Episode 178: Nietzsche as Social Critic: Twilight of the Idols (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2017
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing on Nietzsche's 1888 book. (For Wes Alwan's summary of this book, go here). Is there any ground from which we could judge life as a whole to be good or bad? Is N. more about saying "yes" to life or saying "no" to all the numerous things that piss him off? We also talk Becoming, whether producing great art is more important than being nice to everyone, and whether Nietzsche is ultimately someone we'd want to hang around.
End song: "Oblivion" by Tyler Hislop, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #24.
Listen to part 1 first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition.
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | You're listening to Partial Exam of Life episode 178. |
| 0:50.0 | Parts 2 on Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. |
| 0:53.0 | So maybe we should keep going with the idea of judging life as a whole. |
| 0:59.0 | That seems to be the place where Nietzsche diverged from Schopenhauer. |
| 1:04.0 | They both had this picture at least early in Nietzsche's career. |
| 1:08.0 | In the part of Schopenhauer that we read of the world is a chaotic, conflicted place, a picture of the will. |
| 1:16.0 | The world is will, it's thrashing about. |
| 1:19.0 | That's underlyingly what reality is. |
| 1:22.0 | While Schopenhauer then wanted to escape from that, his idea of what art should provide for us is a rest haven away from that conflict. |
| 1:33.0 | The ethics is going to be renunciation. |
| 1:37.0 | We saw this very recently in our Buddhism episode that there are all these things that were programmed with a lot of the instincts are irrational. |
| 1:46.0 | They steer us wrong. We need to not stamp them down with the force of our will, but we need to somehow overcome them. |
| 1:55.0 | We need to observe them, kind of rise above them and no longer let them control us, which of course maybe has the possibility of leaving us not strongly wanting anything, |
| 2:07.0 | which according to Robert Wright in our recent Buddhism episode was maybe not so bad, at least it keeps you from being a horrible person. |
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