00:07:37.700It's, in fact, Zeus who is torturing him.
00:07:39.980In fact, tragedy is giving you an opportunity to sympathize with the bad guy, so to speak.
00:07:49.060You see this now, like Netflix, you know, what is their latest one? Lizzie Borden or Eileen Orris, or I think that's her name, this damaged woman, sympathetic in some ways. She was damaged, but horrible person, murderer. You want to sympathize with the devil, so to speak.
00:08:11.420well prometheus bound gives us an opportunity to sympathize with the devil he is offering gifts to
00:08:20.740mankind of course so there's there's something you know the adjective promethean certainly fits here
00:08:26.720it's redundant but he's an enemy of zeus he's an enemy of the olympians you are sympathizing with
00:08:33.060the villain, with the adversary of God. Look at what is happening there. He's bound on a rock.
00:08:44.400He's pierced for our inequities. He's a proto-Jewish figure, of course. He's a proto-Jesus1.00
00:08:53.620figure, in fact. And this type of suffering servant to mankind gets worked out in many,
00:09:03.920many different variations before he ends up on the cross as Jesus Christ.
00:09:12.360So there's a lot going on, but that is our view of the origin of tragedy. To sum up,
00:09:22.440tragedy originates with human sacrifice0.97
00:09:50.020jesus christ prometheus as the tragic hero uh so that's how i would sum up our thoughts
00:09:58.540if i if i could i'm glad you asked that question no that was really good so your idea is that
00:10:06.220through this sort of this primordial encounter with this sacrifice that is the basic root of
00:10:14.960tragedy. And it's only sort of a late stage where this individualist Apollonian character emerges.
00:10:22.140That's Nietzsche's view. Our view is something like the opposite, which is that the origin of
00:10:28.600tragedy is the individualism of the human sacrifice. Like, why don't we see a, why don't,
00:10:35.400why isn't the great art of the most famous, at least most salient art of the Greeks? Why is it
00:10:41.960tragedy, as opposed to Oedipus winning, kicking ass. So what if he married his mother?1.00
00:10:52.280Not marrying his mother, but why is it not Oedipus triumphant? Why is it the sublimated0.99
00:11:01.280sacrifice of Oedipus? Why do we go watch a sacrifice? Because that's what tragedy is.0.93
00:11:10.480it's a human sacrifice of this great individual for the whole it's the same logic of uh sacrificing
00:11:20.740uh you know one azazel you know kick him out into the wilderness this one's for yahweh it's
00:11:26.400the same logic that you find in in the torah yeah i see i i i definitely see um
00:11:36.160more so that it's a productive tension between the apollonian and the dionysian and oedipus is
00:11:45.000the greatest example because he's sort of almost a proto-critique of socratism that you can take
00:11:52.240rationality and push it to those extremes and at the base of all reality it is sort of dionysian
00:12:00.960and suffering but yeah that's Nietzsche's view I'm just I'm trying to differentiate our view
00:12:07.180from Nietzsche's now look Nietzsche I resonate with all of that and I it you know at no point
00:12:14.380in my life am I going to really like strongly contradict Nietzsche but we are saying we're
00:12:20.920inspired by Nietzsche sure but we are saying something fundamentally different like Nietzsche
00:12:25.740is embracing tragedy on some level and he's embracing Dionysus on some level and we're not
00:12:32.500but isn't the sort of productive tension between Apollo and Dionysus I mean
00:12:38.720I guess after the greatest tragedies is when the Parthenon is built isn't that the height of
00:12:44.740Athens doesn't that productive tension produce the greatest works of art I think I think you
00:12:51.560could definitely say that and i resonate with that the notion that you you can't really fully
00:12:57.780kick dionysus out of olympus even you need that chaos energy for lack of a better word what you
00:13:07.220have to have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star there's some aphorism from
00:13:11.460nisha like that from beyond good and evil or a book like that i i i get it and i resonate with
00:13:17.020that quite a bit and that is that speaks to my soul but we are saying something different and
00:13:22.520something more critical why can't we have an apollonian epic where oedipus wins because it
00:13:31.360doesn't full moralization doesn't it because it doesn't produce productive tension in in our
00:13:39.540spirit we need we need chaos and we need rationality and realize there's look because
00:13:46.080that's kind of what i think that i get it why not why not have oedipus like experience the chaos
00:13:54.440and then ultimately triumph over it why do we need this tragic outlook because that's
00:14:02.300socratism that's saying that we can solve all of life's problems and through rationality and that
00:14:09.640doesn't produce culture that produces Euripides and I think Euripides the Bacchae I think Nietzsche
00:14:17.880says this somewhere it's almost an apologia of how he ran tragedy before where he kind of just
00:14:24.760explains the plot and explains okay this guy did a bad thing so something's bad going to happen to
00:14:30.180him and the Bacchae is Pentheus getting punished because he denied Dionysus his rightful place
00:14:38.400Yeah. And that's kind of the. I guess I agree with you that Dionysus.
00:14:45.840Look, I totally understand what you were saying and you're speaking directly to my heart on the sense of like you have to have a tension between life and death and chaos and order and et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:59.840I totally get it. But I don't know. One thing that Nietzsche really, really missed, and we get to this in book three, and I think it was a he missed the mark completely was, you know, late in his life, he was signing letters to, you know, what is it, Peter Gast and Jacob Burkhardt.
00:15:23.700He was signing letters as Dionysus, and he signed one, Dionysus versus the crucified.
00:17:11.540And we're going after Freddie on this one.
00:17:17.480Yeah, I think that what you're saying is right in Dionysus and Christ are both suffering.
00:17:26.100But what I get from Nietzsche is Dionysus is suffering as affirmation, as loving life even with its suffering, whereas Jesus and the Christians are rejecting that for the afterlife.
00:17:40.160They're rejecting the suffering of this world and positing nihilist, ex nihilo, something that's going to come after, that's going to make everything right.
00:17:51.120Whereas Dionysus says, no, you live with this here and now.
00:17:55.320We build these beautiful things on top of it, but we recognize at the heart of it, life is suffering.0.91
00:18:01.700The Christians reject that because they can't deal with it.0.72
00:18:05.220And they say, well, in the next life, it'll be okay.0.96
00:18:07.840Yeah. You have accurately explicated his view. There's no doubt about it. And I resonate with that view. I just think we need to be, you know, there's Nietzsche's vision of Dionysus and there's the real Dionysus as he appeared in the ancient world and continues to appear through Jewish and post-Jewish archetypes.
00:18:36.000It continues to recur. And I do think that Nietzsche just missed the fact that Jesus is a version of him. He's a sublimated version of Dionysus, and he's definitely a more puritanical version of Dionysus, at least when it comes to sex.
00:18:55.900You have Venus as a virgin for God's sake, yet she gives birth to the Son of God.
00:19:02.320Although it's not in the Gospel of Mark, but you have a virgin Son of God ruling over you.
00:19:09.340I mean, they really sublimated these things.
00:19:12.340As opposed to Venus mourning Adonis, who has to go back to the underworld,
00:19:18.800you have mary magdalene pitying pieta jesus her son so there's this who's going down to hell0.72
00:19:28.480before he comes back up just like adonis adonis is another one of these proto-jewish proto-jesus
00:19:34.000you know entities and there's no doubt that it's different but nietzsche really because he was not
00:19:43.460and he should have been aware of roman interpretation but he wasn't and he didn't
00:19:47.540use it and he just sort of missed these things and i do appreciate the like the tragic dionysian
00:19:57.000spirit as more attractive to people like us like nietzsche's version of dionysus is much more
00:20:06.760attractive to people like us than jesus but dionysus is jesus do you think that the parthenon
00:20:15.020could have been built without the tragic view of life yes you think that the tragic view had to
00:20:23.540come out of the apollonianism had to come out of the dionysian in in nietzsche's view right yeah
00:20:31.420yeah it's only from housing the dionysian like at the end of um
00:20:37.420orestes whatever that is when the furies are coming after orestes and athena she houses them0.88
00:20:46.560and turns this dionysian chthonic force into the humanides which becomes the structure on which
00:20:54.120the parthenon is built and that's saying you have to acknowledge the founding violence that yeah
00:21:00.360your city was built on but at the same time you create beautiful images on top of them
00:21:06.720even if they're not infinite even if they're not limitless but i took too much time thank you no
00:21:11.660no this is great stuff this is great stuff um i think that our view can be in a productive dialogue
00:21:21.020with a a more like and i mean this in a good way like more like fundamentalist view of nietzsche
00:21:27.720like you're yeah i i totally think that is the case i also think if there's anything that like
00:21:37.360i i've i thought about this a few ways like everything is founded on violence
00:21:44.640there there's a dionysian death energy to everything that's great and we'll just use
00:21:51.660the United States of America as an example. It was founded on a genocide and land theft,0.97
00:21:58.600et cetera, just like Israel. And it's like, on the one hand, the left is more honest about0.91
00:22:08.380this foundation, but then they reject it. So you have like the 1619 Project, whatever it was called,
00:22:14.520where it's like, it's all evil. It's all based on slavery, genocide of the Native Americans,
00:22:19.520land theft brutality etc etc etc and you you sort of have to like reject it in a way whereas the
00:22:28.060conservatives are less honest and they want to deny it you know they're like oh well you know
00:22:34.640actually it wasn't a genocide when you really think of it and you know they'll come up with
00:22:40.420various ways of explaining slavery like we were so good that we freed the slaves or if you're a
00:22:45.840southerner it's like we were the nice guys who took care of our slaves it wasn't bad
00:22:50.360all of that you know there might be even there there are definitely kernels of truth to the
00:22:55.600right-wing views but you're just fundamentally denying the dark reality of america that it was
00:23:03.980founded on the bones of native americans and slaves to be blunt and it's like the left wants
00:23:13.220to demoralize you and say that nothing good can be built on the bones. And the right is like,
00:23:20.580bones? We don't see bones. Both are wrong. And I think a Nietzschean perspective on this is right,
00:23:30.000where you can't deny the bones, but then you also can't deny the shining city that's built on top
00:23:38.240of the bodies and to accept both is a proper, like even psychological, it's a proper way of
00:23:48.720achieving psychological health. You know, like in Jungian psychology, you have to understand your
00:23:54.240own shadow self, your own dark side. And in Freudian psychology, you can't like, there's this
00:24:02.200Because in the circulation of the psyche, there's a block because you're not facing something. And that something might be very disturbing. It might have been that you were abused as a child. It might have been that you still resent your father from sort of ripping you away from maternal warmth.
00:24:19.720You want to kill your father and have sex with your mother.1.00
00:24:21.840Well, that's one way of saying what I just said.1.00
00:24:24.140The father, the paternalistic energy took you away from that perfect place you were in as a baby with your mother.
00:24:44.780You've repressed your homosexuality even.0.93
00:24:47.280This is the Freudian way of looking at it, and it is Nietzschean. There's a lot of parallels with Jung, obviously. Jung was his student or colleague. And it's about facing the dark side. And I agree with this 100%.
00:25:02.600I mean, I don't agree with 100% of the things Freud wrote, but I agree 100% with his overall ethos, let's say, of looking at the darkness and in some ways embracing the darkness, bringing it into yourself.
00:25:23.540And you don't think the purely Apollonian art form wouldn't just degenerate into Socrates with these noble lies of a beautiful world where we don't have any suffering and we just sort of like can go off into rational land and just construct good things and ignore the bad things.