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Join me and the friends of the podcast in our last episode of the year, a light-hearted variety show! This episode has a focus on gift-giving, and several guests have given me the gift of their time and effort - Andrei Georgescu, Karl Nord, Mynaa Miesnowaan, and Quinn Williams. Join each of them as they present their own meditation on giving and how it relates to Nietzsche's philosophy. I've also got a little audio novella for you about Nietzsche's Christmas with the Wagners, and we'll conclude ...
Today, we discuss one of the most important works of political philosophy of all time, Machiavelli's Il Principe - The Prince. This book was composed while Machiavelli was in exile, after having served the city of Florence for thirteen years as a diplomatic official, but by the time of its authorship reduced to the role of an obscure private citizen. In this work, as Nietzsche characterizes it, Machiavelli takes us along at a brisk allegrissimo through matters of the most grave seriousness, main...
Introduction to Machiavelli’s political philosophy. We will consider Machiavelli’s legacy, and the enduring debate as to the significance of Machiavelli’s work. Is he strictly an amoralist, concerned with political power as solely a “force” to be considered in the scientific sense, or does he have a political project of his own that must inform our interpretation of him? To answer these questions, we will take the unorthodox step of beginning with his Discourses on Livy. As always, there is some...
Watch our livestream tomorrow (12/7/22), at 9:00 PM central time, on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@StudioERecording Show flyer: https://www.instagram.com/p/ClzsytPMNrg/ Today we summarize the ways in which Nietzsche's politics was influenced by the Ancient Greeks. Nietzsche derives from the Sophists, such as Thucydides, his preference for realism over idealism in geopolitics, and the "practical justice" of examining every viewpoint on its own terms, and according to what would serve the...
The word “Epicurean” is a wonderful example of the linguistic phenomenon of a word coming to signify the opposite of its original meaning. Epicurean philosophy is hedonistic in that it holds pleasure to be the highest good, but Epicurus drew completely different conclusions than that of blind pleasure-seeking. In truth, Epicurus views the most important task of life to be the removal of pain or distress, and concludes in the ideal of an austere, simple, hidden life: the life in “The Garden”. Nie...
“My cure for Platonism has always been Thucydides.” Nietzsche saw in the first historian of Ancient Greece the will to adhere to realism, and to learn the lessons of the “harsh teacher” of war. Where he sees cowardice in Plato, Nietzsche sees courage in Thucydides, as well as the “practical justice” of allowing all the parties a fair representation of their viewpoint. Thucydides, for Nietzsche, is the epitome of the Sophist tradition, which he contrasts with the moralism of Socrates and Plato. I...
Delve into Plato's Republic, examining its controversial proposals like censorship and philosopher kings, and the debate over whether it's primarily an ethical or political text. The discussion includes Karl Popper's accusations of Plato as a totalitarian forerunner and Nietzsche's multi-faceted critique of Platonic idealism. Ultimately, the episode sheds light on how ancient Greek philosophy grappled with the nature of justice, governance, and the ideal human society.
Nietzsche graduated Schulpforta with a dissertation on the topic of Theognis of Megara. Theognis was a Greek aristocrat from a Dorian city-state, famous for his poetry which survives only in fragments. For millennia, he was regarded as a gnomic poet, whose works were intended to impart moral lessons. In his study of Theognis, Nietzsche combats this view, and argues instead that Theognis was only perceived as a moralist in the post-Socratic zeitgeist. What Nietzsche finds instead is a passionate ...
Having discussed the ancient foundations of the religion that governed the minds of the Hellenes and the Romans, we now discuss how life in the city developed. The social order and the laws governing the cities were rooted in religious beliefs that were so old that they were now already modified and subsumed within other, newer beliefs. Since the belief is the foundation of the social order, Coulanges asserts that it was the transformation of the religious beliefs that began to demand the change...
If you've been listening for a year or more, you know that Halloween is a very special holiday for me. To be honest, finding "spooky" Nietzsche content was a bit difficult last year, such that I probably covered just about everything you could say about Nietzsche's thoughts on ghosts, witches, the fear of the dark, or why we celebrate scary or morose holidays such as Halloween. So, this year, for our Halloween special, I decided to take a detour to an author who came along shortly after Friedric...
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) provides us with the most in-depth account of the ancient religion upon which the city-states of Greece and Rome were founded. While the Hellenes later believed in concepts such as reincarnation, the division of body and soul, and gods that ruled over whole empires, Coulanges asserts that in their earliest days - hundreds or thousands of years before the periods for which we have written documentation - the Indo-Europeans believed that the dead continue...
Introduction to the politics of Nietzsche. In this episode, we give an unvarnished look at the aristocratic radicalism that forms up the foundation of Nietzsche's political philosophy. While many interpreters and commenters on Nietzsche have dealt with his radical politics by ignoring it altogether, by regarding Nietzsche as anti-political, or by interpreting it all away, we will instead begin by taking a hard look at Nietzsche's politics and see if we can come to an understanding of why he held...
Nietzsche recapitulates and summarizes his positions, and provides us with a few relatively simple formulas for understanding the interaction of the two art-forces. He hopes for a rebirth of tragic art in Europe. We conclude with my distillation of the main philosophical concepts, the significance of which can be expanded beyond the work.
Here we find the idea of cultures as admixtures of the Apollinian, Dionysian, or Socratic approaches to life. The Socratic is distinguished from the Apollinian, and modern art and culture is assessed as theoretic parasitism on art.
Socrates, having been introduced in the last chapter we studied in the previous section, appears now to threaten all art, with a worldview described as "the theoretic", which is fundamentally opposed to the tragic. The theoretical worldview is, by nature, optimistic, moralistic, and against all illusion and ignorance. Nietzsche first raises the prospect of "an artistic Socrates", and rails against the New Attic Comedy as a degenerated artform in comparison to Attic Tragedy.
Now we turn to the effect of Euripedes, and Nietzsche’s charge that this tragedian came under the influence of Socrates, and the new form of drama, New Attic Comedy, that followed.
Let’s talk about the evolution of the Attic Tragedy: from solo dithyrambic poet, to dithyrambic chorus, to chorus plus the ritualized portrayal of a masked Dionysus, to an entire tragedy performed on stage behind the “magic wall” of the chorus.
Today we cover the first three sections of Birth of Tragedy. Slow going, I know- but things will begin to move at a faster clip as we continue. In this episode the core concepts of the Apollinian and Dionysian art forces are explained, their relation to one another, and their origin in dreams and intoxication.
In the name of Lord Dionysus, it with great joy and solemnity that we commence this, the first of our Nietzschean bookclubs. This series will see me undertake an in-depth analysis, moving section-by-section, through Nietzsche’s first book: The Birth of Tragedy. In the first episode, we’ll look at Nietzsche’s masterful second preface, written in 1886 and attached to the beginning of the work. This episode will therefore serve as a sort of introduction to the text, contextualizing it within Nietzs...
This is the first conversation on the podcast between more than two people. Given that the episodes involving a dialogue are often the least popular compared to the lecture series, perhaps this simply shows that I have not learned my lesson and refuse to appease the audience gods. We discuss several quotations from Nietzsche during the Untimely Meditations period. The topic is culture - Nietzsche's view of culture and how it informs us about our situation today. We strayed into many other topics...
The final episode of season two. We discuss some of my favorite passages from Nietzsche, concerning the feeling of liberation one has upon finally and fully accepting the Nietzschean affirmative philosophy, and what this means for our future. Nietzsche urges us not to interpret him as giving us a definitive way of life to follow, but furthermore does not wish us to seek for a state of finality, rest, or utopia. The great experience of noontide is the perception that one is truly halfway between ...
A synthesis of all ideas of Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy as we have discussed it this season. Join me as I dare to embark on the challenge of answering, on Nietzsche’s behalf, that age-old question… What is the meaning of life? Episode art: Joseph Werner - Diana of Ephesus as allegory of Nature, c. 1680
This time, I'm answering questions just from patrons. If it sounds cool to you to get to ask me additional Q&A questions in between the public Q&As, you can become a patron. Honestly, I know I say this every time, but every time it's true: this is my favorite question and answer session yet! Got into some very deep and very fun territory. Love it. When this goes up on reddit, I'll ask the public for more questions so we can follow up with another episode, this time with an opportunity fo...
On our second excursion into Nietzschean science, we’re studying Nietzsche’s two most celebrated figures in science: one from Ancient Greece and another from Enlightenment Europe. In Democritus, Nietzsche sees the zenith of the materialist project in Greek philosophy, opening the way for a mathematical atomist description of the world, carried on by the Pythagoreans. In Boscovich, he finds a continuation of this project, centuries later - to describe the world by one force or law, and account fo...
In this episode, we revisit the Pre-Platonic lecture series given by Nietzsche at Basel, the notes for which were assembled and translated by Gregory Whitlock. These lectures detail Nietzsche’s views on the first philosophers of Ancient Greece, and how they demonstrated that the spirit of scientific investigation is a manifestation of will to power: to bound the boundless within the understanding of reason, by appeal to as few possible starting principles. Nietzsche believes that the Pre-Platoni...
In this episode, I'm reading a chapter of my book, Unconscious Correspondences. I considered an episode on Cartesian Dualism, but realized I'd already said everything I needed to say, in a chapter in this book. Rather than repurposing the same content into a new form, why not just read directly from the book? As Nietzsche tended to do when introducing his own earlier works, I shall do the same. I will introduce this essay: "Body and Mind: The Life and Meditations of Rene Descartes - A Polemic" w...
Much had been made of Nietzsche’s predictions of the coming nihilism. As a result of the death of the Christian God, Europe is bound for a crisis of values, in which nothing can any longer give us a goal beyond ourselves and our own happiness, and people search for this meaning or justification in all sorts of other spheres of human life: morality, reason, history, and utility. Ultimately, however, since we have so thoroughly devalued the physical world of experience, we find no such meaningful ...
After the wager is agreed upon between Faust and Mephisto, the two set off to explore the world. Mephisto takes Faust out drinking in Leipzig. Then, Mephisto procures for him a youth potion from one of his earthly servants - a witch - that takes thirty years off of Faust's life, restoring him to perfect youth. Then, while on their travels, Faust meets a young girl named Gretchen, by happenstance, and decides he must have her, forcing Mephisto to help him in this endeavor. Most of the rest of par...
