So I'm going to read something that Nietzsche wrote in the first part Beyond good and evil. Which is a
section called prejudices of Philosophers
and it's a really good example of
the density of this book
one of the ways of conceptualizing Beyond good and evil, and I think this is true for most great works of
It's true. Most great works is that
the
author of the work
Collects; unconsciously collects
 
patterns
from his or her interaction with the world and
then gives them initial formulation
and the patterns can be deep and
multi-level and
the initial formulation
translates them into not so much ideas as into the seeds of future ideas and
the more poetically
Author happens to be the more the case that his or her
ratings contained within the seeds of Future ideas and
Were the romantic philosophers or authors, and I think Nietzsche and dostoevsky are in some sense foremost among them are particularly
notable for their ability to do exactly that
now in this particular paragraph
This particular paragraph, not only serves as an example of that
But it also serves as a self-conscious
Reflection on that because Nietzsche is writing a paragraph here that is
full of the seeds of
ideas that will actually
bloom and flower to a great degree in the 20th century
But while  he's simultaneously revealing these those ideas
He's also telling you exactly how he's doing it, and how it is that philosophers do it so it's a spectacular
accomplishment
I'm going to read it
Probably phrase by phrase and then take it apart because it's so dense and Beyond good evil is like that
When Nietzsche was writing beyond good and evil. He wasn't very well and
Because of that he had to spend a lot of time thinking and not very much time writing and because he was also
Brilliant Beyond comprehension
his ability to
Distill what he was thinking into
Incredibly rich
Phrases and I think in some sense. It's Beyond parallel. 
I mean
Often if I'm reading a book if it has any utility at I'll mark it
Usually I fold over the top of the page or sometimes put a yellow sticky note on it
If I find a place where there's an idea that's worth returning to that
that's
That's particularly worth understanding
and
you can't do that with a book like Beyond good and evil because what ends up happening is you have to mark every sentence and
Obviously marking every sentence isn't any better than not marking any sentences at all
so
I guess I also might as well tell you why it is worth bothering with a book like this at all
Because it's a very difficult book, and it's also the sort of book that will rattle you up.
So Nietzsche is very interested in the problem of value and the problem of value fundamentally is
not the problem of
What is the world made of or even how does the world function which are more
in some sense more specifically scientific questions
but how is it that you should conduct yourself in the world how should you act and
People act towards aims in a sense because we're active creatures, and we're moving from one point to another
we're moving towards things that we want and that means that we're guided by our desires and
We're not only guided by Desires insofar as we have
individual desires, we're guided by
the structure that
Consists of how those desires are related to one another
So for example if you have a room full of people
Say a room full of children
They're active and they're each pursuing their individual desires
But at some point they may choose to organize themselves into a game
And if they organize themselves into a game what they're doing for all intents and purposes is producing a little Society
Little Micro Society within that micro Society they're deciding
What desires will be currently expressed and how they'll exist in relationship to one another and that means that they can cooperate?
without too much conflict and that
They can
jointly Move Towards a joint Aim
without
and
and
Gather all the benefits that might be associated with that and that might be the accomplishment of the aim, whatever it is
But it also might be just the enjoyment that's to be had in the pursuit of that activity now
People do that
socially because we have to do that in order to get along with other people because our desires have to be melded with those of
Other people but we also do it psychologically and those two things
Exist in a dance because as I'm interacting with other people
the demands of the fact that we're interacting
May require each of us to arrange our desires in a way that's acceptable to everyone else
But at the same time while we're doing that we're also observing the process by which those desires are ordered
And then we internalize that process and use that to order our own desires and then so there's a constant
mutually informative dance between the individual and the group and the culmination of that is the organization of society and the simultaneous
organization of the Psyche and
It's that process that Nietzsche is talking about in these paragraphs. Now, you might ask yourself
Well, what's the utility of
articulating such things and conceptualizing them and understanding them? and
The answer in some ways is straightforward
If you don't want to run afoul of your own desires you have to organize them
Because some of them are short-term and some of them are
medium-term and some of them are long-term and some of them aim at this and some of them aim at that
And it isn't necessarily the case that those desires
allow for mutual fulfillment, so for example
Maybe you're very interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with someone
But you're also very interested in having a family and some stability in your life
Or maybe you're interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with a whole sequence of people
But you're also interested in having a family and stabilizing your life. It's not obvious that those desires can
exist in the same universe without producing what you might think about as war and some of that might be a
Psychological war some of its also going to be a war that actually
occurs in existence while you're fighting through the contradictory
Consequences of wanting to pursue many people and formulate a stable relationship with one person
now part of the reason that you want to think about these sorts of things is because if you think about them and
get your thoughts and
your value system
intelligently and
Coherently and cogently laid out then
when you act out that value system in the world
You're going to run into less conflict and less uncertainty and less misery and you're going to have a higher
Probability of getting what it is that you want.
But you're also going to have a higher probability
Of getting what you want in a way that allows you to cooperate with other people without
entering into too much conflict with them and
So in some sense the purpose that you think the reason that you think are the purpose of thinking is so that you can
sort out
How you're going to move forward in the world without having to
directly
Run headlong into all the obstacles that you might run into if you were doing such a thing
Blindly and so then you might ask yourself. Well why would you bother reading?
Philosophy or the Philosophy Written by someone who's great and the answer to that is that
They can help you think these things through in a manner that you would not be capable of doing on your own
you know because
Nietzsche minutes it's difficult to estimate how intelligent Nietzsche was but I suspect he was perhaps
one in a billion
which would put him far Beyond the
99.999% and
there's a massive difference between the ability of people to
think as you move farther and farther out into the extremes of intelligence and
when you have the writings of someone who's
one in a billion, then you can interact with those writings in the way that enables you if you'll put the time into
benefit from the spectacular fact of that intelligence
Nietzsche was a full professor by the time he was 24 at a time and now he didn't even have to write his dissertation
They just made him a full professor at a time where that never happened
so this is what he has to say in the prejudices of
Philosophers such as the first chapter of the book Beyond good and evil
“It has gradually become clear to me
what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of namely the confession of its originator and
the species of Involuntary and unconscious autobiography”
well
That's a deceptive
That's a deceptively simple sentence even though. It's not a particularly simple sentence because it it stands on its head. What people generally
assume about the process of thinking
You generally think that when you're thinking you're thinking about, as I mentioned before, the structure of the objective world but
Nietzsche is making an entirely different point here
and what he's fundamentally doing is treating the philosopher not as a rational being but as a living being and
There's a big difference between being a rational being and being a living being
Because if you're a living being your primary goal is to do whatever it
Is that furthers your life. And if you're a rational being then your primary goal is to do whatever it
is that a rational being might do and you could say that a living being should first and foremost be a
Rational being and in some sense that's the message of the of the western enlightenment, but it's by no means
Self-evident that that's the case
And it's certainly not something that Nietzsche doesn't believe that people are rational beings
As certainly not primarily and more importantly he isn't exactly convinced that they should be. So, for example, one of Nietzsche's most
Famous Maxim's is that
truth serves life and
That's a very difficult different idea then the purpose of truth says the accurate representation of the objective world
Those aren't the same thing at all now you could ask well
What does it mean for truth to serve life and if you construe truth that way?
What would truth look like and you know the mere statement: "the truth should serve life" doesn't offer you the answers to those questions
but
But it's the beginning of a different metaphysics and in some sense of metaphysics
which is say the universe within which a philosopher might operate a
metaphysics is the
initial structure of presuppositions
Within which a view of the world is organized
One presupposition might be human beings are rational and that we're attempting to
formulate and improve our
Sense of the objective world our formulation of the objective world and another would be that human beings aren't rational were irrational and that were
Motivated to do is to live whatever that means and that the purpose of our thinking and our philosophy should be to facilitate
our living and that's Nietzsche's that's one of the
foundation
blocks of Nietzsche's philosophy
So he's a moral philosopher fundamentally because morality is about values and values essentially values are
You could say values are what you aim for but it's more complicated than that values
Actually constitute the lens through which you view the world so it's partly what you're aiming at
but it's also partly your conception of who you are now and where you are and it's also partly your
conception of how you're going to get to
Where it is that you want to be and it's also?
partly the
Psychological system that you use to parse up the world so that it
Reveals to you the pathway that you can take to get to what you want
Values all of that, and then it's more than that because you could say that you have our value
Which contains all of that?
But then you can say that you have a set of values which is the arrangement of all of that
And then you could say that you have a set of values
that's the arrangement of all that that you have to arrange with other people and
Then you could say that
You have all that and you have to arrange it with other people and you have to arrange it across different spans of time
Because what you want today, and what you want next week
And what you want next month are not necessarily the same thing and one does not necessarily lead into the other
so to be a moral philosopher is to examine how that
What that system is and how it operates and how it came about now one of the things that Nietzsche says is
It has gradually become clear to me
Whatever Greek philosophy up till now is consisted of namely the confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious
Autobiography so his claim fundamentally is that no matter what the philosopher thinks,
He's doing while he's reading philosophy what he's actually doing is
revealing and
articulating his being and
Then you might say well
where did that being come from and the answer to that is well partly it's
You could consider it a biological function insofar as that we have
Value structures that are built into us that are the process we would say the process of a very long evolutionary history
but because you're also a cultural phenomena and
because the manner in which you've arranged your values and your desires has been conditioned to the last degree by the
process of enculturation that you are subjected to when you
Confess in an autobiographical manner and articulate that what you're also doing is recapitulating
The entire structure of your culture it's in you and you might say well
Where is it in you? And what is in you mean? part of it means is that
you act out a pattern of behavior and
That pattern of behavior is like a a dance that someone is
Manifesting to a symphonic score. It's unbelievably complicated and
It has its
Psychological elements and some of those are conscious and some of them aren't some of them are just implicit and embedded in the way you
Act and the way you perceive, and what the philosopher is attempting to do is to reveal those to himself and to
Articulate them so that the entire structure can be analysed well, so Nietzsche's first proposition. Is that when
Philosopher is thinking that what he's doing is not thinking
it's revealing himself in an autobiographical sense under the guise of rational thinking and so then it becomes something more like a story and
Well, and he covers all that in the first
two phrases
so that gives you some example some indication of what this book is like.
A species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography
Well, that's a more complicated idea too because you might say well
Why would someone be driven in a nun book in Voluntary way in an unconscious way to
describe their autobiography? and
that's a very complicated question it might be that one of the reasons that people value one another is because we
engage in the process of sharing Deeply autobiographical information
You tell me your story, and I tell you my story, and you might say well
why do we even bother with such things and the answer to that is well if
You can tell me about the pain and tragedy that you've encountered then that gives me a better
Way.. that gives me a better vision of the dangers of the world
Without actually having to expose myself to those dangers except in simulation. I might feel sorry for you
I might feel bad about your tragic experiences, but I'm not bleeding for them
And then there's always the possibility that you'll also tell me
How you solved your problem.
In which case I can either avoid that problem entirely or if I do encounter
I can solve it without having to go through.
Maybe it took you decades to formulate your solution to that problem, and you can tell me your story
And then I have the information, and so that's part of what human beings are always trading
That's why we talk to each other. That's why we can communicate and so Nietzsche would say well, it's it's involuntary
unconscious
Involuntary and unconscious. He's alluding to the fact that that proclivity is so deeply embedded in people that the desire to
to make an autobiographical recounting that
It serves as the kind of motivation that we don't question for doing almost everything that we do
So you know I mean
People do such things as attend movies and plays and they usually do that happily
Especially if the movie or the play is of high quality and the same thing happens with we're reading novels
they're
Attracted to such things they have a built-in value, and it's very rarely the case that people will ever question
why it is that they're doing such things in fact you see this quite commonly with students who are first introduced to the study of
literature
the the introduction of the idea that you should
Analyze what it is that you're engaged in when you're reading actually
comes as unwelcome news to most people who are
Inclined towards fiction because they don't want to interfere with the process of engagement you know automatic unconscious engagement with the material
By detaching themselves and having to think about what they're doing
So that's why it's an involuntary and unconscious
It's it's one of the things within which thought operates rather than one of the things on which thought operates.
Then he says “The moral or immoral purpose in which every philosophy has constituted...”
Sorry; “The moral or immoral purpose IN every Philosophy has constituted the true
Vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown”
Well, that's a hell of a thing to say too because what Nietzsche is alluding to there in some sense is that
The Philosopher can't help and that would be in some sense also the person who is recounting their autobiography
Can't help but tell you what they're up to
even though they might not know and this is something that Jung because Jung was, Carl Jung, the
psychoanalyst was a great student of Nietzsche and
Jung came to
Believe that we all inhabited stories that the stories were the stories
We inhabited were actually the structures of value within which we live and that those stories
essentially had an ethic or a moral and
Then you you can start thinking about what the ethics and the morals
Might be and you kind of have some sense of that because there's there's comedic stories and tragic stories
And there's evil characters and good characters and so forth those are our particular characters
But part of the point that Nietzsche is attempting to make here is that the philosopher is in fact aiming at something with his life
With all of his actions he might not even know what it is, but partly what he's doing in his attempt to philosophize is to
articulate that and reveal it to himself and to other people, so
then the question becomes well, what is it that the person is up to and I would say in some sense
that's the ultimate question and so Nietzsche here in this paragraph it is also dealing with the with the
Ultimate question in life which might be well what is your life aimed, and you might say well, it's not aimed at anything
I don't know I don't seem to have any coherent set of beliefs
I don't know what I believe I don't believe in anything even but that's not the case because
if you didn't believe in anything, you couldn't see
you have to believe in something to be able to see because you point your eyes at things and you can't organize your
Vision without having an aim and so the very act of interacting with the world presupposes an ethic and then all those
Micro ethics that you contain within you are organized into some sort of structure either
Badly or well, and that structure
Roughly has an aim
And you might know it and you might not but that doesn't mean it isn't there so so what other thing that Nietzsche is
Alluding to is that you believe things
Whether or not you think you believe them.
In fact believing them and knowing you believe them aren't even the same thing and so that people believe all sorts of things that
They don't know about and then partly what they're doing when they're doing
Philosophy is to try to figure out what those things are you know and you can also ask yourself where did they come from?
Well they partly came from you, but you
You're an old thing
Your physical form is three and a half billion years old, and you're the process of all that
all the death and struggling that went
Along the entire course of that three and a half billion years is you carry that with you and then on top of that
Inside you is the consequence of the entire
Cultural history of Complex life, that's all inside you, too
and then on top of that some of that's articulated more or less some fits act without
Dramatized represented in fiction and that sort of thing and then some of its articulated
but there's way more at the bottom than is fully articulated and so God only knows what you're up to and
Then you might say well who cares? well the problem with that
Is that you care because first of all that's the definition of caring and second of all
that Determines the
way that you'll move through your life and
Everything that happens to you
That's good or evil or good or bad is going to be a consequence of the manifestation of that ethic in the world
So now Nietzsche is saying something else too when he says:
“The moral or immoral purpose in every Philosophy has
Constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant is always grown”
He's saying that the philosopher can't help but reveal his aim in his writings, and then he's saying something else
which is that aim might be malevolent and
You know modern people aren't very comfortable with ideas like
malevolence because malevolence is an idea that's related to evil and
Modern people think of themselves as beyond good and evil to some degree
they don't believe in the reality of those concepts and of course in this book Nietzsche's also questioning our
At least our a priori presuppositions about what good and evil are but that doesn't mean that he doesn't believe that they don't exist
That doesn't mean that. He doesn't believe that they don't exist yes. I guess that's I guess that's right
You know this is one of the things I've thought about when I was thinking about when I thought about how Hitler died
No, Hitler died...
Hitler Committed suicide in a bunker underneath Berlin when Europe was in flames and so one
Conclusion that a psycho analytically minded historian could derive from that is that's what he wanted
Right and then that opens up an entire
Vast nest of snakes because one of the things that you might ask is well
how is it that someone would desire that? First of all could that even be desired? Is that actually something that anyone could even desire?
Then you might ask well. Why is it that someone would desire that and
Then the next thing you might ask is if a human being could desire that and hit there was a human being then exactly what?
Does that say about you and you might say well?
I could never desire such a thing but following along the train of the argument that we've been laying out is like
What makes you think you're a reliable judge of what it is that you're up to?
So okay, so now we've unpacked three sentences and
We'll continue on with the same paragraph
“Indeed to understand
How the most abstract metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at
It is always well and wise to first ask oneself: What morality do they or does he aim at?”
So what the question is what's the personality?
well
There's an entire nest of snakes underneath that sentence that's sequence of propositions as well
And one of them is well. What does it mean [that] people are up to something? What does it mean that they're aiming at something?
“Accordingly I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy
but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge and
Mistaken knowledge as an instrument
But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted is inspiring them”
This is partly where this is going to require editing; it's so complicated to go through.
“Accordingly I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy
But that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge and mistaken knowledge as an instrument”
Alright so let's take that apart; “accordingly I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy”
So one of the claims I suppose this would be an enlightenment claim is
that
People do have a drive to knowledge, and the that drive is in fact. What underlies the production of such things as philosophy
but Nietzsche questions that because he's trying to bring us back to consideration of the fact that you can't separate the
Philosopher's mind from the Philosopher's being
His first and foremost a living creature, and he's up to something and the question is what is it that
he's up to? And so you can see the earliest manifestations in
a paragraph like this of what later developed into
deconstructionist thought and
that that was mostly French continental philosophers who pursued that particular line of reasoning and
It is derived exactly from this kind of statement by Nietzsche
so for example someone like Derrida would say
It doesn't matter what the content of the text is
what matters is that the text can be used as a tool for power and
Then whether the person who wrote the text knew it or not?
that's what they were doing and they were doing it in a way to privilege themselves above other people and
That's really I would say the fundamental deconstructionist claim, and it's a powerful claim
It's an utterly corrupt claim, but it's a really powerful claim, and it's related directly to the sorts of things that Nietzsche was
Referring to in this paragraph. What is it that the person's truly up to? Now the problem with the de-constructionist claim
Is that it's an it's an open invitation to cynicism, to thoughtless cynicism. I can just make the presupposition that whatever it
Is that you're telling me
You're telling me merely to dominate
Regardless of what it is that you claim to be doing.
well the problem with that approach is that
It's predicated on the implicit assumption that the only
Value that people actually have is the value to is the desire to dominate and of course that's a purely
But that could be the case and I also think that
It's even reasonable to posit that to some degree that it is the case
But to take that from a contributing factor and to make that the highest God
because that's essentially what the de-constructionists are doing those are entirely different things and
You have to beware of people who
take a single causal element and elevate it to the stature of
single comprehensive cause. You know
it's more reasonable to assume that people are complex in their motivations and that many different strands of
Biological and cultural motivation are in some sense primary
and then what happens is that they come together to weave a kind of
Tapestry rather than to make the automatic assumption that you can reduce the entire set of human
Motivations to a single principle like that of power now
You know I would say Nietzsche is also responsible to some degree for the deconstructionist claim that its power because one of his most famous
Utterances was that the fundamental motivating force in life is the will to power
But he wasn't so much, because Nietzsche is a subtle thinker, he wasn't so much attempting to reduce
Human motivation to power he was attempting to redefine what it was that we conceptualized as power
Whereas that as the de-constructionists certainly you know all because fundamentally they're marxists and they believe that you know they
ensconced themselves within an economic Viewpoint where
Within a philosophical Viewpoint where economics is paramount and where all that matters is power
construed as socio economic
domination fundamental
You know and that's in turn is embedded in metaphysics. That's even deeper
which is the metaphysics that presumes that people are fundamentally materialist and
All of those things are quite and all of those things are highly questionable
So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit of the paragraph when Nietzsche talks about
The motivations of you might consider them
people who are working in the Middle ranks of
Bureaucracies, whether they're scientific, or otherwise, so they're in some sense acting as cogs in a particular machine
And so that's what he's describing here he says
“In the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men,
it may be [...]
there may really be such a thing as an ‘impulse to knowledge,’ some kind of small, independent clock-work, which,
when well wound up, works away industriously to that end,
without the rest of the scholarly
impulses taking any material part therein.
The actual 'interests' of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction -
it is the family, or in money-making, or in politics;
it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good
Philologist [someone who studied the origin of words], a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that.”
Nietzsche's point there, fundamentally, is that even when you do analyse people in whom
The will to knowledge might actually be offered
Even though he wouldn't be willing to granted the status of highest motivating power
That even in those people where that will to knowledge does exist the probability that that is in turn
Subordinated to some other
principle that's higher in the value Hierarchy is very very high and
It's hard to tell exactly what that additional principle might be but he points out such things as well
maybe they're primarily interested in serving the interests of their family or
They're primarily interested in making money or maybe they're primarily interested in status
And maybe they're interested in status status becomes it because it makes them more sexually attractive and that sort of thing, so
but the
question of what is it that's lurking in the background is always paramount, so
another
Detour in this particular paragraph
“whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man
with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring genii (or as demons),
will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another,
and that each of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the
legitimate lord over all of the other impulses”
That's another like the beyond good and evil to think of it as a book is a really foolish
Framework you know because this is what a book is
when people think about a book no, it's like a material entity it's
It's eight inches high
And six inches wide and two inches thick and weighs a pound and it's made out of paper. It's between two
Covers you know and that's a materialist. That's the A priori sort of axiomatic
view of the book. But Nietzsche's
Beyond good, and Evil. Isn't a book at all. It's a series of bombs and
each sentence is a ball and
Each sentence blows things up that people don't even know exists and so one of the things with this sentence for example
here's how he's conceptualize a human being so the first thing he talks about is that
There are fundamental impulses of human beings
Okay, so that begs questions. What do you mean by impulse? And what do you mean by fundamental? and
Both of those are externally complicated problems, so an impulse you can think of an impulse as a drive
You could think about it as a biological instinct
You could think about it as an aim or a goal you could think about it as an act of will like there's endless
questions that hang off that question, but we could start with the idea that we
Perhaps can't Define it.
But we are willing to go with the proposition that people do have impulses and I think maybe that's manifest to you more particularly
when you're attempting to do something voluntarily and
something involuntarily interferes with that you know, so maybe you're sitting down to
To try to get some work done in the work is not of any particular
Intrinsic interest but you regard it as necessary
You know necessary element in some higher order scheme, and so you're attempting to organize yourself. So you will in fact concentrate on that
particular relatively mundane activity
But what you find when you sit down to actually engage in that is you can't do it.
You have to go do the dishes or you have to clean under the bed or you have to have a sexual fantasy?
or you or there's some other thing that you could do this useful but that you would normally do that
You'll go do instead or that you fall asleep or that you get hungry or like there's an endless number
Let's call them impulses that might arise to interfere with your conscious movement forward well exactly what are those things
while Nietzsche certainly
conceptualizes the human being as a place where those things live and
he does mean live to because it wouldn't refer to them as demons or
genies
Without introducing the metaphorical conception of something that lives and so hardly what Nietzsche reveals in those sentences is that he
conceptualized as a human being as the
dwelling place of Spirits and
Some of them are genii let's say, that's the root word of genius
That's the terribly powerful thing that exists in the terribly small
compartment right that you have to call forth and some of them are demons and
Demons are things that have their own autonomous will and the generally aren't aiming for the good
So then so those are all things Nietzsche just lays out as implicit parts of the sentence so he activates all those ideas
whether you know it or not in your mind to the degree that you process the sentence and those things start to take on a
life of Their own those ideas
and so
Then he adds another dimension of complexity to that by saying well
you're full of demons and
and genies and
They're all doing their own thing whatever that happens to be
but each of them if left to their own devices would attempt to remake the entire world in their
form and
So I
Thought of this
from a narrative point of view or from a symbolic point of view in
old stories in folk tales and Fairy Tales you often have
cyclops, they're one-eyed giants, and there's a sexual connotation to that
which is our proposed that the psychoanalysts would would certainly point out
But the one eye idea is that this thing is gigantic who wants one thing
And so that's another way that Nietzsche is conceptualizing the fundamental
Structure of the human psyche it's a dwelling place full of one-eyed giants
And they're constantly. well one thing one way of looking at is,
They're constantly at war
One of them wants to be the largest
one-eyed giant and dominate everything else
And then one of the things that so Nietzsche takes that argument further he says not only is this always happening in human beings
But that if you look at Philosophy what it is, is it's a continual
revelation of the attempt of some
singular Minded psychic
monsters psychological monster to dominate the entire
Psychological structure therefore the entire cultural structure therefore the entire world and then you can you can see in that
The entire religious structure struggle of mankind to take this vast
polytheistic
vision of
reality and to organize it into some sort of
monotheistic and
Integrated structure which you could also consider
indistinguishable from the
civilizing; the impulse that operates in human beings to become civilized
because
On the one hand it might a terrible thing that one one-eyed monster emerges to attempt to dominate all the others
but then on the other hand there's no difference between that and organizing something because to organize something is to bring it all into a
Hierarchical structure with some sort of singular value at the Forefront and then the question might be well
What should that singular value be and then?
Nietzsche would that ties it the whole argument back into the first sentences that he wrote at the beginning of the paragraph which is
Well, what is it that the philosopher is up to what is the force that he's serving? What is the unifying impulse?
That's another way of looking at it
If there's a unifying impulse
and he's not only fallen prey to some internal Demon if there's a unifying impulse to bring all of this together into some sort of
functional structure what exactly might that look like
“For every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophise.”
That's part of that, sort of Nietzsche's idea of will to power
In its nascent form like all of these
unconscious entities that
inhabit that human psyche are all alive
and
they're trying to live, they're trying to climb up the dominance hierarchy and
dominate because of course that's partly what life does because
Let's say from an evolutionary perspective, and this is probably more true for males because there are less
effective in their attempts to
replicate
the distinction between
Climbing up a dominance hierarchy whatever that might happen to be and success is
there may be no distinction at all and
then you might say well that just shows that there's nothing but will to power but
That still doesn't answer one of the most fundamental questions is that
Power in relationship to what?
Because that's the question
Okay, so you can shut that off.
