Elijah Millgram: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now, I have just a very general, maybe cynical question. If I look at the status of Nietzsche in 1900 when he died, I would think if I were living in 1900, at that point in time, Nietzsche was a great philosopher. He was very important. He was a culmination of a lot of trends; he gave rise to a lot of new ideas that came to fruition in the 20th century. But when I read Nietzsche today, he doesn’t actually seem to me like a great philosopher; he seems to me like a once-important philosopher, that so much of his work is very context specific. “Will to power” is a phenomenal insight, but we now have better explications of the will to power. If I look at his maxims, they seem to me worse than what I see on Twitter every day. So I pulled a few out from the Sue Prideaux book on Nietzsche. Let me just read three of them. One: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Another: “Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice.” The final one: “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” Now, none of those seem very profound to me; they seem OK. Like I said, worse than Twitter. I understand the historic importance of Nietzsche — but why is he today a great philosopher that we can learn from? I think we can learn from him because, in a lot of ways, we haven’t caught up to what he was doing. There are some moves he makes that we’ve almost gotten to the place where we’re like three steps behind. But I want to step back a second and ask — and think about the form for a moment. Some of these quotes, they belong to a period where Nietzsche was trying to be the next Rochefoucauld, right? So they sort of sound like Rochefoucauld. Sure. And he was, right? Or the next Schopenhauer. But that was then; this is now.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.