Nietzsche's Critique Research Articles

The coming of history: Heidegger and Nietzsche against the present

Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche’s conceptions forgetting, memory, and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng), 1938–1940, wherein he sketches his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the light of his contemporaneous notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern for history and for “what has-been” (das Gewesene) as a thinking of the “coming” of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something arriving, as something that “comes” to us. This coming of history is an ontological determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming of history, I return to Nietzsche’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The concluding sections of Nietzsche’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the conclusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation.

One Hundred Twenty-Two Years Later: Reassessing the Nietzsche-Darwin Relationship

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's perspective on Darwin and Darwinism has received increased scrutiny in recent years, a reflection of the fact that scholars have sensed that the Nietzsche-Darwin connection has not been adequately assessed and that their relationship might be more significant than has been previously assumed. Renewed interest in Nietzsche's alleged naturalism has also focused attention on that scientific paradigm, which best reflects the triumph of the naturalist perspective in the modern era, namely Darwinism. But while numerous studies have pointed to the overlap and shared concerns of both thinkers, no one has systematically interpreted Nietzsche's reception of Darwin as a fundamental antagonism, one that had emerged from an initial sympathy to the Darwinian approach in the early years and ended in a foundational critique. By examining Nietzsche in this way, one can appreciate Nietzsche's critique of Darwinism as one significant component of his larger assault on contemporary culture and decadence, which became his central concern in his final works.

Nietzsche, die Orchestikologie und das dissipative Denken

Nietzsche, die Orchestikologie und das dissipative Denken

Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie

Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

Há espaço para uma concepção não moral da normatividade prática em Nietzsche?: notas sobre um debate em andamento

Este artigo está estruturado em três seções. Na primeira procuro mostrar como a busca por uma concepção alternativa de normatividade prática na filosofia moral contemporânea guarda afinidades com o projeto nietzschiano de crítica da moralidade. Na segunda seção examino os méritos e as limitações da tentativa de Brobjer de filiar Nietzsche à tradição grega da ética das virtudes. Na terceira seção examino as distintas motivações da crítica de Nietzsche à solução moral para o problema da normatividade prática e defendo a tese de que esta diversidade de motivações torna sua posição instável, oscilando entre uma versão consequencialista e uma não consequencialista do perfeccionismo. Não discuto exaustivamente, mas sugiro que a versão não consequencialista é mais consistente com alguns compromissos importantes da filosofia de Nietzsche.

Value, Security and Temporality in Nietzsche's Critique of Modernity

A certain pathos of temporality is at the core of Nietzsche's critique of reason, and it is this pathos that motivates his questioning of the Western discourse of values and of valuation. The well-rehearsed Nietzschean thesis about the decline of values in modernity – nihilism as a kind of character fault of the modern personality –builds in effect less upon the values themselves (whatever these might be specified as) than upon a certain evolution in the human subject. An evolution in the subjectivity that has turned humans around from what Giddens (perhaps misleadingly) called ontological security towards their evolving capacity to navigate an unknown future and negotiate the values that flow from it.This article tries to demonstrate how Nietzsche's notion of modern subjectivity is in this sense inseparable from our negotiation of values over time; inseparable, in other words, from a certain axiology of time. Critically, it is not nihilism that is Nietzsche's primary concern – as so many read him – but rather his notion that values are inhabited by their own contingency: namely, the very possibility of their own exhaustion. For Nietzsche, the critique of morality is a particular case of his critique of values. All evaluation, all practices of conceptualizing, determining and applying values fits into the kind of genealogy Nietzsche carries out on morality. For Nietzsche there is an inseparable link between the supposed essence of value and the temporal field in which their rise or decline is experienced, and bemoaned.

Nietzsche, Kant, the democratic state, and war

AbstractThis article offers a reconstruction of Nietzsche's critique of Kant's scheme for perpetual peace distilled from his life-long confrontation with Kant's critical philosophy. Through this reading strategy, it sheds light on Nietzsche's controversial and yet surprisingly under-researched reflections on the problem of conflict and war in human affairs. Although Nietzsche embraced many of the basic premises of Kant's critical philosophical project, he considered the ethico-political conclusions Kant drew from these to be both irrational and nihilistic. From Nietzsche's perspective, Kant's thoughts on politics and International Relations rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomena of agency, statehood, and war that elides both the tragic relationship between politics and culture, and the violence which Nietzsche believes to be latent in all attempts at reconciling individual with collective autonomy. According to Nietzsche, Kant's influential association between liberal republicanism, freedom, and peace contributed unwittingly in ushering in the cult of the nation-state, which Nietzsche warned would engulf Europe into a wholly new kind of organised violence in the coming decades. Although clearly not without their uncritical assumptions and hubristic tendencies, Nietzsche's reflections on war and peace draw attention to some of the more insidious risks and difficulties attending liberal attempts at accommodating cosmopolitan values and principles within the framework of the modern nation state.

Epistemic Addiction: Reading “Sonny's Blues” with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 3, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA James Baldwin writes that “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.” Baldwin dealt with this crisis in his literary works through the strategic use of Christian theological themes and imagery to make compelling critiques of bourgeois cultural and Christian values. So “prolonged” was his “religious crisis” that Christian theological themes permeate Baldwin’s immense literary corpus. Baldwin thus both was influenced by Christianity and critiqued it in his works. Considering these two points, I think it appropriate to begin this essay with a biblical reference to the Christian narrative of the “fall” of humanity. I choose this biblical starting point not only because of Baldwin’s Christian background and literary inclinations but also because I think that this starting point accurately depicts the moral problem that is at work in Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” I shall call this moral problem “epistemic addiction.” Epistemic Addiction: Reading “Sonny’s Blues” with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

Foucault, Philosophy, and Literature

This article focuses on Foucault's “archeological” books: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It addresses two issues in particular: first, Foucault's criticism of modern philosophical and scientific knowledge about man, showing how this knowledge is based on Nietzsche's criticism of humanism in modernity; second, Foucault's thoughts about modern literary language, contending that it is an affirmative counterpoint to the historic-philosophical analyses of knowledge about man he carried out during this archeological phase. In addition, the objective is to situate Foucault's views on literature during this period of genealogies of power and subjectivity.

AFFIRMATIONS AFTER GOD: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD DAWKINS ON ATHEISM

Abstract. In this essay, I compare the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche with that of Richard Dawkins. My purpose is to describe certain differences in their respective atheisms with the intent of showing that Nietzsche's atheism contains a richer and fuller affirmation of human life. In Dawkins’s presentation of the value of life without God, there is a naïve optimism that purports that human beings, educated in science and purged of religion, will find lives of easy peace and comfortable wonder. Part of my argument is that this optimism regarding the power of objective science is subject to Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and what he calls the “theoretical man.” As such, it fails in terms of providing a true affirmation of life in the godless world.

Reconciliação no pensamento de Nietzsche?

O artigo procura responder à questão se a ideia de reconciliação encontra-se articulada no pensamento de Nietzsche. Esta abordagem é feita em três passos. A primeira parte apresenta a crítica de Nietzsche à motivação e aos objetivos da reconciliação (ou autorreconciliação) presentes em concepções religiosas, sociais e filosóficas. A segunda parte defende que Nietzsche desenvolve uma forma alternativa de reconciliação: a autossuperação. A terceira e última parte discute em que medida a insistência de Nietzsche no eu na autossuperação pode subtrair a figura do outro e assim borrar a linha entre autossuperação e auto-ilusão.

NIETZSCHE E HABERMAS NO TECIDO DA DIALÉTICA DO ESCLARECIMENTO

In this article we examine some connections between criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer to instrumental reason limited to the book Dialectic of Enlightenment and the genealogical critique of Nietzsche to the will to truth , a theme explored in several books. Then resume the reading of Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity on a Nietzsche’s radical critique to modern rationality, in order to examine two points: 1) What arguments support the thesis of inconsistency and lack of foundation of Nietzsche's genealogical critique? 2) why Habermas claims that the heirs of Nietzschean critique repeat this inconsistency, including the very critical of Adorno and Horkheimer? We intend to demonstrate, unlike Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer in demythologization program of instrumental reason resume Nietzschean critical project aiming to build a new positive and demythologized meaning for enlightenment.

‘Looking Down on Creation’: Reconceptualising Incarnation with Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray

Merleau-Ponty's focus on embodiment enacts a Nietzschean critique of the Christian Platonism in Descartes' mind/body split, and subtly challenges the transcendence/immanence, divine/human distinction. Given Irigaray's deconstruction of the transcendence/immanence distinction in her creation of the sensible transcendental, recent feminist adoptions and adaptations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach to bodily being-in-the-world, despite their lack of discussion of the theological, may have contributions to make to a feminist theology. Indeed, the attentiveness to lived experience in contemporary feminist phenomenology can offer a counter discourse to the continuing privilege accorded the abstract, the transcendent, and the rational in contemporary philosophy and theology.

“HALF-MAN” OR “HALF-DOLL”: GEORGE EGERTON'S RESPONSE TO FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

This article argues that several of Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) offer a sustained and intelligent response to Nietzsche's philosophy, and in particular to his take on women. While earlier critics have taken note of Egerton's three explicit references to Nietzsche, as well as of her general affinity with his philosophy, the precise extent of her engagement with Nietzsche's thought has not yet been investigated. Through a close reading of Egerton's short stories, in particular “The Regeneration of Two”, the article aims to show that while Egerton took over some aspects of Nietzsche's critique, she also sought to defend women and, most importantly, tried to construct an alternative feminine ideal which owed a lot to Nietzsche's Übermensch. Interestingly, Nietzsche's influence is not just evident in the general characteristics of Egerton's feminine ideal—self-reliance, independence, strength, a closeness to body and nature—but also in the tensions that haunt this ideal—the tension between masculine and feminine characteristics, as well as the tension between individualism and love or between independence and motherhood.

Camus and Nihilism

Camus published an essay entitled ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism,’ which was later incorporated into The Rebel. Camus' aim was to assess Nietzsche's response to the problem of nihilism. My aim is to do the same with Camus. The paper explores Camus' engagement with nihilism through its two major modalities: with respect to the individual and the question of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, and with respect to the collective and the question of murder in The Rebel. While a Nietzschean influence thoroughly suffuses both books, it is in the second that Camus' most explicit, and most critical, engagement with the German philosopher takes place. The crux of Camus' critique of Nietzsche is that the absolute affirmation of existence he proposes as a response to nihilism cannot say ‘no’ to murder. In the terms of Camus' discussion in The Rebel, Nietzsche's philosophy is thus culpable in the straying of rebellion from its own foundations and its slide into bloody revolution. First, the paper argues that Camus' criticisms of Nietzsche are misplaced. Camus focuses his analysis on sections of the problematic text The Will to Power and misses important sections of Nietzsche's published texts which in fact support the condemnation of revolution which is the project of The Rebel. However, the paper argues that Camus moves beyond Nietzsche in radically democratizing the response to nihilism. While Nietzsche's hopes for the creation of meaning are focused on exceptional individuals, Camus insists that any response to nihilism needs to be accessible to the average person. Such a move is laudable, but it raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the type of problem nihilism is, and how these might be addressed.

Three Essays Against Nietzsche

These essays defend Christian, socialist and realist positions against Nietzsche's critiques. Each essay addresses a problem in Nietzsche's work. The first deals with perspectivism. On his view, the idea of objectivity disappears, becoming no more than simply a multiplicity of perspectives. The essay shows how Nietzsche's approach to knowledge commits the epistemic fallacy, i.e. evades questions about truth by collapsing them into questions about knowing. The second essay addresses Nietzsche's moral psychology in which there is no being behind doing, no agent distinct from her actions. The essay demonstrates how this actualist account of persons is false by showing that the distinction between agent and action is needed for any understanding of moral action. The final essay concerns the history of ideas, rather than philosophical analysis. First, it looks at Nietzsche's account of slave morality couched in terms of envy. Social justice, however, cannot be understood in this way. A section on class, religion and morality in late antiquity reinforces this with evidence that it was far more likely to find vindictiveness in the master class than the servant. The section on theism and ethics deals with Nietzsche's notion of ‘eternal recurrence’: the idea that everything that happens will happen again an infinity of times, a notion that sustains an ethic of passive acceptance. The final part decries contemporary attachments to the Nietzschean virtues of pride, self-assertiveness, competitiveness and contempt for the less successful, preferring a Christian path to self-perfection through the pursuit of goals outside ourselves.

Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche*

This paper examines Charles Taylor's case against complete secularization in A Secular Age in the light of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of the potential for nihilism inherent in different kinds of philosophical appeals to “transcendence”. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as ontotheology suggests that the theoretical pluralism Taylor rightly embraces is more consistently thought of as following from a robust ontological pluralism, and that Taylor's own commitment to ontological monism seems to follow from his own desire to leave room in his theoretical account for an ontotheological creator God who stands outside the world and ultimately unifies its meaning. The Nietzschean critique contends that any such appeal to something that transcends the limits of human finitude remains nihilistic, insofar as such valorizations of the otherworldly undermine our capacity to appreciate and experience the genuine meaningfulness of human existence in its this-worldly finitude. The paper explores Taylor's response to this Nietzschean critique, showing that Taylor “deconstructs” the crucial distinction between immanence and transcendence that any “exclusively humanist” worldview must presuppose. Taylor's response only partly resolves the problem, however, because the Nietzschean can still draw a defensible distinction between legitimate and meaningful appeals to transcendence and illegitimate and nihilistic ones. The paper concludes by suggesting that traditional appeals to a transcendent creator God, a heavenly afterlife, and so on, continue to run afoul of Nietzsche's critique of the nihilism of otherworldliness, and that we would do better to explicitly abjure such otherworldly appeals.

<i>Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography</i> (review)

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...

A crítica de Nietzsche à moral da compaixão de Schopenhauer em "Aurora": o desprezo de si como artimanha de condenação do indivíduo

Pretende-se analisar a crítica de Nietzsche à moral da compaixão no que tange ao critério de negação de si como seu fundamento. Centrar-se-á, nesse artigo, nos dois primeiros livros de Aurora, obra que forma o chamado segundo período do pensamento nietzschiano e que, nessa perspectiva, é parte do processo de rompimento e distanciamento em relação à filosofia schopenhauriana.