The Nietzsche Podcast

Join me for this foray into the work of Algernon Blackwood - theosophist, occultist, and writer of weird fiction tales. Blackwood tell us the story of Professor Mark Ebor: a man with a double life, but a wholesome one, split between the scientific and the mystical. He is an "incorrigible optimist" whose writings give hope to a weary world. Ebor has always believed it his destiny to find...

Welcome to Becoming-Spooky! This is the first of three episodes in this special, seasonal series. Join me and deterritorialize the domains of sanity, the familiar and the human. Patrons will receive two additional episodes! The first half of the episode is my full reading of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe. The second half includes my philosophical analysis, drawing on Lovecraft&...

Do we live in the best of all possible worlds? Join me and find out as we explore the most famous novel of Voltaire, one of Nietzsche's most important influences. Candide is a satirical novel that lambasts the optimism of Leibniz, the hypocrisy of religion and tradition, and the pretensions of philosophy itself. We will examine the Lisbon Earthquake & the debates about it that form the bac...

Neema Parvini is well known on Youtube for his channel, Academic Agent, and for his para-academic work at the Academic Agency. He discusses a broad range of topics in political philosophy, and does not shy away from any topic, from elite theory to Marxism, from Julius Evola to Guy Debord. We discuss how he moved from literary theory to political philosophy; what politics really demands and why it...

Melanie Coughlin, a scholar whose work focuses on Nishitani and the Kyoto school, joined me for a conversation that will hopefully provide a nice conclusion to the recent focus on Buddhism. We discussed karma, the misleading nature of intentions, Nishitani's theory of affect, emptiness-as-affect, the important difference between Nietzsche & Feuerbach, and the insights of Nishitani regardin...

How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of subjectivity. The episode concludes with a brief tour of the shift to subjectivity found in the Old Testament.

What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controversial work, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes puts forward the hypothesis...

In this episode, we're going to discuss what is likely the founding text of the Zen tradition, the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra. According to some of the earliest sources on Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, the "Lanka" was the teaching whose "abstruse principle" he passed down to his successor, Huike. Within the same story, Huike laments that within only a few generations, th...

This episode begins with an analysis of Baizhang's wild fox koan found in the Wumenguan, which we will use as a jumping off point for understanding the paradoxical relationship of the enlightened person with karma. This opens up into the general problem of discussing reality from the perspective of sunyata, in which samsara and nirvana become equivalent - because, so long as one approaches fro...

UPDATE: I accidentally uploaded part two to Spotify instead of part one. This has been fixed. To those who got to listen to the entire two-parter already already, lucky! But, the audio should now be part one. Join me for a deep dive into Nishitani's opus, Religion and Nothingness: an intersection of philosophy and religion, east and west, Heidegger and the Mahayana. The topics I choose to emph...

For all that is admirable in Buddhism, Nietzsche fundamentally opposes the movement towards the Last Man that Buddhism not only cannot oppose, but may even help bring forth. Why does the notion of a "European Buddhism" haunt Nietzsche's later writings? We will explore this question here: how a religion that is realistic, empirical, and achieves great practical success in the relief o...

Welcome back to The Nietzsche Podcast, Season Seven! We're beginning with a two-part episode concerning Nietzsche's view of Buddhism. This episode, we will consider some of the basic teachings of Buddhism, and explore why Nietzsche viewed Buddhism with admiration. A repeated refrain in The Antichrist concerns Buddhism's superiority over Christianity. Why is it that Nietzsche considered...

Season seven begins soon! For now, enjoy a selection of fascinating questions.

We've finally arrived at the conclusion of The Gay Science. The theme of these final sections is perspectivism - we have opened up a "new infinite", penetrating beyond narrow, limited views of the world that have always made grand claims to universalism but have only ever trapped us in dogmatic certainties. Nietzsche sums up his new affirmative attitude as a quest for "the great...

We incomprehensible ones - how our thought branches in every direction, how willing we are to shed our bark, to grow, to change! In this episode, we discuss, among many other sections, important passages such as "What is Romanticism" - in which Nietzsche explains how he departed from the romantic pessimism of Wagner and Schopenhauer. He opposes the theater to music, fully breaking with h...

In this chapter of our readthrough, we confront "the problem of the actor". Nietzsche predicts that things shall become ever more "artistic" in Europe, as the actor's talent self-falsification becomes developed in all members of society. Whereas in the Middle Ages, the individual was bound to his role as an unchangeable identity, the modern person picks up and discards roles: he gives the appearan...

The grand experiment continues with a series of naturalistic explanations for the origins of ideas or modes of life. The scholar's intellectual habits are inherited "in blood and instinct"; Spinoza's philosophy is sourced to his sickliness; Darwinian theories of evolution are a product of the "musty air" of English overpopulation; religious and moralistic perspectives a...

"You tremble, carcass?" After a long hiatus, we shall now fearlessly embark upon book V of The Gay Science, added to the text in 1887. In this final division of the text, we'll see Nietzsche's attempt to incorporate his late philosophy, as the conclusion of his middle period meditations. Some of the hardest-hitting sections in the book appear here. Join me on this quixotic journe...

You know what it is. Questions get answered. The Gay Science readthrough begins in a week's time.

"You, whoever you are, reading me - take your own chance. Just as, at the moment of writing, I gamble with you." The much-awaited conclusion to season six is here! The year is 1944, and we follow Georges Bataille through the months of February to August as he recounts the end of the Nazi occupation of France, while writing of his daily encounters, his inner experiences, first-hand accoun...

The two-part conclusion of season six begins. We're delving into the work of Georges Bataille, with a focus on his book, "On Nietzsche". Bataille is one of the most interesting intellectual nodes of 20th century philosophy. For a long time, his work was obscure in the English-speaking world, often eclipsed by those he influenced, such as Derrida and Foucault. However, among the postm...

Today, I'm speaking with independent scholar, translator, and lecturer, Stuart Kendall. Stuart is responsible for helping to bring new translations of Georges Bataille's work into English, and he joined me for a conversation about Georges Bataille and his influence from Friedrich Nietzsche. We discussed the notion of expenditure, the metaphor of the potlach, the will to chance, war as an o...

In this episode we're going to explore three very different thinkers who nonetheless converge on their theories of language. We're going to see if we can't extract an intelligible whole out of the ideas generated by this trio: the Nietzschean theory of language as command, the view of Cassirer that man is a symbolic animal, and Wittgenstein's concept of the language-game.

In this episode, we're venturing into the life and thought of Ernst Cassirer, the last humanist of the Enlightenment tradition. Cassirer is widely known today for his debate with Heidegger at Davos, in which Cassirer appeared as the old style philosopher against the new world signified by Heidegger's radical existentialism. And yet, the very fact that this debate was taking as symbolic of...

This is an audio version of the first two sections of a planned series of political writings, gathered under the name Antipolitik: I. The Birth of the State at the End of Warre, and II. Anti-Schmitt. I've grouped them under the name Anti-Schmitt because these two sections form a polemical unity, against the philosophy of Carl Schmitt and his friend-enemy distinction. Enjoy!