In order to overcome the unhealthy perspective of body-mind dualism and become capable of holding the “higher” and healthier perspective of body and mind as will to power, Nietzsche stresses that one must engage in a process of cultivation of the body. Such a practice of self-cultivation involves leaving behind incorporated illusory and life-denying perspectives and incorporating more “truthful” and affirmative perspectives on life. In this article, Nietzsche’s views on the body and its cultivation will be further explored and compared (...) with Japanese Buddhist thought on body, mind, and cultivation. In Japanese thought, the notion of shinjin-ichinyō (oneness of body and mind) was developed in order to overcome a dualistic approach to body and mind. The unity of body and mind plays an essential part in the philosophies of both Kūkai and Dōgen. Whereas in early Indian Buddhism, self-cultivation took place primarily through the mind (citta), in Japanese Buddhist practice the body, not the mind, is the primary locus as exemplified in Dōgen’s somatic practice of zazen. Although from the everyday perspective, body and mind are experienced as two separate things, a higher perspective is possible in which body-mind is experienced as a continually changing configuration of dharmas that doesn’t contain any “I.” Such a higher perspective is called “samadhic awareness” by Dōgen, in which “body and mind are cast off” (shinjin totsuraku). For both Nietzsche and Dōgen, their “philosophy am Leitfaden des Leibes” does not aim at discovering “truths” by means of introspection and thinking, but at increasing the body’s capacity for the incorporation of new and liberating perspectives. (shrink)

From a prima facie point of view, Nietzsche’s use of virtue may appear to be a form of virtue ethics. Certainly, this is one position that has been established within the secondary literature; however, I argue that a more fruitful philosophical reading is to view his use of virtue as a part of his drive psychology. Indeed, what makes Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology relevant to this topic, is the way in which he characterises the “sovereign individual” as an agent that is (...) in control of good or appropriate actions because they are strong enough in character to sublimate their “drives” in the act of willing. Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology has important educational implications because an obvious place to cultivate the sovereign individual is through education, but to Nietzsche, education and educational institutions seem only interested in promoting certain Christian virtues (e.g., faith, hope, and charity), and herd forming virtues (e.g., obedience, guilt, and equality) that breed sick young people who are decadent and weak willed. In response to this dilemma, I turn my attention to how Nietzsche overcomes this problem by proposing new virtues that should figure in a new type of education which is concerned with educating the will of the sovereign individual. Central to Nietzsche’s new type of education is the painful labour of self-cultivation (Bildung), the revaluation of one’s values, and a ceaseless striving to overcome obstacles (will to power), so we are able to educate ourselves against life-negating virtues or vices that make us decadent and weak willed. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 186-203, February 2021.

Philosophers and artists frequently make use of metaphors drawn from female bodily experiences of pregnancy and childbirth to express intellectual or artistic creativity. While philosophical and artistic originality are presented as a kind of spiritual pregnancy, women's bodily pregnancies are often presented as at best intellectually or spiritually insignificant, to be valued solely for their products — physical children. I contrast the view of pregnancy found in philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche, and artists such as Chagall, with an understanding (...) of pregnancy influenced by feminist body art, and focus on the significance of the extent and pace of change that women experience during pregnancy. (shrink)

Abstract Struck by essentialist and anti-essentialist elements in his writings, Nietzsche's readers have wondered whether his conception of the self is incoherent or paradoxical. This paper demonstrates that his conception of the self, while complex, is not paradoxical or incoherent, but contains four distinct levels. Section I shows Schopenhauer as Educator to contain an early description of the four levels: (1) a person's deepest self, embracing all that cannot be educated or molded; (2) a person's ego; (3) a person's ?ideal? (...) or ?higher self?; (4) a person's ?true self? or ?true nature?. In the remaining three sections, I show that Nietzsche develops and enriches this conception, without ever abandoning it. Section II treats the fourfold conception as it appears in Human, All Too Human. Section III interrogates relevant passages in the Gay Science, showing that while Nietzsche speaks of artful self-fashioning (as Alexander Nehamas emphasizes), he also pays due regard to the sense in which we are not our own creations. Section IV turns to the ?deepest? level of the self, consisting of motives and drives. Drawing primarily upon Daybreak and Beyond Good and Evil, I show that Nietzsche regards neither the drives nor their hierarchical ordering as things that we construct. (shrink)

By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.

This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency by proposing a relational conception of the subject open to mimetic influences that will have to await the discovery of mirror neurons (...) in the 1990s in order to find an empirical confirmation. On the political side, I say that Zelig foregrounds the power of authoritarian leaders in the 1930s to cast a spell on both imitative crowds and publics in terms that provide a mimetic supplement to Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil”. The philosophical purchase of Zelig’s cinematic dramatization of a mimetic subject is that it reveals how the “inability to think” characteristic of the case of Eichmann rests on unnoticed affective principles constitutive of the all-too-human penchant for “mimicry” the film dramatises. Thus reframed, the human chameleon reflects the dangers of mimetic dispossessions that reached massive proportions in the past century and continue to cast a shadow on the present century. (shrink)

Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche's accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an (...) account of drives. I argue that Nietzschean drives are dispositions that generate evaluative orientations, in part by affecting perceptual saliences. In addition, I show that drive psychology has important implications for contemporary accounts of reflective agency. Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche's drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent's action by influencing the course of the agent's reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting. I show how this point complicates traditional models of the role of reflection in agency. (shrink)

In this paper I call into question the commonplace assumption in Anglophone Nietzsche scholarship that ideal psychological self-cultivation comes about solely by means of the sublimation of all of one's drives. While the psychological incorporation of one’s drives and instincts plays a crucial role in promoting what Nietzsche considers a higher self, I argue that some degree of removal and elimination of particular drives and instincts could be, perhaps necessarily is, involved in ideal cases. Yet I will suggest that we (...) should not think of these cases as constituting ‘repressions’. I will seek to offer a better characterization of the discussions of productive removal and elimination in Nietzsche’s texts, and consider how they fit in his model of self-cultivation. Nietzsche’s texts demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which certain kinds of removal and elimination can lead to greater integration for the would-be exemplary individual. My reading, I argue, helps to better understand the instances in the texts where Nietzsche valorizes the removal of particular drives and instincts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I call into question the commonplace assumption in Anglophone Nietzsche scholarship that ideal psychological self-cultivation comes about solely by means of the sublimation of all of one's drives. While the psychological incorporation of one’s drives and instincts plays a crucial role in promoting what Nietzsche considers a higher self, I argue that some degree of removal and elimination of particular drives and instincts could be, perhaps necessarily is, involved in ideal cases. Yet I will suggest that we (...) should not think of these cases as constituting ‘repressions’. I will seek to offer a better characterization of the discussions of productive removal and elimination in Nietzsche’s texts, and consider how they fit in his model of self-cultivation. Nietzsche’s texts demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which certain kinds of removal and elimination can lead to greater integration for the would-be exemplary individual. My reading, I argue, helps to better understand the instances in the texts where Nietzsche valorizes the removal of particular drives and instincts. (shrink)

The continued presence and importance of Christian moral values in our daily lives, coupled with the fact that faith in Christianity is in continual decline, raises the question as to why having lost faith in Christianity, we have also not lost faith in our Christian moral values. This question is also indicative of a more pressing phenomenon: not only have we maintained our faith in Christian values, we fail to see that the widespread collapse of Christianity should affect this faith. (...) To tackle this latter phenomenon, I claim, we have to pose the Nietzschean question of the value of our moral values, so as to see that this value can be a possible object of questioning. In chapter one, I consider different approaches found in the history of moral philosophy that look like potential candidates for this task. I argue that, ultimately, the task requires simultaneously taking our familiarity with Christian moral values as both sui generis and a questionable phenomenon. In chapter two, I articulate in detail the sui generis nature of this familiarity with moral values,in terms of the phenomena of habituation and sedimentation. In chapter three, I consider the possibility of estrangement that is built into our familiarity with moral values, by focusing on the role of cognition. I demonstrate how cognition, in the form of self-consciousness, can disrupt the sedimented, habituated nature of our moral values through a form of ironic disruption. In chapter four, I develop this account by considering the possibility of an appeal to an alternative moral outlook. To do so, I draw upon the structural isomorphism that is present between the process of estrangement and a rite of passage. (shrink)

Summary: In this paper I investigate Nietzsche’s ideal of wholeness or unity. The consensus among commentators is that this ideal consists in the achievement of psychic integration in a person whereby the various parts of the agent’s mind are restructured into a harmonious whole. Against this prevalent reading, I argue that Nietzschean wholeness concerns cultural integration: a person becomes whole by pursuing the ideal of freedom and humanity in himself and in all, an ideal that transcends national boundaries and that (...) is universal in scope. For Nietzsche, the pursuit of this ideal makes a person into a piece of fate or primal law, that is, it makes him necessary for all that is and that is yet to come. In this way, the person who becomes whole finds redemption from the meaninglessness of existence. Instead of allowing his life to become a mindless act of chance, this person manages to project his energies into the future in the form of the very ideal he fought and aspired to realize while alive – an ideal that is being perpetually renewed and guaranteed for all within the suprapersonal community that is made up of those genuine fighters of culture who became whole. Resumen: En este trabajo investigo el ideal de Nietzsche de completud o de unidad. El consenso entre los analistas, es que este ideal consiste en el logro de una integración psíquica dentro de la persona a través de la cual las diversas partes que conforman la mente del agente son restructuradas de forma tal que se vuelvan un conjunto armonioso. En contra de esta usual lectura, sostengo que la completud Nietzscheana se refiere a la integración cultural: una persona alcanza la completud persiguiendo el ideal de la libertad y de la humanidad en sí mismo y en todos, un ideal que trasciende fronteras nacionales y que es de alcance universal. Para Nietzsche, la búsqueda de este ideal hace que una persona se convierta en un pedazo de fatalidad o de ley primaria, es decir, hace que se vuelva necesario para todo lo que es y está por venir. De esta forma, la persona que alcanza la completud logra redimirse del sinsentido de la existencia. En vez de permitir que su vida se convierta en un puro acto de azar carente de pensamiento, esta persona proyecta sus energías hacía el futuro en la forma del propio ideal por el cual luchó y que aspiró a realizar mientras estuvo vivo – un ideal que está siendo constantemente renovado y garantizado para todos dentro de la comunidad suprapersonal que componen los auténticos luchadores de la cultura que alcanzaron la completud. (shrink)