Nietzsche Geneaology of Morality 3rd Treatise

welcome to ethics my name's mark doors B in this video we're going to be talking about neat neat J's genealogy of morality we're gonna be looking at the third essay or the third treatise so let's go ahead and get started the title of the third treatise is what is the meaning of the ascetic ideal what we're gonna see here before I sort of begin to get into and trace through the key points and there's a lot of them of the things that need to brings up in this essay let's do a quick brief overview of what we've looked at so for instance if you recall the first essay in the Tuni ology of morality concerns the distinction between good and evil and good and bad good and evil is essentially the moral dichotomy of values implicit in what nature calls slave morality conversely good and bad refers to master morality and ultimately what Nietzsche Nietzsche a thinks is that good and evil developed over time from its historical roots in master morality so slave morality gets his title from the idea that a slave revolt given out of the resulting MA or the resentment to the slaves held for the masters within the Roman Empire particularly he's thinking about what Jesus Christ does in his creative inversion of master morality in each a thinks that the type of morals that are indicative of contemporary modern life where we're living today have their roots all the way going back into this distinction so that's what the first essay was about we've traced it quite thoroughly in the second treatise which is about guilt bad conscience and related related matters Nietzsche argues that guilt which is a moral concept has its roots ultimately and not just guilt but guilt and Duty has its roots in ultimately an economic time of activity so originally he thinks that what happens is in the second treatise he talks a lot about the psychological components of repression that ultimately develop into what we call the bad conscience and so so you can see her in the first treatise we've seen in each a distinguishing master and slave morality as being indicative of the origin of moral thought and then he digs deeper in the second treatise by looking at the bad conscience and the way in which our own psychologists human beings is giving rise to this evolution moral thought or T evolution potentially a morals in a chest view so the third trait is here is it takes a different direction and it's on the question of the meaning of ascetic ideals so let's jump right into it let's start here with well what exactly is asceticism asceticism really refers to extreme forms of self-discipline self denial and abstention and these are characteristics of the ascetic so for instance all of the great religions typically have a sort of ascetic ideal so for instance think about here about the Catholic priest who's given up for instance their ability to have sex right so the Catholic priest has decided to live a celibate life so there's a form of self - now this is a type of asceticism but we also see the ascetic tradition for instance notably within Hinduism and and we also see it within Jewish thought within subcultures of Jewish of the Jewish religion we also see it within different domains within the Muslim tradition in fact we see within Buddhism we see it everywhere so in this in fact Nietzsche actually articulates that the asceticism seems to be a part of the human condition not simply the Western condition but there's this aesthetic ideal and of course when we talk about master morality and we talk about the way in which I'm sorry slave morality and the way in which slavery offers a psychological repression system upon the individual which is one of denial of the will remembered Nietzsche's core concept is going to be the will to power and asceticism is the denial of the will to power and so Nietzsche here wants to articulate what exactly is asceticism how does it relate and he's gonna really offer some really fascinating interesting insights particularly related to philosophy I'm particularly interested but to a number of different Aires areas so the ascetic ideal is the ideal of withholding one's will from the object of does its desire ok so let's jump into here excuse me so what is the aesthetic ideal this is the very first question that Nietzsche it begins with and the first thing we have to recognize is that the meaning of the aesthetic ideal looks different under different conditions so for instance from the perspective of the artist that's not a risk this artist the ascetic ideal can mean a lot of things and sometimes there's no aesthetic ideal for the philosopher the cenek ideal seems to be an instinct for the preconditions of a sort of higher spirituality sort of universality when we look at animals there's a certain aesthetic ideal he prefers this is the angelical look of a plump pretty animal I'll be honest I'm not quite sure exactly I don't have that same sense of the aesthetic ideal when I think of animals but in each a offers this and of course he talked about the priest who's a very important character when we talked about asceticism in the priests assort degree of ascetic ideal seems to be grounded in a sort of supreme license for power and we'll see that Nietzsche has a very negative view of priests obviously I'm given everything he said up to this point and there's many different Tomatoes one of these we can recognize is there's a plurality of this aesthetic ideal so what does the plurality of this ideal he indicate well Nietzsche offers this he says that the ascetic ideal was meant so many has meant so many things to man however is an expression of the basic fact of the human will in other words it needs a goal and it will rather will nothingness than not will at all so ultimately what Nietzsche wants to articulate here is that this notion of the will to power is so central that even when in in an effort to improve one's own condition as it were the asceticism is still a form of willing even though it's at type of willing and negated willing right because the person who is decided to deny themselves of so for instance sensuality or deny themselves an intellectually or whatever the the type of asceticism it is it's always despite its denial it's still always a positive form of the will acting for itself it just happens to be a will towards nothingness so you can see here this last chapter and this is really the conclusion and the central thesis of the whole chapter at the end of the day the will to power is the central ingredient when we talk about the psychology and the development of moral thought now he begins here with an example with Richard Wagner and I'm not going to talk too much about Richard Wagner I'm assuming that many people watching this video may probably heard of vogner but don't know his music he's a famous composer and he wrote many many works of art in fact he lived at the same time and there was a time in which need she knew him by the time of Nietzsche's niches writing in this text he's become somewhat of a critic of Faulkner so in for instance we talked about the uber mentioned a previous video vogner was a suggested possibility as being an uber-bitch but this possibility is denied ultimately right so the thing here is what we see is that Nietzsche is drawn to the work of vogner on the one hand but he's also deeply repelled by his work on the other particularly his later work and what it looks like is that vogner really vogner's operas in his compositions seem in the early years seem to really recognize the power of the will and are much more aligned and indicative or analogous to this master marathi but by the end of vogner's career we see vogner making a turn back to some of the more conventional themes and here it looks like vogner leaps over into his opposite so you see there's a sort of kind of in the earlier work you see a high emphasis on sensuality no later work you see an emphasis on chastity and then in other words there seems to be an antithesis between these two so the early vogner was an enthusiastic follower food you walk for instance now funer park who you may not have heard of was an important I believe German intellectual he I'm I'm Bailey from the theater Bach in terms of the relationship that he has with Marx or I should say Marx has a relation to him because I think your block was dead by the time Marx was writing his work well no that's not true anyway I shouldn't say stuff that I haven't I'm not prepared to research I don't remember the dates but anyway funeral pock who's a staunch staunch atheist really capture the inside of not only Karl Marx but in particularly right here in Bogner and in so vogner's a Suzy assic follower and theater box seemed to emphasize the need for a healthy sensuality right if I remember correctly theater box original text was a large indictment against people who believed in God and it was it was a strong articulation for atheism and whatnot so you can see there's a slaw strong resonance here but particularly Nietzsche his insistence that God has to add and all of this sort of stuff so but whereas the earlier vogner seems to be a follower of theater Bach the latter vogner seems to glorify what nietzsche calls the country simpleton he's thinking here of the boy Parsifal from one of vogner's operas right who is a country simpleton in vogner seems to glorify this but this doesn't really make sense at least not from the master morality sense right the master in terms of master morality in terms of the ubermensch this idea of the country simpleton who as being the ideal person is quite problematic because the country simpleton is not achieving the will to power the way they really ought to right so for instance he even Nietzsche Nietzsche even says that even the blood of the Redeemer is invoked so vogner even begins to invoke this notion of Christian sanctity and redemption and this is highly problematic for Nietzsche will see that he'll talk about that a little bit later as we go through and again remember the numbers here are correspond to the sections of the say that Nietzsche has so this is the fourth section so any of the quotes I have come from these sections I didn't include the page numbers because you're probably working with the different text than I am or publication so are different translations so you can if you want to follow along in the text you can follow along with these section numbers now and again I also say that I'm not covering everything in this it's just too much but I'm covering the key points and you'll see if there's a lot of them right it's okay let's go with hear from Nietzsche so what has to separate the work from the artists in order to take both seriously so Nature doesn't think that we have to just look at vogner's work and vogner as being the same thing is that ultimately to really take both the artist and the work seriously we have to recognize that there are two distinct things and we can we can do that we can pull them apart in a certain way this is a way not to oversimplify vogner or the analysis of vogner's work nietzsche argues one should guard against a confusion through through psychological contiguity a confusion to which an artist himself is is only too prone right now contiguity just is the sort of British term for I guess English term for talking about when something's next to Arnie or something else so simply because the author clearly is near the work that the author creates doesn't mean that the two are the same thing or that we should confuse the two right Nietzsche says the the fact is that if he were it he would not represent conceive and express it a homer would not have created an Achilles nor a Goethe a thousand former had been in Achilles or Goethe a fast right so it's clear that Homer writes about Achilles but obviously Homer's not Achilles because if he was a kid he would be writing about it he would be living it that's an important thing to mention here is that there is a sort of removal between the author other texts and the work in the characters right so the author in a certain way is living in a suspended animation compared to their characters I don't know at least that's what I kind of think let's move here let's move on so what is the meaning of the ascetic ideal we're gonna see need me to return and can and again to this question the first thing here is eliminate the artists and you'll see here the Nietzsche sort moves on then stops focusing on vogner and an artist and moves on to look at the ascetic ideal that seems to be contained within the philosopher and he considers most prominently number one Schopenhauer and number two caught now I put soap in how first because I think that Nietzsche has velocities more indebted to Schopenhauer than it is time but caught is the earlier philosopher so in much of Schopenhauer's work it is very much in juxtaposition to Kant's so but in a che who's a reader of both discusses them both right so for Kampf the problem is always viewed from the perspective of an impartial spectator right so for con the if you know Kant's work and you can take a look at some of the other the videos I have on Kali if you're not too familiar with it for Kant ultimately the ideal of knowledge is given in an impartial sense and this means that when we look want to look to the aesthetics of something so if we want to consider art and think about what makes a text beautiful what makes a landscape beautiful what makes a life beautiful right for caught the beautiful can only be appreciated ultimately in an objective manner which means you have to be an impartial spectator to the beautiful Kahn writes that in the critique of judgment sections one through five or it's in there right that that is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest so in other words Conte seems to be articulating that the things which are beautiful are things would give us pleasure that are independent of our interest and therefore independent of our will now to duck suppose this position Nietzsche offers a quotation here from Sten and Hall which is the Beautiful's of promise of happiness this is really good direct opposite because if the beautiful is a promise of happiness then that means that standing halt here is emphasizing the way in which we have an interest in the beauty right because all of us want happiness so if the beautiful is a promise of happiness then it is a promise regarding our own interest so you can see how these are two very time different ways of looking about looking at what the beautiful is and thinking about and here in nature wants to emphasize the way which con insist upon this impersonal sort of thing right in other words for we look here at Schopenhauer we can say that constant distance on the disinterested Specter is taken up by Schopenhauer in a sort of personal way so in much of Schopenhauer's work which is quite individual to him I would say there is a strong indebtedness to his reading of Conte and so even though Schopenhauer is different than cotton he really follows through with company does so by sort of personal as in the discussion right so for instance Schopenhauer articulates the idea that beauty counteracts our sexual interest entered interested nasai is what calms the will right this is very much in line with claude even though it's not the same for stan and all Beauty arouses the will so you have two very different ways of seeing this and what we see here is that for philosophy the ascetic ideal right the ideal itself to now seems to be intertwined with what means you will refer to as a castration of the will particularly regarding sensuality so what does it mean when a philosopher plays homage to the ecstatic ideal right think here about for instance Epicurus who argues that you should seek pleasure but you should only seek the right pleasures and you should deny yourself the wrong pleasures so many philosophers sort of offer these sorts of homage to the aesthetic ideals so what does this mean well Nietzsche thinks that will the answer is that the philosopher wants to gain a release from a sort of torture now here we're start talking about the sort of psychological torture pain or suffering that is indicative of a stifling of the will so but this torture that the philosopher Esther overcome is also a sufficient condition for the philosopher Nietzsche writes that if deprived of his enemies Schopenhauer here soap and our enemies are Hegel right it says so if soap and our were deprived of his enemies of Hegel of woman of sensuality and the whole will to existence to persistence well without these Schopenhauer would not himself have persisted and Nietzsche is arguing here that even though Schopenhauer wants to deprive himself even though Schopenhauer is seeking a sort of ascetic denial of his own will right he wants to deny these other things ultimately without Hegel without women without sensuality without this will to existence we wouldn't have sharpen our right so sure there's this sort of kind of paradox where the overcoming of something is precisely a sufficient condition for the identity of something and and so then Michi refers here or that articulates the idea that the philosopher tends to disparage sensuality he writes every animal instinctively strives from optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all of its energy strengths and achieve its maximal feeling of power every animal harbors I should say are yeah I think it's arbors just as instinctively and with the subtlety of discernment that is a higher than reason every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could have struck this path to the optimum so this is why philosophers are generally not married at eh-eh argues right because for the philosopher to become married is to engage into a commitment to another person which can be an impediment to the ultimately the development of the optimal form of life and as we mentioned earlier the optimal form of life for the philosopher is this sort of high spirituality at least that's how Nietzsche refers to it and so and he discusses the fact that many of the great philosophers were not married at all and so he's sort of negative on marriage but that's partially because marriage is an embodied activity of an embodied commitment there is ultimately the includes of a high degree of sensuality right I mean carnality so the philosopher by contrast seeks a desert right in so Nietzsche offers this this image of the desert the philosophers seeking desert in which they can't avoid themselves of all of these distractions ultimately in order to develop their will towards this sort of idea of the optimum as he calls it now there's three sort of slogans or aspects to the ascetic ideal that can be articulated if not more one is an ascetic ideal poverty the second is humility and a third chastity right so poverty means not being grounded down by a desire to attain material things and to gain wealth and power humility self tuned out of the will chastity a self-denial sensuality so for the philosopher though the most philosophers or professors at least in the contemporary world and they were sort of live with lots of educated people but Nietzsche L offers the idea that for the Philosopher's other people who are educated are themselves a type of desert but they are themselves a desert so for Nietzsche though he talks about the mountains or desert for him their way a place for him to go and escape these distractions ultimately right and so here you might he doesn't ask this in the text but I'm asking to ask you where is your desert where do you go in order to isolate yourself from distractions in order to attain a sort of higher spirituality or something like this or enlightenment or whatever whatever phrase you want to use what is the desert or is there an ascetic eye is there in a place or a way in which you pursue your own type of asceticism right Nietzsche continues for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all everything to do with today we reverence what is still cold noble distant past and which everything in the face of which there's the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up what one can speak to without speaking aloud here I'm quite reminded that of Plato's fado in which Socrates on his deathbed talks about death as being a healing any talks about the idea that death is the ultimate goal for the philosopher a putting away of that which is active that which is hot that which is passionate right it's ultimately towards something which is anti-life right and he mentions for instance there's this motto that it seems that you might say the philosopher lives by which is he who is pizzette hue possesses is possessed and so you can see here that if you try to possess material things then the idea would be that the material things possess you or they possess your will they capture your will and your consciousness really but it doesn't have to be just material things here we can talk about sensuality or other people marriage and lots of different things and if the goal of the Philosopher's is to free themselves of being possessed then that means they will pursue a self-denial of possessing things right so this means that their philosophy does indeed potentially have a close link to asceticism and what Nietzsche is articulated as the ascetic ideal he writes philosophy began as all good things begin for a long long time it lacked the courage for itself for a long time it lacked the courage for itself web sighs it must be a typo and always it was always looking around to see if someone would come and help it yet it was afraid of all who looked at it drop a list of the various propensity and the virtues of the philosopher is bent to doubt his bent to deny has been to suspend judgment he's been to analyze he's been to investigate seek tear etcetera it is not clear that for the longest time all of them could contravene the basic demands of morality and conscience but now we can say is that we violate her Nietzsche says we violate ourselves today there's no doubt of it we nutcrackers of the soul every every questioning and questionable as if life were nothing but cracking nuts and thus were bound to grow day by day more questionable worthier of asking questions perhaps also worthier of living you can see here Nietzsche ends this quotation with the question mark which is if the philosopher constantly is violating their own desires and their own will or their own life by seeking questions and denying themselves what kind of life is this now Nietzsche obviously who's indebted to the philosophers and he's not attacking philosophy per se but he's offering a critique regarding the psychological motivations that seemed to underlie what we might call is the sort of modernist philosopher the modern philosopher though he would say it goes all the way back to Plato so I don't know how Martin that really is I've done a thing in this section that the philosopher indicates is that all the virtues that we hold today were once of vices right he says when suffering was everywhere counted as a virtue cruelty as a virtue disassembling as a virtue revenge's of virtue slander of reason as a virtue and went on the other hand well-being was counted as a danger thirst for knowledge as a danger peace was a danger pities a danger being pitied as a disgrace work as a disgrace madness has divine change is the very essence of immortality and pregnant with disaster so here this is sort of just another rumination or a reminder of what we saw in the very first treatise here at the genealogy namely that our virtues tend to turn in devices and our vices tend to turn into virtues when we take into account this difference in this movement between master and slave morality and remember it's all about the will number 10 contemplation when we think about contemplation we think about obviously philosophy is a type of activity of contemplation in Nietzsche goes back and says when contemplation first appears on the earth it is a sort of disguise right the earliest philosophers endowed their existence with the meaning in which others would fear them right here I'm thinking of the pre-socratic philosopher I think it's inexact Mandor someone can tell me if I forgot it and I'm telling the wrong pre-socratic philosopher put it in the comments if I'm wrong and I didn't look it up ahead of time but I believe it's an examiner threw himself into a volcano so that everyone would believe that since there was no body he was a god where he was divided or he was descended in heaven or something like this right so you see these early sponsors seem to live on a type of existence and articulate and build out a type of meaning for those lives that has a social function of other people fearing them as sort of interesting he says the philosophical spirit always had to use as a mask in a cocoon the previously established types of the contemplative man the priest sorcerer of the soothsayer and in any case a religious type in order to be able to exist at all so that ascetic ideal for a long time served the philosopher as a form in which to appear as a precondition of existence he had to represent it so as to be able to be a philosopher he had to believe it in order to be able to represent it so you have this sort of interesting thing between the distinction between that which appears and that which is real and the sort of indicates here that the earliest philosophers built took on an ascetic form of existence in order to in order to a pure a certain way but in a period they be essentially became it or at least they began to believe it so Nietzsche is offering sort of interesting I think pre historical analysis of the origins of philosophy itself he says for the longest time philosophy would have been possible I'm sorry would not have been possible all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloak without an ascetic self misunderstanding right so asceticism has at its core I'm sorry philosophy has its core deep relationship to asceticism on Nietzsche's view let's move forward the ascetic priest in the ascetic priest here of course you can think it was the Christian priests but it doesn't have to be a Christian priest any anyone who's who is I guess practicing religiously asceticism and enforce note others would have been ascetic priests but the ascetic priests links his or her will to the power will to power with the interest of the ascetic ideal so asceticism is not the denial of will it's rather an activity of the will the ascetic treats life as a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to where it begins but it's still a road in which one walks right so the activity of will does not perish despite its denial of itself now earth can be almost conceived of as an aesthetic prison planet and nietzsche offers this really sort of interesting analogy here he says read from it read from a distant star to imagine the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet a nuke of disgruntled arrogant and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves at the earth and all life who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of what pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably about their only pleasure so nice to him Nietzsche imagines here if aliens could sort of see what human beings are like on earth and they saw this aesthetic ideal is totally intertwined not only to the philosophical spirit but in to our moral spirit they would think this is a quite bizarre worlds right where the type of pleasure these people have is is pain and it's suffering and at the heart of this aesthetic ideal ultimately is resulting law its resentment it you can see here that Nietzsche is bringing back again the linchpin category he articulated in the first essay about how master morality have a slaves of the Masters in the Roman Empire they essentially gave birth to a creative hatred in which they inverted the moral order this is result Imam where does it come from or how is it related it's related to this aesthetic ideal so and we'll see here that you don't have to be a Christian in order to have this aesthetic ideal which means that resulting law is not simply a category that's indicative of the transition of between Roman and Christian morality it's indicative of something regarding human nature now Nietzsche rejects the philosophical content attitude that endorses the idea of the the impersonal spectator right and this includes specific philosophical concepts and categories things like the pure subject the will list painless timeless knowing subjects concepts such as pure reason think here about Colin's primary work the critique of pure reason also there's a rejection here of the notion of absolute spirit think of Hegel the note is a rejection of knowledge in itself think of most philosophers Aristotle would be a good example there and Nietzsche wants to reject these philosophical attitudes is ultimately built upon a misunderstanding of human life right by contrast meetcha develops and articulates and endorses well today we will cause perspectivism and this is the idea I mentioned this in another video but it's all to move the idea that our knowledge of the world is grounded in the person the subjective perspective we have of the world which means that our knowledge is a function of the will it's not something that's outside of it in this impersonal speck tutorial way that Kant would have it Nietzsche writes there is only a perspective seen only a perspective knowing and the more effects we allow to speak about one thing the more eyes different eyes we can use to observe one thing the more complete our concept of this thing our objectivity will be so it looks like here is that we have multiple perspectives and the more perspectives we take in the more objective our ideas will be but this doesn't but you can see here is that epistemological e this means that objectivity is functionally built upon a plurality of subjectivities take a look at the work of edmund husserl who has a very interesting discussion regarding the nature of objectivity in its basis on subjectivity so if you want to take a look at a contemporary philosopher a phenomenologist who talks about something similar take a look at a man who strolls work moving to section 13 we see that the ascetic Springs from the protective instincts of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself into fight first existence so the ascetic ideal is a type of a reaction if you will it's a way of fighting back against the degeneration of our life then the degeneration of the will over time so the ascetic priest even though they excited Cruz is a denier of life the ascetic priest is actually cultivating life or is acting out of a desire for life right the Cypress is both a naysayer and a yes saying force if you will right that should be no saying not yo a ting right so but that means this High Priest it has this complicated contradictory role though it may be unknown to them in particular now the aesthetic ideal for Nietzsche is a type of sickness it is not something that's bad or evil it is rather understood as a deficiency of will right or it's sort of disease nature argues and you'll recall here is that even previously Nietzsche referred to the development of bad consciousness is also a type of sickness so you notice here that for Nietzsche the categorical distinction is between health and sickness it's not between good versus evil or good versus bad these are a moral categories remember Nietzsche is developing a psychological analysis of morality ultimately and that would make sense that these are a moral categories that stand at the basis of morality he writes examine the background of every family every organization every Commonwealth everywhere at the struggle of the sick against the healthy so the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche is recognizing here is universal in human life in human culture and it seems to transcend time because we see this ascetic ideal in pretty much every time period as well it's not just simply a function of our contemporary world or even the Christian world it seems to be everywhere but when each a recognizes is the sickness seems to be everywhere now where why what's motivating the sickness well it has to do with resentment and resentment of what resentment of pleasure and pain right here's what it is is the priest alters the direction of results in ma the direction of resentment and and directs it inward upon the individual in a form of self-denial which means that resulting law becomes a form of anesthesia it becomes a way of making one forget the feeling of pain what's the feeling of pain it's the denial of one's own will to power so the aesthetic ideal exploits the bad instinct of all the sufferers for the purpose of self discipline self surveillance and self overcoming particularly I want to emphasize here the notion of self discipline and self surveillance well actually a self overcoming and in the next video lecture a part of this series we're gonna be looking at some some chapters from Michelle fucose discipline and punish where he specifically looks at the way in which the modern world enforces the type of self discipline a type of self surveillance and ultimately a type of self overcoming we're gonna see next time that Foucault sees himself really is an itch and right and in many ways I think he's the contemporary version of Nietzsche now Nietzsche indicates that the entire situation is physiological at the end of the day and that the psychological suffering we're talking about is actually tantamount to a physiological problem he says this release that's how I realize were right in here he says a strong and well constituted Manti just his experiences as a digestive meals even when he has to swallow some tough morsels if he can't get over an experience and haven't done with it this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as is the other and often a consequence of the other so with such a conception one can between ourselves still be the sternness opponent of all materialism so it's sort of interesting here Nietzsche is offering the idea here that that there is a sort of material basis for for this condition even the psychological condition we've been discussing but simply because there's a material basis doesn't mean we had to argue for materialism in fact Nietzsche himself is a stern apone to materialism and we'll see why that is it really has to do this idea that materialism these contemporary materials it becomes its own form of the nest disguising the soul or anesthetize in the will so Nietzsche is going to extend his critique of asceticism in section 17 to Christianity in particular in which he will specifically argued that this notion of redemption Redemption from sin redemption from your will is itself a type of hypnotism it's a way of lowering yourself out of suffering and pain ultimately which is driven by your psychological instincts not to be in pain right the will in order to also develop and emboldened the will to power now in this section Nietzsche actually talks quite a bit about things I'm gonna skip through it because there's a lot of discussion I'm so I'll leave it to you to take a look at but what we do see in the next section is that there's another form of this hypnotic muting of sensitivity of this capacity to feel pain and that is mechanical activity and here think about our daily lives think about the way in which when we fall into a pattern of regularity which is a type of sort of unthinking obedience to the type of life we're living this becomes a sort of training for the impersonal a type of self forgetting so you don't have to be the philosopher to have this aesthetic ideal right you don't even have to be a Christian you can just simply be someone who who whose existence gets poured into a type of mechanical activity in which which is governed through a sort of regularity now on the other hand think now about the way in which if you live in a capitalist society as most people do think of the way in which a capitalist society regulates the movement of your life the movement of your existence right you have a job you're forced to go to work at 8:00 a.m. cut a little at 5:00 most people that have these nine-to-five jobs and when they go to their work they principally just do the same things over and over and over again notice this this is a type of mechanical activity which is development to an aesthetic idea think about it if your job my wife for instance I'm she works at a company where typical nine-to-five job and sometimes she likes her job but oftentimes she at least expresses to me that her job can feel quite meaningless meaningless personally right it's quite impersonal though it's a self but becomes a way in which you're supposed to as an employee give up literally 40 hours a week of your life if not more to your job right and this is a type of way which you can anesthetize yourself so some people do this think about workaholics for instance maybe you're a workaholic I am but think about that for a moment so the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche is discussing in the origin genealogy where I extends to many other types of activities that go simply beyond the ones that he's really been attacking so far on the text now we look go back to Christian we can say that in Christianity this same torts of hypnotism ization and a neces ization emerges as the pleasure found in giving pleasure for instance think about the emphasis that Christian thought places on doing good giving relieving helping encouraging people consoling people and there's a whole range of values that Christianity argues are necessary and Nietzsche seems to suggest that these are based in pleasure really and it's a sort of petty pleasure the idea that you get pleasure by giving pleasure to others so by prescribing a love of neighbor the ascetic priests prescribes fundamentally an excitement of the strongest most life-affirming drive namely the will to power so even in the case where you're supposed to do unto others as you haven't doing you love your neighbor as you will yourself right these notice that when when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself the core concept is still the self and it's still the will of the self so even in this denial of oneself through the ascetic priest we still have a life-affirming drive towards the will to power another form of the way in which we can lose we can hypnotize and enesta sighs our will is through the herd and we talked into one of the earlier viewers about his notion of the herd instinct he thinks we naturally instinctually heard it we naturally conform to each other this you can theme this group conformity and you can ask yourself do the simple experiment next time you're in a elevator trying to stand and face the other direction as everyone else and you'll find it's very difficult and if you do one of two things will happen either you will feel very awkward so everyone else in the other or everyone will follow you they will do exactly what you do in fact there's a famous psychological experiment where they did this where there was a gentleman who'd go to an elevator and he would turn and then everyone else would turn - and he would just turn in circles and everyone would follow him naturally so we have this natural tendency to do what others do and to congregate in herds right and Nietzsche's words so the formation of her herd according to Nietzsche is a significant victory and it's an advance in the struggle against oppression with the growth of a community a new interest grows for the individual - and often lists him or her above the most personal element in their disconnect can discontent which is their aversion to themselves again I apologize for the slight typos I've been typing this all day and I just I missed all this so much I'm sorry about that hopefully it's helpful though and this thing about it when you joined a community and you take up the burdens or the desires or the will of a community in a certain way you find meaning in a place that allows you to get away from yourself right and this seems to be I personally find this to be the case when I'm left to my own devices sometimes I fall into a deep despair in which I I will sometimes frequently just think to myself man you are such a failure and I will go and just really focus on all of my problems and all this sort of thing but in order to get out of that I'll call someone up go to the bar or go somewhere and hang out with people and by joining others I can escape myself so this is one of the other primary mechanisms and Nietzsche indicates here is that the people who have a strong will tend to separate themselves from others and the people who have a weak will or people who are weak tend to congregate so the strong separated while the weak congregate now these forms of hypnotism are considered in the modern world to be really innocent means in the struggle against our displeasures and against our depressions and he gives examples here of some famous authors in which this seems to be the case he talks about when Lord Byron dies Thomas More burned all of Lord Byron's work and dr. governer did the same with Schopenhauer's work and what we see here is that there is this interesting thing in which when Pete when people die or when we or what we want to die we when people die they will frequently ask that their personal effects are destroyed because they don't want that their self revealed it would seem and nietzsche offers an interesting thought experiences imagine if there was a biography of martin luther which focused on him as being focused on him as cultivating the activity of the will to power which would be very very different from the type of martin luther we know from the history of Protestantism now there is reason enough Nietzsche asked is there not for us psychologists nowadays to be unable to shake off a certain mistrust of ourselves and given all this right we would look to our psychological Constitution and we do this origin of morality what we see is that yeah there's good reason not to trust our own the reasons we say we do things for because it appears there in remind yourself of the some of the notion of sublimation sublimation is when you can't achieve something you find something else to take its place and it looks like we got the aesthetic ideal as a type of such activity of sublimation Nietzsche suggests that the aesthetic ideal enables what he calls an orgy of feelings despite its character of self-denial that is the person who lives in this era ideal let's say the philosophers living in their desert of educated people think of the philosopher in there their tower at the their university office right where they're surrounded by their books and they don't have to actually live and engage in the world right this aesthetic ideal enables a type of orgy of feelings it enables feeling of pleasure even though it's its formation in its process appears to be one of self-denial Nietzsche says that everywhere ii somehow I cut that off everywhere the center of breaking himself on the cruel wheel of a restless morbidly lascivious conscience everywhere dumb torment extreme fear the agony of a tortured heart convulsions of an unknown happiness and a cry for redemption right so and by the way people have been complaining I say right too much in the videos and I know it is kind of annoying so my apologies I'm trying my best to get myself off of that but anyway there is so the asceticism even though it's a self-denial is actually still organized around a principle of sensation and sensuality now Nietzsche characterizes the modern world improvement of humanity what we would call it in the improvement of the game if it's an improvement its weakness it's just it's discouraging it makes us refined it makes us more effeminate and emasculates us right Nietzsche characterizes this process the process of the ascetic ideal that takes place in all these different ways as a form of treatment for the sick which increases the sickness though because as this self-denial it's sort of as if the self-denial like this I'm sorry the self-denial of the setting is really just digging their grave deeper and deeper and deeper in each ii suggests that this is the case across the entire spectrum of moral life because slave morality has won the day as it were so the ascetic priest has ruined the psychical health wherever he's come to power Nietzsche says and Nietzsche here it gives an interesting sort of discussion where he says he really doesn't like the New Testament because the New Testament of course with Jesus Christ arguing that you ought to do others he's doing to yourself you did nine your own self the poor will right the poor will inherit the earth and so on and so forth Nietzsche thinks the New Testament really embodies this aesthetic ideal and he doesn't like it whatsoever but he says but all hail to the Old Testament he loves the Old Testament because in the Old Testament you have great human being human beings who are acting out their will right and they're not simply denying themselves and so this is quite interesting think here about King David in the Bible where King David obviously from the Christian perspective King David denies himself towards God but I think Nietzsche here is suggesting that if you ignore the New Testament when you look at the Old Testament when you ignore the New Testament look at the old one what you see is that human beings are acting out of their own will and they're acting more in line with this master morality we've talked about in the very first section so the focus here though has to be on the meaning of ascetic existence not simply the products or the activities of ascetic existence so what exactly is the meaning of this existence and what's the meaning of this part of the power that the ascetic priest holds or that the aesthetic ideal holds over individuals keep in mind here that Nietzsche will characterize the ascetic meaning as something which total eise's and reinterprets our worldly totalities now that is not a phrase that Nietzsche uses that's that's my characteristic characterization of how Denis Chi discusses it in section 23 he seems to see he not seems he does suggest that the aesthetic ideal eventually takes over and we begin to understand all things according to an in line with it so the meaning of ascetic existence part of it it has to do with its totality now the the meaning of ascetic existence isn't simply about religion and I think a lot of readers of Nietzsche like to think that they're above all of his criticisms regarding Christianity and slave morality and all of this stuff because they are good scientists and they believe in science and they're atheist well guess what in this section Nietzsche's going to directly attack science scientism an atheist because he thinks that the type of science we have today which is a good thing he's not against it and he doesn't think we should stop doing science but he thinks that science has become its own form of the aesthetic ideal and so even if you're not a Christian and you're watching this video eh-eh thinks it's in you need to see yourself as something of a scientific mind having a scientific mind said Nietzsche thinks guess what your own identity is also wrapped up in this aesthetic ideal take a look what he says he says science today is absolutely no belief in itself let alone an ideal above it and where it still inspires passion love ardour and suffering at all it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and the noblest form of it so it's a noble form of it so neatly give some credence here and he says over and over as caveats that he's not trying to attacks that I answer scientists but he's I think what Nietzsche is articulating here is that science because at the science science itself doesn't believe anything beyond itself right it becomes a type of self to now because in EJ's view the mass from Rui believes in themselves they believe in their own will to power science today is a hiding place for every kind of discontent disbelief knowing work a bad conscience it is the unrest of the lack of ideals the suffering from the lack of any great love the discontent in the face of involuntary contentment right so science here becomes a means for it because maybe the pinnacle of self acidic idealism in the sense that a person who who is constantly thinking of science or we might call has fallen prey to scientism is a person who is has actually endorsed a type of self narcissism but what does that mean exactly it means that by using science they have found a way to flee from their own will to flee from their own suffering and pain and you ask yourself this do you have an experience of this or actually Nietzsche asked us the reader do you have an experience of that is science this is this what science is for you is it a form of escapism not simply a form of pursuing knowledge now the great fear of modern life Nietzsche mentions is the regaining of consciousness and that is the consciousness of ours of our own will to are in our own wills any things we don't were scared to do this and we've been trained not to do it in science scientism is the new form in which we are able to flee from ourselves and able to forget our own consciousness of ourselves and with this in mind we can we can read Nietzsche when he says we men of knowledge and remember at the very preface of the genealogy more like Nietzsche talks about the men of knowledge are actually unknown to themselves so he says we men of knowledge have gradually come to distrust believers of all kinds our mistrust has gradually brought us to make inferences the reverse of those former days so we see here is that this distress in herself has led us to invert these virtues and we saw earlier how Nietzsche was trying to trace the the way in which our virtues can be inverted and so what was once a vise becomes a virtue it was once a virtue now has become advice so nothing and here we get this famous phrase I put it up there at the top which is nothing is true everything is permitted and this was the phrase of I believe it was a medieval secret sect called the sect of assassins there what the Christians fought during the Crusades and they had this view this sect of assassins that everything that nothing was true everything was permitted that ultimately they were nihilist right and this seems to be an important recognition of what nietzsche is talking about right that that was the freedom of spirit in that way the faith in truth itself was abrogated so there's no science without presuppositions as another point that's important because at the heart of science ism is a type of metaphysical faith and in this point is often made by Christians who want to criticize science in eh-eh agrees which is namely that the scientist has a metaphysical faith in the process of science itself he says quote it is still a metaphysical face that underlies our faith in science and we men have them knowledge today we godless men and anti metaphysics we too still derive our flame from the fire ignited by faith a millennia old the Christian faith which was also play knows that God is truth and the truth is divine notice here that nee J's do is the truth is sculpted it's something developed out of the will and this faith that there's the truth is somehow metaphysically beyond us and it's something that we can discover and attain to this same kind of faith though it's not articulated by scientists in this way is held by scientists because science it has olds nothing sacred science wants to understand the world I'm thinking the physical sciences always wants to understand the world in terms of how the world is but that means that we have a faith that it's possible to do that and that's not something that science can itself prove because it seems to be a presupposition for science or this the faith that people have in place in there it's in science there again Nietzsche is not arguing that science is bad or that science is a type of religion ultimately though that science is a part of the evolution of this moral train it's not something outside of it so that means that for those of you are reading Nietzsche and/or atheist and think oh yeah I don't want to fall into that you have to realize here that he's arguing that science is not going to be the way out per se in that it's just a new form of the way in so the effects in thinker that science rests upon the same foundation is the aesthetic ideal a certain type of improvement of life right improvement of life the effects grown cool the temple of life slowed down dialectics in place of instinct seriousness imprinted on faces and gestures and right this is a description of what scientism is or what the scientists the scientific ideal is the cool had a person who thinks who debates who reasons and who's always serious right in fact Nietzsche thinks that the best aesthetic ideal today is modern science modern science is the perfect encapsulation of this aesthetic ideal he writes since Copernicus man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane now he's slipping faster and faster away from the center into what into nothingness into a penetrating sense of his nothingness very well hasn't this been the straightest route to the old ideal sorry I made that too small I can't make it oh there we go hasn't this been the straightest route to the olds ideal so you can see here is that scientism for Nietzsche plays a role in our world development in so far is it's a way back to the very beginning it's a type of willing towards nothingness notice that in contemporary science in the contemporary world we reject teleology that is we don't think that the world has a natural purpose or direction or aim and so the scientist doesn't look at the Sun and think what's the purpose of the Sun right the Sun the scientist looks at the Sun and says here's what the Sun does here's what its effects are but whether or not it has a meaning or a purpose it's devoid of all of those science completely rejects that in other words we reject that the world has meaning and he says here we no longer really seek to prove anything it looks like we've given up the will to prove truth in favor of just a will to describe the world as we can so we in here I can't help but think about what in the modern Academy so I'm a professor and I teach you lots of classes and I go to conferences and I talk to lots of different people at the University at the desert my own desert as Nietzsche might say but one of the things I noticed is that increasingly there is a sort of pervasive nihilism not just among the students but among my colleagues in which they tend to reject the notion that there really is any meaning to anything and they know our seed to prove anything sometimes this has been called sort of postmodern malaise I think what Nietzsche would say it is is this is just the high point the high-water mark of the aesthetic ideal this is a part of the evolution of this moral development which began 2,000 plus years ago now let's all now need to turns his attack on the atheist we the Atheist ultimately is also having the type of aesthetic ideal but their aesthetic ideal is given by the fact that now they're denying their own will to believe in God which Nietzsche thinks is a will to truth he thinks that's good because he thinks that he doesn't think that God exists but he thinks that the person who says I'm an atheist and as a proud staunch atheist has not actually extricated themselves from the the moral slave morality we saw in the first treatise he writes everywhere else that the spirits are strong mighty and net worth without counterfeit today it does without ideals of any kind the popular expression for this abstinence is atheism except for its will to truth so unconditional honest atheism is not the antithesis of that ideal they ideal of the aesthetic ideal as it appears to be its rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution one of its terminal forms and its inner consequences it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training and truthfulness that finally forbids itself the like involved in the like involved in the belief in God so the Atheist too is also a part of this evolution of asceticism now all great things Nietzsche says bring about their own destruction through an act of self overcoming and that's what it seems to be with the case of slave morality in particular as it is slowly right slavery begins with Christianity but it looks like now it has overcome itself I mean it's sort of self overcoming in terms of atheism but it's still in the same movement Nietzsche brides Christians that Dogma was destroyed by its own morality in the same way Christianity has morality must now perish - we stand on the threshold of this event so Nietzsche as normal is constantly looking ahead to a potential future a paradigm shift in back to with ubermensch back to a sort of mass morality or to something new probably something new so what does this mean at the end well it means that we as human beings have derived our meaning from Anas ideal we contemporary modern human beings you watch in this video and also think I didn't he has mentioned I think technology for us today has become a way for us to also Nesta ties our own suffering think about Facebook for instance when people are on Facebook and they're posting many pictures of things they do but they only post the pictures of things that make them look good you can see here they are fleeing from themselves right but the aesthetic ideal reveals ultimately that our own meaning is itself lacking so we see here that Nietzsche recognizes that all of these developments in the modern world that where people think that they've overcome all of this ancient religion and all of this business that they haven't and we're still struggling with this primary question of what does it mean to live in the world what is it what is it what is our own sense of living mean and it looks like primarily we found we're still following through with the logic of the aesthetic ideal now let me give you this final passage this is the last passage in the book he says we can no longer conceal ourselves from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which is taken its direction from the aesthetic ideal this hatred of the human and even more of the animal and more still of the material this horror of the senses of reason itself there's a reason of happiness and beauty this longing to get away from all appearance change becoming death wishing from longing itself all this means let us dare to grasp it a will to nothingness an aversion to life a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life but it is and remains a will and to repeat in the conclusion what I said at the beginning man would rather will nothingness than not will right so at the end of the day Nietzsche is putting down his his money on the idea that that the will to power is the central principle for the activity of morality it's at the very core of the origin of morality so this will conclude our discussion of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality in the next video we're gonna begin looking at some of the excerpts from Michelle fuko's discipline and punish which I take to be really the next step in Nietzsche's discussion of morality and in particular looking at how socially and institutionally we are essentially disciplining and punishing people based upon this aesthetic ideal so that's we're gonna take a look at in the next video again I appreciate you all for watching I appreciate all all of you who are kind with me I know I make mistakes and mispronunciations people have been come and you know commenting on that I'm trying about that so thank you very much I look forward to seeing you guys online next time okay bye

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 1,925

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Nietzsche, will to power, asceticism, morality, athiesm, science, nihilism, psychology, repression, sublimation

Id: _Agn02H5Yik

Length: 65min 10sec (3910 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2017