Nietzsche's nostrils
Silicon Valley's philosopher, Totalitarian states, Cyclic Cosmology, and Wittgenstein.
« My genius is in my nostrils » says Nietzsche, and what smells would those nostrils pick up today?
Nietzsche is often funny, and always irreverent. I think a lot of people miss out because reading philosophy is supposedly like reading a textbook. But his autobiography has chapters like “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Am So Clever”, or “Why I Write Such Good Books”. He always has an opinion. This makes him so much more enjoyable to read than the sterile and obscure academic prose I’ve seen elsewhere; incidentally, it’s also why Russel’s History of Western Philosophy is so good, and Russell doesn’t even like Nietzsche!
I sometimes meet really cynical people who wear it as a badge of cleverness, sort of like modern day Raskolnikovs. Indeed in my worst moments I can be like that. This is a great example of reverse-Nietzsche thinking.
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: not wanting anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just enduring what is necessary, still less concealing it—all idealism is hypocrisy in the face of what is necessary—but loving it…
— Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever”
As a side note, ecce homo, “behold the man”, is really an insane title for an autobiography, those were Pontius Pilate’s words when he presents Jesus to the crowd, shortly before the crucifixion. Cool cool.
I’ve heard so many educated people in my age group argue that the future is so screwed that it’s best to not have children, or to get a job that in any way shape or form might hurt the planet. This broadly acceptable disdain for life and human agency always seemed like a typical intellectual-yet-silly perspective. A room full of Cambridge graduates will acquiesce to it, but it’s so evidently the wrong answer.
It’s hard to argue this point in a logical manner, it’s more something I take on faith (faith in my guts? faith in fate? amor fati!). People will see suffering in the world and « think this refutes life, but really it is only them who are refuted».
Nietzsche is a joyful and positive character, « Zarathustra is a dancer ». His ideal is a knight, a poet and a thinker all at once. He plays with words, describes Spinoza as a frog1 , and Kant as an albino2! (Spinoza is actually a very lovable character.) He encourages us to be tough, embrace the fire, but also to laugh about it, and dance. Laughing and dancing are surprisingly common themes throughout. His philosophy is «the joyful science». It’s love of fate, firmly saying « yes! » to life, in spite of everything, perhaps even because of it. This was also Viktor Frankl’s take away from his time in Auschwitz (I was somehow compelled to read Frankl on my birthday this year, concentration camps and birthdays are strange bedfellows and I’m not sure I recommend the timing). I’m reminded of this Colbert line about being grateful for the worst things that have happened to you, it’s worth watching that for a minute or two.
Of course, comparing Spinoza to a frog and saying Socrates is ugly3 because he has a big nose didn’t get Nietzsche a lot of love from the academic community.
A criticism often levelled at him in the past is that he isn’t a serious philosopher, more of a literary figure. He’s inconsistent. He argues poetically rather than logically. This is a fine criticism, in the sense that it’s true, he is incoherent and illogical, but I think part of the Nietzsche story is that this is sort of the point. Nietzsche would say he argues physiologically, with his body, that « unknown sage», or his nostrils, but that this is superior to arguing with the mind.
Come to think of it, it’s funny that it’s now fashionable to say that the gut is our second brain, but of course, “I believe it in my guts” is un-intellectual. hmm.
Hiding in “-isms”, finding aliens, and cyclic cosmology
If a thinker has « a system », or a formula, red flag! Philosophical systems nerd-snipe a lot of us because they seem to explain everything (e.g. utilitarianism). This is what we dream of; but of course it’s also the bait that induced Faust to sell his soul to the devil in Goethe’s play4.
Idealistic philosophers that build systems like Kant or Hegel, the usual suspects, give us a sense of total objectivity, “fundamental” reality, the pure platonic forms, the kantian thing-in-itself, these are known as noumena. Philosophy as mathematical theorem proving. Math envy? Our experienced reality consists in phenomena, so why all the this talk of noumena? Does idealism smell bad? Ok, so any useful philosophising5 should steer clear of ideals. If it doesn’t relate to my life, change my behaviour, it’s not my thing.
In software, we have this analogy of the cathedral and the bazaar6 to describe closed source vs open source software. Trust the bazaar, never trust the cathedral!
«A systematic spirit is a lack of integrity»7. A system is a cathedral. Nietzsche’s thought is a bazaar. I always cringe a little when someone in silicon valley claims “I’m a libertarian” as this is almost always immediately followed-up with sloppy thinking. This goes for any political party. Plenty of good libertarian perspectives to be had, but it’s too easy to “hide in the -isms”, libertarianism, utilitarianism, atheism, protestantism. They give us a sense of safety in our intellectual position, we like to hide in the cathedral’s protective embrace. Following Wittgenstein’s analogy it’s best to use the “-isms” as steps on the ladder to understanding, and then throw away the ladder!8
Now we have to talk about aliens for a minute. Astrophysicists working on stellar evolution or other niche topics always complain about how little funding there is for them, as opposed to, say, people studying exoplanets and looking for life on other worlds. They complain. Does anyone like complainers? Nietzsche doesn’t either. Boo hoo! Discovering aliens is the most important thing astrophysicists could do for us, of course they get the money. Incidentally, for those who haven’t heard, it looks like we may have found aliens. Doubly exciting for me as the discoverer was one of my favourite lecturers in Cambridge. Perhaps fundamental has mostly come to mean “far removed from reality”, i.e. useless? Maybe academia is broken (it is), and if it were fixed it would get more funding? This aside on aliens is over, but we will return to physics shortly!
One Nietzschean idea I still have a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around is «eternal return», the idea that we will all have to live our lives, exactly the same, over and over, an infinite number of times. He calls this his one «truly abyssal idea», and is supposedly the whole point of Zarathustra. Dafuq? The second law of thermodynamics was formulated properly in the 1850s, which led to a good amount of public discussion around the possible heat death of the universe. Simply put the argument goes like this: some parts of the universe are hot, others are cold, if you put a cold thing in contact with a hot thing, they both end up lukewarm. Because there’s way more cold stuff in the universe, we should expect that if we wait long enough, the whole universe will be too cold to support life. This is heat death, sort of.
Nietzsche talks about Darwin in a few places (mostly to argue that his ideas about the overman are not darwinian), so he was clued in to the scientific discourse of the day, and considering that even poets were writing about heat death, it seems likely that he’d heard of this. It may have prompted him to give his own view of cosmology, a cyclical one, eternal return.
There is plenty of modern physics that lend credibility to eternal return. Let’s start with the un-controversial crazy physics, Poincaré’s recurrence theorem.
Wikipedia definition: In mathematics and physics, the Poincaré recurrence theorem states that certain dynamical systems will, after a sufficiently long but finite time, return to a state arbitrarily close to (for continuous state systems), or exactly the same as (for discrete state systems), their initial state.
Explain to me like I’m 5: Dynamical systems are collections of things that move (e.g. atoms). Say you have a box of gas (atoms that jiggle). Now look inside the box, the atoms are at certain positions and have speeds and directions. If you let them jiggle about for a long time (called the Poincaré recurrence time), let’s say 5 minutes, they eventually end up in the same position as when you first looked at them, moving in the exact same way. This is cool because that means they’ll then repeat their exact motion once again, and then again, etc… In practice, it may take more than 5 minutes.
So… this is kind of crazy because, maybe we are just atoms that jiggle (bodies) in a box (the universe)? And then Nietzsche was right, just wait for the right amount of time and you’ll have to re-live the exact same day! So we should be pretty careful to live lives we’re proud of because we’re going to have to put up with them forever. Now, it’s not actually clear that the universe is a box, nor that we are atoms that jiggle deterministically. But it could be true, if you believe in superdeterminism, even quantum mechanics is deterministic, and suddenly this sounds a lot less whacky.
Now for even more exciting physics. Nobel laureate Roger Penrose has a model he calls conformal cyclic cosmology. Consider this:
From the paper: A new analysis of the CMB, using WMAP data, supports earlier indications of non-Gaussian features of concentric circles of low temperature variance. Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) predicts such features from supermassive black-hole encounters in an aeon preceding our Big Bang.
Explain to me like I’m 5: there are circular regions in the sky that aren’t the temperature they should be according to standard physics. Penrose has some math that explains this. The math implies that the universe goes through cycles: Big Bang → time passes → new Big Bang → time passes, etc…
So… maybe, just maybe Nietzsche was right about this eternal recurrence thing. What the hell? There are some caveats to this particular model, but the cyclical idea is being worked on.
Modern physics is very weird, this is something we’ll come back to another time. Did you know that causality, i.e. cause precedes effect, is not a thing in modern physics? Sometimes, effect precedes cause!
Silicon Valley’s philosopher, Nazis, and the totalitarian state action heuristic
Europe is a great place to live, but California is a great place to feel alive. I think silicon valley loves Nietzsche because agency is highly valued and encouraged around there. Ambition is cool. Balaji talks about “uncle Fred versus uncle Ted”. Fred is Friedrich Nietzsche, Ted is the unabomber. Fred and Ted agree that human happiness is « the feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome ». Fred talks about « will to power », Ted talks about « the power process ». Where Ted goes wrong is that he argues: well, all the easy problems have been solved, so that leaves trivial problems which don’t satisfy our will to power, or very hard problems which can’t, so we have no agency, and that sucks, let’s go back!
Fred says embrace reality, love it, dance forward into the future, you have agency, use it! You have the potential to be a hero, cultivate it! Nietzsche’s view is much closer to modern psychology’s view of mental health: cultivate agency and gratitude.
Balaji’s point is that this is a new political axis: do we go the stars, or back to the past. The unabomber moved to the forest to send bombs in the mail and return to a pre-technological era. Silicon valley is squarely in the first camp.
Thinking about Nietzsche and SV gave me this idea for a heuristic: if a totalitarian state would do it, we probably should avoid doing it too much; if a totalitarian state would ban it, we should probably do it a bit more.
First fruitful application of the heuristic: totalitarian states exile journalists and poets. Engineers? Not so much.
What sort of education was favoured in the Soviet Union? Technical education, engineering, mathematics, and with as little literature and philosophy as possible. Stalin was a poet as a youth, so he had a bit of a soft spot for them, but of course also realised the danger.
The other day a friendly guy at the WeWork asked me if I’d done the international baccalaureate when I was a teenager. Upon learning I’d done the french baccalaureate instead of IB he said “oh, the one with way too much philosophy?”
Right, god forbid the kids learn to think for themselves.
Consider the Paypal mafia, how come so many of the cool companies in SV were started by guys with philosophy and law degrees? Palantir’s CEO has a PhD in social theory, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman were undergrads in philosophy. Narrative violation.
Incidentally, it’s through Reid’s book recommendation that I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein, about which I’ll have more to say (this biography of Witt. is one of my favourite books).
Engineers aren’t encouraged to think about civic issues (even civil engineers!), or how they should give meaning to their lives. They’re taught to build bridges, code in React, and sometimes we ask them to build bombs. Very convenient!
A strong state prefers a feeble mind. Do your calculations, write code for us, and shut up. A strong state is bad for the development of a rich culture.
Now consider that every child in silicon valley is encouraged from the youngest age to study programming so that “they can go to Stanford”. hmmm… It’s doubly f’d that increasingly universities seem like finishing schools for how to not have ideas. Harvard is ranked last of 248 universities for its free speech climate, described as « abysmal », an exciting prospect for bright young minds! :)
Returning to Nietzsche, one piece of lore surrounding him is his supposed adoption by the Nazis. I find this so hard to believe, given all the irreverent things he says about « party men » being mindless, and the state being what gets in the way of the greatness of a culture. At some point, I think in Beyond Good and Evil, he even suggests that to breed a master race, one should mix Germans and Jews. It seems crazy that one could mis-read Nietzsche so thoroughly. Perhaps never did a convinced Nazi read a whole Nietzsche book? Or his evil sister, which he kindly describes as an «anti-Semitic cow», did a great job of selectively publishing his works? Hitler attended her funeral, so definitely something odd was going on.
Second fruitful application of the totalitarian state action heuristic
Link to Wittgenstein, a larger than life kind of guy: this man loved music, he grew up surrounded by music prodigies (a few of his siblings), Brahms and Mahler were family friends. «Without music, life would be a mistake» says Nietzsche. Witt. almost never gave talks, and only published one book in his lifetime, but in one talk he did give, about ethics, he has this interesting line: « now I will use the term [ethics] in a slightly larger sense, which includes the most part of what we commonly call aesthetics.» Hmmm… At first this seems a bit suspicious, what’s the link between music, or a painting, and ethics? Is this philosophical nonsense again?
But we can use our earlier heuristic: isn’t it odd how art in totalitarian states is always boring and monotonous statues of aryan masters or heroic workers and nothing else? They ban the other stuff! Perhaps the totalitarian state knows that there’s an ethics/ aesthetics link, and so it suppresses the arts. Sounds pretty practical to me. I haven’t figured out this connection fully yet, but strongly suspect there is something there. Another hint in this direction is this: when someone acts in a truly good way, we’re inclined to say that was a beautiful action. Ok…
My best guess goes something like this. Wittgenstein’s central idea is that language is limited, like a tea cup, you can pour a litre of water in it, but it will only ever hold a teacup’s worth of water. Language is imperfect, we can’t use it to talk about everything. Indeed Nietzsche also has this line where he says that what you can talk about, you’ve already overcome it, understood it. What is communicable is commun (common). It’s the trivial stuff we’re able to talk about easily, the hard stuff is, well, hard. Ethics is hard, Wittgenstein argues it’s in the class of things we cannot properly discuss with language. So what do we do? Well, art! Maybe I can’t describe my emotion it but I can paint it? I’m a taker if anyone has good ideas about this.
The order in which you should read Nietzsche
The first time round I made the mistake of trying to start with Zarathustra and I gave up, mystified. Why is the city called «Motley Cow»?! This seems to be many peoples’ experience. So this time I approached it a bit more carefully. Start with Beyond Good and Evil, it’s a broad and funny book, covering many of his key ideas, and very accessible. Then read The Genealogy of Morals, this will clarify the slave morality / master morality thing. After these two, I think any order works for his other works. The Anti-Christ is a short, hard hitting and absolutely hilarious book, I highly recommend not leaving that one out. A funny line from it is his description of « messieurs the metaphysicians — those albinos of the intellect. » Another analogy that has stuck with me is his riff about the « colourblind utilitarians » seeking « english happiness » (read: a comfortable chair, a scone and a cup of tea, or, equivalently, a job at Google), which as a frenchman who lived in the UK for years was of course very amusing. Twilight of the Idols is good and read-able in a day or two. Right now I’m half-way through Zarathustra, it’s good, but I don’t think I could have appreciated it very much without a lot of prior reading.
Thanks to Coline Rialan, Anthony Kirilov and Domenico Praticó for useful comments.
Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 1, part 3. Checking my references revealed that he wasn’t referring to Spinoza specifically here, but to metaphysicians in general. He has other good lines on Spinoza though, such as “Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask—in fact ,the "love of his wisdom," [this cracked me up, philos-sophia!] to translate the term fairly and squarely—in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that Pallas Athene”.
The Anti-Christ, section 17. Further digs at Kant include “The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative” and “Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg was only a great critic”.
Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates”. Compare how Nietzsche refers to his own nose very lovingly vs Socrates’ nose, “We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, which in itself is an objection, was among the Greeks virtually a refutation.”
“Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust ( c. 1480–1540). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.”, Wikipedia entry on Faust.
If it doesn’t change behaviour, I call it useless. Of course a lot of things change behaviour in non obvious ways.
Twilight of the Idols, aphorism 26.
Wittgenstein’s ladder, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 6.54.