there is a fundamental disconnect between men like Alcibiades and Leonardo da Vinci and their own times--they are not men determined by their own time, they represent or embody something older and stronger that is in some sense “out of place” in its own time and can therefore overcome an age of decadence. While this same age of decadence is in an indirect way the “cause” or the opportunity both for the emergence of Alcibiades and of his weaker and decadent contemporaries, Alcibiades is not deter...
Sep 26, 2023•18 min•Season 13Ep. 32
Nietzsche discusses Alcibiades, Caesar, da Vinci, he mentions that these are exceptions, while the rule is: The man from an age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and frequently not merely conflicting drives and standards of value, which war among themselves and rarely give each other rest--such a man of late culture and broken lights will typically be a weaker man. His most basic demand is th...
Sep 26, 2023•30 min•Season 13Ep. 31
the “raw material” for philosophy is furnished by the aristocratic regime in a much more direct and literal way, in that only the impressive specimens bred over generations by such a regime can become philosophers in the beginnings of philosophy, or receive philosophy at its beginnings. This point is made in a somewhat limited way, but for our purposes, most clearly, when Nietzsche discusses the incredible work that had to go into cultivating physical beauty in Athens--itself originally just the...
Sep 26, 2023•40 min•Season 13Ep. 30
a) Aristocratic physical culture as precondition of philosophical life. Critias - Socrates’ criminal, tyrannical, and mad student, is said to have written an abstraction or radicalization of the Spartan constitution, which he understood to have as its purpose the breeding of a “physically supreme specimen.” The Spartan regime is perhaps enough to produce this intended result
Sep 26, 2023•18 min•Season 13Ep. 29
The ultimate origin of this identity is in what Nietzsche calls high culture, and which might be understood literally as the cultivation of human nature, a cultivation that is by necessity of long duration, strict, and difficult; a cultivation that might also go by the name of “regime.” ... Nietzsche goes so far as to compare Schopenhauer to Napoleon, another “classical man” who appeared, as he says, as an untimely and unexpected comet or meteor, totally out of place in an age of modern men and ...
Sep 26, 2023•24 min•Season 13Ep. 28
In Plato we have both the salvation of philosophy from persecution and its “concealment” under a political mask, its coming forth into the world under the mask of the moralist and the “priest,” under the mask of the “good man.”
Sep 26, 2023•20 min•Season 13Ep. 27
Hippias’ rhetoric only aims to please and therefore has to cater to the pleasures of others. Hippias is a man who knows nothing of what is beautiful by nature, but instead slavishly memorizes names to please others with old wives’ tales. He thinks he rules, but he is really being used as a clown.
Sep 26, 2023•16 min•Season 13Ep. 26
a) Restatement of the Rhetorical Aims of the Gorgias; the Inconsistency Between the View Presented on Rhetoric in the Gorgias and that in Other Dialogues. Philosophers must defend the virtues of the many-- chiefly, self-restraint, sophrosune, and justice--if they are to rule, and if they are to have anything to rule at all.
Sep 26, 2023•19 min•Season 13Ep. 25
not only do Socrates and Callicles agree fundamentally on the “problem”--the salvation of the erromenesteros and thereby of phusis from convention--but even on the ultimate solution, which is “to rule in the city.” It is only that Plato is much wilier about how to achieve this and that, in fully understanding the requirements of rule and therefore of legislation in the highest degree, he realizes Callicles’ aristocratic radicalism must be spiritualized; and similarly the form of rhetorical warfa...
Sep 26, 2023•41 min•Season 13Ep. 24
The preservation of the “superior breed” or biological specimen is the preservation of nature in the world and therefore the guarantee of the emergence of truth about the world. ... “it didn’t work; it leads to men like Socrates being killed; it leads to the extinction of breeding and therefore of the knowledge of nature in the world; for nature and truth to preserve and manifest themselves the ‘philosophers,’ or rather the erromenesteroi, the men of ‘sufficient nature’ from whom the philosopher...
Sep 26, 2023•31 min•Season 13Ep. 23
the perfect moment of “Platonic political philosophy”: the moment when the philosopher is both forced to become political as a matter of self-defense, and the moment when, in the Straussian sense now, philosophy becomes “political,” when it begins to put on a mask and to become a rhetorical project of apologetics intended to portray the philosopher as a man of “justice” and a “good citizen.”
Sep 26, 2023•10 min•Season 13Ep. 22
the final result of Socrates’ “educational” project is not passivity, but anarchic and destructive violence: there is a debate about the beating of parents followed by a mob uprising and arson against Socrates’ own school. One is reminded possibly, and in this case half-anachronistically, of Alcibiades, also Socrates’ student, and his involvement in the destruction of the herms and the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, events that the people of Athens took to be precursors to a plot for t...
Sep 26, 2023•15 min•Season 13Ep. 21
Wealth is widely powerful, whenever a mortal man receives it, blended with pure excellence, from the hands of fortune, and takes it as a companion that makes many friends. ... Wise men are better able to bear even god-given power. Great prosperity surrounds you, as you walk with justice. First, since you are a king of great cities, your inborn eye looks on this as a most revered prize of honor, united with your mind; and you are blessed even now, because you have already earned the boast of vict...
Sep 26, 2023•12 min•Season 13Ep. 20
The wise man possesses a great eye--an “inborn eye.” He is on the hunt for prey, for truth or insight about the world, which is snatched up in one bold move from afar, from high up, or hit from afar as an archer hits his target. The art of seeing, of bringing out forgotten truths into the radiant light, in short, wisdom, is an inborn art, it is knowledge by nature or by the blood. By contrast those who have learned--whether it be the mass of the many who need interpreters--or their representativ...
Sep 26, 2023•11 min•Season 13Ep. 19
“Two high-haired men, sons of the earth-shaker, who, obeying their inner valor,” could not resist Jason’s call for adventure and danger of death. ... No law or regime could ever restrain excellence, nor really ever be responsible for its having emerged. Areta and by extension the biological fundamental phusis from which it emerges is beyond all convention, all law, all regime, and can co-opt, prosper under, or take over any; it is the only thing that is “regime- independent” or “convention-indep...
Sep 26, 2023•9 min•Season 13Ep. 18
If a man has devoted his whole spirit to excellence, sparing neither expense nor toils, it is right to grant the boast of manliness to those who achieve excellence, with an ungrudging mind. ... The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos. The boast of manliness, andreia, is alone granted to such a man; other males are not men, andres, but mere anthropoi, indistinct beings with anthropoid form. ... It is right for a man to follow straig...
Sep 25, 2023•17 min•Season 13Ep. 17
Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island Phaeakia. He has been stripped of literally everything, including his clothes. The princess Nausicaa is on the beach with her consorts engaged in the age-old renewal and purification ritual of washing and airing out clothes. Odysseus boldly approaches her completely naked; the servants are frightened and run, but he manages, naked and stripped of every outward mark of power and wealth, to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of aristocratic speech...
Sep 25, 2023•18 min•Season 13Ep. 16
There is the elevation of this vehement being, blood, or will, silent and effective in real men, extolled and memorialized in splendid songs--and that exists in distinction to the chatter, the word-obsessed envy, the darkness of the many. Bred phua is more real than other bodies, which are shrouded in darkness. These men are apparent and manifest in their great deeds; the watchful eye of the seer, the poet, picks these out and preserves the deeds in words to make them apparent, visible, through ...
Sep 25, 2023•26 min•Season 13Ep. 15
"in marriage a noble man thinketh not twice of wedding the bad daughter of a bad sire if the father give him many possessions, nor doth a woman disdain the bed of a bad man if he be wealthy, but is fain rather to be rich than to be good. For ’tis possessions they prize; and a noble man weddeth of bad stock and a bad man of noble; race is confounded of riches. In like manner, son of Polypaus, marvel thou not that the race of thy townsmen is made obscure; ’tis because the noble are mixed with the ...
Sep 25, 2023•15 min•Season 13Ep. 14
The first simile compares the gleam of the army’s bronze to the shining of a fire consuming forests on top of mountain. The second simile refers to the broad movements of the host: they are compared to tribes - ethnea - of geese that fly backwards and forwards and then settle with a thunder on some Asian meadow; in just such a way the many tribes – same word – flowed from the ships to the Skamandrian plain, and made the earth thunder with their feet and the hooves of the horses. Another two-line...
Sep 25, 2023•13 min•Season 13Ep. 13
a) The Aristocratic Principle as Distinct from the Primitive “Fundamental Democracy”; Historical Origins in the Greek World. The polis--what Nietzsche calls “the aristocratic commonwealth” of breeding--is unique because of how it was able to accommodate and elevate what has been in this chapter called the “aristocratic” or “pastoral” way of life within the bounds of static, settled life; it represents a compromise between a “lower” and a “higher” that are of alien origin to each other....
Sep 25, 2023•58 min•Season 13Ep. 12
Philosophy, as Strauss notes, can only be born once the concept of nature appears. But it appears that the concept of nature itself can only appear after the rather late institutions of sacral and divine kingship exist ... nature-- the “source” simultaneously of both philosophy and tyranny, as argued in this thesis--really appears not as a rational concept, or by rational analogy to abstractions, but rather as a manifestation or, one could go so far as to say, a revelation. Its appearance, it mu...
Sep 25, 2023•25 min•Season 13Ep. 11
Law or nomos retained this character for the city even to the end of the Classical period, and was understood to have an all-pervading power to determine daily life and thought; and even during the convulsions of the Peloponnesian War, with its murderous civil strife between factions, it was understood--at least for the purposes of lip service--that nomos as an original constitutive act was something that lay quite outside the self- interest of parties, let alone that of the individual--a perman...
Sep 25, 2023•13 min•Season 13Ep. 10
According to Strauss... Nietzsche and Hume agree that the experience of fear or terror is the “original” primitive experience, they differ substantially on how early man responded to this experience. The matter of prephilosophic mind and religion is straightforward for Hume and in general for “English psychologists” because it has a basis in a rational, preservationist, utilitarian morality; but it is a complicated matter for Nietzsche... believes they on one hand do not go far enough in reveali...
Sep 25, 2023•17 min•Season 13Ep. 9
a) that the Greek world is, from as early as we can tell, stratified into a conquering and a conquered people, an aristocratic element and a “banausic” or serf-like element... b) that these two features of Greek life, namely the top-down imposition of order by a conquering elite and the separate and independent status of the warrior class, is likely what allows for a principle different from the fundamental democracy or fundamental collectivism to emerge... c) that this principle consists, not i...
Sep 25, 2023•4 min•Season 13Ep. 8
This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders, in abstracting and radicalizing the case for aristocracy in the face of its critics, come upon the teaching of nature and the standard of nature in politics. It is precisely this teaching of nature, so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and th...
Sep 25, 2023•12 min•Season 13Ep. 7
The “classic” modern case for why totalitarianism is a new phenomenon may be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism is perceived as a novel form of regime based on the twin application of ideology and terror ... in the study of “tyranny” it is impossible to reduce human agency to an impersonal force or to the milieu; the study of “tyranny,” more so than any other political phenomenon perhaps, is not separable from the human actor, in this case the person or persona of the tyrant....
Sep 25, 2023•11 min•Season 13Ep. 6
This book will hopefully serve as a correction to this deliberate “hole” in our knowledge of the classics. It is also a beginning attempt to engage the new biological sciences from the point of view of the tradition of Western philosophy.
Sep 25, 2023•17 min•Season 13Ep. 5
The discussion of the natural inequality of human groups is strictly forbidden. Being suspected of holding a belief that some individuals are superior is likely to get one called an elitist, or an eccentric. Saying the same about a group, with regard even to a limited quality, is going to get one called a racist and destroy one’s career. Therefore, those few who do question modern egalitarianism, who talk about virtue, and who even dare to bring up the natural inequality of individuals, always “...
Sep 25, 2023•32 min•Season 13Ep. 4
The social and political meaning of breeding... is a question almost identical to the question of human superiority and inferiority.
Sep 25, 2023•21 min•Season 13Ep. 3
