https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y0tGxcUaVm0
You may know, you may not, that I’m an admirer of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity. Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions, I suppose. Although he’s a very paradoxical thinker, because, for example, one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn’t believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn’t been for Christianity, and more specifically for Catholicism, because he believed that over the course of, really, a thousand years the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework. Coherent, if you accept the initial axioms. A single coherent framework. So, Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations and then concentrating on something else, which, in this particular case, happened to be the natural world. And so, Nietzsche believed that in some sense, Christianity died at its own hand. It had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth. You know, absent the corruption and all of that, that’s always part of any human endeavour. And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. And everyone woke up and said something like, or thought something like, well, how is it that we came to believe any of this? It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time, and that’s what people do. And, you know, there are reasons that Christmas trees came about, but the, what would you say, the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten. So, now Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity, because you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free in some sense, unless you had been a slave. And by that, he meant that you don’t go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality. You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery, to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific, before you might be able to reattain the generality that you had as a child. And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. But in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead, and you often hear of that as something triumphant. But for Nietzsche, it wasn’t, because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded. See, Nietzsche understood that, and this is something I’m going to try to make clear, is that… There’s a very large amount that we don’t know about the structure of experience, that we don’t know about reality. And we have our articulated representations of the world, and then you can think of outside of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about, and there’s a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about, and we don’t know them in an articulated way. Here’s an example, you know, sometimes you’re arguing with someone close to you, and they’re in a bad mood, and they’re being touchy and unreasonable, and you keep the conversation up, and maybe all of a sudden they get angry, and maybe they cry, and then when they cry they figure out what they’re angry about, and it has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument. That’s an interesting phenomenon, as far as I’m concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level, without being able to speak what they know at another. So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions, and we have all sorts of ways that we understand, before we understand in a fully articulated manner. And so we have this articulated space that we can all discuss, and then outside of that, we have something that’s more akin to a dream that we’re embedded in, and it’s an emotional dream that we’re embedded in, and that’s my personal opinion, it’s an emotional dream that we’re embedded in, and that’s based at least in part on our actions, and I’ll describe that later, and then outside of that is what we don’t know anything about at all, and in that dream, that’s where the mystics live, and that’s where the artists live, and they’re the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure. And you see, what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don’t really understand, and that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream, then we become dissociated internally, we think things we don’t act out, and we act out things we don’t dream, and that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit, and that sickness of the spirit, it’s cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation, and then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure to try to organize their thinking, and then that’s a catastrophe, and that’s what Nietzsche foresaw, you see, he knew that when we knock the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this God ideal, let’s say, that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let’s say, and the extremes of ideology, he was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, and believed and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude, predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world, and we’ve been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since, with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair, in some sense that’s the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general,