45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil

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—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. 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. The more poetically the author happens to be, the more the case that his or her writings contain within the seeds of future ideas.

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 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 and 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. Because he was also brilliant beyond comprehension, his ability to distill what he was thinking into incredibly rich phrases is, I think, in some sense, beyond parallel.

I mean, often if I'm reading a book, if it has any utility at all, 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'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. 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? 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, a 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 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, 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 it’s 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 or 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, 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 a way that enables you, if you'll put the time in, to benefit from the spectacular fact of that intelligence.

Nietzsche was a full professor by the time he was 24, at a time when 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 section, 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 deceptively simple sentence, even though it's not a particularly simple sentence, because 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 Western enlightenment.

But it's by no means self-evident that that's the case. And it’s certainly not something that Nietzsche believes that people are rational beings. Certainly not primarily. And more importantly, he isn't exactly convinced that they should be.

So, for example, one of Nietzsche's most famous maxims is that truth serves life. And that's a very different idea than the purpose of truth, which 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 it's the beginning of a different metaphysics, and in some sense of metaphysics, which is to 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, we're irrational, and that we're 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 one value which contains all of that. But then you could 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—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 has 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 phenomenon, 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 does “in you” mean? Part of it means is that you act out a pattern of behavior. And that pattern of behavior is like 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 a 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, 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 an involuntary 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 it, 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 involuntary, unconscious. Involuntary and unconscious—he's alluding to the fact that that proclivity is so deeply embedded in people that the desire to make an autobiographical recounting 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 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 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—automatic, unconscious engagement with the material—by detaching themselves and having to think about what they're doing.

So that's why it's involuntary and unconscious. 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 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 can start thinking about what the ethics and the morals might be, and you kind of have some sense of that because 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 is also dealing with the ultimate question in life, which might be, well, what is your life aimed at? 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, another 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'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 representation in fiction and that sort of thing, and then some of it's 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 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 psychoanalytically 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 Hitler 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 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 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. He's 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 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 deconstructionist claim is that 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 deconstructionists 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 a 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 it's 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 deconstructionists 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 socioeconomic 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 materialists. 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 analyze people in whom the will to knowledge might actually be offered—even though he wouldn't be willing to grant the status of the 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 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 bomb, 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 conceptualizing 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 are 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 try to get some work done, and the work is not of any particular intrinsic interest, but you regard it as a 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 there's some other thing that you could do that's 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 too, 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 conceptualizes a human being as the dwelling place of spirits, and some of them are genies. 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 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 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—one-eyed giants—and there's a sexual connotation to that, which is, I propose that the psychoanalysts 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 way of looking at it 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 monster—a psychological monster—to dominate the entire psychological structure; therefore, the entire cultural structure; therefore, the entire world.

And then 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 be 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 tie 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 philosophize.” 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, 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 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.