This episode is an attempted revaluation of the much maligned Ego. Drawing on Jung, Freud, New Age thinking and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus we pick apart the many meanings of Ego as we try to unearth the infamous reputation of Ego in the culture and to restore to it some of its lost dignity.  ____________________ Further Reading: - Basic Writings of Nietzsche edited by Walter Kaufmann - The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay ________________ ⭐ Support the channel (thank you!) ▶ Patreon:...

In this episode we are going to explore Nietzschean spirituality in contrast to Buddhist spirituality (and other Ascetic Ideal spiritualities and religions). This topic was prompted by a question from Kevin Sherman on Patreon so thanks to Kevin for the interesting spark.  This script kind of poured out of me and it was only afterwards that as I was listening to it again and again in editing that I found myself inhaling through my teeth a bit with the critique of Buddhism. I feel like I was a...

Why it matters is back! And this time we're talking about why Nietzsche matters. We're going to look at why I find Nietzsche so important and why you should too.  ___________________ ⭐ Support the channel (thank you!) ▶ Patreon: https://patreon.com/thelivingphilosophy ▶ Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/thelivingphilosophy _________________  💬 Discord  ▶ https://discord.gg/XNd4gTpfu9 _________________  #thelivingphilosophy #philosophy #nietzsche #existentialism #psychoanalysis

In this deeper dive into philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche we are going to look at his big ideas and his overall philosophy through the orienting generalisation of his thought as being health vs. decadence. Through this lens we can fruitfully place Nietzsche's "no-saying" work where he critiques Christianity, science and philosophy as well as his "yes-saying" work in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (with Zarathustra's three great ideas of the Ubermensch, the Eternal Recurrence and the Will to Power) and...

Friedrich Nietzsche is commonly known as the Father of Existentialism but he could just as well be called the Father of Psychoanalysis or the Father of Postmodernism. Along with Marx and Freud, Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers in the past 200 years.  Nietzsche's ideas are famous (and due to much manipulation of his work, infamous) — the Will to Power, the Ubermensch/Overman and the Eternal Recurrence are the three great doctrines of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. They form his...

The Living Philosophy is two years old! Two years ago the 100 videos in 100 days began. But before there was the Living Philosophy, there was The Living Myth — an Irish mythology podcast with my friend Barry that gave me my first taste of YouTube and podcasting.  I thought it'd be nice to mark this second anniversary by looking back at the origins of this channel. It's also an auspicious time because I've been having some cogitations about how it's been going and how I want to take things...

This is a deeper dive into the Father of Existentialism Soren Kierkegaard. Following on the 5-minute introduction to Kierkegaard, this episode looks in more depth at the philosophy and life of Soren Kierkegaard and why he is one of the greatest philosophers ever. In this episode we look at the three phases of Kierkegaard's work: the First Authorship (and its masterpieces Either/Or and Fear and Trembling), the Second Authorship (including Kierkegaard's third masterpiece Sickness Unto Death)...

Soren Kierkegaard is commonly known as the "Father of Existentialism". This brief introduction to Kierkegaard looks at why you should care about the Danish philosopher and why his work is still relevant today.  Kierkegaard was one of the most prodigious philosophers. In 1843 he published three books in a single day (one of which Fear and Trembling is commonly placed in the canon of great philosophy). In the space of three years he published sixteen books. These books were written using...

Immature heroic complexes and us and them dynamics — after reading The Cut's article "Did Olivia Wilde Just Make Jordan Peterson Cry?" something stirred in me that seems quite obvious in hindsight: the two sides of the culture wars are psychological mirrors of each other.  Both sides partake of the same ingroup and outgroup signalling. They show a lot of compassion for a certain group and a lot of hatred for the outgroup. There is also the same vein of a hero complex running through both....

Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century for many — from Giles Deleuze to the alt-right and undoubtedly one of the most controversial characters in the history of philosophy. In this episode we are going to look at the life and philosophy of Martin Heidegger and his masterpiece Being and Time. We also explore his lesser-known later philosophy after going through what scholars call 'Die Kehre' or 'The Turn". At this point, we see Heidegger on technology and the dangers...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theory of evolution posits that with the emergence of the Noosphere (the thinking or mind sphere which transcended the Biosphere and in turn the Physiosphere) the Omega Point was now being converged upon. With the Noosphere Life has penetrated a new ceiling unlike any since the birth of life itself. Now evolution wasn't limited to chromosomes but we saw the emergence of a whole new form of evolution: acquired traits. In other words, culture is a new form of...

In A Conflict of Visions Sowell distinguishes between the two visions that have shaped the landscape of the modern era (and beyond): the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained vision. From Hobbes's "bloody war of each against all" to Rousseau's "man is born free but is everywhere in chains" we see these visions develop and grow in the modern era, shaping the world we find ourselves in.  A Conflict of Visions which Thomas Sowell published in 1987 and has always spoken of as his favourite...

The Three Metamorphoses is Nietzsche's map of the development of Re-Valuers of Values — the Übermensch. At the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's Zarathustra delivers his first discourse — The Three Metamorphoses. In the first 100 days of the channel I made a video exploring this topic. Recently I sat down to transcribe the video and release it in article format on the website. Instead, I ended up overflowing with thoughts and insights. This is one of those incredibly rich...

In the episode on Foucault we touched briefly on the question of what might happen if we combined Jung's analysis of the gods with Foucault's analysis of power. There is a precedent for this question in the work of the philosopher loved by both thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche.  In his book, On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche talks about how the gods can have very different effects on their believers. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, God is the embodiment of the superego. He is the ideal...

The Presocratic Heraclitus of Ephesus is a philosopher's philosopher. His work was beloved by Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The philosopher from Ephesus is commonly known as the philosopher of fire (thanks to Aristotle) or, for those with a little more nuance, he is known as the philosopher of panta rei or flux — of constant never-ending change.  But there is another side of Heraclitus's philosophy that is less talked about and that is his philosophy of Logos. This element...

For Michel Foucault Power is critical to understanding the world we live in. Foucault's theory of power revolutionised the way we look at power from being a top-down domination to being an omnipresent force of nature. This episode is an introduction to the Foucault theory of power. We'll be explaining Foucault's theory in simple terms using examples from everyday life to show how revolutionary this new understanding of Power truly is.  A critical distinction in approaching Foucault's work on...

In this episode we explore a potential Nietzschean revaluation of all values in the form of a distinction. If we separate the ideas of femininity and masculinity from females and males, we are left with two possible revaluations.  There is the fight over the respective value of men and women in society; this is the classical struggle of historical Feminism. In this episode we are going to call this the Womanist struggle. There is another, deeper, struggle that has yet to be wrestled with on a...

The Four Quadrants model developed by Ken Wilber is an exceptional map of knowledge and of the human experience. It gives us a language for understanding differing fields of knowledge and why they are approaching the problems that they are and in the way that they are. The Four Quadrants model was developed by Ken Wilber in his book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and for him it is a map of the Kosmos (that is to say, of the entirety of reality rather than the merely materialist external cosmos)....

Jordan Peterson’s idea of Postmodern Neo-Marxism is a conspiracy theory. It is also the Shadow in the Jungian sense of Jordan Peterson. Nothing whips Peterson into a more passionate frenzy than the Postmodern Neo-Marxist idea. And to hear the way he talks about the “main villains” of the Postmodern Neo-Marxist movement — Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — this diagnosis becomes all the more obvious. Peterson goes beyond the bounds of reason and strays into the possession of his Shadow....

Is Buddhism a religion or philosophy? I have debated many times over the years with people who are fond of Buddhism but tend to dislike religion. Of course anybody who has studied Buddhism in any depth knows that Buddhism is a religion first and foremost. Is Buddhism a philosophy? Yes but in the way that Christianity is a philosophy that is to say that there is a philosophy within it but that is not what defines it.  In this episode we examine different schools of Buddhism and their...

In his 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard makes the claim that we are all living in a simulation. Baudrillard’s conception of simulation is extremely complex, going beyond The Matrix’s conception of the simulation (a movie that was inspired by Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra) as a virtual reality world in which we all live. Baudrillard says that with the emergence of the postmodern age, we have entered the simulation, a hyperreality in which all access to the real has...