Instead of ad reads, my channel is funded directly by people passionate about the Great Books. Help me keep making more episodes with a paid subscription: johnathanbi.com * Full transcript: open.substack.com/pub/johnathanbi/p/transcript-for-interview-with-brian-leiter-on-moral-antirealism * Join my email list to be notified of future episodes: greatbooks.io Companion lecture: * Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality Explained: ruclips.net/video/M0w2eQ-FcE/видео.html Professor Leiter's books with relevance to this interview: * Nietzsche on Morality: amzn.to/3x4QQMc (affiliate) * My book notes: www.johnathanbi.com/p/nietzsche-on-morality-by-brian-leiter * Moral Psychology with Nietzsche: amzn.to/3yL9fy3 (affiliate) * My book notes: www.johnathanbi.com/p/moral-psychology-with-nietzsche-by TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 0. Introduction 00:02:38 1.1 Prologue: Nietzsche's Moral Views 00:07:12 1.2 Prologue: Nietzsche and Marx 00:12:31 1.3 Prologue: Nietzsche's Inegalitarianism 00:15:46 2. What is Anti-Realism? 00:37:37 3. Arguments & Objections to Anti-Realism 00:57:28 4. How to Live Life if Anti-Realism is True 01:16:19 5. Postscript: Nietzsche after Nazism
@@bi.johnathan Always well spoken. Please start interviewing philosophers who actually advocate against modern liberalism. How about interview Greg Johnson PhD from Counter Currents publishing, a brilliant nationalist philosopher on Aristotle?
THANKS SO MUCH JOHNATHAN YOUR INFORMATION HAS PROVEN TO BE EXTREMELY INCREMENTAL FOR THE SHIFT OF FOCUS IN MY LIFE AND NOW I AM RISING TO THE UPPER ECHELONS OF THE SOCIOECONOMIC LADDER IN KENYA AS A 20 YEAR OLD. THANKS TO YOU. KINDLY RESPOND IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO INSPIRE ME MORE TO SKYROCKET MY CAREER AND QUICKLY RISING RETAIL BUSINESS.
I shared this with all of my stripper friends. And we are literally addicted to just chill. You bring insight to people you may not have ever even considered. Johnathon, you truly have the gift of the gab when it comes to speaking and interviewing. Thank you so much for all of the hard work you put in.
Terrific content. Love your enthusiasm and the intelectual sparring between the two of you. I wholeheartedly support your work and eagerly anticipate more of this high-quality material that enriches minds and encourages greater responsibility, participation and ownership in our lives.
Good vigorous interview Johnathan! You pinned him down into saying we couldn’t make any definitive moral judgments, that we only have tastes and preferences.
Me and my confirmation bias is really happy to have stumbled upon this video at this stage. My former self wouldn’t have gotten anything out of this since it’s really hard to grasp without a lot of philosophical legwork and the future me might shift my ethical stance. So thank you!
Jonathan has a great understanding of Nietzsche in relation to other philosophers and thus, have very direct questions to relative thoughts that were answered as good as one can. In other words, a good understanding of controversial Nietzschean ideas.
Anti-realism holds not only for the value of things, but also for the meaning and the purpose of things, and even for ‘things’ themselves. Reality-the eternal becoming, the “ever-living flame which kindles, extinguishes, and rekindles itself in regular measures” in the words of Heraclitus-is not a series of ‘individual events’ or ‘distinct moments’, but a continuum; one with no ‘intrinsic nature’ or ‘essence’, no ‘extrinsic source’ or ‘significance’, no ‘first causes’, no ‘final effects’, nothing ‘independent’, ‘dependent’, or ‘interdependent’, and nothing ‘fixed’ or ‘certain’. It is only through the overstimulation of the human intellect that the scene which appears before each of us becomes abstracted, statified, individuated, moralized, and crystallized, with each ‘distinct moment’ or ‘event’ seeming to follow down a ‘purposeful’, ‘necessary’, or even ‘good’ or ‘bad’ causal chain. Reality, however, is not so simple, and hardly so rational. Just as human reason is undergirded and driven by irrational forces, so too is reality as a whole. We are each, after all, just one ‘aspect’ of the whole that is reality, just a single small ‘event’ in the one, overarching, ever-flowing processual phenomena. And the world is one of chaos, not order; order is only an invention, introduction, and imposition… To both Mr. Bi and Mr. Leiter, I say this: it’s not enough to say that a moral statement is just the expression of a “subjective taste” and not an “objective fact”, or that the value of a thing has its ‘source’ in ‘us’. This perspective operates out of the same sort of metaphysical thinking of Christianity, Platonism, and other adjacent doctrines. Remember Nietzsche’s wise words, which he put forward to the idealists and the empiricists of his day: “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena and says ‘[T]here are only facts and nothing more’, I would say: [N]o, facts are precisely what is lacking; all that exists consists of interpretation. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: it may even be nonsense to desire to do such a thing.-‘Everything is subjective’ you say (a figment of your reasoning-mind or imagination, for example), but even this is only interpretation! The ‘subject’ is not something given, but something superimposed by fancy and introduced behind.-Is it necessary to posit an ‘interpreter’ behind the interpretation already to hand? Even that would be fantasy, hypothesis!”
Some people are ‘higher expressions’ than others, at least to those that value cultural refinement over and above all else-those that pursue creative endeavors while lending no credence to the concerns of others have more value, utility, etc. to a culture than those that saddle themselves with sentimentalities in every waking moment of their lives… The latter bog a culture down, diminish its quality-and the tension between the two plays a significant role in the invention of moral positions like egalitarianism or inegalitarianism… And ‘God’, far from being dead, has only changed faces and hands. His new name is-‘Man’! The secular humanism of Mr. Leiter is the modern Christianity, and is precisely the soil out of which such ideologies as socialism grow. In the ever-prescient words of Stirner, “[O]ur atheists are pious people…”
Nietzsche even predicted the rise of secular egalitarian morality as we see in the modern day left, the worship of science & the Silicon Valley nerd is clearly the last man.
Morality is forced and expected to be followed by everybody. If not there is consequences. Personal responsability is out of the equation. Personal ethic is much more useful to everybody.
Often people speak of morals as universally good or bad.”slavery is always bad” “kindness is always good” really it’s subjective and some are more useful than others.
@@bryanutility9609Can slavery of any sort be good? For instance, let’s see an oppressive nation loses a war to a nation they were oppressing and get slaved like previous times. Is the act of slaving those “bad” people, any good? Or is it a strategic way of using the wrong doing? For instance self defense… Although one may be defending himself, the law will take his action initially as murder, then justify the forceful nature of murdering somebody that was going to murder that same individual, making him a victim of a crime and a wrongful forceful action of retaliating. There’s a morality involved! The fact that it’s taken as a justified option, doesn’t make it good! It’s just a response which we all as humans beings are prone to do, but killing somebody is definitely not a good thing. However, the circumstances make a objectively bad decision to be necessary due to the consequences, but not making it “good” either way. Therefore, there’s a moral component involved and not a subjective one. Or would you think that somebody raping a loved one of yours would be subjective? There’s no justification to how that can be a good thing in any way. It’s morally incorrect! Just as slavery, and murder! Morality refers to a higher standard that can’t be humanly imposed, leading us to God, the only being making a law where He’s not subjected to it, being the true lawmaker. Subjectivity leads us to transgressions as humans can’t never agree upon the same things due to their personal beliefs and background (e.g., Trauma).
@mwamba6696 I'm Christian, but also have to say without the study of eastern philosophy and ways I might have never made it here . Some will come to know God by what he is ,some will come to know God by what he isn't. We will all know God. If Jesus met gautama he would politely say ,you've done good for 3000 years I'll take it from here...
@MiyamotoMusashi9 I am also a Christian and I think it's important for one to take time and study philosophy, then compare the teachings of Jesus by do so you can be able to create your own philosophy but picking a few ideas from eastern philosophy and adding to Jesus's teaching.
If Guatama met Jesus and said you have done a great job and I'll take it from here, do you think guatama would continue with Jesus's teaching or he would take he's own route.
32:56 America freeing the slaves is more an improvement in "economics" than in "morality". Furthermore, the economical burden of black slavery in America are already slowly puting slavery out of practice before the war. The war did expedite the process faster and more thoroughly, but the moral improvement is questionable.
Why was there such a big civil war then? In the UK, Britain actually spend more money freeing the slaves than actually profiting from Slavery. A debt that was so big that it was paid off in 2015. 182 years after abolition in 1833 in Britain
Fascism in general, the world’s leading scholar on fascism Emilio Gentile summed it up concisely, “For Mussolini, syndicalism was the most modern embodiment of the spirit of Marxist doctrine, which he added to the myths of his Nietzschean aristocratic philosophy to reach a socialism of quality rather than quantity.”
@@Solla774 For fascism I’d say Hegel was the largest influence. Read the points of Hegel’s philosophy of right, and then the fascist manifesto, it’s basically a copy and paste and in many cases word for word identical
The ontological essence of moral good is love. The objective parameter of ethical validity is the Principle of Reciprocity. With the above in mind... How one is generally inclined to value others is their own intrinsic worth; the extent to which one is inclined to respect the lives & liberties of others defines their own natural rights.
But aren't you also helping us understand him through your own lens ,morality psychology? Can we understand him through our own? Then all come to a converging understanding? This is why when someone calls themselves expert i walk away
Great actor this young man. Why not Julius Ceasar? In Ecce homo Nietzsche wrote Ceasar could have been his father. of course Marx also has psychology, how some one can even say otherwise?
Ahhh non duality. The non-ness of things. The nothingness of everything. The most confusing concept introduced to me through Buddhism and Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita). Truly made me lose my fire and internalize my crazyness that I blamed to a world to dominate
We know from evolutionary psychology & game theory a general structure of “ethics” that spans the human type. We can see how these measured instincts are adapted to various situations. It can at least lend explinatiom to most moral values we’ve seen throughout history. Too bad Nietzsche didn’t live long enough to see the empirical data.
@@bfarzady5212 Nothing we measure is independent from humans who measure. In any case morality is an issue affecting humans & thus that’s like saying biology & human biology should be independent of humans. Morality is biology.
@@bryanutility9609 So in other words, human morality is relative to our evolving biological selves and if some humans enjoy inflicting torture on others so much so that it outweighs the victims suffering, it may in fact be justified? Or, if one human has no sense of justice or respect for the categorical imperative their actions are justified due to their unique biology and psychological makeup? That is not what moral realists believe.
@@bryanutility9609 I already responded to this. Not sure why it isn't showing up. If our morality is evolving and changing subject to our biology, then it is not objective and there are no real moral facts in the world independent of people. You could still be a soft realist and believe morality is subjective to human biology and psychology. But murder, for instance, most realists would not want to say is wrong subject to changes in human biology.
“Some people are objectively wrong” Says the guy whose entire idea of “objectively correct” is whatever he thinks modern science has a decent handle on. All I can say is that the things he thinks are objectively correct will likely be laughed at by science in 1000 years. To put it simply
Indeed, science is not an established canon, but an ever-continuing, ever-renewing process of postulation, experimentation, interpretation, description, and skepticization. Your intuition serves you well, even if the manner in which it’s expressed itself is somewhat crude.
Marx?! The only value Marx ever contributed was in outlining the hierarchical structure and dominative mechanisms of Capitalist societies. Otherwise, he was a quack and an exemplar of ressentiment. How does Mr. Leiter reconcile the ostensible subjectivism of Nietzsche with Marx’s “Labor Theory of Value”? How does he reconcile the notions of aristocratic radicalism with those of humanism and socialism?
@@bryanutility9609 How convenient. As if there were no psychological elements involved in production and consumption. As well, is this how ‘he’ sees things, or just you? Do you think only mindless automatons are involved in economic processes, or are living, breathing organisms involved in them, each with their own interests, beliefs, and motives in acting?
@@aeternaflux I’m relaying to you the guest’s personal view of Marx & Nietzsche. Maybe go back & listen again to better articulate the claim you seem wanting to critique.
@@bryanutility9609 And I’m asking you, specifically, for your perspective on the matter here, but it would seem that you’re entirely set on being the representative of other peoples’ perspectives and not your own-so I suppose that since you’re either unwilling or incapable of providing your own perspective to me, I’ll let it remain with you. Probably better that way. I didn’t ask the questions I asked in my initial comment seeking an answer from you or from anyone else-unless a certain someone by the name of “Brian Leiter” happened upon it in passing (which I surely would welcome, but would never expect to occur). In addition, you’re not technically relaying his view, itself, to me, only your view of his view, which I never asked for and don’t really care about. I do appreciate the sentiment, though. You’ve done a great job “relaying”. Good work.
@@aeternaflux I don’t have much to say about Karl Marx. Nothing there worth my interest tbh. Same reason I don’t entertain “gender theory”. I just see ugly people hating beauty. I’ve never found a summary of his ideas worth considering, but I feel the same about most philosophy. I don’t care about Plato’s forms or Kant’s categorical imperative, or Bible theology etc.. it’s all so tiresome. I only care about psychology, economics, & Nietzsche. Nietzsche at least has a frame for discourse not that I always agree with him. Asking my opinion, yes psychology plays a major role in economics. Modern economics especially game theory has shed light on morality as such. It can make predictions in behavior & inform those who consider it to make even better decisions. If there is anything objective about morality it is as set of functions as the rest of biology.
“There’s no objective right or wrong”… Is this statement itself right? Or in the other words, how can this statement be true then? The thesis is by itself already incorrect. There are objective rights and wrongs.. Simple as that, unless people can’t see that the mentioned statement is contradiction. If there’s no morality, then what Hitler did was subjective not objective. And believe me… What he did was wrong! Objectively Wrong! If there’s no right and wrong, everything is subjective and personal, and that’s a lie.
If one believes God exist ; how can such a person have a strong belief in the efficacy of human nature n desire to lead one to a higher self? Does this dampen the desire for power honor and sexual gratification? Is it that a person should change a feeling of God’s existence , to then focus on the efficacy of human nature and desire to become a higher man? Can the two co-exist? Or will it be a never-ending clash…#unanswered questions
I’ll have to agree with the previous brother, your question is not well structured. But I mean, Plato referred to human beings having 2 natures, flesh/worldly and the logical world, and that was how long ago? The idea of a man being a higher self only exists when the human isn’t in his sinful flesh. Being a “higher self” can be a quite used concept where people don’t understand the real problem we’re immersed in, the sinful nature we’re in and how a just God can’t justify that besides taking punishment upon himself as a random. If you’re truly wants to learn about an existence of God, read: Mere Christianity by C.S. Laws (The same writer of The Chronicles of Narnia) where you will understand better about the true issue and how we as humans can’t amount to surpass besides with Jesus.
@@bfarzady5212 What does it matter? In today's society, that means nothing. He is a regular woke conformist and nothing else. Only they make careers in higher education because they are the domesticated ones.
@@bfarzady5212he makes little quips at things he doesn’t personally like, was kind of annoying. But he did a good job summarizing the topic The real problem with these priestly types is their departments don’t allow scholars who disagree with modern liberal virtues. Where are the pro might makes right anti equality anti human rights philosophers in his department? They exist, they are oppressed because they are just parroting the status quo ultimately.
Oooh, but what a brave man you are! 😂 I’ve been reading Nietzsche for twenty-five years, including a huge range of the secondary literature, and Leiter’s diagnosis of N.’s thought is entirely fair and non-controversial. Leiter is not mischaracterizing his work. N. is a complex, often opaque, sometimes contradictory thinker. Discerning a substantive what we might call political or ideological theory from N. beyond a few often-cited remarks from his oeuvre is a fool’s errand. It is possible that you have fallen under the sway of a particular, dare I say (appropriately) ‘perspective’, on N. that aligns with your ideological biases. An example of such distorted readings began with N.’s sister Elisabeth’s early control over his archive and have manifested in different ways in both academic scholarship and popular culture ever since. But please, if you have a more fulsome response to Leiter’s presentation, citing extensively from N.’s writings, please share with us.
@@EyeByBrian You, yourself, are not free from that. You esteem yourself as superior to this individual, think of yourself as the privileged proprietor of a certain “understanding” of Nietzsche while having had no opportunity to verify that for yourself, and you are all too content to cite your long study of Nietzsche in an attempt at bolstering your authority in the mind of that individual who’s comment you responded to; however, this course of action only spells insecurity and vanity, as well as a baseness of perspective. For all intents and purposes, you and this individual are at approximately the same position. You are both feeble-minded grass-grazers focused more on taking comfort in others than affirming and acting upon your own cupidity. It is the fault of your own myopia, not of Nietzsche’s prose, if you cannot glean from his work his overabundantly apparent political stance. That you use terms like “discernment” illustrates the laziness and the half-hearted ambition with which you’ve set out into the sea that is his oeuvre. When taking that into account, it comes as no surprise to me that your voyage has only been partly bountiful. I do commend you for even setting out in the first place. It takes a certain strength of spirit; but, alas… Your spirit, it would seem, is still not free, and turns back on itself in every other moment of your pitiful existence. There may yet be time for you, but the odds are stacked sorely against you. You must abandon everything and everyone, and set before yourself only yourself, if you are to give to yourself what you futilely attempt to take from Nietzsche and others.
@@morrink Are you in a good place? I ask because in order to take morality into consideration, one first need to be in a good enough place to foster empathy.
"I'm, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolution of Beethoven's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould is a charlitan communist. His entire thesis, has been debunked. He argues that there is no inherent difference in genetic populations that environmental luck is all there is. His entire project is to devalue the greatness of Western civilization as if pigmy’s in rainforest would have invented the internet if only they had easier access to rocks & mud. Well the environment of Europe did produce better genes.
How many Beethoven’s have you met at the local grocery store? How many college grads can even understand quantum physics? All those cotton pickers who could have invented space travel I’m sure.
@@ontologicaldiarrhea6582Yea well some people design & build particle accelerators & most people don’t know how an LED bulb works. The difference isn’t a lack of education rather it’s innate intelligence.
Nietzsche making truth claims while asserting there is no such thing as truth is incomprehensible. It honestly baffles me how his philosophy ever gained as much traction as it did. Mentioning him with the likes of Aristotle and Plato is insane.
@@anon_genz Nietzche’s position on truth is only incomprehensible to you because you lack the capacity necessary to comprehend it-hence your misrepresentation of it and your alignment of yourself with basket-cases such as Plato. This expression of yours, among other things, betrays your own hubris and feelings of fear. You believe wholeheartedly in the notion of ‘objectivity’. You can’t even begin to imagine yourself believing otherwise. You align yourself with whatever is familiar to that notion and to you, take refuge in whoever advocates for it and validates you and your belief in it-and lash out at whoever doesn’t… And I don’t blame you whatsoever for doing so; as I, myself, have done and believed in the same, and then acted out of a need for comfort, consolation, and contentment that is not at all dissimilar from yours. Mark my words, though: only the weakest and the dumbest of men rely on such nonsense as metaphysics to go about living their wretched little existences. You will go your entire life without affirming yourself, and will be marked most notably by your miserable easement and obsolescence of opinion, if you stay set upon it. If you are content with that, then-by all means-stop reading here. Go on about your day. Forget the challenge I’ve posed to your perspective. If you do, you will almost certainly live a lengthy life replete with simplicity and equanimity. For some men-even for most-this is the best kind of life that could ever be lived. If, on the other hand, you do not want to live the lowly life of an insect; if you do not simply ignore me and move on; if you find yourself stuck to my words and filled with hostility at my challenge; if a feeling of rage bubbles up inside you at my poking and prodding of your belief-or if even all you feel in response to me is a mild indignance or intrigue at my assertions-then prepare yourself either for the uprooting of your perspective and an even greater emotional upheaval than the one which you currently experience, or for the further solidification of your dogma and the greater development of your madness; for I am about to describe to you in just what ways exactly your belief system is a heap of trash that deserves only to be thrown into the wastebins of human history and left to rot there with the rest of man’s idiocy. I don’t expect that the expression of my perspective will change your mind on the matter, and, in all honesty, my intention is not to change your mind at all, nor is it my intention to express myself for anybody’s sake but my own. Frankly speaking, I only say what I say here out of an enjoyment of myself-which, in my mind, ought not to be taken as an act of charity or benevolence, as such ‘selflessness’ does not exist anywhere except in the imagination of Christians such as yourself. I only appear magnanimous or megalomaniacal to those without a sense for themselves-while, in reality, I am as selfish, covetous, deceptive, and petty as any other man is, himself, selfish, covetous, deceptive, and petty. I take pride in my words, feel powerful in expressing through them my most intense passions and deep-seated convictions. I am like you in that way, and so, too, are you like me. Thus, I implore of you that you heed my words well, even while understanding that you will not do any such thing; for you, like me, have only yourself before yourself, and are unconcerned altogether with anything that is not you or yours. You will only take from me what you already ‘know’, for you have only the ears to hear whatever is soothing, near and dear to you. And yet, to you, I still say this: The notion of “truth” which you cling to so desperately is absolutely rife with contradiction. It presupposes, first and foremost, that there is an object, a subject, and a perspective which acts as a mediating force between the two of them. As its ‘source’, this perspective has the latter, and as its ‘aim’, it has the ‘impassionate representation’ of the former, the ‘self-preservation’ of the latter, and so on. “Truthfulness” is a purported quality of this perspective, whereby it corresponds-or is ‘observed’ by the ‘subject’ to correspond-in some way, with that ‘object’. But-how might one go about performing such an observation? How, in other words, might one verify that their perspective comports with this ‘object’ when all that one is familiar with, in any way, is their perspective itself, and when this ‘object’ exists entirely independently of that perspective and themselves? Can one remove oneself from oneself; can one observe without observing; can one exit their own perspective and view those ‘things’ which exist ‘outside’ and ‘apart’ from it “objectively”? Indeed, how might one verify that there even is such an ‘object’ in the first place if they are completely incapable of proving it to themselves by way of such observation? Is not ‘seeing’ as good as ‘believing’? Moreover, where in the world of appearances does one view anything ‘fixed’, ‘independent’, or otherwise? Is there any such thing, or are these terms simply inventions and impositions upon some ‘X’ of which one is altogether uncertain of the character-or of whether or not there even is such a character? Does a thought have its ‘source’ in anything-does any ‘thing’ have as its ‘first cause’ anything else-or, rather, is thinking simply one of a variety of unique processual phenomena that are occurring simultaneously in a single, undivided-yet chaotic, and synchronous-whole? Is the notion of ‘I’ reflective of any ‘real-state-of-things’, or is it simply an abstraction: a picking-and-choosing of sorts? Are things really existent ‘in-themselves’, or are ‘things’ just “the boundaries of man?” Conversely, is there any particular ‘source’ or ‘cause’ for the stimuli of sensation, or is this, itself, an oversight and a mischaracterization? Finally, can a man act ‘impassionately’ at any point in his life, or is he fated always only to act in attendance to whater passion predominates within him in each given moment-even in reasoning, for example? Food for thought. Heraclitus, who I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread, put it best, I think. Of metaphysicians such as yourself, he said, “I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your own myopia, not of the nature of things, if you see ‘land’ in the ocean of coming-and-going. You name things as if they were rigid, as though they persistently endured-yet even the ‘stream’ within which you stepped a second time is not the same as the one stepped into before.” To paraphrase, and to apply the statements to you and your perspective specifically: “[Y]ou assume there to be a stable reality independent of your own interpretations, which you refer back to from moment to moment and place to place, but even the phenomena you’ve interpreted a second time is not the same as the one interpreted before…” In other words, you’ve set yourself on a fantasy, and have devalued the only world and person given to you to experience and to be as a consequence. This is the very crux of the argument against the notion of ‘truth’; not only that it is unprovable, but, even more importantly, that it is harmful to believe in. If you value this truth over and above yourself, then all well and good with you. You will live your life at length, and will likely become as embittered and embattled of an old man as those with whom you identify. You will be in the company of Plato, Paul the Apostle, and so on and so forth. If you take solace in that, all well with you. If, on the other hand, you value yourself and life more than ‘truth’, and if you do not want to become a weak old man mired in the mirages of your mind like Plato, then re-read what I’ve said and re-read Nietzsche as well until you’ve been sufficiently shaken from your seat of security and all that is certain to you is the uncertainty of certainty!
Instead of ad reads, my channel is funded directly by people passionate about the Great Books. Help me keep making more episodes with a paid subscription: johnathanbi.com
* Full transcript: open.substack.com/pub/johnathanbi/p/transcript-for-interview-with-brian-leiter-on-moral-antirealism
* Join my email list to be notified of future episodes: greatbooks.io
Companion lecture:
* Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality Explained: ruclips.net/video/M0w2eQ-FcE/видео.html
Professor Leiter's books with relevance to this interview:
* Nietzsche on Morality: amzn.to/3x4QQMc (affiliate)
* My book notes: www.johnathanbi.com/p/nietzsche-on-morality-by-brian-leiter
* Moral Psychology with Nietzsche: amzn.to/3yL9fy3 (affiliate)
* My book notes: www.johnathanbi.com/p/moral-psychology-with-nietzsche-by
TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 0. Introduction
00:02:38 1.1 Prologue: Nietzsche's Moral Views
00:07:12 1.2 Prologue: Nietzsche and Marx
00:12:31 1.3 Prologue: Nietzsche's Inegalitarianism
00:15:46 2. What is Anti-Realism?
00:37:37 3. Arguments & Objections to Anti-Realism
00:57:28 4. How to Live Life if Anti-Realism is True
01:16:19 5. Postscript: Nietzsche after Nazism
Isn’t this guy a communist?
@@bi.johnathan Always well spoken. Please start interviewing philosophers who actually advocate against modern liberalism.
How about interview Greg Johnson PhD from Counter Currents publishing, a brilliant nationalist philosopher on Aristotle?
THANKS SO MUCH JOHNATHAN YOUR INFORMATION HAS PROVEN TO BE EXTREMELY INCREMENTAL FOR THE SHIFT OF FOCUS IN MY LIFE AND NOW I AM RISING TO THE UPPER ECHELONS OF THE SOCIOECONOMIC LADDER IN KENYA AS A 20 YEAR OLD. THANKS TO YOU. KINDLY RESPOND IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO INSPIRE ME MORE TO SKYROCKET MY CAREER AND QUICKLY RISING RETAIL BUSINESS.
@@LOVYTONUI-i2c
Incrementally, I recommend you reconsider your word choices
I shared this with all of my stripper friends. And we are literally addicted to just chill. You bring insight to people you may not have ever even considered. Johnathon, you truly have the gift of the gab when it comes to speaking and interviewing. Thank you so much for all of the hard work you put in.
Terrific content. Love your enthusiasm and the intelectual sparring between the two of you. I wholeheartedly support your work and eagerly anticipate more of this high-quality material that enriches minds and encourages greater responsibility, participation and ownership in our lives.
Good vigorous interview Johnathan! You pinned him down into saying we couldn’t make any definitive moral judgments, that we only have tastes and preferences.
Me and my confirmation bias is really happy to have stumbled upon this video at this stage.
My former self wouldn’t have gotten anything out of this since it’s really hard to grasp without a lot of philosophical legwork and the future me might shift my ethical stance.
So thank you!
empty betamale speak.
He’s feeding us again boys! Good to be back
This is merely mental masturbation.
I'm subbing for the high quality cinemaotography, sound and presentation.
Jonathan has a great understanding of Nietzsche in relation to other philosophers and thus, have very direct questions to relative thoughts that were answered as good as one can. In other words, a good understanding of controversial Nietzschean ideas.
Wow brian leiter?! Hes an expert its awesome to see him
Anti-realism holds not only for the value of things, but also for the meaning and the purpose of things, and even for ‘things’ themselves. Reality-the eternal becoming, the “ever-living flame which kindles, extinguishes, and rekindles itself in regular measures” in the words of Heraclitus-is not a series of ‘individual events’ or ‘distinct moments’, but a continuum; one with no ‘intrinsic nature’ or ‘essence’, no ‘extrinsic source’ or ‘significance’, no ‘first causes’, no ‘final effects’, nothing ‘independent’, ‘dependent’, or ‘interdependent’, and nothing ‘fixed’ or ‘certain’. It is only through the overstimulation of the human intellect that the scene which appears before each of us becomes abstracted, statified, individuated, moralized, and crystallized, with each ‘distinct moment’ or ‘event’ seeming to follow down a ‘purposeful’, ‘necessary’, or even ‘good’ or ‘bad’ causal chain. Reality, however, is not so simple, and hardly so rational. Just as human reason is undergirded and driven by irrational forces, so too is reality as a whole. We are each, after all, just one ‘aspect’ of the whole that is reality, just a single small ‘event’ in the one, overarching, ever-flowing processual phenomena. And the world is one of chaos, not order; order is only an invention, introduction, and imposition…
To both Mr. Bi and Mr. Leiter, I say this: it’s not enough to say that a moral statement is just the expression of a “subjective taste” and not an “objective fact”, or that the value of a thing has its ‘source’ in ‘us’. This perspective operates out of the same sort of metaphysical thinking of Christianity, Platonism, and other adjacent doctrines. Remember Nietzsche’s wise words, which he put forward to the idealists and the empiricists of his day: “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena and says ‘[T]here are only facts and nothing more’, I would say: [N]o, facts are precisely what is lacking; all that exists consists of interpretation. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: it may even be nonsense to desire to do such a thing.-‘Everything is subjective’ you say (a figment of your reasoning-mind or imagination, for example), but even this is only interpretation! The ‘subject’ is not something given, but something superimposed by fancy and introduced behind.-Is it necessary to posit an ‘interpreter’ behind the interpretation already to hand? Even that would be fantasy, hypothesis!”
Intriguing and thought provoking contribution. Thank you!
I love this guest. Energy, charisma and deep knowledge in a great topic.
Some people are ‘higher expressions’ than others, at least to those that value cultural refinement over and above all else-those that pursue creative endeavors while lending no credence to the concerns of others have more value, utility, etc. to a culture than those that saddle themselves with sentimentalities in every waking moment of their lives… The latter bog a culture down, diminish its quality-and the tension between the two plays a significant role in the invention of moral positions like egalitarianism or inegalitarianism…
And ‘God’, far from being dead, has only changed faces and hands. His new name is-‘Man’! The secular humanism of Mr. Leiter is the modern Christianity, and is precisely the soil out of which such ideologies as socialism grow. In the ever-prescient words of Stirner, “[O]ur atheists are pious people…”
Nietzsche even predicted the rise of secular egalitarian morality as we see in the modern day left, the worship of science & the Silicon Valley nerd is clearly the last man.
Morality is forced and expected to be followed by everybody. If not there is consequences. Personal responsability is out of the equation.
Personal ethic is much more useful to everybody.
Morality seems like an excuse to convince people to choose preferences without good reason.
Morals are not good or bad. They are useful.
Often people speak of morals as universally good or bad.”slavery is always bad” “kindness is always good” really it’s subjective and some are more useful than others.
@@bryanutility9609Can slavery of any sort be good? For instance, let’s see an oppressive nation loses a war to a nation they were oppressing and get slaved like previous times. Is the act of slaving those “bad” people, any good?
Or is it a strategic way of using the wrong doing? For instance self defense… Although one may be defending himself, the law will take his action initially as murder, then justify the forceful nature of murdering somebody that was going to murder that same individual, making him a victim of a crime and a wrongful forceful action of retaliating.
There’s a morality involved! The fact that it’s taken as a justified option, doesn’t make it good! It’s just a response which we all as humans beings are prone to do, but killing somebody is definitely not a good thing. However, the circumstances make a objectively bad decision to be necessary due to the consequences, but not making it “good” either way.
Therefore, there’s a moral component involved and not a subjective one. Or would you think that somebody raping a loved one of yours would be subjective? There’s no justification to how that can be a good thing in any way. It’s morally incorrect! Just as slavery, and murder!
Morality refers to a higher standard that can’t be humanly imposed, leading us to God, the only being making a law where He’s not subjected to it, being the true lawmaker. Subjectivity leads us to transgressions as humans can’t never agree upon the same things due to their personal beliefs and background (e.g., Trauma).
@ your phone is made by Chinese slaves & conflict minerals.
Support!
I wouldn't consider buddhism a religion, as soon as statues are made and worshipped the point of the doctrine is missed
Buddhism trips over itself.
I totally agree with you
@mwamba6696 I'm Christian, but also have to say without the study of eastern philosophy and ways I might have never made it here . Some will come to know God by what he is ,some will come to know God by what he isn't. We will all know God. If Jesus met gautama he would politely say ,you've done good for 3000 years I'll take it from here...
@MiyamotoMusashi9 I am also a Christian and I think it's important for one to take time and study philosophy, then compare the teachings of Jesus by do so you can be able to create your own philosophy but picking a few ideas from eastern philosophy and adding to Jesus's teaching.
If Guatama met Jesus and said you have done a great job and I'll take it from here, do you think guatama would continue with Jesus's teaching or he would take he's own route.
@mwamba6696 he said "I'm not a GOD " so I think he would follow
He didn't mean God is dead literally. He means society as a collective considers him dead
For him the Idea of God is itself man made
Food for the mind 😊
Alcohol🍺❌
Milk. 🥛✅
32:56 America freeing the slaves is more an improvement in "economics" than in "morality". Furthermore, the economical burden of black slavery in America are already slowly puting slavery out of practice before the war. The war did expedite the process faster and more thoroughly, but the moral improvement is questionable.
Why was there such a big civil war then? In the UK, Britain actually spend more money freeing the slaves than actually profiting from Slavery. A debt that was so big that it was paid off in 2015. 182 years after abolition in 1833 in Britain
Thank you!
Great video
Hello. This is a comment. Good video.
Awareness is known by awareness alone.
Omg! Jonny B!
"I have a taste for Aryans and no one else."
Yes
What about the guilty conscience
Did I already watch this a couple months ago?
Mussolini is a perfect example of someone who was inspired by Nietzsche and Marx, only Sorel was a larger influence on Mussolini’s thought
Fascism in general, the world’s leading scholar on fascism Emilio Gentile summed it up concisely, “For Mussolini, syndicalism was the most modern embodiment of the spirit of Marxist doctrine, which he added to the myths of his Nietzschean aristocratic philosophy to reach a socialism of quality rather than quantity.”
@@Solla774 For fascism I’d say Hegel was the largest influence. Read the points of Hegel’s philosophy of right, and then the fascist manifesto, it’s basically a copy and paste and in many cases word for word identical
If fascism doesn’t tolerate trans kids then it’s morally superior.
The ontological essence of moral good is love. The objective parameter of ethical validity is the Principle of Reciprocity.
With the above in mind...
How one is generally inclined to value others is their own intrinsic worth; the extent to which one is inclined to respect the lives & liberties of others defines their own natural rights.
But aren't you also helping us understand him through your own lens ,morality psychology? Can we understand him through our own? Then all come to a converging understanding? This is why when someone calls themselves expert i walk away
Great actor this young man.
Why not Julius Ceasar? In Ecce homo Nietzsche wrote Ceasar could have been his father.
of course Marx also has psychology, how some one can even say otherwise?
Ahhh non duality. The non-ness of things. The nothingness of everything. The most confusing concept introduced to me through Buddhism and Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita). Truly made me lose my fire and internalize my crazyness that I blamed to a world to dominate
We know from evolutionary psychology & game theory a general structure of “ethics” that spans the human type. We can see how these measured instincts are adapted to various situations. It can at least lend explinatiom to most moral values we’ve seen throughout history. Too bad Nietzsche didn’t live long enough to see the empirical data.
Objective morality as the realist conceives of it should be independent of any humans.
@@bfarzady5212 Nothing we measure is independent from humans who measure. In any case morality is an issue affecting humans & thus that’s like saying biology & human biology should be independent of humans. Morality is biology.
@@bryanutility9609 So in other words, human morality is relative to our evolving biological selves and if some humans enjoy inflicting torture on others so much so that it outweighs the victims suffering, it may in fact be justified?
Or, if one human has no sense of justice or respect for the categorical imperative their actions are justified due to their unique biology and psychological makeup?
That is not what moral realists believe.
@@bfarzady5212 to your point we want to separate our personal bias from the objective facts if able.
@@bryanutility9609 I already responded to this. Not sure why it isn't showing up. If our morality is evolving and changing subject to our biology, then it is not objective and there are no real moral facts in the world independent of people.
You could still be a soft realist and believe morality is subjective to human biology and psychology.
But murder, for instance, most realists would not want to say is wrong subject to changes in human biology.
“Some people are objectively wrong” Says the guy whose entire idea of “objectively correct” is whatever he thinks modern science has a decent handle on. All I can say is that the things he thinks are objectively correct will likely be laughed at by science in 1000 years. To put it simply
Indeed, science is not an established canon, but an ever-continuing, ever-renewing process of postulation, experimentation, interpretation, description, and skepticization. Your intuition serves you well, even if the manner in which it’s expressed itself is somewhat crude.
Like Cobain ,. No Cobain if no society slavery
Good interview , but you need to stop saying “another way to say what you just said…….”!
The audacity but I guess 💭🙋♀️🧠🕺🤓🙌🏋️
Marx?! The only value Marx ever contributed was in outlining the hierarchical structure and dominative mechanisms of Capitalist societies. Otherwise, he was a quack and an exemplar of ressentiment. How does Mr. Leiter reconcile the ostensible subjectivism of Nietzsche with Marx’s “Labor Theory of Value”? How does he reconcile the notions of aristocratic radicalism with those of humanism and socialism?
He sees them as unrelated frames. Economics & production vs psychology.
@@bryanutility9609 How convenient. As if there were no psychological elements involved in production and consumption. As well, is this how ‘he’ sees things, or just you? Do you think only mindless automatons are involved in economic processes, or are living, breathing organisms involved in them, each with their own interests, beliefs, and motives in acting?
@@aeternaflux I’m relaying to you the guest’s personal view of Marx & Nietzsche. Maybe go back & listen again to better articulate the claim you seem wanting to critique.
@@bryanutility9609 And I’m asking you, specifically, for your perspective on the matter here, but it would seem that you’re entirely set on being the representative of other peoples’ perspectives and not your own-so I suppose that since you’re either unwilling or incapable of providing your own perspective to me, I’ll let it remain with you. Probably better that way. I didn’t ask the questions I asked in my initial comment seeking an answer from you or from anyone else-unless a certain someone by the name of “Brian Leiter” happened upon it in passing (which I surely would welcome, but would never expect to occur). In addition, you’re not technically relaying his view, itself, to me, only your view of his view, which I never asked for and don’t really care about. I do appreciate the sentiment, though. You’ve done a great job “relaying”. Good work.
@@aeternaflux I don’t have much to say about Karl Marx. Nothing there worth my interest tbh. Same reason I don’t entertain “gender theory”. I just see ugly people hating beauty. I’ve never found a summary of his ideas worth considering, but I feel the same about most philosophy. I don’t care about Plato’s forms or Kant’s categorical imperative, or Bible theology etc.. it’s all so tiresome.
I only care about psychology, economics, & Nietzsche. Nietzsche at least has a frame for discourse not that I always agree with him.
Asking my opinion, yes psychology plays a major role in economics. Modern economics especially game theory has shed light on morality as such. It can make predictions in behavior & inform those who consider it to make even better decisions.
If there is anything objective about morality it is as set of functions as the rest of biology.
“There’s no objective right or wrong”… Is this statement itself right? Or in the other words, how can this statement be true then?
The thesis is by itself already incorrect.
There are objective rights and wrongs..
Simple as that, unless people can’t see that the mentioned statement is contradiction. If there’s no morality, then what Hitler did was subjective not objective. And believe me… What he did was wrong! Objectively Wrong!
If there’s no right and wrong, everything is subjective and personal, and that’s a lie.
Invite people who's talk about fyodor dostoevsky.....
If one believes God exist ; how can such a person have a strong belief in the efficacy of human nature n desire to lead one to a higher self? Does this dampen the desire for power honor and sexual gratification? Is it that a person should change a feeling of God’s existence , to then focus on the efficacy of human nature and desire to become a higher man? Can the two co-exist? Or will it be a never-ending clash…#unanswered questions
Would help if you asked a more simple practice question.
I’ll have to agree with the previous brother, your question is not well structured. But I mean, Plato referred to human beings having 2 natures, flesh/worldly and the logical world, and that was how long ago?
The idea of a man being a higher self only exists when the human isn’t in his sinful flesh. Being a “higher self” can be a quite used concept where people don’t understand the real problem we’re immersed in, the sinful nature we’re in and how a just God can’t justify that besides taking punishment upon himself as a random.
If you’re truly wants to learn about an existence of God, read: Mere Christianity by C.S. Laws (The same writer of The Chronicles of Narnia) where you will understand better about the true issue and how we as humans can’t amount to surpass besides with Jesus.
This was very disappointing, he just seems like a generic American social constructivist liberal more than any kind of authority on Nietzsche
What? He has a chaired position in philosophy and law at Chicago. He is not a social constructivist liberal. Where are you getting that?
@@bfarzady5212 What does it matter? In today's society, that means nothing. He is a regular woke conformist and nothing else. Only they make careers in higher education because they are the domesticated ones.
@@bfarzady5212he makes little quips at things he doesn’t personally like, was kind of annoying. But he did a good job summarizing the topic
The real problem with these priestly types is their departments don’t allow scholars who disagree with modern liberal virtues.
Where are the pro might makes right anti equality anti human rights philosophers in his department? They exist, they are oppressed because they are just parroting the status quo ultimately.
Mr. Bi disappointed me. This was just pure woke lecture by a weak man.
Oooh, but what a brave man you are! 😂 I’ve been reading Nietzsche for twenty-five years, including a huge range of the secondary literature, and Leiter’s diagnosis of N.’s thought is entirely fair and non-controversial. Leiter is not mischaracterizing his work. N. is a complex, often opaque, sometimes contradictory thinker. Discerning a substantive what we might call political or ideological theory from N. beyond a few often-cited remarks from his oeuvre is a fool’s errand. It is possible that you have fallen under the sway of a particular, dare I say (appropriately) ‘perspective’, on N. that aligns with your ideological biases. An example of such distorted readings began with N.’s sister Elisabeth’s early control over his archive and have manifested in different ways in both academic scholarship and popular culture ever since. But please, if you have a more fulsome response to Leiter’s presentation, citing extensively from N.’s writings, please share with us.
@@EyeByBrian The soy is strong in you.
@@EyeByBrian You, yourself, are not free from that. You esteem yourself as superior to this individual, think of yourself as the privileged proprietor of a certain “understanding” of Nietzsche while having had no opportunity to verify that for yourself, and you are all too content to cite your long study of Nietzsche in an attempt at bolstering your authority in the mind of that individual who’s comment you responded to; however, this course of action only spells insecurity and vanity, as well as a baseness of perspective. For all intents and purposes, you and this individual are at approximately the same position. You are both feeble-minded grass-grazers focused more on taking comfort in others than affirming and acting upon your own cupidity. It is the fault of your own myopia, not of Nietzsche’s prose, if you cannot glean from his work his overabundantly apparent political stance. That you use terms like “discernment” illustrates the laziness and the half-hearted ambition with which you’ve set out into the sea that is his oeuvre. When taking that into account, it comes as no surprise to me that your voyage has only been partly bountiful. I do commend you for even setting out in the first place. It takes a certain strength of spirit; but, alas… Your spirit, it would seem, is still not free, and turns back on itself in every other moment of your pitiful existence. There may yet be time for you, but the odds are stacked sorely against you. You must abandon everything and everyone, and set before yourself only yourself, if you are to give to yourself what you futilely attempt to take from Nietzsche and others.
@@morrink
Are you in a good place?
I ask because in order to take morality into consideration, one first need to be in a good enough place to foster empathy.
@@morrink Do you have any valid points instead of just name calling? who is soy?
Wrong and good have as many interpretations as there are humans on earth. Not precise at all.
Wrong and right, good & bad depend on “if” statements to be true.
"I'm, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolution of Beethoven's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould is a charlitan communist. His entire thesis, has been debunked. He argues that there is no inherent difference in genetic populations that environmental luck is all there is. His entire project is to devalue the greatness of Western civilization as if pigmy’s in rainforest would have invented the internet if only they had easier access to rocks & mud. Well the environment of Europe did produce better genes.
He’s also Jewish. Just like Sapolsky. Both want you to feel guilty about the better accomplishments of your genes.
How many Beethoven’s have you met at the local grocery store? How many college grads can even understand quantum physics? All those cotton pickers who could have invented space travel I’m sure.
@@bryanutility9609 there is literally not a single human who understands quantum physics
@@ontologicaldiarrhea6582Yea well some people design & build particle accelerators & most people don’t know how an LED bulb works. The difference isn’t a lack of education rather it’s innate intelligence.
Niech was a delusional crazy person ...
Good until objective confirmation about trump lol
Judge, according to my morality, i wasn't doing anything wrong.
Judge:😂
Taking shots at trump; instant moron in my book.
Why is what he said of Trump moronic? If Nietzsche were around today, he would certainly call Trump an exceptionally weak man
Nietzsche making truth claims while asserting there is no such thing as truth is incomprehensible. It honestly baffles me how his philosophy ever gained as much traction as it did. Mentioning him with the likes of Aristotle and Plato is insane.
Sounds like you don’t have any idea about Nietzsche much less the concept of truth. It baffles you for this reason.
@@bryanutility9609 Sounds like you have a concept of Truth that is illogical and contradictory.
@@anon_genz Nietzche’s position on truth is only incomprehensible to you because you lack the capacity necessary to comprehend it-hence your misrepresentation of it and your alignment of yourself with basket-cases such as Plato. This expression of yours, among other things, betrays your own hubris and feelings of fear. You believe wholeheartedly in the notion of ‘objectivity’. You can’t even begin to imagine yourself believing otherwise. You align yourself with whatever is familiar to that notion and to you, take refuge in whoever advocates for it and validates you and your belief in it-and lash out at whoever doesn’t… And I don’t blame you whatsoever for doing so; as I, myself, have done and believed in the same, and then acted out of a need for comfort, consolation, and contentment that is not at all dissimilar from yours. Mark my words, though: only the weakest and the dumbest of men rely on such nonsense as metaphysics to go about living their wretched little existences. You will go your entire life without affirming yourself, and will be marked most notably by your miserable easement and obsolescence of opinion, if you stay set upon it. If you are content with that, then-by all means-stop reading here. Go on about your day. Forget the challenge I’ve posed to your perspective. If you do, you will almost certainly live a lengthy life replete with simplicity and equanimity. For some men-even for most-this is the best kind of life that could ever be lived.
If, on the other hand, you do not want to live the lowly life of an insect; if you do not simply ignore me and move on; if you find yourself stuck to my words and filled with hostility at my challenge; if a feeling of rage bubbles up inside you at my poking and prodding of your belief-or if even all you feel in response to me is a mild indignance or intrigue at my assertions-then prepare yourself either for the uprooting of your perspective and an even greater emotional upheaval than the one which you currently experience, or for the further solidification of your dogma and the greater development of your madness; for I am about to describe to you in just what ways exactly your belief system is a heap of trash that deserves only to be thrown into the wastebins of human history and left to rot there with the rest of man’s idiocy. I don’t expect that the expression of my perspective will change your mind on the matter, and, in all honesty, my intention is not to change your mind at all, nor is it my intention to express myself for anybody’s sake but my own. Frankly speaking, I only say what I say here out of an enjoyment of myself-which, in my mind, ought not to be taken as an act of charity or benevolence, as such ‘selflessness’ does not exist anywhere except in the imagination of Christians such as yourself. I only appear magnanimous or megalomaniacal to those without a sense for themselves-while, in reality, I am as selfish, covetous, deceptive, and petty as any other man is, himself, selfish, covetous, deceptive, and petty. I take pride in my words, feel powerful in expressing through them my most intense passions and deep-seated convictions. I am like you in that way, and so, too, are you like me. Thus, I implore of you that you heed my words well, even while understanding that you will not do any such thing; for you, like me, have only yourself before yourself, and are unconcerned altogether with anything that is not you or yours. You will only take from me what you already ‘know’, for you have only the ears to hear whatever is soothing, near and dear to you. And yet, to you, I still say this:
The notion of “truth” which you cling to so desperately is absolutely rife with contradiction. It presupposes, first and foremost, that there is an object, a subject, and a perspective which acts as a mediating force between the two of them. As its ‘source’, this perspective has the latter, and as its ‘aim’, it has the ‘impassionate representation’ of the former, the ‘self-preservation’ of the latter, and so on. “Truthfulness” is a purported quality of this perspective, whereby it corresponds-or is ‘observed’ by the ‘subject’ to correspond-in some way, with that ‘object’. But-how might one go about performing such an observation? How, in other words, might one verify that their perspective comports with this ‘object’ when all that one is familiar with, in any way, is their perspective itself, and when this ‘object’ exists entirely independently of that perspective and themselves? Can one remove oneself from oneself; can one observe without observing; can one exit their own perspective and view those ‘things’ which exist ‘outside’ and ‘apart’ from it “objectively”? Indeed, how might one verify that there even is such an ‘object’ in the first place if they are completely incapable of proving it to themselves by way of such observation? Is not ‘seeing’ as good as ‘believing’? Moreover, where in the world of appearances does one view anything ‘fixed’, ‘independent’, or otherwise? Is there any such thing, or are these terms simply inventions and impositions upon some ‘X’ of which one is altogether uncertain of the character-or of whether or not there even is such a character? Does a thought have its ‘source’ in anything-does any ‘thing’ have as its ‘first cause’ anything else-or, rather, is thinking simply one of a variety of unique processual phenomena that are occurring simultaneously in a single, undivided-yet chaotic, and synchronous-whole? Is the notion of ‘I’ reflective of any ‘real-state-of-things’, or is it simply an abstraction: a picking-and-choosing of sorts? Are things really existent ‘in-themselves’, or are ‘things’ just “the boundaries of man?” Conversely, is there any particular ‘source’ or ‘cause’ for the stimuli of sensation, or is this, itself, an oversight and a mischaracterization? Finally, can a man act ‘impassionately’ at any point in his life, or is he fated always only to act in attendance to whater passion predominates within him in each given moment-even in reasoning, for example? Food for thought.
Heraclitus, who I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread, put it best, I think. Of metaphysicians such as yourself, he said, “I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your own myopia, not of the nature of things, if you see ‘land’ in the ocean of coming-and-going. You name things as if they were rigid, as though they persistently endured-yet even the ‘stream’ within which you stepped a second time is not the same as the one stepped into before.”
To paraphrase, and to apply the statements to you and your perspective specifically: “[Y]ou assume there to be a stable reality independent of your own interpretations, which you refer back to from moment to moment and place to place, but even the phenomena you’ve interpreted a second time is not the same as the one interpreted before…”
In other words, you’ve set yourself on a fantasy, and have devalued the only world and person given to you to experience and to be as a consequence. This is the very crux of the argument against the notion of ‘truth’; not only that it is unprovable, but, even more importantly, that it is harmful to believe in. If you value this truth over and above yourself, then all well and good with you. You will live your life at length, and will likely become as embittered and embattled of an old man as those with whom you identify. You will be in the company of Plato, Paul the Apostle, and so on and so forth. If you take solace in that, all well with you. If, on the other hand, you value yourself and life more than ‘truth’, and if you do not want to become a weak old man mired in the mirages of your mind like Plato, then re-read what I’ve said and re-read Nietzsche as well until you’ve been sufficiently shaken from your seat of security and all that is certain to you is the uncertainty of certainty!
@@anon_genz You’re not saying anything of substance & you’re just wrong.
@@bryanutility9609 The word "wrong" has absolutely no meaning coming from the likes of you.
like to see Jordan Peterson conversation on Nietzsche
Peterson dishonestly engages with Nietzsche