Great Books Webinar: Dr. Jim Garrison on Friedrich Nietzche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Part 1

hello everyone I'm Jim Garrison and I want to welcome you to the great books of the wisdom school of wisdom of ubiquity University I want to thank everybody for their patience over the last month or so we had a technical snafu with will tagil last lecture on rachel carlson and her great book the Silent Spring but we're hoping to get that recording out to everybody this week we turn now to another great thinker and great book in the tradition of great books of the world that have influence over time have taken up great noble themes that people everywhere ancient and modern East and West have grappled with and books that change lives just on their reading and I'm particularly excited to take up Friedrich Nietzsche and his work thus Spoke Zarathustra and a companion work that he wrote right after Zarathustra called Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche encountered me when I was in my late teenage years just going to college and as many people in the 1960s Nietzsche along with Jung along with many other contemporary thinkers literally blew my mind wide open and I saw the world in some ways as if for the first time and so in speaking about Nietzsche I'm speaking about someone that I've contemplated for many decades now I've read many times and his probably one of the most influential thinkers in my life and I say this as you know those of you who know me I a lover of Greek philosophy and Plato and Socrates and Aristotle but in a very fundamental way Nietzsche brings Plato and Aristotle to a close he brings Judaism Christianity Islam to a close he brings the axial religions to a close and he challenges all of us after literally millennia Hall's enslavement slave morality to liberate ourselves and to think in fresh terms in new ways with a new story because nothing less than that he says we'll ensure the survival of humankind and the evolution of our humanity into what he calls the ubermensch the superhuman and so when one encounters Nietzsche one counters the great no to every yes you think you have when you encounter Nietzsche you're encountering a new organizing principle for how life should be lived and so over the next two lectures we're gonna contemplate his life we're gonna comp template his illuminations around Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil and we're gonna delve into the text to really get the genius of one of the most prolific and skillful writers in the German language in the history of German literature Nietzsche was born in 1844 and he was the son of a Lutheran pastor and a very pious mother he had another brother born shortly thereafter who died and he had a sister named Elizabeth who was to play a very important role very complicated role in his life when he was 5 years old Nietzsche's father died and his mother moved to her mother's house and Nietzsche was raised in a small german town southern Germany surrounded by three older women and he recounts later in life that he felt suffocated he felt constrained he was obviously extremely precocious he excelled in school he was very introverted very shy he went off to school when he was 20 and he read feuerbach's Ludwig for a box great work the essence of Christianity and which for a box says God didn't create us we created God in our own image and when he read feuerbach Nietzsche records that he lost his faith and he wrote to his sister at the time Elizabeth a great line he said if you seek piece of soul and pleasure believe if you want to be a potay of truth in choir and I love this line because that is at the heart of ubiquity University that's at the heart of our wisdom school in a spirit of Socrates we do not seek truth possessed we seek truth pursued we believe that the questions are much more important than the answer and we believe that inquiry is much more important than belief and I think that is at the heart of Nietzsche's greatness of his day he did not stop searching after truth he was unsure what to do when he lost his faith so he joined the Prussian army turned out he was a very skilled horseman and one day after about six months in the in the army he injured himself on the horse and he never really recovered from that so he left the army and went off to the University of Basel aged 23 and was the youngest a professor of classics ever hired by the University of Basel and to this day anywhere in the world Nietzsche ranks along with a few others as the youngest scholar to be granted full professorship at any university he didn't have a doctorate he didn't even have a teaching credential but he was so brilliant that the University of Basel wanted him on their faculty and he engaged in philology he immediately delved into the essence of Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy and wrote extensively on you know the Dionysian and the apollon Aryan aspects of Greek tragedy and began to distinguish himself as a very young brilliant professor of classics at the University of Basel but he was plagued with illness he would come down with debilitating migraines that would actually affect his eyesight he had intense intestinal issues he had insomnia he was always full of aches and pains and they were so debilitating that when he was about thirty years old he actually had to resign because he could no longer teach and carry on the duties of a professor at a major university in Europe he was very depressed about this and yet his brilliance continued to shine and he continued to write and in fact it's worth just noting that Nietzsche was one of the first people to experiment with typewriters up to that point everybody wrote in hand but somebody had developed a typewriter and because he couldn't see very well he memorized the keys on the typewriter and began to type when he would be struck by the migraines that caused sort of the blindness but that gives you an idea of how nietzsche lived a life of on the one hand precocious brilliance in the pursuit of truth and on the other hand contained in a body that never let him be who he really wanted to be he went to various sanatoriums and how he began to cure himself was to go into northern Italy and Switzerland and go to the most beautiful places he could find and just stay there by a lake in a forest along the side of the mountain and he so fell in love with beauty of the earth that he renounced his German citizenship he declared himself stateless and he literally spent time in different locations of exquisite beauty and continued to write a series of brilliant works but Nietzsche's writing was different than anybody who had preceded him if you think of most philosophers or most books that you read they're logical they're closely reasoned they have footnotes to have bibliographies they are meticulous in their area addition not so with Nietzsche Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms he would have spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm or inspiration and would would just write them out some of the aphorisms were only a line long for example one of his aphorisms is if if it doesn't kill you you stronger nets entered into common parlance that's Nietzsche that's an aphorism from Nietzsche some of his aphorisms work a paragraph or a couple pages long and he wrote in these incredibly piercing penetrating ways in which often one aphorism would be contradicted by the next aphorism and he kept saying that truth is not what you think it is it is not in a box truth is a many-splendored thing and it is our job in our inquiry to grab on to different fractals of truth as we live our lives and then when he was 39 living in a beautiful lake by a beautiful lake in Switzerland one of his friends a man by the name of Paul ray contacted him wrote him a letter and said Friedrich I have met the most extraordinary woman in the world Lou andreas Salome come and meet her and let's travel together and Nietzsche responded and when he set his eyes on the beautiful loo andreas Salome 21 years old of extraordinary beauty of extraordinary intellect of extraordinary soul he immediately and passionately felt completely in love but here was Paul ray who had also fallen in love and they were accompanied by Salome's mother and what had it caught Paul and Salome up into a delirium of excitement is the reason why they had contacted Nietzsche is because they wanted to set up a comm unit to have free thinkers from around Europe gather together and think big thoughts and have you know extraordinary discussions and so this is what they were do so they began to travel together accompanied at some points by Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth and to make a long very complicated and extraordinary story very short his sister considered Salome an immoral woman because she didn't abide by the strictures of the time and she began to connive and write letters and be divisive and nietzsche was was infuriated by this he proposed to Salome three times banged her to marry and she said no she also said no to Paul ray and she was later by the way to become a great friend and confidant of Rainer Maria Rilke the great German poet she was a great friend of Sigmund Freud Lew Andria's Salome became the great Dom of Europe mesmerizing everyone with her beauty at her intelligence in the expansiveness of her spirit and went on the third time Nietzsche was rejected he went into an intense despair from which he never recovered that was deepened when Paul and Salome left him behind and went off by themselves and completely devastated Nietzsche sought the solace of beauty by a lake near Rapallo in Italy and as he was walking by the lake one day there appeared to him in his mind a pyramidal block of solid stone and the stone grew and grew until Nietzsche was enveloped inside the stone and he fell to his knees and out of the stone came a voice I am Zarathustra and in a delirium of non ordinary reality just staggered back to his room and in the next ten days wrote first section of what became known as the spoke zarathustra Zarathustra appeared to him three more times and over the next several years he was would be have an encounter when the stone a pyramidal stone would appear and he would be given reminds one of Muhammad remember when Muhammad at about the same age as Nietzsche around 40 when he was up in the cave like Nietzsche was was by the the lake Rapallo he was was encountered by the Archangel Gabriel what did Archangel Gabriel say to him recite and out of that came the Quran you so who was Zarathustra and what did he represent to Nietzsche because ah thus Spoke Zarathustra was easily Nietzsche's greatest work in fact it's the only work that is coherent in a way that we would consider a book the other ones are aphoristic as I mentioned before but Zarathustra is qur'anic it is a discharge of truth from the other side so let's take a moment or two to lily contemplate Zarathustra and what it is about Zarathustra that was so crucial in the thinking of Nietzsche and became the basis of a great book that is influenced people all over the world the German army gave a copy of Zarathustra to every soldier in World War one and it has inspired people including myself very deeply ever since you Zarathustra is according to Nietzsche let's start with Nietzsche Zarathustra was the first person in history to articulate ethics the notion of good and evil and as Nietzsche was the write later Zarathustra in pursuing truth as the highest virtue demonstrated more intestinal fortitude than all the other thinkers of the world put together to speak truth shoot well with arrows this is the highest of Persian virtue I it's well worth contemplating for a few minutes to pursue truth to shoot well with arrows the highest of Persian virtue let's just think for a moment about the magnitude of the first human being develop the notion of ethics this is why Zarathustra Zoroaster as we know him in the West which is an is an English derivative of the Greek derivative of the Persian Zarathustra was variously dated the ancient Persians by the way believe that Zarathustra had lived five thousand years before Cyrus the Great that founded the Persian Empire in the 6th century BC various scholars date Zarathustra to around twelve hundred to a thousand BC he has not ever been definitely dated but he what is attributed to him is along the following lines he was born in what is now North East Iran the heart of ancient Persia he his name Zarathustra means a writer of camels and his father his name meant the possessor of horses so it's clear from this that he came from a family of nomads that engaged in you know camels and horses and trading and he lived at a time of intense violence and if you think of the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods for example you think of the Egyptian gods you think of the Anessa potamia in gods mardukan Tiamat and ananna there's no moral aspect to these gods one of the characteristics of the emergence of civilization and the emergence of agricultural societies is that religion was not about ethics religion was about the the sacrifices you make on the springtime and during the harvest to ensure that the gods will give you the or enough rain and that the in the Nile the floods will rise and and you inundate the land and you'll get the crop so that the the the gods of antiquity are not a particularly moral Bunch you know they engage in incest they kill each other they're lying to each other they steal from each other they're deceiving each other they're engaging in all kinds of it's like watching reality TV it's it's it wasn't about ethics it was about something else it was about holding the cosmic order together that as human beings engaged in life in a cosmos they didn't understand they felt that what they needed to do was sacrifice and engage in ritual to make sure that the cosmic order sustained itself to ensure human survival you is our thew stris time the Aryans had swept out of the steps between Black Sea and Kazakhstan down into what is now Persia and India in the Middle East and they were particularly ferocious and they worshipped a god called Indra which was a god of the storm and fury and they stole and they they raped and they pillaged with abandon Zarathustra grew up in this and he was deeply troubled that the religious structures of his time gave sanction to what he saw was destruction and violence and pillage and then when he was about 30 years old he went into a deep meditation said that on an afternoon sitting under a tree by a river a shining being came to him and said Zarathustra let me give you a great truth and the truth was that all these gods are false gods there is good in the world there is evil in the world there is light there is darkness and you as a human being have the moral obligation in your life to choose who you will serve all these other gods are false gods Hurra mazda the god of light the god of truth the god of goodness is the God that you should worship and Ahriman the great deceiver the god of the darkness why is not to be worshipped now just think of the magnitude of this thought right at the beginnings of civilization when all the gods everywhere were essentially without moral content it was the young Zoroaster that articulated probably the most profound truth that we human beings grapple with that in our lives we are obligated to make choices between good and evil and through the exercise of these choices we can experience freedom that a completely new concept the whole notion that an individual human being has an obligation and that as we choose history is shaped and freedom is articulated and equality is experienced was a seismic shift in the in-depth in the in the thinking of civilization itself and the reverberate of impact of Zorah laster's insight has really shaped the world particularly in the West it's the origin of ethics it's the origin of human rights it's the origin of democracy it's the origin of virtually everything that we value that was our Astra and factset Zarathustra how humans determine their fate is all bound up with cosmic unfoldment that the very cosmos in which we live breathes with us you informs us and is shaped by our conscious choices between good and evil as we make ethical decisions in our everyday lives it's a beautiful elegant conceptualization of reality in fact you know Zarathustra generated many of the ideas that have shaped the Abrahamic religions it was a Zarathustra that that asked his disciples to pray five times a day it was Arthur striated told his disciples to his Chiu from certain forbidden things it was Zarathustra who said that at the end of history a messiah will arise well who he calls Xiao Jian born of a virgin who had judged the quick and the dead and therefore it was Zarathustra that quite literally a sized history and the immediate benefits benefactors of Zarathustra was the Persian Empire and the Persian Empire was arguably the most extraordinary Empire in the history of empires you when cyrus degree consolidated the alliance between the Medes and the Persians in the middle of the sixth century BC he set in motion an empire Beach that stretched from India to the east and the eastern meditate Mediterranean to the west and it was an empire based on ethics you may remember the cyrus seal cyrus cylinder it's the first articulation of human rights that we know of in history it's in the British Museum I saw several months ago whence special just to see it and if you've read Thomas Mann the shape of ancient thought it is because of the Persians and their belief that human beings are basically call equal and should have the right to believe what they want to culture that allowed the first global Empire through which India and Greece in India and Egypt and Mesopotamia began the first global conversation about what it actually means to be human in a very complex cosmic reality that's another great work shape of ancient thought extraordinary account of the zoroastrian elegance of spirit that enabled humanity for the first time free trade free thought free spirituality in the beginnings of the notion of human rights so that was Zarathustra now the question with which we want to now grapple and then we'll open it up to questions is why did Sarathy stray dormant for 3,000 years emerge with such power in the psyche of the man Friedrich Nietzsche what truth what challenge was Zarathustra giving through Nietzsche to humanity and that of course is the corpus of material that constitutes Nietzsche's writings at the heart of which is our athu stris clear message all your gods are false gods the Christian God is a false god he's dead you the god of the Jews the god of the Muslims the guy Buddhist the Hindus they're dead they no longer serve who you want to become that's the greatness of the penetrating truth of Zoroaster in his day that the gods were dead we need new ones was the central message of Nietzsche you truth said Zarathustra is what will set you free look at the way you're living your lives look at the Christian religion it has become a social organization come a slave morality it legitimates every kind of exploitation and dominance and cruelty in the world god is dead said Nietzsche because God is no longer moral look at the behavior Christians that's who their God is you and in thee Challenge of God being dead and we needing to articulate a new understanding zarathustra's mess to Nietzsche very generally was along the following lines you when one pursues truth one has to come to a fundamental realization that we are animals on a planet called Earth we are like the bees we are like the birds we are like the fish we're like the elephants and everything that we have thought that have been told us by our religions that were somehow going to heaven when we die and where there is there's there's all kinds of other places for the deceased and that value and truth is always somewhere else some in some transcendental place said Nietzsche it's just not true you look at a you look at a dog you look at an ostrich said Nietzsche they're animals we're animals and to pretend anything else is to deviate from the most fundamental truth of who we are and what that means is that the locus of value has to stop being a god outside history and become the earth itself from the beginning of Nietzsche's works till the end he's trying to get all of us work our way through the lie like in Plato's cave where we're sitting at the back of the cave looking at the shadows being told that's what's real the truth is somewhere else and that we're not worthy we are sinners in the hands of an angry god that's just not true and when we realize that that is not true and we turn around in a variation of Plato's allegory of the cave where with Plato you came out and you saw the Sun with Nietzsche and was Zoroaster when you come out of the cave you see the earth and you realize that we are part of an evolutionary process and even as species grow and expand that's true of our humanity and once we cast off the shackles a false belief and come up with our equivalent to a Haram Asda that is when we begin to become superhuman you and the superhuman in us is that evolutionary impulse being drawn from the future you know remember Reiner Maria Rilke was a contemporary of Nietzsche his great line and one of his pose that the future speaks ruthlessly through us you that's what changes the world said Roca and that's what Nietzsche's getting at with his uber Mitch he says we're not finished he says all the the the ministers say that were made in the image of God and and we're the crown of creation he says that's not true in a thousand years humans will have evolved something different and just like the apes evolved into human and we look back on the Apes and we say whoa we were Apes in the future we're going to look back on who we were and are now and say we were doing back so that the goal of life said Nietzsche is to break out of the shackles of your culture whatever binds you as a slave looking at shadows in the back of the cave break it free yourself from and begin to experience what it means to be superhuman what drives the superhuman it's two things one is a deep awareness that from the earth and that we're to be natural like the earth and the second is that we need to orient everything we do as an expression of beauty as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra our ultimate challenge is to embody beauty leave God aside he says and embrace life and in this regard Nietzsche is the great counterpoint to Plato and the Greeks who elevated reason highest virtue and rationality and a negation of the body because of the pristine qualities of the soul Nietzsche said no that's slave mentality anything that denigrates your body is wrong that's of Ahriman anything that negates your passions your feelings your vitality your emotions needs to be done away and if you can understand that your animal impulses the Dionysian pulses of the Greeks blended to be sure with the rationality of Apollo ultimately enveloped in the pursuit of beauty itself in every instance so that you never look up you're always looking down you're walking step by step on the earth who is your mother out of which you came you know there are no straight lines in nature the only straight lines are what humans create there are no straight lines in nature everything is much more beautifully ornate and Nietzsche says that is the model for how we should live our lives and in that that knew that expression of the authentic embodied human life oriented into the here and now organized creatively around the pursuit of beauty humanity begins to understand that it's destiny is always going to be to evolve in something more potentiated more aligned with the natural order let me conclude by just reading something from the opening lines of Zarathustra this was the Rost that was the first encounter of Zarathustra with Nietzsche so it's like the early Souris of the Quran where Zarathustra begins his tale and he'd been he was 30 years old and he had left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains and he was for 10 years in the mountains with the animals and the Eagles and then one day heroes with the rosy dawn he says and went to the mouth of the cave and greeted the Sun just one of the greatest minds and hearts of our species going away into the mountains for 10 years living in a cave and one day comes out and he greets the son and says thou great star what would be thy happiness if thou heads not those for whom thou shyness the son needed Zarathustra all of the cosmos needs every other part and he speaks and he realizes in the first instant encounter with the Sun beyond the earth that what he now needed to do for the rest of his life was go down the mountain I go down the mountain to the community of humankind and he went down the mountain alone and his first teaching think of the Buddha and his fire sermon forty day meditation he gains enlightenment like all great avatars do I stay in my aloneness and eternal bliss do I go into the cities alienated torn asunder violently disassociated and teach as Arthur stirrer went down and the first teaching he gave God is dead he said long live the superhuman humanity is something that is to be surpassed we are always challenged to be beyond who we are and I'll go into this much more next week but I just wanted to tease out a couple more lines though I teach you the superhuman the meaning of the superhuman is the earth let your will say the superhuman shall be the meaning of the earth I conjure you my brethren my sisters remain true to the earth and believe not any of those who speak unto you of super earthly things poisoners are they whether they know it or not once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy but God has died and therewith also those blasphemers phim against the earth is now the worst sin and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth thus Spoke Zarathustra thank you everyone we'll now have our questions and I'm gonna call on some people as time goes but mark why don't you start us off with a comment on these matters while I look to see which students I want to select I want all you students out there to think about what we're going to say about this subject of Zarathustra and Nietzsche in our pursuit and journey beyond good and evil Marc well thank you Jim the I have two two things I'd like to introduce here into the discussion Jim has given us a beautiful account of the I would say the deep roots of Nietzsche and and of the going well back into the Persians the Greeks a drawing in the metaphor you'd like to use GM drawing the bow back to its fullest extent I'd like to just mention two things what the zeitgeist and Nietzsche's own times and how they fit into this argument and then secondly the ambiguity of Nietzsche because if my perspective he seems a very complex figure and one who has been drawn on in many ways for often contradictory from often contradictory quarters so regarding the zeitgeist even that's a concept that Nietzsche himself referred to he he talks about I'd focused my reading on Beyond Good and Evil that book he talks about the fact that our conscious thinking is interconnected we're all part of the web of thought that seems to emerge at a given time and what was coming up in that era was I think to two things especially that I come to my mind one is Darwinian he's writing at a time when the impact of Darwin's thought was really going into the broader culture when meat was first interpreted in the US as first the first critical book on Miche was by the journalist HL Mencken and he saw amici is pretty much a social Darwinist and saw it as much like Herbert Spencer at the time of someone who was looking for the survival of the fittest and aid but that that Darwinian impulse certainly had that connection with the animal nature of man and the emphasis on evolution so those things were very much in the air when Nietzsche wrote and but also and I think this is what particularly fascinating from my perspective beyond good and evil was published in 1886 that is precisely the year that william james identified as the time of the discovery of the unconscious Goodwyn just beginning to write he was working on his doctoral dissertation and it was he who who formulated the term suit called feein subconscious for the first time the unconscious that that term had been around for a while Michi uses Siddons but the point here is that when he's arguing about the shallowness of rationality he's he's absorbing his light guys this beginning is see that the human mind has a much greater depth in range and has ever articulated by rational thought and that some of that someone that can be very dark some of it can be difficult the initial investigations of the unconscious focus very much on the dark and difficult side that at the same time in 1886 we had figures like Frederik Meijer when we look at her last year or maybe it's a little over that yeah who was seeing that the unconscious could also take in a much more subtle wide range of truth and and moved towards a kind of growth that was really unavailable to the rational mind so I think he's he's writing out of that that that element I was like guys as well this discovery of the unconscious as well as the discovery from the animal nature and of evolution all of those things are feeding into his lot the other the other comment I wanted to make Jim has to do if the in this I invite you to address next time around is the ambiguity of Nietzsche's writing is because as you say it's very different it's not laid out in a logical format so much as its aphoristic and people have seen in those aphorisms very different kinds of impulses he's been claimed by the right he's been claimed by the left as you know he was strongly claimed by the Nazis and his sister Elizabeth was a live long enough to be quite as open and enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer and in the Nazi world that developed but they saw themselves as as pushing the development of Meechum and it is true that Michi had elements in him that wouldn't seem so say to me to us now in beyond good and evil their comments about mixing races change to a weak man and in some disparaging comments about women saying that they're best in the secondary role and and they don't have enough manly enough facing of something and there's also a denigration of compassion often um even speaks of um denigrating the religion as cultivating a morality of sympathy whereas he's looking at a hard taking a clear-eyed view that in order to evolve we must get better and better and that means that we don't we aren't so sympathetic to the weak to the people who were who were representing the the site of mediocrity represent mediocrity even even refers to and be gone beyond good and evil as you're being threatened by a new Buddhism with this with its interest in in things such as compassion and with Britain's interest in things such as compassion so I'll leave that at that and I'm sure you will get into those kinds of concerns but next time around but it's just to say that there there are many different ways to look at Nikki and he seems to embody what only many facets but let's in quite contradictory lines of sympathy yes thank you but as with anybody there are aspects of Nietzsche that are conditioned by his time one aspect which i think is very important given the fact that that nietzsche was his last book willpower was seized by the nazis it's worth just noting the following Nietzsche was passionately anti anti-semitic in his whole life he broke with Richard Wagner the great German composer over the anti-semitic issue he broke with his own publisher over the anti-semitic issue he broke with his sister when his sister married an anti-semite Nietzsche broke with her and to those who said that Christianity was different than Judaism he says no they're basically the same thing they Jesus was a Jew you can't separate Christianity from Judaism what happened and they're the reason why he got a claim by the Nazis is due to his sister the the guy that she married committed suicide about five years after they married and then when Nietzsche himself died in the year 1900 and we'll go into that next next time he left on his notes it left on his desk a lot of notes for a book that he was written which his sister gathered up named the will to power and inserted anti-semitic lines and and interpret they called interpolations and it was that book that was that was seized by Hitler and the Nazis but scholars first of all Nietzsche didn't write it his sister put it together and later scholars have sorted out which parts were hers and which parts were his so I that's all that's a matter of public record I think that should be noted about Nietzsche that he was not anti-semitic and so I just want to make that point very strongly he did have disparaging attitudes toward women both given his experiences with his own mother and then with the demise of Salome and that is I think a very legitimate critique of Nietzsche he didn't get the the rise of the of the feminine in that sense and because he spoken aphorisms because he spoke in very multi-dimensional ways people have seized one one aspect and made a meal of it as it were rather than seeing the totality of what he was trying to get at and his extraordinary capacity to hold contradictions that's what I love about about Nietzsche is his capacity to hold contradictions that's what you admired about Nietzsche that's what Freud many of the great thinkers of the early twentieth centuries in fact Freud stopped reading Nietzsche because he says if I don't stop reading Nietzsche I'm not gonna have any more good ideas so Nietzsche was a was a in some ways an undisciplined genius like a fountain head you know like Tesla as opposed to Einstein and so that's an aspect of of Nietzsche's personality and constraints but also genius that we should admire today so let's see I see Bona hey why don't you give us a comment from the perspective of Persia on these matters I'm still reflecting to the honest video I'm just taking in your beautiful lecture amazing and I'm still I'm still reflecting if you can take some other people and I'll come back all right off table I see half table out there so after I'm good to see you what's your comment on these matters Jim I'm especially glad to be on this one because conversation and how he was working at a time of theory and he's trying to forge his understanding of human development both individual and collective but there is no developmental theory like we and to understand this impulse to under to recognize the force of human development individually and collectively this this is a great gift and you haven't yet spoken about his influence on Heidegger and that would be good to hear what you have to say about that well you know Heidegger wrote up I think it was a four-volume work called you know where he was the one who really teased out Nietzsche's notion of the will to power and Heidegger was a Nazi so given the brilliance of Heidegger and his free interpretation of Nietzsche for in each of the will to power was the will to become a superhuman and embody beauty and creativity as a animal of this earth under Heidegger Nietzsche's will to power became the boot of National Socialism and the Nazi Nazi war machine the whole notion of will to power in a political dominating extortionist way was was the real sacrilege I believe of Heidegger and the way that great German philosopher to his dying day was a Nazi and unrepentant about it and you remember heidegger's love affair with honor Arendt who wrote the book the mass psychology of totalit so Talat arianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem and after the Second World War she had a brief affair with him in the 30s she pleaded with him as a Jew to give up his anti-semitism and he would not and even after the war they tried to get back together and it was around his ongoing commitment to the Nazi ideology that broke them apart so when Heidegger wrote his opus on Nietzsche he was the one that created in my view created the great sin against Nietzsche and took an extraordinarily beautiful notion of the will to power into something perverted and evil and desperately destructive and it didn't but more when we get to next time I I hope enough say why don't you grace us with any thoughts that you have and then we'll turn to will well I was especially moved by the quotes that you said ubermensch is the meaning of the earth this is very this is very important this very important for especially today as we as we work on ourselves and as we come into alignment with the earth to remember that that what we aspire to is too coming to harmony with the earth and that is probably not probably most slightly the most important achievement for us and the most important aim so to have that the Arctic articulated from Zarathustra is also very moving because he he does a restraint tradition is so much about the way to embody truth like you were saying and that invite the embodiment of truth is to come into alignment with earth specially so this was for me very very important that you touched upon so thank you so much thank you I mean it is an extraordinary thing that after you know thousands of years of taking human beings out of the earth but in one profound illumination with a pyramid of stone out of a pure a stone pyramidal shape and will I would love to have since you you know you take our students every year to the great pyramids of Teotihuacan I would love to have your reflections or speculations why woods are thooose turret appeared in Nietzsche in a pyramid of stone by a lathe what would you say to that you know one of my favorite comments by Nietzsche is he said if you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back at you and and he yeah he sought to heal himself by immersing himself in the healing energies of Mother Earth although he he didn't have that way of expressing it because he was coming out of a new european paradigm that he was moving away from but that was in fact what he was doing and so you you raise the question what about the pyramidal stone the ancient tall Tech's had the notion that there is a geometry built into the universe this was some time before Plato and that the pyramid is a particularly important geometric shape that cultivates trends ordinary experience between dimensions and interestingly enough it's Jimbo's of your contact and that is that Russian scientists have delved deeply into the role of the pyramidal shape in cultivating all different kinds of things all the way from non-local observations the KGB to placing seeds agricultural seeds in a pyramidal shape and other seeds just in ordinary circumstances and then planting them there's my side and seeing that the seeds that spent time within the pyramidal shape performed at a an uber-bitch love friends ordinary I love this I love this yeah so anyway those are those who don't want to spend a lot of time with that but but it's definitely an important thing for us to see that that out of the loins of the earth this really tortured human being this very vulnerable human being and it was out of his wounds that he sought the deep healing and like Einstein who hiked 18 miles up to the glacier lake out of that experience you remember he hatched a special theory of relativity and in a similar way Nietzsche is being birthed himself by the abyss that's looking back at him hmm very profound thank you well that then they cut you know the comparison of Einstein and Nietzsche who spent a lot of time in very similar areas in Switzerland and northern Italy and beautiful mountains and lakes and took great solace out of just being in the wood in the wondrous beauty of nature is is is that's where you find the abyss in some ways in the beauty of nature and then it looks back and you're illumined and by the way for those of you who who don't know we're having our pilgrimage to Chartres on the 1st to the 7th of July coming up in just a couple of months and it's on sacred geometry and we're going to be looking into what they call the Platonic solids you mean what are the implications of a pyramid as opposed to a square as opposed to a circle as opposed to a octagon polyhedron all these different shapes have different qualities that affect the human soul and as will was pointing out affect the life of plants I mean it's extraordinary thing how shape gives rise to content and so thank you so much for that we'll really appreciate that Dave we'll go to you then Dave basically a question Jim and as usual I love you presentation did and the question is that it seems to me that Nietzsche is as powerful a avatar as as many others and what comes to mind is Jesus and the misinterpretations that have been risen with Christianity probably Muhammad as well with the misinterpretations within Islam and the question is what is it within the human personality that focuses us on the misinterpretation you know I have my own reflections on that but but I would love to hear your your responses well take a minute to give us your reflection I'd be very interested in what you have to say then I'll comment ok put simply I think of it as what I call the pointing finger which is an emotional triangle there is a always a problem a situation there is what I can point to outside of myself and there's three fingers pointing back at me it's an emotional triangle and for whatever reason it is such that human beings focus on this dimension the ex what I call the third limb of the emotional triangle and that is fundamentally both a place in which we can blame in which we can make the problem external to ourselves but it is also a place in which we have no power our power is within and it's much harder work to get to our power within and thus we focus on the outside you know simply you know a simplistic way of looking at it yeah I think there's a lot of truth to that I think that Nietzsche's comment as he grappled with the notion of truth is he says there's a there's a strange paradox about truth and that is truth makes you free and also truth can get you killed that's what happened to Socrates well that's what happened to Jesus yeah you know that's what happened al Haj that's what happened to Jared daun Oh Bruno and all the great martyrs who have stood true and been brought down Plato says in one of his dialogues that the good man they will always hang upon a tree and he saw his own teacher when he was only in his 20s be executed and poisoned so he knew what it meant to be a truth carrier nietzsche was very very enamored at both Socrates and Jesus for the reasons that you indicated in their time they were carriers of truth but over the passage of time what they express this truth was distorted by people who were pointing the finger and if you've read one of the great I'm gonna teach this I mean I it is the work you know Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov and the chapter called the grand inquisitor where the grand inquisitor the great church official comes to Jesus and Jesus comes back and the Grand Inquisitor immediately puts him in prison and then they have these dialogues and if anyone wants to grapple with what Paul just raised read the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus isn't in a Cell and the Grand Inquisitor doesn't know what to do because this is Jesus and he's an official of the church that was built on Jesus he can't let Jesus out because Jesus is gonna challenge him just like Jesus challenged the religious leaders of his own day and the chapter that Dostoyevsky writes is brilliant the grand inquisitor goes to Jesus at night and he says listen man I know you meant it well but not only do can't people handle freedom they actually don't want freedom they want to be told what to do and so the church in your name has had to negate what you taught in order to give people what they really want back to Plato's cave right and over a series of nights Dostoevsky records that the Grand Inquisitor comes up with every argument for high that's the King Jesus in prison Jesus says never a word and when the Grand Inquisitor has said everything he has to say to legitimate the lie back to Zarathustra Jesus disappears so this question of truth and the deep and big you attract that it sets you free Jesus said that and he was crucified so the the complex your posit Oram as young would call it anti Gnomeo contradictions around truth and the reason why nietzsche felt that zarathustra the first truly great truth carrier who had more Estel fortitude than all the rest of the thinkers combined because he was the first one at least that we know about as an individual figure in history was carrying the essence of the deliverance from Plato's cave you know how do we shackled by our own prejudices looking at the back of the cave and seeing just the shadows that the grand inquisitors of our time are putting up for us to believe in so they can control us and at some part of ourselves we want to be controlled how do we stand up how do we take the shackles off how do we walk to the mouth of the cave and see the earth and the Sun and the sky for the first time and experiencing what is true and what is good and what is beautiful have the courage to live that truth in a creative way and in complete dedication to the essence of truth which is always beautiful even in its contradictions that's Nietzsche that's his own sister and that's what we're gonna be delving into next time when we go into the some of the text and greater detail about some of the questions that mark was raising and and I want to close with the image that we'll brought out you know when you when you're on this path every one at times like all great human beings you look down into the abyss and you have to look and you have to suffer and you have to endure and you have to persevere until finally the abyss looks back at you and then the truth comes and then you experience life for the first time and you discover that it is beautiful so thank you everyone we'll be sending out the text the recording in a few days and then we'll meet again in June for my second lecture and we'll deepen the discussion from there bye

Channel: Ubiquity University

Views: 8,989

Keywords: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Jim Garrsion, Nietzche, ubiquity university

Id: WB-RspGD0pc

Length: 85min 15sec (5115 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018