The Nietzsche Podcast

Today, it's an examination of a single aphorism: Beyond Good & Evil, 295, "The Genius of the Heart": "...the genius of the heart, who silences all that is loud and self-satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire - to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them -..." In this passage - essentially a prose poem by Nietzsche - he expresses praise for Dionysus, and describes himself as his last initiate and disciple. The poem encapsulates the spiritual message of Nietzsche's mature philosophy: the spiritualization of human feelings, the longing for something greater, and the demand for the absolute love of life. Episode Art: John Collier - The Priestess of Bacchus (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Another episode on a single passage: The Gay Science, book V, aphorism  354: “The Genius of the Species”. One of the most thought-provoking  passages in Nietzsche’s work, he expounds on his hypothesis that all  consciousness is a product of human sociality, and was only necessary as  a net of communication between human beings. This has dire implications  for Nietzsche’s aspirations to individualism, and makes suspect  everything to him which enters into consciousness. He believes that the  deeper, more profound aspects of human life remain, ultimately,  untranslatable. Episode art: Alphonse Maria Mucha - La Pater (1899)

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.

The podcast discusses Nietzsche's translations, realist geopolitics and the end of history, Nietzsche's view on love, Nietzsche's perspective on punishment, Nietzsche's concept of will to power, and concludes with expressing gratitude.

It's finally time to talk about Richard Wagner. After meeting Wagner by happenstance in 1868, Nietzsche began a ten-year friendship with the older man, who was a rising star in the music world, on track to becoming one of the most famous living composers. Nietzsche was himself a fan, and described the chain of events leading to his friendship with Wagner as a kind of "fairytale". Soon, Wagner embarked upon the idea of a music festival that would serve as a cultural spearhead for the movement Wagner wished to create in Germany. The town was settled upon: Bayreuth. Construction began on a new theater house to accommodate the festival. Nietzsche aided Wagner in founding it. The first year was a financial disaster but an artistic success, reverberating throughout Europe. But the young Nietzsche left the festival troubled, reporting in a letter that it was then he decided to retreat into the mountains of Interlaken, where he composed the first third of Human, All Too Human. In this episode, we'll discuss the early friendship between Nietzsche and Wagner, what Nietzsche was looking for, and why he thought he found it in Wagner. We'll draw on quotations from the Untimely Meditations essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, as well as Nietzsche's letters. Episode art is a depiction of the Bayreuth Opera House, as of 1895.

"Without music, life would be a mistake." It's commonly known that Nietzsche was a sort of 'musical philosopher' - in fact, it was a feat he aspired to quite openly - but a glance at Nietzsche's thoughts on music reveals that he was so enamored with this form of artistic expression as to have once suggested that music lays at the very heart of reality. Only through music, Nietzsche argues in Birth of Tragedy, can we directly experience the primordial pain and contradiction of reality. Here we will touch on the major points of Nietzsche's engagement with music: his love of Wagner and eventual break from him, the cultural problem he wished to solve, and the perception that music was not just another type of art or entertainment but a geist that could reshape hearts and minds, or even whole societies. Even as his admiration for Schopenhauer and Wagner waned, the love of music - and exaltation of music to the highest importance in his philosophy - remained consistent, even to the bitter end of his life. BONUS SEGMENT: I also set aside a half hour to talk about my experiences returning to the world of underground touring. In the latter part of the episode, I recount the events of my recent outing with my band, Destroyer of Light, on the West Coast of the United States. Episode art: Francis Coates Jones, "Music" Yunus Tuncel's Lecture Notes, "Nietzsche, Music and Silent Suffering": https://www.nietzschecircle.com/Silent_Suffering.html Charlie Huenemann's book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002EL4T2I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Join me in a discussion of passage 109 of Daybreak: "Self-Control and Moderation and Their Final Motive". In this passage that we've oft referenced but not yet attempted a deep dive of, Nietzsche outlines six ways of dealing with the "vehemence of a drive". As Nietzsche considers the self to be governed by impulses, some of which are competing, we should not expect that we can simply command ourselves with a voluntarily governing ego, or somehow will ourselves into having willpower. He also rejects the Christian abdication of responsibility: i.e., that every person is inherently sinful and shall only find perfection in the next life, and therefore all men must simply yield to the grace of God. For Nietzsche, the picture of the human condition is akin to that of William James: we are bundles of habits, and every little nourishment or denial of a habit either enhances or diminishes it. This is the way that drives make war against one another within the psyche: by drawing in more nourishment for themselves at the expense of the others. The question of self-control then becomes a question of how to consciously bring about the nourishment or diminishment of one's impulses. Today's episode covers the practical question of "giving style to one's character". Art: Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard Pass, 20 May 1800/Musee de l'Histoire de France

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

This is the last great concept of Nietzsche's that we have not yet covered on the podcast. With all of the background context that we've collected over the first season and the first part of this one, I feel we're now ready to confront the pinnacle of Nietzsche's philosophy, the highest ideal, and the most sacred value: the Overman. Contrary to popular belief, the Overman is not a figure that has ever existed within recorded history: Zarathustra says that Caesar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Goethe, Socrates, Jesus, or whoever else you may have had in mind as a candidate for Overman, were all found to be, in the end, "human, all-too-human". Zarathustra is also, according to his own sermons, not the Overman himself, but merely his prophet (which would seem to rule out Nietzsche himself as an Overman, in spite of what some have claimed). Zarathustra insists: "Never has there yet been an Overman" - the concept is an ideal image that must ever recede into the future, in order to spur us on to greater and greater things. Lest one take this for a biological concept, or a literal race of future super-humans which Nietzsche is prophecying,even here, we must say that the text defies this interpretation: Zarathustra only speaks of the Overman in the singular, individual form, and speaks of its meaning in terms of creating value in our own lives, today. The meaning, apparently, is not in literally bringing forth overmen, but in living our lives in such a way as to "prepare the earth" for the Overman. How do we square the circle of the future-arriving Overman with the non-progressive view of history? How do we understand the Overman in relation to his opposition, the Last Man? What do both represent? Is the Overman an answer to Nietzsche's quest to elevate man? And if so, how? Is it to be taken as a symbol, a metaphor, an allegory, or what? Join me in this long awaited episode when we tackle all of these difficult questions by diving deeply into the text itself. Today we concern ourselves mostly with the first two books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and especially the prologue.

The philosopher is a misunderstood figure - perhaps most of all by philosophers themselves. This is Nietzsche’s charge, in his later work: what we imagine drives the philosopher, the “will to truth“, is instead a sublimation of the will to power. The philosopher seeks to experience his power in an abstract realm of the intellect, where he can seek for higher and higher goals. But where does this assessment leave the philosopher? If a pure, disinterested drive to knowledge is not what is behind the goals of philosophy, then can we really credit the philosopher with attempting to render a picture of universal existence? Is it a paradox to say that relativism is universal? Is it still truth-seeking if we question the very activity of truth-seeking? Join me in exploring Nietzsche’s nuanced analysis of the philosophical type.