Introduction to Philosophy: Shopenhauer & Nietzsche

GERMAN PESSIMISM (aka ‘Happy Times’)

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany and German thought had been going through a great period of pessimism.  Just like in ancient Egypt, Greece and China, human thought often flourishes in periods of tragedy and war as people are forced to turn critically to old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions about what works and does not for the individual and the community.  In the late 1700s, the American and French revolutions, along with developments in England, had brought new rights to common people.  When the German people rose up to fight for rights similar to their neighbors, several German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movement.  Germany was at this time a loose confederacy of regional principalities, ruled locally.  Hegel’s student Marx, German though writing much of his work in England, was writing for this discouraged audience, arguing that the people would rise up and overcome oppression.

Recall that Descartes, Kant and other rationalists argued that the world (Descartes) and/or the mind (Kant) worked like a clock that provides us with mathematical and deductive certainties.  When the political tide turned against the German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the American and French revolutions, the people began to wonder: Is the world, society or mind run by reason?  This created a tide of pessimistic popular and intellectual culture.  Remember that Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) in the Republic argued that the world is true and created by ideal forms that can be known by the just and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice was merely the will of the stronger who could impose their ‘order’ on others.  German thought likewise turned from the reason of Kant towards the will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the world.  Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true.  Life, at its best, is romantic and dramatic, not rational or mathematical.

German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement we will study soon) and post-WWII through the Vietnam War for America (producing the counter-culture of first the beatniks and then hippies, particularly thriving in the Bay Area).  Nietzsche has been celebrated by counter-cultural thinkers and artists as a pessimist who trashed his own country, culture and people as prideful and ignorant sheep who would rather seek pride in being a member of a group than be excellent as individuals.



SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860)

Arthur Schopenhauer, who looks something like a cross between a cranky grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of Kant, unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued against him frequently.  Kant and Schopenhauer were both great influences on Wittgenstein, who we will study next.  Remember that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can have about it are assumptions, but the mind works mathematically and so we can know the categories of the mind with deductive certainty.  Schopenhauer, more pessimistic than Kant, saw the gulf and gap between the world and our ideas as a stormy abyss that forever frustrates our idealizations.  He agreed with Kant that the mind works categorically and mathematically, but the gap between our conceptions and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned Schopenhauer from Rationalism and mathematical science to Buddhism and ecstatic art.

Remember that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the ‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason through dialectic.  Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that reason could not overcome the gap.  In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both taught at the University of Berlin as philosophical rivals.  As Hegel became increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy, but when this backfired and more students attended Hegel’s lectures Schopenhauer resigned in disgust.  Schopenhauer openly called Hegel a charlatan who tricks people into believing reason completely fleshes the world out, and wrote that when he read Hegel’s central Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind he felt as if he were in a madhouse.

Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism.  Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the most sublime philosophy of world history, and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my death”.  Schopenhauer saw parallels between the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha and his own philosophy of existence as will and suffering.  He wrote that, if his own philosophy is correct, it is expected that it agrees with the most popular system of thought in human history.  He received instruction in meditation, though it is unknown whether he practiced with any regularity.  Like much of Indian thought and Hume, who himself may very well have been influenced by Indian sources, Schopenhauer argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the fundamental essence of all things.

Schopenhauer’s great work is The World as Will and Representation.  The mind represents and idealizes the world, which is essentially will.  All things, including the self and conceptions, are manifestations of will.  Recall that Buddha taught that existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire and attachment.  For Schopenhauer, the world is full of perpetual striving for ideals that never come to perfection.  The classic metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship build of ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires.  One must recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold one’s course in spite of the endless hardship.  Developing sea legs and a tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.

There is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self.  Through art, which can include philosophy, we can temporarily escape ourselves and our desires through ecstasy and identification with others and the whole.  Nietzsche similarly argued that creativity was the highest form of life, but he argued that it was not the loss of self and escape from will but rather the highest activity of the individual, expressing power and accomplishment.  For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an individual but identification with the world beyond representation, feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.  

Schopenhauer considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no particular things or ideas.  In this way it is similar to American Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are quite similar to Darwin.  Like Jains, but unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar manifestations of will, striving and suffering.  In one passage near the end of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea-lions and the way that they form a circle around their young.  Whenever a pup tries to escape the circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach it to stay where it is safe.  Clearly he is drawing a comparison between the way sea-lions and humans learn through suffering and overcoming of will in themselves and others.  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who saw civilization and human behaviors as repression of desire and will, as the super-ego putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check.  Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were critical of philosophy for avoiding subjects such as sex, laughter and friendship because this raw material of life, the most vibrant forms of will, defies most powerfully conceptualization and categorization.





NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Nietzsche is often called the first modern thinker.  In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker.  Descartes is also called the first modern thinker, but truthfully he was the first modern European thinker, and Europe is being identified with modernity.  Nietzsche is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt.  He argued, like Descartes, that everything must be questioned, but unlike Descartes he argued against the certainty of religion, science and politics.  For Nietzsche, truth is an individual quest that should not be put in servitude to an institution.  Because human beings are easily made into sheep, the excellent must strive to overcome both themselves and institutions to bring greater truth to the world and greater meaning to their own lives.

Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers, five generations deep (following his great-great-great-grandfather, thrice times great like Hermes Trismegistus, the author of the Hermetic Corpus of Neo-Platonism).  Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, suffering both physically and mentally.   Nietzsche as a boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher, and older brother died in spite of being Christian.  Though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian, like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy (after a brief period of turning to mathematics).  It seems that many great philosophers of Europe begin by studying religion or science (particularly mathematics) and then turning to philosophy to seek the rules of the rules, the deeper understanding of human understandings.


Nietzsche versus Morality

The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity and systems of thought critically and see that following the rules (the rationalist morality of Kant) or ‘the greater common good’ (the utilitarian morality of Mill) is for sheep and not for the genuine individual.  The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way.  Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly.  For Nietzsche, inequality and individuality is the beautiful mountain range for each individual to climb and conquer.

Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality that limits the individual, and he called Christianity, scientific ‘objectivity’, German nationalism and German racism (very much centered in anti-semitism) out on this vocally.  These are all the systems that Germans of his day identified with.  Nietzsche was possibly the first to openly call all the group identities and institutions of his day foolish.  He is seen as a hero by many for this.  Consider that in one place he wrote, “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals, a growing subject of his day that reached its peak in the Nazi regime, but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.

Nietzsche argued that in any system, the revered leaders always have the strength and individuality to criticize the system.  Unfortunately, then the individual’s thought becomes canon and dogma, and the process repeats as Hegel recognized in each stage of history.  Nietzsche praised Jesus as an individual who criticized the religious and political system of his day, standing up to the Pharisees and the Romans, but Nietzsche bashes Paul and Christianity for systematizing Jesus’ thought and actions, making them constraints on the individual.  In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche calls Paul the penultimate priest, the individual who takes their own inability and imposes it on others.

It is often noted that Nietzsche was a critic of religion and Christianity.  In two places, he famously says that God is dead, and you and I have killed him.  This is not, however, confined to religion.  By the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche was equally critical of any authority, of any singular interpretation of truth, whether in the name of religion, science, philosophy, race or politics (the first four often serving the last).  One of the fundamental thoughts of Nietzsche is that truth is always individual interpretation, and that all philosophy and thought are a self-confession of their author.  To accept any human truth passively, whether religious, scientific, academic, or political, is to compromise one’s individuality, one’s ability to create greater meaning and truth.

Like Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker Nietzsche loved most, the world is unknown beyond any human attempt to understand it by experts, making us little more than apes (a metaphor used by both Heraclitus and Nietzsche).  The great individuals, those who form the systems themselves, are those who both support and oppose the system to create something new.  Consider that if you believe Newton and his ‘laws’ are entirely correct and certain fact, you would not be Einstein and invent the Theory of Relativity.  In one passage I take dear to heart, Nietzsche warns us: If you thought religion created problems and mislead people by offering them an identity that embraces some while rejecting others, wait until you see how this can be done in the name of science and the modern nation-state.

It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis, thanks to the efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, to support their ideas of the rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine.  Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again, and he attacked both nationalism and racism as poisons that intoxicate the weak-minded.  Nietzsche does speak of the superman, the ‘ubermensch’, much as the Nazis called themselves the supermen and other races the inferior, the under-men or sub-human (‘untermensch’).  When Nietzsche uses the term ‘ubermensch’, he means the one who overcomes both themselves and their own culture, not those who embrace group identity to give meaning to their lives.  Nietzsche’s superior person is the visionary thinker or artist, not a nation or race.  Nietzsche called himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’, and moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to walk alone in the mountains.


Nietzsche versus Nihilism

While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true.  Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality.  Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many.  Indeed, he predicted excellent individual thinkers (such as Bataille, Foucault, Derrida) as well as corrupters (such as the Nazis) following in his wake.  Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system.  However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could escape individuality and will.  Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life.  He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, though this is just what his critics, religious and not, have often called him.

Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Non-Being.  He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also avoids believing in nothing whatsoever.  It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of nihilism, the nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat.  He fears a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there.  Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create.  As the Nietzschean founder of the Dada art movement Tristan Tzara wrote, “One must have the courage to be both for and against thought”.


Nietzsche versus Women

One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings, a particularly interesting example of his philosophical method, is his sudden and unexpected turn in his book Human All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to saying, “Here are some of my truths”, and without warning begin trashing women, including the famous line, “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”.  Why is Nietzsche suddenly misogynistic? He has told us that philosophy is a self-confession of the author, and that truth is always open to interpretation.  Nietzsche is putting on a self-conscious philosophical performance, inspiring to many including Bataille and Derrida.  Nietzsche here is showing us both sides of himself at once, both his hatred of women and his understanding that this is merely his own twisted perspective.  Unlike other philosophers, who write what they hope can be consistent and clear truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological, contradictory and complex, and that beauty and achievement come from tension and pain.  Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed.



The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the ancient Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said in Nietzsche’s time and still is today.  He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt).  Apollo was the ancient Greek god of knowledge, and Dionysus was the god of ecstasy, intoxication and transformation.  Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape restraint, to categorically understand and transcend categorical understanding, engaging in both science and art.  This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of understanding versus reason and culture versus counter-culture we studied last time.  However, unlike Hegel and following Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the opposite of understanding not as reason but will, not as mathematical science but as creative expression.  This became influential on the philosopher Bataille, who argued that systems of meaning, knowledge and economics are not simply systems of containing and maintaining things but also of release and excess.



Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

In this book, Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond categorical understandings of good and evil and of true and false to show the complexity of human meaning and life.  He starts this work asking:  Why do we want simple truth or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely started, but it has been assumed that something in us wants absolute truth and can acquire it.  Nietzsche says that asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk.  If we question our ability to gain truth, it becomes possible that we will lose all hope for truth and turn to nihilism, which Nietzsche argues later is equally as dangerous to human creativity and the process of life as the belief in objectivity.  Typically, thinkers have assumed that there must be absolute pure truth apart from or hidden within the messy world and various human opinions.  He writes:


“This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which gives away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this ‘faith’ that they trouble themselves about ‘knowledge’, about something that is finally baptized solemnly as ‘the truth’.  The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values.  It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary...For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use.  For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust.  It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things, maybe even one with them in essence.  Maybe!”
(BGE 2)


Note the ‘frog perspectives’ in their nooks, used by painters, is possibly from the Daoist Zhuangzi.  Later, Nietzsche uses the term ‘well-frogs’ similarly.  European painting was influenced in the Renaissance and later Enlightenment by Chinese landscape paintings.


“After having looked long enough between the philosopher’s lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking...most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.  Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life, for example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than ‘truth’... (BGE 3)


“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment...The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating, and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments apriori) are the most indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life.  To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” (BGE 4)


Notice Nietzsche calling Kant out on apriori truth as a fiction, as well as the title of the work stated here.


“What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are, how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray, in short, their childishness and childlikeness, but that they are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely.  They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish, and talk of ‘inspiration’), while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’, most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract, that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.  They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’, and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.  The equally stiff and decorous tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce, this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and finds it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists...” (BGE 5)


Notice Nietzsche calling the dialectic of Kant and Hegel, the two big names in German thought in Nietzsche’s time, a sham that parades itself as pure cold truth.  Nietzsche argues that truth is seduction, we believe what we want to believe and project it through abstraction into the places we can not see or are afraid to look.  Baudrillard, another French Nietzschean philosopher, took ‘Truth is Seduction’ as the starting point of his philosophy, wandering in Vegas and marvelling at the seduction of consumerism and the spectacles we can create through technology.


“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir... Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument.  But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time, and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.” (BGE 6)


“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” (BGE 14)


“There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’, for example, ‘I think’, or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’, as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself’, without falsification on the part of either the subject or the object...I shall repeat a hundred times, we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!”  (BGE 16)


“With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’.  IT thinks...The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is explained easily enough.  Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.” (BGE 17)


“O holy simplicity!  In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!  One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel!  How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple!  How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences!  How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance...and only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement!  Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation...here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitable constructed and suitable falsified world, at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life.”  (BGE 24)


“Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom, of suffering ‘for truth’s sake’, even of defending yourselves...as though ‘the truth’ were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!” (BGE 25)


“In all seriousness, the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers...A philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’, as the being who has so far always been fooled best on earth.  He has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion...Why couldn’t the world that concerns us, be a fiction?  And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’, couldn’t one answer simply: Why?  Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction too?...Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)


“One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous.” (BGE 41)


“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” (BGE 76)


“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” (BGE 78)


“A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” (BGE 94)


“A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.  Yes, and then to get around them.” (BGE 126)



Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)

This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books.  The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often.  The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole.  Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.


Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect.  This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome.  He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker.  Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but in this scene the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same.  Some of the most quoted lines of the text come from this scene, as Zarathustra addresses the crowd.


“I teach you the superman.  Man is something that is to be surpassed.  What have you done to surpass him?  All beings have so far created something beyond themselves, and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?  What is the ape to man?  A laughing-stock, a thing of shame, and just the same shall man be to the superman.  You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.  Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape that any of the apes.  Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom...Truly, man is a polluted stream.  One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” (TSZ 3)


“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss, a dangerous crossing...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” (TSZ 4)

Intro Philosophy: Third Response Paper

For the third paper, you should discuss in at least three typed double-spaced pages whether there are absolute certainties (the position of Descartes) or if all truth is assumption (the position of Hume). A good example is 2 + 3 = 5, about which Descartes says we could not possibly be deceived. Do we know this truth by deduction to be absolutely certain, or do we assume this by induction to be decently useful?

Social & Political Philosophy: Anarchism

We have been studying political philosophies that support or advance toward bottom-up democracy through top-down structures of authority.  Anarchism also aims at bottom-up democracy, but more radically does not propose any top-down authority for support.  Just as Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience, “That government is best which governs the least”, Anarchists believe in getting rid of government as much as possible.  This may or may not leave room for a diminished government that leans towards capitalism or socialism, but it is at odds with communism imposing a dictatorship even though it also ultimately aims at direct governance by the people.  Hard capitalism could be similar if not identical to anarchism (remember that communists consider capitalism to be anarchism already but anarchism for the wealthy rather than for the common people), however capitalism traditionally relies on the state for money and military support.  Socialism is not compatible with complete anarchism because it presupposes a state structure, but a more libertarian socialism would aim at anarchism as much as it is possible and feasible, just like communism.

How feasible is anarchy?  Some say it is impossible.  Others say it is entirely possible and we can figure it out and live it now.  Others say we cannot figure it out, but we should dream the impossible and strive to achieve what may only be a dream for now.  To many anarchism is no different than Hobbes’ state of nature: nasty, brutish and short-lived.  Without government, the police and military for example, how would the powerless and marginalized be defended from the powerful and dominant?  Anarchists would side with Saint-Simon, the socialist, and argue that technology and culture have advanced to a point where power can be held by the people without the necessary abuses of the state.  Government and structures of power, they would argue, are already inherently abusive, and anarchism would be less abusive than the current structures of power.  For instance, while the powerful could still hire private armies to do what they want without fear of the state police, international wars would become virtually impossible. 

One can find the idea that power is inherently abusive in ancient Chinese and Greek thought (Daoism and Stoicism specifically), in the thought of Rousseau and Thoreau, as well as libertarianism of 1800s France and America today.  The term ‘anarchism’ was used as a negative term by the Royalists against the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War (involving Hobbes and Locke).  During the French Revolution, progressives who began opposing the dictatorship of Robespierre began using the term in a positive way. This prefigured the split between communists and anarchists.  The question is, is centralized authority more or less abusive than decentralized authority?  All the political philosophies theoretically aim at decentralized authority, but none trusts decentralized authority like anarchism.  One could equally say that none trusts dictatorship like communism that we have studied so far, but fascism (which we study next week) believes in dictatorship like communism but does not believe in evolving toward direct democracy.

Proudhon

The first to call himself an anarchist by name was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865).  He is best known for the quote, “Property is theft”, from his work, “What is Property?”.  He is also quoted famously for saying, “Anarchy is order”, the possible origin of the A surrounded by an O which is the symbol of anarchism.  Marx and Proudhon were friends for awhile in Paris before splitting over differences.  Proudhon argued for a collectivism of co-ops and communes without the need for a centralized state.  Unlike Marx and communism, Proudhon did not believe in the nationalization of property under state ownership.  Through free association, individuals labor in collectives and reap the fruit of their efforts without individual or collective ownership of the kind Locke felt the state must protect.  Rather than property, Proudhon argued for possession through mutual and voluntary use. 

While communists such as Marx argued that dictatorship was necessary to transform society, Proudhon and his followers recalled the French Revolution and argued that this would be a step backwards that would take power from the people rather than giving power to the people.  Proudhon repeatedly spoke of “the people”, and regarded all government as tyranny.  This goes beyond Rousseau, who believes in central government that has the support of the general will.  Proudhon argued that property was the cause of all wars, including religious wars and the French Revolution, and so if possession through use made property rights unnecessary war would become a thing of the past.  Towards the end of his life, Proudhon began to compromise with the idea of a balance of central authority as a socialist, but retained his belief that mutualism was superior and more trustworthy than authority.

Bakunin

Socialists in Europe became polarized at this time between the communists who followed Marx and the Anarchists who followed Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876).  A Hegelian like Marx, Bakunin  had met both Marx and Proudhon in Paris and translated Hegel and the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels into Russian.  Like Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin was exiled from Russia for his criticism of the tyrannical power of the Tsar.  Unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky however, Bakunin had come to distrust authority even under the guise of socialism and communism.  At meetings of the First International socialist congress, Marx argued that they should participate in European national elections while Bakunin argued that they should abstain from voting and complying with state held power.  Bakunin argued for rising up against the state in acts of open rebellion, what he called “the propaganda of the deed” (actions speak louder than words).  Later anarchists would use this phrase to describe bombings and assassinations against those they believe oppress the common people.  The Marxists, who dominated the congress, expelled Bakunin and his followers.  Bakunin continued to argue that no one should be given political power, not even the workers, as this power would come to exploit the workers themselves.  All dictatorship is self-perpetuating, and a communist dictatorship would merely claim to be the voice of the people.  Marcuse and Chomsky have both been influenced by Bakunin in their criticism of communist dictatorship.

The Spanish Civil War

During the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), the fascist general Francisco Franco fought for control of a divided Spain with the support of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany and American corporations such as General Motors, Ford and Texaco.  Those on the left, the communists, socialists and anarchists, saw the war as a struggle for freedom, while those on the right saw the war as a struggle for Christian civilization.  On the left were peasants, workers and intellectuals.  On the right were the clergy, the military, land owners and business interests.  Anarchism had gained more influence in Spain than elsewhere in Europe, and for a brief time, especially in Andalusia and Catalonia, land and industries were collectivized and run as mutualist co-ops.  Unfortunately, this success frightened the communists as well as the fascists, and infighting between communists and anarchists weakened the left side of the war.  With the victory of Franco in 1939, these communities were crushed and thousands of anarchists and communists shot.  I personally saw walls in Barcelona that were riddled with pockmarks from this period.  This is known as a brief period where anarchism did flourish and work as a political form, but because it was so brief and crushed by fascism its feasibility remains controversial.  Would it have survived and flourished had Franco and the powers that backed him not been victorious, or would it have been swallowed up by communism or another form of power?

Squatter’s Rights

One concept of anarchism that still has a following today is squatter’s rights.  Do the poor have the right to seize unused property such as houses and factories and use them as they see fit, gaining possession of these lands and facilities through use?  Capitalism and communism would say no, because property is the right of the individual or the state, not to be seized voluntarily.  Anarchists argue that people should take possession of buildings that are not used and put them to good use for the good of any who wish to contribute to the effort.  There are countless squatter’s communities around the world, especially in impoverished areas (consider homeless camps visible underneath freeway overpasses here in the East Bay).  In Detroit there have been activists for decades who help poor families break into unused homes and repair them so that they can be used, resulting in continuous struggles with local police.  Some of these activists even call the police and let them know what homes they are “liberating” to wear down police already busy with other matters.

Free Love & Women’s Rights

Anarchism is often in solidarity with free love and women’s rights movements.  Just as anarchism wants an end to the domination of the wealthy over the poor, it also seeks an end to other forms of oppression such as the tyranny of the male over the female.  Anarchists often are champions of free love, the voluntary sexual association of individuals rather than the prescribed and state sanctified sexual union of marriage, as well as women’s rights such as equal treatment, suffrage, contraception, and abortion.  While this is much more accepted today under state systems, sexual relations outside of marriage were considered criminal in the past and remain so in many places today.  Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was a feminist and anarchist who argued the real anarchist and social revolution should be concerned with ridding society of gender inequality.  Critical of both American capitalism and Soviet communism, she is considered one of the first revolutionary feminists who hoped that one day women would be recognized as full individuals who are able to get married or not and have children or not without the coercion of the state or culture.

Now we consider two thinkers who are not only affiliated with anarchism but increasingly important today: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault.  Both criticize the way power and information are held in society and the oppressive nature of human institutions.  However, Chomsky is very much a positivist who believes that there are true human rights and objective facts while Foucault is very much an existentialist and Nietzschean who believes that any conception of true rights or objectivity is itself oppressive in the same way as all human institutions.  Both agree that power as it is practiced today marginalizes the truth, perspective and reality of the oppressed, but they disagree over whether this is monstrous or all too human.  This is an important debate within not only anarchism but many other schools of thought.  Are human beings always dominating and marginalizing, or are there just forms of social life that liberate us from domination?  Are there true human rights, or are human rights another form, perhaps more evolved, of political domination and control?  On the one hand, with positivism, we can agree that there are human rights and social forms we believe in and push for, but on the other, with skepticism, we know that America, Britain and the Soviet Union have paid great lip service to human rights while ignoring and marginalizing brutality and domination at home and abroad.  Either way, we should push for the good while maintaining skepticism.

Noam Chomsky (1928 – present)

Chomsky, who has openly declared himself an anarchist, is one of the foremost critics of American empire and colonialism as was the late Howard Zinn.  He first became famous and secured tenure at MIT in the 50s as a linguist and philosopher of language with his theory of universal grammar, also called x-bar y-bar theory (essentially, that there are basic structures of grammar inherent to all human language such that ancient Chinese has nouns and verbs just like modern English).  In the late 60s, he gained far more fame across many academic disciplines and the reading public as a critic of the Vietnam war and American empire.  One of his most famous books is Manufacturing Consent (1988) that he co-wrote with Edward Herman, which argues that the American mass media maintains silence about the brutality of our military, corporations and allies while repeatedly putting the brutality of our enemies and opponents on display.  For example, TV news programs and newspapers devoted many minutes of airtime and inches of print discussing suppression of dissent in communist countries while maintaining media silence about the same forms of suppression here at home and in Central and South America.

Chomsky states that all forms of authority and domination should be challenged and if the forms are unjustifiable they should be dismantled.  Chomsky clearly has the political, economic, and military domination of America over much of the rest of the world in mind.  Because power is by nature domineering and potentially abusive, the burden of proof should be on the authority itself to justify its own existence and importance.  Chomsky is consistently critical of academic journals maintaining silence as he is of the mass media, arguing that even left-wing academics are either brainwashed into believing that the West and America stand for freedom and democracy in the face of the evidence he collects or know what not to say and practice self censorship to maintain and advance their careers.  Chomsky criticizes forms of democracy and libertarianism as practiced in America and Britain that give property rights overriding support (like Locke) while maintaining silence about poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as Soviet communism for being an enemy of true socialism.  Chomsky argues, unlike Foucault, that there is a true human nature and that unjust institutions contradict and violate this nature, however he does also say that we do not know enough about human nature to know whether it is basically anarchistic and libertarian or oppressive and domineering.  In other words, he hopes that Mencius is right but we do not know enough to rule Xun Zi out.

Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)

Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science.  He also taught briefly at Berkeley.  His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality.  Foucault called himself a Nietzschean (a follower of Nietzsche, who we will study next class along with how some Nazis misused his philosophy) and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil.  The famous story is that Foucault went on vacation to the Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche. 

As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations.  Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth.  This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured.

For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with desire.  We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only power, it is domination.  He states that truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world.  Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change.  A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence.  Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man.  

Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other.  However, Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant. 

Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good.  Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through fear and desire.  Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together.  While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought.  His conception of power is very similar if not identical to anarchist criticisms of society.

BCC Philosophy Club: April 18th Meeting Notes

In today's meeting, the following sources for short video and audio clips to discuss were suggested:

RSA Animate
3 Minute Philosophy
Philosophy Bites
TED Talks
Lectures of Wendy Brown

After taking votes on specific shorts recommended, we created the following list of clips that we would prefer to discuss:

1) Nietzsche (3 Minute Philosophy)
2) Zizek (RSA Animate)
3) Foucault (3 Minute Philosophy)
4) Internet Empowerment or Censorship (RSA Animate)
5) Shifting Educational Paradigms (RSA Animate)
6) Zizek (3 Minute Philosophy)
7) Locke, Lacan & Cornell West (3 Minute Philosophy)

The Nietzsche 3 Minute Philosophy video is only one minute long, and contains no content, a commentary on Nietzsche's lack of a system and suspicion of all totalizing judgements.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFUlXPX_-_E

The Zizek RSA Animate: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

I could not find a 3 Minute Philosophy piece on Foucault, though I did find this absurd film, Kung Foucault. I don't suggest we, or anyone else, watch it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1owkkNhTs4c

RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowerment or Censorship?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

RSA Amimate - Challenging Educational Paradigms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

There is no 3 Mintue Philosophy piece on Zizek. Nor is there a piece on Lacan or Cornell West. There is, however, a piece on Locke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY

Club members are encouraged to find additional short (less than 15 minute) clips they wish to submit to the club for discussion.

Ethics: 3rd Paper Topics

While you are welcome to write on anything we have covered so far for the three page third response paper, here are some possible topics.

Option 1: What is the ethical conception you think best prevents theft, and why?

Option 2: Must all societies lie? Is the American and British style of propaganda better or worse
than the older methods of the past?

Option 3: Are Grossman’s findings on human violence comforting or disturbing, and why?

Ethics: Environment & Carson

In the earliest cultures, humans and animals were understood to share a world together as very much equals. As humanity began domesticating livestock, humans are increasingly understood to be above all animals, the god-like animal. Adam in the Bible is namer and master of all.
At same time, world as balance with humans (like Leviathan and Behemoth). We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. This makes sense, as Europe got its machines and chemistry from Islamic civilization.

As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. Remember that it is not ‘the oil stupid’ as far as just gasoline. All our life is permeated with petroleum products and synthetic chemicals. Monsanto and DuPont are the big giants.
What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact.

Add on top of externalization the competition between corporations in a culture that ignores the consequences and people are racing to screw things up and put money in their own pocket before someone else does. This imbalance creates further imbalances. Modern plantations and corporate farms have created surges in pests, and then we spray tons of pesticide to kill the swarms of pests, and then the pests resurge because all of the other pests were killed, and the cycle grows steadily out of control. As silent spring suggests, we need human rights to not be poisoned. While many thought DDT ban was point of book, actually Carson calls for rights. Consider differences in infant mortality rates and who lives in the inner city.

Environmental Issues (from the Blackwell Environmental Reader):

Wilderness: We have seen that this is an interesting issue for utilitarianism. Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term?

Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse.

Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources. Some, like Rev. Chaviz Jr., argue for the concept of Environmental racism, that pollution and cleaning products affect those who are ostracized in the worst areas of town far more than others. The horrifying infant mortality rate among American black people, twice that of white Americans, is evidence of this.