Why Nietzsche Loved Odysseus

[00:00:00]I too have been in the underworld just as Odysius and I shall often be there again. Not even my own blood have I spared. For NZ philosophy is not a cheap academic exercise. He descended into the darkest regions of human existence. The nihilism, the cruelty, the lies we tell ourselves, sacrificing pieces of his sanity, his health, and his own illusions along the way. Just like Odysius, who traveled to the underworld to gain knowledge, Nze gazed into the abyss and found that it gazes back. But here's where it gets strange. The same Nietze who praises Odysius and the Greeks for their fearless descent into the depths of the human condition also wrote that what he admired most about the Greeks was how superficial they were, how they were joyful affirmers of life. Oh, those Greeks. They knew how to live. For that purpose, it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface. Those Greeks were superficial from profoundity.

[00:01:08]And crafty, wily, tricky Odysius is the greatest exemplar of this Greek tendency to stick bravely to the surface. Odysius is a pragmatic hero who doesn't care much for deep truths about the human condition. In fact, he's a prideful liar who uses tricks and cleverness to get what he wants. Truth be damned. So, which is it? What's up with this apparent contradiction where the Greeks are to be praised both for their death as well as for their superficiality?

[00:01:40]Does Nze want us to gaze into the abyss or to stand joyfully next to it dancing on the edge? And why does he view Odysius as the prime example of both of these modes of being? In this video, we're going to find out. So, strap in, get yourself some coffee, black of course, and join me as we meet NZ and Odysius in the realm of the dead to explore what kind of knowledge they were seeking there. By the end, you might see Western philosophy and maybe even your own life in a completely different light. But first, darkness.

[00:02:20]Odysius gets an explicit mention at the very end of part two of Nichzche's human all to human. In a particularly revealing and personal apherism, he compares himself to the Greek hero Odysius, who ventured into the underworld to gain knowledge from the dead.

[00:02:38]In order to do so, Odysius had to sacrifice two sheep and perform a ritual. Nze doubles down on the metaphor by saying that in his visits to the underworld, it was his own blood that he sacrificed, not that of a few sheep like Odysius. The point is clear. Nze, like Odysius, doesn't shy away from venturing deep into the dark unknown in order to gain knowledge.

[00:03:05]In the passage, Nze laments the fact that the people alive in his day aren't quite up to par with some of the dead he admires. He singles out eight dead philosophers with whom he converses and with whom figuratively he tests out his ideas. Epicurus and Montenia, Gert and Spinoza, Plato and Hul, Pascal and Schopenhau. In the near future, we'll make a dedicated video series on this council of Nichzche's dead philosophers and why he would choose precisely these eight as worthy conversation partners for his own. So, subscribe to the channel if you don't want to miss it.

[00:03:48]This is not the only passage where NZ compares the act of doing philosophy to spending time underground in the dark.

[00:03:56]The recurrent theme of this video will be the paradox of Nze's choice for metaphor. One time being a philosopher means to live underground in the dirt and another time a philosopher is like an eagle perched up high in the mountain air. In Daybreak, Nietze makes use of the underground motif once again. In fact, he does so from the very first sentence.

[00:04:21]In this book, we find a subterrestrial at work digging, mining, undermining.

[00:04:27]You can see him always, provided that you have eyes for such deep work. How he makes his way slowly, cautiously, gently, but surely, without showing signs of the weariness that usually accompanies a long privation of light and air. He might even be called happy despite his labors in the dark.

[00:04:47]In Ajiomo, Nze's autobiography where he talks about every book he wrote before, he says that in Daybreak, Nze begins his assault on morality. An assault that would culminate in the radical language of Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist and which would be deepened and explicated to the fullest extent in the genealogy of morals.

[00:05:10]This assault on morality is a long arduous work. Nze has to dig deep for this purpose. He is searching for the foundations of our western morality.

[00:05:22]Roots that go back 2500 years and then some. It will take a long while to expose these rotten foundations to the open air. Hence the laborious work of digging underground.

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[00:07:04]Nichch's investigation of morality happens over the course of multiple books. His 1881 book, Daybreak, is the first installment of the metaphorical mole coming to the surface to tell us what all his labor has been for. One easily unlearns how to hold one's tongue when one has for so long been a mole and all alone like me. The symbolism brings to mind another famous Nietian apherism, the abyss. He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. A period of long solitary darkness can have adverse effects on one's psyche. If you spend too long in the darkness, you might become a part of the darkness. The mole must keep working and he must keep faith that someday he will come to the surface and in Nichzche's words become a man again.

[00:08:03]The darkness in Nichzche's writings often symbolizes the past. the philosophical traditions of the west, but not the surface level philosophies, but the hidden moral assumptions that underpin them. That's why his underground work is so solitary and why he views himself as doing this work all alone, because no one else has gone quite as deep as NZ has. For NZ, someone's philosophy is not the product of rational, level-headed inquiry and debate and argument. It's rather a question of one's health, of his strength, his psychological constitution. And it's his opinion that the entire western tradition since Socrates onwards has been marked by a sickness that always managed to disguise itself by dawning the language of rationality and objectivity.

[00:08:56]In reality, says Nietze, these high and mighty philosophies all rest on a fundamental assumption that is faulty.

[00:09:03]They are grown from rotten soil. They are the ideas of sick minds.

[00:09:10]All the philosophers of the past says Nietze seem to be in agreement as to the value of life. It is not worth very much. From this mistaken idea born from a lack of strength to affirm life is created every system of western philosophy.

[00:09:28]In all ages, the wisest have always agreed in their judgment of life. It is no good. At all times and places, the same words have been on their lips.

[00:09:37]Words full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of hostility to life. What does that prove?

[00:09:46]What does it point to? Formerly, people would have said, "In any case, there must be some truth in this. In any case, there must be some sickness." Here, we make reply. These great sages of all periods should first be examined more closely. Is it possible that they were every one of them a little shaky on their legs, a feet rocky, decadent? Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth after the manner of a crow attracted by a slight smell of carryon?

[00:10:16]This insight of niches did not come cheap. It came at great cost to his personal health. He became sick himself in order to understand the sickness.

[00:10:26]Like we said at the start of the video, he sacrificed his own blood in order to go down into the underworld and attain the wisdom there. This is why a common criticism of Nietze in my opinion is without merit. People will say Nietze espoused this philosophy of strength and verility and then point out how in his personal life he was sick and weak. Of course, he was. NZ is the first to admit this and to explain why it had to be this way.

[00:10:55]In his autobiography, Nze spends an entire paragraph listing off all the health problems that plague him and he ends it with having admitted all this do I need to say that I am experienced in questions of decadence. I know them inside and out.

[00:11:12]The difference says NZ is that he fundamentally believes himself to be healthy to have a richness of life within him which ultimately allowed him to see both perspectives to look at the world as the sick and as the healthy.

[00:11:27]Like the mole at the start of Daybreak who couldn't let himself be consumed by the darkness because he had a hidden faith that kept him going through his hours of loneliness deep underground.

[00:11:38]Does it not seem as if some faith were leading him on? some solace recompensing him for his toil. Or that he himself desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own mourning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn. To be part of the darkness without letting the darkness consume you. That is ultimately the goal here. working alone deep underground towards some bigger goal, some kind of redemption to come back to the surface, having attained wisdom and experience paid for with blood.

[00:12:17]To bring it back to Odysius, it's noteworthy that Odysius himself never actually goes into the underworld.

[00:12:25]Instead, he stays at the entrance. He summons spirits of the dead to converse with him and then he leaves. We can read this as Odysius taking the arduous trip to the underworld but not being consumed by it. He doesn't allow himself to be trapped in there. Even the sacrifice he performs is just a customary libation and the sacrifice of a few sheep. Unlike Nze, Odysius doesn't spill his own blood. But what both men do have in common is that they make a descent of some sort and they get out before the darkness can claim them. They have to wake up to a new dawn. The metaphor of being claimed by darkness doesn't limit itself to the underworld either. In Aemo, Nze compares Christian morality to Cersei from the Odyssey, the witch who turned Odysius's men into swine after luring them onto her island with her beautiful singing. Morality. The Cersei of mankind has falsified everything psychological, root, and branch. It has moralized everything.

[00:13:29]Up to the present, Christian morality has been the Cersei of all thinkers.

[00:13:34]They stood at her service. What man before my time had descended into the underground caverns from out of which the poisonous fumes of this ideal of this slandering of the world burst forth? What man had even dared to suppose that they were underground caverns? was a single one of the philosophers who preceded me a psychologist at all and not the very reverse of a psychologist. That is to say, a superior swindler, an idealist.

[00:14:03]Nichch's big project consists in dismantling this Christian morality and robbing the witch Cersei of her power.

[00:14:10]Cersei's magic that turned men to swine and wild wolves into docsile puppies.

[00:14:16]Christian morality is the most malignant form of the will to lie. the actual X Cersei of humanity, that which has corrupted mankind.

[00:14:25]Odysius uses Cersei, but isn't used by her. With help from the gods, he wins her over, sleeps with her, and allows his men to feast on wine and meat for a year's time before he takes on the next step in his odyssey, the visit to Hades.

[00:14:43]Again, there is the theme that Odysius, crafty, wy Odysius, engages with the darkness, but isn't consumed by it. He enjoys the pleasures of Cersei's magical island, but isn't trapped by them. He gains wisdom from the underworld, but isn't taken in by it. [clears throat] In a similar way, Nietz works and toils in the abyss, but isn't consumed by it.

[00:15:09]In this way, Odysius serves as a great metaphor and example for Nietz, the prototypical man who has tamed the darkness, who can converse with it, who might even feel at home in it, but who isn't consumed by it. Someone who is equal to all circumstance as Nietz once described Odysius. When Nze speaks of the underground and uses this symbolic language, there is one element that is always implied. At some point, we must come back to the surface just as Odysius concludes his conversations with the dead and sets sail for Ithaca. After dismantling and dissecting the hidden assumptions of the great philosophical systems of the past, after the tearing down of ideals and religion, after spending time in the darkness, we must come into the light. After the twilight of the idols must come daybreak.

[00:16:03]Someday in a stronger age than this rotting and introspective presence must he and sooth come to us even the redeemer of great love and scorn, the creative spirit rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away from every transcendental plane and dimension. He whose solitude is misunderstood by the people as though it were a flight from reality. While actually it is only his diving, burrowing and penetrating into reality so that when he comes again to the light, he can at once bring about by these means the redemption of this reality. Its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid upon it.

[00:16:43]This man of the future who in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of great nausea will to nothingness and nihilism. This toxin of noon and of great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope.

[00:17:03]This antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness, he must one day come.

[00:17:13]Of course, this final passage hints at Nichzche's idea of the uber mench. This is a notoriously difficult concept in large part because it's like a subtle undercurrent in his entire philosophy.

[00:17:26]Subtle because he pays no explicit attention to this concept in any of his works except the spoke Taratustra which is of course arguably his most important work. But that makes the contradiction all the more puzzling. NZ always claimed that his entire philosophy can be found in Zaratustra and he explicitly wrote that many of his subsequent works were explanations for Zaratustra. But the Uber makes no literal return in any of Nichch's following works. Instead, all we get is hints. So with hints, we'll make do. What would the Uber mench be like or act like? To answer that question, we would need a whole entire new video. And trust me, it's coming.

[00:18:12]But for the purposes of this video about Odysius, we can take a look at this Greek hero for some inspiration.

[00:18:19]We've seen Nichch's admiration for Odysius from one perspective. So far, the fact that Odysius ventures into the underworld and comes back stronger and wiser from the voyage. The coming up is equally as important as the going down.

[00:18:36]And what do we find when we climb out of the underworld? Well, we find the world.

[00:18:41]Of course, we arrive at the surface. And Nietze wants us to stay there. In this world, on this surface out of such abysses, a man returns as though born again. He has new skin. He is more susceptible, more full of wickedness. He has a finer taste for joyfulness. He has a more sensitive tongue for all good things. His senses are more cheerful. He has acquired a second more dangerous innocence in gladness. He is more childlike, too, and a hundred times more cunning than ever he had been before.

[00:19:15]Mind the language here. Three things stand out. One, the emphasis on sensual experience on the body, a new skin, sensitive tongue, more cheerful senses.

[00:19:26]Two, the themes of joy, innocence, childhood.

[00:19:30]Three, cunning. And who is more cunning than clever Odysius himself? This is the other way in which Odysius is an exemplar for Nichz. He brings together many elements that Nze admired in the Greeks and that he also looks for in his search for the free spirits of the future. Those readers of his who will complete his philosophical project of the transvaluation of values.

[00:19:54]Odysius relentlessly sticks to the surface. That's the entire meta message of the Odyssey. He travels from island to island. It's episodic in nature.

[00:20:05]Odysius is not a deep character. The Odyssey is a horizontal story, whereas the Iliad is more vertical. Achilles has much more depth to his character than Odysius. Both Achilles and Odysius were admired by the Greeks, but for entirely different reasons. And it's easy to see why Achilles, the brave, relentless demigod warrior, was admired. It's harder to make the case for Odysius. In fact, the Romans famously didn't understand him at all. To the Romans, Odysius was a coward who got out of fights not through bravery or strength, but who resorted to dirty tricks and cheats.

[00:20:45]Yet, this is precisely what the Greeks admired. Odysius won. Odysius was the best, and to the Greeks, that's all that matters. He overcame obstacles and clawed his way back home to Ithaca and restored his kingdom and marriage. He affected change in the real world and that's the main point. He had to resort to lying and cheating to get his way.

[00:21:06]But so what? In fact, elsewhere in posthumously published notes, Nietz argues that the capacity for lying is a sign of a high rank in the order of beings. Rocks cannot lie. With plants, we can already see some tricks. Just think of the Venus fly trap. And in humans, the greatest exemplars of humanity are also the biggest deceivers.

[00:21:30]In the inorganic world, this simulation seems to be entirely absent. Their power opposes power quite roughly. Ruse begins in the organic world. Plants are already masters of it. The greatest men such as Caesar and Napoleon and also the higher races the Italians, the Greeks, Odysius.

[00:21:50]The most supreme cunning belongs to the very essence of the elevation of man.

[00:21:56]This ties into greater ideas that Nze has on the value of truth in general which is not something we have time to get into here. But to summarize, for Nietze, lying is often, if not always, preferable to truth. In fact, there are no bigger liars than artists. and no higher human calling than art. He wrote in the birth of tragedy that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. Art is the only thing that makes life worth living. And if art is basically one big lie, then why shouldn't lies be more valuable than truth? In other words, art is what makes life bearable. And no one understood this better than the ancient Greeks, who invented a whole slew of gods, each with their own distinct personality and attributes, a whole mythology and tragedy itself.

[00:22:50]Nze is not naive. He knows that the world is horrible and full of suffering.

[00:22:55]That nature is not beautiful but terrifying. The Greeks knew it too. The difference between moderns and ancient Greeks, according to Nze at least, is that the Greeks took in the whole completeness of life and affirmed it all in spite of the misery and suffering.

[00:23:12]The terrifying ravaging thunderstorms that destroy temples and crops, they turned into Zeus. The unrelenting unforgiving sea that swallows ships, they turned into Poseidon. They made art out of life, and in doing so, affirmed it. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence. To be able to live at all, he had to interpose the shining dream birth of the Olympian world between himself and them.

[00:23:40]Thus do the gods justify the life of man in that they themselves live it. The only satisfactory theodysy. Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as that which is desirable in itself. And the real grief of the homeriic men has reference to parting from it, especially to early parting.

[00:24:01]Here we also need to return to Odysius.

[00:24:05]One of the shadows that Odysius summons at the edge of Hades is that of the short-lived Achilles. He lived a life of glory, but as had been prophesied, was slain when young. Now he spends his days in the underworld, literally as a shadow of his former self. When Odysius speaks to him, he tells Achilles that he should not grieve his own death because he was viewed as a god while living. And now he gets to lord over the dead. Achilles shoots back with some mysterious lines.

[00:24:37]No winning words about death to me, shining Odysius. By God, I'd rather slave on earth for another man, some dirt poor tenant farmer whose scrapes to keep alive than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

[00:24:52]This passage has been the subject of much debate. It's easy to see why. It appears as if the glorious death of Achilles was not so glorious after all.

[00:25:01]It seems like he has regrets. If he could go back in time, would Achilles have made a different choice? a long, stable, perhaps boring life over a short, glorious one. Was this passage maybe written by a more mature Homer, who grew out of childish fantasies of dying gloriously on the battlefield? In other words, a critique of the heroic code and aspiration, or is it simply an emphasis on how much it sucks to be dead, that even the great Achilles wasn't prepared to endure the endless nights after such a short but glorious day. Or is Achilles finally humbled, an attempt to maybe humanize the Superman? Or is Odysius telling his audience, the peaceloving utopian fiats, what they want to hear, namely that a long, boring life is preferable to a blaze of glory. In this interpretation, Odysius shows his cunning self yet again. He's telling his pacifistic audience this lie about how chaos glory isn't worth it and that survival at all costs is more important than an honorable death, even if he himself doesn't believe in it. In doing so, he would flatter his audience, implicitly validating them on their comfortable lifestyle versus the warrior lifestyle.

[00:26:21]Whatever the interpretation might be, Nietz has one of his own. namely that the Greeks so affirmed life that even the miserable existence of a peasant or a slave is preferable to being dead. If once the lamentation is heard it will ring out again of the short-lived Achilles of the leafike change and vicissitude of the human race of the decay of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a continuation of life. A even as a day laborer. So vehemently does the will at the appalonian stage of development long for this existence. So completely at one does the homeriic man feel himself with it that the very lamentation becomes its song of praise.

[00:27:09]Far from Achilles showing regret over his life's decisions. It shows Achilles being such a big affirmer of life that he would even take a miserable existence alive over a glorious existence dead.

[00:27:23]The fact that it's so jarring makes it more profound. We would expect Achilles to say something like, "Oh well, being dead is horrible, but at least I lived a glorious life on my own terms, and I find some happiness in that." No.

[00:27:39]Achilles is in fact so in love with life that even the tiniest bit of it he would embrace a hundfold over being dead. The lamentation is the praise. It does not contradict the life of Achilles at all.

[00:27:52]Nor does it diminish his choice to die early and gloriously. It in fact illustrates just how strongly the Greeks clung to life. going out in a blaze of glory or living life as a peasant would have no essential difference from the perspective of someone who affirms life to the fullest. That's why life affirmation is such a difficult concept to come to terms with. It's easy to affirm life when everything is going well. When you're the Superman effortlessly slaying all your enemies, when you win the admiration of your comrades, when you die a heroic death and your deeds are remembered for eternity. Everyone wants that true life affirmation would also affirm the opposite kind of life. The life of an unremarkable peasant.

[00:28:41]Nichch's challenge, the infamous proposal of the demon who comes to you in dead of night and asks you if you're willing to live the life you live right now over and over again for all eternity, all the highs and all the lows in an unending cycle until the end of time is such a difficult burden precisely because life is full of lows.

[00:29:02]Nze implied only the ubern would be able to say yes to this demon and in fact not just accept his proposal but joyfully embrace it. The challenge of the demon is to say yes to every moment of life.

[00:29:17]Yes, I want this again and again and again forever. Every moment of life. Not just the happy ones, but also the deeply sad ones.

[00:29:28]It's easy to say, "I want this moment to last forever." when you're holding your newborn son in your arms. But can you say the same on the day you hear your son has died? That's the true test of the uber mench. A good example of this idea and the mindset of Achilles is this famous quote from Julius Caesar. It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

[00:29:57]Going out in a blaze of glory, that's easy. enduring pain and suffering for a long time, even forever. Can anyone really do that? Wouldn't you have to become something more than human to be able to say yes to this? To endure pain and suffering with patience? In fact, to even joyfully embrace it is the true test of life affirmation. It means saying yes to the totality of existence.

[00:30:27]In this niche argues the Greeks came closer than anyone else and perhaps closer than any human will ever get.

[00:30:35]This is where the uberch comes into play yet again. As we've said, Nietze doesn't actually say all that much about what the Uber is or what he will do. But this attitude of life affirmation is the biggest clue we have. The creation of values is another. I don't want to make this video overly long, so we'll leave that other part of the equation for another video. So, please subscribe if you don't want to miss our future deep dives into Nietze and the Greeks and the Uber men.

[00:31:07]But there is one more thing. We've talked about how Odysius relentlessly stays at the surface of things.

[00:31:15]Symbolically, he didn't even go into the underworld. He literally stayed at the surface instead of going in deep. We can tie this into Nichzche's broader philosophical project because a part of life affirmation involves affirming this life, this existence and most importantly this world. In other words, we don't cope by seeking refuge in another world, a beyond world. The Superman of the future, this Uber will, just like Odysius, stick to this world for his joy and happiness. In fact, he will destroy the very idea of a beyond world. The Greeks, at least the pre-platonic, pre-socratic Greeks, took a different route than us moderns. When faced with the terrible depths of despair and suffering on offer in the world, they took no refuge into an imaginary beyond world. No promise of heaven to make the injustice of this world tolerable. When faced with such a dreadful existence as this one, they didn't cope and hide, but they doubled down on their embrace of it. In this respect, the Greeks were healthier than we are. They had the strength to do this. One task of the Uber mench will be to have that same strength. Nze himself took the first steps in this direction by aiming his cannon at the great mistake of Western history, Christianity.

[00:32:43]an adversary the Greeks didn't have to wrestle with, and in order to do so, as he dove down deep below, he climbed up high. No one hither two has felt Christian morality beneath him. To that end, there were needed a height, a remoteness of vision, and an abysmal psychological death not believed to be possible hitherto. This needed height, this remoteness of vision means we have to ultimately leave even the surface behind. and soar on high. Here we get Nichch's vision of the future and the final puzzle piece of Nichzche's metaphors of verticality from underground to surface to lonely heights and mountain air. He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscience that it is the air of the heights that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near. The loneliness is terrible. But how serenely everything lies in the sunshine, how freely one can breathe, how much one feels lies beneath one.

[00:33:47]Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain peaks, the seeking out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which hitherto morality has set its ban. And to that end, to reach such sublime heights, we must even leave Odysius behind. As Nze says, "Ah, my friends, we must surpass even the Greeks."

[00:34:17]Nichch's invocation of Odysius is not a mere metaphor made for style points. It reveals something about his philosophy, specifically the tension of going down deep versus staying bravely at the surface. Neither of those two things stand on their own legs. They work in tandem. We go deep underground so that we are better equipped to eventually live on the surface. Darkness makes the light shine brighter. Odysius, the wy survivor, consorts with the dead, but remains alive himself. He enjoys the pleasures of Cersei without becoming a swine like his men. He takes without being taken in turn. He entertains ideas without being obsessed with them.

[00:35:01]Embraces pleasure but doesn't fall to addiction. We see all of this reflected in Nichzche's philosophy. The interplay between the underground and the surface.

[00:35:10]The period of privation followed by a period of joy. The strength of mind to not cling to ideas but to freely switch between them instead. Nietze wants us to go underground but not to stay there to dig deep within oneself and uncover the philosophical prejudices, moral illusions, psychological sicknesses that plague us. We rid ourselves of them and we come back to the surface stronger.

[00:35:36]That is the true meaning of NZ's famous quote, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Don't let the darkness take you. Emerge from it stronger.

[00:35:47]One emerges from such long dangerous exercises in self-mastery as another being with several additional notes of interrogation, and above all with the will to question more than ever, more profoundly, more strictly, more sternly, more wickedly, more quietly than has ever been questioned hitherto.

[00:36:06]We must go deep in the underground, embrace the chaos we find there, so that we may dance all the more joyfully on the surface upon our return. One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. The apparent paradox of these metaphors that we've talked about here finds its solution precisely in that movement and the necessity for those movements. To be stuck in the underground is decadent. To be at the surface without having seen the depths is naive. Only when we do both we get the full picture. Only then do we see the fullness of life. to be superficial from profoundity. That is the Nietian challenge. The Greeks succeeded in this challenge by justifying life as an aesthetic experience. The raw terrifying forces of nature, the bellowing of lightning, the ruthless wild of the sea, they turned into gods in their own image, the whole pantheon of Olympus. In creating the gods, they created their own values. And in creating their values, they found the strength to affirm life in all its horribleness. and they joyfully embraced it. Anyway, we as moderns have not created a new pantheon of gods. In fact, we only created one and then we killed him. Our challenge is tougher than what the Greeks faced. But the victory will therefore be all the more glorious.

[00:37:31]God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood off us?

[00:37:47]What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement?

[00:37:51]What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? The Greeks created their gods. In the modern day, that seems like an impossibility.

[00:38:09]2,000 years have come and gone, and not a single new god. Only one avenue remains, to become gods ourselves, to work towards the arrival of a new creator of values. Someone who can once again affirm life in all its totality without feeling the need to escape into a beyond world. Someone who has the strength and the will to embrace existence and create new values. The Uber Mench. The Uber Mench is the one who will converge the two extremes of death and altitude. He will have dug deeper and flown higher than anyone before. The danger of the underground is to get stuck there. The danger of the surface is to enjoy its pleasures without the wisdom of the depths, without thinking. The challenge is to affirm the totality, the high and the low. To stand bravely on the edge, to look upon existence, all the terrible and all the great, and with the weight of the wisdom of the dark upon you, dance in the light. Now I am light, now do I fly, now do I see myself under myself. Now there dances a god in me.

[00:39:16]Thus spoke Zaratustra.

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[00:39:38]In fact, in the coming days, I'll upload the first part of a new multi-part video series for early access on Patreon concerning Nichzche's ideas of autod domestication or how mankind became weak. So, join us on Patreon if you want to have early access and see the video when it's available. Of course, your likes, subscribes, and comments are greatly appreciated as well. If you enjoyed this video, we have an hour-ong deep dive into Nichze's most famous apherism about gazing into the abyss that touches on similar topics as this one. And we also have a video on the ancient Greeks and how their morality was so different and alien to ours. You see our lovely patreons on screen right now. I humbly thank them for their support and I invite you to join them as well. And with that said, thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next one.