Episode 10: Nietzsche and his Heirs

Hi everyone, this is Adrian.

I just wanted to let you know that this is the second part of our episode on Friedrich Nietzsche and his thought on gender and sexuality.

And as you'll notice, this one goes into detail on some of his texts.

And one of the things that we touch on is Nietzsche's antisemitism.

I mentioned that because we recorded this actually back in September.

We just didn't get around to editing it, cleaning it up, and releasing it quite yet.

Meaning, this is from before the Hamas massacre on October 7th and the subsequent resurgence in global anti-Semitism.

Meaning, if we sound a little bit jokier than we would have been in October, then that's why.

And please don't take that the wrong way.

We in no way wanted to downplay that.

If you're not in the mood to see that discussed or hear that discussed right now, it's also absolutely okay to skip this one.

But we felt that we didn't want to withhold the rest of this conversation.

I know a lot of people enjoyed the Nietzsche episode.

A lot of people wanted more detail.

And this is what this is.

It's more detail, but it does mean that we grapple with some pretty repellent things that Nietzsche said and wrote.

And at the same time, as you know, we always do, try to sort of figure out why people find value in what this man said.

Nevertheless, so again, this is none of this meant to relativize the horror that is anti-Semitism.

What this is, is us trying to grapple with a complicated person and a complicated text.

Hope you enjoy it.

I'm Moira Donegan.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

Whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

So today we are digging into part two of our Nietzschean deep dive.

Yeah, so we're in bed with the right and in bed with Friedrich Nietzsche, which is like two places I didn't want to be.

How did I wind up here?

Today we are furthering our exploration of Nietzsche's thinking on sex and gender, beginning with a discussion of his like Dionysian versus Apollinian like dichotomy of thought.

Adrian, can you like set the scene a little bit for us?

Yeah, so when last we met Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a budding philologist and writer of many books who then had an unfortunate incident with a horse and went mad and became famous, not necessarily in that order, and who we sort of thought pioneered a kind of trollish sensibility when it came to feminism and to women's issues.

And he did so very interestingly in dialogue really with the first wave of German feminism.

He knew some of the protagonists, they read him, they also cleaned his clock with refreshing regularity.

And so, you know, this is someone who's really thinking through gender questions from a very openly conservative position while at the same time kind of both being in dialogue with women thinkers, but also someone that women thinkers drew on and feminist thinkers and queer thinkers drew on with quite some profit, right?

We read a couple of quotes where people were like, yeah, no, this, like a lot of this is really bad, but there are some interesting ideas here.

And I think that Dionysian and Apollonian is a pretty good first place to start with that, because that is indeed something that a lot of people really liked of his, even if they thought that some of his other politics were just kind of bizarre or pointless or misguided.

So, this is from Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

And this is the only book I think he really wrote while he was still sort of thinking, oh, maybe I'll make it at the university.

He was teaching at the University of Basel.

Right, he was working as a classicist.

Yeah, exactly.

And so, this is a book about the ancient Greeks.

Or what we would now identify as a classicist.

Exactly.

And this was about Greek tragedy and what that meant.

And he basically, it's his attempt to blow up his field.

On the one hand, like, you might wonder, like, well, gee, how did that make him, like, how is that part of a big, broader philosophical project?

Same time, I would sort of encourage listeners to think about the fact that like how much classical...

classical imagery, classical architecture, art, et cetera, et cetera, are kind of interlaced with questions of like the ancient Greeks, right?

Like all of Washington, D.C.

is basically one big Athens pastiche, right?

Like our politics and our, frankly, our understanding of gender owes a lot to the ancient Greeks.

And so it's not maybe, you know, if he had been a specialist for the Vikings, it may not have made quite as much sense that he thought he could put a stick of dynamite in the idea of Greek tragedy and that way the whole house would come down.

Like in 1872, that there was a little bit of a reason to think that this was indeed a pretty powerful intervention in a broader philosophical or broader historic kind of trajectory.

It's also the book that's most most indebted to the music and the thinking of Richard Wagner, who we mentioned, who he very much admired at that point, and whom he came to hate later, as expressed in his book, which I didn't mention last time, Nietzsche Contra Wagner.

Because

he's not subtle.

He's like, you know who I hate?

That guy.

What's the Dionysian and the Apollonian?

I don't want to go on too long, but the Apollonian is basically the easiest way to think about it.

It's the serene stoic Greeks that we get from traditional classicism, right?

If you, again, think of Washington DC or something like that, right?

Like measured, humanistic, right, centering, like think of the dimensions of a Greek temple versus the dimension of a Gothic cathedral, right?

Like the temple is like made for you and me.

It's meant for human beings to interact with in a way that's not like totally terrifying.

The Gothic cathedral is like, God is bigger than you, get used to it, comma, ant, right?

Like that's like, that's like an anti-humanist point.

The 19th century very much regarded the Greeks as a sort of a consensus idea, as like pretty humanistic, as kind of about measure, rationality, etc., etc.

Well, that's the Apollonian.

And Nietzsche is like, that's there.

It exists.

I'm not going to deny that.

But there is this other strain entwined with it, which was like the Greeks as this like the opposite, opposite of our popular image of ancient Greece, right?

It's instinctual, it's wild, it's immoral, it's drunk.

It's, and this is key, deeply aware of the fact that existence is suffering, that the world basically sucks, right?

Like Apollonian aspect of the greeks was essentially optimistic and the dionysian is like the world sucks and that's fine let's embrace it anyway right so this is the greece of empedocles who jumps into a volcano this is the greece of the weird mystical gods that comes straight out of hp lovecraft or something like that this is the grease of a kind of garrulous contradictory oral tradition that later then gets streamlined into the homeric epics right so the dionysian is sort of is sort of like a totally different kind of way to think the Greeks.

It understands that existence is suffering, but unlike the later Greek Stoics, it doesn't try to react to that awareness by withdrawing into itself.

It embraces suffering.

It says yes to existence, not because it is great, but maybe because it's actually kind of rough.

So this is also like, I mentioned last time that Nietzsche was very impressed with Schopenhauer.

This is basically his rewrite of Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer thought, at the end of philosophical reflection stands the insight that the world is terrible and getting worse, and the best thing we can do is kind of withdraw into some kind of nirvana.

And Nietzsche is like, no, the point is not to shrink from existence.

It's to say yes to it, to affirm it.

There's a really famous passage that I might read here.

Just it's a little long.

I hope that's okay.

It's called heaviest burden paragraphs.

This is paragraph 341 in the gay science from 1882.

This is the idea of eternal recurrence.

I don't know if that rings a bell for you.

Yeah.

It's a good one.

Also, just because like we've been reading so much Nietzsche that's just like hot stinking garbage, basically.

And people are like, God,

why are they even talking about this guy?

I think, I have to say, this is the kind of Nietzsche that where I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to have to keep reading this guy because that's pretty, I don't know how much you felt of this, but I think it's pretty damn good.

So, this is about the passage about eternal recurrence.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.

And there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every every sigh must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.

Even the spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment, and even I myself.

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine?

It's pretty good, right?

So that's what he means.

That is pretty.

But like the Greeks could affirm it all, right?

Yes, Yes, there was pain.

Yes, there was dullness.

Yes, there was boredom.

Yes, there was size, you know, like, but you affirm it all.

You just affirm it all.

And, you know, this test, whether you could say to this demon, like, yeah, let's do it.

I'll do it all over.

I'm ready.

It's a great idea.

And like, it's, and that's what he means by that.

Right.

Now, the reason why I think this book kind of had a legacy and the idea of the Dionysian sort of had a legacy is, for one, like this

idea of affirmation, right?

This idea that this is a pessimism that is ultimately not shrinking from the world, right?

But the main thing, and I think we just have to be clear about this, is that the Dionysian, as he describes it, right?

Think of like the Apollonian is all about like measure and thoughtfulness, et cetera, et cetera, but sort of like a dreaming kind of rationality.

It's fantastical, but it's not ultimately, it's not ultimately like crazy.

Whereas the Dionysian is just like, you know, burning man after someone spiked the punch, basically, right?

Like, right.

It was just, you know, this is in the middle of the Victorian era, right?

Like, this is just, people can imagine deeply, deeply sexy time and place, uh, and figure out, like, oh, actually, maybe like this guy is saying we should come back to some of that.

This book is really saying, like, you got to bring this back.

And he thinks Wagner's music does that.

And so people are like, yeah, cool.

So, like, it seems like, you know, we're doing

orgies now.

So, like, that's, that's neat.

I'm pro with that, you know?

Corsets

versus orgy.

I don't know.

I might have to go with the orgy here, right?

Part of it is just as simple as that.

People really liked that it seemed to consign traditional Christian morality to the dust heap and to say that like, no, the rebirth of civilization will come from embracing this wild side, basically.

Which contains...

to be rigorously fair to Nietzsche, not just this like hemistic pleasure, but also like a real darkness.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, he thinks you can't have one without the other.

It's both halves of the secret history.

Yeah.

Exactly.

That's right.

That's a good ode.

That's a good use of tart.

Exactly.

It's, or, or to put it a different way, it's if he had woken up in 1969, he would have been like, yeah, that's my point, man.

You get the human being

and you get the Mansons.

They're the same thing.

They go, they go together.

You don't, you can't like.

Human beings living their untrammeled impulses is a wonderful and terrible thing.

And it's both of those things.

You're not going to, no, there's no way to be like, Oh, what if, what if only the good stuff?

Like, nope, uh, it's uh, it's the both of it.

I mean, there's one example, I

think he would have known this book as well.

There's a famous example of these kinds of like big theories about the ancient Greeks and like the weird outsized impact these these could have in the thought of Johan Jakob Bachofen.

I don't know if you've ever heard of him, he wrote this book, The Mother Rite.

Bachoven is a

theologian, but also a classicist, and he writes about this idea that, like,

before the classical Greeks, there was a Greek matriarchate.

And what we're seeing in the ancient Greeks, in the epics, and in something like this, like Hesiod's Theogony, we're really seeing is a kind of an allegory for the overcoming of the overthrow of the matriarchate by the Greek men and then the institution of patriarchy.

And it's this typical book for its time in that Bachoven was like, and thank goodness for that, right?

Like, thank goodness those Greek men overthrew those terrible women and now we have civilization.

But every single person who read that book was like, oh my God, that must have been so awesome.

And he's like, no, no, no, it was terrible, guys.

It was terrible.

Everyone just had sex with everyone.

And like, it was pure lasciviousness.

They're like, yeah, keep going.

He's like, no, no, no, no, no, guys.

I swear, this is terrible.

You don't want this.

And they're like, no, this, I'm sorry, but this is sounding super sweet.

And a lot of early feminism, a book like Her Land is very heavily indebted to this.

Yeah, the early free love movement.

Yeah, it's a lot of, a lot of people kind of reading these ideas of the matriarchate and being like hey this is a this is a great feminist text and he's like no no no no this is a i'm sorry this is an anti-feminist text right and they're like sure buddy like but did you listen to your own story right and he keeps being like no no i'm telling you it was a filthy sexy drunken hedonistic place and they're like oh my gosh this is so good right

and so there's a little bit of that here that like nietzsche is like no it also was terrible and we were like yeah but were people naked and he's like sure probably but uh no, guys, like, this is not all positive.

It's like, oh, Friedrich, please go on.

Right?

Like, so this idea of

this idea of like our sexual morality is something to be overcome.

It's not something he invented, but like, it's something that very much made this idea of the Dionysian deeply appealing to people.

And, let's say, one of the more repressed, no matter what Michel Foucault would say, one of the more repressed times in Western European history.

And this strikes me as where, you know, I've been categorizing using the taxonomy that we invented in our previous episode.

I've been categorizing Nietzsche as primarily useful to the creeps, but this is a place where he might be increasingly useful to the perverts and like being able to cast the pursuit of

heterosexual male sexual gratification as like sort of a kind of transgressive liberation is

something that is very appealing to a lot of misogyny.

Yeah, we might even say, I mean, I'm wondering, maybe the theme theme of the second episode is: Nietzsche Colin turns out he's less of a creep and more of a pervert.

I actually think that, like, that'll be my theme today.

That, like, you're exactly right.

That, like, he, he is ultimately

gonna come down on the side of like, there's very little we can say with certainty to establish gendered hierarchies, but he can still think that, like, the best thing to do is to like get wild, right?

So, like, so he's, he's more, he's more in that kind of wheelhouse i would say but we'll we'll see maybe i'm wrong on this but that would be my i think my thesis for this for this episode is that he's he's more of the pervert so then he publishes the genealogy of morality yeah another famous book that i think a lot of people will know right so like which is very frequently assigned uh early philosophy text early in like philosophy classes and colleges right where nietzsche sort of proposes to treat moral values not as a starting point but as he says as a consequence as a symptom as a mask as an illness as a misunderstanding, but also morality as a cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as an inhibitor, as a poison, right?

And then, of course, that's something that, again, like, I'm hoping people can hear why feminist thinkers thought this could be interesting, right?

This is about how do our moral values relate to everyday life?

How do they relate to the way we as creatures live our lives, right?

Which is something that like philosophy had indeed kind of bracketed, especially in Germany, like with someone like Immanuel Kant.

So there's this really interesting sort of question, like, what if values were praxis?

What if they were a way to make certain shit happen in the world and not make other shit happen in the world, right?

Rather than like, are these these transcendent things that like reside on high, the good, the true, and the beautiful that we sort of have to try and find access to, right?

The other thing that I think made this short book extremely influential to feminists is that it asks this very simple question, who's morality?

right?

He's an anti-universalist in this book.

The normal approach that a moral philosopher would take is to say, look, morality has to be morality for everyone.

Otherwise, I'm not sure how we'll be calling it.

Like, if I regard something as binding, but I think you can do whatever you want, that's not a moral judgment, right?

Like, if I judge you morally, I'm saying, well, I wouldn't have done that if I were in your shoes.

And Nietzsche radically breaks that up.

He says, like, no, there are different kinds of morality depending on...

where you find yourself in power hierarchies, basically.

So this is this idea that pretty famous about slave morality and master morality, right?

That like originally morality was about strength right it was not about good and evil it was about the good and the bad in german gut and schlicht where schlicht is basically common base he's like it's not it's not it's a value judgment yes but it's not saying you did something wrong it's like you're weak and grovelly and snivelly and i don't like you and like you are dependent on other people and that's bad, right?

Like, whereas good is like self-sufficient and strong and virile or whatever, right?

You can hear the sexism in this thing, but at the same time, you can also, yeah, mind is right.

Yeah, but you can also hear like the diagnostic power of this.

He's like, this is not to say that like these are the right values.

This is just a description of like, this person's on top of this other person currently, right?

Or this person is like, you know, has this boot on your throat, basically, right?

But he thinks that Judaism and Christianity flip this hierarchy, right?

They reinterpreted goodness basically as meekness and weakness, right?

And the bad became evil.

And Nietzsche's point is that this is slave morality.

It values the lowly, the poor, the sick, right?

Thinking of the Sermon of the Mount, things like that.

And most importantly, it castigates strength, right?

As Nietzsche, in a not at all regrettable turn of phrase, will say, the blonde beast.

Oh, great.

Yeah, it's good stuff.

Good stuff.

Yeah.

It has aged like a...

like a wine that's turned into vinegar.

But the point is, strength is evil, strength is sinful right domination is bad at the same time and this is really important it's easily missed in latter-day versions of this from among other things a lot of silicon valley creeps like this kind of story right uh peter thiel sort of recurs to something like that right this idea of transvaluation of values the reinterpretation from one into the other is of course a massive act of resentment this is a what he calls the slave revolt immorality it's about will to power and nietzsche tips his hat to that it's like that's pretty cool right?

You're overpowered by these other people, and then you get them to believe that they should feel bad about the fact that they overpower you.

I mean,

that's pretty smart, you know?

So in both directions, it's just about power relations, right?

It's just about using this will to power to figure out how to sort of maximize your position in these hierarchies, right?

Yeah, so that's the famous idea of the genealogy of morality.

As I say, it's extremely influential still today.

If you think about about the fact that like all these times that like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think of themselves as like these gullivers tied to the beaches of Lilliput by a thousand small strings, right?

Like, you know, Elon Musk clearly thinks of himself that way.

If you think of like stories about like political correctness run amok, you know, and then they started a whisper campaign, they pulled this great man down, right?

Like these are all stories about like, oh, the people you think are weak in society are actually secretly strong.

And they've used, they've devised these woke ideologies to to effectuate to kind of obvert what naturally or normally should be the case right that right they've turned traditional power relations on their head and that in turn gives the previously powerful hegemonic figure the moral status of being an aggrieved victim with a claim exactly And it's important to note that, like, I'm not even sure Nietzsche is saying that, but that's definitely how everybody, and this is a problem where like every dumb right winger in the country has read this in their freshman philosophy class.

Like, I'm not entirely clear whether Nietzsche is actually saying that, but that's definitely what they're reading, right?

Like, this is definitely what they're seeing into it, right?

Because it's important to note, a lot of Nietzsche scholars would point to the fact that Nietzsche doesn't have to be saying that it's a good thing that good used to be synonymous with strong.

All he needs to say is that it's back in the day, it used to be obvious who was good because they were the one with the fucking boot on your throat, right?

Like, oh, that must be the good.

So, I'm in the dust currently, eating dust.

So that's, I'm guessing I'm the bad here, right?

I'm the ace.

He's not saying that that's necessarily a a good thing.

He just says it's more obvious.

Christianity, the slave revolt and morality, sort of detaches good and bad from the obvious and makes it into something metaphysical, something that you need to have explained to you by priests, by philosophers, right?

Something that's removed from everyday life.

You know, you might feel good about something you're doing and then, you know, you have the preacher man McGee over there to tell you that, nope, you're actually sinning, right?

That doesn't, of course, say whether the old system was better.

It simply says that no one in archaic times would have been confused about the fact where they fell in that system.

Today you feel guilty because of a system you can't but sin against.

And what you're guilty for is well just doing what comes naturally.

You could see why Freud and why some feminists and why the queer movement might like this quite a bit.

He's not necessarily saying this was the right state of affairs, though he can sometimes sound like that, unfortunately.

But I think all he has to be saying for now is to say, well, it's a lot less mysterious what's good and what's bad.

It's a far more direct relationship to like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, right?

Whereas like, it's a lot harder to know whether you've run afoul of God who laid out his rules and, you know, a new and old testament, parts of which contradict the other.

Yeah.

Right.

It's like, oh shit, which, which denomination do I belong to?

Am I, did I just sin?

And so you can see why, if you squint, Nietzsche is indeed saying something that's pretty much central to all right-wing thought in our present moment, right?

There are places where power legitimately and naturally resides, and there's this conspiracy of the weak to take it away from them.

There's a natural elite, and it being on top is the way the world really should be.

There's this natural hierarchy, but others, and note that Nietzsche's very first example of this is the Jews.

Again,

aged wonderfully.

Jesus Christ.

I'm sorry.

And if this is an anti-Semitic narrative, and I do think that it is, it's worth noting that this is an anti-Semitic narrative in the service of a critique of Christianity, of an exploration of Christianity's origins.

And this is true for Nietzsche in general, that I don't think that anti-Semitism is ever the point.

His views on Judaism and the Jews are shot through with overriding concerns for him, things that he cares about more obviously, right?

As I said, Christianity and its origins, the relationship of both to Germany and German nationalism, definitely suffused with his reception of Wagner and of Schopenhauer, right?

All this is true, but I don't think that changes the fact.

And I think we now looking back and see that far more clearly, that especially when it comes to questions of power, the basic structure of this narrative is anti-Semitism.

You may hear

certain echoes to all anti-Semitism ever, where like the people whose house you just burned down are allegedly running the world, right?

Like

this is the anti-Semites' big secret, like how they are somehow, you know, constantly visiting violence on a small oppressed minority.

And at the same time, they're like, oh, but really, aren't they the powerful ones?

Like, nope, probably not, though.

You can also extrapolate this framework to the entire current conservative project, wherein the targeted minorities are assigned in the conservative imagination this outsized power.

Exactly.

And like, I think, you know, this goes to the way that we ended our previous episode about the way that currently feminism is assigned hegemonic power in the conservative imagination.

And it's got this like pretext of being something that everybody believes, which makes it very easy for the right and for like Nietzsche's descendants on the right to sort of claim that they are challenging a hegemonic idea, even when it's something that, you know, very few people actually act on.

Like, just like how these targeted minorities, like I'm thinking of like trans people in the contemporary right, are like assigned this tremendous cultural influence when they don't actually seem to have a practiceable power to enforce any of this power that they're assigned, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So it's very convenient to a right-wing fantasy, is what I'm trying to say.

Exactly.

And it's definitely there, Nietzsche.

And like, it's absolutely like, like, they're not completely misreading him.

There's a twist to it, I think, I hope, but it's very easy to get this out of the genealogy of morals.

I think you're exactly right.

There is this very easy kind of slip that we have fallen away from what is obvious to what's obvious is also therefore right.

And Nietzsche I think himself falls into this, right?

That like there are certain hierarchies that to him are obvious and there are other hierarchies and relationships that seem to him new and scary.

He thinks that there is a value in kind of the directness of perception, which he thinks of as kind of ontological rather than like, that's just the way it's been traditionally.

If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying the right-wing is not wrong to view this sort of like intellectual scaffolding for their own project in the the genealogy of moral.

Yeah, absolutely not.

I think he definitely, you know, the anti-Semitism is hard to miss.

I mean, the fact that Christianity was a religion of the downtrodden is something that a lot of people in the 19th century believed.

I think there's some historic evidence for it.

He's drawing on some tropes that are quite anti-Semitic.

At the same time, I think also he is reflecting a kind of scholarly consensus, right?

Which is to say that Constantine converted kind of last, right?

It was a bunch of other Romans who

converted first.

And notably women.

Women, poor people etc etc right enslaved yeah yeah so i think he's both activating these kind of very noxious tropes but also it's not it's not a hundred percent inaccurate or at least it was sort of reflective of the way people thought of early christianity at the time and at the same time of course it is one should say right like a lot of his latter-day readers on the contemporary right are like, and did you know that it's just feminists exerting their will to power?

And they're saying, basically, that's bad.

Yeah.

And Nietzsche would say, like, no, that's what every human being ever does.

You shouldn't forget that fact, but like, there are no exercises of power that are more or less legitimate.

The human being wants to live

and live well.

And they arrange the world such that they can do that, right?

Like, there's nothing illegitimate about the slave revolt and morality.

It's just he thinks it's overall a bad thing.

But he's like, I get why people did it.

And it's a, you know, like, why wouldn't they?

Like, and maybe it's on the masters for believing this bullshit, right?

Like, so it's, it's very interesting.

He wouldn't say that the exercise of power is itself in any way illegitimate, but that does get added, I think, in many of the modern receptions of this, right?

Where it's like, this is a bad exercise of power.

This is a sneaky, right?

This is like, this is a conspiracy.

What is a conspiracy if not political influence you don't like, right?

It's just basically, it's a way of accounting for your fact that like the people that you disagree with and that you hate like, convinced a majority of your fellow citizens to be nice to them?

And you're like, there can only be one explanation, and

it's utterly nefarious, you know.

Or they just decided, like, yeah, I don't need to be mean to trans people.

Why would I do that?

You know, it's like, no, no, it's the trans agenda.

The other thing is that we should point out is that this conspiracist thinking, it's like not incidental to me that Nietzsche's first example was Jewish people, right?

No, absolutely not.

Like conspiracist thinking of this genre about like the will to power of the previous marginalized or the illegitimately, those who are illegitimately like seeking a place in the social order with like dignity and equality, like that this is all somehow a Jewish plot is a like recurring feature of you know, Nietzsche, obviously, but also like right up to the John Bergers,

like increasingly like Elon Musk.

You know, it's a it's also a framework that lends itself very specifically and conveniently to anti-Semitism.

Yeah, that's right.

The thing I learned is that I'm not no longer posting on Twitter because I can't get the app to work for me anymore because it's so buggy.

It's because of the anti-defamation league.

I found out from Twitter owner and uh

did you hear about this?

Oh, that is long tweet blaming blaming all travails of Twitter on the ADL.

Yeah, and clearly not on his own mismanagement of the company.

Yeah.

And I guess we should also say, in case that wasn't obvious to people, we're dwelling here on gender and sexuality.

Also a huge anti-Semite should just be made very clear.

It's just, as Maura is saying, that's just here.

Well, but finally, I do want to say something about where I think...

his modern readers sort of would probably not agree with him and where again, like I want to make the case in this episode that like feminists and queer activists and leftists who liked this thought or think that there's something here are not totally wrong either.

They're not being duped by this guy.

There's something here that one can work with.

And one of the big things that the third bucket I wanted to sort of talk about after the Dionysian versus the Apollonian and the genealogy of morals would be what he calls the destruction of metaphysics.

So essentially, Nietzsche really hates these kind of elaborate conceptual edifices that we erect to sort of scaffold ourselves from what's actually kind of obvious, right?

A lot of this is about the central categories of metaphysics.

For instance, for Nietzsche, all ontological statements are basically fictions, right?

It's about stuff like causality.

But it goes beyond that.

A bunch of his essays are really about these kind of cultural truisms, and you could sort of understand them as like a kind of a Larry-David-ish, like, is it, is it though?

Right.

He's like, here's our received wisdom.

Let me debunk it.

It's a Michael Hobbes posture.

That's right.

That's right.

It's a friend of the pod, Michael Hobbes.

Just to give one famous example, in the famous short essay called On Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense, he takes on this very idea of truth, right?

Human beings want to know the truth and always seek it out, right?

That's why you can cue Nietzsche saying, do they?

Is that true?

Basically, he argues.

that what we call truth amounts to conventionally agreed upon fictions that are most agreeable to the largest number of us, right?

What we call lying is not telling the truth.

It's going against the prevailing consensus and then being subject to punishment for it.

That's all truth is.

Well, that's a critique that's very relevant to like feminist critiques of like sexual assault.

Absolutely.

She's not lying.

She's going against the

prevailing consensus that is going to be punished for it.

Yeah, this is exactly where someone like Foucault is so influenced by Nietzsche.

The very point that the idea that there is a truth to be gotten, independent of facts, as opposed to infinite gradiated interactions that are evaluated differently by different people participating in them.

I mean, like Foucault will say, like, in sexuality, like, no, there is no such thing as homosexuality.

There are different urges and bodily acts and different ways of conventionally bundling those.

And, like, that's straight up Nietzsche.

He's saying these are mobile armies of metaphors, of metonomies.

These are metaphors we live by.

These are things that we do to sort of impose some kind of order on the way we experience the world.

But, you know, the idea that there is a single truth behind that is ultimately illusory.

Another example of this is from The Untimely Meditations.

This is the essay on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life, where Nietzsche takes aim at the idea that basically we act best if we remember our history.

Nietzsche says, too much history is kind of a dead weight that keeps us from acting.

Be like cows, remember less.

It's like, who says that being weighed down by the past is like such a fucking healthy thing?

He's like, it's just, no, it'll just make you neurotic.

Like, don't do it.

The best way to do something is to be like a little dumb about it, you know?

Like,

oh shit, if I'd known that there were dangerous rip currents, I never would have swum across it.

And he's like, well, good for you, buddy.

You goof, but you goofed well, you know?

Right.

And so, like, this is the kind of thing that he keeps taking aim at.

These kind of metaphysical truisms that seem to govern the way we think about the very nature of what discourse is supposed to be, what philosophy is supposed to do, what inquiry is supposed to do.

And this distrust in the categories by which the philosophy of his day operated operated kind of also makes clear, and that's my point, why people who understand Nietzsche to be straightforwardly advocating for certain natural hierarchies, as we kind of just did ourselves, are pretty clearly wrong.

Because Nietzsche also thinks that nature doesn't form the basis for anything, right?

He thinks nature also falls in this bucket, right?

He's like, this is another one of these things that we love.

returning to as though we knew what it meant, like truth, you know, like history.

He's like, nope, that also doesn't exist or it's a whole bunch of things that you're calling nature and you're making a pick because of you know effects of power basically right here's a paragraph from early in beyond good and evil you want to live according to nature oh noble stoics what deceitful words imagine a being that is like nature wasteful without measure indifferent without measure without intentions and considerations, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate, and uncertain at the same time.

Think Think of indifference itself as power.

How could you?

How could you live this indifference?

Life.

Isn't that exactly a desire to be different from what nature is?

Isn't life evaluating, preferring being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different?

Right?

I think that's a great

passage for this and for our podcast, right?

And that reminds me of...

you know, Friend of the Pod, Susan Stryker's Frankenstein essay, right?

The rejection of nature and that concept of the natural as in fact like a cold, restrictive, received fiction that is not either practicable or desirable.

Exactly.

And this idea that you would be living if you sort of became one with nature, it's a really interesting point for him to make, right?

Like life is...

evaluating, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different, right?

Like you stake out a claim over and against everything else when you live.

And nature is basically this absolutely inimical to us being humans.

Right.

And so, right, like that does mean that, like, you know, going back to these kind of supposedly natural hierarchies is for Nietzsche.

Like, he's just telling you another story.

It's another fiction, right?

He's like, yeah, I mean, I need this for my essay, but it has this asterisk.

And then I don't believe nature is real either.

Like, I don't think it can actually do this work that I currently wanted to do because I'm mad at Helena von Druskovic, and I want to to argue against her, so I'm gonna just do this, right?

Like it is this almost semi-fiction that he offers.

Again, like, I'm not saying that necessarily even to defend him because it is this trollish energy, right?

Where you're like, right, do you really believe that, Friedrich?

And he's like, lol,

well, I got you mad, didn't I?

Right?

Like, it's like, you know, like, there's an irony here too, right?

Like, he's like, do I, or do I not?

It's for me to know and for you to find out.

And you're like, oh, this guy, this fucking guy.

Yeah.

But, like, he uses these things as what he identifies them as, which is like discursive tools rather than ontological realities.

Yeah.

Exactly.

He thinks he can impose his will on you through them, and so that's why he's telling you them, right?

It's exactly modeling, he's modeling the thing he's describing, right?

He's like, that's all I am doing, and frankly, that's all I can do, right?

I'm not here as like Friedrich Nietzsche, famous naturalist, right?

He's like, well, I've studied the...

the lemur and I can tell you that in fact, right, like this is the natural thing to do.

I'm going to tell you a story that puts me on top mysteriously and all the people I don't like at the the bottom.

Frankly, you're doing nothing different from that, right?

Yeah.

But this is not how he gets read.

He gets read as endorsed like natural hierarchies.

Yeah, it's hard not for him to be misread in this way, right?

Because in the end,

this is what I meant when I said in the first episode that like he's both political and sort of anti-political, because like

it's really hard to know exactly what the political ramifications of this would be other than like complete and utter like semi-individualism.

Like at some point, you have to sort of say some power relations in society are a little bit more okay than others.

It's okay for this person to have a certain amount of power over you right now.

And them having that is not a conspiracy, right?

I do think that like Nietzsche then gets read and taken up by political thinkers who just kind of unreflectively import whatever power relations they think are a-okay, right, to be the like, well, that's natural, and then pick up on the other ones that seem to them new and scary.

And they're like, well, those are the ones that are like actually a conspiracy against me.

So nature for Nietzsche is something that kind of unsettles our moral prejudices, right?

It like makes us, it should make us question, right, our moral judgment.

It doesn't seem that on the whole, it can actually be a pretty good anchor for them, right?

Like it can unsettle hierarchies, but it's unclear whether you can really found a hierarchy based on nature for him.

And like you say, very consistently, right-wing Nietzsche readers are able to miss that fairly simple fact.

There's a piece from May of this year in the American Conservative by a guy named Matthew Freeman, who I don't know much about, right, which is all about, it's an overtly Nietzschean reading of classical education, a topic near and dear to Nietzsche's own heart.

And Freeman writes, the task of classical Christian education is to train a noble class within our own institutions so that they can supplant the class currently turning America into a dump.

We need the good elite.

We need the, what, to reverse the hierarchy so that our guys are on top of

not your improper, illegitimate guys.

Yeah.

And now some of this, some of this is indeed very faithful to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche did think that our allergy to hierarchies is a bad thing, is an unnatural thing.

He just thought, look, if it's about power, some people are going to end up on top and some not.

It's wrong to think that you should therefore abhor hierarchies.

So Nietzsche did think that, right?

He was an anti-egalitarian in that way.

At the same time, this whole idea of like a noble class that can supplant the class currently turning America into a dump, Nietzsche would be Like, yeah, no, that's, no, there's no way to prefer one to the other here, right?

Like, this is, this is the kind of, this is the kind of naturalizing that really shouldn't be flying here either, right?

So, and very clearly, this is, you know, very frequently when it comes to these wrong and right elites, which is so central to conservative thought post 45, I would say, in the United States, right?

Like, William F.

Buckley, why is William F.

Buckley so fixated on what Yale is teaching students?

He thinks it's creating the wrong kind of

elite.

A hereditary elite is being taught the wrong things.

Exactly.

Like discipline into, you know, capitalist Christianity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or the entire hatred of the Johnson, you know, liberal kind of activist state, right?

Like it's all anti-elitism, but like it's not anti-elites themselves.

It's anti- that elite.

No, not elites qua elites.

It's not the hierarchy that's a problem.

It's what the people at the top of the hierarchy are doing with their privileges.

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly.

What's really interesting here, of course, is that like, for someone like Freeman, who again I don't know much about, it's also like not quite Nietzsche, it's pretty much Ayn Rand.

Rand gets rolled into this in a really interesting way, right?

That like she is someone who, because of her emphasis on the market, has a pretty clear sense of who deserves to be on top and who doesn't, which is something that Nietzsche would absolutely run away from, right?

But like her Nietzsche is a basically is one that recognizes one natural variable in all of human history, and it's money.

It's the modern credit system, which is what it takes some getting to.

I mean, like, I applaud, you know, taking only 900 pages of Adelshrug to get to that fucking position.

But it's, it's, but that's what that is, right?

Like, it is obvious who the right elite is, and they are being hamstrung by these,

you know, by these small-minded,

pusillanimous weaklings, the takers rather than the givers, the Liliputians rather than Gulliver.

So what's Nietzsche's legacy now?

How do you put all these misreadings in the context of, you know, his life and his

immediate post-death?

Yeah, so I think we'll need to do a little bit further talking and reading about the people through whom we get our Nietzsche.

And I think that's...

you know, I think the Rand example is a pretty good one, right?

That like very few, very few of the people that profess to Nietzschean ideas or who draw on him, maybe even without mentioning him, have read that much Nietzsche.

Or if they have, they still draw him through other people.

And especially when it comes to gender and sexuality, right?

Like Nietzsche was so central to the thinking about gender and sexuality at the turn of the century that he gets sort of baked into a bunch of things.

You can see him in Freud.

Peterson clearly gets his Nietzsche through Jung.

We're going to look at Otto Weininger, who's very influenced by Nietzsche.

I do think we have to sort of see how he gets to us, because I think that that's a really, really important aspect of the story, that like Nietzsche's misogyny can feel very contemporary, but it actually has traveled quite a distance to get to us.

And I think that is important.

But like people are still engaging with Nietzsche on his own terms or trying to.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, like...

He is taken seriously in philosophy departments to this day.

I have a bunch of colleagues working on Nietzsche at Stanford.

And as we mentioned, he was also deeply influential on people that I think you and I both read with great enjoyment and profit.

From Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Butler, from early feminists to the Frankfurt School.

So he's taken very, very seriously.

But I think what we're going to find as we delve into the post-Nietzean kind of thinking about gender and sexuality is that there's this missing Nietzsche legacy that kind of this game of telephone, as you put it earlier, that we don't know much about because it's it concerns almost entirely utter and complete cranks.

Like the people I mentioned sort of on the left that read Nietzsche, and even someone like Harvey Mansfield, right?

Like on the right, they've read their Nietzsche carefully and they have some interesting things to say about him.

But people like Weininger, no one reads Weininger anymore, right?

Like we're gonna

read people like Ludwig Klaus.

We're gonna read Weineker for the podcast.

We are, yeah.

Buckle up, everybody.

Otto Weiniger is coming to your, to a podcast feed near you.

Yeah, come for the sexism and stay for the anti-Semitism and the self-hatred.

Yeah.

Yeah, and homophobia.

It's all there.

A lot of the circuitous paths that Nietzsche took into the contemporary right, I think, is through thinkers that have like zero reception anymore.

Sometimes they never were translated, or if they were translated, it's like the volume is like gathering dust somewhere in the Stanford Library or whatever, right?

And so that's going to be really fun.

And these are people that like, if I were to like apply to a philosophy department, like working on them, people would be like.

yeah that's not what we do here like this just appears to be this appears to be a guy like trying to restart an arian knighthood in 1902 Munich, which like, I think he needed help.

I don't think he needed a position in a philosophy department.

And like, and there's, there's a lot of that.

We're going to, we're going to be delving into that.

And I think we're going to find that like there are these lines of transmission that like we kind of forget at our own peril because like how exactly sexism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, for instance, hang together has probably a lot less to do with Nietzsche and much more to do with the way his immediate followers kind of received him and then passed him on and were read at the time.

Like that's, I should point that out.

These aren't books that no one read.

These books were bestsellers in their day.

They're just completely forgotten today.

Yeah, there's these lineages of crankhood that bring ideas from, you know, thinkers like Nietzsche into the far right and then get laundered back through into

like a David Brooks column.

And I think like tracing that project is, you know, a big part of the project of this podcast and something that Nisha gives us a lot of opportunities for.

So I'm excited to dig in with you

and future episodes of your favorite podcast, In Bed with the Right.

Thanks guys.

Thank you for listening.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.