Friedrich Nietzsche - J. P. Stern

[Laughter] there can be little doubt i think that the two 19th century philosophers who have had the widest influence outside philosophy are marx and nietzsche in continental europe especially the influence of nietzsche on philosophers since his day has been prodigious but he's also influenced creative writers including some of the most eminent in the english language for instance bernard shaw w b yates and d h lawrence the quality of his own prose is simply dazzling and is second to nobodies friedrich nietzsche was born in saxony in 1844 he had an academic career of extraordinary brilliance as a classic scholar and became a full professor in his mid-twenties an almost unheard of thing but then he threw over his university career went into isolation and became a philosopher for 16 years he poured out his writings mostly either short books or books of essays and aphorisms some of the best known titles are the birth of tragedy human all too human the gay science beyond good and evil and most famous of all thus spoke zarathustra at first he was deeply influenced by the ideas of schopenhauer and wagner but he rebelled against both and went on to produce some notorious anti-wagner polemics until the last four years of his creative life he made no attempt to build a system of any kind but then he began to think of drawing all his main themes together into one single comprehensive work first to be called the will to power then the revaluation of all values but it was not to be always plagued by ill health in january 1889 he collapsed into mental illness a condition almost certainly caused by tertiary syphilis and he was helplessly insane until his death in nineteen hundred with me to discuss his work is jp stern professor of german in the university of london and author of one of the best known of the many books on nature professor stern i think one can say that nietzsche was the first philosopher really to face up to western man's loss of faith in religion loss of belief in god or in the existence of any world outside this one and if there's no god and no transcendental world then all values or uh truth rationality standards of any kind are not given to man from some agency outside himself but are created by man presumably for his own needs we choose our values or at least we create our values now this is an extraordinary disruptive and disturbing thing to confront and nietzsche knew that can we start the story from there yes i think that this is a perfectly fair way of starting uh in addition to what you said about his life i think one might mention that he was a son of the man's that he himself had his father was a was a minister of the lutheran church and therefore his attack on christianity is not a neutral not a disinterested uh not a pacific thing at all but is violent dramatic melodramatic in many ways it's an attack on christianity rather than on christ and i think the point that you made that he envisages 19th century man to have to stand on his own feet without the support of faith or dogma of any kind is central as a central kind of starting point to his philosophy i think we want to see him as somebody who does not simply profess a flat kind of atheism but who is personally intimately involved in the denial of divine justice and divine mercy and all that but this nietzschean starting point did launch him didn't it into a revaluation of all values yes to use the title of his book i mean one thing he was saying was that uh in a way we are basing our lives on false premises because we adopt attitudes and values and standards which when we actually examine the premises of them we reject those premises what he believed in what he tried to show was that the whole edifice both of christian values and of idealism which he saw derivative from those values was false had to be thrown over and something else to be put in instead the question as to what was to be put instead is not quite so simple but that was the basic premise from which he began and that i think makes for the melodrama the extraordinary melodrama of the person of the style of the whole phenomenon of nature now this revaluation of all values is of course a colossal task and i think it'll make our discussion of it clearer if we divide our consideration of it up a little bit yes there are four main traditions within western civilization to which nietzsche addressed himself in which he attacked the tradition of christian morality the tradition of secular morality uh the herd values as he called them the ordinary morality of the mass of mankind and some at least of the traditions deriving from ancient greece from socrates now let's have a look at each of those four in turn can you say a little bit more about his fundamental criticism of christian values well i think to say to start with on the christian i think the attack is a very simple one a very straightforward one or the positive values of christianity turning around you're turning the other cheek loving your neighbor as you love yourself having compassion for those suffering all these are ruled out of court now not absolutely because as we shall see later i think i want to make that point very clearly nietzsche is constantly making special rules for special people and he is very much against the notion of generalizing simply rules in the in the way in which kant had done in the categorical imperative so yes the first thing then is the attack on not on christ but on christianity as really furthering the underdog furthering the person who cannot stand on his own feet and requires compassion requires pity requires uh illicitly requires sympathy from the outside but why was he against compassion and against pity why did he despise those he's not against them he does not despise them and they come from the strong person what he despises is the support of the weak person from outside himself whatever that source is the outside source may be whether it's another person his compassion or rules or regulations laws or whatever and the reason for being against this was what the reason for being against it was his fundamental appeal is to authenticity to self-hood to the elo vital to the life within the person live to the forum yeah now what about his criticism of secular morality i mean the great moral philosophers like kant or in his own day the utilitarians and so on that wasn't christian morality quite but he was against that too yeah why i think the main reason there is this that all systems of secular moralities are based on an abstraction from the individual case they're based on an appeal to a generality for nietzsche the word general is the same as common and by common he means common in the nasty sense of the word and therefore in a sense all rules and regulations one might almost go as far as saying all laws are for him matters for the common herd and no more and now we're of course already on the third point that you made the point about the common herd yeah he's most emphatically not a democratic philosopher he's a philosopher of the great and the noble people the heroic kind of philosophy and therefore for him the appeal of democratic ideology is very very low indeed he thought that the the noble man the great man the hero should be a law unto himself and shouldn't be hamstrung precisely petty yes rules and regulations and so on that's the best phrase you can use a law unto himself it's not the sentence he used but it's very very precise what he meant now what about the last of the four uh uh traditions that i mentioned that of ancient greece yes it's worth remembering in this context that he did start adult life as a classic scholar yes he knew about ancient greece and became deeply critical didn't he have the whole tradition deriving from socrates yes but uh his classical work and i think it's one of the most remarkable works ever written on the whole problem of tragedy is concerned with pre-socratic greece with pre-socratic tragedy which for him is a kind of golden age and the whole thing uh goes flat at the point when euripides aristophanes and and socrates come on the scene what happens there is that strength and good will and warmth and beauty are replaced by reason are replaced by rationalizing things by the socratic algae bhaji he never forgave plato so to speak for bringing up a hero whose main qualities are those of talking everybody else into the ground now this concern with the origins of culture uh which he displayed uh in such a rich way one has to say um was all bound up with his notion that we remake our that we make our values yes because if we if if human values and human culture are made by us and not given to us by god or authority outside ourselves then the whole question of how we get them yeah where they come from becomes a fundamental one for here doesn't it and it's also a fundamental 19th century concern the whole concern with origins yes it thinks of the origin of species darwinism was nietzsche influenced by darwin uh yes well he certainly was anti-darwinian and i think the idea is that he didn't really understand very clearly what the whole theory of the origin of the species came to like so many 19th century figures he was always going to study physiology going to study chemistry going to study physics but never got round to it so i don't think that there's an awful lot of interesting things to be said about his attitude to that but i think the main point about origins is that again like some philosophers like marx for instance he believes that you can determine the quality of the product by the nature and quality of the origin this after all is very much what freud did and i suspect that freud got it very largely from nietzsche although he does isn't very ready to acknowledge it now what that means is really that the background the the genealogy of morals for instance you quoted one of the titles is in fact indicative of the quality of morals now let me say i don't believe this is true but i mean that is very much the 19th century view over and over again that you can determine the quality of a mental product by the nature by the origin uh that is at the back of it yes and we are now inclined sometimes to call that the genetic fallacy so i don't want to go into this i think it's very close yes you're mentioning freud another question that i wanted to put to you this program of uh reevaluating values and seeing values is something that we create to meet our needs let nietzsche do a psychological analysis of values in terms of both individual and social media it becomes an essentially psychological it is a way of psycho psychologizing a lot of phenomena this is perfectly correct and indeed i think he was a very remarkable psychologist in many ways and he puts he does not produce a system either in psychology or in anything else and in that sense he's different from freud but he's very very similar in fact very much of an antecedent to freud because he places a very great deal of emphasis upon the unconscious there is a myth about to the effect that freud invented the unconscious nothing could be further from the truth the unconscious has been about since the end of the 18th century and nietzsche is one of those who used term and put tremendous emphasis on it but he does not have a layer theory of the self the way that freud did as i say he is very very much less systematic he distrusts systems he thinks there's something indecent about trying to encapsulate a human being or human psyche within a systematic account another aspect of that is is his notion that that different moralities are different are appropriate for different people which he certainly had didn't mean wouldn't it be true to say well in fact you have said it i think that he distrusted rules you thought they hamstrung the strong they limited the creative yes yes he does believe that individual people are entitled to individual kinds of behavior and to individual bits of knowledge this is the most astonishing thing and also i think in many ways very prophetic kind of thing that he believed that knowledge was not absolute that the that the acquisition the pursuit of knowledge was not to be taken absolutely but that a given civilization had its own particular entitlement to the kind of knowledge that it could bear you see the emphasis is on it could bear it he did envisage situations where knowledge would destroy the knower our knowledge of nuclear fear has become a lethal threat to us and that is something that nietzsche would very easily and very well have understood yes and he did in fact say so he i mean not about nuclear physics of course but about knowledge generally you see we only have really one other theory of knowledge apart from our own our own is that all knowledge is worth pursuing regardless isn't it yes well the other one is the soviet idea which uh goes on and which simply creates uh a system by which knowledge is socially useful and then pursued and not pursued if it's not socially useful nietzsche's view is somewhat similar to this he does believe that given civilizations uh can destroy themselves and the basic the ground on which all this is erected is in fact we're coming back now to socrates the socratic yen for knowledge this this endless uh um this driving force uh which pushes us on up to this point in our discussion we've talked about nature's critical enterprise yes this basic view that up to this point in our history the morals and values and standards of western land have all been historically based on belief in a god or in gods who gave us these values gave us these moral standards and so on and would judge us by our failure to live up to them or success in living answer them and so on now he comes along he says we've lost belief in god we've lost belief in religion that means we've lost belief in the whole foundation of our value system and if we're to have a valid value system we've got to re-evaluate it and refund it from the bottom up and we've not we've talked to some of the various critiques individual critiques into which this led him i now want us to move on from this to the next stage of the discussion in a sense it's the obvious question to ask what were his positive values having as it were swept everything away on a colossal scale what is he now advocating that we put in its place well the answer to that is a very simple and a very complicated one both at the same time the simple answer is be yourself at the top of of everything that you are uh to to to the hilt uh live your life fully live it adventurously um and all the other things which later on come under the under the heading of elon vital that in the human sphere i mean that essentially the be thou thyself is the major premise from which he begins since also the goal to towards which ethics ought ought to the goal uh towards which ethics ought to be directed now you may ask of course if everybody is himself and himself alone how is this to be done uh in a wider sphere how is it to be done in a political system and so on the answers to that question are i'm afraid very unsatisfactory as far as he's concerned as indeed his whole attitude towards social questions never does get very far now i said also that this is very very complicated precisely for this reason because it makes living together um living together in some kind of harmony extremely difficult if you add to this the view that laws are after all there simply to make easy make things easy for the weak person you can see there's not very much purchase to be got out of that either so it is on the face of it a simple system but um basically i think there is a great deal of difficulty facing anyone who is going to put this forward in a sense i think we can say that some of the more uh some of the fascist uh uh politics earlier of of the early part of the century is based to some extent among the intellectuals at any rate on this view that you must create your own values um well it hasn't got us very far as you can see but this notion that you must say as he put it say yes to life yes a firm life yes be untraveled to the top of your bent uninhibited also led him to the view that that of course this is going to lead you into conflict with other people but you must simply sweep them aside you must sweep away the weak and the unable and all those who as it were get in your way yes that of course is absolutely flat head-on in conflict with christian morality isn't it yes it has but then you see you've only mentioned one half of it the other part of it is you must also conquer all that is comfortable all that is cowardly or that is less than adventurous within yourself and if you've done that that is the view that he puts forward in zarathustra for instance if you've done that you won't really want to be so very aggressive towards the others you will have some understanding of their weaknesses though the understanding of the the positive the tolerant understanding of weaknesses is not precisely uh nietzsche's very strong what he's most famous people of course have always been shocked by his saying this and they thought that what he was advocating was contrary to moral standards and so on yes but his point of course was that that in fact model standards ought to be derived from life or to be subordinate to life yes that our notions of truth and rationality and all the rest ought to derive from life from the great man from the great man and by the great man he meant as i already mentioned goethe would be one um napoleon would be another sometimes luther sometimes even some of the great borja popes would figure as that and sometimes even socrates would because he had the strength of mind to carry through his own project but this supremacy of life assertion self-assertion means that even truth truth itself must be subjugated if there are truths that would damage us that in other words would damage our lives then we don't want to yes you see we're back again at the question of the entitlement to truth or of at what he once called the hygiene of knowledge there ought to be some kind of hygiene that would tell us what kind of knowledge we may face and what kind of knowledge we should reject and you're quite right the truth itself in that way is subjected to this kind of embargo to this kind of to this kind of sanction that he puts forward well one sees absolutely how this is flat contrary to all moralities that have actually existed would it be true to say that nietzsche's defense if he deigned to defend himself against criticism would have been to say something like this but look the whole of civilization humanity itself if you like the whole evolutionary process has consisted of the strong eliminating the weak the able eliminating the unable the intelligent eliminating the stupid and it's only because these process have gone on perpetually over millions of years that we have any civilization at all that we have any humanity at all these things have created value yes i think that is precisely what he says and uh what you would say a number of occasions different contexts and his worry about the future is precisely that this kind of thing will not go on that the democratic spirit the spirit of the plebs of the of the rebelment will take over and will annihilate all these values but it will put into reverse the very process that has actually created civilization out of power yes but in addition to that i think we have to bear in mind that he has a view of history which is rather different from the view on which your analysis was based he sees history as repeating itself now what that means we shall talk about that a little later but what it essentially means is this that any historical situation can create and absorb and make use of the highest that man is capable of creating there aren't any privileged situations that are no privileged eras and and therefore any era that sees itself as capable of fully understanding or fully creating these values should be should allow should be allowed to do that and the trouble is late 19th century the early 20th century may very well be what he calls areas of decadence in which this strength cannot be fully realized now your mention of his doctrine that history repeats itself yes uh brings me to what i would like to think of as the next stage of our discussion um when one comes to regard nietzsche's later work there are four big themes in it and again i think for clarity's sake it will help if we take them one at a time one is uh what you might summarize under the phrase the will to power a phrase which he has popularized one is the ubermensch or translated as the superman again an invention of his that's entered our language one is this dr new mention of the eternal recurrence of time and the fourth i would say is his notion of the aesthetic uh understanding of life now let's deal with those in order let's cut let's talk first about the will to power which at one time he was going to give as a title to the summation of his life's work yes what was this notion of his voice the will to power well he takes the notion the will from your own special philosopher schopenhauer of course and he reverses the the evaluation of that where shaupe mahara regarded the will as the source of all evil in the world and as the source of man's unhappiness he regards it as the strength of uh of man's man's strength the source of man's strength and the um the cultivation uh the permission to the will to enact what it can enact is part of a healthy culture now uh the the difficulty there i think is that uh um this obviously brings you in conflict with other people and therefore at this stage the will to power becomes becomes a will to self-assertion uh will to use user patient of the other uh but that's not all there is to the will i think it's to be emphasized not over emphasized as some some critics have done but to be emphasized that the will to power also turns itself inward that is to say it destroys within the self all that is weak or that is comfortable or that is uh simply um yes part of uh a man's self-intelligence a kind of drastic bring of oneself to the mark up to up to the mark which one has created oneself and this is the difference the superman now everybody knows the word superman and it was in fact nietzsche who invented it it's been a very much misunderstood concept people have associated it with the blonde beast of hitlerian mythology and nazi caricature because that's not what he meant to talk i think that is not what he meant at all um i think the superman is the man the production i mean who can be produced by any civilization remember i said that any any era is capable of bringing forth the maximum values that men are capable of superman is the man who lives all that the will to power will secure for him lives it to the full is capable of repeating his own willing ad infinitum we're already arriving at the doctrine at that most controversial of all the things the most uh bizarre if you like of these views the the eternal recurrence yes don't let's get there yet because i want you to unpack this notion of the superman yes uh which has played such an enormous role in the thought in the last hundred years yes it's been so abused and misused by the nazis for example um wouldn't it be truer to say that what nietzsche was actually trying to get at was the notion of an unrepressed man yes if you like the freudian sense a man who has reevaluated his values yes he's not living his life according to false values who is being to the top of his best in an uninhibited untrammeled free spirit way isn't that rather yes i think that is so and but it would be a man who without as it were restricting himself would naturally instinctively not do any of the things that nietzsche regards as evil for instance the one category that he comes out unequivocally that comes out unequivocally in his system is grudgingness is what he calls resontimo is the grudgingness the grudging admission of warmth the grudging admission of success and all these kind of things now the superman is one who naturally does not feel any of these things you know this is not a generous spirit it is a general it is a generous spirit um yes and there again you see the whole notion of the christian genu general spirit is not all that far from nietzsche's purview now let us move on to the third of our four main themes and you've touched on it already this notion of the eternal recurrence now i would say that if anything of all the doctrines of nature this is the hardest not just for people to understand but even to take seriously i mean on the face of it he appears to be saying that the whole of history moves in epicycles vast epicycles so that everything comes round again and again and again forever so that you and i have actually sat in this studio having this conversation unnumberable times before and we'll do so a number of times again now is he really saying that well he's really saying that and he is trying out what might happen if you took that view seriously and i think we want to say all together in our whole discussion that a great deal of his thinking is of this experimental kind and by that i don't mean that it's not serious i don't mean that it is not responsible i don't mean that it is trivial but i do mean that here's somebody who's facing the whole of human thought and is trying to make some sort of shift with almost any area in it and is trying out again and again different views there's a saying of his i think a very tragic saying of his in a letter where he writes i feel as though i wear a pen be a new pen a quill presumably being tried out by some superior power on a bit of paper it's a very strange thing to be feeling for somebody who's advocating the will to power and the superman yet i think he did genuinely feel that now he does then try out this thought and it seems to me not so much a theory of being not so much a theory of the cosmos it seems to me a moral theory that is to say our actions our willing our intentions our thoughts should be of such a superior kind of such a grand kind have such generosity and grandness about them that we should not flinch to er and be able to be willing to repeat them over and over again add nauseam ad infinitum so in other words you're really only saying yes to life yes embracing life as he always says we should if you would be willing to with that over and over again that's what you're doing now and only ever yes i think to go on very much further than that and try to produce geometrical or mathematical equations in order to prove either the possibility or the impossibility of these youth which has been tried has been done doesn't seem to me to be terribly sensible in other words there's a huge metaphor it is a huge metaphor and of course a great deal must be said about nietzsche's uses of metaphors well today's just something about it because uh it's very relevant yes i think we i i think we we are in the habit of taking things literally in a way in which which doesn't make sense as far as a great many of his statements are concerned you spoke to begin with about his grand style and i think it is an extraordinary powerful effective style if i ask myself where it arrives from i think it derives from a strange invention a strange discovery he seems to have made of placing his discourse his language somewhere halfway between metaphor and literal meaning and this is something which very very few people certainly very few german writers have done before him he stands entirely on his own as far as thinking is concerned you have mentioned that and we've we've seen how he attacks every tradition in the west where he does find uh his um his precursors is in the style and mountain and pascal and la rochefoucault are his favorite authors and that whole aphoristic style i think derives a tremendous lot from them and it's not only me saying it it's himself saying it and this style which is pitched halfway between metaphor and literal statement uh is something quite extraordinary and i think unless we understand it for what it is we are going to misread him i have a a quotation which i think gives a an example of what i have in mind when he talked about the terrible deprivation uh that he felt 19th century people experienced through what he called luridly the death of god he wrote as follows he says rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition men will continue to seek their shattered god and for his sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among his ruins now you see this mixture of on the one hand conceptual thinking i mean loneliness and condition are abstract terms belonging to conceptual thought on the other hand you've got the serpents glistening somewhere through the ruins of the shattered god well that and the refusal i think to go beyond that in other words to write out the theory behind the metaphors i think essentially constitutes what he what he's about and it does give us the readers a problem this mixed this fusion of poetry and metaphor on the one hand with concepts yes hard gives us a problem about how to take him and that's really implicit in what you've just been exactly this leads to the fourth of the fourth questions of the later philosophy we've talked now briefly about the will to power about the superman and about his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of time what you've just been saying about his use of metaphor leads us to the fourth of the four main themes in the later work which is his notion that life is to be understood aesthetically yes and i suppose the point here is is that if there's nothing outside this world no god no transcendent realm or anything then any meaning or justification that life has must be meaning derived from inside itself yes so that like a work of art i mean the only meaning a work of art has is what it so to speak gives itself yes it doesn't derive its meaning from outside is it is that well that certainly is a very fair way of of of of coming close to what he's after in the very first of his books the birth of the the the birth of tragedy he uses this phrase three times it's only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the being of man and the world are eternally justified it's a very complicated sentence and i don't think i want to go into all the details of it but what he's saying essentially is this the greatness of the early greeks of the pre-socratics lay in that tragedy that tragedy was a way of facing the worst aspects of human life that is its transitoriness its impermanence its corruptness its dependence upon forces greater than yourself and to make of these a major tale a story a wonderful tragedy and this he applies in the largest in the most cosmic possible sense and he's asking as indeed i think shakespeare occasionally he's asking is the whole world really to be taken seriously or is it not a great game a great play some kind of drama played out by we do not know who um and if there is to be a justification mind you justification is the phrase he uses which is a very dicey word to use in this context because of course it's a judicial phrase isn't it but if there is a justification for man being here and being what he is maybe it is simply as part of this huge cosmic drama and a great deal of his thought and i think of some of his most interesting and greatest thought goes precisely into rehearsing and trying to make sense of this justif this aesthetic justification of man now you're talking about the way metaphor uh and aesthetic considerations are fused into the very substance of the thought itself and you spoke very interestingly a moment or two ago about his actual style yes and the tradition to which it related it in its turn has had immense influence hasn't it i instant some of the great creative writers yes uh that he has influenced in my introduction to this program yes now your particular field of expertise if i may say so is known to be comparative literature it would be extremely interesting i think to end this discussion with just a word or two from you about the way nietzsche and his writing and his philosophy have influenced creative writers since his well simply to take the three names that you yourself mentioned wba's is the first one yates read nietzsche for the first time in a very brief little excerpts translated by a man called john common of all things it seems to be a most inappropriate name for a translator of nietzsche and from 1902 onwards when he read him i think that is a very clear change in the general tenor and in the attitude of yates's poetry and that slightly sultry slightly sentimental uh yellow roses kind of poetry of founders here creates changes very much and the great poetry which is the poetry or as he him as yates himself calls it the poetry of blood and maya i think he's very strongly influenced by his reading of nietzsche by his attempts to grasp some of the problems that we discussed earlier on with uh sure that the influence is a very very different one it is very much in the biological sphere it is in the sphere of that elon vital which i mentioned it is in the sphere of the ruthless life the life that justifies itself um and the with d.h lawrence i think again it is the question of authenticity now the authenticity as lawrence consists it's a very different kind of authenticity from the one that nietzsche had in mind in other words it's social and sexual and of course both of these are really rather minor factors in nature but it is certainly from nature through his wife frieda lawrence that he acquired some knowledge of nietzsche and that he was deeply influenced by in a very late and i think rather dreadful christ story of lawrence's seems to me to derive straight out of nietzsche's psychologizing of the christ figure if you look on the continent of course pirandello thomas man andre malugo all these people not only have been very strongly under his influence but they acknowledge the influence throughout srinberg ahead along correspondence through a common friend with nietzsche and so on i think that there are immensely powerful influences but we have to bear in mind that the aphoristic style the uh tremendous attractiveness of the metaphors the brevity of the message and literary persons don't like to read heavy books they like to read aphorisms all these play very much into nietzsche's hand one last question professor stern i don't think we can finish our discussion without touching on it if you say the name nietzsche the most educated people in the west nowadays what they immediately think of is the nazis and the nazis seem to have appropriated nietzsche as their philosopher in the same sort of way as they appropriated wagner as their composer and that's had the effect ever since of contaminating the reputation of those two geniuses in the minds of large numbers of people now is it fair or is it unfair to associate nature with fascism i think he must be associated with it to some extent and fascism rather than national socialism it was uh mussolini who read him extensively who received a copy of the collected works from the furore on the brenner in 1938 as a present hitler himself i think probably knew phrases i mean certainly new phrases like the world to power but hadn't read anything of his i think in some ways this is a justifiable charge and i would put it this way that to the extent that these parties depended upon their intellectuals and to the extent that the intellectuals depended upon some sort of more or less ill-assorted ideology nietzsche was part of it but of course at the same time i think it's to be emphasized very strongly there are lots of things in him much more important things in him which are absolute anathema to these people to these gangsters let's put it quite quite plainly and self-control and the the inward struggle of the self and the attainment of valid of of of generosity for instance uh and and and greatness of the kind that we have described have nothing whatever to do with the kind of murderous uh ideologies that came into being in the third rush and among the and and early on among the italians and it's quite plain from the fact that you yourself have devoted so much of your life to studying nietzsche and writing about you that you think this is a hugely valuable undertaking yes nevertheless yes i certainly think it is an immensely valuable undertaking providing we do not go to it with some expectation of getting a panacea on how to live right but provided we go to it with a view to finding out what human beings can do what the human possibility is what the being of man is capable of understanding and creating from within itself thank you very much professor stan thank you i'm john berson very much

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Nietzsche, Western Philosophy, Bryan Magee, Great Philosophers, Ethics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Death of God, Nihilism, Continental Philosophy, Morality, Existentialism, Individualism, Genealogy of Morality, Richard Wagner, Postmodernism, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Gay Science, Slave Morality, Übermensch, Will to Power, Psychology, Ressentiment, Eternal Return, Schopenhauer, Religion, Fascism, Perspectivism, Nietzschean

Id: nlqdLHK2K-s

Length: 43min 12sec (2592 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017