Ep. 262: Nietzsche on Self-Denial (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals (1887), "Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?"
Self-regulation, where we tamp down certain aspects of our personality, is necessary for disciplined action, but it can clearly go too far. Nietzsche uses this concept of asceticism to analyze both geniuses and the masses. It is a chief tool of the will to power, highly dangerous to human flourishing but also unleashing many new capabilities beyond our animal nature. Does this picture of motivation and greatness make sense?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the partially examined life podcast by some guys who are at one point |
| 0:11.8 | set on doing philosophy for living, but then hope better of it. |
| 0:14.9 | Our question for episode 262 is something like, why do people do philosophy or maybe what's |
| 0:19.6 | the meaning of the aesthetic ideal? |
| 0:21.4 | We're reading essay three of Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals from 1887. |
| 0:26.6 | For more information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com. |
| 0:29.5 | This is Mark Linson-Meier, apparently in rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites |
| 0:33.1 | of life despite my best efforts in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:36.2 | This is Seth Pascon, putting to flight at least temporarily my dull pain and my lingering misery |
| 0:42.3 | with a religious interpretation and justification in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:47.0 | This is Wes Allen, doing my best to avoid the sick and Cambridge Massachusetts. |
| 0:52.5 | This is Dylan Casey instinctively striving for an optimum of favorable conditions under |
| 0:56.8 | which to expand all my strength and achieve maximal of feeling of power in Santa Fe, New |
| 1:02.1 | Mexico. |
| 1:03.1 | That is a happy collection of bumper stickers we have created for that. |
| 1:08.4 | But that's what this essay is using to us. |
| 1:11.4 | This is a peculiar thing. |
| 1:13.0 | I couldn't make the main question here be, what is the meaning of the aesthetic ideal because |
| 1:18.7 | no one would know what the hell we are even talking about by that. |
| 1:22.1 | Why is that a thing? |
| 1:23.1 | Dylan, why don't you explain to us why we are doing this now? |
| 1:27.4 | We're going to be doing for the next episode part of a book called War Speak Nietzsche's |
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