Nietzsche’s Lesson on Suffering

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Anyways, long story short, uh Nietzsche will not tell you how to arm yourself to survive. Nietzsche will tell you uh to to love the fact that you will die.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> Beyond Good and Evil is a cardinal work, a prodrome to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century.

[00:00:23]What?

[00:00:25]Brilliant, romantic.

[00:00:28]That's romantic.

[00:00:30]Insightful, deep, psyche-shattering. It exuberates fantasticisms.

[00:00:38]Dancing bit of literary genius.

[00:00:43]That's going to be a new alert. Dancing bit of literary genius. He's had a remarkable impact on [music] thought over the last 140 years.

[00:00:53]It's reasonable to say that he philosophizes with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed to read It's It's actually supposed to be like a tuning hammer. It's not It's not a hammer as in you're smashing stuff.

[00:01:03]It's a tuning hammer.

[00:01:05]It's a tuning hammer.

[00:01:08]Jesus Christ.

[00:01:09]>> Reading Nietzsche is daunting psychologically. He's like a motivational speaker. He's practical >> He's like a motivational speaker. than other philosophers tell them [music] are. Nietzschean philosophy is a call to arms. To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against the sea of troubles. It's to arm yourself okay.

[00:01:29]And since you will encounter [music] a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed. And this is one way to do it.

[00:01:36]Nietzsche Nietzsche is going to tell you how to be prepared to to survive hardship, I guess. Okay.

[00:01:45]That's all [ __ ] So, let's talk about what Nietzsche's actually about very quickly before we get into this. Um Nietzsche, if there is one common theme throughout all of his work, and you'll see it even in the titles sometimes. Beyond good and evil, right?

[00:02:00]Human, all too human.

[00:02:05]If there's one Get the freak off my wire cloth. If there's one common three theme in all of Nietzsche, it's uh the integrity and survival of your individuality and your form and what is familiar to you is not only irrelevant. Uh it is it is a hindrance to progress. It is a hindrance to growth into the emergence of the new and its greatness rests in not preserving itself, but in containing and compressing and manipulating the forces of the world in such a way that it allows for an explosion of stuff and for newness to emerge from that. And so Nietzsche, for example, uh has a take on metaphysics.

[00:02:50]And his take on metaphysics is this.

[00:02:52]Uh human beings can't [ __ ] do it.

[00:02:55]Why?

[00:02:56]Welp, because the way in which we perceive the world, ala Spinoza, Kant, etc., is we identify things in such a way as we render the world intelligible and useful to us. And this right down to the level of thinghood itself. We identify objects and so on and so forth, despite the fact that from the point of view of the world, there is no actual distinction between objects. The world is continuous.

[00:03:19]Um we identify objects because we essentially project little images of our own false sense of personhood and agency onto the stuff of the world in order to make it intelligible to us. And so right down to the notion of atomic theory where the idea is, contrary to how we talk about atoms today, um that there's a little pellet of reality that is responsible that is causally responsible for making up the forms and the dynamics of the stuff of the world and so on and so forth.

[00:03:46]Um actually, what we're doing is we're projecting our notion of of and soldness and selfhood and so on and so forth um into stuff and giving it causal power in the exact same way that a soul or a mind is supposed to to be able to do to do, right? To be. We imagine that the soul as opposed to the rest of your body, your sort of your like the whole of your corpus or whatever, um contains, for example, freedom, the ability to spontaneously choose and do and so on and so forth. Um and we project that onto objects, despite the fact that we know that every single moment is the product of a previous moment and therefore there aren't strictly speaking instances in the world or or like like movements, there's simply one big movement which we carve up in the virtual reality of our heads into into different parts.

[00:04:34]Uh we still have this notion that there is causality, that one object pushes another one. And this is not the case.

[00:04:40]Right? And fundamentally uh Nietzsche, he's sort of like the anti-Bergson. Bergson is the big philosopher of memory.

[00:04:48]Nietzsche's the big philosopher of forgetting.

[00:04:50]Um the the the greatness of an organism or of anything is not just in what it produces, it's in it stepping aside to make way for something else.

[00:05:01]Right?

[00:05:03]And so it's not enough that uh like individual things become great, they have to expel their power to produce something new in the world and then they have to make way for it.

[00:05:15]Um and it's one of the coolest things about uh like FromSoftware games, for example, and and why they are so incredibly Nietzschean that they they crowd their worlds with like the gravestones of previous generations.

[00:05:24]Anyways, long story short, uh Nietzsche will not tell you how to arm yourself to survive.

[00:05:29]Nietzsche will tell you uh to love the fact that you will die in a in a non-nihilistic, depressing way. Motivational speaker, no. Very effective, powerful speaker, yes.

[00:05:40]Motivational, god, no. No, Nietzsche Nietzsche doesn't want to teach you how to get better if you're weak.

[00:05:46]Uh Nietzsche doesn't want to to teach you how to become the strong Ubermensch.

[00:05:51]You can't become the strong Ubermensch.

[00:05:52]Your greatness is that you may uh, in the course of your life by striving really really hard and or by getting really really sick and or by being really really evil or whatever you like. The more intense the better, the greater the the expulsion at the end.

[00:06:06]Um, you may contribute to something new with that expulsion of energy. Not you get to become the new thing yourself cuz what's so great about that? You already know what you are. You're not new, right? Nietzsche's in love with his sickness.

[00:06:19]He says this. He's grateful for being sick. He's grateful for his illness.

[00:06:21]Why? Cuz it created the unique circumstances, the the strange tensions and and sufferings and so on and so forth.

[00:06:29]And resentments even. Even though Nietzsche looks with an evil eye on ressentiment, ressentiment is heavily productive. You wouldn't have philosophy or science without ressentiment, right?

[00:06:38]So, that's Nietzsche. Um, I have a suspicion that everything Peterson is going to talk about here is going to be completely wrong in a radical way primarily because I think he's going to talk about Nietzsche as if Nietzsche is warning us of the nihilism that comes from leftism or some such or the nihilism that comes from I well, warning us from nihilism fundamentally cuz Nietzsche's not warning us of nihilism. Nietzsche describes nihilism. Um, he is in a certain key nihilistic himself except also not and it's tricky.

[00:07:08]So, Nietzsche doesn't believe that there is a higher order or whatever that gives meaning to things. But, he also believes that nihilism is the product of the doubling of the natural world into a world that is that is physical and that has a higher order above it.

[00:07:22]Why? Well, why do we why do we invent this higher world? Well, he argues that we invent this higher order because we are in some sense defeated on this one. Somebody stronger comes by, steals our stuff, and enslaves us and we want to get revenge but we can't because we're too weak. So, we we think that there's a way we imagine a way in which that victory is illegitimate. There's some higher measure that makes that action not actually count towards the greatness of the person who conquered you, right? And so now all of a sudden we're talking about uh like like another plane on which to conquer back. On the flip side, with language, we also double things as well.

[00:08:01]So we'll talk about how the lightning flashes, right? Perfectly reasonable statement. What was that flash? It was the lightning. Tells you everything.

[00:08:07]Here's the thing though, the lightning doesn't flash. The lightning, strictly speaking, is a flash. The thing that gives rise to the flashes is is electrical activity that's caused by something else, but the lightning is the flash. So when we see the lightning flash, we're saying the flash flashed.

[00:08:21]Practically, it makes sense because you are explaining that the flash came from the thing we call lightning and not from some other source cuz other things flash in this world. However, you are left with the impression of an object, lightning, that emits a flash.

[00:08:36]But it is the emission of the flash. And so our tendency is to double things. Our tendency is to attribute causality and identity and ensouledness to objects by dint of our language. Not in the way that um and we'll talk about this on the uh we talked about this last patron stream, but we'll talk about this a little bit on the patron stream tonight.

[00:08:53]Not in the way that, for example, Descola argues that animism, for example, is some sort of like universal intuition. Like the ensouledness of of objects is a univer or the uh the division between the soul and the body is sort of a universal intuition of all peoples.

[00:09:10]But in the sense that the way our language names things is it creates uh a shadow of the thing in the name itself. We talk about the name of the thing, the identity of the thing, and then the object. And so by dint of that, we we double things there, too. And so for Nietzsche, who is a nihilist in the sense that he doesn't he doesn't believe there is a {quote} meaning above things, the nihilism that he accuses, for example, Christianity of leading us to or Platonism leading us to because Christianity is Platonism for the people, remember, is that you invest all of your cares, all the stuff in this world that you love and cherish and fear, etc., etc., into this other doubled false world. And then when you are disabused of the existence of that because it does not hold up the philosophical scrutiny, and it's just not really believable under high pressure for a lot of people, you lose all that care as well with it.

[00:09:57]And so now you've lost that double world, that metaphysical plane of existence, that extra like higher moral order, whatever, and it's taken away all of your investments in the world with it because you didn't care about stuff in the world or people in the world. You cared about your quote-unquote immortal soul. And now that that's gone, well, I guess everything's permitted now. Who cares, right? Now you're now you're in Dostoevsky territory. But like if your investments were in the world to begin with, which is dangerous because stuff here blows up and disintegrates and betrays you and so on and so forth.

[00:10:31]So it's scary and sometimes you lose, but if your investments were down here, they wouldn't be vulnerable to sailing away with some magical nether world that you've you've decided doesn't exist anymore.

[00:10:41]And so he's going to butcher this because he's going to say that Nietzsche is giving you advice for how to survive.

[00:10:45]No, Nietzsche is not giving you advice for how to survive. Nietzsche is talking about how it's good that we pass away to make room for something new and how the the mutilations and the damages of history and experience and so on and so forth, uh we should actually love those because they give rise to stuff at the opposite pole, so to speak. That's amor amor fati, right? Love of fate. If there is anything in this world that you you love or appreciate, you love all the horrible things in the world that made that possible or that are a part of that world ensemble that includes that. And there's problems with this, by the way.

[00:11:17]One of the things, for example, that's going to come up a little bit, um and once again, credit to Envy for putting me on the LaTour train, um is the idea that the world itself is unitary and self-contained. The idea that the world itself is like uh of limited possibility and so on. Is it fatigue or farty? Uh can be both depending on your diet. But that's why Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. That's why Nietzsche doesn't say things are evil or good. He says he gives an evil light to it. There are things he dislikes. And he scowls upon them, but he strives to say yes to them nonetheless. Yeah, amor fati. You only appreciate life because you know there will be an end. No, that is not that is not what Nietzsche's talking about. You don't appreciate life because you know there will be an end. You appreciate the bad things in life and you in fact say yes to the bad things in life and accept them because the world is one thing.

[00:11:59]And what happens over here is conditioned by what happens over there and vice versa. So if you love something over here, you love the thing over here that came with it. Even if you don't see it right now and vice versa.

[00:12:11]Scary concept when you consider stuff that's going on.

[00:12:15]Right?

[00:12:16]Or when you expand it to not, for example, simply include humans. Like right now at this moment there are people being massacred by allies of your country and by your country as a matter of fact. Maybe keep your amor fati to yourself a little bit sometimes. It's it's it's it's an upsetting uh line of thought in a lot of ways. There's a great book uh QC is going over right now I believe unless I finished um called Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle by Pierre Klossowski. Give it a look.

[00:12:42]Um it's still in print. You can still buy it.

[00:12:45]Anyhow.

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