Through a Glass Darkly is yet another Ingmar Bergman film I have watched repeatedly.  I’m not sure the story is quite as cohesive as Wild Strawberries or Seventh Seal, but it’s still an absolutely fascinating film.  I’m not sure I’ve completely made sense of it, but I made an attempt.  This is the first of Ingmar Bergman’s Silence of God trilogy so maybe it will make more sense after I’ve completed the entire trilogy.

Supposedly, Kieslowski’s Colors trilogy was inspired by Bergman’s Silence of God Trilogy.   Bergman said of the trilogy,  “These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly — conquered certainty [certainty achieved, God defined]. Winter Light — penetrated certainty [certainty unmasked, God exposed]. The Silence — God’s silence -the negative imprint [negative impressions]. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy.”

And… “Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named ‘conquered certainty.’ The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.”

Perhaps Bergman identified with David, the writer, who uses those closest to him as material for his art.  He maintains an objective distance from those he loves and this creates a painful isolation because artists are not easily forgiven by those who have been objectified through their art.  Also, Bergman was the son of a pastor who had been an advisor to the Queen so this trilogy was an attempt to work through his disillusionment with the emotionally cold Lutheran Church.

Only four characters are used which Bergman calls a sort of musical Chamber play.  Karin is the main character.  She has just been released from an asylum.  Karin’s younger brother, Minus.  He desperately wants a relationship with his father.  Karin’s & Minus’s father, David, the emotionally distanced writer.   He is almost completely objective about Karin’s breakdown because he knows he can use it as subject matter for a future book.  Karin’s husband, Martin.  Martin is a physician and clearly loves Karin although he doesn’t really allow her a voice.  He’s somewhat smothering.   The film revolves around Karin’s descent into madness the affect on David, Minus and Martin.

It seems that Karin and Minus have an incestual relationship and it has been suggeted that there may have been a sexual relationship between Karin and her father, too, although I didn’t see that as clearly within that relationship as I did the relationship between Karin and Minus.

The title, Through a Glass Darkly, comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12:  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”  This is the King James interpretation but new versions usually refer to a mirror rather than glass.   The Swedish Bible of 1917 also referred to a mirror rather than transparent glass.  The mirrors of the ancients were polished metal so images were seen darkly and imperfectly.  Apparently, Bergman’s title is read literally as “mirror” so a distorted reflection is likely what he had in mind.

So what does this mean, exactly?  That  the reflection of God is much darker than the actuality of God?  That our own self-reflection is much darker than the reality of our being?  Maybe both?    Does Karin see God, or a reflection of her own insanity?   Karin waits with great anticipation her meeting with God, but all that comes through the door is a stony faced spider that tries to penetrate her.  She looked into God’s eyes and they were cool and calm.  When she wouldn’t allow God to penetrate her, God crawled up her chest and face and back onto the wall.    So what does that mean??   Some people think the spider represents an incestual relationship between Karin and her father. Could be.  But, Bergman said the spider represented “a question of the total dissolution of all notions of an otherworldly salvation.”

Karin has been waiting for the appearance of God with great anticipation.  What is it she expects to get from this encounter if not some sort of salvation?    Karin represents the play between two worlds: the world of reality and the world of illusion.  From an existential perspective, the religious desire for another world is delusional.  We live in this world and to place the focus of life on some future, more perfect existence, is to negate life.   It’s a sort of insanity.

Karin decides she can’t possibly live in two worlds so chooses the world of insanity over the world of reality.  Nothing can save her from her descent.  There is no hope for her at all.   At the end of the film, she puts on sunglasses, perhaps symboliing the rejection of light?   Karin has made the descent into nihilism -she’s rejected the reality of this world in favor of the illusion.

I have a theory on the spider that may or may not make sense.  I’ll just put it out there.

I’ve written repeatedly about Nietzsche’s warning that we have been a slave to our idea of an abstract God for thousands of years and now that we finally realize it, we should not allow ourselves to become slaves to reason.   Perhaps the stony faced, cool and calm spider represents God as reason?  Karin refuses to be penetrated by reason and so she descends into insanity.   It’s a negative transcendence rather than a mystical, spiritual one.   The mystical transcendence of reason is not about letting go of our reason or rejecting reason or getting rid of it.    It’s simply about keeping it in perspective and not allowing ourselves to be slaves to it.  If we do, we become like David and one day find ourselves attempting to drive our car off a cliff because that’s the rational response to an absurd world.

I’d love to know how Bergman came up with the idea of using a spider as God.  In Jonathon Edwards Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, there is reference to a spider - we are hanging over the fires of Hell by the thin strand of a spider’s web and God can cut the web at any moment.   I always imagined it was a spider that would cut the strand.   But the God Karin sees isn’t angry so I guess that doesn’t really fit.  In Crime and Punishment, Raskonikov says he doesn’t believe in a future life and Svridigailov replies, “And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort… We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast.  Vast!  But why must it be vast?  Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner and that’s all eternity is?  I sometimes imagine it like that.” That doesn’t really fit, either.  In Norse mythology, the spider sometimes refers to Loki, a trickster God.   Ananse in African folklore is also a spider-god and a trickster god.  Athena was associated with the spider because she turned the mortal weaver, Arachne into a spider for having the hubris to think herself better than the gods.    But that doesn’t really fit, either.

And what does Bergman mean that Through A Glass Darkly is conquered certainty (or God defined)?   Especially if conquered certainty (God defined) is God is love?  For those of us who have struggled with the existential question, God defined as love is somewhat trite, especially the way it is described by David at the end of the film.  Apparently, Bergman himself was sorry about this epilogue.   When David first offered this definition, I thought it was going to be countered as trite, but this was exactly what Minus wanted to hear.  What was most important was that his father finally talked with him.

So here is another thought about the spider God who is cold, distant, and wants to penetrate people but is unable to do so if he is refused.  God is often referred to as the father and this father figure has become an extremely distant, cold, abstract God.   People suffer horribly and this God does nothing.  We long to know the father, but he’s not there.  So when David finally talks with Minus, especially about God being love and love being God, it’s as though God is made known.  God is defined.   Conquered certainty.

Just one last thought:  the film reminded me of one of my favorite American short stories, The Yellow Wallpaper, which was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman who descends into psychosis.

I actually watched Seven Samurai last week so am posting out of chronological order.

Seven Samurai is one of Akira Kurosawa’s more famous films.   It’s often listed as one of the greatest films ever made (usually in the top 25 on various lists).  It takes place in Japan during the 1500s.  There is a lot of poverty and people are hungry.  It starts out with bandits who are considering the raid on a farming village, but they change their mind because they had already stolen all of the village rice so decide to wait until fall after they have harvested the barley.  News gets to the farmers and they are panicked and grief stricken because they are already starving thanks to the lack of rice.  They decide to higher samurai to help protect them.

Toshiro Mifune plays a crazy, but lovable wild man who used to be a farmer but is mistaken for an undisciplined Samurai (although he is not mistake as Samurai among the Samurai).  Takashi Shimura plays a very distinguished, confident, wise and disciplined Samurai who organizes the seven Samurai.  I loved watching Shimura in this film.   It amazes me that he can go from playing the meek Kanji Watanabe in Ikiru (which I think is probably my all-time favorite movie), to the rambuncious drunk doctor in Drunken Angel to the sophisticated, confident Kambei Shimada in Seven Samurai.  He’s incredibly versatile.  He’s fantastic!   So is Mifune.  But so far, he isn’t quite as versatile as Shimura - the characters he plays all have a sort of jerky, energetic quality about them.  But Shimura had been acting for quite a while when Kurasawa made these earlier films and Mifune was new to the movie scene.

I think it’s interesting that both Bergman and Kurosawa set many of their films in the middle ages.  I think telling modern stories based upon past history allows the viewer to let go their modern day prejudices and engage in the story in a way they wouldn’t be able to do if it were set in modern times.     The middle ages were extreme times for many societies so provide an excellent setting for existential themes.   Japan experienced very long periods of civil wars and the Samurai reached it’s height of glory during these wars.

The Samurai followed the Bushido code which is somewhat analogous to the western understanding of Chivalry.   During WWII, a new breed of Samurai was born, the Kamikaze, which likewise adhered to the Bushido Code.  Because of this code, the Japanese were able to employ much harsher disciplinary methods than any other WWII force.   They were brutal on their own forces because the code taught that defeat was the deepest humiliation.  Military commanders would inflict unbelievably strict disciplinary action on their troops and would also send their troops straight into artillery fire knowing that it was suicidal.  The code demanded loyalty and so the commanders could get by with this treatment of their soldiers.   The code also allowed for the inhumane treatment of American soldiers because according to the code, they weren’t true soldiers.  They were cowards in search of their own glory.   The code allowed for extreme inequality.  It could not create a decent society.  It could only “reflect and reinforce the inequality and brutality of a violent society”.  (See Seven Samurai by Dr. Patrick Cooney.)

I think Kurosawa wants to allow Japanese society some self-reflection and can best do this through use of the past.  The villagers are deeply afraid of the Samurai because during the civil wars, they would take food from the farmers, rape their daughters and kill those who interefered.    When the seven samurai enter into the village that has asked their help, they don’t understand why everyone hides from them.  They finally start to trust each other, but when the Samurai discover that the villagers have killed Samurai in the past, this greatly angers the Samurai who now want to kill the villagers rather than help them.   Mifune’s clownish character tells them that it is the Samurai’s fault that the villagers have acted that way toward the Samurai.  The brutality of the warring class has created extreme hardship for the villagers and they were forced to do extreme things to survive.  The Samurai feel ashamed after they are made to understand the inequality of class distinction by Mifune’s character.

Kurosawa does not view the Samurai as heroic.  At the end of the film, Shimura’s character says that it is the farmers who have won, not the Samurai.  The film ends with the village joyfully singing as they go about their work.  The warriors and the warring way of life is defeated by life sustaining work. From an existential point of view, the individual is victorious over the abstract principles of the Bushido Code.

I’ve never actually read The idiot so can’t compare Dostoevsky’s novel to Kurosawa’s adapatation, but have seen this film several times.

Unlike Stray Dog, this movie is cold, cold, cold!!  The origination of the plot for the film is given to us in various ways: some of it is written in third-person narrative; some of it in spoken third-person narrative; and some of it we figure out through the actions of the characters.  I’m not sure I’ve completely followed the purpose of the various forms, but it’s interesting - kind of like reading a novel while simultaneously watching the action unfold in front of you.

The film starts out in written narrative: “Dostoevsky wanted to portray a genuinely good man.  It may seem ironic, choosing a young idiot as his hero, but in this world, goodness and idiocy are often equated.  This story tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.”

I’m laying out the plot just to try and get it straight in my mind…

The idiot, Kameda, was accused of war crimes he didn’t commit and was sentenced to death.  At the last minute, the sentence was revoked, and he went crazy from the shock of the pardon.  He developed epileptic dementia and had so many fits he eventually became “an idiot”.  He can’t recall what life was like before his idiocy.

Akama befriends Kameda and tells him about Taeko Nasu, whom he fell in love with because he had been repressed as a child and took one look at Taeko Nasu which immediately released all of those pent up passions.  He stole money from his father to buy her a diamond ring and this so outraged his father he disowned him.  But his father died and so Akama has recently come into his fortune.  Both he and Kameda are headed to Sapporo.  Kameda is going to see Mr. Ono, his only relative, who is tied up in some ugly business regarding Kameda’s ranch, I think.  The military had reported Kameda as officially dead, and it seems that somehow, Mr. Ono sold the ranch through Kayama?  But that has me a bit confused.

Taeko Nasu is apparently a woman of ill-repute.   Supposedly, she’s been Tohata’s mistress since childhood.  Fearing for his reputation, Tohata has offered a dowry of 600,000 to marry her off, but doesn’t really want to let her go.  Taeko Nasu, like Akama, feels like a caged animal.  Akama feels this way because he was forced to repress his emotions, Taeko Nasu because she has been a kept woman since childhood and has likewise has had to repress who she is.

Kayama is about to marry Taeko Nasu in order to get the 600,000 yen dowry and this somehow involves Mr. Ono - maybe because he sold the ranch through Kayama?  I’m not sure.  According to the film, Kayama isn’t really a scoundrel, he’s just an unassertive coward.  Secretly, he’s in love with Ono’s daughter Ayako.

There are lots of twists and turns that keep twisting and turning.

SPOILER WARNING!!

So, Akama ends up with Taeko Nasu, but it isn’t pretty for either one of them.  They look like the Adams Family but with hateful passion rather than joyful, loving passion. The doors creak of their large home creak and everything is dirty and dark.  Really dark.  Kameda ends up in love with Ayako who is likewise in love with him.  But she can’t let go of her jealously toward Taeko Nasu who Kameda also loves, but not in the same way he loves Ayako.  Ayako promises she won’t let her impetuosity get in the way, but of course it does.

Desire, rather than reality, rules the outcome of everyone’s destiny.  Nothing is allowed to be what it is.  Instead, everything is judged on image.  Emotions are repressed and come back to bite in a big way.

Like I said, I haven’t read, The Idiot.  But this sounds a lot like what I know of Dostoevsky’s story.  He was sentenced to death and somehow managed to escape and likewise suffered from epilepsy.   Dostoevsky had some sort of mystical experience during his imprisoned days that made him feel connected to all that is.   He de-magicalized the sacraments and re-framed them within existential terms.   You see a lot of those re-framed sacraments within this film.

The idiot represents Christ and the isolation that is experienced by someone who is “good”.  People recognize the “good”, but they can’t accept it because to accept it requires too deep of a look at their own lives.   Akama’s love is solely based on passion, and this eventually kills Taeko Nasu.  But Kameda’s love for Taeko Nasu is based on the Christian ethic of forgiveness.

This sort of turns the norm around - where the upper class thinks of itself as “good” while the lower classes are “bad”.  This thinking was true in both Japan and Russia (and in the U.S. although the U.S. doesn’t like to acknowledge class differentiation.)

Kurosawa is compassionate toward the suffering of those who get stuck in situations they had little control of but maintains that human beings still control their destiny through the choices they make.  It’s the existential malaise:  we are responsible for who it is we are - no matter our circumstances.  And, what we think of as good and bad has been socially conditioned - it isn’t absolute.   Those who consider themselves to be “good” and superior to those who are “bad” have no right to claim that superiority.  Those deemed “bad” by society remain worthy of compassion and are very often “bad” thanks to the actions of the “good” who refuse to acknowledge their darker sides and what it is they have contributed to the actions they deem unworthy.

Stray Dog is considered to be one of Kurosawa’s first great films.

It’s about a rookie policeman whose gun is stolen and used in several crimes.  The policeman recognizes his existential connection to the criminal early in the film and feels responsible for the crimes that are being committed.  Many more similarities between police man and criminal are presented further into the story.  But, there is one thing that differentiates the men and that is choice.

It is existential choice that defines us as human beings.  No matter how bad the circumstances (and the circumstances are terrible in Post WWII Japan!) we still have the ability to make choices and it is through our choices that our destiny is created.

Excellent film.   Somewhat reminiscent of Crime and Punishment - the heat is excruciating and the mental anguish experienced by Yusa is similar to that of Raskolinikov’s.

Philip Novak wrote the text my professor used for a World Religions class I took about 10 years ago. Later, I discovered that Novak is a Buddhist when I bought a book he co-authored with Huston Smith on Buddhism. So when I was at my favorite Half Price Bookstore and happened upon a book about Nietzsche by him, I immediately bought it.

The vast majority of the book is a collection of aphorisms written by Nietzsche organized around specific topics to show his progression of though so very little of the book is actually written by Novak. But he has an interesting Afterward that compares Nietzsche and Buddha. He writes that even though Nietzsche looked with suspicion upon spiritual teachings of the traditional sort, “was in spite of himself an embodiment of the archetype of the religious prophet and the philosophical seer - not only because of what he said, but also because of the form in which he said it. Nietzsche’s teaching has a familiar soteriological structure [soteriology is theology dealing with salvation]. First, he diagnoses a fallen state: human beings in their normal, untransformed situation are in a radically unsatisfactory condition. They live diminished, benighted lives, embracing illusions as truth. Second, he provides a prescription for salvation: human beings have within themselves the potential for self-transformation, for conversion to a limitlessly better condition, a fulfilled, enlightened life. Every teaching that presupposes such redemptive possibilities must also entail, as Nietzsche’s teaching does, destructive and constructive tasks; first errors must be destroyed, ignorant modes of living must be abandoned; second, new ways of life in accord with the new aim must be envisioned and adopted.”

Many wisdom traditions claim that false self-assessment is the most pernicious error that needs to be destroyed. We overestimate what we, thinking we already possess the fullness of human potential when our lives are more impoverished than they are full. Wisdom traditions attack self-complacency, ignorance, and unfreedom (that is thought to be freedom) in the same way Nietzsche does. But you can’t just attack, you must also provide general blue prints for a new way of being. Nietzsche does attempt to provide a blue print but Novak says Nietzsche’s redemptive vision doesn’t fulfill it’s promise to “bring glad tidings such as there have never been.” But, Nietzsche’s vision did make room in Western thought for the ancient ideas of self-transformation that had originally been rejected in the Western world as “Eastern”.

The viability of his positive vision relies on the viability of the Ubermensch. Solomon is always very clear to say that the Ubermensch is an ideal and not something we should take literally. But Novak says the idea of the Ubermensch is very similar to Buddha’s awakened being. Both Buddha and Nietzsche did something unusual in that “they offered their teachings on the psycho-spiritual refinement of the human person without recourse to theism.” In the case of both the Ubermensch and the awakened being…

1. the emphasis is on disciplined self-mastery;
2. the idea of lifelong overcoming is involved;
3. inner freedom is cherished as a high aim;
4. contemplation is not about fleeing reality but penetrating into it in order to see the true nature of what lies before it;
5. a psycho-physical training that aims at deconditioning the self, freeing it from automatic reactivity, and draining the poisons of enmity and ressentiment are recommended to provide it with access to life’s free flow of quality and the concomitant blessings of freedom, plenitude and gratitude.

But there are definitely differences. For instance, Novak points out Nietzsche’s repudiation of pity. Solomon would say that Nietzsche repudiates a very specific type of pity and compassion (Christian pity) and not the sort Buddhism espouses. When compassion and pity are undertaken in terms of a belief in external morality, the “help” being offered doesn’t take into account the values those being helped might hold and becomes oppressive. Without realizing it, the Christian has placed himself as superior to the person he claims to have compassion for. I wonder of Nietzsche would have been troubled by an understanding of Compassion that takes into account interconnectedness and is not based on a belief in an external morality? It is the belief in an external morality that makes loving your neighbor as yourself narcissistic rather than truly compassionate. In order to truly be compassionate, we must be able to see “the other” as “other”. To think we are helping someone based on our own value system and what we would want to happen to us without also taking into account that the person we are helping may not share our value system is narcissistic. This sort of compassion isn’t really compassion at all and I think Nietzsche was right to reject it.

Nietzsche does reject Buddhist compassion, but both Novak and Solomon claim this is based on long-held Western biases that say Buddhism is life-denying. (Buddhism is definitely about self-control and self-mastery. But the purpose for this is not to deny life. According to N.P. Jacobson, it’s purpose is to provide the means by which we celebrate the wonder of being alive every day.)

It does seem doubtful that Nietzsche’s Ubermensch will be able to stand the test of time as a means to live a joyful life. But I think Novak is definitely right. What Nietzsche has provided us is a way out of a belief system that created the most violent century in history (which Nietzsche accurately predicted). There are many among us who wonder if we are about to kill off the entire planet and a very typical response people have is to laugh and say that if the planet is going to come to an end, they’ll go down in style. (They don’t want to give up their products and comforts). That’s the complacency of Nietzsche’s Last Man who only exists for safety and comfort. It’s mediocrity and is definitely not life affirming! There is a growing group of Christians who want to actively bring about “the end of the world” because for them it means the chance to go to an even better world. We are in dire need of creating new meaning that values life - this life, this world, now!!

Buddhism has become a really big deal in America. Supposedly, it was a dying religion and America has revived it. It’s a very flexible religion so American Buddhism looks very different than Eastern Buddhism. We’ve made it our own and much of it’s teachings have been incorporated into all sectors of our culture. Mindfulness training shows up in Christianity as does meditation. Medicine has been making extensive studies on meditation with interesting results showing it has a positive affect it has on our well-being.)

Novak concludes:

There is a sense in which Nietzsche sacrificed his life for us, offered it as an experiment to test the consequences of sailing on a sea where all Gods have died. His books, written in the blood of this sacrifice, constitute a school through which everyone who wishes to think deeply about life’s enduring questions should pass - but only if they can afford the tuition: the exposure of all cherished convictions to Nietzsche’s relentless hammer. And if our above remarks have any validity, Nietzsche has given us at least one other gift. He has made a western clearing for an ancient path of self-transformation now freed of its commitments to premodern Asian cultures.

And some more sketchy notes from the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company.

If anyone does happen to read these notes, please forgive the typos. I highly doubt I’ll go back through and proofread for a while. I primarily write these notes for my own understanding and future reference.

Morality

Nietzsche distinguishes between Morality with a capital M and morality with a lowercase m. Different societies have different moralities which is morality with a lowercase m and in the plural. To have an individual morality is to have a rank order of values.

Morality with a capital M, on the other hand, is Morality in the singular. This understanding of Morality is objective and writ large.

Nietzsche attacks singular Morality. He doesn’t attack individual plural morality.

There are no moral facts There are only moral interpretations of facts. Values are not facts in the world and if one appeals to a morality in which these are supposed to be objective, one is always going to be subverting oneself because this is not the nature of values. (The Commandments/facts about human nature are examples of objectified values.)

Values aren’t “in the world”. But they aren’t subjective or personal, either. The truth is more complicated and Nietzsche saw through this very clearly. He was probably one of the first philosophers to do so. To ask if values are in the world or in us doesn’t make sense.

Hume said the values were in us, not in the world. But Hume admitted that when we are worried about values, morality, human behavior, etc. - the question about whether values are in the world is of no interest whatsoever. This is where Nietzsche picks him up. What matters is is what is valuable for life. We experience the world in value laden terms and there is no way to get beyond that. That’s what makes us who we are. It doesn’t matter if it is subjective or objective. What are the values and how do we negotiate them given that different cultures have different values?

Values are culture specific. Different groups have different senses of morality. One of the big issues in the U.S. is always which of these singular moralities with a lowercase “m” are we going to make binding on everyone as a Morality with a capital M? This is what Nietzsche says we have to reject. We have to reject that values were given to us with a capital M from God.

“Thou shalt not” are prohibitions. Morality is seen in terms of what we should not do. Morality with a capital “M” is negative and prohibitive. God given morality is rejected by Nietzsche because the idea of an externally imposed morality is unnatural. We have to understand morality as coming from us.

The modern and most philosophical notion of Morality with a capital “M” is from Kant. Kant said there was a Moral Law and called it “The Categorical Imperative”. It is a command and it is absolutely unexceptional. “Thou Shalt” - no exceptions. Kant has in mind the singular sense of Morality (capital M).

Kant says that we should “Act always that others should act likewise.” We should ask: “What if everyone were to do what it is I am doing?” When you universalize in this way, you take morality out of experience and now understand it as a product of pure, practical reason. It is a rational phenomenon, not an experiential phenomenon. As you universalize as a test of morality, it becomes a rule for everyone. But this doesn’t work. Applying the rule to everyone almost always benefits some and disadvantages others. Universalization isn’t as fair as Kant wants it to be.

Nietzsche says applying the same rule to everyone destroys the exceptions. Nietzsche is always interested in the exceptions. We each have our own individual moralities. Morality (lower case “m”) must come from within - and those are the values worth defending. This is a defense of life in all it’s various forms. It’s the inclinations which give us morality. It is not a rational enterprise.

But even so, to say inclination is good and rationalism is bad is stupid. Some inclinations are healthy and enhance life. Others are stupid and drag life down. It is life itself that is the value. Life by it’s nature is confusing. It is diverse. The defense of life is a defense of diversity. The defense of the individual is a defense of vitality.

Are our values healthy or sick? Do they support life or drag it down? Nietzsche says externally imposed values are unhealthy. Asceticism is life denying. Rational principals are also life denying because they are externally imposed. Reason is opposed to nature in the way Kant uses reason.

Nietzsche likewise attacks modernity. He saw democracy and socialism as a leveling devices. American consumerism makes us all equal in that we have spending power. But it removes any sense of value but the market value.

Immoralism (Virtue, Self & Selfishness)

Nietzsche was a kind and gentle person. His last sane act was to hug a horse to save it from a beating. Nietzsche rejects morality as something universal. Nietzsche did not kill, steal, or commit adultery. He honored his mother and father. He obeyed the commandments but he objected to the idea that these commandments were externally imposed.

He doesn’t reject the content of the commandments. What he rejects is the idea that breaking the commandments relegates people to the realm of evil. That doesn’t explain anything. that they break the commandments consistently is a psychological, sociological problem.

Nietzsche doesn’t reject rational principals. What he rejects is the rationalization of rationality and morality. Kant separates inclinations from reason and says reason is the realm of morality. But once you do that, once you ascertain a person’s moral worth is based upon the moral law itself, you are pushing out of view the inclinations and saying they don’t matter - that we shouldn’t bother looking at them. This pushes aside the actual motives of our behavior in favor of doing the rational thing. But human beings are rarely motivated by what is reasonable, rational, or moral.

Kant says we are not in a position to know what the motives of our behavior actually are. Freud says philosophers before him introduced the unconsciousness. He just made it scientific. Kant was one of the philosophers he was referring to. In Germany, the idea of unconscious has a long picture of motivation as mysterious. Kant uses the unconscious as a way of remaining oblivious to the motivations Nietzsche wants to expose.

For Nietzsche, a kindly act that is understood as acting on principal may very well be motivated by an urge for superiority, a kind of contempt or self-defense. Kant doesn’t let us see this motivation. Instead he gives us a system of rationalizations.

A principal of morality may be perceived as absolute but it often involves all kinds of fiddling. If you have an abstract moral principal, the application of that principal is going to require some gerrymandering and fiddling to apply to the particular case and then it becomes a rationalization. It operates in such a way that doesn’t require we look at the actual motivations behind our behavior. It is possible to be a good person by not doing anything wrong. The focus is never on what you did wonderful - it’s on what you did or didn’t do wrong. For Nietzsche, this is a definition of the sickly. Being a good person and living a good life on those terms doesn’t amount to living a life at all. Existence requires commitment, passion, vibrancy, adventure.

Modern philosophy thinks of ethics in terms of Kant and John Stuart Mill. Kant represents rational principal; Mill emphasizes the general good. These are essentially the same because they are involved with rational principals.

Jesus present Kant with a moral problem. the temptation of Christ shows a person so perfect where the individual is not at war with universal morality. To say Jesus is a good person does not fit.

What ethics consists of are excellences (this comes from Aristotle). To think in terms of virtues is not about being good or obeying rules. It is about being excellent. To be excellent is to be exceptional - not to be like everyone else, The test of having a virtue is that you enjoy doing it. It’s not about being like everyone else.

Nietzsche the Immoralist; Genealogy of Morals

Even now what is sick may have once served healthy moral values. Morality is not just about doing what you want to do. It must also be noble. Mozart doing what he wants to do is noble because his creation of music benefits everyone.

Master morality is doing what you want to do. Slave morality is not doing what you want to do: asceticism, slavery, etc. It’s also following gurus rather than finding your own way.

Morality with a capital M comes about through slavery and persecution. It is a reaction to Master morality.

The term “good” comes from an ancient root which means warrior. It has to do with confidence and price - self-esteem. “I am my own ideal.” It is about pursuing a sense of excellence which is one’s own and that is what the word good means.

The term “bad”, on the otherhand,’ refers to what is pathetic, failure, weakness, pathos, vulgar, what is unsatisfying. Masters speak in terms of doing what they want to do and following this in a straightforward way. Slaves speak in terms of prohibition. “Thous Shalt Not”…. (Not doing what you want to do.)

Nietzsche considered the original development of slave morality a step in the right direction: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives births to values.” The way the masters behave, doing anything they want, is not something to admire. It is something despise . If the slaves were in the role of the master, they would not want to behave in that way. If you make masters evil, you can consider yourself good. This is the opposite of the Master view. Masters view themselves as good without question. People who are different from them are bad (unsatisfied, vulgar, etc.)

Master morality is about good and bad. Slave morality is about good and evil. Slaves have to conclude they are good by seeing someone as worse than them (the Masters). What good amounts to in the slave morality point of view is not directly asserting yourself. It involves having more self-control and they veiw the masters as people who haven’t learned these traits. They haven’t learned to internally disrespect what externally they might go along with. this internal move on the part of the slaves Nietzsche thinks is a brilliant bit of psychology. But the problem is that it later ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps the slave in a secondary position. there is no immediate view of self-worth without the view that someone else is evil.

Nietzsche calls it a transvaluation of values. Evil is doing what those guys do that they think is good. Good is not doing all that. Wealthy is viewed as evil. Strength, power, warrior virtues are flipped and meekness instead is what is seen as virtuous. In modern times, this is like saying ignorance is bliss when knowledge is the virtue of master morality.

How did slave morality become Morality with a capital M? When Constantine converted to Christianity and made Rome a Christian nation around 330 A.D.

Bad consciousness is the twist between master morality and slave morality in all of us. Where both exist, slave morality is likely to take over. Solomon offers an example. Consider a Baboon who exhibits Master Morality. He does whatever it is he wants to do. But he is placed in a zoo and is told stories about the Zoo Keeper who will do horrible things to him if he makes an exception of himself. The Baboon is master of the Baboon world, but the Zoo Keeper will become his Master. This presents a conflict. The Baboon will very likely give in and try and make himself seem like every other Baboon so as not to anger the Zoo Keeper.

Master morality lends itself to a Virtue Ethics. Slave morality lends itself to a Kantian/Judeo-Christian analysis where ethics is understood as universal and the rules are externally imposed and they apply in just the same way to everyone.

Slave morality was originally a good move. But it no longer serves us. Nietzsche doesn’t think we can go back to Master Morality. that’s not possible. But we can move beyond good and evil.

Resentment, Revenge and Justice

The French Ressentiment differs from the English Resentment. Resentment is a much stronger term. Ressentiment means irritation. Resentment seeks revenge. It is a viscous attack. Resentment is a strategy. It turns failure into virtue. It requires putting other people down and getting even with them for their superiority. Resentment is brilliant. The idea is kill someone without them even knowing you killed them.

Revenge is the original meaning of the world justice. Self-revenge is getting even with oneself for doing so well.

As we get used to judging on the basis of negating what is outside of us in order to feel good about ourselves (the blame game), we are constantly at war with ourselves about our excellence. the initially healthy move made by early Christians and Ancient Hebrews of turning the tables on Master Morality has become so internalized that there is almost no way we can get enough support to gain a good opinion of ourselves through our negative views of what is outside of ourselves. We are forced to drag our view down of everyone else in order to make ourselves feel relatively good. But this doesn’t work. It doesn’t provide us with self-esteem.

Nietzsche wages war and guilt and sin. The type of guilt he’s referring to is inward guilt - the belief that we are inherently deficient. Nietzsche says this is an unhealthy way of viewing the self and that it creates resentment.

Sin is judgment from another plane. It is not against oneself or against others but against God. It is impossible to live a sinless life based on the conventional definition of sin. Psychologically what this creates is a need to blame others for our faults.

We are so habituated to the Christian story and we are so obsessed with the need for a God that we will accept anyone who we think adjudicates across the board. This is how Nazism came to power.

Nietzsche calls slaves, not masters, brilliant and strategic. Hegel likewise has Master and Slave switch roles as a battle for recognition. The loser becomes the master slave. The slave becomes creative. The master falls into the slavish dependent position of having to be like others. Nietzsche wants those who are creative and talented but suppressed to turn that around.

Is there a difference between justice and vengeance? Another form of justice is the idea that goods are equally and fairly distributed. Nietzsche has mixed views about justice. He talks about herd morality and uses this term because Herd is considered to be the Christian flock of sheep that are difficult to distinguish but the good shepherd can recognize each individual one. What has happened to this notion of individual differences? Different individuals have different things to contribute to society. But people want to think of justice as an absolute, Nietzsche says it is better to think of justice as personal virtue. Forgiveness is important in this sense, but not as a strategem for getting even. If we have enough going on in our lives, then it becomes easy not to worry about what someone else has done to us.

Will to Power

Solomon and Higgins don’t think Will to Power is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy like other philosophers do. The Will to Power is systematically misleading. Nietzsche doesn’t mean will or power and he probably doesn’t mean “the” or “to”, either.

For Schopenhauer, the will is not individual, it is inside all of us. For Kant, it is individual, but it is external and lies behind our actions. We choose them - we will them. Nietzsche rejects both notions. He maintains Kant’s idea that the will is individualistic, but he rejects the idea of “the will”. He says it is a fiction. Will, in the Kantian sense, is nonsense. There is no agency or force behind “the will”. With Schopenhauer’s understanding, Nietzsche says the idea of a universal will is a metaphysical fiction. Will, for Nietzsche, is really more like motive.

Power is likewise problematic. It is often understood is political or military power. But the term for this in German is “reich”. Nietzsche uses the term “macht” which translates into English as the will to be alive, to feel vital and creative. In this sense, saying “the will” makes no sense. And “to” indicates a goal orientation that Nietzsche rejects. For Nietzsche, “The Will to Power” represents the present - not the future. It is never extinguished. No individual goal can satisfy it. It’s always a drive to enhance vitality and express oneself. The Will to Power cannot be predicted in advance. Any particular goal is a manifestation of The Will to Power. when one goal is fulfilled, another one takes it’s place.

Life consists of doing what you love. this isn’t imposed on you from the outside. It is discovered by trial and error. If you want to succeed, do what you love. The problem with goal setting is that if you set power as a goal, you make success far less likely. Likewise, to say “I want to be happy” is self-defeating.

Life is a process. It is ongoing. Life is exciting. It is dangerous. It involves taking risks. This thinking is in conflict with Darwin who talks about survival of the fittest. Goals should not be about survival. They should be about being a great “this” or a great “that”. It is the exercise of excellence.

Life is cruel. That’s the way ti is. To say we strive for pleasure and an avoidance of pain is likewise a faulty understanding. Creativity doesn’t offer a point of satisfaction. We are desiring creatures. To think in terms of complacency or contentment is to deny the kind of creatures we are.

The Ubermensch is an ideal. It is a full manifestation of “The Will to Power”.

Eternal Recurrence

The idea that time repeats itself over and over again is an ancient idea. Time as a wheel was an understanding in Zarathustra’s Persia; the Vedic Philosophy of India, Ancient Greece (through Heraclitus, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans). But Christian Orthodoxy rejected it. The church insisted that history is linear. The atonement would be a linear event in time. The Church said that there is only one time and it is linear.

In his notes, Nietzsche plays with a proof for Eternal Recurrence. It goes something like this: Time is infinite. there is a finite number of energy packets (energy states) and consequently a finite number of sequences of energy packets. In the infinity of time, the number of sequences is going to have to repeat itself an infinite number of times.

This proof is obviously flawed and Nietzsche never intended to publish it. But that doesn’t mean Nietzsche doesn’t believe in Eternal recurrence.

If you were to take this thought seriously - that your life is going to be repeated an infinite number of times, then the weight it gives to this life and the moments of this life is incalculable compared to the Christian image that this life is but a blink and it is the next life, the eternal life, that gets all the weight.

Milan Kundera in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, played with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. If events repeat themselves an infinite number of time and consequently have a certain amount of weight because of this repetition, would we be able to tolerate the idea of that much weight on the way we live our lives instead of rationalizing our lives? The rationalization goes like this:

This will be over soon, then I’ll get what I want. If I just put up with the job now, I’ll get the promotion in the future. There is yet another world waiting for me that is more perfect than this one.

What if, instead, we took the moments of our lives seriously?

The Nietzschean alternative to Christian consciousness where we are always looking forward to the next life is this idea of eternal recurrence. We are so used to thinking of life as linear that it is difficult to understand the idea of time as circular in many cultures, current and ancient. The problem is that we can’t know the difference between on occurrence and a recurrence.

There is a deep prejudice against eternal recurrence in the Judeo-Christian world because of the belief in “free will” even though there is some evidence for it in physics. Nietzsche says that the idea of “free will” is often used as and excuse for blame. It leads to a general reinforcement of uglifying the world around you in order to feel good.

Nietzsche thinks our primary freedom is how we deal with internal drives. Freedom is to feel free to actively engage in your life. To deal with life in the present and fully be yourself. This is the only freedom we have and thankfully is the only one we really want because it is readily available to us all the time.

Nietzsche was clear that there is a sense of immortality for those who excel. Not as in an after life, but in the same sense Homer is immortal through his works.

Nietzsche gave meaning to his life by doing something that went beyond his life. Becoming who you are doesn’t end in death. Events after death deeply affect one’s flourishing. [Which makes me think of Solomon who is dead, but here I am watching a lecture by him as though he is alive.]

Nietzsche says “become who you are”. So who does Nietzsche want us to be? He won’t ofer concrete advice. Instead he says in The Gay Science: Give style to your character. Love who you are and what you have to work with and make something beautiful out of it.

The slave takes his flaws and turns them into weapons by re-describing them as good. Nietzsche is a sick lonely man. What do you do when you find yourself alienated from other people? Nietzsche gave shape to himself. The man with the mustache becomes irrelevant to the creation Nietzsche has become.

It’s an art of transfiguration. This is about taking your own traits and giving them a setting. Taking the resources you have and creating a masterpiece. Our endowments are not virtues until we figure out a creative way to use them.

The individual plays off other people and vice versa. If we becomes ourselves, we positively affect others.

Solomon and Higgins conclude the lecture with a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever has really gazed down with an Asiatic and Super-Asiatic eye into the most world denying of all possible modes of thought (beyond good and evil) and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell of morality. Perhaps by this very act without really desiring it may have opened himself to this opposite ideal. The ideal of the most high spirited, energetic, world affirming man who has not only come to terms with and assimilated with what it is but wants to have it again as it was and is for all eternity - insatiably calling out, “Once more”.

More sketchy notes from the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company. (I may or may not proofread this tomorrow. Forgive any typos.)

Love Pity and Resentment

• There is a dichotomy that occurs between doing the right thing and doing what you want to do (self-interest). Nietzsche questions this dichotomy and says that very often that self-interest may be the right thing to do and the right thing to do may be self-interest. People do what it is they are motivated to do. When you practice benevolence you are often practicing a form of subtle revenge. Also, if someone is suffering and I feel pity for them, I’m not making them feel any better. By suffering with them, I’m not making them feel any better. I don’t reduce the suffering, I increase it. Pity for someone casts them into an inferior role. When you pity them, you no longer fear them. You are superior.
• How much can we actually empathize with another person? When we pity someone with insight and empathy we can understand that we share the world and are subject to the same plight. This is Schopenhauer’s stance. We realize we are all inferior and subject to the same plight. We are victims. Nietzsche says this is pathetic. To think we are all victims together is not a noble notion. He says the idea of compassion is a hypocrisy.
• Ressintement (Resentment) seems to be a justified and reasonable response to injustice but really it is nothing more than a sense of hopelessness.
• Guilt goes along with resentment. The major thrust of Christianity is to cure the problem of guilt. But Christianity created the problem of guilt; Christianity makes people feel guilty and then offers them a way out of the guilt. That’s hypocritical.

Love & Friendship

• Love is a longing for something far beyond oneself.
• Christian love doesn’t emphasize friendship and it de-sexualizes love. Nietzsche rejects this. Love always has a sexual element.
• Marriage is a long conversation.
• A friendship based on mutual enjoyment is much different than a friendship based on mutual advantage. Enjoying someone is much better than using someone for advantage. But even more important is friendship based on mutual admiration - one that makes us want to be a better person because of the relationship. Aristotle said this was the key to friendship.
• Friendship is also about mutual inspiration.

Women

• Nietzsche is often thought of as sexist. Some of his comments do seem very sexist but when understood in context, they aren’t as sexist as they first appear.
• Nietzsche says “Supposing truth is a woman, what then?” Truth in German is a feminine noun. People think this is a sexist comment but it isn’t. Nietzsche assumes women are psychologically complex and suggests by this aphorism that truth, like a woman is reticent to be known. It has to be wooed. (Women are resistant to male demands.) Like a woman for a desiring man, truth cannot ultimately be had.)
• In Beyond Good & Evil (pp. 231-239), he prefaces his comments about women as the comments being “only my truths”. He recognizes that women may not agree with his ideas about them. (That the female perspective is very likely different than his perspective.) He says that women want to debunk fantasies men have had about themselves and that this is not a persuasive approach. It’s giving control to consciousness what is better left to instinct. They are buying into a game men have been harmed by. Nietzsche tries to understand an alternative consciousness - that of women. In doing so, he upholds perspectivism. He doesn’t think women should be more like men. They have will of their own. They have a different perspective than men and this perspective is beneficial.

Top 10

This lecture provided a list of Nietzsche’s top 10 favorite philosophers and top 10 least favorite philosophers. I didn’t write them all down, but a few definitely caught my interest.

• Spinoza is on the list of favorites. Nietzsche recognized himself in Spinoza. They had much in common: Love of fate; the rejection of pity; naturalism; the attempt to understand the individual in the context of the whole
• Emerson is also on the list of favorites. (He’s the only American on either list.) Some of Nietzsche’s ideas have names that come from Emerson. Emerson talked about the Oversoul, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (Overman) is a very similar idea. Emerson talked about the joyous science. Nietzsche uses the term “gay science”. Emerson talked about the “death of God and, like Nietzsche, he rejected orthodox theology for religious reasons.
• Kant is one of Nietzsche’s favorite and least favorite philosophers. He greatly admires Kant but he also criticizes him because he doesn’t propose something naturalistic. He proposes something dictated to us - even if it is reason doing the dictating.
• Martin Luther is one of Nietzsche’s least favorite philosophers. Much of Nietzsche’s thought shows clear Lutheran underpinnings. But Nietzsche sees depravity in Luther that he rejects.
• St. Paul is one of Nietzsche’s least favorite philosophers. He is an opportunist. A propogandist. Paul had no use for the life of the redeemer. He needed the crucifixion. Paul was resentful and had no use for life.
• Absurd rationality leads to the idea that life is worthless.

History

• Hegel said that spirit is this worldly. It’s a sort of cosmic consciousness. It’s isn’t otherworldly. Nietzsche agrees with this understanding of spirit.
• Hegel invented history. The question of whether truth changes through time were not questions actively raised until Hegel. He makes this question a central focus and this thesis is very close to Nietzsche’s. The truth of history is the truth of change. There are many truths and these truths can contradict each other. It isn’t a matter of which ones are right and which ones are wrong. It’s a matter of which are more developed, which are more naive, which are one sided, which take account of others.
• Hegel said Bacchanalian revel was the truth of philosophy in general. this is very similar to Nietzsche’s Dionysian metaphor. Philosophy is not a neat linear progression. It is not a matter of rational thinking. It is a passionate mess. It is complicated and unresolved.
• Philosophers conflict and they build on one another in a patterned way. (Not that there is a purpose behind it all - a teleology). Something emerging in a patterned way is what Nietzsche’s genealogy is all about.
• Darwin said that man is not the ultimate stage but a stepping stone to something else. Nietzsche was against the idea of “the survival of the fittest” because he said it had not been fully established. He says it is about a struggle for power. Nietzsche interprets Darwin as an English theologian - that we are at the end of evolution and man is the result. Social Darwinism says only the fittest societies survive. It is a moral philosophy. Those that perish were meant to perish. those that survive were meant to survive. It’s harsh doctrine and Nietzsche rejects it. Nietzsche’s had a far more artistic sense. For Nietzsche, it’s not just a matter of simple survival, it is a matter of creativity and imagination. Those who survive are the most creative. What comes out of natural selection in terms of society isn’t the best, it is the weakest; the most common; the most repulsive. The cockroach is most likely the most fit. But is this the best?
• Nietzsche’s Last Man is most likely the fittest in terms of natural selection. But if it is up to us to choose through our ability to create, is this what we want to choose? Do we want to be the ultimate couch potato living safely and comfortably. Or do we want to live a more risky, creative existence?
• What we call truth are those things that best lead to human survival. Evolution tells us why we believe what it is we believe not by justifying belief but by showing the place beliefs play in a flourishing life.
• History can be a form of the “other-worldly” because it is based on the past. But you can’t just go back to the past. You have to live in the here and now.
• History is essential for many things, but it is not an ends in itself.
• How do we find a perspective where history affirms life? Antiquarian History is a way of appreciating our past that doesn’t involve white washing. Greece was a culture steeped in cruelty. It’s not enough to just look at the nice parts but as it really was. Our history, ugly or beautiful, is part of what makes us what we are.
• The underlying value must always be life itself.

Nihilism

• Nihilism was originally understood as something akin to teenage rebellion. It was a rejection of tradition. Nietzsche rejected German Society so in this sense he could be called a nihilist. But he didn’t reject society altogether.
• Nietzsche defined nihilism as the highest values devaluing themselves. He’s talking about two values in particular: moral values and the values of the Judeo/Christian tradition. Religion and morality are his focus.
• Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is an unhealthy denial of life. Trial and error is skepticism. Cynicism is being tired and weary - being so skeptical that you aren’t open to anything. It doesn’t allow for possibilities. It is closed rather than open.
• Nietzsche is against Nihilism. But he refuses to take “the truth” as something fixed, absolute and easily accessible. We create the truth through our experience and our living. He is a nihilist in terms of knowledge.
• If Christians are honest, it doesn’t take much to realize that God is not central to their conception of the real world. Realistically, the Christian God no longer played a major role. Our culture is no longer centered on this God - whether we uphold the idea or not.
• Are the values we once held valuable? Values change. Perhaps they were reasonable moves at one time but they are no longer valuable.
• Schopenhauer said asceticism was a way to make life good - renounce the will and maintain peace. Nietzsche rejects this. To fast for the sake of fasting or to sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice makes no sense to him. Is there a deeper motive for asceticism? Someone able to control impulses often feels superior and self-righteous.
• Nietzsche sees science as having been pursued as a sort of Goethean selling the soul to the devil. The desire for truth is a desire to align finite powers with the infinite. With this thinking, one becomes a representative of humanity rather than an individual. Nietzsche says the scientific world view is a shadow of God that still lingers with us. It’s important not to transpose habits of the past to a scientific world view. We need to resuscitate our powers and not transfer them to the Christian God or some dream of nature we know nothing about.

I posted my notes on Lecture 12 yesterday from the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company. The notes were fresh on my mind so I took the most notes on that lecture because it was primarily new to me. The earlier lectures were primarily review, but I did jot down some notes from lectures 1-11 for future reference…

• Nietzsche very often makes references to images Luther used.
• I thought this was very cool! Nietzsche thought Christianity had served an important historical function for people. In the passage about the madman, it’s not people who believe in God who the madman assaults. The madman assaults those who think they can eliminate the need God once filled in society. By simply focusing on science they can ignore the needs of humanity for something like myth. Nietzsche thinks this is ungrateful. The way to show gratitude is to think beyond the historical function.
• Nietzsche says we shouldn’t throw out our desires. What we should throw out is the idea that we can reach perfect contentment and that the attainment of perfect satisfaction is even desirable.
• Nietzsche is far more optimistic that Schopenhauer. Life involves the negative components, but we can become something that takes joy in.
• The meaning of life is not in reason, rationalism, or theology. It’s to be found in the passions.
• Camel stage - treats tradition with reverence. Says “yes” to it. Lion stage - evaluates tradition and asserts individuality by challenging what has been handed down. Say “no” to tradition. We have to fully make our way through the camel stage before the lion stage makes sense. The Child stage is a new affirmation of life. It is boundless energy for what is new. Experimentation. Creative energy - full creative response and full vitality.
• The Ubermensch is an idea. It is a way of being that involves risk taking. This is contrasted with the Last Man which seeks nothing but comfort - the ultimate couch potato.

Rationality, Romanticism, Consciousness

• Rationality has several meanings: 1) thinking ability, to reflect; 2) mathematics; 3) instrumental reasoning, to think; 4) having the right goals (Aristotle); 5) reason is the royal road to truth (modern understanding/Enlightenment)
• Nietzsche, like Aristotle, thinks reason involves having the right goals. He says that reason becomes a tyrant when it is thought of as the royal road to truth (contra-Kant).
• Kant preached a faith in reason and even brought religion into the realm of reason. Nietzsche felt this idea that reason is universal was a pretension. While France and Britain were moving toward the age of reason, Germany was involved in Romanaticism which puts its faith in the passions and not in reason. Nietzsche saw much wrong with Romanticism, too. He said it was a pretense of passions.
• Nietzsche says we are animals motivated by drives and instincts. We are natural, biological beings. The meaning of life is to be found in life itself. Not in the upper realms of reason. Like Freud, Nietzsche understood that what drives us are very often things we are not conscious of.
• Nietzsche asked where does consciousness come from? And he comes up with a theory: It developed because of the need for communication. Consciousness was created in our interactions with others (rather than the traditional view that consciousness was somehow already in the mind). If you live alone, consciousness becomes superfluous. We have cultured, sophisticated, individual instincts.
• Thinking, for Nietzsche, can be a sort of disease. It can be dangerous because it blinds us to our creativity and uniqueness. Therefore consciousness is dangerous. BUT!! It’s an important stage in our evolution. When a faculty is new (like the advent of language/consciousness), it is always dangerous at first. But as it matures, we learn to make better use of it.
• Nietzsche was very interested in how language (the new faculty which gave rise to consciousness) expresses the truth.
• Nietzsche was very critical of the romantics of his time. He said they pretended passion. He said that romanticism is a mask; an act. The reality is that passion contains a quantum of reason and reason contains quantum passion. Both reason and passion contain an amount of both the Apollonian (reason) and the Dionysian (passion).
• Nietzsche uses aphorisms because he doesn’t want followers. He knows the reader won’t understand the whole picture by reading a single aphorism so it will take some work to understand. An active readership achieved through a sort of companionship with Nietzsche.
• Most of philosophy is centered on formal deductive reasoning. Not Nietzsche. Some would say he doesn’t do philosophy at all. He uses a sequence of fallacies; aphorisms, rhetoric, literature and ad hominem arguments. He wants to stimulate our emotional experience.
• Sophistry is an appeal to emotions and understands argument as an art form because the use of strict rational argument convinces no one. Philosophy is a sort of rhetoric. Socrates was a great rhetoritician. This is what made him so powerful even though his arguments would be readily dismissed in institutions today. So it is no dis-service to say that Nietzsche is doing rhetoric rather than logic.

Truth

• Nietzsche says there is no truth, there is only interpretations. But he praises truthfulness. This idea is not antagonistic toward science. Science is experimental and Nietzsche is willing to allow any hypothesis which says “let’s try it”. Experimenting with ideas and philosophical view points is kindred with science. Nietzsche says it isn’t good enough to say God created it this way.
• Science is non-dogmatic. Most beliefs people have held turn out to be false eventually. So why think current theories are the truth? Theories are always tentative. Philosophy should be undogmatic like science. But Niezsche also sometimes opposes science. This opposition is based on the aesthetic perspective. The aesthetic view has ways of seeing that are non-scientific. If science and aesthetics are opposed, Nietzsche says that aesthetics always get the upper hand. If it doesn’t, science easily becomes dogmatic. And when it does, it loses it’s virtue.
• Nietzsche asks “Why is truth important? Why must we have truth at any cost?” Individual lives are ruined. People have been excommunicated for the truth. The truth has upset entire civilizations (Freud). Why are we willing to pay the cost?
• Nietzsche comes up with several reasons. Truth isn’t necessarily pursued for itself. It is very often pursued for other goals. The main motivation for searching for truth is sometimes status. Status is the primary objective, not truth. Truth is a means to an end, not the end in itself. “The truth shall set you free.” Truth as a means to an end is based on the idea that truth is rock hard and immovable. If you get the truth, you gain power because claiming to have the truth puts you in a privileged position.
• But Nietzsche says there is no way of getting to the bottom of things. All we have is our experience which is an interpretation based on other interpretations. It’s all experience and experience is always an interpretation of something else.
• Appearances depend on being some thing of which there are appearances. There is a gap between the experience and appearances on the one hand and what they are experiences and appearances of on the other hand. There is no way of getting around or behind the appearances and experiences to see reality itself. This is something Nietzsche struggles with. Traditional philosophy, science ancient times, makes a distinction between reality on the one hand and appearances on the other. Nietzsche thinks this is a bogus distinction. There is only the world of our experience and it doesn’t make sense to talk about anything else.
• But what do we say about our experience? Kant talked about “world in itself” which is the world as God might see it. Kant admitted that we can’t have a conception of “the world in itself”. But Nietzsche says there is no such thing as “a world in itself”. There is no God’s eye view. Even if there were a God, this God would have to see it from a god’s perspective which remains a perspective.
• What is truth from once perspective is not the truth from another perspective. But this doesn’t mean that one truth need exclude the other.
• Nietzsche holds what is now called “perspectivism”. There are lots of different viewpoints we can take on things. This does not rule out argument, debate or pursuit itself - just the understanding that it must always be perceptualized. Science, for instance, is a difinitive perspective.
• Perspectivism is not the same as relativism why says that every view is as good as any other. But it is always a matter of not taking one position and digging in. Philosophy is about shifting perspectives.
• Where is the truth? It doesn’t lie behind appearances. Philosophical truth is getting a sense of how all the perspectives tie together. You have to be able to entertain different truths at the same time.
• Nietzsche was a quasi follower of Darwin. The Darwinian notion of fitness as a pragmatic theory of truth fits with Nietzsche’s theories. Imagine a species of creatures who have built into their brains that the future will be unlike the past. If you see lightening strike a tall tree, you rush under the tree during the next storm expecting that lightening won’t strike in the same place twice twice (or having struck this tree it will strike elsewhere next time). It’s easy to see how such a species would be short lived. A species that developed and inductive mind and learns by experience is much more likely to survive and flourish.
• What are our truths? They are the indispensible errors of mankind. They are the truths without which we as a species would not survive. To ask if these truths exist apart from reality is nonsensical.

I’ve been watching the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company. (It’s currently on sale.) I’ve made my way through the first twelve lectures so far. I didn’t take many notes on the first 9 lectures or so because they were mostly a rehash of what I’ve already written about. But I did end up taking far more copious notes on lectures 10 through 12. These are my notes from lecture 12. I’ll have to back up and provide earlier notes later, but this lecture was of particular interest to me.

I find some of the concepts within Existentialism interesting although I must admit my main interest as far as Existentialism goes are people who aren’t necessarily existentialists - Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The main thing that distinguishes Nietzsche from the existentialists is that he rejects the existential notion of freedom. Sartre’s understanding of freedom is that it is entirely up to us what it is we become. It’s almost as though we are given a blank slate and can write upon it (besides where we were born, how old we are, etc.) whatever it is we choose to write upon it.

This is not how Nietzsche understands freedom. Nietzsche’s idea of freedom can be summarized in one phrase: “Become who you are”. This is not the same thing as the meaningless comment parents often tell their children - “Be who you are”. Being who you are suggests an unchanging event. Becoming suggests something in process. We are born with talents, abilities and potentialities. But we are rarely thrown into circumstances that cultivate these abilities. It is up to us to cultivate them.

In England and France, a negative conception of freedom, Laissez Faire, had become popular. To be left alone was freedom. But in Germany, the idea of freedom was a positive notion - “freedom to”. Freedom to have a career, freedom to participate, etc.

Nietzsche had a totally different idea of freedom. He said freedom was to become who one is. He believed the idea of freedom as freedom from constraint was a fantasy - especially a fantasy of the oppressed. Great art and great things in general are not freedom from constraint. It’s the limits which define greatness and make for creativity. (For instance, the creativity that emerges through Haiku or the Japanese art form that requires a single brush stroke. When the paintbrush is lifted from the page, the drawing is finished.)

We are constrained by culture, biology circumstances of history, etc. For Nietzsche, freedom could only be understood within these constraints. He summarized freedom as “freedom to create”.

Nietzsche is an individualist, but not in the modern sense which emerged in the 12th century.  The 12th century is when the notion of individual first became prominent. The idea of the individual found even more prominence through the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What gets left out of this notion is family, community, etc.  But Nietzsche’s idea that freedom is an individual’s ability to create is not the same as an individuals ability to choose. There are always constraints and determinants on our behavior (something Sartre completely denies).

Nietzsche was a biological determinist. He said that often what appears to be choices aren’t choices at all. But we can “become who we are”. We have to spend our lives creating ourselves - not on a blank canvas saying anything goes - but within the limitations and restrictions of our individual circumstances. It’s similar to the idea of self-realization if you can drop the new-age baggage that goes along with that idea. We are born into a tradition, a culture, etc. that defines are limits.

Nietzsche would not agree with Sartre that it is our choice who it is we become. But he does say that there are many choices along the way that are already in accordance with a shape that has been given to us, from the most part, from birth. In order to become who it is we are, we have to trust our instinct. We are much more in tune with the person we can become through instinct than we are through reason. This is because reason is very often based on compliance with the culture.

We each have our own idea, our own character, our own destiny to fill out. Nietzsche rejects universal will. He asks, “Do we have a will”? Do we decide to do something or is it done through us? How much do we choose to do and how much is an expression of our natures?

This makes agency a subtle problem for Nietzsche. What makes us think we are the agents of our own actions?  Take thinking, for instance. Why are we so sure we are thinkers? Nietzsche says a thought comes when it will, not when “I” will. Nietzsche therefore thinks we overemphasize agency, freedom and choice. There is a sort of fate and it is important that we love our fate (amor fati). But we can and will be something if we work hard enough to cultivate it.

So while he definitely rejects the existentialist notion of freedom, he emphasizes what all existentialists emphasize - the imporance of individual existence and seeing to it that we take responsibility for who it is we are.

It seems true to me that we are born with a certain conditioning that limits our choice to an extent. We are interconnected beings. We don’t live in a vacuum.

I found Camus & Sartre: The Story of the Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It at the HalfPrice Bookstore. Couldn’t even believe it. I had wanted to read it since I first started researching Sartre and Camus but it wasn’t available through our library and was quite expensive so I decided to forgo it (especially since there are so many other books I’ve read that I haven’t gotten to yet.) Glad I found it because it was quite helpful.

Doing a decent summary of the book would be far too time consuming because it involves a lot of history. So here is a quick and dirty summary…

Camus and Sartre were great friends. They were both becoming famous about the same time and shared philosophical and literary interests. There were definitely differences, but nothing friendship threatening. For the most part, they were able to laugh with each other about them. With the occupation of France, Camus swung into action and joined the Resistance movement. He took huge personal risks. Sartre admired this in Camus and tried to do the same but couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. It took him several years to work through his philosophy before he could figure out how to act on it.

Both he and Camus became involved with the Communist party because it seemed to be the only means of supporting the working class. But Camus became disillusioned early on because of it’s violent nature and decided that he did not want to be a part of a system that used violence as a means of control. Sartre, on the other hand, became a spokesman for the Communist party saying that Camus no longer knew what it iwas he stood for. Passivism wasn’t a stance.

The problem was the Cold War. It drew a line in the sand and people had to choose - are you Communist anti-Communist. Camus and Sartre had both desperately attempted to come up with a third option. But there was no room for that third option at that time so the choice was either/or. Camus chose anti-Communism (although at one point he spoke harshly against anti-Communism) and Sartre chose Communism.

But Sartre wasn’t actually a Communist and Camus wasn’t actually an anti-Communist, either although those were the sides they chose. What it boiled down to was that Camus didn’t want to get his hands dirty and Sartre did. Camus had been born into a working class family in Algiers and already felt that his hands were dirty. He wanted to do the humane thing and could no longer condone violence. Sartre had been born into a well-to-do bourgeoisie family. What Sartre wanted to do was “come down” and be a spokesman for the working class. He felt the only way he could do this was through Communism because anti-Communism wasn’t speaking for the working class.

The division began after Camus published The Rebel which was his bomb dropped on Communism, linking it with violence and pointing it at Sartre. Many took the book to say that if Camus was right, Sartre was wrong. Camus expected to see Sartre’s review in Sartre’s Magazine but it didn’t come for months. When it finally did come, the review wasn’t by Sartre, it was by one of Sartre’s assistants and it slammed Camus’ book. This was insulting to Camus (because of the condemning review but primarily because it was not Sartre who reviewed the book.) Sartre replied to Camus through his newspaper and a very public quarrel was on with each man representing one side of the two sides of the Cold War division. Infact, they each became the main spokepersons for anti-Communism and Communism in France.

By keeping his hands clean, Camus’ completely lost sight of the Algerian struggles even though he became a spokesperson for Algerian issues. He was more hindrance than help. By wanting to get his hands dirty, Sartre got in touch with the people he wanted to get in touch with, but failed to notice the horrors that were being committed in the name of Communism.

It is very likely that without the divisive nature of the Cold War, Camus and Sartre would have remained friends despite their differences. But the world had moved into “either/or” thinking and it didn’t allow for dialogue. It demanded a militant stance. Aronson contends we are still living with that “either/or” thinking from the Cold War and that it is time we find a way out of it.

Both Camus and Sartre were ultimately in bad faith. Both were concerned ultimately with France - even Camus, who claimed to be so interested in Algiers, always made France the audience for his books. (He wrote to be read in France, not in Algiers.)

Aronson writes: “The deepest issues motivating and dividing Camus and Sartre are still with us…the time is ripe for a new type of political intellectual who might bring together each man’s strengths and avoid each man’s weaknesses. We can imagine someone speaking the truth at all times, and opposing oppression everywhere, uniting each man’s characteristic power of insight under a single moral standard. Such an intellectual would illuminate today’s systemic violence while accepting the challenge of mounting an effective struggle against it without creating new evils.” Aronson admits this might be like asking for an angel (as Sartre once said). “Angels do not exist, but they can be a yardstick for human beings.”