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

Returning to our regularly scheduled lectures on Nietzsche... this week, we're going to wade into a hornet's nest and tackle one of the most contentious topics: freedom of the will. This episode will draw heavily on the conclusions reached in "9: The Wisdom of the Body", so brush up on the material there is you haven't already. It's not uncommon to encounter people who have no interest in talking about free will. Wherever one meets a philosopher who does want to talk about it, they usually have a very strong opinion on the matter. I think the fact that many are hesitant to discuss the issue owes to the fact that there are so many intractable opinions, which people are unwilling to change and which it is hard to imagine what kind of evidence could motivate people to move on the topic. In essence, we have a philosophical gridlock: and thus, like the issue of God's existence, or moral realism, or political ideologies, the debate ends up resembling something less like a competition of ideas, and more like two sides asserting, in the absence of reason, their own temperamental convictions. Hopefully, Nietzsche's perspective on this topic can help sear through these stale debates. While Nietzsche took a strong stand on free will vs. determinism, his position is not all that easy to summarize neatly. Furthermore, his views on free will are not as popular as many of his other ideas: partially because they are misunderstood, and partially because his position offends our sensibilities. Nietzsche attacks the heart of the free will debate: the issue of moral responsibility. He says that we have no moral responsibility for our actions, and no man chooses his own nature. An incendiary idea, to be certain! Michael Puett talks about Confucianism & the Chinese idea of the self: https://youtu.be/MfnSTr6-1g4 A short pair of clips of Hitchens' ironic comments on free will (RIP Hitch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_TGNJfg0s Episode art this week is courtesy of Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832)

24 Aug 20211h 25min

Untimely Reflections is a podcast within a podcast! In this series, I’ll be having conversations with other people interested in Nietzsche, and in philosophy. This time, I’m talking to Mynaa Miesnowan. This conversation was largely freeform. We talk about art, politics and religion as related forces that direct the course of society. We consider mass movements, dictatorships, and revolutions as caused by sociological forces that consciousness and ideology then steps in to explain and justify. Central to our interest is the relationship of world historical forces to our political, religious and aesthetic situation today. As of yet, I have no schedule for how frequently I'll produce these: it'll be limited to the availability of the people involved, but no more than one every two weeks or so. I plan on releasing these concurrently with the regular episodes of The Nietzsche Podcast (though if I'm particularly busy that won't always be the case), but I thought I'd put out he first one on our regular release day just to get your attention. A note on something I'd forgotten in the show: in Genealogy of Morality, the Church fathers whom I was trying to think of were Tertullian, and Nietzsche also mentions Aquinas. Visit Mynaa's website to keep up with his work in podcasting, and read his writing: https://www.bezabezar.com/ Thanks for listening, see you all for the regular Nietzsche podcast episode!

17 Aug 20211h 39min

This week we’re going heavy on the source material, because this particular set of ideas was fleshed out (no pun intended) in passages spanning multiple works, and for the most part in unpublished notes. As Nietzsche was fond of saying, however, all the main points of his philosophy are covered at one point or another in his Zarathustra — and so this week’s episode takes its name from a passage in Zarathustra, wherein the titular character says “there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy”. The Nietzschean view of the self is that the body and its instincts are primary, in contrast to the Enlightenment view of the mind as primary. For Nietzsche, the rational consciousness is a narrator which merely gives an after-the-fact explanation. The true person is the body and its unconscious, irrational drives. This view of the self subverts many of our presuppositions about the power of reason, and about man’s free will. Episode art: Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

10 Aug 20211h 15min

The topic for this week is... The Truth. The Nietzschean view of truth is one of the most difficult positions to convey, because the nature of the topic requires pushing language to its limits. To question the value of truth-seeking seems antithetical to the very activity of philosophy. Is Nietzsche just being obstinate? Is he an irrationalist? Is he a postmodernist? What about a Neo-Kantian? And what about Jordan Peterson's summation of his view of truth, that, "truth ought to serve life"?  As I was expounding the wicked immoralisms of Nietzsche, towards the end of the episode, the rumbling of thunder was picked up by the microphone. This is either evidence that God himself was angered as I continued to challenge the sacred relationship between "the Good" and "the True", or else that I decided to record an episode during our rainy season. It recurs a few times, so I thought I'd clarify that it is not an added sound effect, but simply a random occurrence. Nevertheless, it makes the concluding section of the episode sound all that more forbidden and profound! This week we venture into one of the most fraught topics among the followers of Nietzsche. Ready your swords and your shields, my friends, for Truth Loves Only a Warrior! Episode art this week is Pallas Athene by Rembrandt, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

3 Aug 20211h 9min

I’m still out of town, wandering through the desert and the mountain-peaks (no, seriously). I’ll be home next week, but for now it’s still adaptations from my articles on Medium. This one also began as an essay on reddit and was eventually polished into the form you hear it in now: Nietzsche versus Socrates. Upon looking it over again, this essay is actually quite comprehensive in assessing Nietzsche’s view of The Old Gadfly of Athens. “Socrates, to confess is frankly, is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.” Nietzsche’s thoughts on Socrates are complex, but this is the closest one can get in a single sentence to Nietzsche’s relationship with him. In this episode, which consists of a reading of the essay, we’ll examine Socrates from various angles: as the philosopher of life, as the critic, as the martyr, as the decadent, and finally — as what Nietzsche calls, a “destiny”, as a great-souled individual who left his mark on the hearts and minds of men throughout time.

27 Juli 202146min

Since I’m out of town, I recorded some shorts for you! This one is a reading of a Medium Article I wrote, introducing the concept of resentment and will to power as a psychological phenomenon. Included is a bit of extra material I recorded off the cuff, drawing on material in The Antichrist.

20 Juli 202120min

Today, we’re going to delve for the first time into one of Nietzsche’s influences. Heraclitus is known for his sayings such as “Everything flows”, and “One cannot step into the same river twice.” Heraclitus lived during a time before philosophy was well-defined as a discipline, and before there were well-known philosophical schools in Greece. Nietzsche had his own fascinating theories about the philosophers who lived before Plato, and we cannot understand his inspiration from Heraclitus without understanding how he perceived the Pre-Platonics: as archetypal philosophers, who dared to uniquely define their own style of philosophical thought. This was the greatness of the figures Nietzsche called, somewhat controversially, the Pre-Platonics. They were the first Greek philosophers, at a time before philosophy, science and religion had split. Rather than seeing them as outdated or unimportant, Nietzsche sees a fascinating narrative about the rise of materialism and scientific thought, and in Heraclitus - perhaps the very model for Nietzsche’s own philosophical quest.

13 Juli 20211h 18min

A mysterious illness. A headstone for Karl Ludwig. An enigmatic inscription. In today's episode, we pose the question of why Nietzsche would memorialize his dead father, a Lutheran pastor, with a verse from Corinthians. This unusual event in Nietzsche's life intersects with both his lifelong ailment and his most ambitious philosophical ideas. In order to answer this question, we'll go on the podcast's first deep dive into Nietzsche's personal life - particularly his early life, his romantic period, and his ill-fated friendships with Richard Wagner, Paul Ree, and Lou Salome. This episode was partially inspired by an essay by Charlie Huennemann, a professor who has published many books worth checking out, including one on Nietzsche. You can find his blog here: https://huenemanniac.com/ Other sources utilized in the episode: Leonard Sax, What was the cause of Nietzsche’s dementia? (pdf link: www.leonardsax.com/Nietzsche.pdf) Hemelsoet D1, Hemelsoet K, Devreese D., The neurological illness of Nietzsche (Abstract): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18575181 Information on CADASIL: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/cerebral-autosomal-dominant-arteriopathy-with-subcortical-infarcts-and-leukoencephalopathy

6 Juli 202153min