Episode  

The best and most comprehensive Nietzsche interpretation I have ever encountered.

Thank you! And yes, more Nietzsche.

Great episode! And yes, more Nietzsche would be nice! :)

Hi Steven, Your commentary here got rid of some confusion I've harbored about this stuff with a sense of shame since high school. Thanks

Best philosophy channel out there!

My Sunday funday just got better! I am grabbing an IPA!

No one makes me like philosophy more than Steven West, doing Nietzsche.

first time I listened to this podcast in 2017. Im so so glad its still going. one of my favorite channels on youtube by a landslide. hardly anything gets close to this level of presentation on philosophy, maybe only Michael Sugrue. thanks man.

My favorite podcast on the internet!

Ah Nietzsche, the OG self-help guru…

Great video. And yes. I’d love to hear more Nietzsche.

Yes! More Nietzsche! And thank you for what you do!

My favourite philosopher, thanks Steven. ( I listen on Spotify)

Thank you. 💯 agree with this .

Quite strange when I realise - not having dived into Nietzsche - I’ve been advocating, fighting & living the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy all my 58 years… Dialectics were a thing with me before I knew anything about Hegel. Political economy a “given” until I got into historical materialism. All of this a little too inhuman until I realised modernist reductionism as a distraction, and my path towards meta-modernism. And all of this is NOT present in our general education - No surprises as to why. Thanks a lot for sharing! 😊

Nietzsche contents was what introduced me to your podcast, glad to hear it back again, the other philosophers especially the political one are nothing compared to the existentialists.

4 minutes in and I am already loving this episode. I have always avoided Nietzsche because it seemed too...intimidating. But now, at this juncture, I feel confident enough to tackle at least an introduction to his works. Lets do this!

I love it when the idols ring hollow

recently finished gay science and started twilight of the idols. he is serving as a good companion through the day

1) Somehow Nietzsche liked one way more than another - and denied that privilege to anyone else, as they are part of a herd. Well, so what? Perhaps straying away for the sake of it is just the opposite of pragmatic? 2) When I imagine a lion on a savannah, I see quite a bit of comfort and laziness, not necessarily an animal doing workouts just to get more tired and have more muscle volume. 3) And if a society lets someone exercise all the power he may desire or amass, this may well mean little power to share for those weaker. This is what authoritarianism boils down to - oopsie. 4) Or else, why would authoritarianism be "wrong"? Meh, that's herd thinking, right? Obviously, nothing should stop the better of us spread to infinity, riiiiight? A geopolitical catastrophy like WW2 may ultimately be just in the eye of the beholder. Some uber-Nietzscheans may see it as a splendid Dionisian spectacle, cause why not. Even if some fans claim Mr N. would not be among them for some reason. The only merit I see in that baroquish writer is he having pointed out that all those people before may not have seen good and evil as merely concepts and not some form of transcendent being. Good point there. Yet there is no good argument given for blowing this thing the hell up. These concepts have made sense because comfort and harmony is what helps people restore their power levels and live a happier life than a Macbeth figure. That assumption was a good intuition to have. And still is. Let's call it that and just stop mixing mr N with politics, the times are fun enough already.

Very interesting episode. I've always intended reading Nietzsche. This just reinforces that intention. I'd like to hear more.

Inspiring! I hope that works both ways.

Well explained as always. Easier to understand how his words can be twisted into ideas that were he to hear what has been done with his work, he'd tear his hair out

“Only ONE true Christian has ever existed: The guy who died on the cross.” Great context to comprehend Jesus’ teaching regarding ‘true religion’, and when James’ constituency wrote ‘it is (only, solely) caring for widows and orphans’.

Yeah, it was very interesting and if you have some more of this from Nietzche, I'm up for it!

Nice...

At 35:09 : “His point is, we need great people not living in denial of that voice inside of them.” But if Nietzsche didn’t think there was such a thing as an authentic self (also mentioned on this channel when discussing Zizek) what is this voice inside of them? Nietzsche wrote people are a collection of instincts and drives, right? But how to get from that to a voice inside of them saying how to live their lives?

Comfort - suffering and related dynamics that you describe here sounds a lot like... dialectics. But Nietzsche was critical of Hegel and dialectics?

Didn't some of the Pre-Socratic philosophers place a lot of emphasis on the beyond, objective and universal world, such as Parmenides?

It's Nietzsche! And he got a folding chair!

34:54 it is very obvious to anyone who studies the difference between earlier and later Nietzsche that his mind did not, in fact, go in one clean break. While some of his deepest insights came later, so did some of his most sociopathic moments. His sanity was definitely waning well before he succumbed to whatever he ultimately succumbed to.

You’ve already done like 5 or more 👀 WHOLE episodes on Mister Nietzsche and only 1 or 2 measly ones on Schopenhauer. Harrumph! 🤨🧐 “Why”?… I ask. Do at least one on more on Schopenhauer in order to re-balance the cosmic scale please. Thx

This man is an anarchist. ❤

This is like an undergraduate Philosophy degree in 30 minutes

30:10 Absolutely ridiculous! Legislating new values, which Nietzsche only grants to a few "superior" individuals, is the supreme kind of (meh!) "authoritarianism".

18:50 he suggests this outright in multiple places. The dogwhistle that is his favorite is that of “higher types”

I don't know man. The more I know about this Nietzsche, It feels more like philosophising by an eloquent nincompoop than philosophising by hammer.

Would a society built on the finding optimal pain and pleasure fit in Nietzsche 's view? By getting too much pain and you are weak and can't survive. Too much of pain and your can't handle it and die. Too little pleasure won't motivate you to do anything. And too much will make you weak because you can't live properly without it. The optimal of both would get people motivated in doing things and get people to grow mentally and physically.And getting school to find out what young people are great at and have them specialize in that instead of being great at many things and given they are taught critical thinking skills to finding solutions to problems and stuff. What does you think about this?

What set of circumstances represent comfort? What set of circumstances represent tribulation or suffering? You hear stories of people buying million dollar yachts then being miserable when their neighbours bought 10 million dollar ones. And of people choosing to sleep on beds of nails because they are comfortable and good for posture. I watched a youtube video where they showed a wall hanging of the buddhist wheel of existence. In each of the 5 realms there are buddhas. It doesn't really matter where you end up in life if you treat triumph and disaster as both imposters just the same. That's Nirvana. Everyone is different, but everyone can also better themselves and are worthy of respect, but not necessarily deference. Coming up with new ideas is hard, so why not just take up the ideas of great thinkers that resonate? How should 'diamonds in the rough' best be found? Who decides what such criteria should be? That notion also seems to be a product of slave morality to me. Don't go out to find someone to believe in. Believe in yourself! Buddhists don't believe in the Buddha. They just think he had good ideas.

"Nietzche hates christianity, with the whole 'god is dead' thing." Im gonna be real. That is not even close to my interpretation of that concept.

Every time I m hearing that Nietzsche was against a society that tries to minimise suffering Im thinking wĥat world did he live in? Where or when was this too equal society? Maybe he spend too much time in his head and not the real world? The world has a lot of problems but being too safe, equal or comfortable is not one of these

And well, if Jesus and other strong characters have shone through, that's because strong individuals don't need more support than those weaker than them, right? They have the power and they achieve what they wanted to achieve. So where is a problem?

Socrates/plato

finally some good fucking food

Well Mr. West, I hate this one. I hate how you've steel-manned Neitzch and made his ideas sane and meaningful. I hate how you've taken away the arch-villain of my religious youth and replaced him with deep questions. Joking aside - I have to think about this for a while.

Nietzsche, Everyone's favorite proto-fascist.

36:15 this is an oversimplification, of which Mr. This! is most definitely aware and is not doing fallaciously. However, to (even implicitly) suggest that Nietzsche’s work cannot be extrapolated into highly problematic and violent political views is as blatantly wrong as seeing outright authoritarianism in his words.

25:44 and Napoleon