okay so today we are going to talk about
one of my favorite philosophers and I
don't mean that that I agree with
everything he says by any stretch of the
imagination but but I do mean that that
he is just lovely to read especially if
the philosophy you're used to reading
and stuff like Immanuel Kant or even
worse John Rawls who are just brilliant
thinkers but they write constantly as if
they're constipated I mean that's really
the only way that I can put it I think
John Rawls in particular I mean it's
just it's awful it is awful writing and
I give a salute to anyone who is able to
actually get through any of this work
without falling asleep or getting a
headache I just for the record I
literally fell asleep when I had to read
Rawls when I was getting my masters I
had to read the entire theory of justice
which is a huge book and and I couldn't
at first I kept falling asleep and then
finally you know because I was so behind
on readings in class I finally figured
out that I had to stand while reading
him and I got through it that way but
but it took a lot of trial and error and
a lot of pain frankly anyway I mean
that's that's a whole other thing so
let's get into it so before Twitter you
know came along and made biting sarcasm
mainstream and before Richard Dawkins
came along and turned an angry
form of atheism into a social movement
and even before Jordan Peterson
began getting famous by
bumbling his way through misreadings
of philosophy texts
there was the original angry atheist
troll Friedrich Nietzsche. Now it's
difficult to overstate just how
important and insightful and troubling
and and even downright frustrating
Nietzsche can be and in my opinion is.
He's a notoriously unorthodox thinker he
eschews systematic treatises in favor
of pithy, inflammatory, offensive often
and sometimes hilarious aphorisms
he's every bit as readable essentially
as Kant is unreadable or Rawls, heaven
forbid, but because it's so easy to get
lost in his sublime use of language it's
equally easy to miss what he's actually
saying and indeed there's one famous
person who misread Nietzsche really
quite badly. Actually, there are a few
famous people who did that and as you
may have noticed more than a few of
these figures come from the FAAAAR right of
the political spectrum and this brings
me to a question that that always
comes up and should always come up in a
class that devotes any time to Nietzsche
and that's the question of Nietzsche's
politics. The question of where Nietzsche
falls on the political spectrum is a
hotly contested one. Is he a leftist? Tthat
is, does he prize equality over hierarchy?
Or is he a right winger? That is, does he
value hierarchy and authority over
equality? Traditionally, in my experience
if you ask a right-wing Nietzschean
they'll point to the very
well-established facts that he loathed
democracy and praised hierarchy as
evidence
that he is ultimately a right-wing
thinker and ask a leftist Nietzschean and
guess what they'll claim? That his
atheism, his relativism, and his aversion
to any final capital T truth
so to speak makes him a leftist, at least in
spirit if you know not necessarily in
word. The truth is that each is not gonna
be a slave to your labels man but if I
can be serious for a second
my left-wing academic friends have a
point. He was fiercely individualistic
and that's a quality quite frequently
and you know maybe more than a tad over
simplistically associated with the left.
Furthermore, his skepticism towards any
you know final capital-t truth informed
a lot of mid 20th century French
philosophy in particular which was
almost universally left-wing though I
really really want to quickly emphasize
that there is nothing inherently
left-wing about skepticism of truth but
that was the trend in left-leaning
French academic departments in the 70s
who really loved their Nietzsche
furthermore he was a truly fierce
opponent of anti-semitism.
He broke what was likely the most
rewarding relationship of his entire
life, which was his friendship with the
composer, the German composer Richard
Wagner
because Wagner was among many other
things a virulent anti-semite. Nietzsche
broke off contact with his sister
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche because she
went off to Paraguay with her husband to
found a German ethno state free from
racial undesirables so while anti-semitism
I mean don't misunderstand me it's not a
quality that is
always confined to the right or to the
left even though it's more associated
with the right thanks to Nazi Germany
it's worth mentioning here because he he
does write in ways that sound a little
suspicious, frankly! You no doubt noticed
this yourselves while reading the
genealogy you know there he writes at
various points about Jewish hatred and
that's what gave birth to slave morality
and of course slave morality that sounds
bad right?
And sure enough he does have plenty of
criticisms—no shortage of criticisms—of
Judaism as a religion and an ideology
but you know I mean it's this this this
desire to ask the question you know hey
if it looks like a Nazi if it goose-steps
like a Nazi, and I guess quacks like a
Nazi
you know then isn't it a Nazi? I mean
that's a good question to ask and the
answer I think today is, well, yes! But I
think we have to treat writings from the
19th century even the late 19th century
a little differently. I mean if you heard
someone today speaking openly about
Jewish this and Jewish that and you know
it's—maybe it's almost entirely negative
it would be entirely reasonable
to assume that this person falls
somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun
on the political spectrum. But again
Nietzsche was writing in the late 19th
century well before the Nazis took
over in other words and back then his
way of speaking wasn't so you know
associated with race hate. However he was
absolutely right wing in a lot of
significant ways. That fictional
right-wing academic friend that I quoted
at the beginning of this slide is
absolutely right:
Nietzsche did prize hierarchy and he
prized strength. He DID loathe equality
and democracy and in that sense he is
absolutely and fundamentally a
right-wing thinker. And I realize that
that this may strike the American ear as
odd, since in this country I think we
tend to associate right-wing politics so
strongly with religion. But that's
actually a very narrow and and frankly
false misconception of religion in general
and Christianity in particular—since I
think that's the most relevant
religion for us here in America and
especially in the Ozarks—has been
utilized by the political right in
America in ways that the American Left
has just always failed to utilize it. Or
not always, but for a long time. Now
there's a good case to be made that
America doesn't really have a left and
it hasn't for over half a century but
but that's another rant for another time.
In any case it has not always been true
that right wingers in America or
anywhere have a monopoly on religion or
that religion has a monopoly on being
right-wing. Just giving you a brief
idea of what I'm talking about, one of
the foremost progressives of the early
1900's and late 1800s I believe
was this guy named William Jennings
Bryan. He's considered today one of
America's great populist and orators
this guy was a progressive who would
make Bernie Sanders blush and yet and
yet he was an incredibly religious man
who actually went on to argue in the
famous Scopes Monkey Trial against the
teaching of evolution. This was another
guy in other words he was you know too
big for your labels man. Then there is
Richard Spencer, the white nationalist
most famous probably for getting punched
in the face but also famous for throwing up Sieg Heils at a
neo-nazi conference. Now Spencer calls
himself a conservative, he identifies
with the Republican Party, and he is an
atheist. He's one who idolizes Nietzsche,
as a matter of fact. All of this is to
say that that I think we have a very
inadequate view of what constitutes left
and right in this country and the
reality is that religion in general and
Christianity in particular has given us
as many progressives and you know
outright socialists and even communists
sometimes as it has Jerry Falwells and
Mike Pences. And atheism has given us
plenty of Richard Spencers. Christianity
knows no left or right and once you
understand this I think you've got one
less obstacle in your way on the journey
to understanding Nietzsche. So before we
get into Nietzsche proper I want to talk
a bit about what the philosopher and
historian Paul Ricœur called the
masters of suspicion. This was a group of
three 19th century philosophers
including Nietzsche who agreed on pretty
much nothing but were nevertheless
united by a sort of common modus
operandi. So let's let's actually open up
Ricœur's text, why don't we. But after that okay so
let's look here at the outlined part. If
we go back to the intention they had in
common the Masters of suspicion we find
in it the decision to look about upon
the whole of consciousness primarily as
false consciousness. They thereby
take up again each in a different manner
the problem of the Cartesian doubt—
remember that from the like the very
first class?—
to carry it to the very heart of the
Cartesian stronghold. The philosopher
trained in the school of Descartes knows
that things are doubtful, that they are
not such as they appear, but crucially he
does not doubt that consciousness is
such as it appears in itself or to
itself. In consciousness, meaning and
consciousness of meaning coincide.
Since Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, this too
has become doubtful; after the doubt
about things we have started to doubt
consciousness itself. So think about what
Descartes was doing with his method of
doubt. He wanted to arrive at something
certain—anything—so he used this
methodological skepticism, you could
really call, it by imagining an evil
demon had fooled him about everything
that he believed he knew and clouded
his senses with all this false sense
data. And in the end, Descartes couldn't
be certain of anything. Anything but one
thing, of course: Descartes couldn't be
fooled about the fact that he was
thinking; the fact that he was conscious.
So for Descartes it seems there was at
least one undeniable truth in this crazy
old world. But what if consciousness
itself were called into question?
so does this mean the Masters of
suspicion are just skeptics on steroids?
Definitely not. And Ricœur tells us as
much in the very next paragraph: "These
three masters of suspicion are not to be
misunderstood however as three masters
of skepticism. They are assuredly three great
destroyers. But that of itself should not
mislead us. 'Destruction,' Heidegger says in
Sein und Zeit, is a moment of every new
foundation including the destruction of
religion insofar as religion is in
Nietzsche's phrase, a 'Platonism for the
people." It is beyond destruction that the
question is posed as to what thought
reason and even faith still signify." What
this means is that Nietzsche and Co
aren't merely saying, "well you know we
just can't know if consciousness as we
know it can be trusted." No, they are doing
something much more radical than that.
What they're saying is not only can what
we call consciousness not be trusted, we
don't even properly understand what
consciousness even is. For Freud, what we
think of as consciousness in reality
masks a complex web of desires and ways
of containing said desires, not to
mention a whole sea of unconscious
drives right below the surface. For Marx,
consciousness was far from being
something we can control or really be
conscious of in everyday life is in
reality determined by the ideology of
the ruling class, the capitalists, which
is itself a product of a society's
material or economic conditions. And as
an aside, I've always thought that a good
albeit slightly over simplistic
way of beginning to understand marks in
media are to see them as something very
close to polar opposites. Marx—who you may
know as being the most important
communist theorist—was very much someone
that Nietzsche would have accused of a
propagating slave morality. And for his
part, Marx would have found Nietzsche
to be an insufferable example of the sort
of nobility-worship or really rich-worship that capitalism is predicated on.
And to be fair to both, neither would
have been entirely correct in their
estimation of the other. But they'd be
close enough to, you know, get in some
pretty heated tweet battles if they were
around today. Anyway, as for our boy
Friedrich he saw the ultimate root of
behavior as being an unconscious drive
he called the will to power. Now
Nietzsche never set out in any
systematic fashion what the will to
power was—of course he never set
anything out in a systematic fashion so
this is not too surprising—but it's
pretty clear from his writings what he
was talking about, and to my mind he
describes it most clearly in section 13
of Beyond Good and Evil, which is another
book of Nietzsche's that I have not assigned
(you're welcome) and he defines it
here he defines the will to power as the
desire to discharge one's strength. In
other words, this is the drive to
dominate, but not in the sort of of
brutish way that you're probably
thinking of it. For instance it's
possible to dominate through generosity.
Think of it this way: the generosity of
the truly generous is itself a
manifestation of will to power
because generosity is an indicator
of strength. If you're talking about
generosity of spirit, it's an
indicator of strength of spirit; if
you're talking about generosity is it's more commonly
talked about today, as generosity with
money, that's an indicator of
financial strength, financial dominance,
and so forth. So please don't
misunderstand Nietzsche as saying that you know everyone's just a brute
looking to bully others. The
truth is a lot more subtle than that, as
it often is—or even really usually is with Nietzsche. And the will to power is indeed
fundamental for Nietzsche. In fact he
says it's more fundamental than the will
to survive! And you know maybe you think
that that's a bit of a stretch, but if
you can understand that he DOES think
that, I think it's helpful for
understanding the genealogy of morals in
general. So how about that genealogy
morals eh? As you may have noticed this
is not the kind of genealogy that your
granddad uses on the computer machine
that he make makes you set up
whenever you visit. However that kind of
genealogy can actually be quite useful
for understanding the kind that
Nietzsche is engaged in. So think about
it this way: the genealogy software that
your grandpappy
uses traces his genetic lineage, right?
Well the kind of genealogy that
Nietzsche is engaged in traces the
historical lineage of morality: how it
developed over time, the factors that led
to this development...It's like a
conceptual genealogy and what Nietzsche
is trying to do is show
what factors made what
we think of today as morality morality.
And he begins by doing what Nietzsche
does best, which is making fun of people.
Specifically he makes fun of "these
English psychologists." He doesn't ever
say who exactly he has in mind, but it's
almost certainly people like this guy,
Jeremy Bentham. And that's him right here—or rather it's his corpse, which he
insisted in his will be put on display
for future generations to...enjoy?
Don't worry, though, that head is fake.
Actually the real head fell off ages ago.
And Bentham is most notable as the
inventor of the moral theory called
utilitarianism. And utilitarianism is, as
I'd mentioned in an earlier class, the
moral theory that tells us that the
morally correct action in any given
situation is the action that maximizes
utility—or "happiness" in Normie-
speak—for the greatest number of people.
And this leads us to some, well, pretty
agreeable conclusions! You know, like, if a
scientist discovers the cure for a
disease that's ravaging humankind, for
instance, then he or she is, according to
utilitarianism, morally obligated to
share the cure with humanity at large
even if not doing so, like for example if
they kept it secret and sold it for
profit, would make him or her filthy rich.
Of course his particular brand of
utilitarianism also tells us that if it
meant saving the world we should torture
a small child to death. That's not what
bothers Nietzsche about Bentham though
Nietzsche thought it was just, well, dumb
to pursue happiness for its own sake. I
mean pigs pursue happiness for its own sake. Pour
some slop into the trough and watch him
go! And boy he thought the British were
dumb pigs. Dumb and boring. And Nietzsche was the kind of guy who thought that
calling someone boring was as bad as
calling them a child a torturer. Nietzsche
was also a humanities guy. Bentham and
his fellow English psychologists were
science guys. They were adherents of what
you may remember from the philosophy
religion lecture I called scientism,
this belief that that science can tell
us literally everything that there is to
know about everything. So these guys
believed in the power of reason and
induction. Nietzsche believed in the
power of poetry and history and music and
he believed a moral theory that ignored
the history of morals was DOA, ok,
dead-on-arrival.
So he gave us a history of morality. It
is of course a history that favors
Nietzsche's own pet conclusions, but he
doesn't try and hide that. History is
messy, and any grand historical
narratives or stories are of necessity
ones that we impose on history with
benefit of hindsight. It's not—it doesn't
exist in history right? These are just
interpretations of historical event
events, and as Nietzsche says at one
point, "there are no truths, only
interpretations." So ever the consistent
relativist, Nietzsche acknowledges the
fact that this account favours his own
conclusions and he takes a stance where
he's like, "is my theory true? Well you
know maybe! But doesn't really matter.
what matters is it
useful for life." And this is one way in
which Nietzsche differs drastically from
previous thinkers. You know, despite being
German, he is in many ways I think the
Godfather of American pragmatism. If you
remember pragmatism from my lecture on
skepticism and truth, Nietzsche doesn't
care all that much if his historical
account corresponds to reality in some
one-on-one sense; what he wants is his
account to be useful for us when we
start creating NEW and in his mind
healthy values. And we're gonna have to
do that any day now if we want to
improve as a species. You know, if
Nietzsche is right. The thesis of
Nietzsche's first essay can't be summed
up in seven words, but if it could it
might be "good and evil versus good and
bad." In fact that is roughly the title of
the first essay. In Nietzsche's account
of things, the so called master morality
of the Greek nobility didn't distinguish
between good and evil in in the way we
think of those terms. Instead they
distinguish between good and bad and in
the noble aristocratic ethics (if you
could even call it that) you can think of
these two words in terms that I think
all of us as Ozarkers will understand:
Hipster versus hillbilly. Now if you find
this dichotomy slightly offensive as I
do, then good! Nietzsche wants to offend
you!
He always wants to offend you, because
that's how he wakes you up! Or at least
that's what he would say. So the noble
class, or "hipsters" if you will, they're
good in the good versus bad sense.
They're hipsters, okay, so they do what
hipsters do: they sit around digging music art beauty
and just generally being above it all.
Hillbillies are bad for nobles—
I mean hipsters. Bad is really just
something or really just everything that
good isn't. It's like the difference
between good and bad music: good music is
catchy and melodic and innovative and
speaks to something deep in the human
spirit. Bad music is—you know it's,
it's lame. It's stupid. It's not evil, it's
just boring and that's because good and
bad in the whole you know quote unquote
knightly framework are ultimately
aesthetic judgments not moral ones.
What's an aesthetic judgment? Well, it's
the kind of judgment that we make when
we see a painting. Is the painting
beautiful? Yes? Well then it's good. Is it
ugly? unskilled? Well then it's bad. Bad, in
other words, is just whatever isn't good.
It's not some cosmic moral force in
a constant battle of good but what
happens after the slave revolt in
morality? Well here's the thing
the so-called slave revolt in morality
takes everything bad, okay, bad according
to the nobles: everything that's humble,
modest, subservient, plain, and says, "wait a
second; actually, these are all good
things!" and they're not good in the sense
you know of the noble sense of "I listen
to some good music last night." Because
after the slave revolt in morality, good
becomes a moral phenomenon and I think
section 13 of the first essay explains
this really well:
"But let us return the problem of the
other origin of the good, of the good as
conceived by the man of ressentiment
demands its solution. That lambs dislike
great birds of prey does not seem
strange, only it gives no grounds for
reproaching these birds of prey for
bearing off little lambs. And if the
lambs say among themselves, 'these birds
of prey are evil; whoever is least like a
bird of prey but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?' There is no
reason to find fault with this
institution of an ideal, except perhaps
that the birds of prey might view it a
little ironically and say, 'well we don't
dislike them at all, these good little
lambs. We even love them! I mean, nothing
is more tasty after all than a tender
lamb!'" Notice how the lambs or the slaves
or hillbillies or I guess whatever most
offends us, the Lambs frame
good in terms that are entirely reactive.
They don't define goodness in an active
sense. Like they don't invent it out
of whole cloth. They don't invent new
values, okay, but rather a reactive sense
where they say, "you know, goodness is just
everything the hipsters aren't. They
think they're better than us? No, we're
the good ones! And we're good in a more
important sense: we're good in a moral
sense." Meanwhile the birds of prey, the
hipsters, are still calling the
hillbilly lambs good by noble
standards—that is to say, by aesthetic
standards. They're not saying the Lambs
are morally good, they're saying that
they're good in the sense that they
taste good: they are aesthetically
pleasing to the senses (specifically the sense of taste). And then
there's evil, which is yet again defined reactively by
the hillbilly lambs. It's just everything
the hipsters call good, but it's not
merely a reversal of good and bad:—it's a
change in their very nature, okay, because
evil is different from bad. Evil—I mean
bad was just kind of parasitic on good,
right? In the noble conception, bad was
just whatever the good wasn't, right, but
with the slave revolt in morality, on
Nietzsche's account evil becomes an
equal and opposite force in the good/evil framework, okay, the
one that comes after the slave revolt in
morality. So here evil, as opposed to bad,
I mean anyway like I just said it's
almost like an equal and opposite force
to good. Or you know not really to good
in the noble sense, but to the reimagined
post-Judaic conception of good. And there.
Yeah, you see that backs me up totally.
So are hillbillies bad? That's the
question right? Well, yeah! The nobles
would say we are. You know, if
we're all the things that Hillbillies
are so often accused of being in
you know the media and so on, you
know we're uncultured, we're plain, we're
miserly, and we wouldn't know good art if
it slapped us in the face. But you know
what? Hillbillies or slaves or whatever
you want to call them—they conquered the
entire world with this new value system.
Judaism became Christianity and then it
took over half the globe. Then Islam
comes along and splits off from
Christianity and it takes over even more
of the globe to the point where today, it
is fair to say that our entire world
is dependent on this initial Jewish
reversal of values. So no, Hillbillies are
not stupid. In fact, they are supremely
clever. They are the reason that we have
philosophy. I'm not joking this is this is
Nietzsche's totally sold on this. They
are the reason we have philosophy and
this is really the point at which all of
the far-right Nazi-type readers
of Nietzsche seem to stop reading. They just assumed that he is on the side of master
of morality and that everything
everything hillbilly sucks. And then of
course they always equate master
morality with, you know, "white" morality or
"Aryan" morality, or whatever. It's
kind of funny how that works, right? But
that isn't it at all. Nietzsche doesn't look back on master
morality with this sense of nostalgia. I
mean, okay, maybe a little, maybe a little,
but that is by no means the sort
of primary thing that he's doing.
Nietzsche wants to create NEW values. In
fact, he wants everyone to create their
own set of new values. Each individual—I
mean, as I mentioned before, he's fiercely
individualistic and he wants these new values to be ones that aren't
merely parasitic on judeo-christian
values or on noble values—so I mean
going back to the question of stupidity, in reality, if anyone's dumb
it's the hipsters! I mean, they just...what
do they do? What are they good for? What
do they do? They just sit around all day
like, you know, Buzzkillington, seeking
higher pleasures and looking at etchings.
PETER: But so far you're a bigger buzzkill than
Buzzkillington.
This is the best party I've ever been to! BUZZKILLINGTON: Evening everyone! I thought
it would be very droll if we all sat
down and looked at etchings. Would you
like to join me Peter? PETER: uh well we're kind of partying here BUZZKILLINGTON: Good! Hold this up now.
Here's a fellow attempting to ride a
bicycle. But he's having some trouble
isn't he? Would you like to know why? PETER: Why 
BUZZKILLINGTON: Because he's a Scot [chuckles]. Now who here likes a
good story about a bridge? And if we're
going to beat this hillbilly metaphor
until it's dead—and we absolutely will—I'm going to mention one of my favorite
films of the past few years: Tucker and
Dale vs. Evil. Hopefully you've all seen
this already, and if you haven't, you
really should (assuming you
can stomach some comic gore). But in the
film, Tucker and Dale are hillbillies
whom all the dumb rich kids think are stupid
but the thing is that Tucker and
Dale aren't actually stupid. Okay, well
maybe Tucker is—I think he's the guy on
the right—but they're resourceful and
even clever and in a way it is I think
the ultimate sort of slave morality
movie, in a good way! I mean it depicts I
think I mean obviously it doesn't depict
slave morality, it's not that deep.
But I think it depicts it in in a
way unintentionally that Nietzsche maybe
would have liked it to have been
depicted, which is depicting it in in
really all its glory, as well as it's
sort of lamer aspects, as he might say.
Anyway, it's just a brilliant and
hilarious film and I just wanted to
work that in there. So I hope you found
this quick stroll through all the ins
and outs of the Genealogy of Morals
helpful. It is not intended to be
anything but
introductory because I really want you to get all this information, as much as possible
at least, from the text. It is a really
subtle read and an important read
that I think really needs to be
understood by reading it, and not just,
you know, listening to me talk about it.
But I hope you enjoyed it I hope it was
useful, and I hope you will maybe find more Nietzsche to read. Or, you
know, or don't. I mean, if
I'm speaking as a Nietzschean, I just
want you to do you, man. Alright, I will
see you on Tuesday.
