The Nietzsche Podcast28 Nov 2023

77: Robert Pirsig’s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Today we continue with our inquiry into rhetoric and dialectic, with Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig, like Nietzsche, saw himself as a modern-day Sophist, and part of his work was the rescue of the Sophistic school from the ill repute visited upon them by the Socratics. Perhaps more expansively, Pirsig devotes his philosophical work to the question, “What is quality?”, drawing on the Greek concept of arete, or excellence. His philosophical ideas do not come to us through a dispassionate treatise, however, but through an autobiographical novel. Pirsig was treated with electroshock therapy, leaving him with a new personality, and the feeling that the person he once was is dead: he merely happens to carry the blurry memories of another man. While on a motorcycle trip with his son, Pirsig struggles to unify the dichotomy between classical and romantic, between substance and form, between the two personalities within himself, and between himself and his son. This work remains one of the most important philosophical contributions to American literature in the 20th century, and hopefully today I can show all of you why this work of “pop philosophy” is one of my favorite books, and one to which I regularly return.

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Avsnitt(279)

146: Extinction (Nietzsche vs Buddhism, pt. 2)

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 "...

25 Aug 1h 39min

145: The Religion of Self-Redemption (Nietzsche vs Buddhism, pt. 1)

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 Budd...

18 Aug 1h 53min

Q&A #16

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

11 Aug 2h 51min

The Gay Science #25 (V.372-393)

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 wor...

4 Aug 1h 51min

The Gay Science #24 (V.364-371)

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 passa...

28 Juli 1h 37min

The Gay Science #23 (V.356-363)

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...

21 Juli 2h 21min

The Gay Science #22 (V.348-355)

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 ...

14 Juli 1h 54min

The Gay Science #21 (V.343-347)

"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...

7 Juli 2h 5min