Untimely Reflections #7: Paul Katsafanas - Nietzschean Constitutivism

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.

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.

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.

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.

Among Nietzsche's critics, René Girard is perhaps unique. Girard's understanding of human civilization and the origins of human culture is that it is based on ritual, collective violence against a scapegoated individual - and he argues that Nietzsche is one of the only thinkers hitherto who understood this. Nietzsche's famous formula - Dionysus versus the Crucified - is the title of Girard's critical essay on Nietzsche. He does not quibble with Nietzsche's framing of the situation, but rather with Nietzsche's conclusions. While Nietzsche takes up for the side of Dionysus, Girard stands on the side of the Crucified, arguing that Nietzsche was fundamentally wrong to lament the ascendance of Christianity and to yearn for a return to the Dionysian. In the course of Nietzsche's defense of Dionysus, he put forward moral theories that were "untenable", and become increasingly "inhuman". Among the many commenters of Nietzsche, both disciples and critics, it is rare to find a figure like Girard, who recognizes Nietzsche's brilliance, but totally condemns his legacy. Join me today to learn about the life of Rene Girard, his theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating, and the impassioned case he puts forward for The Crucified.

Today we examine an 1875 Fragment, entitled "Science and Wisdom in Battle". Not only does this fragment contain one of my favorite quotations of Nietzsche's, it represents his continual grappling with the meaning of Ancient Greek culture. In particular, we discuss the importance of "relations of tension" in Nietzsche's earlier work: art versus science, culture versus the state, history versus forgetting, and of course, science and wisdom. Both are drives to knowledge, and the tension between them created philosophy in the tragic age of the Hellenes. Science is characterized by logical, objective, specialized knowledge, whereas Wisdom is defined by Nietzsche as a tendency for illogical generalization, leaping to one's ultimate goal, and an artistic desire to reflect the world in one's own mirror. Episode art: Sofia & Athena

In this episode, we continue our discussion of the Pre-Platonics, and cover the ideas of Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus. The episode begins with a brief recap of the previous philosophers and the dialogue up to this point. After considering the remaining Pre-Platonics, I have some brief concluding remarks in which I attempt to make sense of the entire picture as Nietzsche lays it out in this unfinished essay.

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is one of the more obscure texts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s corpus. There are many good reasons for this: it is unfinished, and ends abruptly; it was never published; and it concerns subject matter that is not as immediately accessible as Nietzsche’s more popular writings. You will not find his major concepts in this work – such as the will to power, or the critique of metaphysics - except insofar as those ideas appear in the background, inchoate, unnamed… not yet fully formed. In Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Pre-Platonic philosophers of Ancient Greece, we find the starting place for his later philosophical career. The inspiration for many of those great ideas, can arguably be found in his exegesis of these extraordinary figures from the Hellenic world, from the 6th to the 4th century BC. In today's episode, I'll introduce the text, then we'll cover the first three figures who I've classed as "the first cosmologists": Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus. While I'm mostly sticking to the text of the essay, I fill in some details using Nietzsche's lectures on the Pre-Platonics, on which this essay was based. Episode art: photo of the Temple of Poseidon

I answered questions from the Patrons. Enjoy!

Nietzsche said of this work that it was “the best German book”. For the last nine years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s life, Johann Peter Eckermann journaled about their conversations together. Goethe was a celebrity at the time, and destined to be remembered as perhaps the greatest writer of the German language, certainly of the 19th century. Eckermann, on the other hand, was a farmboy with a talent for copying - whether it was the artwork of Ramberg or the poetic style of Korner. When he met Goethe, who was in his seventies at the time, the young Eckermann looked up to him as the greatest of poets, and wanted nothing more than to record all of his wonderful memories with Goethe. In this work we find no narrative arc or rigorous structure, but simply a series of thoughts and feelings. It is a portrait of Goethe rather than a story about him, and offers a fascinating view into a different time and place.