I am very happy that people found our talk engaging and took the time to write. Robinson is genuinely interested, which shows in his thoughtful questions and arresting reactions. I confess I haven't been able to watch more than a minute or so!
Thank you very much for such a wonderful talk, professor! It brought colors to our mundane weekends, and was, indeed, enlightening. Thanks also go to Robinson for his great channel!
Vegan here! Haha. I always start with that. I believe The Will to Power addresses a general Nietzschean position towards human treatment of animals: The way organisms interact is viewed as a biologically determined, amoral, process,. When a noble lords over a serf, or when a farmer slaughters the lamb, then it is just as when a stronger cell assimilates the weaker. However, following the doctrine of 'perspectivism', how we feel about this will be down to our cultural norms and situation. I see Nietzsche as suggesting we are free to create our own values, and we should take a perspective that avoids life-denying asceticism and self-corrosive resentment. That is his perspective, and he unapologetically leaves no room for pessimism, self-pity, resentment and dullness. As he quips, “Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.” But I do think that Nietzsche's final 'sane' act, where he hugged the flogged horse in Turin, suggests that perhaps he realised that he had been in error. Perhaps his whole mental construction came crashing down when he shared the suffering of a slave-like animal. Just speculation. I cannot find a way to avoid veganism, but if I do I'll be moving toward a Nietzschean perspective. I'm pretty sure it might make eating a lot less restrictive, but at the same time I have a feeling I'll always taste my bad faith. If I witness an animal suffering then I think it will all fall apart. Some things go beyond reason and argumentation. Nietzsche would agree with that.
Thanks Podcat! And thanks Robinson for helping him with another video. My cat, Puss son of Puss, turned to nihilism as a way to deal with his rage over people constantly anthropomorphising. He hates that.
This is a beautiful comment and I appreciate it in every way. The Podcat, however, resents being referred to as "him", because she is the empress of the show.
I love Nietzsche: Life as Literature. It's a no-brainer for anyone interested in both Nietzsche and literary theory, and has plenty of beefy, instructive analysis of a crucial Nietzschean issue for philosophy-heads; namely, the collapsing boundaries between moral, aesthetic, and epistemic categories of thought. Can't recommend it enough!
what a coincidence, I'm reading his "The Art of Living", thank you for interviewing these great scholars! guest suggestion: Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith
A day early, nice. Funny i've been studying nietzche/heidegger this week, because it seems they stumbled upon something worth thinking about; interrogating being and "truth," then I see that you uploaded this! Pretty cool, keep up the good work Robinson!
Fantastic, Robinson! One observation or however you might call it (subjective): there should be more distance between people (you and an interviewee). That is a much more comfortable set. But again thanks, a great show!
Nietzsche was a deeply reactionary thinker much troubled by the revolutionary fervour of 19th Century Europe (1848, and later events like the Paris commune of 1871). His political nature is often ignored as in this interview (played down historically by mistranslations like Kaufmann) and outright ignored by many philosophers (including Derrida). Far from being a path for self discovery, thereby casting 'eternal recurrence' in existentialist terms, the objective was to erase universalism and to eradicate notions of progress (and thereby social revolution). Lukács, for example, pinpoints the fear that drove Nietzsche when he states that “the proletariat is the first oppressed class in history that has been capable of countering the oppressors’ philosophy with an independent and higher world-view of its own.” Nietzsche knew this himself, as we see in one of his notebook fragments from the late summer of 1873: “If the working classes ever discover that they easily could surpass us in matters of education and virtue, then it is all over for us!” He then adds a fascinating counterpoint to this reflection: “But if this does not occur, then it is really over for us.” Nietzsche, who served in many ways as the paragon of the reactionary form of critique,was also against socialism, democracy and any political project that sought to give power to the masses. As Domenico Losurdo has explained in detail, Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed ‘radical aristocrat’ whose identification of reason with domination served as a bulwark against the rational and scientific critique of class, racial, gender and sexual hierarchies.
I wish I could give my younger self some much needed advice but I would probably be like who are you to tell me what to do? Let me make my own mistakes. Then I'd reach my current age and wish I'd listened to myself. ps. A four point nine star rating is fine. A rating of 5 suggests you are trying too hard not to ruffle any feathers. Not everyone appreciates honesty.
Humaneness and kindness, for us, comes from the Christian focus on agape (love). Regarding animals: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So, my Christian take is if I were behind the veil of ignorance, knowing I might be an animal, my choice would be: If I'm a cow or something destined for the table, and I'm given a life only because of that, then if the life is good and the death is fast I'm happy to be that cow, chicken, whatever. Nietzsche would think all this talk of being nice to chickens absurd, but I'm a soft Christian and wouldn't want to hurt anything that lives.
