Hello lovely Patrons!
A new episode drops tomorrow on YouTube. You've already gotten early access to one version as paid patrons or through Nebula. This is a slightly edited version.
A sentence has been deleted: "[Nietzsche] was pretty much a white supremacist."
Let me explain. A few nights ago I went to see Judith Butler live in London, and one of the things they talked about is how on social media there's a tendency to slap a label on someone that acts as a simplistic judgement. But what philosophy and theory can (ideally) do is allow us to sit with complexity and difficult material; to suspend judgement and stay in that tension with patience to see what it brings us; to look at material through a variety of different lenses and thereby sharpen our critical faculties.
Butler's comments got me thinking about the way I wrote these two Nietzsche videos, and I think I fell into that trap a little bit. It's way too late to go back and edit Part 1, or to do any kind of rewrites or reshoots, but I went back and deleted that sentence from Part 2, which was the part that was bugging me the most. It's not that I think it's false per se: I do think that we could learn something interesting about Nietzsche and white supremacy (including how antisemitism functions as a part of white supremacy) by looking at his work through that lens. But that's not the words I used. In my haste, I did the thing Butler warned about - slapped a label on someone that came with a judgement, and used that as the end of the conversation rather than the beginning of one. In 'educational Youtuber' there are two words, right? And I think I let 'YouTuber' flex just a little too much over 'educational.' A bit of intellectual humility would have been a better approach - 'curiosity not ambition,' as you've heard me say before.
So I went back and removed it. It was a bit of extra work to re-render the video and then redo all the subtitles, but it was the right call. I've edited the Nebula version too: you'll see it change over shortly, and matching subtitles will follow.
I'll say more about this in the postmortem livestream to this Part 2 video. I'll remember this lesson for the next episodes too. I hope you find Part 2 of the Nietzsche series interesting and entertaining when it drops tomorrow!
Abi XXx