Hello, everyone.I'm Stephen West.This is Philosophize This.So I want to continue where we left off last episode, which means you may need to listen to that one before this one.
So just fair warning, I'm talking from here on out as though you've listened to it with little explanation.It's called Nietzsche Returns with a Hammer.
Now, I want to talk more about this life-affirming perspective that Nietzsche's bringing up in his later work.
What would it look like if someone woke up in the morning and started their day from a place where they were affirming all aspects of life as they were, rather than renouncing them?
Rather than that overly rational, overly idealistic way of living that just recreates a classic Christian renunciative way of looking at the world, that in his eyes is responsible for the decay of Western society.
What would that world of life affirmation look like?And what would a morality structured around affirmation even be like? I mean, these are questions that really captivated Nietzsche for a lot of his later career.
They're tough questions to answer, too, by the way, and we'll get into what he had to say about them.
But first, real quick, if on this episode we're going to try to look at the world through this life-affirming lens, you know, if you're trying to see things in a new way, and if you're someone who's intrigued by the story Nietzsche's telling of him smashing the idols from the history of Western thought with a hammer, real quick, can we just take a second to appreciate
what Socrates looks like from Nietzsche's perspective if he's right here.I mean, you know he doesn't like Socrates, I get that, but just think about who this guy really is if Nietzsche's right.Think of his whole game.
He denies the whole Dionysian side of what reality is, the chaos, the passions, the emergent context-dependent side of reality. And then he says, no, what we're going to do is we're going to steer hard into the Apollo side of this, the rational.
And my little game we're going to play today is you can only use rationality, but you've got to try to nail down the absolute truth about everything in full.Give me the essences of everything, he says.
So then Socrates goes out into the public square and just starts harassing people.Hey, you over there, you think you're a wise person, huh?Well, then why don't you give me a definition of what justice is, hmm? Go ahead.No, no, no, no.
Tell me, in simple, rational terms, what justice truly is.It's a very simple question.Go ahead.So then you give him a definition of justice, and then he picks it apart, points out the limitations in it, says, that can't be all of what justice is.
So you give him another definition, he picks it apart again.He's like, look, I can keep doing this all day, guys.You keep making these mistakes.I mean, eventually you're all going to have to realize the Oracle's probably right about me.
I am the wisest person of all of us, because at least I can admit that I don't know anything.You guys can't.God bless you, though, kids.Thanks for coming out.You tried hard.Thanks for being a contestant on the Socrates Rationality Game Show.
But to Nietzsche, this guy is a terrible person.Or, I mean, whatever I can say on a family-friendly show like this.
Look, there is no more clear indicator of a simple mind that hasn't thought about the complexity of things than someone who demands a rigid definition for something and then says, hey, we can't have a conversation about it until you give me a perfect definition that I can't critique.
Definitions, rational representation more generally, as it's gone on throughout the entire history of philosophy, is fundamentally for Nietzsche a process of taking that emergent chaos of reality in full and then trying to turn it into something that human minds can comprehend and work with.
Now, maybe you can do that with something simple like a triangle.
But with concepts like justice, beauty, temperance, the kind of stuff Socrates is talking about, of course rational categorization is going to fall short, and we'll get into examples of why it always does more in this episode.
But from the perspective of Nietzsche, when it comes to Socrates, Look, you set up the rules of this game show, Mr. Socrates.You're the one that said truth has to come purely from rationality.
You gave people an impossible task, and then sat around patting yourself on the back.For what, though?Like, noticing how stupid your entire approach was?Pointing out where reason comes up short?You guys don't know anything, do you?
Listen, just to be clear here, I went kind of hard last episode.Nietzsche did respect some things about Socrates.But again, this episode today is about looking at things from the perspective of life affirmation, okay?
It's about getting away from this classic, life-denying, renunciative perspective that a lot of people have just inherited and then smuggle into basically every moment of their life without even realizing it.
And as we talked about last episode, even one change into this more life-affirming direction can have a monumental shift on someone's entire life, on the entire way they see the world.
Tons of examples out there of people reporting this kind of paradigm shift, obviously not just with Nietzsche's work, but people will talk about this.Take suffering or discomfort, like we talked about last time, as just one initial example of this.
The idea is, if you're renouncing suffering all the time, you know, if you live life seeing comfort as the default state of life, and then any discomfort you feel you have to ration it or justify it to yourself,
You know, if you're always thinking in terms of, I want this thing, but how much discomfort do I have to pay to be able to get the comfort and security on the other side of it?
If you're always thinking in terms of minimizing or removing discomfort, then no wonder discomfort's so difficult to be in.You're approaching the whole thing from a place where you're renouncing a necessary part of life.
But see, from this other perspective, though, discomfort, again, is just a part of life.It's not something to steer into.It's not something to steer away from.
The point for Nietzsche becomes, if you want something, if you have that voice inside of you that won't shut up about it, sometimes discomfort is the set of sensations you are in if you want to get there.Why not affirm that journey then?
So from that perspective, discomfort is not some sacrifice you have to pay in a very religious sense.You know, it's a sacrifice of blood so I can get to the promised land across the scorching desert.
No, if you affirm discomfort, then it becomes more like just the set of directions for how to get somewhere you want to be.Point is, there isn't this misery-inducing, pessimistic outlook towards a fundamental piece of what it is to be alive.
Life isn't something you're always renouncing and at war with. No, to Nietzsche, you just say yes to it.You affirm that which is necessary.Amor fati, as we talked about in episode 159.
Now, people will talk about going through this kind of shift, and then seeing life in a completely different way on the other side of it.
So, one question that naturally follows from this is, is the elimination of suffering the only one of these things we might be smuggling in from a renunciative tradition, where if you were to notice it, and then to affirm it, it could lead to a pretty substantial shift in someone's perspective on the world?
And the fact I'm even talking to you about this right now should probably make you guess that yes, there is in fact a lot of differences, it turns out, when you affirm life rather than renounce it.
We're going to talk about many of them today, taking this concept of amor fati to a different sort of level.And again, this is one of the things Nietzsche was really interested in towards the middle and later parts of his work.
What would a morality look like if someone affirmed life instead of renouncing it? And when he first starts talking about this in his work, he's quick to say, look, I don't got all the answers here.
It's not like I got some book for you to read, 12 Rules for Affirming Life, or something.Although, turns out that may have worked.
But the thinking is, a lot of this work may have to be done by you personally, or by some philosophers later in the future.But that said, he doesn't give up.He does spend quite a bit of effort coming up with examples of what this might look like.
And it's in this context that you can understand his concepts of the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence, the transvaluation of all values, all things we've talked about in earlier Nietzsche episodes.
It's in this context that these ideas make sense.This is what he's up to when he's creating them.So knowing that, and again, knowing that he thinks there's a lot more work to be done here,
He does say that despite our history of being dominated by mostly people that come from this renunciative tradition, there are a couple places we can look throughout history if we wanted to get some insight into what it was like to be a person that was not so captured by Socratic and Christian ideals.
One is going to be the people that lived during the time of the Renaissance.The other, the one we're going to focus on today, is going to be
what he thought was maybe the greatest culture that ever existed, and that is the Greek societies that lived before the corruption of Socrates came along.In other words, pre-Socratic Greek culture.
He has a telling line from his book, The Twilight of the Idols.He says, quote, my recreation, my predilection, my cure after all Platonism has always been Thucydides, end quote.
What he means is, Thucydides was a Greek historian from these very pre-Socratic Greek societies we're talking about.Nietzsche's a big fan of his work.
He's a fan of them because, unlike other historians of his time, and most people after the influence of Plato and Socrates, Thucydides doesn't tell the story of human history from a place where he's constantly trying to moralize about it, or attributing value to the events that happened.
Just as a point of contrast here, for example, Herodotus, another famous Greek historian, he'd tell the story of the Persian War, for example, and it was common, even expected at the time, for him to describe the stuff that went on as though it happened because of some divine retribution.
You know, he'd say, this is the pride of the Persians, the hubris of them that led to them getting beaten in this particular battle. Nietzsche respects the fact that Thucydides didn't do any of this.
Instead, he focuses on the power dynamics of the time, pragmatic moves that are made by cultures.
And he doesn't shy away from talking about the harsh reality of what it was to be someone that's caught up in the macro-level political events that were brutal.In other words, there's no attempt at moral justification.
This war wasn't the will of the gods, obviously, to Nietzsche.And Thucydides just seemed to accept that much better than other historians.
But if Thucydides is just a historian from around this time, a time where people overall seem to be thinking differently than we do today, where can we get an even deeper insight into this culture and what it was to look at the world like they did?
Well, for Nietzsche, an absolute treasure trove when it comes to this is going to be the artwork that was produced at the time, particularly in pre-Socratic ancient Greek tragedies.Tragic plays, as they were written.
If you want to see artwork that depicts the world in a more life-affirming way, to Nietzsche, you should be reading Greek tragedy. You've no doubt heard of some of the more famous ones, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Hecuba, the Trojan women.
Well, there's 31 of these ancient Greek tragedies in total, and to understand why Nietzsche thought they were so useful for seeing a more life-affirming perspective, it's helpful, I think, to contrast this art with a lot of the artwork we have to look at today.
What was so different about it back then? Well, think of the average movie that gets made today.So many of the recurring themes in an average movie mirror the life denial or the recurring themes in people's thinking.
Again, that overly simplified Socratic Christian decadence that Nietzsche thinks has decayed Western culture.In a typical movie, for example, there's always a protagonist and an antagonist, good character and a bad character.
Then there's a linear, predictable storyline, with tons of plot development spelling out exactly who these characters are and the choices they face.Then some conflict inevitably comes up.
This is a problem for the good character, but the good character always knows what they must do.They must find a way to do something to fight against the bad character.Kick him in the face at the karate tournament, whatever it is.
Then after they destroy their enemy, the good character holds the trophy up over their head, the janitor of the school comes over and says, I'm so sorry, I didn't believe in you.
And then it fades to black and everyone lives happily ever after, the whole storyline being resolved.Now, if you grew up in a society where this is the type of story you have crammed into your head day after day from the moment you're born,
then of course it's going to be easier for you to think of your life in terms of you being a main character that's the morally good person, that your life is a predictable linear storyline, that the obstacles in your way are the work of bad forces or evil people, and many more life-denying assumptions that we'll talk about on the rest of this episode.
The point for right now is, Greek tragedies from around this era don't reflect this same idealistic version of reality.
And to read and to spend some time on Greek tragedy is to immerse yourself into an entirely different way of orienting yourself towards the world, one that celebrates the true ambiguity of existence and the fragility of the events of our lives.
And it's at this point that I want to bring in the work of another great philosopher, whose decades of interest in Greek tragedy can really help make this point here more deeply.
He's kind of perfect for it, because he's someone who's inspired by Nietzsche, but much more inspired by other thinkers.
So this allows him to appreciate some of the genius of the points Nietzsche made, but not necessarily have to turn so radically into the individual side of existence. His name is Simon Critchley.I guess I should tell you his name.Simon Critchley.
He's alive today, he's written tons of books at this point, and they're written in a style that makes his ideas as a philosopher pretty widely accessible.
It's not the easiest, but if you listen to this podcast regularly, you'll probably be able to get a lot out of them.
And one of these books he wrote back in 2019 that's particularly accessible was called Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, talking about the very thing we're discussing today, Greek tragedy and what it has to teach us as modern people.
So Simon Critchley represents someone who's done this work of reading tragedy that Nietzsche definitely would have appreciated for anyone trying to find this more life-affirming direction moving forward.
We're going to go through some of his analysis of tragedy as a genre.
And for each one of these ways that tragedy looks at life through a slightly different lens than we do, we can ask, do any of these represent a potential shift in someone's whole view to reality on the level of that affirmation of discomfort that we talked about before?
And for Simon Critchley, the end of the story here is that the tragic perspective is a philosophical orientation, and when it's applied to modern life, has an incredible amount that it can teach people.
So I guess let me take a few minutes, give you some of the highlights of what a fan of tragedy, like Simon Critchley, loves about it after all his years of doing the work to study it.
The first misconception he might want to correct, if we're starting a conversation about tragedy to someone that's never read him before, is probably to say that when we call these things tragedies, that does not always mean that there was some horrible thing that has happened and we're all going to sit around like a bunch of emo kids wallowing in how tragic it is.
No, Greek tragedy, if you pay attention to the themes across the 31 of them that we have, tragedy, he says, is less about that kind of sadness.And it's more about war.And not literal war, although that is part of some of them.
Exactly what he means by war will become more clear the deeper we get into his thoughts on tragedy.But first, let's just all understand that to Simon Critchley, the world around us is always in a state of becoming.
Things and people are always changing.Circumstances are always developing. And as these things develop and change, we as people are met with a constant tension on many different levels as we're called to respond to those changes.
He says, the frame of our world is war.
And he says, quote, tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, how we might become cognizant of that suffering and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action, end quote.
Meaning, and this is the very first point of many, but the expectation someone might have that life is ever going to be some static, unchanging, peaceful thing where you're meditating on a boulder next to some beavers in a waterfall.
No, you deny the constant tension of life only at your own convenience. And of course, Nietzsche would see the life denial that's going on here as an important piece of what you get when you become a member of the herd.
You take on a passive-reactive approach towards the changing world around you.
You know, circumstances keep developing until one day they've changed enough for them to start causing you problems, at which point you cower back into the group and you rely on strength in numbers.
But if you were to do this, it structures your life around a denial of an important and necessary piece of what life is.Life is always in a state of movement and tension.
Well, Greek tragedies are always written from a place where it assumes this constant tension.There is no happily ever after.There is no, you know, we find our protagonist where everything is sunshine and rainbows in their life.
No, we are always, in a sense, when we read a tragedy, brought into the breach of an ongoing war.
Now, something important to consider about what a tragedy is, is when you're creating a piece of artwork that starts from this place where you're affirming the warlike aspect of our lives, to Simon Critchley, what you notice when you read him is that tragedy is never trying to solve the problems of the world.
It's a lot like what Nietzsche respected about the work of Thucydides.It's never trying to moralize.It's never trying to say, this is the way the world should be, and here's how we make it more that way, like a lot of modern movies might.
No, tragedy just, just sits in it.Just sits in what the world is, without some higher ideal, in a way that can come off as annoying to people that are used to being prompted on how they should be feeling about things.
And this is ultimately, to Critchley, a tendency people have, because they always have an expectation of there being some sort of philosophical order to things.
See, this is what philosophy has typically done all throughout history, and Nietzsche would agree on this point.Philosophy, beyond the work of Socrates and Plato, is always trying to nail reality down in some way.
It's trying to come up with some set of ordering principles that everything can be filtered through, and then all of a sudden the problems of the world are solved.The war is over, nothing's moving anymore, everything makes sense now rationally.
But just like Nietzsche, he thinks there's something big we miss out on when we remove the emergent, chaotic, ambiguous pieces of reality that are impossible to rationally predict and categorize.
I mean, you can try to do the thing we were recently talking about on the Peter Singer episodes, where you come up with the exact kind of moral strategy that you think is best. And you can do your due diligence.
You can say, you know, after careful deliberation, I finally arrived at my ultimate moral approach.I am a non-cognitivist, utilitarian, meta-realist with zebra stripes and a party hat.
And you just try throwing any moral dilemma you got my way, and this rational approach of mine's gonna solve it, alright?You can do that. But what you'll probably always find is that it's fighting a losing battle.
You will always, eventually, run into the limitations of reason when you try to use it to tie down something that's as ambiguous and ever-changing as life is.Now, should that stop us from using rationality altogether? Well, no.
Again, this isn't dualism.This isn't an argument for the opposite.The point is, reason will always be something that comes up short to you.
If your expectation of it is idealized, that it's going to solve human conflict entirely, or that it's going to provide a universal morality for all situations, this is yet another common, life-denying tendency of the modern world that tragedy is never going to be assuming.
And again, realizing this could be for someone yet another one of those life-affirming perspective shifts. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everyone that goes through the sponsors today.
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And now, back to the podcast. Tragedy, then, to Simon Critchley, is always a direct challenge to this attempt at having a neat philosophical ordering of any given situation.
Because philosophy done in this way is always aiming for an ideal of non-contradiction.See, contradictions in the world of classical philosophy usually meant that something's seriously wrong with your philosophy.
You better go and fix it, and until then, get away from my desk. Life, on the other hand, our psychological experience of it, is filled with contradictions.
We lie to ourselves all the time, or we feel two seemingly opposite ways at the same time, or we think we're one person, rationally, until the chaos of the moment's actually there, and then all of a sudden we're a different kind of person.
Well, tragedy doesn't run from these sorts of contradictions.It affirms them, even showcases them, because within a tragedy, this is an important piece of what a human life is.
So what that means is, if you feel like you're someone who's capable of living your life believing that you're the main character and that choosing the right thing to do in a situation usually comes very easily to me because I just stick to my moral principles, what's more likely, you think?
That you've arrived at an objective view of morality?Or that you're just ignoring a lot of the details of the world that would make you aware of how messy the situations you're involved in really are?
See, from the tragic perspective, human conflict, moral decision-making, is a complicated thing.
Again, it would be nice if life was a modern movie and there was a clear good side and a clear evil side and a clear right answer that points to a moral ideal that any reasonable person could agree with.
But the tragedies of these early Greek societies, it was never this clear-cut.I mean, the main character of the story in a tragedy is usually a deeply, deeply flawed individual.I mean, think of Oedipus from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles.
Think of the lack of self-awareness he has, how hasty and destructive he is when trying to do what he thinks is right.
Think of how he thinks he's smarter than the very plague that's ruining his city just because he solved some riddle of the Sphinx before that.Think of Agamemnon from the play by Aeschylus.Think of the disregard for his family and the other.
Think of the vanity.Think of how blind he is to the impacts of his actions that end up leading to the events of the play.In other words, there's no hero in a tragedy that's glowing and perfect sitting up on a pedestal.
In a tragedy, people are more presented as these multidimensional, complex characters where everybody is both good and bad.You never idealize a person in a tragedy.
There just seems to be an acknowledgment that everybody is capable of great things sometimes and horrible things at other times.And that our judgments about a person always live within this messiness, whether we're denying that fact or not.
that contrary to the way it might look in a modern movie, if you see someone in the world that everyone's saying is great or everyone's saying is terrible, affirming life means knowing that there's no doubt more to that story you could find in either of those cases that would make that sort of judgment not as clear-cut as it might initially seem.
But here's the point.Imagine someone living in an expectation that it is that clear cut.I mean, forget for a second how much that would absolutely affect their views on things like politics or relationships, who they would support.
But more than that, this person would no doubt eventually turn that denial of the complexity of people internal onto the judgment about themselves.
Think about the person living in this space, of expecting themselves to always be doing things that are good, where every time they do anything, where there was even a glimmer that there may have been something wrong with it, they feel the need to justify themselves.
They got to explain their decision-making.I mean, forget about all the consequences.Y'all got to know my intentions, at least here, were good, even if the outcome was horrible for people.
This is a person that's been convinced at some level that they can't make mistakes, that they have to be this ideal of the good, or else what does that mean?Does that mean I'm evil?
this tragic perspective can be liberating from that kind of dualism about yourself.
Staying on the morality side of this, Critchley says, another thing that the tragic perspective can show us is that there isn't always some clear-cut, correct moral decision to be made.
I mean, again, if you're operating in the mindset that there's some ideal we're striving for, then maybe that kind of thinking makes sense.
But in tragedies, the stories often mirror something that's more along the lines of what our lives are actually like when we have a problem to solve.We're often faced with a situation that is ambiguous. We don't have all the information.
Oftentimes, all the options we have are suboptimal.There's no right answer.Somebody's going to get hurt here.And our job is to just make the best decision we can within these messy parameters.
That's more similar to what life is like to Simon Critchley, not the idealistic nonsense you see in movies.
And again, think of the numbers of people that would resent something about themselves for years, maybe, for not being able to find some perfect solution, as though one even exists.
Simon Critchley has a moment in the book where he talks as generally as possible about what he thinks is better about the tragic perspective.He says this, quote,
It is my conviction that the lesson of the adversarial reasoning of tragedy is that it is prudent to abandon any notion of monotheism, whether it's either of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, a Platonic monotheism rooted in the metaphysical primacy of the good, or indeed the secular monotheism of liberal democracy and human rights that still circles around a weak deistic conception of God.
The motto on the back of the dollar bill might be slightly improved if it read, in gods we trust, and sometimes distrust. Admittedly, this is not very catchy."So you can get a feel for the way he writes his books there.
Now the point he's making, just to briefly restate it, is to notice the monotheism present in our thinking that relies on that renunciative tradition that Nietzsche thinks is the decay of society.
We're always striving for that monotheistic, life-denying ideal, whether that's moral idealism in philosophy, religious ideals, or in liberal democracies.
But as far as we can tell, when it comes to the way people looked at things in pre-Socratic Greece, people more saw themselves as being caught up in the middle of a bunch of different messed up gods, all with competing interests and ideas of what the good is.
Now, that picture is certainly a much messier picture, but it's maybe much more affirming to what the world is that we actually exist in.
One of the most obvious examples you can find of this difference, again, just comparing artwork here, is the visibility of the concept of fate in Greek tragedies.
You know, it feels wonderful when you're watching a modern movie to see a hero, and it doesn't matter what gets thrown their way.It could be an alien species invading with laser cannons.
And there's this theme in these movies that if the hero just believes in themself, if they just keep practicing, they will eventually beat the bad guy. And it's like in tragedy, and in life, that's just not actually how it works.
There's always a baseline when you're reading a tragedy, that there are deterministic forces out there that are just beyond anything you can possibly control, usually many of them competing with each other.
Now, there's of course also the fact that you are making choices from within those parameters.Again, this isn't dualism.But this picture of a human life starts to look more like one we'd see in compatibilism.
Now, when you start from this place in a tragedy, turns out there's tons of interesting themes you can explore that just don't make sense in the typical monotheistic way of viewing things.
Like for Simon Critchley, one question you can ask, that example is seen in Oedipus, is how am I, how are we as people, often complicit in our own fate?
What he means is, sometimes bad things happen in our lives, and when you look back to the things that led up to that event, you realize that there were active choices that you made, that felt entirely free to you in the moment, that nonetheless were the only things that made it possible for this particular fate to unfold in the way that it did in your life.
meaning in our lives.It's not just the bonds of fate that have their hand up you like a puppet dancing you around all the time.
We are oftentimes participants, catalysts in our fate, that help to bring on things like suffering into our lives in ways that might not always be obvious unless if we're taking the time to reflect on them.
Also, we are always, from a tragic perspective, operating from within this soup of competing forces that we are also a competing force in as well.
And if this is starting to sound to you like a dialectical way of viewing reality, well, that's well spotted.Critchley says explicitly in the book that tragedy is in part what he calls a dialectical invitation.
It's an invitation to celebrate the true ambiguity of life. Just keep in mind that I think he would see dialectics along a similar line that Nietzsche would have.
You know, if dialectics is presented to someone as aiming for the ultimate truth about things.
In other words, if dialectics becomes yet another way to rationally order the chaos of reality into this complicated network of oppositions, where the ultimate goal of doing dialectics is to get to the ultimate truth about things, well, it's the expectation of truth there that becomes problematic about that.
This starts to look just like another delusional attempt at using rationality to arrive at the ideal. However, with many more modern ways that dialectics have been interpreted, there isn't any sort of hope for arriving at a destination like that.
And if we're talking along those lines, then while Nietzsche certainly had a special axe to grind against basically any form of methodology, obviously Simon Critchley doesn't share that level of skepticism.
He thinks dialectics can be extremely useful, especially when it comes to getting us out of these life-denying ways of seeing things that we often default into.
Keep in mind that we also have the benefit of over a hundred years of philosophers critiquing Nietzsche's work, showing the methodologies that even he was using when he made this critique.But, you know, anyway, that's just the nature of philosophy.
Something else that tragedy affirms about life, that it's very common to live life in denial of, is how fragile our lives and relationships truly are.
For example, one of those philosophers that critiqued Nietzsche heavily was Martin Heidegger, and he has this famous concept in his work of being unto death.
His point is that in modern society, we cordon off death and illness into these distant buildings that we call hospitals, or into these tucked away plots of grass that we call graveyards.We hide them away.
that it's possible to live your entire life never really encountering the reality of death until it shows up on your front porch and starts ringing the doorbell.Well, death is just one form of what we fear more broadly, which is irreversible loss.
And basically nobody wants to be living their life considering the fact all the time that these things we set up in our lives that we'd like to think are very stable, the friendships, your health, the career, the marriage, no one wants to live in consideration of the fact that these things can be gone in an instant.
And it's not just a possibility.This happens to people every single day.
And then more than that, when people have lived in this idealistic place, denying the ever-present reality of that, well, all of a sudden, one day, when one of these things hits them, it can traumatize them and stick with them for years.
This shouldn't have happened.This isn't right.That person shouldn't have done that.This is evil. People are crushed by these moments, in other words.
But to Simon Critchley, in a Greek tragedy, the story always begins from a place where how fragile our lives are is a fact that's always looming over the story.
Now, to get back to the picture of the modern movie from before, what else is different that might also illuminate the totally different expectations that we have of things?
Well, one of them for Simon Critchley is the expectation we have for sturdy, durable knowledge about the characters and the situations they're in.
I mean, if you walked into a movie theater and sat down, and the movie started playing, and there was no explanation at all as to what was going on, no in-your-face plot development, and you were left to just make inferences about who the characters were, a lot of people would probably say, that's a horrible movie.
I mean, you haven't told me why I should even care about any of these characters.How am I supposed to like it? But oftentimes, in a tragedy, this is exactly what the beginning of the play is like.And the ending, by the way.
There's no expectation in a tragedy that there needs to be some clean-cut final resolution to the story where we all know what happened to the characters afterwards.This is a point that Nietzsche actually spent some time on in his work.
He thought when you look at the 31 Greek tragedies that we have, there's an obvious decline in the quality of the writing during the work of the last of these people who wrote tragedies during this time, Euripides.
He thought it's obvious, when you look at the way that he wrote, that he was starting to become corrupted by that Socrates and Plato ideal, that knowledge is necessary for determining the moral content of something.
So what you see in the work of Euripides, you start seeing plot development.You start seeing backstories about the characters.
You start seeing gods coming down at the end of the play, letting everyone in the audience know what the resolution to the story was. Now, this kind of resolution is just common in our artwork today.But earlier tragedies didn't do this.
And if you think about it, it really does mirror and affirm the way life sometimes feels to us as we're living it.Think of some world event that you care about that may or may not happen within the next year or so.Got one?Okay.
You live most of your life not knowing what's going to happen there. I mean, even when you're in it, you're never making decisions from a place where you have perfect knowledge either.
Even when it comes to knowledge of yourself, like you'd like to believe, well, if this thing went down, I'd like to think I know who I am and how I would act in that scenario.
But as Simon Critchley says, viewing things from the tragic perspective, sometimes we don't know what's going on, but we have to make choices in our lives anyway.
And just like the character of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex, sometimes we both know and don't know at the same time and then end up destroying ourselves in the process.
Last thing I'll say about the differences in tragedy is to point out that oftentimes, in the movie scenario, justice is something that comes swift and decisive.This is a common thing in a movie.
There's a bad person, they get their punishment, and they're left to sit and really think about the bad things they've done for a long, long time.The good guys have won. But by this point, it should be obvious.
This is a denial of how the world actually works.Simon Christie says, justice is never as final as when it's portrayed like that.
For example, I've had the opportunity when I was a kid to live in multiple places in my life where if someone has a problem with you, they just say, we're fighting.Meet me here at this time, after school, whatever it is.Violence is going to happen.
There's nothing you can do about it except to participate in it. So, then you fight this person, and the expectation can be that that's just going to settle it.
But then what often happens in life is that the conflict just gets delayed to a later date.Now, oftentimes, somebody loses a fight, and they come back with a bat, or with their friends.Then the other person has to come back with their friends.
Then it may escalate into more severe weapons.The point is, living in a modern society, we can think that when a judge bangs a gavel, or when a treaty is signed in a war, that that just settles it.
The whole conflict is resolved, and now everyone can go on back to their lives. But oftentimes in tragedy, prior events or mistakes will come up and haunt the characters in the present.
Oftentimes there is no concept in these plays of ultimate justice coming down on people.There's just cycles of violence that we as people get caught up in.
And that justice, as we call it justice, is just something that turns the wheel to the next iteration of things that will end up affecting us in a slightly new way.
Anyway, I haven't even scratched the surface here of the explanations Critchley gives in the book, his analysis of Greek tragedy and where these ideas come from.
Ultimately to him though, in a world where people are completely captured by fast moving surface level media that confirm this monotheistic bias, this moral idealism, tragedy in that world can serve as an emergency brake, he says.
It can get us to stop, reflect, and it can guide us when we read it to think about the world in a totally different way. In other words, tragedy, he thinks, can trick people into thinking about things more deeply.
And to be clear here, for Simon Critchley, it's not about living every second of your life in this tragic perspective.
It's more about recognizing the very unique type of wisdom that can only come from embracing the contradictions we live in, a type of wisdom that the tragic perspective can help you shine a light on if that's something you want to do.
Now, to shift here to more of the perspective of Friedrich Nietzsche, consider all the different ways we've talked about on this episode that you could be looking at reality that might escape someone if they just mindlessly internalize media created by people projecting a set of Socratic Christian ideals.
Consider the discomfort that might come up when noticing these pieces of life.And now consider what it might be like to say yes to all of them, to this whole messy picture of what life is we just talked about in its entirety.
Imagine you were to say yes to all of that. Well, consider the question, would your life be different if you affirmed these things instead of denying them?You know, to Nietzsche, Plato was ultimately a coward.
He was a man that faced this reality of the world we're talking about as it actually is.And then he chose to retreat terrified into an abstract ideal that made him feel better about it.
And that take from Nietzsche is an interesting one, considering the fact that to someone like Simon Critchley, the tragic perspective he says is a type of courage that someone uses to face the reality of the world head on.
Whether this comes down to courage and fear, I'll leave you to think about this week.I hope you enjoyed this one.Thank you again to everyone who supports an effort like this podcast on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophizethis.
And as always, thank you for listening.I'll talk to you next time.
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