85: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, pt. 1 - Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus

The Nietzsche Podcast

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is one of the more obscure texts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s corpus. There are many good reasons for this: it is unfinished, and ends abruptly; it was never published; and it concerns subject matter that is not as immediately accessible as Nietzsche’s more popular writings. You will not find his major concepts in this work – such as the will to power, or the critique of metaphysics - except insofar as those ideas appear in the background, inchoate, unnamed… not yet fully formed. In Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Pre-Platonic philosophers of Ancient Greece, we find the starting place for his later philosophical career. The inspiration for many of those great ideas, can arguably be found in his exegesis of these extraordinary figures from the Hellenic world, from the 6th to the 4th century BC. In today's episode, I'll introduce the text, then we'll cover the first three figures who I've classed as "the first cosmologists": Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus. While I'm mostly sticking to the text of the essay, I fill in some details using Nietzsche's lectures on the Pre-Platonics, on which this essay was based. Episode art: photo of the Temple of Poseidon