Episode #211 ... Nietzsche returns with a hammer!

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So we live in a time where people will do some pretty moronic stuff in the name of their political beliefs. We also live in a time where it's common for people to look at that moronic behavior that's going on and say, you know, the only reason that person is doing any of that stuff is because they're a follower of the philosophy of Marx or Ayn Rand or Hobbes or Machiavelli, Freire last time. Well, another thinker whose work gets this very same kind of treatment in the modern world is the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. No shortage of people out there will cite Friedrich Nietzsche as the inspiration behind their behavior, and there's even more people out there that blame Nietzsche for the behavior of other people they see as problematic. So as the resident guy that spent way too much time reading philosophy in his life and then passes those savings onto you, I wanna offer some context to Nietzsche's work today that we've never gone into on this podcast before. Just hasn't made sense to bring it up before this point, but it's a great story to know. It's important to know if you're a fan of philosophy why Nietzsche had such an impact on the history of philosophy. It's important to understand why he described what he was doing in his work as philosophizing with a hammer. And look, by the end of the episode, I'm I'm hoping you'll at least know some of the main arguments for why Nietzsche was doing his work, how he saw his work in the context of history. I'm hoping you'll see that. But what I know, there's no doubt you'll see by the end of this, is a picture of the modern world we've been talking about on the show lately that has not been represented yet by any of these episodes. And it does not fit neatly into any political category that we'd recognize today, you know, if it's even appropriate to call any of Nietzsche's work political at all. We'll get into the arguments for and against it. The point is, Friedrich Nietzsche would likely say that much of the conversation we've been having on this podcast lately about the state of the world and how to make it a better place is, one, remarkably naive, and, two, in serious denial of certain realities about life, about history, and about the state of the universe. That this idea that we're gonna have more quality conversations with each other about morality and political realities, and that those conversations are gonna make the world a better place as a result of them. That delusion, he thinks, is the evidence of a decay that's gone on in people's thinking. It's the result of the decline of Western society that's been going on for over two millennia, he thought. A decline that's caused can be traced back to a few …