Matthew Mandel

My friend Johnathan recently delivered an excellent lecture on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. He rightly noted how underrated Nietzsche’s ideas are today, showed how they could be usefully applied to the contemporary world, and offered some fair criticisms of the Nietzschean perspective.

After I left the lecture, I found myself thinking about the below scene from The Banshees of Inisherin, a movie I adore.

Part of the value of art is that it lets us engage in rich thought experiments. Banshees does a great job of embodying Nietzsche and his critics in the characters of Colm and Pádric, and in doing so gives us the opportunity to reflect on how attractive psychologically-plausible instantiations of these ideas are. Colm contends that great men should pursue excellence as a path to transcendence and a kind of immortality. Pádric argues that what counts is how we treat others and that we can live on in those we love.

The irony of the philosophical tension in Banshees is that Colm’s mission is a fool’s errand. He’s an old guy on a small island off of Ireland composing mediocre music– it’s pure hubris for him to compare himself to Mozart. And as one of my other favorite movies makes clear: even if you’re amazingly talented but ultimately short of Mozart, comparing yourself to true genius is a path to ruin.