Untimely Reflections #34: Gnostic Informant

The ninth time that I’ve done this.

7 Maj 20241h 41min

My friend Quinn and I discuss whether Deleuze is an accurate interpreter of Nietzsche. What are the faults of Deleuze's interpretation, and what are its merits? We discuss the eternal return, the anti-Hegelian attitude of Deleuze, ressentiment and bad conscience, and the Deleuzian understanding of will to power. More broadly, we discuss what it is that makes an interpretation correct, and how there are different mindsets behind the left and right interpretations of Nietzsche.

3 Maj 20241h 33min

Carl Jung contributed to psychoanalysis in an important way, but that contribution to the field is inseparable from his engagement with Nietzsche. Jung derived a wealth of insights from Nietzsche’s work, and his psychological state that deteriorated into madness. Jung’s central hypothesis is that Nietzsche was possessed by an archetype. Such archetypal inflation was the result of a deep imbalance within Nietzsche’s psyche, springing from his rejection of the spiritual.

30 Apr 20241h 22min

Carl Gustave Jung was a student of Freud, but broke from his mentor in a dramatic way. Jung acquired the reputation of being a mystic, and put forward ideas that pushed the boundaries of psychoanalysis. This is a crash course in Jung’s most important ideas: projection, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. In this episode, we go in-depth on the major archetypes that Jung describes. These are subpersonalities that exist in every human unconsciousness, which will manifest insensibly in one’s desires, and find themselves projected by the subject into the external world.

23 Apr 20241h 26min

Weltgeist x The Nietzsche Podcast. A long-awaited conversation. We discuss: the aesthetics of Schopenhauer v/s Nietzsche, the Schopenhauerian influence on Wagner's music, The Pale Blue Dot, the Eros as discussed in Plato's Symposium, philosophy and art as luxuries of civilization, and what Nietzsche describes as the asceticism of the scientific worldview.

16 Apr 20241h 43min

Daniel Tutt is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite, a new book which warns leftist thinkers about the power and danger of Nietzsche. Daniel has a long history of engaging with Nietzsche’s philosophy, and argues for a pugilistic relationship with him. In his view, the French leftists who utilized Nietzsche’s work sometimes centered Nietzsche to their own detriment. Daniel’s project aims not at canceling Nietzsche, but in reading him with a sober understanding of his political perspective and the ways in which it informs all of his ideas.

9 Apr 20241h 27min

Stephen Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher, and the author of numerous books, including Understanding Postmodernism, and Nietzsche & the Nazis. As Professor Hicks is a critic of postmodernism, I decided to ask him about Nietzsche's connection to postmodern thought. Is Nietzsche a postmodernist, and to what extent did he influence them? How do we explain the moral differences between Nietzsche and the postmodernists? We also discussed some topics related to objectivism and Ayn Rand. How does Nietzsche's epistemology and ethics differ from that of Ayn Rand? Professor Hicks articulates the case for the foundationalist view, and we finished the conversation by discussing the state of the academy as he sees it, and the future of philosophy.

2 Apr 20241h

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) said of Nietzsche that he had "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live." In spite of this, Freud always denied that Nietzsche was an influence on his thought, in spite of his multiple references to Nietzsche in his early work. While Freud certainly drew from Nietzsche's ideas, he was an original thinker in his own right, who followed on the same path of inquiry as Nietzsche, but with the tools of empirical research and the within the scientific spirit of psycho-analysis. Freud comes to believe that the driving force of human life is libido, a sexual impulse, and that the stages of psychosexual development determine the health or pathology of one's adult life. Central to his analysis of human psychology is the Oedipus Complex, and his notion that the superego emerges to suppress it. In this episode, we also discuss the Id (Unconsciousness), the faculty of repression, the concept of cathexis, and the meaning of dreams. In spite of the ways in which Freud has been marginalized in recent years, in his work we find an extraordinary thinker who built upon Nietzsche's ideas, and truly managed to change the entire paradigm of psychological thinking.

26 Mars 20241h 20min