93: The Idle Hours of a Psychologist

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 about philosophy or Nietzsche, but knows a lot about movies, and especially what makes something a bad movie. Well, she's going to need those skills, because this film was disappointing in almost every respect. Based on a book by Irvin Yalom, the film unfortunately repeats a lot of myths about Nietzsche, some of underlay his entire portrayal in the story, and Nietzsche is mostly sidelined in lieu of Dr. Breuer, whose midlife crisis is the central narrative of the film. It really made me wish for a good film adaptation of Nietzsche's life.  We'll return to our regularly scheduled lecture series next week. Special thanks to Amberly for being willing to watch this long-winded and tortured film with me, which, in her words, "has the production value of a Wishbone historical recreation!"

19 Okt 202157min

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.

12 Okt 20211h 37min

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 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the famous German playwright and author of Faust. This essay is a statement of Nietzsche’s allegiance to one side of German culture - embodied in the likes of Goethe and Schopenhauer - against another thread spun out of the tradition of German Idealism, represented by Hegel. In Goethe, Nietzsche finds the all-important maxim that all learning must be in the service of quickening one’s activity and enriching one’s life. Episode art: Clio, by Gentileschi Artemisia (1632). Clio is the Greek Muse of History. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

5 Okt 20211h 24min

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

1 Okt 202152min

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 morality-building. At the deepest foundations, Nietzsche believes that mankind moralizes from the same underlying, driving force that is behind all life: the will to power. We will explore just what the will to power means, which Zarathustra says is synonymous with the process of self-overcoming. We will then examine how it is that the will to power produces our second-order drives, such as the will to truth, or the drive to obey the community's morality. We'll conclude by examining the practical applications of Nietzsche's level of "moral meta-analysis", how we can use this analysis to turn a critical eye to different world-historical moral systems, and, finally, what this understanding will to power means for our lives.  This episode draws on the arguments of Walter Kaufmann from his book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. I also recommend this very helpful post by Lebensmaler on the Nietzsche subreddit: Polysemy of the Word Morality in Nietzsche's Writing.  Episode art: Rembrandt -- Moses with the Ten Commandments (Courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

28 Sep 20211h 16min

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 the Western philosophical canon. Yet, solely on the basis of this work, Voltaire praised La Rochefoucauld as the greatest master of language since the revival of letters. We'll briefly consider Rochefoucauld's life as a background for his work, study a few central epigrams and his prefaratory essay on self-love in order to lay the groundwork of his thought, compare his ideas to those of Nietzsche's, then take a quick look at a selection of his epigrams of my own choosing.  La Rochefoucauld's style was to write in very short epigrams, often merely a sentence-long. The content of his work is concerned with a number of themes, among them: self-love as the explanation of all human action; the rule of thumb that our true motives are usually concealed from ourselves; that our virtues are often merely our vices in a disguised form. Thus, La Rochefoucauld has the distinction among Nietzsche's influences, insofar as  he influenced Nietzsche both in style and substance. Ironically, the author of the Moral Maxims may have been an immoralist to prefigure Nietzsche. After all, he was one of the first psychologists... and isn't psychology inherently a vice?

21 Sep 20211h 19min

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 polarization, the Bronze Age Collapse, the French Revolution, and the unlikelihood of revolutions happening today. We're both weary of the technocratic revolution in governance that had taken hold in Western nation-states, and wonder whether a more localistic society and economy can even survive going forward. Beyond Talking Points: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Hag3O3dJr64F6VNs7rF3w The Philosopher's Guide to the Apocalypse: https://open.spotify.com/show/0022dxux6LS7t0NDJpQu6Q NOTE: Please excuse my own audio quality on this particular episode. I didn't think it was too terrible to release, but it is a marked decline from my solo episodes, a problem I'm still working on fixing. I tried a new way of recording this time, and I unfortunately seem to have had some settings on that quashed my vocal quality down. Hopefully it's not too distracting and the conversation is interesting enough for you to stick through it.

14 Sep 20211h 32min

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 "the Nietzsche legend", many of the stories about Nietzsche and his collapse are little more than myths. When we search for the evidence to support them, we find they're all unfounded. This week, I'm going after eight myths pertaining Nietzsche's life and ideas. While most scholars have moved on from taking these stories uncritically, they still coalesce in the popular consciousness to form the "Nietzsche legend". Hopefully I can uproot some of these here, so that more people can study Nietzsche (the person) rather than "Nietzsche" (the legend). Thanks to lebensmaler for compiling his own list of misconceptions, two of which I address in this episode (read it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/ogmf2e/top_5_misconceptions/)

7 Sep 20211h 6min