▶︎ 0:00 "I know my fate. One day, my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys the like of which has never been dreamed of. There will be wars, the like of which has never yet been seen on earth. I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far. This does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial."
▶︎ 0:57 That was written by Nietzsche, the beginning of the last chapter of his last book, November 1888, his autobiography. He was looking backwards at his life, and looking forwards towards his fate. He knew that he would be intimately connected with what was coming, and he knew that what was coming was going to be catastrophic. He foresaw a trauma that was coming for all of Western civilization, in his opinion. And he said there would be wars, the like of which we had never seen before, and the bloodshed in the first half of the twentieth century was unprecedented.
▶︎ 1:49 He saw this because he himself had gone through the experience he saw coming. He says that he is here to tell us the history of the next two centuries, because he foresaw it. He thought of himself as a canary in a coal mine. It used to be when people would go into mines, there was always the possibility of very poisonous gas that could kill all of them. And it was odorless and colorless, so they wouldn't know until it was too late.
▶︎ 2:27 So they'd bring a canary with them, and a canary is very small, heart beats very quickly. The poison would get into its system very quickly and it would croak long before it became harmful to the people. So they'd bring the canary in and watch it, and then when the canary died, they knew that was the danger sign, and they would run out. And Nietzsche feels like he is serving that function for all of us.
▶︎ 2:52 He is the first person through this experience that he calls nihilism, a belief in nothingness that he thinks is coming for everyone, that he thinks will undermine whatever foundations we have. We have seen Descartes and Hume and Kant building foundations for us. Nietzsche thinks it's futile. None of it can withstand the nihilism that he sees coming. And his responsibility as he sees it is not just to warn us of it, but to try to find a way through it, because he has gone through it. He has survived it and come out the other end, and he's going to try to help all of us through it as well.
▶︎ 3:46 You see, this now is at the end of the 19th century. We began at the beginning of the 17th century, in 1619 with Descartes' doubt. Descartes wanted science. He felt that the education that was available of the day, the way that people gathered and established knowledge could not create the kind of aids that he felt were necessary for a good life.
▶︎ 4:17 He wanted machines to help us achieve great accomplishments. He wanted medicine that would increase our lifespan, and he did it. By doubting everything that was possible to doubt, he was able to rebuild science, rebuild knowledge on a stronger foundation that would withstand his doubt.
▶︎ 4:50 And now we are almost 300 years later, and now Descartes' revolution, along with other people, like Galileo and Bacon and Newton, the Scientific Revolution has succeeded. And what Nietzsche sees is that it has had unforeseen consequences, that the headlong rush into finding the scientific understanding of the universe has been astonishingly successful.
▶︎ 5:45 But it also simultaneously wiped away what had been previously giving meaning to our lives. In order for Descartes to establish a new scientific way of learning about the world, of studying the world, he first had to get rid of the old way of understanding the world. And the old way was, very simplistically, that we were created by a benevolent, loving God for a purpose. We were put here to serve God, to love God, to fight the cosmic battle that would determine the fate of the universe. That's pretty exciting stuff. Every day we wake up and we are there to serve God to help good defeat evil. Every action you do is seen, every action you do is important.
▶︎ 6:50 What you do is significant, and you will be rewarded with the ultimate reward, eternal bliss forever, if you do what you are told to do. You know what you need to do. You've been given an instruction manual. The Bible tells you, this is what it is to be a human. This is what it is to be successful. This is the right way to live, and all you have to do is follow its rules. Everything that is was put here by God purposefully. Everything that happens occurs because God allows it to happen or arranged it to happen. Everything means something.
▶︎ 7:42 But Descartes gives us a universe of material objects. All there is around us are just physical things. It has no significance, no meaning. It's just objects taking up space. He believed in God, he proved the existence of God, but the world around us has been drained of the very dimension of meaningfulness. Science does not recognize the category of significance. Science recognizes facts.
▶︎ 8:27 Science recognizes what does happen, not what should happen. It recognizes the physical events and objects, not the spiritual importance. Descartes gave us a science that gave us many, many, many more years to live. But he took away the reason to live those years. And this is what Nietzsche sees.
▶︎ 9:02 Nietzsche sees a universe that has been stripped of meaning. We used to be at the center of the universe. The entire, all of reality was built for us, and we were both figuratively and literally in the center of the universe. It was a geocentric world. We were the center. The sun goes around us, the planets go around us, the stars goes around us, because of course they do. It's all for us.
▶︎ 9:37 And then Copernicus came along and said, "No, no, no, no. The sun's at the center and we're just a rock that's going around the sun among a whole bunch of other rocks, and the sun is just one star among others." The estimate that I've read, 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and we just happen to be around one. This galaxy is 200,000 light years across. It takes 230 million years for it to rotate once. And there are at least 170 billion galaxies. If not, a higher estimate was there are two trillion galaxies. What do we matter? What is the point of us?
▶︎ 10:44 Now, at least we are at the pinnacle of living beings. We're at the top of the food chain. We are the greatest living being because God gave Adam dominion over the animals, until Darwin took that away in 1859 and said, "No, we're just another animal. We're the hairless apes." And what produced us is chance. It's regulated chance, but it's randomness. It's arbitrary. It's circumstances in the environment that just happened to change, determining what species will survive and what won't.
▶︎ 11:28 And the point of life is surviving long enough to pass on your genes so that your offspring can survive long enough to pass on their genes, that their offspring can survive long enough to pass on their genes, and that's it. There's no purpose. There's no creator. There's no reason for any of this. There's no plan. There's no goal. It all just happened.
▶︎ 11:57 And this is nihilism. Nietzsche says, "The question why gets no answer." There is no because. There is no why. There's no reason. You see, suffusing the universe with reasons, as science does, took away the reason for anything, because all we have are causal explanations which don't give us a point, don't give us significance or meaningfulness. It takes those away.
▶︎ 12:43 And Nietzsche said people would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe in. They will take up destructive purposes. They will be harmful. There will be blood in the streets rather than have no belief at all. We are a belief-hungry species, and we need something. And science, the very thing that we have seen Descartes, Hume, and Kant dedicate themselves to founding, to justifying, to explaining, to understanding, has taken that away from us.
▶︎ 13:29 Kant worried that we could be rein dogs if we don't have an understanding of the universe, that all of our orientation would be taken away if we can't have basic scientific understanding of the universe. Well, Nietzsche says it's science itself that's the rein. It's science itself that has taken away our orientation in the world, literally. Orientation comes from the word orient, because you would face east where Jerusalem is, because you take your orientation in space like you take your orientation in life, from where your God comes from. Without that, where are we going? Where are we heading in our lives? What does it matter?
▶︎ 14:22 And this general phenomenon is what Nietzsche calls the death of God. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. "Has he got lost?" asked one. "Did he lose his way like a child?" asked another. "Is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a journey, emigrated?" Thus they yelled and laughed.
▶︎ 15:01 The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously, backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. There has never been a greater deed, and whoever's born after us, for the sake of this deed he'll belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
▶︎ 16:26 Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners, and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last, he threw his lantern on the ground and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said. "My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering. It has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time. The light of the stars requires time. Deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves."
▶︎ 17:09 Very, very famous passage. And notice some of the phrasing that Nietzsche uses. "Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? We have unchained this earth from its sun. Is there any up or down?" He is talking about being adrift. He's talking about the lack of orientation. He's talking about the universe becoming completely blank, being an inhospitable environment, that it's just a physical location and not home anymore. And this is the trauma that he sees coming.
▶︎ 17:58 This is the catastrophe that he thinks we are plunging headlong towards, and that we have no idea how to handle. We've had one way for millennia to give our lives meaning, and this way is not working anymore. This way has been hacked apart by science. We thought, "Well, it's an eternal being. It's an omnipotent god who is giving us meaning. It's a being that cannot ever go away." That's as reliable as it can be, until belief in that being falters. And it turns out we are the turkey, and Thanksgiving has come.
▶︎ 19:02 Notice in the story, something that people don't usually notice. We think that the people that the madman is speaking to are pearl-clutching religious people who are horrified at what he's saying, but that's not the case at all. They're atheists. They don't believe in God either. The difference is, they make light of it. They joke about it.
▶︎ 19:29 What the madman knows that they don't isn't that there is no God. They all agree on that. What the madman knows is the gravity of the situation, that this is an event that splits history in two. There is before and after, that this fundamentally changes everything.
▶︎ 19:57 Now, Nietzsche is not writing this to scare us or depress us, nor is he creating this. Who killed God? You and I. God is no longer. This is an analogy. He's not saying there was a deity, and now he has croaked. That's silly.
▶︎ 20:25 What he's saying is that for a long, long time, religion sustained us as a civilization. Religion structured our lives. It told us who and what we were, where we were going, what things meant, why anything was important. That's what's gone. That's what has melted and dripped away, leaving nothing in its place. And again, humans would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe.
▶︎ 21:05 So what Nietzsche wants to do is show us that this is happening, he's not making it happen, and help give us a way through it. So the death of God is not a statement about the change in the status of the deity, but of our belief in the deity. Nietzsche thinks there never has been a God before. It's always been us all along. It's always been our hand up the great sock puppet in the sky, all this time. And that itself could be the key to our survival of this phase.
▶︎ 21:53 He says, "For a person cannot, can never shake off a delusion. He fancies that he is a spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life. He calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this life. We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before. The whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, in itself? According to its nature, nature is always valueless, but has been given value, and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created a world that concerns man, but precisely this knowledge we lack. We fail to recognize our best power and underestimate ourselves. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be."
▶︎ 23:15 That last line is perhaps the motto of all of Nietzsche's work. "We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be." And he's trying to correct that. But this delusion, we are under delusion that we are merely a spectator of the world when we're really creating it. Really, we're fashioning it. That should sound familiar to you.
▶︎ 23:39 You should recognize that idea, because that is Kant's transcendental illusion. Kant described the transcendental illusion as the idea that all the features of experience that we are creating, that we're producing, we believe are actually out there in the world. It is the person with the pink sunglasses looking at a white wall, thinking that the wall is pink, not that their glasses are making it pink. We take what is a subjective effect, and we think that it's an objective fact outside of us. This was Kant's great insight. This was what enabled him to answer the question, how are a priori synthetic judgments possible, and what enabled him to establish science.
▶︎ 24:29 And Nietzsche's agreeing with him here. Nietzsche's saying, "Yes, you are right! We are active! We do constitute the world around us." He says, "Only we have created the world that concerns man." That's exactly what Kant says, that we have created the world for us, that our minds have imposed the forms of intuition and the concepts of understanding to create the world for us. This is a world for Kant that is scientifically knowable. And Nietzsche agrees we don't realize that. It's hidden from us. We think that that's really out there in the world.
▶︎ 25:11 But here's the difference. There are two very important differences. Number one, Nietzsche is not talking about science. He believes that's true as well. But much, much more important is values. What we have created are the values that guide us. We are under the delusion here too. We're under the transcendental illusion that values are out there in the world, values are objective, good and bad are real, are independent of us, and we merely obey them.
▶︎ 25:53 This, of course, gets its ultimate form in religion. God is the most real entity in the universe, God determines what is good and bad, and all we can do is recognize it and obey it. But if there never was a God, then where did these come from? Where did the rules come from? Where did the values come from? They were always from us.
▶︎ 26:22 It was always us making those values. It was always us saying, "This is good and that is bad." The commandments were written by us. We simply were under the delusion that they weren't. We attributed them to a deity because it sounded a lot better. It was a lot more authoritative if a big, angry dude in the sky commanded them than this little guy next to me. So we used that as a rhetorical device to give our values and our commandments and our ideas more weight, more authority, and it backfired.
▶︎ 27:03 It worked great for a long time, but now it's backfired when we no longer can believe in it. And it's gone worse than backfire, because now that's the only kind of value that we can believe in. Only a value given to us from on high is a true value. A value that you and I come up with, that's nothing. We scoff at that. That doesn't seem significant.
▶︎ 27:32 But that's all that there ever has been. What we've been relying on all along has been our creation, has been what we have been writing, what we have been making. We have been the creators of all this value all along! And it worked for a long time. We were able to create and sustain meaning for thousands of years.
▶︎ 27:59 The only thing that's changed is that the delusion has fallen away, and now we see our hand up the puppet. Now, that's what's creating despair, because that doesn't seem like it's enough. If it's just me, then it doesn't mean anything. But this is what Nietzsche is trying to convince us of. He's trying to convince us that that's wrong. He says, "This is our best power." He says, "We underestimate ourselves. Our best power is the power to create." No other species can do that.
▶︎ 28:48 Every other species is locked into their instincts. Every other species is pre-programmed with what is good and what is bad, with what they will do. We are the species that can create. We are the species that can go beyond any biological programming that has been put in there.
▶︎ 29:08 This is where he will disagree with Hume. Hume thinks we are genetically, so to speak, genetically hardwired to react a certain way to stimuli. Kant thinks we are hardwired with specific forms of intuition, concepts, and understanding, ideas of reason, and that's it. Nietzsche says, "We are the animal that has no horizon. We are the animal that overcomes limitations. We are the animal whose horizon is fundamentally open."
▶︎ 29:52 What has been closing it has been us. Yes, on the one hand, attributing these values to a deity has given it this great authority, but also has locked these in place. It has locked the same values in place for 2,000 years while our civilization has changed fundamentally. We're still locked in the same rules, we're still locked in the same laws, the same values, the same ideas of what's good and what's bad, while everything else has changed! This same idea that seems so corrosive, evolution, can also be liberating.
▶︎ 30:38 Because evolution says, yes, there's no purpose. That means we can make our own purposes. Evolution says there's no goal. Well, that means we can point it in any direction that we want.
▶︎ 30:58 We can embrace the change, the mutability of evolution instead of fearing it, instead of being horrified by it. We can take up the power of adapting to new circumstances, the only species that can really do that, and make that the core of our new values, the value of making new values, the capacity to create.
▶︎ 31:31 You see, Kant said, "We need to treat the ultimate goals of science as regulative and not constitutive." That the idea of having complete final answers once and for all, complete answers, you can't ever get that. If you think you can, that's constitutive, and it's either going to be frustrating because you can't get them or you're going to settle prematurely because you think you did. Instead, Kant said, "We treat these ultimate answers as regulative." We seek them even though we know we can't get them because the seeking of them is productive, is fruitful, keeps prodding us, keeps provoking us, keeps us going.
▶︎ 32:16 Nietzsche says, "That's fantastic. I love that. But you, Kant, failed by your own standards because you made the most important pursuit constitutive instead of regulative, and that is the pursuit of the structure of the mind. You, Kant, decided that you found the one and only final structure of the mind, the two forms of intuition, the twelve concepts of the understanding, the three ideas of reason, and that's it." That's it. That's how the mind is structured, period, forever. Forever and ever and ever. And that's how we get universal knowledge, that these laws we find in math and science will always be true.
▶︎ 33:18 Kant wrote Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry into the structure of the brain through our intuition and our understanding. But we don't have them. We don't believe those anymore. We've had scientific revolutions since then. Einstein and quantum mechanics have shown, Einstein showed that time and space are not Newtonian and Euclidean. Einstein had a fundamental revolution in how we understand time and space and the nature of time and space.
▶︎ 33:56 And if our intuition, if part of our brain was locked into a single structure, we would not have been able to even think of relativistic time and space, and that means we wouldn't have all kinds of technology. We wouldn't have GPS satellites. GPS only works if you take into account the time dilation that Einstein said would happen. We only are able to find our way through, get to Starbucks by Google Maps because of Einstein. If Kant was right, we wouldn't be able to.
▶︎ 34:37 Kant said, "We've got one structure and that's it, and we're locked into it." Hooray. Nietzsche says, "That's horrifying. I don't want to be locked into one. I want new ideas. I want to be open. I want to always be growing, improving, increasing, becoming more than I have been." And that's the way science works and that's the way philosophy works.
▶︎ 35:03 Each one of these philosophers, Descartes and Hume and Kant, thought they found the right answer. They felt they found the final answer until the next one came along. They said, "That's great, but I can make it better." Nietzsche is saying, "My answer is not gonna take its place among just another one of these. My answer is the whole process. My answer is the way that we continuously improve on ourselves." It's not Descartes or Hume or Kant. It's Descartes and Hume and Kant. It's the and. It's the process. It's the ever-improving, increasing, changing ideas.
▶︎ 35:57 What Nietzsche says is that we need to be regulative in relation to the very structure of our mind. He thinks that we've been way, way, way too focused on science. He's not anti-science. He's not rejecting science. But we've taken it as the paradigm that we base everything on. And he says, "Well, what about art?" Art doesn't try to find the one answer that will be universal. Art celebrates lots of answers. Art celebrates multiplicity. Art celebrates not finding, but making. Not discovery, but creativity. And that is our greatest strength.
▶︎ 36:53 Nietzsche thinks that the greatest artist is the artist in the medium of concepts. You see, every art form, it takes a certain medium. Sculptures are the medium of stone. They take stone and they make sculptures out of it. Musicians take sound. Well, philosophers are artists in the medium of ideas, of concepts. They're not discovering something, they're creating new possibilities, new ways to think, new ways to live, new ways to love, new ways to be.
▶︎ 37:36 He says around the creators of new ideas, the world turns silently, 'cause we don't realize it, but those are the people who push us forward, who open new paths, who push evolution to the next step. The concepts, the structure of the mind that Kant
▶︎ 38:02 gives us, Nietzsche thinks has a lot of value to it. But, and here's the second difference with Kant, we have control over those concepts. They're not hardwired. They're not autonomic, like the heartbeat or digestion. Most of the time, yes, yes, yes. For most people, most of the time they are, but there don't have to be. We can take control over them, and that would be true autonomy, not the weak substitute that he thinks Kant gives us.
▶︎ 38:37 True autonomy would be our remaking our minds. This is what Descartes did. Descartes reprogrammed his own thinking, his own mind to make it better. But it was in the service of discovering reality. Nietzsche thinks Kant saved us from that. Kant showed us that the idea of getting an accurate picture of the world as it is in itself is impossible. We are humans. We will always see things from the human perspective. There is no God's eye view. There is no purely neutral grasping of the world in itself, and therefore, we no longer have to aim at that.
▶︎ 39:30 Instead of making things accurate, why don't we try to make things better? Why don't we come up with ideas that will make life more exciting, more vivacious, more fulfilling? Now of course, some of those ideas won't work. It's not that we have total control and anything you think will work. Of course not. But we don't know what will work and what won't until we try.
▶︎ 40:03 We restrict ourselves. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be. The limits that we have are limits that we put on ourselves, first and foremost. We have been walking this very, very narrow path for millennia, and there's all this other territory to explore. Kant dreaded the territory without any markings, the disoriented, unoriented land.
▶︎ 40:43 Nietzsche says the only part of the map that's worth exploring is the part that's unlined, the part that's undrawn, the part where there still are, still be dragons. And getting lost, yeah, you can fear getting lost or you can get lost on purpose, which is also called exploring.
▶︎ 41:08 One of the concepts that Nietzsche is trying to reconfigure is the very concept that we've been talking about this whole time, the concept of meaning. The concept of meaningfulness. We've been stuck with one notion for a long, long time, and now it's no longer working. So what Nietzsche is modeling for, he's not just saying, "You should change your concepts. You should create new ones," he's doing it. He's showing us how it can work, because he's taking the idea of meaningfulness and he's radically altering it.
▶︎ 41:51 We need a new one because the old one isn't working anymore. What is the old one? The old one is that the point of life is to get into the afterlife. That life isn't life, life is the before the afterlife. Only the thing that matters is that. Nothing in life matters except getting there. Because life is temporary. Heaven is eternal. Life, you get some good, some bad, that's perfect bliss. So nothing in this world can matter, only what happens afterwards.
▶︎ 42:25 And Nietzsche thinks we need a whole new way to value our lives. He says in his description of the death of God, that I didn't read. He says, "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?"
▶︎ 43:04 We have had celebrations and festivals and rituals from religion that have told us what's important and what isn't. But we need new ones. We need an entirely new way to celebrate, and he gives us one.
▶︎ 43:22 He gives us the only kind of prayer that you can pray to a dead god, which is the eternal return. "What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, 'This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it. And every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.'? If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. How well-disposed would you have become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate, eternal confirmation and seal?"
▶︎ 45:05 Nietzsche thought this was his greatest idea. It's a thought experiment. Imagine that everything in your life, everything you've ever done, everything you've experienced, all the wonderful things, all the terrible things, all of it was going to happen again, exactly the same. Exactly the same.
▶︎ 45:29 We fantasize a lot of the time about living our lives over again. "Boy, if only I could go back." But we fantasize about it in order to change things. "This time I'd do it right. This time I'd go out with that person, not with that person. I'd show up to this. I would work harder at..." This is totally different. This is living exactly the same way over and over and over again forever. And his question is, how does that prospect make you feel?
▶︎ 46:06 Some people are horrified by it. "Oh my God, I have to go through all that again? Oh Jesus, horrible." And Nietzsche says, "What does that say about the life you've been living if you're horrified at having to go through it again?" What kind of life would be the kind that you would embrace this possibility, that you would be exhilarated, that you'd say, "Yes, yes, once more, again and again and again"? And why not live like that? Why aren't you living like that?
▶︎ 46:59 The fascinating thing about this thought experiment is that the exact same effect of the idea of living over and over and over and over again has the exact same effect as the idea that we only live once. Because they both give weight to our decisions. We spend so much time doing things we don't want to do, things we don't like, things we don't value, because there's some pay-off at some later date perhaps, we think. And so we take these chunks of time, and we sell them off. And the problem is, all we are in the end is time. That's it. That's all you have, that's all you are. And we sell ourselves so cheaply.
▶︎ 48:02 He's not saying, "Carpe diem. Every second should be exhilarating. Go on a rollercoaster. Ignore anything. Never do anything you don't like." He's saying, "Make sure it's worth it. Think about these decisions." We kill time. What a horrible expression, "killing time." I mean, you really are killing, but it's your time, it's your life that you're slicing off and throwing away.
▶︎ 48:38 And if you're in school. What would you think of a class you were taking if suddenly you found out that you weren't getting a grade for it, you weren't getting credit for it, it didn't go towards your diploma? Would you show up still? What about if you were at a job? What does it say about your job that it's so horrible you have to be paid to show up? Why not take classes that you want to take because of the class, that have intrinsic value, instead of merely for something else? Working jobs that have quality, that are something you desire.
▶︎ 49:29 I know there are practical issues. I'm not trying to dismiss them. But it's something that we spend a huge amount of our lives and our effort and part of our identity, and we tend to not take it seriously enough. Nietzsche thinks we ought to be living a life that we want to live over and over again, because that's the only kind of life that's worth living once.
▶︎ 50:04 And we can choose this. We can create whatever kind of life we want, whatever kind of love we want, whatever kind of values we want. No one is watching. No one is keeping score. Nothing is going on your permanent record, because in the end nothing is permanent, and no one's recording it. We have so much freedom, and we don't use any of it. We just follow along on the path that's worn. We're not as proud or as happy as we could be. We bang our heads on the bars of the prison cell when the door is swinging open. Walk out.