Hi dr. Peterson now I've been wanting to ask you this for a while now since I started watching your lectures
After I started reading and Nicci's Beyond Good and Evil I came upon a paragraph in his
Chapter on scholars that really really bothered me, and it's actually bothers me to this day
He talked about this kind of person like they were just a mirror-like
They stretched
He said every part of their skin basically to allow every new piece of information that they took
On and that all they ever were was just an instrument
They were just a mirror on reflecting what they had learned never actually having generated anything on their own
And it's it's bothered me because I feel like in a way it's sort of like
It's it's it's impacted my identity a lot because I don't know how are you supposed to create something you know okay?
Well, that's okay that that's a really good question
I mean Nietzsche is often classed with the existentialists right and so one of the tenants of existentialist
There's two real tenants of existentialism
There's more but obviously we're oversimplifying
But one is that life is a problem it isn't because there's something wrong with you
It's that life is a problem, and so that's often contrasted with the Freudian view which is that if you have a problem?
It's because something went wrong during your development the existentialist said no no it's like
Life is a problem make no mistake about it and that
The purpose of
The purpose of scholarship is in some sense to solve that problem and
So for Nietzsche like he said all truths are bloody truths to me and what he meant by that was that
if an idea didn't
incarnate itself in you and
Transform your perceptions and your actions, then you were merely possessed by the idea you were merely a spokesperson for the idea
Or you could say that the idea possessed you you're a puppet for the idea
It's not you
It's the idea is in you and it has you
You haven't taken the idea and incorporated with you and made it part of your life, and so there's a romanticism
That's associated with that right. That's the passionate scholar the person for whom ideas are not merely
They're not merely what would you call?
abstracted
representations that can be tossed about as if they're
Commodities, they're they're they're more like pert. They're more like personalities that might be another way of thinking about it and so
If you're if if those ideas are compelling then you don't
Like one thing I learned a long time ago, and I think this is probably relevant
I know when I was a kid
I liked to argue and I liked to win arguments or or or lose them, although I liked winning them a lot better
But I didn't really mind so much what the content of the argument was
You know I could engage in it like a sparring match
And it was in some sense to establish dominance right to establish intellectual dominance. I quit doing that when I was in my mid-20s
because I
Thought that that was too shallow an approach to the ideas they they're not
commodities of
That sort they're there. They have tendrils that reach down into the living
That's the right way to think about it and so Nietzsche's criticism of scholars
And he did this a lot was that they were bloodless. You know they didn't they were full of performative contradictions
That's another way of thinking about. They'd say one thing and do another because their intellect was completely dissociated from from their actions and
Heath he he thought that was a very bad idea, and I think that that's a good criticism
I think it is a bad idea. I also think it makes for an extraordinarily boring lecturer
You know because you can tell if you're listening to someone
whether the ideas that you're hearing are merely being passed through the person as if they're being memorized say or
whether they're part of the dynamic core of the person and
If they're part of the dynamic core of the person then they're almost always engaging and gripping
And so he wasn't a fan of bloodless scholars, and I think that's correct because one of the things that I see
It's not a good idea to have ideas possess you unless
You know what the ideas are up to and
lots of people are possessed by ideas rather than possessing them and that what that means is they haven't taken the ideas and
integrated them into their own being
They haven't it's like an incarnation in a sense. They haven't incarnated the ideas in
embodied form and
So they're incomplete
you know Nietzsche also in thus spake Zarathustra when Zarathustra comes down the mountain he sees a bunch of people gathered around a
Famous individual, I think maybe a scholar
but it doesn't really matter and when
Zarathustra goes and looks at the person all he sees is a little tiny midget with a gigantic ear and
So he's a hyper specialist right and so he has a pretty impressive ear, but he's only this big
and that was Nietzsche's imagistic commentary on the danger of hyper specialization and
Also on the danger of adulation for hyper specialization and and because he thought about it as a kind of deformity
now Nietzsche was a pretty harsh guy but
But he did address the issue of the relationship between
intellectual knowledge and action because for Nietzsche those things are not to be separated in some sense so
Yeah, so maybe I don't know why it maybe it bothered you
Like it's hard to say why I bothered you it might have bothered you because it's sort of undermined the idea of scholar
But the other possibility and this isn't an accusation because of I don't know anything about you
But it might also be that it struck a chord. You know and that maybe you were doubtful or
questioning how tightly
associated your
intellectual
Endeavor was with your actual character and your practice so that's another possibility
I mean
that's a really good thing to think about because generally speaking that integration is it is very much lacking people are a lot smarter and
fluid with their ideas than they are
ethical and consistent and
characterized by integrity