Much has been made of the apparent tensions in Nietzsche’s ethical and metaethical views. In this essay I examine a kind of value standard available to Nietzsche that is present in his work. I offer an interpretation of honesty as both a Nietzschean virtue and a means of ethical assessment. Despite Nietzsche’s well-known criticisms of truth, he upholds honesty as the only remaining virtue of his free spirits. Honesty has been treated in the literature primarily in the (...) class='Hi'>contexts of truth or life affirmation, but I argue that we should instead recognize honesty as a virtue within the context of valuing. I defend honesty as a distinct kind of truthfulness and sincerity involving what I call confrontation. The seeds of Nietzsche’s mature view are first evident in his work on tragedy, then developed further in Zarathustra, ultimately revealing a constraint on valuing that is essential to Nietzsche’s broader normative projects. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of Nietzschean exemplarism. Drawing on my previous work, I argue that an agent’s instincts and other drives constitute her psychological type. In this framework, a drive counts as a virtue to the extent that it is well-calibrated with the rest of the agent’s psychic economy and meets with sentiments of approbation from the agent’s community. Different virtues are fitting for different types, and different types elicit different discrete emotions in people with fine-tuned affective (...) sensitivity, making Nietzsche’s exemplarism doubly pluralistic. Exemplars show us how a type is expressed in different social and cultural contexts. Some live up to the full potential of their type, while others are stymied and demonstrate how pernicious influences can wreck a person’s psychology. While some exemplars inspire admiration that leads to emulation, others elicit a range of other emotions, such as envy, contempt, and disgust. If this is right, then Nietzschean exemplarism offers a richer, more evaluatively and motivationally nuanced moral psychology than the monochrome admire-and-emulate model currently popular. (shrink)

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language is concerned with the years 1865 through Winter/Spring 1870-71. Four texts of Nietzsche's, "Vom Ursprung der Sprache", "Zur Teleologie", "Zu Schopenhauer", and "Anschauung Notes", are translated into English and interpreted from the perspective of Nietzsche's developing theory of language. An examination of the major influences of Schopenhauer, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, and Frederick A. Lange are pursued. ;Theory, in this work, does not assume that it is possible to take a position of authority (...) or truth in the interpretation of texts, rather that interpretation of texts constitutes an attempt to uncover a discursive practice, to describe a discourse-object. The method used is Nietzsche's method of genealogy, which follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous, and regular and analyzes the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in that discourse. Genealogy is exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination, as the slow, repetitive, gray activity of deciphering what is documented. Major genealogical nodes or elements of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language are used and reused in different contexts throughout the work, resulting in a cumulative effect which explores specific elements in Nietzsche's thinking about language. ;This work offers five major contributions to Nietzsche studies: a detailed introduction of the significant influence of Eduard von Hartmann upon Nietzsche's thinking; a comprehensive look at the influence of Lange's History of Materialism upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language; a thorough analysis of "Zur Teleologie" and "Zu Schopenhauer" in the overall contexts of Nietzsche's thinking with regard to metaphysics and teleology; the gathering together and interpretation into a world view of the "Anschauung Notes"; and a close examination of Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer as it takes place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. ;Nietzsche's primary contributions to a theory of language in these beginning years are three: the adoption of the role of the unconscious instincts in the origins and ongoing production of language; the assertion that unconscious thought processes are a precondition for conscious thought; an examination of the relationships of language to epistemology, which results in the recognition of the limits of language as an instrument of truth, but a realization of the inestimable value and force of its symbolic and figurative aspects, aspects necessitated by the very nature of language itself. (shrink)

With his _An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life_", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. _On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life_ is shown to be a ‘timely’ work, too, insofar as (...) it weaves together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere ‘early’ work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text’s composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche’s arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen’s _Interpretation_ should restore Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19 th Century philosophies of history. (shrink)

Nietzsche's The Gay Science is a deeply personal book, yet also an important work of philosophy. Nietzsche conceives it as a philosophical autobiography, a record of his own self-transformation. In beautifully composed aphorisms he communicates his central experience of overcoming pessimism and recovering the capacity to affirm joyfully the tragedy of life. On the basis of his experiments in living, Nietzsche articulates his most famous philosophical concepts and images: the death of God, the exercise of eternal recurrence, and the ideal (...) of self-fashioning. This book explains the ancient and modern philosophical contexts that shape Nietzsche's central concern with the affirmation of life. It surveys Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, explains the pivotal place of The Gay Science as the source of his ideal of tragic joy, and shows how he revives an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life and the philosopher as physician. (shrink)

This paper examines Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence and the notions of reincarnation in Onyewuenyi and Majeed with a view to showing how convergence and divergence of thought in the Nietzschean, Onyewuenyean and Majeedean philosophy contexts can inform cross-cultural philosophizing. Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence represents his deep thought, which claims that every aspect of life returns innumerable times, in an identical fashion. On the other hand, Onyewuenyi posits that reincarnation is un-African as he conceives it as (...) the theory that when the soul separates from the body, at death, it informs another body for another span of life, while Majeed sees evidence of the African rootedness of the belief in reincarnation, based on his study of the Akan people of Ghana and concedes that the belief, itself, is irrational, since there is no scientific or empirical basis for it. Attempts are made to highlight the dynamics of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence and to articulate the essential ingredients of Onyewuenyean and Majeedean conceptions of reincarnation. These forms of thought will be examined critically to exhibit their convergence and divergence in the context of cross-cultural philosophizing. Keywords: eternal recurrence, reincarnation, will to power, vital force, cross-cultural philosophy, spirit-world. (shrink)

This landmark study is a detailed textual and thematic analysis of one of Nietzsche’s most important but least understood works. Stanley Rosen argues that in _Zarathustra _Nietzsche_ _lays the groundwork for philosophical and political revolution, proposing a change in humanity’s condition that would be achieved by eliminating the decadent existing race and breeding a new race to take its place. Rosen discusses Nietzsche’s systematically duplicitous rhetoric of esoteric messages in _Zarathustra, _and he places the book in the (...) class='Hi'>contexts of Greek, Christian, Enlightenment, and postmodernist thought. (shrink)

Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The main themes (...) of Daybreak are located in their intellectual and philosophical contexts: in Nietzsche's training as a classical philologist and his fascination with the Sophists and Thucydides; in the moral philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, which are the central foci of Nietzsche's critique of morality; and in the German Materialist movement of the 1850s and after, which shaped Nietzsche's conception of persons. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

SUMMARYDebates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from (...) him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit. (shrink)

O artigo discute como Nietzsche compreende a instituição da lei e da moral em distinção a Kant e à tradição cristã. Ele argumenta que Nietzsche é, em grande medida, inspirado pela mudança de paradigma em direção a um pensamento biológico evolutivo, introduzido por diversos de seus colegas ao final do século XIX, entre os quais F. A. Lange, que vê esta mudança como uma sóbria alternativa científico-materialista a Kant. Em Nietzsche, a imperativa moral kantiana é substituída pela noção de uma (...) moralidade emergente graças a processos civilizatórios históricos ou pré-históricos, impostos a um ser humano de mente débil sem quaisquer disposições racionais inerentes a obedecer à Lei. Ela também é um processo que, em vez de universalizar o ser humano, o cinde em uma dualidade, em que uma parte obedece a antigos e imediatos interesses próprios, e a outra parte obedece a novos 'comandos', que lhe foram gritados 'aos ouvidos' por um chamado 'comandante'. A obediência à lei conduz a duas formas radicalmente diferentes em Nietzsche: indivíduos servis e medíocres precisam ser expostos à disciplina e à punição, para adotar a Lei; enquanto os chamados indivíduos 'soberanos' são capazes de impor a lei a si mesmos. A figura do 'soberano' vem consequentemente sendo o motivo de vigoroso debate, especialmente quanto à tradição anglo-saxônica em pesquisa por Nietzsche, uma vez que seu aparente 'respeito pela lei' e 'senso de dever' reiteram típicas qualidades kantianas. Em relação a essas discussões, sugiro que o 'soberano' de Nietzsche (em um contexto) seja idêntico ao 'comandante' (em outros contextos). Quando o 'soberano', como tal, impõe a lei a si mesmo e aos demais, sua ação é convencional e arbitrária (como a linguagem em Saussure), e é mais irracional que racional, como em Kant. Sua vontade não é uma vontade boa, nem uma vontade racional, com visão para a autonomia humana. Seu comando de si mesmo e dos outros é performativo, portanto, sem valor de verdade (como atos ilocucionários de fala em Austin e Searle). The article discusses how Nietzsche understands the institution of law and morals in distinction to Kant and the Christian tradition. It argues that Nietzsche to a large extent is inspired by the paradigm-shift toward a evolutionary biological thinking introduced by several of his peers in the late 19th century, among else F. A. Lange, who sees this shift as a sobering scientific-materialistic alternative to Kant. In Nietzsche, the Kantian moral imperative is replaced with a notion of a morality emerging thanks to historical, or pre-historical, civilizational processes, imposed on a feebleminded human without any inherent rational dispositions to obey Law. It is also a process, which rather than universalizing the human, splits it in a duality where one part obeys old immediate self-interests and another part obeys new 'commands,' having been shouted 'into the ear' by a so-called 'commander.' The compliance with law takes two radically different forms in Nietzsche: servile and mediocre individuals need to be exposed to discipline and punishment in order to adopt Law; while so-called 'sovereign' individuals are able to impose law upon themselves. The figure of the 'sovereign' has consequently been an issue for vigorous debate in especially the Anglo-Saxon tradition of Nietzsche research, since his apparent 'respect for law' and 'sense of duty' reiterate typical Kantian qualities. Relating to these discussions, I suggest that Nietzsche's 'sovereign' (in one context) is identical his 'commander' (in other contexts). When the 'sovereign' as such imposes law upon himself and others, his act is conventional and arbitrary (like language in Saussure), and is rather irrational than rational as in Kant. His will is not a good will, nor a rational will with a vision of human autonomy. His command of himself and others is a performative, thus without truth-value (like illocutionary speech-acts in Austin and Searle). (shrink)

Nietzsche's unpublished notes are extraordinary in both volume and interest, and indispensable to a full understanding of his lifelong engagement with the fundamental questions of philosophy. This volume includes an extensive selection of the notes he kept during the early years of his career. They address the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the nature of tragedy, the relationship of language to music, the importance of Classical Greek culture for modern life, and the value of the unfettered pursuit of truth and knowledge which (...) Nietzsche thought was a central feature of western culture since it was first introduced by Plato. They contain startling and original answers to the questions which were to occupy Nietzsche throughout his life and demonstrate the remarkable stability and consistency of his fundamental concerns. They are presented here in a new translation by Landislaus Löb, and an introduction by Alexander Nehamas sets them in their philosophical and historical contexts. (shrink)

“The will to truth,” says Nietzsche, “is merely a form of the will to illusion”; it’s not the opposite of “the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue,” but instead “its refinement.” What can this mean? How could a quest for knowledge ever serve a desire to remain in the dark? I answer this question by means of an example in Proust, whose protagonist expends huge quantities of energy apparently trying to find out whether his love partner is (...) faithful. The efforts, it turns out, are designed not to yield any concrete information but only to give him the impression that he’s left no stone unturned. So they serve what we might call a second-order will to ignorance: a drive to remain unaware of just how much we don’t know. This, too, is what Nietzsche’s “Wissenschaftler” are up to—and maybe, in some contexts, it’s what we should all be up to. (shrink)

This paper is primarily a response to ?analytically-minded? philosophers, such as Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, who push for a ?naturalistic? interpretation of Nietzsche. In particular, this paper will consider Leiter?s (2007) discussion of Nietzsche?s chapter in Twilight of the Idols, ?The Four Great Errors?, and argue that Leiter has misinterpreted this chapter in at least four ways. I provide a superior interpretation of this chapter, which argues that Nietzsche is using a transcendental style of argument to argue against a (...) common conception of causation. I argue that Nietzsche?s ultimate aim of this chapter is to argue for ?the innocence of becoming? rather than, as Leiter claims, the error of free will. I argue that this anti-naturalist methodology and conclusion are in tension with Leiter/Clark?s Nietzsche, and highlights the need to pay attention to the being/becoming distinction in Nietzsche. (shrink)

Eugen Dühring - A handwritten note on ‘Nietzsche’ from 1896. This paper contains the first publication of a yet unknown manuscript, which Eugen Dühring wrote in response to his reading of - in part falsified and decontextualized - passages about him in Koegel’s edition of Nietzsche’s late notes. Dühring’s note reveals blatant anti-Semitism and he vituperates Nietzsche as a ‘lawyer’ of Jews. The note is subsequently used in later publications of Dühring and his followers. The paper continues to reconstruct (...) Dühring’s engagement with Nietzsche and discusses some aspects of Nietzsche’s reading of Dühring. Despite Dühring’s significance for Nietzsche’s philosophical development, initial similarities are outweighed by important differences. (shrink)

Beginning with the Untimely Meditations (1873) and continuing until his final writings of 1888-9, Nietzsche refers to humility (Demuth or a cognate) in fifty-two passages and to modesty (Bescheidenheit or a cognate) in one hundred and four passages, yet there are only four passages that refer to both terms. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, he often speaks positively of modesty, especially in epistemic contexts. These curious facts might be expected to lead scholars to explore what Nietzsche thinks of humility and modesty, (...) but to date there have been no systematic analyses of Nietzsche’s reflections on these dispositions. In this chapter, I fill that gap in the literature using semantic network analysis and systematically-guided close-reading. In so doing, I show that Nietzsche sharply distinguished between humility and modesty, considering the former a vice (for certain types of people in certain contexts) and the latter a virtue (again, for certain types of people in certain contexts). (shrink)

This essay represents a novel contribution to Nietzschean studies by combining an assessment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenging uses of “truth” and the “eternal return” with his insights drawn from Indian philosophies. Specifically, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of a static philosophy of being underpinning conceptual truth is best understood in line with the Theravada Buddhist critique of “self ” and “ego” as transitory. In conclusion, I find that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” can be (...) understood as a direct inversion of “nirvana”: Nietzsche celebrates profound attachment to each and every moment, independent from its pleasurable or distasteful registry. (shrink)

Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The main themes (...) of Daybreak are located in their intellectual and philosophical contexts: in Nietzsche's training as a classical philologist and his fascination with the Sophists and Thucydides; in the moral philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, which are the central foci of Nietzsche's critique of morality; and in the German Materialist movement of the 1850s and after, which shaped Nietzsche's conception of persons. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In _American Nietzsche_, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's (...) philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, _American Nietzsche_ dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart. (shrink)

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that Nietzsche does not disagree with central normative beliefs that ‘we’ hold. Such disagreement would threaten Parfit’s claim that normative beliefs are known by intuition. However, Nietzsche defends a conception of well-being that challenges Parfit’s normative claim that suffering is bad in itself for the sufferer. Nietzsche recognizes the phenomenon of ‘growth through suffering’ as essential to well-being. Hence, removal of all suffering would lead to diminished well-being. Parfit claims that if Nietzsche understood (...) normative concepts in Parfit’s objectivist sense, he would not disagree with the claim that suffering is bad in itself – that intrinsic facts about suffering count in favour of our not wanting it. I argue that Nietzsche would disagree. Suffering for Nietzsche is not merely instrumentally necessary for psychological growth, nor is it easy to construe it as something bad in itself that contributes value as part of a good whole. Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But for Nietzsche, suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts. (shrink)

The article presents the author's response to Eliyahu Rosenow's review of "Nietzsche's Legacy for Education: Past and Present Values." Rosenow begins his review by relating our collection to Anglo-American philosophy of education and the twin claims made for its uniqueness by the editors: the collection comprises work by a group of scholars from three different locations working from original texts, linking "Nietzsch's "oeuvre" to contemporary scholarship and particularly the work of the French poststructuralists." I do not think that Rosenow makes (...) enough of the second claim for most of the papers included in the volume relate Nietzsche to poststructuralism either by working from poststructuralist readings of the so-called "new Nietzsche" or by exploring the significance of Nietzsche directly for a poststructuralist approach in education. (shrink)

This lecture from 1946 presents Eugen Fink’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Fink’s aim here is twofold: to work against the trend of psychologistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s work and to perform the philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche he finds lacking in his predecessors. Fink contends that play is the central intuition of Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically in his rejection of Western metaphysics’ insistence on being and presence. Drawing instead from Heraclitus, Nietzsche argues for an ontology of becoming characterized by the (...) Dionysian as the temporalization of time and the Apollonian as temporalized in time. The play of becoming is thus the cosmic coming to be and passing away of appearance. Playing, as the creative projection of such a play-world of appearing and concealing, is central to understanding the Nietzschean theme of the will to power as the revaluation of values. (shrink)

“‘[C]onscience,’” Nietzsche suggests early in Essay Two of On the Genealogy of Morals, “has a long history and variety of forms behind it”. Glossing over the explicit equivocity and irony of such statements, most commentators presume that the primary ambition of GM is to reconstruct the emergence and in so doing denaturalize and denounce the reign of conscience, which is treated as equivalent to both bad conscience and slave morality. Such presumption has obscured the central claims, operations, and stakes of (...) the text, indeed of Nietzsche’s late work generally. Although they are intertwined, Nietzsche’s genealogy of conscience is textually, substantively, and strategically distinct from his genealogy of bad conscience, which in turn is involved in but distinct from his genealogy of slave morality. Textually, it is not until Essay Two, section four of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche begins to ask after the emergence and psychosocial consequences of bad conscience, while the genealogy of conscience proceeds from the first essay. Substantively, the three genealogies are concerned with manifestly disparate objects. Strategically, the addressees of the three genealogies are diverse, thus are their modes of address: genealogy cannot be reduced to a uniform method. (shrink)

Overshadowed by his critiques of traditional morality and Christianity, many of Nietzsche’s insightful philosophical analyses have often been neglected. Although Nietzsche as philosopher has, at long last, been recognized, his epistemological reflections are a fairly recent discovery in Anglo-American philosophy. This is curious because some of the earliest German interpreters of his thought had emphasized the link between his metaphysical views and his analyses of human knowledge. At the beginning of this century, Eisler and Rittelmeyer discussed the importance of (...) Erkenntnistheorie for a full understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Despite their basic grasp of his philosophical intentions, they sometimes misunderstood or underplayed central points in his critical negations. With rare exceptions, the significance of what Nietzsche called an “internal phenomenology” has often been overlooked. Even when it is alluded to, the full meaning of this method of analysis is not brought out. My intention here is to show how the concept of causality is construed by Nietzsche and how his analysis of its origin is related to a phenomenology of human intentionality. The analysis of the derivation of the idea of causality that is presented by Nietzsche has an intrinsic interest and the issues concerning the formation of the concept and its validity are obviously still vital ones. (shrink)

Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human: "The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole" . Nonetheless, Nietzsche's interpreters have, to a large extent and to this day, proceeded in just this way. Instead, Nietzsche demanded that one read his aphorisms and aphorism books slowly and thoroughly within the contexts in which he placed them and, further, that one always (...) be attuned, in this reading, to new surprises. This article advocates for such a contextual interpretation of Nietzsche's works . This interpretation must be penetrating enough to clear away the ostensible ambivalence and contradiction with which Nietzsche's work is so often maligned. While notes that Nietzsche did not intend for publication can offer important assistance, they should not themselves become the basis of such an interpretation. (shrink)

While discussions of the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg over ‘secularisation’ focus primarily on the methodological utility of the concept, the difference between them was also one of the philosophical commitments and substantive claims about modernity. This difference is not always obvious. One way of bringing it out is to address the different contexts in which they produced their most famous statements about secularisation. But another, and one that will be pursued here, is to consider the critical (...) dialogue that both thinkers engaged in with Nietzsche. Put briefly, while Löwith thought that Nietzsche misunderstood the ancients, Blumenberg thought that he misunderstood the moderns. For Löwith, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is not Greek, but an aggressive countergospel that owes much to the Christian culture it seeks to oppose; for Blumenberg, Nietzsche assumes, wrongly, that the self-belittlement of man by theology has been succeeded by the self-belittlement of man by science. In addition, Blumenberg – unlike both Nietzsche and Löwith – thinks that he can mount a robust defence of both modern science and progress. (shrink)

Geoff Waite's book is crucial for coming to terms with almost all the important issues of the day and of the future, as the subtitle and length might suggest. Waite is provocative, learned, thorough, and careful in his readings from across the political spectrum, even to the point of providing cogent explanations for his use of punctuation. Surprisingly, Waite points to a host of Canadian figures—Northrop Frye, David Cronenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Kroker— to construct his striking case, making (...) the book even more compelling reading for Canadians. (shrink)

Both Max Hallman and David E. Storey rightly argue that Nietzsche is critical of anthropocentrism in his later philosophy. However, both also claim that Nietzsche, in his early philosophy, is still held captive to an anthropocentric view, particularly in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” the third of his Untimely Meditations. Neither, however, explores Schopenhauer’s own nonanthropocentric, sentiocentric approach to ethics and its influence on the early Nietzsche. An exploration of this background and a closer reading of the essay and its larger contest (...) within the Untimely Meditations reveal that Nietzsche’s very first work in ethics advances not only a metaphysical nonanthropocentrism, but also nonanthropocentric axiological and ethical considerations, too. (shrink)

The current interest in Jung shows no sign of abating, with international controversy surrounding the origins of analytical psychology. _Jung in Contexts_ is a unique collection of the most important essays on Jung and analytical psychology over the past two decades. A comprehensive introduction traces the growth and development of analytical psychology and its institutions. The nine essays which follow place Jung, the man and his work, in three important contexts: historical, literary and intellectual. In historical context, Jung's visions (...) during his confrontation with the unconscious, his attitude towards National Socialism, and the composition of his so-called autobiography are examined. Next, in literary context, two essays investigate Jung's reading of E.T.A. Hoffman, and Thomas Mann's reception of Jungian ideas. Finally, in intellectual context, Jung's work is viewed in terms of the traditions of German and French thought from which it drew so many impulses: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson. (shrink)

The current interest in Jung shows no sign of abating, with international controversy surrounding the origins of analytical psychology. _Jung in Contexts_ is a unique collection of the most important essays on Jung and analytical psychology over the past two decades. A comprehensive introduction traces the growth and development of analytical psychology and its institutions. The nine essays which follow place Jung, the man and his work, in three important contexts: historical, literary and intellectual. In historical context, Jung's visions (...) during his confrontation with the unconscious, his attitude towards National Socialism, and the composition of his so-called autobiography are examined. Next, in literary context, two essays investigate Jung's reading of E.T.A. Hoffman, and Thomas Mann's reception of Jungian ideas. Finally, in intellectual context, Jung's work is viewed in terms of the traditions of German and French thought from which it drew so many impulses: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson. (shrink)

This review essay brings together five books on various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing from the last four years, from different cultural and political contexts, but also spanning a wide methodological range. The general question of how to orient ourselves in Nietzsche-scholarship is inspired by the title of Werner Stegmaier’s book which invites the reader to compare Nietzsche and Niklas Luhmann. It also invites us to contemplate the more general question of how to bring Nietzsche’s thinking (...) into a dialogue with the human and social sciences. A central question concerns the temporality of Nietzsche’s thinking: is Nietzsche’s thinking a thing of the past that primarily necessitates a historical interpretation, or can it still open up ways toward the future. As this review highlights, many contemporary readers of Nietzsche continue to see themselves as working to “save” his texts from fateful misinterpretations. The last part of the review focuses on the new textual, or “poesiological” approach and the importance of seeing Nietzsche not primarily as someone professing a doctrine, but as the creator of uniquely multilayered texts. (shrink)

Nietzsche wrote in a scientific culture transformed by Darwin. He read extensively in German and British Darwinists, and his own works dealt often with such obvious Darwinian themes as struggle and evolution. Yet most of what Nietzsche said about Darwin was hostile: he sharply attacked many of his ideas, and often slurred Darwin himself as mediocre. So most readers of Nietzsche have inferred that he must have cast Darwin quite aside. But in fact, John Richardson argues, Nietzsche was deeply and (...) pervasively influenced by Darwin. He stressed his disagreements, but was silent about several core points he took over from Darwin. Moreover, Richardson claims, these Darwinian borrowings were to Nietzsche's credit: when we bring them to the surface we discover his positions to be much stronger than we had thought. Even Nietzsche's radical innovations are more plausible when we expose their Darwinian ground; we see that they amount to a new Darwinism. (shrink)

This book argues, against recent interpretations, that Nietzsche does in fact have a metaphysical system--but that this is to his credit. Rather than renouncing philosophy's traditional project, he still aspires to find and state essential truths, both descriptive and valuative, about us and the world. These basic thoughts organize and inform everything he writes; by examining them closely we can find the larger structure and unifying sense of his strikingly diverse views. With rigor and conceptual specificity, Richardson examines the will-to-power (...) ontology and maps the values that emerge from it. He also considers the significance of Nietzsche's famous break with Plato--replacing the concept of "being" with that of "becoming." By its conservative method, this book tries to do better justice to the truly radical force of Nietzsche's ideas--to demonstrate more exactly their novelty and interest. (shrink)

The method of the philosophers of the future that Nietzsche heralds, but does not self-identify with, has not received the attention it deserves in the secondary literature. In this essay, I address this lacuna with an interpretation of the roles of the philosophers of the future that explains in what sense they are and are not tempters. As free spirits, cultural physicians, and legislators, the philosophers of the future undertake experiments to acquire knowledge; hence, the philosophers of the future are (...) attempters. Nevertheless, it is also wrong to call them attempters; as educators, the philosophers of the future are tempters. (shrink)

Zuckert has written an intriguing book, whether taken in its exoteric form, as indicated by the title and introduction, as a detached and balanced account of the response to Plato of five “postmodern” thinkers, or in its esoteric form, as indicated by the assignment of the three central chapters to Strauss, as an exposition and defense of Strauss’s account of the truth about the human good. Even if her accounts of the other four are, for many readers, the honey on (...) the rim of the cup of bitter Straussian medicine, the honey is no less carefully presented than the medicine. While the focus is on each thinker’s response to Plato, Zuckert gives sufficient background exposition to explain the motivations, contexts, and goals of the return to Plato in each case. (shrink)

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. (...) On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree. (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)

Nietzsche’s favourable comments about science and the senses have recently been taken as evidence of naturalism. Others focus on his falsification thesis: our beliefs are falsifying interpretations of reality. Clark argues that Nietzsche eventually rejects this thesis. This article utilizes the multiple ways of being science friendly in Nietzsche’s context by focussing on Mach’s neutral monism. Mach’s positivism is a natural development of neo-Kantian positions Nietzsche was reacting to. Section 15 of Beyond Good and Evil is crucial to (...) Clark’s interpretation. The presented interpretation makes better sense of this passage and shows that Nietzsche can accept both falsification and empiricism. (shrink)