The Nietzsche Podcast

No episode this week! Here’s why.

Join me, and my friend Mynaa Miesnowan, for a discussion inspired by the work of Alan Watts, and his "Wisdom of Insecurity". We compare Watts' own approach to the insecurity of life to that of Nietzsche's, and generally analyze Watts' ideas from a Nietzschean framework. Ultimately, we diverge wildly from the topics covered in Watts' work, and the starting topic is really more a guidepost for the v...

Our economy, comrade! Silly cover images and slogans aside, this week we'll consider one of the most peculiar aspects of Nietzsche's political thought: his non-Marxist critique of capitalism, which is mostly found in Human, All Too Human, Books II and III. Since Nietzsche is writing during an experimental period in his thought, he's willing here to entertain thoughts which might not have intereste...

Stream my new song on CvltNation: https://cvltnation.com/experience-the-doomy-grunge-melodies-of-slumbering-sun-dream-snake/ This episode gets us back into reading Nietzsche, and here I think our prolonged focus on influences and previous thinkers will bear fruit. We’re picking back up with Nietzsche’s middle period, starting from his work in Human, All Too Human. In a chapter from this work, Niet...

This episode concerns the least celebrated aspect of one of the most celebrated philosophers of the European Enlightenment: Kant’s politics. Immanuel Kant is responsible for launching the thread of philosophic inquiry known as German Idealism. At the time, perhaps Kant was merely trying to address the skepticism of those such as Hume. Nevertheless, his philosophical attempt to delimit the bounds o...

In this conversation, my friend Quinn and I dare to journey into one of the most labyrinthine passages ever to come from Nietzsche's hand: the 1873 fragment, Zeitatomenlehre, usually translated as the "Time-Atom" or "Time-Atomism" Fragment. Providing a description of this passage in any concise way will be about as impossible as summarizing this conversation, and our interpretations of it, but at...

In Rousseau, we find the mirror image of Nietzsche’s politics. While both have been called romantics, we find enough nuance to consider both something beyond this - and yet, Rousseau & Nietzsche agree in finding problematic the supposed “progress” of the modern world, and both turn their gaze back to the time before civilization to contrast with modern life. But where Nietzsche sees a war of all a...

Join me and the friends of the podcast in our last episode of the year, a light-hearted variety show! This episode has a focus on gift-giving, and several guests have given me the gift of their time and effort - Andrei Georgescu, Karl Nord, Mynaa Miesnowaan, and Quinn Williams. Join each of them as they present their own meditation on giving and how it relates to Nietzsche's philosophy. I've also...

Today, we discuss one of the most important works of political philosophy of all time, Machiavelli's Il Principe - The Prince. This book was composed while Machiavelli was in exile, after having served the city of Florence for thirteen years as a diplomatic official, but by the time of its authorship reduced to the role of an obscure private citizen. In this work, as Nietzsche characterizes it, Ma...

Introduction to Machiavelli’s political philosophy. We will consider Machiavelli’s legacy, and the enduring debate as to the significance of Machiavelli’s work. Is he strictly an amoralist, concerned with political power as solely a “force” to be considered in the scientific sense, or does he have a political project of his own that must inform our interpretation of him? To answer these questions,...

Watch our livestream tomorrow (12/7/22), at 9:00 PM central time, on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@StudioERecording Show flyer: https://www.instagram.com/p/ClzsytPMNrg/ Today we summarize the ways in which Nietzsche's politics was influenced by the Ancient Greeks. Nietzsche derives from the Sophists, such as Thucydides, his preference for realism over idealism in geopolitics, and the "pra...

The word “Epicurean” is a wonderful example of the linguistic phenomenon of a word coming to signify the opposite of its original meaning. Epicurean philosophy is hedonistic in that it holds pleasure to be the highest good, but Epicurus drew completely different conclusions than that of blind pleasure-seeking. In truth, Epicurus views the most important task of life to be the removal of pain or di...

“My cure for Platonism has always been Thucydides.” Nietzsche saw in the first historian of Ancient Greece the will to adhere to realism, and to learn the lessons of the “harsh teacher” of war. Where he sees cowardice in Plato, Nietzsche sees courage in Thucydides, as well as the “practical justice” of allowing all the parties a fair representation of their viewpoint. Thucydides, for Nietzsche, is...

Here we examine Nietzsche's political philosophy by considering one of his antipodes. Plato’s Republic is one of the most important works of classical philosophy, and also one of the most infamous. In this episode we examine a series of questions concerning Plato: is the Republic a work of ethical philosophy only, or must we read political implications in it?; is it a utopian work?; is Plato respo...

Nietzsche graduated Schulpforta with a dissertation on the topic of Theognis of Megara. Theognis was a Greek aristocrat from a Dorian city-state, famous for his poetry which survives only in fragments. For millennia, he was regarded as a gnomic poet, whose works were intended to impart moral lessons. In his study of Theognis, Nietzsche combats this view, and argues instead that Theognis was only p...

Having discussed the ancient foundations of the religion that governed the minds of the Hellenes and the Romans, we now discuss how life in the city developed. The social order and the laws governing the cities were rooted in religious beliefs that were so old that they were now already modified and subsumed within other, newer beliefs. Since the belief is the foundation of the social order, Coula...

If you've been listening for a year or more, you know that Halloween is a very special holiday for me. To be honest, finding "spooky" Nietzsche content was a bit difficult last year, such that I probably covered just about everything you could say about Nietzsche's thoughts on ghosts, witches, the fear of the dark, or why we celebrate scary or morose holidays such as Halloween. So, this year, for...

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) provides us with the most in-depth account of the ancient religion upon which the city-states of Greece and Rome were founded. While the Hellenes later believed in concepts such as reincarnation, the division of body and soul, and gods that ruled over whole empires, Coulanges asserts that in their earliest days - hundreds or thousands of years before the...

Introduction to the politics of Nietzsche. In this episode, we give an unvarnished look at the aristocratic radicalism that forms up the foundation of Nietzsche's political philosophy. While many interpreters and commenters on Nietzsche have dealt with his radical politics  by ignoring it altogether, by regarding Nietzsche as anti-political, or by interpreting it all away, we will instead begin by...

You asked me anything. I answered most of it. Season Three begins next week!

Nietzsche recapitulates and summarizes his positions, and provides us with a few relatively simple formulas for understanding the interaction of the two art-forces. He hopes for a rebirth of tragic art in Europe. We conclude with my distillation of the main philosophical concepts, the significance of which can be expanded beyond the work.

Here we find the idea of cultures as admixtures of the Apollinian, Dionysian, or Socratic approaches to life. The Socratic is distinguished from the Apollinian, and modern art and culture is assessed as theoretic parasitism on art. 

Socrates, having been introduced in the last chapter we studied in the previous section, appears now to threaten all art, with a worldview described as "the theoretic", which is fundamentally opposed to the tragic. The theoretical worldview is, by nature, optimistic, moralistic, and against all illusion and ignorance. Nietzsche first raises the prospect of "an artistic Socrates", and rails against...

Now we turn to the effect of Euripedes, and Nietzsche’s charge that this tragedian came under the influence of Socrates, and the new form of drama, New Attic Comedy, that followed.

Let’s talk about the evolution of the Attic Tragedy: from solo dithyrambic poet, to dithyrambic chorus, to chorus plus the ritualized portrayal of a masked Dionysus, to an entire tragedy performed on stage behind the “magic wall” of the chorus.