https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Noc1OH0CUBc
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So last time we took a look at three pivotal figures. Both of the two of them are in dialogue with the central figure that we were talking about last time and that’s René Descartes and we took a look at the debate between Descartes and Hobbes and how that is so current and relevant to us today in the debate around the possible creation of strong AI and what that means both scientifically and existentially to us. And we then took a look at what comes out of Descartes response to Hobbes. If you remember Descartes builds a defense against Hobbes proposal for a completely materialistic artificial intelligence computer model of the mind in terms that are drawn very strictly and I think rigorously from the central insights of the Scientific Revolution and that seems to save the human soul from the Hobbesian onslaught but we then note we pay a really, really devastating price for the Cartesian defense. We have a radical disconnection between mind and body which is radical because of how embodied your experience of yourself and your world is. A radical disconnection between mind and other minds because you only have access to other minds and if there is no possible connection between mind and body there’s no way you can read other people’s mental states off of their bodily behavior. And then we have the radical disconnection between mind and reality because Descartes gives us two competing models of how we get in touch with what’s real. One is we track the mathematical and then that is of course was picked up by positivism and people who advocate for science as our main access to reality and then the other is the cogito ergo sum that all that’s left of the contact with reality is the moment where the mind touches itself and we get this purely subjective notion of realness that’s picked up by the romantic tradition and is also prevalent in our world today and we swing between the positivistic and the romantic notions of how we decide what’s real in a completely unstable fashion. We then noted that even your connection to yourself has been undermined because the Cartesian project is so radical in its withdrawal it’s so radical in its disconnection from mind body world tradition history culture that all the I is that’s in the cogito all that is guaranteed to exist is this moment of self-awareness so you end up with this completely atomic completely autobiographically empty self adrift in the terrifying infinite spaces that Pascal talked about and we talked about Pascal’s response to Descartes and how Pascal was convinced that Descartes attempts and Pascal was right about this Descartes attempts to try and deal with the anxiety of the scientific revolution by promoting a methodology of searching for certainty would ultimately come to ruin and of course they have come to ruin as we’ve said instead what Pascal pointed out is that we have lost all these other ways of knowing that were so central to the actual revolution we have all we have left is a spirit of geometry we have lost the spirit of finesse we have lost the procedural knowing the perspectival knowing and the participatory knowing that are so integral to the transformative experiences that have been central to our discussion of the axial ages legacy and of course Pascal himself had such a transformative experience and found the Cartesian framework incapable of addressing or articulating it I’d like to now pick up on what comes after Descartes because I foreshadowed at the end of our last episode that we are in a quite significant situation we are radically disconnected from ourselves both our bodies and our own minds from other people from the world from history from culture from sapiensal institutions from traditions of transformation we are radically isolated and bereft and yet we face these tremendous crises ecological crisis socioeconomic crisis political crisis mental health crisis they’re all interlocking and we face it and they’re and they’re so exigent and so pervasive and so profound and so complex that we need a fundamental transformation in consciousness cognition character community in order to really restructure our sense of who and what we are in our relationship to the world in order to address these crises now that the systematic set of psychotechnologies that have brought about such radical transformations in the past have been religion and yet part of the heritage of Descartes and the scientific revolution and the ongoing fragmentation that has followed from the Protestant Reformation is an increasing secularization of the world that’s that’s a little too simplistic I mean it’s it’s it’s bifurcated you get the increasing secularization on one hand and then the increasing attempt to nostalgically retreat to a pre-scientific model in various forms of fundamentalism which of course is doomed ultimately to a complete kind of failure but we this is happening such that for many of us a return to religion in order to provide the multi-level multivariate complex transformation that is needed to meet the crises that we are facing is not available to us precisely because we are post-religious or we are myopically entrenched within a pre-scientific model of the revolution scientific revolution that will in no way avail us with what we need in order to address these crises so either way you want to turn the religious option is not a viable one what I want to now explore is why a secular solution for many people also no longer seems viable so what I want to argue is that we face this hard problem of needing a religion that is no religion but cannot be fully secular but we don’t want it to be religious and it is filled with all this paradoxical tension and contradiction that I’ve tried to argue is the hallmark of the legacy the way I want to argue that is to try and show the responses to the meeting crisis that come after Descartes and I’m going to talk about them in terms of the pseudo religious ideologies and how we have been traumatized by our interest and bewitchment by these ideologies precisely because these ideologies have led to titanic warfare and genocidal bloodshed and so we’re trapped between we can’t return to religion and we can’t move to its political secular alternatives because of the trauma that has been inflicted by their history and so we are stuck right there is no political solution to quote the police and yet we also are not willing to return to a nostalgic and therefore impotent religious framework so we sit trapped so how did that arise so again we have to move rapidly and I mean I don’t want to trespass on your time this video series is already long but we’re moving through titanic figures here and it always is I feel a difficult thing but I want to talk about the figure of Kant and we’ll talk about Kant in a couple places so I need to introduce him here anyways so Kant is trying to deal with this fracturing in realness that Descartes has left right and the two sides the inner subjective mind touching itself and the outer mathematical and Kant brings up a question that is very important and there’s been other people have given voice to this and this is an important one which is how is it how is it that math is so good at describing reality why just accept Galileo’s claim that it’s the language of the universe we have we know long see at one point we had an answer to why math is so descriptive reality we had the Neil Platonic answer the idea that reality is ultimately grounded in intelligible form and those intelligible forms you remember the IDOS the structural functional organizations are ultimately abstract eternal etc and that’s the ultimate grounding that’s why many people who are realists in mathematics formally and explicitly label themselves as Platonists because that is a way of trying to explain how mathematics gives you access to reality when it is nothing like spatio temporal material reality I mean why is it that something like math describes physics so well and what Kant was really trying to get at is how do I get those two sides of Descartes together how do I get the side that says math is real but all I have math gives me access to reality but all I really have is access to my own mind how do I get those together and Kant comes up with a really radical proposal he calls it a Copernican revolution he thinks it’s as important as Copernicus revolution of the external world and the Kantian proposal is a very interesting one because what I think it does is is it really radicalizes things even more so Kant’s proposal is these categories these patterns of intelligibility we find in the world the mathematical properties aren’t actually there not in the sense we think they are so what Kant does is he basically makes use of a move that Occam made if you remember Occam’s razor and remember I often say people don’t understand what they’re invoking when they invoke Occam’s razor Occam’s razor basically says that all these patterns of intelligibility you think are in the world are actually in your mind right what what Kant does is says well these these ways of measuring the world mathematically they aren’t the features of the world they are the way in which experience has to be organized in order to make sense to the mind so let me try and give you an analogy for right so I’m gonna do a reverse on the analogy you see me use when we were talking about Siddhārtha Gautama the Buddha right so let’s do it the other way around the world is very blurry there’s too much and so what I have to do is I have to filter it I have to filter it so that it will fit my eye and my brain and I can make sense of it so these filters have to be put into place and so Kant’s idea was there are structures in the mind that basically act as these filtering frames it’s kind of both a combination of a filter and a frame and what they do is they impose a structure of intelligibility on experience so this is opposite to the platonic this is why it’s a Copernican Revolution it’s a complete reversal of the platonic model so the idea is I’m not discovering the patterns of intelligibility that structurally functionally organize the world what’s actually happening is this right this pattern is being imposed on the information coming in so that it will fit my mind and make sense to my mind and that’s the basis of my capacity for reasoning about the world I can reason about the world not because the world is ultimately rationally but like Occam said the world is an absurd in itself I can reason about the world because I have filtered it in such a way that my mind can process it according to its own internal grammar so you see how this is this is why it’s a Copernican reversal I’m not discovering in the world the mathematical properties of things my mind is filtering and imposing a structure on them so that it can make sense and think about them so you have to take this word and this phrase and make it really really strong your mind is making sense of things and it’s good as we when we talk about relevance we’re gonna see that there’s a deep way in which Kant is I think right you say so yeah I see how he’s he’s sort of completely inverting the world from Plato I get that right so math isn’t discovering reality math is ultimately about how the mind imposes a structure on reality so it can reason about it great all right what does that mean well notice we’ve got now the mind remember we talked about this model of the contact with the world being withdrawn and it’s being withdrawn inside the mind by Luther and then it’s being withdrawn really by Descartes now not only is it withdrawn it’s imprisoned the mind is in here and all they can get in here always has to pass through this filtering frame and for Kant that means we can never know the world as it is in itself as he famously said the thing in itself we can never know the world as it is this is why of course the Cartesian search for certainty is going to be completely undermined right so ultimately notice how this is all coming together the mind is ultimately only really touching itself it has no contact now with the world it’s not only withdrawn from the world it’s isolated and trapped within itself but it does answer the question well why does math work so well well math works so well according to Kant because that’s the grammar of how our minds operate that’s why math which seems such a mental and abstract and weird thing seems to make the world succeeds that give us access to the structure of the world it’s not really giving us structure to the access of the world it’s creating a structure in the world of experience that is makes sense to human beings now that’s right that’s a really big price to pay the price you pay for getting the two sides of Descartes back together is to get them both inside the mind and to be radically radically out of touch with the world now so you can imagine that people are upset with this this is a very challenging idea there’s there’s going to be some really important responses to this there’s going to be the romantics and Hegel but I want to concentrate on the romantic solution because I’ve already mentioned it and we’ll talk a little bit about Hegel when we talk about Marx so there’s an idea here right it’s sort of implicit in Kant right there’s an idea of right information coming in from the world right so in the problem with this diagram is it’s too simplistic so think of the filter as how to having sort of levels of processing right there’s the raw information from the thing in itself and it’s getting processed it’s coming in right and that right and then there’s all of this structure being imposed on it now this by the way is the most prevalent model in most of cognitive psychology and cognitive science where you see this Kantian grammar of trying to understand the mind is in current contrast between bottom-up processing versus top-down so the idea of bottom-up processing we talked about this when we talked about attention right is this is this is processing that starts in perception and moves towards cognition top-down is processing that starts in cognition starts from your knowledge and moves down into perception remember we talked about this when we talked about how you do how you do this right the cat right you see this is an H and this is an A and how you do that well you use the knowledge of the word to disambiguate the letters and you use the knowledge of the letters to construct the word and the two are completely interpenetrating in a completely self-organizing manner outside of it actually makes your reading possible for you it’s a condition on the possibility of you reading and so right this is the same model here the mind is imposing a structure and it’s filtering and framing and structuring the information coming in from the world so this Kantian model is pervasive through all of cognitive science and for good reason it turns out to be a very very powerful way of looking at things but as I move this way as I move into the mind right as I get inside the framework my cognition of course becomes more and more rational becomes more and more mathematically logically intelligible but think about it notice you’ve got is this weird idea now as my processing becomes more rational more logically mathematical I’m actually getting farther and farther away from being in contact with the world now isn’t that a see notice the platonic version the the platonic right reversion like a complete reversal of the platonic structure is bringing with it a reverse consequence so for Plato as you pursue rationality you move deeper and deeper into reality but for Kant right notice as I move more and more into rationality I’m moving away from being in contact with reality now what comes to mind is well isn’t the opposite then the case and think about how this is going to make Freud and Jung possible I mean you know how you get Carl Jung take Kant if you don’t know Kant stop talking about Jung because Jung repeatedly tells his readers I’m a neo-Kantian I’m through and through a Kantian he tells you that repeatedly and so if you don’t know Kant shut up about Jung because you’re not understanding Jung properly the way you get Jung is you take Kant and you take Kant’s epistemology and you add it to Gnostic mythology and that’s how you get that’s the equation for Jung so why do I say this well think about this because if I go the other way if I open the mind up to these more irrational less fully processed parts of cognition the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of my experience as I move into the right the imaginary irrational dreamlike aspects of my cognition I’m gonna lose rationality but notice what I’m gaining I’m gaining back that lost contact with the world Latchman talks about this in a really good book called the lost knowledge of the imagination right and so I think this is a misunderstanding but notice what’s going on here and this is this is one my attitude towards the Romantics is so ambivalent they’re picking up on Pascal they’re trying to recapture the lost perspectival participatory right knowledge the actual involved contact with reality but because they’re inside this Kantian framework the way that’s going to happen is by moving into right the depths of the irrational aspects of the mind because those are the parts of the mind that are closer to reality and so of course what Jung and Freud are going to do is they’re going to take that what the Romantics do about how to reach out into the world and they’re going to make it well at least for Freud is completely reaching down to the psyche for Jung it’s reaching down into the psyche and back out into the world we’ll come back to that later so this this is the main idea of romanticism romanticism ultimately isn’t about loving your sexual partner in a particular way it’s the idea that we can recapture contact with reality by moving away from the rational layers of cognition and into the irrational layers why does that get associated with love because remember in the neoplatonic tradition with the Romantics in this twisted way are trying to get back to they’re trying to get back to Gnosis and participatory knowing in that platonic tradition the quintessential form of participatory perspectival knowing is love the Romantics have they get that they’re remembering that so we move into the irrational and we’ll regain contact and of course that that relationship to the world where we’re actually in touch with the other and there’s mutual disclosure between myself and the other that’s love and so the romantic return to reality through irrationality gets connected with love and that’s how we get romantic love and we get the idea of it as a fundamentally irrational force right and you get romanticism and then you get the idea that well what is the faculty that stands between perception and reason what’s between here’s perception here the part where the thing in itself the world and here’s reason up here what’s the faculty in between that mathematically intelligible and the sensuously experienced right well it’s imagination imagination is where the mind initially imposes that order on the the raw data of experience see for us and the Romantics were very critical of this and this is something that they were right about we understand the imagination just as moving mental images around in our head and the and the Romantics made a big distinction between imagination and that faculty which they called fancy right or like phantasm right no no for them imagination right is how the mind imposes the structure on raw data so that it becomes available to reason and so the imagination is the place in which we can get closer outside of reason to the access to reality so music and art are going to be understood as giving us access through the imagination to what’s real why because music and art are where the mind seems to be imposing an order in such a way that meaning is made that we can then rationally reflect upon so you’re getting you’re getting two views now right that are coming into opposition one the older view represented by the Enlightenment I mean that in the scientific sense not the Buddhist Enlightenment people like John Locke the mind is an empty canvas and sense experience comes in and writes on it right that’s empiricism so the mind is a blank slate the Romantics have exactly the opposite view we don’t actually ever know what the world is in and of itself the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses presses itself out this is why expression is so important to the Romantics to press yourself to press out the mind in imagination presses itself on to the world and of course that’s where Jung and Freud are going to get the notion of projecting onto the world from so you have these two and that’s why the Romantics see themselves in deep competition with the empiricists who of course are part of what becomes known as the scientific model so what’s going on here is these two views the mind is a blank slate upon which the world impresses itself Locke uses the term impressions the world impresses itself on your mind or the Romantics no no the world is a blank canvas upon which the mind expresses itself and both are wrong I mean I very rarely just sort of state things but I’m really confident of this both of these models the mind of a blank slate is just overwhelmingly wrong way too much argument and evidence against it and this model of the world as a blank slate that we merely express herself onto is also wrong but what we get is we get this weird new thing everybody is swept up in romanticism see romanticism is becomes a pan-european movement it’s a movement of the arts it’s a movement in literature good to writes the Sorrows of Young Werther you have people like Beethoven bringing in right a romantic element to music right you have lots of romantic poetry you know think of Blake think of Woodsworth so you have this movement it gets taken up into religion by Schliermacher as a way of trying to understand religion it’s a pan-european movement right and it does what it’s hard to be fair to this but at least at least it appears to do what religion used to do it integrates music and art and literature and the project of trying to find and make meaning in the scientific worldview by giving you this whole framework of how you regain contact with reality one of the hallmarks of the religious quest you’re going to regain contact with reality by moving into the world of the imagination world making use of art and music and poetry and literature all of the machinery we’ll talk about this later of religion and what it’s going to do is irrationally take you into contact with reality so romanticism is the first and it is the godfather godmother of all the pseudo religious ideologies okay it looks like behaves like and performs a kind of massive transformation on culture and cognition and consciousness and people start experimenting with altered states of consciousness precisely because of all of this all of this way of thinking is why Freud is going to take a look at hypnosis etc altered states of consciousness be you know it’s some people are taking various drugs right courage and others there’s all of this experimentation precisely because of this way of looking at things but what it does right you’re paying a really devastating price for this pseudo religious ideology of romanticism right and we have and if you think that romanticism is not alive in our culture you’re not paying attention to the fact that we still understand and use the grammar of romanticism to talk about love and we even buy into at least for periods of time a romantic model of how love operates romantic comedies are these weird metaphysical perversions in which we throw away the scientific model of things and believe that somehow love is this irrational force that brings us in contact with the course of history at least our own personal history and destiny and that of another person and it’s all so much bullshit right and it’s devastatingly bad bullshit because you are still trapped where Luther and Descartes left you you’re still trapped inside your mind not really in touch with things and the only way you get in touch with him is by thinking and behaving irrationally you are trying to make this machinery of the imagination carry all of the neo-platonic weight that religion and tradition and philosophy and history carried you try to make your romantic partner take the role of all of that no person can bear that no human relationship can bear that burden so we go into our romantic relationships with unreachable expectations of how the person is going to address everything that we’ve lost in our history and of course they can’t which of course is why many people simultaneously say that row you know their romantic relationships are the things where they find or look for the most meaning in their life and the romantic relationships are those things that are precisely caused them the most trauma and suffering in their life so these pseudo-religious ideologies are really really important because they point to an attempt to try and get into words try to get into words to propositions into ideological ways of thinking everything that religions used to do for us because the problem with the romantics right see the romantics get this in one way right they get that the language can’t do it all that’s why they turn to poetry right to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower to see infinity in the palm of your hand and spend eternity in an hour there’s Blake trying to use imagery to point to a transformative experience a mystical experience but you see the problem is if you don’t have any sapiental traditions if you don’t have the spiritual exercises that hado talks about if you don’t have the systematic set of psycho technologies if you do not have regular and reliable methods and guides for these transformative experiences all you have in the end are the words and if you’re not Blake if you’re not courage when you read the poem you don’t I mean even if you can’t appreciate how great a poem it is you’re not capable of getting much from it because everything has been reduced to the words see the romantics didn’t give us anything else they don’t give us practices they don’t give us institutions they don’t give us sets systematic sets of psycho technologies they give us promises they give us images and they give us words it’s a pseudo religious ideology so it sweeps the continent but it’s like spiritual junk food it’s tasty but it’s not nutritious and so what happens to it right well it it quickly gets translated into nastier forms not without first of all of course setting the world on fire romanticism plays a big role in the rise of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars don’t forget romanticism Beethoven is writing music initially because he’s a fan of Napoleon when Napoleon crowns himself Emperor that’s when Beethoven actually abandons him this is the time we’re talking about why why would the romantics be attracted to Napoleon you see we have to be careful here there’s some very good podcasts you can listen to comparing Napoleon to Hitler oh right that’s your reaction since I mentioned the word Hitler that’s fine but right why like of course Napoleon didn’t engage in genocide but he drenches Europe in blood he launches imperial conquests there’s lots of good historians that say maybe we only like Napoleon because more time has passed but why do they like him look what Napoleon is doing by force of will and that’s what the imagination is he is pressing a structure on the world he is restructuring the world he is painting his picture onto the world here is the isolated self pressing itself out on the world imagining the world into another shape and existence so of course Napoleon is defeated and science continues to move on and what happens is right there’s a response to the failure of romanticism it ultimately fails now here here’s the thing that we have to understand romanticism and I’ve tried to indicate this to you romanticism fails it fails to actually do what it wants it sets out to do it fails to be the replacement for Christianity and in that but it doesn’t go away so the way I put those two together the fact that it fails which I tried to show you but it doesn’t go away which I tried to show you in the notion that we live with decadent romanticism we live in decadent romanticism and romantic comedies are the quintessential form of pornography in which we indulge in decadent romanticism so what happens after the failure of this great pseudo-religious ideology well there are further attempts to try and understand these romantic the irrational aspects of the psyche and its world-making capacity and the way and it’s it’s we still carrying this remember from what Akam and Aquinas the priority of the will the priority of the will so here romanticism very quickly passes into Schopenhauer who is the godfather of nihilism and notice that a lot of these names are now going to be German good to one of the founding figures of romanticism is German even though he comes to reject it later Schopenhauer German Nietzsche is German Hegel’s German Marx is German again everything keeps happening in Germany and I’ve shown you why because that’s where this history is unfolding what does Schopenhauer argue right well he completely internalizes that model of the world that we saw around the time of Akam and even in Luther he picks up on Kant but he says right let’s not know let’s use an up-down model here’s the rational part remember and it’s out of touch with reality and like the romantics here’s the irrational part right and the romantic saw that this as imagination and they saw it sort of spontaneously happening but it’s still an act of will because they talk about expression pressing out right but Schopenhauer really zeros in on this and he says no no what’s down here is arbitrary will notice that’s like God it’s like that God that we get after Akam here’s arbitrary will this is the this is the will to live the raw let’s just put it the will to live the raw will this is what drives you this is what structures this is what filters and frame it’s all of your experience this will to live of course this is gonna be important to a lot of modern discourse it’s relentless and it’s pointless because it is not rational and here’s where Schopenhauer does a twist it’s doing this but not fundamentally in service of your rational mind it makes reasoning possible but all of this right so Kant does the Copernican Revolution he inverts Protestantism and then Schopenhauer inverts Kant Kant was it that this is processing is for the sake of this but what Schopenhauer says is no no this is actually who’s in charge he says the will is like a huge man and the ego is sitting on his shoulders right this is a little machine in the service of this and if you don’t think that’s Carl Jung you better go back and read some more Jung that’s what I mean if you don’t get this Kantian heritage you’re not reading Jung very well right so Schopenhauer let’s use one of Schopenhauer’s quotes because it really really brings this out and you can see how it prefigures Freud in such a powerful way Schopenhauer says that sex is the cruel joke that the species plays on the individual because what sex is is this will to live this irrational will to live and it filters and frames all of your experience and it promises you meaning and you know fulfillment and everything that God and religion and history and then you have it and none of that accrues to you and he and he says and then what’s the difference between you who do that for 40 years and it may fly that does it for one day so we’re restlessly driven by these Iraq look at look at how again everything’s being drawn into the mind and now drawn into the unconscious irrational parts of this is where that arbitrary God has now withdrawn you know in that Lutheran Cartesian now Kantian now Schopenhauer away it’s inside of you and then and we’re just all machines and you get Richard Dawkins right we’re all just replicator machines for our selfish genes it’s not a radical idea right we think we’re doing all of this for us but it’s actually all and so for Schopenhauer is it’s this nihilism it’s this pessimism because he saw that once you remove the connection between meaning making and rationality you pay a very very devastating price for it and so what do you have there well what do you have you have a meaningless existence because it’s being shaped and framed not in contact with reality all not even contact with your rational egocentric way of it’s just an irrational unconscious arbitrary will to live that is shaping filtering and framing all of your experience with the world and then you die and what was it all for Schopenhauer has enough of the romantics left in him that he has this idea that in art and music we can become disinterested enough in our own self we can quiet the will to live enough that we can get momentary breaks momentary vacation momentary respite from this restless pointless will to live so this is how this is the godfather this is how romanticism as a pseudo religious ideology and nihilism as an existential response become inextricably linked together even though most people don’t realize it most people don’t realize that these two things romanticism and nihilism are actually deeply intertwined and closely related to each other so think about that when Valentine’s Day rolls around are you actually expressing right the contact with reality or are you merely being pushed around by the irrational will to live so Schopenhauer of course has a great follower right a person who is now very prominent because if he’s the godfather right of nihilism Nietzsche is the godfather of postmodernism so Nietzsche is a disciple of Schopenhauer he’s actually a disciple of both Schopenhauer and Wagner and Wagner represents romanticism in music breaking down so Wagner takes romanticism and he sort of breaks the last vestiges of grammar he breaks the connection to the home key all kinds of things he opens up the possibility for music becoming untethered from its tradition in very powerful ways and of course the problem with Wagner is he’s also a very vicious anti-semite and you might say what’s going on like what what’s what’s going on with Germany in this anti-semitism thing well first of all we’ve seen how Gnosticism which is running as an undercurrent as I mentioned right underneath the ryan land mystics and other things right has a possible I’m not equating the two but Gnosticism has a possible version of it that is deeply anti-semitic but more importantly right you have a connection back to Luther why would Luther say that well Luther would say that because the Jews in Luther’s mind are followers of the law and people and member Luther has an interpretation following Augustine and Paul and his own exacerbation of it right people who follow the law are people who are trying to earn their salvation the point of the law is to reveal to you that you’re completely incapable of earning your salvation and so the Jews who reject Jesus reject faith and salvation in terms of the law so the Jews are evil it’s interesting that the two great people the people are to consider to have created modern German style are Luther and Nietzsche what does Nietzsche do does he give up all of this no he takes it and he tries to invert it he keeps the notion of will he keeps the fact that it’s deeper than rather he keeps that it’s framing the world filtering he keeps all of that but he rejects a lot of the Kantian stuff he rejects the platonic stuff he famously says I hate Socrates he’s so close to me I’m always fighting him he’s got this deep conflict with the axial revolution why because he comes up with this way of responding to the nihilism of Schopenhauer with the will to power it shares some features with somebody we’ll talk about later another important Cartesian thinker we’re going to come back to Spinoza the notion of Canadas so the idea here is that everything has a will to live here for Nietzsche everything has a will to power everything is pressing itself out and the thing about Nietzsche is he thinks that this is not just a feature of our minds this is a feature of reality itself that when we’re so Schopenhauer the idea is when we’re in touch with the will to live we’re actually in touch with you know that driving force because again the most irrational part of us is the part that’s in touch with reality and you get this this will to power this irrational filtering framing thing but whereas here it’s pessimistic because it’s wearying and it’s relentless and meaningless here Nietzsche says no no turn it around stop stop being and this is his going to stop being so Christian stop thinking about all that negation as what’s right this will to power this pre-Christian desire to extend and create and master oneself in the world that’s what we need because Nietzsche sees in it something and there’s a deep insight here and and if we’re going to criticize Nietzsche and the postmodernist I don’t understand people who advocate for Nietzsche and criticize postmodernism you’ve got to spend more time getting that working out together right but Nietzsche sees something here he needs he sees a way of getting back something that was lost in this whole history how can we get self-transcendence because Nietzsche tries to understand the will to power as exactly that desire from the actual revolution to transcend oneself to go above oneself to create beyond oneself and he had his father’s a Lutheran pastor so he understands Christianity in a totally Lutheran way that Christianity is about suppressing this capacity for self-transcendence it’s an unfair reading of Christianity it certainly doesn’t capture neoplatonic Christianity Nietzsche is he’s deeply influenced by the stoics and a lot of axial age thinkers and he’s trying to bring it back but he’s right he’s blocked in some important ways by this Lutheran interpretation of Christianity so Nietzsche says Christianity repressed this and that is why we suffer but if we remove the Christian condemnation of this then the pessimistic world-wearying will to live becomes the active creative act of self-transcendence and we can get back the meaning that was lost in the meaning crisis but that’s a very dangerous way to start thinking in a lot of ways because here’s my deepest critique of Nietzsche and it’s really hard to critique Nietzsche because he doesn’t have a single voice he has many voices and they undermine and criticize each other it’s maddening and that’s why if anybody says they have sort of single interpretation of Nietzsche you have to really be careful and cautious about it because reading Nietzsche is like reading the Bible purposefully he purposely modeled himself he wrote also Sprax Arathustra to try and replace the Bible because he understood the role of myth and imagery and symbol because he’s still influenced by the Romantics but here’s my criticism see Nietzsche gets this he understands how self-deceptive we are he constantly is criticizing human beings for being self-deceptive but he can’t do anything about it he can’t do anything about it because he is reduced in his mind reason has gone through this Kantian thing and this Cartesian thing and reason is this logical framing thing he’s lost something because the problem for Nietzsche is you have self-transcendence without the machinery of dealing with self-deception because what’s the machinery for dealing with self-deception from the platonic tradition that Nietzsche rejects that’s what rationality really is rationality is ultimately about the set of psychotechnology that affords self-transcendence by training you skillfully to overcoming self-deception and because although he is so aware of self-deception because of this heritage and because he is so attracted to self-transcendence there’s a tragedy in Nietzsche which is why I believe he was attracted to tragedy because although he wants self-transcendence he cannot provide us with the machinery of overcoming self-deception other than endless critique endless satire endlessly undermining himself he is honest but he’s not capable of the rationality that is actually the core of addressing self-deception and therefore he has a one-sided model of self-transcendence enmeshed in a will to power and that is going to be a very dangerous thing and we’re going to take a look more at that when we take a look at more pseudo-religious ideologies and how they drench the world in post-Napoleonic blood next time thank you very much for your time and attention