For the Love of Nietzsche

Keegan (of The Nietzsche Podcast) graciously agreed to speak with me. I intended to ask him questions about himself, a few of which I get to eventually by way of a detour through discussions about education, Bachelor's degrees, prosperity gospel, wokeness, privileged guilt, the priests of the Identity Politics religion, plastic straws, Trump, Elon, coal-rolling, chewing gum and more. Keegan tells me things about music festivals, the underground music scene, writing and performing music, the Apollonian and Dionyian aspects of the artistic process, ecstasy, Dionysian rites, Elvis, swooning, waltzing, how masturbating can make you blind, chronic illness, pity, the use and abuse of history, fetishism, atheism, mysticism, and of course, Nietzsche. Check out Keegan's educational and artistic productions Slumbering Suns: https://slumberingsun.bandcamp.com/album/the-ever-living-fire and https://open.spotify.com/artist/7znYBHw9e9cY7KKbLXpUsS The Nietzsche Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0ZARzVCRfJZDCyeKjvIEfE YouTube Channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCpsrJufAUNXwot-znspubbg

They aren't getting any shorter, are they? In this episode, I dance the Dance of the 7 Veils. Every time one comes off, there is another one underneath. It's veils all the way down. We consider Nietzsche's contention that Life is a woman, she is wearing veils, and the veils are all that there actually is: there is no substrate behind the veils. Appearance matters. It's what's outside that counts. We consider what it means to be ugly and the ways we can veil, mask, ornament and confront our own ugliness and the ways that philosophy seeks to do the same to the ugly truths that constitute Life. We consider the possibility that lying is good if you are a good liar and that truthing is bad if you are a bad liar and that the intention and consequences of our behaviors actually do not determine their value at all. Beautiful people do beautiful things and vice versa. This is a wicked episode: shameless, revealing, disobedient, and pretentious to the very roots. We look at several sections from The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power and take a superficial pass at Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a whole while exploring the first half of the fourth book in some depth.

Note: this is a re-release of a previously published episode of the same title. I edited out about 20 minutes of obnoxious nagging and repetitive harping, but didn't add anything new. In this episode, I consider ugliness, infertility and other kinds of less-than-ideal states of human being and suggest that Nietzsche's philosophy—especially his views on “free will” and resentment—can help an ugly, infertile woman accept her fate without necessarily becoming a feminist. I describe some of the aspects of what I do consider to be misogyny: the hatred of woman that is corollary to the hatred and denial of this real, embodied, transitory, beautiful, painful, phenomenal life. I contend that Nietzsche's reverence for the Dionysian—the ancient worship of sexuality, sex, pregnancy, child birth and the pain and beauty of Life and Death—betrays him as a man who—rather than hating woman—actually honors the profoundly sacred task of conception, procreation and child birth and the women who participate in this eternally holy rite.

We look at Morality as the Will to Power by considering Nietzsche's contention in “The Antichrist” that Paul created Christianity—as we know it today rather than as Christ lived it in his own earthly life. Paul, the genius of decadence, manipulated the message and the life of the Christ in order to spark a mass movement and to gather and discharge the power of his own intellect. He saw and exploited the fact that weakness always prevails over nobility. I.e. the bad guys (the all-too-many) always win. We explore the consequences of a world which trends toward entropy and the proliferation of the mediocre mass man. We see how a psychological genius of the lower classes can and does use moral systems which are—as all things are—a manifestation of the One Will: The Will to Power.

I give an introduction to several aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy: aristocratic elitism, his thoughts on thinking, free will, pity, morality, Christianity, Life, the relationships between the sexes, the Will to Power, the rabble, and more all in the context of the charges of misogyny that I have heard leveled against Nietzsche. I challenge the Wikipedia derived definition of misogyny--according to which Nietzsche probably is a misogynist--because I suspect that the definition given to the word does not match the denotation of the word very well: "hating women". I consider the doctrine of equality, and suggest that we do not live in a world of equal things, that Life is unjust as well as unfair, and that it is She who governs the relations between the sexes, and the obligations each sex has in the reproduction of the species. We visit several passages from Ecce Homo, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and The Antichrist. I conclude that if Nietzsche is in fact a misogynist, then I must have Stockholm syndrome, because I do not feel hated, but rather strengthened, refreshed, and even honored, by the things he says about Woman. Note: This is the second edition of this episode. The original was overeager and poorly executed, so I made it ten times better and, incidentally, three times longer.

We explore the idea of will (spoiler: it is not a “thing”), and consider the fictions of freedom and of not freedom concerning the will. We consider the nefarious intentions behind the priestly “invention” of the idea of free will: to justify punishment. We collapse the sentence structure to verb only, and jettison the subject as a popular prejudice and a grammatical fiction. The doer and the deed are one and the same. We consider how the idea of free will allows the little lambs to aggrandize themselves as “good” rather than reckoning with the reality of their weakness. We see that lambs, in fact, can only be lambs and birds of prey can only be birds of prey. The will is not free or not free, but rather strong or weak. The will is not separate from the nature of the one who wills. A weak nature = a weak will. A strong nature = a strong will. We briefly consider the pre-historical origins of the weak will of the herd animal and the strong will of the lone predator and the strength and hostility prerequisite to a sharp and clear vision of that which is. All told, we don't figure anything out definitively about whether he loves me or loves me not, but we do gain a means of orienting ourselves more precisely to our own nature—whatever it is—and our attitude toward ourselves and Life.

In which i consider the social structure of souls as gendered sub-souls, make some conciliatory remarks toward feminism, consider the shallowness of Woman, and man's relationships there to, celebrate the artist/actress aspect of women—those amiable little maenads—and conclude with an invocation to my feminine fate and my continued gratitude for Nietzsche's reverence for Life.

I explore further into some of the BGE passages from episode 1 as well as the infamous passage in Zarathustra “on old and young women”. I engage in some exegesis on the naughty truth the old woman gave to Zarathustra and take a great deal of license in my interpretations. I arrive at some harsh truths for both women AND men, but hopefully strike a blow to cognitive dissonance in the process.