The Bible and Western Culture - Nietzsche and the Death of God

[Music] no philosopher has had a greater influence in the 20th century than friedrich nietzsche he was a remarkably original thinker who extrapolates some of the main tendencies of late 19th century western thought and derives certain extreme and disturbing conclusions from his analysis of the history of western thought and he takes a position with regard to religion and theology that is in many respects the inverse of soren kierkegaard nietzsche is an existentialist thinker often regarded as one of the seminal thinkers among the existentialists but he decided to make the other half of the kierkegaardian choice he decided not to abandon all to religion but rather to abandon religion to the tradition of pagan greco-roman antiquity he was the most important thinker in the undermining of theology particularly in the last hundred years there is no one who has had a greater influence on the path of western religion now there are people in the history of the west with whom we might compare him but fewer as radical as nietzsche in some respects you might compare with machiavelli because he is strictly amoral he thinks that morality is an impediment to superior men and the superior activities they might undertake he's also utterly incapable of pity it would seem like say calacles and the gorgius he wants power power is the center of nietzsche's conception of the world when we lose theological orientation when theological insight is denied us and we are marooned in this world of space and time they're only greater and lesser quanta of power we have a greater or lesser capacity to do the things that are truly within the human domain nietzsche wants to provoke us to a sort of atheistic heroism which replaces religion with art it is very clear that this set of philosophical problems is going to be very influential in helping joyce develop his aesthetic philosophy when he breaks away from religion and intends to substitute art in its place now nietzsche is often kind of criticized and sometimes praised for being the source of a great deal of 20th century atheism and existentialism and he's sometimes connected with the nazi movement and that i think is dicey it's hard to say whether he was adequately represented as a proto-nazi or not but it is certainly the case that he was a hyper-sensitive individual and he was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts he had he was a professor of philology who had a tremendous grasp of the classical languages and had them early he was appointed to his first position as a professor at 24 and in the german-speaking world where there's only one professor of a given discipline in a university that is a remarkable and extraordinary achievement people could not speak highly enough of friedrich nietzsche in his early days now while it is true that he was a remarkable scholar he was in addition to that a ferociously honest individual he did his best like kierkegaard to be an individual he did his best to to sense tremors in the foundation of western culture that other people couldn't feel he wasn't perhaps like a seismograph he could see that there were continental shifts occurring which would eventually result in an overall arching conflagration which would generate a sort of intellectual earthquake he didn't cause this intellectual earthquake any more than a seismograph does but because he was a particularly poetic and particularly sensitive individual and because he had an uncannily large and voluminous grasp of the western tradition he was able to see the implications of the development of western thought and the crisis that western thought had entered into after darwin so nietzsche is in some ways not the cause of what he's talking about he is the messenger he's not the he doesn't send us the message he just delivers it to us and the message that he intends to deliver to us is the following god is dead god remains dead and we have killed him we should not blame nietzsche for killing god what he is trying to say is that western culture has already killed god by the time he writes that in his book the gay science in fact god was killed by the rise of modern natural science and by the progress of people from a barbaric state of mythological interpretations of the world to the more sophisticated state in which they find themselves this sophisticated state is an advance in culture but it is a danger to people's moral orientation as a matter of fact all moral orientations will be radically changed now because when god dies all of our constructs of right and wrong all of our conceptions of ethics and metaphysics are now thrown by the board if i would change the analogy slightly you could say that nietzsche was like a canary in a coal mine we put the canary down there to see if there's poisonous gas because it dies much it is affected by the gas long before people are well nietzsche singing at the end of the 19th century is singing a song of the end of theology and that means the end of metaphysics and that means the end of the whole tradition of western philosophy in books like beyond good and evil now there's a title or the genealogy of morals or the antichrist he tried specifically to undermine faith in the western religious tradition and in addition to that he tried to shake up the orientation of western philosophy and move it away from metaphysics towards this world he had the same intellectual goal to make people live in this world and to deprive them of religious illusions which previously had sustained society he said look these are hollow illusions now if we are going to have illusions we'll have to make up new ones the old illusions will not work now this by itself would maybe would not have attracted much intellectual attention had nietzsche not been at the same time the greatest prose poet of the german language nietzsche has remarkable poetic gifts as well as remarkable philosophical gifts that confluence is a very rare thing and when it is incorporated in a man like nietzsche whose will to truth is as ferocious and as tenacious as any of the philosophers we have studied we will certainly find that the results like the results for kierkegaard are quite volatile and quite dangerous um he's nietzsche is at his best when he is sharpening little daggers that he's going to throw at his reader and he's such a wonderful poet he says in section 126 of the gay science you may want to turn to that first if you ever get a chance to look at the book it says in section 126 126 mystical explanations are thought to be profound in fact they are not even superficial oh my oh my i had to spend a great deal of time removing that from my brain that was one of the it was one of the greatest one-liners in the history of philosophy it's devastating whole libraries of theology crumble under the force of that blow it is a remarkably sharp and pointed and barbed instrument of war nietzsche is at war with his readers he says no compromise you must take things seriously for once can you see why spiritually he's very much like kierkegaard it's just that he's the alter ego of kierkegaard he's willing to take one idea the whole way and refuses to make any kind of compromise i believe that he probably would have liked kierkegaard's work either or he just would have taken the other alternative the same sort of philosophical radical and the same sort of spiritual uh i don't know ferocity spiritual power motivates both men now it may be easier for you to read nietzsche if we stop step back a little bit and think about the kind of writing he does and the best way to do that is to compare nietzsche with his great philosophical opponent and his great intellectual opponent socrates nietzsche hated socrates he had great respect for socrates he said finally someone worth talking about and talking to the problem with socrates is in many ways the same is the problem with jesus the problem with both men is that they generated a metaphysics which led the tradition of western culture out of the world of space and time socrates in the republic invents the world of the forms right where we keep perfect beauty and perfect truth jesus has heaven where we keep god and the holy spirit and the saints and the martyrs and all that nietzsche says in both cases the problem here is not the particular dogma that's involved but rather the whole idea of metaphysics he says i have an idea the world we're in this is the world and there's no other world to be in so let's not talk about metaphysics of the greek kind or of the christian kind anymore instead we should adopt a new position we will love the earth we will find what is best in this world and we will do what i be what we can to improve and perfect human possibilities here and now it's obvious how this is going to be very influential in helping joyce develop his aesthetic philosophy now the comparison of socrates goes actually quite a bit deeper than merely professional jealousy and god knows there's a tremendous amount of that in israeli about socrates socrates characteristic locution his characteristic way of communicating to other people is called irony socrates is not remarkable for his literal speech in fact he is constantly and opaquely ironic and many times there are levels to his irony which is what makes his work inexhaustible which is why we still read it 25 centuries later well nietzsche has figured out a similarly neat trick and it's called not irony but oximeron my argument is that nietzsche uses oximeron in the way that socrates uses irony now for those who have forgotten what an occimaron is it's a turn of phrase like cold fire or hot ice the idea is that we attribute an adjective to a thing that doesn't have that property has the opposite property let me give you some examples from nietzsche's works he once said what are mankind's truths but his irrefutable errors irrefutable errors what would that be well that's an oxymoron the point is that the tradition of western rationalism has never led us to certainty has never really led us to anything that could approximate the canons of platonic knowledge in fact the best we can come to knowledge at all since god is not around to validate our knowledge and the realm of the forms that plato invented is no longer around to validate our knowledge the best we're ever going to get is a series of perspectives about the world and for that reason what we call truth is in fact the errors we haven't refuted yet it means that the drive towards knowledge that we've gotten from both greece and from christianity is now being undermined and being devalued part of nietzsche's program he calls the revaluation of all values changing the entire tablet of good and evil that had been handed down from generation to generation throughout the western tradition he says i'm going to destroy that tablet and construct a new one he intends to replace the tradition of western religion with his own thought he also at the same time intends to abolish the tradition of western philosophy because he thinks that it needs metaphysics and once he gets rid of metaphysics then there will be no more tradition of western philosophy in other words he seriously and literally and honestly thinks that western philosophy and religion end with him now this is no small estimation of oneself right and for a man who in print refers to himself as the antichrist you may perhaps get the idea that megalomania has set in somewhere along the line here and in fact there's a considerable justice in that sort of a criticism on the one hand he is dealing with the greatest of philosophical problems and in all honesty and in fairness he is a superior man a man of superior intellectual merit and a man of great courage it is not an easy it's easy to ignore religion it is very hard to abolish it they're quite different it is one thing to be indifferent to religious questions and another thing to decide to torch them all this is a very different set of expectations he is not at all a prosaic writer and no one reads his books without one way or another being affected i remember in particular when i first read the gay science and i read the passage about god being dead i had to read it again and again and again it was one of the most difficult passages i read when i was in college and to this day i have never completely made my peace with it it will repay a very close reading on your part if you ever get to the gay science in the process of reading his works the gay science and the others always keep in mind this idea of oximeron it will make your life so much easier instead of trying to tease out some sense out of irrefutable errors remember that this is nietzsche's stock in trade this is what he's good at because it gives you something provocative to think about without committing him to any logical position if you go back and try and figure out exactly what nietzsche does believe it is not entirely easy to put together like many other philosophers he is better at explaining or if not explaining attacking the things he does not like than in articulating a defense for the things that he does approve of he does say that ethics because it had been previously based upon christian religion or because it had been based upon metaphysical philosophy that ethics is over in the sense that the traditions of right and wrong that had been handed down for the previous 15 or 20 or 25 centuries in the west are now gone ethics turns out to be one of these irrefutable errors and it would seem that for an error that's irrefutable he is trying very hard to refute it remember though that nietzsche because he is not a philosopher he thinks philosophy is over and is primarily a poet not a logician doesn't care if he contradicts himself remember that the essence of an oximeron is a contradictory utterance hot fire or hot ice doesn't make any sense cold fire doesn't make sense but it is a very moving kind of locution that pushes you in a poetic rather than a logical way this is what nietzsche is good at now in abolishing morality in in destroying ethics he is taking a position very much like that of raskolnikov in dostoevsky's great novel crime and punishment if any of you know that piece you'll know that early in the novel before raskolnikov comes back to the christian fold he commits a murder because he has the theory of the exceptional man that the usual norms of right and wrong which we expect to be universal are only partially complete there are certain superior individuals according to dress golnikov for whom the traditions of morality do not apply that's the idea of the exceptional man well nietzsche in fact makes an argument along these lines that the great world historical individuals that superior men do not have to be bound by the constraints of traditional notions of right and wrong they are the great artists they are the great creators and they may be artists in the sense of painters artists in the sense of literary men but they are creative in things like politics or things like science as well from this perspective from the perspective of nietzsche all superior men in every discipline that are breaking the bounds of inherited forms they are what he means by an artist the artist is the creative human being and the creative human being can create in any domain it doesn't have to be a sculpture or literature or something like that what he is saying is that that art and that capacity to create is more important than any moral judgment we might make about an artist an artist may be a wicked man but if he writes well then he is a superior individual it doesn't make any difference whether he obeys the usual rules that we like to oppose upon all people what makes a man great is his willingness to give up that herd morality as nietzsche calls it nietzsche says that all of our moral systems have been made to satisfy lowest common denominator needs he looks for example at the history of christianity and says look the reason why christianity was a religion of slaves is because it serves the interests of slaves if you're a roman master as nietzsche kind of likes and sympathizes with well you can do all kinds of cruel and wicked stuff and because you were superior you never felt bad about it you didn't have this nasty religious guilt what kind of a superior heroic man would do that nietzsche said that all of western heroism was poisoned by the advent of christianity because it made superior people develop what he called a conscience and he thought that was a very bad development because that truncated their ability to act who knows what what great figures would have done if they had not been kept back and held back by these arbitrary strictures of christian morality he once wrote a very telling line he said i will never forgive christianity for what it did to pascal now if you know blaise pascal and his agony over religious questions he says look here we have a superior man he was a great mathematician and a great scientist what did you do you set his own mind against his irrational abilities and you destroyed that man i would give a million christians who think that they're going to be saved for one more blaze pascal and then i'd be able to tell him that you need to be liberated from these christian myths and when you are then you will truly be the heroic man you could become so he has an axe to grind against the entire tradition of western christianity he thinks that it inhibits the growth of individuality and it prevents the growth of heroism and heroism is what he's all about he says look i don't care about the mass of human beings he thinks that the mass of human beings in opposition to christianity he thinks that the mass of human beings have no value whatever the only people who are worth anything are superior people and i have a strong suspicion that nietzsche thought he was one of those superior people something you should consider in the history of philosophy whenever someone makes an argument for aristocracy they always think that they're aristocrats you never see plebeians making arguments in favor of philosophical aristocracy if you see an argument in favor of elitism the speaker thinks he is part of that elite without fail it always works now nietzsche strangely enough would not feel bad about that he said yes of course i'm a member of an elite i don't buy this christian equality of all souls look there's no god for us at all to be equal in front of and big fish eat little fish some people are better and more capable than others we just live in the domain of nature stop trying to even things out and help the feeble and in the incapable and the incapacitated help the great people do great things and to hell with the rest of humanity it's a radical courageous but also slightly slightly immoral actually even slightly more greatly immoral stance in some ways what's heroic about nietzsche is that his immorality is done at the level of milton satan he will not serve and there is something strangely attractive about him for that reason there are times when he comes up with all sorts of repulsive stuff but i cannot eliminate from my mind a certain sort of admiration for nietzsche i would not be a niche and follower nietzsche is the sort of philosopher that if you follow him you are not at all anichan nietzsche wants no followers as he says be a man and follow me not i found my path you find yours anyone who reads all of nature's books and says i believe everything nietzsche told me understood nothing that he read the whole point is that he says go think these problems through for yourself like kierkegaard he forces you to become an individual i think it is a good and necessary tonic but i would worry if anyone came to me and said after reading this it seems to me that almost all this is correct well maybe it is maybe it isn't but the point is it is stimulating and provocative we'll give you interesting questions to ask if not satisfactory answers to those questions now you know in a piece called the use and abuse of history he gave his conception of what human life was like and he gave his conception of the value of human life and amazingly enough it's not very high remember he is living in the age of darwin darwin has published the origin of species and there's been a great to-do about it and some people were trying to find some way of splicing darwin together with the tradition of western christianity and others were trying to say well look we can accept darwin but there's no real big change we can hold on to the essence of christianity just give up those silly myths nietzsche says nay you can do nothing of the kind darwin has fundamentally changed our understanding of ourselves and we can never go back darwin has conclusively proven that human beings are a part of nature they are not part of god's providential plan there was no such thing as adam and eve in the garden of eden in fact all we are are complicated apes he looks at the whole history of of human beings and at the status of history and says we're gonna have to rewrite our history and in the future the universal historian will not start say in ancient babylon or ancient egypt certainly won't start in the garden of eden in the future the universal historian will start with something on the order of pond scum you know that green one cell stuff that grows on stagnant water said in fact darwin has shown that that's what our ancestors are like it or not we're a really complicated version of that green stuff that grows on ponds now the difference between us and that green stuff is that we somehow gotten the bizarre idea that the entire universe revolves around us he says i have an idea no it doesn't you're really complicated and really arrogant pond scum that has an entire misapprehension of the nature of the world around you and once darwin comes we can never go back god is dead it's just that none of you people have figured that out and the way in which he introduces that is quite remarkable he says look if we're ponscum then what are we going to do to find some value here in the world we have to make choices we have to make decisions if we can't do it on the basis of ancient religious myths what will we do even ponscom has to do something and his answer is the will to power nietzsche thinks that he's found a natural motive within all living things in other words he thinks it's an exercise in biology he says the reason why things reproduce and take over a domain or take over a territory why they compete with other species is because all of living things all of organic life is in fact motivated by the will to power the will to power and very complicated organic beings like human beings is sublimated and twisted and distorted but it's the will to power that makes everyone do things a general conquers a city it's an expression of the will to power a scientist finds out about a a particular phenomenon when he does that that's his will to power when a saint engages in fasting and mortification of the flesh and discipline of the senses that is the saints will to power your will to power can be extended to the outside world but it can also be imposed on oneself so what he says is is that the will to power is the one skeleton key to all of human motivation now that we know what we really are just complicated animals nobody here but just us natural things now this leads us to consider the problem of how christianity relates to science which has been a vexing problem throughout the history of christianity but particularly as we come to more contemporary authors it comes more and more to the fore strangely enough nietzsche adopts a very odd perspective what he says is that rather than an antagonism between christianity and science he says that antagonism is actually quite late in fact modern natural science is the intellectual product of christianity and that's a remarkable idea he says that if you look to the roots of modern natural science you will find that they are to be that they are contained within biblical religion uh think about the idea for example in genesis chapter 26 verse 28 when human beings are given dominion over the birds and the beasts and the fishes god told us that we're supposed to push nature around and it's supposed to serve our ends that is not intuitive and that is not obvious to every religious tradition try explaining to a buddhist why you want to dominate nature and they'll just look at you and say well why would you want to do that to nature we want to harmonize ourselves with nature that strikes us as being sensible it is not intrinsic to human beings that they should want to push nature around that is one of the legacies of biblical religion when we have been given dominion over the heaven and the earth we have been given a particular intellectual legacy it takes many centuries to play it out when it finally is realized our dominion over heaven over the earth comes in the form of modern natural science well something most ironic and peculiar happens the truth turns out not to set us free the truth in fact brings us into bondage to nature we had hoped at the end of our inquiry into nature we would get some glyph of god's plan we had hoped that we would be able to discern the hand of god in the design of nature's patterns alas once we get to darwin all we find out is that the world's a big blind arbitrary mechanism natural selection isn't the product of god's design it's just the way things work out in other words we lose teleology nothing has any purpose anymore we are no longer what we used to be once that happens we are in the contemporary world may i suggest that nietzsche is the first of our contemporaries that nietzsche is one of our one of us because the world in which we live is saturated in these nichean themes i would be tempted to call this the end of the zonder stallone in german zander sterling means other position and what that means is that for a great deal of time we had thought that there was create nature as it was created by god trees and bugs and fishes and birds and then there's a special group of things people which have a little spark of the divinity in them which have been made in god's image and that makes them totally different from all the other things it gives to human beings a value that no cod fish has elk are not nearly as important as human beings because they don't have souls human beings have both body and soul human beings are made in the image of god and that's what makes us different and nietzsche says no he says we're not made in god's image because there's no god for us to be made in the image of it turns out that we're really complicated pond scum not only we're not made in god's image but there is no purpose to life and anyone who thinks that they have discerned a purpose to life are just mistaken their imagination is getting is carrying them away also the idea that we can find solace in nature is going to be vacuous there's no solace here it's a big booming buzzing confusion even hume had said that there might be some attenuated justice to the argument from design nietzsche said no design no teleology no purpose as he says in section 125 the section in which the madman announces the death of god he says are we not falling in all directions at once have we not lost our orientation who is it that made us capable of wiping away the horizon isn't that a beautiful image wiping away the horizon and that is in fact what happens with the death of god when we lose our cosmic orientation when we are no longer able to distinguish between good and evil in some authoritative way then we are left with a plurality of perspectives none of which can be necessarily linked up together and none of which is necessarily wrong there is no one authoritative god's eye view by which we can judge true and false accurate and inaccurate there is just a wilderness of mirrors there is just a series of perspectives all of which are equally arbitrary hegel once said that at night all cows are black well i would be tempted to say that nietzsche has turned out the lights and now not all the cows and everything else it's all black nietzsche revels in this because he says look you want to pin this on me and you want to offer a refutation of my work and such like stuff you are being foolish i did not cause this i am not a titan i couldn't kill god you killed god not you as individuals but your culture killed god and it killed god with this faustian bargain this faustian connection that's been made between christianity and science initially the will to truth and the will to dominate nature helped christianity support the rise of modern natural science but unfortunately they kept on doing research until they got to darwin and darwin is the beginning of the end for science at the beginning of the end for christianity because if darwin is right and we are conclusively part of nature then the zonder schnelling is over and what that means is that we are now in a different position we have as much importance as birds or fishes or pond scum whatever value we have will be value that we create as individuals not that is revealed to us from on high and the best we can do then is some sort of heroism in which we create a domain of value rather than inheriting one can you see how these are contemporary themes in some ways he's the other important source of contemporary existentialism well what he says is that once we are in this state we can never go back religion is dead forever as he says god is dead god remains dead and we have killed him what he means by god remains dead is that he's not getting up on the third day not on the 30th day not ever god is dead for good and now we're stuck here so do not blame nietzsche for this set of circumstances he says look we did this because christianity was a snake that ate its own tale it generated science and science bit into christianity but once science eliminated christianity it also eliminated the will to truth and this dominion over nature that had been generating the force and the impetus of science and now science is starting to undermine itself science eliminates religion but it also eliminates metaphysics and in the process of eliminating metaphysics nietzsche believes that that we have eliminated truth isn't truth a metaphysical concept nietzsche believes that it is if truth is a metaphysical concept and science has eliminated all of metaphysics what truth is there left for science to get it's night time and all cows are black all of western culture is self-destructing we are imploding here he is teasing out the consequences of the darwinian revolution he's willing to face something that most people couldn't stand to look at well he kills god or he he announces the death of god in 125 that section that important section of the gay science and the way in which he illuminates this is quite intriguing he gives us the image of the madman there's a madman in the city and he's walking around in the daytime with a lamp a lighted lamp why well because nobody else knows that it's nighttime now and all cows are black number one but two if you know the classical allusion to diogenes the cynic he carried a lamp around in daytime and said i'm looking for an honest man never found one well apparently nietzsche didn't find one either and the search for an honest man is surely madness because that's the kind of thing the madman would undertake how poetic how poignant he's so great well the madman looks around and says where is and then people ask what are you doing carrying this around he's not looking for an honest man he says i'm searching for god where is he and people start to jeer at him and laugh and say you are a foolish fellow what a what a foolish and mad creature you are where is god has he left town has he is he hiding what has happened to god the people in the crowd are laughing at this and when the madman hears it he is shocked and he picks up his lantern and throws it down and he said i have come too early these people do not realize what they have done they think that the death of god is humorous and in fact it is the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world keep laughing sooner or later the news will come to you of what you have done and you are not big enough for the job how can you bear the responsibility for this after he throws down his lamp land lantern he goes to the various churches in the city and sings the tidam the mass for the dead he says all our churches are now the white and sepulchers of god the stole the stone which was rolled away for jesus will not be rolled away a second time these are the tombs of religion and yet people still have recourse to them every sunday he's decided to sing the requiem for god and people of course think he's crazy but unfortunately he's crazy like a fox he is the first one to realize the momentous occasion we are presented with this particular passage is one of the most moving and important in nietzsche's works and nietzsche being the unsystematic fellow that he is is likely to move from theme to theme without developing any one of these themes completely these little vignettes on the other hand are carefully calculated ate a wound they're supposed to hurt you mentally and intellectually he is at war with his readers he is trying to drive you out of your complacency on the other hand not only is he driving you out of your complacency but he is in addition trying to generate something new his idea of something new of a way out of this is not the leap of faith he says that's hopeless the leap of faith you're going to fall because there's nothing that'll leap onto says let's not even talk about that he says the way in which we get out of this is called the ubermensch now in english it translated into it translates into superman or over man and since there are too many resonances to clark kent with superman i'll stick with the german ubermensch the ubermensch will be a superior thing that will arise out of the muck of humanity the ubermensch will relate to regular human beings like you and i the way we relate to the great apes and in the same way that it is no moral transgression for us to kill an animal it would be no moral transgression for an ubermensch to kill one human being or a million this is a superiority that has no moral limitations what nietzsche wants is to take the tradition of heroism in western literature and culture things like homer which is of course a great favorite of his or things like shakespeare's tragic heroes and say these are excellent people at least they live on the proper scale what nietzsche is trying to do is say if we can no longer have the possibility of sanctification and blessedness perhaps here in this world we will be able to create a domain of value and this creation of value will be the titanic aesthetic task writing poems by comparison is light work in creation to inter compared to creating the tablets of good and evil that will sustain a culture for 20 or 30 or 50 centuries that's the kind of ambition that nietzsche has and that's why this easily verges or verges crosses the line into megalomania now this megalomania is partially the product of nietzsche's promethean stance in other words if there's anyone who hates job in the western tradition it's got to be nietzsche nietzsche is the inverse of job he's the new prometheus he shakes his fist at god and saying if you were alive i'd beat you up but as you're dead i'm just going to tell everybody about it he is not willing to serve he is a satanic and miltonic figure and he is saying not only will i not serve but i will create and help generate the ubermensch down here and he will be at least an improvement on the inferior and incompetent people that we have now there in in that case there might be some point to human life we might get some teleology there well this end of metaphysics this rise of the ubermensch is very very intimidating and also very very moving um you can't at the you can't help but be impressed and repelled at the same time with nietzsche's work and in addition to criticizing religion and philosophy and offering a program for the future he also hates virtually everything in the culture around him as you might expect and the things that he connects to christianity you would not think to initially connect but perhaps if we can if we're willing to accept his connection between science and christianity i think that that's a plausible connection perhaps the other connections he make will work as well for example he thinks that socialism feminism democracy romanticism are all the products of excessive christian pity and christian sentimentality says socialism is a bad idea because it helps we weak people and it hurts strong people i don't like socialism i'm not interested in pitying people i don't care what happens to them same sort of thing with feminism men should oppress women if they're tough and capable that's a very fine thing women are intrinsically inferior and he just has no interest in helping out intrinsically inferior beings he's a radical aristocrat and says that he has no inclination to try and democratize people remember that the reason why christianity was so influential in bringing the idea of equality into western political thought is because all souls were equal in the sight of god we were all sinners and none of us were justified in god's sight what happens to that idea when god gets lifted out well then there's no way of making all souls equal and then nietzsche says the fact of the matter is some souls are bigger than others don't tell me that goethe is the same thing as the peasants that's lived around him no goethe was a superior man so was beethoven so was any of the great artists or religious leaders or philosophers now what nietzsche is saying is that although some men have been superior in the past their superiority was inadequate to the present day and we will have to invent a new kind of superiority a new degree of superiority which will carry us through this age of nihilism into which we are entering nietzsche decides that he's going to help us get through this age of nihilism by writing a book called thus spake zarathustra nietzsche literally and seriously intends this to supersede the bible that's not a joke and it sounds like a joke as though a man in the late 19th century should actually take it upon himself to get rid of jesus and take his place in western culture well he thinks that thus big zarathustra can we replace the bible as a scripture for the rest for the west and that it will give us a life-affirming anti-metaphysical stance towards the world zarathustra enjoins his readers to love the earth love this world stop making up metaphysical constructs that aren't real nietzsche thinks that he's going to take the place of jesus and that his books are going to take the place of the bible and that he can fill in for the collapse of western culture clearly megalomania is going as far as it can possibly go here now it's worth noting that what we have here are certain resonances of the megalomania that you may see when you read german philosophy when you get to hegel hegel thought that he had a sort of omniscient kind of skeleton key to all the philosophical problems nietzsche thinks that he's just abolished all philosophical problems but the effect is very much the same he understands something that the rest of us puny intellectual dwarves are not quite capable of absorbing and i'd be tempted to say that what what uh nietzsche forces us towards is the domain of art religion and philosophy because those are the greatest human achievements but religion is over and we can't believe in that anymore and the important part of philosophy that was religious the metaphysics that's over as well so there's a tiny fragment of philosophy left but it wasn't what philosophy used to be and then what still is poisoned and serious and worthwhile art so art now emerges as the domain if not of transcendence but of salvation secular this worldly salvation and stephen deadless is going to take this path to salvation nietzsche is certainly the greatest and most important of the theological thinkers of the last hundred years when he abolishes philosophy abolishes religion and truncates philosophy art and thus the artist achieves consummate importance now it is funny for someone with such great emphasis on aesthetics and for someone with a who's arguably the greatest prose poet in the german language that nietzsche and it's somehow ironic maybe god is standing in the wings laughing at nietzsche forcing him to do these things but nietzsche has absolutely no capacity to criticize his own poetry at the beginning and at the end as an appendix and an introduction in the gay science it's a prelude in rhymes and an appendix in songs and it is absolutely the worst dog girl ever written in the german language it is so hilariously bad that it is hard to understand how nietzsche could possibly allow this to be the introduction to what is arguably the greatest prose poetry in german perhaps even in any language the problem here is that although he was capable of philosophizing about aesthetics it is one thing to be able to construct an aesthetic theory and another thing to be able to make aesthetic writings and it turns out that nietzsche is incapable of doing that uh i've heard arguments to the effect that friedrich nietzsche is best understood as being an intellectual dandy he is no more a dandy than i am he has no capacity to write german poetry and one gets the sense of a sort of frustrated invalid trying to act heroic more than a truly heroic individual in fact he's a hero of the soul or of the spirit not a hero in his actual career in life he died as an infant he died of syphilis actually and he died insane in a sanitarium now i'll have to leave out some of the things that i'd hoped to get to in the gay science because we're coming to the end but i do want to finish with nietzsche's autobiography i must confess that i'm an affectionate of autobiography it's one of the most interesting genres of literature and very hard to think about this as a whole but nietzsche's autobiography has to catch your eye i do strongly recommend it to you the title of it is eche homo those of you that are familiar with latin know that eche homo means behold the man and that this is the phrase used about jesus on the cross so this is no small dose of megalomania here that he should title his autobiography at shea homo and it doesn't stop there eche homo is made up of four chapters and these chapters each correspond to a question and these four questions are the only things that nietzsche thinks are worth telling you about himself which again tells you more about himself than perhaps he intended to say in the first the first question is why i am so clever question two why i am so wise question three why i write such good books and question four why i am a destiny now this of course has gone off the chart with regard to philosophical aspiration and ambition and in some respects it is easy to send up nietzsche's excessive autobiography because if any intellectual or spiritual ambition is excessive this is excessive and the title one's autobiography behold the man and to offer us a choice between himself and jesus and actually expect us to choose him means that he's really lost touch with the rest of the world perhaps the spirochetes of syphilis are setting in but i'd like to turn this in another direction in my conclusion about nietzsche i'm going to wrap them up now i'd like to try and answer those four questions and explain what it is i think the right answer to these is and perhaps this will help make sense of nature for you why i am so clever i would say the reason why nietzsche is so clever is because he is the great poet philosopher of the modern age he is a combination of poet and philosopher that has not been seen with such intensity since plato the reason why he hates plato and white constantly rails against him is the same reason that plato rails against homer professional jealousy he's too good and has been influential in the wrong way so that's why he's so clever he's a great poet philosopher why i am so wise well to be honest i'm not as i was convinced at one time that nietzsche is so wise i think perhaps he is seriously mistaken but i won't take that up i would say to give the devil his due if that's the way he would understand him i'd say that he is so wise if he is wise because he was the first one to see the implication of god's death he was the one that said yes our culture has killed god and we must face up to that it may well be the case that insofar as he is a wise man that his wisdom lies there the question why i write such good books i think that is relatively accessible the reason why nietzsche writes such good books is he had he has mastered the art of oximoron the niche in oximeron is the modern socratic analog or the modern analog of socratic irony it is the skeleton key to all of nietzsche's works and when you go back and look through it if you constantly look at the paradoxical passages and realizing that oxymoron is not the problem it's the solution then you will be able to appreciate nietzsche in a way that perhaps will not drive you crazy as it did me at an earlier part of my life and i'll close with the final question why i am a destiny i believe that friedrich nietzsche was a destiny because he was the first person to be willing to face squarely the implications of the rise of modern natural science the physical world of space and time is real like it or not we must find some way of making our moral intuitions and our religious commitments consistent with the best of our rational activities any attempt to abdicate our responsibility to our rational faculties is ultimately doomed to failure and because darwin is real and because our best understanding of the biological history of the world is through natural selection we are forced to face the fact that science is here to stay and the reason why he is a destiny is because he was the first man to squarely state that science and religion have to be melded into something that we can all participate in if we have to sacrifice one or the other we can do that but the point is that science presents a challenge to western religion that cannot be met by any sort of minor repair you are going to have to make a radical either or sort of choice and nietzsche forces us to that i think that if he had not done that for us someone else would have and for that reason i feel that nietzsche is correct in seeing himself as a destiny because it is the destiny of the west to be forced to confront their rational capacities

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 27,067

Rating: 4.9613528 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Bible, Nietzsche, Death of God

Id: Smq5uRhM_IA

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020