The Knowledge Tree: Embrace the Suck

Christina Jones: It was the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche that famously stated to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. This timeless perspective is kind of a powerful reminder that everyone in life struggles uniquely. There is no one on the planet that does not struggle. The act of consciousness itself and the understanding of our own demise causes its own existentialism that most people are either running from or falling prey to in some capacity. But finding personal purpose throughout the difficulties of life. Is a learned type of philosophy that has many ways of being explored. On this episode of the knowledge tree, we're gonna talk about a couple of concepts that may appeal to you. I'm your host Christina. Let's learn together. Sources for this episode are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Quelia. And Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Uber Mensch, a hero of our time question mark written by Eva Cybolska. Sources, of course, will be listed below for your own pursuit. Feelings and experiences very widely, something we recently talked about on Between Two Queens. Shameless plug. I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. We all are. Philosophers often use the term Quelia, if I'm saying that correctly, or quail in the singular fashion, to refer to the introspectively accessible Phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. What are we referring to there? Well, if I run my hands through a soft bit of material or I lose my temper, or I'm sad, or I have a I don't know, an experience where I'm in some type of emotional or Sensational space, all of that falls under the characterization of qualia. Of course, disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world, both inside and outside the head. Private internal mental states cannot directly be measured or experienced by anyone else. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy, largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem. It challenges physicalism, the idea that the mind and conscious experience Can be completely explained by physical brain processes and matter. There's another quote that I didn't write down who said it that goes, Life is not to be looked at, but into. And what comes to mind for me when I think of Quelia is that this is. Kind of the defining divine gift of humanity. That subjective, unique experience and perspective that cannot be replicated by anyone but yourself. How you feel pain isn't the same as how I feel pain. How you feel or experience touch or how I touch you is gonna feel different than how you touch. me, they're very much something that is absolutely incomparable. However, I think through art, creativity, music, we all have this ability to resonate with each other's frequency, which is highly fascinating when you consider the aspect of Quelia. Have you ever been to a concert or been in? a small space or even a large space where there's this synergetic surge of understanding with the people around you. For me, it's my strongest intuitive understanding of the collective unconsciousness, which at some point, once I feel like I have more of a more of a handle on young, which is easier to digest than Nietzsche, to be fair. With that Idea in mind for those that know what collective conscious unconsciousness is, because consciously it should be impossible to know how someone else is feeling, but you can feel it, and we all vibe together in those moments. It indicates on a connectivity that goes beyond consciousness. Another concept. One I wholeheartedly subscribe to, despite the fact that I didn't even know what it was called until a couple of weeks ago, is amorfati or amor fati, which is Latin for love of fate. It's a mindset where you don't just passively accept the events in your life, but genuinely embrace and love everything that happens to you. Including hardships, failures, and loss. Every unchosen experience or obstacle is a necessary and valuable part of your story. I think people find it for me personally odd when I share details of a somewhat shocking variety when it comes to a lot of my own childhood and early adulthood experiences. But more particularly my childhood, or some other faucet of my life where it was not kind to me, I must caveat, when you intellectualize your emotions, that certainly lends itself to be able to more rationally and logically think in a way that almost constantly puts you in spurp perspective thinking. Where yes, I can hold up my own my own struggles, but I also am highly conscious of the fact that not only are there other people struggling worse, there's a complete understanding that I went through it and came out on the other side of that much stronger. Kind of reminds me of this conversation I had with Mimi and Shy a couple of months ago, where they were talking about how they wish they could have done this or wish they could have done that. And my response remains the same. Everything that happened to me. Then is what led me to what is happening now. And I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't experienced everything that came before it. It brought me my daughter. It taught me how to be strong. I was challenged to rise above the mountain, and now I'm chilling by the sea. Now, of course. having gone through that, having risen through that, it seems maybe easier to kind of see the see the tunnel that you had to go through. And I know that this type of philosophy certainly can almost feel dismissive. Right, of the very real, particularly emotional weight of the world and the burdens that it places upon you. I'm not at all n acknowledging that that is something that often is easier said than done. But as someone who has had a turbulent ride and the scars are still healing in some places. paraphrasing in the words of Bobby Draper from The Expanse, you can only grieve so much before you need to move on and find very much like what Nietzsche was stating, a purpose because life is very singular. And while yes, you are going to have the burden of suffering, you also have the gift of living. And as long as you're living, you can alleviate your suffering or there's hope for an alleviation of suffering. So I hope this message is coming across not as Disregarding of that journey, but that sometimes getting through those hard things often is a change of mindset. You hear that all the time of patients who are terminally ill and yet they they manage to get through it. And the doctors will say, and I think there's research even behind it, that how you go through that, how you choose to take on the mental, the mental strain of that. your attitude that does lead itself to a lot of patients actually ⁓ defeating their own prognosis and living much longer because that fight I think that fight to continue if that is strong then you will in fact be Teflon it'll still hurt but you Will in fact become an even more Brave, confident, and more at peace individual when you kind of embrace this type of philosophy. Because it doesn't put you in the what I find a lot of people that that do have underlying depression or a lot of dissatisfaction in their life, they're consistently caught up in all the things that they could have done, should have done, would have done. But they have a lack of appreciation of the things that have happened that are for the betterment of you. And if you continue to ruminate, and this is from someone who classically ruminates about everything, mind you, it's a whole host of other things that have less to do with ⁓ with the past as much as it has to do with ⁓ figuring out the present. If you understand that things That that there is this ⁓ this false premise in life that you're meant to be happy. That sounds like a shitty thing to say. But objectively, the universe owes us Jack Dillion shit. Everything that we think we deserve in life, we ourselves made up to combat the exit existentialism. I can't say the word, existentialism. That we have been saddled with. So that is why this particular this particular philosophy really resonates with me. And it's something that I embraced without consciously being aware that I ever embraced it. It's just something I came to a natural conclusion about when I really started getting into my late 30s. It doesn't, I want to make this very clear, it does not take away from the tangible horror of it all, especially for those whose stories are so much worse, but it can mold how you choose to shape this state of existence. Which leads us to another philosophy called radical acceptance. It's a synthesis of Buddhist teachings and Western psychology. Radical acceptance. Acceptance that differs from a more fati isn't about giving up. It's about acknowledging what you can't change and instead dwelling on how uncomfortable or difficult things feel. You recognize and accept that you're upset and meet yourself where you are with compassion and purpose. You can't control everything that happens to you, but you can entirely control your response to it. And I think that amorifati and radical acceptance are both a calming balm to a lot of anxiety, which is what I suffer from a lot. I have not yet fully embraced the radical acceptance. This is a harder one for me, but it is something that I am trying to. To bridge the gap in my life by letting go of a lot of things. And I I as I'm going through my forties, it is a little bit easier, the more I start to understand myself, the individual individualization process, which is something that Carl Jung talks about, but the integration process as well. Which leads us to our titular philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche. Frederick Nietzsche still remains one of the most controversial philosophers, mainly because he was tied to Nazism. The irony of all of that, that he's still demonized, whereas Although I won't say there isn't no demonization still going on. But to not then go back and re-explore his work, I think is a testament to ignorance continuing to prevail. And he offers some really great insights. So understanding what he meant versus how his work was co-opted to mean something completely different is beneficial, is necessary, I think. So this is me doing my part. Many regimes that do not have the best interests of mankind in mine have a tendency to adopt a lot of his Philosophies distort them completely because they did not understand or decide to glance through what they thought would apply to them without reading the full paragraph of what he was meaning. And media, well, media has compounded the problem as well. Have you seen that photo they be shopping around? Despite admittedly my struggles myself at consistently reading more than four pages of what he has written and sometimes rereading it at least four more times, I have since started looking at other sources besides his books. And there are a lot of books out there that do kind of simplify. A lot of the ideas, and then I can go back and look at what he wrote and then connect the dots there. There's a lot of videos, though be careful with the videos because it is subject to interpretation. But a lot of actual philosophers that study his work really do also help make it a little bit more digestible. But a lot of it is misunderstood, such as. His argument of slave morality versus master morality. Slave morality is kind of resentment described as morality. It's the weak that resent the strong. So they change the narrative. They moralize their weakness, their submissive virtue. They label Things that are moralizing weaknesses as strong, cruel, sinful, or evil. Don't you put that evil on me, Ricky Bobby! Don't you put that on us? I do enjoy his breaking down of modern society into what we are more transparently seeing and needing to evolve from. One of the ideas is slave morality versus master morality. Morality has become a tool of control and force conformity. Resentment described as morality. The weak resent the strong. So they change the narrative, moralizing their weakness and their submissive virtue. Labeling the strong, cruel, sinful, or evil. ⁓ This, of course, is by religion, culture, and invented. It's to keep people small, bitter, and afraid of their own potential. However, for humanity to evolve, one has to stop ⁓ hiding behind moral. Slogans and embrace life on their own terms. Now, of course, you can see where behind that very simple idea, some people can start justifying their own wicked behavior. But what it's really meant to enforce is that start thinking for yourself. Don't inherit your values. Question and break them if they no longer serve your growth. Moral responsibility is to live authentically. Not a call to chaos, but courage to start becoming who you are. Not becoming a fascist villain that wants to control the entire world, even if that's who you are for the sake of your own selfishness. That's not growth. That is, in fact, Inherently evil. That level of megalomania. In the modern age, Nietzsche knew God's influence was eroding. This isn't a call to atheism, but an understanding of the modern mind, or that the modern mind was going towards a secular thinking and science versus the longstanding foundation of meaning given by. Religion was the belief in God. And those were eventually going to, well, had already started breaking down. Probably started breaking down since the Enlightenment age, which is why I think we so very quickly in the industrial age evolved as a species quicker than our minds ever caught up to that evolution. But that's a topic for a different day. People were performing the rituals of religion without realizing it had lost its foundation. For me, this also explains a greater turn towards nihilism. And in this technological age, narcissism, religion provided hope and structure, a shared story and direction with the ultimate meaning. So you don't have to decide what life is. You are told what life is, which for our very reptilian brains is rather convenient. And while he focused primarily on religion, I think there are other cultural aspects, even in spiritualism, the ideas that still prevail today, like witchcraft, the idea of there being something beyond the veil, the the ghost hunting that we still very much. So some of that didn't even die out, but there were This limited education given to the masses about the full potential of what could be out there in the universe. It was ⁓ one narrative that was for the most part, because even those other things were heavily considered evil. So that one narrative was the prevailing one. So I see why he indicated only religion, but I would say that depending where you are on the world stage, because I think we have a tendency to focus a lot of our historical knowledge on Western civilization versus eastern civilization and the things that they believed, which you know is its own type of religion, but are are different. Faucets of that religion, like Buddhism is definitely different than the Muslim beliefs, that's different than Christianity. And so all of those stories, if you will, gave people from a very young age too in the indoctrination of what life was all about. And then and then the the part of knowledge that was beautiful and exploded started pushing people's brains. to think a little bit more critically, to start expecting things from their life, to start requesting better treatment of themselves, which remains the push and pull between the 1% and all 99% of us. The rest of us, I should say. It was a spiritual catastrophe. People will chase distractions to avoid facing the truth. Without God, people will turn to false idols, to nationalism. I love Tesla. Basically trading one blind faith for another, Nietzsche was the first person to really predict this in his lifetime. And he wanted to wake people up to their vulnerability that we need to create something stronger and more real lest we fall into the gap of what was left in the void of religion, no longer. Being, I mean, I think the while it's still pretty, I think it's like a little bit higher in the US, it's still declining and it declines every generation. Religion is a pillar of cultural stability, shared sense of identity. How to find meaning in suffering, it removed ⁓ fears, disorder, moral chaos, emptiness. People would prefer these comfortable illusions over the loss of those comfortable illusions. However, they cannot and they're struggling to handle the cognitive dissonance. Young and Nietzsche share this idea of becoming who you are, the authentic version of you without the persona. Young argued not to abandon the persona, but that it is only but the outcast of the layers beneath where one's true self resides, aided by archetypes and complexes. Now, I talked about female archetypes last week on the Jones Chronicles. Unfortunately, it is a pretty shitty recording. So Maybe one day I will redo that. Next week I will go into male archetypes. And then I will eventually, once we get into young, talk about what and how archetypes are part of the collective unconsciousness. But it's all to aid in this, for me anyway, the true essence of why we are here. Not to believe in a false promise that all of your struggling will be rewarded somehow as long as you are humble in that suffering, which is very again convenient for the powers that be. But for you to go to that last slumber, whatever that slumber is. In a sense of consistent tranquility that The life in which we live was worth living. Face the void and still say yes to life. The will to power is another idea that is completely, completely distorted. Many use his rhetoric for acts of control, violence, using the meaning or the distortion of the meaning of his own cryptic messaging. It's not about war, fascism. It is about life itself. Everything is driven by a deep essential force to become, to expand. The inner drive of everything you, the inner drive of everything to grow and be master of oneself. Nietzsche defined power as the quote, feeling that resistance has been overcome. True power isn't about hoarding capital or dominance. It is the vital creative energy expended when you conquer obstacles and challenge yourself. The highest expressions of the will to power are creativity and the creation of one's own values. There is an exercise that they have you practice in therapy when you are looking for your audience. Identity is this building of a house. And at the foundation of the house, you're to put pretty much maybe five or six of your key foundations. And everything that you build around you is to support those foundations. Artists, philosophers, and individuals who forge their own meaning exemplify this drive. Suffering is simply the catalyst. Which leads us to the idea of the Uber Mensch. I watched a series called Sinners, and the way in which the villainous character completely malformed what the Uber Mensch was shows how one can adapt this rhetoric to justify their own immoral behavior. For Nietzsche, the idea of the Ubermensch was more like a vision than a theory. It suddenly surfaced in his consciousness during the memorable summer of 1881 in Sils Maria, which is the Swiss Alps, born out of that ephiphonic experience that also gave rise to eternal return, Zarathustra, and God is dead. Two of those books I've not yet read. It was a timeless moment of ecstasy at the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious of present and past of pain and elation. Nietzsche entered his own inferno in, quote, the middle of life, so surrounded by death, end quote. He was, for lack of a better term, in his own midlife crisis. He was haunted by memories of his father's death. His shattered friendship with ⁓ Wagner, the most significant relationship in his life. He never explained what he meant by Ubermensch, only intimated, quote, The Ubermensch shall be the meaning of the earth. I entreat you, my brethren, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of supraterrestrial hopes. Behold, I teach you the ubermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness. Behold, I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud. But this lightning is called Ubermanch. Nietzsche's reluctance to spell out exactly what he meant has provoked numerous interpretations in the secondary literature. The Urmensch is not a Nazi. Nietzsche's anti Semitic sister, Elizabeth, invited Hitler to her brother's shrine in Weimar in 1934 and essentially made an offering of his philosophy. The Fuhrer, who never read the philosopher's works, took To the selected snippets that Elizabeth provided, like a proverbial fish to water, and adopted the Ubermensch as a symbol of a master race. Little did he know that Nietzsche had written that he quote would have all anti-Semites shot. Yes, they deserve to die, and I hope they burn in hell. Not to mention his strong anti-nationalistic and pan-European tendencies. Provocatively, he also talked of himself as quote, the last anti-political German, end quote. I'm suddenly reminded of the TV show Watchman or The Watchman, where Horschak, I believe it's Horschak, his teachings are taken on by white supremacists. And while they never actually knew the man and what he believed in, they ended up adopting a lot of his rhetoric that was in fact very contradictory to what he would have actually stood for. The word hero coined in English in the fourteenth century derives from the Greek word. Nietzsche had a deeply heroic streak in his soul, and a hero archetype became a motivating drive in his life and his philosophy. Young believed that the archetype of a hero is the oldest and most powerful of all the archetypes and considered religious figures such as the Buddha, Christ, or Muhammad to be its various personifications. The hero's journey is ultimately a journey towards self-integration. You see how all of these philosophies kind of have this lovely symmetry to them. The final destination, which Jung called individualization or individuation, is a state of wholeness and completeness, and it involves the unification of opposites. By contrast, the Uberminch is a True poet of his life. He is no longer a plaything in the hands of gods or God, but master of his own fate. In self-creating and self-destroying, he becomes what he is, a symbol which the creator and the creature are united. In Nietzsche's moral universe, evil is a necessity and something to be overcome. The will to power is a will to master one's own instincts, one's own evil and resentment, and has nothing to do with subjugating others. In the process of perpetual self-overcoming, the ubermensch transcends the limits of human existence. Man becomes a lord upon himself. Quote, I teach you the ubermensch. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? To the Christian doctrine of original sin that divided the perfect God from the imperfect human being, Nietzsche opposed the Ubermensch, a symbol of unification, completeness, not perfection, is the ultimate holy grail in the hero's journey. The free spirited Ubermensch would not succumb to the herd mentality and become. A non-entity in some monstrous superstate. Released from the chains of tradition and ideology, such an individual would be free to create new values and a sense of uniqueness and passion for life. In the mood of Greek Agon, he would go beyond the narrowness of national divisions in pericel, I think it's the correct way to say that word: resentments. In my own interpretation, it does support the two primary philosophies we spoke of before. Embracing life, understand that it's not this thing that is just supposed to work out perfectly for you, that is meant to be traversed, and that that journey may in fact be hard. Sooner rather than later, we are all forgotten. The list of people in this universe that's ever exist is so minuscule small. That there is some comfort in the idea that who you are. Who you will be is only as important as the breaths in which you continue to take. And there is a freedom in that to express yourself in ways that do not need to conform to a society that only wants to make you a slave. I did it my Another one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes is one must have chaos in them to give birth to a dancing star. I hope this has been informative. If you want to send feedback, blackercouch at gmail.com, you can leave a comment below. My social media will be there as well next week, because we're not going to do a double one this week because I have another show on the roster. And so I do not have the capacity to do a second episode as I want to, but. Once we finish up with the Big Door Prize, I will end up adding a second show. Maybe I'll switch it up. Depends on how I feel, quite frankly. But next week, we are going to talk about the hedonic treadmill and the terror management theory. Until next time, wisdom is a journey.