In Part VII of Beyond Good & Evil, we get to learn about why “spirit” resembles a “stomach” and try to make sense of Nietzsche’s misogynistic remarks at the end of the chapter.

In this chapter Nietzsche continues his dissection of morality by turning to one of the major topics in the history of moral philosophy — virtue. The first handful of sections begin with an exploration of the relationship between virtue and “order of rank”. This all comes to a head in sections 230 which concerns the “fundamental will of the spirit”, before coming to a clunky conclusion in sections 232-239 which contain Nietzsche notorious remarks about “woman”.

We have been engaged in an extended exploration of the “free spirits” and “philosophers of the future” throughout BGE, and the title of this section tells us that Nietzsche wants to determine what sorts of virtues such individuals will posses.

What are virtues?

Aristotle is the most influential classical source for the ethics of virtue. Aristotle ar…

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Most of us assume “death” means one thing: the biological end of life, the moment the heart stops and experience goes dark. In this conversation, Heidegger scholar Iain Thomson (University of New Mexico) walks us through one of the most counterintuitive claims in twentieth-century philosophy—that this everyday notion of death is not what Heidegger is mainly talking about, and that grasping the difference unlocks the whole architecture of Being and Time.

Three kinds of “ending.” Thomson untangles a distinction that trips up most first-time readers. Perishing is the cessation of a biological organism—”a pear tree can perish,” as Thomson puts it, and there’s nothing it’s like to undergo it. Demise is how we humans experience our own physiological shutting-down—the mortal terror of a heart attack, felt from the inside. And then there’s death in Heidegger’s special sense, which is neither of these.

The problem death solves. Heidegger wants a way to grasp the whole of human existence—what he calls Dasein—all at once. The obvious candidate is to imagine your own demise, your final moment. But here he runs into the old Epicurean paradox: where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. I can never actually experience my own demise, so it can’t give me a complete picture of my life. As Thomson summarizes it, “I can’t live through my ceasing to live.”

Death as total breakdown. Heidegger’s solution is strange and powerful. Death, for him, is the moment when the life-projects that organize your world—teacher, parent, artist, friend—collapse and you can no longer project yourself into them. Thomson offers a vivid image: a pet owner whose animal has died still finds themselves reaching for a leash, projecting into an absent project. Death is that experience scaled up to everything: “projectless projecting,” a self left standing when all its roles fall away like a house of cards.

You survive it. This is why Heidegger can say—astonishingly—that you survive your own death. In fact, you have to, in order to describe it. When your world breaks down, what’s left is a kind of bare self that doesn’t go down with the shipwreck. Thomson is careful to flag the echo of Descartes here, but with a crucial difference: rather than dissolving the world into doubt, this breakdown brings you “face to face with your world as world”—you see, for the first time, the implicit structure you normally just live through, the way a cyclist only notices the bike when the chain snaps.

Why it matters: rebirth, and time itself. Far from being morbid, this confrontation is the gateway to authenticity—what Heidegger calls anticipatory resoluteness. It’s a secularized phenomenology of conversion: you die to the borrowed, default answer about who to be (Heidegger’s “the They”), and reopen yourself to a way of life you can genuinely own. And it’s only in this breakdown, Thomson argues, that we encounter originary temporality—the deep structure in which the future comes toward us, meets who we’ve already been, and produces the living present.

The discussion closes by pushing on the edges: Where does the self come from in the first place (Heidegger’s surprising notion of “birth” as historical, not biological)? How do other people fit a picture that can look so individualistic? And what would Heidegger have made of ego-death and mystical experience—the dissolution not just of your roles but of selfhood altogether—where Buddhism and the psychedelic tradition may go a step further than he was willing to?

Watch the full conversation above for Thomson’s take on all three.

If you enjoyed this type of content, or had any questions or reflections, let me know by leaving a comment below.

Instead of optimizing for productivity and consumption, it will optimize for transcendence.

I call this “Spiritual Economics”.

Spiritual Economics is the telos, or ultimate goal, of all economic systems and the future of entrepreneurship (whether anyone realizes it yet).

That was the biggest takeaway I had after spending past three days at the Future/Proof Creator Summit, an event organized by which brought together 150+ coaches, creators, and entrepreneurs.

When I first decided to attend the summit, I expected to learn about the technical aspects of running a business in the fast-changing creator economy.

What I ended up learning deeply surprised me.

I came to the realization that entrepreneurship is a spiritual journey in which you must transcend the limitations of your former self in order to help others do the same.

While I entered the event mostly thinking about how to improve myself as a creator, I left thinking about how creators could work together to improve the world and move humanity closer towards the goal of Spiritual Economics — a world in which economic systems are intentionally designed for optimizing transcendence and human flourishing rather than scarcity and exploitation.

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I wondered to myself, “What would the world look like if millions of individuals progressed through the spiritual journey of entrepreneurship in order to help others do the same?”, “What if the economic system was actually designed and optimized for spiritual entrepreneurs?”, “What if instead of measuring the production and distribution of material goods, we measured the production and distribution immaterial goods such as meaning, purpose, and higher states of consciousness?”.

The current reality is that most entrepreneurs decide to start their own businesses in order to escape the oppressive conditions of the global economic order, which is optimized for boredom, wage-slavery, consumption, and mass exploitation.

That’s how I got here.

Even though many are able to escape with a bit of luck and persistence, the vast majority are not. They are left to live out their lives in the rotting economic structure designed to exponentially reward the winners and take as much as possible from everyone else.

I hate it.

But things don’t have to be this way forever.

Modern technology has made it possible for small creators to have an outsized impact.

It is now possible to imagine a future economic order consisting of millions of micro-businesses that make the world better in some small way— an economy in which the success of spectacular individuals does not lead to the oppression of others, but to their self-actualization; an economic structure that is not founded on the impossible logic of infinite material growth and economic output, but infinite transcendence, creativity, and self-expression.

You are probably thinking “That sounds nice, but is never going to happen”.

To be honest, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon. And who knows, it might never happen at all.

But that’s not the point.

If we are to avoid perpetuating the same mistakes of the existing economic order, we need to have a healthy ideal to actually strive for (whether it is going to happen or not). So even if you think Spiritual Economics is impossible, it can still serve as a regulative ideal— a standard that guides our economic activity in a healthy way.

I think it’s pretty obvious that we are desperately need such an ideal in the world today.

The digital economy is already moving towards what Yanis Varoufakis calls “Techno-Feudalism”.

Techno-Feudalism appears when digital platforms become privately owned fiefdoms that turn us into unpaid serfs who build their wealth for free through the harvesting of human attention, nervous systems, and emotion.

No one knows how far humanity will go down this path (or for how long).

So if we want to avoid entering a Digital Dark Age, then we need an alternative vision for the future of economics.

That is what Spiritual Economics aims to provide.

At this point, it may be helpful to say something about what I will mean by “spirituality” in this article. I am using “spirituality” in the broadest sense of the term. Personally, I like Christina Puchalski’s definition:

“the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred”.

On the individual level, Spiritual Economics is the spiritual pursuit of business and entrepreneurship.

The ultimate aim of Spiritual Economics is not profit, wealth, and extraction, but promoting and protecting abundance, attention, meaning, purpose, self-actualization, creativity, and the human spirit.

On the macro-economic level, Spiritual Economics consists in intentionally designing economic systems, laws, and education to achieve the same ends on a mass-scale. To use the generative powers of economic activity, commerce, and creativity to promote what’s best in humanity, rather than destroy it.

Personally, I believe that Spiritual Economics is inevitable.

On a long enough time scale, human beings will find a way to design for transcendence and live their lives on a higher plane of consciousness. We just have a hard time imagining it because we have spent 99.9% of our existence as a species in conditions of scarcity, survival, and competition.

For now, we must simply do the best we can as individuals and groups to realize the ideals of Spiritual Economics in a broken world.

My hope is that by writing this article I can give words to something which many people out there have felt deeply but have struggled to articulate— that there must be some deeper purpose to entrepreneurship, making money, and economic activity. That is isn’t all about making money to satisfy our selfish desires or win status games.

My hope is that this new way of thinking about money, business, and entrepreneurship, can shift the conversation around these topics in a positive direction that inspires more creative people to use business for good rather than resist it out of fear that it is inherently unethical.

The Future/Proof Creator Summit helped me see what’s possible when entrepreneurship is pursued as a spiritual activity on a small scale.

It’s now time to work towards changing the very structure of the system we have all been trying to escape from.

The End Of Traditional Economics

Before I explain Spiritual Economics, it will be helpful to contrast it with what I call “Traditional Economics” — that chimerical beast which has caused mass human suffering, exploitation, and environmental destruction, as well as unfathomable amounts of material wealth, prosperity, and technological innovation.

For those who are completely new to this subject, economics is the study of how individuals, businesses, and governments allocate scarce resources to satisfy unlimited subjective desires. An economy is the system through which the production, distribution, trade, and consumption of goods and services takes place.

“Traditional Economics”, as I will call it throughout this article, is the belief that ideal human economic behavior is a rational response to the scarcity of material resources and is aimed at maximizing the satisfaction of infinite personal preferences and desires within these constraints.

The founding axiom of Traditional Economics is scarcity — the idea that material resources are scarce in relation to human desires and interests.

Systems built on this way of thinking must ultimately come to an end.

The reason is that the underlying logic is inherently flawed.

In Traditional Economics, the axiom of scarcity is combined with the aim of unlimited growth, efficiency, and productivity. The idea is that while material resources are scarce, human wants and desires are infinite.

But the material world is a finite system within which economics is realized.

Exponential growth in a finite system must ultimately come to an end.

A finite world cannot sustain an infinite sequence of growth.

This leads to a fundamental problem at the heart of Traditional Economics:

The imperative of exponential growth in a finite system is an impossible command to fulfill and it will ultimately undermine itself.

In sum, the entire global economic system is founded upon an economic philosophy that is inherently unstable.

What will happen when Traditional Economics reaches it’s breaking point? When the supply chain collapses? When the material resources begin to run out?

Some heterodox economists have argued that the solution is to adopt degrowth as an economic aim. Degrowth is the planned and reduction of production and consumption as a solution to the growing social-ecological crises facing humanity.

Although I find degrowth interesting, I want to suggest another solution, which can be called decoupling.

One day it may be possible for human beings to decouple economics from its material limitations by turning towards growing the immaterial rather than the material.

The immaterial aims of self-actualization, transcendence, and spirituality make it possible to fill the black hole at the center of Traditional Economics — what I will call a nihilistic theory of value — and to avoid the limits of finite systems.

The Nihilistic Theory Of Value

You may have thought that the axiom of scarcity was the main problem with Traditional Economics.

But I actually think it is the theory of value at the heart of Traditional Economics.

According to Traditional Economics, value is entirely subjective and determined by the price that people are willing to pay for the acquisition of some good or service. A thing is worth whatever it’s worth to someone based on what they are willing to pay for it and how well they believe it will satisfy their wants and preferences.

In other words, there is no intrinsic value in anything.

This is what I call a nihilistic theory of value.

If value works in this way, then great works of art can be just as valuable as a pile of scrap metal, depending on the situation. An individual’s state of consciousness when they achieve or progress towards enlightenment can be just as valuable as the state of pleasure felt when eating fast food.

In other words, everything that ultimately makes life worth living is stripped of its sacred aspect from the outset, and transformed into a vessel awaiting to be measured on the basis of subjective desire.

This nihilistic theory of value does get one thing right — that the deepest goods in life are immaterial, that meaning, wisdom, transcendence are forms of value.

The problem is that just because value is immaterial does not mean it is simply determined by subjective attitudes or “wants”.

It can be both immaterial and objective.

When Siddartha Gautama attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, his state of consciousness was deeply valuable, but not because he got what he wanted at a good price.

Traditional economics has no theory of immaterial value production, because it measures everything through market prices. Markets are the central means for coordinating decisions and achieving efficiency in the creation and exchange of value. But they are not tracking the real value of anything.

Decoupling, taken to its logical extreme, is spiritual economics — growth in goods that don’t consume the finite substrate at all, because they’re made of meaning, attention, wisdom, and transcendent states. Harnessing the magical powers of economics to play an infinite game.

At this point someone might argue that transcendent states and immaterial goods still depend on finite material constraints. A yogi has to eat, build a shelter, and drink water to survive. Human beings need to reproduce and rear children. We may even need to continue researching new technologies to avoid a future extinction from a natural disaster by allowing us to leave Earth.

I am not denying the existence or reality of finite material constraints on life.

I am arguing that we can adopt an axiom of abundance rather than scarcity. A theory of value grounded in the positive objective value of immaterial states of being, rather than the measure of arbitrary subjective preferences. That we can achieve unbounded growth in the immaterial realm without incurring unsustainable material costs.

There are many ascetics who achieve incredible states of being with very little material expenditure at all.

We can allocate a portion of the public education budget to teaching an entire generation how to meditate and measure the return on investment in terms of wellness outcomes, rather than job prospects.

In 1968 at the University of Kansas, Robert F. Kennedy gave the most eloquent indictment of GDP, the darling of Traditional Economics, ever spoken by a public figure:

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction — purpose and dignity— that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things … Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities … Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile …

Kennedy was articulating the vision of Spiritual Economics.

We must take seriously the possibility that economic growth can become genuinely immaterial.

What is Spiritual Economics?

Ask yourself the following question:

What if instead of measuring GDP, we measured SDP (Spiritual Domestic Product) or TDP (Transcendence Domestic Product)?

As I understand it, Spiritual Economics is the study and design of how immaterial goods — meaning, wisdom, attention, beauty, trust, love, and transcendence — are to be produced, exchanged, accumulated, and distributed in order to promote human flourishing and transcendence.

A spiritual economic system would optimize for immaterial wealth and abundance.

It treats these not as the byproducts of economic life but as its ultimate purpose.

It’s telos.

The point of economics was always the cultivation of human beings, and we’ve been confused about this only because, for most of history, survival was so precarious that it looked like the goal.

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Traditional economics is often aimed at meeting basic needs and then creating false desires and manufactured wants for the sole purpose of profit.

By contrast, spiritual economics grounds economic activity in our deepest human desires and clarifies them rather than distorts them.

Spiritual Economics can be pursued both on an individual and social level.

On the individual level, Spiritual Economics is intentionally adopting a spirit-first approach to one’s economic activity as an individual, business-owner, and entrepreneur.

Some example of this include , , and .

Michael Oliver’s company, The Flying Sage, is “on a mission to democratize transcendence” through integration circles and seminars.

The company began as a clothing brand and eventually transitioned toward community building and membership-based live events.

His company has the following vision:

“A thriving healing ecosystem focussed around breathwork, movement and sound. We are co-creating a new paradigm of wellness that leans into the wisdom gleaned from expanded states — a world where novel and traditional ways of knowing are integrated together through safe, intentional and community-led healing”

Another (more traditional) example is , who created his company Real Growth around the idea of empowering coaches and entrepreneurs to grow with purpose rather than transactions.

Jay helps people build coaching businesses rooted in truth, self-expression, and transformation rather than hustle, hype, or performative metrics. His work is aimed at starting a global movement of purpose-led coaches built around growing “from the inside out.”

In a recent post titled “Business is empty,” Jay wrote the following:

Business is empty in itself.

Empty as in, it is a vessel…

Or better put, a vehicle.

It is not an end in itself, but a vehicle to take the founder, the team, and clients… to a new destination.

The business therefore needs to decide what it is going to be a vehicle for…

…I discovered that THE ONLY sustainable thing to use my business as a vehicle for…

Is a vehicle for your own becoming.

I feel as though it is the only honest way to approach the endless & eternal game of entrepreneurship.

Because when there is no final end place to reach… becoming is all we have….

When we use our business as a vehicle for our own becoming….

…Entrepreneurship is the great vehicle for your own becoming

And when you see it as such…

You’ll have a much better relationship to your biz, to yourself, to your clients and to life itself.

Entrepreneurship is not only a great vehicle for your own becoming, but can also lead to others self-actualizing and initiate a virtuous cycle of growth.

A perfect example of this is , who became famous on social media for the idea of starting a one-person business.

Most of Dan’s work on this topic has been aimed at helping people escape what’s been called “wage slavery” — a life in which “work is seen as necessary suffering”, “exchanging time is the only way to make money”, and “retirement is the only escape, and you just hope the next 40 years are tolerable”.

I have been following Dan’s content for the past few years and watched him help countless people start their own successful one-person businesses in order to escape wage slavery.

What’s interesting about Dan’s development is that he went from running his own one-person business to becoming a meta-creator — a creator of creators.

The Future/Proof Creator Summit only happened because Dan helped thousands of individuals get started on their own creator journey, eventually staring a digital movement in which Dan became the unintentional leader.

In fact, the only reason I started writing on Substack was because I took one of Dan’s courses — The Writer’s Bootcamp.

This process has led Dan to evolving his business into something very unique — he has now created a software tool called Eden that is specifically designed to help creators grow their audiences more effectively.

Dan’s entrepreneurial journey initiated a virtuous cycle of growth within a small corner of the internet.

This is what Spiritual Economics can look like on a small-scale.

Thousands of people are now creating meaning-driven businesses that help others heal their minds, bodies, and various other problems that would have likely gone unaddressed.

While I was sitting at the Future/Proof Creator Summit, surrounded by people approaching entrepreneurship in these ways, I wondered to myself “what would happen if this was what economics looked like on a mass-scale?”

This leads into the second way of thinking about Spiritual Economics — as a macro-economic theory for designing economic systems.

Spiritual Economics is as a way of intentionally designing economic systems, laws, policies, and practices with the explicit aim of optimizing for and promoting human flourishing, actualization, transcendence and spiritual states of consciousness.

Traditional Economics is optimized for keeping people stuck at the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Everything is aimed at the bottom of the brain stem. It is meant to keep us upset, unsatisfied, angry, and divided so that we continue to buy things we don’t need.

But Spiritual Economics begins from Self-Actualization and Transcendence and reverse engineers society to optimize for promoting these states of personal development.

Ask any successful entrepreneur about the growth that was required to build their business and many of them will talk about how pursuing entrepreneurship was one of the best ways for them to self-actualize as a person.

Now ask yourself this:

What if that same developmental structure was mirrored in the economic system?

This way of thinking about the isomorphic relationship between the individual and society is inspired by one of Plato’s greatest ideas — the City-Soul Analogy.

In The Republic, Plato argued that the ideal city should be modeled on the ideal structure of the human soul.

In his view, the ideal human soul was one in which Reason or Rationality ruled over the lower human desires in order to promote virtuous states of character, such as Self-Control, Justice, Courage, and Wisdom. On this way of thinking, society is really just a generalization of what’s inside of us. So if we want to figure out what it means for society to be Healthy, Just, Virtuous, and so on, we should figure out what it means for a single individual to achieve these internal states and then build around that.

This line of thinking lead me to ask the following questions:

What if Maslow’s Hierarchy served as a template for the economic system itself and provided a structural guide both for society as a whole and the development of the individual businessperson, entrepreneur, or private citizen?

What if self-actualization was not a private choice, or an afterthought, but the result of intentional economic design?

What if the power of business, economics, money, were used to help individuals ascend through these states?

Most people I know think that the only alternative to Capitalism is Socialism. This leads to boring debates where everyone ends up saying the same talking points.

What we need is a fresh vision of what the future of economics could look like for humanity.

Not because it is likely or even possible, but because we need to think differently about the nature of business itself.

Why?

Because millions of people who have the capacity to actually make the world better and transform human lives through entrepreneurship are turned away from starting a business because of it’s toxic history of exploitation and competition.

Millions of people want to become creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs, but would rather be a starving artist or corporate employee because they believe that profiting from their unique talents is inherently evil and inauthentic.

The exchange of value is not inherently evil or fake.

It is possible to do business ethically even if the underlying economic system is a problem.

I have seen it firsthand.

And what’s the alternative?

To continue being a customer of mega-corporations while refusing to start your own business out of protest?

The Future Of The Creator Economy

Spiritual Economics is a long way off, but if entrepreneurs and creators approach their work with this ideal in mind, they can help move humanity closer towards it one email list or community at a time.

Modern technology has empowered solopreneurs, life-coaches, writers, artists, and anyone who has something to say, to make a genuine contribution to the future of humanity in some small corner of the internet.

This adds up over time.

Artists can get paid what they are worth by a loyal audience who find meaning and purpose in their work.

Coaches can find clients whose lives they can transform in the exact ways that fit their expertise and meet clients unique needs.

Writer’s can start intellectual and social movements through building a readership that rewards them for their valuable ideas.

Entrepreneurship and value creation does not have to be aimed at making money for its own sake, or winning status games.

It can have a spiritual aim.

For 99.9% of human history, the primary question was “How do we not starve or die?”.

Economics was a matter of survival.

In the 18th century, everything changed.

The Industrial Revolution initiated a new period of productivity, consumption and growth. For most of the world, basic survival was no longer a problem.

Prosperity became the goal.

But people have realized something fundamentally important — that prosperity not only fails to create meaning, but actively undermines it beyond a certain point.

In a world of excessive wealth and production, meaning becomes the new scarce resource.

Humanity doesn’t need more stuff, it needs more meaning.

More people pursuing entrepreneurship as a way to make life interesting again. To help people experience the miracle of existence in ways that they can’t do on their own.

The final stage of human economics is Spiritual Economics.

An economics no longer aimed at survival, or unlimited growth and prosperity, but self-actualization, awakening, wisdom, meaning, purpose, and transcendence.

These immaterial goods are infinite and what make life worth living.

-Paul

“I have set up the most difficult ideal of the philosopher. Learning is not enough! The scholar is the herd animal in the realm of knowledge”

The Will To Power, 421

This week, we consider Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, which Nietzsche titled “We Scholars”.

This chapter is the most essay-like chapter in the text, and probably the easiest to read out of the entire book.

It is important to keep in mind throughout that when Nietzsche uses the term “science” this is a translation of the German Wissenscahft, which is not restricted to the natural sciences like Physics.

Kaufmann writes

“Wissenschaft might just as well be rendered as ‘scholarship’ in this section — and in much German literature: the term does not have primary reference to the natural sciences as it does in twentieth-century English”.

The core concerns Nietzsche expresses in this part of the book are the nature and fate of philosophy, the problem of the scholar, the possibility of greatness.

Section Commentary

204

Nietzsche opens t…

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Nietzsche on morality is my personal favorite topic that he covers, since it subverts conventional thinking and truly forces individuals to question their lives.

Morality also serves as the intersecting point of many of his other themes: religion, psychology, art, history, and so on.

This chapter of BGE is a condensed version and precursor to Nietzsche’s next great work On The Genealogy Of Morals.

Below I provide a thematic overview as well as a section-by-section commentary on select sections from the reading.

Suggested Reading

• Beyond Good And Evil, Part Five: Natural History of Morality

Thematic Overview

In German, Naturgeschichte (“natural history”) can refer directly to study of the development or evolution of life forms, from the past to the present.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the expression would have brought Darwinian theory to mind.

Nietzsche’s title tells us that he is goi…

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We saw last time that the world, for Heidegger, is not merely a list of stuff or a collection of physical objects.

He reserves “world” in quotation marks for that idea.

The world is Dasein’s world — a world that is experienced in a unique way phenomenologically and that reveals itself to us through our dealings with it.

After reading this guide and the suggested readings below, you will have an answer to what makes the world in this sense a world — what Heidegger calls the “worldhood of the world”.

In other words, the being of the world that we are beings-in.

Suggested Reading

This week we will discuss the following stretch of text:

• Being and Time, Part One, Division One, Chapter Three, Sections 15, 16, 17, 18.

This is a bit more reading than usual since we had some extra time.

After we get through Heidegger’s account of the …

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By the end of this week, we will be about halfway done Beyond Good & Evil, since we will be skipping over Part Four: Epigrams and Interludes.

This is probably the toughest section of the book, since it contains intricate and highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the history of the Christian faith, the religious attitude, and its relationship to psychology, culture and morality.

Nietzsche makes many references and allusions that are pretty specific, and his writing here is pretty dense.

My advice is to focus your energy on sections 54-62 which constitute the second half of the chapter.

Do not get bogged down in the details of the earlier sections.

The most important section, on my reading, is section 56, where Nietzsche introduces one of his most famous ideas in BGE for the first time — the eternal recurrence.

Next up would be the final few sections such as 58-62.

I would focus your best energy on those sections, since 61 and 62 provide a general summar…

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“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night … We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time”.

What would it mean for Netflix to win this competition?

Taken to its logical limit, it would be a dystopian scenario in which human beings never needed to sleep, but could instead spend all of their time watching Netflix.

To the average person, Hastings remarks are likely to make their skin crawl.

Does he really view things so inhumanely? So heartlessly?

But imagine you were the CEO of a major platform like Netflix, Youtube, or Instagram and ask yourself the following question:

What would the mind of your ideal customer look like?

I think the answer is pretty much the same across all major social media platforms.

The mind of the ideal customer would have what I call an informational black hole at its center.

What is an informational black hole?

An informational black hole is a collapsed region of consciousness produced by hyper-algorithmic-stimulation and information-overload — when information accumulates faster than the self can integrate it into coherent understanding, action, or identity formation.

An informational black hole appears when the interior structure of an individual human mind collapses under the weight of modern life, but it’s still able (and craving) to receive massive amounts of information within the hyper-consumption environment that we all find ourselves in.

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The result is that the massive amounts of information that stream into the mind, which cause pleasure and the feeling of progress, ultimately vanish into nothingness.

Hundreds of hours of consuming videos, lectures, podcasts, and articles amounting to nothing other than the feeling of a strange emptiness, lost time, and a poor memory…

Why would social media platforms and entertainment companies want an informational black hole to form in their users’s consciousness?

The answer is actually pretty simple if you understand what’s called the information-action ratio.

The Information-Action Ratio

In his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, cultural critic Neil Postman introduced the concept of the information-action ratio.

The information-action ratio is the relationship between a piece of information consumed and the actions that the consumer of that information might reasonably be expected to take after they have acquired it.

Postman writes:

“The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one’s status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it”.

Neil Postman, Informing Ourselves To Death, Speech, October 11, 1990

But things weren’t always this way.

Postman argues that prior to the invention of modern communication technologies, such as the telegraph, the telephone, and the internet, human beings enjoyed a healthy information-action ratio, meaning that there was a high correlation between information and action.

“The information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives”

Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, page 69

While the amount of information that is consumed relative to action is important, it is probably more important to consider the nature of the information and how it is experienced.

Prior to the invention of modern communication technologies, human beings were only able to acquire information through lived experiences such as face-to-face conversations, and social events.

Although it was possible to communicate at a distance through handwritten letters, the handwritten letter is actually a “technology” that promotes a healthy information-action ratio rather than upsets it.

A handwritten letter requires the writer to process a manageable amount of information and synthesize it into a message which is then received and processed on the other end.

By contrast, the invention of the modern print newspaper accelerated the speed at which information could travel across distances.

The ability to rapidly communicate information across time and space naturally led to human beings collapsing information contexts.

Regarding the telegraph, Postman writes:

“the local and the timeless… lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed… Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods … became the content of what people called ‘the news of the day’”

Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, pages 66-67

When information is decontextualized is contributes to undermining the relationship between information and action, since human beings lose the ability to know what to do with it.

Suppose you learn about a flash flood in Tennessee, but you live in New York.

What is one to do?

Perhaps you can make an individual choice to send aid to the affected families in Tennessee.

But then the next day’s newspaper comes out about a forest fire in California, and so on…

Postman claimed that the constant access to decontextualized information upsets the information-action ratio by making the relationship between information increasingly “abstract and remote”.

I ended the last section by asking why social media and entertainment companies would want an informational black hole to form in their users’s minds.

The answer is clear.

Almost any action that users take based on the information they acquire from the internet essentially requires disengaging from using the platform.

When user’s form an informational black hole in their minds, the information-action ratio reaches its full potential:

Maximum Information/Minimum Action

A user who can consume massive amounts of information only to see it vanish into nothingness, is a user who fundamentally does not know what to do with what they are experiencing.

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In some situations, not knowing what to do with the information you consume can be painful.

The real danger of the modern entertainment platform is that it has been designed to optimally transform information overload into a pleasurable experience.

Pleasure And Mental Exploitation

The easiest way to take something from someone is to have them convince themselves that it will benefit them by making it pleasurable.

Prior to the internet, the exploitation and extraction of value from laborers and the working class was mostly visible, painful, and obvious.

People mostly knew the deal and were forced to accept their circumstances because they needed to survive. When things would get too absurd, people would revolt, protest, and seek political and social reform, until thigns became acceptable again.

This was how things were for thousands of years.

But modern technology has fundamentally changed what’s possible.

It has created the perfect conditions of exploitation.

When you take something tangible or material from people, it’s very easy for them to detect it and feel the pain of its absence.

For example, if someone steals your bike, you would probably be pretty pissed off. Even if the bike wasn’t that expensive, there is a moral harm and indignation that most people naturally feel.

For 99% of human history, if you wanted to get economic value out of another human being, you would have to physically require them to do something for you.

A factory owner needed people to reliably travel to their factory for the majority of the day, spending time away from their family, and build something for their company.

Sacrifices like this hurt.

It’s hard to overstate just how much things have changed — and not for the better.

Modern technology has now made it possible for corporations to penetrate human consciousness and extract economic value by stealing something immaterial — people’s time and attention — without them even realizing something has been stolen.

That’s pretty scary, but I actually think it get’s worse.

Not only do people not realize what they have lost, but they also have enjoyed giving it away.

We are no longer in an era where the factory worker grumbles about waking up at 5am to support his family because he has to (although this still happens all over the world).

We are in an era where human beings are voluntarily giving away their time and mental life on top of everything they were already doing before!

This is, perhaps, the most consequential economic shift in human history.

It is a shift from physical to mental exploitation.

In the past, factory workers would have to work 6 days a week for 10-14 hour shifts (sadly, in many parts of the world this is still the case).

This was (and still is) awful.

Today, most people spend around 10 hours per day working (and commuting), but then give away 1,000+ hours per year being engaged online when they get home because they “just want to feel something”.

It is now possible to extract value from individuals when they aren’t doing anything at all.

When we are riding on the bus, laying in bed, or spending time with our kids.

And this process of extraction is more efficient than ever.

In the past, business owners and rulers had to reconcile with the physical needs of their workers and subjects.

People would get hot, cold, angry, hungry, and complain.

Human capital is the most expensive form of capital there is — if only we didn’t have laws and rights things would be so much easier!

But we are now in an era where human beings can be mined at all hours of the day (even while at work!).

Even just a few decades ago, if you saw an advertisement, you still had to physically go to the store to buy the damn thing.

Now that entire problem has suddenly dissolved before our eyes.

Social media companies can even make money without you buying anything — but merely from paying attention.

This is the endgame.

The extraction of economic value from the last thing that human beings thought could ever be taken away from them, even by the cruelest of tyrants — the contents of their own mind.

-Paul

We have made it to one of the most famous sections of Being and Time, section 15.

Although nearly everything we have read is important for understanding the history of philosophy and for thinking differently about your own existence, section 15 contains what is probably the most well-known collection of ideas in Being and Time.

In particular, Heidegger’s famous distinction between “ready-to-hand” and “present-to-hand” and “equipment”.

The past few weeks have been pretty heavy, so with this guide I want to tie together sections 12-15 into a clear and comprehensive overview.

By the end of this guide, you should feel like you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on and why it matters philosophically.

The fog should begin to clear very soon.

Review Of 12 & 13

I want to spend some time reviewing and synthesizing sections 12 and 13 to make sure everything is as clear as possible as we move ahead.

Much of th…

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We will continue covering one chapters per week until we finished the book.

In Part One, we saw Nietzsche attack conventional philosophical ways of understanding the concepts like “truth” and “freedom of the will”.

Since Part Two is concerned with “The Free Spirit”, we should expect to learn a new way of understanding what “free” means — since it obviously can’t mean what it has traditionally meant.

The “free spirit” is an individual who anticipates and prepares the way for the new type of human being that Nietzsche calls the “philosopher of the future”.

When Nietzsche uses “We”, he is referring to “free spirits” like himself and his ideal readers.

These free spirits, however, are not themselves “philosophers of the future”.

Nietzsche takes himself and his ideal readers to be pre-cursors or “heralds” who are paving the way fo…

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• For this week, we will look at sections 14-23 of Part I.

• In these sections, Nietzsche attacks various scientific and metaphysical prejudices that form an interconnected web.

  • Most of all, Nietzsche attacks the concept of free will, which is one of the primary starting points for philosophy (especially when it comes to moral philosophy).

• Another general theme is undermining the relationship between surface level language and complex psychological phenomena.

  • Nietzsche takes aim at the inadequacy of words to capture what’s really going on inside of our minds and bodies.

  • These conceptual prejudices lead philosophers to distort reality and draw various false conclusions.

• A general theme is respecting the extent “physiology” affects our thinking.

14

In this section, Nietzsche criticizes the assumptions behind modern scientific thinking, in particular Physics.

“Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangemen…

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• It is suggested to read sections 12, 13, and 14 for this week.

  • We will continue our study of section 12 from last week where Heidegger commences his analysis of Dasein’s existence and then proceed to his discussion of “the world” which starts in section 14 of Chapter III.

• Heidegger undertakes two primary tasks in Chapter II (sections 12, 13).

  • 1) to describe the ontological significance of what it means to-be-in-the-world.

  • 2) to show that this existential is a priori, and discuss what this entails.

• One of the main points that Heidegger argues for is that being-in-the-world must be understood ontologically rather than ontically.

The First Existential: Being-In-The-World

• Last time, we spent a good amount of time discussing the concept of “existential structures”.

• The first “existential” (what appears in your text as existentialia) is “being-in-the-world”.

  • Heidegger analyzes this existential in different stages. Last time we looked at “being-in” and discussed how a pl…

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If you look back to section 8 of Introduction II, Heidegger proposed to write two parts to Being and Time, each containing three “divisions”, but only completed Division One and Division Two of Part One (with Division Two being rushed).

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At the same time, truth is something that everybody seems to care deeply about.

No one likes being lied to, and no one wants to live their life based on what’s false.

The result is that we become obsessed with questions like “how do we know what’s true?”, or “how do we regulate information to prevent the spread of falsehoods?”

But what if everybody is asking the wrong questions?

In his masterpiece Beyond Good & Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche begins by asking a question so uncomfortable that no one, in his opinion, has even been willing to ask it:

What if untruth is more valuable than truth?

The entire history of Western philosophy is firmly built upon a commitment to the pursuit and value of truth above all. To take a famous example, whenAristotle offered a famous criticism of Plato’s Theory of the Forms, he defended himself by saying the following about truth:

“Still perhaps it would appear desirable, and indeed it would seem to be obligatory, especially for a philosopher, to sacrifice even one's closest personal ties in defense of the truth. Both are dear to us, yet it’s our duty to prefer the truth”.

-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I

The foundational commitment to truth has influenced nearly every aspect of Western civilization and culture. There are few things that the vast majority people hold in higher regard than concepts like beauty, goodness, morality, and rationality.

Truth, beauty, and goodness, are commonly referred to today as the transcendentals, or the ultimate properties of being that exist beyond the material world and are embodied by God.

These master concepts provide the foundations for millions of lives.

And yet, Nietzsche argues that because dozens of philosophers have failed to question these very assumptions they have fallen into deep and harmful prejudices.

But Nietzsche isn’t just another philosopher criticizing philosophers.

He goes even further — beyond.

Nietzsche believes that because the entirety of Western civilization and culture is built upon the prejudices of the philosophers (and more recently scientists), it is threatening to destroy everything that makes human life worth living for by collapsing into an age of “nihilism”.

At the time Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good & Evil, which was in 1886, he already viewed Europe teetering on the precipice of Nihilism — an phenomenon in which human beings would face a prolonged crisis of meaning and value.

If even half of what Nietzsche had to say about nihilism is correct, then things have only gotten worse since he first tried to warn humanity of the impending crisis.

We now live in a world suffering through the absurd effects of “late-stage capitalism” on ordinary human life. A world in which meaning and purpose seem more elusive than ever, and truth is a distant memory.

When Nietzsche urges us to go “beyond” the traditional binary of “good” and “evil”, he is not telling us to act immorally.

He is urging us to transcend the inevitable limitations placed on the human spirit by traditional belief systems and create a new future for humanity in which we can live freely once again.

This may require calling into question the very foundations that the world as we know it was built upon.

It may require taking seriously the idea that untruth is more valuable than truth.

Although this may seem like an abstract philosophical question, philosophy for Nietzsche is not something that people do at a university and leave behind when they go home.

Philosophy is a way of life.

This gives Nietzsche’s work a relevance and weight that most philosophy is lacking.

Almost everything he says is meant to force you to question the assumptions by which you are living and whether they are promoting or devaluing your life (and life itself).

The “prejudices of the philosophers” are also our own.

That is why we must understand and go beyond them.

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Suggested Reading

For this week, we will cover the first half of Part I, since it is incredibly important for making sense of the book, and Nietzsche approach to philosophy as a whole.

It is suggested that you read the following:

• Nietzsche’s untitled preface

• Part I, sections 1-13 (pages 9-21 in the Kaufmann)

If you want to understand Part I more deeply, and are feeling more ambitious, I recommend reading the entirety of Part I for our upcoming meeting this Saturday, and then re-reading it again the following week.

Since Nietzsche packs many layers of meaning into the smallest of spaces, and many of his ideas acquire deeper meaning when understood as existing within a complex web of relations to other ideas and themes, his books reward being revisited multiple times.

This is what makes him a great author and thinker.

Suggested Assignment

It is suggested that you complete the following two tasks prior to our next meeting in order to maximize learning:

• Choose one section to read 3x very carefully

• Bring one specific question about the text to our next live meeting

Part I Overview

Beyond Good And Evil is divided into nine parts (chapters), each of which contains multiple small sections.

The first section to each of the nine parts of the book is generally a statement about methodology, or about the difficulties of pursuing a certain set of questions. Likewise, the last few sections of each part often comprise a summary statement, draw conclusions, or move into another, deeper level of questioning.

They provide a sense of climax and transition.

In Part I, Nietzsche sets the tone for the entire work and introduces several key concepts.

The overarching aim of Part I is to provide a devastating critique of the history of philosophy and the philosophers who have made it into what it is. Nietzsche begins this critique by calling into question the “will to truth” that has served as the fundamental force driving the history of western philosophy. Nietzsche also introduces the idea of “life” as being what ultimately matters. This is connected to his famous concept of the “will to power”, which is really a “will to life”. The analysis of philosophers and people in terms of their “wills” brings in Nietzsche’s famous “psychology”, according to which the self is a collection of competing “drives”.

In what follows, I will provide a detailed commentary of a handful of key sections from this week’s reading.

Section 1

In this first section of BGE, Nietzsche takes a radical new approach to philosophy that forces readers to question the fundamental assumptions about how they live.

Nietzsche puts his inquiry onto what he considers to be a dangerous path (and embraces this fact).

He writes:

“it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far — as if we were the first to see it, fit it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater”

Nietzsche, BGE, Part I, section 1

What problem is Nietzsche referring to as risky?

It is the problem of “the value of truth”.

Nietzsche’s main aim in the opening section of BGE is to introduce a completely new line of questioning and set of problems that most people simply ignore.

This is a classic Nietzschean move — to approach a familiar set of questions and assumptions from an entirely new and previously unrecognized angle.

How is Nietzsche able to do this?

Because he takes himself to be willing to attack and question the deep background assumptions that we all take for granted, either because we aren’t aware that there is a legitimate alternative, or because we are too afraid to ask.

Truth, which was the opening theme of the book in the preface (“Suppose truth is a woman — what then?), is something that philosophers have esteemed as their highest value and ultimate aim for the entire history of philosophy.

Truth is also something that everyone, yourself included, seems to care deeply about.

This is what makes Nietzsche’s opening section so provocative.

Nietzsche is not merely addressing a philosopher’s problem that is stuck inside some abstract academic debate — he is attacking something that everyone cares about.

Nietzsche begins the book by asking a strange question about what he calls the “will to truth” — he asks what questions the will to truth obscures or prevents us from asking.

“What strange, wicked, questionable questions!”

Nietzsche is aware that most people would find the questions he is interested in asking to be “strange” and “wicked”, perhaps even “evil” or “immoral”.

This is one reason why he takes these questions to be risky.

“For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater”

But there is also a great risk in not questioning the will to truth if, as Nietzsche suggests, the will to truth itself prevents us from asking all sorts of important questions, such as:

What is the value of the will to truth?

What’s fascinating about Nietzsche’s opening section is that it completely subverts our philosophical expectations and common ways of thinking.

Typically, philosophers treat truth as a kind of unquestionable ideal worth pursuing and treat falsity with disdain and contempt. Those who question the value of truth are viewed as agents of chaos, immoral, and irrational.

To return to Nietzsche’s preface, he begins BGE with the provocative question:

Suppose truth is a woman — what then?

When read in conjunction with section 1, Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that if truth is a woman whose heart we are trying to win, then we may need to be willing to challenge her, rather than put her on a pedestal.

If truth is a woman, would she choose the man who pursues her endlessly and worships her unquestionably? Or would she choose the man who is willing to think and live differently, to take risks, and to ask difficult questions?

In this section, Nietzsche prepares the ground for asking questions that most people, let alone philosophers, would never even consider:

What if untruth is more valuable than truth? What if truth (as a woman) can only be won through lies?

Nietzsche is a philosopher willing to explore uncomfortable questions at length in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of what’s taken for granted in our ordinary thinking.

While most philosophers aim at developing theories and giving answers that justify what we already believe or wish to be true, Nietzsche constantly seeks to challenge his readers to think for themselves and question what everyone else takes for granted.

Nietzsche’s reflection on the will to truth and the value of untruth raises a deeply personal and discomforting question for his readers to consider:

Is it possible to live a truthful life without taking any risks?

Sections 4 & 6

While Nietzsche asked us to question the value of truth in section 1, in this section he considers the idea that the value of truth may have little or nothing to do with whether a judgment is in fact true or not.

Consider this in your own life.

Does the value of what you take to be true actually consist in it’s being true? Or is what we believe to be true valuable for some other reason — perhaps because it makes us feel good, or is useful?

Nietzsche argues that the value comes from whether truth is “life-promoting, life-preserving”. He writes:

“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; int his respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating”

BGE, I, 4

What does Nietzsche mean by “life-promoting”? Is he saying that things are valuable if they lead us to procreate? Not at all.

Although the topic of “life” and “life-promotion” for Nietzsche is complex, the basic idea is simply.

The ultimate value for Nietzsche is life.

Beliefs, actions, and the like, promote life if they increase our creative activities and lead human beings to affirm their life rather than wish it were to be different.

One of Nietzsche’s most famous criticisms of traditional moralities (like Greek and Christian ethics) is that they implicitly train us to hate ourselves and deny the value of our life here on Earth.

Nietzsche idea above, then, is that a false judgment might have a kind of life-promoting value that far outstrips its disvalue from the perspective of truth. Later in that section Nietzsche writes:

“To recognize untruth as a condition of life — that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil”

BGE, I, 4

Nietzsche provides an example to support this claim — the example of mathematics.

Nietzsche writes:

“without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live — that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life”

BGE, I, 4

The radical implication of Nietzsche’s idea is that we can’t help but view the world through falsehoods because we need them to live.

While most philosophers and scientists are constantly willing and striving to see the world objectively, Nietzsche is calling into question the very value of this aim and presenting it as dangerous or harmful for life.

This completely inverts the standard view of things like science as leveraging objective truth and technology to promote and improve life.

Another way in which life is connected to philosophy for Nietzsche is spelled out in section 6.

In this section, which is one of my favorites, Nietzsche argues that all of philosophy is an involuntary “confession” or “memoir” of its author. He writes:

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”

BGE, I, 6

The idea that a philosophy is really a representation or outgrowth of its creator is something that makes a lot of sense to most people, but has been strongly resisted by many academic philosophers.

According to some conceptions of philosophy, the aim of philosophy is like that of the sciences — to provide an objective description or explanation of the way things are generally speaking.

The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars famously said that:

“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”

If what philosophers produce is necessarily an expression or byproduct of their personal biases and prejudices, then this would undercut the aims of this entire project.

Whatever “understanding” or “explanation” philosophy could provide about how things hang together would, if Nietzsche is right, merely be an expression of how things seem to hang together for someone like me.

Nietzsche does, in fact, end up developing a famous position called “perspectivism”, according to which it is not possible to know anything outside of a particular perspective. He writes:

Let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’’ let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself’: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be”

On The Genealogy Of Morals, III, 12

Nietzsche also considers a radical twist to this very idea in section 6, suggesting that what ultimately shapes our perspective is our moral beliefs.

Typically philosophers separate one’s moral beliefs and values from their “theoretical” beliefs about knowledge or reality.

But Nietzsche understands beliefs as inseparable from psychological and bodily drives. He writes:

“Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy; but rather another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument”

BGE, I, 6

If Nietzsche is right about this, then in order for someone to understand why they view certain things as true, they must radically rethink the relationship between their worldview and moral beliefs.

What if the reason why we perceive things to be true is not because of how we are neutrally seeing the world, but because our personal morality is causing us to see it that way?

Looking Ahead: Week 3 Preview

In Week 3, we will study the second half of Part I.

In the second half of Part I, Nietzsche continues his attack on the fundamental philosophical prejudices that have upheld the edifice of Western thought and culture.

In sections 14-23, Nietzsche develops several fascinating critiques of famous ideas in the history of philosophy such as Descartes conception of the self and cogito argument, freedom of the will, and self-causation.

Nietzsche also engages in unique and thought-provoking discussions of various sciences, such as Psychology and Physics, arguing for the bold claim that Physics is “only an interpretation and exegesis of the world … and not a world-explanation” (BGE, I, 14).

Lastly, Nietzsche introduces one of his most famous concepts — the will to power.

~

If you found this guide helpful, or have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul

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Welcome to the wonderful and terrifying world of 19th century Europe.

This was a world in which the horrors of mass industrialization led to violent and widespread revolts in 1848, a world in which Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony, and in which Italy and Germany became the unified nations we know them as today.

This was the world that Friedrich Nietzsche was born into, and also the world that he died in (1844-1900).

Nietzsche’s life was completely contained by the 19th century, and he understood the significance of his own age perhaps more deeply than anyone.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is an embodiment of his historical self-awareness and it serves as both a warning to future humans, as well as a reason for hope.

What he has handed down to us is not only relevant to contemporary life, but urgent.

Nietzsche believed that the future of humanity, the human spirit, and everything that gives our lives meaning is being fundamentally threatened in the modern world.

If you agree…

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I am incredibly excited because by the end of this week, you will all have achieved something very impressive.

Making it through the introductions to Being and Time is a major intellectual achievement.

Congrats!

You should also, at this point, start to have a better idea of what Heidegger is proposing to do in the work and why it matters not just to the history of philosophy, but to humanity.

These difficult sections contain Heidegger’s revolutionary remarks about “phenomenology” and “hermeneutics”, and help us understand the method through which Heidegger will carry out his investigation.

Every philosopher has a method, and Heidegger’s is incredibly fascinating.

~

If you want to check in with yourself and see how you are understanding the work, I recommend reading section 8 very slowly and seeing if you can understand what he is saying there.

Section 8 contains an incredible condensed summary of everything we have been discussing so far and serves as a kind of “test’ …

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This article provides a brief introduction to Nietzsche’s life and works for anyone who is curious about Nietzsche’s popularity and philosophy, but doesn’t know much about him. It will also be beneficial for individuals who have attempted to engage with his life and works to some extent, but struggle to grasp the big picture of Nietzsche’s significance.

I provide some comments in the second half that will be helpful for anyone considering where to begin studying Nietzsche’s philosophy and how to avoid adopting the wrong approach.

Finally, if you were interested in studying Nietzsche’s masterpiece Beyond Good & Evil with me, I will be reading through the entire book with my subscribers here on Substack starting this Saturday April 18th at 12pm EST.

There are only a few days left to sign up and spots are limited. You can read more about the course here.

Nietzsche’s Life: General Overview

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was one of the major figures of 19th-century European philosophy.

Nietzsche’s influence on intellectuals, artists, and thinkers of all stripes has been immense.

Intellectual giants such as Freud, Jung, Hesse, Mann, Heidegger, and Foucault, as well as conflicting social and intellectual movements, such as Anarchism, Feminism, Nazism, Socialism, Marxism, Vegetarianism, and the “avant‐garde” art movement have claimed Nietzsche as a key influence.

Trained as a classical scholar of antiquity, he was forced by ill health into an early retirement from his academic career while still in his thirties.

Despite living with relentless mental and physical pain for years, Nietzsche transmuted his suffering into a powerful philosophical vision aimed at promoting human excellence and the affirmation of life.

No one took the philosophical stakes to be higher than Nietzsche, who was one of the first individuals to recognize and offer a solution to the impending threat of global nihilism.

Philosophically, Nietzsche was famous for his scathing attacks on traditional morality (especially Christian morality), his penetrating psychological insights into human behavior, and his startling views about the nature of truth and knowledge.

But Nietzsche was also famous for his achievements as a stylist.

According to Walter Kaufmann, who was a world-renowned Nietzsche scholar, Nietzsche was “one of the greatest German writers … and influential Europeans of the nineteenth century”.

He was most well-known for writing aphorisms, which are concise, but intellectually rich, sayings that often contain many layers of meaning.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat Nietzsche as merely a producer of great quotes.

Nietzsche has been interpreted by many to have developed a comprehensive philosophical worldview, or “system” (although this term is controversial because of Nietzsche’s was strong critiques of traditional philosophical systems).

Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas and style were instrumental to the new directions that philosophy would take in the 20th century in the form of existentialism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, to name a few.

Prior to his mental and physical collapse in early 1889, Nietzsche spent all of his time writing his most celebrated works (including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality) while living in various inns in Italy, France, and Switzerland.

Despite receiving very little recognition for his writings during his life, by the time of his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s books sold like wildfire (and continue to sell to this day).

Nietzsche’s ideas are more relevant now than ever.

As traditional belief systems crumble around us, nihilism continues to rise as an existential threat to human flourishing.

The moral norms that once used to structure and ground our lives have been violated by reckless agents of greed.

What does the future of humanity have in store for us?

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers who took this question seriously.

In this article, I provide a general overview of Nietzsche’s life and works in order to help anyone who is interested in learning more about why his ideas matter now more than ever.

Nietzsche’s Life

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, located in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844 (the year in which an assassination attempt was made on the life of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for whom Nietzsche was named and whose birthday, October 15, he shared. Also, the same year in which Marx and Engels met in Paris).

The modern state of Germany did not even exist when Nietzsche was born.

It was not until 1871, when he published his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy, that Germany was bound together by the militaristic rule of Bismarck.

According to Walter Kaufmann, despite significant tensions and divisions, Germans were:

“united linguistically and culturally, thanks to Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible (which played a major role in the standardization of modern German) and their deep appreciation for the accomplishments of German musicians (especially Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert), literary figures (such as Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin), and philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel).”

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

A dominant theme in Nietzsche’s writings is a consideration of what it means to be part of a nation and whether that supports or interferes with the ability to see oneself as connected with a culture.

Nietzsche’s father, Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran minister, and his mother, the daughter of a Lutheran minister.

Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister, was born less than 2 years after him.

By all accounts she adored her brother but was deeply envious of the attention he received. She was especially jealous of Nietzsche’s youthful relationship with the great composer Richard Wagner.

Elisabeth married a radical anti-Semite with whom she left Germany to found an Aryan colony in Paraguay. After her husband’s suicide following a financial scandal, Elisabeth returned home where she lived with her mother and later cared for her ailing brother.

Elisabeth is a notorious figure in Nietzsche scholarship because of what she did with Nietzsche’s ideas after he went mad.

Elisabeth carefully guarded her brother’s literary estate, and unscrupulously edited his notes for publication under the title The Will to Power.

The Will To Power is a book Nietzsche never wrote (although it contains plenty of fascinating and important material).

Elisabeth published The Will To Power in order to have Nietzsche recognized as the intellectual forbearer of what would become National Socialism (In 1885, his sister married to Bernhard Forster, a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche loathed).

Nietzsche’s Education

Nietzsche was educated at the famous Schulpforta on a full scholarship, where he helped to found a musical society and pursued his own compositions.

At the time, Nietzsche deeply admired Schumann (composer) and Hölderlin (poet).

He attended this famously strict boarding school for six years (the same school was attended by Navalis, Fichte, Ranke, as well as the brothers Schlegel), and did exceptionally good work in religion, German literature, and classics.

According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche was bad at math and drawing.

After Schulpforta, Nietzsche pursued university studies at Bonn where he initially pursued theology, but quickly changed to philology (classical studies/interpretation of ancient texts) after one semester.

Nietzsche was widely considered a prodigy in this field and became well-trained in foreign languages and ancient studies. This early work in history, interpretation, and ancient cultures would significantly influence his later philosophical work.

Nietzsche finished his studies in Leipzig, where by chance he came upon the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) in a second-hand bookshop.

He was deeply struck by Schopenhauer’s ideas in his magnum opus The World As Will And Representation that he read the entire (600+ page, two-volume) book straight through.

In particular, Nietzsche was gripped by Schopenhauer’s ideas about the nature of the Will, which Schopenhauer regarded as the driving force of reality.

Nietzsche was also impressed with Schopenhauer’s views on the aesthetics of music, according to which music is the highest form of art. Schopenhauer’s reasons for thinking this are idiosyncratic, but fascinating. Schopenhauer’s idea was that music is able to neutralize the raving desires of the will and thereby temporarily reduce our suffering.

Nietzsche was enamored with Schopenhauer’s idea of a ceaseless, blind, and passionately striving will at the foundation of life which signified, for him, the ecstatic abandonment of the ancient Dionysian cults.

At the same time, Nietzsche strongly rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions which, in Nietzsche’s estimation, undermined the human creative spirit.

At just twenty-four years old, Nietzsche became a professor — an incredible feat at the time (especially in Germany).

He taught for ten years at Basel (from 1869 till 1879) but was forced to retire early because of poor health.

Scholars have speculated about the source of Nietzsche’s poor health (a theme that would underwrite most of his philosophy).

According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s illness may have been connected with his brief military service in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1867, Nietzsche fell from a horse and had his initial military service cut short. In 1870, when the war broke out, Nietzsche volunteered for service as a medical orderly.

While attending to six men in a boxcar who were severely wounded and also sick with dysentery and diphtheria, Nietzsche is thought to have caught both diseases and, after delivering his patients to a field hospital, required medical attention himself.

The relation of a possibly incomplete recovery from his illness to the continued spells of migraine headaches and painful vomiting which made Nietzsche miserable during the next ten years has never been clarified conclusively.

Wagner And Anti-Semitism

In 1868, Nietzsche became personally acquainted with the great composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) at a dinner party at the home of Wagner’s sister.

Nietzsche loved Wagner’s music (particularly Tristan and Isolde) and he considered the composer Germany’s greatest living creative genius. It was Wagner’s presence that convinced Nietzsche that greatness and genuine creation were still possible.

Nietzsche believed at the time that Schopenhauer and Wagner were the most important men in German arts and letters since Goethe’s death.

Eventually, Nietzsche became a regular guest at the Wagner’s home in Tribschen, spending numerous birthdays and holidays there, and he worked to raise funds for Wagner’s Bayreuth concert hall.

Years later, Nietzsche broke off the relationship and wrote sharp criticisms of his former mentor but retained admiration for him.

Nietzsche maintained ambivalent feelings towards many of his main influences.

It was not until he completely broke with Wagner that he would come fully into his own.

Why did Nietzsche eventually decide to “break” with Wagner?

Nietzsche was put off by the emerging culture of Bayreuth, the city where Wagner’s opera’s were performed, because it was becoming a culture in favor of the “German Reich” over the “German Spirit”.

In Kaufmann’s words, it had become the “holy city of anti-Semitic Christian chauvinism”.

Anti-Semitic Teutonism — or proto-Nazism — was one of the major issues in Nietzsche’s life. His sister and Wagner, two important figures in his development,
forced him to confront this ideology.

In his last letter to his friend Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote:

“Abolished Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites”.

And to another friend, Overbeck:

“Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot”.

Despite Nietzsche’s clear hatred of anti-semitism, after the Second World War, almost anything associated with German was viewed with suspicion in the United States and United Kingdom, including Nietzsche’s provocative remarks.

According to Kaufmann:

“Thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (who became a party member) were listed as enemies of “the open society,” and Germany itself was thought to be haunted by a dark, romantic, irrationalist, counter-Enlightenment specter”.

In continental Europe, however, Nietzsche continued to be studied (especially by Heidegger), and inspired existentialism, phenomenology, critical theory, post‐structuralism, and deconstructionism.

When the latter two movements first gained a foothold in the United States, it was Nietzsche who once more was acknowledged as the major source of their inspiration.

In Kaufmann’s final assessment, Nietzsche would have

“looked with scorn on almost everything that has been written or done under his aegis, and the successful take‐over by the academic world, though it cannot compare in horror with some of the other appropriations he has suffered, would have seemed to him most like a final defeat, because he wanted at all costs not to be assimilated to the world of learning, where everything becomes a matter for discussion and nothing for action”

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

There is much more to be said about the details of Nietzsche’s life.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend the BBC documentary “Human, All Too Human” in addition to Kaufmann’s groundbreaking intellectual biography referenced above (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ).

In fact, Kaufmann’s book was one of the first philosophy books I ever read and was one of the primary reasons I ended up studying philosophy at all!

Nietzsche’s Works

Throughout his life, Nietzsche’s books sold poorly, and he often complained that readers were not prepared to receive his forward thinking ideas.

After Nietzsche went insane, ironically, he became world famous, and was celebrated as the originator of a kind of avant-garde philosophy.

Kaufmann writes:

“Those who found official bourgeois culture philistine, materialistic, small-minded, smug, self-satisfied, and conformist found a voice in Nietzsche, as did those who found it sexually repressive, timid, boring, and hostile to change”.

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

In his works, Nietzsche does not state positions and argue for them in the manner traditional in modern philosophy.

He did not write extended essays with chains of argument responding to the academic literature, and he was not very much interested in counter-argument (although he had a thorough knowledge of major figures and positions in the history of philosophy).

Many of his works are also quite different in style and tone both from themselves and from what other philosophers have produced. Nietzsche’s works continously make new demands on readers and tempt them into misunderstanding his ideas.

In fact, Nietzsche famously stated:

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood”

Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 290

The dominant theme of Nietzsche’s work is a critical diagnosis of deep cultural and philosophical problems.

It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Nietzsche to a nay-sayer (or “hater” as we might say today).

Throughout his entire life, Nietzsche took Socrates’ question very seriously:

How should one live?

Nietzsche denies, unsurprisingly, that there is any “one size fits all” or pre-determined answer to this question.

This alone sets him apart from many pre-modern thinkers (both secular and religious).

Instead, Nietzsche encouraged human beings to live creatively, even dangerously, and continuously push the boundaries of human potential in order to promote new forms of human life.

He certainly believed that some answers to Socrates’ question — any answers that place rigid constraints on human life — are most certainly “wrong”, or as he might put it harmful to life.

It is worth mentioning at this point that Nietzsche was not merely a talker or writer, he lived out his own philosophical ideas as much as he was able to, and treated philosophy as something that truly mattered (Nietzsche was famous for thinking and writing while hiking through the mountains of Europe).

Nietzsche’s ideas are developed in a collection of works that have self-important, dramatic, and often apocalyptic sounding titles.

Nietzsche’s titles (and subtitles) collectively suggest that some some great historical moment is imminent, and Nietzsche is it’s herald.

Nietzsche’s published titles are:

• The Birth Of Tragedy

• Untimely Meditations

• Human, All Too Human

• The Dawn

• Thus Spake Zarathustra

• Beyond Good And Evil

• On The Genealogy Of Morality

• The Gay Science

• The Case Of Wagner

• The Twilight Of The Idols

• The Anti-Christ

• Ecce Homo

• Nietzsche Conta Wagner

• The Will To Power (unpublished notes).

Some of these “books” are mostly collections of aphorisms, or short sayings.

Some resemble sociological or historical essays, while others read like prophecy.

Nietzsche’s works, like most “greats” in any field, are often divided into “early”, “middle” and “late”.

Nietzsche himself considered Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1885 to be a complete statement of his overarching philosophy and his magnum opus.

But since Zarathustra was written in a highly metaphorical and poetic style this made it difficult for readers to understand, and I do not recommend reading Zarathustra until one has read at least 5+ of Nietzsche’s other works.

Nietzsche followed Zarathustra with Beyond Good & Evil, published in 1886, and restated his philosophy in a more familiar essay-like style (although this work also contains many short aphorisms as well).

Beyond Good & Evil provides, in my judgment, the best starting point for those interested in Nietzsche because it touches upon all of his major themes and is written in a clear and accessible style.

I strongly recommend avoiding a “chronological” approach to reading Nietzsche’s complete works, as many are often tempted to do (I was tempted into starting this at one point many years ago).

Although The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first book, it is a real stumbling block for beginners.

Nietzsche’s “middle period”, which includes Beyond Good & Evil, On The Genealogy Of Morals, and The Gay Science, serves as a much better starting point.

Nietzsche’s books can be somewhat easy to read (because they aren’t overly technical or academic), but are hard to truly understand. They contain multiple layers of meaning in addition genuinely challenging ideas that force the reader to ask themselves uncomfortable questions. They reward deep thought and multiple readings (especially at different stages of life).

Nietzsche’s writing style can be described as elusive, ironic, funny, crude, penetrating, profound, prophetic, subtle, unfair, and insightful.

Each seemingly isolated statement he makes both has a meaning of its own, but also acquires multiple new meanings when considered in relation to every other statement.

This rewards a “holistic” approach to his thought.

One should not try to read Nietzsche like a systematic philosopher who builds his philosophy brick by brick.

Crucially, Nietzsche consistently brings together multiple distant topics and themes into the smallest of spaces.

Nietzsche’s atomism should not be interpreted as trying to reduce complex topics to axioms or truths.

Nietzsche always tried to retain an open-minded experimentalism in his work, and encouraged philosophers to always be prepared, if necessary, to “boldly at any time to declare himself against his previous opinion,” as he did with Wagner.

Nietzsche wanted philosophy to become scientific.

But he did not think of “science” in the usual sense — a rigorous attempt at describing objective reality.

What Nietzsche had in mind was “joyous science” — something more akin to what the modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend called “epistemic anarchy”.

The spirit of science, for Nietzsche, was the spirit of fearless experimentation and willingness to shatter previous paradigms.

Nietzsche criticized philosophers of the past for having the delusion that they would be able to become the “unriddler of the universe” and solve the mysteries of life with “one stroke”:

“To solve all with one stroke .. . that was the secret wish .... The unlimited ambition ... to be the ‘unriddler of the universe’ made up the dream of the thinker ... many had the delusion, ... at last Schopenhauer, that they were this one being”.

The philosophers of the future, Nietzsche thought, would have no such delusions.

Nietzsche writes:

“A new species of philosophers is coming up … these philosophers of the future might require in justice, perhaps also in injustice, to be called attempters [Versucher). This name is… only an attempt and, if one prefers, a temptation [Versuchung]”.

Nietzsche took himself to be the pre-cursor to this philosophy of the future and dedicated his life and work to giving birth to these unknown thinkers.

Nietzsche hoped to show, by way of example, that it was possible to live with full confidence, boldness, and vigor, despite lacking any foundation or system to fall back on.

He was a philosopher walking a tightrope without a harness.

Eventually, Nietzsche fell.

The End Of Nietzsche’s Life And Work

In 1879, although Nietzsche was forced to resign from the university due to significant health problems, he did not stop living and producing his new kind of philosophy.

In fact, Nietzsche set out to overcome his illness through philosophy.

The result was that he produced an incredible series of books in a very short period.

In 1888, Nietzsche’s efforts produced a sense of euphoria — something that was unprecedented in his long experience of illness and recovery.

Kaufmann speculates that the rapid decline of Nietzsche’s health also led to a decline in his inhibitions, thereby allowing him to write and think more freely than ever before.

Working at an increasingly frantic pace, Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, Twilight Of The Idols, Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner within six months of each other.

The Case of Wagner was the last book which Nietzsche himself saw published.

According to Walter Kaufmann, although some dismiss these works as the ravings of a madman, they actually are “perhaps his most important”.

Nietzsche had a strong sense of purpose and little doubt concerning his own historical significance (it turns out he was right about this).

Kaufmann writes:

“Large parts of his last books are actually distinguished by a clarity and lucidity that are almost unequaled in German letters, and by a startling depth of insight.

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

In January of 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin, Italy.

As Nietzsche fell on the pavement, he threw his arms around the neck of a mare that had just been flogged by a coachman.

He had to be carried home.

Nietzsche would spend the final 10 years of his life completely helpless and having lost the ability to think philosophically forever.

If you were interested in reading the entire text with me, on April 18th I am launching a complete beginner’s course on Beyond Good & Evil right here on Substack.

You can learn more about it here.

Additionally, has invited me to deliver a “how to read philosophy” workshop at the end of April. If you wanted to learn more about Robin’s work and the workshop, you can visit A Mug Of Insights.

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Thanks for a great chat last week on sections 4 & 5.

The recording from last week is posted in the paid subscribers chat.

This week we will move confidently into Heidegger’s Introduction II to Being and Time.

This is his “methodological introduction”.

We should expect to learn more about how he plans to investigate the Seinsfrage — the question of the meaning of being.

The answer is through history and phenomenology.

Suggested Reading

• Being and Time, Introduction II, sections 6-7A

Notes

Section 5 (The Analysis Of Dasein)

This section was especially difficult, so I want to take a second pass at it with a few notes before moving on to the second introduction and sections 6 & 7.

• In order to avoid a kind of dogmatic statement as to what constitutes the meaning of Dasein, the existential analytic must begin from an account of Dasein in its “average everydayness”.

• “Everydayness” does not have any pejorative connotation -- it is merely descriptive.

  • It means that uncritical mode …

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Thanks for a great discussion last week.

Week 2 Recording Here

As some of you have heard, immediately after our meeting, I got a phone call requesting that I make an emergency trip to New Hampshire to see my mother. As I was leaving my apartment, I discovered that she passed away.

I have been spending the past few days with my family healing, bonding, and grieving. It has been an incredibly challenging and profound experience for all of us.

In her last words to me, shared in private letters, my mom expressed that she wants me to use my writing and mind to impact lives, so here I am.

I truly appreciate all of the patience, understanding, and support you have given me. You’re all so awesome and discussing philosophy with you is an incredible privilege, so thank you.

One request I have, given the circumstances, is to move our meeting to Saturday this week at 12pm EST.

I hope this time works for everyone.

Link For Google Meet

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