who better to tell the age that than a prophet who has spent 10 years in solitude up in the mountains? Because that's how Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins. This work is a philosophical novel in highly allegorical, poetic, rhetorical style, and Zarathustra is Nietzsche's mouthpiece. This prophet figure is a stand in for him, although Nietzsche's prophet comes with a heavy twist of irony because he he did not wish to be a prophet himself, though he is often treated as such by some who profess to love him. Nietzsche wanted to be a fanatic only for the truth, and he wanted that of his readers too. He didn't like the idea of followers. The self mythologizing. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra comes with Nietzsche's tongue firmly in his cheek. He did not want blind disciples, and he was always concerned that his work would be dangerously misinterpreted and turned into a creed that he never desired. He said, for example, I am no man, I am dynamite. And he was right about his work being mistaken. Sadly, a lot of the maligned ideas about who Nietzsche was and what he stood for were due to his sister, Elizabeth Foerster Nietzsche. She took over his estate, which involved publishing a constructed work from various unpublished notes, literary remains and manuscripts with the title the Will to Power. Indeed, she would hold back some of her brother's works. She would tease the public with what was coming. She would drip feed the works, releasing them with delay. And she deigned to make herself the authority, the guardian and the academic gatekeeper of her brother's philosophy. And just like her husband, she had a lot of hate in her heart. And her hates have been tragically misunderstood as Nietzsche's hates because she was ultra selective in how she would present and frame his writings. She'd cut things out when it didn't serve her agenda or ideology, which was a German nationalist one and an anti Semitic one. It's thanks to her that the Nazi party, several decades on from Nietzsche's death, would find themselves enamoured with Nietzsche's ideas of the Ubermensch and the Will to Power, the idea as well of the Master Race. And we'll explain what the Ubermensch and the Will to Power means in a moment. But Nietzsche himself, it's important to say, would have been utterly disgusted by everything they stood for. Indeed, one of the things that Nietzsche had to confront in his hero, Richard Wagner, for example, was his anti Semitism, far from being anti Semitic himself, which was rising and rising in the 19th century and would of course reach its zenith in the 20th century with the Holocaust. Nietzsche was a self professed anti anti Semite and he thought that to be one of the most abhorrent and stupid things a person could be. As for being a nationalist, when Nietzsche envisioned a race of men who would become masters over their own lives and have their will made manifest in the world, such a race was definitely not Aryan, it wasn't German. It was international and universal and global. And he was also repulsed by nationalism, seeing the individual, not the state nor the collective who serve it, as having the potential for being heroic. Nietzsche knew he would be misunderstood and he wrote deliberately to foster misunderstandings. But he also ultimately wanted those who read him to argue with him. Nietzsche said that a pupil repays his teacher poorly by remaining a student always and simply parroting his teachings and not becoming his own fully fledged individual. Why do you not pluck at my wreath? He asked in Ecce Homo. So how does one read Nietzsche? Well, you read him the way that you should read any work of philosophy. Not as a discipline disciple, but as a querent and a questant. Nietzsche said he wanted his readers to expose his contradictions and his inconsistencies. He knew he wasn't right on everything and he wanted those who read him to agonistically wrestle with him, challenge him, come at him, try to conquer him and subdue him. See where you can, see where you can't. And that's a very exciting way to read and play and live. At the opening of the book, Thus spoke Zara. The prophet Zarathustra descends from a mountain to share his wisdom with humanity. Now, the religious figure that he chose as his mouthpiece is the founder of one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. He was a religious reformer who challenged the polytheistic traditions that were ubiquitous at the time. Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. And his religion is Zoroastrianism, came from ancient Persia somewhere between the 8th and 6th century BC. He came from what is now modern day Iran, somewhere around Iranian Azerbaijan or maybe even the northern Iraq area. Indeed, he could have come from north Afghanistan. Though never established as a major religion itself, Zoroastrianism would exert significant influence upon other major religions. The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, most significantly in the figure of Satan, who was almost certainly of Persian origin and certainly in the form of angels and demons and our understanding of the underworld. The core beliefs of Zoroastrianism include a worship of the supreme creator, God of light known as Ahura Mazda. Mazda meaning the wise. And this God stands for everything that is good and true and just. And there is also the destructive, evil, chaotic spirit of Angra Mainush, the God of darkness. Central to Zoroastrian belief is the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Individuals are responsible for choosing between that duality and their choices contribute to the ceaseless, eternal battle between the God of light and darkness. Zoroastrians believe in an afterlife and a judgment day, and which direction one goes is dependent upon one's words and deeds and thoughts throughout life. They also have eschatological visions of the end times and a resurrection in their belief in which a Saviour will appear and vanquish evil, resurrecting the dead in order to make the world perfect. Nietzsche, however, wants to take us beyond good and evil, and his prophet figure has very little in common with the prophet of the Zoroastrian faith. His reason for choosing this figure, as Nietzsche would expect explain it, is because Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. As Zarathustra was the first to create the most portentous of all morality, he must be the first to expose it. He would also call Zarathustra the most truthful of thinkers, and he had more pluck in his body than all the other thinkers put together to tell the truth and aim straight. That is the first Persian virtue. So who better to use for one's self overcoming than Zarathustra? Of course there is a tone of irony in Nietzsche's choice and the work is a critique of Christian thought that is part poetry, part scriptural parody, but ultimately fully profound philosophy. There is a self conscious and deliberate irony in Nietzsche commandeering this prophet for his own beliefs because they are often diametrically opposed to fundamental religious beliefs and faith. And nowhere is that more clear than when Nietzsche Zarathustra cries out, God is dead. The book begins when Zarathustra was 30 years old. He left his home and the lake of his home and he went into the mountains. He had there the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude, and he did not weary of it for 10 years. But at last his heart turned and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun and spoke to it thus, great star, what would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine? So what we get here is a parody of scripture, a parody of the Bible. We get a prophet figure who's at the key age for Prophets, we might think of Jesus on the cross, who's anywhere from 30 to 33. This prophet has become awakened, and he says, I am weary of my wisdom. Like a bee that has gathered to me much honey, I need hands outstretched to take it. So I must descend into the depths as you do at evening when you, the great star, the great sun above, go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too. Like you, I must go down. Thus began Zarathustra's down going. So prophets need to descend. We see this in all religions, all mythologies. The prophet figure descends into hell, Hades, Sheol, the underworld, and Zarathustra down going. Here is a return to the normal, everyday world for the benefit of those who might hear him. And when he gets down there, he says, is it possible that people have not heard yet that God is dead? What is the benefit of crying that out? God is dead. And indeed, this is not the first time that Nietzsche has put this down in writing. He said this prior in his gay science, God is dead and we have killed him. Well, it's very important to understand that when he says this, this is not a theological assertion. This is not an atheistic expression. Though, indeed, Nietzsche defended his atheism resolutely and with integrity to the very end, although he also said that those with true faith would be those who wrestle and doubt to the very end. And though he did not read Kierkegaard, or we think he didn't, at least in any depth, I think we tell what he would have thought of Kierkegaard's idea of a leap of faith. Yes, there's uncertainty when it comes to matters of belief, but one should leap into faith regardless. Nietzsche believed it to be intellectually dishonest, to be fully satisfied in one's belief. And I must say that I have heard the best priests, the best bishops, though resolute in their belief, the best preachers are the ones who doubt and wrestle. You're supposed to wrestle with your higher power, but God is dead is not a metaphysical argument. He's not talking about ultimate reality here, or whether there is a divine creator despite his atheism. This is a clear comment. What he actually means is, in our straying away from the religious systems that once ordered society and oriented us and provided clear meaning, we have lost our sense of meaning. Meaning is in decline because faith is in crisis. And in our shift from traditional religious values that no longer signify in our destruction of our faith in God, we have now opened up an abyss and our old values are gone. And Nietzsche said that once we realized and actually faced our loss of faith, the world would descend into madness and an age of barbarism would begin. Gianbattista Vico in the New Science would characterize this as the chaotic age. You go from an age of theocracy or religious, religious belief to aristocracy, then democracy, then chaos, before the cycle resets. We today are in the age of chaos, not democracy. We're very far away from the age of democracy, and we have been so ever since the machine wars of the early 20th century. But Nietzsche saw this coming. And if we do not obliterate ourselves totally, we may see in our lifetimes, or our children may see a return to theocracy. Why? Because we need a sense of meaning, and religion provides it. But do the old stories and symbols still signify, or do we need a new one? That's a question that Nietzsche throws up, and he ultimately sounds out a bugle call for us to forge forward valiantly, for us to seize the opportunity to create our own meaning. Now, despite the 19th century being the century of progress and advance technological and scientific advance, Nietzsche saw the century as a nihilistic one. And much of what he said in his time is now glaringly obvious in our time. And thus, by putting his finger on the pulse of his time, he has inevitably become prophetic. So Nietzsche would call for a re evaluation of values. As all values have become valueless, then why not what is falling? One should also push, he says in Zarathustra. So pushing upon a culture that's already teetering over the abyss of nihilism is liable to have disastrous results. But it's also necessary in order for things to get better, destroy in order to create anew. Hasten it up, he says, and Nietzsche gives us very strong imagery of smashing apart old tables of values. But ultimately, he wasn't actually advocating for a creation of totally new values, but rather he was advocating for a return to the ancient values which had been negated by Christianity. And he was advocating for seeing those ancient values afresh anew. Indeed, if he wanted to smash anything apart, it was the New Testament. And he actually rather liked the Old Testament, in which he said he saw great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naivety of the strong heart. What is more, he said a I find a people. Christianity itself was an agonistic response to the ancient. And now Nietzsche was striving to negate the negation and ultimately deliver an affirmation which sounds like a Pretty nice formula for Nietzschean thought right there. Negate the negation in a willed act of affirmation. Nietzsche doesn't dismiss the classical virtues, but he does think them through again and he tries to claw them back into contemporary life and be an act advocate for them. Nietzsche's values are courage, truthfulness, intellectual integrity, generosity, kindness, politeness, all of these things. People often associate Nietzsche with ruthlessness. Yeah, being ruthless to your enemies and hard to your friends for their benefit. And yes, he is the best philosopher to read along with the Stoics if you want to improve your self discipline. What's often lost in discussions of Nietzsche, however, is the acknowledgment of of his gentle side. He may have scorned compassion and pity. To him these were slave emotions, this was slave morality. And he thought we must be careful when extending a kindness to another. And giving, he said he was a born giver and he loved to give. But one must be aware that when you give, according to Nietzsche, you often saddle another with an obligation and resentment rather than gratitude is frequently the response. But if Nietzsche's underlying assumption is that pity is a condescens that makes people worse, then his refusal to indulge in pity is his kindness. A cold kindness, perhaps a cruel to be kind mindset that might remind us of a strict father. But one could argue that to be the highest form of kindness, whether we agree with that or not is of course another thing. And it deliberately flies in the face of Christian values, as that is the foundational moral base of the Western world. It's not hard to see why Nietzsche can seem callous and ruthless in his rhetoric, but he would say that what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. The deeper into Nietzsche you get, the more ironies become apparent to many a Christian reader. I take a lot of value from the Christian teachings personally. So people might wonder how does one reconcile that exactly with what Nietzsche says and his fierce rejection of Christianity? I think you can read both simultaneously and take from each. But the ironies become apparent as frequently his negations of Christianity can often sound like the message at the core of Jesus teachings, though of course Nietzsche would refute that. And he deliberately took arms against the turn the other cheek teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. No, he's definitely not congruent with that, but there are elements of Christ's teaching that he is. Make no mistake, however, many have co opted Nietzsche for their own political readings. He is no liberal and whilst he clearly holds to strong conservative traditional values, he also rejects much of what typically goes with that, too, like nationalism. And ultimately, it's important to keep in mind that Nietzsche is apolitical, and the idea of choosing a side was abhorrent to him. Nietzsche had so many problems with Christian values. He thought they promoted mediocrity and passivity and were born not out of love, but of resentment. And he had a problem with belief in heaven, too. And he called those who speak of heaven as the after worldsman. The believers in heaven, he said, defer their true living until after their death, and thus they fail to appreciate the here and now. And it's true that some believers in an afterlife do that. Some find a belief in a reality beyond this one that's contingent upon our behavior here to be liberating and a good moral guide or orientation. But, hey, he does have a point. He would call the afterworldsmen the consumptives of the soul. They are hardly born before they begin to die. He would call them living coffins who rejected the gift of the present, the now. Rejecting this world in favor of what's to come, he would say, the world is filled with the superfluous. One can understand why many have taken offense at Nietzsche's rhetoric. Walking coffins, he would call the superfluous. Let others be lured, eternal life out of this life. Eternal life to Nietzsche was actually death, and those who preach it to him were preachers of death. He also took issue with those promoters of resisting temptation. He called them the despisers of the body. He would say, sure, chastity can be a virtue for some, for example, but definitely not for everyone. And of course, a reliable way to kick up religious controversy is to be a voice for embracing the bodily, the flesh. Walt Whitman did this. His spirituality was through the flesh. Blake was an advocate for this, too, and Dostoevsky, who Nietzsche admired intensely. He said he was a psychologist, the psychologist from whom he learned the most. Dostoevsky worshipped the earth and the body, and the Orthodox Church thought him but blasphemous too. This is Nietzsche's smashing of the tables of values, because indeed, one staple of Christianity is renunciation of the flesh, rejection of bodily temptation. Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, would say, we are our bodies, which is quite a difference from Rene Descartes. I think, therefore I am cogito, ergo sum. The Cartesian duality almost looks down upon the body with scorn, as though it's a lower form. But Nietzsche saw body and mind, or body and soul intertwined, and he felt that the power to live truly and courageously lay in doing so through the body, not by mortifying the flesh in the passage of the despisers of the body. And thus spoke Zarathustra, he would say, the awakened, the enlightened man says, I am body entirely and nothing beside. And soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. You say I, and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you will not believe in it, is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say I, but performs I. I love that. To be or not to be. Nietzsche says, no be. Nietzsche also suspected that the religious zealots and pedants of his time did not actually enjoy their life. And what is life? For if we don't enjoy it even when we we are struggling, we should enjoy the blood and sting of battle, to use a phrase from General Patton. General Patton would also say, by the way, in a very Nietzschean way, follow me, lead me or get out of my way. In the section called of the Compassionate, Nietzsche says, or Zarathustra says, I did better things when I learned to enjoy myself better. As long as men have existed, man has enjoyed, enjoyed himself too little. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. And if we learn better to enjoy ourselves, we best unlearn how to do harm to others and to contrive harm. Nietzsche would also warn us to be wary of the supposed moralists, be wary of those who talk much about their justice. Aristotle would say that the highest virtue, and the most difficult, is justice, because in a sense it has all the other virtues wrapped up in it. And indeed Nietzsche would say, be careful of having many virtues. It would be better to have one virtue that encompasses many, because if you have many virtues, they get jealous of each other and they vie for supremacy. And one virtue will rise and you'll be let down in another way. It's very interesting, but to Aristotle, justice was like the God tier level of virtues. Nietzsche takes aim at those who speak much about their justice. And indeed today we talk of social justice warriors, we talk of virtue signalling. And it's the same thing that Nietzsche was talking about. He notes astutely that many who talk of their justice are actually talking of vengeance. In the passage called of the virtuous, Zarathustra says, alas, how ill the word virtue sounds in their mouths. And when they say I am just, it always sounds like I am revenged. They want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue, and they raise themselves only in order to lower others. One of my favorite parts of Nietzsche's work, which has made a very lasting impression upon me, is the passage called of the Tarantulas. He says, this is the tarantula's cave. Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web. Touch it and make it tremble. And then he says of the tarantula, revenge sits within your soul. A black scab grows wherever you bite. With revenge, your poison makes the soul giddy. Thus do I speak to you in parables, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality. This is another thing that Nietzsche rejected. Man is not equal, nor should man be considered so. Equality is ultimately mediocrity in Nietzsche's eyes. You are tarantulas, he says, and dealers in hidden revengefulness. And then he quotes the tarantula. This is what they say. We shall practice revenge and outrage against all who are not as we are. Thus the tarantula hearts promise themselves and will to equality. That itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue. And we shall raise outcry against everything that has power. You preachers of equality. Thus from you the tyrant madness of impotence cries for equality. Thus your most secret tyrant appetite disguises itself in words of virtue. So what is he saying? He's saying those who rage against power, those who preach equality, are not always being virtuous, as virtuous as they would profess. What they are actually doing is trying to get revenge. They're not against power, they're against somebody else or the wrong person having power. They want the power sourced. Self conceit, he says. Repressed envy, perhaps. Your father's self conceit and envy. They burst from you as a flame and madness of revenge. Revenge rings in all their complaints, he says. A male malevolence is in all their praise, and to be judge seems bliss to them. Thus, however, I advise you, my friends, mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong. My goodness. One can understand why Nietzsche is controversial. One can take issue with the words he's saying. But if you look beneath the words, at what he is meaning, the implications, there is much you cannot argue with. Mistrust all to whom the urge to punish is strong. What does that mean? Nietzsche's promoting love. Whilst he may on the surface profess to scorn the philosophy of love, one's neighbor, he's actually being the most loving. He's not operating in a realm of punishment. They are people of a Bad breed and a bad descent. The executioner and the bloodhound peer from out their faces, mistrust all those who talk much about their justice. They want to do harm to those who now possess power. For justice speaks thus to to me, men are not equal and they should not become so either. And it's important to note that Nietzsche definitely is not making an argument for legal inequality enshrined in law. That would be absurd and monstrous. That's not what he's saying here. So often those who profess to be moral are actually immoral and are often weak. And weakness is no morality. Here's a really important Nietzschean assertion and this is a profound truth. One's inability or cowardice or lack of competence is not automatic morality. Many so called virtues are actually vices for most people. Some people would say I would never do that. Yeah, well that often actually means is I never could do that, so I condemn it. I would never do that. Nietzsche says no, no you can't do that. Strength is being able to use a sword, but know when to use it and when not to use it. You know, it's like in martial arts, often the your safest around is the person who's highly competent in defending themselves. They can defend others. Very often strong people don't abuse or misuse their power. It's the weak that do that frequently. Let's take another example in the form of chastity. If chastity is imposed upon you, you're an involuntary celibate, but secretly you would love to have ample sex. You just can't get any condemning. One who can get as much sex as they want. Is not your morality speaking or it's almost certainly not. That's just envy speaking most of the time. Now if you are able to do something and you choose not to, then we're getting into the realm of morality there. Nietzsche will say that often what one calls moderation, there's another virtue, often what one calls moderation is actually mediocrity. So we call mediocrity moderation. We call cowardice virtue, even though it's actually just lack and inability. And Nietzsche makes a distinct between what he calls master and slave morality. Again, he is trying to be as deliberately provocative as possible. We know what these words convey in our minds. They don't typically convey anything good, but those are his two fundamental moral frameworks. To Nietzsche, master morality is noble, it's powerful, it's about strength and pride and magnificence. Whereas slave morality is all about weakness. It values humility. And sympathy and conformity. And he would say that you can find slave morality in Jesus's the Sermon on the Mount, which along with the writings of Nietzsche in select areas, is one of the key texts, the key sublime texts I personally return to. It's one of my touchstones, as Matthew Arnold might say, touchstones for greatness. But Nietzsche would say Christianity is predominantly a slave morality. Nietzsche would say that there cannot be an objective truth independent of different perspectives. So truth is contingent upon the individual. It's shaped by their experience and their will, and thus the herd morality of modern life should be rejected. Forget the herd, he would say. Forget being a sheep. You don't even have a shepherd. So can you be your own shepherd? Can you make your own laws? Can you determine what's good and evil? Can you be a judge unto yourself? And Nietzsche warns that the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is most hated of all. Although Nietzsche also valued envy because a potential superior man could use envy actually as inspiration. Their envy is actually admiration of someone great who will pull out and bait their own will to power. But Nietzsche warns that the hermit, the people, the sheeple, as some might say today, will crucify those who devise their own virtue. They hate the solitary wanderer above the sea of fog. You've seen that painting, right? It's a really powerful representation of the sublime. And though the German romanticist artist Caspar David Friedrich painted it before Nietzsche was born, the image has been used on covers of Nietzsche's work because that painting really captures the essence of Nietzsche's philosophy in visual form. Of course, there's more irony in Nietzsche saying the word crucify. They will crucify those who devise their own virtue. He was well aware of his choice of words. He was a philologist, a genius one as well, who smashed the old tables, who was crucified for forging his own path and pivoting from the established traditions. Well, Christ. So Nietzsche, in doing this himself and even in his anti Christian stance, indeed he actually quite called himself the Antichrist. He called himself that and Dionysus. But there is a sense that Nietzsche, ironically, in some areas, is actually rather Christ. Like, one could argue that at least maybe that's a stretch. Maybe I say that with my tongue in my cheek, but I kind of do mean it because he was kind of following his example. Well, indeed, Nietzsche would say that the only one who was Christ like was Christ himself. The only true Christian was Jesus. But both of them would champion suffering as an avenue towards meaning, redemption, growth and purpose, personal rebirth. Both emphasized radical change, both rejected traditional authority and challenged the established norms. And so I do not think it's incompatible for one to have a map of the world that includes both the teachings of Christ and the philosophy of Nietzsche. Both figures give us signposts towards meaning. Knowing the vehemence with which he rejected Christianity, one might be tempted to say that Nietzsche wouldn't have been happy about me making that assertion. But I actually believe he would have been very amused by my saying that. As I said, Nietzsche was a troll. He was very, very smart, he was very fiendishly funny and he was a contrarian. And he wanted to encourage those, as I've said, who read him to fight him, reject him, challenge him and point out his inconsistencies. And if they do that in a spirit of play, then all the better. Nietzsche was ultimately promoting independent thought. What Emerson called self reliance, that's what he was promoting above all, the heroism of the individual. Do not take your morality wholly from another without thinking it through and rigorously testing it yourself, he would say. Our faith in others betrays, wherein we would dearly like to have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer asking for another's opinion, I suppose. What do you think? What should I do? No, look inward. You should know what to do. And he would say that we must be friends to ourselves and we should ensure that our friends are also our enemies. Because in a sense, you want to choose friends that will sharpen you like steel on steel. You want to choose friends that you can vie with, compete with, divinely strive against, but ultimately in service of one another, because such striving and competing leads to excellence and makes you both better. In a really resonant passage in which Nietzsche is overtly going against Christian teaching, in a passage called of love of one's neighbour, Nietzsche would say, your love of your neighbour is your bad love of yourself. You flee to your neighbour away from yourselves and would like to make a virtue of it. But I see through your selflessness, your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you. Of course. What did Jesus say? He said, love your neighbour as yourself. The thing about that is, if we truly did that, we actually wouldn't be very nice to one another because we don't love ourselves very much. In Christ's words, I have actually long seen a double imploration. This is not just an altruistic message, this is an impression imploration. To be aware that goodness flows from you. Love your Neighbour, as you love yourself, so you have an obligation, if you want to treat people well, to first treat yourself very well, treat yourself the way you would like to be treated, then treat the world that way. If you love your neighbor the way you love yourself and you don't love yourself, you're only going to cause more hatred, misery and harm. And so we have an obligation to ferociously protect ourselves, look after ourselves and be our own most courageous advocate. And I think regardless of his rejection of Christianity, that that is the point Nietzsche is making. And although Nietzsche was pitting himself up against Christianity or indeed the hollow form that Christianity had taken and degraded into, and I think frequently that those who have issues with religion actually have a problem with the Church of that religion rather than the teaching. Primarily. We have many church institutions that people are raised in, indoctrinated in, that are not great, they're not wholesome. You can be born and raised in a very good, loving religious community, but it most certainly is true that you can be raised in something that's anything but that. For Nietzsche, however, it was a combination of both. It was the Church and it was the teaching. And it wasn't lost on him that the Church had gained its supremacy over the Greco Roman world of antiquity through increasing displays of domination and power. Machiavelli knew this too. There's a lot of similarities between Nietzsche and Machiavelli, but another thing to keep in mind is that whilst Nietzsche fully knew how outrageously blasphemous his God is dead assertion would have sounded at first hearing, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just a deliberate show of blaspheming. He's not saying, look, I can say the most outrageous thing about our culture's religious life because I don't care. Well, maybe there's a little bit of that in there. He did have a subversive sense of humor. But this sentiment packaged in a very striking way, is essentially that of what once held meaning after many iterations and permutations, generations and degradations, no longer does. And we have lost our way. And it is our embracing of our forgotten values and our thinking through of them for ourselves that will make us feel as though we've claimed something new or become something new. Nietzsche knew that a lot of the time virtues and teachings lost meaning because we listened to the words rather than the meaning. And that happens with Nietzsche's philosophy as well. Nietzsche was the one who said that for which you can find words to express is something already long dead in your hearts. Nietzsche is in a very strange and difficult position with his philosophizing. He is between Scylla and Charybdis to solicit a Homeric image that I think he would have liked. He's between a rock and a hard place. Because ultimately, yes, Nietzsche's saying God is dead. But Nietzsche wants us to escape nihilism. If you assert the existence of God in the way his peers did, which means doing so in a hollow way, being empty and valueless and meaningless. Nietzsche's peers were Tartuffian, hypocritical preachers of death. If you do that, then as far as Nietzsche is concerned, nihilism, not salvation, is the destination. But if you completely deny God, then you're robbing the world of meaning too. And. And thus, surely nihilism lies that way as well, doesn't it? How can we tightrope walk over that abyss? Well, here's the question, Nietzsche. Can you create your own God, your own center of meaning? Can you become your own God through your will? Can you designate your own meaning and your own values, your own sense of good and evil? That tightrope walk across the abyss is what it means to be a superman. And to illustrate this point, we see very early on, Zarathustra in the Work meets a tightrope walker in the square, the marketplace, when he comes down from his mountain retreat. The Ubermensch, or the superman, is the highest form of human existence beyond good and evil, according to Nietzsche, because man is something to be overcome. This is the constant refrain throughout the book. The book is very lyrical, and this is one of its refrains. Very early on in Zarathustra's prologue, he says, I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves. And do you want to be the ebb of this great tide and return to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment? And just so she'll be man to the superman, a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You've made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape. But he who's wisest among you, he also is only a discord and hybrid of plant and of ghost. But do I bid you to become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the superman. The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say, the superman shall be the meaning of the Earth, I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes. They are poisonous, whether they know it or not. You can see Nietzsche is having fun here. He is really indulging his dramatic flair. We see he's been reading Dostoevsky, he's been reading Shakespeare and Goethe and the ancient Greeks. They are despisers of life, he says, atrophying and self poisoned men of whom the earth is weary. So let them be gone. So we've long had this anxiety that we are part way between beast and angel, or animal and God. This was the Renaissance anxiety, this was Hamlet's anxiety. But the Ubermensch is he who has transcended the limits of conventional morality to be who he truly is or to manifest his potential in the world. The Ubermensch is a rare kind of being, and Nietzsche contrasts the superman with what he calls the last man or the ultimate man. That's the one who seeks comfort and security rather than challenge and magnificence. The true man, the noble man, he says, wants two things, danger and play. And he will make his meaning and his will manifest in the world rather than slip into mediocrity. Nietzsche saw the collective, the state and humanity en masse, as comprised of, as we said, superfluous people. He called them nimble apes, clambering apes. And yes, that is a wry nod to Darwin, whose thought, along with Schopenhauer, was absolutely saturating the 19th century. And he thought most to be mad men whose life was nothing but a slow suicide. And indeed, most are dead before they are buried. For the superfluous people, there's no originality of thought. Nietzsche says they call their theft culture. We can say this in every age. Art and entertainment and intellectualism is more often derivative than it is unique. And we might think if you must steal, then one should do so with gleeful acknowledgement. Cite your influences as you wrestle with them. That's what the spirit of agon, which is a dangerous spirit of play, means. It means you're proud of your foe, your enemy is your friend. But most men have no honor. They steal badly in the night. And a derivative culture is one inclining towards mass spiritual suicide and one that is ultimately mired in mediocrity. Nietzsche looked around and he thought, who are my compatriots? Who are my peers, who are of my mind? What was it that Thoreau said? Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Nietzsche knew this, though I personally today believe that desperation is no longer Very quiet. But rather than be depressed at the state of the world, Nietzsche would actually sound out a liberating implication in this work. He would say, the earth still remains free for a great soul. A free life still remains for great souls. And you find your greatness where the state ceases. Look there, he says. Nietzsche was a ferocious advocate for solitude. He would say he mocks the winter in the morning with an ice bath and then spends stretches alone in contemplation. Flee into your solitude. And that's where the marketplace ends, he would say. Now, unfortunately, we don't get a lot of solitude in modern times. We don't get a lot of chances to exercise that and retreat into ourselves. Yeah, Marcus Aurelius would tell himself in the little notebooks that he was penning on the tented field, he was giving advice to himself, which would ultimately become his meditations. Marcus Aurelius would say, you can always retreat into yourself. You can take a little vacation away from the world by going inward. Today we're bombarded. We're ceaselessly bombarded. We're expected to be on demand and on call all of the time. We are constantly saturated, our devices are pinging, we're constantly getting input. We're burned out, we're fried. We've got too much on our mind and too much of what other people say on our minds and rather what we know to be true in the deepest part of our souls. We distract ourselves when we go out in solitude. When we do anything, we do any sort of chores, we distract ourselves. We put things on, we listen to things. We don't want to listen to our own thoughts. We don't want to confront our own potential greatness. And unfortunately, in recent times, in this postmodern, or indeed post postmodern era, there is resentment around the idea of strong individuals. Individualism is scorned. Individual genius, personal creativity and inspiration is so frequently spat upon. We used to believe that great men and women have diamonds or demons in our personal guides. We used to believe in the muse. The muse would light us up. But today, postmodernists often wish to explain individual genius as merely the result of socio historical, historical forces. Indeed, Harold Bloom would call people who do this the school of resentment. And that word resentment, I think, rings out with Nietzschean tones. But the thing is, Shakespeare is not Shakespeare because of his time. Otherwise, Kidd and Middleton would be remembered and respected as fully as the Bard. Nietzsche's pill is a tough one to swallow for those who wish to resist growth, because growth is painful. And Nietzsche would say that Pain inherently meaningful. It's how we learn, it's how we grow. How does memory impress itself upon the man animal, he would ask in his genealogy of morals. Pain. And he would tell us that life should be hard to bear, otherwise there would be no pride in overcoming it. Yes, and Nietzsche's all about overcoming. That doesn't mean overcoming others, though that might be a fusset. It doesn't mean dominating others, it means overcoming yourself, ultimately being the best that you can be. And he would tell us, from the highest peaks, one laughs at all tragedies, real or imagined. When you get high enough above the fray, all becomes comedic. I've personally started to suspect that the Creator is a comedian. There is something inherently funny in the movements of nature. And though Nietzsche rejected a belief in God, and he certainly rejected the spirit of gravity that infused so much, much religiosity, he would say that the kind of God who could tempt him into belief would be one who could dance, who could joke and jest and play. And this is what Zarathustra ultimately embraces. Dance and laughter. That's what joyful affirmation of life means. That's where wisdom is to be found, in dancing and playing and laughing and embracing and celebrating life totally, which includes, includes its hardships and struggles. So we take on our burdens, we take on our pain with a spirit of play and a spirit of good humor. Yeah, we're playing. Man must be overcome, he would say. Life must be overcome. What does that mean? It means you strive higher and you strive upwards. Nietzsche was a proponent for setting yourself a high ideal, in fact the highest ideal, and then single mindedly striving purposefully to, towards it, going after it, going towards it to hit it. And this means competence rises and survives. This means nature itself is hierarchical. He would talk about how trees agonistically vie with each other for who can aspire upwards, who can climb highest like leafy towers of Babel, to get the most sunlight and air. All creatures want to rise. And man is at his most noble when he sets his sights on the highest and brings it about, creating his own world through his will. The nobleman, Nietzsche says, wants to create new things and a new virtue. And he says, I entreat you, do not reject the hero in your soul. Keep holy your highest hope. And despite the anti religious tone, a spiritual reading I believe is far from incompatible when it comes to Nietzsche. Thomas Aquinas may have called God the summum bonum, the highest good, but to Nietzsche, he doesn't get rid of that idea. He Just says, the highest good is the highest hope of the superman. Yeah. And he who has a why to live for can endure almost any how. So you have to designate your meaning. You have to make your meaning the highest possible good you can envision. This is Nietzsche's be the hero you are, or be the hero you can be. Accept your call to adventure, and life itself is the greatest adventure. He would tell us that as part of this, we must go through three metamorphoses. He says this very early on. Thus spoke Zarathustra. We go from being a camel which bears burdens, then we go to being a lion, because we want to capture our own freedom and be lord of our own desert. And the great dragon of thou shalt is defeated when the spirit of the lion says, I will to counter it. Yeah. You need to be a lion to have the courage to create new values and to say no to duty and obligation and burden. You need to say no and reject the old, the past, the stale, in order to seize the right to create new values. And then the last transformation, Nietzsche would say, is we must become like children again. And then when we do, our no becomes a yes. So we reject in order to accept. Yeah. We negate in order to affirm that is negative Nietzsche's philosophy. You say no, then you say yes, and you have a straight line and a goal. When you become like a child again, you enter a state of forgetting that leads to rebirth. Once you've rejected the past, you forget about it. Yeah. Leave history in the past behind in order to create a future that will become the past that you have willed. And ultimately, he said, we must become like children because we need a sense of innocence in order to create our own world. What the children do, they play, don't they? Yes. The spirit of play. To Nietzsche, the true man had a child inside him and delighted in the spirit of play. And how does the Ubermensch overcome himself? The answer is the will to power, a phrase that was again co opted by his sister. She cobbled together notebooks from her brother and titled a book with this to make it seem like a new work. And she purposefully left out context and qualifications, which is very easy to do when Neat himself was frequently content to be contentious and symbolic. The happiest man, Nietzsche says, is he who can say not? It was, but I willed it. Power. Yeah. Will to power. Power has a negative ring. Today, there's much politicizing of power. But when Nietzsche speaks of power, he so often does so to mean personal excellence. The will to power is the fundamental driving force of life. It's the desire to enhance and to express one's strength. It's not about questing to dominate others, it's about fulfilling your potential. So will is the underlying drive that leads to personal freedom. And this is quite different from Schopenhauer's will. Nietzsche's will was life affirming. Schopenhauer's will is the blind, irrational force driving all of life. Schopenhauer was responding to Kant, who saw reality as comprised of the phenomenal realm, the realm of our sense impressions and distinct phenomena, and the noumenal realm, which is the uniting force behind the veil that connects all and makes all one. It's the awning behind everything. Everything's connected behind the veil. And Schopenhauer saw will as the root of all suffering. Indeed, life is fundamentally suffering. To Schopenhauer, his philosophy of pessimism is everywhere. In the 19th century, we can see it in the novels of Thomas Hardy, for example, but there are many more examples than that Nietzsche. Nietzsche's will was a swerving from that. Nietzsche's will is the drive to grow and create and master oneself and overcome obstacles. And indeed Nietzsche embraced obstacles and promoted a love for all of life, amor fati, which includes hardship. Willing liberates. It's the way to bring about meaning in the world. For Nietzsche, willing is also a form of sublimation. And we will talk about sublimation when we talk about Sigmund Freud later this year at the Hardcore Literature Book club. Although sublimation as an idea has been around for a long time, we do actually have Nietzsche to thank for using it. With its meaning of channeled energy, sublimation is harnessed. Sexual impulse. Civilization is built on cruelty. Nietzsche would say we have cruel impulses born out of the sex drive to conquer and dominate. But harnessing such impulses has led historically to the greatest art, great statues, music that sounds like a force of nature. Impulses that unharnessed can lead to bad things, harnessed can very much lead to great things. And though he was talking about moving beyond good and evil, this is the cosmic struggle that plays out. This is good and evil right here. And for Nietzsche, you need great men. You need men who know how to command. And you also need men in power for whom that so called power is no climb, but actually a stoop. Those who want the power shouldn't have the power, because they will turn tyrant. But the truly great should have the power. Those who've made themselves excellent and competent and have nothing to gain from positions of authority should be the ones in leadership. You should be pulling them into leadership positions. As we talk, it's obviously quite clear that Nietzsche is a hyper masculine philosopher. He speaks to something deep inside men, and this frequently comes at the exclusion of women. Though I'm convinced that there are many women who would be able to find great, great values in his writings and beliefs still. But one could definitely understand if his tone and message were to alienate some women. He speaks of manly prudence. He speaks of masculine virtue and connecting with the warrior spirit. He exhorts his readers not to work, but to battle. What if you saw your work as a battle? Yeah. Your vocation as a war. War as a means to new peace. He's talking about personal excellence. He says, you must be proud of your enemy. Again, the word enemy is so charged and loaded. But of course, if you're proud of your enemy, are they actually your enemy? We could think of a different word for them. But he has a point. You should be proud of who you're striving against, because then your success will be all the more worthy of pride. This is all about choosing the highest good, the highest hope. If you choose the highest ideal to strive after, to make your potential manifest in the world, then of course you're gonna have to come up against some ferocious dragons, aren't you? He would tell people to choose their enemies very, very carefully. But when it comes to talking about the differences between men and women, Nietzsche's words from the 1880s would get him cancelled, no doubt in the 2000s. Let's read some of that material. When Zarathustra comes down among the people, he says, there's little manliness here. Therefore their women have made themselves manly, for only he who is sufficiently a man will redeem the woman in woman. And here's another passage, again, deliberately provocative and controversial. I think this is the part that would be most controversial today, not the religious critiques. You can get away with that for Christianity today, but this is something that today would cause a lot of fuss. And I'm not sure how controversial this would have actually been in his time, but certainly today, if this were posted somewhere online, it. It would be considered rage bait, surely. He says everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution. It's called pregnancy. For the woman, the man is a means. The end is always the child. But what is the woman for the man? The true man wants two things, danger and play. For that reason, he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. He says woman understands children better than a man. But man is more childlike than woman. A child is concealed in the true man. It wants to play. He says to women, let your hope be, may I bear the superman. This is what he saw marriage as being. So the woman was adopting the role of child rearing. The man is the warrior who goes out to fight, and together they raise a child who's better than they are. That's his definition of a good marriage. You raise something better than you, you leave your legacy and you make the next generation better than the one from which it came. And he says, the man's happiness is I will. The woman's happiness is he will. Again, it's understandable why we don't see many women discussing the philosophy of Nietzsche. Indeed, it's not just a tone that rubs many women up the wrong way. There are many men who find Nietzsche's tone absolutely abhorrent. I know Bertrand Russell, for example, really disliked almost everything about Nietzsche's tone and those who follow him. He found a lot of what he said abhorrent and hoped that his philosophy would go away. Many will read Nietzsche's writing through the mist, deliberate controversy as a continued call to arms. Ultimately, he's saying you need to will the highest thing. It's not the height, it's the abyss. That is terrible, though, when you climb the highest mountain, summit and abyss meld into one, he says, and that's how you know you're on the path to greatness. And he says as well, he gives some advice, and in doing so, he sounds like Diogenes. He was a fan of Diogenes, the funniest misanthrope in history. We've spoken about Diogenes a few times. Nietzsche gives us a mindset shift when we are going after that highest hope that is designed to see us through. He tells us nothing is over overwhelmingly evil. Yeah, don't get caught up. Nothing's the end of the world. Nothing is that impressively wicked or good. He basically prompts us to ask, when we come up against the worst atrocities we've ever seen, is that all you've got? He says, this is no wickedness, this is no good. I will transcend this. He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all the tragedies, real or imaginary. He says we could actually use even greater wickedness in the world, because then at least we'd have a good fight. At least we'd be up against Something worthy of us. And we can lament that there is much evil and chaos in the world and we would be right to do so. But we can also defy that and we can say this is nothing. Is that all you've got? This is what the superman wants. The superman wants the super dragon that is worthy of him. Nietzsche says that you should become so ferocious good that those who do not know better would call you the devil. Can you even begin to imagine how powerful and how good and what a boon you would be if you were so good that you were charged with being the reverse? That's a bit of a trip to think about. Nietzsche says that the thing all men most need is to command great things. And the most unpardonable thing is to have the power and yet not rule. Essentially what he's saying. He's not saying go fight to get into office. He's not saying that, he's saying you have untapped potential. What that is is going to differ depending on the individual. There's no clear cut rule for everybody. Yeah. If you read his book and think, oh, I've got to be doing this and I can't do that. Well, that's not what he's saying. He's saying you have untapped potential. You have a purpose, you have a goal, you have an ambition that's unique to you. It can be anything and you know it. And maybe you're not doing much about, or maybe you're not doing as much as you should or as much as you know you could and if you did, maybe things would be different. Nietzsche is ultimately a master of self talk. A lot of this is just him talking to himself, I think, at least this book. Yes, it might be deliberately provocative, but there's much in this work that's an antidote to hard times. Yeah. Joseph Campbell talks about the hero's journey. What's one of the key, most important stages in the hero's journey? It's actually right near the beginning. It's the refusal of the call. You get a call to adventure and what happens. We see this in the Lord of the Rings. We see this in everything pretty much the hero. If the journey is noble, if the journey is difficult, initially doubts, yeah. They go, not sure I should do that. Maybe, maybe this journey is not made for me. That's how you know you're going up against something that's worthy of you. The refusal of the call is a very important stage and you must overcome it. And so reading the philosophy of Nietzsche can help you Forge on past that. Nietzsche tells us that the highest mountains arise from the depths of the sea. That's a powerful mindset right there. That means embrace pain and hardship with a spirit of joy to get to greatness. And I would like to end on what is perhaps the most liberating paradigm shift, a thought experiment, an idea that leads to radical self examination and then ruth positive change. This is an idea that can bring that untapped potential out of you. And it's Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. Zarathustra says he is the first to teach this doctrine. Behold, all things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them. And we have already existed in an infinite number of times before, and all things with us. So all these years resemble one another in the greatest and in the smallest, so that we ourselves resemble ourselves in each great year in the greatest things and in the smallest things. And when I die, he says, the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur. It will create me again. I myself am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence. I shall return with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent, not to a new life or a better life, or a similar life. I shall return eternally to this identical and self same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things. Now, Nietzsche actually first outlined this idea in the Gay Science and I would like to read that to you now as it explains this idea more coherently. He says, basically, what if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more. There will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh must return to you all in the same succession and sequence. Even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself, the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust. So a demon comes down and says, you're going to live your life exactly as you have and will over and over again, and nothing's going to change. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God, and never have I heard anything more divine. If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you? The question in each and every do you want this once more and innumerable times more? Would you lie upon your actions as the greatest weight? Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to your life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? I love this idea. So if a demon were to say, you're going to live everything over and over again, would you say, yes, thank you, I can't wait. I'm so happy about that. Or at least I'm content. I've experienced such moments of transcendental greatness and glory, such moments of pure joy and happiness that have made all the hardships worth it that I would do it again. Or would this prospect crush you? Would you feel defeated and despondent? This is not really a belief. Nietzsche's not again, like with the death of God. God is death. He's not asserting a theological belief. He's not saying this is what he thinks is going to happen, that life will go over and over, frame by frame, for all eternity. Though of course there are literal interpretations too. But really, this is a hypothetical thought experiment, because your answer to this would be very telling. If you're happy with that, if you're content with that, if you think, yeah, I could live with that, then you're living life authentically. If that prospect devastates you, then you need to change things. This is a test of your affirmation of life, because you must affirm your existence and say, yes. And so if you think that, my goodness, I couldn't bear that then. Now you have an opportunity to seize your life and live it as you try, truly want to live it as you will to live it. What monsters would you choose to fight? What dragons would you slay, internal and external? Who would you choose to love? What would your mission, your purpose be if you knew you had to do what you're doing right now, this very second, and the next, over and over again for all eternity. And I'm going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much for listening today. Let us know what you made of these ideas. Let us know what you make of Nietzsche's thoughts. I hope you go forth and read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And if that's your first reading, I would really love to know what you make of it. If it's a rereading, then let us know. You can do that. And you can also see what fellow lovers of the great books have to say about Nietzsche over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club which is@patreon.com hardcore literature. We have a fascinating invite discussion thread for this work and indeed we also have an extensive back catalogue of bookish discussions, read throughs and lectures that you can access on demand and follow at your own pace. We've got lectures for writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Austin, Cervantes, Melville, the Bronte Sisters, Steinbeck, Pynchon and many many more. And at time of recording we are currently deep reading Charles Dickey together as part of our seasonal Dickens Read every year at the Book Club. Around the festive period we clock another Dickens novel and we have currently read four great Dickens stories together, Great Expectations, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Tale of Two Cities and this year we've been reading David Copperfield and it's marvellous to see how much love there is for one of my all time favourite writers. I collect his works and steadily reread them over and over again just like I do with Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. All of these are writers that we have read and enjoyed together this year too. We've also at the Book club just had a special lecture go up on Sigmund Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams. So if you enjoyed our discussion today on Nietzsche, you may well wish to check that one out and get into some Freud too. And we have also, in case you haven't seen it yet, we've also just last month announced the reading schedule, the syllabus for 2025 for the hardcore Literature Book Club. You can check out our program for next year over at my YouTube channel, which is my name, Benjamin McAvoy, or you can check it out at patreon.com hardcore literature and if you do that, you'll also get a downloadable printable guide with my recommended editions and translations and some words of reading advice. I'll also be putting the audio for the book Club reading program for 2025 here on the podcast shortly for you too and I'm going to leave it there for today. I appreciate you deeply and I hope you have a wonderful day. Happy reading everybody and bye bye for now.