My "Nietzschean Phase" | Philosophical Development and Commitments

in one of my earlier videos I talked about how I went through a Sartre and phase that began as an undergraduate and then ran into graduate school and I went through a number of different phases I'm going to shoot some various videos on those talking about why I was attracted to those modes of thought what I want to get out of them and eventually for most of them why I left them behind even though they still have an appreciation for them and another philosopher has been very important for me as as a person although I disagree with him on many different different things is friedrich nietzsche and i would say that i was a full blown Nietzschean at one point it's a little bit hard to say that anyone's truly a Nietzschean because nature himself is you know sort of all over the map with with his set of ideas not all of them really harmonized that well with each other and I think you know there's a good case to be made that that was in some respects deliberate on his part he thinks that reality is fundamentally contradictory and an active the product of the will to power playing itself out in many different dimensions in many different ways historically in that it's it's difficult to attain anything like a purely objective completely agreed upon you know rationally justified perspective in all respects so it's kind of to be expected that different people would make different things on in Nietzsche so I'm not going to talk about Nietzsche as Nietzsche if there is such a thing and I'm not going to talk about you know Heidegger's nature to lose his nature or you know so-and-so's nature except insofar as they they were interesting to me and played played a role for me so I first got introduced to Nietzsche back when I was just getting out of high school and it wasn't through am I high school studies I actually did have a philosophy class in high school which was not a particularly good philosophy clique quite frankly very boring and turned me off on what they were calling philosophy but then I had a really great philosophy class I'll do a video about that with this guy mr. Lorenzo that I learned a lot from without realizing yeah and then I I started you know frequenting used bookstores quite a bit in part because I had friends who would do that sort of thing and in part because I love getting my hands on books and just pouring through them and I'm not sure exactly what it was that I got my hands on it was some you know selections book a Nietzsche and what I found in there was was really heady and I think what I was trying to do is was make sense out of a lot of things at the time I was in some respects as a lot of adolescents and teenagers are profoundly f50 and not really quite sure about how to get out of and all sorts of romantic notions about you know what I want to be doing or perfect you know job for me and you know there's a whole mess of things that I can talk about with that but I was always searching for something I was always searching for what we would call something with metaphysical depth and I found that in Nietzsche and not just metaphysical depth but all of metaphysics of personality and metaphysics of human persons that doesn CS is just an epiphenomenon of natural events but sees us and the choices that we make and the commitments that we sorters our way through and our own histories and our relationships as being in some ways foundational and and I found that in me Chia and I found certain types of analyses in each of that that seemed to make good sense to me at the time and for quite a while as a matter of fact there's some things where I think nature really got things quite right even today so I got introduced to nature in a very unsystematic way and I actually remember this this kind of funny thing that happened I got invited to this this friend's party and I was you know I was actually just working as a grill cook and studying karate and working out about three four hours a day and you know hike hanging around with my my burnout friends and sometimes you know going to parties and you know just you know living this kind of heavy metal' roughy and kind of lifestyle right and but I was reading a lot too at the same time and some of my friends were real readers some of them some of them weren't so I got invited to this this party it was for a guy who I had sort of lost touch with it was his birthday party I'd lost touch with them a while back and so I went to his party and there were there were a few people that I knew because we went to different high schools we were in the same middle school together and then we cast what different ways and there was a guy there there were a lot of college types there like you know there they were in their freshman year of college because that's what should have been my freshman year of college but instead I was you know studying karate and and working as a grill cook and getting into you know various sorts of fairly light trouble and and and all that sort of stuff and reading lots and lots of stuff that I could get my hands on very vigorously and so I'd read some Nietzsche and I was really kind of interested in this stuff and I the guy was a philosophy major and he said you know that came up in conversation he was driving me home from the party because I couldn't get a ride otherwise I have to walk like you know six miles or so so we started talking and then I I mentioned that I was I was reading Nietzsche and he got a very snooty attitude with me you know how could you possibly be understanding anything about Nietzsche if you don't have a teacher you can't just read this stuff on your own but that's what I was doing you know and just to give you sort of an idea of what was going on I was reading each at the same time as I was reading Eugene O'Neill's plays and I was reading you know the history of the Mongol Empire and you know I'm sort of reading whatever I felt like you know thinking about at the time I never was fascinating me so you know some of nature's ideas kind of kind of stuck with me this notion of the will to power this notion of unmasking that that a lot of times you know what seems to be going on on the surface really isn't what's going on you got to dig deeper and that are our affects our emotions are intimately connected with our pretense to rationality that even when we're completely rational our emotions are integrated with that as well that was there was something that I thought was very very fruitful Nietzsche's perspectivism was also something that I was really interested at that in the time that the fact that you could take any standpoint and find another standpoint to contra pose to it and then start saying well which of these is actually the correct one and how would you decide between them that was that was important for me and I didn't do a very good job in conveying it to this guy that I was talking abut but I was I was thinking about these things and then you know I go into the army and I really didn't think about Nietzsche much then it's too bad because you know I was stationed in Germany so I could have gotten my hands of Nietzsche texts if I had to fight Ben smart but you know my philosophical career is for the most part this guy just sort of it's almost like a picaresque novels just wanders around into this and that and this and that so in any case I then encountered Nietzsche again when I was in undergraduate and kept reading him and reading him and you know Kierkegaard Sartre Nietzsche Camus those were the guys that I really enjoyed reading and you know I looked for those four common themes be between these guys and the notion of commitment and that you actually had to try things an experiment and that you know don't don't immediately assume that you know what people are saying is really on the surface is true that was part of what attracted me to nature another thing that really attracted me to nature was his sort of unrelenting elitism and I'll be quite honest with you I've kind of gotten away from this in part by not by abandoning a sense then look there's a higher and you ought to aim for that higher as best as you can now there's a bunch of gradations I've gotten away from you know just sort of saying if you don't have the top everything else is crap by seeing you know the the progress that has to be made and by learning how to be empathetic and to appreciate you know things and other levels and appreciate where people are but one of the things that really did attract me to Nietzsche was his unrelenting elitism and his insistence that democracy was nonsense that this let's put it to the public to decide what he said this was long with Kierkegaard it was just silly that it when it came to fundamental important life questions you had to figure these things out for yourself and you you shouldn't leave them to other people's sake answers or what they're comfortable with or even the people who act like they're progressive I remember people saying things you know it was very popular back I was in college to say who gave you the right to etc etc etc it was usually done to try to shame somebody in the service of being progressive and then I said well who gave you the right to ask who who you know what right anybody has I mean you're just asserting yourself basically you're acting like an aggressor just like this guy over here that you're criticizing so why don't you act like a real aggressor take the mask off and actually you know measure up to here your you know your own desire there why don't you just come right out and say that you want things this way and don't be passive-aggressive about it later on I learned to see that was what you know nature's calling reasons a month but I was struggling with with all these sorts of things with Nietzsche there was a sense that there was a climb that philosophy was this constant ascesis this effort to try to rid yourself of of preconceptions and the debt riches of the past and what was not really living but sort of parasitical on your life and to experience and to come to make your own judgments and there's a paradox and involved with that of course because if you're doing that because Nietzsche told you to are you really doing what Nietzsche is telling you to not not exactly and there's also this this sense of Nietzsche that look there are some people that are just you know spontaneously more energetic more willing to you know push things we're willing to try things more willing to get in the fray and with those sort of people don't try to put all sorts of restrictions on them let them do what they're going to do those are the strong those are the the class that you know will be the master you know perhaps even the Huber mention of Superman or the over man well you know when you read Nietzsche of course and you're just getting out of your teen years into your 20s and you're in as I was at that time just amazing shape if you're working out three four hours a day the various types of training and you already are kind of tough anyway by the way that you you grew up and the circumstances that you went through well you're gonna you know you're gonna have this natural tendency to if not seeing yourself in the role of that person you want to shoot for that and that's that's part of what was going on I also love the fact that Nietzsche was such a witty and brilliant and incisive analyst of other people's philosophy of literary developments of political developments you know the guy had something to say about about all these different things and I wasn't so concerned I think at that time with whether they were really true or right they were to what degree they were I was more you know it was sort of like putting on a suit or putting on some sort of costume and let you do something there was kind of a dramatic role of being in each you know I started getting more and more rigorous in my study of Nietzsche you know I kind of forced myself to try to read as much as I could I have to admit that you know when I was an undergraduate I didn't find the Spoke Zarathustra particularly interesting I was much more interested in works like the you know the genealogy of morals and the Wills of power and the birth of tragedy things that had a bit more they were a little bit less narrative and a little bit more either aphoristic or systemic you know where a picture was being drawn I felt like I don't need a narrative I can come up with my own narrative and figure that I want ideas I want explanations I want you to tell me how things actually work so I can start getting my hands dirty with it I didn't realize how important Nietzsche was to continental thought until there's a whole story that I'll tell about this some other time about 3/4 of the way through my undergraduate I started actually reading some some contemporary continental philosophy and I saw how how neat chiyan themes were playing out in people like Foucault in Toulouse and Jared and art you know I saw how I saw the uses they made of him and the homage that they gave to him but I people like that and so by the time that I that I got out of undergraduate and I had that year where I just worked and it was mostly crap jobs it worked and studied intensively and worked out all also being all the more and worked on my languages and then prepared for going to Europe and then going to graduate school I was getting more and more into Anjaneya and so by the time that I actually got to graduate school I was still you know reading Sartre quite a bit but I had shifted much more to seeing things in a me chiyan way I found that Nietzsche was a richer thicker than then Sartre and one of the things that I really loved about Nietzsche was his attentiveness to language when I first got to graduate school my intention was to specialize in philosophy of language in part because there was you know learning languages and I was seeing connections things and I was really interested in the you know how language fits in and conditions the way in which we review things and the way in which we act and the things that we imagine possible for ourselves and how it conditions culture you know where words come from I was interested in all these sorts of topics I didn't realize that analytic philosophy of language as opposed to the continental philosophy of language was not going to be actually dealing with those those sorts of things too much at least not in the ways that I was particularly interested in well I'll talk about that another another video so anyway was Nietzsche you know being able to to apply the things that he was saying to interactions with other people and you know to analyze the the the conversations and the arguments and and you know being able to make sense of what was going on in graduate school because Grant at least the graduate school that I went to was very aggressive between us graduate students and even some of the professor's the the engagements that we had and yet there was always this sort of veneer of oh yes we're just you know we're just doing something academic we're being very you know civil and nice to each other but but the undercurrent was quite often all this emotional stuff that was you know kind of interesting to think about and pay attention to and again my attitude was he just tear the masks off you know and I was getting that I was getting that from from Nietzsche now what was really interesting for me my first se year in graduate school was I got an office and I would hang out my office late at night and you know work on stuff and read and all that there was another graduate student when I got to be good friends with who was two years ahead of me and he was also very interested in media and we had when we started comparing things he was also you know much better school than that than I was he'd gone to Penn State and you know had professors who actually like you know groomed you and took an interest in your development and tried to make sure that you actually knew what was going on in contemporary philosophy so he was really into Stanley Rosen's understanding of each and Rosen had certain themes that he would you know go after time and time again much more interested in the connection between politics and philosophy than I was and I was if anybody I would say was the biggest influence on me at the time it was probably Kaufmann his views on Nietzsche but really you know I was my view was always well let's just read Nietzsche and not read so and so on Nietzsche and then compare it to so and so I need you let's say actually read the guy himself and see what he has to say so we would get into these big arguments back and forth in the middle of the night sometimes you know late and sometimes actually into the early morning in this this giant concrete complex that was our office building there's a again the whole story to be told about that place as well was built by a prison architect and had some quite interesting design features so there were a couple things that were really good about that what was it was good to see other people's perspectives on Nietzsche the other thing was you know when you have an interlocutor who who knows their stuff and disagrees with you you really got to go back to the text and make sure you know what you're talking about so that's that's what I had to do and it turned out there were sometimes things I I misread and didn't get right and with Nietzsche that's not too difficult to do since he's a tricky writer and sometimes over here that seemed to contradict what he's saying over here and if you're not paying close attention you might miss it again through this entire period I would say that the the concepts I was most interested in were you know the the ways in which the will to power that everyone has within them an aggressive will to dominate plays itself out either aggressively or passive aggressively and then about oh I think I had already finished my masters and I was beginning my ph.d coursework they convinced even time and to teach a class on meetcha usually he would teach you know the German idealism stuff and Hegel and Heidegger as well but there was this clamor hey you know this guy is really good with the German stuff let's have him teach Nietzsche so he taught a class on Nietzsche and he started out with two losses Nietzsche book and the way it worked was each one of us he had to like you know read this text and then and then present it to the class so since you know my French was particularly good and I already knew some of the Nietzsche stuff and I'd already read Toulouse in other contexts and I kind of like to lose my sort of just digested the whole book you know within about a week and then presented it to the class with commentary to and how the translation over here is a little bit different than what you might expect from the French and with Deleuze it was really quite interesting because you know you could see that for him Nietzsche was this great liberating force that sort of tore away French philosophy and he was very concerned with you know making sure that we never fell back into dialectics and with the lose the key conception was force which you know is closely connected to will to power an active and reactive forces and that's how he interpreted in each at least man that little book meet you and you know I read other people's views on him as well and then you know that was the semester of intensive concentration on the whole corpus of the works but in particular on the genealogy of morals which I you know went over to the library and got you know the German copy and started digging my way through it and it was it was wonderful I really enjoyed it it was a very heady time I loved Nietzsche not only as a thinker but also as a stylist his German is this is quite beautiful in many respects except when he tries to write poetry but but in you know when he's writing prose he is just brilliant and you know and he does what a lot of other Germans do and makes up words by compounds but they actually makes sense and fit this works and he's intentionally ambiguous and he exploits the resources of every language that he works with masterfully and so it was a real treat to do that now what started going on after that was I I would say what ended up shifting me out of Nietzsche was becoming dissatisfied with where he was going it did seem to me ultimately to place you in the problematic of are you going to just do this sort of hyper aggressive route or are you going to you know work with a sort of defamed Nietzsche that a lot of people wanted to put forth so that they could you know have Nietzsche light and say that somehow Nietzsche was a feminist or Nietzsche was you know a progressive or Nietzsche was you know not really serious about this part and or were you gonna you know take him seriously and sort of see the whole world is essentially a massive field of aggression or passive aggression playing itself out congealing itself into into history I never liked that that trying to defang him but on the other hand I started to I started to think well you know I'd read him and I think well you're actually wrong about this thing and it's not so much that he was wrong it's that when Nietzsche had decided about something like what say for example Christianity Christianity just pretty much as a whole for Nietzsche is all is all just in a bunk and you know Platonism for the masses and all that he does have a few things we were you know he says I'm not a few nice things about Jesus and he also actually has a few nice things to say about the church mainly when the church works as a power structure but I was I was finding myself my way back to or maybe you know for the first time into my my Catholic faith and you know reading a lot of Catholic authors and I'd read them and I'd be like and you know if if Nietzsche were actually right Thomas Aquinas couldn't say anything intelligent like he is over here or and some would have to be just shocked full of reasons and love but that doesn't appear to be the case so Nietzsche must be missing out on something and there were a lot more of those moments and you know gradually that they began to unravel this this attachment that I had to seeing things through nature and then you know the the language stuff has started to shift more into the study of semiotic s-- and into some of the more you know recent continental philosophy discussions of that so nietzsche kind of got a little bit left behind on those things as well because in a lot of respects when it comes to you know how he plays with language he is he is sort of an old-fashioned romantic you know thinking about this the derivation of words and what that means for us and what it tells us something else that was particularly important for me was reading mock sailor a mock sailor was a a phenomenologist who for a long time as a catholic actually ends up leaving the church towards the end of his life and Schaller was very impressed by nietzsche and he incorporated a lot of Nietzsche's insights into his his work and you might say well how can he do that how can you do that as a Christian you know well you know you you integrate what's true in somebody and you try to you know not just like dust you know push under the the dustbin or something like that the stuff that doesn't work but you gotta actually explain well why did you know why didn't he see this why you know why didn't this work and Schaller Schaller did that with nature and had some decent explanations for why nietzsche went right and then why and where nietzsche went wrong the concept of ressentiment is particularly good and and Schaller has an entire work devoted to this concept of results of money begins with nietzsche and then ii questions well as nietzsche actually getting it right about this and what are the consequences if he doesn't and and so you know it just sort of went on from there I went from being what you might call a true believer and you know a person who was trying to emulate Nietzsche and and make him making my own and trying to think out certain certain problematics that came up with that like you know am I stuck in rosante Monson and how active should I be and how should I be active and if I'm listening to Nietzsche I really you know as free as I ought to be maybe I should like throw the books away and so I went from that to having a much more measured less committed appreciation for for Nietzsche and I would say that means that I left my Nietzsche and fades behind me I would say as well and this is what I'll close on that I used Nietzsche an awful lot as a excuse or as a justifier for a lot of bad behavior of my own pride a lot of selfish behavior a lot of self-indulgent behavior a lot of putting people down a lot of deliberately seeking out conflicts and being tendentious with people and you know and I would say things and you don't have to necessarily have Nietzsche to do this people do this all the time in a marketplace of ideas and you know it's good to always you know confront people which is nonsense really stupid nonsense but you know I would say stuff like that with the idea that well look if you can't stand up to me you're weak and you don't deserve to be heard so shut up you know I'm gonna lay this out and at that time I was I was very good at very aggressive that demolishing people in arguments so so Nietzsche was kind of a natural fit for me but I found that you know once I started to attain some reflection on that I really didn't like that that part of myself I didn't like the tendencies that were being encouraged with it I didn't like what it would seem to be precluding and the sort of damage that it was doing to relationships the Nietzschean thinker has to do a really you know tough tightrope walk in order to maintain good healthy relationships I think so for me the Nietzschean phase was something that I passed through I still very much love to read Nietzsche I like to teach him I like to talk about him I like to use some of his concepts I think he's right about about certain things I think that he got some other things fundamentally wrong and I actually feel that he might have restricted himself in in certain ways might have been reactive in certain ways but in any case that's my Nietzschean phase and I'll tell some more stories about different phases that went through and in in my philosophical studies and career in some other videos

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 22,822

Rating: 4.9293079 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Student, College, University, Sadler, Philosophy (Professional Field), Friedrich Nietzsche (Author), Nietzsche, Ubermench, Elite, Strong, Weak, School, Behavior, Relationships, Dialogue, Conflict, Interpretation, Language, Power, Will, Will To Power, Personal, Development, Southern Illinois University

Id: rHa00nBNT98

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2013