A Postmodern Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morality
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- čas přidán 18. 07. 2022
- The beginning of the end of modernity has come. Modernism is dead. Nietzsche killed it. How shall he comfort himself, the postmodernist, of postmodernism?
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Well, I would... but truth is just an illusion -- or, so I've been told. I have some coins, but I am told they only matter as pieces of metal.
Good stuff dude. This approach to viewing Nietzsche needs to be emphasized more. People who whine about postmodernism but simultaneously claim to uphold Nietzsche (who in many ways paved the way for "Postmodern" theory) are philosophically illiterate.
Also love the White Bat Audio music
Appreciate it! Yup, kinda weird how the whole postmodern thing just gets washed over immensely.
Wow! Right from the start, EP hits a home run! 0:49 “This hermeneutic of suspicion that Nietzsche is throwing out, is that Christianity, while presenting itself as a religion of love and compassion and tenderness, is a mask of hate, and fear, and another form of power.” My sentiments exactly!
Tell me who in their right mind ever doubted that any kind of religion is a form of power?
@@sample6324 Every human institution -- religious, political, militaristic, industrial, financial, environmental, academic, artistic, athletic, communal -- is a form of power. The ultimate purpose of such institutions is to bring like-minded people together for social interaction, structural organization, and cooperative action in order to concentrate and exert their individual power and personal abilities into a unified force for action and form of power.
He’s legitimately one of the best writers I’ve ever read. His writing is so good. I don’t know much about philosophy, but it’s rare to read a philosophy book and be blown away by the writing
I love the decorum in this video, also I hope you cover Michel Foucault more in depth in the future to see where that rabbit-hole goes. Keep up the good work!
The Peterson misreading of Nietzsche never gets old to me lol
Yes, but don't underestimate the misreading from this channel.
Me neither. What a bumdass😅
Have you heard of the works of Georg Lukacs (The Destruction of Reason) and Domenico Losurdo (Aristocratic Rebel) on Nietzsche ?
I’m sure you will find them very interesting !!
Thank you for all your hard work, enlightening and beautiful at the same time as usual.
It is very funny to me how almost every reactionary today uphold Nietzsche and denounce what they believe to be Marxism, Post-Marxism, Post-Modernism, Post-Modern-Neo-Marxist (since they don’t know the meaning of any of those words) because they think that there is a direct link between Marx and philosophers like Foucault or Deleuze when in reality those same post-modern philosophers rejected Marx in favor of new interpretations of Nietzsche thoughts.
And yet the links between them are quite obvious to me : rejection of morality, rejection of meta-narrative, rejection of modernity in favor of a « revolt against the modern world »
Lukacs is a dude I have yet to read but is on the long list!
Thanks for the praise my friend!
Nietzsche does reject the meta-narrative, BUT he does not reject morality, nor modernity, nor does he promote revolution. Nietzsche says he is the first immoralist, which is a moral position
Edit: I totally agree that deleuze and foucault are usually wrongly attributed to marx rather than Nietzsche. But things are changing and people are reading both Marx and Nietzsche again.
I'm definitely on the far right but I've also embraced postmodernism completely.
@@ZackEdwards1234 Relevance?
Man, leftist really will coopt anything into their deluded project for communism.
You're work is so insightful and your videos are so well made
Excellent. It was good to hear some of your criticisms of Nietzsche too, added depth to the whole vid.
Love, how you don't hide Pills as an inspiration for your style and targets. 5mins in and I already sense a "kill all priests" vibe
That's right!
@@epochphilosophy This is hilarious because through the nietzschean lens you are a priest! An impotent, vengeful, weak and sick priest. But it's all to the good, after all:
"Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it."
also:
"For with the priests everything becomes more dangerous, not only cures and remedies, but also arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy" love, lust to rule, virtue, disease but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil and these are the two basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts!"
Love the background music! It would be awesome if you use it for your future videos as well. It makes it more dynamic and easier to follow, imo.
another banger as always. Nietzsche is so fascinating to me, I definitely need to read more of him. I think he's more compatible with emancipatory goals than we might realize.
Definitely so. Even more presciently, how we may view emancipation. One thing about Nietzsche that's helpful is to be a bit more encompassing of how we see positivistic things such as emancipation, progress, etc.
Hardly the first Marxist to have this idea
"Nothing is true, all is permitted"
"Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law"
Nietzsche is an oasis for the individual. Emancipate yourself by becoming a sovereign individual.
@@eccehomonohomo there is no such a thing as that
"The essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function of the commonwealth, but as its own highest justification thereof-that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence."
Nietzsche very much believes that power involves the subjugation of the weak and that it, if anything, denotes a healthy nobility. Don't misunderstand lol. For Nietzsche, most people are just compost heap to be crushed underfoot of The Greats as they stride in excellence, success & victory. The only "emancipation" you will find in this world will have to be wrought through fang & claw, buddy. It'll be glorious.
Great work! Loved the more humorous approach. Very Dionysian. One misconception about Nietzsche that botheres me the most is the view that his tone was uptight, humorless, bitter, resentful or to put it in Nietzschean terms, English. (the incel vibes). Despite his pessimism and seakness he was at moments very much a dancing star.
His life affirming simply was not of the moralist kind, so in his ruthless criticism he appears resentful. His intention was to be at moments a Satyr, a Diogenes of his time and despite his admiration for Naloleon and Bismark, he was far from a brooding edgy right wing icon that people today see him as.
He hated Bismarck. Read Things the German lack in the Twilight of the Idols.
@@moviereviews1446 Yes, you are correct, I misunderstood this myself. He criticises the German culture being sacrificed for statecraft in "what the Germans lack".
"culture and the state are antagonists
the one lives upon the other, one floreshes on the expence of the other, that wihich is great from the stand point of culture was always apolitical or even anti-political."
@@moviereviews1446 Nietzsche is the only dead philosopher from the nineteenth century that can actually Make me LoL! Read Ecce homo, his autobiography (sort of). It’s seriously funny af
Brilliant!!! Such a great primer amazing references in the visual symbology and I appreciate you bridging the Marx gap here too with the elementals of Nietzsche . This is THE video essay to watch before you try to get into headier stuff. Well done truly
Thanks so much, man. Really quite the compliment!
Nietzsche is a profoundly esoteric writer who uncovered the secrets of the eleusinian mysteries. His entire philosophy is based around initiating the reader.
Sources?
@@jackskellingtonation It was revealed to me in a dream
@@Sol-1 lmfao
Nietzsche appeals because he represents of a sort of perfection and cleansing of the intellect, which extends temporally to cleansing history and the future. Obviously, the way I frame this tells a certain story as if taken literally, which it was, leads to less than perfect results.
Been reading, rereading Nietzsche since 1976-79.
After 13 countries, 43 states, 50+ jobs and 45 years, he becomes TRUER by the month!❤
I feel I’ve caught the CZcamsr brain fungus when I imagined a video called “Downton abbey: a Nietzschian analysis” I noticed a sort of class distinction of morality. I haven’t read enough Nietzsche to fully explore this idea and whether it would actually be a Nietzschian analysis. I have too large a backlog of books to get through to add more books onto it atm.
I am very tired writing this so if I sound crazy I have an excuse.
That's not always a bad thing. You now have a whole bunch of perspectives you can take advantage of when you read the actual text.
Perhaps just set a reading schedule and read a certain amount every day. You'll be fine if you are up to it.
@@josephyu8532 yeah I’m trying to set myself a reading schedule. I think the mistake I made was jumping straight into philosophy with no prior experience. My background is physics and maths and the writing style is very different. I thought I could start into philosophy with philosophy of science (I thought there would be some overlap.) and learnt the same thing everyone learns about philosophy of science (I.e. that it’s hard.) but I’m making my way through it. Piece by piece.
great video! what is the song name at the very intro?
check out riuichi sakamato playing "kyoto song" in Paris for the ultimate 80's post-modern clip
Beginning with my boi Rick Roderick amazin i love that guy
excellent job
Nietzsche never ceases to be profound. Great video and love love love the 80s aesthetic!🤘
it's just nietzsche, he says - listen here, u !
-
Gotta say, loving your visual experimentation in this one, there's some truly trippy overlayering action going on here and I appreciate it
I wouldn't mind seeing more of this "silliness", even in less fittingly themed videos.
Amazing video thank you very much
What’s the chant at 4:59?
Hello algorithm
If modern justice is unjust, what is just? What is good? If morality is a societal construct, it seems good and evil are subject to being determined by the loudest voice in society. While current trends in postmodern critical theory may reverse the aristocratic determination of justice and morality, it seems to have the same paradoxical consequences Nietzsche argued was problematic. The values of the minority group will be subjugated to the postmodern critical theorists. Would it not be the same paradox Nietzsche so diligently labored over? Would it not reason then that rather than morality, justice, good, and evil being a social or societal construct that these be determined by a source external of the individual, collective, or state?
We are not (yet!) modern (Modernity is the fundamental empirical realization of liberty/equality/solidarity (to use a more gender neutral term compared to "fraternity")). So how can we have moved beyond modernity, when we haven't realized modernist dreams.
I'm fine with this thesis, but probably disagree with the yet, thing. It's a working idea in my head, but it feels like we almost skipped modernity. It's largely "lived" merely as an ideal. If anything, we jumped from what we'd consider "pre-modern" to "post-modern" almost instantaneously. We almost skipped modernism as a whole. And with today, postmodernism seems to be the reflected culturally material state of neoliberal society. (Still doesn't mean modernist ideology isn't apart of us all. We largely haven't been able to escape this.)
Just a hunch.
“Indeed, at hearing the news that 'the old god is dead', we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation - finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an 'open sea'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche uncovers the actual meaning behind the esoteric secret that "all is becoming", hence time is an illusion and there is literally no "modern", no substance, no being and thus no equality or liberty or need for solidarity, we all only experience the burning of our own flame as the Will to Power.
His early works set up an understanding of historicity, they show how political leaders use history as a weapon against their people and other groups. This view of history emancipates our perspective from the human timeline, allowing us to move Beyond Good and Evil. We can then correctly assess the human condition from this detached, alienated, viewpoint, like a Zarathustra
Who are you to define modernity in such an arbitrary and ideologically charged way? Just because modernity hasn't turned out the exact way you wanted it to doesn't mean it isn't modernity. It is not an ideal, it is descriptive, an actual thing in reality. And it has to be this way. Because if we just treat modernity as this abstract ideal that we are all supposed to dogmatically strive toward, it's all arbitrary at that point. That being said, I think modernity can be better characterized as this uprooting of the traditional mode of human existence at all levels. The life of the average human was largely unchanged for thousands of years. But with the coming of modernity and the industrial revolution, we have been plucked from what is the historical norm for humanity, and we are all trying to grapple with it. All we can do is surrender ourselves to this, and adapt accordingly. Not super-impose a narrative onto it.
Very very underrated.
Idk when this started but there’s this huge amount of content about either Nietzsche or Carl Jung by ppl trying to claim them as x or y. And in our extremely politically divided times, it seems as everyone is trying to claim them. Nietzsche totally is a sort of proto-postmodernist but not in the way we understand the concept today. It’s more about nihilism and while many later writers came of as relativistic, Nietzsche wasn’t. He saw his mission to make the coming “nothing” or nihilism from annihilating the human spirit. Nietzsche did despise Christianity but he was also aware of its stabilizing effect and saw the coming chaos of a bunch of idiots with no God to keep them in line. Nietzsche himself was consumed with anxiety over this issue, not that he had any love for Christian belief whatsoever. He actually went to seminary before he studied philology. He felt he debugged that crap enough and was done with it pretty early on
yeah i feel this video kind of missed the mark a bit
Every person ultimately decides what is good or bad for him. He might have been taught as a child that something was bad that he finds to be good for himself later in life -- thus a conflict within him potentially arises between his upbringing and his experience. But good and bad are ultimately grounded in life, and moral rules are not simply rules for controlling the weak slaves, any more than they are merely rules for controlling the strong masters. There is no such thing as 'slave morality' and 'master morality' any more than there is such a thing as 'the social contract', or some person living at the North Pole named Santa Claus ! Morality is a thing sometimes enforced and often abused by the strong. But its real origin is in the need to limit an unbridled human freedom that would ultimately lead to social chaos and the destruction of the human race -- not by some punishing god, but by that self-destructive animal called 'man'.
Like Rousseau, Nietzsche approaches philosophy more as a romantic than as a reasoner -- indeed, so much so, that he would deny even the possibility of a reasoner who did not have some ulterior motive beyond the love of wisdom (see, for example, 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers' BGE). Also, like Rousseau (see 'Discourse on the Arts and Sciences'), Nietzsche is almost an enemy of philosophy -- at least, any philosophy that would place more value on truth than mortal, earthly life itself (such as Platonism, for example, in which it is supposed to be better to die than to live, for only then can the immortal soul be completely free of the irritation and the interference of the burdensome body, and then know for certain the truth of the eternal Forms by means of pure reason). While I am not a supporter of Platonism, myself, there is surely more rhetoric than there is reason in Nietzsche. Again, like Rousseau, he doesn't have any real arguments to make his case; instead he has merely bald assertions, suggestive comments, and striking metaphors. Philosophy with a hammer ? Really ? ...Yes, Zarathustra, and the fool also attempts to drive in nails with the end of a ball-point pen !
And, yet, in the end, it would be absurd for Nietzsche to ask us to judge his views not in terms of their alleged truth-value.
1:37 why have i never seen this 💀
I love this channel
I love you
Dude the whole "Georges Bataille and Michael Foucault are in the middle of a bdsm scene..." thing totally caught me off guard lmao.
Speaking of Bataille, do you know enough about him to do a video?
Matt's into that kind of stuff you know? But, I sadly don't he's absolutely on my reading list though. I wouldn't be surprised in a few years he gets a video!
@@epochphilosophy For primary material: The accursed share, The Inner Experience, and Story of the Eye, probably in that order. A good intro is The Bataille Reader (Botting, Wilson). He is basically a French Crowley, without the heroin, and is also the primary inspiration behind the Hellraiser films. Basically Hellraiser is what you get when you replace Sade-esque French bdsm with 90's gore.
Also, if you're into metal, the band Deathspell Omega is heavily influence by the writings of Bataille, and to a lesser extent Hegel.
@@epochphilosophy Also also, Bataille is famously the first of the French to staunchly defend Nietzsche against the proto-Nazi fascist interpretations of him while Bataille was prominent in the 20's.
Nietzsche's view of morality is only slightly less superficial than is the modernistic/Judea-Christian based view he criticizes.
banger
I think its best to think of Nietzsche as a critic rather than a philosopher. Because he either lacks or makes almost impossible to understand a coherent whole that encompasses his philosophy. People take Nietzsche so seriously, in how they think Nietzsche has a solution to the problems of the death of God and the last man.
He doesnt, or if we’re being less charitable, he’s sympathetic to ideas like warmongering, social Darwinism and Machiavellianism.
I know a lot would disagree with me saying things like no he’s a life affirming philosopher or that the antidote to these difficult questions is becoming the ubermensch. But i invite you to show me where Nietszche gives a coherent alternatives to these two problems, without resorting to warmongering, social Darwinism or Machiavellianism.
You're right on the money. It is impossible grasp some overarching thought in his philosophy because he didn't believe in any such thing.
"I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system, shows a lack of honesty." The Twilight of the Idols
keep forgetting to watch this :(
Here is my demand that you do so on this Saturday. Or else!
Algo
A plumber's or an accountant's life does not really matter when they give you advice on how to live. We go to them to have faucets fixed or taxes done. But ... when we go to a philosopher to hear his advice on the meaning of life and how best to live it, then we look to his own life as a model of his teachings. Nietzsche fails.
Hume was Scottish not British lol
Well aware. Hume was of the 'British Empiricist/Psychologist' camp that Nietzsche was referring to.
No, morality doesn't come from priests, any more than truth comes from liars. Of course, every liar claims to speak the truth. But claiming something to be true doesn't make it true -- just as claiming something to be moral doesn't make it moral. Morality can only come from the necessities of life, otherwise, it could not itself survive. If something has been claimed to be moral, and it has endured for millennia, then there is a reason for its survival. It might be, and almost certainly is, a fact that this moral rule is constantly ignored or broken, yet its very survival indicates a need in the human condition to place a check on unbridled human freedom. If such a check did not exist -- if, for example, murder was not considered immoral, then you better believe there be a hell of a lot more of it than there already is now ! You give people an inch, you know damn well they'll take a mile. "Why should it be a crime to off that a-hole that just cut you in traffic ? It's not immoral, so it's not wrong, so how can there be a law against it ?" Yes, people use 'morality' for power because they use EVERYTHING for power -- it doesn't mean it doesn't also serve a legitimate purpose that ultimately prevents chaos.
Did you read with your eyes closed?
At 3:42 you have a picture of Hume, yet nothing you say around this time applies to his philosophy. cringe, myguy
Jordan 😂😂😂
C'mon, laddie... Hume was Scottish!!! 🏴
Who is this "British psychologist" you're attempting to teach us about?
God damnit, this is like 4th comment. Hume was apart of the "British Empiricists" titular, not geographical.
Every undergrad and their Mom knows Hume was Scottish.
Epoch.... is postmodern. He'll block you if you have different opinions.
With love Epoch. I love your videos, just not your arrogance.
What a ridiculous interpretation of Bataille...
Go cry about it some more. You clearly need more hardcore BDSM in your life.
@@epochphilosophy
I think we all need a bit more hardcore BDSM in our lives.
@@epochphilosophy Enjoy your STIs you hedonistic fuex-agitator. We all know violence is better than sex.
You claim that others miss Nietzsche's point at the same time missing it yourself. You criticise others for their 'shallow' analyses at the same time not even being shallow yourself. Your are just a mirror image of the far right. Nothing can come from your hands undistorted by ideology. But I can understand you - it is hard to actually present something when you have an ideological axe to grind.
NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERDS