The Nietzsche Podcast

If you've been listening for a year or more, you know that Halloween is a very special holiday for me. To be honest, finding "spooky" Nietzsche content was a bit difficult last year, such that I probably covered just about everything you could say about Nietzsche's thoughts on ghosts, witches, the fear of the dark, or why we celebrate scary or morose holidays such as Halloween. So, this year, for our Halloween special, I decided to take a detour to an author who came along shortly after Friedrich Nietzsche, and addressed many of the same themes that concerned Nietzsche: H.P. Lovecraft. In celebration of the spookiest time of year, Mynaa & I discuss the philosophical meaning behind H.P. Lovecraft's fiction and the cosmic  horror that underlies his work, and the connections we see to Friedrich Nietzsche and Peter Zappfe. Like Nietzsche, Lovecraft perceived the end of the our metaphysical and moral faith, murdered by a rising scientific materialism that left no room for concepts like the salvation of mankind or the centrality of the earth in the grand scale of the cosmos. Mankind instead confronted an increasingly meaningless world - a world which Lovecraft depicted in fantastical terms: in which human beings who were largely impotent in the story were torn asunder by entities who are entirely indifferent towards them. After the discussion, I included some readings of Lovecraft's stories. I picked "The Tree" because it is underrated, a perfectly paced campfire-story-type tale, and one set in Ancient Greece! Then, "From Beyond", a story that encapsulates the Lovecraftian angst about the progress of scientific knowledge.  I figured this could be a fun departure from the normal scholarly rigor to get into the spirit of the season. Happy Halloween!

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

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.

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

Nietzsche recapitulates and summarizes his positions, and provides us with a few relatively simple formulas for understanding the interaction of the two art-forces. He hopes for a rebirth of tragic art in Europe. We conclude with my distillation of the main philosophical concepts, the significance of which can be expanded beyond the work.

Here we find the idea of cultures as admixtures of the Apollinian, Dionysian, or Socratic approaches to life. The Socratic is distinguished from the Apollinian, and modern art and culture is assessed as theoretic parasitism on art.

The podcast discusses the clash between Socrates' rational approach to art and Nietzsche's embrace of illusion and artistic expression. It explores the conflict between optimistic storytelling and tragic art, questioning the influence of Socratic Maxims. Nietzsche's reflections on art, Socrates, and truth are analyzed, along with the rise of Theoretic Man and the potential rebirth of tragedy through music and Dionysian forces.

The podcast delves into the influence of Euripides on the evolution of Greek tragedy, discussing Nietzsche's critique of the democratization of tragic art and shift towards new comedy. It explores the impact of Euripides' rationalistic approach influenced by Socrates, the contrast between Greek cheerfulness and Christian seriousness, and analyzes the artist-audience relationship in dramatic art.

Delve into the evolution of Attic Tragedy from solo poets to masked Dionysus, explore Nietzsche's views on the Satyr Chorus and Tragic Art, unravel the transformative power of art and the nature of sin in mythological tales, and examine the forces of Apollinian and Dionysian in Greek culture. Nietzsche critiques contrived art and celebrates authentic expression, contrasting Greek attitudes towards lust with Christian perceptions of sin.

We continue our analysis of Birth of Tragedy, and enter one of the most byzantine sections of the text. Don’t worry, I shall be your Ariadne.