https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0W7yQhFCG2w
So, the existentialists, this is what they were concerned about. You know, and the locus of their concern was basically… It was basically Nietzsche. And you all know that… The reason I concentrate on Nietzsche and also on Dostoevsky is because I think those two people summed up the 19th century. I really think that. And that the problems that they laid out and predicted would unfold in the 20th century were the problems that unfolded in the 20th century. So they got their predictions right. And I think they got their causality right too. And given the inability of social scientists, including psychologists, to predict large-term mass events, the fact that these two people managed it 30 to 40 years before the events unfolded, and even longer than that, seems to me that it’s pretty much worthwhile to consider them psychologists. And certainly Nietzsche thought that of himself, and so did Dostoevsky for that matter. And they had immense influence on people like Freud and Jung and Rogers, all the people that we’ve been studying. Their thinking is lying underneath every issue we’ve discussed. This is Nietzsche’s… one of Nietzsche’s great statements. Of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently, the advent of nihilism. Our whole European culture is moving from some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe. Restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that’s afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect, as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside. Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical extension of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had. So one of Nietzsche’s claims, for example, was that as Christianity in Europe transformed itself into science, he felt that one of the advantages to the Catholic domination of Europe for so many centuries was that the mind of the Catholic adherents who took the discipline seriously, or the dogma seriously, learned to interpret all events under the schema of a single theory. He thought about that as a form of discipline. So you could imagine that if I want to teach you how to theorize, I might teach you a theory and have you adopt it. And Nietzsche’s point would be that, well, that means you know a theory, but it also means something else. It also means that now you know how to theorize. And the important consequence of learning a theory may not be the theory. It may be that you’ve learned to theorize. Now Nietzsche also pointed out that once you learn to theorize, you can separate yourself from the theory that gave rise to that knowledge. And so you can start to theorize even about the theory that you mastered. And he thought that’s what happened to Europe as a consequence of its domination by Christianity, especially because of Christianity’s essential insistence on the utility of the truth. Now he thought that was transformed after Catholicism into scientific investigation, but that the spirit of theorizing and truth remained intact, and then that the consequence of that was that the European mind was disciplined by a dogma, then it freed itself from the dogma, then it turned its power on the dogma and noted that the dogma itself seemed to be grounded in nothing that you could get a grip on, the way you grip things with an empirical mind. And so it fell apart. You know, and that’s not saying much more than science posed a fatal challenge to religion. But it’s saying it in a much more profound and interesting way. And it also explains why he makes this claim, that nihilism is the logical conclusion of the great values and ideals. So he didn’t think about nihilism as a counter proposition, say, to dogmatic Christianity. He thought about it as the logical outcome of that. So now you think, well, is that relevant? Why is that relevant? Well, I think it’s relevant for a lot of ideas, for a lot of reasons. The first question is, or the first observation might be, that a tremendous amount of mental illness, and this is an existential claim, is grounded in nihilism. When someone who’s depressed comes to see you, what they often say is, I can’t see any point in life. And that isn’t what they mean. What they mean is, they see the meaning of life as suffering, which is a meaning, right? And that that’s not bearable. And then the question is, given that, why bother with it? And that’s the fundamental question of suicide. And it’s a philosophical question. I think it was Camus who said that the only real philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide. Now, you know, that’s a little dark. I mean, maybe old Camus could have used some SSRIs, but you get the point. And it’s inappropriate, in my estimation, to even discuss something, even to discuss depression with someone who’s depressed, especially if they’re intelligent and open, and therefore more tilted towards philosophical wonderings, without actually addressing the issue. Why live in the face of suffering? Okay, so that’s one problem. To the degree that you will find it difficult in your life to build anything solid under your feet that you can stand on and believe, have faith in, let’s say, you’re going to be adrift. And the reason for that is, a lot of the things you’re going to have to do will be difficult and they’ll involve suffering, which is also an existential claim. So the existentialists, for example, they don’t make the same claim Freud does. Freud claims that, in some sense, that the normal person is mentally healthy, apart from the mild distress of normal life. And then in order to be psychopathological, you have to have been hurt. And maybe multiple times. There’s other things that could contribute to that, but the existentialists would say, no, no, no, let’s just wait a minute here. Maybe the fundamental condition of human beings is nihilism and suffering. And that something has to be produced to counter that in order for life to be tolerable. Well, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable proposition. Now it’s a strange proposition, because I’ve seen, in my lifetime, I’ve seen people who are tormented by existential ideas, who can’t get them out of their mind, ideas that relate to the meaning of life, and then other people, and concern about death, for example, and the extinguishing of everything that seems to have any value. It’s a primary concern with them. And then I’ve seen other people for whom those questions never seem to arise. Now I think those people are, first of all, I think they’re conservative people. I don’t think they’re very open, and I think they’re probably rather low in neuroticism. So they’re not philosophically curious. They don’t go up chains of abstractions. And even if they do, they don’t necessarily get disturbed in the most profound areas of their being by the questioning. But that still leaves plenty of people in the other category. Now, the nihilism. Well, you know, there’s… Nihilism and atheism are closely related. I don’t think they’re identical by any stretch of the imagination. Although I think it’s difficult for atheism to describe why it’s not essentially nihilistic. And that’s Dostoevsky’s big criticism, because Dostoevsky’s claim was that without any fundamental value assumed, then there’s no reason why you can’t do anything you want. And that’s his famous line, if there’s no God, then everything is permitted. And all of Dostoevsky’s novel writing is an exploration of that idea. And sometimes it’s an exploration of what that idea might mean if it was acted out in the life of a given individual. And so that would be, say, crime and punishment. And another would be, say, in his book, The Devils Are The Possessed. It’s an examination of what that idea means if it’s gripped by an individual who has social and political ambitions. And that’s when Dostoevsky basically prophesied, so to speak, that one of the consequences of the death of God would be the rise, basically, of communist totalitarianism. Because essentially that’s what he predicted in The Devils. So that’s pretty dead-on accurate prediction. It was really quite stunning to me when I came across it. And Nietzsche made exactly the same prediction, by the way. And so for those two men, the death of an ultimate meaning system, especially one that you see when you think about something like European Christianity, it’s misleading in some sense. Because the system of beliefs that constituted European Christianity and other great belief systems wasn’t 2,000 years old. It was like 25,000 years old. You can think about it as beginning at year zero. But it’s a mistake from a historical perspective. The ideas that profound religious traditions are predicated on are generally grounded in ideas that are much, much older than the traditions themselves. And so in some sense, at the end of the 19th century, when things fell apart for us and we could no longer rely on our history predicated morality to guide us, it wasn’t merely that we lost an overlay, a psychological overlay that had been laid on humanity for 2,000 years. It was way deeper than that. We don’t even know how old those ideas are. We have some idea about how old they are. They’re at least as old as written culture. But we also know that the people who have been brought into the mainstreams of history, as the world has united, the people who were not literate had mythologies that drew from the same themes. And some of those people, as far as we can tell, had lived a lifestyle that was essentially unchanged for 25,000 years. And so the Australian Aborigines are like that. So there’s plenty of evidence that these ideas are extraordinarily old. And what that means is that when we separate from them, in some sense, not only do we separate from our philosophical presuppositions, but we separate from the historical consequences of our biology. It’s a serious problem. And I think that’s partly why it’s very difficult to distinguish between someone who’s nihilistic and someone who’s mentally ill. That’s not a radical claim. I mean, people, especially who are on the depressed side of the distribution, will tell you that they’re nihilistic. You know, they may not use that terminology, although they often do. I just can’t see any point. It’s like, well, why does that matter? Why does it matter? It seems to be a fact that it matters. That’s an interesting fact. That’s a phenomenological fact, in some sense, because one of the things that Heidegger pointed out, and he was a founder of the Phenomenological School, was that your primary orientation to the world, he thinks in a strange way, that your primary orientation to the world was one of care. So you could say, well, what characterizes your experience? What sort of creature are you? And Heidegger’s answer would be, well, you’re a creature who cares about things, in so far as you’re engaged in the world, your primary orientation is one of care. And you can think about that as a value, right? It’s a consequence of your value orientation. God only knows where that comes from. Part of it’s biological, part of it’s developmental, part of it’s historical. It’s very, very complex. But if you stop caring about everything, you’re in trouble. And that’s one of the things that seems to indicate that caring is actually a fundamental reality. You stop caring about things. You don’t stop suffering. And it seems that unless the caring counterbalances the suffering, you can’t maintain an even keel. And that’s partly because it doesn’t seem just, right? I mean, when terrible things happen to people, they always say, well, two things. How is it that being could be constituted in this manner? Like what the hell’s going on at the fundamental levels of reality that such suffering has to be the case? You’ll certainly ask that if you have a child who’s diagnosed with cancer, for example. Or you might think, well, why is this cruelty, as it appears, necessarily aimed at me right now in this place when, hypothetically, it could have not happened at all or perhaps been visited on someone more deserving? Which is the good remain, the good are punished and the evil remain unpunished, something like that. So that produces, for human beings, that produces a cry of, it’s a cry for justice. How can the world be constituted that way? And that seems to be built into us. Those aren’t questions we can just avoid. They’re questions that will arise in your psyche. They’ll arise as fundamental questions when sufficiently terrible things happen to you. So the existentialists would say, well, those are conditions of existence. You’re just stuck with that. It’s part of human nature. It’s part of human being to be perplexed by those questions. And the question is, at least in part, is there any way of answering them? Nietzsche said, we require at some time new values. Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure. It is an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. Now that’s a typical Nietzschean phrase, because there are three profound ideas in that sentence, and each one is in a different phrase. So Nietzsche said at one point, I can write in this sentence what other people write in a book. And then he said, well, what other people can’t even write in a book. And this sentence is a good example of that. So what does he say? Well, you know, if you see that people are suffering and in trouble, one thing you can say is that the reason for that is that the economic system is unjust and they’re layered along the bottom, and that’s the fundamental cause of their suffering. But Nietzsche doesn’t allow that to be a causal interpretation, because he says there are multiple ways of interpreting your position, and mere absence of material luxury does not necessarily destined you to one perspective or another. Physiological degeneration. People are unhappy or suffering because they’re ill in some manner. Well, you could make that a matter of definition by saying that if you’re suffering or unhappy, you are ill, but that’s not a causal argument. It’s just a different way of categorizing the data. And Nietzsche would reject that, because he would also note that there’s some correlation between physiological health and meaning in life, but the correlation doesn’t imply causality. And even if it did, the relationship is by no means perfect to the degree that you would want a relationship to be before you accepted it as relevant. Or corruption of all things. Well, that would be the idea that being itself is evil, like an evil trick, which is what Tolstoy said, by the way, when he wrote his Confessions. Because Tolstoy, at the height of his intellectual power, he was the most famous novelist in the world and unbelievably well regarded, well, throughout the world, but particularly in Russia. And he was a very, like a socially benevolent man and well regarded for his wisdom. For years, he was afraid to go outside with a rope or a gun because he thought he would either hang or shoot himself. And the reason for that was that he had been struck by the idea that life is so unbearable that it should be eradicated. And he couldn’t think his way out of that. And it was a form of thought that was actually very characteristic of intellectuals in Russia during his time and in his place. I mean, Dostoevsky wrote about exactly the same sorts of things. But even Tolstoy noted that merely observing that the world was a corrupt and evil place was not necessarily enough to tilt people towards nihilism because there seemed to be people who weren’t nihilistic despite the fact that that seemed self-evident to him. And he thought Tolstoy actually turned to the Russian people. He was very entranced by the idea of the folk and folk wisdom. And he turned to the Russian people as a source of new inspiration, like the peasantry. And Tolstoy actually fought for the freedom of the peasantry. And he felt that their simple faith, so to speak, was something truly admirable rather than something pathetic and weak from an intellectual perspective. He strove to emulate that criticism-less faith. But of course, he couldn’t do it because once you’ve taken a bite out of the apple, there’s no going back, so to speak. Nietzsche says, distress whether psychic, physical, or intellectual need not at all produce nihilism. That is the radical rejection of value, meaning, and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather, it is one particular interpretation, the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted. The end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality, which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God. The sense of truthfulness highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history. It’s a rebound from God is the truth to the equally fanatical faith. All is false. An act of Buddhism. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. All lacks meaning. That’s rooted in Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, because he believed that Christianity was exceptionally morally flawed, because all it offered its followers was the possibility of salvation and redemption from their suffering after they were dead. It was projected into some other world, which, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, alleviated people of their local responsibility to try to improve things here and now. Jung’s comments about that were essentially that it was the proto-scientists’ recognition of the fact that the spiritual salvation that Christianity promised was no longer sufficient that motivated the development of science. So for the early Christians, this is part of the tension between Christianity and science. For the early Christians, the idea was that the earth in some sense was ineradically corrupt and that all you could hope for in your earthly life was suffering, and that you should accept your suffering and hope for salvation in the future after you’re dead. Well, obviously that philosophy appeared insufficient for people. Jung’s hypothesis about the development of science was that a counter-fantasy developed in the unconscious of the Europeans, which was that the material realm, which had been defined as evil and therefore not worthy of any study or any pursuit whatsoever, actually held the seeds of the redemption that was lacking. And so that was Jung’s commentary on the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone, because the alchemists who were proto-scientists were trying to find a material substance, that would be the Philosopher’s Stone, that would offer its holders wealth, health, and eternal life. And so you think, well, why are we pursuing science? Well hopefully, because we think it’ll do us some good, here and now, right, in our bodies. And so Jung regarded science itself as stemming from that compensatory dream. It’s a brilliant idea. It’s actually the only idea I’ve ever read that seems to do a reasonable psychological account for the emergence of science as a discipline. It’s a very strange practice. You know, you have to narrow your interests tremendously to be a scientist. You have to focus on one set of phenomena that might appear as useless to contemplate as how many angels could dance on the head of a pen. You have to devote decades to the study of that thing to make incremental progress. Why in the world would people ever be motivated to do that? Well Jung’s interpretation was, well, there was a deep counter movement towards the over-spiritualization of the psyche. And that was the revaluation of matter and its possibilities. Well Nietzsche believed that Christianity, as it stood at the end of the 1800s, was an untenable philosophy because he thought it had abandoned its moral obligations by escaping into some beyond, and therefore damned life as it was actually lived by human beings. So he felt that the demise was a good thing. He points out one other thing, and this is the difference between having a theory and then learning to theorize. He says, look, if you’ve been raised in a tradition, whatever that tradition happens to be, you have a belief system, whatever that belief system happens to be, and it falls apart on you at any one point, you suffer for two reasons. The first is your belief system fell apart. And that’s not a good thing. It leaves everything unfixed and open, and you drown in possibility in a sense. That’s a Kierkegaardian phrase. But the second consequence is even worse. Once you’ve learned that one belief system that’s solid could be demolished and fall apart, then it’s very difficult ever again to have any faith in any belief systems whatsoever. So not only do you become a doubter of your own creed, let’s say, you become a meta-doubter, which is the doubter of all belief systems, while in the step from that to nihilism, maybe those are exactly the same thing. You could think about that in some sense as the disease of the critical rational mind. It can saw off any branch that it’s sitting on. And the utility of that is leave no stone unturned. You’re supposed to question things, and the utility of that is you learn new things. But the price you pay for it is that you’re not necessarily ever certain about anything. And you could say, well, maybe you shouldn’t be certain about anything, but you can forget that. You’re going to have to act as if you’re certain many times in your life. When you choose a permanent mate, for example, if you do that, which you probably will, because you’re university educated, and university educated people still do that, although no one else does. And you’re going to pick a career, and you’re going to make decisions one after the other about which, if you’re not certain, you can’t make, in which case you have no life. You’re just a whirlwind of chaos. So you’re stuck with the necessity of following a course of action, which is acted out certainty, that your intellect cannot regard as appropriate. And that’s hard on people. Why should I choose this instead of this? Why should I act this way instead of that way? You know, I don’t know is not a very useful answer when you’re a creature that’s as cognitively able as we are.