The Nietzsche Podcast

It's another episode about a Nietzsche influence. This time, rather than talking about a philosopher from Ancient Greece, we found one from the Ancien Régime: Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the author of the Moral Maxims. Like fellow French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld is "a man of one book". The Maxims - a volume that is about sixty pages in length - is his sole contribution to the Western philosophical canon. Yet, solely on the basis of this work, Voltaire praised La Rochefoucauld as the greatest master of language since the revival of letters. We'll briefly consider Rochefoucauld's life as a background for his work, study a few central epigrams and his prefaratory essay on self-love in order to lay the groundwork of his thought, compare his ideas to those of Nietzsche's, then take a quick look at a selection of his epigrams of my own choosing.  La Rochefoucauld's style was to write in very short epigrams, often merely a sentence-long. The content of his work is concerned with a number of themes, among them: self-love as the explanation of all human action; the rule of thumb that our true motives are usually concealed from ourselves; that our virtues are often merely our vices in a disguised form. Thus, La Rochefoucauld has the distinction among Nietzsche's influences, insofar as  he influenced Nietzsche both in style and substance. Ironically, the author of the Moral Maxims may have been an immoralist to prefigure Nietzsche. After all, he was one of the first psychologists... and isn't psychology inherently a vice?

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.

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/)

This week, we approach one of the most infamous ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: the dual-prehistory of the morality we follow today. Throughout his career, Nietzsche had an inkling that the origins of our moral ideas did not follow a clean, neat pattern -- a single course of development from a single origin. Rather, we have inherited moral ideas that come from different and competing values structures. Even within a single heart, Nietzsche writes, these two opposed origins sometimes make war with one another, which is Nietzsche's attempt at explaining one of the reasons why we experience states of dividedness and moral dilemmas. In this episode, we'll compare some of his earlier work towards answering this question, found in Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good & Evil, then proceed to tackle the first essay of Genealogy of Morality, which is his most rigorous and famous attempt at wrestling with this topic.  This episode will further build upon the subject matter in episodes 9 & 10. If you’ve not listened to those episodes, it is highly recommended that you do so before diving in. As we keep going on the podcast, while we may occasionally divert to topics which require no background in Nietzsche’s thought, the ideas will only get more difficult as we keep going, and I will increasingly refer back to material we’ve covered in past episodes.

Returning to our regularly scheduled lectures on Nietzsche... this week, we're going to wade into a hornet's nest and tackle one of the most contentious topics: freedom of the will. This episode will draw heavily on the conclusions reached in "9: The Wisdom of the Body", so brush up on the material there is you haven't already. It's not uncommon to encounter people who have no interest in talking about free will. Wherever one meets a philosopher who does want to talk about it, they usually have a very strong opinion on the matter. I think the fact that many are hesitant to discuss the issue owes to the fact that there are so many intractable opinions, which people are unwilling to change and which it is hard to imagine what kind of evidence could motivate people to move on the topic. In essence, we have a philosophical gridlock: and thus, like the issue of God's existence, or moral realism, or political ideologies, the debate ends up resembling something less like a competition of ideas, and more like two sides asserting, in the absence of reason, their own temperamental convictions. Hopefully, Nietzsche's perspective on this topic can help sear through these stale debates. While Nietzsche took a strong stand on free will vs. determinism, his position is not all that easy to summarize neatly. Furthermore, his views on free will are not as popular as many of his other ideas: partially because they are misunderstood, and partially because his position offends our sensibilities. Nietzsche attacks the heart of the free will debate: the issue of moral responsibility. He says that we have no moral responsibility for our actions, and no man chooses his own nature. An incendiary idea, to be certain! Michael Puett talks about Confucianism & the Chinese idea of the self: https://youtu.be/MfnSTr6-1g4 A short pair of clips of Hitchens' ironic comments on free will (RIP Hitch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_TGNJfg0s Episode art this week is courtesy of Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832)

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!

This week we’re going heavy on the source material, because this particular set of ideas was fleshed out (no pun intended) in passages spanning multiple works, and for the most part in unpublished notes. As Nietzsche was fond of saying, however, all the main points of his philosophy are covered at one point or another in his Zarathustra — and so this week’s episode takes its name from a passage in Zarathustra, wherein the titular character says “there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy”. The Nietzschean view of the self is that the body and its instincts are primary, in contrast to the Enlightenment view of the mind as primary. For Nietzsche, the rational consciousness is a narrator which merely gives an after-the-fact explanation. The true person is the body and its unconscious, irrational drives. This view of the self subverts many of our presuppositions about the power of reason, and about man’s free will. Episode art: Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

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.

I’m still out of town, wandering through the desert and the mountain-peaks (no, seriously). I’ll be home next week, but for now it’s still adaptations from my articles on Medium. This one also began as an essay on reddit and was eventually polished into the form you hear it in now: Nietzsche versus Socrates. Upon looking it over again, this essay is actually quite comprehensive in assessing Nietzsche’s view of The Old Gadfly of Athens. “Socrates, to confess is frankly, is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.” Nietzsche’s thoughts on Socrates are complex, but this is the closest one can get in a single sentence to Nietzsche’s relationship with him. In this episode, which consists of a reading of the essay, we’ll examine Socrates from various angles: as the philosopher of life, as the critic, as the martyr, as the decadent, and finally — as what Nietzsche calls, a “destiny”, as a great-souled individual who left his mark on the hearts and minds of men throughout time.

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.