NIETZSCHE on the Nature of Consciousness - Deep Dive: “The Genius of the Species” (The Gay Science )
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ค. 2022
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Another episode on a single passage: The Gay Science, book V, aphorism 354: “The Genius of the Species”. One of the most thought-provoking passages in Nietzsche’s work, he expounds on his hypothesis that all consciousness is a product of human sociality, and was only necessary as a net of communication between human beings. This has dire implications for Nietzsche’s aspirations to individualism, and makes suspect everything to him which enters into consciousness. He believes that the deeper, more profound aspects of human life remain, ultimately, untranslatable.
Episode art: Alphonse Maria Mucha - La Pater (1899)
#nietzsche #philosophy #consciousness #mind #linguistics #language #reading
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00:15 📚 Nietzsche's aphorism in "The Gay Science," Book 5, Section 354, titled "The Genius of the Species," is essential for understanding his approach to human consciousness and thought.
01:13 📝 Nietzsche's work in the fifth book of "The Gay Science" marks a transition in his philosophy and lays the foundation for his mature ideas, including the concept of the "Ubermensch" (higher man).
03:33 🧠 Nietzsche explores the development of human consciousness, arguing that it is shaped by fear, force, and the need to suppress impulses, leading to self-awareness and morality.
11:12 🦁 Nietzsche discusses how pleasurable impulses can evolve independently of their original purposes, using the example of the sexual drive in humans.
15:13 ⚖ Nietzsche contrasts master morality (where strength and power are valued) with slave morality (which emphasizes meekness, suffering, and otherworldly ideals), highlighting the impact of Christianity on moral values and the rejection of physical reality.
31:33 🤔 Nietzsche explores the question of why consciousness exists, suggesting it may have arisen due to the need for communication.
36:04 🗣 Consciousness, according to Nietzsche, is closely tied to the capacity for communication, which developed over generations due to the need for collective survival and coordination.
40:18 📚 Language and communication have evolved beyond basic survival needs, giving rise to artists, orators, preachers, and writers who use language for more than mere survival.
42:10 🧠 Nietzsche connects communication with the power to command and obey, emphasizing that communication's purpose is not just equal communion but also coordination and cooperation in the external world.
46:39 🗣 Nietzsche suggests that consciousness is primarily a product of communication among humans, and without communication, consciousness would seem odd and disposable.
53:37 🙌 Nietzsche argues that individual self-consciousness emerges from collective needs and communication, highlighting that our thoughts are shaped by the character of consciousness, which is a result of herd utility.
01:03:08 🤔 Nietzsche criticizes consciousness, calling it a corruption and a disease, emphasizing that conscious thought often leads to a reduction of depth, falsification, and generalization of experience.
01:04:33 🧠 Nietzsche views consciousness as a form of decadence and corruption because whatever becomes conscious becomes cheapened, making intellectual and spiritual life shallow.
01:05:17 💪 Collective power, cooperation, and hierarchy based on values are significant factors in human development, according to Nietzsche, as they sustain and help human groups surpass others.
01:06:57 🐾 Nietzsche suggests that animals live historically, unburdened by memories or fears of the future, which contrasts with human self-consciousness and temporal awareness.
01:09:01 🧘 Nietzsche emphasizes the utility of non-consciousness and acting on impulse, highlighting the importance of suspending judgment and dismissing doubts when taking action.
01:11:20 🗣 Nietzsche rejects metaphysical claims, stating that humans lack an organ for truth. He also critiques the concept of utility, highlighting its subjective and potentially calamitous nature.
Great work! Your series on Nietzsche is the best I've found on TH-cam.
Truly an amazing find. Feel like I’m part of a very small and special club.like a doom metal show in Iowa.
Another excellent episode! You have quite an ability for monologing: that you can talk for an hour or more, and remain thoroughly entertaining throughout is impressive. You clearly -or so it seems- prepare quite a bit before the recording of the episode - i always feel like listening to these is time well spent.
Agreed. Excellent voice and tempo. You can tell he’s a musician and understands an audience. Incredibly well presented and informative. A service to humanity
Thank you very much for the kind words! I do indeed have to prepare a great deal for these, because I like to cover these topics exhaustively and with a decent amount of source material to back it up. I also very much enjoy crafting a lecture that covers many “branches” but ultimately digs down to one, central “root” idea…. Which means that improvisation has only a limited utility for me.
Thanks for listening, any sharing of the podcast on social media is greatly appreciated. 👍🏻
12:23 not only does fear of future social consequence encourage the projection of the self into the futures. but also our basic survival instinct to remember where the water/food source is, and the storing up of resources for future consumption,(like a squirrel) also demonstrates the projection of "self awareness" into the future (future hunger). so "self consciousness" can be an adaptive phenomenon of the basic survival instinct. which would predate any social stigmas, and would demonstrate "consciousness" in all animal life. (as a squirrel stores it's nuts, and all animals remember their way back to their water source) ect.
Warm greetings! And may you continue posting for years to come! Your take on the Faust of Goethe is one of your best videos so far.
Great analysis and breakdown, I find your explanations of Nietzsche the most accurate and precise. The Gay Science is my favorite book of all time, I am grateful to find some analysis of this era of Nietzsche’s work rather than his later more popular books.
Thank you. You are en excellent presenter and you know your subject.
I'm reminded of Heidegger's distinction between cliche and authentic speech -- perhaps another vector for a critique of Nietzsche's theory of mind? Wolves, cows, (ants?,) other herd animals are social. Maybe conscious awareness is, in addition to being about socialization and inter-subjective ("leveled") meanings, an abstraction of what is complex to enable executive decision making: the flexible imposition of horizons on extreme complexity to enable a path forward that is adapted to a very specific set of circumstances. This symbolic abstraction may be used in the light of such complexity, or it may merely be the aping of stale cliches.
My favorite aphorism, thank you!
Absolutely brilliant work!
You can still organize and diminished the hierarchy importance only if beforehand people agreed on some pattern of behaviour. Like stabilishing some rule of engagment or with our modern automation wich is totaly a agreed upon pattern. Then need for hierarchy can be diminished, but perhaps never extinguished.
thank you so much. YOU are so good. fascinating brilliant enthralling. ❤🌠✅♾️⚓️
Just wanted to again say thank you for these. All of your vids have been a great companion to reading the works. Would be killer to hear your thoughts on Cioran, Philip mainlander. 🤘🏻
I will almost certainly talk about Cioran in the future. I haven’t read Mainlander, can you recommend a book?
@@untimelyreflections philosophy of redemption if you can find an English translation online. Hard to find. Read his wiki. Some think Nietzsche plagiarized him. He influenced Cioran also.
although he laid out the hard problem of consciousness at the begining, i was hoping he would go into it further ie why we have subjective experience in the first place. the stuff about communication feels more like the "easy problem".
I think this explains Zen and satori in a more analytical and clearer way.
Do you have a link to your friend's podcast where he talks about the predatory felines? I have been on a binge studying lions and tigers lately.
It’s not the main topic of the episode, just a small part of it, and I can’t remember if he goes into all that much more detail, but I think he cites some sources you can look into: th-cam.com/video/57r6rsXvJwo/w-d-xo.html
the conclusion that the leopard killed for pleasure has been drawn from the attack on domesticated animals alone or has it been observed in the wild? If only the former is true then serious consideration should be given to the fact that domesticated animals are beeing guarded and the predator might have been roaming around being denied the prey which would build tension in his body and exacerbate desire. Cumulate that with the fact that herd animals are incapable of running away from wild predators as they are both fat and lacking stamina ( similar to farmed humans :) and the outcome isn't quite as unexpected.
It is well known in human behaviour that denial of instinct expression leads build up of tension and an exacerbated pursuit for that which has been denied especially in matters which deal with survival.
Eagles have been known to kill domesticated chickens out of (what appears to be) sheer pleasure. I'm not opposed to the reasoning that it has to do with pleasure, but I suspect, much like how an an ExtraTerrestrial alien who would have watched the A-bombs dropped on Japan, that a greater understanding of the cultural presence would afford a a deeper, more nuanced, more accurate understanding of such mechanisms
20:00 the conscious intellect and philosophising.
This was so beautiful. I will see it again just for pleasure's sake.
When the inner world of man and its original consciousness is completely displaced by a synthetic mind you might do well to question What the meaning of survival is for such existence? It is funny to assume there was no self reflect in consciousness without language because certain animals lacking in language are still aware of themselves. Because words can hijack emotions they can maintain or amplify sensations beyond what is reasonable or necessary.This is so because for every sensation of feeling there is now an association I thought concepts by which it is inextricably bound. Does the machinery of language and the genius beyond the individual determines how this individual shall suffer. What sort of consciousness is that it's not a strange collective minds wish the individual has been lost to. He cannot say he is identified with the collective mind he now simply IS this collective. Whatever he really was has either been lost or submerged in a state of suspended animation. Had Nietzsche ever considered What meaning then can be attributed to the aims of a collective species if there is no true individual that exists to judge?
And what causes them to agree to that pattern of behavior? What even _created_ (and tested) that other "prefabricated" pattern of behavior except another hierarchical group/structure that is now imposing itself on you remotely.
I think that hierarchy - sovereignty if you will - is always conserved, just like matter and energy. Power, in the human sense, is never created or destroyed, but only moved around, resulting in local minimums or maximums, but always imposing or accepting a cost elsewhere.
Organization and hierarchy are structurally identically.
Seemingly flat non hierarchical organizations in the anarcolectivist or voluntary sense are always illusions, Wallflowers that can only exist because they are growing within the greenhouse of hierarchy around them that has created the temporary circumstances for the same. They are childish, in the almost literal sense that infants can play freely during recess because the hierarchy of the adult world has created that space for them.
The only sort of organization able to build itself up from the ground level, ex nihlo, without training wheels, is a hierarchical one. Considering that nothing lasts forever and things must always be in rebuilt, it is the only sort that can actually endure.
There is a time and place for reduced or even minimal hierarchy, but it is almost never for anything important.
Mowgli children who grew up with animals is an empirical proof that consciousness is a societal phenomenon.
Others should be more concerned with what I think of their actions. 😊
When the inner world of man and its original consciousness is completely displaced by a synthetic mind you might do well to question What the meaning of survival is for such an existence? first of all It is an assumption there was no self reflection possible prior language because certain animals lacking in language are still aware of themselves. If not recognizably why not still meaningfully? All the More if the authentic individual is retained in such a state? Consider how words hijack emotions and sensations. They maintain and amplify a grasp upon sensations beyond what is reasonable or necessary. This is so because for every sensation or feeling there is now an inextricably bound association to thought once the concept is learned. Thus the machinery of language and the so called genius beyond the individual determines how this individual shall suffer and even perhaps nearly all that he experiences. What sort of consciousness is it that the existence of the original individual has already been sacrificed before "HE" can even realize he is lost? He can nolonger say he is identified with the collective since he now simply IS this collective. Whatever he really was has either been lost or submerged in a state of suspended animation. But Nietzsche seemingly never explicitly considered What meaning could be attributed to any collective species ( its values) if there can nolonger simultaneously exist a meaningfully authentic individual remaining to have a judgement.
Noice
genealogy
Taking Evolution for granted is insane
It fascinates me that Nietzsche is probably referring to a psychopath as the higher man. The similarities are uncanny
Disgusting > everything is consciousness
To me the conscience is just your body telling you what is best. Golden rule, justice, etc…. Doesn’t seem to be dependent on society entirely.
That is an illusion you have my friend. Try to discard that thought and make an argument against it
@@gus8310 I guess your comment is just dependent on society, entirely. Perhaps you could look at the cross cultural psychological data like I have.
@@bryanutility9609 morality has had 2 origins that came to be the morality we know today. Greek and Christianity. You’re saying that you’re conscious is your own built in understanding but it’s actually a preprogrammed or learned morality over hundreds of years. They aren’t objective they are subjective to your culture and you so whos to say they are right?
@@gus8310 there are common moral & psychological traits across human groups that are well studied. The world doesn’t revolve around the West. Those moral instincts are then emphasized or repressed to the degree that a culture has goals based on circumstance. Dogma can be a problem. I’m in touch with my instincts and don’t find it hard to fathom, nor do I blindly follow any cultural beliefs as dogma even though I maintain basic participation with manors & customs.
It’s not hard. Anyone who doesn’t practice reciprocity at some level will end up alienated & alone just about anywhere.
@@bryanutility9609 yes true the world does not revolve around the west. The nihilistic wave is sweeping across the west. We do not see it in the east as much. I do agree with what you are saying yes, following your intuition, reciprocity is a necessity and yes we must conform for the sake of our own self preservation in a sense. But you seem to have a nice balance of questioning and playing the “game”
Nonsense , try to survive without it.
Animals have survived 1000x longer than humans have existed, without it.