A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche’s Affirmative Ethics

Abstract

A mad dog, foaming at the moustache and snarling at the world; that is how the American artist David Levine portrays Friedrich Nietzsche in his well-known caricature in The New York Review of Books. It is not so different in its malicious intent, nor further wrong in its interpretation of Nietzsche, than a good number of scholarly works. This is indeed the traditional portrait — the unconsummated consummate immoralist, the personally gentle even timid arch-destroyer. Of course, Nietzsche himself made adolescent comments about his own destructiveness not infrequently — throughout the whole of Ecce Homo, for example. Nevertheless, these give a false impression of his intentions as well as of the good philosophical sense to be made of his works.KeywordsMoral RuleNicomachean EthicCategorical ImperativeAmerican ArtistKantian ConceptionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.