Nietzsche's Will to Power: Reading Beyond Good and Evil

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to reading niches beyond good and evil. This is going to be an interregnum.

I thought it would be a good time to take a pause and because we've been talking about uh the will to power that NZ is deploying and he's already attacked the free will versus determinism debate. Um, but it is it is confusing. That's totally fair. And I thought, oh, what's a quick way to address the confusion?

And I thought, well, that's a stupid idea. Let's so let's do a slow way. Um, at least take a moment here. Let's just pause and reflect because it is one of Nichch's central ideas, the one he was perhaps of everything he had come up with the most attached to.

And so understanding it is worthwhile for a number of reasons. One, because it's a key to his work. And the idea has been bubbling away for a long time. It appears in various places, but of course is is you know, right here, right now, [clears throat] and beyond good and evil, we're looking at it.

Um, second, it's important because is a direct response to Schopenhau, uh, and Schopenhau's idea of the will, and both of them are responding to what is functionally the stupid um, free will versus determinism debate that people keep going on about, which I've mentioned before. And one reason it's so frustrating that people have the this continuing free will determinism debate is um generally it's uh structured in such a way that it it's as if all these brilliant thinkers not just Schopenhauer and Nichze but those are the two we're going to focus on today hadn't already completely reframed this debate in ways that you could maybe argue against but at least you have to stop and do this. Um, and if you don't, then basically it's the same thing as the flat earth debate. Like you're you're you're arguing on a topology that has already been shown to be unhelpful or at the very least not necessary.

And if you don't address that, then you aren't really actually doing philosophy as it were. And so people make this ...