00:02:20.800So when last we met Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a budding philologist and writer of
00:02:26.460many books, who then, you know, had an unfortunate incident with a horse and went mad and became
00:02:32.940famous, not necessarily in that order, and who we sort of thought pioneered a kind of trollish
00:02:39.320sensibility when it came to feminism and to women's issues. And he did so very interestingly
00:02:44.480in dialogue really with the first wave of German feminism. He knew some of the protagonists,
00:02:50.980They read him. They also cleaned his clock with refreshing regularity. But so, you know, this is someone who's really thinking through gender questions from a very openly conservative position, while at the same time kind of both being in dialogue with women thinkers, but also someone that women thinkers drew on and feminist thinkers and queer thinkers drew on with quite some profit, right?
00:03:17.000We read a couple of quotes where people were like, yeah, a lot of this is really bad, but
00:03:21.840there are some interesting ideas here.
00:03:24.320And I think that Dionysian and Apollonian is a pretty good first place to start with
00:03:29.040that, because that is indeed something that a lot of people really liked of his, even
00:03:33.140if they thought that some of his other politics were just kind of bizarre or pointless or
00:08:41.300and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
00:08:44.320Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment
00:08:46.980when you would have answered him, you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine.
00:08:53.240It's pretty good, right? So that's what he means. The Greeks could affirm it all, right? Yes,
00:09:00.080there was pain. Yes, there was dullness. Yes, there was boredom. Yes, there was sighs. But
00:09:05.900you affirm it all. You just affirm it all. And this test, whether you could say to this demon,
00:09:12.160like, yeah, let's do it. I'll do it all over. I'm ready. It's a great idea. And that's what he
00:09:17.740means by that. Now, the reason why I think this book had a legacy and the idea of the Dionysians
00:09:25.500had a legacy is, for one, this idea of affirmation, this idea that this is a pessimism
00:09:33.740that is ultimately not shrinking from the world. But the main thing, and I think we just have to
00:09:39.280be clear about this is that the dionysian as he describes it right think of like the apollonian
00:09:44.960is all about like measure and thoughtfulness etc etc it's about but sort of like a dreaming
00:09:50.420kind of rationality it's fantastical but it's not ultimately it's not ultimately like crazy
00:09:56.340whereas the dionysian is just like you know burning man after someone spiked the punch
00:10:02.200basically right like right it was just you know this is in the middle of the victorian era right
00:10:06.560Like, this is just people can imagine deeply, deeply sexy time and place and figure out, like, oh, actually, maybe, like, this guy is saying we should come back to some of that.
00:10:17.860This book is really saying, like, you got to bring this back.
00:10:19.940And he thinks Wagner's music does that.
00:10:34.240I might have to go with the orgy here, right?0.96
00:10:36.060Part of it is just as simple as that. People really liked that it seemed to consign traditional Christian morality to the dust heap and to say that, like, no, the rebirth of civilization will come from embracing this wild side, basically.0.93
00:10:51.800Which contains, to be rigorously fair to Nietzsche, not just this, like, hedonistic pleasure, but also like a real darkness.0.86
00:10:58.840Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he thinks you can't have one without the other.
00:11:01.660It's both halves of the secret history.
00:11:03.460yeah exactly that's right that's a good use of tart exactly it's or to put a different way it's
00:11:09.900if he had woken up in 1969 he would have been like yeah that's my point man you get the human
00:11:15.680being and you get the mansons they're the same thing they go they go together you don't you can't0.99
00:11:21.260like human beings living their untrammeled impulses is a wonderful and terrible thing
00:11:26.520and just both of those things you're not gonna know there is no way to be like oh what if what
00:11:31.180if only the good stuff. It's the both of it. I mean, there's one example. I think he would have
00:11:38.080known this book as well. There's a famous example of these kinds of big theories about the ancient
00:11:43.800Greeks and the weird outsized impact these could have in the thought of Johann Jakob Bachofen. I
00:11:49.680don't know if you've ever heard of him. He wrote this book, The Mother Rite. Bachofen is, I think,
00:11:54.040theologian, but also a classicist. And he writes about this idea that before the classical Greeks,
00:12:02.000there was a Greek matriarchate. And what we're seeing in the ancient Greeks, in the epics,
00:12:08.520and in something like Hesiod's Theogony, we're really seeing as a kind of an allegory for the
00:12:13.720overcoming of the overthrow of the matriarchate by the Greek men, and then the institution of
00:12:18.480patriarchy. And it's this typical book for its time in that Barhofen was like, and thank goodness0.63
00:12:23.920for that right like thank goodness those greek men overthrew those terrible women and now we0.96
00:12:28.360have civilization but every single person who read that book was like oh my god that must have been0.99
00:12:33.960so awesome no no it was terrible guys it was terrible everyone just had sex with everyone0.83
00:12:38.960and like like it was pure lasciviousness they're like yeah keep going it's like no no no no guys0.90
00:12:43.820i swear this is terrible you don't want this and they're like no this i'm sorry but this is
00:12:48.820sounding super sweet and a lot of early feminism a book like her land is very heavily indebted to
00:12:54.420this yeah the early free love movement yeah it's a lot of a lot of people kind of reading these
00:12:59.900ideas of the matriarchate and being like hey this is a this is a great feminist text and he's like
00:13:04.640no no no this is a i'm sorry this is an anti-feminist text right and they're like sure
00:13:09.440buddy like but did you listen to your own story right and he keeps being like no no i'm telling0.97
00:13:14.160it was a filthy, sexy, drunken, hedonistic place.0.65
00:13:18.220And they're like, oh my God, this is so good, right?0.92
00:13:21.900And so there's a little bit of that here
00:13:23.460that Nietzsche's like, no, it also was terrible.
00:13:25.400And we were like, yeah, but were people naked?
00:13:43.140But it's something that very much made this idea of the Dionysian deeply appealing to people in, let's say, one of the more repressed, no matter what Michel Foucault would say, one of the more repressed times in Western European history.
00:13:56.760And this strikes me as where, you know, I've been categorizing using the taxonomy that we invented in our previous episode, I've been categorizing Nietzsche as primarily useful to the creeps. But this is a place where he might be increasingly useful to the perverts. And like being able to cast, you know, the pursuit of heterosexual male sexual gratification as like sort of a kind of transgressive liberation is, you know, something is very appealing to a lot of misogyny.
00:14:26.760Yeah. We might even say, I mean, I'm wondering, maybe the theme of the second episode is Nietzsche, Colin, turns out he's less of a creep and more of a pervert. That'll be my theme today. You're exactly right. He is ultimately gonna come down on the side of like, there's very little we can say with certainty to establish gendered hierarchies.0.94
00:14:52.620But he can still think that like the best thing to do is to like, get wild, right? So like, so he's more he's more in that kind of wheelhouse, I would say. But we'll see. Maybe I'm wrong on this. But that would be my I think my thesis for this for this episode is that he's, he's more of the pervert.
00:15:08.200So then he publishes The Genealogy of Morality.
00:15:11.620Yeah, another famous book that I think a lot of people will know, right?
00:15:14.660So like, which is very frequently assigned early philosophy texts, early in like philosophy
00:15:37.340And then, of course, that's something that, again, I'm hoping people can hear why feminist thinkers thought this could be interesting. This is about how do our moral values relate to everyday life? How do they relate to the way we as creatures live our lives? Which is something that philosophy had indeed kind of bracketed, especially in Germany with someone like Immanuel Kant.1.00
00:15:57.800So there's this really interesting sort of question, like, what if values were praxis? What if they were a way to make certain shit happen in the world and not make other shit happen in the world, right? Rather than like, are these transcendent things that like, reside on high, the good, the true and the beautiful that we sort of have to try and find access to, right?0.89
00:16:14.920The other thing that I think made this short book extremely influential to feminists is that it asks this very simple question, whose morality, right? He's an anti-universalist in this book. The normal approach that a moral philosopher would take is to say, look, morality has to be morality for everyone. Otherwise, I'm not sure what we're calling it, right?
00:16:35.640Like if I regard something as binding, but I think you can do whatever you want, that's
00:17:33.540Yeah. But you can also hear the diagnostic power of this. This is not to say that these are the right values. This is just a description of this person's on top of this other person currently. Or this person has this boot on your throat, basically.
00:17:49.520right but he thinks that judaism and christianity flip this hierarchy right they reinterpreted
00:17:55.580goodness basically as meekness and weakness right and the bad became evil and nietzsche's point is
00:18:01.300that this is slave morality it values the lowly the poor the sick right thinking of the sermon
00:18:07.360of the mount things like that and it most importantly it castigates strength right as
00:18:12.840And Nietzsche, in a not-at-all-regrettable turn of phrase, will say, the blonde beast.0.77
00:19:10.080So in both directions, it's just about power relations, right? It's just about using this will to power to figure out how to sort of maximize your position in these hierarchies, right?
00:19:22.500Yeah. So that's the famous idea of the genealogy of morality. As I say, it's extremely influential. Still today, if you think about the fact that like all these times that like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think of themselves as like these gullivers tied to the beaches of Lilliput by a thousand small strings, right?
00:19:40.360Like, you know, Elon Musk really thinks of himself that way.
00:19:43.180If you think of like stories about like political correctness run amok, you know, and then they
00:19:47.640started a whisper campaign, they pulled this great man down, right?
00:19:52.080Like these are all stories about like, oh, the people you think are weak in society are
00:19:58.400And they've used, they've devised these woke ideologies to effectuate, to kind of avert
00:20:04.140what naturally or normally should be the case, right?
00:20:07.220Right. They've turned traditional power relations on their head.
00:20:10.640And that in turn gives the previously powerful hegemonic figure the moral status of being an aggrieved victim with a claim.
00:20:18.660Exactly. And it's important to note that, like, I'm not even sure Nietzsche is saying that, but that's definitely how everybody and this is a problem where, like, every dumb right winger in the country has read this in their freshman philosophy class.
00:20:30.640Like, I'm not entirely clear whether Nietzsche is actually saying that, but that's definitely what they're reading. Right.
00:20:34.880This is definitely what they're seeing into it, right?
00:20:36.980Because it's important to note, a lot of Nietzsche scholars would point to the fact that Nietzsche
00:20:40.820doesn't have to be saying that it's a good thing, that good used to be synonymous with
00:24:34.060And it's got this like pretext of being something that everybody believes, which makes it very easy for the right and for like Nietzsche's descendants on the right to sort of claim that they are challenging a hegemonic idea, even when it's something that, you know, very few people actually act on.
00:24:49.020Like just like how these like targeted minorities, like I'm thinking of like trans people in the contemporary right, are like assigned this tremendous cultural influence when they don't actually seem to have a practicable power to enforce any of this power that they're assigned, right?
00:25:21.720There is this very easy kind of slip that we have fallen away from what is obvious to
00:25:29.560what's obvious is also therefore right.
00:25:31.940And Nietzsche, I think, himself falls into this, right? There are certain hierarchies that to him are obvious, and there are other hierarchies and relationships that seem to him new and scary. He thinks that there is a value in the directness of perception, which he thinks of as ontological rather than that's just the way it's been traditionally.
00:25:52.720If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying the right wing is not wrong to view this intellectual scaffolding for their own project in the genealogy of morals.
00:26:01.080Yeah, absolutely not. I think he definitely, you know, the anti-Semitism is hard to miss. I mean, the fact that Christianity was a religion of the downtrodden is something that a lot of people in the 19th century believed. I think there's some historic evidence for it. He's drawing on some tropes that are quite anti-Semitic. At the same time, I think also he is reflecting a kind of scholarly consensus, right? Which is to say that Constantine converted kind of last, right? It was a bunch of other Romans who converted first.0.59
00:31:17.720Basically, he argues that what we call truth amounts to conventionally agreed upon fictions
00:31:22.360that are most agreeable to the largest number of us, right?
00:31:25.780What we call lying is not telling the truth.
00:31:28.740it's going against the prevailing consensus and then being subject to punishment for it right
00:31:33.080that's all truth is well that's a critique that's very relevant to like feminist critiques of like
00:31:37.920sexual assault absolutely she's not lying she's going against the prevailing consensus and it's
00:31:42.440going to be punished for it yeah this is exactly where someone like Foucault is so so influenced
00:31:46.980by Nietzsche the very point that like the idea that there is a a truth to be gotten independent
00:31:52.660of facts, as opposed to infinite gradated interactions that are evaluated differently
00:31:58.740by different people participating in them. I mean, like Foucault will say, like, in sexuality,
00:32:02.660like, no, there is no such thing as homosexuality. There are different urges and bodily acts and
00:32:08.980different ways of conventionally bundling those. And like, that's straight up Nietzsche saying
00:32:13.380these are mobile armies of metaphors, of metonymies. These are metaphors we live by.
00:32:17.700these are things that we do to sort of impose some kind of order on the way we experience the
00:32:24.120world. But, you know, the idea that there is a single truth behind that is ultimately illusory.
00:32:30.800Another example of this is from the Untimely Meditations, the essay on the advantage and
00:32:35.760disadvantage of history for life, where Nietzsche takes aim at the idea that basically we act best
00:32:40.820if we remember our history. Nietzsche says, too much history is kind of a dead weight that keeps
00:32:45.560from acting be like cows remember less it's like who says that being weighed down by the past is0.94
00:32:52.980like such a fucking healthy thing he's like this it's just no it'll just make you neurotic like0.99
00:32:57.200don't do it the best way to do something is to be like a little dumb about it you know like0.99
00:33:01.620oh shit if i'd known that there were dangerous rip currents i never would have swum across it0.99
00:33:06.300he's like well good for you buddy you goofed but you goofed well you know right and so like this0.99
00:33:11.540is the kind of thing that he keeps taking aim at, these kind of metaphysical truisms that seem to
00:33:17.100govern the way we think about the very nature of what discourse is supposed to be, what philosophy
00:33:22.760is supposed to do, what inquiry is supposed to do. And this distrust in the categories by which
00:33:28.180the philosophy of his day operated kind of also makes clear, and that's my point, why people who
00:33:33.340understand Nietzsche to be straightforwardly advocating for certain natural hierarchies,
00:33:38.220as we kind of just did ourselves are pretty clearly wrong
00:33:42.520because Nietzsche also thinks that nature doesn't form the basis for anything, right?
00:33:47.260He thinks nature also falls in this bucket, right?
00:33:50.280He's like, this is another one of these things that we love returning to
00:33:53.800as though we knew what it meant, like truth, you know, like history.
00:33:58.560He's like, nope, that also doesn't exist
00:34:01.520or it's a whole bunch of things that you're calling nature
00:34:04.240and you're making a pick because of, you know, effects of power, basically.
00:34:08.220Right. Here's a paragraph from early in Beyond Good and Evil.
00:34:11.460You want to live according to nature.0.72
00:34:14.740Oh, noble Stoics, what deceitful words.
00:34:17.320Imagine a being that is like nature, wasteful without measure, indifferent without measure, without intentions and considerations, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time.
00:34:29.880Think of indifference itself as power.
00:34:32.020How could you? How could you live this indifference?
00:34:34.480life isn't that exactly a desire to be different from what nature is isn't life evaluating preferring
00:34:41.520being unfair being limited wanting to be different right i think that's a great passage on
00:34:48.080for this and for our podcast right and that reminds me of you know friend of the pod
00:34:53.380susan striker's frankenstein essay right the rejection of nature and that concept of the
00:34:59.320natural as in fact like a cold restrictive received fiction that is not either practicable
00:35:08.240or desirable exactly and this idea that you would be living if you sort of became one with nature
00:35:17.800it's a really interesting point for him to make right like life is evaluating preferring being
00:35:23.060unfair being limited wanting to be different right like you you stake out a claim over and
00:35:27.400against everything else when you live and nature is basically this absolutely inimical to us being
00:35:35.120humans right and so right like that does mean that like you know going back to these kind of
00:35:42.220supposedly natural hierarchies is for Nietzsche like he's just telling you another story it's
00:35:46.800another fiction right he's like yeah yeah I mean I need this for my essay but it has this asterisk
00:35:51.080and that I don't believe nature is really either right like I don't think it can actually do this
00:35:55.360work that i currently wanted to do because i am mad at helena von druskovitz and i want to argue
00:36:00.260against her and so i'm gonna i'm gonna just do this right like it is this almost semi-fiction
00:36:06.040that he offers again like i'm not saying that necessarily even to defend him because it is
00:36:10.260this trollish energy right where you're like right do you really believe that friedrich and he's like
00:36:13.800lol well i got you mad didn't i right like it's like you know like there's an irony here too right
00:36:19.780like he's like do i or do i not as for me to know and for you to find out and you're like oh this0.91
00:36:23.560guy this fucking guy yeah but like he uses these things as what he identifies them as which is0.93
00:36:29.020like discursive tools rather than like ontological realities yeah exactly he thinks he can impose his0.99
00:36:35.280will on you through them and so that's why he's telling you them right it's exactly he's modeling
00:36:39.200he's modeling the thing he's describing right he's saying that's all that's all i am doing and
00:36:43.120frankly that's all i can do right um i'm not here as like friedrich nietzsche famous naturalist
00:36:48.580right he's like well i've studied the uh the lemur and i can tell you that in fact right like this is
00:36:54.440the natural i'm going to tell you a story that puts me on top mysteriously and all the people
00:36:59.240i don't like at the bottom frankly you're doing nothing different from that right yeah but this
00:37:04.740is not how he gets read he gets read as endorsing natural hierarchies yeah it's hard not for him to
00:37:11.620be misread in this way right because in the end the this is what i meant when i said in the first
00:37:15.720episode that like he's both political and sort of anti-political because like it's really hard to
00:37:22.360know exactly what the political ramifications of this would be other than like complete and utter
00:37:27.120like semi-individualism like in some at some point you have to sort of say some power relations in
00:37:33.080society are a little bit more okay than others it's okay for this person to have a certain amount
00:37:38.220of power over you right now and them having that is not a conspiracy right i do think that like
00:37:43.020Nietzsche then gets read and taken out by political thinkers who just kind of unreflectively import
00:37:48.340whatever power relations they think are a-okay, right? To be the like, well, that's natural.
00:37:53.080And then pick up on the other ones that seem to them new and scary. And they're like, well,
00:37:56.880those are the ones that are like actually a conspiracy against me. So nature for Nietzsche
00:38:00.720is something that kind of unsettles our moral prejudices, right? It like makes us, it should
00:38:05.320make us question, right? Our moral judgment. It doesn't seem that on the whole, it can actually
00:38:10.200be a pretty good anchor for them, right? Like it can unsettle hierarchies, but it's unclear whether
00:38:15.380you can really found a hierarchy based on nature for him. And like you say, very consistently,
00:38:20.920right-wing Nietzsche readers are able to miss that fairly simple fact. There's a piece from
00:38:26.260May of this year in the American Conservative by a guy named Matthew Freeman, who I don't know much
00:38:30.320about, right, which is all about, it's a overtly Nietzschean reading of classical education, a topic
00:38:37.360near and dear to Nietzsche's own heart. And Freeman writes, the task of classical Christian
00:38:42.180education is to train a noble class within our own institutions so that they can supplant the0.93
00:38:47.760class currently turning America into a dump. We need the good elite. We need to reverse the
00:38:54.600hierarchy so that our guys are on top and not your improper, illegitimate guys. Yeah.
00:39:00.700And now some of this, some of this is indeed very faithful to Nietzsche. Nietzsche did think
00:39:05.660that our allergy to hierarchies is a bad thing,
00:39:20.440He was an anti-egalitarian in that way.
00:39:22.680At the same time, this whole idea of like a noble class0.92
00:39:26.540that can supplant the class currently turning American
00:39:28.920into a dump, Nietzsche would be like, yeah, no, that's,
00:39:31.800no, there's no way to prefer one to the other here, right?
00:39:34.200Like this is the kind of naturalizing that really shouldn't be flying here either, right?
00:39:39.660So very clearly, this is, you know, very frequently when it comes to these wrong and right elites, which is so central to conservative thought post-45, I would say, in the United States, right?0.96
00:43:57.620A lot of the circuitous paths that Nietzsche took into the contemporary right, I think,
00:44:03.140is through thinkers that have like zero reception anymore.
00:44:06.440Sometimes they never were translated, or if they were translated, it's like the volume is like gathering dust somewhere in the Stanford Library or whatever, right?
00:44:16.500And these are people that like, if I were to like apply to a philosophy department, like working on them, people would be like, yeah, that's not what we do here.
00:44:23.260Like, this just appears to be a guy like trying to restart an Aryan knighthood in 1902 Munich, which like, I think he needed help.
00:44:35.680I don't think he needed a position in a philosophy department.