The Nietzsche Podcast (Untimely Reflections)

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 philosophers, there sits at the center of his ideas a recapitulation to the Biblical idea of providence? Karl & I discuss all of these fascinating questions which he raises, as well as the Roman pagan origins of the concept of providence, and how the great writers of antiquity conceived of virtue and fortune. We consider how our view of ourselves and our own luck can be affected by the underlying worldview we hold. Machiavelli, Seneca, Turchin, and many more of your favorite writers from antiquity and modernity make appearances in the discourse. Amor Fati - let that be my love henceforth!

Answering questions from Patrons for our tenth Q&A episode! Thank you everyone, first episode analyzing The Gay Science next week.

My band Slumbering Sun releases The Ever-Living Fire today, on 2/24! This is a project composed with the themes of amor fati and embracing a world of eternal change. I wanted to tell all of you the story of how this band came into existence, how it fits into my story, and what it means to me. This is perhaps one of my most philosophical outings in music, about the choice to say Yes to life, live the tragic worldview, and fall in love with the world again. I included a song from the album at the end of this short, special episode. Cheers! Here’s our linktree: https://linktr.ee/slumberingsun?fbclid=PAAaauPYoaUrAzAghu407YOWXhDouGvvmBZB47bluZ-LFQItv7uAeR9sZUCUU

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, is the ultimate life-denying figure: the apotheosis of pity. Through his torture and death at teh hands of the Romans, which he does not resist, he became a mimetic example for the spread of this moral contagion. "Resist not evil" is, in Nietzsche's argument, the entire key to the doctrine of the gospels, and the explanation Jesus' profound difference from other gods - even from the God of the Old Testament. Because he was so extraordinary, even the later Christians never measured up to Jesus' complete defiance of the natural world. "An instinctual hatred of reality" is how Nietzsche describes Jesus. Rather than a "hero", Jesus does not fight, resist, or oppose. He lives in the immanent knowledge of his salvation. "The kingdom of heaven is within you". The later message that was spread was a corruption of this way of life only ever attained to by Jesus. The effect that this religion of pity had on the hearts of the cruel, European barbarians, meanwhile, was to harness their cruelty and turn it inward. With the rejection of all value in the external world, only the internal has meaning. With no external fights, the only fight of any importance becomes the fight against one's own sin. This fight endlessly multiplies the suffering of the world and makes it ever more questionable and worthy of denial: the follower of Christ yearns for some release to this tension, some relief from the endless suffering he lives within. As bleak as all of this sounds, contained in this message, Nietzsche's own "gospel" as it were, or good news, is that if pity is only added on to life, ersatz - that means it is possible that it can be removed. Through this revaluation, maybe we can finally be free of the weakness that has crippled the once strong and beautiful psyche of humanity.

Today we begin our analysis of Beyond Good & Evil. This episode concerns the preface, which is perhaps my favorite of Nietzsche’s, and the first five sections of chapter one: On the Prejudices of Philosophers. As always I move incredibly slowly during the opening sections because of their incredible importance for understanding the entirety of the work, but promise to move more quickly as we proceed. I’m not sure how many parts this series will require; we’re going to make it up as we go along. Episode art: Giovanni di Paolo -- The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise

Aeschylus' Oresteia is the only extant trilogy of Greek drama. Alongside the Parthenon, the Oresteia is considered one of the two greatest 'monuments' to the Golden Age of Athens. In this trilogy - The Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides - Aeschylus dramatizes a rite of passage from savagery to civilization. Over the course of the narrative, the ancient law of blood is overcome by a new civic law, sanctioned by the gods. The word "justice" (Dikê) is used more often in the Oresteia than in any other Greek tragedy. Through these verses, we witness a struggle from the hazy, mysterious world of archaic Greece, governed by gods who behaved capriciously and unpredictably, into the clarity of civic life, in which human beings are empowered to make the contextual decisions of governance.

Michael D. Davis, lectures on Philosophy of Tragedy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiyEzRZtxXGU_Q5-jFqhIHJYbsahnQBNd&si=7o-LZMjQfX5Mb657

Episode art: John Singer Sergeant - Orestes Pursued by the Furies

Update on my life and the podcast, some random musings and stories. NO EPISODE NEXT WEEK. We’re taking a short break before season 4. Cheers

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.

You asked me anything. I answered most of it. Season Three begins next week!

Gnostic Informant on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/

We discussed the following topics: why the Torah is probably younger than commonly believed; the influence of Hellenism on Judaism as well as the New Testament; the Carpocratians (syncretists of Greek philosophy & Christian religion); the link between Platonism & Christianity; Nietzsche's argument that the Epicureans struggled against "latent Christianity"; Christianity as a hyper-rationalist religion set against the more sophisticated theologies of the pagan world; the possibility that extinguishing the Vestal fires actually brought down the Roman Empire. We also talked about Neal's personal journey through the Christian faith into his own idiosyncratic spirituality, and an attitude that he describes as a balance of Gnosticism & agnosticism; he views a life of Gnosis (knowing) as essentially a life of skepticism in which one demands to know for oneself and reject all inherited dogma. At the end we discuss his upcoming journey to Greece & film project, during which he will interview the group setting up a new temple to Pan in Greece, and the Orthodox figures opposing them.

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" with, "An attempt at self-criticism".

This  essay has its flaws, and belabors the point a bit too stringently at  places. In retrospect, I made some very overgeneralized claims about  academia and modern attitudes towards Descartes that one could easily  challenge. I should also say that these claims derived from personal  experience with my own professors, and the professors of many of my  friends. Descartes was always taught as being "basically a secret  atheist who didn't believe the religious stuff at all and included it  just to please the church." Not only did one of my own professors say  some version of this, I heard this from others, attending different  universities. This always struck me as odd, because the central  premises of his Meditations on First Philosophy are completely derived  from Christian presuppositions, which are simply taken from theology and  put into philosophical language. Thus, I challenged: whether Descartes  was truly a departure from past philosophy (Plato, of course, sets up  figures to raise assertions and Socrates to raise skeptical  objections/doubts); whether Descartes was actually an atheist or a deist  (or whether we could understand him within the assumption he was a  Christian, perhaps a Rosicrucian); whether our own interpretations of  Descartes have to do with our embrace of the "mind as self"  ego-consciousness (thus leading us to be confused and embarrassed by  Descartes' invocation of God as the ultimate certainty). While I wrote  in a way that was somewhat clumsy in my eyes now, and while I may have  spent too much time in a detour talking about the background historical  context in which Descartes emerged, I feel these challenges are raised  in a forceful and meaningful enough way to be useful for people to think  about. https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/unconscious-correspondences/3fe82dc3-d4ac-4d61-81c3-9ce9a7abe483

Continuing with The Gay Science readthrough! More sections on art, the eternal war between prose and poetry, the Apollinian and Dionysian, and more. Episode art: The Human Condition by Rene Magritte.

Nietzsche's philosophy drove him mad, everyone knows that. If it wasn't his philosophy itself, then perhaps the syphilis did him in. He collapsed in the streets of Turin, throwing his arms around a beaten horse! He looked into the abyss, saw that nihilism was coming for society - and that's why we should all return to Christian values! We've all heard these takes before. But, unfortunately for "the Nietzsche legend", many of the stories about Nietzsche and his collapse are little more than myths. When we search for the evidence to support them, we find they're all unfounded. This week, I'm going after eight myths pertaining Nietzsche's life and ideas. While most scholars have moved on from taking these stories uncritically, they still coalesce in the popular consciousness to form the "Nietzsche legend". Hopefully I can uproot some of these here, so that more people can study Nietzsche (the person) rather than "Nietzsche" (the legend). Thanks to lebensmaler for compiling his own list of misconceptions, two of which I address in this episode (read it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/ogmf2e/top_5_misconceptions/)

A fascinating discussion with someone with an unusual perspective for modern times. Vivienne joins me while we go over the remainder of aphorisms from Beyond Good & Evil, section 7, Our Virtues: the ones concerning women. This is a topic that is incredibly complex and has often been handled without nuance by modern readers: either by those who criticize Nietzsche as a misogynist, or those who celebrate him as a representative of chauvinistic masculinity. I have always treated this issue as something on the peripheries of my concern with Nietzsche, first and foremost because his ideas never resonated with me, he says they are only "his" truths, and finally because I think it will divide and alienate people. Nevertheless, we have never shied away from the reactionary ideas of Nietzsche's, and have never tried to hide the truth when it comes to Nietzsche's uncomfortable beliefs. Perhaps that very discomfort is something beneficial, as the willingness to explore these strange, wicked, questionable questions can help us to learn a great deal about ourselves, and why we believe in the unchallenged values of modern life. Even for those who are stalwartly in the camp of the equality of the sexes, perhaps there is something to be gained from exploring Nietzsche's arguments. In this episode, Vivienne helps me with something I've always striven for: to be to articulate the perspective of those from ages and moralities that are not my own. I think she goes a good job of providing a steelman for Nietzsche's views on women here, in terms I hadn't heard before. Vivienne's podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/vivienne-magdalen Episode art: Nicholas Roerich - The Mother Of The World, 1924

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 divine force. While those who have only a passing familiarity with Nietzsche may be surprised to hear that the pitiless philosopher was enamored with a conversation about the finer points of love and romance, in fact, Plato's Symposium is rich with insights that had a profound impact on Nietzsche. Central to the conversation in the Symposium is the understanding of the power of love - for love, as with all things the Greeks perceived as forces within the psyche that pushed or motivated mankind, is evidence of a divine influence that grips human beings and makes its will upon us felt. In part one, we'll consider the background of the work, why Nietzsche would have read such a work, and the importance of Plato to the classicists at that time. We'll also briefly discuss the social institution of the symposium as a place for competition, or intellectual "sparring" - or else, for the prominent men to outdrink one another. Then, we'll break down the first three speeches of the work: Phaedrus, Pausianus, Eryximachus. Next week we'll consider the final four speeches, and Nietzsche's interpretation of the work.

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 Educator", as figures that showed forward a way beyond nature: a leap into something above mankind.

Perhaps the most complex figure to examine in this formulation is the saint. Those of you who have been listening along since the beginning of the podcast, or who have read The Antichrist, may wonder how it is that Nietzsche ever offered a positive assessment of the life-denying holy men of the world at all. But Nietzsche, in his early writings, expresses an admiration for the power of the saint - the ascetic priest, the sage, the arahant, or whomever we might consider from world-history - as one in whom the "I" has melted away and power over the desires has been obtained. Unfortunately, all great things in the world, it seems, come from prolongued spiritual and physical torture, and the saint is no different. Beneath his power is a dark desire to set himself above the world by refuting the physical in favor of the abstract. Even though the priest offered the ideal to mankind, it was the ideal of nihilism - of seeking after nothingness. Why was this type tolerated among ancient societies at all, Nietzsche wonders? Because of the saint's remarkable power to strike fear into the hearts of men, and his utility for redirecting the destructive drives of the weak and the botched of every society. Join us for the first of several episodes examining these candidates Nietzsche entertained throughout his career for "higher people" - the type who is "too good for this world", the saint.

Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka, 1925-1970) wrote dozens of stories, including famous works such as Confessions of a Mask, and Patriotism. He was considered for a Nobel Prize in literature about half a dozen times, through he never won it. His works were adapted into films, which received international acclaim. He wrote modern No plays which were performed all over the world, in Europe and America. He is known for his provocative style, his romanticization of death and of warrior culture, and for his political radicalism. Mishima desired to return Japan to a pre-WWII samurai culture, ruled under the absolute authority of a divine emperor – and yet, his writing incorporates influences not only from traditional Japanese literature, but from writers from the west: Rilke, Wilde, Batailles, Klossowski, and, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. From the time he was 19, when he first picked up a copy of Birth of Tragedy, Mishima had a lifelong fascination with Nietzsche. In this episode, we consider the major philosophical ideas in his combination of confession and criticism, Sun and Steel: the unity of art and action, the corrosive nature of words, and necessity of a 'beautiful death' to truly affirm one's existence.

In this episode, I attempt to give a fresh biographical account of Nietzsche's life, by examining his life in light of his Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit, found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the course of this biography, using Nietzsche as our concrete example, we discuss the abstract meaning of the Camel, the Lion & the Child, and where I see these transformations appearing in the course of Nietzsche's life and thought. We've covered Nietzsche's biography in many previous episodes, often focusing in on a particular time or event in Nietzsche's life: Nietzsche's wandering throughout Europe (episode 2), the headstone he bought for his father (episode 4), the departure of academia and break with his friends (episode 24), the complex relationship with Wagner (episodes 36-37). Rather than examining any one part of his biography in granular detail, we're going to try and take in the entire picture, and see to what degree we can say that the Camel, the Lion & the Child are stages in Nietzsche's own story. Central to this analysis is Nietzsche's great struggle with the "problem of life", as put forward by Christianity, Schopenhauer, and the Socratics. Their solutions always incline towards a rejection of our nature and the submission of life to reason, virtue, or asceticism. Nietzsche's long quest is to discover an affirmation of life and desire, in contrast to the need to 'redeem' life from suffering. This mirrors his long struggle with an illness that tormented him throughout his life. Nietzsche's project culminates not in a condemnation of life on these grounds, but in his embrace of a life of agony.

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. 

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.

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 striving. Having mastered all the faculties of the university, and attained the zenith of knowledge available to mankind, Faust feels his lifelong quest has been for naught. He declares: "...for all our science and art / we can know nothing, it burns my heart". His restless heart sees Faust turning to magic and conjuration in order to break past the boundaries of science, morality, or even common decency - in his neverending quest to pursue knowledge and achievement. This path leads him straight to Mephisto, who offers Faust a deal that he cannot refuse. In part one, we'll discuss the philosophical themes of Faust, and how they influenced the thought of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Then, Goethe's place in literature and a brief summary of his life and work, as well as the background of the work in question, Faust. We'll then examine in detail some of the scenes and monologues from the first scenes of the play: from Heaven's Prologue to the scene in Faust's study where the deal is struck. I'm very excited for this one! Episode art: Philipp Winterwerb - Faust in his Study

Today we continue with Psychology & Alchemy. This week, we'll spend the beginning of the episode considering the parallel between the lapis philosophorum and Christ, and the unusual claim of the alchemists that man can redeem God. The rest of the episode concerns Carl Jung's extended dream analysis of a single patient, which he found to be laden with alchemical imagery and symbolism.

Episode art: The Anthropos with the Four Elements

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 animal and that which is super-human, and that transformation into something greater is possible: that we can overcome our previous limitations that we believed once were set in stone. The episode concludes with a thank you to the fans, a teaser of what is to come in the podcast, and a reading of Nietzsche's Aftersong for Beyond Good and Evil, "From High Mountains."

Episode art: Zoroaster Clavis -- Alchemist Who Has Achieved Illumination

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 life, up to that point. Where Wagner was once a trusted friend, mentor, and likely surrogate father-figure for Nietzsche, he begins to write with utter scorn against the old composer. For the first third of the episode, we examine the biographical aspect of the break. For the remainder, we consider Nietzsche's charges in The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner - essays written in 1888, a time of retrospection for Nietzsche - that Wagner capitulated to everything that Nietzsche despised, that he was ultimately a world-despairing Christian, and that maybe Wagner's transformation was not even genuine. That he was, at heart, nothing more than an actor. As a man with an immense artistic power, he debased music by using it simply as a means of moving people's feelings, while never truly challenging or subverting German culture. Music became sick - yet another form of mere entertainment, another enhanced, rarefied sense pleasure of the late-stage of a society. Whereas once Nietzsche believed Wagner to be perhaps the opponent of modernity, he now writes of him as modernity personified: the epitome of the decadent artist who loses himself in the crowd.

A whirlwind tour through the epigrams and interludes of Beyond Good & Evil. A relatively free spirited and brief segment of our analysis before we dive into some of the denser divisions of the work - albeit with a bit easier time in terms of the intellectual labor, given that the major premises of Nietzsche's project have already been outlined in the first half of the work. This part is placed as a 'bridge' between BGE's first and second half, and serves as an example of how one applies Nietzsche's approach to psychology, and his anti-metaphysics. Episode art: Miranda by John William Waterhouse

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 the priest or the saint, who worked with the feelings of guilt and resentment. The artist is the type who emerges from the restrictions of a given religious mindset and dares to work his artistic magic outside of any institution or dogma. Is the artist therefore a benefit to society and culture, and a rebel against the rigidness of religion? For Nietzsche, it’s not that simple, because of the fundamental problem that art deceives. It draws its power from its incompleteness, its willingness to represent reality in accordance with drives or passions instead of facts, and ultimately dwells within the realm of deception. As Nietzsche himself is both an artist and a philosopher, he feels this contradiction therefore within him. Alas, the great philosopher, Nietzsche, is only fool, only poet! Lecture on the scientific contributions of alchemy by Walter F. Rowe: https://youtu.be/L6hTS3ajCBk Episode art: Joseph Wright of Derby - The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus (1771/1795)

Nietzsche described Napoleon as "a type of atavism" - a throwback to an earlier age, and quipped that he, not unlike Rousseau, also sought after a “return to nature”. Nietzsche and Rousseau have mutually opposed perspectives on what nature is, however, and Nietzsche is quick to note that Napoleon was not simply a 'going back', but a 'going up'. To understand why Nietzsche thought the way he did about the figure of a Napoleon or a Caesar, we will recapitulate to the entire Nietzschean understanding of the cycles of history, consider aphorisms from across his career, and examine how Goethe's conversations with Eckermann influenced Nietzsche in this respect. I intend to argue that Nietzsche meant the Caesar figure, the 'non-theoretical genius', to be a replacement for the Messiah figure in Christianity. Rather than salvation in the spiritual, abstract sense, the redeemer of man is an individual who exercises power in the physical world. All of the ideas considered this season culminate in order to explain this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, commonly dismissed as 'great man worship'. What we find instead is a phenomenon that Nietzsche believes to be natural, objective, and unavoidable. While this is one of the most difficult ideas of Nietzsche's to tangle with, I think we're better off for comprehending his position in this respect. Episode art: Battle of Wagram by Horace Vernet, 1836

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 philosophers of the future find some means of pushing their way through the stage of relativism, or "active nihilism". But such a project would be to ignore the contingency of all our moral beliefs; worse yet, by outlining a new values-structure, Nietzsche will have to think and work systematically. But Nietzsche's thinking is by its nature anti-systematic. As a result, numerous contradictions come to the forefront in his philosophical outlook, not all of which are neatly resolved. However, what we find as key to understanding the work is the opposition we discussed in the previous episode: of Dionysus v/s The Crucified One. The opposition is between the Dionysian morality of which gives a rough sketch, based on life, overcoming and will to power, and the Christian morality which is defined negatively and as the decline of all of these things. He uses this opposition to illuminate the true nature of the Christian religion and to argue for the values that he finds to be badly needed by the modern man. In the course of this moral revaluation, Nietzsche gives a theory of decadence: how empires behave during their decline and collapse. His various considerations lead him to the conclusion that all of the most cherished productions of our society, our highest values, our human ideals, art, philosophy, music, education, and our whole morality - are products of decadence, and thus of weakness. He thus calls into question the value of abstract thinking, and indeed the value of our faculty for conscious thought. Hilary Putnam on Quine and Ontology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhHIVEN839s

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.

In this episode, we’re exploring how Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy culminates in the idea that we must deny the will-to-live. This second part will take us through Schopenhauer's view of art, his idea of genius, and how the Platonic forms relate to aesthetics. Finally, we'll discuss the final end of Schopenhauer's philosophy: nothingness. Unlike other noted pessimists, who fixated on mortality, and the finitude of a human life, Schopenhauer insists that being itself is always indestructible. Death isn't even a way out of the horror of existence. Thus, it becomes imperative that the knowing subject discover through reason how to negate the will and to become free of the blind, ceaseless striving that creates his suffering.

For the episode image, I decided to go with young Schopenhauer. Since he wrote World as Will and Representation at 28 years old and never changed his mind about the contents of the book, young Schopenhauer and old Schopenhauer represent exactly the same Platonic Idea. And since time is simply an illusion of the phenomenal world, why not go from old to young?

Next week, we'll discuss Nietzsche's essay, Schopenhauer as Educator.

I released a song today! Go check it out on Invisible Oranges: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/slumbering-sun-together-forever/

The new single is also live anywhere that you stream music, including spotify, apple, etc. You can also visit our bandcamp to pre-order the album or purchase the single now: https://slumberingsun.bandcamp.com/album/starmony

This episode is a discussion of my favorite essay by Tolstoy, the contents of which factored heavily into my book (The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll) as one of my major influences on the topic of aesthetics. Tolstoy poses the problem of art, the reason why art must justify itself. Criticizing the existing conceptions of art's value, he puts forward his own theory as to art as communicative, then attacks what he considers to be the self-absorbed art of the upper class and the counterfeit art that has captured European culture. Eventually, Tolstoy comes to the conclusion that true art is aimed at the Christian vision of the unification of man. This is the conclusion of the second leg of season five.

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… not yet fully formed. In Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Pre-Platonic philosophers of Ancient Greece, we find the starting place for his later philosophical career. The inspiration for many of those great ideas, can arguably be found in his exegesis of these extraordinary figures from the Hellenic world, from the 6th to the 4th century BC. In today's episode, I'll introduce the text, then we'll cover the first three figures who I've classed as "the first cosmologists": Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus. While I'm mostly sticking to the text of the essay, I fill in some details using Nietzsche's lectures on the Pre-Platonics, on which this essay was based. Episode art: photo of the Temple of Poseidon

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 this perspective. As with all things Nietzsche, his political views begin with Hellenic Greece. What we discover, in the course of this examination, is that Nietzsche's political philosophy, antithetical to our modern morality though it may be, is intertwined with his broader philosophical ideas. In this episode, we will cover the concepts of the order of rank, and the pathos of distance - as well as the devilish metaphor that Nietzsche employs in order to describe the aristocratic social order: that of the Sipo Matador vine, a parasite that strangles the trees of the Brazilian rainforest so that it might ascend above the canopies and unfold its flowery crown. 

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 goal in a literal future, which would seem to contradict with the doctrine that "all returns, eternally" and every life repeats endlessly, contained forever within itself. How can the value in life be cast off into a distant future, while at the same time invested within this life? This is the contradiction Nietzsche faced because it is a contradiction in the very essence of the quest for meaning: we find meaning only in spending our lives in the service of something greater than ourselves, in the very quest to bring forth that "something greater"; and yet, at the same time, the brute fact of mortality and the sole existence of this world and this life as the total reality necessitates that we must be able to find value in our lives as they are, never to see that "something greater" that they may or may not give rise to. We must therefore live in such a way that we recognize becoming, and seek to overcome ourselves, but must also simultaneously find eudaimonia within ourselves as we are. This paradox of finding meaning in an atheistic universe is overcome with the resurrection story of Zarathustra himself, who lies dead for many days before rising again to gain a realization of the secret, underlying harmony of the eternal return and Overman ideals. Join me in making "The Convalescent" a new passion play for we philosophers of the future!  A review of Rohit Sharma's book that covers the major points discussed in the episode, with citations: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/reviews/rohit-sharma-on-the-seventh-solitude.-endless-becoming-and-eternal-return-in-the-poetry-of-friedrich-nietzsche

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 the episode by reading fan mail. Topics range from the Buddha's magic milkshake, to the Franco-Prussian War to It's a Wonderful Life. There will be no new episode on Tuesday. I'm out of town and taking a well-needed holiday break. We'll resume the regular Nietzsche Podcast episodes in the New Year. Join us to celebrate everything we've done this year and to reflect before pushing forward into 2023. Slumbering Sun - Liminal Bridges (New Single Dec. 2022) https://youtu.be/AqOWuuOP980

Is this an anti-Christian screed? Far from it. Today we take a deep dive into one of Nietzsche's core concepts from the Antichrist: the reversal of our understanding of the terms "soul" and "spirit". While many Christians do not even give much thought to the difference between these terms, this was, historically, a key distinction. Nietzsche's great subversion is in critiquing the spirit as a false world, and redefining the soul as a chaotic multiplicity. This radical attack culminates in a suspicion of not only all theology, but all philosophy, all dialectic. Merry Christmas!

From all accounts, Nietzsche did not read nor comment upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, outside of a few remarks from Schopenhauer in one of his essays that Nietzsche might have read. But what we find in his Muqaddimah is a theory of cyclical history, in which many of the key principles of Nietzsche's political philosophy would find agreement. Ibn Khaldun was a historian from North Africa whose work sought to explain why it was that the same pattern seemed to repeat ad infinitum. The Bedouin desert tribes would overwhelm one of the settled cities of the Mediterranean, from time to time, then establish a new city there. For a time, the culture of the new city would be like that of the Bedouins in the desert. But, eventually, a sedentary culture set in, over the course of several generations, and the inhabitants grew complacent, became incompetent, and eventually found themselves overthrown by another desert tribe, and the process would then repeat. In his studies, Khaldun arrives at the concept of asabiya, or the capacity for collective power, which can be very useful for a Nietzschean perspective on social power structures. This concept of asabiya means, literally, 'group feeling', and describes the extent to which the individuals feel themselves to part of a unified, coherent group, and are thus able to act as instruments of the group, and coordinate their actions as a team. Asabiya increases in harsh conditions, and declines in conditions of luxury, and thus the cycle of empires is set into motion - "This is how God proceeds with His creatures." Just as Nietzsche suggests the idea of all things returning eternally, Khaldun's writing brings this idea into the historical and political sphere. But Ibn Khaldun is significant because he presents this not only as a poetical idea, but as a pattern based on observable facts. There are many, many observations and anecdotes in the Muqaddimah, and we will not be able to cover it all, so we shall focus on the points most relevant to the ideas covered this season. This will be our first journey into a work outside the Western Canon, into one of the most important thinkers of the Near East. Join me in exploring the dynamics of history, as we jump into the basic ideas of the Muqaddimah. 

My unnecessarily long review of the cultural meaning of Barbenheimer.

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 desires, and find themselves projected by the subject into the external world.

Welcome back to The Gay Science! In this episode we commence with book II, which begins with an exploration of perspectivism and the pitfalls of scientific realism, and quickly moves into ruminations on women and relationships. It's no one's favorite part of Nietzsche, but in this talk we'll clean all of the philosophical meat off of the bone, because Nietzsche actually has some genuinely valuable insights in these sections. Cheers!

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.

Nietzsche finishes sketching his vision of a philosophy of the future. True free spiritedness represents a fundamental commitment to hardness and independence of spirit. This makes the philosopher opposite the scholar in terms of his virtues. This total individuality necessitates that there are some truths that are inexpressible or peculiar to the point that they cannot be shared: they must be ”masked”. We finish by looking at the first two sections of part three, “What is Religious”. We consider how N’s method so far brings him to regard religion as another field of study regarding the human soul (its knowledge and conscience), and how this section is an application of his psychological method. He considers what is meant by the religious pathology as part of his ongoing critique of Christianity. Episode art: Henri Lievens - The Wild Hunt of Odin

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 with Nietzsche's conclusions. While Nietzsche takes up for the side of Dionysus, Girard stands on the side of the Crucified, arguing that Nietzsche was fundamentally wrong to lament the ascendance of Christianity and to yearn for a return to the Dionysian. In the course of Nietzsche's defense of Dionysus, he put forward moral theories that were "untenable", and become increasingly "inhuman". Among the many commenters of Nietzsche, both disciples and critics, it is rare to find a figure like Girard, who recognizes Nietzsche's brilliance, but totally condemns his legacy. Join me today to learn about the life of Rene Girard, his theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating, and the impassioned case he puts forward for The Crucified.

Michel Foucault is one of the most influential philosophical thinkers of the 20th century. He remains a controversial figure, but undoubtedly he had a profound impact on the way we think about mental health and mental illness up to the present day. In this episode, we take a deep dive into his work, Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, based on his dissertation. In this work, Foucault charts a history of how madness was perceived and experienced in the western world, exploring the changes in understanding of insanity from the Middles Ages, to the Renaissance, to the Classical period (17th & 18th centuries), to the 19th century creation of the mental asylum, and finally to the foundation of psychoanalysis.

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”. Nietzsche made numerous interesting remarks about Epicurus throughout his literary canon. After studying the basic outline of his life and ideas through Diogenes Laertius, we’ll read some of Nietzsche’s interpretations and critiques of Epicurus. Even though Epicurus can be seen as a forerunner to utilitarianism, in him Nietzsche finds a great man and a precursor: a man who loved life, dealt with the world in real terms, and who “created the heroic-idyllic way to philosophize”.

Patrons: "Have you ever said Yes to a single joy?"

Salts: "Yes"

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?"

This is the final episode of our series on Schopenhauer, and the episode where we will finally draw some general conclusions, not merely about Schopenhauer’s philosophy or his life, or how he influenced Nietzsche - but rather about Nietzsche’s philosophical project itself and how Schopenhauer helped him discover the true opposition at the heart of his work. Nietzsche has been called a romantic during his early period, owing to the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche has also been called a pessimist, because of his cynicism about our will to truth, for example, his critiques of morality, and his predictions of the collapse of our values structures in the wake of the death of God and thus the rejection of a divine origin or teleology for man. In this episode, we’re looking at writings from 1886 and 1887, where Nietzsche looks back on his intellectual development , and tells us in his own words how he grew to differ from the romantic pessimism of his influences. Through this understanding of his fundamental differences with Wagner and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche gained a clear idea of that which he opposed in current society, and that which he felt was needed or lacking. His discovery is another useful skeleton key for his work: the Dionysian as the life-giving spirit of transformation that man can discover by again spiritualizing the animal drives, and all that is Christian as the symbol of the denial of life and the turn towards nihilism. Through the formula of Dionysus v/s the Crucified, Nietzsche discovered what Schopenhauer lacked, and what his own task was in philosophy: to search for “a pessimism of strength” that could harness the penetrating, heroic honesty that Schopenhauer modeled, and put it into the service of life.

A mysterious illness. A headstone for Karl Ludwig. An enigmatic inscription. In today's episode, we pose the question of why Nietzsche would memorialize his dead father, a Lutheran pastor, with a verse from Corinthians. This unusual event in Nietzsche's life intersects with both his lifelong ailment and his most ambitious philosophical ideas. In order to answer this question, we'll go on the podcast's first deep dive into Nietzsche's personal life - particularly his early life, his romantic period, and his ill-fated friendships with Richard Wagner, Paul Ree, and Lou Salome. This episode was partially inspired by an essay by Charlie Huennemann, a professor who has published many books worth checking out, including one on Nietzsche. You can find his blog here: https://huenemanniac.com/ Other sources utilized in the episode: Leonard Sax, What was the cause of Nietzsche’s dementia? (pdf link: www.leonardsax.com/Nietzsche.pdf) Hemelsoet D1, Hemelsoet K, Devreese D., The neurological illness of Nietzsche (Abstract): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18575181 Information on CADASIL: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/cerebral-autosomal-dominant-arteriopathy-with-subcortical-infarcts-and-leukoencephalopathy

The text proceeds from epistemology to morality. Nietzsche suggests that value judgments are at the foundation of perception. Exploration of herd instinct & herd conscience. Suggestion that the moral skepticism of Christianity was turned against Christianity. Preparation for the Madman passage.

Update about my life, and some musings on AI, aliens, the supernatural, and why I don’t get involved in contemporary politics.

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 antinatalist, I found my guest this week to be a pleasant conversation partner and overall a delightful guest. I’m not convinced of the truth of antinatalism, but the conversation was far more interesting than I’d anticipated. Hope you all enjoy it, and that this episode of Untimely Reflections makes your life just a little bit more worthwhile in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Cheers!

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, maintaining sobriety and good humor the whole way through. His intended audience is a leader who could found an Italian nation-state. Accordingly, he makes a distinction between republics, hereditary monarchies, and the kind of monarchy that such a unifier of Italy would inevitably have to create: the new monarchy. He writes without concern for the questions of legitimacy, natural rights, or the progress towards a political ideal. Machiavelli instead concerns himself with the practical challenges of establishing a new state. He looks not to the future, but wishes to emulate the example that lies in the distant past, in the form of Rome. His hero, Cesare Borgia - a tragic figure who played the game of thrones rather well, but still lost - was similarly held by Nietzsche as an example of a great individual. In our examination of why Machiavelli admired Borgia, we find an important key to Nietzsche's understanding of Europe's moral-psychological past, and the revaluation of values that took place during the Italian Renaissance, only to be thwarted by the arising of Luther and the Protestant Reformation. 

GWF Hegel is one of the most difficult philosophers in the western canon, but today we’ attempt to demystify him. In this episode, we’ll break down Hegel’s phenomenology, the dialectic, and the Hegelian understanding of desire. Our concrete entrypoint into the thought of Hegel is his famous chapter, The Master-Slave Dialectic. Deleuze argued that Nietzsche’s work constitutes a rejection of Hegel: his master and slave morality can be read as a direct rebuke to Hegel’s interpretation of this very same power relation. In order to prepare for our reading of Deleuze, we’re going to first tangle with Hegel on his own terms, and understand the very different way in which he approaches the questions of consciousness, morality and perspective. In researching this episode, Nathan Widder’s lectures on Hegel and Deleuze were very helpful, as was Justin Burke’s.

After getting several suggestions in our comments sections, Stef and I touched based and decided to have a conversation. I asked him about his attempt to harness both the philosophy of Nietzsche with that of Carl Jung, since there are some contradictions between their thought that keep them from being easily reconciled. We discuss Jordan Peterson, why we both liked him once upon a time, but why he has, perhaps, 'lost it'. And throughout the conversation, Stef gives his vision of the "Promethean West" - that European civilization is fundamentally based on aiming for the stars, unlocking the secrets of the universe, inventing and innovating, stealing the fire from the gods. His thesis is that many young people have lost this fire, and his goal is to kindle it again. I understand from reading some of the comments that Uberboyo might be a controversial figure for whatever reason. I actually found him to be a compelling speaker and to have a good grasp of Nietzsche's ideas, and much of what he said didn't seem divisive or intentionally controversial, at least to me. Hopefully we're all mature enough to tolerate opposing viewpoints on this podcast, especially given that the next guest will bring some critical theory into the mix, and I don't want to hear any (bad faith) griping from the other side either. Some of the patrons have said this was one of the best conversations so far, so I hope the audience at large will enjoy it also. 

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 for everyone to have their queries answered. 

Short form episode; audio version of a Youtube release. Additional content coming on Thursday!

Creating a listicle of Nietzsche's ideas is always problematic, but thankfully Nietzsche occasionally provides us with one. In his notes, collected in Will to Power, Nietzsche records his "Five Nos": five ideas that he roundly rejects, and positions his philosophy as a struggle against. You will not find a more straightforward statement of Nietzsche's philosophy anywhere in his corpus. This passage remains fairly obscure, so join me in exploring this hidden gem that explains Nietzsche's philosophy in negative terms.

This part of the text is a re-evaluation of what morality is, or can be, for the philosopher of the future. Nietzsche is a bit sneaky here, by implying the free spirit, or philosopher of the future, to be admirable from the perspective of our own moral intuition. Nevertheless, he throws us some curveballs here and there as the chapter continues, and Nietzsche attempts to lyrically portray the paradoxical task of both accepting fate, and actively shaping one’s character. Episode art is Narcissus (1594–1596) by Caravaggio.

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 our world-picture, and dare to suggest that we abolish the metaphysical world beyond... make the proclamation that our lives, exactly as we live them, are eternal? There are many interpretations of this doctrine - ranging from the classification of eternal return as a thought experiment, all the way into mystical territory - but one thing is made crystal clear by Nietzsche's own words: he held that it was the hardest challenge one could put before themselves, akin to facing the greatest stress, or fighting the toughest opponent. Embracing eternal return means the ultimate revaluation of life and the natural world as imminently good and worthwhile. Those who are unable to do so will find this doctrine crippling, or so Nietzsche predicts. Thus, he puts this mysterious teaching into his work in the form of fables and in the teachings of his prophet, Zarathustra. Nietzsche founds his answer to the "problem of life" - that is to say, the problem of the value of a human life, within a mortal, human existence finding some kind of transcendental value - upon the basis of this central idea, of the eternal return. Forgive the couple of times my voice cracked, for I have a bit of a cold. Episode art: George Bellows - Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

In America, we celebrate Halloween with costumes and trick or treating. In Germany, Allerheiligen is a holiday of paying respects to the dead, and showing reverence for all the saints of the Catholic Church. In Mexico, Dia de los Muertos involves the building of shrines and offering of food to the deceased. Among the ancient Celts, there was Samhain, a time in which the veil between worlds became thinner. Where do all these death holidays come from, and why do so many cultures, with different religious traditions, set aside a day for the ritualized celebration of the dead? And, most importantly for the subject of this podcast... what can Nietzsche tell us that can help understand this anthropological puzzle? Today, we're talking all things Halloween, from a Nietzschean lens. We discuss the effect of darkness and night upon the psyche, the overactive imagination and collective dream state of early man, how we never stop believing in fairytales, and why rituals help spiritualize the wicked thoughts and feelings of mankind. Join us for a special, creepy episode of The Nietzsche Podcast. Muahahahahaha! Episode art: Hans Baldung — Die Hexen (“The Witches”, 1510), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A rhizomatic discussion. Craig tells us his history with philosophy, and his journey through the work of Jung, Hillman, Deleuze and others. We then discuss Anti-Oedipus and some of the core concepts, such as the Deleuzian reinterpretation of desire and the unconscious, and the body without organs. Then, as a tribute to the late, great David Lynch, we attempt a Deleuzian intepretation of Eraserhead, which of course is impossible, because both Deleuze and Lynch would agree that the interpretation of signs and symbols as a theater of the unconscious is always a misinterpretation; or, as Lynch puts it, the talking is all up there on the screen.

Visit Acid Horizon: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Lepht Hand Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1E9kBe72ce15ZcqaPT8uBOCraig's Philosopher's Tarot Deck: https://www.penguinrandomhouseretail.com/book/?isbn=9781914420917

Jeff Henson is a producer, audio engineer and touring musician in the band Duel. He's worked with acts such as Clutch, Spirit Adrift, Down, The Sword and others in both live and studio recording. As Jeff and I are both about to embark on tours of the United States, and we'd often talked about doing a podcast together, we finally sat down to talk about what the touring experience is like, the principles behind capturing a band's sound, and some light philosophical discussion on the role of art in revealing a human being's soul. We also discussed the differences between the music scene in Europe v/s America, which country "gets it right" in terms of the balance between freedom and social cohesion, and whether things have gotten better for humanity in the course of these endlessly turning cycles of history. Jeff is one of my good friends and this was one of my favorite conversations, even if the topic is orthogonal to the overall ideas of the show.

Duel's New live album: https://heavypsychsoundsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/duel-live-at-hellfest

Red Nova Ranch: https://www.rednovaranch.com/

The Clutch album we couldn't remember the name of was Psychic Warfare.

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 part one then deals with this storyline as it unfolds: the "Gretchen Tragedy", in which an innocent, devout young woman falls in love with a charming, mysterious stranger - only to have her heart broken, her family destroyed, and her life ruined. In his endless quest for new experiences, Faust is willing to take on all pain, all pleasure, all triumph, all calamity. But what about when Faust brings tragedy onto others? And what if it is the very woman he loves who suffers the most because of his actions? While part two of Faust is impossible to summarize, we'll then do our best of covering that material, and then, of course, the masterful final scene of the play, written more than fifty years after the first lines were first put to parchment. Goethe's Faust ultimately reveals to us the story of Faust's entire life, and thus could only be written over the course of a lifetime by Goethe. Join me in exploring this great work of world literature, which seeks to redeem the dissatisfied, wayward aspect within the Enlightened mind.

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 continued to live on in the same body, underground. These dead ancestors became gods in the imaginations of the early Hellenes, bound to the land and the object of a secret worship carried out only by their descendants. Alongside these peculiar beliefs was the practice of keeping a sacred hearthfire in the center of the home - the home being the temple of the domestic religion. This fire was regarded as a literal god, real and living, who blessed the household so long as they kept the fire burning and pure, and would curse them if they did otherwise. Coulanges builds his case by following the clues remaining from the days of this worship - such as strange contradictions in the holy books, and rituals and hymns which did not reflect the beliefs but pointed to something more ancient. It is from these beliefs - alien and incomprehensible to us today - that the social order of the city was formed, and the laws that governed the cities written. Thus, we paradoxically find that the ancients were both completely foreign to us - and yet even we today preserve odd relics of this old belief. While Coulanges' seminal work, The Ancient City, is nowhere found in Nietzsche's library, and thus it is likely that Nietzsche never read it, it is indispensable for understanding the perspective of the ancient Hellenes. Since we're going to be covering a great deal of Hellenic thought in the coming episodes, we're going to preface all of it with a crash course in the development of their religious beliefs - for, as Coulanges argues, it is according to these beliefs that the political reality was shaped. Episode art: Dedication of a new Vestal Virgin, by Alessandro Marchesini (1663–1738), courtesy of Creative Commons

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-Platonic philosophers - Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and others - represented the descent from an understanding of the world as controlled by a personified heaven, into something explained by natural forces. The end result is materialism: matter as explained by matter itself and its properties or laws. This is powerful and dangerous as an innovation. Materialism offers the greatest utility, but precedes a slide into nihilism. Many of Nietzsche’s insights in his interpretation were influenced by the philosopher of science, Friedrich Albert Lange. In this episode, we examine the relation of Nietzsche to Lange, their view of the Pre-Platonics, and then analyze each figure individually to see how each fits in to Nietzsche’s narrative of the unfolding of scientific thought in Greece. Rather than a mere historical curiosity, Nietzsche finds the Greeks to express the same driving tendency that underlies science in our own time.

The topic for this week is... The Truth. The Nietzschean view of truth is one of the most difficult positions to convey, because the nature of the topic requires pushing language to its limits. To question the value of truth-seeking seems antithetical to the very activity of philosophy. Is Nietzsche just being obstinate? Is he an irrationalist? Is he a postmodernist? What about a Neo-Kantian? And what about Jordan Peterson's summation of his view of truth, that, "truth ought to serve life"?  As I was expounding the wicked immoralisms of Nietzsche, towards the end of the episode, the rumbling of thunder was picked up by the microphone. This is either evidence that God himself was angered as I continued to challenge the sacred relationship between "the Good" and "the True", or else that I decided to record an episode during our rainy season. It recurs a few times, so I thought I'd clarify that it is not an added sound effect, but simply a random occurrence. Nevertheless, it makes the concluding section of the episode sound all that more forbidden and profound! This week we venture into one of the most fraught topics among the followers of Nietzsche. Ready your swords and your shields, my friends, for Truth Loves Only a Warrior! Episode art this week is Pallas Athene by Rembrandt, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Untimely Reflections is a podcast within a podcast! In this series, I’ll be having conversations with other people interested in Nietzsche, and in philosophy. This time, I’m talking to Mynaa Miesnowan. This conversation was largely freeform. We talk about art, politics and religion as related forces that direct the course of society. We consider mass movements, dictatorships, and revolutions as caused by sociological forces that consciousness and ideology then steps in to explain and justify. Central to our interest is the relationship of world historical forces to our political, religious and aesthetic situation today.

As of yet, I have no schedule for how frequently I'll produce these: it'll be limited to the availability of the people involved, but no more than one every two weeks or so. I plan on releasing these concurrently with the regular episodes of The Nietzsche Podcast (though if I'm particularly busy that won't always be the case), but I thought I'd put out he first one on our regular release day just to get your attention.

A note on something I'd forgotten in the show: in Genealogy of Morality, the Church fathers whom I was trying to think of were Tertullian, and Nietzsche also mentions Aquinas.

Visit Mynaa's website to keep up with his work in podcasting, and read his writing: https://www.bezabezar.com/

Thanks for listening, see you all for the regular Nietzsche podcast episode!

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 was a patron Q&A that the small group of people who donate to the show got some time ago, so all the questions are from patrons. Nevertheless, I thought all of you might enjoy it. I retread a little ground from the first season, and cover some questions about issues I’ve delve more deeply into during season two. Please join me next week for the inaugural episode of season two!

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 advantage or disadvantage to that perspective. From Epicurus, he derives the "anti-politics" of praising withdrawal from the world, and the intellectual or philosophical class acting based on a pathos of distance in which they remove themselves from mass politics and from quotidian concerns. Finally, he inherits from figures such as Theognis a desire to way a cultural battle against democratic or egalitarian values. Rather than becoming political in terms of practical political action in his own time, Nietzsche sets his sights to the long-term, beyond any one regime, country, or people, and attempts to provide a timeless argument for hierarchy and aristocracy. This is "Nietzsche's Contest" in the philosophical arena: the war for his ideals, which he feels to be the most powerful, most life-enhancing, and thus most deserving in the political sphere, to triumph over the zeitgeist of democratic moralism. Our main sources today are the fragment, "The Greek State", and the essay, "Homer's Contest". This will serve as a kind of recap and conclusion to our focus on the Greeks, bringing an end to this antiquarian section of the season. Next week will serve as a bridge into the political concerns of the Enlightenment, by examining the ways in which one author of Enlightenment Europe, dear to Nietzsche, was influenced greatly by the political history of Rome. 

Episode art is Johann Köler - Hercules Removes Cerberus from the Gates of Hell, 1855. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In this next episode on Beyond Good & Evil, we discuss the simplification of the world out of a psychological need, and the ways in which we have sought for “Being” in the soul, the ego, the will, and in the materialistic atom. All were expressions of the ”one ruling thought” of the drive doing the philosophizing. Nietzsche reconceptualizes thinking and willing as inseparable, and declares psychology to be the route to the deepest questions. We conclude with a look at the first two passages of part two, The Free Spirit, in which Nietzsche advocates a departure from solemn seriousness and martyrdom for the sake of truth, in exchange for love of uncertainty and a sense of humor.

Episode art: Jean Delville - The God-Man

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 Zarathustra that whatever goes up must come down, and that his own downfall is inevitable, even from the great heights into which he has cast himself... perhaps even especially so. Zarathustra's answer to this is courage and the Nietzschean demand for life-affirmation. After exploring Zarathustra's many visions, and his need to return to solitude in order to "ripen" and prepare himself to preach the terrible doctrine of eternal recurrence, we conclude this in-depth analysis of eternal recurrence with a reading of two sections (or perhaps "verses") of The Drunken Song, which is a cheerful celebration of eternity and of the willingness to take all of life with all its joys and sorrows, set near the very end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In a nice parallel to season one, after our inaugural episode - which focused on a central idea of Nietzsche's upon which the entire next season is an elaboration - this second episode returns to the mythos of Nietzsche (or in this case Zarathustra) as a "Wanderer",  with the mountains to himself. This episode is about taking the eternal return idea and taking it to higher and more deadly vistas. From the edge of this cliff, looming over the great depths of human experience whilst glimpsing the highest and farthest things, Zarathustra must learn to overcome his nauseau, and dare to still carry out the task of elevating our individual human lives. Nietzsche and Epicureanism (previous of a paper available on Academia.edu): https://www.academia.edu/49101903/Great_Politics_and_the_Unnoticed_Life_Nietzsche_and_Epicurus_on_the_Boundaries_of_Cultivation Episode art: Lena Hades - Gemälde "Zarathustra und Zwerg" + An Oroborous (all courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

We've now heard Fustel de Coulanges' understanding of the disturbances in Ancient Rome as revolutions brought on by changes to their religious belief structure. We've considered Machiavelli's fawning historical interpretation of Rome, through Livy, as a people who were more virtuous than any other, and maintained that virtue by subjecting themselves to privation and hardship, and who fell into unrest when they strayed from virtue. And we've now heard Turchin's view, that the unrest of the Roman Republic was created by structural-demographic factors. Now, we hear the people's history of Ancient Rome, from Marxist-Leninist Michael Parenti, whose view I wanted to include because it was so different from any other in how he views Julius Caesar and his role in Roman history: as a reformer and liberator of the people, killed by an entrenched oligarchy who wished for nothing other than to hold on to their wealth. Parenti walks through the history of the Late Republic as a history of increasing excesses of the nobility, which was then challenged by people's tribunes and other attempts at reform. In all cases, the nobility put down the reformer, but Caesar was different because he was only assassinated after he'd managed to succeed, and to redistribute the land and the wealth. The legitimacy of the senate was forever shaken, for Caesar was forever the people's champion, and it was thus that it required a civil war afterwards, and only the man who most successfully presented himself as Caesar's heir was able to win and secure order once again - even if he was not revolutionary that Caesar was. Parenti attacks the view of the 'gentleman historians' of Great Britain, and throughout history, who have viewed Rome as a true republic, with democratic representation. Instead, Parenti makes the case that Rome was ruled by a closed-off patriciate who cared for nothing other than their own wealth, and were even willing to undermine the health and stability of their empire in order to extract more. Caesar was the incarnation of this popular uprising into one man, who was willing to break all of the limitations and decorum the nobility had put into place as a means of ensuring that nothing ever changed. Caesar, rather than a tyrannical villain who was justly killed by Brutus, the "noblest Roman of them all", Parenti portrays Caesar as a tragic hero, who was the only hope for saving the republic and achieving justice. 

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

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 Goethe, who was in his seventies at the time, the young Eckermann looked up to him as the greatest of poets, and wanted nothing more than to record all of his wonderful memories with Goethe. In this work we find no narrative arc or rigorous structure, but simply a series of thoughts and feelings. It is a portrait of Goethe rather than a story about him, and offers a fascinating view into a different time and place.

You have questions, I might have answers. Khajiit has wares, if you have coin. I was originally planning on doubling up episodes this week, but with the approaching tour, I’m going to have to set aside a couple weeks to just release an interview or Q&A in order to have steady releases. Hope this episode satisfies! Cheers.

This episode is a polemic. While I have addressed Jordan Peterson's misunderstandings of the "God is dead" aphorism, or his bungling of Nietzsche's view of truth, here we address one of his most often repeated distortions of Nietzsche's philosophy. According to Jordan, Nietzsche said we can create our own values, but, in fact, this is impossible.

I break down Jordan's misreading into four sections: 1) Jordan doesn't understand what Nietzsche means by "values"; 2) Jordan doesn't understand what Nietzsche means by "creating" values, 3) Jordan's problems with the "creation of values" fail, largely due to these misunderstandings, 4) Values do not need to be created by the Overman.

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 tragic downfall of Oedipus, his redemptive last days at Colonus, and Friedrich Nietzsche's interpretation of the significance of Oedipus in Birth of Tragedy.

Episode Art: Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust, Oedipus at Colonus (1788), Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Since I’m out of town, I recorded some shorts for you! This one is a reading of a Medium Article I wrote, introducing the concept of resentment and will to power as a psychological phenomenon. Included is a bit of extra material I recorded off the cuff, drawing on material in The Antichrist.

This is the twentieth episode of the podcast! Maybe the smallest of milestones, but we decided to celebrate. It's a bit unusual for me to do two Untimely Reflections in a row, but hopefully it'll be as fun for everyone else as it was for me. Today, I'm sitting down with my wife Amberly to talk about a movie we just watched, "When Nietzsche Wept" by director Pinchas Perry. Amberly knows very little about philosophy or Nietzsche, but knows a lot about movies, and especially what makes something a bad movie. Well, she's going to need those skills, because this film was disappointing in almost every respect. Based on a book by Irvin Yalom, the film unfortunately repeats a lot of myths about Nietzsche, some of underlay his entire portrayal in the story, and Nietzsche is mostly sidelined in lieu of Dr. Breuer, whose midlife crisis is the central narrative of the film. It really made me wish for a good film adaptation of Nietzsche's life.  We'll return to our regularly scheduled lecture series next week. Special thanks to Amberly for being willing to watch this long-winded and tortured film with me, which, in her words, "has the production value of a Wishbone historical recreation!"

This episode concerns the autobiographical essays in Ecce Homo, which Kaufmann has called, Nietzsche’s Apology. Similarly to Socrates, Nietzsche gives a defense of himself and his career: a defense against being “mistaken”, or “misunderstood”. Like Socrates, who came with a special mission for Athens, Nietzsche comes with the greatest demand ever made of mankind. Central to our analysis is the physiologism of Nietzsche, and the rejection of idealism in favor of brute reality. The physiological is reinterpreted as the root cause of the psychological, and Nietzsche uses his life as the basis and the chief example of how the body determines who one is fated to become. Nietzsche expresses a profound gratitude even for his illness: that which allowed him to gain a subtler eye, to overcome pity, to recognize pathologies.

We all know that Nietzsche said, "What does not kill me makes me stronger", but it is less often remembered that he began that aphorism with the caveat, "From the military school of life". We find, in fact, that many of Nietzsche's powerful insights on self-knowledge, self-control, and the search for truth come from this same military school of life. Nietzsche celebrates war and warriors throughout his work, most notably in passages of book one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra which often beguile first time readers coming at Nietzsche's work from a humanist or existentialist bent. How could a philosopher of intellectual freedom and independence tell his audience to "die in battle and squander a great soul"? How could he say that a war is not made just by the cause, but the cause made just by the war? Could Nietzsche actually have been pro-war? As a matter of fact, views on war that were on the whole positive were not uncommon in the 19th century, and Nietzsche is no exception to this. Of course, with Nietzsche, it goes deeper, insofar as the influence of Heraclitus and his conception of strife as a creative force inspired Nietzsche. In his view, all the world is war, and every aspect of existence is a manifestation of this unceasing conflict. This war exists on the physical level, on the social level, within our ideas, and within ourselves. Life itself is a bella omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. With this war as the revealed character of the phenomenal world, Nietzsche argues for accepting war as a fact of life: even as its fundamental character. Episode art: Nietzsche in his military uniform, circa 1864

A question and answer session just from the patrons, though I figured the public would enjoy some of the topics covered. Enjoy!

This episode is the culmination of several weeks of episodes on the topic of morality, drives, the body, free will, reason v/s the passions, and the master and slave morality. With all that we've learned as a foundation, in this episode we will give a generic definition of the phenomenon of morality from the Nietzschean perspective, and explore Nietzsche's explanation for why man engages in morality-building. At the deepest foundations, Nietzsche believes that mankind moralizes from the same underlying, driving force that is behind all life: the will to power. We will explore just what the will to power means, which Zarathustra says is synonymous with the process of self-overcoming. We will then examine how it is that the will to power produces our second-order drives, such as the will to truth, or the drive to obey the community's morality. We'll conclude by examining the practical applications of Nietzsche's level of "moral meta-analysis", how we can use this analysis to turn a critical eye to different world-historical moral systems, and, finally, what this understanding will to power means for our lives.  This episode draws on the arguments of Walter Kaufmann from his book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. I also recommend this very helpful post by Lebensmaler on the Nietzsche subreddit: Polysemy of the Word Morality in Nietzsche's Writing.  Episode art: Rembrandt -- Moses with the Ten Commandments (Courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

Nietzsche concludes the book with the suggestion that cognition itself is “common”, insofar as communicability is more effective the more common the experience that is communicated. Language facilitates the “abbreviation” of the most common sentiments and experiences, which is part of the process of joining a people together as one. The person whose experiences, thoughts or feelings are individual & peculiar will necessarily find himself unable to communicate them to others, and will be thrust into solitude. Much of the final aphorisms concern this eternal struggle between the rule and the exception, one of the themes of the work. Nietzsche ultimately muses that even the precious, wicked thoughts he has offered us throughout the work are but a pale imitation of the thoughts during their spring: for all thoughts are events, fleeting experiences, a physiological process within a living being. All the philosopher can do is catalogue their aftermath, or display the frozen remnants that linger in their memory. This section also contains multiple remarks on pity, and the prose poem, “The Genius of the Heart”. An exegesis of this poem can be found in episode 39. Episode art: Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian (detail)

Today, we look at the other side of the coin. Nietzsche's critique of capitalism is in fact inextricably bound to his critique of socialism. What he finds beneath both approaches to managing human economic affairs is the utilitarian value structure and the view of the human being as homo economicus. Socialism, rather than the solution to capitalism, is the necessary end of the same internal logic, and further seeks to cut off avenues for man's will to power as we labor under the mistaken assumption that by reducing suffering we will maximize pleasure. The closer we proceed to an idealized, painless society, the more our individuality is smoothed over. Increasingly, the only avenue for the expression of power is through the only remaining hierarchical structure: the state. Originally created by mankind to be a means, the state becomes the ends. In a twisted irony, the likes of the socialists and anarchists - who desire above all for a classless, stateless society - bring forth an all-powerful state as the means of doing this, and become consumed by it.

A neat aspect of the episode order here is that we're covering Nietzsche's political thought in a rough chronology - meaning that, while we might jump around from place to place, and occasionally grab a quote from Beyond Good & Evil, we're moving from the second and third book of Human, All Too Human into covering a lot more material from Daybreak, while still drawing on sources from elsewhere in the middle period. The next episode - Nietzsche's critique of fascism - covers around the same period, in terms of the letters and statements he made about Wagner and Elisabeth during his breaks with them, in addition to drawing on passages from throughout his work. 

Ian Wright's article, "Capital as a Real God": https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

Thomas Brobjer's studies showing that Nietzsche knew Marx: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110170740.298/html

My essay on Star Trek: https://untimely-reflections.blogspot.com/2021/05/neverending-frontier-star-treks.html

In this section, Nietzsche describes the truth-seeker as an exception among the rule, and emphasizes the difference between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. Nietzsche explores differences in tempo of thinking between individuals and cultures, which he sources to physiological realities. This portion of the text also concerns Nietzsche’s natural history of morality in three stages (pre-, moral, post-) and an experimental portrait of the world as will to power. Does this mean God is refuted and the devil is not? On the contrary, friends, on the contrary! And who forces you to speak with the vulgar? Episode art is John William Waterhouse - The Magic Circle.

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.

Apologies on the late upload! There were technical difficulties that have since been resolved. We’re back on track and next week’s release will be on Tuesday again. The ascetic values of the saint are premised on self-denial. It was this self-denial that caused the saint to become a great mystery, who stood in judgment of the powerful people of the world. They suspected that the saint knew something they didn’t, as this miraculous being who transformed from evil to good. Good became synonymous with the otherworldly and the unsensual, and this image became most powerful in the hands of the extraordinary person who has turned out a failure in life. The person with great creative potential who is taken over by the power of self-denial becomes the most dangerous among the ascetics, and over centuries of this religious neurosis dominating the European mind, the result has been the modern man.

This time, I'm having a conversation with Paul Katsafanas, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. He is the author of Nietzschean Constitutivism, an analytical approach to Nietzsche's ethics. This is the primary focus of our conversation, though I also talked to Professor Katfasanas about changes in the analytical/continental divide, his take on my own fictionalist approach to metaphysics, and the state of philosophy in 2021. I found Paul to have a wealth of insights into Nietzsche's work which were stated with utter clarity and directness.

Katsafanas' moral constitutivism, based on Nietzsche, stands in opposition to the work of Kantian constitutivists such as Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman. Katsafanas argues that the Nietzschean theory of meta-ethics, based on will to power, more coherently explains human action than the Kantian insistence on universalization and adherence to rational principles. Nietzschean constitutivism includes the unconscious and habitual side of man, not just his deliberating, rational side.

There was some glitching on his end but I think it was just my own poor connection. Or maybe this is just an inevitability of recording on Zoom from far-flung parts of the country.

Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History is a loveletter to Greek tragedy, that begins with a dedication from Nietzsche and Plato. Central to the story is the concept of the Dionysian, and the attempt of the main characters to experience the Dionysian. Richard Papen's fatal flaw is his "morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs". His undying quest for a beautiful aesthetic life leads him to become part of an elite clique of students at Hampden College in Vermont. All six of them are under the sway of a charismatic and mysterious professor named Julian Morrow. After his friends accidentally kill someone while attempting a modern-day bacchanalia, Richard finds himself drawn into their crime, as he does everything he can to help them cover it up. This year becomes the defining event of Richard's life, and the story is his retelling of this 'secret history' of how he became what he is. We will examine the novel's use of truth and appearance, and how the Dionysian in this story serves as a "pure fire of being" which burns away the false appearances of the characters in order to unify their appearance and essence, and force each person's nature to draw its final consequences.

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 philosophical project which is anti-Christian. He says he has no taste for faith in God, and that this faith is an indelicacy among thinkers. Today, we will examine Pascal's life, and the basics of his philosophy. Then, we will compare these two malcontents of the Enlightenment. Both question the supremacy of human reason, and offer an alternative to the materialistic concerns of a secular society. Both were men afflicted with ill health, and who struggled with mental illness. But they come to completely contrasting views in their assessment of life. In spite of this, there are ways in which Pascal's influence may have lasting importance for understanding Nietzsche. In Daybreak, Pascal is a stand-in for Christian hatred of mankind, who may have shaped Nietzsche's psychological analysis of Christianity. And in the eternal recurrence, we arguably find a variation on Pascal's Wager. While Pascal urges us to bet on God, Nietzsche's invitation is to bet on the world. “The Only Logical Christian”: Nietzsche’s Critique of Pascal by Brendan Donnellan, available on JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469656557_oflaherty.12?seq=10

This time, I'm speaking with Matt Hazelwood. He is the co-host of the political podcast Beyond Talking Points, and also hosts his own podcast called The Philosopher's Guide to the Apocalypse. In this conversation, we talk about nationalism versus internationalism, how global economic forces have rendered the individual irrelevant, the prospect of Balkanizing the United States, political polarization, the Bronze Age Collapse, the French Revolution, and the unlikelihood of revolutions happening today. We're both weary of the technocratic revolution in governance that had taken hold in Western nation-states, and wonder whether a more localistic society and economy can even survive going forward. Beyond Talking Points: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Hag3O3dJr64F6VNs7rF3w The Philosopher's Guide to the Apocalypse: https://open.spotify.com/show/0022dxux6LS7t0NDJpQu6Q NOTE: Please excuse my own audio quality on this particular episode. I didn't think it was too terrible to release, but it is a marked decline from my solo episodes, a problem I'm still working on fixing. I tried a new way of recording this time, and I unfortunately seem to have had some settings on that quashed my vocal quality down. Hopefully it's not too distracting and the conversation is interesting enough for you to stick through it. 

Giles Deleuze is one of the most significant figures of French postmodernism, famous for his work with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. In this episode, we're going to consider Deleuze's work, Nietzsche and Philosophy. In the words of Deleuze, the opposition to Hegel runs through the entirety of Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge. Nietzsche's philosophy is truly 'against the dialectic': as Nietzsche's work is perspectival and pluralistic, which represents the only significant challenge to the dialectical mode of thought. In contrast to dialectical labor and seriousness, Nietzsche's way of thinking affirms difference. Nietzsche asserts that being is not premised on negation, but affirmation, in which each force asserts its difference and enjoys that difference. In Deleuze, we find a new systemization of Nietzsche, in which Nietzsche's critique of morality, religion and the sciences can be reconceptualized as part of a struggle on Nietzsche's part against the triumph of reactive forces. Deleuze offers us a new language for discussing and understanding Nietzsche's work, and a radical re-evaluation of the eternal recurrence and the will to power. In this first part of our two-part series on Deleuze, we're going to consider Nietzsche's anti-Hegelianism, Deleuze's interpretation of sense, value & genealogy, the concepts of active and reactive, Nietzsche's typology, the metaphor the dicethrow, and the eternal return considered as a Nietzschean theory of time.

What does eternal recurrence mean in the historical sense? Nietzsche invites us to explore that question in his raising of the Problem of Science, and the notion of conflict as central to life. Today, in the penultimate episode of the season, we'll take a look into a section from Will to Power called "The History of European Nihilism", in which Nietzsche takes on the history of Europe from the perspective of his cultural/moral analysis, and charts the history of the descent into materialism as it played out in Enlightenment Europe. In his Pre-Platonic lectures, Nietzsche suggests a parallel between the project of Greek philosophy, and the progression that played out in the centuries of the Enlightenment. The Pre-Platonic Greeks experimented with materialist philosophy, eventually culminating in the atomism of Democritus and the arrival of Socrates, the ultimate logician - soon, the values of their traditions, and their long-held superstitions came to be questionable. The values of the society were undermined, and a crisis of nihilism set it. Nietzsche believes that this played out over the course of several centuries in Europe: in the form of the Reformation, then the scientific dawning of the Enlightenment rationalism with Descartes at the forefront. He comments on many of the figures we have covered this season, such as Kant, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and others, as manifestations of the spirit of their times, who signified shifts or turning points in the European psyche. He reimagines Kant as a sentimentalist towards the concept of duty, a twin spirit with the moralistic Rousseau, who rebelled against the self-legislating rationalism of the 17th century and instead opted to be guided by feeling. Now, in Nietzsche's 19th century, he sees the ascendance of a more honest yet more gloomy period of European thought. The animalian in man is fully uncovered and embraced, and man becomes understood as a historical creature. This has dire consequences, bringing on the dissolution of society and the disbelief in all past metaphysical and moral comforts. But, as a result, the European psyche has the opportunity to enter a period of "Active Nihilism", and overcome the previous dogmas as part of a revaluation of all values. In spite of his predictions of coming great wars, Nietzsche is hopeful that the conditions of decay will lay infinite possibilities before us for the future. Contrary to many who warn of degeneration or decadence, Nietzsche cleaves to the conviction that with decay comes new growth, and that periods of dissolution are always periods of great creativity. This is, somewhat paradoxically, one of the more hopeful passages of Nietzsche, which acquiesces both to his belief in eternal recurrence, as much to the hope for something new in the future. Episode art: George Frederic Watts - Hope

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

Much of the second half of the Natural History of Morals is a meditation on the common morality as one of prudence, stupidity, and fear. In one word: timidity. Nietzsche draws upon ideas he’s explored in Human all too Human, Daybreak & The Gay Science: man as animal/natural being, morality as a means of dealing with vehement drives, and the wicked person as being just as indispensable as the moral person. Episode art: John Maler Collier - Fire

In Rousseau, we find the mirror image of Nietzsche’s politics. While both have been called romantics, we find enough nuance to consider both something beyond this - and yet, Rousseau & Nietzsche agree in finding problematic the supposed “progress” of the modern world, and both turn their gaze back to the time before civilization to contrast with modern life. But where Nietzsche sees a war of all against all, Rousseau sees a state of natural happiness. Rather than a “going back” to this natural utopia, as Rousseau’s philosophy is sometimes described, instead Rousseau’s project is an indictment of the injustice of civilization and the goal of remedying this injustice. For Rousseau, man can only be made free once again if society is brought into accord with the general will - the underlying will of the populace at large. In this, harmony between the individual and society is achieved, and true democracy realized. There is hardly any figure who receives more scorn from Nietzsche than Rousseau, but because Rousseau is eerily similar to Nietzsche in many respects, learning the basics of his politics is essential to understanding Nietzsche. Join us while we cover Nietzsche’s opposite in political philosophy.

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!

Peter Turchin has continued the work of Ibn Khaldun, by elaborating upon Khaldun's hypotheses and testing them against the wealth of historical data that we now possess. By means of a structural demographic analysis of historical empires, Turchin has worked for years to generate mathematical models in order to explain the trends that seem to recur in every complex society. Now, with the data of 10,000 years of human activity on the group level, it may be possible to finally move beyond the preliminary, pseudo-scientific steps of the discipline of history, and proceed into a truly mathematized phase. This is the discipline that Turchin calls "Cliodynamics", after the Muse of history of Ancient Greece. His intention to leave behind the anthropological and archaeological studies that characterized history in the past, and bring mathematics into the field so that we can begin to make predictions. The reason why many have been so resistant to this development is our belief in free will, and the unpredictability of human action. Turchin thinks that this is a mistake, because while individual decisions are often unpredictable at the individual, granular level, at the level of entire populations or demographics, human beings become rather predictable. Quite in line with the cyclical view of history postulated by Plato, Thucydides, or Nietzsche, Turchin brings the math to demonstrate the truth of their ideas: that, in the realm of human history, all returns eternally. For our sources today, we're primarily using Turchin's books: War and Peace and War, Ultrasociety, and a brief dip at the end into the overall idea of Ages of Discord, as well as some references to Secular Cycles by Turchin and Nefedov. We'll also include a number of quotes from Roman historians Livy, Plutarch and others, as we examine the period of the Roman Republic, the chaos of the Late Republic and the transition to the Principate, as explained by Turchin's structural-demographic theory. This should be fun, given that we've already considered these events somewhat through the eyes of Machiavelli. Now, we can approach the subject with more rigor. In my view, Turchin is following in the traditions of these thinkers, but developing their work further. Episode art is Thomas Cole's now famous "Destruction" piece of his cycle, "The Course of Empire".

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, everything. Nietzsche says of Spinoza, "I have a precursor! And what a precursor!" While he was critical of Spinoza, Nietzsche acknowledged the ideas of Spinoza as profoundly influential on his thought. And yet, Spinoza's work remains famously difficult. Where he fits in to the Western philosophical canon is not readily apparent. Rarely is he portrayed as a great opponent of any one philosopher or school, and it seems that he lacks true antipodes. He is grouped among the three great rationalists, along with Descartes and Leibniz - even though these three come to radically different metaphysical conclusions, and bear little resemblance to one another aside from this one classification of their epistemological stance. And since Spinoza's philosophy is so voluminous, its ideas interrelated and comprehensive, approaching Spinoza and having some idea of where he stands within the discourse is difficult for the average reader. In this episode, we'll consider Spinoza's life and work, and then consider the ways in which his life parallels Nietzsche, and the ways in which his life influenced Nietzsche. Episode Art: Samuel Hirszenberg - Excommunicated Spinoza