The Nietzsche Podcast

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 a...

Who is the artist? Where does art come from? What is the future of art? Doing a comprehensive view of Nietzsche’s take on artists is probably too big a topic for any one episode, so here we will concern ourselves primarily with these questions, the answers to which all involve the idea that the artist is a sort of alchemist of the psyche, who works with the raw material of the soul in order to cha...

Back in season one, we teased the idea of Nietzsche looking for some way to elevate mankind beyond the natural world. While Nietzsche is celebrated for his uncompromising critique of Christian values and otherworldly metaphysics, the advantage of these ideas was that they showed man an ideal which was beyond the cynical view that human beings are simply "clever animals who invented knowledge". Nie...

Andrei Georgescu is a writer, a poet, an artist, and an insightful mind. He has grappled with the complexities of the human physiology for years, out of necessity if for no other reason, and it was because of an essay on the topic of diet that I first ran across Andrei's work. Our discussion centers around this topic, which was a concern shared by Friedrich Nietzsche: how diet affects one's mood,...

The ugliest man of Athens? Or the most beautiful soul of all? A mere intellectual? Or the finest fencing-master? The central focus of our episode today, in part two of our analysis of Plato's Symposium, is Nietzsche's interpretation of the text. Nietzsche argues that Socrates rounds off the discussion on the attributes of love in his speech, and that the image he gives of the power of love is then...

You don't need money, don't take fame Don't need no credit card to ride this train It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes But it might just save your life That's the power of love Today, we discuss Nietzsche's lieblingsdichtung, or favorite work, from the time of his graduation at Schulpforta: Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is one of the most popular Platonic dialogues, which consi...

Was Nietzsche influenced by the Lutheran idea of pietism? Is there a clear parallel between the ideas of Ecclesiastes and the idea of Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche intend a degree of comedy to his work? Are some of his ideas even to be taken as 'tongue-in-cheek', as not entirely serious, as mere thought experiments, as something to be taken with a dash of irony & a wink and maybe even a complementary n...

In part two, we look at eternal return in its full implications - the eternity of all that is low and contemptible in human beings, contrasted with the eternity of all that is great and has great potential in human beings. The depressing fact that mankind's smallness and Christian weakness is written into infinity is what Zarathustra calls his "most abysmal thought". He is also tormented by his ow...

Kevin Rogers is a musician, one of my old friends from the Zen forum & one of the co-hosts of the Knot Zen Podcast.   In  this episode, we talk about Zen found in the corpus of literature  produced during the middle ages in China, and the dialectical shift that  happened when this Chinese movement was brought into Japan by Dogen.  Kevin gives an explanation of Zen, which dovetails into discussions...

Welcome to Season Two, my beautiful, free spirits! We ended the last season on a "cliffhanger"... the lead-up to the new mythology forged within the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Today, we discuss the basis of that new myth. The eternal return, also known as the eternal recurrence, is one of the most famous ideas of Nietzsche, but one of the most difficult to comprehend. How could this philosop...

Season two is coming soon! This is the last episode in the interim - or what we might call the afterbirth of season one (if we wanted to be a little gross with our metaphors) - and I'm very excited to begin with some of the gargantuan topics of our next series of episodes. Truly, the episodes to follow are on the ideas that stand like magnificent, granite pillars, upholding the beautiful frescoes...

By popular demand, I’ve finally had a conversation with an antinatalist. Gabriel and I discussed the arguments for antinatalism, the pessimistic assessment of life on which those arguments are based, and the difference between continuing life versus bringing it forth. I threw Gabriel some curveballs about transhumanism and suicide machines towards the end of the talk, and furthermore we brought in...

On a cold, rainy afternoon this past November, Mynaa Miesnowan and I met up at a little bar in Austin, Texas called Sagebrush. I'm a lifelong South Austinite and Sagebrush is a newer bar that exists within a very, very old building, that was a country & western dancehall back in the 1960's. The modern decor reminds of a Texas bar in a Rodriguez or Tarantino film, with a backlit landscape of a star...

We can pinpoint the end of an era in Nietzsche’s philosophy precisely at Book IV of the Gay Science. This is where Nietzsche marks off a new chapter in his life. He begins the book with the aphorism, "For the New Year", and there is a celebration of the month of January, as the beginning of the year – a celebration of newness, of rejuvenation. In a letter to Franz Overbeck, on September 9th, of th...

In the second part of our deep dive into The Antichrist, we tear into the meat of the text: the scathing, uncompromising attack of Christianity. Unlike most critics of the Christian religion, Nietzsche devotes very little time to the refutation of the arguments for Christianity's truth, or the supposed evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Instead, Nietzsche is laser-focused on the effect of the...

The Antichrist (1888) is one of the last books Nietzsche wrote before losing his sanity the next year. It serves as the culmination of a decade or more of Nietzsche's thoughts on morality, Christianity, and the need for a revaluation of values. This project - of finding or defining a new set of values by which man could live - was something about which Nietzsche was deeply ambivalent. On the one h...

Carefree Wandering is my favorite Youtube channel that currently produces philosophical content, making Hans-Georg Moeller a very special guest on the Nietzsche Podcast. Our conversation involved many of the topics of his videos, which I of course wanted to ask him about. But overall, I think we presented a relatively coherent procession of ideas. We discuss Professor Moeller's background in Chine...

This is the final episode of our series on Schopenhauer, and the episode where we will finally draw some general conclusions, not merely about Schopenhauer’s philosophy or his life, or how he influenced Nietzsche - but rather about Nietzsche’s philosophical project itself and how Schopenhauer helped him discover the true opposition at the heart of his work. Nietzsche has been called a romantic dur...

This time, I'm having a conversation with Paul Katsafanas, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. He is the author of Nietzschean Constitutivism, an analytical approach to Nietzsche's ethics. This is the primary focus of our conversation, though I also talked to Professor Katfasanas about changes in the analytical/continental divide, his take on my own fictionalist approach to metap...

We begin to answer the question as to what Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer, mostly in Nietzsche's own words. But the answer is not so simple as Nietzsche simply listing off a few ideas or character traits that he liked. Rather, Schopenhauer is held up alongside Rousseau and Goethe as an "image of man" to reveal to mankind how we might be elevated beyond the merely animal. All three are among those w...

Sigh. When I did the soundcheck my mic was plugged in. Then, I guess the cable slipped sometime before we started rolling. So, the crisp mic quality you got in the last couple episodes is not here and I was foolishly speaking into a mic while the computer mic is what actually recorded me. But, regardless of my own failures, my guest had a lot of fascinating things to say. Today I'm talking to Greg...

In this episode, we’re exploring how Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy culminates in the idea that we must deny the will-to-live. This second part will take us through Schopenhauer's view of art, his idea of genius, and how the Platonic forms relate to aesthetics. Finally, we'll discuss the final end of Schopenhauer's philosophy: nothingness. Unlike other noted pessimists, who fixated on mortality,...

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is known today as the ultimate pessimist among philosophers. Among Nietzsche's influences, perhaps none can be said to be more significant than Schopenhauer. Given that Nietzsche promoted a life philosophy that was ultimately "yes-saying" and full of determination to embrace this world and all its suffering, it may be surprising to some who are not familiar with Sch...

This is the first episode with my new mic set-up! Enjoy that crisp, crystal-clear vocal quality on my end, for the first time during one of my conversations with a guest. Apparently the bitrate was wreaking havoc on my normal mic setup, but thankfully the problem is finally solved. In this Untimely Reflections, I have a conversation with Matt Keck, the co-host of Beyond Talking Points. Matt is an...

In America, we celebrate Halloween with costumes and trick or treating. In Germany, Allerheiligen is a holiday of paying respects to the dead, and showing reverence for all the saints of the Catholic Church. In Mexico, Dia de los Muertos involves the building of shrines and offering of food to the deceased. Among the ancient Celts, there was Samhain, a time in which the veil between worlds became...