Discussion Of Nietzsche Research Articles

Ressentiment and power: On Reginster's The Will to Nothingness

AbstractA critical discussion of Bernard Reginster's book The Will to Nothingness. The contribution engages with Reginster's interpretation of Nietzschean ressentiment, arguing that it is an essentially interpersonal attitude in two different senses. It is a response to a social situation of structural deprivation, and it involves an element of antagonism toward those who are better off within this social structure. The contribution then discusses Reginster's claim that modern morality restores the sense of power of the masses by adjusting the goals that they aim to pursue. I argue that this interesting interpretation does not do full justice to the themes of hostility or hatred that permeate the Genealogy of Morals, extending from Nietzsche's discussion of the slave revolt to his treatments of the bad conscience and of ascetic ideals.

시그림책의 예술교육적 활용 방안 모색

Objectives In this study, on the premise that art education should be developed in the direction of enriching human life, this study aims to find a way to utilize art education of poetry picture books for elementary school students. Methods To this end, the direction of art education was examined focusing on Dewey and Nietzsche's discussion on art, and the characteristics of poetry picture books as a medium suitable for art education were explained. Also, based on this, art education measures applicable to elementary school students were proposed. Results Dewey emphasized the process of learners capturing and expressing experiences with a unique quality in their lives, while Nietzsche focuses on the process by which artists create artworks through intoxicating emotions. When art education begins with the body and life of learners, learners will have the creative ability to reshape their lives through art. Poetry picture books express the poet's insights and thoughts through pictures. Therefore, poetry picture books can be said to be a suitable medium for art education in that they evoke images to the reader, feel the intense power of artists expressed through images, and deepen their thinking about objects and the world. Conclusions There are three main ways of artistic education of poetry picture books that can be applied to elementary school students. The first is to verbalizing feeling, the second is to think through images, and the third is to talk about life. Such a study is meaningful in that it was proposed for the affluent life of human beings, the essential purpose of art.

Nietzsche's Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge

Nietzsche's <i>Dawn:</i> Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge

Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub

Reviewed by: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub Babette Babich Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 524. Cloth, $85.00. What is the nineteenth century? If some historians of the "long" nineteenth century date its beginning back to 1750, does it end in 1900 or, as is said, in 1914 or, as one German historian reflects on the ongoing influence of the so-called "historical century," is it still ongoing? In [End Page 622] continental philosophy, the nineteenth century seems to have a certain durability, to take the case of Slavoj Žižek and other Hegelians like Robert Pippin. Is Nietzsche representative of his own times? Or is he, as he himself says, "posthumous"? Robert C. Holub's book introduces Nietzsche as "The Timely Meditator" (1), the better to contradict what Holub describes as Nietzsche's "conscious effort to present himself as an 'untimely' thinker" (1). Yet the question of the nineteenth century interested Nietzsche as a thinker of his times, timely and untimely, and as a Classicist, a professional theorist of history. In his key "untimely" meditation on The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche reminds the reader that it is "only out of the highest force [Kraft] of the present that one can interpret the past, only in the strongest exertion of your most noble qualities will you fathom what in the past is worth knowing and preserving. Like to like! Otherwise you will drag the past down to yourselves" (§6). In the penultimate section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes that the nineteenth century encompasses everything in the eighteenth century that produced a Goethe but now engenders only "a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, utter cluelessness" (§50). As a result: "Isn't the nineteenth century, especially at its conclusion, merely a strengthened, courser, eighteenth century, that is, a décadence-century?" (TI §50). Dismissing Nietzsche's scholarly formation as a philologist, which included classical hermeneutics, archaeology, and methodological discussions on how to set history on the path of a science (see Barthold Georg Niebuhr, whom Nietzsche cites in his own essay on history), while his book's chapters are conceived as a series of questions Holub does not engage Nietzsche's own "Homer Question," the inaugural lecture which defines Nietzsche's disciplinary—both philological as well as philosophical—"untimeliness." In consequence, Holub also fails to raise the question of the historical person, a key to a text left out of Holub's reading of Nietzsche's "timely" untimeliness, concerning the hermeneutic representation of the historical Jesus. Thus Nietzsche's first Untimely Meditation, on David Strauss (as confessor and author), articulates the Jesus question as the Homer question relevant for thinking both edification and education (significant for both Strauss and for Schopenhauer) along with the challenges of history (broadly: philology as Nietzsche understood it) for life, to which schematic whole Nietzsche would append Wagner. Holub's book is rich in learning, yet conspicuously has blinders, not least because Holub reads an author who was explicitly concerned with history throughout his thought while leaving aside that same author's specific formation in history. To this same extent, Holub's point of departure betrays a want of hermeneutic "method," to use a convention deriving from both Albrecht Ritschl and (again) Niebuhr as well as Nietzsche's own teacher, Friedrich Ritschl, who praised his student's methodological rigor. Holub also has a chapter on "The Evolution Question," along with "The Cosmological Question," and "The Eugenics Question." He begins it with a discussion of Nietzsche's Übermensch via George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (313), tricked out with reflections on Überwindung and übergehen, nodding to the same Walter Kaufmann everyone mentions, yet excluding reference to Nietzsche's formation in Classics, which might have taken Holub to the literary context Kaufmann references: Lucian's Kataplous, The Downward Journey—a reflection on the underworld for the ancient Greeks, complete with a reflection on the aesthetics of the "higher" human being to match the rhetoric of Nazi eugenics. Darwin fits such a scheme for the sake of superior breeding...

“Let Us Return to Herr Nietzsche”: On Health and Revaluation

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's 1886 prefaces, in which he reorients his earlier work toward his future project of the revaluation of values, are pervaded by the theme of health, and more specifically, Nietzsche's own health. In On the Genealogy of Morals, health is not a topic in its own right, but it recedes into the background as an evaluative criterion by which to judge Christian morality. In this article, I use Nietzsche's discussion of health in the 1886 prefaces to shed light on the role of health in his project of revaluation. Specifically, I will claim that in attending to health, Nietzsche experiments with an evaluation that twists free of a faith in opposite values.

Nietzsche on Art and Life

Nietzsche on Art and Life

Spinoza and Nietzsche on Freedom Empowerment and Affirmation

AbstractAgainst much of the philosophical tradition, Spinoza and Nietzsche defend an understanding of freedom opposed to free will and formulated as an ethical ideal consisting in a transition from a smaller to a greater power of acting. Starting from a shared commitment to necessity and radical immanence, they present freedom as a passage to a greater power of self‐determination and self‐expression of the body. Nevertheless, the continuities between their power ontologies and their respective commitments to a life of knowledge break down in their discussion of the various possible manifestations of power. I will argue that Nietzsche's distinctive formulation of power as struggle between wills to power enables him to formulate the question of the qualitative dimension of empowerment in a way that is foreign to Spinoza's rational determinism. While acknowledging the profound similarities, I will argue that we must see Nietzsche's discussion of affirmation as the culmination of his disagreement with his predecessor on the topic of freedom and empowerment.

Art and logic: Godard’s Alphaville as philosophy

ABSTRACTJean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) constitutes a strikingly brilliant mise en scène of strife between humans and logic. Led by a supercomputer and its scientist-creator, this technocratic city annihilates emotive human creativity. I argue that this dystopian science fiction film is philosophy, precisely because it engages a problem that philosophers also address, namely humanity’s relationship to art and logic. I present this film as an example in defense of the ‘bold thesis’ for film as philosophy developed by Paisley Livingston (2006). Though Livingston argues against this thesis, Aaron Smuts (2009) provides a valiant defense, to which Livingston (2009) responds, stating that only a more relevant example is missing. Supplying this example is the precise intention of this article. To do so, I begin with a discussion of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy ([1872] 1967), to provide a legitimate philosophical background from which to show how Alphaville not only serves as a thought experiment of prior established philosophy, but also builds upon those ideas to create its own philosophical contribution.

On the institution of the moral subject: on the commander and the commanded in Nietzsche's discussion of law

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).

Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future

Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future

The Play of Ethics in Eugen Fink

The Play of Ethics in Eugen Fink

Nietzsche’s ‘Anti-Naturalism’ in ‘The Four Great Errors’

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.

Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition

Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition

On Nietzsche's Judgment of Style and Hume's Quixotic Taste: On the Science of Aesthetics and “Playing” the Satyr

Abstract I read Nietzsche's discussion of scholarly judgments of style beginning with his own inaugural lecture at Basel together with David Hume's stylistic reflections in his “On the Standard of Taste.” This casts light both on the context and the substance of Nietzsche's own scholarly concern with the question of style and taste in terms of what Nietzsche called the “science of aesthetics” and consequently of scholarly judgment in both classics (or classical philology, here including archaeology and historiography) and philosophy. I also include a brief discussion of Nietzsche's phenomenological performance practice of dance or playing the “satyr.”

„SELBST-TYRANNEI“ UND „BILDSÄULENKÄLTE“. NIETZSCHES KRITISCHE AUSEINANDERSETZUNG MIT DER STOISCHEN MORAL

Article „SELBST-TYRANNEI“ UND „BILDSÄULENKÄLTE“. NIETZSCHES KRITISCHE AUSEINANDERSETZUNG MIT DER STOISCHEN MORAL was published on November 14, 2009 in the journal Nietzsche-Studien (volume 38, issue 1).

The Transfiguration of Existence and Sovereign Life: Sloterdijk and Nietzsche on Posthuman and Superhuman Futures

This essay provides a close reading of Sloterdijk's book Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism (1989, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN). Sloterdijk's book is itself a discussion of Nietzsche's book The Birth of Tragedy, and the account offered here is a critical appreciation of both texts, focusing on the question of individual and collective existence. The essay looks at the question of the future of the human, raising the question of the superhuman alongside that of the posthuman. In doing so, it brings in other texts from Sloterdijk—especially “Rules for the human zoo”—and offers an account of Nietzsche's work on these themes as a whole. The essay criticises some aspects of Sloterdijk's appropriation, but more positively makes the case for retrieving the uniqueness of Nietzsche's answers. Human existence cannot be corrected, but it can be transfigured.

How Does the Ascetic Ideal Function in Nietzsche's Genealogy?

It is remarkable that four commentaries on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals will h ve been published within the space of one year?a testimony to how prominent the text has become in scholarship and college courses. Recently I had the great pleasure of convening with the other three authors?Dan Conway, Chris Janaway, and David Owen?to share and discuss our work. I can say with confidence that each of these authors has produced a first-rate study, and I am proud to share the stage with them.1 Moreover, there should be little concern about redundancy within this set of commentaries; each is written in a distinctive style, with distinctive interpretations, emphases, and perspectives on Nietzsche's complicated book?yet each with careful and expert attention to the text as writ ten. So there is plenty of room for productive disagreement and cross-fertilization among these commentaries. In my article I will focus on Nietzsche's discussion of the ascetic ideal in GM III.2 In the course of my analysis I will indicate how my approach differs from those of the other three works when appropriate. Each of the other writers does a remarkable job examining this crucial part of GM. The contribution of my approach, I think, involves developing elements in Nietzsche's text that are either bypassed, underdeveloped, or developed in a manner that I would want to amend. Four topics that fit this scenario are the relationship between the ascetic ideal and nihilism, the meaning of the metaphysical value of truth, the mean ing and importance of life affirmation in the text, and Nietzsche's remark about art in relation to the ascetic ideal. To get started, I believe that the fundamental question underlying GM is: Can there be meaning and value in natural life following the death of God? The eclipse of the supernatural in modern thought is a presumed turn to nature, but Nietzsche insists that this turn is in fact a looping reliance on the theological tradition and that the eclipse of God forces a more radical naturalistic challenge: If the Western tradition in one way or another is beholden to a nature-transcending or life-averse condition, then the loss of this condition's divine warrant undermines traditional sources of meaning and value, to the point where the West faces the choice between nihilism and a new, affirmative philosophy of nature. GM is a quasi-historical study that fills out the details of the above scenario by trying to show how and why the tradition has been life averse and cannot

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion (review)

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion Rebecca Bamford Julian Young . Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 230. Paper, $29.99. Readers might be forgiven raised eyebrows on first noting the title of Julian Young's book. Young's chief and surprising claim is that, even though Nietzsche "rejects the God of [End Page 488] Christianity, he is not anti-religious," and that he is "above all a religious thinker" (201), whose atheism only applies in the case of the Christian God (2), and whose early "religious communitarianism" or "Wagnerianism" persist throughout the texts (1). Young defines Nietzsche's early thought as communitarian by virtue of concern with the flourishing of the community as a whole, and as religious given Nietzsche's view that a people cannot flourish or indeed truly be a community without a "festive, communal" religion (1). Nietzsche is seen as broadly in step with the anti-modernist tradition of "Volkish" thinking in nineteenth-century Germany, but as rejecting "genuinely wicked" aspects of Volkish thinking that might prompt his identification as the "godfather of Nazism" (201–02). While tempting even to Young himself, however, his discussion of Nietzsche cannot simply be summarized by the Heideggerian "slogan" that only a god can save us (179). Young's argument rests, to a significant extent, on the strength of his reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche's religious communitarianism is rightly taken to emerge, via two of his key Schopenhauerianisms (pessimism, and the distinction between the metaphysically real and dreamlike appearances), as the solution to the problem of nihilism posed by the myth-lessness of modern culture (32–33, 179). Symptoms of myth-lessness include a loss of cultural unity and community, and the agitated quest for meaning in the face of death (14–15, 29, 32). Nietzsche's solution crystallizes in his call for a modern replacement of the role played by religious myth, "tragic myth and the tragic festival," for the Greeks (33). Nietzsche's acceptance of the Christian God's death, which Young's reading—rightly, in my opinion—identifies even as early as The Birth of Tragedy, is therefore no celebration of the disappearance of religion from our culture: it is a call for a religious revival to reinvigorate our culture (32–33, 210). Tracing this path through Nietzsche's subsequent writings in a manner familiar to readers of his Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (1992), Young links his claim for Nietzsche as religious communitarian with an argument against previous individualist interpretations of Nietzsche either as having little to say of communal life because it is not his "department," or as seeing the proper role of society as a "support-system" for the "production of übermenschlich types" (2–3). Nietzsche, Young suggests, is far more concerned with the flourishing of the community than of the individual: his religious communitarianism prompts his cosmopolitanism, global cultural community transporting us beyond "national cultures of earlier times and the age of comparisons" (82). The objection that communitarianism is incompatible with cosmopolitanism is countered by an appeal to Nietzsche's definition of human greatness, in section 212 of Beyond Good and Evil, as a unity, or wholeness, in multiplicity (214–15). Supporting evidence for compatibility is garnered from Nietzsche's admiring remarks on the unifying power of the medieval Church as a ruling structure, for instance in the third essay of the Untimely Meditations, and in section 358, book five of The Gay Science (44, 98–99, 214–15)—though tantalizing mentions of J. M. Coetzee's affinity with Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a long aberration (100), of the works of contemporaries such as Cecil Rhodes and Robert Baden-Powell (128), and of the notion of synthesis between West and East (144), hint at unresolved questions concerning the contemporary meaning and status of global "good Europeanism" with respect to (post-) colonial cultural flourishing. Young's discussion also re-opens the case for attending to continuities across Nietzsche's texts. However, while he argues effectively for Nietzsche's religious communitarianism as continuous, he is less comfortable in tracing continuity through Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His discomfort at the "aberration...

Die Selbstverkleinerung des Menschen

This is a critical discussion of Nietzsche's view of the self-devaluation of human beings in modernity. In view of the modern devaluation of the exceptional position of humanity in the evolution of life, it is of little avail to insist on the traditional Christian view of the image of God as created autonomy. In theological terms, the decisive feature of human beings is not their active creativity but rather their creative passivity.

The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (review)

380Comparative Drama relating to his chosen dramatists and patrons and, similarly,he is always alert to the purely practical benefits to be reaped by ambitious authors and stationers from the patronage networks of the late Elizabethan and Stuart court and metropolis . But this book is perhaps at its best in exploring the more abstract concepts ofearly modern literary patronage, including issues ofthe growing social status ofdramatic endeavour and the sheer diversity ofthe various concepts of authorship held not only by writers but also by their readers and patrons. This book offers a major new addition to our knowledge of the possible definitions of literary patronage and will undoubtedly serve to stimulate further research into the various topics raised. Michael G. Brennan University ofLeeds Brenda Murphy. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 282. $85.00 cloth. Brenda Murphy begins her exploration of the Provincetown Players and the culture ofmodernitywith theunqualified assertion that"the Provincetown Players was the most significant and the most influential American theatre group ofthe early twentieth century" (xiii). Generously acknowledging earlier studies that have provided groundwork for this contention, Murphy then articulates her unique focus on the groups"wider significance in twentieth-centuryAmerican culture,"specifically, the significant links between Provincetown artists and the development of American modernism in the arts (xiv). Her carefully researched , compelling investigation ofthis phenomenon not only illuminates and expands previous scholarship but undoubtedlypaves the way for further investigation ofthe works andprocesses examined.Murphybrings to the project,which combines cultural history and dramatic criticism, a thorough understanding of her subject, keen critical insight, and lucid expression. Her identification of Provincetown as a"movement" (xv) is a telling choice that echoes Provincetown business manager Eleanor Fitzgerald's insistence on a Provincetown"idea"that transcends organizational, chronological, or spatial boundaries. Accordingly, Murphydevotes considerable attention to works that were, strictlyspeaking,produced by other organizations (the Other Players and the Experimental Theatre, Inc.).That theseworks are,however,best understood as part ofthe Provincetown "movement"and aresignificantlylinked to theparentorganization,is eloquently demonstrated in this study. Reviews381 Murphy's analysis unfolds in five chapters of nearly equal length. In her first chapter,"The Founding: Myth and History? she is obliged to retrace some familiar territory in summarizing the group's legendary creation in the summer of 1915 and its general organizational history. Murphy does not dwell on these matters, however, moving swiftly to her greater interest in the intellectual and ideological currents ofAmerican modernism and their aesthetic manifestation within the Provincetown repertory. Murphy's list of philosophical and ideological influences includes William James, John Dewey, Freud, Nietzsche, Monism, anarchism, and feminism. Within this overview, her consideration of James and Dewey, minimally treated in previous accounts, and her thorough discussion ofNietzsche's wide-ranging influence, are particularlywelcome. This chapter also includes a brief overview of burgeoning aesthetic innovations, including the realist/naturalist dramaturgy of Ibsen, Strindberg, and others, the gritty realism of the Ashcan School of Art, and the nonrealistic "postimpressionism " that supplanted the Ashcan School as the visual avant-garde. In setting up an aesthetic framework within which to analyze Provincetown's repertory, Murphy challenges Gerhard Bach's influential 1978 categorization of "three phrases ofdramatic development—an initial phase ofsocial realism,leading to the phase ofrealism versus symbolism—leading again into the last phase ofrenewed social realism interspersed with experiments in expressionism"(40). Following and further developing an argument begun by Glaspell biographer Barbara Ozieblo, Murphy offers a persuasive alternate view: a repertory characterized by tensions between realist and nonrealist art "present from the very beginning of the Players" (41), and continuing throughout its history. In her second chapter Murphy analyses the thirteen plays comprising the Players' first two summer seasons (1915-16). Here Murphy reminds us that the Provincetown's founding membership was virtuallya"Who'sWho"ofNewYork's Little Renaissance (16), including post-impressionist artists Charles Demuth, Marsdon Hartley, Bror Nordfeldt, and William and Marguerite Zorach; radical labor journalists Jack Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse; Max Eastman, editor of the magazine Masses, and his wife, feminist activist Ida Rauh; fiction writer Susan Glaspell and her husband, classicist/socialist/Nietzschean Jig Cook; New Stagecraft pioneer Robert Edmond Jones, and the budding playwright...