Episode #212 ... Nietzsche and Critchley on the tragic perspective. (Amor Fati pt. 2)

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So I wanna continue where we left off last episode, which means you may need to listen to that one before this one. So just fair warning, I'm talking from here on out as though you've listened to it with little explanation. It's called Nietzsche returns with a hammer. Now I wanna talk more about this life affirming perspective that Nietzsche's bringing up in his later work. What would it look like if someone woke up in the morning and started their day from a place where they were affirming all aspects of life as they were, rather than renouncing them? Rather than that overly rational, overly idealistic way of living that just recreates a classic Christian renunciative way of looking at the world, that in his eyes is responsible for the decay of Western society. What would that world of life affirmation look like? And what would a morality structured around affirmation even be like? I mean, these are questions that really captivated Nietzsche for a lot of his later career. They're tough questions to answer too, by the way, and we'll get into what he had to say about them. But first, real quick. If on this episode, we're gonna try to look at the world through this life affirming lens, you know, if you're trying to see things in a new way, and if you're someone who's intrigued by the story Nietzsche's telling of him smashing the idols from the history of Western thought with a hammer, real quick, can we just take a second to appreciate what Socrates looks like from Nietzsche's perspective if he's right here? I mean, you know he doesn't like Socrates. I get that. But just think about who this guy really is if Nietzsche's right. Think of his whole game. He denies the whole Dionysian side of what reality is, the chaos, the passions, the emergent context dependent side of reality. And then he says, no. What we're gonna do is we're gonna steer hard into the Apollo side of this, the rational. And my little game we're gonna play today is you can only use rationality, but you gotta try to nail down the absolute truth about everything in full. Give me the essences of everything, he says. So then Socrates goes out into the public square and just starts harassing people. Hey, you over there. You you think you're a wise person, Well, then why don't you give me a definition of what justice is? Go ahead. No. No. No. No. Tell me. In simple rational terms, what justice truly is. It's a very simple question. Go ahead. So then you give him a definition of justice, and then he picks it apart, points out the limitations in it, says that can't be all of what justice is. So you give him another definition. He picks it apart again. He's like, look. I can keep doing this all day, guys. …