151: Julian Jaynes, part 2 - The Witness of History

Neema Parvini is well known on Youtube for his channel, Academic Agent, and for his para-academic work at the Academic Agency. He discusses a broad range of topics in political philosophy, and does not shy away from any topic, from elite theory to Marxism, from Julius Evola to Guy Debord. We discuss how he moved from literary theory to political philosophy; what politics really demands and why it is not the same as theorizing, the "take economy", or expressions of individualism; we discuss the difference between Evola & Nietzsche; and we try to come to an understanding of how it is that politics as most people experience it and understand it is fake. Join us for what I believe to be a fascinating conversation about the illusions of politics, and hopefully a step in the direction of disillusioning ourselves. Neema's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AcademicAgentAcademic Agency: https://www.academic-agency.com/

Melanie Coughlin, a scholar whose work focuses on Nishitani and the Kyoto school, joined me for a conversation that will hopefully provide a nice conclusion to the recent focus on Buddhism. We discussed karma, the misleading nature of intentions, Nishitani's theory of affect, emptiness-as-affect, the important difference between Nietzsche & Feuerbach, and the insights of Nishitani regarding technology and the modern world. Melanie's latest article: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/speculative-philosophy/article/doi/10.5325/jspecphil.40.3.0269/411454/Cripping-Epistemic-Justice-Yoritaka-s-Model-of?guestAccessKey=57a4823a-0672-4798-aff3-1a0d6f49f975

How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of subjectivity. The episode concludes with a brief tour of the shift to subjectivity found in the Old Testament.

What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controversial work, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes puts forward the hypothesis that consciousness is generated out of language, and therefore that language predates consciousness. Jaynes' argument has sweeping implications for human history and civilization, and he presents evidence for his case through psychological experiments on consciousness, the neurology of schizophrenia, and through the analysis of ancient texts such as the Iliad of Homer. The shocking claim made in this book is that the Greeks of the Iliad were not conscious in the way that we are, but experienced their volition in the form of admonitory voices - actually, a communication from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left, using language as a kind of code - but which the ancients experienced as the voices of gods.

In this episode, we're going to discuss what is likely the founding text of the Zen tradition, the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra. According to some of the earliest sources on Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, the "Lanka" was the teaching whose "abstruse principle" he passed down to his successor, Huike. Within the same story, Huike laments that within only a few generations, the sutra will pass into obscurity - which is exactly what has happened. Though few read this text today, during my time in Zen, I found the Lanka's philosophical presentation of the "mind only" teaching to be uniquely intriguing among all the Buddhist scriptures I'd read. Join me on this exploration of the Buddha's teaching in Lanka, including an analysis of the eight consciousness model of the mind, the concept of paravrrti, the non-reliance on either existence or non-existence, and sublime teaching that the world is nothing other than mind.My Diagram:https://untimely-reflections.blogspot.com/2026/09/lankavatara-sutra-my-diagram-of-eight.html

This episode begins with an analysis of Baizhang's wild fox koan found in the Wumenguan, which we will use as a jumping off point for understanding the paradoxical relationship of the enlightened person with karma. This opens up into the general problem of discussing reality from the perspective of sunyata, in which samsara and nirvana become equivalent - because, so long as one approaches from the perspective of conceptual thought, they will remain forever unequivalent, and all such statements will be false or misleading. Join me as we discuss karma, the bodhisattva vow, "plucking out the eye of Buddha and sitting in its hollow", the meaning of "just sitting" in zazen, and the time when St. Francis made the sign of the cross to a cauterizing iron and blessed his brother, fire.

UPDATE: I accidentally uploaded part two to Spotify instead of part one. This has been fixed. To those who got to listen to the entire two-parter already already, lucky! But, the audio should now be part one. Join me for a deep dive into Nishitani's opus, Religion and Nothingness: an intersection of philosophy and religion, east and west, Heidegger and the Mahayana. The topics I choose to emphasize in my reading are: the "double exposure" whereby the two layers of reality (being and nihility) are simultaneously perceived; the mechanization of the world, which serves to objectify the scientific worldview; Nietzsche's answer to this problem, as Nishitani understands it; the religious quest, in which one pushes through nihility, subsuming their entire life and body within the "great doubt"; finally, the standpoint of sunyata in which emptiness is perceived as the ground of being.

For all that is admirable in Buddhism, Nietzsche fundamentally opposes the movement towards the Last Man that Buddhism not only cannot oppose, but may even help bring forth. Why does the notion of a "European Buddhism" haunt Nietzsche's later writings? We will explore this question here: how a religion that is realistic, empirical, and achieves great practical success in the relief of suffering isnevertheless inevitably aimed at uprooting all action and delivering man to a state of passivity. Here we find another religion of pity, and another denial of the world - merely deprived of the sensualism and moral fanaticism of Christianity. Were such a religion to take hold in the West, Nietzsche believes, the opportunity of moment, which we face as a consequence of the death of God, would be squandered. Join me in exploring more sutras, as well Nietzsche's criticisms of Buddhism in The Gay Science, Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, and the Will to Power.

Welcome back to The Nietzsche Podcast, Season Seven! We're beginning with a two-part episode concerning Nietzsche's view of Buddhism. This episode, we will consider some of the basic teachings of Buddhism, and explore why Nietzsche viewed Buddhism with admiration. A repeated refrain in The Antichrist concerns Buddhism's superiority over Christianity. Why is it that Nietzsche considered Buddhism, a religion with a complex metaphysics and cosmology, to be a far more realistic and logical religion than Christianity? We are pointed in the direction of an answer in Nietzsche's description of Buddhism as "the religion of self-redemption".The following episode will concern Nietzsche's criticisms of Buddhism.

Season seven begins soon! For now, enjoy a selection of fascinating questions.