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March 20, 2015 - Davis Aurini
27:35
Nietzsche & the New Testament Part 2: Going Over or Under

Part 1 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T6a-HBVOYI My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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This is the second part of the video requested by Mr. Davis, contrasting Nietzsche's work with the New Testament.
In the previous video, we covered the background that Aristotelian Platonic philosophy, as well as the theological development that's been going on over the millennia, that set the stage so that you can understand where Nietzsche is coming from.
In this video, we will actually consider Nietzsche's work itself.
One of the major themes running throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in fact in much of Nietzsche's writing, was the eternal reoccurrence.
You see, there's two ways of interpreting history.
The original way, going back to the Sumerian gods that I was talking about in the previous video, it is the cyclic understanding of history, the eternal reoccurrence that Nietzsche is talking about there.
And most primitive peoples, most primitive tribes, this is how they understood things, the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the generations, same story over and over again, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning.
The alternative view is the progressive, the linear understanding of history.
And this is what we start to see with the patriarchal religions, the idea of a direction that things are going, a purpose, the development of science, the advancement of society.
These are all very progressive, linear concepts.
Now, both views of history are a little bit myopic in their own way.
And in my opinion, I would argue that the correct view of history requires both, that you recognize, you recognize the sine wave, the cycle that's going on, but at the same time, you don't degrade humanity to just another part of the animal kingdom that does the same thing over and over again, bound and cursed into eternally repeating itself.
Now, when Nietzsche talks about the eternal recurrence, I don't believe that's what he's doing.
He's protesting at the time that Christianity had very much embraced this purely linear thought of the direction that time was going.
They did not think about the cycles.
They did not admit their animal nature.
And the great irony being, because they absolutely refused to admit that they were animals, that there were cycles, that there is the eternal recurrence, this is what curses them to do exactly that.
It's the thing that you're completely unaware of that's going to trump you up.
And so when Nietzsche talks about embracing the eternal recurrence, it's about embracing your life, about embracing the fact that, yeah, you do live here in time with cycles, with hungers, with needs, and loving every minute of it.
And so it's from the eternal reoccurrence that we get the will to power.
Now at this point, I'd like to start splitting in the two people that Nietzsche is talking to, the two groups that misinterpret him.
On the one hand, you have the materialist Christians, the Churchians, as we call them nowadays, the church that he is so frustrated and angry with.
On the other side, you've got the atheists, the ones that are living purely hedonistically, that have abandoned all value.
And to look at how he's shouting at both sides at the same time, and how both of them are completely getting him wrong.
The will to power.
The will to power is all about loving your own life.
It's about living life to the fullest.
And so Nietzsche would say that the Churchians, they're completely abandoning the will to power.
See, the will to power requires courage.
It requires that you go out in the world and possibly fail.
It demands that you learn and that you think and that you risk things, because you're actually aiming for something.
See, you've got the eternal reoccurrence, but the will to power is directional.
It is moving towards a goal.
The hedonist, mind you, the atheist, hears the will to power, and all they have is the will to lust, the will to sate their lusts with no long-term plan, no ultimate goal, in complete absence of any and all values.
The Churchian completely denies the world.
They live like an aesthetic.
They don't engage, they don't really live.
The hedonist, on the other hand, lives entirely in the material world and refuses to embrace anything higher.
Now on my website, the subtitle of Stairs at the World is a quote from the Gospel of Thomas, which goes that the kingdom of heaven is everywhere upon the earth, but men see it not.
That people aren't truly living life, that they are either they're a slave to their passion, or they're fleeing from reality.
And they don't see the beauty and the potential that you can have living your own life, understanding the will to power, understanding that you're a part of the world, and pursuing self-improvement, pursuing betterment, pursuing beauty, pursuing magic.
People ignore it in so many ways.
And C.S. Lewis, he heavily criticized Christians for this.
In his book, The Screwtape Letters, one of the things he talked about was where were you focused time-wise.
Now the devils in his book, the devils want, ideally, they want you focused upon the past, upon what's already happened.
They want you reminiscing about better times or feeling bitter about times you were slighted.
They want you dwelling on things.
Instead of dealing with the present, instead of coping, instead of moving forward, they want you to dwell on the past, ideally.
If they can't get you to dwell on the past, what they love to do is get you to dwell in the future, is to think about all the exciting things you're going to do, is think about where you're headed, dream about the next vacation.
And while the future is a little bit better than dwelling on the past, since the future challenges you to do things, it's how am I going to get to that point in my life?
Ultimately, it's still just daydreaming.
Because the past doesn't exist anymore.
It happened already.
The future is just imaginary.
Where you should be spending most of your time is in the present.
You should be mindful of what you're doing today, right now, where you're going, what you are doing.
You should be loving and embracing your own life.
And again, this is the will to power, is living in the present, accepting the eternal recurrence and the long-term direction where things are going, but living in the presence, loving your own life.
Not abandoning your self-awareness, not engaging in drug abuse and opiate abuse to distract yourself from the fact that you're alive.
At the same time, not looking forward to heaven, but finding heaven in the present, in the world as it is.
Nietzsche would say that these Christians that he was seeing, they were living in the future.
They're imagining their salvation.
They're imagining going to heaven, thinking about that, rather than living in the present.
Which leads to the next point.
The next great quote that's often misinterpreted.
Nietzsche and the death of God.
Now when Nietzsche talks about the death of God, he's talking about our conception of God.
God is dead, and we have killed him.
Now think about these Churchians for a moment.
These churchings that aren't living in the present, but instead are living in the future.
One big thing you find nowadays is this statement of being saved.
I am saved.
Now C.S. Lewis wrote about this again.
And he wrote about how there comes an element, and he says, you know, I'm very hesitant to even mention this because mentioning it is almost blasphemy.
But there comes a point when you've been faithful for long enough, when you've been engaged in enough self-improvement, where you've been catching yourself as you sin, that you realize that you're still a sinner.
You still screw up all the time.
And yet, you're on the upswing.
I liken it to hyperbolic equations.
You see, a hyperbolic mathematical equation, if you draw it on a graph, they have asymptotes.
So the asymptote will be a horizontal line, for instance, that you'll get this equation that's always increasing, but never hits that line.
The closer you get to infinity, the closer they get together, but it never hits that line.
And that's most people.
That's our default state.
That's us living as the animals that Nietzsche talks about.
But when you've been correcting yourself, when you've been living in the present, when you've been loving life, when you've been accepting the reality of being an animal and yet being more than an animal, when you start doing that for long enough, you realize that your asymptote, you are going to break through that barrier.
It's impossible, it's magical, but it's going to happen.
And yet it's the sort of thing you should never say.
Any more than Nietzsche would claim to be an ubermensch.
It's one of those high mystical things.
It's this gut feeling, but you still recognize that you're a sinner.
You still recognize that you're a broken, terrible person that needs to get better.
That you're not good enough yet.
That I think was the original idea behind being saved.
And yet the people that say, I am saved, I am in the grace of God, they're putting that in the past.
They're putting that in, I am saved, I don't have to self-improve anymore.
It's a very arrogant statement.
It's like screaming that I am the ubermensch.
The real ubermensch does not say that they are the ubermensch.
They are just living that life that's constantly improving, that's constantly getting better.
They're living joyously, they're living in the moment.
They're not justifying their actions based upon the past.
And they get this sense that every moment of their life is the life they're living, that there's the eternal reoccurrence.
Philosophically, they would be willing to live their entire life over again, ad infinitum.
That is the heaven that they seek.
That is all the heaven that they need.
But the Churchian, he puts that in the past.
I am saved.
And so what is this God that the Churchian worships?
This God is one that gives him rules, that gives him morality, and the Christian morality that Nietzsche was so critical of.
Now, some basic societal rules, some basic morality is a bloody good idea.
That is the training wheels that people need to live by to get better, to train themselves.
But the Christians that Nietzsche was seeing, they were just coasting through life leaning on their training wheels and never thinking.
In the past, I am saved.
In the present, I blindly obey the rules of God.
In the future, I get heaven.
And so I don't have to think.
I do not have to be aware or thoughtful about what I'm doing in the present.
It's an abandonment of thought.
It's an abandonment of the self.
And it's worshiping a dead God.
When Nietzsche says we've killed God, that's the God we've killed.
Not the God of the New Testament that said, you don't need the rules.
You don't need the training wheels to ride your bike.
What you need to do is ride your bike.
And hey, I'm going to bleed on the cross for you so that you can do that.
So that you can be impossibly more than you are.
So you can use this ridiculous side effect of centripetal motion that a two-wheeled motorcycle can actually go down the highway.
No, they're leaning on their training wheels.
They're not thinking.
They are living purely by an objective, measured morality, not reaching up to the higher.
Contrasting them are the atheists, the atheists who laugh at this dead God the Christians worship, who live doing whatever they want.
But these atheists have abandoned all value in the process.
They live purely hedonistically.
They live purely for the animal desires, as opposed to anything grander.
They are just as dead as the Churchians are.
They are just as unaware.
You know, you've got this radical religion that was all about overcoming yourself, and both groups are living like animals.
One's a slave to the rules, the other is a slave to their desires.
And overcoming yourself, this is the next point.
Going over, overcoming.
The ubermensch, the overman.
This is a constant theme throughout Nietzsche's writing.
You know, you've got the eternal reoccurrence, the cyclic history.
Yes, you are part of the universe.
Yes, you are part animal.
And yet he's also writing about overcoming.
About walking the tightrope over the abyss, about being more than you were, about this impossible, magical, joyous form of living that is out there.
And you tell me, folks, is that not the same sort of principle that Christ was talking about with salvation?
About overcoming the sins of the past, about being more than just an animal?
The good and evil that Nietzsche talks about, overcoming good and evil, he talks about the cycle of good and evil.
And there's very much, these are allusions to Zoroastrianism, which, unlike Judaism, unlike Christianity, Zoroastrianism is a religion that talks about the good and the evil forces being equal opposites,
as opposed to Christianity-Judaism, where good is the fundamental nature of reality and evil is just a twisting, a perversion of that fundamental nature.
Zoroastrianism has a lot in common with these old forms of paganism that we find, where good and evil, anger, love, etc., it's all part of this endless cycle repeated endlessly.
In the modern era that Nietzsche's writing in, the Christians have completely rejected that cycle by following the rules.
Not by thinking about the rules, but merely by following them.
And yet they're still subject to these rules.
They're still, the petty squabbles of day-to-day might be a little bit less bloody than it was in ancient Babylon, but it's the exact same petty struggles, the constant cycle, living in the universe, being merely part of the universe rather than overcoming, rather than being more.
And this is why he says, there is more ape in you than there is in the apes.
The ape can't help that endless cycle of morality, of birth and death, of the same stories over and over again.
The ape can't help it.
And yet people can.
People can be more than this.
But people live as slaves to all of this.
To avoid thinking, to avoid thinking in the moment, to avoid going over.
Because going over is scary.
It's terrifying.
And ultimately, it means pursuing your own understanding of the good.
Now, this is a part that is deeply misunderstood.
Your own understanding of the good does not mean whatever you feel like.
Nietzsche was just as upset with the atheists who did whatever they feel like.
Abandoning the simplistic morality of a degenerate church doesn't mean that there is no such thing as beauty.
There is no such thing as good.
There is no such thing as architecture.
What it means is casting off the training wheels and actually pursuing it on your own.
Terrified because you aren't going to get a direct revelation from God.
You're not going to get a simple stone tablet telling you what to do.
There are signs out there.
You feel them in your heart.
You feel it when you hear a beautiful song, when you see the magnificence of nature.
There's something there.
There is something worth pursuing, but you can't quite nail it down.
When Nietzsche talks about abandoning good and evil, I believe that's the good and evil he's talking about, the simplistic, basic, cheap understanding of right and wrong.
which is really more just about authority, doing whatever you're told to do as opposed to thinking.
It means going above being a mere animal, being a mere obedient peon or a slave, being above a slave to your desires, but pursuing something grander.
To ride that bike without training wheels.
You know, it must be said that Nietzsche was not a Christian.
He was very disgusted with the Christianity he saw and very disgusted with the atheism he saw, the simplistic materialist science that, of course, we see all over the place nowadays.
He was not impressed with any of it.
And most Christians have taken that assault on the church very deep down.
See, I was just quoting C.S. Lewis, and C.S. Lewis hated Nietzsche, but I seriously wonder whether he ever read his work.
Nietzsche is very angry.
He is shouting loudly at the world, and his voice is red with blood.
He's a pretty pissed off guy, but for some very, very good reasons.
And ultimately, I don't see that much of a difference between the values, the philosophy that Nietzsche is promoting.
You know, the idea of finding that divine spark, that even within the material world, within the eternal reoccurrence, that there is this divine spark out there that we can reach for.
And we do it by going over and living courageously, living in the moment, living in the present, and loving our lives and being happy with what we have.
I don't see a huge difference between that and the New Testament, which is, again, about not just living for the sake of society, not just living to follow the rules, not just living out of fear of punishment, but is embracing suffering, embracing the loving of life.
Now, the final part of this video is the hardest to answer because Davis asked me, how do we solve this nihilism present in our society?
You know, Nietzsche looked at, he looked at the church and he looked at the atheists and he saw nihilists in both groups.
How do we overcome this?
And the frustrating answer is we can't.
You see, trying to save civilization, trying to save society, trying to prevent these dark times that we have ahead of us, that's just being a slave.
That's falling into the old trap.
Zarathustra didn't go out into the world with any hopes of being successful.
Neither did Christ, for that matter.
He knew he was going to die on a cross.
When you start trying to save the world, you become, you get dragged down.
You get dragged down into the abyss with the rest of the animals.
You start worrying over much about all the rules, about the obedience to the rules.
You know, and if you sit there too long, you might actually lose all faith and just fall into hedonism.
The world's going to fall apart.
I've been trying to fix it forever.
I give up.
I've got a crisis of faith.
So I'm going to join the local swingers club.
I'm going to do heroin.
I'm going to do every drug in the world because life is meaningless.
Or I'm just going to sit around playing video games, never leaving my bedroom.
It's not about saving the world.
Okay, resisting nihilism is not about you can't save the world.
Only the world can save itself.
Nobody can save you except you.
You need to embrace going over because that's the correct way to live your life.
Not because it's going to save the world.
Not because of anything else, but that it's the right way to live your life.
It's the moral way to live your life.
It's the joyous way to live your life.
And if you have to do it a hundred times over, a million times over, it would be the life that you would want to live.
The best that any of us can do is to set an example for others, to live the best life that we can.
And if others want to listen, to give them what advice and what knowledge we have.
Virtue is its own reward, and the only reward of virtue is virtue.
If there is any way to save society from the abyss, it is individuals choosing to live better lives, to abandon narcissism, to abandon legalism, to abandon drug addiction, and to live joyously in the present, pursuing virtue for virtue's sake.
Best of luck, folks.
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