The Nietzsche Podcast

Finally getting into part five, The Natural History of Morals. We’re more than halfway through the text, and Nietzsche applies his psychological method to morality. Episode art is Satan overlooking Paradise by Gustave Dore.

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

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.

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

WARNING: It seems my microphone was not fully plugged in during this exchange, and the computer defaulted to the internal microphone... which is, well, garbage. So, my audio quality sounds pretty dreadful here, but it's at least listenable, and there's no way we were re-doing this entire conversation. As mentioned towards the end, however, I may do a regular series episode concerning Burnham's Machiavellians at a later time, if there is further interest in the topic.My friend Karl Nord and I discuss James Burnham, one of the intellectual forebears of modern conservative thought in the United States. Remarkably, upon a closer look into his life, we find that Burnham is an iconoclast who could have been called a socialist, a nationalist, a conservative, a Trotskyist, a neoliberal, a centrist or a social democrat at various times in his life - and yet, he repudiates and attacks all of these ideologies at various times as well. This is a thinker who once thought a communist revolution was inevitable for America, who wrote briefs for the CIA, who supported McCarthy, and who shaped the worldview of generations of conservatives. In the end, the only label that suits him is "Machiavellian", which is fittingly the title of one of his books, which we take a cursory look at during this episode.

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.

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

My conversation with horror author John Hunt, an Amazon bestseller in his genre and veteran of the homicide division in the Canadian police. John and I cover a range of topics in this discussion, from why he loves Nietzsche, to the role of revenge and justice in his stories as well as horror and suspenseful writing more broadly. John and I gush over our mutual love of Tarantino, and his pick for his favorite among Tarantino's films may surprise you. Other topics include the best ways to show rather than tell about a character's inner turmoil, the theory of drives and how it plays out in John's stories, and what it is that makes Stephen King so damn good. I included quite a bit of banter at the end where we continued talking long after I'd planned on ending the conversation, but most of it was interesting and genuine so I left it in. John's overarching commitment in his work is to realism: in honestly portraying the brute reality as he sees it, without trying to sugarcoat or hide the truth. So glad to have had John on the show, and we can add him to a number of interesting characters with very different life paths who have joined us on Untimely Reflections. John's website: https://johnhuntfiction.ca/ John on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/John-Hunt/author/B01MUHIIOA?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true John on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@johnhuntfiction2537

We continue our exegesis of Beyond Good and Evil, and cover the bulk of On the Prejudices of Philosophers. This section involves Nietzsche’s analysis of various philosophers for whom he has admiration or which exercised a great influence on the philosophical world, but he approaches them with the method of treating their philosophy as an involuntary, unconscious memoir. Episode art: An artistic representation of Epictetus, courtesy of Wikimedia Common.

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