You've made your way from Worm to Man yet there is much in you that is still Worm. How you doing my fellow Worm Greg? I'm doing great Alex. How are you?
Which show is this is the new thingery? Oh, welcome. Welcome. Yeah, if I'm talking at the top that means that David Barr has fallen off his rope and then left over by a, by a devil.
So we have to proceed without it but luckily we have somebody far wiser in his place. The great job. You can't shake your head. We see your wiser than bar.
All right. Just friend of the show Justin got shot. Yeah, second time was your first time was for Frankenstein. There's show is Frankenstein.
Now we're going to something that's deep in your wheel. Wheelhouse, right? I think you think, you know, yeah, I mean, some, you know, I should know it a little better than Frankenstein, but you know, it's out through stress. I don't know if anybody's wheelhouse or science meeting each other.
Tell the folks whites in his wheelhouse, Alex. He's a great interpreter of Nietzsche. I mean, you know, right. Is it safe to say that you know Nietzsche better than any other thinker?
So you're better than any other thinker knows Nietzsche or better than I know anything. Well, both I know. I mean, I don't know anything other than any other thing about you know. Yeah, I think that's probably fair.
Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of time. And yeah, you translate the Myers book, right?
Yeah. On the Xerathusra. Myers. That's what Chicago Press, what's it called?
The Xerathusra. What is Nietzsche's Arathusra? Is he going to do the sequel? Where is Nietzsche's where there's like a little Xerathusra in and among all these people, I got the beach playing with all these.
Really good idea. Where is Xerathusra? I could mention that to him. I think he might go for that.
He seemed like an amiable chap who's open to suggestions. Oh, he's hilarious, actually. He's a mischievous. He's a mischievous.
He's just a fantastic guy. He's a little glint in his eye. And I just finished translating the sequel to this more or less, Antichrist and I can't hold on. That's what we call Nietzsche's legacy.
That's what really forms a pair with this book. Yeah. He suggests that at the beginning of his program. Is that going to be Chicago too?
Chicago also. Yeah. I think he really wanted to write about the later stuff and realize that we do have to interpret Xerathusra. And so we get a backtrack.
But it all kind of culminates, I think, in this one. So what are we doing tonight? The prolongs is the Arathusra. We're going to really just poem in on...
Bye. Bye, whom? Some else should talk. Is there a Not everyone's read this.
The title is, first book, the first and second part appeared in 1883, the third, 1884, the fourth and last in 1885 as a private printing. In 1886, Nietzsche led to the three first parts appear together in a single volume, and that was called the same thing, but in three parts. And so, yeah, the fourth part is technically awesomeness, right, just a? Well, I mean, besides the private printing, which you gave out to his friends, and then I believe it was in 1888, wanted to have those copies pulled back.
He asked his buddy Peter Gaston to pull them back because he thought that they weren't gonna make a number of splat ash unless the fourth part was published after the Antigarst, which he considered at that point was the evaluation of all values, and he thought it was gonna be this big, you know, events, and he wanted to kind of do that, and then let that simmer for a while, and let your portal fall apart, you go into devotions, and then, we'll be a series of outages before, which people don't talk about, there's outages before all that much. The Phantom Menace, right, don't just get to go. Which is which, you know, in my opinion, is a mistake, because it's hilarious, and it's, you know, the farce and really great labor. All this serious stuff to end.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting. He's the one who went into convulsions. I guess your convulsions are gonna be different. But yeah, I mean, it's a strange book.
Should we talk about, I mean, you know the overall book better, do you wanna just give us a sense of what happens in the book arts, and then I'll go and give us sort of introduction in the prologue before we get into some real meat of what's going on. You know, I mean, it's been a couple years since I read this book, I think I could be like a much of a, you know, blow-by-blow plot, you know. He comes off the mountain, and he reads the part that we're gonna read, talk about tonight, which is where he dresses the crowd, and then he resolves, you know, I really shouldn't be talking to crowds, I have to talk to companions. So books doing free are kind of about his relationship with his disciples, and whether that kind of, how that goes, and for various reasons.
He's dissatisfied with them, goes back him to the mountain, he's back down, and has a couple crises, where he goes into a catatonic state, and he goes through a few, he's very, very, very at the time, and then comes out with something new. And you know, you can kind of read it as his attempt to figure out, and how somebody who comes off the mountain can address humanity, and how we can teach what he wants to teach, which turns out to be a tricky problem, and thinks it's gonna be. And that's, you know, we really see that in this part that we're gonna talk about tonight, what he talks to the crowd, and he doesn't need it. And then in the fourth part, he goes back up to the mountain, and summons the higher man, right, who are kind of, you know, from the crown to the crown of contemporary society, but even they turn out to be just, you know, kind of morons.
And so he's kind of, at the end, he doesn't, you know, he's a little, you know, he's a little, you know, what's to make of that kind of, but all he said seems to come and send him out of peace with that, but only after he's, you know, whittled down to his followers to this kind of select group, and then even they are, you know, just unsatisfactory. And before David, or before Alex Hopsen on sort of just the overview of the prologue, I just, I'm a question, like, seriously, like, you have a pitch for why someone should read this. You have to know each other. I mean, you want to read this because he says this is his best book and, you know, you know, look, I read the book for the first time when I was, well, Parks and May, I read all the rest of your team, and I can sit down and read it.
And, you know, You're not gonna be able to make heads or tails but unless you've done more. You know, a lot, I will speak to you, and you'll take it out of context in the future, and you will think about it as the entire, you know, meaning of the text and, you know, that'll stay with you for a while until you decide to go back to it and put it back in context, then you realize that there are many more moving parts than you, you know, than you initially suspected, and then of course you have to put it into context the rest of the works. You know, not just the pros, which he was probably a snowfall, but the poetry because, you know, this is such a poetic text that if you want to figure out what the symbols, you know, sample or in this text, it's good to know what they stand for, and other places are how they've changed over, you know, over his career from the early 1870s to late 1980s. So, you know, I mean, anybody can sit down and read it and that's great, but, you know, I don't know, I don't know who has gotten to the bottom of it exactly, which doesn't pre-clude enjoyment, but it's not the first to be a teacher.
It's not where you should start. Yeah, fair enough. Maybe. This was the, yeah, well, I think more weight use summarize the book shows you, I think that what Nietzsche, or sorry, is there a few circumstances to see is that his lessons are for all or they're for none, right?
And he's kind of been tough with none, right? It feels like Nietzsche is sort of suggesting, look, I need to make this turn. This is my great book, but I need to also get down and write more prefetory books, which is what he was writing on, right, when he writes me on the channel, it's a little challenging morals. It's meant to be more prefetory stuff, but because he recognizes this on its own, he's just not going to work.
This was actually incidentally the first work of philosophy I ever read. Yeah, when I was an undergrad, I was impressed. Yeah, so much. Yeah, I mean, that's why I walk like a dancer.
But the dance, like, well, this is my original one. It's my quarter. I have the single volume, but I can't find it. So I bought another one.
But it doesn't have the whole thing. It doesn't have a little bit. Oh, we all have it. We all have the affordable in Nietzsche.
Yeah, this one is done more. We have a screenshot that is that is dead romantic right there. The three of us who's going to be shot at me. I'll take a screenshot from the recording.
OK, good. All right. I'm actually using the peak when the freestanding is. The Kauffman.
The Kauffman. I got the Hollendale also, but I feel like the Kauffman. Oh, you tell me, actually. Well, I mean, the Kauffman is better than the Hollendale.
That's what I thought. Good. I thought the future was the Hollendale. I think it was the Hollendale.
The first and last man is the ultimate man. Yeah. And I was a kid. And I'm like, I used to think about the Superman.
I'm like, it's a Superman related to the ultimate man. It's a super great. Like, which one is supposed to go? Which one is but not what's in it is bad?
The Hollendale is just stick to making sauces, right? Am I right? That's Hollandaise. Hollandaise.
And there's also the grandpa. That's the last man. That's the last man. Wait, is that Jesus from the pattern?
Yeah. Is it a Zorro Esther? No, it's a Zorro Esther. No, it's a Alex with my...
Is it Jesus? No. No. He's the only other guy named in the book.
It's a Zorro Esther. Let's give it back. Sorry, sorry. Sorry.
So, yeah. So, to get to the prologue, Justin pointed out or alluded to something earlier, which is that the whole thing is called the prologue, these 10 sections, but after the fifth section, we see that it's Zarathustra's prologue is opposed to Nietzsche's prologue. And it's there. Right.
So, speaking is Zarathustra's prologue, and then the very end of the fifth, all the way through the tenth, is the rest of it constitutes light. Well, I don't think that's exactly right. That's not exactly right, because at the end of five, he says, here ends the first speech, the first speech, which is why also calls the prologue, which is also called the prologue. So, it's the speech, which is Zarathustra's.
That is correct. So, those are the sections two through, or three through five. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. So, one way to think about this is that Zarathustra's prologue is not Nietzsche's prologue, which is a way of suggesting that they are very similar, and they walk a very similar path, in a way. Specifically, and this is something that needs to be backed up, Zarathustra seems to have gone down somewhat foolishly or with foolish hopes in mind.
And he seems to have come to a realization afterwards that he needs companions. And those sorts of things are what Nietzsche adds to what for Zarathustra is the decisive experience. Somehow, the decisive thought for Nietzsche or the decisive experience is the whole process of the prologue as a whole, which is where I would suggest that Nietzsche is saying that he's, I think, maybe early way of saying that the search for companions isn't going to go great, because he's saying, no, no, no, he thinks this is the decisive moment. Actually, the real decisive era is the decision to go to a campaign.
So, that makes sense. That's the best sense. Yeah. Yeah.
No, that's a good way of interpreting it. And that kind of, so, one way I can kind of frame this, which is, you know, like a minor swing, is that Nietzsche has this experience of eternal return kind of dawning on, like this idea of eternal return, eternal recurrence. And it's almost like a revelation. He asked himself, okay, how am I going to grapple with that?
Right? Am I going to become a prophet effectively? And so, one way to think about Zarathustra is Nietzsche's way of asking what would happen if I were to, I don't understand what I would do, if I were to try to become a prophet and, you know, what would be the likely sort of outcome? And why should I maybe not do that?
Right? And why should I be the Zarathustra, not kind of end up there in the end? But there is a kind of attempt to encroach on the territory of religion, reveal religion, and if it works through the possibilities of that, that Zarathustra, and the part of the word that's for Nietzsche. Yeah, I have a question.
The thesis right is that he's trying to be both prophet and philosopher in a way the difficulties he runs into are as a result of that attempt. Right? And so, it's essentially to say, I don't know, I haven't worked through Myers book and I don't know Zarathustra well enough. Does it kind of reduct to you, I guess, on that possibility?
Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, that's one way to look at that, or sure. Yeah, yeah, that's fair because, you know, before is absurd, it's okay. I have a quick question about the title and your comments about it as being, by the way, welcome David the last time. I'm really glad that David's here.
Hi. Welcome, David. As the title of the spoke Zarathustra, I mean, I sort of, in some of the language I've read Zarathustra before reminds me of early scoff and translation seems to remind me of the King James Bible. And so, in my head, I'm wondering, is there an authoritative German edition Luther, for example, that Nietzsche seems to be invoking with this, Zarathustra is obviously Zoroaster, this Persian monotheist of some kind, but then is it fair to say he's sort of invoking the language of the Bible too?
Yes. And so, I thought that's another point that my race is a little hint on, in this section, in the prologue, in the beginning of four, and beginning of five, you have Zarathustra looking at the people, everything in four, and the word for looking is S-A-H-E, saw up and then on. But it's spelled S-A-H-E, instead of S-A-H, which would be the contemporary spelling, and the idea is that the N-D there is eluding to the archaic spelling of the Luther Bible. Yeah, and also, Strauss makes this point as a lecture course that occasionally Luther inserts into the text, what's not there, which is also Schruck, Jesus, or whatever.
So that title is also a direct recollection of the Luther's Bible. Yeah. And does it, you might make the point just in that in one of his other works, is it Echehomo, where he says he refers to the individual snippet paragraphs as verses? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. But it's definitely, he says that. So, and Kofen's pretty good about this.
He does combine some of the mini paragraphs into one, but you do get the sense as you read, it's like chopped up very like almost one sentence paragraph that it has like a biblical read. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the original, it looks much more clearly like verses. And you know, the big drawback of Kofen's translation is that he doesn't really follow that. And the grandpa, Oxford translation follows that and also has good notes regarding biblical parallels and stuff like that.
So it's worth having that as a supplement. But are there any parallels at the beginning to, with the republic going down, you know, it's a look at the ascent of the parades, who's down the mountain. What other sources is he kind of drawing from? Because of course, like the beginnings were played with images of the stutter and so you constantly recall back to the Old Testament.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as I recall, like the imagery at the beginning about, you know, the house leading us is his homeland in the lake is taken almost directly from a biography of Zara Laster from the front of the period.
So there was a kind of kernel of the narrative that each kind of is just picking up on. Yeah, I do think the going down and the republic was of course the difference being that Socrates compelled and that he shows goes on and goes on and goes on. There's a couple of other interesting parallels, which is that the sun is now illuminating the cave at the top. And that's a private activity rather than leaving the cave.
And then you go down with the sun and you're somehow supposed to, the sun fills him and then he fills the people as the image that he had the hopes for. And then he learns that that doesn't quite work. Maybe we should give a little bit, let me give a little narrative of leading up to where we are. So we know that Zara Thuszto left his home 10 years ago and he had some ashes in his hand and he passed this old man in the woods, right?
And where are you pointing at me? I don't know. Okay. And then he goes, we're going to stick you in a tree later, Greg Thorin.
And then he goes up to the top of the mountain and there he kind of passed into sunlight. We find out later when he's like walking with the corpse, it says that he's used to walking at night. So I suppose when the sun sets, he would take these strolls and they with his animals. I don't know what this means.
He comes like he's kind of resting in the sunlight during the day. But it's I think pretty strongly intimated that the reason he left is that God is dead and maybe the ashes have something to do with that. And that in the light of the death of God and we can talk about what that means, he's gone to what seems to be the highest life giving being, which would be the sun, which nourishes the earth and then he comes down with all this message of being true to the earth. And on the way down, it seems like as he encounters this hermit and maybe wants to spend some time on this, he's shocked to learn that the hermit doesn't know that God is dead, which I take to mean because the hermit was already out that hermit left, God died, Zara Thuszto left, comes down.
And I took his shock to mean, adhering this from hermit that nobody else has left, the town of the mountain. You would think that in the wake of this death of God, there would be Zara Thuszto, who's this peak, but maybe others would go up into the woods and maybe climb up the mountain. But it seems like nobody's gone and told the hermit that this has happened, which I take to be an early indication that he's not going to find many like-minded people, right? Not many people have the same reaction to events and a little bit older, he comes to the next town.
They're hanging out in the marketplace, just enjoying some entertainment, some tightropeark walking, some mild dangerous activity, right? But nothing too dangerous. And so there's a sense that in the wake of an expected sort of ascent of others, and then he goes down and maybe gathers a group in or maybe gets everybody behind him, things have gotten even worse. And they've decayed into this kind of marketplace and sort of base entertainment.
And he has to learn, I think, just how resistant they're going to be to his first few speeches. That's sort of allegorically how I read those first. That makes sense that you think about the other things you should write about God's death not being felt right away, right? So in book five of days of science, number 343, the greatest reason about God is that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable is already been in cast as first shadows over Europe, for the few at least, and so on.
So in other words, the sun sets for different people at different times. And that first term is probably a religious term, right? Isn't that kind of implied in the text? Yeah.
Okay. Yes. Yeah, he's given up on loving man, right? He loves God.
He loves God and he kind of goes into these weird reveries by himself, like speaking in tongues or something like that. And so he's a kind of, he's stuck to the religion, but it's no longer viable where people were starting to reject it or just turn away from it. And so he fled and now he has his personal relationship with God. And it's clear he's just avoiding the problem.
He's not really interesting. And is there a thucher by contrast loves man? Yeah. And he's, well, okay.
Well, it's very hard, right? Because he says I love man, but then, you know, two verses later, three verses later, what did I say of love? I bring man, I give it. Yeah.
Right. It's not that I love man. It's that. And so this is one of the things that makes you think about why he came down the mountain, right?
Is it philanthropy or is it that something in him, right, wants to be, wants to come out? Right. There's a necessity coming from within him. He said, I was overflowing, you know, like a, like a bee with too much honey.
He says, but hold on, I'm overburdened with my wisdom. Like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands outstretched to receive it. Right. So there is a kind of necessity from within him that is not a philanthropic motive.
And that, that thing gets really worked out in the night song, which is a, it's about kind of this, you know, this solar seller love that was tragic because it doesn't mean to be loved. It means a lot. Justin, would you say that that he's coming? So he says I love me and I'm going to give him a gift.
And the service that seems, okay, that's just like a restatement. Everybody throws it out. And then he says, and then he goes to teach them. So the love is expressed as a gift, but the gift is a teaching.
And when they're non-receptive, it seems like the philanthropy then fully falls away. So is he maybe in a process of realizing? Yeah. I mean, I think it turns out to be that he loves what man could be, right?
And this is also a point that my earnings, right? It's not that he wasn't as such, he loves the possibility of heroes called the Superman and the overman. He loves the possibilities, but it's a, in that regard, a future, a future important to the love. I have a quick question.
I don't know about Zarathusra's education or it's like, he hangs out on top of a mountain. It's like he gathers all of this power from nature. It's not like he goes away like Prospero and is just, he knows deep in his book for a long time and acquires some sort of wisdom in this way. We don't hear anything about Zarathusra's education unless we do later in the book.
Yeah, not at least it's really part. I guess I'm trying to understand the source of his power. Is it just natural? I mean, it's all described in natural with not in natural terms and phrases.
I mean, solitude is an extremely important motif for nature. And either it's kind of coupled with the sun, the green, the sun and the animals, right? That he's hanging out with. But also just, you know, solitude allows you to kind of hear your own inner voice and get in touch with your own nature.
So there is a kind of internal spring of compulsion that is the source of this knowledge. It doesn't seem to have been derived from anybody else. And, you know, like I said, maybe nature to some extent, the nature that he is as well. Should we get into the Superman?
David once told me he's going to have a revaluation of all of Nietzsche's values by inventing the super duper man. How's that going? It's not going too well, Alex. I see you've discovered the super size, size me, man.
I discovered that years ago, at the bottom of the mountain in college. So let's get into the speeches because we want to focus on the last man's speech. Yeah, third in a series. And so maybe just because there's a, there's a, he fails twice before he gets to the last man's speech and he's making rhetorical adjustment, sensible rhetorical adjustments in the course of that.
So yeah, actually, the only way I would have to worry about the right to get in part is just this strange, there's a strange turn of fur praise, which doesn't come through in translation, really. Um, for the end of section one, he says, for that, I must descend to the deaths. And I descend to the deaths is in the teeth, died in that same means climb, but normally means ascend in the host side. I don't like my, my, my, my spoken term accent is horrible, but into the heights, to climb into the heights is a much more usual usage.
And there are times when this bird is used to mean, um, descending, but it's, it's not, it's, it's kind of, um, you know, paradoxical, certainly. And I think that that there's a lot of paradoxical language here in this, um, in this preface that that kind of signals. And that has to do with Nietzsche's view of morality and greatness. And if I can just give a kind of, um, helpful kind of watch word, I think for all of each it's that it's easy to kind of conceptualize it.
Okay. You can think of good and evil tonight, good and say it's a Sunday, the people you can say it's decentally, right? That's how we normally think about these things, right? Do it is like, I mean, and from each of those two things are the same thing.
In other words, it's a question of amplitude. It's a question of anytime rise, um, and goodness, you're also descending the evilness. And so there's a mix of mix up of upper and, and under, over and under. I don't think there's a mix up is what David has.
I think this is related to this. Sorry, let's just a fish is very good. I just, I just think this is related to this idea of a depth of God. There's no longer an up and down, right?
There's just magnitude, or amplitude, and what he calls greatness. So in my opinion, when each uses the word great and when he uses the word small, these are technical types that refer to this sort of absolute value, um, or magnitude. And so what the last man represents is the smallest or narrowest possible amplitude from that, whereas what the Superman represents is the greatest possible amplitude, which means both the greatest good and the greatest evil. So let me be familiar with that.
Tell me if I've got it right. One way to say this is that if you want to avoid the evil, you have to become uninteresting and, and sort of just have no inherent goodness, right? You have to become just new school and like media, basically having no impact or any kind of effect. And if you want to become good and great, even, you have to become evil and capable of great evil.
Do do great evil and destructive at the same time as you're creating something. And it's fascinating because in a way he takes over the argument from the hippiest minor where you remember the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the man, the man, the person who can give you the answer mathematical question wrongly is also the same person who's best at answering it rightly. Because the person who doesn't know math very well might get it right by accident. Right.
He's trying to get it wrong. Whereas the one who knows math really well knows how to get it wrong. And each and not only lectures on that in the 1870s, but even in the later 1880s refers to that point from that, from that dialogue. So you sort of absolute magnitude or amplitude of knowledge is always, I think, behind the scenes here and you know the symbols like a tree, right, which grows as high as its roots can descend.
So I think, you know, talk about a plant here and so I just think that that's a helpful thing to keep in mind when we're talking about everything in the tree is that, you know, everything has both sides to it. So sometimes they'll say something good about something and you're like, wait, I thought you did that thing. Well, no, anything has those, you know, can you look that either way? And so, you know, confusing if you're not looking at it in a way beyond good evil.
Great. It's a necessary consequence of the denial of opposites, right? If you deny the opposites, they have to be co-extensive and therefore you have this sort of magnitude, absolute magnitude. And that's the bow, right?
The tense bow that is the image that is made by those two arms. So the Superman is the tensest bow because it's the furthest that the arms can get from each other and therefore can shoot the furthest. And Zarathustra, the Persian, you know, the Phoneticians, the one who shoots well with arrows in his arms. And Zarathustra represents that.
Okay. So, but anyway, so I just wanted to point to the sort of paradox of the language here that I think sticks with us and also, you know, relates to the overall. So, all right. So great.
That's helpful. And he reaches the town and he gives three, one speech, but it's in three parts, right? And the first is, he says, I teach you the overman and he gives the speech. And everybody, at the end of this, everyone says, now we've heard enough about the tight rope walker.
Now let us see him too. The idea of being like, oh, the overman, that's the guy who's over us. They make a joke about it. A tight rope walker in German is silent tensor.
It means literally roped answer. But the word for rope sounds like soul, which is Zila, silent Zila. And he said, man is a rope stretch over a bit. So there's, and Nietzsche is kind of following the path of the sun.
And then it's isn't midday when the dancer falls, right? And so it's like he's right above Nietzsche because he's there through the street because he lands right next to him. And so the sun is above. So this is kind of parallelism going through out.
Sun's there through the street and tight rope walker. That then leads to this moment that then requires him to think at night and therefore see companions and take a less direct approach, right? So I'm just trying to connect it. After that joke, he decides to speak again about the overman at the end of which, and this is now in section five, which when he says, I am not the mouth for these ears must once smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes.
So he tried to speak to them. And then he tried to use the thing they were watching as a site, right? Learn to listen with their eyes, right? And then that doesn't work.
So he makes this pivot to the last man, which is more of a, which is a deeper psychological move that he's trying. So it's his first sort of attempt to win them on a sort of even further removed basis from his abilities. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Three speeches. Three speeches progressively get like progressively diluteous is meaning or is teaching until an even that fails and he has to start with these. So he's slowly coming to this realization. So what I, I think, bosses speeches.
Yeah. No, that's, that's good. I mean, yeah, clearly the last man's speeches about repulsing, repulsing, right? He's supposed to provide them with a figure of identification because that obviously doesn't work.
And we're so repulsing, making them repulsed at another rather than repulsing themselves. I don't think they like the idea of being told, you f***ing worm. You need to be overcome by the worm. No, they need to think, oh, that guy's a worm.
I take pride in being above this guy. Let me push that for. He says they take pride in our education. Therefore, they're for the.
This is another full nation. This is another parallel to the, to the Republic, the allegory of cave. Hey, isn't the, the man who makes out he's destroyed, well, he's blinded by the sun, but isn't it, I guess he's destroyed on his way back down. Because he's in his art, we should running to the risk that these townspeople will kill him.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Certainly. And there is kind of an expertise in the background of that in general too, you know, when that, when the, when the jester wants him away, right?
But it seems to be warning of a kind of mob mentality that, you know, the good and just or, you know, the, the leaders of the belief, they don't like it when you come in and, you know, say something new and bring in new gods or something like that. And so, you know, if you stay here another day, then, you know, they're gonna kill you. That's how I write that. That's what it is.
But just a final word on what analysis point about the identification or, you know, the teachings is that a problem with the plasma thing is they end up identifying with him. They say, well, bring us this guy. Okay. Like let's see this guy, you know, it sounds comfy, you know, it's, it's like, you know, the guys in Wally, right?
Which I've talked about before in the, in the, in the, I mean, I think once you see that movie, it's hard to get that image out of your mind. That's the last man. That's like, you know, so, you know, so, you know, so I guess it lastly doesn't sound too bad. He says we have invented happiness.
Yeah. It always reminds me of that scene in the, what's that movie Greg's always trying to get us to discuss with the go away, bait and what is a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, just rewind it. Yeah. He sits in his chair and he has his, like a nourishing, so as a shepherd.
Yeah. And he masturbates. And his pleasure. Right.
And he's like, Oh, I mean, what, I mean, what, what's wrong with that? Right. If God is dead. You know, what's the difference?
Right. I mean, unless you get, I mean, this is like, this is something that, you know, you have a kind of heroic existentialism which does know you put meaning in your life, like giving yourself a project, a freely chosen project and pursuing it. You know, I don't, to me, you know, sounds better. I mean, you know, it sounds better.
He knows in a lazy boy. I'm a joke chair. It was a poop chair. Yeah.
That if you're, if you're concerned about living well and doing this marginal way, it's not clear that that's actually, right. If you can, if you want to magnify that, that living well, it involves this strenuous out. I mean, this is where you see why Strauss honed in on this text as perhaps recovering a natural standard. Right.
And you see this, for example, in toilet, I don't say, you know, at the end of the section, probably a Socrates section, 12 as he said, but at the end of section 11, he says, so life is so long as life is in ascendancy, that's happiness, right. So you have this implicit standard of ascent. And you try to kind of hold it in place and say, OK, I'll just do this. I'll follow these strictures or whatever.
But it's actually indebted to this higher standard, which is this dynamic standard. Right? And so you're asking about the metaphysical difference. I think you've said it, right?
It's less happy. You're less good and therefore less happy. Now, how does that show up in the experience of the last? I think it's a difficult question.
Because it looks like the last name is completely self-contained as a final type that just cannot be escaped, which we were talking before. I think that's a rhetorical exaggeration on set up. It was just part maybe, maybe it's Nietzsche's part. But is it possible that we will reach this low point and never get out?
Or is it necessary that there's a counter explosion, or a counter force? That's another way of it. Yeah, I think that's true. I'm not sure that I'm back on metaphysical, but there's a difference.
And the way I've given it away, because there's this concept of a more encompassing soul. And ultimately, that's what it would come down to, is that because it means both the philosopher and the last man had leisure. Leisure is a prerequisite for both. And the way leisure is something that is kind of a society to create leisure.
And then the question is what do you do with it? And it's difficult to judge between the way that somebody, two people, use their leisure. And what grounds do you say that want to secure it to the other? It might be Nietzsche's answer has to do with this amplitude of soul, meaning that the person who's greater can also do the thing that the narrow person does.
The greater person can sit around and jack off, and they can do that. And they can even enjoy that. As an expert, as an Ubermensch, I will say, it's not true. I don't have a proven much air.
Whatever. You could. But on the other hand, the last man can't do the other things and have the experiences that the Superman can have, or the philosopher, the future can have all of this. So in a way, it seems like we talk about Nietzsche.
And you guys were talking about the clients as the other day, and Nietzsche's idea of creative will and all that. And I think that's there. But there's also a sense of, you can't just go on and create whatever you want and have that be the truth. It's like a banking.
In order to command nature, you have to first obey nature. There's a guessing, Nietzsche's words are rotten. There's a kind of discovery that comes before invention. And that part is hard.
That part involves a kind of not manual labor, but it involves something besides just sitting around doing nothing. But from the outside, it doesn't look all that different. Let's just mostly happens mentally. So at the point is that Nietzsche is trying to reestablish a border of rank.
In the world, he's trying to reestablish that of hierarchy. There's all up and down. The higher a lower is making sense anymore. So how do you do it?
What do you have? The hierarchy of human types or the hierarchy of human soul. And that's why after this text, he pivots becomes fascinated with psychology. And the younger evil says that psychology is once again the path to fundamental problems.
And it's because he thinks he can reestablish a kind of order of the world by establishing an order of human types. And the person who's at the top of that order of rank will have a perspective that's greater and more encompassing than those underneath it. And so that person's creation is different from something that the last name would create and is better. It's not just relatively him or him.
There is an attempt to reestablish an order of rank. You can say he failed it. But you're certainly trying to do that. I have a question.
I think we've circled around this in touch down a few times. I'd like to have him work. A serious conversation by way of segue. To what extent does the death of God pave the way for the last man?
And then more generally, I was just wondering if you want to have a conversation about the death of God and Nietzsche's atheism generally. I was reading Strauss's lecture notes on this. One of the things that Strauss mentions is that God is dead is different than Zeus is not. And so just thinking through that.
But the first question of course is, in your right, but God is dead. Therefore, I can just sit around in my chair and self-pleasure and defecate and watch game shows all day or something. So are they connected? How are they connected?
And then the second question of how it was Nietzsche's atheism is different than, because I think the popular understanding of Zarathusse is that it's a sort of weird, religious, anti-religion thing. Or it's a weird religious expression. It's atheism, if that's fair. But there's a lot of questions there.
So take a stab at how are you on. Let me jump in on this one. Because I think this connects us. I was asking Justin.
No, please. No. Because I think this connects us to something Justin was saying, which is, yeah, nature in order to be commanded as be obeyed and big. But the way that's crucially modified in Nietzsche is that it's no longer like sense data.
It's not like an empiricism, but it's more of like a historical and physiological fatalism. Like you are so constituted, as are people of your similar descent, your folk or whatever, right? You are similarly constituted in such a way that you have to think through your internal contradictions. It's somehow built something out of them.
And then you can sort of rise to this level of creativity. Whoever does that most fully and most fundamental level can attain this highest level of creation, right? Now, how is that different from the atheism of like, it's not, I don't think this atheism is fully won. It seems to be a kind of, because it's like a fatalism or historical fatalism, it seems like it's just a matter of historical fact you could say that people no longer believe.
And therefore an alternative, fiction has to be found. But you don't see, at least in this overt presentation, you don't see the full critique of revelation. At least in Zarathustra, maybe because he's trying to be profited and maybe that's part of his mistake. I don't understand Nietzsche well enough to claim this, but at least on a surface level, this is not the critique of revelation or the sort of taking seriously of the claim.
It seems to me nearly like, no, this idea no longer has traction. We need new ideas. It's not kind of simpler. Yeah, I mean, that's right.
He's not doing that work here. Where does he do it the most? Maybe in Antichrist, where he really gets into the psychology of religion founders and stuff like that. And we're called it that for each other, this is a kind of self undoing of Christianity through probably through brotherschide, meaning that you've now spent so much time and energy examining your soul for moral reasons for the sake of going ahead and not sitting against God.
But now you have this skill of knowing how to be truthful in that one. And so all these other things that are part of the substructure of that start to become questionable and no longer than. So it's its own kind of undoing. And he's really saw himself that way as the son of Lionel, the wistler and pastors and so on.
The way Christianity is overcoming of itself in him. But now he's not doing that. He's not doing that work here. And he's not doing that work here.
But the doctrines of the world's power and the eternal return and the overman, the Superman, certainly could be understood as it attempts to fill that void. But then the question is, this is a big and bummer. Does he need to then go do that? He doesn't write the world's power book.
He writes and said, the evaluation of all values. He writes, he writes, he writes, he writes, he writes, he writes, and he writes, he writes, he writes, and he doesn't write the projected volume on the eternal occurrence or eternal return. He mentions that at the end of Twilight the Idos. But in the context of that kind of noble religion that has to be as he greets.
And the overman kind of goes away even in this book. There seems to be options that for one reason or another doesn't want to take in his own name or even as our thisters name. So that's another question of each interpretation. Why didn't he do that?
Why didn't he want to put something in that place? He clearly thought he had the most encompassing soul. Why is one and two? I mean, it's pretty clear that he thinks that back at home means like to hold a man.
That's me. I am the most comprehensive soul that there has been so far. And so if you're going to build a world, build it on me, that's the most, that's the rest of the superior world that we have. And he held out the possibility of new and higher types, which I think kind of takes him away from the ancient stuff certainly.
But he did think that he was himself a kind of high tide. That's a quick question for you. Sorry, did you have a follow up? Can you say a little bit more about, or do we get late?
Hopefully we can do this whole book with you, but later on in Zarathustra. And then of course, he writes about this and other sources that you could talk about that. How do the last men achieve last men's status? What's the key?
A lot of the, is there a key point of degeneration that's pushing this? Because he reads Zarathustra and you think, oh, well, God is dead. They haven't heard about his death, but somehow they've degenerated because of it. But I don't know if that's accurate, or if there's a different cause of the degeneration.
Yeah, so he doesn't use the term last man on the outside of his text. So possibly, possibly at all. And some gets into notes, but I'm not sure if there's in any of the other public checks. He uses last man and Superman only once more in the text outside the photo.
Yeah, right. So it's even within this work, it's, it's. But he has other terms with more or less what he means. And Milan beast.
Well, I don't know if he's the last man of her, right? And so I have a good note here. So the last man appears for the first time in the notes and he can see 18 to three. He says that last man of Superman called out at the same time, part of the same movement of thought.
But it's helpful to recall that there is a kind of evolutionary substructure here that like, you know, he's not in need with Darwin, he's out there. There's an aphroism and pylary idles where he criticizes Darwin. But he also sort of takes Darwin for granted. So we're in the aid.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he says, this is note 721 from 1883. Morality up to now has had its boundaries dictated by the CCs.
All Morality is up to now. We're useful for establishing first and foremost the unconditional stability of the CCs. When this has been achieved, the goal can be set higher. So in other words, the Morality has kind of been almost like a Darwin idea group selection.
They help groups to survive because they create these herds. He says of that movement, but once you are out of danger, then you can look at alternate Moralities. And that's the point he thinks that we've gotten to. He says, the one movement is unconditional, leveling of humankind, giant vehicles, et cetera.
The other movement, my movement, is conversely the intensification of all opposition's and divisions, the elimination of equality, the creation of the super powerful. The former generates the last men, my movement, Superman. So there is a kind of logic of biological, you know, treating the human as an animal, certainly. That the last man, it's not just a cultural phenomenon.
Like that does happen, but there's a reason that this faithful is no longer believed to do this because it's no longer necessary. And now he thinks we have to have a point where you can have like a, he tells it like a hot house where there's all kinds of new plants bringing up, like through the mixing of races and mixing of people from people from over there. And that for the most part, for the most part, those mixtures are gonna result in failures. They're not gonna come out now.
People will be too divided against themselves. But in a few cases, the intensity of opposition will be mastered by the person that has that inside them. And that will create a kind of new and higher type that's never been seen before, which is able to marshal these greater forces that have never been put together by them. So there is this biological cultural, and he talks about greed, you know, and he talks about the human as an animal.
And then he says, and this is interesting, just as a code has to that, the next line says, the goal is not at all to conceive of the latter, the Superman, as the masters of the former, the last time, but rather the two species should exist alongside one another, as segregated as possible. The one, like the Epicurean gods, having no concern to the other. And you see that in this book, in Zarathustra, when he talks about the Isles of the Blessed Isles, right, that there's, in fact, the need to kind of take these few people who can handle this internal strife and master it, and plant them like trees kind of on their own, and let them grow tall and also down into the depths. So what do these people look like, Jut, I mean, because I think that when younger people, especially, their imagination runs wild on what this type, I think the lowest type is probably because we're closest to it, is easier to understand.
And then the imagination runs wild when you're thinking of this highest type. I mean, there's an Elon Musk, but what is, I mean, I mean, let's say, in the new edition of the Complete Works of Nisha, they actually attempt to unravel who the Iron Man Zarathustra 4 are. And they think that they can actually, you know, tell you, by means of Nisha's work, he's referring to specific figures, it's unclear whether that's possible. But, you know, somebody like Napoleon, you know, he writes very, you know, positively about Napoleon, Napoleon from Corsica, and then it was an island, right, that has been kind of, you know, left alone, and has these older types still within it.
But I think, you know, a big part of his problem is that he says there were no fish, like there weren't, I couldn't really find these people. I think they're out there, the philosophers in the future, but I don't, you know, you don't want to pre-specify what they were going to look like. And I think he was disappointed by the fact that he sort of cast out his hook and didn't really find too many of them. But, you know, you could look at Zarathustra 4 and those types as the Iron Man as kind of approach to, but they have all sort of miscarried too.
It's a principle in each of that, the greater a thing can be, the more likely it is to miscarry. So it's a very rare thing. And he thinks that European democratic culture will tend to destroy these types. So even if they're being born, they're being deformed by equal rights and by the democratic mentality.
And he focuses on the great criminals, right? So he's interested in those are sort of capable of acting outside society in a way that's, you know, coherent, might have been interested in something like Amafya, honestly. I don't know, maybe that's not interesting. I think he thought he was going to.
There's like an old school strength there. The problem is it's so familial. It's not like European vision, right? Of Iron Man that are not just tied to their nations but to all of Europe, right?
To become a European event or something. Yeah, right. And it's amazing, there's a moment when he goes from kind of, so when we look at the last man, right, we feel disgust, right? I think there's a lot of history that makes us feel disgust, whether it's, whether it's the basis of this, right?
It's pretty clear that, you know, this is something that we're supposed to be repulsed by. As there are a few, the book goes on. He has to come face to face with his own disgust again and again. And when he goes into his Catatonic State in book three, he says that what brought it on was that even the highest is all, even the greatest is all true small, right?
That if the eternal return is true, then the last man will recur and recur and he, you know, he can't handle it. But there's a moment and it correlates also with the way he talks about politics, where he stops being motivated seemingly by disgust and, you know, stops kind of speaking deal of democracy and starts to see it as something that's useful for the future rulers of the Earth. You already have a tame populace, which is also habituated to science, right? So there's a, in the meantime, there's a conscientious of spirit who's a leech, leech reign scientist.
He sits in his little thing and he studies the leech's brain. But he's really good at it. And he's really knows how to be clean in that way. And he knows how to read himself and prejudice his minutes just on this narrow scale.
So he starts talking about a tense bow that Christianity has created in Europe that means basically there's a mass that's ready to be led. And they just have to kind of keep being heard to people and that that's actually a good thing, right? That's exactly what he would want. So having discussed is not just an unphilosophical asset.
You're missing what's actually good about the situation, the way you can deal with the situation and exploit the situation. This is where it sounds so platonic, right? The city and speech where you have the guardians, the kings and kings and he says that, look, and you know, who knows how seriously you can take this point, but he does argue it, the Socrates argues that they have a relationship of supporters and protectors, right? Like we're feeding you, we're taking care of your stuff.
Like we're making things for you and we're supporting you but they're buying. And you and Trump protect us if we're a vedic or something like that. And there's a kind of friendship now, who knows how that is. But that suggests that if this relationship is going to work out and be anything more than tyrannical oppression, it has to evolve an appreciation of this distinct domain of virtues that the lower types.
Well, on the leech brain, I mentioned this before, but when I said this was the first work philosophy I ever read, and that passage, I was studying physiology and neurology at the time I wanted to be a doctor. And it's about this guy who is an expert in the leech, but only in the brain of the leech. And that's all he knows, he's used the whole world. And it's funny because his brain is a leech, it sucks the life out of everything.
So he's got a leech brain studying the leech brain. And so, but he doesn't have self knowledge, which is the funny thing, he seems to prime for it. But I remember going into a lab practical, where there's a bone in front of me, I had to name all these weird like fissures and lines. I know any of them, there are all these complex names.
And I was just like, I'm sucking the life out of things. I have a leech brain. And I was the thing that turned me around, I was like, I'm not learning anything about myself. I studied my body, like, and everyone needs to understand myself really.
But I mean, so I think a lot of these speeches, just a large way of saying that, a lot of these speeches which there are three-thistures using to try to find disciples and deciding who's worthy or not, also function on the reader in the same way, which is, look, this is a profound insight into a way of life. And if you're pursuing this way of life, this is what you'll look like. Are you gonna be disgusted? Is that really your happiness or are you gonna change things?
And I think each one's meant to challenge a different operating set of assumptions. And so we're talking about a little bit. Just a little bit or anybody has thoughts on the rhetoric of sorry, so why is this the medium for this message in particular? So it needs to write all kinds of books.
But he decides to deliver this teaching in a bizarre, half-biblical, half-nobble kind of structure. Do you have any thoughts why he chose? Or did he write anywhere in his journals? Why he decides to write his arthush?
Rather than just another treat. What he says about the process of writing his arthush? That he was almost automatic writing. That it just, it was an economic homage that washed over him.
And therefore he knows the feeling of religious writers who felt that they were inspired by God. Because he felt that there was, you know, every word had to be exactly where it was. And it was coming through him. And it wasn't so much that he was writing.
And he says he wrote in part in 10 days and so on. Is there evidence that he's lying about that? You look at the notes, it's like, I mean. Four parts in 10 days, that's 40 days, that's biblical.
That's obviously pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. But there's indication that he's lying.
That he says that's my plan. That's true. And it's clearly like a parody of the Bible. I know with the animals, certain parts of the Quran.
Yeah, I mean, just, you know, you wrote a lot of poetry. And this is a kind of, you know, the only text that's really intermediate between his poetry and his prose. But, you know, I think he thought that, you know, as he was trying to work out this, because the problem was prophecy. And it was probably most, you know, religious experience and how a philosopher deals with religious experience.
It seems, you know, to hammer to his unconscious mind or whatever was motivating him to write, it seems, you know, like this would be the way to, I mean, it certainly couldn't be something where it's, you know, not making a case. You're, you know, operating mostly in symbols. You're telling a narrative story about a, you know, unless a hero, but somebody who's either of a, you know, you don't know what exactly he is. But, you know, you are recounting that person's, you know, journey, progress.
So, you know, I think, you know, I think that that's probably the main reason he wrote that way. But- Does he just deepen? Does he deepen this teaching later on, reject aspects of it? I apologize, I'll stop asking you.
Which teaching is specific? No, I am just like what the message of the messages in Zara's book. And he still talks about it in the most glowing possible terms. I mean, he says, I've given him a kind of deepest book that it possesses, which is Zara Thustra.
And the answer is, will be the most independent book that it possesses. But he talks about it in very long terms. And I think, you know, there is a hope of it's being taken as a kind of scripture of some kind. And, you know, not again, a parodic scripture.
And he's not trying to be a religion founder here. But he did think that this was kind of, you know, on that level. And, you know, what you hear about the, you know, with being taken into the foxholes and what were one with the soldiers and so on. It sort of did operate that way, you know, for a lot of people.
So- I never heard that. You mentioned that Nietzsche was a poet and I thought I could take us out on one of Nietzsche's best poems. Let's hear it. All right.
Yeah. There once was a nun from Frankfurt, who stressed that it did hurt. He went to Falvakna's to do so and had her. And his name, it's Louis Lawrence Knappert.
Made a powerful nun, he said. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. Worth it.
Just gonna wrote that? You wrote a lyric? I remember. Wow.