This video is 7th in the 8-part series, Nietzsche and the Postmodern Condition (1991).
Lecture notes:
I. Nietzsche in comparison to other great thinkers
A. Nietzsche has been praised as a forerunner of Psychoanalysis
B. For Kierkegaard, the search for an authentic self is doomed to fail.
1. He says that the self is a despairing relation.
2. Nietzsche puts a positive twist on this view saying that the self is a "risky" relation to itself.
II. An uninterpretable text of Nietzsche's is "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
A. This contains a parody of the Bible. There is a "sermon on the mount" given for cows.
B. The text is meant to enact the gay science.
C. It is self-indulgent and especially appealing to adolescents, as is much of Nietzsche's work.
D. You are meant to have a good time with the text and to be challenged by it to try to remember your adolescence.
E. Mass media has eliminated the necessity for religion.
F. Intoxication has always been an important aspect of culture.
G. Nihilism is not a strong enough name for the threat faced by human subjectivity and lived experience in the terrain of our culture.
III. War is the last indication of reality, but now even that may not be true.
A. The gulf war can be considered a virtual non-reality.
B. Our culture has as excess of the visual.
For more information, see http://www.rickroderick.org
A philosophy podcast, The Partially Examined Life, held a detailed discussion of Nietzsche, which can be found here:
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/11/10/episode-11-nietzsches-immoralism-what-is-ethics-anyway/