Goethe is perhaps the most widely-celebrated author of German literature, and Faust is his most famous tale. While the historical Doctor Faustus had always been portrayed as an essentially evil man, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for greater power, Goethe reinterpreted the story into a wager between Faust and Mephistopheles, and set it against the backdrop of a metaphysical wager between God and Satan. Faust, as protagonist, stands not for evil, but for the spirit of ceaseless strivi...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Season 2Ep. 23
"Emerson – Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home, as – I may not praise it… it is too close to me... The author who has been richest in ideas in this century so far, has been an American..." (Nietzsche) Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most influential minds in America, as a leading figure in the Transcendentalist movement that emerged during the mid-1800s, a personal friend and strong influence on Thoreau, and a preacher outside of any church or dogma. Emerson believed th...
May 31, 2022•1 hr 36 min•Season 2Ep. 22
In a second episode with my wife, Amberly, we talk about another movie. This time it's not a movie about Nietzsche, the man, but a film that I argue approximates some of Nietzsche's ideas about the decline of society, the weakness of modernity, and the need to rediscover the barbarian within us all. That film, of course, is Demolition Man (1993) by Paul Verhoeven, starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock. In the film, the reanimation of a super-criminal from a cryogenic pri...
May 24, 2022•56 min•Season 2Ep. 21
William Kaiser is a sociologist, a pupil of Peter Berger, a student of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and an autodidact in all things Freud, Nietzsche & Kaufmann. His dissertation on the topic of Wittgenstein was entitled, "A Wittgensteinian Critique of Realism in Social Science Methodology", and to this day, Kaiser maintains his skepticism towards what he characterizes as "naive realism". He expresses the common thread he sees in many philosophers, from Nietzsche, to Rorty, to Wittgenstein...
May 20, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Today, it's an examination of a single aphorism: Beyond Good & Evil, 295, "The Genius of the Heart": "...the genius of the heart, who silences all that is loud and self-satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire - to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them -..." In this passage - essentially a prose poem by Nietzsche - he expresses praise for Dionysus, and describes himself as his last initiate and disciple. The poem ...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Another episode on a single passage: The Gay Science, book V, aphorism 354: “The Genius of the Species”. One of the most thought-provoking passages in Nietzsche’s work, he expounds on his hypothesis that all consciousness is a product of human sociality, and was only necessary as a net of communication between human beings. This has dire implications for Nietzsche’s aspirations to individualism, and makes suspect everything to him which enters into consciousness. He believes that the deeper, mor...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 18
In part two, we shift from the friendship - at first strong, and later, a bit troubled - to the break that happened in 1878/9. Nietzsche writes, in his personal correspondence, and in his reflections in Ecce Homo, of the liberating freedom he felt when he left Bayreuth and moved up to the Alps, and how this turning away from Wagner represented a completely new chapter in his life. Indeed, the break corresponds with Nietzsche's departure from academia, and his uprooting of his entire established ...
May 03, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 17
UPDATE: Yesterday, when the episode went live, it had the wrong audio uploaded and simply contained a repeat of Q&A #1. Sorry everyone. This has been fixed. Better late than never! I answer fan questions for a third time. I want to start doing this more frequently, so if you have a question you want answered, let me know on reddit, or send a voice message to the podcast on Anchor.
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 17
It's finally time to talk about Richard Wagner. After meeting Wagner by happenstance in 1868, Nietzsche began a ten-year friendship with the older man, who was a rising star in the music world, on track to becoming one of the most famous living composers. Nietzsche was himself a fan, and described the chain of events leading to his friendship with Wagner as a kind of "fairytale". Soon, Wagner embarked upon the idea of a music festival that would serve as a cultural spearhead for the movement Wag...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 16
"Without music, life would be a mistake." It's commonly known that Nietzsche was a sort of 'musical philosopher' - in fact, it was a feat he aspired to quite openly - but a glance at Nietzsche's thoughts on music reveals that he was so enamored with this form of artistic expression as to have once suggested that music lays at the very heart of reality. Only through music, Nietzsche argues in Birth of Tragedy, can we directly experience the primordial pain and contradiction of reality. Here we wi...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Season 2Ep. 15
Join me in a discussion of passage 109 of Daybreak: "Self-Control and Moderation and Their Final Motive". In this passage that we've oft referenced but not yet attempted a deep dive of, Nietzsche outlines six ways of dealing with the "vehemence of a drive". As Nietzsche considers the self to be governed by impulses, some of which are competing, we should not expect that we can simply command ourselves with a voluntarily governing ego, or somehow will ourselves into having willpower. He also reje...
Apr 12, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 2Ep. 14
In the second of our examination of the Overman, we'll examine a passage I'd originally planned to look at in respect to the eternal recurrence of the same events: The Convalescent. This chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra deals with both of these grand doctrines of Nietzsche - the Overman and the eternal return - and provides, in some sense, the means for understanding both in relationship to one another. It may seem, from a surface reading of Nietzsche's ideas, that the Overman represents some g...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 13
This is the last great concept of Nietzsche's that we have not yet covered on the podcast. With all of the background context that we've collected over the first season and the first part of this one, I feel we're now ready to confront the pinnacle of Nietzsche's philosophy, the highest ideal, and the most sacred value: the Overman. Contrary to popular belief, the Overman is not a figure that has ever existed within recorded history: Zarathustra says that Caesar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, G...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 2Ep. 12
The philosopher is a misunderstood figure - perhaps most of all by philosophers themselves. This is Nietzsche’s charge, in his later work: what we imagine drives the philosopher, the “will to truth“, is instead a sublimation of the will to power. The philosopher seeks to experience his power in an abstract realm of the intellect, where he can seek for higher and higher goals. But where does this assessment leave the philosopher? If a pure, disinterested drive to knowledge is not what is behind t...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Who is the artist? Where does art come from? What is the future of art? Doing a comprehensive view of Nietzsche’s take on artists is probably too big a topic for any one episode, so here we will concern ourselves primarily with these questions, the answers to which all involve the idea that the artist is a sort of alchemist of the psyche, who works with the raw material of the soul in order to channel, redirect, heighten or deaden one’s inner feelings. The artist thus emerges from the type of th...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Back in season one, we teased the idea of Nietzsche looking for some way to elevate mankind beyond the natural world. While Nietzsche is celebrated for his uncompromising critique of Christian values and otherworldly metaphysics, the advantage of these ideas was that they showed man an ideal which was beyond the cynical view that human beings are simply "clever animals who invented knowledge". Nietzsche floats the idea of the saint, the artist, and the philosopher in the essay, "Schopenhauer as ...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Andrei Georgescu is a writer, a poet, an artist, and an insightful mind. He has grappled with the complexities of the human physiology for years, out of necessity if for no other reason, and it was because of an essay on the topic of diet that I first ran across Andrei's work. Our discussion centers around this topic, which was a concern shared by Friedrich Nietzsche: how diet affects one's mood, mental state, and overall emotional and physical health; how to fine-tune one's diet to their own ne...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 44 min•Season 2Ep. 7
The ugliest man of Athens? Or the most beautiful soul of all? A mere intellectual? Or the finest fencing-master? The central focus of our episode today, in part two of our analysis of Plato's Symposium, is Nietzsche's interpretation of the text. Nietzsche argues that Socrates rounds off the discussion on the attributes of love in his speech, and that the image he gives of the power of love is then demonstrated to be manifested by Socrates himself, in his living character, by the final, drunken s...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 2Ep. 6
You don't need money, don't take fame Don't need no credit card to ride this train It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes But it might just save your life That's the power of love Today, we discuss Nietzsche's lieblingsdichtung, or favorite work, from the time of his graduation at Schulpforta: Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is one of the most popular Platonic dialogues, which considers the topic of love, and the nature of the god Eros, who represents love as a metaphysical or div...
Feb 14, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Was Nietzsche influenced by the Lutheran idea of pietism? Is there a clear parallel between the ideas of Ecclesiastes and the idea of Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche intend a degree of comedy to his work? Are some of his ideas even to be taken as 'tongue-in-cheek', as not entirely serious, as mere thought experiments, as something to be taken with a dash of irony & a wink and maybe even a complementary nod? And can we perhaps dare to suggest that in Nietzsche, the most Anti-Christian of all philoso...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 47 min•Season 2Ep. 4
In part two, we look at eternal return in its full implications - the eternity of all that is low and contemptible in human beings, contrasted with the eternity of all that is great and has great potential in human beings. The depressing fact that mankind's smallness and Christian weakness is written into infinity is what Zarathustra calls his "most abysmal thought". He is also tormented by his own faults, his own human-all-too-human nature, and taunted by the "Spirit of Gravity" - who tells Zar...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Kevin Rogers is a musician, one of my old friends from the Zen forum & one of the co-hosts of the Knot Zen Podcast. In this episode, we talk about Zen found in the corpus of literature produced during the middle ages in China, and the dialectical shift that happened when this Chinese movement was brought into Japan by Dogen. Kevin gives an explanation of Zen, which dovetails into discussions on the idea of lingering moments, the direct experience of reality, and the epistemic implications of...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 38 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Welcome to Season Two, my beautiful, free spirits! We ended the last season on a "cliffhanger"... the lead-up to the new mythology forged within the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Today, we discuss the basis of that new myth. The eternal return, also known as the eternal recurrence, is one of the most famous ideas of Nietzsche, but one of the most difficult to comprehend. How could this philosopher who made it his business to attack every provisional truth, point out the perspectival nature of...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 34 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Season two is coming soon! This is the last episode in the interim - or what we might call the afterbirth of season one (if we wanted to be a little gross with our metaphors) - and I'm very excited to begin with some of the gargantuan topics of our next series of episodes. Truly, the episodes to follow are on the ideas that stand like magnificent, granite pillars, upholding the beautiful frescoes of Nietzsche's grand ideas. This is the second time I’m answering questions from the audience. This ...
Jan 25, 2022•45 min•Season 1Ep. 36
By popular demand, I’ve finally had a conversation with an antinatalist. Gabriel and I discussed the arguments for antinatalism, the pessimistic assessment of life on which those arguments are based, and the difference between continuing life versus bringing it forth. I threw Gabriel some curveballs about transhumanism and suicide machines towards the end of the talk, and furthermore we brought in a few references to Twilight Zone and Black Mirror. Contrary to the stereotypical depiction of an a...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 35
On a cold, rainy afternoon this past November, Mynaa Miesnowan and I met up at a little bar in Austin, Texas called Sagebrush. I'm a lifelong South Austinite and Sagebrush is a newer bar that exists within a very, very old building, that was a country & western dancehall back in the 1960's. The modern decor reminds of a Texas bar in a Rodriguez or Tarantino film, with a backlit landscape of a starry desert lining the walls. Mynaa and I grabbed a beer and made our way around back, even though...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 43 min•Season 1Ep. 34
We can pinpoint the end of an era in Nietzsche’s philosophy precisely at Book IV of the Gay Science. This is where Nietzsche marks off a new chapter in his life. He begins the book with the aphorism, "For the New Year", and there is a celebration of the month of January, as the beginning of the year – a celebration of newness, of rejuvenation. In a letter to Franz Overbeck, on September 9th, of that year, still in 1882, he wrote: "If you have read 'Sanctus Januarius', you will have noticed that ...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 33
In the second part of our deep dive into The Antichrist, we tear into the meat of the text: the scathing, uncompromising attack of Christianity. Unlike most critics of the Christian religion, Nietzsche devotes very little time to the refutation of the arguments for Christianity's truth, or the supposed evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Instead, Nietzsche is laser-focused on the effect of the Christian doctrine of pity, and its character as a totally life-denying force. Jesus, for Nietzsche,...
Dec 28, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 32
The Antichrist (1888) is one of the last books Nietzsche wrote before losing his sanity the next year. It serves as the culmination of a decade or more of Nietzsche's thoughts on morality, Christianity, and the need for a revaluation of values. This project - of finding or defining a new set of values by which man could live - was something about which Nietzsche was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, some sort of moral direction is required for ascending life. It is essential that the philosoph...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Carefree Wandering is my favorite Youtube channel that currently produces philosophical content, making Hans-Georg Moeller a very special guest on the Nietzsche Podcast. Our conversation involved many of the topics of his videos, which I of course wanted to ask him about. But overall, I think we presented a relatively coherent procession of ideas. We discuss Professor Moeller's background in Chinese philosophy, and the similarities between Heraclitus and some of the Daoist philosophers. As both ...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 30
