An Introduction to Nietzsche
The ambition of this series of blogs is a compressive introduction to Nietzsche’s corpus, with an eye to addressing current issues on the right, it’s an explicitly right Nietzschean approach which uses both the classic sources in expounding Nietzsche’s thought as well as contemporary and live ongoing debates in academic Nietzsche studies. It is a philosophical approach to Nietzsche which serves to clarify and advocate for both the most commonly occurring ideas throughout his published works, such as genealogy, the drives, tragic philosophy and so on. It also serves to tackle interpretations of the big central ideas: the Death of God, Transvaluation, the Will to Power, and the Eternal Return.
Internet Platonism as a movement has some significant strengths to it. It has narratives about the decline of the West, it points to a solution, it has theoretical depths, and it has arguments. On the other hand Nietzscheanism has broadly been more of an aesthetic, intuitive phenomenon bringing together people with similar attitudes and interests. Certain key Nietzschean themes are certainly present and there’s some real substance, but since the Jonathan Bowden interviews with Richard Spencer, there hasn’t been something which stands out to me. Bronze Age Mindset for example does have some good elements to it and practically points people in the right vitalist direction but is also an artistic project itself and so hardly an authoritative source, which it’s not intended to be.
My intellectual focus here on the underlying arguments and historical reconstruction of Nietzsche is not intended to replace or to compete with existing online right Nietzscheanism, simply to point in a new direction and to provide resources of exploration. The artistic and vitalist bodybuilding themes people have taken, and the broad elitist European politics with pagan aesthetics which it has encouraged are all excellent, what I want to do here is to provide a space where someone who likes this, or even doesn’t, wants to know who Nietzsche was and what he was on about as a whole. Reading texts like Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Twilight of the Idols can be a strange experience if you don’t know this.
The different topics planned here are to introduce Nietzsche’s tragic worldview, cover the Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian contexts, address the transition from Nietzsche’s early to middle and middle to late periods, cover his monument, Zarathustra, deal with the large guiding metaphysical ideas he had, and refute relativist readings of him. Then we move onto substantive discussions of Nietzsche’s contribution to ethical and political thought with his relationship to psychology and Darwinism as backgrounds, finally I want to deal with his critique of Christianity and discuss Nietzsche’s political positions and inspirations from Plato’s Republic, as an appendix and coda I want to sketch what Apppolonianism might mean as a positive ideal stripped from its ascetic context.
Tragic Philosophy: Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian backgrounds
Nietzsche contra metaphysics part 1: Parmenides and Heraclitus.
Nietzsche contra metaphysics part 2: The Falsification thesis
Nietzsche contra metaphysics part 3: The Will to Power and Perspectivism
The Free Spirit
Zarathustra
Drives and Values part 1: Nietzsche’s “critique of Darwin”
Drives and Values part 2: Eugenics and Genealogy
Drives and Values part 3: Drives and Moral psychology
Dionysus versus Christ
Nietzsche and Politics
Appendix: Appolonianism without life denial.