Agonistic Friendship, a Dietetics of the Passions, and the Cultivation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche

and I wouldn't know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want than to be a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety […]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Th...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: This essay begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the developmental strategy adopted in my Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” in relation to the contrasting approaches of Conway, Hatab, and Janaway in their studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. It then turns to take up a topic that, in the light of the readings of Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and myself, I now take to be much more central than any of us has adequately acknowledged, namely, the relationship of GM to the Hellenistic conception of philosophy. I sketch this argument and explore its implications through Janaway’s and Hatab’s different (but not incompatible) reflections on perspectivism, before finally providing an illustration of how Nietzsche’s indebtedness to the themes of freedom and slavery in ancient philosophy illuminates our understanding of the slave revolt in morals, the psychology of the priest, and the interpretation of the sovereign individual. Given the complexity of the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, any author presumptuousness enough to offer a study of this text needs to have a clear (and defensible) strategy for approaching it.1 Such strategies may be various, and in the cases under consideration, this is the case. Both Larry Hatab and Dan Conway offer textualist interpretations, with Hatab seeking to communicate the intensely radical character of GM by focusing strongly on the agonistic dimensions of its argument and rhetoric, while Conway reads GM as a Bildungsroman and so seeks to track and explicate Nietzsche’s efforts to guide his readers from innocence to experience. (Such readings need not be incompatible since it could be, for example, that it is through his efforts to construct an internal agon within the reader that Nietzsche seeks to overcome their innocence.) By contrast, both Chris Janaway and I offer more contextualist accounts. Janaway’s strategy is to take Nietzsche at his word and to offer a close reading of the argument of GM in relation to the two philosophical figures—Paul Ree and Arthur Schopenhauer—that Nietzsche identifies as his representative opponents. My own strategy is to adopt a developmental approach to considering GM, one that seeks to reconstruct the reasons—internal to his project of reevaluation—that lead Nietzsche to require a genealogical investigation of morality and to use this reconstruction as a way of orienting the analysis of this text. (And obviously there is some overlap here given Nietzsche’s varied relationships to Schopenhauer and Ree in the course of his philosophical development.) Although my own methodological commitments favor a contextualist approach, it is wise to avoid dogmatism on this issue—not least because one might reasonably note that Ridley’s Nietzsche’s Conscience, perhaps the most widely admired recent analysis of GM and one to which all of the authors considered here are indebted, is thoroughly textualist in its strategy of focusing on the central characters of GM.2 In what follows, I will briefly review my reasons for favoring a developmental form of contextualist account and what I take the strength and limitations of this approach (and of my performance of it) to be. I will then turn to consider what I now see as a central issue for understanding GM—namely, Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy—that has emerged in the light of further reflection on the arguments presented in these four works. I conclude by briefly reconsidering the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise.

Noise on Noise

Nietzsche-Forum-München

Nietzsche’s readership often assumes that what is meant by the term ‘decadence’ is simply a condition of moral and cultural decline. This study argues that Nietzsche’s conception amounts to a more complex hypothesis. While Nietzsche gives no formal analysis of decadence, Chapter 1 provides an initial discussion of the ‘formulae’ and ‘recipes’ for decadence that Nietzsche mentions. It emerges that decadence denotes a disunity within a self and a culture, and the dynamic relationship between the two. Moreover, Nietzsche describes decadence as a physiological condition with psychological consequences that inclines those who suffer from it to be against life. An investigation of the method Nietzsche uses to unmask decadence’s workings in Chapter 2 reveals that he arrives at his ‘decadence hypothesis’ by reasoning backwards from the assumption that cultural values stem from individuals’ physiological and psychological weaknesses. Central to his hypothesis is that adoption and proliferation of decadent values inhibit and further weaken decadent lives. An initial critical assessment shows that Nietzsche’s hypothesis is possibly self-referential, incomplete, and cannot be seen as established as the best explanation. Chapter 3 elucidates in more detail the underlying causes of decadence as a process of physiological corruption of humanity by the forces of civilization that suppress an individual’s powers. Decadence emerges as possibly self-reinforcing, self-replicating, and self-propagating. Since Nietzsche and commentators frequently use the term ‘decadence’ to describe also the subsequent psychological expressions of decadence, Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the effects, and then discusses a number of exemplar decadents (Chapters 5-8) to demonstrate a discernible set of common attributes: psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical expressions of weakness underpin decadence’s most important attribute, i.e., restricted agency and failure to realize an authentic self. Chapters 9 and 10 offer further support for a physiological reading of decadence and provide a summary of my findings.

The subject of the study is Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism as an integral part of his socio-philosophical views.The relevance of addressing the concept of nihilism in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on society is due to the fact that, in the philosopher’s view, nihilism is the main concept for substantiating the idea of the crisis nature of modern Western civilization. It is because of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche believed, that Western society in the historical perspective is doomed to decline and death.So, Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical approach to the problems of society is conceptual in nature, in a historical-philosophical sense, Nietzschean criticism contributed to the formation of the problem of the formation of a mass society and the idea of a crisis of Western culture in Western philosophical and social thought.In accordance with the purpose of the research, the article analyzes the Nietzschean criticism of society in the context of the reception and reflection of this criticism in the thoughts of famous representatives of non-classical philosophy, which is important for the formation of the modern discourse of Western culture.The paper analyzes the concept of nihilism as a prerequisite for Friedrich Nietzsche’s negative attitude towards the development prospects of Western society. The close connection between the idea of nihilism and rationalism is noted, it is rationalism, according to the philosopher, that is a prerequisite for the moral decline of society.It is emphasized that Friedrich Nietzsche’s fundamental criticism of rationalism at the level of general philosophical ideas has certain deviations when the philosopher considers specific socio-political processes.It is concluded that it is precisely in the socio-political aspect in the views of Friedrich Nietzsche that the complexity of the relationship between the concepts of rational and irrational is most characteristically manifested. This complexity actually goes beyond purely Nietzschean philosophy and becomes a subject of reflection for many representatives of non-classical philosophy.The article, based on the statements of a number of researchers of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, proves the opinion that the philosopher’s anti-irrationalism can be understood in a constructive way, as a supplement and deepening of modern ideas about the nature of the rational, and not always the positive influence of the rational on man and society.Thus, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche acts as a prerequisite for the further deepening of ideas in Western culture about the contradictory nature of society in which rational and irrational elements are inextricably intertwined.

Reviewed by: Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography Daniel Blue Julian Young. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 649 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-87117-4. Cloth, $45.00. In 2006 Julian Young published Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion, a book in which he argued that the standard view of Nietzsche as a staunch individualist and atheist was incorrect.1 From The Birth of Tragedy onward, Young claimed, Nietzsche had written from a communitarian standpoint that embraced religion as a source of inspiriting myth, uniting groups into a folk. Heretical as this view was in the academy, there was considerable evidence for Young's position, and it is noteworthy that the individualistic side of Nietzsche excites more interest in the English-speaking countries (and particularly the United States with its heritage of Emerson and Thoreau) than on the European continent. If Young's thesis was new and piquant, however, it seemed of secondary importance. While Nietzsche certainly celebrated a communitarian outlook in the works before Human, All Too Human, any such tendencies seem comparatively vestigial in the later books, where (when they surface at all) they appear rather as reflexive memories of earlier views than living ideas still generative of consequences. There were few, if any, converts to the new point of view. Young has apparently not yet conceded. In his new book, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, he returns to the fray, arguing for the same views that had proved unconvincing before. But there is a difference. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion was plainly polemical and tilted toward the academic community. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography presents itself as a non-partisan work of scholarship, a magisterial survey of the life and works of Friedrich Nietzsche that attempts to do justice to both. Young not only discusses all the books Nietzsche himself prepared for publication (as well as some of the juvenilia and Nachlaß) but embeds these in an account of the man's life that is clearly intended to compete with the comprehensive biographies of Ronald Hayman and Curtis Cate.2 He further presents these in racy language and with a disarming informality that will appeal to students. Behind the appearance of judicious authority and sage command of facts, however, he disseminates the same views that raised so many eyebrows in the past. Young is presenting as authoritative ideas that almost no one believes except him. This bias is enabled by the unusual way Young structures his book. One might expect that a work purporting to present both biography and philosophy (and which is moreover subtitled "A Philosophical Biography") would explore the interplay between those two. Young does attempt this occasionally. He observes, for example, that dislike of Wagner the man preceded Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner's music and that the Lou Salomé incident led to a new ferocity toward women in Nietzsche's books. Less mechanically and more resonantly, he argues that Nietzsche came to admire Epicurus partly because he found in the latter's teachings the "philosophical 'self-doctoring'" (280) needed to address his own health issues. Such observations prove to be exceptions in this book, and necessarily so, for Young segregates most discussions of Nietzsche's philosophy into discrete sections separate from the narrative. (He even distinguishes the two by assigning them different type styles: italic headers for the philosophic sections and roman for the biographic.) There are clear advantages to this formal decision. It allows Young to analyze Nietzsche's works at length without concern that he has veered too far from the biographical narrative. It also makes navigation of the text convenient for those who want to read just the life or just his analyses. Nonetheless, by literally segregating action and thought, Young [End Page 115] has removed from Nietzsche's life the very activities that gave it meaning, those that he called his "task." When these intellectual and moral tensions are shelved off, the "life" is reduced to inglorious struggles with ill health and Nietzsche's sometimes maladroit relationships with women. These are aspects he would hardly want stressed, and they are rarely central to his attempt "to become who one is." This problem is compounded by Young...

This paper attempted to explore into the whole philosophy of Nietzsche from a different perspective: the role of the politics in Nietzsch's thought. It proposed that there was an identity between the great politics and the philosophy of future. That is, in Nietzsche's world, via the analysis of his epistemology and his understanding of metaphysics, the politics was always a first and intrinsic determination if people tried to understand the reality by following Nietzsche's logic of diversity and plurality. Also, through the model of body, Nietzsche intended to prove that the organism was nothing more than a process of organization, simply like a political organization in particular. What Nietzsche tried to do, in fact, was the revolution, since he believed that the Being was political and the way that one thing became real would be conceived as a process of politics: a political organization or a fight of multiples forces.

The article is dedicated to understanding the health of the person in Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche develops the look at health and illness different from classical philosophical tradition, where health is the harmony opposition, tranquility and well-being. From Nietzsche's point of view, health is the dynamic process, fight for health, expecting enemy on behalf of disease. The disease is the necessity condition, the element of repulsion and overcoming, and formations of health. The body of the person is the place, where turns round the fight for health, it is interpreted by Nietzsche as a base of man's individuality, and, hereunder, is overcome known object approach to person, having place in medicine today. So it is possible to consider Nietzsche as the founder of critical relations to the positivism of medicine.

This article discusses the relation between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche by developing a comparison between Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler and Nietzsche’s Antichrist , in order to show both the similarities and dissimilarities between the two philosophers regarding both Christianity and what Kierkegaard called Christendom. In this sense, the characterization of modernity as a period of spiritual decadence – a theme developed in various works by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – is of particular interest, in spite of the different solutions proposed by the philosophers for this malady. Thus, an analysis of these two different views of the fate or future of Christianity proves to be very important for philosophy of religion and ethics. Key words: Adler, Antichrist, Christianity, Christendom, modernity, decadence.

In this essay I examine Nietzsche’s reception of the major pre-Platonic figures and illuminate his appraisal of them. Although dismissed by Heidegger as lacking in intellectual value, an appreciation of Nietzsche’s early inquiry into the beginnings of Greek philosophy is vital to understanding his beginnings and some of the fundamental philosophical problems he will wrestle with throughout his intellectual life. Nietzsche’s retrieval of early Greek thought is one of the first attempts in Europe to contest the authority of Aristotle on their value and importance. For him the original Greek philosophers put us moderns to shame since their thinking and character are devoid of conventionality with no academic professionalism. They lived lives of magnificent solitude and devoted themselves to the task of fashioning an individual form; taken together they form a republic of creative minds in contrast to a republic of scholars. Nietzsche notes that where other peoples have saints, the Greeks had sages. Whilst in other cultures the philosopher exists as a chance random wanderer, in ancient Greece he was not an accident. In the case of the great philosophers we encounter a rare and impressive resourcefulness, a daring that is both desperate and hopeful, it is life pushing itself further and further, upwards and ever higher or more encompassing, as if the thinker possessed the spirit of one of the globe’s great circumnavigators. This is what the great thinker is, a circumnavigator of ‘life’s most remote and dangerous regions.’

Although Nietzsche is long regarded as a prophet of and precursor to Modernism, if not also Post Modernism, his impact on Joyce—the archetypal High Modernist author—has been mostly, but not entirely, neglected. With some exceptions, Joyce criticism seems content to have progressed little beyond David Thatcher’s claim, in a survey of Nietzsche’s impact on English-language writers, that Joyce “went through a period of temporary infatuation with Nietzsche which left no mark of any consequence on his creative work.”1 This relative lack of comparative consideration is odd since Joyce’s greatest ability as a writer is his fluency in a wide range of styles and Nietzsche is the preeminent philosopher of style and perspectivism. As Nietzsche wrote in a somewhat ironically boastful manner in Ecce Homo, “I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man” (EH, 265). Whilst writing Ulysses, Joyce made a similar boast when he described his task as “of writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen” (LI, 167). Indeed, Joyce’s career as a writer could be well described by the rubric “the most multifarious art of style.” From the naturalism of Dubliners to the free indirect discourse of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the radical stylistic, modal, and linguistic shifts in Ulysses and (even more so) Finnegans Wake, Joyce expands and refines the stylistic possibilities of representing multiple individual perspectives.2 Already in the earliest-written stories of Dubliners, Joyce modulates style to the individual temperaments represented. With A Portrait he expands this stylistic variability into a sophisticated form of free indirect discourse and with Ulysses takes this a step (or two) further. The absence of quotation marks—or “perverted commas” (LIII, 99) as Joyce styled them—and discursive markers, such as the phrase “he said,” are signs of Joyce’s confidence in his being able to differentiate characters purely on the basis of their own individuating and identificative patois, as well as of his faith in his readers’ interpretive prowess.3 And in the Babelian (or, rather, post-Babelian) Finnegans Wake stylistic pluralization expands across multiple languages. Even early works such as Chamber Music can be seen to lie within this trajectory of refining styles: Seamus Heaney approvingly cites Yeats’s comment to Joyce that his early poems are “the work of a man ‘who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops.’”4

Journal Article Critical Review Get access Nietzsche: the Ethics of an Immoralist. By Peter Berkowitz. ( Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. xiv + 313. Price £10.50.)Infectious Nietzsche. By David Krell. ( Indiana UP, 1996. Pp. xviii + 281. Price £15.50.)Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity. By David Owen. (London: Sage, 1995. Pp. x + 180. Price £13.95.)The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. By Stanley Rosen. ( Cambridge UP, 1995. Pp. xviii + 264. Price £13.95.)Making Sense of Nietzsche. By Richard Schacht. ( Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 276. Price £13.50.)Nietzsche's Voice. BY Henry Staten. ( Cornell UP, 1990. Pp. xviii + 223. Price £12.50.)Nietzsche. By Michael Tanner. ( Oxford UP, 1994. Pp. 86. Price £5.99.)Nietzsche: a Re-examination. By Irving M. Zeitlin. ( Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 178. Price £12.95.) Aaron Ridley Aaron Ridley University of Southampton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 191, April 1998, Pages 235–242, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00099 Published: 07 January 2003

This paper’s intention is to critically interpret Nietzsche’s critique of moral. Theauthor initially analyzes the meaning of Nietzsche’s main “ethical” notions: die Moral, die Moralitat,die Sitte and die Sittlichkeit. The analysis reveals that those notions are not free of contradictionsin their philosophical and ethical foundation. It is shown that Nietzsche’s critique ofmoral does not apply to the moral phenomenon itself, but to customs, social conventions andconformism instead. That is the contradiction in Nietzsche’s critique of moral. The author thusextends the contradiction in question to the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, because the relationbetween separate teachings within it shows itself as that of the teleology of antiteleology.

Nietzsche’s view of catharsis has attracted some but not a great deal of attention. Part of the reason is that he rarely makes use of the term itself, whether in his Birth of Tragedy or elsewhere, and when he does he is rather dismissive, seemingly rejecting out of hand the Aristotelian-inspired theory of tragic catharsis in its ancient or modern (notably, classicizing) forms. Catharsis would appear to be an unrewarding area for understanding Nietzsche. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that The Birth of Tragedy appears to foreground Nietzsche’s rejection of tragic catharsis in its classical form, and the book is surely very much about catharsis in this sense. As it happens, a closer look at both this work and a handful of later texts on tragedy in Nietzsche’s writings suggests that catharsis theory is everywhere on his mind even where the term is not being mentioned, not least of all in The Birth of Tragedy , where it is fully operative in the form of pity or co-suffering ( Mitleid[en] ), identificatory fear and horror ( Furcht, Schrecken ), and redemptive discharge ( Erlosung, Entladung ). Nor is his view as clear-cut as his emphatic rejection of Aristotelian catharsis might appear to indicate. His view of catharsis is neither simple nor entirely uniform across his corpus. Nietzsche’s understanding of catharsis proves to be much closer to the view he appears to reject, and much closer to classicism’s reading of tragedy than one might suppose.