How to Become a Monster | Nietzsche

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/Weltgeist/ . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos: ▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT OUR ANALYSES: ▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk ▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c ▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI ▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA ▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8 ▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA ▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 03:10 Nietzsche the psychologist 09:40 Nietzsche the Greek 25:01 Into the abyss 30:44 A psychology of the future 42:23 Nietzsche and cruelty 52:50 Zarathustra speaks "He who fights monsters, should see to it that he doesn't become a monster himself. And if you stare long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." This is one of most famous yet mysterious quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. What does it mean? In this video, we try to offer an exposition of this aphorism, according to Nietzsche's own dictum that an aphorism is not understood at first reading, but requires an "art of exposition." Nietzsche claims that he is the only psychologist so far who has dared to venture into the depths of the human soul. Western society being so strongly influenced by Platonism and Christianity that we cannot look beyond our naive belief in opposites: good versus evil, truth vs lie, egoism versus altruism. He harkens back to a pre-Platonic view of looking at the world, in the manner of the Homeric Greeks, before Plato and his "Egyptianism" sought to capture Being in neat concepts (ideas) instead preferring a Heraclitean way of looking at things: reality and nature being in an eternal flux of Becoming. Such a worldview would go Beyond Good and Evil and beyond the naive belief in antinomies, and would pave the way for a new psychology of the depths, a psychology that reckons honestly with the dark side within the human soul rather than explaining it away as the result of ignorance or an imperfect representation of some Platonic Ideal, a corrupt copy of a copy of "the Good." No, says Nietzsche, the monster at bottom of many a human soul must be confronted honestly, and reckoned with as part of human nature. Only then will we be able to make way for the coming of the Superman. As Zarathustra says, mankind needs to become more evil.