Nietzsche Was NOT an Atheist. He Was a Mystic
You've Been Reading Him Wrong
You’ve been reading Nietzsche completely wrong.
He wasn’t an atheist. He was a mystic.
His great work, Zarathustra, is a religious text inspired by a mystical experience in Switzerland.
Nietzsche had a precognitive dream that shaped his metaphysics: as a young boy he dreamed of his dead father rising from the grave and taking his infant brother … who soon fell ill and died.
People read his claims that he was “Buddha” and “Dionysius” as madness. Yet those are his most profound statements.
He hated not Christ but Christianity.
In short, Nietzsche is spiritual but not religious.
This is the claim of my guest Rice University’s Jeff Kripal who will give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. Jeff witnessed the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago, and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. His ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life and he sees the same mystical inspiration in Nietzsche.
These interviews with Jeff have been the most transformative I’ve ever done since starting this project. As a religious seeker I haven’t found a contemporary scholar who is able to tie together classical religion, the great books, and new age spirituality in one philosophical framework quite as Jeff has.
What you are going to hear in this interview then isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Plato, Dante, Homer, Fuerbach, James, Hegel we’ve been reading all of these thinkers completely wrong as we have with Nietzsche. Jeff is leading nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist orthodoxy of the humanities.
Topics we cover:
2:42 The Übermensch Will Replace Humanity
7:38 Great Thinkers are Divinely Inspired
11:30 Nietzsche is a Mystical Thinker
16:09 Why Most People Misread Nietzsche
35:22 The Evidence for Prophecy
54:21 Holy Men Are Egomaniacs
1:18:33 Nietzsche Loved Christ but Hated Christians
1:30:04 Why Books Engender Mystical states
2:07:37 Why The Humanities Have Failed
2:23:05 All Philosophy Is Disguised Mysticism