Episode Details

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
02:19 The Underworld
17:11 The Surface
34:15 The Heights

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and intimately familiar with both Homer’s Odyssey and the Iliad. He admired the Greeks for their way of life, their culture, and specifically how they justified life as an aesthetic phenomenon, through art.

In particular he was fond of using Odysseus as an exemplar of this Greek ideal. Wily, cunning Odysseus, throughout the Odyssey, brushes with darkness but is never consumed by it. He escapes from the cave of the Cyclops, he visits the Underworld but never quite enters it (he takes what needs from Tiresias, converses with Achilles, and leaves), he manages to hear the Siren’s Song without being bewitched by it, he enjoys his time with Circe and Calypso but never loses sight of his ultimate goal: Ithaca. Odysseus sticks bravely to the surface, he doesn’t fall into the trap of the “introspective present”; he always pushes onwards.

For Nietzsche, Odysseus represented the best of mankind. A joyful affirmation of life in spite of its sufferings, which are many. In particular Nietzsche singles out his conversation with Achilles in Hades, where Achilles says he’d rather live as a poor farmer than “reign over the endless dead.” For Nietzsche, this was not Achilles showing regret, nor Odysseus flattering his audience of pacifists (the Phaeacians) but rather a Homeric song of praise for life. The Greeks were such staunch affirmers of life that even the lowest life possible is preferable to being dead. The Greeks, in this way, loved life in a way that is alien to us: they took the totality of existence, and in dreaming up their world of gods and myths, managed to say yes to it so much that even a miserable existence would make them happy.

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