The Earth has become small—and the Last Man lives the longest.
In 1885, Nietzsche foresaw mankind's transformation into a being who cares only for safety and contentment—the final step before he gives up his higher nature. Jonathan Wallis joins Wolf Tivy to help us understand the Last Man.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: All right. This one we did a little differently. We weren’t sure where to start, but have ended up having a very interesting conversation about the last man and how to escape the problem of the last man through the lens of Nietzsche’s work. I’m, as usual, the host of The Students, Wolf Tivy, with Prince Vogelfrei, Jonathan Wallis of Avalon House. So I hope you enjoy.
The greatest threat is not disorder but the Last Man (00:32)
Jonathan: At the start of “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche is writing about sort of his faith in humanity and how even people who may be bad or evil on the surface of things are very plausibly provoking the human race to excel in some way. And how what it means is not just a state of calm or peace or good order, that the play of life has to continue. And Nietzsche sort of views the greatest threat against humanity isn’t disorder, right? It’s this state of the last man, where no one wants to take any form of risk, and they want to work just enough that they can live a comfortable life, and just everyone is kind of getting by and getting along with each other. And so there’s no willingness to provoke.
There’s no willingness to go out on a limb and do and say things that you cannot provide an immediate justification for. To act passionately, in other words, to be moved to do something. And I think Nietzsche believes that Christianity as a sociological force has locked a lot of these passions down and not just Christianity, but the systems that in some way sort of supplanted it and started constructing new justifications for what it meant to be a sort of universally good or universally acceptable person. And I think that our world is kind of visibly becoming dominated by forms of domestication, by forms of efficiency, by forms of management that act contrary to any kind of real political passion.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I wonder, efficiency is a word that you used there. I’m not sure that fits. The rest of it I think fits for sure. I think the system larps efficiency, but a lot of it really is just this lockdown, as you’re saying.
It’s this containment of spirit, the system... And I don’t think it’s Christianity either. I think obviously it’s these things that came after Christianity, or it’s the structural thing that Christianity, the structural role that Christianity filled for a time, and maybe is still trying to fill, but is also filled by these other things. And it’s, yeah, that thing about the last man, about everyone kind of becoming the most boring version of themselves, the most domestic, the most given-up version of themselves. And I think we have to see that that’s because part of that is because people have been propagandized into that mode of being.
Radical potential is always recuperated, domesticated, defanged (03:39)
Wolf: And part, it’s sort of made unthinkable that you could do anything else. And part of it is that whenever anyone tries anything else, they’re sort of struck down by the system. There’s various ways that the, I don’t know, this comprehensive control matrix is kind of—behind the whole thing, where it’s whenever you get anything actually radically different in terms of motivations of action or lifestyle or something, you get in some way the plug is pulled on that, or it gets recuperated into the system and domesticated, defanged. Whatever sort of radical potential it thought it had is sort of frustrated and humiliated. You see this with the hippies.
You see this with various kind of political cults in America. You see it with all the cults, basically. They all reach this limit where they run into the system and find they can’t go any further and sort of—lose vitality. And so the last man is a sort of learned helplessness about these things. And I wonder where all that goes.
First of all, I’m curious if you agree that the cause of it is this system of control that we’ve ended up in. I think in Nietzsche’s time, it was maybe identifiable with this Christian heritage. Nowadays, I guess it still has this, if you follow Moldbug or Land on these things, it’s very much kind of coming out of, it’s an evolution of Christianity or it’s moral—
Jonathan: Well, that was—
Wolf: precepts or evolution
Jonathan: Nietzsche’s hypothesis. Was that Christianity’s been weaponized from, in his era. It’s what he calls socialism, and also nationalism in a way.
Because all of these things are trying to divide the world into good and evil, and they’re all eschatological. Right?
Wolf: And good means things that the system can tolerate, and evil means things that the system won’t tolerate. And it becomes this very petty definition.
Jonathan: Yeah. And—I think there is a system of control. I think it’s a social system of control. It is too pervasive to... I’m not a big believer in conspiracies, just in the sense that in the modern world, you can’t keep large secrets among—
Wolf: No, but it’s—
Jonathan: substantial numbers of people
Wolf: it’s not a conspiracy, and no one’s trying to keep it secret. I think everyone involved is very open about what they’re doing, and—
Jonathan: Well, I guess I would just say that I think Nietzsche’s angle on this, or let’s say my own angle informed by Nietzsche—and by Arendt too, is people are very concerned. When I was talking about management and perspectives that are formed by, maybe it’s not efficiency exactly, but really by control, where trying to maintain, sometimes it’s referred to as bare life. Where you’re just trying to keep something going, kind of regardless of the costs you pay or what you have to end up doing, which is what the ancients would’ve called very dishonorable behavior, where you’re like, “I will do anything so that my own life can continue.” And then the ancients look at that, and they say, “Well, but what is your life? It doesn’t have any content.”
It’s not a—it’s not a hypothesis. Nietzsche says that one has to win the right to live one’s life as a hypothesis. Which is again, you’re not saying, “I know what to do.” You’re not saying, “I know what the consequences of my actions are going to be.” You’re saying that this is something—
Wolf: This is a way
Jonathan: coherent. This is a way.
Wolf: I’m going to live this way. And you see what happens. But—
Jonathan: And I think people are afraid.
Wolf: Well, the reason they’re afraid is because all the people who did that have been erased from the world. And I am getting back to this problem of where does the last man come from, right? It’s like, okay, yeah, the people are dishonorable because they’re the ones sort of left over after this selection process. A lot of people have been sort of disabled and clamped down through the last 200 years. The sort of Napoleonic impulse was eventually contained, or at least for a time, and then we had the world wars, and that whole thing was contained.
And then, you have the hippies, you have the Scientologists, you have these—attempts. You have Mishima, you have any number of these projects of radical content have been contained. They get to a certain degree, even the Mormon Church. It used to be this really quite radical organization with respect to the existing system, but somehow, physically, the system is able to contain them. It’s able to recuperate them.
And there’s this sense, there’s this question I always have that I argue with friends about, which is that, are we held back primarily by, or not we per se, but are these radical projects held back primarily by lack of belief in some alternative, or by lack of physical possibility under the current system? Is it the case that some group of people could radically depart from the system, and continue in that? Could they live a hypothesis, in that term, an alternate hypothesis? Or do all the attempts to live an alternate hypothesis end up getting recuperated into the system somehow? Someone’s playing Whac-A-Mole and says, “No, we don’t know how to deal with that,” smack.
And it actually wipes them out. And I’m curious, this seems like one of the essential questions. Because it goes to where do you invest your effort, insofar as we find the current system intolerable. We have this sense that it’s intolerable. We want out.
We want to live some hypothesis. We maybe even have some hypothesis that we want to live, something particular. But do we put our effort into radicalization intellectually, socially, spiritually, or do we put our effort actually, it needs to be in physical circumvention? This is the central question for me is how do you not become the last man? And that, I don’t know the answer to that question.
I’m curious what you think. Because this is another big part of Nietzsche’s big project. It’s like diagnosing this problem. He sees it coming. He says we’re going to be in the shit for 200 years with this problem that he’s laying out.
And society’s going to reach this totality of the last man. Nothing else allowed. Everything’s just suppressed. And he’s kind of speaking to this era of moral escape from that.
So I think he’s been sort of very justified in that prediction. But what then we do about that is this question that I don’t have an answer to.
Jonathan: Yeah.
People should do the things that they’re particularly well equipped for. I know that that it’s in some sense a kind of banal answer.
Wolf: But we are well equipped to be the last man. That’s the thing. We’re raised in this cage.
Jonathan: I think that people should, one is that they should develop their own sense of values and their own aesthetic priorities. I think that for me, it’s important to really take the long view. And when Nietzsche is writing about thinking on 1,000-year time frames, he’s not—necessarily just thinking about, again, it’s often not even so much a planning mentality as like what will stand the test of time. And historically, we have plenty of evidence that these attempts that fail or don’t immediately sort of overturn the order of the world, in the long run can add up to things. And I think there’s kind of—
Wolf: Yeah, they can add up to something if some seed stays present and alive, right? And the thing that’s so horrifying about the current moment is you have these things that were living in some positive direction that it’s not like, oh, they’re suppressed, and they’re kept small, it’s that they’re wiped out, right? Or that they’re made to rot. They’re made to like the converged of the last man.
Jonathan: Well, they haven’t succeeded. They haven’t succeeded, but—
Wolf: No, but again, I’m drawing a distinction between—
Jonathan: I think so far as anyone cares about them, one of the things that I think has happened in the modern world is that people have ended up only relitigating a really small number of conflicts that all anchor on essentially the modern ideological set, right? So we’re having fights about capitalism, we’re having fights about state control, we’re having fights about socialism, fascism, we’re having fights about what kind of rational ideas for how human beings relate to each other should be kind of imposed on the whole population. Whether that’s a certain kind of free speech, or whether that’s the assertion that you can only enter into certain kinds of compacts with other people. Whatever it is. We are still trying to hash out the ideological struggle, and I think that’s the wrong struggle to have.
And when you adopt the frame of mind that you can relitigate whatever past struggles you want to, and that that can have a really kind of lasting significance. So Nietzsche believes he’s kind of recapitulating certain periods of history, right? And he’s like reintroducing a conflict over the character of Socrates and also the formation of the nation state in the 15 and 1600s, that he believes are better battlegrounds. And so long as you sort of don’t admit defeat, it’s like, yes, I think that the lesson is not...
To my eyes, the cracks in the system are showing. And they may take a very long time. I think if you start to see the cracks in something like this, it’s very easy to get in the mindset of like, oh, it’s going to any moment now.
Wolf: No, it’s definitely not any moment now.
Jonathan: And just the right sort of shock, right? But it’s like if you take the Roman Empire, the cracks were showing for a really, really long time, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I think a smart Roman could’ve figured out all the causal map of decline, and it’s like, okay, if you’re looking at that, you’re looking at a really large system, and maybe you can’t do anything about it right now. I think that the right approach is not to say, “Well, everything is doomed,” or that any kind of pocket is doomed, but to really just try and create something that’s consolidated and kind of continues on a logic of its own and doesn’t end up too correlated with the rest of the system, right? And I agree that’s a challenge in the modern world.
Wolf: But let’s say you’re not correlated with the system, and you’re sitting there as one of these cults that has an alternate reference on value in the world, whatever it is. You’re not trying to be the last man, you’re trying to be something else.
Jonathan: Can I say something just about that?
Wolf: Go for it.
Cults reenact the logic of modernity (16:46)
Jonathan: Because I think it is important, the concept of a cult—and where correlation fall. Nietzsche really strongly advances this idea that if you fight something, you are correlated with it. The famous, “Beware of fighting monsters, lest you become one.” Cults, I think, really do reenact the logic of modernity by defining themselves into opposition with it. Something that was new, I think, would have flexible boundaries.
It would have boundaries that the modern world didn’t understand, and therefore couldn’t contain. I think cults are always kind of contained within the logic of the modern world because they are defining themselves—
Wolf: Okay, let’s say you have some—
Jonathan: in that strict opposition to it
Wolf: let’s say you have some tendency that’s not a cult, whatever thing it might be, and you’re looking at these ways that, I don’t know, comparable. I guess if you remove it from all kind of comparison with other things, then it becomes very hard to sort of draw any kind of prediction. But if there are comparisons to be made, like oh, it’s like this particular movement or that movement or whatever, you’re seeing this consistent trend towards the last man, right? And the question is, this is this existential question for every like seed of some new idea is why is this idea not going to be defeated in the same way everything else is defeated? And why is this not going to just—become the last man?
That sort of feels like this essential question now, is what is the actual evasion here?
Jonathan: Yeah. I worry about that question because I worry that it introduces too much concern about the future. And that you are pulling yourself out of the modes of confidence that would allow you to develop anything new by trying to—
Wolf: Yeah. Maybe the question—
Jonathan: pre-rationalize how to—
Wolf: The question bakes in this sort of omnipotent tendency towards the last man, right? But nonetheless, it seems like there’s something there worth understanding, right? It’s like, do we have to understand that or don’t we, right? Are we engaged in philosophy or not?
Jonathan: I think my question is, to what extent does asking that question give us perspectives that make us healthier in a grand sense? Rather than trying to engage in an extended hunt for some sort of rational answer that will allow us to capitulate the entire state of the world and strike at some weak point on the Death Star or whatever.
I think sometimes you can ask that question and it’s like, okay, what are things that are making people tend towards last man-ness? And then you can find discrete behaviors that are the equivalent of sort of finding tactical reasons things went wrong. Okay, well, we have this particular case of whatever group or organization, or Napoleon, and what mistakes did they make? Where were they unbalanced? Where did they misunderstand the capabilities of the system—or get kind of trapped by its own logic?
And then I think the discussion kind of becomes fruitful. But I think that it’s sort of a question of okay, when the logic of the world has changed, and social organization has changed in a big way, I think it’s often been a surprise to almost everyone involved. And so I think when you ask the question, okay, how can I conduct myself so that I don’t run into the particular thing? I think you’re trying to get around surprise, I think maybe in the wrong way. And that probably what you should do is find things you’re really passionate about, do them very well, and then when that creates a conflict with the system, don’t sell out, basically.
And then I think some number of people will continue doing that, and eventually the combination of that kind of external pressure, individuals challenging the system, will blow some larger cracks in it, and then things will become more dynamic. It’s the dynamic of a Chinese dynasty that’s slowly losing legitimacy. And the overall edifice is, the cracks develop slowly. People are really afraid of the system falling apart because it will cause a lot of chaos. And it’s unclear what alternatives exist for any kind of stabilization.
And you get just local individuals, most of whom lose, but the contradictions within the system are continuing to pile it up. And then when a local rebellion starts to win or gather momentum or make a big enough dent in the system that it starts to kind of fall apart on its own terms, I think it’s not because they understood the weak point of the dynasty and struck at it. I think it’s because they did local things well, right? I think it’s because they understood the terrain they were on. I think it’s because they understood their own men and how to organize them—and how to answer these tactical questions that then created a wider opportunity within the world.
So that’s kind of my like... And Deleuze is always talking about—this re-territorialization thing, where I’m almost like, not in a way that ignores the circumstances of the world, but kind of overwrites them. You should figure out what all your local advantages are in an existential sense, and then keep trying to multiply them and gather them together. And then I think that will create an expanding field of possibilities that I think you can’t anticipate them in advance. And this is kind of the ecological thing.
I think the solutions that emerge will be the result of a bunch of different powers and trends in the world kind of joining together.
You have to live the hypothesis (23:45)
Wolf: Yeah. The one way to follow that thread, one way I often put this is in terms of the leap of faith. I’ve written about this in Palladium and other places.
You can’t actually know what strategy is going to work. If we think of it in terms of strategy, you can’t know what strategy is going to work. It’s this extremely indeterminate problem. It has to be worked out—the hard way, right? It’s computationally irreducible with respect to history.
You have to actually just go and try it. You have to live the hypothesis. Right? And so you have to just pursue some hypothesis, and to your point, just like—what does the hypothesis say I should do at every given moment, and how do we do the hypothesis as effectively as possible at every given moment? And then that’s either going to make it through or it isn’t, and you kind of just have to be able to stake yourself on that.
And that’s a leap of faith because there’s no way of knowing prior to getting through whether it’s going to get through.
Jonathan: This—
Wolf: And just to kind of connect this, I think, back to Nietzsche and so on, I think we have this hypothesis, which is a particular tradition of philosophy, a particular way of thinking about the world and particular set of concerns that are very dear to us that we have been making a hell of a lot of sacrifices for in terms of things we’re not doing, things that we are doing. And I think questions like what I was asking about, what’s the escape from the last man problem, this is one of the questions that kind of comes up within that philosophy. But I think the philosophy is not simply that, right? It’s got its own—hypothesis to it.
Jonathan: I think this really—
Wolf: And so this is an interesting kind of answer to that, which is—okay, let’s just worry about keeping the flame. Let’s just worry about making it grow—and not worry about the strategy so much.
Jonathan: And I think that again, part of why I push back on using a word like cult is I think a cult is a group that thinks that it has the answers—and it needs to sit there and kind of let its own internal logic build up—and then it’s kind of like cults always believe that they’re going to foom, right? In the AI sense.
Wolf: Yeah. That is—
Jonathan: Cults believe that they’re going to construct this sort of like—
Wolf: They’re going to get the answer. Yeah
Jonathan: sociologically perfect organization, and then it’ll explode. And—
Wolf: We’re six months away from the whatever. The singularity. Yeah.
Jonathan: They’re eschatological, right? And modern AI is actually really interesting in the sense that rather than this sort of rationalistic single-page program—that then perfectly understands itself or whatever. You have something that is really hard to interpret. No one knows exactly how it works. It’s tied in with...
It’s learned things. It doesn’t fully understand what it’s learned from the wild, expansive human language, right? And so when I think about organizationally kind of the difference, the wild edge, if you will, between something that’s a cult and something that’s like, “Well, we need to just sit here in our little internal bubble until we sort of self-perfect enough, or the modern world starts to crumble.” So, that’s unbalanced in one way. And then you would imagine you have a fairly normal modern corporation that’s like, “Well, we’re just interested in making money and getting the efficient product.”
I think the things that kind of find their balance there are going to be organizations that have a hypothesis, but understand the hypothesis as a hypothesis, and so are willing to listen and engage with others. And it’s something that we’re both doing, is building organizations that really stress surface area with the world. People are going to—it’s already a hard question to answer. It’s like, what’s the purpose? What’s the goal of The Students?
What’s the goal of Avalon? And I think we’re both going to have a degree of hesitancy in answering that question because people are looking for the management. They’re asking what you’re optimizing for, and will kind of keep optimizing for. And in the realm of the modern world—
Wolf: Yeah, it feels like the wrong question
Jonathan: where everyone wants control, right? Everyone wants control, and we’re all very anxious about the future, and we have all these arguments about our anxiety about the future and what exactly is going wrong and what the solutions are, and trying to hammer those out in kind of an ideological sense rather than creating situations, circumstances, organizations where it’s easier to listen to other people, to listen to other traditions—to actually engage. I think that there’s a way in which the mindset of looking for the right answer really reduces the individual and all of the things that they contain to a program for executing the right answer once you find it. Where it’s more like, because again, in the Nietzschean framework, you are this unification of all the different traditions and perspectives—that have influenced you. You are your friends, you are your culture, you are the philosophies and the authors you have read.
And Nietzsche, as he started to go mad, he said, “I am every name in history.” And maybe that’s going too far, but one is a lot of things. And those things all come with their own internal logic that in order to mean anything in the world has to be self-consistent, right? And so it’s sort of this, everything in the world is not capital in the sense that it’s not all the things we believe in, the passions are not reducible, they’re not exchangeable. If someone came, I think, to any individual who has substance to their character and was like, “Well, I have this plan for saving or changing the world”—I think they might find that interesting, and they may even put a lot of effort into whatever it is, but they’re not going to drop everything, right?
Because passions are things that we sort of find worth doing forever, which I think explains a lot of human character formation, why people appear irrational in a certain sense, right? We could ask the question, okay, why can’t you give someone why is it hard for people to pivot? Because I love Nietzsche. I’m going to keep reading Nietzsche. I’m going to keep bringing up Nietzsche.
Maybe if there’s some kind of war in the future, I’ll be reading Nietzsche in the trenches. And I think the things that matter to the character of the world are the things of this type, that people are just going to keep doing and keep insisting on.
Wolf: Yeah. Right. How would you put this? It’s like that insistence, the passion. This kind of gets back to something I was talking about or I was alluding to earlier, I think maybe even before this conversation, of the thing...
It’s almost the wrong question to say... It’s first of all the wrong question to say, we’re looking for the answer because it’s sort of like, well, then what’s actually going on here is a particular form of question, right? And it’s also like you have something already in you that is defining your direction, and the main problem is pulling that out and articulating it and nurturing it. There’s some mode of life. The hypothesis is in there.
It’s just been contained to some degree. And at least that’s what I think is going on here is we have a hypothesis. It’s just we haven’t figured out how to articulate it. And I think to your point and to Nietzsche’s point about this kind of Dionysian aspect of truth, it’s like maybe it can’t be articulated. It’s not something that is subject to verbalization.
It’s this instinct—that is instinct for life, that maybe can find boundaries with other things instinctually. It can find alliances with other things instinctually. I try to understand it verbally as this kind of, I call it philosophy. But specifically philosophy in the Nietzschean kind of tradition. But even that, it’s not like you write down its axioms on a piece of paper and be like, “Yeah, this is the thing.”
There’s nothing like that. It’s a living thing. It’s a living tradition that has, like you were kind of alluding to earlier, it’s kind of got encrypted boundaries. Like your point about cults, like a cult maybe is trying to make itself too legible. And the real thing is actually this thing that’s not necessarily legible even to itself, but does exist and it is insistent.
And unfortunately, this makes the whole thing very difficult to talk about. But I think there’s something here. That we have this tradition that we’re pulling on, and maybe as it finds footing in the world, it will find names. It will come to be referred to in one way or another. But yeah, I like your point that to sort of pre-pattern yourself with this kind of VC-optimized metrics, it’s like, well, here’s our goal, here’s our metric, here’s how we’re subordinate to your pattern of optimization and your pattern of evaluation.
It’s like that’s what you’re declaring in that, is a certain kind of subordination that I think in one way, it’s right to resist the subordination of clarity. On the other hand, clarity is this difficult and valuable thing, and it’s easy to cope about not having it. You know what I mean? It’s easy to say, “Oh, yeah, we’re avoiding answering what our thing’s for because it’s actually just a bunch of people hanging out and wasting time. And it doesn’t have any goals. It doesn’t have any tendency. It doesn’t have any reality to it.”
And it’s easy to bullshit that, right?
Jonathan: Well, that’s another—
Wolf: And so I wonder how you distinguish those. Not that we have to make ourselves accountable to anyone, but—internally, how do you know?
Jonathan: I think putting value, and it’s like you were talking about with language. I think Nietzsche does a remarkably good job of evoking a lot of the significance of life in language. And that kind of evocation is different from explanation or—
Wolf: Specification
Jonathan: just specification, really getting pinned down. It’s trying to bring out something in you.
Wolf: Yeah. He’s painting impressions. He’s showing metaphors. It’s poetic. It’s not this analytic mode.
Jonathan: Yeah. And sometimes he’s very clear-sighted, and Nietzsche engaged really extensively. We know from his notes that he was sometimes sitting there and running through different logical patterns. He read logicians. He had familiarity with that tradition.
It’s just that he didn’t believe it was the ultimate and final good of philosophy.
Wolf: Yeah. Just that it’s not sovereign.
Jonathan: So that’s the... Yeah.
Wolf: You do have to engage a lot with the analysis. You do have to engage a lot with these questions of optimization, these questions of strategy, or these questions of how do you get out of this, or how do you get through that, or what’s the specification of what we’re doing? I think these are all actually really valuable questions, which is why I’ve been asking them. But I guess the thing that—that you’re getting at about Nietzsche’s work, because he’s sort of denying the sovereignty of any of those questions, which I think that’s correct. I think the thing that has sovereignty is much more in Nietzsche’s thought is much more like the will to power itself.
It’s just this kind of instinct of life, and it’s this particular pattern of play and joy and living.
Civilization is the ability to pass the crown (37:20)
Jonathan: And I think that things that are worth giving sovereignty to are often mysterious. And also do not try to insist upon themselves in all cases. I often think about civilization as this remarkable ability to sort of pass the crown, and it’s like in a genuinely civilized environment, the political leaders go and they watch the musicians and give all due respect to the musicians or the philosophers or whatever other traditions, which are all going to go and insist upon themselves and have their own interior loyalty—which should not just refer back to the loyalty to the state or the ideology or the correct way of managing the world. Right? People should be loyal—
Wolf: Even if they existed in that order, yeah.
Jonathan: People should be loyal to their own things, and we have to find anything that’s remarkable, anything that’s a civilizational level order, or even a good national level order, right? Where you’re like, well, here is a framework which we don’t even fully understand, by which we’ve miraculously managed to get all of these crazy people with their own priorities and their own things that they kind of want to do eternally—and their own passions, and here’s some framework where we can all kind of participate mutually in paying attention to some set, at least, of the same musicians—
Wolf: Well, this is—
Jonathan: the same films, and then creating this rich culture around that. And that’s kind of like—I am not personally... I love answers. I have studied as many people about the origins of the modern world, the particular subsystems that compose it. There’s a lot of time, I think, for that strategic and tactical discussion, but I think that there is more—it’s like finding sovereignty, not just kind of within ourselves, not just in terms of Mishima writing about the inner darkness of the body and growing pneumatically.
That’s all very important. But also with other people, and starting to actually have a sense of a we that is sophisticated, and this is another, just a problem with cults, is they’re ecologically boring from a cultural perspective.
Wolf: Yeah, and I like what you’re saying here. This is very much pulling together a bunch of different things. Like that point about every sort of tradition in society, whether it’s the musicians or the philosophers or the politicians and the statesmen or the military people, they have, in a way, their own gods, right? And they’re doing their own thing, and each thing is mysterious to the others. Nonetheless, in a healthy civilization, they’re able to work out some kind of mutually beneficial relationships, right?
It’s like, okay, well, the musicians learn how to engage with the statesmen, and the statesmen learn how to sponsor the musicians, and they learn how to get mutual profit out of this. But that doesn’t mean that any of these things is fully subordinate to the other, right? There’s no shared sovereignty. And this is one of the flaws maybe of modernist or rationalistic thinking, is attempting to kind of place society in a single hierarchy, right? This sort of social monotheism of there’s going to be some set of axioms held by the philosopher king, and everything else is self-consciously in reference to the philosopher king or whatever, right?
And I think it’s an impoverished view of, like you’re saying, kind of cult-like, right? And this is why a lot of the big modernism, the modern totalitarianisms, have been these sort of cult-like outbreaks of simplification. And this also ties back to what you’re sort of pointing out in Nietzsche’s work, which is this kind of ecosystem thinking. And Nietzsche’s very much looking at the thing much more in this kind of mysterious multiplicity. And I wonder even the religious angle seems relevant, and I think this is another thing we wanted to discuss in Nietzsche, is Nietzsche’s maybe a little bit more pagan than a lot of other philosophers had been up until that time.
He’s certainly not Christian. He’s certainly a Hellenist. He likes the ancient Greeks. I don’t think he’s explicitly invoking gods in any sort of kitschy way, but there’s something polytheist about that ecosystem-centric view—that sees the multiple forces in society as having their own traditions and their own gods. And yeah, that’s this question that fascinates me, is like, okay, if we are in the grips of some mysterious tendency, some mysterious divinity even, that is going in a particular direction with a particular hypothesis, that’s not the totality of—it’s not the one God or whatever.
What does that mean religiously? This is a fascinating question to me. I’m curious to hear your take on that set of angles.
Jonathan: One of the first poems that Nietzsche ever wrote when he was a kid, he’s like 14 or 15 or something like this—was entitled “To an Unknown God”—referencing Paul and Alexandria.
And I think something that remains really consistent throughout Nietzsche’s thought is that he has this real hatred of people trying to... It’s almost like you said, this like kitschiness or obviousness. Where you take something that is, in fact, the central mystery of everything. Whether you believe in God or not, we can just replace that with, where are things headed? What should we do?
Is it all adding up to something?
You could certainly say, and Nietzsche certainly entertains the idea, as much as sometimes he writes about there being some kind of directionality to life or some kind of legibility through the will to power as an interpretive system. At other times, he thinks about the other perspective. Everything’s raw, irreducible chaos. You can say that, and then sort of ends the discussion. So insofar as the discussion is kind of continuing and it references the mystery of what ends up on top of your hierarchy of values—what is ultimately most valuable.
That whatever was even a good symbol or articulation of that would have to be almost unimaginably rich, rather than this kind of systemic pastiche. So what I mean by that is, I think for Nietzsche, the thing that is kind of almost like a horrific mutilation is, “Well, we figured it out, guys. Here’s the handful of tenets that conduct rational behavior, how humans should live-” or please God, and whatever it is, and that Nietzsche really believes that. I think he does believe that some things are higher. He has a lot of faith in life that is kind of uniting this religious orientation towards the world with Darwinism, that—evolution is real.
Evolution is taking place, and—
Wolf: But I don’t think his thought is with reference to Darwinism in that way.
Jonathan: Well, maybe he believes in evolution.
Wolf: We would parse it in that way. Well—
Jonathan: But he had his equivalent—
Wolf: He’s even believing—
Jonathan: his quibbles.
Wolf: Yeah, I think he’s got quibbles—with it, but—
Jonathan: But just evolution—
Wolf: We can parse it in that way
Jonathan: evolution is happening. It’s definitely something he’s on board with, and as a result of evolution, we get to these states that we find better and better, and kind of can presume this is continuing. So if we’re orienting ourselves, if we believe that we can have an orientation towards the future of life, then we’re essentially asking the question, how do we, even given our sort of limitations and the fact we don’t know everything, establish the foundations for something better to come after us? So this is the question of how do you create something beyond yourself? Which Nietzsche essentially characterizes as paving the way, almost as I sometimes think of as providing micronutrients.
Nietzsche uses the phrase, “Making the rich,” or, “the Earth,” excuse me, “making the Earth richer—for what’s going to happen next.” So we find ourselves within the context of modern civilization and the things we find valuable in our own life. Nietzsche was totally revolutionary for me when I read him, like did change my life. And we have all of these other things. The songs you found the most moving, the poetry, the films, the existence of your nation, your country, your civilization, whatever else you find valuable on the dimension of sort of social and political order.
The road has been paved for your existence.
Even just the whole ecology of life. As human beings, we require such an incredibly rich... We’re not phytoplankton sitting there just getting this—single point source of energy. No, the world has kind of been prepared for us, and we absolutely could not exist without all of the extreme diversity that only exists kind of because it exists for itself—and is trying to go in its own direction and do its own thing, and by so doing, produces this environment where more and more sophisticated things can emerge. So within the context of human life for Nietzsche, this essentially means figure out what you’re willing to kind of die for, to die in the process of doing, really.
To do indefinitely, to try to perfect, so that you create, in your own way, your addition to the fabric of the world—on which anyone who makes anything you could ever characterize as a kind of progress will emerge. So in the first sermon in “Zarathustra,” he’s writing about these people who go under for the sake of justice or for the sake of scholarship or pity or love, and he runs through all these kind of archetypes of human beings who nobly really went and did something and contributed to this ecological edifice of culture on which things can mount. And so I think that’s at least an individually orienting perspective is like maybe you will, in the course of that, find some kind of answer to some set of the modern set of struggles we’re experiencing. But insofar as you kind of believe that you as an individual are not about to necessarily draw Excalibur from the stone—and strike down whatever force is making the modern world kind of a depressive place. Then you’re in a position of trying to have something like in yourself and then trying to find other people to like do that kind of cultural work with.
And I mean, that’s the question we’re both kind of concerned with is that we need to have a new environment where both one can worship one’s own god, so to speak, do one’s own thing without bowing to others, but exist around other people enough that you get the flow of a real ecology. And that is the tricky balance of like finding the right distance from other people. Insofar as we’re both not disposed to be hermits, and we also don’t want to make ourselves participate in the system of the crowd or like the kind of—naive, normal logic of civilization.
Wolf: I don’t know about that. Sometimes I feel like I should just be a hermit. But I want to sort of dig a little deeper on the question of like some phrasing you used around you creating this kind of thing beyond yourself or like your contribution to history. I wonder if it’s maybe better to even say it’s you’re participating in something beyond yourself that is coming from outside yourself. And this gets to this question in Nietzsche, like Nietzsche very much emphasizes this need for the Übermensch to kind of create new values, right?
Or like for man and to like rise above the sort of things that we’ve received and to kind of do the transvaluation of values to sort of push that boundary in this creative way. But I wonder the actual ontology of that act is interesting. Like, are you creating? Is it an act of will and creation or is it it feels like the kind of thread we’ve been pulling on here would suggest much more of a you’re being swept up in something, right? You’re finding something.
You’re joining some current that exists beyond yourself. I wonder how does Nietzsche think about that? I mean, you’ve read a lot more of it than I have.
There is no soul-atom; you are an intersection of forces (51:34)
Jonathan: Yeah. One of the things that Nietzsche, and he kind of finds, I think, at least a parallel thread to Buddhism—obviously, if he has a lot of disagreements with it. One of the things that Nietzsche ends up rejecting quite firmly is what he refers to as like soul atomism. So this is the idea—that there’s some permanent irreducible essence of the self.
Wolf: Yeah, the Rawlsian atom, like the—sort of the self that comes out of the ether and incarnates into a person by some random lottery and then takes on moral responsibility for the actions of just that self, but not the circumstances or whatever. Yeah. He rejects that
Jonathan: I do not know everything about how the soul or even the body or mind work, but I think that there’s a lot that can be gained—
Wolf: Let’s just be atheists with respect to those things
Jonathan: Well—or at least agnostic. But let’s just try and approach it in a sense practically, and say that your sort of naive physical body has a certain kind of value, your relationships have a value—the knowledge you’ve accumulated has a kind of value, and that you are not, and this is again, Nietzsche is definitely pushing against the sort of Cartesian perspective, which again like sections—the self off from the world. And so you are an intersection of a bunch of other forces and things, but that intersection is potentially like very, very valuable. And—to use again the metaphor of like dance and music, the dance can have an extreme kind of significance and beauty. It can demand a lot of skill, even just a simple like willingness to be moved.
And also you’re not going to get the same kind of dance if like the music is absent. So this is just to say there’s just kind of a straightforwardly real interaction that is transformative, but I think we don’t need to invoke a kind of mysterious creation where like the soul atom does something or exercises its freedom of will.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, there’s this sort of like there’s this I guess you’re articulating what I might call a healthier viewpoint, which is like, okay, the self has this confluence of existing features of the world, existing tendencies in the world, this valuable confluence that then goes and passes on—those inheritances to other things. And you can talk about it as I or as a self or as a you can talk about its actions as actions of will. They certainly involve some level of agency. But yeah, there’s this kind of like what you might even call a satanic kind of view of the will that is like that the things you do are yours alone, right?
That this counterpoint to that—which I think am I accusing Rawls of being a Satanist? Maybe, right? Like that or Descartes, like it’s—this kind of the moral like self atom.
Jonathan: I think it’s worth addressing where that comes from because I think it has a—
Wolf: Yeah. What do you think it is?
Jonathan: I think it has a, like I think there is some valid basis for an intense feeling of individuality. And I think that it’s probable even from things we could kind of describe mathematically and from a purely sort of even a naive materialist view of the world. Like the way in which something is altered by coming in contact with you is extremely individualistic, right? Like the way any particular set of information exists inside of your own mind, your memories are stored holographically within your brain, so they say. I hardly understand even what that means.
But what I know, and what you can know experientially, is that there is an enormous amount of texture to your own experience. And I think that a lot of that texture, elements of it may be genuinely irreducible. So something could be definitively only ever the product of a single mind, right? In the sense that I don’t even know. Some of these people—
Wolf: Yeah. There are definitely—
Jonathan: talk about ancestor simulations
Wolf: there are definitely creative works of a single great mind. Yeah, so I’m not denying that.
Jonathan: Well, so I think that the—
Wolf: But there’s also this maybe useful thing, even of those great minds, for them to understand themselves as channeling something larger.
Jonathan: That is, generally speaking, how the great minds understand them—
Wolf: Well, that’s what I’m getting at, right
Jonathan: they are constantly evoking the muses for a reason. A lot of mysticism, including the Sufis, who Nietzsche has some familiarity with, are evoking the image of being an instrument in some sense. That you are, and you can be a good instrument, you can be a really beautiful, a really significant instrument. You can even be a totally individual instrument, and there’s no other instrument quite like it. But that doesn’t do anything in the absence of the other forces that are moving and moving through you.
Wolf: Right. And you have to have a certain openness to that. And to get back to the last man, the last man sort of feels, if I can kind of dwell on that for a minute, the last man feels sort of dejected by the belief that none of those larger forces are with him. Right? I think that’s part of what characterizes the last man psychologically, is just this kind of detachment from all that.
It’s like, I am just myself, just living in this extremely humble sort of disconnected way, not participating in the stream of history, do not have agency over the world, except to—sort of fear or hate and tear down.
Jonathan: Satanic or let’s just say, an arrogant will has a redeeming feature of a kind, which is that it’s on a collision course—
Wolf: At least—
Jonathan: with the rest of the world, right?
Wolf: At least it has ambition, right?
Jonathan: Right, at least it has ambition, and that means that something is going to be worked out, like something—is going to happen.
Wolf: There’s going to be a tragic arc there of some kind.
Jonathan: There’s going to be a tragic arc, and maybe other people will learn from it. The world will change. Maybe the arrogant person will be usefully humbled. Maybe they’ll humble other people and then themselves be humbled, which is often what happens with—a Napoleonic type figure.
And then the last man, I think, is in a position where they have a kind of extreme, they’re kind of doing everything for themselves. Everything is being bent towards just the continuity and comfort of their own life.
Wolf: Yeah, they just want to grill.
Jonathan: Not falling out of place. And so it’s a kind of very odd combination, I think, of a sort of arrogance that says, “I’m not going to be moved to any kind of-” self-sacrifice or passion.
Wolf: They’re the center of their moral universe, but simultaneously, they’re not going to really do anything.
Jonathan: Yeah, it’s like they’re the center of their moral universe, and their universe is really, really, really tiny, right? Rather than, I’m the center of my moral universe, which means I’m going to go out and do these expansive things and think about the whole condition of the world and try to do something definitive within my domain, whatever that happens to be, whether it’s philosophy or politics or—some sport even, or music. Where you often see these people who are really possessed of a belief that they’re godlike, basically, and have to—go and work that out. And they’re going to find something out at the end of the day. They’re either going to succeed, in which case all honor to them, or they’re going to fail and add to the sort of tragic memory of the human race.
But yeah, the moral universe being tiny, and almost nothing can really enter into it.
Wolf: This question of tragedy, of going beyond yourself to actually live tragically, to risk tragedy, I guess, is maybe one way to characterize that agency that is not the last man, right? The last man is not willing to risk tragedy. He might have all these other ideas. He might be like this intense sort of frustration with his position, he might even attempt things, but never in a way that risks becoming this tragic example, right? And maybe is the escape from the last man to live as a hypothesis, is that not just the will to, or the willingness to live a tragic arc, right?
The willingness to fail spectacularly, right? It’s like, yeah, you want to succeed. You’re certainly going for success. But the lack of fear of failing spectacularly, because the one thing the last man will never do is fail spectacularly, right? The last man will sort of be snuffed out of existence quietly, and no one will care.
Jonathan: Yeah. I think if you love anything, then you will be willing to take risks for its sake.
Wolf: Yeah, or I wonder if you can turn that around, and it’s like you’re not capable of loving anything unless you’re going to take a risk. Unless you’re willing to take risks. Yeah, this might be a good place to end the conversation. I feel like we’ve had a good sort of tour through the problem of the last man, through Nietzsche’s work, the various lenses that he’s bringing on that. This has been really interesting.
Thank you for coming on.
Jonathan: Yeah. My pleasure.