Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture, by Andrew Huddleston

Abstract

Those of us who see the historical figures we work on as sources of philosophical insight, rather than merely of historical interest, will sooner or later run up against the question of how to handle those parts of our chosen figures’ views that are morally objectionable. Those of us who work on Nietzsche, and consider him to be a source of significant philosophical insight, face this problem in an especially troublesome form. It is not merely that Nietzsche’s views, when they are objectionable, are particularly egregiously so (though this is probably true), nor merely that such objectionable views occur within the texts with an especially high frequency compared to other figures from the history of philosophy (though this is probably also true). Rather, the difficulty is that Nietzsche’s objectionable views are—in various different ways—very intimately bound up with what is most genuinely important and interesting about his work. Nietzsche is...