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Welcome to season five of The Nietzsche Podcast! First of all, a warm thank you to all of my listeners and patrons who have helped to make this show such a phenomenal success. For our first episode in this new collection of episodes, we're diving headfirst into the Oedipus plays of Sophocles: Oedipus Rex & Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles triumphed with the best tragedy at the Dionysia more than any other playwright, and Aristotle named Oedipus Rex the model tragedy. We will fully explore the t...
Concluding with our readthrough of book I of The Gay Science! We'll return with book II in a short while. In the meantime, we're going back to regular episodes of the podcast in the immediate future, covering a variety of topics. Cheers!
Join me for the next installment of our readthrough of The Gay Science. Here, we cover a number of aphorisms concerning: fame and its effect on friendship; the dying words of Roman emperors; the hidden significance of all historical events; the desacrelizing effects of market forces upon society; and the value in knowing the supposed motives of human behavior, if the professed motives happen to be 'false'.
In this episode, we discuss the way in which selfishness is the root of all selfless morality, how corruption produces greatness, why the ascetic is driven by ambition, and the age old question, "What is Life?"
We begin our walkthrough + analysis of The Gay Science today, starting with some brief remarks on the background context of the work, a loose examination of the preface, and an intense exegesis of the first nine aphorisms. Excited to dive into this one with all of you1
Updates on my life, the new direction for the podcast, revealing the next book that we’re analyzing, and general thoughts on the spirit of the show, what binds the community together, and self celebration about the release of my book.
A summary of Nietzsche's teachings, examined by considering the parallel of Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche with how the modern person could adopt Nietzsche as a similar type of influence. I attempt to distill the central message of Nietzsche's philosophy, and explain how this interpretative framework helps elucidate new angles to many of his important ideas. This episode is my final word on Nietzsche's philosophy, considered in its totality, as the podcast transitions away from our focus ...
In the aphorism, "Journey to Hades" in Human All Too Human Vol 2, Nietzsche lists eight thinkers who helped to shape his thought. Each of these eight is paired with another thinker, a choice which is intentional and intended to reveal something about each pair. These eight are: Epicurus and Montaigne; Goethe and Spinoza; Plato and Rousseau; Pascal and Schopenhauer. In this episode, we will examine each one of these pairs in order to determine what similarities and what differences Nietzsche is a...
The second part of a two-parter we began near the beginning of this season. The completion of our analysis of Ecce Homo. In this episode, we consider Nietzsche's reviews of his own books, and argue that it presents a creative narrative of Nietzsche's life: Nietzsche as a tragic figure. Nietzsche mythologizes himself and the circumstances of his great works, dabbling in exaggerations and lacunae - but nevertheless providing an invaluable interpretation the significance of his entire career, and c...
The Twilight of Idols is described by Nietzsche as a work of leisure: a leap sideways, a bit of sunshine, a form of play rather than work. The laboriousness of 'notebook psychology', in which one strains and squints and spies on reality, could not be further from this natural discernment based on what one is given. In this episode, we explore exactly what Nietzsche means by this distinction. Once again, it is tied in with his differentiation between the artistic and the theoretic. Through Twilig...
A deep dive into one of the most important passages in Twilight of Idols. We’ll explore Nietzsche’s critique of our erroneous habits of thought: mistaking the effect for the cause, false causality, creating imaginary causes, creating a doer of the deed, and free will. We explore Nietzsche’s explanation for how these errors take hold of our thought, the psychological need for these errors, and why they persist. Episode art is The Billiard’s Player by William Bastiaan Tholen
My friend Quinn and I discuss whether Deleuze is an accurate interpreter of Nietzsche. What are the faults of Deleuze's interpretation, and what are its merits? We discuss the eternal return, the anti-Hegelian attitude of Deleuze, ressentiment and bad conscience, and the Deleuzian understanding of will to power. More broadly, we discuss what it is that makes an interpretation correct, and how there are different mindsets behind the left and right interpretations of Nietzsche.
The podcast explores Carl Jung's profound engagement with Nietzsche, particularly Jung's view that Nietzsche's "God is dead" reflected a widespread psychological fact of archetypal change, not a final end. Jung argued that Nietzsche succumbed to "archetypal inflation" with Zarathustra, leading to his eventual madness. The discussion contrasts Nietzsche's rejection of Christian morality with Jung's interpretation of Christ as a timeless hero archetype, highlighting humanity's continuous need for mythic and religious meaning in the face of modern scientism.
Carl Gustave Jung was a student of Freud, but broke from his mentor in a dramatic way. Jung acquired the reputation of being a mystic, and put forward ideas that pushed the boundaries of psychoanalysis. This is a crash course in Jung’s most important ideas: projection, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. In this episode, we go in-depth on the major archetypes that Jung describes. These are subpersonalities that exist in every human unconsciousness, which will manifest insensibly in one’s...
Weltgeist x The Nietzsche Podcast. A long-awaited conversation. We discuss: the aesthetics of Schopenhauer v/s Nietzsche, the Schopenhauerian influence on Wagner's music, The Pale Blue Dot, the Eros as discussed in Plato's Symposium, philosophy and art as luxuries of civilization, and what Nietzsche describes as the asceticism of the scientific worldview.
Daniel Tutt is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite, a new book which warns leftist thinkers about the power and danger of Nietzsche. Daniel has a long history of engaging with Nietzsche’s philosophy, and argues for a pugilistic relationship with him. In his view, the French leftists who utilized Nietzsche’s work sometimes centered Nietzsche to their own detriment. Daniel’s project aims not at canceling Nietzsche, but in reading him with a sober understanding of his political perspective an...
Stephen Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher, and the author of numerous books, including Understanding Postmodernism, and Nietzsche & the Nazis. As Professor Hicks is a critic of postmodernism, I decided to ask him about Nietzsche's connection to postmodern thought. Is Nietzsche a postmodernist, and to what extent did he influence them? How do we explain the moral differences between Nietzsche and the postmodernists? We also discussed some topics related to objectivism and Ayn Rand. How...
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) said of Nietzsche that he had "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live." In spite of this, Freud always denied that Nietzsche was an influence on his thought, in spite of his multiple references to Nietzsche in his early work. While Freud certainly drew from Nietzsche's ideas, he was an original thinker in his own right, who followed on the same path of inquiry as Nietzsche, but with the tools of empirical research and the...
Among Nietzsche's critics, René Girard is perhaps unique. Girard's understanding of human civilization and the origins of human culture is that it is based on ritual, collective violence against a scapegoated individual - and he argues that Nietzsche is one of the only thinkers hitherto who understood this. Nietzsche's famous formula - Dionysus versus the Crucified - is the title of Girard's critical essay on Nietzsche. He does not quibble with Nietzsche's framing of the situation, but rather wi...
Today we examine an 1875 Fragment, entitled "Science and Wisdom in Battle". Not only does this fragment contain one of my favorite quotations of Nietzsche's, it represents his continual grappling with the meaning of Ancient Greek culture. In particular, we discuss the importance of "relations of tension" in Nietzsche's earlier work: art versus science, culture versus the state, history versus forgetting, and of course, science and wisdom. Both are drives to knowledge, and the tension between the...
In this episode, we continue our discussion of the Pre-Platonics, and cover the ideas of Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus. The episode begins with a brief recap of the previous philosophers and the dialogue up to this point. After considering the remaining Pre-Platonics, I have some brief concluding remarks in which I attempt to make sense of the entire picture as Nietzsche lays it out in this unfinished essay.
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is one of the more obscure texts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s corpus. There are many good reasons for this: it is unfinished, and ends abruptly; it was never published; and it concerns subject matter that is not as immediately accessible as Nietzsche’s more popular writings. You will not find his major concepts in this work – such as the will to power, or the critique of metaphysics - except insofar as those ideas appear in the background, inchoate, unnamed...
Nietzsche said of this work that it was “the best German book”. For the last nine years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s life, Johann Peter Eckermann journaled about their conversations together. Goethe was a celebrity at the time, and destined to be remembered as perhaps the greatest writer of the German language, certainly of the 19th century. Eckermann, on the other hand, was a farmboy with a talent for copying - whether it was the artwork of Ramberg or the poetic style of Korner. When he met ...
In the tradition of the great theistic philosophers, Baruch Spinoza presents us with a metaphysical vision of the cosmos, as ordered by God. But in sharp contrast with thinkers such as Pascal, Spinoza's arguments for God are crafted with an attempt of logical precision. In fact, Spinoza structures his arguments as geometric proofs, and considers the only serious philosophy to be a truly mathematized philosophy. In his Ethics, Spinoza gives us a comprehensive system that describes God, Nature, ev...
Pascal and Nietzsche are two names of monumental importance in the Western philosophical tradition, but rarely are their names mentioned together. At a glance, there is a wide gulf that separates the two, and seems to place them at irreconcilable odds. Pascal was a devout Christian, whose philosophical works concern the Christian faith: his most famous argument is the wager, which is a kind of apologetic device for bringing people into the faith. Nietzsche, on the other hand, carries out a philo...
