The Problems with Causality: Reding 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. Now, last time I said that, hey, we're going to start going a little more quickly, and that was a lie.

I apologize [laughter] for that for setting up false expectations because of course I should have known better of I should by now know better when dealing with passages like this from major works. Nija in the next two chapters which is probably all we'll get through today 20 and 21 introduces two very important ideas and they they each of them has some historical framework which we need to cover to understand what he's talking about. So he starts in chapter 20 with um that the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving but growing up in connection and relationship with each other that however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent. So that this is the idea.

So we get different philosophical ideas you know new ones all this and he says no this is not what's happening is just [clears throat] as and notice the idea of evolution of family trees all this is starting to bubble up into the intellectual culture of Europe at this time and so he says just as is true with animals that they're linked in family trees that they're related that similar animals and similar places will evolve in similar ways this is exactly what's going on with philosophy he says As just as much as to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent is betrayed in the end by the circumstance, how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. So you think it's a new philosophy. You think it's a new thing, but in fact it is a simply a coloring in of the bounds of what's possible within a predetermined range. And that range is set by your culture, by your history.

And he goes on a little bit. He says, "Their ...