Nietzsche Returns With A Hammer!

(The following was originally released as podcast episode #211 on September 22, 2024. Minor edits for clarity. Hope you enjoy! <3)

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So we live in a time where people will do some pretty moronic stuff in the name of their political beliefs.

We also live in a time where it’s common for people to look at the moronic behavior going on and say, you know, the only reason that person is doing any of that stuff is because they’re a follower of the philosophy of Karl Marx, or Ayn Rand, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli– whoever it is.

Well, another thinker whose work gets this very same kind of treatment in the modern world is the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

No shortage of people out there who will cite Friedrich Nietzsche as the inspiration behind their behavior, and there are even more people out there that blame Nietzsche for the behavior of other people that they see as problematic.

So as the resident guy that has read way too much philosophy in his life and then passes those savings on to you, I want to offer some context to Nietzsche’s work today that we’ve never gone into before. It just hasn’t made sense before this point to cover it, but it’s a great story to know– it is important to know why Nietzsche had such an impact on the history of philosophy. It’s important to understand why he described what he was doing in his work as philosophizing with a hammer.

Look, by the end of this, I’m hoping you’ll know at least some of the main arguments for why Nietzsche was doing his work, how he saw his work in the context of history– I’m hoping you’ll see that.

But what I know there’s no doubt you’ll see by the end of this is a picture of the modern world we’ve been talking about lately that has not been represented yet on any of our episodes, and it does not fit into any neat political category that we'd recognize today; if it’s even appropriate to call any of Nietzsche’s work political at all—we’ll get into the arguments for and against it.

Friedrich Nietzsche would likely say that much of the conversation we've been having on this channel lately about the state of the world and how to make it a better place is, one: remarkably naive, and two: in serious denial of certain realities about life, about history, and about the state of the universe.

This idea that we're going to have more quality conversations with each other about morality and political realities, and that those conversations are going to make the world a better place — that delusion, he thinks, is the evidence of a decay that's gone on in people's thinking.

It's the result of the decline of western society that's been going on for over two millennia, he thought. A decline whose cause can be traced back to a few key figures that we'll talk about in this episode, but a good place to start for him would no doubt be the collection of issues that he had with Socrates and his entire philosophical project as it was described by Plato.

And from here on out, I’m just going to combine Plato and Socrates and say Socrates. The two are a package deal here for Nietzsche.

If someone was reading this from the outside, not knowing much about Nietzsche’s work, but knowing who Nietzsche and Socrates are, if I asked you who you think Nietzsche believes is most responsible for a decay in western society, Socrates or Jesus, most people I’d imagine would say Jesus.

I mean, obviously. Nietzsche hates Christianity, right? The whole “God is dead” thing. Socrates is a philosopher, fan of reason. Seems like these two should be blood brothers of overthinking everything together.

But the reality is actually the opposite. As far as we can tell, Nietzsche seems to have a considerable level of respect for Jesus as a historical figure, which we’ll also explain in this episode, but as it turns out, not very much for your boy Socrates.

Should be said: it’s not that Nietzsche didn’t like Socrates personally. It’s just Nietzsche thinks that the very fact that Socrates could even get off the ground as an influential thinker, with the particular sales pitch he was bringing to the table, is more of a testament to the horrible state of Athens at the time than it is to Socrates being any sort of religious figure that’s incredible.

There were a few big problems Nietzsche had with Socrates:

The first problem is going to be his obsession with rationality.

To give context here: in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes the case that great artwork has represented in it both the energies of Dionysus and Apollo.

And what he means when he says that is that it references two very different sides to human life that are always in tension with each other.

On the one hand, you have Dionysus — that’s the Greek god representing the side of human life that is chaotic, passionate, volatile, unknown. Dionysian elements like these are important pieces of what a human life is.

But on the other hand, you can’t forget about the whole other side of this that’s represented by the Greek god Apollo. Apollonian elements, as they’re called, represent the side of life that is ordered, rational, and harmonious — which is another important piece of what a human life is.

Here’s the point: great art, for Nietzsche, and more importantly, a human life that is looking at existence fully, always has a tension between these two drives. You need both order and chaos, reason and passion, Apollo and Dionysus, to be looking at reality fully.

And the first mistake of Socrates, in the eyes of Nietzsche, is going to be removing the Dionysus side of this — the passionate, chaotic energy — and then steering western thought completely into the Apollo side of existence, strictly looking for rational, harmonious order to things.

That’s a very Socratic kind of idea. And it’s a very Socratic kind of mistake, if you’re Nietzsche.

The second big mistake that Socrates made was the creation of what Nietzsche called the Hinterwelt. People call this the other world, the real world. “True world theory” is, I think, how I put it years ago when we talked about Nietzsche. I was trying to make it relatable.

Point is: this true world theory is an idea you’ll no doubt recognize because it continuously comes up in people’s thinking in different variations all throughout the history of western thought.

For the character of Socrates, this is Plato’s world of forms. It’s this concept that we have this world that we live in. This world is but an earthly shadow.

And then there’s the ideal world, the world of forms. It’s a world that’s more important or real to Socrates, in some sense.

And as Nietzsche says, you see this same logic used in Christianity, with heaven as the ideal, and this earth as a moral obstacle course where you’re being tested. You also see it in Kant’s work, where he talks about the noumenal world, or the world of things-in-themselves, versus the phenomenal world of human experience. The binary distinction between surface level appearances and a more fundamental reality underneath has become core to European thought.

This is not a coincidence that we keep seeing this dynamic show up over and over again.

Now again, Socrates wasn’t the first genius to ever come up with this idea, but his character —it was actually Plato who was writing— was the first genius to ever do it to philosophy.

And to Nietzsche, this metaphysical dualism, combined with that obsession with rationality of Socrates, the denial of the Dionysian aspects of existence, it leads to a familiar outcome that we’ll all recognize: that this world, as flawed and messed up as it is, cannot be the place where you look if you want to find the truth.

Truth lies in the ideal world, up there somewhere, and the only way to get there is through rational contemplation — or thinking about stuff really, really well.

For Nietzsche, the problem with this is that it denies a major aspect of what life is.

It is life-denying, as he says, and what that leads to more broadly are people that prefer attitudes of renunciation about the world they live in, in favor of some higher ideal.

The basic idea is: look, this world sucks, and this other world is where things really matter. So where should our focus be going? Obviously on this other world.

And Nietzsche says this idea being systematized into a philosophy — that was one of the contributions of the character of Socrates. I mean, this is not something we see pre-Socratic philosophers do, not even Parmenides. This just wasn’t a part of their thinking.

More than that, societies prior to this Socratic turn, Nietzsche says, if you read their literature– if you try to get into the heads of the people living prior to this turn, you just get the sense that they weren’t caught up in this duality between the real and the ideal.

The world that they lived in was enough for them.

It was real to them. And more than that, the meaning in their lives didn’t need to come from anything other than the world they actually existed in. Even their gods just referenced processes that were going on pragmatically in the real world — god of the harvest, fertility god, god of the sea.

In other words, people back then seemed to affirm rather than renounce the world as it was, in a way that post-Socratic societies had seemed to move away from.

Now one of the things that becomes possible with this idea — that thinking rationally will lead you to the ideal — is the further assumption that if we think rationally about morality, then that’s also something that will get us an ideal or objective form of morality.

This is a new idea too.

And again, to add some context here, this is what Nietzsche writes about in his book On the Genealogy of Morality. That around this time of Socrates, the religion of Zoroastrianism that would later go on to influence post-exilic Judaism and Christianity — well, there’s argument to be made that it had an influence on Plato’s thinking around this time too.

The thing about Zoroastrianism is that it is one of the first times we can find in the history of humanity where it’s a religion that’s built around the concepts of good and evil.

And don’t get him wrong — people obviously thought about outcomes in the world as good or bad for them before this — but Zoroastrianism was one of the first examples we can find of there being specifically an abstract concept of the good that is written into the universe somehow. A good that is always battling against an abstract concept of evil that’s written into the universe.

That’s a fairly recent development in the scope of human history.

Well again, this concept of abstract good and evil plugs into Plato’s philosophy incredibly well.

You can see how: the ideal is going to be aligned with this concept of “the good,” and the real is naturally going to be aligned with this concept of “evil.”

Meaning in practice, what this is gonna do is denigrate people’s view of the real world.

So this naturally leads us to the last big problem that Nietzsche has with Socrates.

If rationality is how we get closer to the ideal, and the ideal is aligned with this abstract concept of “the good,” then the assumption that gets made by Socrates is that if people are doing something that is immoral, it’s really because they just haven’t reasoned about morality well enough to arrive at the wisdom of being a virtuous person.

That all evil is born of ignorance, as he famously says.

In other words, morality is something that can be taught to people. And if we teach people to reason better about morality, if we have more moral conversations, then everyone can become a more virtuous person. It’s universalizable.

More than that, the assumption is if we just have more of these moral conversations– if enough people are knowledgeable of the truth, then we will have a more moral society as a result of it.

The question just becomes: how do we convince people to have more moral conversations?

Well, to put it bluntly: Nietzsche thinks this idea is nonsense at best, and, uh, destructive to the history of the world, at worst.

See, to Friedrich Nietzsche: these abstract concepts of good and evil don’t actually exist. They are human rational constructions that allow us to make sense of the chaos of the world.

Also, this duality of these different worlds that supposedly exist — the ideal world vs. the real world — those don’t exist either.

I mean, to him, obviously they don’t exist. We can trace their historical origins. And just because abstract, objective good and evil don’t exist doesn’t mean nothing means anything.

To talk about morality at the level of the universe, to Nietzsche, is beyond ridiculous. And by the way, that assumption only opens up the possibility of people talking about ridiculous concepts like the moral progress of society, which obviously doesn’t exist in this picture, and it keeps people not talking about power dynamics that actually explain the changing circumstances that go on in the world.

To Nietzsche, what exists is the world. That’s it.

And he doesn’t resent that fact.

This is why he admired pre-Socratic societies so much — they just seemed to accept this a lot better than we do.

And this idea that there’s a linear progress that’s being made as we march closer and closer to some moral ideal, or some ideal society, this is in complete denial of our actual history.

Human history is not linear to Nietzsche. It is cyclical. Or more accurately as a metaphor: history to him was like a spiroid. We spiral forward between different levels of a lot of things — of abundance and scarcity, strength and weakness, peace and war. We spiral forward between different circumstances that people then label moral or immoral depending on how well it corresponds to their values — a set of values that’s constructed and inherited as well.

And it’s at this moment in Nietzsche’s argument here that he’s gonna make a criticism of basically every philosopher in the history of the western world — philosophizing with a hammer, as it were — and it’s a criticism that will go on to have a massive impact on a lot of thinkers that have lived since Nietzsche and the way they approach their work.

The argument is that philosophers don’t actually seek the truth when they create their philosophy.

What they actually seek is power, in the context of his will to power.

So when a philosopher arrives at a fully devised system of philosophy, a worldview, the contents of it say much more about the individual bias, drives, and personality traits of the philosopher than it says anything about the truth of the universe.

That philosophers — despite the glamorous picture that’s often painted of these people as sitting around totally unbiased, you know, just walking around their house with a magnifying glass, “I don’t even know what I’m looking for, I’m just searching for the truth about things” — the reality of the situation, to Nietzsche, is that most of these philosophers don’t start at zero and then piece together the truth through investigation.

Most of them start with a knowledge of the problems that face the philosophers of their time, then pick answers to those problems that seem right to them, and then fill in the blanks with their rational arguments after the fact.

So what that means is that the answers a philosopher arrives at are always going to end up reflecting their own personalities and bias.

And this extends to non-philosophers as well.

When a person picks a moral approach to life that seems right to them, what are they doing? Well, they’re picking the moral approach that seems right to their own bias and personality.

More on this in a second, but consider an example of this at the level of one of these philosophers from history that Nietzsche is criticizing here.

Take Immanuel Kant, for example — a guy Nietzsche had plenty of choice words about. Kant’s the guy that writes the essay What Is Enlightenment? He’s the guy that says,

“Hey everyone, you gotta remove yourself from your self-imposed immaturity, we gotta remove all this dogmatic thinking that’s been going on. Dare to be wise,” he says, “and start thinking purely for yourself.”

But from Nietzsche’s perspective, all that Kant did when he tried to come up with these categorical imperatives and this objective morality that’s written into the universe, all he did was try to use rationality to recreate the morality of Christianity in a purely secular form.

He no doubt just projected the bias that he had internalized from living in proximity to Christians throughout his entire life.

This is a criticism that actually extends to a lot of philosophers that are alive today. If you can think of a philosopher that tries to reproduce objective morality as a concept being written into the universe somehow, and more specifically if that philosopher also tries to say that that objective morality is the elimination of the suffering of people, and that that morality is universally reachable by every single person — well, what does that type of system remind you of?

I mean, from Nietzsche’s perspective, you could say that subconsciously, that philosopher is just projecting into their work two things: the teleology of Christianity, where the elimination of suffering is an ideal, and the Socratic idea that morality is teachable and universalizable.

And considering some of those people see Christianity as a type of primitive moral approach that’s based on utter nonsense, it’s pretty scandalous that they’d be making that mistake — if you agree with this criticism.

Now to Nietzsche, knowing that philosophers throughout history have been doing this, you look at it from his perspective and the optimism that came out of an era like the Enlightenment — where reason’s going to be applied to our political institutions and make them better — the optimism of the Enlightenment starts to look pretty naive.

Because if you’re Friedrich Nietzsche, you are very wary of the potential negative impacts of the egalitarian societies that we have today, that emerged out of that Enlightenment optimism.

He traces what you could call a genealogy of egalitarianism that gets us from Socrates to our modern egalitarian societies.

Step one: Socrates convinces people of this nonsense that anyone can be a moral person if they just use their rationality well enough.

Step two: Christianity comes along and popularizes a worldview of people being totally equal beings under the eyes of God.

Step three: Enlightenment philosophers come along, internalizing both of these points, and recreate our political systems under the idea that everyone is an equal, autonomous, rational agent — that our abilities to be rational are equal, that no one’s opinion is any more valuable than anyone else’s, and thus everyone should get an equal say in how things are organized: one person, one vote.

And this obviously leads society into an era of egalitarianism, liberalism, democracy, socialism.

And these things all sound wonderful in theory — especially being people that live in these modern societies that put the universal equality of everyone as the highest priority we’re shooting for.

But to Nietzsche, it sounds wonderful on the surface to say that everyone is equal.

Until you remember the obvious fact that not everybody is equal.

People are born with and develop different abilities, different skills, drives, passions.

There is a big difference between a five-year-old banging on pots and pans on the kitchen floor and a professional drummer who’s spent 20,000 hours of her life practicing the drums.

It sounds great on the surface to say that everyone’s opinion is equal — that everyone has an equal ability to be a moral person, to know about their political reality. They just gotta put in the work to have the right conversations and arrive at the right reasonable conclusions. Yeah!

That is until you realize the obvious fact, to Nietzsche, that those conversations are not getting people closer to being moral — they’re just getting people closer to agreeing with you. Not to mention the fact that this oversimplifies how virtue is expressed differently by people depending on what their individual goals are.

See, it sounds great to say that a society’s chief focus should be to maximize equality across the board. But Nietzsche thinks this type of setup leads to a very predictable outcome.

It leads to the people in these societies having a passive, reactive approach to life — where mostly mediocre people demand equal consideration to everyone else, regardless of the amount of effort they’ve put in, all the while constantly obsessing over equal representation in culture, spending much of their time resenting the other people around them for not denying reality like they do.

Now, why would this happen particularly in an egalitarian society?

Well, if everyone is supposed to be equal — if that’s the biggest goal of society — then when I look around me and I see somebody doing worse than me, where does my head go?

“This is wrong. This isn’t what our society’s all about. Somebody must be responsible for this person not doing well.”

A fact that then breeds resentment towards the people they see as responsible.

On the other hand, if I look around me and I see someone doing way better than me — well, what the heck? Aren’t we all supposed to be equal? Why do they deserve to be doing so well?

Nietzsche would not be surprised that people operating from within this cultural logic would eventually start to see every event of their lives filtered through the lens of oppression.

Constantly looking for: “How much oppression is going on here? Any way we can fix it? Any way we can restructure things overall to make things even more equal?”

This is the culture of egalitarianism.

Now the first thing that needs to be said is: don’t take this as Nietzsche arguing for the opposite here. That’s a common mistake people make when reading him, and it’s understandable. Nietzsche is not saying that we need more inequality in our political setup. He’s not saying that there’s too much equality.

What he’s saying is that when we structure things around egalitarian and Socratic principles like this, there just end up being more people out there, that statistically conform to a herd-like mentality.

And if the label of “herd mentality” starts to throw you off there — understand this within the context of Nietzsche’s work: a peek to the end of the book here is that eventually he is trying to shake people out of this herd mentality and get them to engage with life more fully. So the “herd” rhetoric is really designed to get people a little self-conscious, but it’s not Nietzsche trying to make most people feel bad — it’s just not his intention.

To him, most people choose what he calls the herd mentality. That’s just the truth.

And egalitarianism as a set of values is ultimately a moral approach, he thinks, that really aligns with you if you’re someone who is weak.

And there again is the rhetoric designed to get the gears turning in you.

To explain this point — why egalitarianism is a value system of the weak — let’s talk about Nietzsche’s views on Christianity for a second.

I go into a deeper explanation of the master/slave morality dynamic in episode #158 that we did on him and his work on the ascetic ideal. So in the interest of time, I won't re-explain everything here.

But the short version of this is that for Nietzsche:

Early Christianity, if you look at the values it embodies, exalts and makes virtues out of the qualities of weak people.

Turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

You’re told you are a good person if you possess the qualities that make you not being able to assert yourself on any situation.

Christianity then becomes a slave morality to Nietzsche, because it is the type of morality that would resonate with somebody if they were a weak person — a slave to the circumstances around them.

Remember, to Nietzsche, when we choose an ethical approach, it says much more about the person than it does about the truth of the universe.

And think of what this means: when we are forced to accept the reality of the fact that everyone is not equal, then in that world, weak people are always at the mercy of the strong.

So the weak, as one of their only forms of recourse, have to band together — or else they just get walked all over by the strong for the rest of time.

For Nietzsche, the rise of Christianity as a slave morality represents a historical victory for the weak overcoming the strong.

And similarly, he would see modern egalitarianism as a similar kind of victory for the weak.

Because here’s the thing: developing yourself and becoming a strong person requires you to be someone who overcomes your own limitations. Sometimes you have to read the thing that’s difficult to read. You have to have uncomfortable experiences, push yourself to get the things that you want — that will make you more capable of navigating whatever world you find yourself in.

But modern egalitarianism is a cultural setup that incentivizes weakness, and not overcoming those limitations. It incentivizes mediocrity, collecting ideas that other people have told you, and becoming a member of the herd, relying on the strength of the group.

I mean, the thinking is:

Why push myself to learn more about something? My opinion’s just as important as everyone else’s. If you don’t think so, well then you must be one of those people that must think you’re better than everyone else. But that’s not equality!

If you doubt whether modern society incentivizes weakness, just look around you at all of the products — digital and otherwise — that are created with the sole intention of trying to make people feel more comfortable and secure.

Comfort and security is what most people are trying to maximize in their life.

Modern egalitarianism is practically a cult that is built on a few maxims:

1. Be a weak person.

2. Enjoy the fruits of modern civilization and be comfortable.

3. Avoid suffering and discomfort as much as you possibly can. And if at any point this passive approach you have towards life, relying on the herd, starts to backfire because life throws something difficult your way, just turn to your friends for moral support or help from other people who will tell you that:

“There’s nothing you could’ve done about it. You just got unlucky, and don’t worry, the herd’s gonna take care of you. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

But comfort, to Nietzsche, is not the default state of human existence.

Neither is suffering, by the way, to Nietzsche. Again, this isn’t dualism. Both comfort and discomfort are types of sensations that lead to different circumstances, but the important thing is that they’re both part of what life is.

And somebody sitting in comfort all day is not a moral nihilist to Nietzsche.

It’s easy to make that mistake. People will say, “If there’s no meaning to anything, then why do anything? I guess I’ll just sit around and be comfortable all day.”

No, that’s not nihilism.

To Nietzsche, that’s choosing the value of comfort, and thus choosing a slave morality that could be limiting your potential. It leads to Nietzsche’s concept of the Last Man as laid out in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

To live life fearing, running from suffering, always doing an accounting of how to minimize the amount of suffering I’m going to endure, to live life running from an inevitable part of human existence is to live life in denial of the full picture of what existence is.

Again, it is fundamentally renunciative and life-denying. And the question that leads Nietzsche to his idea of the Übermensch is to say:

Okay, we know how a system of morality would be if it was created by a weak person trying to avoid suffering all the time...

But what would morality look like if it was built by someone strong? Like truly strong.

A person that starts their day affirming all aspects of life as they are. Again, living in the world rather than in some abstract ideal.

The idea would be accepting — look, life is crazy. You can’t predict what’s going to happen perfectly by rationally understanding it.

So I’m not going to deny these Dionysian aspects of existence, and in the face of that chaos, I cannot be a passive, reactive person whose highest goal is to have as much comfort and security as possible.

Suffering is part of life. Obstacles are a part of life. I’m not going to sit around obsessing over them. Instead, I’m going to face the world authentically, listen to that voice inside of me that wants to overcome my own limitations, and then create my own set of values and meaningful projects out of my interaction with that chaos — thus being one of the people truly engaging with it, not avoiding it and trying to be comfortable, the slave morality of the weak.

Well, if you wanted to do that, obviously laying out an exact blueprint for that goes against everything Nietzsche believes in.

The specific values and projects that you would embark on could only be something that you come up with, or else they wouldn’t be authentic.

And while he can’t lay out a blueprint, he does lay out one example that seems to correspond to his life and times — in other words, the values and projects that he has created.

More than that, he also thinks we can spot examples of these remarkable people that have done this by looking at our history — people where the sheer force of their authentic way of living couldn’t help but boil over into the herd of people around them that were passively consuming.

And this is where his respect for Jesus comes from. Keep in mind Nietzsche also has choice words for Jesus and his life-denial in other passages, but he also has a quote:

“There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

See, Jesus represents for Nietzsche one of these exceptional historical figures that was a radical of his time.

He faced the chaos of the world he was living in head on. He created meaningful projects out of that chaos, and then lived authentically in the name of that meaning that he created — in the face of a very painful, bitter end.

The way Nietzsche sees it: Jesus didn’t create a new religion. What he created was a new way of living — a way of approaching the reality he was in, where you could be hit with basically anything and be totally free of resentment of any type.

The values embodied by Jesus throughout the stories are all instrumental to this goal.

Now, some of these values were renunciative and life-denying to Nietzsche. But again, there’s not just one way to embody the Übermensch and to live authentically.

The true question is one of inner authenticity.

The question is: Did Jesus create a set of values and authentically engage with the world in accordance with them?

Well, yes.

Was he tested to see how real those values were, as opposed to him just saying something that sounds good?

Uh, yes. Crucifixion — check!

Well, that’s not a slave. That’s a master.

And to Nietzsche, it’s the early Christians that come after Jesus that then turn his example into a codified way of living that people can emulate.

And it’s only then that the strong approach of Jesus gets appropriated and dulled over time by the herd — again, people who aren’t engaging with the chaos. People living in a reactive way, where they’re just parroting the ideas that are given to them.

So in a sense, anybody can be one of these people who’s living authentically like this.

It’s just, to Nietzsche, in practice, the people that are actually doing it are exceedingly rare.

Like, compared to the number of people that think they’re doing it — when they’re actually constantly in denial of certain things about life, constantly looking for external validation.

Again, the real test of this is going to be:

Does this truly come from a place where you are trying to overcome your own limitations? Are you truly creating your own meaning here, or are you simply emulating the values of some actual great person in a deflated, passive way?

Because the story of Jesus’s example being dulled and appropriated by the masses is the story of human history to Nietzsche.

We are not living in a world where our political institutions and democratic participation are getting us closer to an ideal society.

Again that’s very Socratic of you, very Christian of you, but that’s nonsense.

The changes that go on throughout the cycles of history are really just the story of these exceptional individuals, overcoming their limitations, becoming great, where again the sheer force of their existence overflows, inevitably, into the herd around them, calibrating society to be in accordance with their values.

So that isn’t a process of good and evil going on. Anything that changes that you perceive to be good or bad is just some impact, of some great individual at some point in time, that either corresponds with your morality or it doesn’t.

The point is: contrary to what Socrates had to say, social change doesn’t happen because people are having more rational conversations in democracies.

For Nietzsche it almost always occurs more fundamentally on the level of a specific type of cultural elitism.

Now I get how that sounds. Nobody likes an elitist, especially in these societies we’re in where we’re all trying to look at things equally.

But what’s important is to notice what the term cultural elitism is not saying here.

It’s not saying political elitism.

Nietzsche doesn’t call for political elitism.

And cultural elitism does not mean elitism based on race, class, gender, or creed.

Now don’t get me wrong: if you’re searching for an interpretation of Nietzsche’s work that says he would’ve called for a type of political elitism, you can definitely find it.

There’s Marxist historians out there who actually do a great job all things considered, and some of them will frame Nietzsche’s work completely from the perspective of him being an anti-revolutionary.

More scholars out there would say though I think that as interesting as that framing is, this is ultimately them projecting how important they think politics is onto the work of Nietzsche, who clearly they say was far more concerned with culture and people’s individual experience of the world.

Common view is that Nietzsche is obviously influenced by politics but is not a fan of making political statements, he’s not in the business of giving rigid prescriptions of any type for that matter, and that any time that he mentions politics in his work you always gotta view that through the lens of his larger project of shaking exceptional individuals out of that herd mentality.

And see, that’s the reason why a lot of people say he could never be calling for any type of political elitism.

People that cite Nietzsche as the philosophical foundation for authoritarianism. Look, Nietzsche was clearly not in favor of authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is exactly the kind of society that keeps people locked in these narrow lanes of existence, not able to create their own values.

His point is that we need to encourage the development of these great people that calibrate society to an updated set of values that corresponds to the ever-changing state of the world, not create political systems that drive people away from that project.

And this is the claim he’s ultimately making about modern egalitarian society. It disincentivizes this individual development.

But why would you ever want to do that?

Maybe you’re someone who thinks we don’t need great individuals so much. What we need are well educated, politically engaged average populations.

Well for the people that think they’re saving the world when they listen to the news, have political conversations around a water cooler and cast their vote every couple years, consider what those people are really doing.

Few different angles here Nietzsche might be critical of:

First of all he would say clearly what you’re doing is participating in a kind of herd activity. Which isn’t bad unless you really wanted to change things.

Let me explain: I mean just by default, by participating in this democratic, political process you are supporting the very system that furthers the interests of the herd mentality. You are concerning yourself with conversations about the quality of life of the average herd member.

But more than that: what is it that people are really doing when they talk about politics? Are they Rhodes scholars?

Almost all of them are not authentically engaging with the issues. It’s just people repeating ideas that they heard from someone else that was talking about it. And then that person they heard it from is often just repeating a variation of a theme that they read from some original great person who did engage with the chaos of the world, create values, and came up with the idea in their work.

Political conversations, then, from one perspective, are just second- or third-order actual conversations that mostly happen among the herd about herd things that are going on.

It’s a fun thing to do maybe, it’s entertainment, may make you feel like you have a say in the world.

But the reality is to Nietzsche: politics is at bottom a weak person’s game.

Politicians are so often controlled by the actual powerful people that are behind the scenes.

Now this is not Nietzsche endorsing any of these powerful people behind the scenes today. I think he would say that the type of society we’ve set up allows these people to have influence at this level without actually needing to go through the tough process of overcoming their own limitations and being a true reflection of strength.

His point is not to justify their existence. It’s to say that power doesn’t fundamentally go on in the political process.

So to that you may just say: well then I’ll run for political office and I won’t let these elites behind the scenes control me! That’ll work!

Okay, even if you run for political office: what do you do then? Argue with people? Try to convince people to come over to your side?

Again to Nietzsche: arguing is a weak person’s game.

If you were truly strong, you wouldn’t need to argue, and considering how corrupt and inefficient these systems usually are, most of the effect you think you’re having on politics by arguing is an illusion anyway.

So for somebody that truly wanted to change the world to correspond more to their values, all of this for Nietzsche is mostly a distraction from the more important work of developing yourself and becoming a strong person who truly changes things.

And you can say back to that: well, not everybody can do that! Not everybody is going to do that, Nietzsche, so your whole moral approach you’re giving is horrible if it can only apply to an elite few.

But he could say back to that again: how very Socratic and Christian of you to say that.

Morality doesn’t have to be universalizable.

He’s not sure what percentage of people can possibly become an Übermensch. And by the way, the Übermensch in practice is likely somebody that doesn’t even concern themselves with being noticed by culture, or overflowing into the herd.

That wouldn’t be a goal of theirs that drives their self-overcoming, because they wouldn’t be looking for external validation.

You could be an Übermensch and just move out into the woods, each day confronting your own limitations and the chaos of the world, creating values and projects that mean something to you.

You could be that in a place where no one even knows that you exist.

You could be a scientist: each day confronting the limitations of your own knowledge and experiments, accepting the chaos of the universe you’re studying, creating new projects and values from a totally authentic place.

Nobody in culture would know who you were until the results of your work led to something incredible that bled into the lives of the rest of the people.

So I guess the safest way to talk about what Nietzsche’s saying is that if you set society up in a certain egalitarian way, it’s going to have certain consequences.

You’re going to have people that are living in those societies that have this voice inside of them that tells them to develop themself— and in these types of societies that voice is sometimes going to get squashed by any number of things: by this obsession with equality, or by them blaming obstacles in their way, or by trying to constantly remove suffering from your life in a way that is in denial of life, seeking comfort and security.

Otherwise great people in these societies he thinks will be wasted. Never developing themselves.

And again his rhetoric gets more severe the later in his work you get. Some people say it’s because his health was declining. Other people think it was because his main goal above all else is to reach the very rare person out there who might hear him, feel a bit ashamed, and shake them out of these chains that they were born into.

We need great people not living in denial of that voice inside of them.

We need the people that are going to be this generation’s cultural elites.

We need great people that are going to assist those cultural elites.

And instead of our society’s biggest goal being to provide average well-being for the greatest number, why not focus on maximizing the greatness of these diamonds in the rough?

I mean you can imagine a program like this where no one is excluded, but when we find people that show a lot of potential, we hold their development to be one of our highest, cultural priorities. Regardless of whatever political framework may or may not be in place.

And you know we started this by talking about people that cite Nietzsche’s work for problematic ways of looking at the world.

Last episode we talked about people that claim to be inspired by Freire that do things that oppress people in the name of removing oppression. And we talked about how if someone was doing that, it is ironically exactly Freire’s work that, properly understood, might help them to see the mistake that they’re making there.

Well if people look at Nietzsche’s work and they do something similar, if they see him promoting excellence and developing yourself and how he thinks we should facilitate the discovery and cultivation of these great people as the rare diamonds that they are, if somebody saw all that and took that to mean that he wants to dismantle egalitarian society and erect an authoritarian one in its place, well then similarly, just like the Freire people, they should go back and read Nietzsche’s work.

He’d have a lot to teach them if they did.

Further Reading

Secondary Sources

1. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
   
   

2. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
   
   

3. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality
   
   

4. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche
   
   

Primary Sources

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
   
   

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
   
   

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
   
   

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols