Heroes are Dangerous — my interview with Johnathan Bi
"Is a hero the same thing as a good man, as a virtuous man?"
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Johnathan Bi. Johnathan left success in the startup world to focus on researching the deep ideas that power the world, and has recently launched his series on the Great Books of the West, starting with his lecture on Nietzsche.
In this episode:
What is Rousseau’s impact on the world?
Johnathan’s Journey towards the Great Thinkers and their Books
The Duality of Heroism & Rousseau as Hero Worshipper
Rousseau’s balanced treatments of Nietzsche’s Ideas
Why do we need Heroes?
The Difference between Desire for Power and Execution of that Power
Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs and their Selfish Desire for Glory
The Hero vs. The Citizen
The Degeneration of Modern Languages
The Core of Nietzsche’s Interest in the Great Heroes of the Past
Tech Startups are Non-Egalitarian!
Rome Against Judea
Resources mentioned:
Johnathan’s Interview and Lecture Series: Great Books of the West
Johnathan’s Newsletter
Stay Ancient,
Alex
Transcript
Alex Petkas: Is a hero the same thing as a good man, as a virtuous man? The Great French novelist Stendhal who flourished in the age of Napoleon, wrote to his younger sister thus when advising her on what books to read in order to get the most enjoyment out of literature and the arts. He said, "I advise you to try to read Plutarch's Lives of the great men of Greece. When you are further advanced in literature, you will realize that it was the reading of this work which forms the character of the man who possessed the finest soul and greatest genius of them all, Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
Today, I'm excited to be joined by my friend Johnathan Bi, and we're going to talk about this man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, what he thought about—well, the subject of The Cost of Glory really—heroes. Welcome, Johnathan. It's great to have you.
Johnathan Bi: Thank you. The first confessional note I'll make is that my Chinese name is actually hero (speaks Chinese name), so I am afraid this is going to be a bit more confessional and autobiographical than I would hope for, but confessional is good. It's fitting for Rousseau, right? He famously wrote his Confessions, which is probably only rivalled by Augustine's Confessions.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, yeah, indeed. And maybe we'll end up deciding that heroes are bad after all. You'll be on the hot seat.
Johnathan Bi: There we go.
Alex Petkas: The Cost of Glory, as you know, as everybody knows, it's based on this idea of Plutarch's Lives, retelling these great biographies from the heroes of antiquity, of Greece and Rome, and Plutarch's Lives had an impact on so many famous figures from the past, including Rousseau, who we're going to talk about. And we're going to talk about him and I think that we're also going to get to some examples studying what Rousseau would say about some of the men that we've already hit on The Cost of Glory or that we will hit down the line maybe in more detail. We're also going to talk, I think, about another very interesting Plutarch-intoxicated soul, Friedrich Nietzsche, who has some really interesting connections to Rousseau.
Johnathan, to give the audience a taster, Rousseau had a huge impact on world history. Who were some of the people that his writings affected through the centuries, and why is he important, in a nutshell?
Johnathan Bi: Well, Rousseau affected just about everyone since Rousseau. There's that famous quote about how everything after Plato has been a footnote for Plato, and the same perhaps could be said about Rousseau. Rousseau is an 18th century Enlightenment thinker, although we're going to complicate that a bit because he actually really dislikes Enlightenment. And the first thing that stands out to him is just the breadth of genre that he covered. Today, we read Rousseau because of his philosophy, things like the Second Discourse, The Social Contract, and his philosophy influenced people everywhere from the left, like Marx, his critique of inequality, to people on the right, like Friedrich Nietzsche that we talked about. He was also the greatest influence on the champion of reason, Immanuel Kant. Kant called Rousseau the Newton of the moral World.
Alex Petkas: Wow.
Johnathan Bi: That's how highly he thought of him. And while he influenced the greatest champion of reason, Immanuel Kant, he also gave birth to the Romantic movement, with his emphasis on feeling and his devaluation of reason in his works like the First Discourse, his attack, famous attack, on science, art, and enlightenment. But that's just Rousseau's philosophy. Rousseau, at his time, also wrote one of the most important novels of the 18th century, Julie, and Julie is part of who we have to thank, or blame, I suppose, depending on your stance, of why we consider the constitutive quality of marriage and relationships to be love and not, say, familial connection.
That's one of Rousseau's revolutions, but it wasn't just novels. He also put on some of the most popular plays of his day, like The Village Soothsayer. And, of course, he also had a lot of works that really crossed genres, things like Emile, which appears to be an instruction manual for the education of this fictional character, this fictional child, called Emile is also considered to be one of the greatest educational treaties in the Western canon. Of course, he also wrote his famous Confessions, which is this confessional autobiography, which, like I mentioned, is really only rivaled by Augustine's Confessions, who bears the same name. Rousseau is this towering figure that encompasses and left a drastic shadow after the entire world behind him.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And I would add he was very influential in the American founding period. The Founding Fathers were reading Rousseau, Jefferson's a big reader of Rousseau, and just a huge impact on world history and men of action. In his way, he was a man of action. He's not a general or politician, but he does get invited to help people write the Constitution of Poland and just funny stuff like that. He's this number one, A-list intellectual of his day and very involved in affairs.
Johnathan Bi: Two things to say there, the first one is, you're right, I forgot to mention all the political influences of Rousseau. You mentioned the American Revolution, but the much more direct influence is the French Revolution. Both Robespierre, as well as Robespierre's opponents, cited Rousseau for justification. That's how important he was. You know you're influential when both sides cite you, almost like quoting scripture to sort of defend your side.
But he also had even darker influences, people like Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator who studied in France and was a big fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and saw in the Cambodian farmer the archetype of Rousseau's noble savage. Long story short, he ended up killing a quarter of his country's population to try to bring about a Rousseauian agrarian paradise, which needless to say, did not come forth. And in fact, I must believe that he was not a great reader of Rousseau because Rousseau explicitly warns that, even though he dislikes intellectuals and enlightenment, turning back is not an option, but we can get into that later.
Alex Petkas: Wow.
Johnathan Bi: The other thing I'll say about Rousseau as an intellectual is Rousseau's influence was quite odd, even in his own time, because he was a very late bloomer. You have people like, let's say, Mozart or Goethe, or even Nietzsche, who from a young age showed a lot of promise right out the gate. Nietzsche was the youngest person ever to be given a professorship at University of Bonn. Rousseau didn't really flourish until his forties. He was born in Geneva. He went to Paris. He really desired fame and to be famous. He invented a fake aristocratic name for himself, when he was a young man, to be taken more seriously. He created a series of musical notations to try to be famous. Nothing really worked. He tried to play chess, and he was a good chess player, but not a great chess player. But when he did hit home, he hit home big. He wrote his famous First Discourse, which like I mentioned, is this critique of science and art, and it caused great controversy. And then he became famous beyond people's wildest imaginations and in all these different genres.
But the last thing I'll mention about Rousseau as a public intellectual was that he was an exile for a lot of his time, because of the ... let me put it this way. One of his friends said that Rousseau was the only person who wrote more than a quarter of what he actually thought. He was notoriously brave in speaking truth to power, so to speak, and that costed him. And the last thing I'll say is Rousseau's self-conception is that he's not a hero because he's not strong enough to be a hero, although Rousseau, as a young man, fantasized a lot about martial glory. He would have daydreams about martial Rousseau leading his troops to victory. There is that affinity there, but Rousseau, his self-diagnosis is that he's a good man, but not a strong man, which precludes him, as we're going to discuss, from being a hero.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And we will get more into that young Rousseau in a bit here. There's some very interesting passages. Now, before we move on, I want to give people a sense of what you're doing, because you're engaged in a very interesting project, an exciting new series on classics of the Western canon, and you've given me a sneak peek. And I'm really excited about this project. I urge everybody to check it out. We'll put links in the show notes for your new series, which will be available on YouTube and other platforms. Yeah, before we dust off Rousseau, give people a background a little bit of who you are in a nutshell, how you ended up doing this philosophy project, because you're not just a kind of textbook case of an academic philosopher, by any means. Yeah, how did you get to where you are?
Johnathan Bi: I was born and raised in Beijing, and I grew up with a deep loathing for the humanities, simply because, I think this is true in the West already, but it's even more true in China, everyone with half a brain cell is taught to practice math basically, that math and STEM were the respectable disciplines, and humanities and philosophy, and God forbid, poetry, was what you did when you couldn't make it in math. And it's funny because, in different generations, that priority shifts. For example, in Nietzsche's time, he never really got into math because classics was what smart people did. It's quite interesting to think about how disciplines rise and fall.
But back to my own story, I grew up as a math kid. I competed in the Canadian Math Olympiad. I got a full ride to Columbia to study computer science, and I absolutely hated the humanities until I founded a company, I dropped out, founded a company, company crashed and burned, and I was not depressed, but I had this existential angst that I had no idea how to resolve. And so I got into philosophy, not through theoretical curiosity, but through practical necessity. As any engineer worth his money, I wanted to find the API document, the instruction manual for human nature, and I found that in philosophy and in literature as well. And so my path into philosophy has always been deeply practical with a core focus on knowledge for life rather than life for knowledge, and especially the knowledge that's helpful for living the good life.
And so long story short, the project I'm undertaking is a survey of the great books of the Western canon, so people like Shakespeare, we're launching with Rousseau and Nietzsche, which people can go on YouTube and check out. And the whole idea is to really bring these books to life in a way that's relevant to our lives while staying faithful to the ideas. We take a lot of these ideas, which are very abstract, and because they're abstract and eternal can be applied to our day, and we take Rousseau out of his time and say, "Well, Rousseau critiqued science in the 18th century, what would he have to say about technology today?" or, "Nietzsche critiques equality and egalitarianism. What would he say about tech culture today?" We really use the lens of today, and specifically this very practical lens of living the good life, to understand these fundamental texts of the West.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, I'm certainly very sympathetic with this idea. It's what we're trying to do with The Cost of Glory, what would Plutarch tell us about what we need today through these great, great figures? But why don't we turn to Rousseau himself and get a sense of the man. And I want to open this with a quote that is not from Rousseau, but from Nietzsche, and just listen to this for a second, and we'll get to Nietzsche later, as we said, he says ... this is from the discourse on the “Uses and Abuses of History”.
Johnathan Bi: Right. This is the third chapter in Untimely Meditations. Yep.
Alex Petkas: There you go. "Satisfy your souls on Plutarch and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. 100 such men educated against the modern fashion that is men who have ripened and are used to the heroic could now silence forever the whole noisy pseudo-education of our time." And I love that, for our discussion, because I feel like, having read a fair bit of Rousseau with your guidance, that quote could have come right out of Rousseau. It's a very Rousseauian sentiment. We talked a little bit about-
Johnathan Bi: Alex, can I pause you there? Because there's something very interesting about what you just said, which is that, traditionally, when people think about Rousseau, they would be shocked if something like that came out of Rousseau's mouth, but of the readings that we did together in preparation for this, that is what Rousseau sounds like. Let me read you a quote as a counterpoint.
All right, here's the Rousseau quote, "Hypocrisy is to shut oneself off forever from any possible return to virtue. There are lofty characters who bring, even to crime, something proud and generous, which reveals that they still have left in them some spark of that celestial fire made to animate beautiful souls, but the vile and groveling soul of a hypocrite is like a corpse without fire or warmth or vitality left. Great villains have been known to return into themselves and end their life wholesomely and die saved, but no one has ever known a hypocrite becoming a good man."
What does that make you think of? It makes you think of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, that his claim, that paganism, Rome, even when they're great criminals, even when Achilles rapes, burns, and pillages, it's awesome. The Christians, they're hypocrites, they're hypocrites who are two weak-souled to do that, so they turn these values upside down and they say, "No, no, no, I'm not ugly, I'm chaste. Okay? I'm not bad at making money, I have the virtue of poverty. I'm not cowardly, I'm patient." Now the reason that I think most people ... and certainly I was so surprised when hearing something like that come out of Rousseau's mouth is we usually associate Rousseau as an egalitarian. He's the famous egalitarian of modernity. And we also associate Rousseau with reason, this famous idea of the general will.
Long story short, the general will is the rational process by which citizens come together in a somewhat democratic process to figure out what is good for the state, instead of, for example, a dictator determining everything. Now those two immediate associations, that he's a philosopher with an affinity, let's call it, to reason, and that he's a philosopher, egalitarian philosopher, immediately sets up a very interesting question that we're going to spend the next hour or so to resolve, which is heroism is intention with both ideas. Heroism is necessarily inegalitarian, elitist in some sense.
And I think you can see this most clearly in the Greek heroes who were literal demigods, they're literally different in nature. And that's certainly Nietzsche's conception of them, not that they were demigods, but that they're different in nature. And for reason, we don't think of Achilles as solving Pythagorean puzzles on the side. That's not why he's awesome. Reason is also very different from heroes. That's, I think, a Gordian Knot that I've presented that we're going to take this entire hour to unpack, which is how can Rousseau, who is egalitarian, and is a fan of reason in some certain sense, also be such a big fan of heroes, or have such a strong view of heroes?
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And I had dismissed him earlier too. I read the Second Discourse, which is his egalitarian discourse, and it's all about primal man, no desires beyond food and drink, finding each other in the forest. It's just very proto-utopian. But to find this kind of hero worshiper, as we're going to see, was really stunning to me. Here's a quote from Rousseau's Confessions, which is his autobiography that I love, and he tells about his education, and his dad was a big influence on him. Dad was a clockmaker, watchmaker.
And so here's Rousseau, "Plutarch presently became my greatest favorite. The satisfaction I derived from repeated readings . I gave this author, extinguished my passion for romances, for silly novels, and I surely preferred Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides to Arundhati's Artemines and Juba." These are fictional characters in these silly novels. "But as for Plutarch, these interesting studies, seconded by the conversations they frequently occasioned with my father," which I think is important, "produced that Republican spirit and love of liberty, that haughty and invincible turn of mind, which rendered me impatient of restraint or servitude and became," I think this is interesting, "the torment of my life as I continually found myself in situations incompatible with these sentiments," so be careful, heroes can make you a misfit, "incessantly occupied with Rome and Athens conversing, if I may so express myself, with their illustrious heroes. Born the citizen of a republic republic myself and of a father whose ruling passion was a love of his country, I was fired with these examples." And he talks about imagining himself as Scaevola Skyvilla at the dinner table, thrusting his hand into a hot bowl of soup to make a point.
It really hit him at a young age. And he even talks later about how it's the gift that keeps on giving where, let's see, he wins a prize in 1750 for an essay, and he says, "The year following, I was not thinking more on my discourse, I learned that I had gained the premium at Dijon, I won the prize. This news awakened all the ideas which had dictated it to me, gave them new animation, and completed the fermentation of my heart of that first leaven of heroism and virtue, which my father, my country, and Plutarch inspired in my infancy."
I love that talk that he has in that first passage there of the kind of pain that you get when you have this heroic drive welling up inside of you. I think of that as a version of the pain of zeal, where Aristotle talks about how zeal is this pain that you feel when you see present among others things that are good and honorable which you yourself are capable of achieving. And it can often manifest itself as this sense of difference from your fellow human beings. Yeah, what do you think of all that?
Johnathan Bi: I definitely agree with you that I've become much more interested in Rousseau after just the vanilla stuff you usually are forced to read about Rousseau in college, where he's just painted as this egalitarian. In fact, I'd go even as strong as to say that I think I now prefer Rousseau over Nietzsche, because many of the interesting insights of Nietzsche, his attack on science, his attack on reason and objectivity, his critique of egalitarianism and the role of hierarchy and power in social life, I think Rousseau treats, but in a more balanced manner, and I think balanced in two senses.
The first sense, it's not that Rousseau is a lot more moderate than Nietzsche, i.e. Nietzsche thinks heroism is great, and Rousseau is maybe in the middle. Rousseau is deeply, as we're going to talk about today, deeply, deeply ambivalent on heroes. Rousseau is more balanced in the sense that he sees both extremes, and I think that's what makes him so interesting. And the second part that I think makes Rousseau a lot more palatable than Nietzsche is that I think he's a lot more historically aware of what is possible in one's own time.
The Second Discourse, for example, rightfully or wrongfully, is attributed by many philosophers to have injected this idea of historicity into philosophy, which obviously Hegel takes on, and this idea that there are certain things possible in certain historical epochs and certain things that are just impossible. We're going to discuss today why heroes, Rousseau thinks, are not really possible anymore in modernity, whereas Nietzsche, I think, he's obviously not a strict reactionary that we should just go back to the Greeks, but I just find the appreciation of history to be a lot more poignant in Rousseau.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Why don't we get into this essay on heroes. It's a short essay, and of course, we're not expecting anybody to have read it, but I'll put a link in the show notes for people if they want to go read it. It's not that long, 15, 12 pages. Here's a question to kick us off here, why do you think this essay is interesting for listeners of The Cost of Glory, Plutarch-filled crazies that are tuning in? Yeah. What is this essay about?
Johnathan Bi: Because it's a philosophical treatment about the essence of what you guys are interested in, the hero. Like many of Rousseau's discourses, this is in response to a question posed by an academy. And the question posed this time is what are the virtues necessary for a hero, and what are the heroes who most lack such a virtue? This is a Platonic question essentially, which is like a what is X question, essentially, what is necessary to be a hero? And Rousseau's answer is also extremely interesting because he goes in and essentially observes and rejects all of the traditional virtues we associate with heroism, things like justice, temperance, and he even rejects courage.
And so he spends the most amount of time on courage, so let me just give you an overview because it's very interesting. Rousseau first says, "Look, there's a lot of bad people who are courageous. The Nazi soldier storming the front lines, he's pretty darn courageous." But obviously that's not answering the question of the academy. That's to ask is what virtue is sufficient? Rousseau will also go to show that courage is not only not sufficient for heroism, it's not necessary. And the example he gives are people like Ajax. In many times, Ajax is courageous, but there's other times where he runs away like a little child. There are times when Hector runs away, fleeing Achilles, because he's scared.
There are also examples that Rousseau gives which are people who are clearly heroes, but not because they're primarily courageous. Augustus is the example. Augustus might be considered courageous in battle, but Rousseau really thinks it's Augustus's political abilities. That's what really set him apart, that he says that it's what Augustus did at Rome and not how he defeated Marc Mark Antony. That's what really makes him this foundational figure for Rome. And so he goes on to reject all of these virtues, his heroes, and so the question is, well, what is necessary for a hero?
Alex Petkas: Well, let's pause for a second, because this Ajax example you brought up reminded me that in ... because, in the essay, he also cites the example of Pompey, who is this great brave commander. And at the battle of Pharsalus, he loses it. After he's defeated, he forgets who he is and flees ingloriously, and Plutarch actually cites that example of Ajax fleeing Hector, that very example. And he quotes, let's see, he says, "But Zeus the father, throned on high, in Ajax stirred up fear. He stood confounded and behind him cast his shield of seven ox hides and trembled as he peered around the throng." He says that's what Pompey was like, just like Ajax fleeing before Hector. I think it's fascinating how steeped Plutarch is in these examples. Anyway, let's go on.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And what I also found fascinating about Plutarch's treatment of Pompey is when Pompey, I think, bids his family farewell or something, he quotes Sophocles or something like that, where it just shows you what a cool age to live in, where your rivals are quoting you Sophocles at the end of a battle. Born in the wrong age, indeed. But anyways, so those are all things ... Rousseau begins his essay, his discourse, on what is not necessary for a hero, and so we'll be cleared all of those virtues. And the other ones are even easier to show, like temperance. Is Alcibiades temperate? No, he's defined by his immoderation, but Rousseau thinks, at least, he's still a great man of Greece.
Justice is also not clearly ... there are heroes who have no really concern for justice. Achilles, again, is a great example here. What's the story of Achilles in The Iliad? It's his desire for his own glory. It has nothing to do with even protecting his fellow Greeks. He basically pouts, and in fact, he's willing to sacrifice his Greeks when Achilles leaves the battle because he didn't get his glory because he was upset by Agamemnon. What does he wish for? He wishes that the Greeks would be defeated by the Trojans so that they feel like they need him more. Justice clearly has nothing to do with heroism either.
The question is what, and I think Rousseau gives really two answers here of what is the constitutive qualities of a hero, and that's a virtue and a desire. The virtue is strength of soul. And you can think about it as a form of effectiveness. Can you carry out your ambitious claims? And this is why, for example, the greater your foe, the more heroic you are. What I loved about your episodes on Sulla and Pompey was that the great odds that they faced. If you defeat someone who has one-tenth of your troops, that doesn't make you as heroic as if you defeated someone with 10 times your troops. And that's why Alexander defeating the Persians was so heroic. Strength of soul, I think can be understood through a philosophical concept I think many more of your readers will be familiar with, and Nietzsche's will to power.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, I was thinking about that connection there. I wanted to ask you about that.
Johnathan Bi: And I'm not a Nietzsche or a Rousseau scholar, but my intuition of how the two are different is that will to power focuses more on the desire for power, the feeling of power, whereas strength of soul is not just the desire, but the ability to execute it. In Nietzsche, who has strong will to power, what Nietzsche calls the priestly class, essentially the early Christians, the early Jews, who flipped this Greco-Roman view on its head, and the modern equivalent would be an intellectual or something like that. These people don't necessarily have as high strength of soul in the sense that they can accomplish their great ends. They need to satisfy their will to power, their desire for power, in a very different way, and Nietzsche thinks it's by inverting the values of the dominant Greco-Roman, masterly way of thinking.
I can't make enough money for you, so what do I do? I say, "Well, it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel through an eye of a needle." I can't get as many beautiful women as you do, so I say, "Look, virginity is one of the most important virtues." Will to power doesn't mean you have the ability to satisfy that will to power. It just means that you have a strong desire for it, and what that can and Nietzsche thinks tends to lead to in most people, most weak people ... in Nietzsche's view, you can be, I think, high will to power and also incompetent or weak in a certain sense, is that it leads to a transformation of values, re-evaluation of values. Whereas when Rousseau says strength of soul, I think he not only means the desire for power, but the ability to execute it. Again, think back to the example of Alexander, think back to the example of Pompey and Sulla and Caesar and all their other great victories. Okay, so that's one virtue that they have.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, you got me thinking about Sulla and Pompey. And so when I think of this clash between Sulla and Marius that Rousseau is very familiar with, he actually talks about ... interestingly, Gaius Marius, for him, is this example of somebody who has a lot of bravery, of valor, military valor, but doesn't have heroism in the same degree. And I think you got to wonder if Rousseau would've taken the side of Sulla in that civil war. But when Marius and Sulla first ... their first clash is Sulla is marching off to war against Mithridates in the east. He's gotten proconsular command, he's the appointed general of the Senate. It's all legit. They're going, they're gone. Marius gets a tribune to propose a radical plebiscite vote and strip Sulla of the command. And he's betting that Sulla would do what Marius would do, which was realize that you'd been defeated, you've been outwitted in the political game. It's time to lay down your command and realize who's really the first man in Rome. It's Marius.
But Sulla is actually faced with this choice of, "Do I submit to Marius or do I defy the Republic?" And he chooses to defy the Republic, to march on Rome and to capture the city back and declare Marius enemy of the state. In a way, I think it's like you could say Rousseau might say Sulla had more strength of soul in that situation. Marius underestimated how much strength of soul the man he was dealing with had.
So, in a similar way, I think you could look at the clash between Pompey and Caesar. Um, Pompey, kind of, through political chicanery, through political maneuvering, gets Caesar in this position where he has the choice to either submit to the will of Pompey and kind of lay down his command. Maybe risk prosecution. Probably Pompey's going to look after him because they're bros. They were bros before, but Pompey just wants Caesar to realize who's the real boss, you know, I'll protect you from prosecution, but you got to kind of like genuflect and, and Caesar's choice is, either that or defy the Republic and, um, and assert that, that, uh, he's, um, he's who he is and basically, you For the short term, at least, as the unjust aggressor in this war.
And I think again, Pompey underestimates, maybe Rousseau would say, Caesar's strength of soul, his like, heroism stat, uh, in, in Rousseau's eyes. Um, so I, it's, it's an interesting heuristic, this kind of like the, the, the ability and the willingness to affect your ends is kind of like, it's a very concise way of describing a hero. And for Russo, it's kind of an ambiguous quality, right?
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, well, it's an ambivalent quality, not an ambiguous quality.
Yeah, it has good and bad. In the sense that, well, you can be effective at good or bad things, right? And so, with that very definition, that the core virtue of the hero is strength of soul. You can already see that Rousseau has a very ambivalent attitude towards heroes. And, you know, one thing of this essay, I'll read you a quote right now, a passage that really illuminated part of the Sulla as well as the Pompey episodes that I listened to um, in Cost of Glory. So when I was listening to Sulla and Pompey, I was like, man, like, they had so many cool heroes all in one sitting.
This is so cool, right? Because like everyone was one upping each other. Right, Sulla was this legendary, like, never before seen general, Pompey was his protege, if I remember correctly, right?
And Pompey would have been known as the greatest general of all of Rome if it weren't for Caesar, right? And then you have Augustus, who, like, outdid him, and I thought, well, man, it sure sucks to be in modernity.
You know, we don't have, we don't even have one of those guys, and they got, like, a handful of them. But then I read Rousseau, I quote to you Rousseau. “There must not be two Suns in nature nor two Caesars on earth, said the Ancients. Indeed, heroism is like those precious metals whose value consists in their rarity and which would become pernicious or useless by their abundance. The person whose valor brought peace to the World would have been its desolation if there had been a single rival worthy of him.” In Rome there have been too many rivals. “Certain circumstances can make a hero necessary for the salvation of the human race, but at any time whatsoever, a people of Heroes”—which is what Rome was in that period—“would infallibly be its ruin”.
So that again shows you this deeply ambivalent attitude that Rousseau has towards heroes, again, which is why I prefer him over someone like Nietzsche, is because he sees sort of both extreme sides here. Now, this is a perfect segue for me to talk about the second necessary quality, I think, for the hero. It's not a virtue, it's a desire. And that desire is the desire for glory. Okay, and I think this is an even more interesting insight into the psychology of heroes, because Rousseau believes that heroes can be, when done right, heroes are the greatest benefactor of the community. But the irony is, they don't give a damn about your community. They benefit your stupid little community only if it gives them glory. Again, think back to Achilles. He doesn't care about the Greeks. He helped the Greeks. He killed Hector for his own glory, or at least, you know, to avenge his friend, right, Patroclus. And, again, Sulla, your episodes in Sulla is a perfect example of this. Sulla, if I remember correctly, was this kind of not a playboy, so to speak, but he was kind of like Rousseau. He was a late bloomer, right?
And I remember you said very clearly, he's like, well, he turned 30. It's now or never. Got to give the Senate a try.
What's going on in his head? It wasn't it's now or never to help the Republic. It's now or never to make my, to make a name for myself, right? That's what heroes really want. And so that desire for glory, that is why heroes are so ambivalent. Because sometimes you win glory by doing the right thing. But sometimes you can win glory by doing what's notorious, right?
And I'll just give one more, one more modern example. I think this intuition is totally right. So I've spent a lot of time building tech companies in Silicon Valley, which I think is probably one of the closest domains to the hero today. Maybe the other one is athletics. I spent also a lot of time practicing in Tibetan monasteries, um, and in Tibetan Buddhism. And I find it so ironic that the Tibetan Buddhists, who are genuinely the most compassionate people that I've ever met, they have genuine desire for compassion, are probably one of the leeches. Sorry, that's too strong. They, at least in this life, in this world, seem to be doing the least to sort of help community, right?
The community gives them all alms. They claim that they're, you know, helping your karma. They're doing all these things, but from a simple materialist perspective, they're not really doing that because they're holding away in the mountain. Now, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who I think are one of the most selfish archetype. By selfish, I don't mean brute material, uh, petty selfishness. I mean this sort of desire for glory. They can be the ones who benefit society the most, not because they care about society, but because they care about their own glory. Read a biography of Elon Musk, and it'll say Musk wants to save the world, but he wants to save the world. And that's my observation of all the entrepreneurs I've met. To this day, I have not met a single entrepreneur who has as his own goal to make, not even own goal, who has his primary goal to make the world a better place at best. And even this is incredibly rare. It's, I want to make the world a better place.
I want to be the one doing it. That's the psychology of the hero.
Alex Petkas: well put. And, and I, I think again of, uh, of Pompey and Caesar. I mean, it's just such an obvious case, but you know, um, Cicero is writing these letters to his friend Atticus around this time. And, um, you know, he's just like, why is Pompey doing this? Doesn't he realize, like, we had this discussion. I wrote The Republic about the ideal statesman. He wrote this treatise on the Republic and he didn't like, probably didn't read it, but he, you know, he went to Pompey's villa and he kind of summarized contents for the conqueror and Pompey was like, yes, yes, very good Cicero. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that Cicero says in that treatise is the ideal ruler is the one who always wants the good of his people, you know, um, who always works for the good of his citizens and their well being.
And he's like, well, Pompey is—this is right after Caesar marches on Italy—Pompey's fleeing. He's preparing basically to extend this war, to turn this war from like a quick and dirty Italian conflict to a massive Mediterranean wide world war and Cicero's like don't do this, please. How is this the work of the ideal statesman?
But, you know, I think Rousseau would come back around and say that, you know, when you have a, when you have a hero at the, at the helm of the Republic, uh, this is what you get.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so here the plot thickens even more. Because Rousseau says that there are people who genuinely care about the community and those people he calls citizens, right? So, so he distinguishes the virtuous man from the hero. The hero often has a lot more vice than the virtuous man, but he's a hero because of the virtues he does have. Luster is the word that Rousseau uses. His strength of soul gives what virtues he does have so much luster. That's one archetype, okay? Virtuous man, hero. And then you have what Rousseau calls the citizen. And the citizen is someone who genuinely cares for the community, for the community's sake and not for his own glory. But here's the real irony. The citizen cares about the community because he's imitating the hero. Does that make sense?
Do you get why that's ironic? It's ironic because even the citizen, the guy who genuinely cares about the community, someone maybe like Cicero, it's because he perhaps misattributes the desires of heroes, someone like the original Brutus who founded Rome, who defended the Roman Republic. And this is why Rousseau thinks that heroes are all—we talked a lot about the bad—this is why heroes are so important for communities. Because without the hero, you don't get citizens, if that makes sense. Like, like normal people, if normal people don't have heroic models to imitate, you don't have people who genuinely desire to help the community. So, so that's how complicated, sophisticated, and I think right, and interesting, a picture of the political world that Rousseau paints, which is that at the very top, you're the hero who doesn't give a damn about your stupid community. He cares about his own glory. But when done right, he helps the community. And that's what engenders people who actually care about the community because they, they want to imitate the hero, but they, they might not have that same degree of strength of soul or the same desire for glory. Um, so so that's the, the, the other sort of plot twist there.
Alex Petkas: I want to get to this idea a little deeper of the, uh, hero as kind of essential for the community, which I think is so fascinating. But I want to just kind of put a bookend on what you said, uh, from a little passage earlier in the text that I, that I really liked that talks about, The hero's benefit to mankind, which, which is, you know, ambiguous because he's not trying to benefit mankind at the end of the day, he's…
Johnathan Bi: …doesn't give a damn.
Alex Petkas: He's following some kind of biological drive, but, but, um, Rousseau says, uh, kind of contrasting the, the philosopher, he likes to kind of poke fun at philosophers: “the philosopher can give the universe some salutary instructions, but his lessons will never correct. Either the nobles who scorn them, or the people which does not hear them at all. Men are not governed in that way by abstract views. One makes them happy only by constraining them to be so, and one must make them experience happiness in order to make them love it. Those are the occupations and talents of the hero. It is often with a strong hand that he puts himself in a position to receive the benedictions of men whom he first constrains to bear the yoke of laws in order to subject them to the authority of reason in the end”.
So, uh, just a, you know, a great passage on like the hero's job is, uh, He knows his job is kind of bigger than pleasing the people, obviously. Um and that, that very act of benefiting the community can be part of his mission. I think you can see that in a figure like Augustus,
Johnathan Bi: Or the entrepreneurs. Yeah. Or the entrepreneurs…
Alex Petkas: right, right. It can really be part of their meaning story and, and, and what energizes them.
Johnathan Bi: But it's their meaning, it's their story. That's the point.
Alex Petkas: yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like, that's just kind of what you get with people who are able to pull it off in Rousseau's eyes. And I love that image of like, forcing people to be happy through this great act of the will.
Johnathan Bi: What, what, what this reminds me of is Rousseau's, uh, famous slash infamous line, I believe in the social contract where he says, “I will force people to be free” which is a sort of, kind of paradox in, in its way, and it's—I'm not gonna get into it, but it has to deal with, uh, the, the tensions of the operations of the general will, which I won't get into. Another example that Rousseau's gives, I believe is the Spartan lawgiver called like Lycurgus? And Rousseau's Point, I think is that he said, he said something to the fact that Lycurgus enslaved the Spartans, but bound them up so close, um, with the laws that they cease to see the laws as something different from themselves.
Um, so, so it's, that's a poor paraphrasing, but I think you could get the general idea. For Rousseau, there is a fundamental tension between being an individual and, uh, being a citizen, right?
Someone who is a member of a community who treats that community's ends as its first ends. And Sparta is an example of one extreme where individuality is completely, um, subjected, um, to the community. Um, in the best way possible, right? There's a way to do that that's totalitarian and bad, but Rousseau thinks that Sparta, Sparta, they did it in the right way. And in modernity, We're kind of in the opposite direction. Where Rousseau thinks there is no citi—Sorry, that's not true—It's not that there is no citizen anymore. It's that that side has been given away to the individual side. Right? So today, Rousseau thinks that society is really governed on self interest and the threat of physical force and law, essentially.
Alex Petkas: So what, what are we missing today in Rousseau's eyes? You know, do we still need heroes? Can we have them or what's serving that function? It's too many questions at once, but I think you get the drift.
Johnathan Bi: Maybe it's important to discuss why heroes are so important first, and then we can talk about the consequences of their absence. Um, Here's a riddle that I'm going to pose, which is, how do we square the rational Rousseau, right? Again, general will, democratic sort of discussion and debate, and coming out with what's the fundamental interest of each, with the heroic Rousseau who sees imitation of heroes as somehow fundamental to the community. Um, and the answer is that, um, the imitative Rousseau grounds the rational Rousseau. So take the example of Brutus. Um, Rousseau thinks that for Rome to form its citizens who are willing to engage this type of citizen-like behavior, where they're willing to argue from the perspective of the general will to give up their own self interest, they need to have someone there like Brutus, whom they can imitate. So in other words, you know, there's really, I think, two important questions in political philosophy.
Alex Petkas: And, and just to clarify, this is the Brutus…
Johnathan Bi: Who drove Tarquin out…
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Yeah. Who's the later one—the assassin of Caesar—was the namesake of 500 years later. But yeah, and we'll talk about that Brutus sometime on the Cost of Glory. Right. So he, he drives the kings out and then he, he kind of lives by his own laws after that.
Johnathan Bi: And, you're right, I should add here, the specific example that I think Rousseau has in mind is that Brutus, again, the first Brutus, not the Brutus who killed Caesar, who drove the tyrant Tarquin out, he killed his own children, or he sentenced his own children who were charged as, uh, having rebelled against the Roman Republic in an attempt to restore the monarchy. He did not acquit himself on the trial. I mean, think about how easy it would have been to say, you know, these are my children, right? I can't do this. People will totally understand. But Rousseau's point is that if he did that, he would set up a poor example of a statesman who is unwilling to override private, uh, private interest with public interest. And so, it's because Brutus was willing to stay on the council, and not just stay on the council to judge his children, but sentence them to death. That heroic model is what gives the citizens of Rome the reason, the, the willingness, and the desire, and the impetus, and the fuel to will the, the general will over their private wills. So I think there's two, you know, really important questions in political philosophy. The first one is quite obvious, which is, what is the good? The second one, people don't find it as obvious, but I think is even more important, which is, why should I care what the good, like, what justice is? Why don't I just, uh, go around sleeping with everyone I can, and getting as much gold to myself, and getting all the glory to myself?
Why should I will what is good for the public? And this is a foundational question in political philosophy, right? Plato in the Republic had this famous, uh, thought experiment of the ring of Gyges, right? Like a lord of the lord's ring where you put it on, you go, you turn invisible. And his interlocutor wants this to show that no, we're only just because we want to be perceived as just.
So if you can take away that perception, no, we would rather be unjust. Plato obviously argues against this. And so this is one of the most important roles that the hero serves in the community, is that he is the reason that people desire the good. And when I say he's the reason, I'm not saying people think, well, you know, deductively, you know, we'll begin with Brutus is just, and then somehow QED, I'm just. It's that imitative impulse of humans to imitate Brutus, to imitate the hero. That is the reason, even if it does not provide a rational reason for justice. And this goes back to the fundamental bedrock of why heroes are so important for communities for Rousseau, which is that he thinks reason is extremely impotent.
And this is also behind his famous critique of Enlightenment and science. So another, uh, uh, sort of interesting thing is Rousseau, despite being an egalitarian, not only critiques Enlightenment, but he critiques popular Enlightenment. He critiques things like the printing press. He critiques when philosophy gets out of the hands of wise men and into what he derogatorily calls the people, right? And so, so for Rousseau, philosophy is this like thing that should be limited to individuals. It's very few individuals because most people can't handle it, right? Most people are gonna, uh, you know, succumb to half truths. They're going to reason themselves into contrarian lies. They're going to take on fashional beliefs because it's cool. Um, now what will tell you just how impotent Rousseau thought reason was is the defining quality of these wise men, the only people that should have any business doing philosophy is that they understand their own ignorance, right? And Socrates is the paradigmatic example here. So Rousseau's argument is that in a rational enlightenment society like our own, people aren't improved by reason.
In fact, most people are harmed by reason. However, all of us have very strong imitative capacities. So not all of us can be Socrates but all of us have the capacity to be a good citizen in Sparta. Um, because imitation is strong, so if you have good models, you'll be good. Whereas reason is, is, is incredibly weak.
And so, I wanna get, now that we understand the role of the, um, of the hero in the community, I wanna get back to your question about, um, what it means that the hero is absent. Okay, so let me quote you Rousseau here: “In the modern age, men no longer have a hold on one another, except by force or by self interest. The ancients, by contrast, acted much more by persuasion and by the affections of the soul because they did not neglect the language of signs”—I'm going to get to what that means—"It was in the God's presence that individuals made their treaties and alliances and uttered their promises”. He's talking about this ancient, what we would consider, superstitious superstitious tradition of oath making, right? “The face of the earth was the book in which their archives were preserved stones, trees, heaps of rock concentrated by these acts and thus made it respectable to barbaric men were the pages of this book. The faith of men was more assured by the guarantee of these mute witnesses than it is today by all the vain rigor of the laws”.
So, Rousseau says, okay, let's look at this example of promise making, right? How people kept promises. In antiquity—this might be rose colored, it definitely is—people kept promises because of oaths, right? Because they had this probably superstitious and unjustified belief that there was some god sort of like looking over them or something like that. In modernity, when reason, when enlightenment gets rid of all these superstitions we don't end up being moral characters out of reason, right? I mean, think about your life. Do people keep their promises out of reason? They don't. Why do people keep their promises? Through law. What is behind law? Self interest and the threat of state violence. So law has to fully envelop our lives in every angle. Think about the amount of legal stuff you have to worry about when you hire a contractor or something like that, or you put on a YouTube video and copyright claims when honor, when nobility, when imitation is not the rule of the land. You go back down, we go back down to animals. We go back down to self interest and force. And that's the society that Rousseau thinks we're living in right now. Rousseau does not think that we are in a society of citizens who imitate models, who imitate heroes, good heroes, and help the community for its own sake. He thinks we help the community because it benefits us because we can see the benefit to us—or even darker—because of the threat, uh, of state violence.
Alex Petkas: So, yeah, I mean, if you think about people tearing down statues, I mean, even of a, you know, liberal figure like Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, you know, um, but we really seem to have rejected heroes. Even more forcefully, although I think I get the sense that there was, there was a lot of, you know, hero snarkery going on and even in Rousseau's day, uh, and maybe always to some extent, but is there a way to bring them back or what's, what's his advice for us?
Johnathan Bi: So just want to comment on that. Rousseau does say that in his own time, the tendency was already to tear heroes down. Um, and obviously that has only been exaggerated today. I also find it humorous that superheroes have never been more popular in media. But real heroes have never been more absent in actual society. And there's something really interesting there. Maybe it's a, it's a, it's a crutch or it's a, it's sort of this, this compromise or it's the, it's the next best thing that, you know, any real person will be so problematic because they're real people. And especially as heroes, they have strength of soul and they're going to do all this weird shit that we don't like, that we have to have some kind of fictional ideal there.
Um, but I think Rousseau is very pessimistic about the ability to bring back heroes. Yeah, I think you can tell that he's very pessimistic about bringing back heroes because in his famous, uh, educational treaties called Emile, right, where he, it's this sort of hypothetical upbringing of this hypothetical kid called Emile, he very much makes Emile into, it's a pretty anti-heroic education.
Rousseau's own education through Plutarch is not found in Emile at all. Um, Rousseau says that even if it's Socrates that Emile wants to imitate, it's all over, right? And so, um, Rousseau says that, and this just goes to show the extent to which Emile's education is an anti-imitative, anti-heroic one, which is that he, he's really given, I don't even want to say hero or role model, um, but it's Robinson Crusoe.
Now, this is funny for two reasons. One is that Robinson Crusoe is, um, It's obviously defined by his asociality, right, that he doesn't participate in society, which again, I think just shows you how impotent reason is. Even the asociality that Rousseau wants to inject into Emile has to be done through imitative means, i.e., even for, for Emile to ward off social desires, he has to be given a social exemplar to imitate.
And the second reason that it's quite different from your traditional, uh, role model of hero upbringing is, um Emile is often asked to criticize by Robertson Crusoe and is asked to think if I were in his shoes, what would I do instead? Now, okay, so, so, so clearly is quite pessimistic about, uh, the ability to bring back heroes, uh, in modernity. The question is why? One answer is just politics. Um, heroes, for the reason that we described, are anti egalitarian, right? They're kind of these problematic—great men is the word that Rousseau uses in, um, in, in his own treaties here. But just to show you the depths of the problem and how deeply this problem runs, Rousseau thinks that modern language itself is incapable of producing heroes anymore.
And, you know, um, to share with our listeners is, uh, to blame or to be credited for my decision this summer to learn ancient Greek. And actually, one of the key reasons I decided, so I was debating between learning ancient Greek and modern German, because those are the two kind of traditions that I'm most interested in, in the European languages, at least. And one reason I decided against ancient Greek was actually because of Rousseau's argument here. And Rousseau's argument, and Alex, you can tell us, is that modern languages have degenerated from ancient languages in this one specific sense, which is that modern languages have given up in their attempt to become more rational, have ceased to become poetic.
And so I, I know, I'm a native speaker of Mandarin and I know classical Chinese somewhat well, definitely true. Right. Right. Like when I read Confucius or one of the, uh, the four books in the five classics, these are the classics of a Chinese antiquity. I can't understand it. And it's not just because I'm bad at classical Chinese. It's because it has this poetry to it. But what it lacks in precision, it more than makes up in persuasion, right? It has this poetic quality you can't but help be compelled by its arguments, even when it's wrong. And this is the corollary to the hero. This is why those languages can be very dangerous. But even modern languages itself, I think Rousseau thinks has lost in their attempt to become more rational, in their attempt to speak to our mind—which again reason is very impotent—it has lost a lot of that persuasive power. And so for Rousseau, societies are either built on persuasion or coercion. Okay, so they're never built on reason. So persuasion is having a heroic model like Brutus. Brutus who drove Tarquin out. It's, uh, The Jews, right? Psalms literally meant song. Many of these ancient laws were enveloped in the beautiful Quranic chants of Islam. Were enveloped in art. That's what persuasion is. Right? It influences you outside of its rational semantic content. When we move to a rational society, you know, moderns think, you know, we become rational creatures. You know, we, you know, we, we, we calculate our, I don't know what they think, but whatever the utilitarians think.
We calculate our, our optimal utils, and But Rousseau says no. Rousseau says by giving up persuasion, we end up in coercion. And that's, again, self interest and, um, and the threat of physical violence. And I do think that's a pretty accurate description of what drives the modern world today. Um, and so that's how deeply the problem runs, which is that even modern language itself, if you were to capture, for example—maybe Cost of Glory would be a counterexample—of these ancient heroes in modern English, I think Rousseau thinks that you would lose a lot of the force that is captured in Plutarch in the Latin, or especially ancient Greek.
Um, and you know, one more note I'll just make of this, of how difficult it is to have heroes. Um, Plutarch, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, he dramatizes and he fantasizes to the point of creating hypothetical scripts for his characters that he could have no idea what they actually said. That's persuasive. It might not be right, but that's persuasive, and that's what you need to do to create heroes. If you did that in the history department today, you're going to be, you're not even going to be laughed out of it. You're just going to be hung or something, right? Like, so that’s how deep the problem runs.
The modern world with its addiction to reason cannot, can no longer sustain heroes. And you know, one last plug here, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem with reason and enlightenment and science and art. And so there's a lot more cataclysmic issues for people who are interested. They can watch my first discourse lecture.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, which is great. I, I've, I've seen it. And, um, so I, I will take that as a personal challenge from Rousseau that, you know, we are, we are damn sure going to resurrect some heroes, uh, today. And, well, and I, you know, I wonder if we're, we might be seeing kind of different phases of Rousseau’s thought, but you know, we don't have to get into that.
So, there's one passage that he says in the first discourse somewhere that, um, all this distinction between reason and its power to affect people and the power of heroic examples where he talks about, you know, Athens versus Sparta, okay, we have great tragedies, great works of history. We have all the works of philosophy. But, uh, you know, Rousseau says basically, I would not weigh those as anything versus the, the, the weighty examples of heroes that we have from Sparta, like a Leonidas or, uh, I mean, I like Lysander and Agesilaus, though they're, they're, they're not as popular today. So, and, you know, truly, where is the equivalent of 300, um, movie for classical Athens?
And in a way, I sort of like to think of Plutarch and these great figures of the past as a canon. Like, people talk about the canon of Western literature, the canon of Western art, canon of Western, well, you know, a canon is a measuring stick. And actually, the metaphor is more appropriate to a person, to an individual.
And in a way, that's the idea that, that Rousseau is getting at there with saying, You know, Sparta's heroes are of more value to mankind than Athens. So that, that's what I thought…
Johnathan Bi: And, um, Spartan Athens is the classical example that he gives in his first discourse, the famous example. Um, because, you know, in modernity, who has an issue with Athens, right? And he famously, at least in this comparison, hates Athens. Now, he thinks Athens, like an Athenian theater, is a step above his own theater, and his own theater is a step above our theater, so it's the generation, really, all the way down, and this is his sort of civilizational pessimism, speaking. Um, but what Rousseau gets at there is not just in their product. So one produces books—ethics books—one produces ethical people, but also in their education.
So the Athenians, what's the pillar of Athenian education? Rhetoric, right? It's a sophistry, essentially. It's like, being able to, because why? If you want to win in democracy, you've got to know how to flatter people. You've got to know how to lie and appear as if you're telling the truth. What is the education system of the Spartans?
The agoge, right? Where young boys who are not the head of the house are ripped out of their family and they're subjected into this most intense military training known to man. So that they would develop the willingness and the desire to sacrifice themselves for the state. And Rousseau says, this is why, despite Athens’ drastic, drastic advantage in the Peloponnesian War, right?—We're talking like in terms of manpower, in terms of resources—Sparta won.
Right? That's why Sparta won. And so that, that's another one of, uh, Rousseau's critiques, uh, of enlightenment, which is that it, it makes you lose, um, in military conflicts. The Chinese and the Mongols is another example of this, yeah.
Alex Petkas: Could not point to a better, uh, example of this than, uh, The Life of Lysander by Plutarch, or if you like, The Cost of Glory series we did on Lysander and the death of democracy. Um, but yeah, no, it's excellent. So before we get to Nietzsche, I want to get to Nietzsche too. There's this one quote that I I liked from this discourse. It says, “just as one can perform actions of virtue without being virtuous, one can perform great actions without having the right to heroism. It's not about the magnitude of the deed. The hero does not always perform great actions, but he is always ready to do so if needed, and shows himself to be great in all the circumstances of his life”.
And, uh, I think, to me, I took that as encouragement, that, like, we can all cultivate this heroic spirit. Uh, one of the ways that, that Rousseau talks about doing this is through self mastery. Basically he says: how does a hero become a hero by, by kind of channeling the energies into himself, uh, by channeling his chaotic energies and drives towards some, some higher goal through the strength of will, uh, through, through strength of character and, and that, that, that very active wrestling with oneself kind of increases that strength of character, kind of like a muscle. Um, so I took that as a great encouragement. I don't know if…
Johnathan Bi: Right, or potentially cope. Right, that like, “oh, it's fine that I'm not doing—Hey, don't worry. I'm strong, I'm strong of soul. I'm just not using it.”
Alex Petkas: Right. Take it as you will. Yeah. But, um, Let's, let's talk, we have a little bit more time to, um, to talk about one of my favorite guys. So, Nietzsche is, as we've mentioned many times, an interesting connection here. He gets a lot of credit these days for inspiring a kind of return to the ancients. Especially in the Greeks, but in the Romans too.
And, um, So, what's, you've done a series on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals that I've watched, that I have to say, I'm not trying to flatter you, but like, it's a fantastic introduction. I don't know if I've ever seen anything better for like a, like an entry point into Nietzsche, into like the heart, the core of what he's about.
So, but, just in a nutshell, maybe, what's the core of Nietzsche's interest in the great heroes of the past?
Johnathan Bi: Right. So I will probably have to draw a distinction here, which is if Rousseau is concerned about the great man, right? At least in this treaties—he uses it synonymously with heroes in his treaties on heroes—Nietzsche is concerned with what he calls the higher man. Um, and again, this is something I find quite interesting. Nietzsche's higher men are more often than not creative rather than martial heroes. So when Rousseau talks about heroes in his treaties, it's often. You know, it's the Napoleon—not Napoleon because he was after him, but it was the Napoleon types, right? It was the, the Caesars, the Pompeys—but Nietzsche does bring up people like Napoleon, but he more has in mind the Goethe's of the world, the Shakespeare's of the world, and of course, uh, given the high opinion he holds of himself, the Nietzsche's of the world. And so he, he titled his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he titled the chapters. Chapter one: why I'm so wise. Chapter two: why I'm so clever. Chapter three: why I write such great books. Uh, there's actually a somewhat humble answer to that question and you can, uh, you can figure out the answer if you, if you want to go listen to my, to my, um, to my episode.
But that's the first somewhat interesting distinction, um, that I want to draw out initially, which is it's the higher man versus the great man. And the higher man is not just defined by his strength of will, his ability to do things, but that he establishes new value systems in some way. And so the heart of Nietzsche's project, I think, is his discontent with modernity, uh, in a way not too dissimilar from Rousseau, that modern values—and what he means by modern values are really Christian values, uh, brought to modernity—are antithetical to the production of higher men, to production of greatness. And those values, he basically wants to convince a few higher men to get rid of those values, to be unshackled by those values. And he wants to convince them to give up everything that they probably learned to call morality. Things like equality, things like compassion, things like moderation, right? You can see how these are core Christian values transplanted into the modern world.
Obviously, the question is, how can they, you know, thwart greatness? Because the Greco Roman world had higher men, of course, like Sophocles, but the Christian world had quite a lot of great composers and artists as well. And I think Nietzsche's answer would be something like, well, let's take a closer look at your Christian great men, your Christian higher men. Democratic higher men. And what you're going to find is people who pay lip service to, uh, these egalitarian morals, but are actually deeply elitist in their actual life.
So a good example of this is Beethoven, right? So Beethoven, uh, nominally was a Christian. He did not live a Christian life. And if he did, he wouldn't, we wouldn't be talking about Beethoven right now. Um, he wasn't Christian in the sense that, his work wasn't produced by a sort of love of God. It wasn't produced by, you know, his desire to help his fellow man. It was the idol of his life, where he sacrificed everything to create. And he would have these quotes where he says, you know, “my friends are mere instruments for me … for me to advance my own ends”.
So you see how Beethoven is kind of heroic in the Rousseauian way, right? Where he doesn't really give a damn. It's about his own, uh, his own projects.
Alex Petkas: And Beethoven… huge Plutarch nut from, from adolescence on. I mean, it's just, it's perfect.
Johnathan Bi: And, um, I think if you look at democracy today, right, what can say to Nietzsche? Well, democracy, that's, that's modern morality, that's egalitarianism, we produce a lot of greatness. But Nietzsche would say, again, look closer at the domains where democracy produces greatness, produces the higher men still. And they don't really give a damn about these values they pay lip service to. Again, tech startups are another great example. They work so well because they're structured as dictatorships. Go read Elon's biography and tell me if he's a real egalitarian, right? And so that's, I think, at the core of Nietzsche's project, which is kind of freeing these higher men and he thinks that higher men are born to be higher men that they're born with noble aristocratic natures. Now these natures need the right type of values to really flourish which is why he's so concerned that majority is suffocating them but that I really take to be the essence of his project or one of the core pillars of his project.
And in the book that I chose to start with, his Genealogy of Morality, it’s a Genealogy, it's a critical genealogy, critical history of how modern values came to be. It’s supposed to make you disgusted with these modern values and disgusted with Christianity. And that's the other really interesting thing, which is in today's day and age, Um, there are so many Nietzscheans who are Christian, right? And like the right wing is the bed upon which two uncomfortable, unlikely bedfellows rest: Jesus and Nietzsche. Right? There are so many sort of young right wing guys who are both Christians today and deep Nietzscheans, which I find to be quite funny. I mean, you're obviously both, I would say, so maybe you can help us resolve the tension.
But, uh, but Nietzsche is very much against, explicitly against Christianity.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, you, you kind of pose this question of Nietzsche and, uh, and Christianity and it's something I think about a whole lot. But, You know, look at a figure like Constantine: tremendous will to power, strength of character, uh, I mean, he kills many, many of his family members. He just decides that that's politically necessary. It's something that the emperor Julian, uh, you know, that basically made Julian a pagan because he saw how ruthless Constantine was. And yet you see him chumming with churchmen at the church councils and with a smile on his face and waving and kissing babies.
He knows what he's got to do. And I also think that his faith is like genuine. I do believe that, but, um, another example that…
Johnathan Bi: Can I say one thing in response here? Um, which is that. I don't know about Nietzsche's specific comments on Constantine, um, but I just want to be crystal clear here. Just because someone is nominally Christian, even recognized as very Christian by the church, for Nietzsche, does not mean that they embody Christian values.
That's what he has against. So in his genealogy, his famous sentence is “Rome against Judea”. So Rome representing Greece and, and, and, and those values and think like Homer and Achilles and, you know, Homer saying, uh, revenge is sweeter than honey, right? That's not, that's not Christian at all. And then there's Judea, right? And that's the Judeo Christian worldview.
What's really interesting is that which side you fall on is not which side you advertise you or say you fall on. So, for example, he conceives as the Renaissance—which is, again, this nominally Christian event, right—to be on the side of Rome. Why? Because it, for example, has a lot, emphasizes sensuality, right?
It resurrects, like, nude sculpture and nude paintings and, and most of the art in the Renaissance is still Christian, nominally, but that's Rome for Nietzsche. And so, I think Nietzsche could have a very fair response to you, which is that, look: Constantine is just a pagan in Christian disguise. And he says this about Napoleon, actually, where he says that, um, something to the lines of, “if you want to be a great man today, you're going to have to don on the Christian robes for a while”.
In Napoleon, the case was the egalitarian robes, right? And so, um, I guess, to ask the question back to you, is, do you think what Constantine did of killing all those people, that is Christian? Like, to you, is that what Christianity is about? Sorry, that that's too strong. It's not, obviously not what Christianity is about, but is that consistent with, with what Christianity is about?
Alex Petkas: it's a fair question because, I mean, if you look back at, uh, um, past the New Testament to, you know, David and Absalom, and, you know, God is a jealous God. He's a zealous God. That's, that's the, the Greek is, uh, he's a God of zeal, which means he goes and he wreaks vengeance upon his enemies. He won't tolerate rivals.
There is this, there is this kind of other side of the coin that I think a man like Constantine can draw on for examples of like, uncompromising, ruthless power from the Old Testament—if it's for this higher goal—that allows them to believe that that heroic drive, kind of in Rousseauian terms, is it might just be a desire for glory, but it can kind of get baptized from this perspective of it's this is what the community needs,
Johnathan Bi: Can it though? because that's the key question, right? In the same way that the Pagan hero does not desire the community's ends, does the Christian hero really desire the ends of God? My, I'm, I'm leaning towards no, but, but, uh, you know, I, I, I'm not very firm on that.
But the other thing I'll say to what you just said is, well, perhaps you're more Jew than Christian because I thought one of the, the, the core foundations of Christianity is that it is a dialectical, in the Christian's eyes, progress upon the Jewish values, right? The Beatitudes, like you heard it in Leviticus, eye for an eye, but I tell you, turn the other cheek, right?
I thought of Christianity was a deepening of this sort of, uh, Um, these values of mercy and egalitarianism and compassion for the weak. It's not just we're all equals under the law of God. It's the meek shall inherit the earth. So all that I'm saying and I think that Nietzsche is gesturing at is what he takes to be the core of Christianity is not this sort of just war side.
It's not the Christianity of Constantine, but the Christianity of Mother Teresa. That's what Nietzsche takes to be the core of Christianity. And of the Christianity that I've been exposed to as both a practitioner as somewhat scholar, I would definitely agree with him that the core of Christianity is not waging war and, and vengeance. It's more otherworldly. It's not impotent, so to speak, but it's not pagan in the way—which is again, why I find your project so fascinating because I'm listening to you talk about Sulla and Pompey kill all these people with maybe reserved but nonetheless admiration. And that, that doesn't strike me as very Christian.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, it could be that I, I spent most, I spent too much time around the ancient Christians…to be distracted by what modern people think Christianity is.
And a lot of what I base it on is this kind of interaction with these dead men and bringing them to life, people like Constantine.
Another great example is Theodosius, um, who is the emperor, yeah, 50 years or so after Constantine. And he's really the man responsible for ending the Aryan controversy through brutal totalitarian suppression. And the church, celebrates him magnificently for this, uh, because the Aryans were, you know, they had this wrong doctrine of the Trinity, according to the church and it wasn't going to get solved through church councils.
The emperor had to come along and persecute these people hard. And it worked. And, uh, and yet Theodosius is like, not necessarily this model Christian in other ways. He, he suppresses, there's this famous incident where he suppresses this revolt, um, this riot, violently. I think it's in Milan. Maybe it's in Constantinople. What matters is that he killed a lot of people, many of whom were probably innocent, that were like basically soccer hooligans that were starting to overturn imperial statues, that kind of thing. And so he cracks down hard. Then Ambrose, the churchman, the Bishop of Milan, refuses him communion until he repents.
And so there's this famous scene where Theodosius comes in this procession and like bows down before Ambrose and asks for forgiveness and Ambrose offers him forgiveness. And do you think Theodosius would have done the exact same thing all over again? Yes, I think he would have. He was, he was glad to play that role. Ambrose, he could kind of offer the church this, uh, this carrot of, you know, you can, okay, now you get to show that, you know, the church is supreme over the state. But, you know, I still get to do my business as emperor.
And, um, so, I think it's a lot more ambiguous than Nietzsche. I think Nietzsche has this kind of like buttoned up 19th century protestant version of christianity, which even if he's read history and you know, he's only kind of like engaging it with it at this at this certain level. Um, I don't know. The story's more complicated.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, and that's something that, um, I think I've read too much Buddhism into Christianity, and so my Christian friends have always kept reminding me that there is an active side to, uh, to, to Christianity, like a, uh, or like a militaristic side, almost, yeah.
Alex Petkas: Well, Jonathan, I think regardless of, uh, of whose side we take in these debates, Nietzsche's or Rousseau's or, uh, or that of the Christians, I think they're all going to give us a similar advice when it comes to the great heroes of the past, which is drink deeply.
And I can find many, many precedents for this among, among the churchmen too. Heroism is something that we need more of today—[that’s] part of my mission, but I urge everybody to listen to your [series] and to watch the videos that you've got together. They're, they're really fantastic and I, I can't wait to see what other thinkers you're going to save me the time of having to read like Hegel and, uh, and, and other difficult philosophers. I know you're going to get to the ancients too.
But, If I have convinced you to learn ancient Greek, I will, uh, consider that to be a tally on the wall of Alex 1 Rousseau 0 as far as bringing back ancient heroes, because that's, to me, that's, that's one of the key steps.
Johnathan Bi: Right, right, there you go.
Alex Petkas: Well, uh, thanks for joining us, Jonathan. And where can people find you?
Johnathan Bi: Probably my YouTube channel ‘Johnathan Bi’ is the easiest, um, and uh, greatbooks.io where I have all of my transcripts, my email lists. Joining my email list is probably the best way. So just greatbooks.io and there I not only give lecture updates, interview updates, but also transcripts, book notes, recommendations, and my essays as well.
And by the time this comes out, um, the Nietzsche lecture already will be out, including an interview on, on free will, Nietzsche on free will. And then next week, we're going to do the First Discourse, which is what we talked about today, Rousseau's critique of reason and science, um, and the Enlightenment, as well as an interview on Rousseau and heroes. So a deep dive into Rousseau and heroes with one of the world's leading Rousseau scholars.
Alex Petkas: Fantastic. Look out for it. Well, um, Jonathan, we'll see you soon.
Johnathan Bi: Thanks, Alex.
