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

The final episode of season two. We discuss some of my favorite passages from Nietzsche, concerning the feeling of liberation one has upon finally and fully accepting the Nietzschean affirmative philosophy, and what this means for our future. Nietzsche urges us not to interpret him as giving us a definitive way of life to follow, but furthermore does not wish us to seek for a state of finality, rest, or utopia. The great experience of noontide is the perception that one is truly halfway between animal and that which is super-human, and that transformation into something greater is possible: that we can overcome our previous limitations that we believed once were set in stone. The episode concludes with a thank you to the fans, a teaser of what is to come in the podcast, and a reading of Nietzsche's Aftersong for Beyond Good and Evil, "From High Mountains." Episode art: Zoroaster Clavis -- Alchemist Who Has Achieved Illumination

2 Aug 20221h 42min

A synthesis of all ideas of Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy as we have discussed it this season. Join me as I dare to embark on the challenge of answering, on Nietzsche’s behalf, that age-old question… What is the meaning of life? Episode art: Joseph Werner - Diana of Ephesus as allegory of Nature, c. 1680

26 Juli 20222h 3min

This time, I'm answering questions just from patrons. If it sounds cool to you to get to ask me additional Q&A questions in between the public Q&As, you can become a patron. Honestly, I know I say this every time, but every time it's true: this is my favorite question and answer session yet! Got into some very deep and very fun territory. Love it. When this goes up on reddit, I'll ask the public for more questions so we can follow up with another episode, this time with an opportunity for everyone to have their queries answered.

19 Juli 20221h 13min

On our second excursion into Nietzschean science, we’re studying Nietzsche’s two most celebrated figures in science: one from Ancient Greece and another from Enlightenment Europe. In Democritus, Nietzsche sees the zenith of the materialist project in Greek philosophy, opening the way for a mathematical atomist description of the world, carried on by the Pythagoreans. In Boscovich, he finds a continuation of this project, centuries later - to describe the world by one force or law, and account for the problem of motion in a way that rejects Kantian or Newtonian appeals to God, or Spinozistic teleology. What comes out of this inquiry is an understanding that Nietzsche may have construed the will to power as a physical reality from the very beginning. From this perspective, will to power is the answer to the problem of motion; it is the inner, “intelligible character” of matter; it is the qualitative expression of what Boscovich’s unified field theory offers us in quantitative terms. This episode culminates in a look at some of Nietzsche’s more extreme or puzzling statements in his notes where will to power is discussed as a very real physical principle. Pictured in the episode art are Democritus and Boscovich.

12 Juli 20221h 32min

In this episode, we revisit the Pre-Platonic lecture series given by Nietzsche at Basel, the notes for which were assembled and translated by Gregory Whitlock. These lectures detail Nietzsche’s views on the first philosophers of Ancient Greece, and how they demonstrated that the spirit of scientific investigation is a manifestation of will to power: to bound the boundless within the understanding of reason, by appeal to as few possible starting principles. Nietzsche believes that the Pre-Platonic philosophers - Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and others - represented the descent from an understanding of the world as controlled by a personified heaven, into something explained by natural forces. The end result is materialism: matter as explained by matter itself and its properties or laws. This is powerful and dangerous as an innovation. Materialism offers the greatest utility, but precedes a slide into nihilism. Many of Nietzsche’s insights in his interpretation were influenced by the philosopher of science, Friedrich Albert Lange. In this episode, we examine the relation of Nietzsche to Lange, their view of the Pre-Platonics, and then analyze each figure individually to see how each fits in to Nietzsche’s narrative of the unfolding of scientific thought in Greece. Rather than a mere historical curiosity, Nietzsche finds the Greeks to express the same driving tendency that underlies science in our own time.

5 Juli 20221h 50min

In this episode, I'm reading a chapter of my book, Unconscious Correspondences. I considered an episode on Cartesian Dualism, but realized I'd already said everything I needed to say, in a chapter in this book. Rather than repurposing the same content into a new form, why not just read directly from the book? As Nietzsche tended to do when introducing his own earlier works, I shall do the same. I will introduce this essay: "Body and Mind: The Life and Meditations of Rene Descartes - A Polemic" with, "An attempt at self-criticism". This essay has its flaws, and belabors the point a bit too stringently at places. In retrospect, I made some very overgeneralized claims about academia and modern attitudes towards Descartes that one could easily challenge. I should also say that these claims derived from personal experience with my own professors, and the professors of many of my friends. Descartes was always taught as being "basically a secret atheist who didn't believe the religious stuff at all and included it just to please the church." Not only did one of my own professors say some version of this, I heard this from others, attending different universities. This always struck me as odd, because the central premises of his Meditations on First Philosophy are completely derived from Christian presuppositions, which are simply taken from theology and put into philosophical language. Thus, I challenged: whether Descartes was truly a departure from past philosophy (Plato, of course, sets up figures to raise assertions and Socrates to raise skeptical objections/doubts); whether Descartes was actually an atheist or a deist (or whether we could understand him within the assumption he was a Christian, perhaps a Rosicrucian); whether our own interpretations of Descartes have to do with our embrace of the "mind as self" ego-consciousness (thus leading us to be confused and embarrassed by Descartes' invocation of God as the ultimate certainty). While I wrote in a way that was somewhat clumsy in my eyes now, and while I may have spent too much time in a detour talking about the background historical context in which Descartes emerged, I feel these challenges are raised in a forceful and meaningful enough way to be useful for people to think about. https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/unconscious-correspondences/3fe82dc3-d4ac-4d61-81c3-9ce9a7abe483

28 Juni 20221h 3min

Much had been made of Nietzsche’s predictions of the coming nihilism. As a result of the death of the Christian God, Europe is bound for a crisis of values, in which nothing can any longer give us a goal beyond ourselves and our own happiness, and people search for this meaning or justification in all sorts of other spheres of human life: morality, reason, history, and utility. Ultimately, however, since we have so thoroughly devalued the physical world of experience, we find no such meaningful answer to the problem of life. That we have devalued life in order to justify life was a masterstroke of Christianity, so long as we had a transcendent authority to look to: a higher sphere to justify the material sphere. But now, we are left only with the burdens, the curse on existence, the “in vain”. As the will cannot aim at nothing, the ultimate consequence is the pursuit of happiness for the greatest number. Rather than this passive, incomplete nihilism, Nietzsche dreams of an active nihilism, and a strength of will to cut through the meaninglessness into a true revaluation. Come explore the meaning, causes and consequences of nihilism with me! Episode art: Gustave Dore - Satan’s Fall to Earth

21 Juni 20221h 26min

After the wager is agreed upon between Faust and Mephisto, the two set off to explore the world. Mephisto takes Faust out drinking in Leipzig. Then, Mephisto procures for him a youth potion from one of his earthly servants - a witch - that takes thirty years off of Faust's life, restoring him to perfect youth. Then, while on their travels, Faust meets a young girl named Gretchen, by happenstance, and decides he must have her, forcing Mephisto to help him in this endeavor. Most of the rest of part one then deals with this storyline as it unfolds: the "Gretchen Tragedy", in which an innocent, devout young woman falls in love with a charming, mysterious stranger - only to have her heart broken, her family destroyed, and her life ruined. In his endless quest for new experiences, Faust is willing to take on all pain, all pleasure, all triumph, all calamity. But what about when Faust brings tragedy onto others? And what if it is the very woman he loves who suffers the most because of his actions? While part two of Faust is impossible to summarize, we'll then do our best of covering that material, and then, of course, the masterful final scene of the play, written more than fifty years after the first lines were first put to parchment. Goethe's Faust ultimately reveals to us the story of Faust's entire life, and thus could only be written over the course of a lifetime by Goethe. Join me in exploring this great work of world literature, which seeks to redeem the dissatisfied, wayward aspect within the Enlightened mind.

14 Juni 20222h 2min