I’m starting a new series of conversations on philosophy with my young friend Hadar Hazony—he’s writing a dissertation on German philosophy at Notre Dame when he’s not posting on X, so we decided to study Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil together & talk about it for the online audience.
Our first episode is an introduction to the series & a discussion of Nietzsche’s introduction to a work which is itself an introduction to “a philosophy of the future,” according to the subtitle. Our enterprise is different from many others in a few important ways. First, we comment paragraph by paragraph, reading the text aloud as we go. Second, that necessitates long conversation & encourages a certain thematic coherence, a development of certain thoughts that reappear in new formulations in the text. Third, we act as interlocutors to the direct address of Nietzsche in thinking about what he’s suggesting, turning his questions & suppositions into assertions to see the evidence for them & then returning to his own tentative formulations to see why he introduces philosophy in this style. But we do have to answer a number of questions about such a project.
Why Nietzsche?
Nietzsche was the first philosopher of the post-Christian right & maybe the last philosopher in a long tradition that stretches back to ancient Greece. Nobody as powerful has shown up since. Meanwhile, we live in a world of ruined Progressive edifices & retreating Christian communities. Nietzsche predicted this collapse & helped bring it about. This end of Enlightenment was both his description of what’s going on among people, who at least in his day considered themselves to be civilized or cultured, & his self-appointed task.
Nietzsche was the last philosopher to claim philosophy is inherently dangerous, maybe explosive, & the first to brag about that power himself. Fragments of his thought are now everywhere in “modern” thought. But if Progress is over, then we really are “post-modern,” & post-modernity is the child of Nietzsche. Is there much to brag about in this child? It doesn’t look like it. Nietzsche’s own post-modernism is much more interesting because it was built on a return to Greek thinkers, including those he called pre-Socratic. It was an attempt to compass the whole tradition of thought, as well as bring it to an end.
Why Beyond Good & Evil?
The book came out in 1885. Its title is one of several formulations Nietzsche made for his great enterprise. Anti-Christ is another (written in 1888, one year before Nietzsche went mad, but only published by his cautious friends in 1895, five years before he died); it sounds mad, but in a way it means something boring—Nietzsche’s life was that thing, attempting to philosophize, largely indifferent to the goings on in the world, & in turn attracting the attention of only a very few people. In another way, it’s indeed as terrifying as the wars of the 20th c., which Nietzsche predicted, & the subsequent transformation of our way of life, as old authorities lost the power to compel & the power to convince. Various versions of going beyond good & evil are being attempted or enacted or willed everywhere you turn these days; it would be good to know what this was supposed to be.
The book’s subtitle concerns a philosophy of the future—it’s 140 years later, this is that future. It would be good to learn to see ourselves through Nietzsche’s eyes, since that vision is the only vision a philosopher offered of our times.
Read the book’s table of contents: Nietzsche will be talking about what peoples are & what nobility is, about religion & philosophy, about virtues & scholarship. These are the human concerns from a certain, very sophisticated point of view. Nobody since has spoken about these things convincingly. Most educated people couldn’t if they tried. Seriousness & provocation have both been largely lost, therefore.
Why a podcast?
We’re in a digital situation—Hadar & I can talk over zoom, text over Signal, swap emails, prepare everything for each episode, keep a plan to update, for years in advance, while talking to our friends to help us make the best of it & reach the largest audience of intelligent people concerned with civilization or philosophy, & then still have to look into the camera & say hello. We have remarkable powers at our disposal, to record, share, distribute, & store however many hours & episodes are needed to go through all the book, with an audience that increases all the time & can start anywhere & pick up, or return at any point to a specific chapter or aphorism. Many more people will be listening to this series in the future than now, eventually it will be thousands of intelligent young men & tens of thousands of older people besides. Such a series is needed to counteract the prejudices of the academics, & therefore also those of their enemies. Academia is collapsing, so it’s necessary to replace nonsense, but also to reintroduce, to revive sustained thought, conversation, & the connection between thought & life that was the core of Nietzsche’s concern as a stylist, as a provocateur. A new home for thought & thinkers is needed. That is, a new education.
Why us?
Nobody is doing what we are doing now. We’ll eventually learn why, but so it is for now. Supposedly rightwing thought is a wasteland. The institutionalized, educated people live in their small world which is gradually becoming narrower. The digital realm is comparatively vast, & not only completely apart from it, but as difficult to navigate as it is to enter the institutions. All enterprises in eduction now should be guided by simple questions like these: Would what you're doing happen if you didn't do it? Are you simply repeating what millions of others are already doing, saying, trying? If not, why do you think it’s worthwhile?
What is our oracle if not the university? What commands do have but to learn? Hadar is an academic, perhaps still respectable, studying, teaching, publishing, & as soon he completes his PhD, he will have to submit to the miserable process of job seeking. Good luck with that! Hopefully, Nietzsche will fortify him for the ordeal…
I am editing a journal of political philosophy, teaching (Machiavelli this spring), & without comparable respectability, have been studying philosophy for 20 years. I’ve seen the collapse of institutional thought all my adult life, in short, & I’d like to reverse the trend. Interest in Nietzsche in my young friends has exploded in this period, without any guidance. I began studying Beyond Good & Evil last year & mean to achieve something by the study, which will become obvious first in these conversations.
We’re also willing to take on a responsibility of showing what’s happening in the souls of young men today, surely an important topic, through the examination Nietzsche made of this problem. This isn’t all pleasing to see or flattering to hear about, but it’s important.
Finally, Hadar will be reading from the Walter Kaufmann translation, because it’s the one that made Nietzsche famous & admired in America. Time to reexamine that, too.
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