Vox

Leitura de 70 min

Taking Nietzsche seriously

Summary

Sean Illing welcomes Matt McManus, lecturer at the University of Michigan and editor of “Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction,” to discuss the complex and often contradictory philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both hosts share their personal histories with Nietzsche’s work, acknowledging his electrifying influence while grappling with the darker, politically reactionary elements of his thought.

McManus argues that Nietzsche must be understood as a profoundly right-wing political thinker, an “aristocratic radical” who rejected Christian egalitarianism and its secular offspring—liberalism, democracy, and socialism. The conversation centers on Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the “death of God” not as a celebration but as a catastrophic event that unravels the foundations of Western morality and opens the door to nihilism. They explore how Nietzsche anticipated various modern crises, from passive hedonism to violent ideological conflicts, and how his ideas have been appropriated by figures across the political spectrum, from the Nazis to the French left to today’s alt-right.

The discussion delves into Nietzsche’s contempt for the “herd,” his concept of the Übermensch, and his advocacy for a hierarchical society that would use the masses as slaves for the projects of the great. McManus and Illing critique Nietzsche’s lack of a coherent argument for fundamental human inequality and highlight the inconsistencies of modern conservatives who try to claim Nietzsche while upholding Christian values. They conclude that while Nietzsche is an indispensable diagnostician of modernity’s crises, his political solutions are repellent and dangerous, and his work requires careful, critical engagement.

Recommendations

Books

  • Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche’s book where he challenges traditional morality; mentioned by both Illing and McManus as a foundational and electrifying text they read in their youth.
  • The Antichrist — Nietzsche’s work where he expresses a begrudging respect for Jesus Christ as a world-historical figure who created a enduring faith through supreme sacrifice.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Nietzsche’s chief work, described as a secular myth prophesizing the arrival of the Übermensch to redeem human history.
  • The Birth of Tragedy — Nietzsche’s first book, which cratered his academic career but is considered a minor masterpiece exploring Greek tragedy and the dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.
  • Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction — The essay collection edited by Matt McManus, which frames Nietzsche as a right-wing political thinker and is the impetus for this conversation.

People

  • Walter Kaufman — The foremost translator of Nietzsche for American audiences, credited with rehabilitating Nietzsche’s post-WWII image by presenting him as an apolitical, bohemian psychologist.
  • Michel Foucault — French intellectual who, along with other leftists in the 60s and 70s, appropriated Nietzsche, leading to the perception of him as a radical, liberal thinker.
  • Richard Dawkins — Cited as an example of a “crude, simplistic atheist” whose bus campaign message (“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”) is contrasted with Nietzsche’s deep, active anti-theism.
  • Jordan Peterson — Modern commentator criticized for inconsistently appealing to Nietzsche while defending Christian civilization, a tension Nietzsche himself would have mocked.
  • Dinesh D’Souza — Another modern conservative figure who appeals to Nietzsche to criticize social democracy while also claiming to defend Christian values, creating an unresolved contradiction in his work.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:03:55 — Personal Encounters with Nietzsche’s Philosophy — Sean Illing and Matt McManus share their personal stories of discovering Nietzsche as teenagers during crises of faith. They describe his work as electrifying and world-changing, but also acknowledge the discomfort of encountering his derogatory comments about slaves, women, and “lower cultures,” which they initially glossed over. This sets up the tension between Nietzsche’s brilliant insights and his repellent politics.
  • 00:09:21 — The Shifting Interpretations of Nietzsche’s Legacy — McManus outlines the history of Nietzsche’s reception. After early academic promise, his work was largely ignored until after his mental breakdown, when it was appropriated by German imperialists and later the Nazis. Post-WWII, translator Walter Kaufman rehabilitated Nietzsche for English audiences by presenting him as an apolitical, bohemian psychologist. Later, French leftists like Foucault claimed him, leading to a view of Nietzsche as a radical liberal. McManus argues we have now come full circle, with a new generation of right-wing thinkers correctly interpreting him as a committed aristocratic radical.
  • 00:13:36 — The True Meaning of ‘God is Dead’ — The hosts clarify the common misconception that Nietzsche was a nihilist celebrating God’s death. McManus explains that for Nietzsche, “God is dead” describes an event that has already happened due to the rise of secular science, which grew out of the Christian ethic of truth-seeking. Nietzsche’s point is a lament and a warning: society is not prepared for the moral abyss and nihilistic crises that will follow the collapse of the foundational value system. This is contrasted with the “banal atheism” of figures like Richard Dawkins.
  • 00:18:47 — The Political Crisis of the Death of God — The discussion turns to why the death of God was a cataclysmic political event for Nietzsche. McManus explains that Nietzsche believed egalitarian systems like liberalism and socialism were rooted in the Christian “lie” of the equality of souls. With God gone, the basis for these values vanishes, revealing what Nietzsche saw as a socially Darwinian reality of fundamental inequality. This leads directly to his “aristocratic radicalism,” which he saw as the necessary replacement for Christian morality.
  • 00:23:24 — Nietzsche’s Predictions of Modern Nihilisms — McManus details Nietzsche’s predictions for how people would respond to nihilism. These include passive nihilism (hedonic pleasure-seeking), scientific realism as a new form of purity, active nihilism focused on destruction, and, most importantly, secular utopianism. Nietzsche saw liberalism, democracy, and especially socialism as the “truest forms of Christianity” because they sought to create heaven on earth. He viewed these projects with contempt for not facing the full implications of God’s death.
  • 00:28:20 — The Enigmatic Figure of the Übermensch — Illing asks for a definition of the Übermensch or Superman. McManus admits it’s unclear, even to Nietzsche, who said he himself was not one. At times, the Übermensch is described as a “Caesar with the soul of Christ”—a figure combining heroic, confident power with deep reflection. The concept grows from Nietzsche’s admiration for Homeric heroes like Achilles (vital, proud, unburdened by guilt) but seeks to integrate the psychological depth Christianity introduced. No historical figure, certainly not Hitler, met this ideal.
  • 00:32:33 — Nietzsche’s Contempt for Democracy and Egalitarianism — The conversation focuses on Nietzsche’s hatred for democracy and egalitarianism. McManus reads from his own essay, calling Nietzsche “the most profound and dark defender of hierarchical reaction.” Nietzsche rejected the French Revolution and all secular egalitarian movements as extensions of Christian morality. He feared the “leveling power of mass culture” and wanted an aristocratic society where the “herd” or “lower orders” could be used as slaves for the projects of great individuals, whom he saw as akin to different species.
  • 00:40:18 — The Right’s Core Commitment to Hierarchy, Not Tradition — McManus challenges the idea that the political right is about preserving tradition. He argues its defining feature is a commitment to inequality—the belief that superior people deserve higher status and power. Since liberal egalitarianism became hegemonic, the right’s project has necessarily been one of transformative change to roll it back, as seen with Reagan, Thatcher, and William F. Buckley. Nietzsche aligns with this but goes further, advocating militant secularism to fully embrace Darwinian inequality, unlike conservatives who want to re-Christianize society.
  • 00:47:08 — Nietzsche’s Appeal to the Modern Alt-Right — Illing and McManus discuss why Nietzsche appeals to the contemporary alt-right. In a culture where the left holds significant cultural power, Nietzsche’s subversive, transgressive, and “punk rock” energy attracts those who see themselves as a counterculture. Figures like Richard Spencer and Paul Joseph Watson use Nietzsche to justify “shit-posting” and anti-woke sentiment. While Nietzsche despised nationalism and anti-Semitism, McManus concedes his writings provide a license for violence, exploitation, and radical inequality that the far-right finds conducive.
  • 00:53:21 — Critiquing Nietzsche’s Blind Spot and Teaching His Work — McManus offers his critique: Nietzsche was a master diagnostician of resentment but only located it on the left (the weak envying the strong). He failed to diagnose “aristocratic resentment”—the bitterness of those who feel entitled to superior status and blame the “herd” for taking it away, a potent force in modern right-wing politics. In closing, both hosts agree Nietzsche is indispensable reading for understanding modernity’s crises. They advise students to read him carefully, appreciate his creativity and honesty, but firmly reject his anti-egalitarian politics, grounding their own in love and collective empowerment instead.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
  • Author: Vox
  • Category: Society & Culture Philosophy News Politics News Commentary
  • Published: 2024-07-15T09:30:00Z
  • Duration: 01:02:28

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has been a big influence in my life.

[00:00:04] If you listen to the show, you already know that.

[00:00:08] But the guy is full of contradictions.

[00:00:11] And he’s one of those rare philosophers who’s managed to cross over into popular culture.

[00:00:18] Is that Nietzsche?

[00:00:19] You don’t speak because of Friedrich Nietzsche.

[00:00:24] Far out.

[00:00:25] That’s from Little Miss Sunshine, an Oscar-winning 2006 movie.

[00:00:30] For a 19th-century German philosopher, that’s pretty mainstream.

[00:00:37] And yet, when it comes to his actual philosophy, his ideas are hard to pin down.

[00:00:45] He wrote in many different voices and in many different and often contradictory ways.

[00:00:52] Nietzsche challenged readers to live heroically.

[00:00:55] To transcend the banalities of a sick, decadent culture.

[00:01:00] The irony, of course, is that he himself was very sick.

[00:01:06] And at the end of his life, while staying in Italy, he suffered a full mental breakdown.

[00:01:16] He never recovered.

[00:01:19] The contradictions pile up in Nietzsche’s work, too.

[00:01:22] In books like Beyond Good and Evil,

[00:01:25] he tosses away most of traditional morality.

[00:01:29] But he’s also trying to warn us about why this is such a catastrophe for civilization.

[00:01:36] That has something to do with what he called the death of God.

[00:01:40] And trust me, we’ll get into that later.

[00:01:43] He’s notorious for the concept of the ubermensch, or Superman.

[00:01:49] This is an idea that Nazis would later borrow to suit their own sordid political goals.

[00:01:55] And while it’s never entirely clear what Nietzsche meant by that word,

[00:01:59] it’s obvious it had nothing to do with anti-Semitism or eugenics.

[00:02:06] So Nietzsche is a bit of a mystery.

[00:02:08] But he is, without question, a radical and inspiring thinker.

[00:02:13] Someone who anticipated some of our modern crises better than anyone else.

[00:02:18] And yet, because of how he wrote, and often what he wrote,

[00:02:23] he can,

[00:02:24] in the hands of a certain

[00:02:25] kind of reader,

[00:02:26] lead to some dark places.

[00:02:30] But,

[00:02:31] he remains an essential thinker for our time.

[00:02:35] And it’s up to us to resolve the contradictions.

[00:02:41] I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

[00:02:55] My guest today is Matt McManus.

[00:03:00] He’s a lecturer at the University of Michigan,

[00:03:03] and he’s the editor of an essay collection called

[00:03:06] Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction.

[00:03:10] As McManus reads him,

[00:03:12] Nietzsche is a political thinker,

[00:03:13] and a right-wing one at that.

[00:03:15] He says if we want to really understand Nietzsche,

[00:03:18] we’re going to have to grapple with that fact.

[00:03:21] McManus thinks that Nietzsche is the ultimate reactionary.

[00:03:25] And in that respect,

[00:03:26] he thinks that we can use Nietzsche

[00:03:28] to understand our politics today.

[00:03:31] And so I wanted to talk to him about

[00:03:32] how this weird, brilliant, singular philosopher

[00:03:35] can shed light not just on the far right,

[00:03:38] but on progressives too.

[00:03:41] But in order to do that,

[00:03:43] we’re going to have to take Nietzsche seriously,

[00:03:46] and confront what he has to say,

[00:03:48] even when we don’t like what he’s saying.

[00:03:55] Matt McManus, welcome to the show.

[00:03:58] Yeah, thanks.

[00:03:59] I’m looking forward to this.

[00:04:00] I think a Nietzsche episode is long overdue for this show.

[00:04:03] This one is tough for me because I love Nietzsche.

[00:04:06] I mean, he’s one of the great intellectual influences of my life.

[00:04:09] And I continue to think he understood the crisis of modernity

[00:04:15] better and sooner than anyone.

[00:04:16] And yet there is this dark side to Nietzsche.

[00:04:19] And if you take him too far, too seriously,

[00:04:21] it can lead to some pretty ugly places.

[00:04:23] We’ll get into what I mean,

[00:04:24] but I just wanted to kind of throw my cards on the table

[00:04:27] right at the start of this thing.

[00:04:29] Oh, hey, listen, I love the guy also.

[00:04:31] I mean, I sometimes get annoyed emails from people being like,

[00:04:34] why are you attacking such a great thinker?

[00:04:35] Why are you trying to cancel Nietzsche?

[00:04:37] I’m not trying to cancel Nietzsche at all.

[00:04:39] I started reading him when I must have been like 17 or 18 years old.

[00:04:42] I was raised Roman Catholic,

[00:04:43] going through the very cliched crisis.

[00:04:45] And I just thought his work was electrifying, right?

[00:04:47] Changed my life in a lot of ways.

[00:04:49] I mean, come on, dude, that’s so cliche.

[00:04:51] Oh, 100%.

[00:04:52] Did Nietzsche cause the crisis?

[00:04:53] Or was the crisis?

[00:04:54] Was it well underway by the time you happened upon him?

[00:04:58] Oh, no, it was well underway at that point.

[00:04:59] I mean, part of it was prompted by politics

[00:05:02] because a lot of the Catholics that I knew and grew up with

[00:05:04] were very conservative.

[00:05:06] Quite a few of them were very homophobic,

[00:05:07] which I didn’t like at all.

[00:05:09] But, you know, part of it was just also metaphysical.

[00:05:11] Like I started asking questions like,

[00:05:13] well, does God actually exist?

[00:05:14] If God exists, you know, what form does he take?

[00:05:16] If there is no God, what does that say?

[00:05:18] And, you know, I didn’t know shit about anything at that point.

[00:05:20] So I just did the typical thing,

[00:05:22] which is go on the early,

[00:05:24] you know, this is just around when Wikipedia is coming up,

[00:05:27] being like, who answers these kinds of questions?

[00:05:29] And they’re like, oh, there’s this guy, Nietzsche,

[00:05:31] a book called Beyond Good and Evil and the Antichrist.

[00:05:33] So I went out to the store.

[00:05:35] The nice thing about Nietzsche, too,

[00:05:36] is because he’s so popular,

[00:05:37] you can get him at any bookstore, right?

[00:05:38] So I just picked up, I have the same copy, actually,

[00:05:41] Beyond Good and Evil,

[00:05:42] Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist for Penguin.

[00:05:44] And like you, it just rocked my world, right?

[00:05:46] Like I’d never thought about things like that before.

[00:05:48] Didn’t understand everything, you know, I was 18 years old.

[00:05:51] But there was this real sense

[00:05:52] that there was something important going on

[00:05:54] that was opening my eyes to ways of looking at things

[00:05:56] that I had never even considered before.

[00:05:58] So I’m very grateful for that.

[00:05:59] But like a lot of people,

[00:06:01] you would sometimes say these things about slaves

[00:06:03] and women and lower cultures,

[00:06:07] and your eyes just kind of drift over that

[00:06:09] and you don’t really pay too much attention to it.

[00:06:10] And you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:06:11] I think that we do need to pay attention

[00:06:13] to that kind of stuff.

[00:06:14] So it’s been a learning process for me also.

[00:06:16] Yeah, that’s the thing about Nietzsche, right?

[00:06:17] From page to page, you can swing from,

[00:06:19] oh my God, that’s the most brilliant insight

[00:06:21] I’ve ever encountered.

[00:06:22] And then on the next page, it’s like,

[00:06:24] ooh, yikes.

[00:06:25] Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:26] Did he really just say that?

[00:06:27] And you’re like, I’m not really sure

[00:06:29] that I can get on board with that one.

[00:06:32] You know, you edited this anthology of essays about Nietzsche

[00:06:36] and you’ve completed a monograph

[00:06:38] that is at least partly about Nietzsche.

[00:06:41] It’s a history of right-wing thought generally.

[00:06:43] He figures largely in it though.

[00:06:44] I think actually he has four whole sections

[00:06:46] dedicated to him, more than almost everybody else.

[00:06:49] So what’s the motivation there?

[00:06:50] Why do you think we need to engage

[00:06:52] with someone like Nietzsche?

[00:06:53] Yeah.

[00:06:54] In this political moment?

[00:06:55] Well, I think there are two reasons,

[00:06:57] one good and one bad.

[00:06:58] The good reason is like you,

[00:06:59] I think that Nietzsche offers a profound diagnosis

[00:07:02] of the problems of modernity

[00:07:03] that anyone can profitably learn from,

[00:07:06] including wherever you stand on the political spectrum.

[00:07:08] And we can talk a lot about what I think Nietzsche offers

[00:07:11] as a kind of positive program

[00:07:12] for progressive or liberal thinkers going forward.

[00:07:15] But the bad reason is that for a long time,

[00:07:18] it was expected that Nietzsche

[00:07:19] really just didn’t even have a politics.

[00:07:21] Or if he did, that it was a pretty minor aspect

[00:07:23] of his thinking.

[00:07:24] What we’ve seen is of course,

[00:07:25] that he does have a politics

[00:07:27] and it’s an extremely right-wing politics.

[00:07:30] And understanding that not only helps us

[00:07:32] gain a better appreciation of his own thought,

[00:07:34] but it allows us to see how it is

[00:07:35] that he’s influenced generations

[00:07:37] of right and hard right thinkers,

[00:07:38] including many who are very active today.

[00:07:40] Yeah. You know, the idea that Nietzsche

[00:07:41] was anti-political or apolitical

[00:07:43] was always so bizarre to me.

[00:07:46] I mean, it’s true.

[00:07:46] He spends a lot of time fretting about culture,

[00:07:50] but for him, culture and politics

[00:07:51] are very clearly bound up with one another.

[00:07:54] And so his concerns about culture

[00:07:56] are very much tethered to his concerns about politics.

[00:07:58] So you just simply can’t separate those things out.

[00:08:01] My friend Hugo Drogon wrote a book

[00:08:03] called Nietzsche’s Great Politics.

[00:08:05] And that’s actually a line that comes from Eke Homo,

[00:08:08] right, his autobiography,

[00:08:10] where Nietzsche actually explicitly says,

[00:08:11] it’s only with me that great politics

[00:08:13] will finally enter into the world

[00:08:14] or will begin again.

[00:08:16] Sometimes it’s translated variably.

[00:08:17] And by great politics,

[00:08:19] he means war that the earth has never seen before.

[00:08:22] Quite prophetic if you think that World War I,

[00:08:24] and World War II were upcoming, right?

[00:08:25] Oh, yeah.

[00:08:26] And this isn’t something that he looks upon

[00:08:28] with exclusively terror.

[00:08:29] It’s something that he’s really anticipating

[00:08:31] because it will provide a kind of edifying

[00:08:34] or purifying function over the face of the earth.

[00:08:36] So it’s very hard once you recognize these statements

[00:08:40] to then go back and say, you know,

[00:08:41] he was just a bohemian intellectual

[00:08:43] who was offering critiques of art or psychological advice.

[00:08:47] It may help to set the table a little bit

[00:08:49] for the rest of the conversation

[00:08:51] to just ask you,

[00:08:52] how people have interpreted Nietzsche over the years.

[00:08:56] He wasn’t terribly well-known

[00:08:58] when he was alive and writing.

[00:09:00] He died in 1900.

[00:09:02] Then he ends up getting appropriated by the Nazis

[00:09:05] for sordid reasons that we don’t have to get into here.

[00:09:08] And then later in the 20th century,

[00:09:10] he becomes a kind of radical,

[00:09:13] proto-postmodern, progressive darling.

[00:09:16] I mean, is it possible to give us

[00:09:18] some of the broad strokes here

[00:09:19] in terms of how he has been read over the years?

[00:09:21] Why has this guy,

[00:09:22] I had so many philosophical lives?

[00:09:25] I think that there are a number of different things

[00:09:27] to be said about this.

[00:09:28] Nietzsche early in his own career

[00:09:30] actually enjoyed tremendous academic prominence,

[00:09:33] something that people don’t know,

[00:09:34] but as a philologist, right?

[00:09:35] And super quickly,

[00:09:36] what’s philology for those of us who don’t know?

[00:09:39] Generally, the study of ancient languages,

[00:09:41] but really examining the roots

[00:09:43] of various words in ancient languages.

[00:09:45] And this, of course, contributes to Nietzsche’s early interest

[00:09:48] in things like Greek philosophy.

[00:09:50] And people thought he was a wonder kid,

[00:09:52] somebody who was going to revolutionize the discipline.

[00:09:55] And great expectations were put on him.

[00:09:58] And then he releases his first book,

[00:10:00] The Birth of Tragedy.

[00:10:01] And pretty much the whole philological community

[00:10:03] is like, what is this, right?

[00:10:04] This is not philology.

[00:10:06] This isn’t quite philosophy.

[00:10:07] It’s not even art commentary.

[00:10:09] It’s just weird.

[00:10:10] And his academic position pretty much craters at that point,

[00:10:14] undeservedly, because it’s a minor masterpiece, I think.

[00:10:17] He wrote better books later on,

[00:10:18] but it’s a very interesting text.

[00:10:19] Then, you know, he spends the rest of his life

[00:10:21] flirting with a bunch of,

[00:10:22] you know, different movements,

[00:10:23] won’t get too much into them.

[00:10:24] He’s only really gaining a little,

[00:10:27] tiny little bit of attention near the end of his life,

[00:10:30] where in an important correspondence,

[00:10:32] he’s chatting with one of the first lecturers in Denmark

[00:10:35] who’s talking about Nietzsche’s work.

[00:10:36] And this is important because the lecturer says,

[00:10:39] I think of your philosophy

[00:10:40] as a kind of aristocratic radicalism.

[00:10:42] And Nietzsche says, that’s exactly right.

[00:10:44] You know, that’s what I’m aiming for.

[00:10:45] And then, of course, after Nietzsche collapsed into madness,

[00:10:48] he enjoyed this extraordinary intellectual prominence.

[00:10:51] Unfortunately,

[00:10:52] amongst a lot of the worst kinds of people,

[00:10:54] particularly on the political right,

[00:10:55] where the Nazis appropriated him

[00:10:57] and almost transformed them into their philosopher.

[00:11:01] German imperialists did the same in the First World War,

[00:11:03] where they would hand out copies of

[00:11:04] Thus Spoke Zarathustra to German soldiers on the front.

[00:11:07] So then after the First and Second World War,

[00:11:10] there was a real effort by people like Walter Kaufman

[00:11:12] to rehabilitate him, deservedly, right,

[00:11:14] for English-speaking audiences.

[00:11:15] And we could just say, just real quickly,

[00:11:17] Walter Kaufman is the sort of foremost translator

[00:11:19] of Nietzsche for American audiences.

[00:11:21] Absolutely.

[00:11:22] I mean, if you’ve read a book by Nietzsche,

[00:11:23] odds are it’s the Kaufman translation.

[00:11:26] And, you know, he’s a great translator.

[00:11:27] He also wrote a very good book on Nietzsche as a psychologist.

[00:11:29] But that’s kind of a self-telling,

[00:11:31] because the way that Kaufman tried to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation,

[00:11:35] amongst the Anglosphere especially,

[00:11:36] was by presenting him as a kind of bohemian existential psychologist

[00:11:40] who more or less doesn’t have any bearing on politics at all.

[00:11:43] And this was pretty effective in convincing people

[00:11:45] that they could read Nietzsche safely

[00:11:46] while not having to align him with these far-right movements

[00:11:50] that he had once been so associated with.

[00:11:51] Yeah, he’s not fascist.

[00:11:53] He’s just a little weird.

[00:11:54] Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:54] He’s a little cranky and eccentric around the edges, right?

[00:11:57] Then starting, you know, in the 1950s

[00:11:59] and really climaxing in the 60s and 70s,

[00:12:02] he’s appropriated by generations of French intellectuals,

[00:12:05] mostly leftists,

[00:12:06] who find all kinds of interesting stuff to do with his work.

[00:12:09] So much so that by the 1970s,

[00:12:11] we even find people like Michel Foucault just saying,

[00:12:14] I am a Nietzschean, right,

[00:12:15] with a hundred different qualifications to that, of course.

[00:12:18] But this led to the kind of presupposition,

[00:12:20] even amongst conservative thinkers,

[00:12:21] that Nietzsche was fundamentally a kind of bohemian,

[00:12:24] liberal, maybe even radical intellectual.

[00:12:27] And now we’ve kind of come full circle

[00:12:29] since a new generation of right and far-right thinkers

[00:12:32] have really rediscovered him

[00:12:33] and reinterpreted him, I think,

[00:12:35] more appropriately as a right-wing thinker.

[00:12:38] His politics are not Foucault’s politics,

[00:12:39] and they’re definitely not Kauffman’s kind of soft psychologism.

[00:12:42] He is very committed to aristocratic radicalism,

[00:12:45] and it’s a pretty nasty thing,

[00:12:47] especially if you hold to liberal and progressive views like I do.

[00:12:50] So let’s get into the,

[00:12:51] As you point out,

[00:12:53] Nietzsche is one of those rare philosophers

[00:12:55] who has managed to enter into the pop cultural imagination.

[00:13:01] That’s partly why so many people have opinions about him,

[00:13:05] despite having never read him.

[00:13:07] And the thing I hear the most about Nietzsche

[00:13:11] is he’s the guy who was a nihilist,

[00:13:15] who gleefully pronounced that God is dead.

[00:13:19] That trope triggers the hell out of me.

[00:13:21] I,

[00:13:21] I don’t know about you,

[00:13:22] Matt.

[00:13:23] Oh, yeah.

[00:13:23] But we should clear this up right now,

[00:13:27] because I think understanding this part of his thought,

[00:13:30] what he actually meant here,

[00:13:31] is really essential to making sense of everything else

[00:13:34] that comes out of his mouth later.

[00:13:36] So what did Nietzsche mean by God is dead?

[00:13:40] One thing that it doesn’t mean

[00:13:42] is that Nietzsche is there to kill God

[00:13:44] or offer a scholastic rebuttal

[00:13:46] of conventional proofs for God’s existence, right?

[00:13:50] What’s important,

[00:13:50] when he says God is dead and we have killed him,

[00:13:53] is that Nietzsche is describing something that has already occurred,

[00:13:57] even if people aren’t really acknowledging it,

[00:13:59] or more importantly,

[00:14:00] even if they’re not prepared to deal with the implications

[00:14:02] of what it is that they’ve done.

[00:14:04] So the crisis that he’s talking about

[00:14:06] is really the crisis in European Christianity

[00:14:09] that he sees as emerging in the middle of the 19th century,

[00:14:12] when the natural sciences,

[00:14:14] which themselves were an offspring of the Christian worldview,

[00:14:17] basically killed their father

[00:14:18] and established a new civilization,

[00:14:20] secular view of the universe.

[00:14:22] But he is very concerned that it’s going to generate

[00:14:25] many new kinds of outlooks

[00:14:27] and new kinds of approaches to the world,

[00:14:28] many of which are going to be sick, unhealthy,

[00:14:31] and lead people to be profoundly either unhappy

[00:14:33] or potentially even worse,

[00:14:35] to seek happiness in the most crass, venal places.

[00:14:39] I mean, that’s sort of what’s so ironic here, right?

[00:14:42] Like when Nietzsche is talking about the death of God,

[00:14:45] it’s really a lamentation.

[00:14:47] You know, he’s saying like,

[00:14:48] yo, yo, people, do you see what we’ve done here?

[00:14:50] Do you understand the crisis this is going to unleash?

[00:14:53] We are absolutely not prepared for what is about to happen,

[00:14:57] or for what has already happened, actually.

[00:14:59] It’s so different from this notion

[00:15:01] that he was sort of dancing on God’s grave.

[00:15:04] Oh, absolutely.

[00:15:05] One of the things that I find frustrating about,

[00:15:07] say the Richard Dawkins types.

[00:15:09] Richard Dawkins famously had a bus

[00:15:11] that would go around the UK.

[00:15:12] London’s iconic red buses will soon display the message

[00:15:15] that God does not exist.

[00:15:17] The plan is to have 30 buses carrying signs that say,

[00:15:20] there’s probably no God.

[00:15:22] Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

[00:15:25] The campaign has the support of prominent atheist

[00:15:27] Professor Richard Dawkins.

[00:15:29] It’s funny and it gets people to talk about it.

[00:15:32] It gets people to think.

[00:15:34] That’s a very crude, simplistic, almost banal atheism, right?

[00:15:39] Because it almost tries to ignore religion

[00:15:41] and the history of religion

[00:15:42] and the way that it contributed to our very basic moral values

[00:15:45] and say, now that we don’t believe in God,

[00:15:47] we’ll just carry on like everything was going on before.

[00:15:49] We’ll just…

[00:15:50] Take this little bit out of that.

[00:15:52] Whatever you can say about Nietzsche

[00:15:53] and his approach to Christianity,

[00:15:55] he took it extremely seriously.

[00:15:56] He did not ignore religion.

[00:15:58] If anything, he was trying to develop

[00:16:00] what you might call an active atheism

[00:16:02] or even an active anti-theism.

[00:16:04] There are some remarkable things

[00:16:05] that come out of his work from that,

[00:16:07] but it’s really a testament to his creativity and honesty

[00:16:11] that he took this kind of issue as seriously as he did

[00:16:14] and really dedicated his life

[00:16:16] to trying to solve the problems

[00:16:18] that he thought were thrown up from this.

[00:16:19] Even if I think…

[00:16:20] Most of his solutions were quite repellent.

[00:16:22] Yeah, he has this startling line.

[00:16:24] And like so many of his lines,

[00:16:26] it packs so much into a few words.

[00:16:30] He writes,

[00:16:31] Ever since Copernicus,

[00:16:32] man has been rolling away from the center toward X.

[00:16:37] It’s getting at this idea

[00:16:38] that humanity’s self-understanding

[00:16:40] of its place in the cosmos, right?

[00:16:42] Our understanding of our own creaturely significance.

[00:16:46] That starts to melt away with Copernicus

[00:16:49] when we realize we’re actually…

[00:16:50] We’re actually not the center of things.

[00:16:51] And then it finally gets extinguished by Darwin

[00:16:54] when we realize, oh, we’re just a random product

[00:16:56] of blind, impersonal forces.

[00:16:59] And that is a gigantic event in human history.

[00:17:04] Absolutely, right?

[00:17:05] It implies fundamentally that there’s nothing

[00:17:07] all that significant about human life

[00:17:09] and that consequently any kind of meaning we attribute to it

[00:17:12] has to be ours for the making.

[00:17:13] Yeah.

[00:17:13] But I think it’s also just important to stress

[00:17:15] that even his approach to anti-theism

[00:17:19] was extraordinarily creative.

[00:17:20] And innovative.

[00:17:22] And has been of great influence

[00:17:23] even to theologians going forward.

[00:17:25] For instance, it can be very tempting to see natural science

[00:17:28] as kind of the antithesis of Christianity.

[00:17:31] What’s remarkable about Nietzsche is he says

[00:17:33] that actually modern science has its basis

[00:17:36] in this Christian ethic,

[00:17:37] that you must always search after the truth

[00:17:39] and you must be relentlessly honest in that pursuit,

[00:17:42] which could also trace back to Plato, for example.

[00:17:44] And he says this led to a lethal situation

[00:17:46] where in one of his most striking comments, he says,

[00:17:49] one day Christians were compelled

[00:17:50] to ask the horrifying question,

[00:17:53] which is to ask the question against themselves, right?

[00:17:55] Is the Christian ethic about truth

[00:17:58] that I buy into itself true?

[00:18:00] And that’s where all the kind of problems start to begin

[00:18:03] because this is where you start to see

[00:18:04] the scientific method that emerges

[00:18:06] from this Christian outlook turn inwards.

[00:18:09] I don’t know whether this is entirely true

[00:18:11] as a kind of unpacking of the basis of modern science

[00:18:14] and its association with anti-theism,

[00:18:17] but it’s a really striking creative claim.

[00:18:19] And again,

[00:18:20] very contrary to cruder atheists

[00:18:22] like Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens,

[00:18:24] who just say, you know,

[00:18:25] science emerged, had nothing to do with religion,

[00:18:26] and then destroyed religion.

[00:18:27] We don’t need it anymore.

[00:18:29] So if God is dead wasn’t a celebration,

[00:18:32] and it wasn’t,

[00:18:33] Nietzsche wasn’t a champion of nihilism.

[00:18:36] He was diagnosing it.

[00:18:38] So in terms of the story we want to tell here

[00:18:40] about his legacy,

[00:18:42] why was the death of God

[00:18:44] such a cataclysmic political event for him?

[00:18:47] Like, why did he think

[00:18:48] we really need to grow up?

[00:18:50] Why did he think we need to grapple with this?

[00:18:52] Well, this brings us to the roots

[00:18:54] of his aristocratic radicalism.

[00:18:55] And it’s a very complicated question.

[00:18:57] So I’ll try to unpack it as simply as I can.

[00:19:01] He believes that ultimately the basis

[00:19:03] of most conventional egalitarian systems,

[00:19:06] including liberalism, democracy, and socialism,

[00:19:09] ultimately is this Christian ethic, right?

[00:19:12] You think about Thomas Jefferson saying,

[00:19:13] all men are created equal.

[00:19:15] Didn’t really believe that obviously

[00:19:16] because he had slaves, right?

[00:19:17] But still a very inspiring statement.

[00:19:19] Nietzsche says,

[00:19:20] at its root, this comes from the lie, he calls it,

[00:19:23] of equality of souls that you find in Christianity.

[00:19:26] Because according to the Christian outlook,

[00:19:29] all human beings are sinners,

[00:19:30] all of us are finite,

[00:19:32] and all of us are equally loved

[00:19:33] and equally responsible before the throne of God.

[00:19:36] Once you take that away,

[00:19:38] what you find is something that looks a lot more

[00:19:40] like a kind of socially Darwinian universe

[00:19:42] where Nietzsche says,

[00:19:43] of course there are fundamental inequalities between people,

[00:19:46] just like there are certain kinds

[00:19:47] of fundamental inequalities between animals.

[00:19:50] There are some animals that are brought into the world

[00:19:52] destined to die because they’re too sick

[00:19:54] and they’re not gonna be able to survive.

[00:19:56] And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that.

[00:19:58] It’s just a kind of natural fact

[00:19:59] that we need to learn to accept.

[00:20:01] And this is again,

[00:20:02] what’s eventually going to lead to his convictions

[00:20:04] about aristocratic radicalism,

[00:20:05] which he sees as the necessary substitute

[00:20:08] for Christian egalitarianism.

[00:20:10] Right, so it’s this idea that our whole notion

[00:20:12] of absolute moral truth was tethered to God.

[00:20:18] So the real problem was,

[00:20:19] wasn’t that everyone is now suddenly on the road to atheism.

[00:20:23] The problem for him is that we are still clinging

[00:20:26] to these absolute values about good and evil,

[00:20:29] about, as you were saying,

[00:20:31] the fundamental equality of human beings.

[00:20:34] But the foundations for these original claims

[00:20:37] had dropped out beneath us.

[00:20:39] Once you take God away,

[00:20:41] the notion that human life has any kind of dignity

[00:20:43] or any kind of intrinsic value at all,

[00:20:45] vanishes with it.

[00:20:46] And Nietzsche is very critical of people,

[00:20:48] let’s say Immanuel Kant,

[00:20:49] who thinks that you can somehow secularize

[00:20:51] a notion of dignity and say that each individual life

[00:20:53] has an intrinsic worth,

[00:20:55] even if we don’t necessarily buy into God.

[00:20:57] And he thinks this is why Kant, for example,

[00:20:59] needs to bring God back in,

[00:21:00] even after his critical thought had destroyed

[00:21:02] the possibility of proving God’s existence,

[00:21:05] because it’s so important morally.

[00:21:07] And again, he says,

[00:21:08] once you deny the idea that life has any intrinsic value,

[00:21:11] let alone that each person’s life is of equal value

[00:21:14] relative to everyone else’s,

[00:21:15] this much more competitive, diverse,

[00:21:19] and, quite frankly, brutal world,

[00:21:22] where you have to will value to your life

[00:21:25] into being through your own efforts.

[00:21:27] And it is worth saying that the claim here

[00:21:30] wasn’t that there could be no morality or truth without God.

[00:21:34] He’s saying the moral order that shaped our civilization,

[00:21:39] that had collapsed,

[00:21:40] and that was a political crisis as much as anything else.

[00:21:43] And this is so important for Nietzsche,

[00:21:46] partly because he thinks it reopens this question,

[00:21:49] of what humanity actually is.

[00:21:52] And he’s trying to force this confrontation with this crisis.

[00:21:55] And given how the 20th century unfolded,

[00:21:58] it is unnerving to revisit some of his predictions about,

[00:22:03] you know, quote,

[00:22:04] wars to determine the future of mankind, right?

[00:22:06] Like, the destruction of established religion for him

[00:22:09] wasn’t the end of religion.

[00:22:11] This is the beginning of nihilism, right?

[00:22:12] Nihilism was what happens when our,

[00:22:14] to use his language, our highest values lose their value,

[00:22:17] lose their ground, and that sort of,

[00:22:19] sets us adrift in this moral abyss.

[00:22:22] It’s quite startling.

[00:22:23] He does predict a lot of things that have a very clear

[00:22:26] coincidence with different subgroups and subcultures

[00:22:29] that we see today.

[00:22:29] So, for instance, he says,

[00:22:31] one of the things that I’m concerned with is that people

[00:22:33] are going to give into a kind of passive nihilism,

[00:22:35] where they’re going to assume there’s really no point to my life,

[00:22:37] so the only thing that’s worth pursuing

[00:22:39] is a kind of hedonic pleasure.

[00:22:41] And so they’re going to dedicate themselves to drugs

[00:22:44] and alcohol and opiates to dull the pain

[00:22:46] of not having any kind of meaning to their life.

[00:22:48] And,

[00:22:49] Nietzsche is very contemptuous of this,

[00:22:51] in a way that I think is deeply unfair.

[00:22:53] Another kind of nihilism that he thinks is going to emerge,

[00:22:55] very interesting,

[00:22:56] is the strong commitment to scientific realism.

[00:22:59] Because he says,

[00:23:00] what you see when people describe themselves as realist

[00:23:03] is a re-articulation of the idea that knowledge

[00:23:06] has some kind of worth for its own sake.

[00:23:08] And the fact that I have a lot of knowledge

[00:23:09] and see the world the way that it is,

[00:23:11] without judging it, without evaluating it,

[00:23:13] gives me a kind of purity.

[00:23:15] But the other more important predictions he makes

[00:23:18] is that there will actually be very active kinds of nihilism,

[00:23:21] or active responses to nihilism, that will emerge.

[00:23:24] Some of these more active forms of nihilism

[00:23:25] will be people who just enjoy destruction for its own sake,

[00:23:29] want to take revenge against the world

[00:23:30] on the basis of their feelings of profound resentment

[00:23:32] and alienation.

[00:23:34] Other groups, he thinks, will be unwilling to accept

[00:23:36] the full implication of the death of God.

[00:23:38] And what’s going to be interesting about them is,

[00:23:41] he says, they will try to produce utopias on earth.

[00:23:44] That essentially, they’ll say,

[00:23:45] we no longer have a kind of heaven that will guarantee us

[00:23:48] bliss in the future,

[00:23:50] but we are still committed to this Christian ethic

[00:23:52] of everyone achieving redemption and happiness,

[00:23:55] but we need to achieve it in the world here and now.

[00:23:57] In one of his most remarkable formulations, he says,

[00:24:00] the truest forms of Christianity that are available right now

[00:24:03] are liberalism, utilitarianism, democracy,

[00:24:05] and especially socialism.

[00:24:06] Because all of these people are committed to this idea

[00:24:08] that we can carry on Christian morality,

[00:24:10] but we’re just going to try to achieve a more happy,

[00:24:15] equal, dignified society in this life now.

[00:24:17] And he thinks, again,

[00:24:18] that that’s contemptuous,

[00:24:19] because it’s not fully dealing with the implications

[00:24:21] of the death of God.

[00:24:22] And he wanted to smash it.

[00:24:24] Human beings seem naturally inclined toward religion.

[00:24:37] So what happens to our religious impulses

[00:24:39] after the death of God?

[00:24:42] That’s coming up after a short break.

[00:24:48] We’ll be right back.

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[00:25:22] from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee,

[00:25:25] Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, Robin Arzon, and more.

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[00:25:34] and get a special discount

[00:25:36] on your South by Southwest innovation badge.

[00:25:39] That’s voxmedia.com slash South by Southwest.

[00:25:43] Hope to see you there.

[00:25:48] You know, I always read Nietzsche as saying,

[00:26:02] there’s going to be a vacuum in the wake

[00:26:04] of this enlightenment destruction of God,

[00:26:06] and something’s going to fill it.

[00:26:08] And what’s going to fill it is political religions,

[00:26:11] for lack of a better phrase,

[00:26:12] like nationalism or communism or fascism, right?

[00:26:15] Like that these isms would become

[00:26:18] the new antichrist.

[00:26:18] And human beings are deeply religious by nature.

[00:26:24] And that doesn’t mean we’re conventionally religious.

[00:26:27] I think what he meant was that human beings

[00:26:30] have a thirst for absolutes.

[00:26:32] We want to be certain.

[00:26:33] We want a horizon and a story that secures it for us.

[00:26:38] We want capital T truth.

[00:26:40] And whether it’s God or political ideologies,

[00:26:43] we’re going to glom on to whatever provides us

[00:26:45] with this horizon of meaning,

[00:26:46] whatever gives us this way to,

[00:26:48] you know, interpret events and validate action

[00:26:51] and all that kind of thing.

[00:26:52] That is partly why he was anticipating

[00:26:54] that there’s going to be a new kind of ideological,

[00:26:57] metaphysical conflict in the 20th century.

[00:26:59] And it is a direct result of this destruction.

[00:27:04] I think Nietzsche himself had complicated feelings

[00:27:05] about this as he did about everything.

[00:27:07] At points in his writing,

[00:27:09] he does seem to be attracted to this kind of aesthetic idea

[00:27:12] of being a philosopher, right?

[00:27:13] Somebody who apprehends the world the way that it is,

[00:27:16] without illusions, without faith,

[00:27:17] without any kind of ulterior convictions

[00:27:20] being brought to bear on it.

[00:27:21] But more often than not,

[00:27:22] I think you’re absolutely right that he says,

[00:27:24] human beings actually cannot live like that, right?

[00:27:27] We cannot live according to this aesthetic outlook.

[00:27:30] We need to put our faith in something.

[00:27:33] And Nietzsche himself was one of the great

[00:27:36] secular myth makers of all time.

[00:27:38] I mean, his chief work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

[00:27:40] is essentially a prophesizing of the appearance

[00:27:43] of the superman or the overman,

[00:27:45] who is going to redeem the history of humankind,

[00:27:47] because, you know, he’s going to be able to, you know,

[00:27:47] he’s going to be able to, you know,

[00:27:48] he’s going to be able to, you know,

[00:27:49] he’s going to be able to redeem the history of humankind,

[00:27:50] because when he arrives,

[00:27:51] he’s going to will great projects

[00:27:52] that will provide a sense of meaning

[00:27:53] and vindication to human life.

[00:27:54] So he set himself a task in some ways

[00:27:56] that no one could possibly achieve.

[00:27:58] He wanted simultaneously to be honest enough

[00:28:01] to reject any potential myth-making

[00:28:03] that wasn’t firmly grounded in reality,

[00:28:06] while at the same time being sufficiently honest

[00:28:08] to recognize that no human being,

[00:28:10] including himself, could possibly live with that.

[00:28:12] A lot of the interesting dynamics of his texts

[00:28:14] come from the clash between these competing impulses.

[00:28:17] I think.

[00:28:18] You used the term ubermensch, right?

[00:28:20] The superman, I think this is another term

[00:28:22] that people know,

[00:28:23] and they probably know it came from Nietzsche,

[00:28:25] but they may not know what he actually meant by that.

[00:28:28] What was the ubermensch for him?

[00:28:30] I’m not sure he knew what the ubermensch was for him.

[00:28:33] At points, he suggests,

[00:28:34] I am not an ubermensch,

[00:28:36] and any ubermensch is going to be necessarily stronger than me,

[00:28:39] so he’s not going to look like what I project onto him,

[00:28:41] because he’s going to will his own identity into being.

[00:28:44] But at other points, he has a kind of formula

[00:28:46] for the ubermensch.

[00:28:47] And this is actually something that goes back

[00:28:49] to his early work on The Birth of Tragedy,

[00:28:51] where one of the things that he points out

[00:28:53] is that with the elevation of the Christian egalitarian ethic,

[00:28:57] you see the diminution of heroic values

[00:29:00] of the sort that you saw in Homeric poems,

[00:29:03] where if you think about somebody like Achilles,

[00:29:05] Achilles doesn’t feel guilt over the massacres that he conducts.

[00:29:10] If anything, he sees his capacity to inflict violence

[00:29:13] as a testament to his strength

[00:29:14] and as a sign that he’s going to achieve immortality.

[00:29:16] And Nietzsche really admires this to a certain extent,

[00:29:19] where he says there is a vital, powerful, proud individual

[00:29:24] who doesn’t allow the mass who looks upon him

[00:29:27] as a frightening figure to diminish his near divinity.

[00:29:31] At the same time, Nietzsche also points out

[00:29:33] Achilles is kind of a dumbass is the only way to describe it.

[00:29:36] He has two modes of apprehension,

[00:29:38] either, you know, come at me, bro,

[00:29:40] or I’m the biggest and the strongest

[00:29:41] and you’re all going to bow before me.

[00:29:43] And he does at points say that

[00:29:45] one of the things that Christianity accomplished

[00:29:47] was a deepening of the human soul

[00:29:49] through the invention of things like guilt,

[00:29:51] through the invention of something like conscience.

[00:29:53] And even though this had the effect of undermining

[00:29:56] these kind of vital heroic characteristics,

[00:29:58] he still wants to keep a little bit of that

[00:30:00] in his new Ibramensch.

[00:30:01] One of the descriptions he gives of him

[00:30:03] is he would be a kind of Caesar with the soul of Christ,

[00:30:06] which is a remarkably paradoxical formulation.

[00:30:09] But I think you can kind of get the idea, right?

[00:30:11] It’s somebody who’s going to be thoughtful

[00:30:13] and reflective about the world,

[00:30:15] in a way that somebody like Achilles just never is.

[00:30:18] But he’s still going to embody

[00:30:19] these kinds of heroic, confident characteristics.

[00:30:22] And a lot of people have tried to pinpoint

[00:30:24] somebody who seems to match this configuration.

[00:30:27] But I don’t think that anybody who would have emerged

[00:30:29] in the 20th century

[00:30:30] quite met it to his satisfaction.

[00:30:32] So they’re not all the people like Hitler

[00:30:33] who claim to be a figure like this.

[00:30:35] One of the most, I think,

[00:30:37] beautiful accounts of Christ, actually,

[00:30:40] is in Nietzsche’s book, The Antichrist.

[00:30:43] He has this kind of begrudging respect

[00:30:45] for Christ.

[00:30:46] Oh, yeah.

[00:30:47] It’s this figure who established

[00:30:48] this kind of new moral universe, right?

[00:30:50] That is a supreme act of creation.

[00:30:53] And that is something he admires as much as anything.

[00:30:56] Nietzsche often thought that having a great opponent

[00:30:58] who was worthy of you

[00:30:59] would, of course, compel you to become stronger.

[00:31:01] And it’s very clear in The Antichrist,

[00:31:03] his best book on the subject,

[00:31:04] that Christ was the one opponent

[00:31:06] he thought was worthy of him.

[00:31:07] Sometimes Socrates also gets thrown in there.

[00:31:09] But by, you know, his very late life,

[00:31:11] he was even signing his letters.

[00:31:12] The Antichrist.

[00:31:13] About as megalomaniacal

[00:31:14] as you can possibly get, right?

[00:31:16] But I think that you’re absolutely right,

[00:31:17] that he sees Christ as doing something

[00:31:19] that is genuinely awe-inspiring,

[00:31:22] which is to create a world historical faith

[00:31:24] that endures over the course of 2,000 years.

[00:31:27] And one of the reasons he says

[00:31:28] Christ was able to do that, of course,

[00:31:30] is because Jesus was willing to commit

[00:31:32] a supreme act of sacrifice

[00:31:34] in order to live according to his value system.

[00:31:37] He died on the cross for humanity, right?

[00:31:40] Compared to him,

[00:31:41] most other Christians are kind of pale imitation,

[00:31:43] since how many Christians do you know

[00:31:45] who would actually be willing to

[00:31:46] lay down their life for another

[00:31:48] the way that Jesus calls upon them to do?

[00:31:49] Yeah, he says that there was but one Christian

[00:31:51] and he died on the cross.

[00:31:52] Exactly, right?

[00:31:53] I sometimes think it’s a shame

[00:31:55] in an ulterior universe,

[00:31:57] Nietzsche actually reads Soren Kierkegaard,

[00:31:59] who was planning on reading

[00:32:00] before he fell into madness,

[00:32:01] because Kierkegaard himself had very similar views

[00:32:04] of Christianity near the end of his life.

[00:32:06] He would point out things like,

[00:32:07] listen, there’s a fundamental difference

[00:32:09] between Christianity and Christendom,

[00:32:11] this kind of conservative,

[00:32:12] nationalist outlook

[00:32:14] that reduces religion down to

[00:32:16] being essentially a social glue

[00:32:18] that allows people to live more easily.

[00:32:20] I think Nietzsche would have found

[00:32:21] a kind of kinship with this view.

[00:32:23] I want to go back to something

[00:32:25] you mentioned earlier,

[00:32:26] and that is really his hatred for democracy

[00:32:30] and his contempt for egalitarianism.

[00:32:33] Yeah.

[00:32:34] In your essay in that anthology on Nietzsche,

[00:32:37] you say that we really ought to understand him,

[00:32:40] as now I’m quoting you,

[00:32:42] the most profound and dark defender

[00:32:45] of hierarchical reaction in the modern era.

[00:32:48] What makes him both profound and dark

[00:32:51] from your point of view?

[00:32:53] First off, I just want to say

[00:32:54] that I think that Nietzsche is

[00:32:55] the greatest reactionary thinker of all time,

[00:32:57] maybe rivaled only by Dostoevsky.

[00:32:59] But what’s interesting about Nietzsche is,

[00:33:01] and Lissardo points this out in his book,

[00:33:03] earlier kinds of conservatives

[00:33:05] were really committed to this idea

[00:33:07] that what we need in order to support

[00:33:09] a hierarchical worldview is more religion.

[00:33:12] Because religion serves as a kind of

[00:33:14] social conservative glue that also

[00:33:16] sublimates human hierarchies in important ways.

[00:33:19] So you see people like Joseph de Maistre, for instance,

[00:33:21] characterizing the French Revolution

[00:33:23] as a fundamentally satanic enterprise.

[00:33:25] It’s actually the term he uses

[00:33:26] in his considerations on France.

[00:33:28] Nietzsche has no truck with that.

[00:33:29] Nietzsche says, actually,

[00:33:30] and this is what’s remarkable,

[00:33:31] the French revolutionaries were absolutely Christian

[00:33:35] in their orientation.

[00:33:36] If anything, they took Christianity far more seriously

[00:33:39] because they really believe in human equality,

[00:33:41] human dignity, and human freedom for the herd.

[00:33:44] Whereas these kind of crass social conservatives

[00:33:46] who think that you can use Christianity

[00:33:48] just aren’t brave enough to interrogate

[00:33:50] their own worldviews sufficiently.

[00:33:52] And Nietzsche is.

[00:33:53] And he says, at the root of the French Revolution,

[00:33:55] socialism, liberalism, and democracy,

[00:33:57] is this Christian idea that all human souls are equal

[00:34:00] and that we should try to create a humane,

[00:34:03] beatific world where the criteria of justice is

[00:34:06] how well is your society doing for the least among us?

[00:34:09] And he says, I reject that.

[00:34:11] I reject that emphatically.

[00:34:12] So we need to get rid of all these

[00:34:14] secular forms of Christianity,

[00:34:15] particularly socialism,

[00:34:16] but liberalism and democracy also need to go hard.

[00:34:19] And we need to replace it with this

[00:34:21] system of aristocratic radicalism

[00:34:23] that is deeply committed to inequality

[00:34:25] at its very core.

[00:34:27] Yeah, I mean, this is something you see

[00:34:29] really throughout Nietzsche’s writing,

[00:34:31] this deep fear of the leveling power of mass culture.

[00:34:36] And he is always trying to protect

[00:34:38] the free, creative individual against,

[00:34:41] which is his language, which you just used as well,

[00:34:43] the herd.

[00:34:44] And we shouldn’t dance around this part of it, right?

[00:34:46] Oh, no.

[00:34:47] He pretty clearly thinks that

[00:34:49] the average person cannot face up to reality,

[00:34:53] isn’t up for the challenge of creating themselves, right,

[00:34:56] in the wake of God’s death.

[00:34:57] And the average person, for that reason,

[00:34:59] prefers to make a virtue of ignorance

[00:35:02] and self-fulfillment.

[00:35:04] And that’s all he sees when he looks at democracy,

[00:35:07] this triumph of the least creative.

[00:35:10] Absolutely, right?

[00:35:11] He thinks that what you’re going to see

[00:35:13] in a democratic society,

[00:35:15] let alone a liberal or socialist society,

[00:35:17] is a leveling of all higher values

[00:35:21] and a reduction of all human beings

[00:35:23] to the most animalistic level,

[00:35:24] where the kind of politics that people

[00:35:26] will be concerned about is,

[00:35:27] how do we redistribute food to the poor

[00:35:29] more effectively?

[00:35:30] How do we show greater compassion

[00:35:32] to human weakness and disability?

[00:35:34] You know, he would look at the kind of woke activists

[00:35:37] that people like Jordan Peterson hate so much

[00:35:39] and say, these are the most Christian individuals

[00:35:41] in society right now,

[00:35:42] way more Christian in many respects

[00:35:44] than the social conservatives

[00:35:46] who claim allegiance to this faith,

[00:35:48] because they really believe

[00:35:49] in placating human weakness.

[00:35:51] He doesn’t want any of that.

[00:35:52] What he wants, again,

[00:35:53] is an aristocratic radical society

[00:35:55] where the lower orders can be used,

[00:35:58] even as slaves,

[00:35:59] and he’s not afraid of that term,

[00:36:00] for the projects of these truly great individuals.

[00:36:03] And the reason for this is he thinks

[00:36:05] that some people are just herds, right?

[00:36:08] Animals.

[00:36:09] They don’t really contribute that much to life.

[00:36:11] They’re going to go about their merry way,

[00:36:12] and if you give them too much power,

[00:36:13] they’re going to drag the truly great amongst us down.

[00:36:16] So why not reduce them to the level of slavery

[00:36:19] and allow the great individuals out there,

[00:36:22] the Napoleons or whatever,

[00:36:23] to get on with the project of producing

[00:36:25] genuinely edifying enterprises in human life?

[00:36:28] Look, human beings are not all the exact same.

[00:36:33] There are differences between individuals.

[00:36:35] Anyone can observe that.

[00:36:37] It is the epitome of non-controversial.

[00:36:39] Some people are stronger, faster, smarter, better looking,

[00:36:43] but plenty of thinkers have made that same banal observation

[00:36:47] and still supported egalitarianism

[00:36:49] and liberal democracy.

[00:36:51] So despite our differences,

[00:36:53] maybe all humans are equal

[00:36:55] on some deep metaphysical level,

[00:36:57] or moral level,

[00:36:58] or whatever you prefer.

[00:36:59] Does Nietzsche actually give an argument

[00:37:02] for why he doesn’t think that’s true?

[00:37:04] Well, I don’t think that he actually provides

[00:37:06] a lot of arguments for this.

[00:37:08] Now, to be fair to him,

[00:37:10] he does point out that a lot of egalitarians

[00:37:12] just treat the equality of souls

[00:37:14] as an axiomatic truth, right?

[00:37:16] It’s just something that’s obvious

[00:37:17] and that we start our moral musings from.

[00:37:20] And I don’t know that that is true.

[00:37:22] I think that you need to develop a theory of equality

[00:37:25] that defends it comprehensively

[00:37:26] from a philosophical or theological perspective,

[00:37:29] and many of us don’t bother to do that.

[00:37:31] And we should.

[00:37:32] On his front, though,

[00:37:33] arguing that there is a fundamental inequality

[00:37:36] of the souls,

[00:37:37] I don’t think he ever really provides

[00:37:38] compelling arguments for that.

[00:37:39] And I’m not sure that he’s really confident

[00:37:41] about that either,

[00:37:42] precisely because he keeps flipping through the deck,

[00:37:44] if you want to call it that,

[00:37:45] looking for the kind of right argument

[00:37:47] that will knock down proof, his point.

[00:37:49] So sometimes he’ll say things like,

[00:37:51] look, what I mean by an inequality of the souls,

[00:37:53] it’s just the kind of Darwinian inequality

[00:37:55] that you see in nature,

[00:37:57] where, yeah, the lambs look upon the eagles

[00:37:59] and they think that eagle is a really monstrous figure

[00:38:02] because it is strong and it is dangerous.

[00:38:04] And Nietzsche says, no.

[00:38:05] You know, the bird is just hungry.

[00:38:07] It probably doesn’t even think about the lambs.

[00:38:09] It just looks upon them as a kind of tasty snack

[00:38:11] and almost has a bit of love for them in that respect.

[00:38:14] And I don’t think that that’s all that convincing,

[00:38:16] and not least of which,

[00:38:17] because from a purely Darwinian standpoint,

[00:38:19] cockroaches are the most evolved species, right?

[00:38:21] Because they’ll fucking survive anything.

[00:38:23] And I don’t think that Nietzsche is saying,

[00:38:24] be more like the cockroach, right?

[00:38:26] That is the more evolved sensibility.

[00:38:28] At other points, he tends to align it with

[00:38:30] a kind of health, psychological health

[00:38:32] or even physical health.

[00:38:34] He says, look, just like there are healthier bodies

[00:38:37] and stronger bodies,

[00:38:38] so too are there healthier and stronger minds.

[00:38:40] He never really provides that much of a template for this,

[00:38:43] but there’s a kind of I know it when I see it mentality.

[00:38:46] And again, I’m just not really sure that I buy this idea

[00:38:50] that people who are psychologically more healthy

[00:38:53] are necessarily better than others.

[00:38:56] I’m not even sure how one would actually define that,

[00:38:58] especially because a lot of great people,

[00:39:00] including Nietzsche,

[00:39:01] seem psychologically very fucking unhealthy.

[00:39:03] Let’s put it that way, right?

[00:39:04] If anything, their deep deficiencies as individuals

[00:39:07] and their profound anxieties seems to be a catalyst

[00:39:10] for them engaging in these grand enterprises.

[00:39:12] Again, is that self-evident?

[00:39:14] I don’t think so.

[00:39:15] I agree.

[00:39:16] But it’s a remarkably creative kind of interpretation.

[00:39:18] And I think that what’s important about this

[00:39:20] is it does put pressure, theoretical pressure,

[00:39:23] on people like myself who are democratic socialists

[00:39:25] to defend equality on a more theoretically sophisticated basis

[00:39:29] rather than just treating it as axiomatically obvious

[00:39:32] that either people are equal,

[00:39:33] or that everybody is going to accept that people are equal.

[00:39:44] What would you say is the defining belief

[00:39:46] of the political right?

[00:39:48] Is it a defensive tradition?

[00:39:50] A devotion to the past?

[00:39:52] Matt’s going to tell us what he thinks

[00:39:54] after one last quick break.

[00:40:03] We tend to think of the political right

[00:40:18] as being mostly about this devotion to tradition

[00:40:22] or to gradual change.

[00:40:24] But you say, no, it’s really much more about

[00:40:27] a defense of hierarchical organization.

[00:40:30] Why is that an important distinction

[00:40:32] for you to make, especially today?

[00:40:36] Well, the political right has never actually been

[00:40:38] that committed to maintaining tradition.

[00:40:40] The way I define the political right

[00:40:42] is in terms of its commitments to inequality.

[00:40:45] I think that F.A. Hayek is absolutely right

[00:40:47] that to be on the political right means that you believe

[00:40:49] there are demonstrably superior people in society

[00:40:51] and they are entitled to higher status,

[00:40:53] higher political influence, and more wealth

[00:40:55] if you’re kind of crude.

[00:40:56] Ever since liberal and egalitarian movements

[00:40:58] have gained hegemony over much of the world,

[00:41:01] the effort has always been to try to push back against them,

[00:41:04] which is necessarily going to entail transformative change

[00:41:07] of a certain type.

[00:41:08] And this is true of even people who will label themselves

[00:41:10] traditionalists of a certain sort.

[00:41:12] Think about somebody like Ronald Reagan in this country, right?

[00:41:15] Ronald Reagan instituted some of the most profound transformations

[00:41:18] in the United States since FDR.

[00:41:20] Now, I think Reagan changed the country very much for the worse.

[00:41:23] And it’s worth noting that in the so-called land of the free

[00:41:25] that he constantly talked about,

[00:41:27] there were more people in jail in the USA by 1991

[00:41:29] than there were in the Soviet Union.

[00:41:31] The so-called evil empire.

[00:41:33] Or even think about somebody like Margaret Thatcher, right?

[00:41:35] Margaret Thatcher presented herself as a conservative

[00:41:37] and enacted a revolutionary set of changes

[00:41:39] that were consciously intended to profoundly reformat British society.

[00:41:44] So even these traditionalist figures are not comfortable

[00:41:47] with retaining forms of egalitarian institutions

[00:41:50] that they don’t want.

[00:41:51] And they are very happy to reconstruct them

[00:41:53] or even get rid of them if that’s what’s necessary,

[00:41:55] even if they’ve been around for decades.

[00:41:57] You know, a really telling example of this also is William Buckley.

[00:42:00] I’m sure you know Buckley, right?

[00:42:01] Sure.

[00:42:02] The founder of the National Review,

[00:42:03] a very famous American conservative writer, thinker, pundit.

[00:42:07] He used to go on campus tours.

[00:42:09] And a bunch of know-it-all professors and eggheads like me

[00:42:12] would sometimes sit there and be like,

[00:42:13] you know, Buckley, you’re all about conserving and preserving

[00:42:17] and tradition and all that stuff,

[00:42:18] but what about like FDR’s welfare state?

[00:42:20] Isn’t that part of the American consensus?

[00:42:22] And shouldn’t you be committed to conserving that?

[00:42:24] And every single time they said that, he laughed in their face,

[00:42:27] saying, I am not interested in conserving that at all.

[00:42:29] We have to get rid of it, and if that means big transformations,

[00:42:32] then so be it, right?

[00:42:33] So the way that this aligns with Nietzsche

[00:42:35] is that he is very much in keeping with this attitude towards change

[00:42:40] that you see on the part of the political right,

[00:42:42] but he wants to go further than any of them are usually willing to go.

[00:42:45] For many on the political right,

[00:42:47] the ambition is to kind of turn back the clock on liberal secularism

[00:42:51] and move back to this more Christian model hierarchical complementarity

[00:42:56] where there will be social stratification,

[00:42:58] it’ll be justified according to a religious basis,

[00:43:01] and we’ll all get along.

[00:43:03] Nietzsche says, actually, the problem is that Christianity is at the base

[00:43:07] of all these egalitarian movements.

[00:43:10] Any kind of religion that emerges will probably also have the same propensities

[00:43:13] inherent within it, so what we need to do is actually commit ourselves

[00:43:16] to a kind of militant secularism,

[00:43:18] because it’s only once we become militant secularists

[00:43:20] that we can realize that Darwin is right,

[00:43:22] that there are fundamental inequalities between people,

[00:43:24] and that those should be reflected in society.

[00:43:27] This is a really huge point.

[00:43:29] Most of the conservatives drawn to Nietzsche over the years

[00:43:32] don’t really want to face up to his challenge.

[00:43:36] They may hate progressivism,

[00:43:38] and they want to reinforce Christianity as a moral and civilizational anchor,

[00:43:44] but Nietzsche’s whole point is that it doesn’t work like that.

[00:43:48] If you’re a conservative who hates progressivism,

[00:43:50] you have to realize that the progressive movement

[00:43:52] for more egalitarianism grew out of Christian soil.

[00:43:56] It is a secular extension of Christian morality.

[00:44:00] Nietzsche is at least consistent in his contempt for that,

[00:44:03] but a lot of conservatives aren’t,

[00:44:05] so they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too.

[00:44:07] Oh, absolutely. I’ll give two examples.

[00:44:09] Nietzsche would look at people like, say, Jordan Peterson or Dinesh D’Souza,

[00:44:13] both claim to like Nietzsche and also want to defend Christian civilization,

[00:44:16] and he’d say, you people may claim to believe in the Christian God,

[00:44:20] but you certainly don’t like his message at all.

[00:44:22] You want to reject his message as emphatically as you possibly can.

[00:44:25] By contrast, all those woke secularists that you constantly rail against

[00:44:29] might not even believe in the Christian God anymore,

[00:44:32] but boy, oh boy, do they love his message.

[00:44:34] They absolutely agree, as Frantz Fanon once put it,

[00:44:36] that the wretched of the earth have God on their side

[00:44:38] and will one day triumph, and should triumph, right?

[00:44:41] So, think about Dinesh D’Souza’s recent book,

[00:44:43] United States of Socialism.

[00:44:45] He is very contemptuous of people like Bernie Sanders

[00:44:47] for undermining a kind of religious conviction

[00:44:50] that he thinks is essential to holding the United States together.

[00:44:53] But at the same time,

[00:44:54] he will directly appeal to Nietzsche

[00:44:56] to criticize things like the Scandinavian social democracies

[00:44:58] by saying, even if a kind of social democracy could work,

[00:45:02] as it seems to there,

[00:45:03] why would we want to do that?

[00:45:04] That’s a society, he says, of last men,

[00:45:06] in the way that Nietzsche describes,

[00:45:08] where they are concerned for the least amongst them,

[00:45:10] they don’t commit themselves to any kind of great projects,

[00:45:12] I want none of that.

[00:45:14] And this remarkable tension is never reconciled in his book.

[00:45:18] Jordan Peterson is even worse in a lot of senses,

[00:45:20] where, on the one hand, he will sit there and constantly appeal to Nietzsche,

[00:45:24] describing how this death of God has led to the birth

[00:45:27] of all kinds of secular totalitarian ideologies

[00:45:29] like communism or Marxism,

[00:45:31] while never taking on board Nietzsche’s fundamental point

[00:45:33] that communism isn’t antithetical to Christianity.

[00:45:37] Communism was Christianity.

[00:45:39] It’s the herd gaining control of the house

[00:45:41] and doing what they inevitably were going to do,

[00:45:43] which is level it.

[00:45:45] It does feel like you sort of make a plea to the left.

[00:45:49] The left, certainly in this country, has a kind of reflexive discomfort.

[00:45:54] With religion, certainly in the American tradition,

[00:45:57] but part of what you’re saying here,

[00:45:59] and certainly part of what Nietzsche would say,

[00:46:01] is that no, actually, contemporary progressivism

[00:46:04] is very much an heir to the Christian tradition,

[00:46:07] and that presents a kind of political opportunity for the left

[00:46:11] that they probably haven’t made good use of up to this point,

[00:46:13] but maybe they should.

[00:46:15] Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that.

[00:46:17] The most important Christian figure in American history

[00:46:20] is, I think, inarguably, MLK, right?

[00:46:23] And MLK was a radical in almost every respect.

[00:46:26] He wanted a very pronounced form of economic democracy

[00:46:29] in addition to the elimination of all forms of racial hierarchicalization.

[00:46:33] And he argued for that on a Christian basis, I think, correctly.

[00:46:37] And Nietzsche would have had nothing but contempt for someone like MLK.

[00:46:41] But at least he would have said he really gets it.

[00:46:43] He understands what this message is about.

[00:46:45] It’s about empowering the lower orders of society

[00:46:48] to strike back against the elites.

[00:46:50] And I think that the left is mistaken.

[00:46:53] If it assumes that there isn’t a kind of power to this Christian ethic

[00:46:57] that it could mobilize on behalf of more progressive causes

[00:47:00] than it traditionally has been used for.

[00:47:03] What do you make of Nietzsche’s appeal on what we now call the alt-right?

[00:47:08] I wrote a piece about this for Vox a few years ago

[00:47:11] after I heard that racist, half-wit Richard Spencer

[00:47:15] tell someone in an interview that he was, quote,

[00:47:18] red-pilled by Nietzsche.

[00:47:20] But this faction of reactionaries,

[00:47:22] of reactionary politics today,

[00:47:24] or right-wing politics today,

[00:47:26] it’s younger and more transgressive

[00:47:29] and it’s kind of weird.

[00:47:31] And clearly, Nietzsche is a popular figure for them.

[00:47:35] And I think part of what I see happening here is

[00:47:39] Nietzsche is a very subversive writer and thinker.

[00:47:42] And in the last decade or so,

[00:47:44] the left has achieved a kind of cultural supremacy.

[00:47:48] The left is sort of influencing the culture

[00:47:50] more than the right has been.

[00:47:52] It’s shifted some of that subversive,

[00:47:54] transgressive energy to the alt-right or whatever.

[00:47:57] And now there’s this kind of punk rock delight

[00:48:00] in shit-posting, anti-woke memes.

[00:48:03] And there’s just something really juvenile about it.

[00:48:06] But I could see how Nietzsche could inspire it, right?

[00:48:09] I mean, he tells you,

[00:48:10] yeah, look, the society is all upside down.

[00:48:13] All these sacred cows need to be slaughtered.

[00:48:15] If you’re living in a multi-ethnic society,

[00:48:17] then you trash pluralism, right?

[00:48:19] If you’re part of a liberal democracy,

[00:48:20] then you play with fascism.

[00:48:21] It’s just negation for the sake of negation

[00:48:24] or just poking holes in sacred cows

[00:48:27] for the sake of poking holes in sacred cows

[00:48:29] and really nothing besides.

[00:48:30] I mean, think of somebody like Paul Joseph Watson,

[00:48:32] who once said,

[00:48:33] conservatism is the new counterculture.

[00:48:35] Paul Watson? Is that the Alex Jones guy?

[00:48:38] The very same.

[00:48:39] In fact, I’ve never seen so many members

[00:48:41] of the lefty Twitterati so triggered

[00:48:44] as when I tweeted,

[00:48:45] conservatism is the new counterculture.

[00:48:48] So I tweeted it again and again.

[00:48:50] And again.

[00:48:51] And again.

[00:48:52] And again.

[00:48:53] You know, and I was pissed off at that

[00:48:54] because he says he likes things like nirvana and punk.

[00:48:56] I’m like, you know,

[00:48:57] I don’t know that defending the cops

[00:48:58] is all that punk, buddy,

[00:48:59] but we’ll put that aside for now.

[00:49:01] I think that that’s absolutely true.

[00:49:02] And I think this tells us something important

[00:49:04] about Nietzsche.

[00:49:05] Nietzsche’s worry really was that

[00:49:07] even though God was dead

[00:49:08] and we should commit ourselves

[00:49:09] to this aristocratically radical vision of the world,

[00:49:12] that was not what was going to happen.

[00:49:14] Instead, the herd would continue to triumph

[00:49:16] and various forms of secularized Christian doctrines

[00:49:18] would become ever more heretical.

[00:49:20] Hegemonic.

[00:49:21] And this would lead to a leveling of all higher values

[00:49:24] and the entrenchment of a very kind of nihilistic outlook

[00:49:27] over the world.

[00:49:28] And if you view these kinds of ideas as hegemonic culturally,

[00:49:32] the way that you just described,

[00:49:33] you can understand why you could turn to Nietzsche

[00:49:36] as a kind of countercultural figure

[00:49:38] and present yourself as a kind of right-wing punk

[00:49:41] or right-wing countercultural figure.

[00:49:43] Now, I think a lot of this is done in bad faith

[00:49:46] and it’s extremely crude.

[00:49:47] And we can talk about how the alt-right misappropriates it.

[00:49:50] But there is a kind of affinity there to his work

[00:49:54] that we shouldn’t deny.

[00:49:55] What do you think is the primary way

[00:49:57] in which the alt-right misappropriates or abuses

[00:49:59] or misreads Nietzsche?

[00:50:01] Richard Evans, in his Third Reich trilogy,

[00:50:03] points out that Nietzsche had a profound influence on fascism.

[00:50:05] And this is something that has been better understood

[00:50:07] by historians than by philosophers.

[00:50:09] You know, we like Nietzsche and we want to read him.

[00:50:11] And the idea that he is aligned

[00:50:13] with the most sinister movement of all time

[00:50:15] and profoundly influenced them

[00:50:16] is a deeply discomforting thought.

[00:50:17] But it is something that should give us pause.

[00:50:19] Because I think that Nietzsche

[00:50:21] was not a fascist thinker in some respects,

[00:50:24] but he definitely provides ammunition

[00:50:26] for far-right movements very overtly

[00:50:28] in many other respects.

[00:50:29] He wasn’t a far-right thinker in the sense that

[00:50:31] he was deeply contemptuous of nationalism.

[00:50:34] It was just another herd morality

[00:50:36] that was emerging by weak people

[00:50:38] because they weren’t able to will their own destiny

[00:50:41] as individuals.

[00:50:42] They needed to kind of project it onto this collective identity

[00:50:44] that would then be the standard barrier

[00:50:46] for great politics going forward.

[00:50:48] And some of the things that I admire about Nietzsche

[00:50:50] is just how much fun he’ll poke at things like

[00:50:52] anti-Semitism, German nationalism.

[00:50:54] So, in these respects, we can criticize

[00:50:57] the far-right for its appropriation of Nietzsche

[00:50:59] since it almost invariably turns in this kind of

[00:51:01] nationalist, identitarian, racist direction.

[00:51:04] On the other hand, there is no denying

[00:51:07] that a person, again, who says,

[00:51:09] we should train a group of slaves

[00:51:11] that will be at the service of the truly great people

[00:51:14] who will demonstrate their arrival through great politics,

[00:51:18] that can be very conducive

[00:51:20] to a kind of far-right, alt-right politics.

[00:51:23] And most of the people who’ve taken up his mantle,

[00:51:27] people like Richard Spencer, are inconsistent.

[00:51:30] But they’re not wrong to assume that

[00:51:32] Nietzsche provides a license for violence,

[00:51:35] exploitation, slavery, radical forms of inequality.

[00:51:39] And I think that we need to be attentive to that

[00:51:42] in a way that we haven’t been in the past.

[00:51:44] Well, that’s sort of the other side of this.

[00:51:46] You know, if you’re someone

[00:51:48] stewing in resentment,

[00:51:50] and you’re searching for a psychologically satisfying

[00:51:54] explanation for your own discontent,

[00:51:57] this punk rock side of Nietzsche

[00:52:00] is pretty intoxicating.

[00:52:01] You read him and you’re thinking to yourself,

[00:52:03] well, the problem isn’t me, right?

[00:52:05] It’s this unthinking herd out there, right?

[00:52:07] The world is rejecting me because

[00:52:10] I refuse to dance to the same conformist music

[00:52:13] as everyone else, right?

[00:52:14] When of course, the reality, almost invariably,

[00:52:17] is that the person thinking that

[00:52:19] is not the ubermensch he thinks he is.

[00:52:22] And yes, it’s usually men.

[00:52:25] But if you’re the type who doesn’t like

[00:52:28] what the world’s become or becoming,

[00:52:30] it is not hard to see the appeal of Nietzsche’s obsession

[00:52:34] with decline and decadence.

[00:52:37] And like the Ayn Rand fanatics who read her work

[00:52:40] and think they’re John Galt, right?

[00:52:42] And society is stifling their greatness.

[00:52:44] You’re not, I’m sorry to say, actually.

[00:52:46] Whenever somebody puts down on pen and paper

[00:52:49] that we should have an aristocratic

[00:52:50] and highly elitist society,

[00:52:52] it’s a pretty good bet that they think

[00:52:54] they’re going to be part of that elite, right?

[00:52:55] Of course.

[00:52:56] And the problem with texts like this is, of course,

[00:52:58] it invites readers who are sympathetic to the text

[00:53:00] to imagine that they will also be part of that elite.

[00:53:02] Like you very rarely will find Ayn Rand fanatics

[00:53:04] who will sit there and say,

[00:53:05] I’m not John Galt.

[00:53:06] I’m one of the second handers.

[00:53:08] Same is true, you very rarely find people

[00:53:09] who read Nietzsche’s politics sympathetically

[00:53:12] imagining, well, I am part of that herd

[00:53:14] and I will be the slave.

[00:53:15] And that’s all well and good.

[00:53:17] But I think this is where I would offer

[00:53:19] my own critiques of Nietzsche.

[00:53:21] And I think we need to be critical of him

[00:53:23] as a philosopher in a way that maybe we haven’t before.

[00:53:25] One of the things that’s interesting about Nietzsche

[00:53:27] is he’s a profound diagnostician

[00:53:29] of resentment.

[00:53:31] But he only ever locates resentment

[00:53:33] on the political left,

[00:53:35] where it’s envious people looking up

[00:53:37] and wanting to bring others down.

[00:53:40] He very rarely talks about the kind of resentment

[00:53:42] that can emerge on the political right,

[00:53:44] which I think is by far the most potent

[00:53:46] kind of resentment that you find in politics today.

[00:53:49] And the resentment that you see emerging

[00:53:51] on the political right very much is

[00:53:53] this kind of aristocratic attitude that

[00:53:55] I am entitled to superior status relative to others

[00:53:58] and this is being taken away from me

[00:54:01] by the losers in society.

[00:54:03] I can’t quite understand how,

[00:54:04] but they keep managing to accomplish that.

[00:54:06] And I am embittered about that

[00:54:08] and I will do something about it.

[00:54:10] Sometimes this can take extraordinarily

[00:54:12] malicious forms.

[00:54:13] Probably the worst example of this kind of

[00:54:15] right-wing Byzantine model that I found

[00:54:17] is George Wallace in the 1960s,

[00:54:19] who was the governor of Alabama.

[00:54:21] He once said that if the Supreme Court

[00:54:23] will actually enforce desegregation in schools,

[00:54:27] then I will just get rid of all public schools

[00:54:29] in Alabama.

[00:54:30] My white children will not go to school

[00:54:32] with black children.

[00:54:34] And if that’s the kind of equality that we’re going to see,

[00:54:36] then no one will go to school.

[00:54:38] This is just something that Nietzsche

[00:54:39] never really contemplates.

[00:54:40] This idea of aristocratic,

[00:54:42] aristocratic resentment.

[00:54:44] And I think we need to be

[00:54:45] much, much more pronounced

[00:54:47] in diagnosing that in our society right now.

[00:54:49] The real creatures of spite and malice

[00:54:52] that exist right now

[00:54:53] usually aren’t people on the political left.

[00:54:55] There are plenty of them

[00:54:57] in the Trumpist movement

[00:54:58] who think that this is their country.

[00:54:59] They were entitled to it.

[00:55:00] They’re better than others.

[00:55:01] And they will not allow

[00:55:03] the losers and immigrants of the world

[00:55:06] to take it from them.

[00:55:08] I mean, you’re a teacher.

[00:55:09] I assume you teach Nietzsche.

[00:55:11] Yep.

[00:55:12] I’m asking you,

[00:55:13] how do you counsel your students

[00:55:14] not to read Nietzsche?

[00:55:15] I mean, I think you and I both

[00:55:16] pretty firmly believe

[00:55:17] he is absolutely worth reading,

[00:55:18] whatever you think of him.

[00:55:19] Oh yeah, everyone should read him.

[00:55:20] He’s indispensable to trying to make sense

[00:55:22] of the pathologies of modern politics

[00:55:24] and much, much more.

[00:55:26] But when you do encounter someone who’s younger,

[00:55:28] like we once were,

[00:55:30] but when you do encounter someone

[00:55:32] who’s being entranced by Nietzsche

[00:55:34] in some of these ways we’ve described,

[00:55:36] what do you say to them?

[00:55:38] How do you tell them to read Nietzsche

[00:55:40] or to take Nietzsche?

[00:55:41] Or do you at all?

[00:55:42] Yeah.

[00:55:43] I mean, look,

[00:55:44] I teach a class on the political right

[00:55:45] and Nietzsche is an important module on that.

[00:55:47] And I think that Nietzsche

[00:55:48] can have a profoundly beneficial effect on students

[00:55:51] by getting them to ask questions

[00:55:53] that they didn’t before,

[00:55:54] by instilling them

[00:55:55] a deep sense of intellectual honesty,

[00:55:57] and really just by fostering their creativity, right?

[00:55:59] I mean, that’s something we didn’t talk about,

[00:56:00] but Nietzsche has been a profound influence

[00:56:02] on all kinds of artists

[00:56:03] through the 20th and 21st century,

[00:56:05] most of whom I really admire,

[00:56:06] people like James Joyce, for example.

[00:56:08] So if anything,

[00:56:09] we should be encouraging people

[00:56:10] to read more of Nietzsche.

[00:56:11] But we need to also insist

[00:56:12] that they read him carefully

[00:56:14] and recognize that there is a deep politics

[00:56:17] in his work.

[00:56:18] It is a politics

[00:56:19] that is fundamentally contrary

[00:56:20] to the liberal and egalitarian values

[00:56:22] on which our society is predicated.

[00:56:24] And I think that there’s a lot of,

[00:56:26] I’ll just use the term evil

[00:56:27] in what it is that he’s trying

[00:56:28] to accomplish politically.

[00:56:30] And we should be critical of that

[00:56:32] while also accepting the fact

[00:56:33] that there are extraordinary gems

[00:56:35] in that work as well.

[00:56:36] What I’ve always said about Nietzsche,

[00:56:38] and I used to teach him as well,

[00:56:40] he can only take you so far.

[00:56:42] And if you’re concerned with politics,

[00:56:44] he will lead you into an abyss

[00:56:47] because he can’t offer,

[00:56:49] doesn’t want to offer,

[00:56:50] any basis for meaningful collective action.

[00:56:53] His thought necessarily collapses

[00:56:56] into a muddled individualism,

[00:56:59] which is why he, I think,

[00:57:01] ultimately becomes much more useful

[00:57:03] to artists than to politicians

[00:57:05] and legislators.

[00:57:06] But he remains incredibly important

[00:57:09] and incredibly dangerous

[00:57:11] because he was right about quite a bit.

[00:57:13] And we are still very much living

[00:57:15] in the shadow of his destruction.

[00:57:18] I mean, along with Marx,

[00:57:20] he’s one of the great diagnosticians

[00:57:22] of the crisis of modernity

[00:57:23] that emerged in the 19th century.

[00:57:25] And he’s indispensable

[00:57:26] to understanding that.

[00:57:27] The way that I go about rebutting him

[00:57:30] is by saying, look,

[00:57:31] I take seriously this idea

[00:57:33] that Résentiment can lie at the basis

[00:57:35] of all human actions.

[00:57:36] And I don’t think that there’s any denying

[00:57:38] that there’s plenty of Résentiment

[00:57:39] on the left as well.

[00:57:40] Anyone who sits there

[00:57:41] and sees those burn the rich

[00:57:42] or eat the rich signs

[00:57:43] can’t help but be a little bit

[00:57:44] worried about that.

[00:57:45] But I think that progressive causes,

[00:57:47] unlike what he thinks,

[00:57:48] actually require quite a bit of strength,

[00:57:50] creativity, and will to go into them

[00:57:52] if they’re going to be successful.

[00:57:54] And I think he profoundly underestimated

[00:57:56] the emotional importance of love

[00:57:58] as a kind of empowerment,

[00:58:00] including universal love.

[00:58:01] Whether you understand that

[00:58:02] in a Christian, a liberal,

[00:58:03] or a socialist way,

[00:58:04] that’s the kind of emotional basis

[00:58:07] on which I’d want to ground my politics,

[00:58:09] not this kind of aristocratically

[00:58:10] radical sensibility.

[00:58:13] I think that’s a good note

[00:58:15] on which to end.

[00:58:17] This is awesome, man.

[00:58:18] I love this stuff.

[00:58:19] So I appreciate you coming in

[00:58:21] to help me think it all through, Matt.

[00:58:23] Yeah, thanks.

[00:58:24] I had a great time.

[00:58:37] You were actually짉

[00:58:42] my throughout this interview.

[00:58:43] Anyway, I wanted to just

[00:58:44] let everybody know

[00:58:45] that the work

[00:58:46] that you’ve done

[00:58:47] today

[00:58:48] brought us such an optimal

[00:58:49] experience to these projects

[00:58:50] and made the most out of it.

[00:58:51] And you’ve been

[00:58:52] all the challenging

[00:58:52] parts of the show

[00:58:53] of our music completely找た Garrett has been

[00:58:56] a true god at the iPad.

[00:58:57] So we’re pleased

[00:58:58] to be saying good-bye this night.

[00:58:59] Thanks.

[00:59:00] Thank you so much.

[00:59:01] Bye.

[00:59:02] Bye-bye.

[00:59:05] ¶¶

[00:59:05] ¶¶

[00:59:06] ¶¶

[00:59:06] some of our worst impulses and really reckon with them.

[00:59:10] And to go on that journey with Nietzsche,

[00:59:12] looking into the abyss, as he would put it,

[00:59:15] is kind of a thrill as a reader.

[00:59:18] And whatever one thinks of Nietzsche,

[00:59:20] I think he’s always going to be worth reading.

[00:59:26] But tell me what you think.

[00:59:28] Drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com.

[00:59:32] And if you appreciated this episode,

[00:59:34] as always, share it with your friends on all the socials.

[00:59:37] New episodes drop on Mondays.

[00:59:39] Listen and subscribe.

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