The Nietzsche Podcast

Welcome to season 6! Part I of III. In this first episode, we'll lay the groundwork for Klossowski's critical reading of Nietzsche, beginning with the material from the first two chapters. Klossowski applies Nietzsche's own methodology to Nietzsche's works, and reads his philosophy as a sign-language of impulses. The valetudinary states that dominated Nietzsche's life are reinterpreted in a radical way, with Klossowski's assertion that Nietzsche oftentimes saw thought as a source of suffering, and sided with the "attacks" of his body against the conscious, rational agent.

If you would like to have your own questions answered on The Nietzsche Podcast, no matter how unusual, niche, or rambling, then join the Patreon and participate in our regular Q&As that happen about twice per season. Season six starts next week!

The conclusion of the main books of The Gay Science! We'll cover some of the best aphorisms so far: the greatest weight, the dying Socrates, long live physics, and many more. Thus begins Zarathustra's down-going. Episode art: Nicholas Roerich - Zarathustra (1931)

More aphorisms concerning drives, the way that impulses appropriate thought for their own ends, "moral pluralism", means of finding happiness, pleasure and pain as means rather than ends, and experimentation as method.Episode art: The Two Crowns (1900) by Frank Dicksee

Continuing with our readthrough of The Gay Science, book number IV.

Embark, philosophers! Nietzsche hopes for the discovery of many new suns - many new suns - by the philosophical explorers of future ages. For what is needful is that man may learn to be satisfied with himself. Episode art: Fresh Breeze of Sandy Hook, 1860 by William Bradford

PF Jung's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PFJungIf politics is in some sense determined by our psychological temperament, then from an evolutionary standpoint, perhaps there is social value to both the left and right wing perspectives. And yet, centrism remains a dirty word in online discourse, connoting a type of establishment position that favors the status quo. Pf Jung joins me to discuss his philosophy of "radical enlightened centrism", which opposes the status quo while drawing on ideas from both fringes. Also, a correction: at one point in the conversation I claim that Australia has a mandatory civil service, but this is actually incorrect. I got this confused because of a conversation I recalled between myself, an Australian and a German, in which we talked about mandatory civil service (which Germany has) and mandatory voting (which Australia has), but Australia does not have mandatory civil service.

Continuing with The Gay Science, and beginning with book IV, "Sanctus Januarius". Here, we encounter some of the most famous aphorisms: For the New Year, Preparatory Men ("Live Dangerously!") and Excelsior. Exciting times!Episode art: View of Genoa under the Snow - Eugenio Olivari (1882-1917)

The conclusion of our two-parter on Erich Heller, and the conclusion to season five! We discuss Nietzsche's friendship with Jacob Burckhardt, and how Burckhardt's view of history can inform our understanding of Nietzsche's divergence from him. We also consider Goethe's four ages of intellectual culture, and Nietzsche's echo of Goethe in his history of European nihilism, and how he comes to differ from Goethe, Schopenhauer and all his influences in his proclamations about history, in which the Overman shall transcend the cyclical, unchanging stagnation of human history by changing the nature of man himself. Finally, we consider what the hazard of modern poetry means for us in the present day, what each figure's answer to this divorce between symbol & real means, whether they succeeded or not, and what we can learn from them.

Something happened to the human mind around the birth of modernity: the divorce of reality and the symbol. Once unified in eucharist, the symbolic and the real are now separate spheres of the human mind, and while it initially seemed that art and science might benefit by this separation, in the long run, both have ended up poorer thereby. In this episode, the two-part finale of season five, we will discuss Luther & Zwingli, and their dispute about the holy communion; Goethe & Schiller and their argument about the difference between the idea and the experience; and Goethe's avoidance of tragedy and what this says about the "hazard of modern poetry".

Additional episode will release tomorrow. Erich Heller two-parter starts next week for the season finale!

An exploration of the chapter on Homer's Odyssey and on De Sade's Juliette. How enlightenment and the rationality of domination is contained in the Odyssey, and how the self-undoing of enlightenment morality is contained in Juliette.

Foundations of Critical Theory, and an exploration of the chapters, "The Concept of Enlightenment", "The Culture Industry". We analyze how myth and enlightenment both contain one another, and why enlightenment negates itself. We explore what this means in concrete terms by examining the culture industry and how the apparent democratization of culture leads to its dissolution. Part one of two.

Don't worry, we're still doing Dialectic of Enlightenment next week, but my tour schedule and personal demands on my time (I'm moving) prevented me from finishing a full episode before departing for another week. Thankfully, I had this reading guide finished and decided to release it now. Back next week with a full length episode. Cheers!

In this episode, we begin a three-part series on Martin Heidegger and his reading of Nietzsche. The episode begins with a discussion of the background of Heidegger's life and ideas, as well as a brief tour of the content of Being & Time in which we look at Dasein, temporality, care, being-towards-death among other core concepts. In the latter half of the episode, we turn towards an introductory discussion of how Heidegger sees Nietzsche & his place within the Western philosophical tradition, as well as his comments about the necessity of the interrelation between will to power and the eternal return.

An Irishman named Stef visited Austin recently. We met for a discussion about the revaluation of values, strange brain experiments with magnets, Gnosticism and its relation to the politics of castration, the brain's threat detection matrix as creating the "hard times strong men" cycle, the possibility of neuro-physiological centrism, and how this all relates to Dionysus v/s the Crucified.

This episode is an upload to Spotify of my response to Abigail Thorn's "Was Nietzsche Woke?" video. This video was previously uploaded to Youtube.Watch me spend more time than the entire length of Abigail Thorn's video explaining why it is a superficial hit piece based on strained, bizarre arguments and outright false information. There are many "creative omissions" in Philosophy Tube's video, "Was Nietzsche Woke?": rather basic information about Nietzsche's life and his ideas is left out that would completely one's view of the information presented. In this rebuttal, we'll look at the statements in Nietzsche's own published works in Human, All Too Human (1878), Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Beyond Good & Evil (1886) Ecce Homo (1888) & Twilight of Idols (1888) as well as selections from Nietzsche's letters, his essays, and unpublished notes assembled in Will to Power. Philosophy Tube's video relies almost entirely on secondary sources and clearly does not derive from a direct engagement with the actual texts. While I actually have read all of the primary source material, I also reference the following secondary sources in this video:The Legend of the Anti-Christ: A History by Stephen J. Vicchio (2009)Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antchrist by Walter Kaufmann (Fourth Edition, Princeton University Press, 1974)Nietzsche's Women: Beyond the Whip by Carol Diethe (2013, De Gruyter)I was also informed in my study by the biographies provided by Krell & Bates, as well as Curtis Cate and the work of Charlie Huenemann. Stephen Hicks' book, Nietzsche and the Nazis, while I disagree with it on many points, was also helpful in elucidating the difference between Nietzsche's view of Christianity versus that of the Nazis. Also, Robert Solomon helped contextualize the common views around eugenics in 19th century Europe.

I talk about philosophy & music, my history as a musician, my new album, and give some updates about the future direction of the podcast.Stream the album today: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2025/05/slumbering-sun-on-starmony-an-interview-with-dooms-crazy-romantics.htmlAlbum comes out tomorrow, buy it here: https://slumberingsun.bandcamp.com/Listen to us on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7znYBHw9e9cY7KKbLXpUsS

The lightning round! The final episode of The Gay Science book III. The 100 sections we cover in this episode are all rapid-fire, short aphorisms on morality, human nature, the social life, virtue, vice, really the whole panoply of human experience!

Renaissance & Reformation, the critique of saintly virtue, the color we have thrown onto life and how it differs from that of the ancient world, and Nietzsche's attempt to "untangle the knot" of his moralization of the world by returning to the style of the moral maxim. Rapid fire epigrams finish out book III, we cover a large swatch of them in this reading and will hit the remainder of the book in the final episode for book III, next week.