Nietzsche Returns With A Hammer!

(The following was originally released as podcast episode #211 on September 22, 2024. Minor edits for clarity. Hope you enjoy! <3)

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 the moronic behavior 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 Karl Marx, or Ayn Rand, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli– whoever it is.

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 who will cite Friedrich Nietzsche as the inspiration behind their behavior, and there are even more people out there that blame Nietzsche for the behavior of other people that they see as problematic.

So as the resident guy that has read way too much philosophy in his life and then passes those savings on to you, I want to offer some context to Nietzsche’s work today that we’ve never gone into before. It just hasn’t made sense before this point to cover it, but it’s a great story to know– it is important to know 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.

Look, by the end of this, I’m hoping you’ll know at least 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 lately that has not been represented yet on any of our episodes, and it does not fit into any neat political category that we'd recognize today; 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.

Friedrich Nietzsche would likely say that much of the conversation we've been having on this channel lately about the state of the world and how to make it a ...