023- On Distance, Nietzsche, and Conscious Rap

This episode delves into a passage from Nietzsche's Gay Science on giving style to one's life to demonstrate that his view of style is not superficial but rather substantive. This giving of style creates an orbit of several of Nietzsche's most important conceptions: the need for an Ultimate (the Death of God), the dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus, the need for distance or abstraction, the importance of aesthetics, becoming what you are, and the eternal recurrence. To further examine the issue of distance, I turn to Graham Harman's view of the withdrawal of the real object and the tension he labels "allure." The last segment then applies this view of abstraction/distance and the constellation of other concepts discussed to some elements of the conscious rap of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Digable  Planets.