Solomon & Smith

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Solomon & Smith episodes

  • Was Paradise Already Lost? | Achsah Guibbory on Milton’s Theology of Desire

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this conversation, Achsah Guibbory joins Jack and Milo to discuss John Donne, John Milton, love, sex, sin, marriage, desire, Paradise Lost, and the problem of whether erotic love can ever be holy.


    Donne and Milton are two of the great Johns of seventeenth-century English poetry, claimed by some to be entirely different men. Donne is witty, erotic, devotional, cynical, sacred, obscene, metaphysical, and impossible to pin down. Milton is austere, sublime, political, theological, revolutionary, authoritarian, and not much fun at a party. Yet both poets return, in radically different ways, to the same infinity: love.


    The discussion begins with the word itself. What did “love” mean in the seventeenth century, before Darwin, before Freud, and before modern romantic individualism? How did English poetry inherit older distinctions between erotic love, spiritual love, charity, friendship, desire, marriage, and the love of God? And why does one little English monosyllable have to carry so much metaphysical weight?


    Guibbory places Donne and Milton against the long Christian tradition that associated sex with sin, chastity with holiness, and desire with the Fall. Augustine looms large: original sin, shame, bodily rebellion, and the problem of sexual desire after Eden. But Donne, in poems such as *The Good-Morrow*, *The Ecstasy*, *The Canonization*, *The Sun Rising*, and *A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning*, offers something stranger and more daring: the possibility that bodily love might itself become spiritual.


    The conversation then turns to Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. What is sex like before the Fall? Do Adam and Eve desire one another in Eden, or is their prelapsarian love something more equal, mutual, peaceful, and almost desireless? What changes after the fruit is eaten? Why does Milton describe postlapsarian sex as the “seal of guilt”? And why does Adam fall so quickly once Eve has fallen?


    Along the way we discuss Milton’s bower scene, Eve’s reflection in the lake, Adam’s loneliness, Satan’s resentment, hierarchy, equality, the strange ending of *Paradise Regained*, and whether Milton gives Satan some of his own political instincts. We also talk about Donne’s contradictions, Milton’s unresolved tensions, Thomas Browne, Kafka's weird humour, and why great writers are often most alive when they have not fully solved themselves.


    Expect reflections on:


    John Donne and John Milton as rival poets of love


    Achsah Guibbory on Donne, Milton, sex, and theology


    Augustine, original sin, chastity, and sexual shame


    Erotic love, spiritual love, charity, and marriage


    Donne’s love poetry and the holiness of consummated desire


    Milton’s *Paradise Lost* and sex before the Fall


    Adam, Eve, equality, hierarchy, and the bower scene


    Desire as lack, danger, or spiritual possibility


    Satan, resentment, monarchy, and Milton’s politics


    The difference between Donne’s lyric contradictions and Milton’s epic resolutions


    The “seal of guilt” and sex after the Fall


    Milton’s divorce tracts and the nightmare of “household captivity”


    Paradise, the New Jerusalem, and whether we really want a world without desire


    If you enjoy long-form conversations on poetry, literature, theology, philosophy, seventeenth-century writing, erotic love, sin, Milton, Donne, and the strange borderlands between body and soul, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.


    Who writes love better: John Donne or John Milton? And can erotic love ever be holy?


    Chapters:


    00:00:00 Sex, sin, and Donne’s dangerous poetry

    00:01:16 Introduction

    00:06:32 Achsah Guibbory appears

    00:11:06 Milton’s youthful love poem

    00:16:02 Donne versus Milton

    00:20:23 What does “love” mean?

    00:27:03 Augustine’s sexual legacy

    00:29:02 Donne’s sacred eroticism

    00:31:17 Plato, Genesis, and desire

    00:35:14 Sex before the Fall

    00:44:33 Desire, lack, and Satan

    00:49:41 Milton’s unresolved epic

    00:52:41 Donne’s contradictions

    00:56:30 Paradise Regained and grace

    01:01:16 Adam’s desire

    01:12:20 Eve and Adam fall

    01:14:16 Sex after the Fall

    01:22:52 The Messiah's Daughter

    01:33:23 Marriage, divorce, and captivity


    Correction:

    2:00 It is, in fact, Barnard.

    1 hr 40 min
  • Reading is... BAD For You Actually

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith


    The smartphone has quietly assassinated humanity's greatest invention.


    In this discussion, we explore the decline of deep reading. An obligatory video for all book-based channels. We look at the atomic annihilation of literacy, attention spans, memory, and critical thinking. A crazy Faustian twist: though we have access to more information than ever before, we are actually losing the ability to read and think.


    Topics discussed:


    Why smartphones are changing the way our brains process information


    The decline of reading for pleasure


    AI, ChatGPT, and the miserable future of literacy


    Gen Z, attention spans, and digital culture


    Books vs. short-form gunk


    The printing press, literacy, and the miserable future of 'civilisation'

    1 hr
  • Who REALLY Wrote the Quran? | Gabriel Said Reynolds

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith


    Who wrote the Quran? Did it flow directly from God? Did Muhammad compose it? Did several authors compose it over several centuries? Does it have the characteristics of a dictated text, or a written text? How simple or complicated is the story of the Quran's origins?


    In this episode, Jack and Milo are joined by Islamic studies scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds to explore one of the most controversial questions in Islamic Studies.


    The conversation examines the traditional Islamic account of the Quran alongside modern academic perspectives. Reynolds argues that the evidence may point toward a more complex process of composition than is commonly assumed, challenging the long-standing Western, secular scholarly consensus that Muhammad himself was the sole human author.


    Topics include:


    • Who wrote the Quran?

    • Did Muhammad write the Quran?

    • The traditional Islamic narrative of revelation

    • Academic theories of Quranic authorship

    • How the Quran was compiled and transmitted

    • Why the Quran is arranged by surah length rather than chronology

    • The relationship between the Quran, the Torah, and the Gospel

    • The emergence of Classical Arabic

    • The literary qualities and inimitability (i'jaz) of the Quran

    • Early Islamic history

    • Historical-critical approaches to the Quran

    • Western scholarship on the origins of Islam


    If you enjoy long-form conversations on religion, philosophy, history, and literature, consider subscribing for more discussions with scholars.

    1 hr 9 min
  • This Philosopher Believed in Magic | James D. Reid on Novalis

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this conversation, James D. Reid joins Jack and Milo to discuss Novalis: poet, philosopher, natural scientist, early German Romantic, and perhaps the greatest pen name in literary history.


    Novalis — born Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg — died of tuberculosis just before his twenty-ninth birthday, yet left behind one of the strangest and most suggestive bodies of work in European Romanticism. Reid discusses Novalis as a thinker who refuses ordinary divisions between philosophy, poetry, religion, science, nature, and love. Was he a poet doing philosophy, a philosopher writing poetry, or some bizarre contortion of the two: a philosopher for whom poetry was the only possible means of philosophizing.


    The discussion begins with Novalis’s life and intellectual world: Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling, the Freiberg Mining Academy, early German Romanticism, and the extraordinary range of Novalis’s unfinished projects. Reid explains why Novalis should not be reduced to the familiar image of the death-haunted mystical poet, and why his notebooks, fragments, novels, and poems reveal a more precise and incisive mind.


    Much of the conversation centres on Kant and the imagination. Reid explains how the German Romantics inherit Kant’s "subjective turn," but extend the imagination far beyond perception and art, into science, morality, politics, religion, and our most basic orientation toward the world. We discuss Fichte, the thing-in-itself, appearances, language, and the Romantic conviction that reality is not simply found, but partly shaped by how human beings attend to it.


    The second half of the conversation turns to Novalis’s *Hymns to the Night*, the death of Sophie von Kühn, erotic longing, Christianity, mysticism, darkness, mediation, and the possibility that poetry can do philosophical work which ordinary propositional prose cannot. Reid discusses the challenge of translating Novalis, the relation between philosophy and poetry, the *Monologue*, magical idealism, and the idea that words do not merely describe a world, but help give us one.


    Expect reflections on:


    Novalis as poet, philosopher, scientist, and early Romantic


    Kant, Fichte, imagination, and the thing-in-itself


    The fragment as philosophical and literary form


    Why Novalis is more than a mystical death-haunted poet


    The *Hymns to the Night* and the death of Sophie von Kühn


    Christianity, mediation, religion, and heterodoxy


    Night, eroticism, death, and mysticism


    Poetry as philosophy, and philosophy as a literary form


    The problem of translating beauty and precision


    Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, and the sciences


    Magical idealism and the possibility of poetising the world


    Mountains, language, ecology, and seeing the world as a “you”


    If you enjoy long-form conversations on literature, philosophy, German Romanticism, theology, poetry, metaphysics, and the strange borderlands between science and spirit, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.


    Is Novalis the greatest literary pen name? And can poetry think things that philosophy cannot?


    00:00:00 Words, world, and magical idealism

    00:02:00 Introduction to James D. Reid and Novalis

    00:08:17 James arrives

    00:15:44 Poetic epigraph

    00:18:06 Who was Novalis?

    00:21:54 Novalis, fragments, and Romantic “memes”

    00:24:16 Kant's imagination

    00:35:31 Fichte, subjectivity, and things in themselves

    00:40:49 Language and perception

    00:43:13 Novalis or Hardenberg?

    00:46:21 Friedrich Schlegel and the early Romantic circle

    00:47:17 What made Novalis unique?

    00:52:07 *Hymns to the Night*: origins and textual history

    00:58:24 Was Novalis a Christian?

    01:08:02 Erotic night, death, and mysticism

    01:18:04 Translating Novalis: poetry as philosophy

    01:24:14 Kant and the night

    01:30:01 The *Monologue* and language

    01:31:44 Plato, Descartes, and philosophy as literature

    01:34:14 Wagner, Nietzsche, and Romanticism after Novalis

    01:37:00 Why philosophers distrust poetry

    01:44:41 What is magical idealism?

    01:49:01 The magical power of words

    01:54:47 Mountains, ecology, and seeing nature as a “you”

    01:58:40 The blue flower, longing, and *Heinrich von Ofterdingen*

    02:01:37 How James D. Reid came to Novalis

    02:08:10 Conclusion

    2 hr 9 min
  • The Greatest Novel of Every Decade (1800–2000) | Andrew Nixon’s Picks

    *- Andrew's list is pasted below -*


    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this video Andrew discusses his favourite works of fiction decade by decade, starting in 1800 and going 200 years, decade by decade, until they reach the borders of our present century. If you would like to be interviewed by us about your favourite books, please send an email.


    Two bonus decades are available over on Patreon!


    1800s

    Tales from Shakespeare - Mary & Charles Lamb


    1810s

    Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen


    1820s

    A barren decade.


    1830s

    The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens


    1840s

    Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray


    1850s

    Mada-- Bleak House - Charles Dickens


    1860s

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


    1870s

    Middlemarch - George Eliot


    1880s

    Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson


    1890s

    The Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith


    1900s

    The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame


    1910s

    Howard's End - E.M. Forster


    1920s

    A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes


    1930s

    A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh


    1940s

    Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake


    1950s

    The Ginger Man - J.P. Donleavy


    1960s

    The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien


    1970s

    Watership Down - Richard Adams


    1980s

    The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis


    1990s

    Blue at the Mizzen (representing the full 20-book Aubrey-Maturin series)


    00:00:00 Introduction

    00:05:11 1800s

    00:08:29 1810s

    00:13:56 1820s

    00:14:45 1830s

    00:19:20 1840s

    00:22:40 1850s

    00:27:48 1860s

    00:32:13 1870s

    00:38:06 1880s

    00:42:20 1890s

    00:45:33 1900s

    00:51:46 1910s

    00:56:20 1920s

    01:01:45 1930s

    01:08:16 1940s

    01:11:51 1950s

    01:16:47 1960s

    01:22:48 1970s

    01:28:06 1980s

    01:31:25 1990s

    01:36:07 Conclusion

    1 hr 37 min
  • Virgil is the Greatest Poet of Antiquity (Not Homer) | Wright & McGill on The Aeneid

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this conversation, Scott McGill and Susanna Wright join Jack and Milo to discuss their recent translation of Virgil’s *Aeneid*: one of the foundational poems of Roman literature, a work of exile, empire, grief, violence, duty, divine terror, and extraordinary poetic control.


    The conversation begins with the problem of collaboration: how do two translators produce one poem? McGill and Wright discuss the six-year process of translating the *Aeneid* together, from early divided drafts to an intensely collaborative line-by-line revision, and reflect on what it means to develop a single poetic voice out of two sensibilities.


    Much of the discussion centres on Virgil’s style: his elevation without bombast, his emotional restraint, his “majesty of sadness,” his difference from Ovid, and the challenge of translating a poem that is at once ancient, literary, musical, political, and deeply humane. We talk about Tennyson, Dryden, Emily Wilson, Homer, Ovid, alliteration, metre, syntax, wordplay, and the question of how far a translator should go in making an ancient poem feel modern.


    The conversation also explores the *Aeneid*’s relationship to Homer. Is Virgil merely reworking the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, or is he creating something radically new out of inherited material? We discuss Roman originality, translation as collaboration with the dead, the poem’s strange “cinematic universe” of myth, and the way Virgil turns Homeric models inside out.


    In the second half, we turn to the poem’s darkest and most difficult questions: Aeneas and Turnus, the shocking final killing, whether the poem is Augustan propaganda, the human cost of empire, and Virgil’s extraordinary capacity to extend pity even to enemies and monsters. The episode also ranges through Dido, Mezentius, Lausus, the fall of Troy, the shield of Aeneas, the future of Rome, and the burden of history.


    Expect reflections on:


    Virgil’s *Aeneid* and why it still matters


    How two translators collaborate on one poem


    The difference between Virgil, Homer, and Ovid


    Emily Wilson, translation, accessibility, and “otherness”


    The emotional gravity of Virgil’s Latin


    Dido, Aeneas, Turnus, Mezentius, and Lausus


    The ending of the *Aeneid* and the killing of Turnus


    Whether the *Aeneid* is Augustan propaganda


    Empire, violence, pity, duty, and the costs of history


    Alliteration, assonance, metre, syntax, and wordplay


    Roman originality and the creative use of the past


    The fall of Troy and the terror of the gods


    If you enjoy long-form conversations on classical literature, translation, poetry, mythology, philosophy, history, and the strange afterlives of ancient texts, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.


    What is your favourite translation of the *Aeneid*? Is Virgil’s ending a failure, a shock, or the whole point of the poem?


    00:00:00 The Fall of Troy and the Terror of the Gods

    00:01:06 Introduction to Scott McGill, Susanna Wright, and *The Aeneid*

    00:08:04 Guests arrive: Rome, Christianity, and imperial continuity

    00:11:47 Poetic epigraph

    00:13:04 Two translators, one poem

    00:18:38 English poetic traditions, Tennyson, and translation taste

    00:22:07 The Emily Wilson Revolution

    00:27:58 What is Virgil’s Latin like?

    00:35:39 Virgil, Homer, and originality from the past

    00:45:29 Turnus, Achilles, and the second Trojan War

    00:47:53 The shocking ending of *The Aeneid*

    00:53:26 Ecumenical pathos: Empathy in Virgil

    00:59:35 The *Odyssey* and unending battle

    01:06:46 The shadow of heroism

    01:10:00 Ancient endings, unfinished poems, and Lucan

    01:14:00 Sound, syntax, alliteration, and Virgilian texture

    01:23:25 Roman history, prophecy, and the shield of Aeneas

    01:29:36 First encounters with *The Aeneid*


    Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr (BWV 639) performed by Chiara Bertoglio and shortened for the video, under the following license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

    1 hr 36 min
  • Harry Potter Is Secretly About Class

    Harry Potter, the work of a 'socialist', is in love with the trappings of the upper-class. The wizarding world is based entirely on the aesthetics Britain's elite institutions. It is not the story of an outsider, but a fantasy about inheritance, privilege, and belonging to an ancient, racially pure elite.


    In this episode, we discuss Harry Potter as a British class allegory.


    We discuss


    - Hogwarts' resemblance to elite boarding schools and Oxford colleges

    - The contrast between the suburbian pleb Dursleys and the rustic pleb Weasleys

    - Harry Potter as an aristocrat trapped in suburbia

    - The relationship between magic, bloodlines, and social hierarchy

    - JK Rowling's internally conflicting attitudes toward modernity, tradition, and class

    - The influence of Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien on the Pottiverse

    - Hogwarts as an escape from modern, middle-class life and cultural rootlessness


    00:00 Intro

    01:21 The Hype

    04:10 Rowling's main weaknesses

    08:03 Rowling's main strengths

    10:28 HP as Gay Allegory

    12:26 HP as Class Allegory

    16:01 The disdain for pleb mediocrity and modernity

    22:25 British Class - Poshos magic, plebs muggles

    25:50 British Elite Public Schools are the model of Hogwarts

    28:35 Harry as member of master race aristocracy

    32:32 Why isn't mudblood Hermione the main character?

    35:55 Parallels with Star Wars and Superheroes

    38:55 Harry as posh boy cannot fail

    41:18 Malfoy as posh boy purist

    44:57 Rowling as a socialist

    47:00 Rowling as SJW

    50 min
  • How Ovid Rewrote Greek Mythology Forever | Stephanie McCarter

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this episode of Solomon & Smith, Jack and Milo speak with classicist and translator Stephanie McCarter about her acclaimed translation of one of the most influential works in Western literature, Ovid's Metamorphoses.


    Ovid retold Greek myths of transformation, and in so doing transformed Greek mythology. We talk about why Roman writers saw translation as an act of cultural conquest, and about what is gained and lost when Latin poetry is brought across into modern English. McCarter discusses her approach to translating Ovid, her decision to render sexual violence explicitly rather than euphemistically, and why she believes no translation can ever be faithful.


    We discuss Roman attitudes toward Greece, the philosophy of transformation, the poetic differences between Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, the politics of translation, and why Ovid remains one of the most modern voices from the ancient world.


    Topics include:


    Ovid's Metamorphoses


    Ancient Greek mythology


    Roman literature


    Classical studies


    Translation theory


    "To translate is to conquer"


    Stephanie McCarter's Penguin translation


    The history of Rome and Greece


    Mythological retellings


    Poetry and meter


    Horace, Virgil, and Catullus


    The politics of storytelling


    Women in classical literature


    Sexual violence in ancient texts


    The philosophy of change and transformation


    00:00:00 Translation as conquest

    00:01:28 Introduction

    00:05:00 Flux, Rome, and McCarter’s translation

    00:10:07 Stephanie McCarter arrives

    00:13:04 Poetic epigraph

    00:14:34 English poetry, Dickinson, Byron, and Chaucer

    00:16:45 Horace and the magic of Latin

    00:21:51 Ovid in Latin: speed, play, and rhetoric

    00:25:27 Virgil, allusion, and Ovidian style

    00:30:30 Epic, epyllion, and the structure of the *Metamorphoses*

    00:38:08 Greece, Rome, and translation as conquest

    00:42:35 Translating Ovid: negotiation, constraint, and compensation

    00:53:38 McCarter vs Mandelbaum: architecture and line

    01:00:16 Apollo, Daphne, archaism, and poetic style

    01:06:06 Puns, wordplay, Catullus, and the “fuckathon”

    01:09:12 Sexual violence, legal language, and Roman readers

    01:14:54 Arachne, power, Augustus, and exile

    01:20:14 Ovid’s immortality and the final metamorphosis

    01:21:27 Nature, flux, Lucretius, and the minded cosmos

    01:29:58 Ovid, Shakespeare, and negative capability

    01:36:30 First Encounters and Farewells

    1 hr 43 min
  • The Novel That Predicted Europe’s Collapse? | Ritchie Robertson on The Magic Mountain

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    In this conversation, Professor Ritchie Robertson joins Jack and Milo to discuss Thomas Mann’s *The Magic Mountain*: one of the great modern European novels, a thousand-page comic-philosophical epic about illness, love, death, time, politics, and the fate of humanism.


    Ritchie Robertson is one of the leading English-speaking scholars of German and European literature. He is the author of a major study of the Enlightenment, general editor of the current Oxford World’s Classics Thomas Mann translations, and translator of Mann’s *Death in Venice* and *Doctor Faustus*. Here, he helps us situate *The Magic Mountain* within Mann’s wider work, German intellectual history, and the political crises of the early twentieth century.


    The discussion begins with the Enlightenment, and with the novel’s two great intellectual antagonists: Settembrini, the liberal humanist and advocate of progress, and Naphta, the Jesuit-communist defender of terror, sacrifice, and revolutionary violence. Between them stands Hans Castorp, Mann’s magnificently ordinary hero: a young engineer who travels to a Swiss sanatorium for a short visit and accidentally remains there for seven years.


    Much of the conversation centres on Hans Castorp’s education. In the Berghof sanatorium, he is removed from ordinary life and exposed to fundamental experiences: illness, erotic fascination, biology, music, death, philosophical dispute, and visionary solitude. Robertson discusses the “Snow” chapter as the philosophical heart of the novel, in which Castorp sees both the possibility of a golden age and the permanent human possibility of blood, cruelty, and sacrifice.


    We also explore why *The Magic Mountain* remains so readable despite its reputation for difficulty. Mann’s novel is undoubtedly a book of ideas, but it is also comic, sensuous, characterful, musical, and full of memorable scenes: Behrens, Joachim, Clavdia Chauchat, Mynheer Peeperkorn, the sanatorium routines, the medical lectures, the erotic charge of biology, and the strange theatricality of life above the “flatland.”


    Expect reflections on:


    Thomas Mann, music, Wagner, and novelistic composition


    The Enlightenment as an unfinished project


    Settembrini, Naphta, liberalism, communism, and terror


    Hans Castorp’s development from passive mediocrity to individual consciousness


    Love, death, illness, and the sanatorium as a school of experience


    The “Snow” chapter and its vision of paradise and blood sacrifice


    Whether *The Magic Mountain* is really a difficult novel


    Rereading, Adorno, and the book’s strange addictive power


    Homosexuality, erotic indirection, and Clavdia Chauchat


    Russia, the East, Orientalism, Dostoevsky, and revolution


    The First World War and the novel’s battlefield ending


    Premonitions of catastrophe, and the danger of reading later history backwards


    Susan Sontag’s criticism of Mann as an “over-cooperative” novelist


    Whether you are already a devoted reader of *The Magic Mountain*, or have been meaning to climb it for years, this conversation offers a detailed, lively, and intellectually generous guide to Mann’s strange, comic, terrifying, and inexhaustible novel.


    If you enjoy long-form conversations on literature, philosophy, theology, politics, German thought, and the great novels of European modernism, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.


    Have you read *The Magic Mountain*? And if so: should one read it once, three times, or a thousand?


    00:00:00 The Snow chapter: paradise and blood sacrifice

    00:01:18 Introduction to Ritchie Robertson and *The Magic Mountain*

    00:03:31 What is *The Magic Mountain* about?

    00:05:56 Why do people still read *The Magic Mountain*?

    00:13:33 Ritchie Robertson arrives

    00:14:16 Poetic epigraph: Eichendorff and longing

    00:16:19 Thomas Mann, music, and *Doctor Faustus*

    00:19:38 The Enlightenment, Settembrini, and humanism

    00:25:49 Clavdia Chauchat, love, and Hans Castorp’s education

    00:30:07 Illness, death, Joachim, and transformation

    00:34:04 The “Snow” chapter explained

    00:38:24 Difficulty, rereading, Naphta, and Lukács

    00:49:10 Erotic memory, homosexuality, Russia, and the East

    00:58:38 Revolution, utopia, and the meaning of life

    01:04:03 The ending: war, death, song, and love

    01:07:28 Nazism, later history, Sontag, and Mann’s over-explanation

    01:12:34 Conclusion

    1 hr 13 min
  • Nietzsche: Christianity Is the Most Successful Form of Nihilism

    Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership


    This discussion is largely a response to some of the reactions to our most recent DBH interview. We discuss Nietzsche, Chesterton, antisemitism, Christianity, nihilism, morality, Nazism, Darwinism, Schopenhauer, and On the Genealogy of Morals.


    We examine Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality, his relationship to Nazism, the influence of Darwin and Schopenhauer on his philosophy, and why Genealogy of Morals remains so provocative.


    00:00 Introduction

    02:28 Chesterton's claim that Hitlerism was "Jewish"

    05:19 Conspiracy theory that Nazism was a Jewish plot

    06:38 Nietzsche, Judaism, and Christianity

    08:00 Christianity as the universalisation of ressentiment

    10:48 Was Nietzsche a precursor to Nazism?

    12:42 Nietzsche, Darwin, and evolutionary thought

    13:13 Schopenhauer, the Will, and Darwinism

    16:06 First impressions of Genealogy of Morals

    18:16 Nietzsche's style

    21:16 Reading Nietzsche for the first time

    24:39 The power of Nietzsche's literary voice

    27:11 The crisis of morality before Nietzsche

    31:35 Nietzsche's wordplay and philosophy of affirmation

    33:25 Compassion, suffering, and Christian morality

    34:06 Christianity as "the most practical form of nihilism"

    35:38 Socrates, asceticism, and the origins of morality

    38:07 Determinism and the psychology of belief

    40:53 Nietzsche's collapse and legacy

    41:22 Nazi appropriation - Hitler, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

    43:23 Nietzsche's anti-nationalism and anti-anti-Semitism

    45 min

About Solomon & Smith

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Solomon & Smith discuss literature, philosophy, history, film, and the meaning of the universe.