The Nietzsche Podcast

Philosophers have a birth defect. They are cursed, destined to philosophize without a historical sense. Even without realizing it, we take for granted the moral prejudices of our own times. For better or worse, language and the cultural software we inherit both play a role in shaping our thought. For all these reasons, philosophers of all ages have fallen victim to habitual errors: of beginning fr...

This is the twentieth episode of the podcast! Maybe the smallest of milestones, but we decided to celebrate. It's a bit unusual for me to do two Untimely Reflections in a row, but hopefully it'll be as fun for everyone else as it was for me. Today, I'm sitting down with my wife Amberly to talk about a movie we just watched, "When Nietzsche Wept" by director Pinchas Perry. Amberly knows very little...

In this episode, I'm chatting with my friend Karl Nord about Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto, Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History for Life, whether H.P. Lovecraft's characters have volition, the use of deus ex machina in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, the depressing spirit of Von Trier films, morality in art and as art, and the alchemical power of aligning the artistic and the political. 

What is the point of history? What is the point of our acquisition of knowledge? Is there a way for man to live unhistorically? And supposing that we cannot do without history, are there uses for it which are helpful? Are there uses which are harmful? Today we take a deep dive into the Untimely Meditations essay, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. In this essay, Nietzsche reveals his love o...

You know what it is. Questions from the subreddit, answers from me. Hope it is not too rambly!

This episode is the culmination of several weeks of episodes on the topic of morality, drives, the body, free will, reason v/s the passions, and the master and slave morality. With all that we've learned as a foundation, in this episode we will give a generic definition of the phenomenon of morality from the Nietzschean perspective, and explore Nietzsche's explanation for why man engages in morali...

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...

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 polarizati...

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 "th...

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 structur...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 Nietzs...

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.

Today, we’re going to delve for the first time into one of Nietzsche’s influences. Heraclitus is known for his sayings such as “Everything flows”, and “One cannot step into the same river twice.” Heraclitus lived during a time before philosophy was well-defined as a discipline, and before there were well-known philosophical schools in Greece. Nietzsche had his own fascinating theories about the ph...

A mysterious illness. A headstone for Karl Ludwig. An enigmatic inscription. In today's episode, we pose the question of why Nietzsche would memorialize his dead father, a Lutheran pastor, with a verse from Corinthians. This unusual event in Nietzsche's life intersects with both his lifelong ailment and his most ambitious philosophical ideas. In order to answer this question, we'll go on the podca...

Today we'll study the words of a saint, a pope, a madman, the ugliest man, and Zarathustra himself - in order to find out what they all have to tell us about one of the most momentous events in world history, but one which is not yet perceived or understood by the great many. This event is the Death of God, one of Nietzsche's most important ideas and one which lays the groundwork for understanding...

In this episode, we discuss the character of The Wanderer. The Wanderer appeared in multiple Nietzsche works, mainly during the period from Human, All Too Human, through The Gay Science. Evidently Nietzsche identified himself with this character. The wandering that Nietzsche did throughout Europe, and while hiking the Alps, paralleled the metaphor of 'philosophical wandering' in Nietzsche's work....

Welcome to The Nietzsche Podcast! In this first episode, we introduce Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), through the passage, "How the True World Finally Became a Fable", from his book, The Twilight of Idols. In this passage, Nietzsche sketches the history of a particular error in Western philosophy: the error of metaphysics. Nietzsche establishes himself as an anti-metaphysical philosopher, who is...