24. An Economy of Bodies: Nietzsche, Sex, and Beauty.

Special Episode: An Economy of Bodies – Nietzsche, Sex, Beauty, and the Will to Power

This week’s episode is something different. I’m sharing the recording of my presentation at the annual Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference at Queen's University in Belfast (6th September). My paper, An Economy of Bodies, brings Nietzsche’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary psychology and behavioural science to explore sex, beauty, culture, social status, destiny, and what Nietzsche calls “ascending life.”

Though delivered in an academic setting, the ideas here cut straight into lived experience: why we find bodies beautiful, how our aesthetic sensibility shapes culture, and how power, desire, and valuation work at the most basic human level in our most primal impulses.

I’ll be developing this work into a concise, practical guide soon, but for now, here’s the raw presentation that set the discussion in motion.

Next episode will be our season finale released on the 26th September, slightly out of kilter with our regular schedule due to the Belfast conference. It's going to be a scorcher. Do not miss it! 

Transcript

Special Episode: An Economy of Bodies: Nietzsche, Sex, and Beauty

This week’s episode is a little different. After this introduction, you’ll hear the recording of my presentation at the Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which took place last Saturday, the 6th of September.

That’s also why this episode is arriving later than usual: I was away at the conference, but I made sure to record my talk so I could share it here.

My topic was An Economy of Bodies — a Nietzschean account of sex, beauty, culture, social status, and what Nietzsche calls “ascending life.” It brings together Nietzsche’s philosophy with evolutionary psychology and behavioural science, which is my professional background. The paper was written for an academic audience, but the ideas are no less relevant to everyday life, because the practical implications for our experience and our life chances are profound.

I’ll be working this material up into a more accessible and practical guide in the coming weeks, which I’ll publish through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. I’ve been writing on these themes for years, so my hope is that it will be a quick process to crystallise the ideas into something punchy, insightful, and useful.

So, what is the Friedrich Nietzsche Society? It’s an annual conference — more like a symposium — bringing together Nietzsche scholars: professors, lecturers, PhD students. Out of about seventy delegates, only two of us were “independent scholars,” which is the somewhat grand title for people working outside the academy.

Attendees came from all over Europe — France, Holland, Italy, Spain, the UK — but interestingly the majority were from the US. It’s quite a commitment to travel, but of course their universities usually cover it.

It was slightly surreal for me, because some of the people there were established Nietzsche experts whose books I already own and have studied thoroughly. People like Bernard Reginster, who wrote Nietzsche’s Affirmation of Life — an excellent book. For most listeners, names like that won’t mean much, and that’s fine, because we’re not really concerned with academic philosophy here. As you know if you’ve been listening along, Nietzsche himself was deeply sceptical of academia. Everyone at the conference was aware of the irony of holding an academic event around his philosophy. One of the keynote speakers even joked: if Nietzsche could see this, he’d probably be delighted by the attention — given how ignored he was during his lifetime — but appalled by the format.

Nietzsche wrote in Untimely Meditations: “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something — namely, trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it — has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.” Well, yes. This conference was still mostly “words about words.” But it was valuable, and stimulating.

Of course, academics are constrained by the requirements of their profession: objectivity, engagement with contemporary debates, heavy citation. I had to conform to those conventions in my paper, even though Nietzsche himself despised them. But the advantage of being independent is that I can go beyond theory, into what’s practical and transformative in real life.

It was also illuminating to see the human side of academia. One evening over Guinness, a professor told me how fierce the one-upmanship can be in the field, the constant scramble for status. Nietzsche would not have been surprised.

On a lighter note, I had some great conversations, particularly with Rob from Rhode Island — a philosophy professor who recently produced Nietzsche’s Gay Science: A Critical Introduction and Guide for the Edinburgh Critical Guides series. If the book is written with the same charm and wit he showed in person, it should be excellent. I’ll certainly be reading it.

So overall: a great conference, fascinating people, good lunches — important, since Nietzsche’s philosophy is an embodied philosophy, after all — and a chance to explore Belfast. The weather was dire, but the city is striking: flat, full of handsome architecture, and ringed by steep green hills that rear up around it like walls. I’d love to hike there next time.

I’ll certainly attend next year, when the conference will be in Athens, birthplace of Western philosophy.

And one last piece of news: there are plans for me to guest on The Nietzsche Podcast. If you’re a fan of Nietzsche, you’ll likely know it — it’s the only Nietzsche podcast I rate apart from this one, though we have very different aims. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Right, before we dive into my actual presentation, I’ll give you a quick primer on a few Nietzschean basics — ideas we may not yet have covered here, but which are prerequisites for getting the most out of my paper. After that, you’ll hear my talk: An Economy of Bodies.

Primer before the Presentation

Okay, before we get into the talk itself, let me sketch a few Nietzschean basics that will help you follow along. My presentation was written for an audience of scholars who already know this material, but since this podcast is aimed more broadly, I’ll give you the essentials.

The paper is called An Economy of Bodies. At its core, it’s an extension of Nietzsche’s philosophy of aesthetics — but rooted in sex and beauty. Why? Because aesthetics begins with the body: we’re attracted to beautiful bodies, and it’s our own bodies that perceive beauty in the first place. That aesthetic sensitivity has profound effects on human life: on our culture, our status systems, even our myths and religions.

My account is naturalistic: no gods, no metaphysics. Just what can, in principle, be demonstrated in the real world. So Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a foundation — the theory that best explains the facts as we have them. Creationist alternatives don’t measure up; most are based on misunderstanding, and when they do grasp the science, they tend to be disingenuous.

From there, I bring in Nietzsche’s will to power. There are multiple interpretations. Some take it as psychological: a basic human hunger for power. Others as a biological drive present in all life. My own position is the broadest one: will to power as a description of reality itself, of all phenomena. It’s not just a drive among others — it’s the dynamic of existence. I won’t go too deep into that now, because the next episode of this podcast will be devoted entirely to a full account of will to power.

A few more points you’ll hear in the talk:

• Dionysus and Apollo. For Nietzsche, art is always a fusion of the Dionysian — raw, arrational, creative energy — and the Apollonian, which shapes that energy into intelligible form.
• Disinterested aesthetics. Kant and Schopenhauer thought aesthetic pleasure comes from being detached from desire. Nietzsche disagreed: to desire pleasure is already to be interested. There’s no such thing as a “disinterested” gaze.
• Aesthetics as style and self-interpretation. Nietzsche also extended aesthetics into life itself: our ability to shape our own existence as a kind of artwork. That comes up briefly in the paper.
• On “things.” Nietzsche didn’t deny that objects exist, but he saw them as abstractions produced by language. Language carves the seamless field of experience into discrete nouns — rocks, cats, shoes — which are really collections of effects. The world itself isn’t built out of “things”; it’s a flux, parsed by us into manageable chunks.

With those premises in place — Darwinian naturalism, will to power, the body as aesthetic ground, and Nietzsche’s suspicion of objectivity — you’ll be able to follow the thread of my presentation.

So, let’s move on to the main event: my talk at the Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference, An Economy of Bodies.