The Gay Science #11 (III.114-III.124)

Nietzsche described Napoleon as "a type of atavism" - a throwback to an earlier age, and quipped that he, not unlike Rousseau, also sought after a “return to nature”. Nietzsche and Rousseau have mutually opposed perspectives on what nature is, however, and Nietzsche is quick to note that Napoleon was not simply a 'going back', but a 'going up'. To understand why Nietzsche thought the way he did about the figure of a Napoleon or a Caesar, we will recapitulate to the entire Nietzschean understanding of the cycles of history, consider aphorisms from across his career, and examine how Goethe's conversations with Eckermann influenced Nietzsche in this respect. I intend to argue that Nietzsche meant the Caesar figure, the 'non-theoretical genius', to be a replacement for the Messiah figure in Christianity. Rather than salvation in the spiritual, abstract sense, the redeemer of man is an individual who exercises power in the physical world. All of the ideas considered this season culminate in order to explain this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, commonly dismissed as 'great man worship'. What we find instead is a phenomenon that Nietzsche believes to be natural, objective, and unavoidable. While this is one of the most difficult ideas of Nietzsche's to tangle with, I think we're better off for comprehending his position in this respect. Episode art: Battle of Wagram by Horace Vernet, 1836

25 Apr 20231h 48min

Jeff Henson is a producer, audio engineer and touring musician in the band Duel. He's worked with acts such as Clutch, Spirit Adrift, Down, The Sword and others in both live and studio recording. As Jeff and I are both about to embark on tours of the United States, and we'd often talked about doing a podcast together, we finally sat down to talk about what the touring experience is like, the principles behind capturing a band's sound, and some light philosophical discussion on the role of art in revealing a human being's soul. We also discussed the differences between the music scene in Europe v/s America, which country "gets it right" in terms of the balance between freedom and social cohesion, and whether things have gotten better for humanity in the course of these endlessly turning cycles of history. Jeff is one of my good friends and this was one of my favorite conversations, even if the topic is orthogonal to the overall ideas of the show. Duel's New live album: https://heavypsychsoundsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/duel-live-at-hellfest Red Nova Ranch: https://www.rednovaranch.com/ The Clutch album we couldn't remember the name of was Psychic Warfare.

10 Apr 20231h 30min

"He who says organization says oligarchy." With these words, Robert Michels advances his sociological theory of what is called the iron law of oligarchy. Whenever human beings arrange themselves into a social group, the structural realities of organizing human beings for coordinated action result in minority rule. Far from asserting this as a reality that we have overcome with democracy, this pattern obtains just as strongly in democratic structures of power as in others. Robert Michels lived from 1876 to 1936, wrote several books, and taught sociology and economics at university - including at Basel, where Nietzsche also taught. Michels' arguments are particularly compelling because he began his political career as a socialist and worked within the socialist parties in Germany to advocate for economic reform. However, he soon began to perceive that the structure of the party itself had created another oligarchy within it, and that the leaders of the party seemed to naturally drift from the interests and perspectives of the workers at large. While we might expect such dynamics within monarchist or conservative parties, it was the revelation of this tendency within the leftist parties that disturbed Michels and compelled him to change his approach to politics. If even the avowedly socialistic and revolutionary political parties were destined to become oligarchic in their structure, then this surely points to something inherent to the human social structure that inevitably produces oligarchic rule. Today we're diving into his work, Political Parties, and exploring whether there is good evidence for the iron law of oligarchy.

4 Apr 20231h 33min

Today I'm speaking with Mark LeVine, a professor, touring musician, and author of several books, including Heavy Metal Islam, a book on the metal scene in the Muslim world. Mark has traveled throughout the world to explore musical styles and scenes outside of the Western mainstream. He became a rock musician at a young age, and spent his twenties reading Nietzsche in graduate school during the day, and gigging in New York City at night. In the course of his career, he's set up concerts in Cairo and Baghdad, discovered artists from Indonesia and Togo, and brought musical acts from around the world to perform in the United States. Mark and I share many interests as we both have a deep connection with Nietzsche and heavy metal, and both see a connection between aggressive, challenging styles of musical expression and Nietzsche's philosophy. In the course of the conversation we venture into the Frankfurt School and Nietzsche's influence there, consider how the different generations of that tradition approached Nietzsche, and discuss how Nietzsche's project differed from that of Adorno, Horkheimer, or Fromm. In spite of their critiques of him, Nietzsche remains indispensable for understanding the social critique that came out of the Frankfurt School, both because of his attack on the Enlightenment, but also through his influence on Freud. Heavy Metal Islam on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Heavy-Metal-Islam-Resistance-Struggle/dp/0307353397 Mark also offered some suggestions for Heavy Metal from the Muslim world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCZnQlkC-VQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNav2lzd-TQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iak5NDINSPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhQ-99Qqj_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P82dJIwi4Qc

27 Mars 20231h 42min

We've now heard Fustel de Coulanges' understanding of the disturbances in Ancient Rome as revolutions brought on by changes to their religious belief structure. We've considered Machiavelli's fawning historical interpretation of Rome, through Livy, as a people who were more virtuous than any other, and maintained that virtue by subjecting themselves to privation and hardship, and who fell into unrest when they strayed from virtue. And we've now heard Turchin's view, that the unrest of the Roman Republic was created by structural-demographic factors. Now, we hear the people's history of Ancient Rome, from Marxist-Leninist Michael Parenti, whose view I wanted to include because it was so different from any other in how he views Julius Caesar and his role in Roman history: as a reformer and liberator of the people, killed by an entrenched oligarchy who wished for nothing other than to hold on to their wealth. Parenti walks through the history of the Late Republic as a history of increasing excesses of the nobility, which was then challenged by people's tribunes and other attempts at reform. In all cases, the nobility put down the reformer, but Caesar was different because he was only assassinated after he'd managed to succeed, and to redistribute the land and the wealth. The legitimacy of the senate was forever shaken, for Caesar was forever the people's champion, and it was thus that it required a civil war afterwards, and only the man who most successfully presented himself as Caesar's heir was able to win and secure order once again - even if he was not revolutionary that Caesar was. Parenti attacks the view of the 'gentleman historians' of Great Britain, and throughout history, who have viewed Rome as a true republic, with democratic representation. Instead, Parenti makes the case that Rome was ruled by a closed-off patriciate who cared for nothing other than their own wealth, and were even willing to undermine the health and stability of their empire in order to extract more. Caesar was the incarnation of this popular uprising into one man, who was willing to break all of the limitations and decorum the nobility had put into place as a means of ensuring that nothing ever changed. Caesar, rather than a tyrannical villain who was justly killed by Brutus, the "noblest Roman of them all", Parenti portrays Caesar as a tragic hero, who was the only hope for saving the republic and achieving justice.

21 Mars 20231h 50min

You have questions, I might have answers. Khajiit has wares, if you have coin. I was originally planning on doubling up episodes this week, but with the approaching tour, I’m going to have to set aside a couple weeks to just release an interview or Q&A in order to have steady releases. Hope this episode satisfies! Cheers.

14 Mars 20231h 13min

Peter Turchin has continued the work of Ibn Khaldun, by elaborating upon Khaldun's hypotheses and testing them against the wealth of historical data that we now possess. By means of a structural demographic analysis of historical empires, Turchin has worked for years to generate mathematical models in order to explain the trends that seem to recur in every complex society. Now, with the data of 10,000 years of human activity on the group level, it may be possible to finally move beyond the preliminary, pseudo-scientific steps of the discipline of history, and proceed into a truly mathematized phase. This is the discipline that Turchin calls "Cliodynamics", after the Muse of history of Ancient Greece. His intention to leave behind the anthropological and archaeological studies that characterized history in the past, and bring mathematics into the field so that we can begin to make predictions. The reason why many have been so resistant to this development is our belief in free will, and the unpredictability of human action. Turchin thinks that this is a mistake, because while individual decisions are often unpredictable at the individual, granular level, at the level of entire populations or demographics, human beings become rather predictable. Quite in line with the cyclical view of history postulated by Plato, Thucydides, or Nietzsche, Turchin brings the math to demonstrate the truth of their ideas: that, in the realm of human history, all returns eternally. For our sources today, we're primarily using Turchin's books: War and Peace and War, Ultrasociety, and a brief dip at the end into the overall idea of Ages of Discord, as well as some references to Secular Cycles by Turchin and Nefedov. We'll also include a number of quotes from Roman historians Livy, Plutarch and others, as we examine the period of the Roman Republic, the chaos of the Late Republic and the transition to the Principate, as explained by Turchin's structural-demographic theory. This should be fun, given that we've already considered these events somewhat through the eyes of Machiavelli. Now, we can approach the subject with more rigor. In my view, Turchin is following in the traditions of these thinkers, but developing their work further. Episode art is Thomas Cole's now famous "Destruction" piece of his cycle, "The Course of Empire".

7 Mars 20231h 48min

From all accounts, Nietzsche did not read nor comment upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, outside of a few remarks from Schopenhauer in one of his essays that Nietzsche might have read. But what we find in his Muqaddimah is a theory of cyclical history, in which many of the key principles of Nietzsche's political philosophy would find agreement. Ibn Khaldun was a historian from North Africa whose work sought to explain why it was that the same pattern seemed to repeat ad infinitum. The Bedouin desert tribes would overwhelm one of the settled cities of the Mediterranean, from time to time, then establish a new city there. For a time, the culture of the new city would be like that of the Bedouins in the desert. But, eventually, a sedentary culture set in, over the course of several generations, and the inhabitants grew complacent, became incompetent, and eventually found themselves overthrown by another desert tribe, and the process would then repeat. In his studies, Khaldun arrives at the concept of asabiya, or the capacity for collective power, which can be very useful for a Nietzschean perspective on social power structures. This concept of asabiya means, literally, 'group feeling', and describes the extent to which the individuals feel themselves to part of a unified, coherent group, and are thus able to act as instruments of the group, and coordinate their actions as a team. Asabiya increases in harsh conditions, and declines in conditions of luxury, and thus the cycle of empires is set into motion - "This is how God proceeds with His creatures." Just as Nietzsche suggests the idea of all things returning eternally, Khaldun's writing brings this idea into the historical and political sphere. But Ibn Khaldun is significant because he presents this not only as a poetical idea, but as a pattern based on observable facts. There are many, many observations and anecdotes in the Muqaddimah, and we will not be able to cover it all, so we shall focus on the points most relevant to the ideas covered this season. This will be our first journey into a work outside the Western Canon, into one of the most important thinkers of the Near East. Join me in exploring the dynamics of history, as we jump into the basic ideas of the Muqaddimah.

28 Feb 20231h 24min