Episode #213 ... Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche (Difference, Joy, Affirmation)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So this episode's building off the last two episodes on Nietzsche and affirming life as it is. And if you're someone that hears what Nietzsche has to say and goes, wow. Wow. Checkmate philosophy. I mean, this guy Frederick just destroyed all of you. Go grab your herd membership cards. Get together. Find a place to moo at each other in a field for the rest of your lives, and let the cultural elites like Frederick take over from now on. Well, if that's how you're feeling, then unfortunately, gonna be a very short lived party for you. But that's a good thing, I think, ultimately. I mean, you could probably see it coming. Like, if you're Nietzsche and you say the kind of things we've been talking about, dunking on the entire history of philosophy, Even if you're right about some of these things, you're just unleashing the hounds on yourself when you talk like this. Future philosophers are gonna come after you, and when they do, they're gonna be very smart and find where you made all your mistakes, which Nietzsche no doubt would have appreciated, by the way. But the point is, there are a ton of people disagreeing with him even just a few years after his work. One of which we talked about last time was Martin Heidegger. You know, to Heidegger, despite Nietzsche seeing himself as someone that despised Plato's work, as someone that had moved beyond the metaphysics of the ideal versus the real, to Heidegger, Nietzsche in his work had really just created the inversion of Platonism, where he makes the same kind of mistake that Plato does and needlessly favors the real over the ideal. I mean, to Heidegger, whenever Nietzsche brings up the concept of the will to power in his work, by doing that, he's embedding himself in the same metaphysical tradition that he was claiming to try to move past. He was still operating on the assumption, in other words, that being itself always needs to be viewed from the dualistic perspective of being a subject that's navigating a realm of objects. And it's building on this that Heidegger comes up with what would eventually become a highly important question in his own work, definitely with Nietzsche in mind. The question is, is it possible to think without the will? This is a classic Heidegger style question. And I mean, you wanna talk about a philosopher that smashes the idols that came before him. Heidegger in his work thought he was rebuilding all of human thought from the ground up. I mean, he even refuses to use terms or categories that former philosophers had used because to him, all their work has to be called into question because it's all built on top of a bunch of faulty ontological assumptions. How do you trust any of it then? Anyway, Heidegger's response to Nietzsche, his critique of the technological way …