>> Welcome back to Intro to Philosophy,
1010, the summer session 2019,
Introduction to World Philosophy is our book and
this video is going over Friedrich Nietzsche,
the Human All Too Human and the Cheerful
Science, which is more commonly known
as the gay science, so we will be going over
the final exam questions for exam three,
so it will be Part A, number 7, how's
Nietzsche's critique of the metaphysical world
in aphorism number 9 in Human All Too Human,
similar to Berkley's critique of matter?
And in part, that's actually Part B, that's
the 100 word essay option and then for Part A,
the 250 word option is; compare Nietzsche's
the Cheerful Science to Plato's Phaedrus,
the Taittiriya Upanishad,
and the Katha Upanishad.
Keep the idea of horizon of the cosmos in mind.
So I'll briefly explain both of the basic
answers for those first and then I'll going in
and look at excerpts from Human All Too Human
and the Cheerful Science or the Gay Science,
and that'll cover what you
need to know for the exam.
And then after that, I will give a little
more context for Nietzsche's theories
because he's different than all of
the other philosophers that we've gone
over with the exception of Plato.
So Plato, he wrote in dialogue form
and therefore you can never be absolutely
sure what Plato himself believed
because he's just expressing the beliefs of
Socrates and the people that he's talking to.
So there's a lot of theories; oh he didn't
mean what he said, and so at any rate,
similarly with Nietzsche, he likes to
write about wearing masks and lying,
so I'll read the introductory notes, his
philosophy's sometimes called perspectivism,
everything is just the perspective, and it seems
like Nietzsche plays with different perspectives
and he'll flip flop all the time and that's
what makes it difficult to summarize his books.
So again, I'll first go over the straightforward
surface reading which you'll be responsible
for on the exam if you choose to cover
Nietzsche, and then I'll put it in some context
and show you how his ideas kind
of go in circles and to give a,
just a preface of what I'll be saying, we saw
in Hegel, said it's the sequence of evolution
of philosophical concepts that is fixed.
The dynamic process of history that moves the
cultural mind from one philosophical world view
to the next, to the next, each
of those world views is fixed
in a certain series leading
towards knowledge of the absolute.
So what I'm going to argue that Nietzsche,
I'll point out sections of his different books
where he points out that that sequence of
philosophical concepts works in a circle.
And he calls that circle,
the vicious circle god.
So if that's what he really believes, then the
atheistic philosophy that he preaches in most
of his books, with the exception of
the Birth of Tragedy, his first book,
it was not an atheistic book, he
talked about Dionysus, the Greek god,
but you could see what he's doing
is articulating different phases
of this historical progression of concepts
that go in this circle, starting with well
and he points out himself, the Hindu
philosophy of the Brahmans, 4000 years ago,
where they believed in Vishnu, as
we've been going over the Upanishads.
And then it rejects itself
in the form of Buddhism,
but if it's really a circle it would indicate
it's coming back to this theological cosmology
which is consistent with some of the things
Nietzsche says about his god, Dionysus.
Okay, so now I will go over briefly, the
summary of the answers for exam three,
so compare Nietzsche's the Cheerful
Science to Plato's Phaedrus,
the Taittiriya Upanishad
and the Katha Upanishad.
Keep the idea the horizon of the cosmos in mind.
So, in the Cheerful Science,
Nietzsche talks about,
he says his most famous phrase; God is dead.
So, I think, therefore I am, cogito,
ergo sum, that's Rene Descartes,
that's the most famous philosophical saying
except for maybe, Nietzsche's God is dead.
That might be equally famous
if not, it's a close second.
And he says that in the Gay Science, number 108.
I'll just read it here; new struggles, so this
is page 501 of our book; after Buddha was dead,
his shadow was still shown
for centuries in a cave,
a tremendous shiver inducing
shadow, god is dead.
But given humans as they are, there
may be caves for thousands of years
in which his shadow is shown and we, we still
have to defeat his shadow, exclamation point.
So, Nietzsche likes to use exclamation
points, you can imagine him yelling
when he's giving his prophetic
exclamations, but again,
what does Nietzsche himself really
believe, that is definitely up to question.
So then the next section in our book is
aphorism number 124, and it is in the horizon
of the infinite, and the image he
uses is wiping away the horizon.
So and I'll get into that, if you look at
the madman, aphorism number 125, he says;
how are we able to drink up the sea, who gave
us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?
What did we do when we loosed
this earth from its sun?
So when we murdered god, he's saying
we wiped away the whole horizon.
So, in these previous videos I've been showing
that according to Plato in the Phaedrus,
the absolute ideas which seem St. Augusta
later called, the ideas of god's mind,
exist specifically at the outermost horizon
of the cosmos, which is very similar
to holographic string theory
as I've been pointing out.
So Nietzsche here is saying, we killed
god, how are we able to drink up the sea,
who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the whole horizon?
That, you can see in the context of the Phaedrus
and the Upanishads, which Nietzsche was familiar
with both, he was very familiar
with Plato and the Upanishads,
he liked the philosophy of the ancient Brahmans.
He talked about them and Plato as the beginnings
of philosophy in the east and the west.
So I'll go then read selections from the
Phaedrus and the Upanishads where they talk
about the horizon and the ideas of god.
So that's just the brief introduction,
that could get you going, you know,
if you wanted to do that, you could read
it yourself, but I will be going over it.
The Part B question is; how is Nietzsche's
critique of the metaphysical world
in Human All Too Human, similar to Berkley's
critique of matter, so in Human All Too Human,
aphorism number 9 is on page 499 of our
book, it's called metaphysical world,
it's on the bottom of the right hand column.
And he's just basically saying,
Kant's idea of the thing in itself,
in the previous video we went over Hegel
and then prior to that we went over Kant,
he is saying that, Nietzsche's
saying that's a useless idea.
Even if it was a real thing, since
we have no way of accessing it,
since all we can ever experience is
phenomena, the world as it appears to us
after having been filtered through the
categories of thought, space, time,
and causality, the main ones, so Kant says
we have no way of knowing the thing itself,
the very claim to try and know it is absurd
and self-contradictory because to know it is
to alter it and then it wouldn't be itself.
So it would be conditioned by
our own cognitive processes.
So is there a thing in itself?
Nietzsche's saying, well
I'll grant you it's possible,
but even if it exists it's the most
useless of all realizations he says
on page 500 up at the top on the left.
And that is what Berkeley says on
page 470 about the concept of matter.
So Berkeley is an empiricist and he says
all that exists are ideas in the minds
that perceive them, nothing
exists, there is no such thing
as unthinking substance existing
outside of the mind.
Because you're assuming that ideas
are reflections or like photographs
of something existing outside of our
mind, he didn't think about photographs
but representations of objects
that exist in themselves outside
of our mind, he goes, how is that possible?
How could you prove it?
If all we know is our ideas, then
how do we know they reflect something
that isn't represented by our ideas.
He's saying it's an unnecessary addition to
what we actually experience and we can get along
in the world just fine if we understand
the so called physical objects
that we see as just ideas in our mind.
And then he said, what's the difference
between our own private ideas in our minds
that no one can know about and the
apparently stable physical objects
that we can all perceive?
And he says those are the ideas in god's mind,
but all that ever could possibly exist
are ideas in the minds that perceive him.
And even if there is such a thing
as matter, says Berkeley, it's this,
it's a useless postulate, it might exist,
there's no way we could prove
it, we don't even need it.
When we dream, we see a whole world
as if there was physical objects,
but they're just ideas in our mind.
So that's the basic answer for that.
Alright, so I've gone over the basic answers,
you've got enough I think with just that,
to develop your answers for the exam
and now I'll give a little more
context to Nietzsche's philosophy.
So again, he is probably the most, not probably,
he's the most popular philosopher today.
If you go on, you know, for example, I gave this
summer class last summer with our other book,
Four Fundamental Questions, and I went
through the chapters just like this
and so other people can see them on YouTube,
the two most popular ones were the videos
on Nietzsche, I mean this is just a
community college class, but by far,
that drew the most interest and
because he's pretty interesting,
he's a pretty interesting philosopher
and very tricky to get ahold of.
So let me give you the straightforward analysis,
beginning with the introductory
remarks on page 496.
So, the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche,
1844-1900, a fierce critic of Christianity,
also rejected much of traditional
philosophy, including its style.
His works are, for the most
part, [inaudible] of aphorisms,
standalone paragraphs, and brief essays.
Arguments often emerge only over the
course of a work or even several works,
so that's an important point to keep in mind,
you have to read what he said in one book,
and put it in the context of the same
imagery that he's used in previous books,
which I'll give a little taste of after I go
through exam questions again
in a more straightforward way.
So then continuing here, Nietzsche's father
and grandfathers were Lutheran pastors,
one grandfather was a noted scholar
of Christianity, but his father
and younger brother died when Nietzsche was
only 4, and then he was, had chest injuries
when he was thrown from a horse at age 23, he
served as a nurse in the Franco-Prussian War,
he contrived dysentery, he got very sick, he
was a prodigy in philology, which is the study
of languages, how they develop and so he
studied the classical literature and he,
and that's an important point to keep in
mind, he mentions it in Human All Too Human,
philology in aphorism number 8, but he
was recognized as a genius very young
and it says here, he became a professor of
classical philology at the University of Basel
in Switzerland at 24, but had to reason
at 35 because of his failing health.
He spent the last 11 years of his
life, incapacitated by mental illness.
So that is also interesting.
I will just, I'm going to give a lot more detail
of the background for understanding Nietzsche
after this straightforward analysis but
one contextual point I think is important
at the outset to have in mind is,
here is his friend, Paul Deussen,
who became the top most Sanskrit philologist who
studied the ancient Hindu language of Sanskrit
in which the [inaudible] literatures were
written, was Nietzsche's close friend.
And here's what Paul Deussen said about their
confirmation, so they were Lutherans, so;
our confirmation together on [inaudible]
Sunday of the year1861, I don't even know what
that word is, when, so Nietzsche was 17, set a
new bond between us, as the conferment's walked
to the alter in pairs to receive the
consecration on their knees, Nietzsche and I,
as closest friends, knelt side by side.
I still remember very well
the wholly ecstatic mood
that filled us during the week
before and after confirmation.
We would have been quite ready to
die immediately to be with Christ
and all our thoughts, feelings, and actions
were irradiated with a super terrestrial joy,
which however as an artificially grown little
plants could not last and under the pressure
of studying and living very soon
vanished just as quickly as it had come.
So, Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor,
both of his grandfathers were Lutheran
pastors, some of his uncles were also.
He lived in kind of a cast of pastors, so
theologians and this is why he had an affinity
for the Brahmans of ancient India.
He romanticized them, he also saw them you
know, at a shadow side so he wasn't the kind
of philosopher who looked
away from the shadow side,
that was one of the things he's famous for,
showing the underside, the dark side of reality.
But at any rate, he's famous
for saying God is dead.
He wrote a book called, the
Antichrist, he attacks Christianity,
but he rarely attacks Jesus himself.
And many Christians enjoy
reading Nietzsche's books and find
that it bolsters their Christian faith.
And we saw at age 17, he was quite ready to die
for Jesus Christ, but then Paul Deussen said,
oh but our mystical attitude
vanished like a little plant.
Well, it didn't vanish for Nietzsche, and
he criticized Deussen for being a kind
of a shallow philosopher, a great
Sanskrit philologist but he wasn't so up
on Paul Deussen's more or less atheistic
interpretation of the Hindu texts.
Which you would think is strange
since Nietzsche said God is dead.
But so there it, so when we get to the Cheerful
Science where he's proclaiming that God is dead,
this isn't, he's not happy
about the fact that God is dead.
For Nietzsche, he did believe in God and
then for him that was what was most important
in life, as it was for his whole family.
But, then it seems he lost his faith in God
under a historical analysis of the origins
of Christianity as a philologist.
Oh, this is how the scriptures, oh they
lead back here through the Zoroastrian texts
into the Hindu texts and what's unique about you
know, this is supposed to be divine revelation,
it looks like a historical progression that--
an accretion of different myths over
[inaudible] so he became an atheist.
But did he come back to belief in God?
Some people think he did and he gives
all sorts of tantalizing little hints
about such a possibility so that's just
something to keep in mind when we're going
through the book here, so now continuing
here on the introductory notes,
Nietzsche's unusual style, this is page 496,
and hostility to philosophical system building
make it difficult to summarize his thought,
some of his themes, especially on his attack
on Kant's thing and themselves in this version
of relativism, often known as perspectivism,
appear in a relatively early
book, Human All Too Human.
So that's what we'll be going over, his most
characteristic theses emerge in the works
of his middle period, Beyond Good and Evil,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Genealogy of Morals,
and the Cheerful Science, usually
translated the Gay Science or Joyful Wisdom.
The last is famous for Nietzsche's
pronouncement that God is dead.
So that's what we'll also be going over.
To understand what Nietzsche meant
by the startling proclamation,
contrast Nietzsche's position
with that of Hegel.
Hegel tells the story of spirit, progressing
through stages, coming to self-consciousness
and ultimately realizing absolute knowledge,
which they say it's tempting
to identify with God.
And that absolute knowledge
is unity with the mind of God,
that is certainly what Plato indicates as well
as the Christian theologians like St. Augustine
and the mind of God is specifically at the
outermost horizon of the cosmos, where the past,
the present, and future are
experienced simultaneously.
So Nietzsche rejects not only the
existence of God as defended by Christianity
and other religions, but also an absolute in the
possibility of absolute knowledge in any sense.
He embraces Hegels historicism
or thought is needed relative
to his particular historical
epoch in which we find ourselves,
but he rejects Hegel's identification
of constant dynamic principles
governing the unfolding of human thought.
That's the thesis, antithesis, that's the
dynamic principle, the dialectical principle
of history that Hegel says that's constant.
Not the [inaudible] categories of space, time,
and causality, those might evolve and change
from one epoch to another, but the
dialectical process of I'm claiming this,
you claim the opposite, and then
someone synthesizing the two,
that is constant says Hegel.
And here in these introductory notes
they're saying Nietzsche rejected
that even the dialectical process was
an absolute eternal fixed law of nature.
So, then continuing here, the progression
of human thought, Nietzsche contends,
is not reducible to principles of logic
or rationale, dynamic or otherwise,
indeed it is to a large extent, irrational,
driven by a will to power and other factors,
there is no reason to expect that it will reach
some ideal fixed point of complete knowledge.
In fact, there is no reason to
expect it to progress at all.
Human thoughts sometimes advances,
sometimes retreats, sometimes bogs down,
and sometimes detours, well I'll
point out where Nietzsche does say
that there is a very definite fixed pattern
of philosophical progress and
that pattern is the circle.
As a spoil alright, it's Beyond Good
and Evil number 20 shows it very clearly
that all the philosophers of history fall into a
very definite fixed sequence which is determined
by the logic of the grammar of the
language that they use, he'll say.
But at any rate, this idea of the cyclical
progress of the philosophical concepts
through history that is a
point that Nietzsche makes,
so he doesn't think it's just a random chaos.
He implies things like that occasionally but
ultimately his idea is this eternal return,
is one of his most famous concepts.
Every single detail that you've ever experienced
will happen again after an enormous span
of time, that repeats itself in every
detail, so the cyclical progress
of history is a pattern for
Nietzsche that I'll address.
But, getting now into Human All Too Human,
so I'm just going to do that one first
because it comes first in our reading, so it's
Part B, question 7, I'm trying to get here
without turning off our, alright good, so
question 7, part B, how is Nietzsche's critique
of the metaphysical world in aphorism
number 9 in Human All Too Human smaller
to Berkeley's critique of matter?
So page 499, here's what
Nietzsche says; metaphysical world,
that's the title of the aphorism, it is
true, there could be a metaphysical world,
the absolute possibility of it can hardly
be resisted, we regard all things by means
of the human head and cannot cut it off.
The question remains nevertheless, what
of the world would still be
there if one had cut it off?
Alright, so what he's saying, he's talking
about the a priori categories of thought.
The space and time are the categories of
thought that frame out sensations and then cause
and effect is the main category of thought
that helps us link those sensations
together in a meaningful way.
And Kant said, we can't know
the thing in itself,
because all we can know is
what's been filtered to us
through our a priori categories of thought.
So that's what Nietzsche's talking
about, we can't cut off the head
so what would the world be like when our
head is cut off, when we're not perceiving it
through these categories of thought?
So he says, the question remains nevertheless,
what of the world would still be there
if one had cut it off, this
is a purely scientific problem
and not very likely to worry people.
But everything so far that has made metaphysical
assumptions valuable, frightful, delightful,
is passion, error, and self-deception.
The worst methods of attaining
knowledge, not the very best,
have taught us to believe in them.
That means the idea of another
world beyond our senses.
If one uncovers these methods as the
foundation of all existing religions
and metaphysical systems, one disproves
them, the possibility still remains
but one can do nothing at all with
it, let alone base happens, welfare,
and life on the spider thread
of such a possibility.
So the spider thread, I think is important to
keep in mind because according to the Hindus
and Plato, the absolute ideas of the
outermost horizon, the ideas of God's mind,
are connected to us down here by a thread of
destiny is what Plato called it in the End
of the Republic, in the Myth of
Er, the near death experience.
And the Hindus call it Akshara, and one of the
Upanishads, I'm trying to remember which one,
but they talk about the ethers woven
with the past, present, and future,
and then there's this spiritual thread
that links from the outermost ether
to the internal spheres of the universe, with
earth in the middle of this hollow cavity.
So at any rate, a spider
thread of such a possibility,
you might have been thinking along those lines
because he was certainly aware of that history.
So he says; the possibility still remains,
means there might be a metaphysical world,
but one can do nothing at all with
it, let alone base happiness, welfare,
and life on the spider thread of such a
possibility, one could assert nothing at all
about the metaphysical world
except as other, as another world,
inaccessible, incomprehensible to us.
It would be a thing with
negative characteristics.
If the existence of such
a world were well-proven,
then knowledge of it would nevertheless stand
firmly as the most useless of all realizations,
more useless than knowledge of the
chemical analysis of water would be
to the sailor in the midst of a storm.
Okay, so remember there is a metaphysical
world, we can't prove that there isn't,
but even if it exists, it's useless
to us because it's inaccessible to us
so that is very similar to what Berkeley
said about matter on page 470 of our book.
Let me go over there, Berkeley says in
the dialogue between Hylas and Philonous,
Philonous is representing
Berkeley's own philosophy
and Hylas is representing John Locke's
philosophy that there are primary
and secondary qualities of matter, we
understand, we only know the secondary qualities
which are taste and color, they're subjective
opinions, what tastes sweet to you is bitter
to someone else, what's red to you might look
gray to a dog or someone who's color blind,
so those are just created by the
primary qualities interacting
with our own subjective faculties.
The primary qualities are extension in
space, shape, and there's other ones,
but the main one is extension
substance extended in space,
this unthinking substance extended in space.
That's a primary quality of
matter, it has extension.
Is it large or small?
That's your subjective opinion,
but it is extended in space.
And it's there, outside of
your mind, that's the theory,
that's John Locke's empirical, empiricism.
And Berkeley says that's, how could you prove
that there's unthinking substance extended
in space outside of your perceptions of it?
It's impossible to prove and there's no reason
why you should even think that it is there,
we experience ideas in our mind, the sensations
of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
Why do you want to add a whole other
world of unthinking matter outside
of our empirical experience,
it's unnecessary, it's useless.
Maybe there is, I can't prove
there isn't some mystical idea
of an unthinking substance you call matter
outside of our minds, but there's no reason
that it doesn't help our philosophy
and there's no way to prove it.
So I'll just read here, page 470; Philonous
says, my aim is only to learn from you the way
to come at the knowledge of material beings,
whatever we perceive is perceived immediately
or mediately by sense, which is immediate, I
see it, I touch it, I taste it, or by reason
and reflection, oh, I remember something
and now, so that's mediated by your memory.
There's the thing that happened and
your memory of it and that's so.
But as you have excluded sense, pray show me
what reason you have to believe their existence
or what medium can you possibly
make use of to prove it?
Either to mine or your own understanding, how
do you, you admit you can't perceive matter
with your senses, all you perceive
with your senses are sense perceptions,
and they don't exist in matter,
the primary qualities
of matter don't reflect our sense
perceptions, so you can't perceive matter,
you only perceive sense perceptions.
So then you must understand
it's thereby using some sort
of a rational theory so explain
that theory to me.
Here's what Hylas says, to deal ingeniously
Philonous, now I consider the point,
I do not find I can give you any good reason for
it, but thus much seems pretty plain that it is
at least possible such things may really
exist and as long as there is no absurdity
in supposing them, I am resolved
to believe as I did
until you bring good reasons to the contrary.
Philonous says, what, with an exclamation
point, sounds like Nietzsche, is it come to this
that you only believe the existence of material
objects and that your belief is founded barely
on the possibility of its being true?
Then you will have me bring reasons against it,
though another would think it
reasonable the proof should rely
on him who holds the affirmative.
Alright, so there is the basic
material to work with if that's going
to be the exam question that
you use on exam three.
So going now to Part A, question 5;
compare Nietzsche's the Cheerful Science
to Plato's Phaedrus, the Taittiriya
Upanishad and the Katha Upanishad,
keep the idea of the horizon
of the cosmos in mind.
Alright so, the Cheerful Science, I already
read aphorism number 108 where he says
after Buddha was dead, his shadow was
still shown for centuries in a cave,
a tremendous, shiver inducing shadow.
God is dead, but given humans as they are,
there may be caves for thousands of years
in which his shadow is shown and
we still have to defeat his shadow.
So I don't want to disturb my neighbors
too much, reading Nietzsche with all
of the exclamation points that he has.
So there's the preface and then we skip
to aphorism 124, and then to aphorism 125.
So I might as well just read through most of
it to give you an idea of what he's getting at,
but the main things, so aphorism number
124 is in the horizon of the infinite.
So remember, in the Phaedrus, Plato says the
absolute ideas, the idea of goodness, you know,
the idea of the good, which contains all of the
other ideas; the idea of justice, and beauty,
and courage, as well as the idea
of tree and rabbit and water
and everything you can experience through your
senses, is a reflection of some absolute idea.
We saw that in Plato's different
dialogues, the Republic,
but here we're comparing it to the Phaedrus.
Those ideas, the sources of reality,
the unchanging simple forms of being,
exist at the outermost horizon of the cosmos.
Nietzsche would have been aware of that, he
read Plato's dialogues in the original Greek,
he didn't read Sanskrit by well but his friend
Paul Deussen did and he read the translations
of the Upanishads, he knew about
the ether, so if God is dead,
that means the horizon of
the cosmos is not God's mind.
So how did we wipe away the whole horizon?
He was thinking almost certainly in
terms of that ancient philosophy of God,
it was the Christian St. Augustine
carried if forward, so did Dante,
so that's what we're going to keep in mind here.
So I'll just read, I might skip a sentence
or two, but I'm going to just keep flowing
on aphorism 124 and 125, so 124 is; in
the horizon of the infinite, he says;
we have left the land and
gone to sea, we have burned--
so every single sentence
has an exclamation point,
so I'm going to just give a little emphasis,
we have left the land and gone to sea,
we have burned the bridge behind us, even more
we have destroyed the land behind us, now ship,
look out, look ahead, beside you lies the ocean.
To be sure, it does not always roar, every
now and then it lies there like silk and gold
in a fantasy of grace, but hours will come
when you will recognize that it is infinite
and that there is nothing
more terrible than infinity.
Oh the poor bird that fell free and now
pushes against the walls of this cage,
woe if homesickness for the land strikes you
as if there would have been more liberty
there, and there is no longer any land.
So you get homesick for the land,
there is no longer any land,
that's it, the horizon of the infinite.
We've left the land behind us, I'm interpreting
that to mean there is no ground of being,
so the horizon of the infinite ironically is
the ground of being in Plato's philosophy.
But if you don't believe in God and the
ideas of God's mind, then there's nothing,
you're going to be left floating in an
empty, meaningless space without any way
of knowing what's up, what's down,
everything is morally relative,
all knowledge is impossible if there is no God.
That's the land, the land is disappeared,
there's only now an ocean of possibilities,
which is reminiscent I think,
or not reminiscent,
more foreshadowing quantum
mechanics, the quantum,
the world view inspired by quantum physics.
And Nietzsche, we'll talk about physics and how
it changes our philosophy and we should left it.
So now, aphorism number 125, the Madman, let
me make sure that this camera is still going.
So now, the madman, alright
I'm just going to read here,
a madman comes to tell everyone God is
dead, and they're astonished to hear it,
some don't believe in God and they mock him.
Others do believe in God and escort
him out of the church, so, the madman.
Have you not heard of that madman who, I'm
screaming already because I'm just preparing so,
have you not heard of that madman who lit a
lantern in the bright morning, ran to the market
and cried incessantly, I'm looking
for God, I'm looking for God!
As there were many who stood
together there who did not believe
in God, he excited much laughter.
Is he lost, said one.
Did he wander off like a child, said another.
Or does he keep himself hidden?
Is he afraid of us?
Did he go to see emigrate?
In such a way they laughed
and yelled in disorder.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced
them with his gaze, where is God, he cried.
I will tell you, we killed him, you and I, we
all are his murderers, but how did we do it?
How were we able to drink of the sea, who gave
us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon.
So there's the key quote for exam
question 5 in part A. What did we do
when we loosed this earth from its sun?
Where does it move now?
Where do we move?
Away from all suns?
Don't we continually fall backwards,
sideways, forward and all directions?
Is there still such a thing as up or down?
Don't we wander as through an infinite nothing?
Don't we feel the breath of empty space?
Didn't it become colder?
Doesn't night follow night?
Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning?
Do we still hear nothing of the noise
of the grave diggers who bury God?
Do we still smell nothing from the divine
decay for God's to decay, God is dead,
God remains dead, and we killed him.
How can we comfort ourselves,
the murderers of all murderers?
The holiest and most powerful one
the world possessed bled to death
under our knives, who will
wipe this blood off us?
With what water could we clean ourselves?
What ceremonies of atonement?
What holy games must we invent?
Isn't the size of this deed too large for us?
Don't we have to become gods
just to appear worthy of it?
Okay, so now there's, he's bringing in this
idea of the Ubermensch, which he makes famous
in his next book, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, there is no God.
The only way to endure that fact is to become
a kind of god-man, so he'll go on to say,
there was never a larger deed and
whatever's born after us will belong
to a higher history than all histories so far.
Here the madman fell silent and gazed at his
listeners again, they too were silent and looked
at him in astonishment, finally he threw his
lantern on the ground, it broke into pieces
and went out, I come too early,
he said, it is not yet time.
This tremendous course of events is still on
its way, it has not yet reached the ears of men,
lightning and thunder require time, the light
of the stars requires time, deeds require time,
even after they are done, in
order to be seen and heard.
This deed is more distant than the furthest
stars and yet they have done it themselves.
So again, the horizon of the cosmos
is where the most distant stars exist.
And I'll bring in here at this point, the
history of physics which Nietzsche was talking
about in Human All Too Human, and all of his
books, has led us full circle back to this idea
of the omniscient horizon of the cosmos.
That the past, the present, and the future,
according to holographic string theory,
which unites general relativity and quantum
mechanics, they're all interwoven at the point,
the spherical point from
our perspective on earth,
where space is expanding at the speed of light.
Everything's recorded there and
radiates in with the echo of the big bang
on these little one dimensional threads,
like the spider threads that Nietzsche talks
about in Human All Too Human, what we read
earlier, to create this holographic illusion
of three-dimensional objects
unfolding through history.
So Nietzsche's bringing it up, the deed
is more distant than the furthest stars
and yet they had done it themselves.
It takes time for light to travel, it
travels at this absolute speed of light,
but it still would take, what is it,
13.7 or 13.8 billion years ago is
when the big bang occurred, so you know, light
out from the big bang that's expanding outward,
that's how long it would take for it to get back
to us, but at any rate, my main point here is,
Nietzsche's making us think of the horizon
of the cosmos, which he introduced us
to in aphorism 124, in the
horizon of the infinite.
So God is the horizon and that's why he talked
about wiping away the horizon with a sponge.
But here he's bringing up the idea we
killed God and he's identifying that act
with the most distant, furthest stars, and
it takes time for this deed to be known.
So I'm just going to finish off here
on page 502; it is said that the madman
that same day forced his
way into different churches
and therein intoned his requiem
aeternam deo, eternal rest to God.
Let out and called to account, he answered
in each case, what are these churches
if they're not the tombs and crypts of God?
Okay, so now we will compare that to
the pertinent sections of the Phaedrus,
and that would be back on page, I believe
2-- I don't want to, alright, so page 257,
forum Plato's the Phaedrus, so Socrates
as he's talking about life after death,
in between reincarnations, here's what happens;
the reincarnating souls, they follow one
or the other of the demigods, and then so he
says, but when they go to banquet and festival,
he's talking about the demigods, but
when they go to banquet and festival,
then they move up the steep to
the top of the vault of heaven.
The chariots of the gods in even poise obeying
the rain glide rapidly, but the others labor
for the vicious egos heavily weighing
down the charioteer to the earth.
So that was the metaphor of those two forces
pulling, two winged horses pulling a chariot
and the soul is in the chariot but you've got
your sense desires as one rebellious horse
and the other one is your passion,
which obeys the intellect and tries
to force the wayward sense desires
in line with the intellectual goal.
But almost inevitably, the sense desires win
out and pull the soul back down earthward,
away from the horizon of the cosmos.
So this is the hour of agony and extremist
conflict for the soul, for the immortals,
when they are at the end of their course, go
forth and stand upon the outside of heaven.
The revolution of the spheres carries them
around and they behold the things beyond.
But of the heaven which is above the
heavens, what earthly poet ever did
or ever will sing worthily, but I'll describe
if for I must dare to speak the truth
when truth is my theme, there abides the very
being with which true knowledge is concerned.
The colorless, formless, intangible essence
visible only to mind the pilot of the soul.
The divine intelligence, alright so when the
soul can get you out to the heaven of heavens,
outside the horizon of the
cosmos, that's where you will,
your horses can feast on the absolute ideas.
Of beholding you know, knowledge
absolute in existence absolute,
in the revolution she beholds justice
and temperance and knowledge absolute,
not in the form of generation or of
relation which men call existence,
but knowledge absolute in existence absolute.
Beholding the other true existences and
like matter, and feasting upon them,
she passes down into the interior
of the heavens and returns home.
So, on the right hand column on
page 258 he says, but the soul,
which has never seen the truth, will
not pass into the human form so you have
to see these absent forms
to become a human being.
That's what differentiates us from
the animals, that's what reason is,
the ability to connect the sense perceptions
to their absolute ideas at
the horizon of the cosmos.
So, for a man must have intelligence
of universals and be able to proceed
from the many particulars of
sense, to one conception of reason.
That's the absolute forms of knowledge.
This is the recollection of those things
which our soul once saw while following God,
when regardless of what we now call being,
she raised her head up towards the true being
and therefore the mind of the philosopher alone
has wings, this is just, for he is always,
according to the measure of his
abilities, clinging in recollection
to those things in which God abides.
In beholding them, he is what he is,
and he who employs aright these memories
as ever being initiated into perfect
mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect,
but as he forgets earthly interests and is
wrapped in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad
and rebuke him, they do not
see that he is inspired.
So, the madman makes illusions
to this idea of the horizon
of the cosmos being the place
where God's ideas exist.
God created the universe, when God creates a
tree, he refers to his idea of the perfect tree.
All of the different pine trees, oak
trees, maple trees, and every other tree,
are all like fractal fragments of the
absolute tree which contains all of those.
They all radiate from God's idea of tree, which
exists interwoven with all the other ideas
at the outermost horizon of the cosmos.
The whole ensemble of absolute ideas,
the spherical container of the cosmos,
and the central point we learn in the dialogue
called the [inaudible], that would be the idea
of the good, it contains all
of the other absolute ideas.
So in the Gay Science, number 124 and
number 125, Nietzsche's saying, you know,
how did we wipe, what sponge did
we have to wipe away the horizon,
how can you erase the mind of God?
Do you understand what this means,
there's now no longer any ground of being,
there are no moral absolutes
by which to guide our behavior.
Now we have to become like
God, because God is dead.
So that is the comparison to--
