The Nietzsche Podcast on YouTube is the best source for understanding the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche that I have found online. This splendid content is authored by Keegan Kjeldsen, a heavy metal guitarist and former zen practitioner. Where Keegan got his insights into Nietzsche is unknown to me, though he seems to be steeped in a philosophical background with a special understanding in postmodernism. That does not matter, however. I have never read or listened to anyone who is so gifted in the nuances of Nietzsche's thought. The following is a slightly edited transcript of highlights from his episode entitled “The Meaning of Life, According to Nietzsche.” Keegan's articulation of this thread in Nietzsche's philosophy is refreshingly spot-on (as are almost all of his episodes).
He begins by stating that he wants to summarize how concepts like the Overman, Will to Power, and Amor Fati meld together to form Nietzsche's “religion,” his affirmation of life, and how, simultaneously, Nietzsche does not offer his insights as a “religion” or a “faith” for anyone else. Nietzsche is simply sharing his own unique path in order to guide us and encourage us to find our own unique paths. There are several short readings throughout the more than two-hour lecture (most of Keegan's episodes are lengthy and detailed). He begins with a parable reading from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part Two, 12) a work which Keegan refers to as Nietzsche's “novel.” I note the additional readings he offers supporting his statements in [brackets]. His goal is to discern what Nietzsche writes about the meaning of life and what the “good” life (the well-lived life) actually looks like. I pick up his lecture about halfway through and go from there.
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All things are force points that push and strive for and against one another. He explains both attraction and repulsion with the same equation. On the level of biology, Will to Power is not a drive for preservation so much but the drives for nourishment and procreation. Nietzsche argues that nature is a great squanderer. It can be wasteful, arbitrary and so on. The individual of the species is never preserved. Quite the opposite, really none of them are preserved. But the species survives if nourishment and reproduction continue.
So, that is the pattern that we perceive that is the parable. A drive to exist? Yes. But part of Nietzsche's point is that its not really descriptive to say that something merely strives to exist because that does not explain animate matter at all, of life, why we engage in action and motion. It's a criticism that he levels at Schopenhauer that we already exist now and if the will driving life is simply the will to continue existing then we're driven to do things we are already doing. We are striving to attain something we already have. It does not tell us anything about the actual character of existence. It creates a strange circle that things exist for the sake of continuing to exist. So why then would life generate itself, generate new forms? Why would forms arise that move themselves about and consume things and make offspring?
Nietzsche's counter-description is that life is engaged in this process of striving to find nourishment. Which means to consume and extract energy from other forms than the ecosystem and to reproduce the process by which the organism creates beyond itself. He says that organisms don't seek to preserve themselves but to discharge their strength. Life is a positive phenomena. Not positive in the sense of good necessarily. But essentially generating, self-generating, doing so by giving rise to things in a long active process of differentiation as all things strive to be different, to be distinctive, to express power in their particular way. Thus Nietzsche would say that an understanding of genetic mutation, for example, and its role on evolution on the macro scale in the process of speciation we have a phenomena that is described by Will to Power.
On the level human psychology or human sociability, Will to Power is an explanatory principle for human action also. In one sense power or potency is a prerequisite for acting at all and in terms of examining human motivations we find the desire to become powerful, to feel powerful, to manifest power at the root of all of them. Nietzsche argues, for example, there is no truly selfless act because all selfless acts emerge from a foundation of selfishness. In fact, selfishness and selflessness are not opposites at all but gradations of the same thing.
Our motivations can be coarse or refined such that both the philanthropist and the car thief are both expressing their Will to Power. Or, to put it another way, our identity can be complex and individual or rigid and and inherited like the difference between us children of the age of authenticity, of discovering our true selves, as someone placed into a role in Chinese society by which he gains his identity by family and class. So, we can see how in different of circumstances or social class your means of advancing always see a Will to Power as a fundamental principle in all of these.
Finally, on the moral level or the metamoral level, Nietzsche argues that all moralities that have ever been created involve a level of self-overcoming shy of the basest hedonism which one abandons discipline and restraint altogether and lives purely to one's impulses. Any system of right and wrong requires that one overcome impulses and instincts, feelings. Either abstaining altogether, withholding from indulging, or doing so only in a proper context. All morality is the attempt for the self to challenge itself, its own weaknesses and shortcomings and become something greater.
All of these are aspects of human life and what life is is the Will to Power from every single one of those perspectives for Nietzsche, as something he sees revealed empirically in the world. Will to Power is the content that is generalizable across all these perspectives. Nietzsche believes this not because it is something we find when we look deep within ourselves. It is because it is manifest in all these observable phenomena. Thus, whatever the world might be independent of the human mind, we can say without a doubt that the world for us, the world as we experience it, is Will to Power. Will to Power is the simplest most fundamental statement of what the world is like without an appeal to anything outside of it being necessary and without invoking a divine personality or an intelligence or purpose to life.
In this view, this life has no transcendent value, no value placed upon it from a world that is above it and it has no purpose unless the circuit of Eternal Recurrence itself is a purpose and it has no intelligence except that we are a part of it and we are intelligent. But it seems that our intelligence comes out of a blind unintelligent world in which our intelligence is not the rule but the exception.
Morality is self-overcoming. The inner character of morality is Will to Power like everything else. Morality is issuing commands to oneself. Completely absent from this vision is anything like freedom of the will or the libertarian application of some quality of reason to govern human action. Rather, it is simply a question of whether one has the strength to command oneself and if not then one shall be commanded by his drives rather than the other way around.
The choice is to command or be commanded. To take command of your own life and reshape it into an artistic pattern, giving “style” as Nietzsche says, these are dangerous experiments and most people throughout history do not do this experiment. Most people throughout time live their life in accord with the inherited conventional pattern. And yet there is this driving will beneath us all and always this tendency for some number of us to burst forward attempting to be different and to define ourselves individually.
How many aquatic life forms suffocated above the water until some mutated into forms that could endure more and more exposure to the oxygen atmosphere? Advancement requires vast sacrifices. We always have to pay for it in some way. When we zoom out, so to speak, and consider the total picture, life as a whole is always doing this. Meaning that life is constantly judging which forms of biological patterns are worthy of esteem and which ones are not. In so far as this war of all against all takes place continually across generations of lifeforms, all eating each other and competing for the feeding ground and the right to reproduce.
With this somewhat troubling picture of what life is and who we are as living beings, is there such a thing as the “good” life? Nietzsche would obviously say yes, although his conception of it changes a little bit throughout his career. In his early days, he believes life can be aesthetically justified (sublime Beauty). What the later Nietzsche eventually concludes is related to what every attempt creating the good life has been – and that is the Will to Power.
Nietzsche then inquires about the direction this transformation proceeds or how these judgments on the world eventually manifest in human life. He sees that his own attempt to impose an aesthetic judgment on the world was actually not innovative at all. It was simply what every religion was trying to do. The real question we should be asking is why all these aesthetics that already exist do not work for us anymore.
What is it that these various moralities and religions have given rise to? All the various manifestations of the Will to Power have these fundamental characteristics but not all its manifestations are created equal. Accordingly, some ways of life are stronger and some are weaker. Or we might say healthier or sicker. Some are the ascending path of life, meaning that these are expressions of strength that give rise to more strength, but some are descending which represents a degeneration into weaker and weaker forms. It is still a manifestation of your strength but it is a manifestation that does not give rise to more strength but to weakness. It is the difference between a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop.
So the good life is the positive feedback loop in the sense of life-affirming life. The root of this all is still physiological. Our judgments and preferences occur at that physiological level. One's strength to order their drives according to such a life-ascending manifestation of will that is determined at a physiological level, If we are going to take seriously the idea that human beings are bodies, then we are physical beings and our psychic life, in the sense of the psychological, as well as our social life and our moral life, all of this flows out of the headwaters of our own nature, the conditions that produced us, aspects of our temperament.
Another way to look at it is to say how much vitality do we have or how much vitality do we have left? Nietzsche believes that self-undermining moral values, for example, are at bottom the product of a weary degenerating person. And that this is true in some sense of them physiologically as well as psychologically. We are viewing people as human becomings rather than human beings, as a dynamic process that is ever unfolding and never standing still. So we can not really say whether a life is healthy until we know what it led to. In pursuing the good life the important thing is what direction are we moving and what are we bringing forth.
This is where the concept of the Overman comes into play. This simply means that your life is bringing forth something greater than you are. It means to live your life in longing for something beyond your current horizons. It means being willing to make sacrifices, which Nietzsche mentions a lot, to spend yourself and your vitality. In this the Overman is the promise of redemption of mankind from all its faults. It is a (dare I say it) faith in the ascendance of life winning out over the degeneration of life. It is faith in the positive feedback loop of life.
Let's look at some examples of good lives which I think might be instructive. Nietzsche would suggest we look to figures such as Goethe, a true Renaissance Man. He wrote beautifully in every style of literature, expanded the possibilities for the German language, wrote a vast catalog of poems. Goethe stands as a soul torn between classical aesthetics and the fiery passion of romanticism.
Or we could consider a non-artist, a completely non-theoretical man. A man praised by Goethe as much as by Hegal and many of the intellectuals of his time, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon emerges from the chaos and excess of the French Revolution in order to produce a new French empire and in the process he constructs the modern French state. He is, by the numbers, the most effective military commander of all time.
So just as Goethe reshaped the German artistic landscape in his own image, Napoleon reshaped the French political landscape in his own image. These were two men who dared to command, to follow the dictates of their will, and impose their judgments and that was a risk, a hazard. Most won't measure up to these examples. Many will fail. Some like Caesar will succeed but in their moment of triumph, when their victory has barely drawn a breath, they meet their downfall. But in the image of such people, whether we find it attainable of not, we may find the inspiration to imitate the good life.
Nietzsche often speaks of great and terrible individuals and there are many ways we could take that description. But at bottom the important thing that he is getting at the essentially innocent nature of all of our drives. Innocent because they are natural. Innocent in the way that it is innocent when a hawk eats a little field mouse. The high, free, terrible naturalness he speaks of is a human being who has recaptured this sense of innocence and thus is free to follow the commands of his own will because he's free of imposing guilt or imposing moral condemnation upon those drives.
Such a person might end up doing what we would call evil things but that is by no means the focus of what Nietzsche is talking about here. Napoleon is not great because of a body count. That would be rather morbid. The point of living the good life is not to do evil things. The moralists will try to scare us by making us think that that's any sort of belief in the world outside a transcendent or divine telos. Nietzsche is simply demanding of himself that he be honest with us here and admit that a return to innocent human nature in fact means getting in touch with a part of ourselves which is passionate, domineering and, at times, violent and unreasonable.
In comparing and contrasting the profiles of Napoleon and Goethe surely both are candidates for what Nietzsche would call the good life and we have a more or less adequate picture of what it entails: naturalness, straightforwardness, and a trusting fatalism. Also, of course, the fact that they both create something great beyond themselves which is an imposition of their creative will on reality.
In other places Nietzsche criticized a fatalistic attitude in the sense of being oppressed or like a bound fatalism. But this trusting fatalism he describes is different. It is trusting in life, trusting in necessity, feeling that everything is redeemed in the whole. The whole picture life is more beautiful than it is ugly. In the full awareness of the danger that Napoleon brought upon himself but without a care for it. He pursues this ambitious course in life, that is the perfect example of trusting fatalism.
The fruits of such a natural, healthy life are freedom, gratitude, and a sense of cheerfulness. But notice when we are talking about a life that is free and natural it is inherently sort of violent and dangerous. Those who most profoundly mantel that role in life become something that is almost more than human, more like a cataclysmic event.
Everyone has their own way, their own virtues to cultivate. Nietzsche says that your most precious virtues will be known to you alone and you will not even have a name for them because the most personal things are the things we cannot share by the universal word concepts that we communicate with via language. Nietzsche nevertheless offers us a few suggestions about the cultivation of a good life. There are a few reliable pieces of wisdom he has for us who wish to live a healthy life.
[Beyond Good and Evil, 284] Four virtues here, first, courage is required for the good life because it is required for any command decision. Insight, which means not acting based upon superficial qualities or surface level observations that would just see you misled and would be counterproductive. Sympathy is an odd one for Nietzsche, especially sense he follows it up with solitude which he justifies by saying that all participation in society makes us unclean. I think he means intellectually, morally, emotionally unclean. We are getting communicated all these sick herd values into our heads more in society.
This reveals that we have two couplets within the four which are sort of counterbalancing. You need to be courageous which means suspending deliberation and acting. Yet, one also needs insight which means not acting blindly or based on short-term interests that are in the long-term sense unhealthy. So, a counterbalance to the capacity for action that you need in courage. Insight is the capacity for reflection in some sense. We also need a sense of sympathy, a sincere heartfelt emotional connection to other human beings that is natural for human beings as much as anything else we have been talking about.
It is natural between members of a family or people we love. It is required to some extent in order to function in society. It is the basis for all things like courtesy, respect, and charity, many of these socially beneficial behaviors and attitudes that are required for civilization, as a project, to continue. Yet, if we truly want greatness in our lives solitude is required. One has to be able to leave the endless all-pervasive influence of the thoughts of others. This chorus of judging voices all around us that render our own individual judgments moot or our experimental judgments forbidden.
For someone to live the good life, to bring forth something greater, something stronger, something healthier, they have to be able to move outside of the current cultural moral software. One has to be able to cultivate the ability to think their own thoughts because that is the only way beyond the current values. That's the possibility of the great individual who reshapes said values, creates new things.
Nietzsche has another set of four virtues in a different place. [Daybreak, 556] Courage is in both. So, out of these two lists of four, the “cardinal Nietzschean virtues” would be: courage, insight, sympathy, solitude, courtesy, magnanimity, and honesty. I hope everyone can hear that when I say “the cardinal Nietzschean virtues” that my tongue is in my cheek here. Nevertheless, that is as good a list of virtues as any religions ever produced and maybe better insofar as we have solitude as a virtue. That is a masterful idea and a unique contribution of Nietzsche.
[Beyond Good and Evil, 96] Nietzsche's ideal attitude is of celebrating and being grateful for having been graced with that encounter with Beauty. But not becoming despondent and melancholic by having to part from this experience but doing so voluntarily and with ease. This expresses an attitude that is totally commensurate with people who are, in some ways, their attitude is an antipode of Nietzsche but we might consider the Taoism of Lao Tzu – the image of the figure who loves life but does not cling to life.
True love of life involves a knowledge of life's transformative and impermanent nature. The sage in his wisdom, in Taoism, does not cling to any particular forms or manifestations of life. Nietzsche puts this in perhaps a stronger way in which he brings out a dichotomy between two ways we could think about death. One way in which death is viewed in an unhealthy manner and another way in which we regard death in a healthy or life-ascending manner.
The inevitability of death that we perceive in our mortality could either hang over our heads at all hours and therefore ruin all the happiness and joy and fulfillment we might be able to have or why can't we see it in more light-hearted terms as something we take in good humor and allows us to keep our life in perspective, to see the comedy of the misplaced importance we have in the trivium of our lives? Some limit to life, some framing, some finitude creates the horizons within which we can actually have a distinct different individual existence. It is through these limitations that we have a narrative making our subjective experience possible. This is all found within finitude.
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