Welcome back to the New Thinkery. We want to thank Jake, the Canon, Gannon. Comes out of that Canon, Greg. Pure wisdom, more pure wisdom.
And love and love. So Jake began again and he produces this show for free. In fact, he refuses. We get and are grateful for many donations to the New Thinkery.
We try and pay Jake, he refuses it. Maybe, but not enough, keep it coming. Well, that's true. But we allow you to give cards for dinners and stuff.
But thank you so much, Jake. We don't say it enough, but we're grateful. If anybody needs a pod or freelance producer, Jake is the best in business. So with that, I'm David Barr.
How are you doing? I'm doing well. And how are you, Greg? I'm doing great.
You guys always take turns bringing your kids to the show. So I thought I'd bring stubby to the show. My 12 year old Chihuahua who doesn't have any teeth. I was kind of hanging out of his mouth.
No, we're devicates. Other things. Hang out. Do I have to pick up on the body?
Yeah. I do have one question, Greg. Is that why you invest so much in cans of Jeff Peanut butter? He likes to be, no teeth.
So he has to lick things. We have to apply it somewhere, of course. But yeah. Just how many zippers open?
Does that sound weird? Yeah. It's just my fleece for the record. Yeah.
So many women who's demonstrating what the peanut butter has advanced. Yeah. This is me. This is me.
If some people ask us, we're live, or sorry, the video recordings of the show, right? We can't do that. No. We should do Patreon.
We should really should. I mean, people would love what we do. But we mimic things to one another. It's unhealthy.
Wait, that's not recording that one time. Somebody got really mad at us for mimicking things. Yeah, because we recorded a bad episode on Faters Republic. And then when we were starting another one, you guys just try to do all sorts of obscene gestures.
Don't do it. We didn't know what we were doing. Yeah. So it was funny.
It was funny among us, but to the audience, it would just mean we can't hold the thought together. It was just really funny. You think about it in the abstracts, but I was like, I was like, are we just going to have nothing but that episode song? It's where it's a political philosophy.
Pretty funny. Yeah. We can just think we're sort of mentally, so not there. Like, why are these guys so bad at this?
I'm not really trying to make it hard. It's funny. When we fight in bigger, we tend to push it pretty far. I think I've threatened to quit the show or just been grumpy about the show.
I quit just a lot of it. The other day we joked about replacing Greg with somebody. And Greg said, all right, I'm walking. And I was like, and just say, I'm out of here.
I'm on this bullsh**, but we stick together. We do. And part of the weathers, we stick together is because we lie to one another. And we enjoy the show.
Lying is a huge theme of the show and her Twitter. When she's real. That's true. And we lie almost about everything except for a marathon, a mess of private proclivities.
So where do we learn? Where do we learn our great skill of dissemination? I mean, lying is a huge topic and the history of political philosophy, baking has a wonderful essay online in this essay. But what are we reading today on?
So this is part of Greg proposed a series on lying. You won't. Mainly so you can understand his marriage, which is long. But we did an episode on the noble lying.
Greg got his idea. It's a good idea. And we did that one, which is coming out actually tomorrow. Yeah, probably we'll come out by the time we're speaking out weeks before this one.
Right. And then we're also going to do one on content after sending an email actually, because I think we want to get a guest for Constance. We have a couple of people in mind. And David's words got kills.
Right. Right. So but today we're going to do somebody else who kills as we saw from rope, right? Misha.
Right. Right. Right. A truth in lie and the extra moral or in a moral sense, right?
He doesn't mean it in talking about morality, which I think is already a nod to Kant, right? But this is a philosopher writing about lying, but he's not concerned with morality, right? Because Kant was concerned princely with morality. Yeah, that's where the discussion of lying.
Maybe a good place to start is with a great way of your entry. What we should do is the hippiest minor as well. Obviously. Oh, that'd be great.
Yeah, we absolutely should. So great. Why don't you jump in and tell us why you think lying is an interesting topic or why this occurred? Well, sure.
Well, I think it's philosophically interesting. And I was sort of raised that the one virtue my father always instilled in me was truth-telling. You would say the only thing a man has is his word. And I sort of really valued that.
I think it's really important. And then I got corrupted by all these philosophy professors telling me that, you know, actually it's a mark of wisdom to lie. And so there's something to it. And I just thought, you know, we've been talking about natural law.
Alex and I know parents have talked about natural law. And lying seems really to get people going. It touches on all kinds of things for speech in America right now. To what extent is it OK?
Why does one lie to protect oneself? Because to shield people you're speaking to maybe, maybe should I get a v-strapsy and hermeneutic? Right. So Alex and I are, you know, like quite like that, but I'm making a joke.
But no, I think that's right. And in careful writing, and you could remember the beginning of my monadies guide, he gives you all these, who essentially tells you in enumerates the various ways he will deceive you. Other ways, yeah, the trick. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, well, just as the listeners probably have gleaned, we think that some of the best writers are less than forthcoming.
They're less than truthful in their writing. And I thought maybe we should, instead of most of our episodes, we just go straight through text. And I thought, what if we did a series where we brought some people into dialogue? And I just sort of thought Kant seems to be like the paradigm, the paradigmatic thinker who argues on behalf of always telling the truth.
And let's look at various reasons for lying, various accounts of lying, various defenses of lying. We did play on the noble lie. And I got to say, as we turned in at Nietzsche on Alex's recommendation, I was not prepared for what this text had to say about truth and lying. So I'm just trying to schematize all the various ways that want to look into the same.
I mean, I think that most human beings could be, could be, could be seen to come to agree with a notion that sometimes lying is excusable. And so we'll see what happens when we try to confine, maybe we'll find some expert comfort and then persuade me that I should always tell the truth, but probably not David's going to thumbs down. So that's kind of why I'm just kind of an interesting thing. And also just trying to bring some episodes together to speak to one another.
Well, more than just an interesting thing, it's this topic, I can't think of a single serious philosophy, philosopher in the Pantheon that does not treat this very subject, go out of his way to tackle lying or the obverse of the truth. Sometimes you can get at falsehood lies by writing carefully on truth telling. Alex and I were talking, yeah, everybody lies. Alex and I were talking just before the show before David got on because he was running late, because he's selling an ottoman or something like that, not the piece of furniture, but the furniture.
No, no, I've sold the other four leading ottoman's who were my biggest, geez, at least that was for the slavery episode. And any event he never talked about one of the ways that most of the philosophers that we read, I don't know if we would say lie, but okay, fine, is that they write esoterically. And Alex and I were just talking about, I'm sort of confusing because Nietzsche works, doing Nietzsche's non-truths and the lie-national senses, Alex said. And I don't know, it's almost like he's saying that lying isn't even possible or that the attempt to tell the truth is a lie.
But I'm sort of a loss as to whether Nietzsche employs this esoteric writing. I was talking to Alex and I was saying, look, when we read this and he really calls in the question, even our ability to tell the truth about the world, it seems like that might escape us. And I was telling Alex that that seems like the last time I read Deanna Mont by Aristotle. I was detecting something kind of similar that our view of the world is very human-centric.
Like we're looking at the world through human eyes. We can't butt look at it through human eyes, it would seem. So we'll have all things. Yeah, and so but therefore it would send out a sort of perception of being, it seems.
But Aristotle, if he says these kinds of things, I think he says it very carefully and very quietly. But Nietzsche screams it from the rooftops. It's all lies basically. So I don't know where we want to go.
I mean, he's engaged in this work. Maybe let me say a couple of things about the work. Sure. Yeah, yeah.
The year where it's part of, it's part of, now it's strange. He has all sorts of little snippets and even whole books from like the 1870s early in his career. Where he, people haven't really read it as much. This is one of the most famous pieces.
And it's strange because it's only about 10 pages, right? If you add apparently five sections or chapters, at least I noted, that seem to be part of this work. And yet it's incredibly powerful stuff. He really, and what reads in excerpts, because I think some of the passages are just too eloquently not too sort of.
Right. This wasn't published though, wasn't it? It was not published. It's from his notebooks.
And again, there's tons of stuff in the notebook. For instance, I mean, philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks is a work in his notebooks from this time. It's published and translated. And it's probably more read than this work.
But it's strange that these 10 pages are from all the stuff in this, some of the most famous, and sort of, I think, attractive pages. I didn't read it for some time, but it is in the portable Nietzsche. And that means that it's pretty out there. I think our friend of the show, and just friend simply just in Kuchmak, right?
He brought up that this has been, he thinks this is responsible for so many people being turned on to Nietzsche. It is peculiarly powerful and dense statement of certain themes in his writing that are expressed elsewhere and even up to his last writings, right? About creativity versus rationality and so on and so forth. With also some suggestions of what he was on his way to writing in the birth of tragedy.
Right? Especially in that creativity provides us greater access to truthy things. It seems like it's conscious or conscious creativity, at least, gets at something that's more self-aware than scientific or sort of scientific sort of abstraction or reasons, abstractions in trying to look at the world, right? Sort of cold concepts as he calls him, right?
Okay. So this was written in 1873 and dictated and... The year the perfect gun came out. That's right.
Yes. Winchester, 1738. I'd like to just start, if you guys don't mind, if there's no objections, we're just reading the first paragraph. Which I first read this.
I was like floored by how it just directs. When did you first read it? I think it wasn't until grad school. Actually, right.
It was... Valki was teaching, of course, on Nietzsche. And this was one of the assigned readings early in the semester. It was on the birth of tragedy and beyond good evil.
And I was really taken when he read this. I think it's worth reading. Before you do, Alex, can you tell the folks at home what translation you're reading from? So I have an edition.
It's called Philosophy and Truth Selection from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870s. It's just edited and translated by Daniel Brazil. I haven't checked the translation that much. What little bit I did just from the beginning, I was just reading a little bit of German than looking at this.
It seems pretty good. If you're interested in picking up, it's got a number of these shorter works that were founded in notebooks. This is from Humanity Books and in Pranapravious books. Very nice.
Okay. Sorry. On to the first paragraph. I mean, just on translation, he translates the title as, on truth and lies in a non-warl sense.
It really is on truth and lie in an extra-warl sense. So... That's how coffin translates, by the way. Yeah, it should be, ouch, in the word.
It should be ouch, in the wordation. Zina, right. So extra-warl. So, okay.
Here's how it begins. Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe, which is dispersed into memberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and endacious minute of world history. But nevertheless, it was only a minute.
After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed and the clever beasts had to die. Well, my invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
But his intellect has no additional mission, which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human. And only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly, as though the world's axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the net, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.
There's nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature, that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon, at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe, telescopically focused upon his action and thought. I mean, that's a beautiful eloquent statement, and the eloquence, the rhetorical sort of power of this passage, I think is also meant to draw attention to his own sort of poetic action. A lot of this has to do with poetry about the intellect inventing its own importance out of pride, and creatively and artistically imagining itself as most important, and Nietzsche is himself employing a different kind of poetic out, right?
That's cutting itself down, right? But therefore, I think to some extent redeeming itself, which is one thing I'd like to spell out as we go. Yeah, the poetic parts, I mean, the repetition of how shadowy, how aimless, how arbitrary. And then a bunch of senses begin with conjunction and, which is a sort of a 12-level advice for him.
Yeah, there's, okay, good. I like that. Even the beginning, once upon a time, I was struck and I wanted to think about looking at some of the fairy tales, because I assume that's the common construction beginning of the Brothers' Grimm, is that would that be right? Probably?
We should check the German on that. I thought that the contrast was the events in the Garden of Eden, and what man gains intellectually thanks to his expulsion. Right, I had thought that. That's fascinating.
Keep going. I don't know. I'm at a gas. I'm at a gas.
I just thought that there. So Greg, you're pious. So before man knew good and bad, what is it that man gains during the so-called fall? Knowledge of good and evil.
But it's somewhat, it's not consistent, right? So there's one point that servants does to you. You'll be like gods. And so the knowledge would be like gods, and then later it's described as knowledge of good and evil.
But then Maimonides tries to change this at the very beginning of the Guide to the Black, so he's very particular. He thinks that what he learned, he thinks that what man learns, the morally good and the morally bad, not the good and bad simply. I just mean here that in Nietzsche, none of these powers of creation come from a god. No, they come from human beings, right?
Like beasts. Yeah. Yeah. And to sort of spell things out a little bit, he makes this reference to world history and quotations, quotation marks meant to be scarequists, but also I think to suggest he has a mind Hegel, right?
Right. And so he's saying, what do you really get when you look at world history, right, in the sort of cosmic perspective? It's not this sort of grand culmination and sort of rise to this moment of absolute knowing, right? What you get is a sort of blink of an eye in terms of the time of the cosmos, right?
In which a thing imagine itself, imagine itself to be most important, but in fact, it's most in significant. Like the net. Yeah, like the net. And therefore, it's not the sort of trajectory, but it's the kind of nothingness.
Right. So the time horizon of man, even that's maybe obvious, but that's anthropocentric, right? Like we look at things, I'm just having this discussion with some colleagues of the day, like, from a human perspective, things might have fixed nature because they persist for a long time, dozens of years, hundreds of years, thousands of years. But if the universe really has a billion years older, however many billion sticks or whatever, then a species that exists for a million years is really nothing.
There's the blink of an eye. And so what we're talking about, the fixity of species or something like this, it's sort of difficult to contemplate because in that, we think that human beings are eternal, right? I mean, he's a good thing. Yeah.
And to show his courseness, he makes this really macabre joke, right? In the second paragraph, he says, it is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate delicate and ephemeral beings, merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence, right? So the sort of these visions that it has. For without this addition, they would have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing's son.
And that's on later notes, a reference to the Austrian of Lessing and Eva König, who died on the day of his birth. So you would, if you could, as a newborn, immediately commit suicide, right? Lessing's son was lucky, right? It's the same sort of existence that you could see the truth of things.
It's a macabre joke, but even so far as you take offense to the joke, you're guilty of the very same sin as the philosophers, right? This pride. It doesn't matter, right? Against infinity, a day and a lifetime, a whole existence of a species are the same, right?
Divided by infinity, it's zero. And so he's trying, I think, to shock you. So he's trying to shock you to think it actually doesn't make a difference. Lessing's son's death is not a sad affair because your life is not that great, right?
Your life is not that important. Human existence itself is actually, if anything, just medacious and absurd. But it matters to the net, right? And the natural life matters to the net.
I mean, it is a curiosity. You should correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe you're listening to the correct me. So that point about suicide, I mean, humans are the only animals that commit suicide.
Like, they'd intentionally take their own lives. I mean, I think there's some animals that do this for an accident. Like they all follow each other on the live. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, yeah, right, right. But anyway, that's all. So in other words, I guess my point is like all these other animal species beings, despite the fact that they have this perspective that is the net, looks at the world through a net, lens and so on and so forth, they still think that it's important. And so like maybe the, I don't know, maybe an awful fact, I can actually as well.
The human being, I mean, you should try and say, yeah, we're only looking at from human point of view. So if you look at a different cosmic point of view, you realize that your life is pretty significant. Why couldn't the inadequate artistic response be, yeah, but I'm a human. And so I want to look at it through the human lens.
Like, because I want my life to be more meaningful than. I think the difficult way to look at it through a nastolence is then I'm freaking awesome. I'm like a god almost. Why is he wanting to ask for breakfast?
I think his point is that precisely the people who claim to know, right, to look at things directly and understand the world. Don't, right? They've inflated their own importance, right? As though they've retained, right?
Again, to take their reference to Hegel, right? The idea, you know, I'm giving you Nietzsche's Hegel. I think Hegel on a closer reading, you know, doesn't necessarily fit the scare control. But if there is a kind of art history and then there's a kind of peak, right?
There's no, what's there to be proud in that, right? In that state of absolute knowing, it's strictly speaking or nothing in relation to the world. So it's not so much that you and the, you and the net are not so far apart, in other words, in this sense. Yeah, from the cosmic point of view, that's right.
Yeah. And if you could actually, and he could get you there and kind of show you this, but he says, if you could look at this, it would be absolutely fatal, right? He says, this is the end of the third paragraph, says, woe to that fatal curiosity, which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness. And then suspect that man is sustained in the difference of his ignorance by that, which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous as of hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger, right?
I mean, it's pretty vivid image by me. He's saying it would be absolutely fatal to understand the truth of our situation. But he does. Yeah, this is, this is, is that the implicit claim?
Yeah, I think there's, there's a kind of trap door that he's, he's sort of subtly pointing to, if I could read just, I like trap door, you had a trap door like Matt Lowers now, your office, right? On a side, did you see you on the bus tweeted about him? Oh, it's so good. MVC tried to pull the rug out and he was like, did you guys have a rape door from Matt Lowers?
Yeah, yeah, which they did because he had specially constructed office. Yeah, so anyways, I'm going to read a brief paragraph from Leo Strauss' course on Beyond the Nevel from 1971. Is that the one published by UChicago Press? I don't think it's been published yet.
This is, you get us that St. John's, it's one of the last years before he died. Interestingly, the last of the texts he taught on before he died, were the Thucydides, he just beyond good and evil. Oh, and I know, and I know the homeboy Vico.
No, gorgeous was the last thing. And he just, I just like talked a little bit about the philosophy, right? Yeah, that was going to be a piece, but it never got me. All three of those were going to be two of them, but interesting, he was returning to some of these sort of, sort of earlier critiques of Socrates or sort of, I'm in a democratic position, but he starts the fourth lecture this way.
He says, first, he just to enigmatic theses. So he's presenting theses, but they're meant to be a niggas, she has a saying. First, truth is deadly and second, truth is human creation. Both of these are really operatives in this piece, right?
He says, the difficulty is this. Truth is deadly. This itself, this is itself true. Is this truth, truth also deadly?
Is it not rather life-giving? Because it emancipates us from the power of the deadly truth. And second, truth is a human creation. And this proposition is itself a truth.
But is this truth also a human creation? Apart from that, how does he need to know that the truth is deadly and that it is a human creation? So he's raising a epistemological claim at the end. But he's showing how if you take these central claims, the fatal truth or the, everything is created, right?
If these are observationally true, they show us another path to a non-creative life-supporting truth that is able to face these questions head on. And I think that's a subtle sort of undertone, even of this piece. As he works through his critique of the philosophers, I think he does end, at least from what we have, suggesting a kind of path in which you're sort of conscious of your own creations, right? And they understand their limits.
So if you can withstand his shock to the system, or maybe put another wave, if it can wake you up, what he's offering here is a kind of cosmic help, like in a massive way, right? Suppose, yeah, a kind of provocation that's on the one hand really dark. But on the other hand, in your ability to understand it and sort of wrestle with it, it's somewhat, it gives you a path, right? That's possible, right?
That's even in its consciousness of these difficulties and its ability to sort of guide you in a way of how to think about them offers a kind of path that's not simply deadly or merely created, but somehow true and self-aware. I mean, what that looks like is another question, but I think that's what Strauss is suggesting in his brief comment. So, she's in worth talking about the scientists for a couple minutes, and how the scientists distort the truth or something like this. So, who is on the bottom?
You can just lay out a quick structure of this piece. I guess folks can read it quickly before the episode. Alex just heard the introduction. So, what follows, just automatically?
I don't have a snout line of it, but I mean, he talks about, I think he spends a lot of time talking about where truth comes from, where the driver truth comes from, what is it that leads you to understand the way the world is. Then he talks fairly dismissively about attempts to understand the world scientifically or to understand the truth about the world. I'm not going to get all the words, right? But he sort of basically says that our attempts to understand the world scientifically are basically nothing but metaphors and symbols and stand-ins for things that really are.
So, it's all sort of, it's much more strange, we have a much more creative, it's human creative about the world, but I guess because it's not consciously creative like poetry or music or something or art, it's deceiving itself because it's things that it's just sort of describing the way that the world is when in fact it's painting the world as it might be. So, for example, he gives an example of mammals. If we define mammals as an ex, and we're like, oh, see, we found camel, camel is a mammal. And it's like, well, I assume camel is a mammal.
So, by the way, most of the mammary glands. But in so he's saying, I thought there's a lot or not, I thought there was a lot. I thought those were like back loops. No, that's what I needed to do.
It's your fantasy, brother. What's a what's a seal? Well, what's a seal? What kind of animal is it?
Is it a fish? Are you asking seriously? Or is it a dog? A seal, I don't really know what to do with it.
You can fish sleep with a dog. Is that how we got the seal? Yes, it's a wild exercise right now. I don't see.
I pick up what he's putting down. You just need more imagination. I mean, that's like, I think that's obviously what happened. Anyways, that's my side to the explanation.
But you're getting to it, Greg, camel's. The camel's is that the the breast example he uses. I'm not sure. Remember that.
Let me talk about the mammals, the definition of mammals. Maybe it wasn't a camel. He says this is the bottom page, a five. If I make up the definition of a mammal and then after inspecting a camel, actually, it is okay.
If I look a mammal, I have indeed brought a truth to lay in this way, but it's the truth of limited value. I want to come back to the summary of the whole thing in just a moment. But I wonder if those words rhyme in German, do you know the way that they do in English camel? I have no idea where what pages are some.
Some page 85. Or while you're looking that up, I think eventually he goes on to say he builds toward the idea that it's not the scientists, but the artists who understand the way the world is. This is the bottom of 86. For his not true that the essence of things, quote, appears in the empirical world.
He says a painter reveals more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. And so he wants to talk about the contrast seems to be with scientists, mathematicians, empirical philosophers. On one hand, painters, musicians, artists, even says something like everyone is blind, painters who could just come up with some notes about the world, somehow reveals more about the way that it really is. There are five sections in the text.
Alex, if he's not allowed to see you, throw me a lifeline here, but it's their five sections and then they're looking at the camel thing, man. Sorry. Sorry. So what's the verdict Alex on the camel business?
The don't rhyme. That's the shame. Maybe he knew that it right. That leads me to part three, which I think lumps in language with science, by the way, because language is another way that we think we're understanding the world.
Like what's the platonic account of law that's trying to describe what being is or something like this. The language is another attempt that humans make that fool themselves and thinking we're simply describing the beings. That's sections one and two of them. There are three more sections, three, four and five, which are only sketched, where the third part is about philosophy and it's the kind of religion.
Same thing in number four and then five talks about Plato, who's mentioned by the way a handful of times through the entirety of the text. And then at least in this edition, there are a number of other passages from various notebooks that apparently were intended to have been included in what would have been a final version of this. So it's, I don't know how I did this at the beginning, but where the truth comes, where the zyper truth comes from, science, language, and then philosophy and religion at Plato. It seems like.
Yeah, the number of these themes. And then section two, which is much briefer than the first one, which suggests that it's not complete either. Who knows? It indicates that he's already answered this question about where the truth comes from.
He says it's a drive toward the formation of metaphors. He says that's the fundamental human drive. And then he goes on, the fundamental human might not food, not sex, not peace. Yeah, I think there's this shows the degree to which things aren't exactly worked out.
It seems like on the one hand, he wants to say that the reason we're drawn to fictions is because the truth is deadly. So it's a kind of preservative or survival aspect. So what did the desire to survive on the one hand? On the other hand, that doesn't actually explain all desires and each will push against this in other writing.
So maybe I'm just incorrect in seeing that. I think you might say that maybe there's an attempt in some way to sort of make a vision of your place in the hall. That would be the metaphorical drive. But I see a lot from that.
And any discussion is a really interesting sort of end. The distinction between the rational man and the intuitive man. This just comes up in this paragraph. Can I ask a question?
Sure. I don't know if this takes us too far up here on the run show or whatever. But what is, you know, we chose this series online. What does the takeaway?
What are we learning about truth telling in line? I mean, like, this isn't a very, it's an extra more sense, I guess, maybe my approach to this, he's sort of saying my approach is entirely wrong. It's not a more question. It's actually an extra or a moral question.
What do we learn about telling the truth from this or lying? This isn't hard. Yeah. We think that we're like, it's just it's a matter of justice, but it's actually a matter of on this thesis, right?
It's enigmatic thesis that the truth is deadly. It's actually a matter of survival on a certain level. Now, my personal reading of this is that he exaggerates how harsh the truth is to deadliness as a sort of way to wake us up. I think that's the enigma.
I unravel the enigma is to say, well, the truth isn't deadly, but it's to some extent, not the cause of happiness. It involves a sort of the motion of our place. They can be quite depressing. And for some people, I think it could be quite deadly.
But I think he's trying to show you that even in those ways in which we think we're being brutally scientific about the world, right? We're still being attracted. So, like, for instance, if you take, for example, Darwinism, which needs to make much out of particularly in Zarathir's, right? You're not great.
You decided from apes, and apes came from worms. So there's still a lot of value that resembles the worm. It goes on to tell you, like, worm like your love. It is no, no, no, for some more than others, right?
And so there's a, they've just raised his hand. So it seems like, oh my God, this is world shattering. It is, right? On the one hand, on the other hand, there's an immense pride that comes in having figured out, right?
Where you fit in and how everything works. And even if you look at evolutionary theory, the way that people think about it, right, is in terms of getting better and better, right? And you know, need to exploit this in this idea of the Uber-Mets, right? And trying to sort of transcend your whole humanity, right?
When in reality, it's all going to get destroyed as he points out when the star explodes, right? And in that sense, I think you're sort of... Wait, what? What?
What? What? Oh, yeah. It's gone.
What are you talking about? I remember Vellke talking about this in class once. He was like, you know, one day the sun will explode and all the few minutes distance, we know it will be evaporated. Nobody will know about it.
And I was like, well, thank you, Richard. I guess I'll attack on a couple of years of alcoholism. Yeah, seriously. Look on to Mars by then, right?
We'll be out of here. Well, we find there. Well, actually, we'll have destroyed ourselves prior to it. Yeah.
Anyway, sorry. I mean, it's just really with my... You know, you know, there's a bit that George Carlin used to do on entropy, right? And how everything's just going to fall apart and be destroyed.
And it's hilarious. And he's really just talking about how much he loves entropy because it's just everything falls apart. But there's a kind of pride and kind of delight and take, yeah, knowing and overcoming a master. But if you really looked at it, even that pride is just full of...
It's full of... It's not real. And so what Nietzsche I think is sort of pushing us to see is that even in these sort of scientific coldness, right, the coldness provides some kind of comfort, right? It still gives you.
And in fact, the coldness is something to be lamented when you compare it to this sort of intuitive man, right, who has a real joy in his suffering, right? Finds is... It was obviously pointing forward to his work on tragedy, but in sense that one can live a colorful existence, one with full of mistakes, right? But way more interesting, way less austere, right?
More in the actual world that you live in, which is ephemeral and full of particularities and not, you know, rife with concepts, which he takes to be metaphors, right? Should we talk about that? Well, I was wondering, yeah, absolutely. But as we move on, is it fair to say that Nietzsche thinks that the lie really, in the extra moral sense, is going to sound silly, maybe too much producing it too much, but it's a lie to yourself.
And the lie to yourself is that you actually are, you think you're understanding something about the world. So it's not like the lie in the moral sense is I'm winningly deceiving another person for a personal pain or something like this. The lie in the extra moral sense is I'm deceiving myself into thinking that I'm understanding something about the world. Is that fair?
Yeah. Yeah. You're lying to yourself. And the lie specifically is that what you think in a rationalist sense, right?
Or the scientific sense is that what you think is science in reason is actually a sort of creative production. And the way he explains this, just put this in a simple way, is you see a number of trees. And you say, those are all trees and you define a tree and you feel like you've understood the trick, right? And that's a sort of abstraction, right?
But in reality, to know the tree, right, is to know this individual tree and circumstances and to sort of engage with it as a particular being. And that's not something conceptual. It's more experiential or perceptual. And it's not looking at in terms of cold.
This is a huge issue. I mean, he's not just sort of, yeah, he says the concept is a kind of lie we tell ourselves, right? Absolutely. Yeah.
So we invented it. Yeah. Yeah. This is the way this comes up in my aerosols metaphysics, for example, is defining what a thing is in terms of its essence versus its material, right?
Right. On the one hand, experience, aerosol says, allows you to understand the particular thing. Like, I know how to fix, get my car to work, right? When it's acting funny, like you jiggle this deck and then it works, right?
But when it comes to knowing how a car works, I can have a purely theoretical understanding. That looks like knowledge, scientific knowledge, absolutely. But aerosol is clear. Something's missing, right?
So do I understand David Barr, if I know that man is the rational animal and the political animal on a certain level? Yes. But I knew nothing about David as David, right? Which requires experience familiarity with the particular thing, you know, long observance to the cameras that keep around his house and his toilet.
What? So the question I have for you, Alex, with this piece does, does Nietzsche not consider that some of these lies are beneficial or part of the glue that keep society together? Does he really want this intellectual emancipation and clear, clear vision, intellectually clear sightedness for everyone? I don't think it's for everyone.
I mean, to put it, I think one thing that's missing from this piece that you get in other things that Nietzsche's written is that there's a lot of, maybe we can transition to these illusionists he makes, other authors. A lot of this, like, piggy off of Hegel, and there's a lot of other figures in the background, Hobbes, Bacon, and Greg, they talk about few things from Aristophanes. There's this whole sort of reading of the history of philosophy. And so, when he brings up the same themes and say, Twilight of the idols, right, he really situates it as a sort of, or beyond ganneville, there's a tension in the bow, the decay of the history of philosophy, especially in the wake of sort of Kantian skepticism about the possibility of knowing the world, right?
Saying you can't know it, right? It's just all sort of human constructions. In the week of that, there is a kind of new possibility of an age of conscious creativity that's not merely sort of lying to yourself, or sort of self-aware sort of creation of projects or visions of them. So that's kind of a duty here.
I think while it's very powerful as a sort of thought experiment, it doesn't necessarily raise these questions of, wait, why is he saying this now? What's distinctive about this historical moment he just might have? Well, since you brought up Aristophanes, I'll sort of bring that up and try to... Is it fair to say, by the way, is Aristophanes the only non-velocity of humanience here?
Because we had all the, the reference to Hegel, although Hegel's not named, does he? Go ahead, go ahead. There's one unnamed person that I think he has in mind who's a poet is swift. He talks about the being the spider and how man is not a be but a spider.
He doesn't mention Aristophanes either. No, he doesn't mention. So it's an interesting thing is he mentions the philosophers and loose to the poets of the war. He doesn't mention Hegel, he doesn't mention Kant, he mentions Plato, right?
But that's, he mentions Plato in the section that was written. So he mentions the lesson, because he's just his kid dying. Oh yeah, that's awful. He's a poet in a philosopher.
So, let's start with the... Well, the first one, I mean, this is silly, but I'll try and build my least persuasive case first. Just the first paragraph mentioned the gnats in the telescope, I thought, right? So this is sort of making fun of the two things that Socrates is investigating in Aristophanes's clouds.
That's small, non-gl evidence. He does mention the word cloud a few times, which is sort of fascinating, so I think that's to be a pretty direct reference. This is on page 82, excuse me. He talks about the separation of things according to gender, which I think is also a joke that Aristophanes makes in the clouds, right?
Like the idea that we don't do this in English so it's a little hard, but cats in Spanish is feminine, right? Or smash those, excuse me, El Gato. But so what do you do with a cat that's a girl? It's El Gato, it's a girl.
So there's these jokes that we play with gender, because most of the nouns have genders. And then he points out here, which is, I think, part of Aristophanes's joke, that I watch my students sometimes with Alsomchas. Greg in Spanish, it's masculine, Anthony. The word is...
But El Gato is cat, right? Um, Gato or... It's masculine, Anthony. I thought it was masculine and not...
I thought it was only feminine if you're for instance a cat. Ken the abstract, that was El Gato. Oh, okay. Okay.
But maybe I'm wrong. But I mean, you're right, Greg. Okay. I mean, I don't know if that's right, but I can do other...
I just chose Bannish. I think there's one thing we're sure of, one person here is El Scudido. One of us is... That guy's already in that story.
Yeah, Alex would wear that shirt with an arrow and then he would sit next to me. I had a shirt. He's like, oh, funny. I had a shirt.
I would wear this. In a snake jaws would be wearing a sweater over it and then I'd sit down next to somebody. Either David or somebody would annoy me. I'd take off my sweater and it was a finger point to my left.
I think it's Doy Con is stupid though. I'm a Spanish. I think you've said that on show. Very much in the spirit of success.
So Nietzsche points out and he says, designating the tree is masculine and the plant is feminine. What an arbitrary assignment. So I think this is the joke that our softness makes as well. Just as a brief aside, it's funny.
I'll say to my students, the students, the air softness, I'll say, it's silly to have genders for animals, right? But what's a dog and what's a cat? Well, I'll say, well, dogs are boys and cats are girls. So I say this to God a little bit against what.
I'm not sure it's arbitrary. It's sort of strange to me that maybe it's an American thing, but it's strange to me that we Americans, I think we do think dog, boy, cat girl, don't know why. Maybe that's wrong. But anyway, Nietzsche's saying that's in a position on the thing that we make that has no grounding in reality.
It's just completely arbitrary assignment. But the biggest, the biggest indication I take that he's talking about, he's talking about Aristophanes before. And I'd like to talk about why he's invoking Aristophanes here is on the top of page 83. He says, thus, the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case.
And all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from Neverland is at least not derived from the essence of things. And our footnotes, footnote 17, our translator points out that this is Vulcan Kukusaim, which would be cloud Kukuland, which is the name of the place where the clouds go and Aristophanes, who's not the birds, go and Aristophanes birds. And so that my only tip here would be that I wonder if Nietzsche doesn't see an Aristophanes, a fellow maker of gods, as it were. And that Aristophanes and the birds, I think Aristophanes is a strange defender of the gods, but who recognizes their conventional status and Greece and wants to be a new maker of gods.
And so it's this conscious act of creation. And so he sees himself having something in common with Aristophanes over and against Plato, who's simply trying to describe the world as it is. But that's as far as I've made it. If you have other insight into why why are Staphanes, I'd be interested in hearing.
Let me read a passage from Beyond Good and Evil section 28, where he also brings up Lesson, go not his child. And at the end, he says, I'll just read the final part of this, who finally could venture on a German translation of Petruinius, who more than any great musician so far was master of presto in invention, ideas and words. What did the swaps of the sick wicked worlds, even the ancient world matter in the end, when one has the feet of a wind as he did the rush, the breath, the liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run. And as for Aristophanes, that transfiguring complementary, that's with an E, complementary spirit, for whose sake one forgives everything Hellenic for having existed, provided one has understood in its full profundity all that needs to be forgiven and transfigured here, there's nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy on space nature than the happily preserved Petifé that under the pillow of his deathbed, there was no Bible or anything Egyptian, Pythagorean or Platonic, but a volume of Aristophanes.
How could even Plato have endured life, a Greek life he repudiated, without an Aristophanes? So you're absolutely right to pick up on the Aristophanes because, and this is why right-stressed, the Stocket and Aristophanes begins with this suggestion about Nietzsche, though Aristophanes critiquing the pre-Socratic Nietzsche, Nietzsche's critiquing the Socratic Socrates, in any case, in Strauss makes this point. There is in Nietzsche this affinity for Aristophanes, in his willingness to mock and lampoon the philosopher as sort of stuck in the clouds. Well, again, also sharing this is true of Nietzsche's well, deep admiration for Socrates, right?
As much as he critiquing, every time he critiquing, he comes back around in the end saying, yeah, but I think he understood everything I was saying, right? There's Aristophanes, I think, provides the key or sort of opening for Nietzsche, for anybody who wants to really understand a reason, not as a sort of scientific abstraction, but as embedded in a way of life, right, which is absolutely what he's just concerned with. Yeah, that's very good. I like that a lot.
So where does the drive? I was going to ask where the driver comes from. That was my closing question that Alex wrote that I read. Well, I think it's this metaphor thing, right?
Maybe one way to think about is where does this leave us and where we're going to go or how we're supposed to live. So Kant, he comes up, page 87, all that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to that time and space and therefore relationships of succession and number. It's very Kantian in its critique. He's like Pascal, actually, we should say, right?
Right, right, right, right. But he comes to the end with this idea of the rational man and the intuitive man. And he suggests a kind of opposition between them. And yet, as he's describing, each one, the rational man is driven into sort of fictions and dreams and they're happier in a way.
They're not as free of pain. And then the rational or in artistic man, who's more free from pain, but who's just kind of avoiding clouds is the way it comes up at the end, right, which is obviously another sort of suggestion there are softness. There's I think in this, in this juxtaposition, a suggestion that these two kind of purifying types, the rational or the rational man and the intuitive man, there is a more fundamental relationship between them, which is the kind of marriage of reason and art that finds expression in Nietzsche's own poetic capabilities in this piece. Right, we've read a number of quotes.
So much of this is readable. It's only 10 pages, so it reads quickly. But with the way he writes, it reads even quicker than you'd expect. And one of the reasons it reads so quickly is because while it is very carefully recent, that thought out, it's also quite eloquently written to sort of draw you in.
Nietzsche, I think, exaggerates. I brought this up before, conscious of the tendency to exaggerate it, to use metaphor, he employs them himself, right? And exaggerates how volatile the truth is for the sake of a kind of waking up our reason to thinking about the our tendency to creation. And in that respect, I think he shows not so much of what he says, but in how he says it, or in how he does what he's doing, one way in which intuition and reason might work together, right?
Or find a way, and therefore not be simply trapped by creations, but use them in a kind of philosophic spirit, right? And kind of sort of exploring and trying to understand this problem of man's eating in the world that's not proud, as sort of arrogant as he seems in time, not proud of mankind's abilities, et cetera, but sort of coldly serious, but delighting in it nonetheless, right? Tragic yet, it's still somehow cheerful. Yeah, when a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak and the slow steps he walks from beneath him.
Yeah, I think I've learned so should I tell the truth or not? What's the what's the I need the TLDR with the other right? I mean, yeah, too late to too long, get a read. Oh, that's it.
That is a good time. It's 10 pages. Yeah, it's finals week, man. Yeah, tell me about it.
I got a lot of papers to read. I look forward to our episode on Kant and can maybe at the end of that episode, we'll try to bring Nietzsche back to sort of see how Nietzsche might respond, but we got to try to present Kant on his own. We're going to read passages from on the ground and metaphysics of walls. He was just fell asleep.
You don't have to read. You can just like, you know, you can just show up and make fart jokes. Isn't Susan's shell going to be on the show? We have to ask her, so we should say whatever she says now, you know, she's not here.
She'll be. All right, well, folks, I hope you enjoyed it. I learned something. I enjoyed it.
So I'm listening, Alex talk about Nietzsche. I know the folks at home always enjoyed that too. So I hope he went in. Wait, did you get somebody to sign on?
Yeah, this is, I'm waiting on stuff, but yeah, I might have a translation to talk about it. We'll see. Very nice. Wow.
Very nice. We'll see. I'm also getting 80. So who knows?
All right, folks, like us subscribe. Thank you. Send to X. Yeah.
I'll do that. Bye. Peace.