The Charlie Kirk Show - Is God Dead? Making Sense of Nietzsche with Dr. Khalil Habib
Aired: 2021-10-09
Duration: 49:32


=== Dive Deep Into Ideas (06:20) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
[00:00:02]  You know what Saturday means.
[00:00:03]  We dive deep into ideas while other podcasts just talk about right versus left and Republican good, Democrat bad.
[00:00:08]  Let's get into the ideas.
[00:00:09]  Is God dead?
[00:00:11]  That's a very important question.
[00:00:13]  That might be something that might be mildly offensive to you, but that's a really interesting question.
[00:00:18]  Friedrich Nietzsche, who was German, wrote in Beyond Good and Evil and in many other places that the West was falling apart.
[00:00:28]  A lot of what we are living through right now is downstream from Nietzsche.
[00:00:33]  He was right about a lot.
[00:00:35]  He was dreadfully wrong about a lot.
[00:00:38]  I talk with Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College about the existential crisis facing the West.
[00:00:44]  This is a thoughtful conversation that you might want to listen to once or twice or three times.
[00:00:49]  And it's all made possible thanks to the beacon of the North, Hillsdale College.
[00:00:54]  I was just in Hillsdale, Michigan, broadcasting live from Hillsdale College.
[00:00:58]  And I could tell you, this college is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
[00:01:01]  The students were all incredibly wise, polite, magnanimous, curious, willing to discuss big ideas.
[00:01:10]  I sat in on Dr. Larry Arn's Aristotle course, and I learned more in one hour of Dr. Larry Arn's Hillsdale course than I think I learned in my entire four years in high school.
[00:01:20]  Good teachers matter and good ideas matter.
[00:01:23]  Hillsdale College is all about preserving the American idea, preserving the American nation, defending truth, and it's what college is meant to be.
[00:01:33]  Life, freedom, and liberty.
[00:01:36]  They take no government money, everybody.
[00:01:38]  They've been pursuing truth since 1844.
[00:01:41]  No government money, not one penny.
[00:01:43]  So a lot of the alma mater that maybe you support, they probably take government money.
[00:01:47]  Hillsdale, zero.
[00:01:49]  And I personally take their online courses.
[00:01:52]  Their online courses are exceptional.
[00:01:55]  In the online courses, you are able to dive deep into these ideas, get a better understanding of where we come from, who we are as human beings.
[00:02:03]  What is our country?
[00:02:03]  What is the proper way to govern people?
[00:02:08]  Here are the courses I have completed.
[00:02:09]  Introduction to Western Philosophy.
[00:02:11]  In there, we dove into Nietzsche, which we talk about today.
[00:02:15]  Immanuel Kant.
[00:02:17]  We talked about David Hume.
[00:02:18]  We talked about Aristotle, Socrates, and many more.
[00:02:22]  I finished the Introduction to the Constitution, which might be the greatest course that I have had a chance to take when it comes to why the Constitution is written the way it was.
[00:02:32]  Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, How to Lead a Good Life.
[00:02:35]  Constitution 201, the Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism.
[00:02:40]  And Constitution 101.
[00:02:41]  And I just finished the Winston Churchill Statesmanship course.
[00:02:45]  And by the way, all this can be found at charlie4hillsdale.com.
[00:02:48]  And here are the couple of courses I'm working through right now.
[00:02:50]  It's going to take some work.
[00:02:51]  You got to put your work boots on.
[00:02:53]  This stuff does not come easy.
[00:02:54]  You know, people say, Charlie, how are you able to cover such a wide range of topics?
[00:02:58]  I spend two hours a day trying to learn.
[00:03:01]  I learn like people work out.
[00:03:03]  And I do work out four or five times a week.
[00:03:05]  I take it very seriously.
[00:03:06]  But I want you to think about what matters to you.
[00:03:08]  Do you spend time doing it?
[00:03:10]  For me, learning matters.
[00:03:11]  Learning is very important.
[00:03:13]  Pursuing truth, diving into the ideas and understanding where we come from.
[00:03:17]  So right now, I'm 23% of the way completed with Western heritage from the book of Genesis to John Locke.
[00:03:24]  I'm 17% of the way through the Genesis story reading biblical narratives.
[00:03:28]  Phenomenal course.
[00:03:29]  I want to tell you, for those of you that are Christians, it is one of the greatest courses I've ever taken.
[00:03:34]  And so when you go to charlie4hillsdale.com, charlieforhillsdale.com, you'll see other courses as well.
[00:03:40]  And I'm sure some will resonate with you and some of you are like, yeah, I'm not that interested.
[00:03:44]  They have Theology 101, the Western Theological Tradition, American Heritage from Colonial Settlement to Current Declaration, Athens and Sparta, the U.S. Supreme Court, a proper understanding of K-12 education theory and practice.
[00:03:55]  And guess what?
[00:03:56]  I am going to finish every single online course.
[00:03:59]  It's going to take some work and do it alongside me and email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:04:05]  I think it's important that people dive deep into the ideas.
[00:04:07]  People say, Charlie, what can I do?
[00:04:09]  If you want to know how to save the country, spend some time learning.
[00:04:12]  Things will start to make more sense.
[00:04:13]  They'll start to open up.
[00:04:15]  And all of a sudden, you'll say, wow, because of what I learned in that course, I now see an opportunity to act, to do something.
[00:04:22]  Strength rejoices in the challenge, which is why I'm so thrilled to be partnering with the Beacon of the North, the college that all of you should send your kids to, everybody, Hillsdale College.
[00:04:30]  And maybe it's not for you.
[00:04:31]  I didn't go to college.
[00:04:32]  College was not right for me for a variety of different reasons.
[00:04:34]  And Dr. Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, gives me a hard time for that.
[00:04:38]  But he also said, hey, he is taking the online courses and he deserves points for that.
[00:04:42]  And it's true.
[00:04:42]  No one should be given an excuse and say, I don't want to learn.
[00:04:46]  It's not for me.
[00:04:47]  Take it.
[00:04:48]  It'll enrich your life.
[00:04:50]  And for those of you that are saying, I can't find my place in this world, I'm having a tough time.
[00:04:54]  I believe a lot of people that are struggling with identity issues, they're not learning the right things.
[00:05:02]  There's such a beautiful world out there.
[00:05:04]  And let's learn about it together.
[00:05:06]  Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
[00:05:08]  Is God dead?
[00:05:10]  If that gets your interest, you will love this conversation.
[00:05:13]  Dr. Khalil Habib, buckle up.
[00:05:15]  Here we go.
[00:05:16]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:05:18]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:05:20]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:05:23]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:05:26]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:05:28]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:05:29]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:05:30]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:05:36]  Turning point USA.
[00:05:37]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:05:46]  That's why we are here.
[00:05:48]  Hey, everybody.
[00:05:49]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, backed by Popular Demand, Dr. Khalil Habib from The Beacon of the North, the last college, how college is meant to be, Hillsdale College.
[00:05:58]  You guys can find all things Hillsdale, charlie4hillsdale.com.
[00:06:02]  Doctor, great to see you again.
[00:06:04]  Likewise, Charlie, how are you doing?
[00:06:06]  I'm doing great.
[00:06:07]  So I asked you this question right before we got started, which actually is a perfect segue into the type of philosophy that Nietzsche helped advance or birth, which is, who knows what the truth actually is.

=== Nietzsche And God Dead (14:57) ===

[00:06:20]  How do you pronounce Nietzsche?
[00:06:22]  I pronounce him Nietzsche, but my teachers always refer to him as Nietzsche.
[00:06:26]  Well, that's, I guess it's the truth isn't that's the point.
[00:06:31]  That's what I was getting to is what difference does it make, right?
[00:06:34]  It's whoever has more power determines how to pronounce his hard to understand German name.
[00:06:39]  So let's start with it.
[00:06:40]  Is God dead, Professor?
[00:06:42]  And where did that question come from?
[00:06:44]  Well, it's meant to be a paradox because as anyone knows, God, by any reasonable definition, is eternal.
[00:06:50]  So the idea that God is dead is just a paradoxical statement.
[00:06:54]  And I think Nietzsche is intending to get us to reflect on what he means by that.
[00:06:59]  And what he means by that is he's dead in the hearts and the minds of Europeans.
[00:07:04]  And what that essentially suggests is that the belief in God or the existence of God rests on the opinions of the faithful.
[00:07:11]  And in the same context in which you see that phrase uttered, Nietzsche says that God has been replaced by the newspaper.
[00:07:19]  And if you want to think about what that means, when you contrast God, who is eternal, who gives us a transcendent ideal toward which we can aim and be dutiful towards, with the newspaper, which is essentially ephemeral, what he's essentially saying is that the modern world has shifted away from a longing for eternity and greatness in some capacity to the here and now, the immediacy of one's sensations and to the to just newspapers, to the ephemeral.
[00:07:50]  And he thinks that that diminishes man's longing for greatness and ultimately impoverishes civil society.
[00:07:56]  And let's dive into that.
[00:07:57]  So, what was he seeing that made him say this?
[00:08:01]  And I want to also ask you this question.
[00:08:03]  I think we touched on this in the prior episode.
[00:08:05]  He wasn't celebrating the death of God, was he?
[00:08:09]  Well, it was mixed.
[00:08:10]  On the one hand, what he was mourning was man's capacity to long for something beyond the here and now.
[00:08:17]  Nietzsche is very famous for always thinking about the future, beyond good and evil, a prelude to a philosophy of the future.
[00:08:24]  Zarathustra thinks about things in terms of the future.
[00:08:27]  The present for Nietzsche, especially at the time he's writing, he felt was the land of the last man, a phrase that he coins to describe modern Europe, the commercial man, a human being who's essentially middle class, concerned with comfort, preservation.
[00:08:43]  And so, to go back to your first question, what he was observing was man's incapacity to think beyond just comfort, safety, security, commercial enterprises.
[00:08:55]  And he thought that these were an impoverishment of what man once was and could be.
[00:09:00]  So, he does appreciate certain aspects of the past where he thinks that we had great heroes that we could look up to.
[00:09:07]  There was a hierarchy in society that established what he calls a pathos of distance, meaning an inequality that allowed opportunity for greatness to shine.
[00:09:17]  And what's happening is this diminishing expectation of any kind of ambition.
[00:09:22]  So, talk for a second here about the significance of these writings.
[00:09:28]  This is not just a one-off guy that happened to write a book or two and is cited in a mixture of many other philosophers.
[00:09:37]  He really influenced the modern world as we know it, did he not?
[00:09:43]  Incredibly so.
[00:09:44]  Some would argue that he was an inspiration to the Nazis and National Socialism.
[00:09:49]  Stephen Hicks, for example, has a documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was based upon a book that he wrote.
[00:09:55]  Some, of course, denied that Nietzsche would have anything to do with such a movement.
[00:09:59]  Then there are those who can just simply identify our easygoing nihilism or relativism as ultimately derivative of Nietzsche's thinking.
[00:10:09]  For example, in The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom describes the certain kind of relativism and an openness to any idea has actually closed our capacity or even incentive to search for any meaning beyond just one's own perspectival vision.
[00:10:26]  So he's quite influential.
[00:10:30]  And so, just two points on the Nazi thing: every soldier that was deployed in World War I was actually given Nietzsche on the German front.
[00:10:40]  And so, they read this idea of the importance of the will, which we're going to get into, and this idea of becoming the Superman or the Overman or the Übermensch.
[00:10:50]  And then they come back to kind of war-torn Germany, and these ideas kind of laid the philosophical foundation for Hitler's most popular speech, The Triumph of the Will.
[00:11:03]  And if you read that speech, it sounds a lot like Nietzsche's ideas.
[00:11:07]  So, let's work our way backwards from there.
[00:11:10]  And so, can you just give us some biographical context of who this guy was and how he was able, why he published ideas at the time that were so different than some of the metaphysics and philosophy that was considered to be the consensus?
[00:11:27]  Well, he was a prodigy.
[00:11:28]  He was obviously a German philosopher.
[00:11:30]  He died in 1900 and at a very young age was teaching philosophy.
[00:11:35]  He was trained as a philologist, which means essentially somebody who studies languages and tries to think about their meaning.
[00:11:42]  And in one of his works, Eke Homo, he tells us that he essentially abandoned his post as a professor so that he can become a god.
[00:11:49]  And what he meant by that is that he was horrified by what he describes as Buddhism for Europe, which is just code for a certain kind of nihilism.
[00:11:57]  He believed that Europe in particular has lost its capacity and meaning and any kind of sense of identity.
[00:12:04]  And he was looking to try to inspire certain aspects of European instincts that he thought could still breed some kind of idealism or transcendent, that was transcendence that was just essentially close to being buried.
[00:12:19]  For example, in Dasbek Zarathustra, in a very famous speech entitled The Last Man Speech, his character Zarathustra mentions that, you know, our soil is still thick enough to perhaps plant a grand tree, some kind of ideal, but it's getting increasingly more difficult to find anyone in the world who's interested in anything beyond just the here and now.
[00:12:44]  So what motivated him to do that was to inspire a taste for greatness in an age of what he believed was mediocrity and egalitarianism.
[00:12:54]  So the reason why he goes against the metaphysics of his time, which he believes is already on its last legs anyway, is a series of prejudices in the West, beginning with philosophy.
[00:13:06]  So Beyond Good and Evil, for example, the first chapter is entitled On the Prejudices of the Philosophers.
[00:13:11]  So part of the meaning of that title, Beyond Good and Evil, is to go beyond ideas of some kind of notion of the good, like Socrates claims to have discovered the good life, a life according to nature.
[00:13:24]  Evil, which he associates with Christian morality and the impulse to want to punish that which you are resentful toward.
[00:13:32]  And so it's a combination of a critique of Christianity, Platonism, philosophy, and religion.
[00:13:40]  But it's also a critique of nationalism, because if you remember in Plato's Republic, there's an interlocutor with Socrates named Polemicus, and he defines friends and enemies essentially in terms of who is born into your country and who isn't.
[00:13:52]  And a good man punishes his enemies and does good to his friends.
[00:13:57]  And so you can see towards the end of the work in Beyond Good and Evil, there's an attempt to move away from nationalism, which he's often associated with.
[00:14:05]  That's why it's a bit tricky to say that he inspired the Nazis.
[00:14:10]  Of course, there's clearly very vivid images that the Nazis appropriated.
[00:14:15]  For example, in Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche does talk about the blonde Aryan beast, this uncaged beast of prey, this primordial pre-social impulse for destruction and domination, which he never criticizes.
[00:14:28]  In fact, he thinks underneath what he calls a master morality is this desire to have the will triumph over one's enemies and to essentially establish dominance.
[00:14:40]  And he gives us several names of cultures or races that he believed had this.
[00:14:45]  He says the Arabs, the Japanese, the Aryans, for example.
[00:14:49]  And so you could see how in certain hands that could be used as very powerful propaganda.
[00:14:54]  So he is somewhat responsible, at least in a sense of just being reckless.
[00:14:58]  Well, yeah, and then one of his most famous phrases is, I think in German, it's the Will Ze Macht, which means the will to power, right?
[00:15:09]  Which is this idea that if we do not have objective metaphysics and objective truth, then we must use the will of the being to get into a place of power or power dynamics.
[00:15:22]  And so as Nietzsche realized that God is dead, and he did say, and we have murdered him, that was part of his quote, too, that people forget.
[00:15:29]  Before I go any further, can you comment on that?
[00:15:31]  What is the significance of that?
[00:15:33]  As Nietzsche said, not only is God dead, but we have murdered him.
[00:15:37]  Well, some would argue that for Nietzsche, God essentially died in modernity.
[00:15:42]  The combination of science, sort of a crass materialism, the belief that what is real is what is empirical.
[00:15:49]  Well, you know, for Nietzsche, God is really an ideal, among other things.
[00:15:54]  And also democracy, this idea that there really is no higher authority beyond just merely human beings, because all our views are just simply equal to one another.
[00:16:03]  And so he sees this confluence between science and democracy, which he believes go hand in hand as conspiring against any belief in an eternal authority, you know, or any kind of hierarchical structure.
[00:16:16]  And so as you can imagine, what makes him so dangerous and what makes him also so interesting is he's essentially running up against and very critical of our so, you know, so to speak, our sacred cows.
[00:16:28]  Science and democracy are our two real authorities now, and Nietzsche's going after them with gusto.
[00:16:34]  In some ways, he wasn't wrong because religion has struggled since the advent of modernity.
[00:16:43]  I'm not saying that it's failed.
[00:16:45]  Can you comment on that?
[00:16:46]  That he actually might have saw something coming.
[00:16:49]  I couldn't hear you.
[00:16:50]  I'm sorry, Troy.
[00:16:50]  No, that's okay.
[00:16:51]  Just that in some ways, Nietzsche was not wrong in pinpointing this idea that once modernity started to get up and running, you know, post-Bacon and Newton, we talked about Machiavelli, and then you have Darwin.
[00:17:07]  What is the logical endpoint of that?
[00:17:10]  He was onto something.
[00:17:11]  He was.
[00:17:12]  And I think what he's really good at is psychology.
[00:17:14]  I mean, I think Nietzsche would probably argue that he's a psychologist first and foremost.
[00:17:19]  And what I mean by that is he doesn't take metaphysics or any moral ideal on its face, on its face value.
[00:17:25]  He wants to know who is the person behind this morality.
[00:17:30]  So if it's true that morality is relative and it's subjective, then there's no rational reason to choose one morality over another.
[00:17:38]  So the question that he then wants to raise is, well, why choose, for example, toleration as a value as opposed to intoleration?
[00:17:45]  And what he ultimately does is he wants to reduce the world to this binary between a master morality and a slave morality.
[00:17:53]  So a slave instinct would embrace the idea of toleration, for example, because they would want someone, especially someone with the power and the ability to dominate them, to be, quote, tolerant.
[00:18:07]  But if you're a master, why would you embrace that?
[00:18:09]  Because embracing it would essentially mean crippling your desire to have a triumph of the will.
[00:18:14]  So why not intoleration?
[00:18:16]  So what often happens in our day is when we're taught in school that we should all be tolerant of our views because all views are essentially equal.
[00:18:25]  Well, Nietzsche wants to remind you that that doesn't follow.
[00:18:28]  If they're all equal, why not choose intoleration?
[00:18:30]  It's just as equal as toleration.
[00:18:33]  So what he wants us to do is look past good and evil.
[00:18:37]  He wants us to look past that and to look at what he believes ultimately motivates it.
[00:18:41]  And it's always a human person who, unknown to themselves, is writing their secret confession onto the world in the form of morality.
[00:18:50]  So what this really translates into is all morality is warfare.
[00:18:55]  No matter how simple it looks and how pious or how generous or how beneficent, he thinks behind it is a secret desire to dominate and to preserve its existence.
[00:19:07]  And so a slave morality could only exist in a world that's quote tolerant, egalitarian, recognizes the meek as opposed to the strong.
[00:19:18]  And this is where he gets pretty tricky to really unpack, because as you noted, on the one hand, when he declares that God is dead, it's not necessarily in a note of triumph.
[00:19:26]  But on the other hand, there are passages in his work, Beyond, I'm sorry, genealogy of morals, in which he says, well, let us look at, for example, the Christian heaven.
[00:19:35]  What is the delight there?
[00:19:36]  And he quotes passages in which those who go to heaven get to witness the eternal damnation of those who oppress them in this life.
[00:19:46]  And so for him, this is exhibit A of all morality, including religion, as secretly cloaking, masking a desire to have the will triumph.
[00:19:56]  And so he wants us to look past morality and, in particular, modern morality and modern science.
[00:20:02]  Even science, by the way, he ultimately argues, is a prejudice.
[00:20:06]  Now you're thinking, how can that be?
[00:20:08]  It's objective.
[00:20:09]  And he gives us an example from physics.
[00:20:12]  He says, in physics, you have these laws of gravity.
[00:20:15]  He says, well, there's two ways to interpret them.
[00:20:17]  Most people say all objects have to obey the laws of gravity.
[00:20:21]  He says, well, that's a slave interpretation.
[00:20:24]  Why obey?
[00:20:24]  Why not look at it the other way around and say all objects need to be commanded?
[00:20:31]  That's just as valid.
[00:20:32]  And so everything we look at doesn't have an essential objectivity behind it.
[00:20:39]  What it has is an interpretation that emerges from us and its value is essentially perspectival.
[00:20:45]  It tells us more about us than it does about the world.
[00:20:48]  And he didn't stop there.
[00:20:50]  He then went further and said, well, now we have to create our own values.
[00:20:54]  And one thing that he proposed is one of his most controversial yet longest-lasting contributions to the Zeitgeist or not the Zeitgeist, that would be more timely spirit of the times, just kind of how people view themselves.
[00:21:10]  And that would be the Übermensch.
[00:21:12]  What is the Übermensch?
[00:21:14]  And what was Nietzsche trying to say here?

=== The Power Of Lying (09:42) ===

[00:21:17]  So the Übermensch is a character in his work, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
[00:21:22]  And the way to really look at Nietzsche's works is in sort of two categories.
[00:21:26]  He's got some that I would call sort of a wrecking ball approach.
[00:21:30]  They're really designed to clear the deck, so to speak.
[00:21:32]  Beyond Good and Evil would be an example.
[00:21:34]  It's a very destructive book.
[00:21:35]  Its primary focus is on destroying the prejudices of the philosophers, you know, trying to push nationalism out and make way for some new horizon.
[00:21:45]  Zarathustra would be sort of more of a constructive work.
[00:21:48]  Okay, so it necessarily follows his other works.
[00:21:52]  And in Zarathustra, what he essentially wants, the Übermensch simply means the overman.
[00:21:57]  It can be translated as Superman, but it's more accurately overman.
[00:22:02]  And the question is over what?
[00:22:05]  And essentially, in that work, over the nihilism that has engulfed Europe.
[00:22:10]  And so he has this image of a tightrope walker who stretches a rope across an abyss.
[00:22:15]  And he wants to cross it, meaning he wants to carry civilization over this abyss, but he falls and dies.
[00:22:21]  He doesn't have the spirit necessary to lift Europe up.
[00:22:26]  And so what the Übermensch is designed to invoke or inspire are men who see the problem of modern Europe as essentially nihilism.
[00:22:37]  There's nothing meaningful left in man's life anymore.
[00:22:40]  I mean, when you think about how pop culture most likely has more influence over most people's lives today than, say, God or family or country, you can see Nietzsche's point.
[00:22:50]  The three things that had historically always been the portal through which human beings can gain some sense of continuity or meaning have been replaced essentially by just the market.
[00:23:01]  And so the overman is designed to connect a link between this world and something over the nihilism of contemporary Europe and sort of serve as a bridge to some kind of ideal.
[00:23:14]  And so how would this idea of the Übermensch apply to kind of our life today?
[00:23:20]  Who would be trying to believe that we need to create the overman?
[00:23:24]  Are these the people that are playing in scientific experiments or is it just more of a thought exercise?
[00:23:31]  It's not a thought exercise for him.
[00:23:33]  I mean, he really sought what he calls a transvaluation of values, which is a very clunky phrase that essentially means an attempt to overcome democracy.
[00:23:43]  He was not an egalitarian.
[00:23:44]  He did not want liberalism.
[00:23:47]  He didn't want anything like a traditional aristocracy or monarchy.
[00:23:51]  He wanted a new form of aristocracy that was built upon the insights of his philosophy, that what you're ultimately celebrating is human greatness.
[00:24:02]  You're not celebrating so much the ideals because he says in the past, human beings would mistake those ideals as just simply an objective rather than celebrating the true source of them.
[00:24:11]  And that is the great man, the poet philosopher, who's somewhat like a legislator.
[00:24:18]  And so that's, so his vision is not just simply poetry, but it does appeal to people who are frustrated in democracy, who feel alienated from it, who are searching for meaning or longing for some kind of eternity in their lives.
[00:24:32]  And the modern world just simply doesn't offer that for them.
[00:24:35]  He appeals to them.
[00:24:36]  And that's why in your earlier comment, that you would often find Nazis who are dead in a battlefield with copies of Thusbek Zarathustra.
[00:24:45]  You could sense what that was about and what was that.
[00:24:48]  They were fighting sort of the forces of nihilism and materialism and destruction in the name of some greater Germany, you know.
[00:24:57]  And it was very effective.
[00:24:59]  And I mean, Nietzsche, well before anyone else realized it, he said, this thing's fallen apart.
[00:25:05]  And therefore we have to create our new values and create something new.
[00:25:10]  And I want to really focus on this word, the will.
[00:25:13]  Can you just take a moment?
[00:25:15]  Because this is something we've been talking about on our program, just kind of how conservatives don't always have the will to win.
[00:25:20]  Are we willing to act?
[00:25:22]  You know, on our program, we say, are we willing to enforce the southern border as a state?
[00:25:26]  Are we willing to do what's necessary?
[00:25:29]  Now, we might be dealing with different definitions of the same word, but can you talk about just generally in political philosophy, how charged that word, that phrase, the will is?
[00:25:41]  Well, it's extremely charged.
[00:25:43]  I mean, depending on which philosopher you're thinking about, it means different things to different people.
[00:25:48]  For Nietzsche, the will doesn't ultimately seek the truth.
[00:25:53]  It doesn't seek objectivity.
[00:25:55]  That is the mistake of previous philosophers.
[00:25:58]  The will isn't an instrument of reason that is designed to condition the passions towards some kind of moderation.
[00:26:05]  That assumes a certain kind of order of the soul, for example, moral virtue.
[00:26:10]  For Nietzsche, the will, he says, is essentially an irrational appetite for power.
[00:26:16]  So the will to power suggests that the will lacks power.
[00:26:20]  And what its natural inclination is, is to seek power.
[00:26:24]  So what it does is it orients our reason and our passions toward some sense of domination or power.
[00:26:30]  So for example, he even interprets somebody like Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who placed a great emphasis on the categorical imperative.
[00:26:39]  Always had it the same way.
[00:26:39]  There you go.
[00:26:40]  I don't mean to trigger any bad experience you may have had reading Kant.
[00:26:44]  No, thankfully, I've never read it.
[00:26:46]  I only took the Hillsdale online course, and that was more than enough for me.
[00:26:50]  You've had enough of Kant.
[00:26:51]  But I did remember that part.
[00:26:53]  So there you go.
[00:26:53]  So in Kant's case, for example, the will could assist our desire for a moral universe.
[00:27:00]  It can will a categorical or universal imperative, thou shalt not lie.
[00:27:04]  Nietzsche looks at that and says the will is not seeking any kind of objectivity like Kant is claiming or some kind of universal moral compass or direction.
[00:27:15]  What it's actually seeking is a kind of power.
[00:27:17]  So something like thou shalt not lie, Nietzsche again would apply the master slave instinct and ask the question, who would say such a thing, the master or the slave?
[00:27:28]  It's complicated because in genealogy of morals, he does associate lying with sort of a base soul because what it does is it reveals that you're operating from a position of weakness.
[00:27:40]  You only lie when somebody has power over you.
[00:27:43]  And you're honest when you can be autonomous.
[00:27:46]  And so he celebrates honesty as, again, as a measure of power and dishonesty as a measure of the lack of power, as opposed to merely seeking some kind of objective standard by which to judge human beings.
[00:28:00]  For Nietzsche, it always comes down to the position of the will.
[00:28:03]  Do you have power or do you not have power?
[00:28:06]  And that really is how many people in the modern American left and some people on the right, but mostly on the left, view their existence.
[00:28:16]  Are we in power?
[00:28:18]  Are we in control?
[00:28:19]  We know what we want.
[00:28:20]  Why don't we get it?
[00:28:22]  Can you try to connect the thread?
[00:28:24]  Maybe it's not there between Machiavelli and Nietzsche.
[00:28:27]  No, there is a thread.
[00:28:28]  And I'm glad you brought up the modern left because Nietzsche has the peculiar distinction of inspiring both the left and the right.
[00:28:38]  In the left, for example, the emphasis on power does come from Nietzsche.
[00:28:43]  Machiavelli never talks about power.
[00:28:45]  He talks about mastery.
[00:28:47]  He talks about ruling.
[00:28:49]  He talks about law and order.
[00:28:50]  Nietzsche is the one who makes power the central idea of morality.
[00:28:55]  So when people say, for example, that we have institutional racism and what those institutions are are an attempt to create a victim class and to dominate.
[00:29:07]  That's very Nietzschean.
[00:29:08]  I'm not saying that Nietzsche would agree with that, but you can see how it's derivative of this idea.
[00:29:13]  Totally.
[00:29:14]  And, you know, whereas Machiavelli, that's not really, that wouldn't even be a question.
[00:29:19]  The question is, does it produce law and order?
[00:29:21]  Does it produce acquisition?
[00:29:22]  Does it produce a good effect in war?
[00:29:28]  And new lands and like, you know, a good harvest.
[00:29:33]  He's not thinking in terms of these abstractions.
[00:29:35]  I mean, he's thinking in terms of what's good for the regime.
[00:29:39]  Whereas Nietzsche wants us to think in terms of, well, what are these moralities?
[00:29:42]  And all of them are a form of morality, including science or how we interpret science.
[00:29:47]  What are they actually saying about the authorities of our day?
[00:29:50]  Are we under a master morality or are we under a slave morality?
[00:29:55]  And he thinks that the slave morality is what's dominant in Europe.
[00:29:59]  And the problem with it, again, this is going back to genealogy of morals, is according to Nietzsche, slave morality has a secret source in resentment.
[00:30:07]  All of its morality is nothing more than resentment being vented through a moral outlet.
[00:30:15]  So the meek and shall inherit the earth.
[00:30:17]  Well, where did the strong and noble go?
[00:30:18]  Well, they go to hell.
[00:30:20]  So for Nietzsche, well, what then happens if the slave morality is victorious and manages then to essentially destroy the aristocracy, destroy pagan heroism?
[00:30:29]  If it's only negative, if it only emerges, in other words, in reaction to something that it hates, well, what happens when there's an absence of that?
[00:30:38]  He says the slave instinct can no longer be creative, and that's where you end up with this last man, this mediocrity with no real purpose or meaning anymore in its life because its entire existence and its morality rested on some kind of opposition of evil that it needed to destroy.
[00:30:55]  Well, once it's successful, it essentially brings about a state of just nihilism.

=== Hollowing Out Humanities (03:21) ===

[00:31:00]  It's literally a kind of a nothingness.
[00:31:03]  And maybe you did this earlier, but can you just reinforce the best definition of nihilism?
[00:31:08]  Because I think that is too widely used sometimes.
[00:31:12]  So nihilism is this idea that there really is no meaning.
[00:31:16]  There's no meaning in nation.
[00:31:17]  There's no meaning in God.
[00:31:19]  That everything that human beings had always oriented themselves, all the tablets of good and evil of any people have been drained of any kind of meaning.
[00:31:29]  It's the idea that nothing really has any integrity, that love is not really real.
[00:31:34]  It's a power relation.
[00:31:36]  And so, for him, nihilism is not a condition that can breed any kind of longing, any kind of desire or any kind of incentive for something beyond just a here and now.
[00:31:49]  It's fundamentally rooted in an idea that there is no cosmic meaning in human existence at all.
[00:31:55]  And the difference with Nietzsche is, of course, that meaning can be generated from somebody like an Übermensch, a very rare, special person.
[00:32:05]  So, if there is no meaning, therefore, we need to try and create our own values and lift ourselves up to be superhuman.
[00:32:14]  And so, can you draw that connection then?
[00:32:17]  And as this is, you know, wonderfully, we're partnered with Hillsdale College, Charlie for Hillsdale.com.
[00:32:23]  Everyone should send their kids to college or at the very least take the online courses.
[00:32:26]  How the predominant view of the academy, not Hillsdale College, is deconstructionism, postmodernism.
[00:32:33]  Can you kind of walk us through how Nietzsche really led some of this along?
[00:32:40]  So, prior to this revolution, this transvaluation of values, to use Nietzsche's phrase, there was a belief that the humanities were a broad set of disciplines that have various portals through which a human being can enter and discover something objective about human life.
[00:32:56]  And we can be enriched by a wide variety of courses and disciplines.
[00:33:01]  But if you were suddenly told that there is no light at the end of any of those tunnels, that what you're essentially studying is just the power structures that produce those, as opposed to the paths towards some kind of self-knowledge, well, then you've essentially hollowed out the humanities.
[00:33:20]  So, if there's really no text out there in the world to read and to study, but only interpretations, well, then the humanities have nothing to tell us about what it means to be human.
[00:33:30]  And what the humanities have done for centuries now is essentially saw the branch off that they were sitting on.
[00:33:37]  And now they're, of course, scratching their heads, wondering why they are the ones who are getting gutted from the curriculum.
[00:33:41]  Well, by their own admission, there's nothing there to read other than just the peculiar hobby of their instructor.
[00:33:48]  So, once you lose this goal of reaching some kind of objectivity or, say, salvation, any incentive that would mark a genuine progress in your intellectual journey, what incentive is left for you to pursue it?
[00:34:03]  And so, you see, the decline of the humanities works in tandem with this sense, this, this, the onset of this nihilism.
[00:34:12]  And at Hillsdale, I learned when I was visiting, and I also heard this before, that wonder is the beginning of philosophy.
[00:34:18]  But if you believe it, there's nothing to anything, why even wonder?

=== Beyond Good And Evil (14:11) ===

[00:34:21]  Why even consideration?
[00:34:23]  That's right.
[00:34:23]  And wonder gets replaced with existential dread, because wonder at least presupposes that there's what do you mean by existential dread?
[00:34:33]  So, if there, if wisdom begins in wonder, the implication is that that wonder has some place to go.
[00:34:40]  It can have a guide and mentors.
[00:34:42]  So, what Virgil was to say, Dante in the divine comedy.
[00:34:45]  But if there is no objectivity, if there's nothing beyond wonder, then wonder can quickly become a sense of dread, anxiety.
[00:34:53]  All you've done is essentially liberated yourself from a set of prejudices and maybe national horizons that used to define your life.
[00:35:01]  But if there's nothing beyond them, what position are you in other than one of just existential anxiety?
[00:35:08]  You've lost whatever meaning.
[00:35:10]  And even though the previous prejudices may have just been illusions, well, now what do you have?
[00:35:17]  Do you see more and more American young people kind of suffering under a Nietzschean framework?
[00:35:28]  Do you see the damage that this has done?
[00:35:30]  I'm just talking non-academically, just generally.
[00:35:33]  I do.
[00:35:34]  I think this idea that you can reduce human relationships to just simply power is destructive because what you're essentially saying is that all institutions, whether they're marriage or whether like citizenship, Aristotle goes out of his way to define what a citizen is and he connects it ultimately to an activity of participating in government with real virtue.
[00:35:58]  But if you have this idea that everything is just power, well, then you can easily say, well, you just closed the door behind the last immigrant because it's all just about power.
[00:36:07]  So in other words, there's no real meaningful definition, say, for example, of what a citizen is.
[00:36:11]  It's just those who got in first got to define it and at the exclusion of everybody else.
[00:36:16]  Marriage, traditional marriage, doesn't have any real sacredness to it.
[00:36:20]  It's just the power of what was previously traditional.
[00:36:24]  But we've now redefined what is a traditional marriage.
[00:36:26]  And if you were to exclude people from that, that's also an expression of the reigning power structure.
[00:36:33]  And so it's deadly in the sense that there's not an institution or ideal that you couldn't apply it to.
[00:36:42]  And at the end of the day, just simply reduce it to some empty, hollow sort of moral halo that you've placed upon a power structure that you're just incentivized to keep in its place.
[00:36:54]  I see it with a lot of young people, students in high school and college, that they are not exposed to Nietzsche all the time, but his ideas are everywhere.
[00:37:03]  There is no meaning.
[00:37:05]  There is no truth.
[00:37:07]  Got to create it for yourself.
[00:37:08]  Puts a lot of burden on a 16-year-old to kind of do that.
[00:37:13]  I'm still growing up.
[00:37:14]  What was Nietzsche doing?
[00:37:15]  Not even the teens.
[00:37:17]  I mean, adults.
[00:37:18]  Many people are extremely uncomfortable saying that there is an actual wrong or right way of life, that the good life is something that's even objective.
[00:37:26]  Who am I to judge?
[00:37:28]  That relativism isn't just simply in young people.
[00:37:31]  Those young people become adults.
[00:37:33]  And in many ways, you lose cultural wars and battles when you don't have anything that you firmly believe in.
[00:37:40]  Totally.
[00:37:42]  But the left believes in power.
[00:37:44]  And so at least they can galvanize behind that and then go after whatever perceived or real institution that they believe is creating some kind of injustice.
[00:37:53]  It's everybody else who's sort of willy-nilly about it.
[00:37:58]  I don't know what the right way of life is.
[00:38:00]  Who am I to judge?
[00:38:01]  And that creates, it saps the spiritedness necessary to defend any way of life.
[00:38:07]  And just from a personal level, it makes your existence less enjoyable and more confusing and chaotic.
[00:38:15]  I have a couple remaining questions.
[00:38:17]  What was Nietzsche's view of pleasure?
[00:38:20]  Because would he say that that is a desirable outcome?
[00:38:26]  Or is power higher in whatever hierarchy he designed than pleasure?
[00:38:30]  Creativity for Nietzsche is higher than power.
[00:38:32]  The ultimate manifestation of power ought to be creativity.
[00:38:36]  In other words, the human being who steps into the fray, steps into the nihilistic culture and has the creativity and the will behind it to be able to create meaning for modern man where there isn't one.
[00:38:49]  Pleasure, he's quite critical of.
[00:38:50]  He's also critical of, say, Rousseau's sentimentalism and romanticism.
[00:38:54]  He thinks that pleasure is the way in which modernity saps the will and the strength of people.
[00:39:01]  It's somewhat like Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus lands in the land of the lotus eaters.
[00:39:06]  They're very peaceful people.
[00:39:08]  They don't harm you physically, but what they do is they give you an opium-like kind of drug, and it looks harmless because it just looks like you're just experiencing a pleasant sensation.
[00:39:18]  But it turns out, according to Homer, that that's the most dangerous place his men landed at because they started to forget about home.
[00:39:25]  They lost the capacity to think about the future and to think about their families and to think about their duties as soldiers and to live in the inebriation of their senses.
[00:39:34]  Nietzsche is very much Homeric in that regard, that pleasure is the secret drug.
[00:39:39]  It's the opiate of the masses in an age of egalitarianism.
[00:39:43]  It's a way of keeping people emasculated and disincentivized from wanting to do anything beyond just the immediacy of their sensations.
[00:39:52]  One example of Nietzschean philosophy that shocked America to the core, I think it was in the 1920s when two University of Chicago students, Leopold and Loeb, studied Nietzsche.
[00:40:04]  And how did it end?
[00:40:06]  Not well.
[00:40:06]  I think they wanted to see if they were beyond good and evil.
[00:40:09]  And I believe that the passage that really inspired them was the pale criminal and thus big Zarathustra.
[00:40:16]  In that work, there's a criminal who hangs his head in shame of having been caught.
[00:40:21]  There and in other places in Nietzsche's work, Machieu, sorry, Freudian's lip, Nietzsche, criticizes the criminal who can't go beyond his deed, meaning to kill with a complete clear conscience, like the beast of prey that he talks about in Genealogy of Morals.
[00:40:37]  And so you have, for example, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Rostolnikov, he wants to kill a pawnbroker that nobody likes to see if he can actually kill and go beyond the pang of the conscience.
[00:40:50]  He's testing to see to what extent there really is a law written across the heart.
[00:40:55]  And so he does this thought experiment.
[00:40:57]  At first, he justifies it on utilitarian grounds.
[00:40:59]  He says, well, nobody likes her anyway.
[00:41:01]  I can be a hero for all of those who are oppressed by this poor, unlikable pawnbroker.
[00:41:06]  But then his conscience gets the better of him.
[00:41:08]  Whereas Dostoevsky looks at that as a sign of health, that that shows that there really is that the conscience isn't some kind of artificial experience we feel when we trespass.
[00:41:21]  Nietzsche is quite critical of that view and says, no, the conscience shows that the criminal was not able to go beyond good and evil, because the conscience, for Nietzsche, is the secret weapon the weak use to punish the strong who are willing by nature to want to dominate.
[00:41:36]  Let me give you an example.
[00:41:37]  It's kind of complicated.
[00:41:39]  Imagine, for example, if you can't physically defend yourself against someone stronger than you, you can't harm them physically.
[00:41:46]  You can harm, you can get them to harm themselves by turning their own power against them.
[00:41:51]  How so?
[00:41:52]  If you teach them power is bad and all they can know is this impulse to be powerful, what are they going to think about themselves?
[00:41:59]  They're going to have guilt.
[00:42:01]  They're going to have a bad conscience about the very thing that they are.
[00:42:04]  You can't punish the rich.
[00:42:07]  They're powerful.
[00:42:07]  You can get them to punish themselves by telling them it's a privilege.
[00:42:11]  And so what you have is so what ends up happening is I can get you to punish yourself.
[00:42:17]  I don't have to lift a finger.
[00:42:18]  I just have to repeat enough that wealth is bad, that privilege is bad.
[00:42:23]  So what the pale criminal and what the psychology of the criminal is in Nietzsche is what is really the status of the conscience?
[00:42:30]  Is it real or not?
[00:42:31]  For Dostoevsky, it is.
[00:42:32]  And Raskolnikov wasn't able to go beyond it.
[00:42:35]  And he had to come to terms with a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a human being.
[00:42:40]  In Nietzsche's case, the conscience is just an artificial invention of a slave morality designed to put that blonde beast of prey back into his cage where he will then lacerate himself with the sense of guilt about his power or whatever perceived privilege.
[00:42:57]  And that's how you get a dominant class to harm itself.
[00:43:01]  That would explain a lot if he was right.
[00:43:06]  But he's definitely onto something because I see that it perplexes me when I see people that seemingly enjoy like the scene.
[00:43:14]  So take a power, label it as bad, and those who have that power will now can only wield it with a really bad, guilty conscience.
[00:43:24]  And it has to go somewhere, according to Nietzsche.
[00:43:26]  And where it's going to go, since it can't go outwards anymore with a clear conscience, it's going to be internalized and turned inward where you're going to start punishing yourself.
[00:43:35]  And every time you punish yourself, you think you're actually making progress because you're harming what you believe is evil.
[00:43:40]  So it's essentially a form of self-inflicted suicide, harm.
[00:43:43]  So it's a kind of psychological suicide.
[00:43:47]  You ever see the Da Vinci Code, the guy that beats himself, is an example of that, I think, far too often.
[00:43:53]  Let me ask you, what would Nietzsche say if someone says, well, what's the point in living?
[00:43:59]  That's a great question.
[00:44:01]  Well, many philosophers have raised that question, Camus being one of them.
[00:44:04]  Why not commit suicide?
[00:44:06]  I think for Nietzsche, there's too much opportunity for the right kind of soul.
[00:44:12]  Well, actually, in Tuspik Zarathustra, he said most people simply could, and we wouldn't miss out on anything, and they wouldn't miss out on any meaning in their lives anyway.
[00:44:21]  Their lives are a walking death anyway.
[00:44:24]  For Nietzsche, though, there are rare, increasingly rare opportunities for great-souled men to actually lift human beings from this state of nihilism.
[00:44:35]  And the only thing that would make life worth living, according to him, where he has a passage in Thusbek Zarathustra, who deserves to have a true monument upon their death?
[00:44:43]  Those who've actually achieved some kind of greatness.
[00:44:45]  Everybody else, he says, were just a footnote in history.
[00:44:49]  So it is a good question.
[00:44:50]  But he would say that if you have the capacity and longing for greatness and you have the psychological and philosophical tools that he thinks he's providing, then life is worth living because it gives you the tableau upon which you can paint a new horizon for our civilization.
[00:45:05]  That's what he thinks ultimately is the root of life.
[00:45:09]  This is where this is why you get school shooters that are saying, I'm either going to kill myself or kill others.
[00:45:17]  Or bring everyone else down with me.
[00:45:18]  And that's Nietzsche would say that is a classic example of nihilism, the sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness.
[00:45:25]  Now, Nietzsche, of course, doesn't think he's creating a culture of hopelessness.
[00:45:31]  In his mind, he's thinking that Zarathustra, a work like Zarathustra, can inspire perhaps a generation and ultimately a leader that can create this new hierarchy, this new aristocracy that recognizes that the threats to greatness, science, democracy, sensuality and whatnot, and wage a war against it in the name of greatness.
[00:45:55]  In the name of greatness.
[00:45:57]  Let's close with this.
[00:45:59]  Did he die sane?
[00:46:01]  You know, apparently not.
[00:46:03]  I mean, apparently he had contracted syphilis, but I've even read some people say that that actually never happened.
[00:46:09]  That was essentially something that someone invented to discredit him.
[00:46:13]  I don't have an opinion on it.
[00:46:15]  But I don't think he wrote any of his books in an insane capacity.
[00:46:19]  I mean, I think there's serious probity in his work.
[00:46:22]  Well, at the end of his life, maybe you can help unpack me the multiverse theory that he put forward, where he said that you might have multiple existences.
[00:46:33]  I'm not very well versed in this, but I've heard critics saying he was basically losing his mind at the last couple of years of his life.
[00:46:41]  That might be true.
[00:46:42]  That might be true.
[00:46:43]  I mean, my knowledge of Nietzsche is essentially limited to his works.
[00:46:48]  And I never detected as hairy and scary as some of his ideas can be, I always detected a mind probing, feeling his way through certain problems and not simply just the ravings of a lunatic or something like that.
[00:47:02]  He's too powerful to just simply be dismissed as insane.
[00:47:06]  At the end of the day, his philosophy might just completely be wrong, but that certainly wouldn't make him the caricature of a madman that you often hear about.
[00:47:16]  That is, definitely hear a lot about that.
[00:47:18]  The last, last question is applied to today, 2021.
[00:47:23]  What the good, the bad, the ugly, how do we apply all of this to what we're living through right now?
[00:47:29]  I think where he can be helpful is if people can see that when they're under attack by the media, by popular culture, quite often they just want to get along and they'll take it at face value.
[00:47:41]  What Nietzsche is really good at is get you to look past the morality and say, who gains from this?
[00:47:48]  What's the instinct behind this that wants me to inflict a wound on myself?
[00:47:53]  What do I get out of it?
[00:47:54]  How is that good for me?
[00:47:56]  And so where I think he can be liberating in an age that he ironically helped to shape in an odd way is to turn it against those who want to attack you and get you to attack whatever perceived privilege you might have or what have you and turn the tables and say, well, if morality, as you claim, is really just subjective, what does that tell me about what your morality is about me?
[00:48:18]  And there you can kind of defang it, so to speak.
[00:48:22]  I think that's really wise.
[00:48:24]  When I tell people all the time, when the New York Times comes after you or someone comes after you, it's not a debate.
[00:48:30]  It's a power conflict.
[00:48:32]  It's war.

=== Rights Based Alternative (00:58) ===

[00:48:33]  That's right.
[00:48:35]  And that is when we are building civil society amongst people that share a rights-based view of existence, that's a different deal, but not if the other side...
[00:48:45]  The rights-based alternative isn't about power.
[00:48:47]  It's about recognizing that we have fundamental rights and there's no legitimate argument for coercion.
[00:48:55]  So that would be the alternative.
[00:48:57]  I mean, in many ways, Locke would be a moderate middle ground between, say, what we are experiencing today and someone like, say, Machiavelli.
[00:49:06]  So I think you're right to close on that remark about natural right.
[00:49:09]  Very good.
[00:49:10]  Thank you, my friend.
[00:49:10]  Charlie4Hillsdale.com, Charlie FRHillsdale.com.
[00:49:13]  We're glad to have you back.
[00:49:14]  Dr. Abib, really appreciate it.
[00:49:15]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:49:16]  Take care.
[00:49:16]  Have a good weekend.
[00:49:17]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:49:18]  Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.
[00:49:21]  God bless you guys and get involved with Turning Point USA, TPUSA.com.
[00:49:24]  Thanks so much.
[00:49:28]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.