Weltgeist

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WATCH:
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Socrates: https://youtu.be/DM78nStythg

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
02:28 Apollo and Dionysus
08:41 The Chorus
16:27 A glimpse of horror
21:02 A spoonful of sugar
24:05 The death of tragedy
26:05 Euripides
34:14 Socrates
41:03 Richard Wagner
49:03 Beyond the Birth of Tragedy
55:02 Conclusion

The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first major work. It immediately split public opinion in half: hated by the academic world, embraced by the artistic world.

Heavily drawing on the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, it features the twin concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian as creative drives in the human spirit. Apollonian art representing individuality, restraint, delineation; plastic arts, as opposed to the Dionysian; exuberant, formless, ecstasy, emotion; musical arts.

Both of these creative forces reach an equilibrium in Greek tragedy. This work deals with how Greek tragedy came to be (borne from the Greek chorus), how tragedy died (featuring also one of Nietzsche’s earliest critiques of Socrates) and how tragedy can be reborn (through the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.)

Although this work put Nietzsche on the map, he would later disavow much of its ideas while saving others. In particular, he would become disillusioned with Wagner’s art and turn against his former idol Schopenhauer. The metaphysics underpinning the entire work would also be discarded.

He revisioned his ideas on the nature of (Greek) pessimism and the role of art in a culture. Republished fourteen years after the original with a new foreword which includes a self-criticism, the work attained a unique place in Nietzsche’s larger body of work and philosophy.

Still, the Birth of Tragedy stands as an influential work, if not in philosophy, definitely in art history and aesthetics.

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Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
03:10 Nietzsche the psychologist
09:40 Nietzsche the Greek
25:01 Into the abyss
30:44 A psychology of the future
42:23 Nietzsche and cruelty
52:50 Zarathustra speaks

"He who fights monsters, should see to it that he doesn't become a monster himself. And if you stare long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

This is one of most famous yet mysterious quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. What does it mean? In this video, we try to offer an exposition of this aphorism, according to Nietzsche's own dictum that an aphorism is not understood at first reading, but requires an "art of exposition."

Nietzsche claims that he is the only psychologist so far who has dared to venture into the depths of the human soul. Western society being so strongly influenced by Platonism and Christianity that we cannot look beyond our naive belief in opposites: good versus evil, truth vs lie, egoism versus altruism.

He harkens back to a pre-Platonic view of looking at the world, in the manner of the Homeric Greeks, before Plato and his "Egyptianism" sought to capture Being in neat concepts (ideas) instead preferring a Heraclitean way of looking at things: reality and nature being in an eternal flux of Becoming.

Such a worldview would go Beyond Good and Evil and beyond the naive belief in antinomies, and would pave the way for a new psychology of the depths, a psychology that reckons honestly with the dark side within the human soul rather than explaining it away as the result of ignorance or an imperfect representation of some Platonic Ideal, a corrupt copy of a copy of "the Good."

No, says Nietzsche, the monster at bottom of many a human soul must be confronted honestly, and reckoned with as part of human nature. Only then will we be able to make way for the coming of the Superman.

As Zarathustra says, mankind needs to become more evil.

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Eternalised's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb79IM0UcJM

If we read the book the Will to Power, which is really a compilation of notes, released after Nietzsche’s death, and compiled by his sister, a different picture of the Eternal Recurrence comes to light. We see an attempt by Nietzsche to offer a kind of materialist framework in which the Eternal Recurrence is not merely a thought-experiment, but an actual state of affairs.

The problem is, that this compilation of notes is not generally viewed as a canonical work by Nietzsche. That is to say, scholars disagree on whether or not the ideas in this work truly represent Nietzsche’s own views. There is considerable debate as to the influence of his sister in the compilation of these notes. Did she make changes? Did she make things up? Did she add a word or sentence here and there? For the purposes of this video, we will not concern ourselves with these questions, but as we go on, it’s important to keep this in mind.

The entire final chapter of The Will to Power is devoted to the Eternal Recurrence. 14 notes in total deal with the subject. They present a radically different picture of the Eternal Recurrence than we saw in Nietzsche’s earlier writings.

We see how the concept of the Eternal Recurrence has become more than a thought experiment, as it was first formulated in The Joyful Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

If we take this conception of the universe as a fact, it follows that the universe was not created, but that it has always existed. It implies time is not linear, but cyclical.

The cyclical nature of time is found in other systems of thought, notably in Eastern religion, but also in Norse mythology and Greek philosophy – notably with the Pythagoreans. In fact, the conception of time as linear has only really been found in one religion: the Judeo-Christian one which has since come to dominate Western thought.

Because of this, Nietzsche finds with his new conception of the Eternal Recurrence another breaking point with Christian values. By asserting the cyclical nature of time as an actual reality instead of a thought experiment, he can deliver another blow to the Christian worldview, which fits into his greater project of bringing about a transvaluation of values.

The point is that Nietzsche has found a physical basis, not just a theoretical or moral basis, to assign a positive value to the material world.

If everything repeats itself and comes back again for all eternity, then this present moment, this material world of ours, becomes of great importance. Every moment is eternal. Every single experience of your life is now part of the absolute, part of a perpetual cycle.

Our life is not just “a lightning flash between two eternities”, as Schopenhauer puts it, but an everlasting light.

This is the most radical formulation of a life-affirming philosophy. By promoting the Eternal Recurrence from a theoretical thought-experiment to an actual, physical reality, Nietzsche seeks to affirm life in a very true and real sense. The Eternal Recurrence becomes a more serious matter. It’s the difference between living your life as if something was true, versus living your life knowing something is true.

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Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

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Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

Mentioned in the video:
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

In the Joyful Science, Nietzsche notes his surprise in how our culture came to regard love as a sweet, romantic, selfless, self-sacrificial thing. For Nietzsche, true love is actually the opposite of these things: it's about desire, about wanting something for yourself, about not being willing to share, about willing to compete with rivals and to wish for them nothing, and for yourself, everything.

He even goes so far as to say that love and greed might be the same psychological impulse, just under a different name.

But then how did love come to be associated with selflessness? The answer is to be found in the slave revolt in morals: the powerless, deprived as they were of the pleasures of love, invented an imaginary victory over the powerful: they transvaluated the value of love, redefined it to mean general love of mankind (agape in the Ancient Greek sense) so that now anyone could enjoy the pleasures of love, not just the happy few. Through a long march through our culture (Nietzsche always maintained the slave revolt in morals was a resounding success) the slaves succeeded in taking love, originally conceived as Eros, a violent, lust-filled affair with a tinge of violence in it (just think of jealousy as one of the strongest human emotions) and turned it into Agape, a kind of neutered, general, abstract "love of mankind."

The Western, Romantic conception of love is the history for a forgetting of the original meaning of love, and the heart of darkness within it, the human, all-too-human base impulses that rule our existence: the desire for power, domination, competition.

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Twilight of the Idols PART 1: https://youtu.be/5r2IflhebzE
Twilight of the Idols PART 2: https://youtu.be/nFbgzoegVNA

In the previous part of this series on Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, we looked at the concept of degeneracy or decadence and what that means on a metaphysical level. In this part, we will explore decadence through a moral lens – we will look at a tiny little chapter in Twilight of the Idols entitled “Morality as Anti-Nature.”

There are more parts coming out. If you want to be notified when these are released, please consider subscribing to the channel and clicking the Bell button.

Nietzsche will argue that a morality is defined by how it teaches us to deal with these passions. Nietzsche notes that nearly every morality thus far formulated, advocates the quelling of passion.

“…owing to the stupidity inherent in passion, men waged war against passion itself: men pledged themselves to annihilate it,—all ancient moral-mongers were unanimous on this point, "il faut tuer les passions."”

It’s not hard to come up with examples. The idea that impulsive emotion is bad, that unbridled lust or greed are problematic, that violent anger is rarely justified – these are all ideas that have become so commonplace they are barely questioned. Every single system of morality, from Stoicism to Buddhism to Kantian ethics – preaches either the control or even the annihilation of emotions.

And of course, Nietzsche singles out one system for attack: Christianity. In particular, he cites the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus says, with regards to sexuality: “if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.”

This is the prototypical example of a morality that seeks to annihilate passion and emotion.

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Schopenhauer on being alone and how to deal with society:
▶ https://youtu.be/eSbaqqDfGxU

▶ SCHOPENHAUER'S WORKS:
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3pK6xCj
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3jJa2p0
The World as Will and Representation vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3FPGkIj
The World as Will and Representation vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3FT0nFC

The hedgehog dilemma is a metaphor for the difficulty of human relationships.

(Schopenhauer’s original is about porcupines, not hedgehogs; Freud seems to have popularised hedgehogs when paraphrasing Schopenhauer in his own works.)

On a cold winter’s day, two hedgehogs cuddle close together for warm. But soon their spikes hurt the other. So they separate again. But then the cold forces them back together, and of course they end up hurting each other again.

So the hedgehogs ultimately find an equilibrium: far enough to not be hurt by spikes, close enough to be somewhat warm. A compromise that leaves them unsatisfied, but it’s better than nothing.

Schopenhauer argues that it’s better to be alone, to be your own source of warmth. While also realising that such is not possible for the vast majority of people: humans are social animals. So he advises us to ‘keep our distance’ (he even uses the English expression.)

The video goes a step further by thinking about a possible Nietzschean perspective: seeking intimacy and friendship, knowing full well that hurt might result.
We can view the hedgehog’s dilemma as something more than a simple metaphor for human relationships. It’s a litmus test on how a person views life: full of suffering yes, but does that mean we should run from it, or embrace it? In this way it lays bare the biggest difference between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

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In the third and final part of our series on the core philosophy of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, we explore his theory of aesthetics. We highly recommend you watch the previous videos in this series, on both his metaphysics and ethics, before watching this one.
Schopenhauer has sometimes been called "the artists' philosopher" because of his lasting influence on art. Art, for Schopenhauer, is a way for us to forget our suffering, even for only a short time. And music was the most perfect means to do so. Lots of artists took Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory to heart and felt emboldened in the pursuit of their craft as a result. We also touch upon his rediscovery of the Platonic Ideas.

Watch: SCHOPENHAUER Explained: Metaphysics of the Will:
https://youtu.be/i87hX_uznEQ
Watch: SCHOPENHAUER Explained: Ethics of Compassion (pt. 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAeKylqj-Xg

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WATCH:
Pt. 1: https://youtu.be/f9EVlUJyrQg
Pt. 2: https://youtu.be/XAXj06hZe5I

It is pretty well-known that Schopenhauer greatly admired both Buddhism and Hinduism. It’s said he read the Upanishads every night before bed, and at the end of his life he even taught himself Sanskrit. Let’s take a closer look at his thought on these Eastern religions.

Recall how in the previous parts we saw how Schopenhauer calls religions pessimistic or optimistic depending on how they interpret the nature of the material world. According to this classification, Judaism was optimistic while Christianity was pessimistic.

Buddhism and Hinduism of course, are both pessimistic with regards to the material world.

The Buddhistic acknowledgement that life is suffering, that earthly happiness cannot be found, the strict ascetic lifestyle of Buddhists and Brahmans, these factors are, in Schopenhauer’s lexicon, signs of a pessimistic religion: a religion that regards with contempt the material world and seeks to turn away from it through fasting, meditation, and abstinence.

The question is, where does this pessimism come from? Ultimately, the pessimistic outlook must stem from an epistemic scepticism regarding the material world. What this means is that there must be a conviction that the material world is not the world of supreme importance, that something exists beyond mere matter, that the material world is an illusion.

We see how Buddhism and Brahmanism (or Hinduism) are in fundamental agreement (even if there are some particular differences) with Schopenhauer’s metaphysical as well as moral teachings. While New Testament Christianity is certainly in agreement with Schopenhauer’s moral teachings, it is lacking on the metaphysical front. Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, score well on both fronts. For this reason, Schopenhauer ranks the Eastern religions as the most perfect expressions of truth to be found in religion.

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Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaDxR7zOymI
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud_3lkq_tAk

In the third video in our series on The Genealogy of Morals, we see Nietzsche dive deep into prehistory towards the creation of a morality of custom which leads to man's instinct for cruelty being repressed, and finally, turn inwards.
The bad conscience, in this analysis of Nietzsche, is not "the voice of God" as Kant and Christianity claim. Rather, the bad conscience is the paradoxical self-torture and self-pleasure that results from a drive for cruelty which cannot be directed externally and therefore must wreck havoc internally.
This is a notoriously difficult essay and it has been somewhat overlooked as a result. With this video, we hope to do it justice.

The fourth, and final part, is coming soon. Please subscribe if you want to be notified when it's up.

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