▶︎ 0:02 There's a sense in which it's only at the end of a journey that you can actually begin it. You can only take it then because only then do you know what exactly you're taking. So now that we're at the end of this, we can look over it and take stock and see where we've come and perhaps a bit of what it meant.
▶︎ 0:20 We began with Descartes, who himself began again. He decided to begin his own education again and begin all of Western civilization again, to whatever degree he could. He had the best education, but he was unsatisfied with it, and he felt that among other things, besides just not being certain enough, besides just not being practical enough, he had not educated himself.
▶︎ 0:49 For Descartes and for many philosophers, the only way you can actually know something is if you learn it yourself, if you come to understand it on your own efforts.
▶︎ 1:02 And that's what all of methodological doubt was. His whole project was to think through these thoughts himself, that they were going to be his beliefs, not beliefs that he simply swallowed down, not beliefs he took on authority, not beliefs that he believed because everyone else believed, but beliefs he believed because he had examined them, he had thought them through and actually genuinely believed them.
▶︎ 1:28 There's a sense in which he was really recreating his self, because if your body is what you eat, then your mind is what you believe.
▶︎ 1:40 And he talks about his famous line, of course, is, "I think, therefore I am." But you could think of that as, "I think for myself for the first time, and therefore I am a genuine self now for the first time. Only now am I myself." He was unsatisfied with the world that he lived in, so he made it the world that he wanted, a world, and that's the world that we live in, a world of jets and instantaneous communication and open heart transplants.
▶︎ 2:22 And he believed that there were, in principle, no limits on what we could do because there were no limits on what we could know. We could know the fundamental structure of the universe. We could know the categories that everything falls into. We could know the very nature of God.
▶︎ 2:43 And this is what Hume objected to. Hume felt that Descartes didn't understand the very thing that he did, which was doubting. Descartes thought he could doubt beliefs when, in fact, we can't doubt some of our beliefs. We cannot doubt that the second billiard ball will move when the first billiard ball hits it because our brain will expect it no matter what we think.
▶︎ 3:12 All the conscious thought that Descartes went through is all on the surface, and the really important stuff happens beneath our awareness in this hard wiring, this custom or habit. And that is not susceptible to control or change. That is not susceptible to thinking, to... it's not a belief. It's not something that we come to, it's something that we simply are.
▶︎ 3:41 And that is a limit that we cannot get beyond for Hume, and it's a limit that isn't a limit but is enabling, because it's what enables us to make use of our past experience when reason could not. If we were to become purely rational thinking things as Descartes wanted, Hume says we would die immediately because we could not sustain the beliefs that guide us through our lives.
▶︎ 4:07 Now where Hume objected to Descartes, Kant reconciles Hume and Descartes. Kant salvages what he sees of value in each and cuts away what he sees as wrong in each to bring together these two schools of rationalism and empiricism that were warring for 200 years until they became a beautiful unified coherent system in his philosophy. Whereas Hume used Descartes' doubts, in Hume's opinion, better than Descartes did, Kant used Hume's idea that we are imposing ideas like causality onto our experience better than Hume did.
▶︎ 4:59 Each one of these philosophers has taken ideas from people before them and adapting them, extending them, developing them, deepening them, applying them in new categories, in new applications and new circumstances to improve them. This is how the history of philosophy works.
▶︎ 5:17 It's a long, long conversation where everyone tries to make the previous ideas better by making them their own.
▶︎ 5:27 And Nietzsche then thinks that he can take Kant's ideas, that we are imposing our concepts on experience, that we have this transcendental illusion, better than Kant had. Because for Nietzsche, yes, we now have a science. We now can do some amazing things, but what's the point if none of them matter? We now can live much longer, but we have nothing to live for. The very thing that gave us all this knowledge has been undercutting the significance of it all along.
▶︎ 6:08 We can't go back, of course. We can't retreat, but we can move forward. We can learn the transcendental illusion that Kant said we have. We can learn that we are the ones doing the organizing. We are the ones coming up with these ideas that we think are outside of us, and the most important one being the values by which we live. We think those are handed to us by God. We think those are out there, objective in the world, when in fact, we have been creating them all along.
▶︎ 6:39 That initially fills us with horror because that seems paltry, that seems like it cannot be enough because we're used to the idea of objective values. But if we go all the way through that nihilism to the other end to get through it to the other side, we can realize that this is the salvation. We can realize that our ability to create these values, which is what we've had all along, is what also enables us to create new ones, better ones, ones that are faithful to the Earth instead of to some transcendent deity, that will make life better instead of demeaning life in favor of the afterlife. And this is what he tried to
▶︎ 7:24 dedicate himself to because he thought that our greatest strength is our creativity. Our greatest strength is our ability to always come up with new ideas, new values, new avenues to explore rather than to remain at home. Kant wanted to make a home for us. Nietzsche wants to go exploring to see what else is out there.
▶︎ 7:56 Because for Nietzsche, we are the animal that has no limits. We are the animal that goes beyond whatever limits we find. Evolution is our true creator for Nietzsche, rather than God. And the single-cell amoeba that begins life could not conceive of or imagine what it'd be like to be a fish, which is where it ends up. It couldn't think of what life would be like in that form.
▶︎ 8:35 And the fish couldn't comprehend what it'd be like to walk on the surface of the Earth and breathe air, and the land dwellers had no idea what it'd be like to take flight, to fly through the air. And none of them could have the faintest inkling what it'd be like to be an animal unrestricted by evolution, unbound by instinct, to be able to turn around and comprehend the very process that led up to its ability to comprehend that process and to control it.
▶︎ 9:10 And this drive to surpass what we have been, to be more than what we are, is what we are. It is our essence to be more than any essence that we find ourselves to be.
▶︎ 9:24 This is how the history of philosophy has worked. This is how we've seen every thinker react to the previous thinkers, and this is what you have done in your life. You started out as a single-celled being, and then you breathed liquid in the womb, and then you crawled on land, and then you thought, became a thinking being. Through this thinking process, you have fundamentally changed yourself over and over and over again.
▶︎ 9:58 Think of who you were as a 15-year-old. The 15-year-old self could not have made the choices that you make today. The 15-year-old self had radically different values, saw the world in a completely different way, thought about things in a completely different way, made choices according to totally different values than the person you are, could not have even recognized some of the thoughts that you have, couldn't have thought them, couldn't have seen the value in the values that you now take to be defining of your life.
▶︎ 10:38 You have become a completely different person, and the 10-year-old self couldn't have recognized the 15-year-old self. Between 10 and 15, if you passed puberty, you practically became a different species. You developed a whole new sense. You saw a whole new dimension of the world. You have been changing species throughout your whole life.
▶︎ 11:02 And if we can take that backwards view and turn it towards the future, who will you be? Who can you be? What are your limitations? That's the question that Hume and Kant asked. What will you do to overcome those limitations? That is Nietzsche's question. And Kant wanted us to grow up. Nietzsche wants us to never stop growing.
▶︎ 11:40 Nietzsche wants the you five years from now to be unrecognizable to the you today, just as the you today is unrecognizable to the 15-year-old, the 15-year-old to the 10-year-old. He wants you to keep evolving, keep growing, wants you to never have a constitutive view of yourself as having become who you really are, but a regulative self.
▶︎ 12:02 Who can you become? What else is out there? What new thoughts can you have? I hope that thinking these thoughts of these four philosophers has opened up your horizon at least a little bit into the possibilities of what else you can think, and I hope you continue exploring.