Nietzsche's Account Research Articles

Il pragmatismo di Nietzsche. Saggi sul pensiero prospettivistico

Il pragmatismo di Nietzsche. Saggi sul pensiero prospettivistico

Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy

<i>Nietzsche and</i> The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche and Aristotle on Friendship and Self-Knowledge

Abstract Focusing on Nietzsche's “middle period,” I argue that in those works friendship serves a vital function in Nietzsche's account of self-creation, and that there a kind of self-knowledge figures importantly. It is knowledge not of a self per se, but of an ineliminable need for what Nietzsche will call self-overcoming, the imperative to understand oneself as importantly constituted by processes of change and development rather than as the logical or transcendental condition of such processes. Friends figure in such processes because they are best placed to propel us on the particular path down which our development leads by making life seem worthwhile, and so making the processes of self-creation matter too. Here, I discuss Nietzsche's view of friendship and self-knowledge as it compares to that of Aristotle. And I attempt to show how Nietzsche's positive account of friendship and self-knowledge makes sense against the background of his more general criticisms of modern morality.

Nietzsche on Honor and Empathy

Abstract My aim here is to contribute to the literature about Nietzsche's exemplars by excavating two undertreated but important themes in Nietzsche: first, his investment in the value of honor, which unifies many strands of thought in his ethics and his criticism of Christian morality, and second, his account of and investment in our capacity for empathy. I demonstrate Nietzsche's consistent preoccupation with honor, and give a specific account of what he means by it and why he is invested in it, offering some new additions to accounts of familiar Nietzschean themes along the way. I then describe Nietzsche's account of empathy and offer some remarks on its connection to honor in the case of the higher type. I conclude by setting out some implications the addition of these two concepts to our conception of Nietzsche's central concerns might have for philosophers.

Nietzsche on Generosity and the Gift-Giving Virtue

Generosity and gift-giving are important themes in Nietzsche's philosophy. This essay focuses on Nietzsche's idea of the gift-giving virtue which is explicitly discussed at the end of Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I begin with a critical discussion of this section, and then I consider three different interpretations. Finally, I look at some ways in which the idea of the ‘gift-giving virtue’ may be understood in terms of spiritual generosity, leading to ‘sovereignty’ as its ultimate goal. Throughout, there are important comparisons to be made between Nietzsche's account of generosity and the traditional viewpoint.

Nietzsche's Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics

Nietzsche's Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics

Slave Revolt, Deflated Self-deception

The problem of self-deception lies at the heart of Nietzsche's account of the slave revolt in morality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. The viability of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality is thus crucially dependent on a successful explanation of the self-deception the slaves of the first essay are caught in. But the phenomenon of self-deception is notoriously puzzling. In this paper, after critically examining existing interpretations of the slaves’ self-deception, I provide, by drawing on Alfred Mele's work on self-deception, a deflationary account of the slaves’ self-deception; an account which explains the slaves’ self-deceived predicament but without either the attribution of contradictory mental states or an intention to produce or to facilitate the production of the belief the self-deceived subjects end up holding. In light of my account of self-deception, I interpret Nietzsche's intriguing claim that the slaves’ revaluation of ressentiment amounts to their ‘most mendacious artistic stroke’.

Defending Nietzsche's Soul

ABSTRACT We respond here to criticisms of our book, The Soul of Nietzsche's “Beyond Good and Evil” offered by contributors to the Symposium on it in JNS 45.1 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0031]: We defend our interpretation of Plato's soul, and of Plato's reason as “atomistic,” and argue that these points help explain how Nietzsche's theory of the soul can be a refinement of Plato's tripartite account. We defend our account of what we call “the will to value” against a misunderstanding shared by Janaway and Katsafanas, and we compare the latter's account of Nietzsche's self unfavorably to our “two-level” account. Finally, we defend our interpretation of the relation between Nietzsche's philosophy and Kant's on several points but do recognize one error in it. Responding to Leiter's criticism of our interpretation of BGE 11, we change one detail of that interpretation, which strengthens our overall interpretation and makes Nietzsche even more Kantian. Unless otherwise noted, page numbers refer to contributions as they appear in the earlier publication.

Nietzsche's Use of Monumental History

ABSTRACT This article examines Nietzsche's notion of monumental history in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and considers its importance for Nietzsche's later work. In the first section, I examine the connections between monumental history and the work of Polybius, Thucydides, and Livy. Here I argue that Nietzsche takes his notion of monumental history directly from the practice of history in the ancient world. In the second section, I demonstrate that Nietzsche regards the production of illusions as the principal benefit of monumental history, while he criticizes its mendacious and conservative tendencies. Finally, I argue in the third section that the collection of characters we encounter in Nietzsche's later works—including the free spirits and the figure of Zarathustra—ought to be understood through Nietzsche's account of the uses and disadvantages of monumental history. These exemplary figures neither falsify nor glorify the past, but they remain illusions in the service of life.

Nietzsche, Drives, Selves, and Leonard Bernstein: A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin

ABSTRACT In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsche's “drives.” They are not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the subject and try to get the rest to follow their lead. Such “subjugation,” whether within one or between different persons (“the will to power”), often results not in the other's destruction but in its improvement. Moreover, no drives are immune to change. Nietzsche likens their unification, which results in one's becoming an “individual,” to the unity of works of art. Aesthetic values being essentially social, unification depends not just on its agent but also on its reception by an audience. I end by arguing that “the eternal recurrence” forbids our imagining that our life could ever have been different in any significant respect.

Die Materielle Richtung der Utopieen:

ABSTRACT The coming months will witness the publication in English of the second volume of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, the magnum opus of an author who is currently intensely fashionable among architects. Sloterdijk embeds within that text what might appear to be a staggering claim: that architectural aspiration is ultimately responsible for the very conception of the Judeo-Christian God. This claim is validated by reference to the Tower of Babel, long a marker both of utopian aspiration and of anti-utopian doubt, a tower constructed within the enclosure of city walls that were themselves, in Sloterdijk's account, designed to protect the utopia of a tight community against the threat of an expanding world. Sloterdijk illustrates his text with an image taken from Uriel Birnbaum's 1924 Der Kaiser und der Architekt: itself a magnificently illustrated retelling of the story of Babel. But not only is Birnbaum himself radically opposed to utopian thought, whether artistic or political; his text might more readily be associated with Nietzsche's account of the death of God than with Sloterdijk's account of the birth of that God. This article explores the curious ambiguity of Birnbaum's position, drawing in part on his unpublished manuscript entitled “Wesen und Geschichte der Utopie.”

Nietzsche, Illness and the Body’s Quest for Narrative

This paper explores Nietzsche's approach to the question of illness. It develops an account of Nietzsche's ideas in the wake of Arthur W. Frank's discussion of the shortcomings of modern medicine and narrative theory. Nietzsche's approach to illness is then explored in the context of On the Genealogy of Morality and his conception of the human being as "the sick animal". This account, it is argued, allows for Nietzsche to develop a conception of suffering that refuses to reduce it to modernist restitutive conceptions of well-being. Instead, Nietzsche advocates a more nuanced conception of varying degrees of health. This, it is argued, can be developed into a model that allows for a more satisfying conception of the relation between medical practitioner and patient.

How the Free Spirit Became Free: Sickness and Romanticism in Nietzsche's 1886 Prefaces

This paper explores Nietzsche's account of the free spirit's genesis, as primarily given in the 1886 prefaces written for the works of his ‘free spirit trilogy’. In particular, it will focus on how what will be argued is the free spirit's distinguishing capacity for radical questioning is created out of the process described there. That is, it will examine how what Nietzsche calls, ‘the experience of sickness’, in enabling the free spirit's liberation, helps forge a mode of philosophical awareness which is not otherwise attainable. However, the second half of this paper goes on to explore how the success of this process is endangered by a certain psychological tendency to which free spirits are susceptible. In other words, the free spirit's chance of enduring those painful depths of sickness necessary for liberation is threatened by the appeal of ‘romantic pessimism’; a perspective which offers consolation by idealizing the sufferer's state. As such, then, in our final section, we will examine Nietzsche's efforts to combat this phenomenon. In particular, we will look at his advocacy of a specific kind of asceticism for this purpose, and with it his attempt to show how a true liberation of the spirit can be achieved.

Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for Ethics

ABSTRACT Nietzsche claims that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). What are these “fundamental problems”? I provide a partial answer by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche's account of value. I argue that Nietzsche's ethical theory is based upon the idea that power has a privileged normative status: power is the one value in terms of which all others values are to be assessed. Yet how could power have this privileged status, given that Nietzsche denies that there are any objective facts about what is valuable? Nietzsche's account of psychology provides the answer: he grounds power's privileged status in facts about the nature of human motivation. In particular, Nietzsche's account of drives entails that human beings are ineluctably committed to valuing power. So Nietzsche's ethical theory follows from his philosophical psychology.

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence

MORALITIES ARE A SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE AFFECTS

AbstractThis essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to Nietzsche, as I reconstruct his view, moral judgments result from the interaction of two kinds of affective responses: first, a “basic affect” of inclination toward or aversion from certain acts, and then a further affective response (the “meta-affect”) to that basic affect (that is, sometimes we can be either inclined towards or averted from our basic affects). I argue that Nietzsche views basic affects asnoncognitive, that is, as identifiable solely by how they feel to the subject who experiences the affect. By contrast, I suggest that meta-affects (I focus on guilt and shame) sometimes incorporate acognitivecomponent like belief. After showing how this account of moral judgment comports with a reading of Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I have offered in previous work, I conclude by adducing philosophical and empirical psychological reasons for thinking that Nietzsche's account of moral judgment is correct.

Apollinian Scientia Sexualis and Dionysian Ars Erotica?: On the Relation Between Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality and Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy

Abstract This article explores how a nonreductionist account of Nietzsche's influence on Michel Foucault can enrich our understanding of key concepts in singular works of both philosophers. I assess this exegetical strategy by looking at the two dichotomies Apollinian/Dionysian and ars erotica/scientia sexualis in The Birth of Tragedy and volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, respectively. After exploring the relation between these two dichotomies, I link the science of sexuality to the Apollinian art instinct via the existence of Socratic culture and argue against the “pleasure of analysis” as a sublated form of (Dionysian) ars erotica. These considerations lead to the notions of history in Nietzsche's and Foucault's philosophies that result in situating the polyvalent Ursprung of Greek tragedy and the descent of ars erotica and scientia sexualis in an antimetaphysical and nonteleological picture of historical development.

Suffering and the Affirmation of Life

Abstract Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life (2006) purports to fill a gap in our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophical project by explaining why Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement. Reginster is not alone in emphasizing the centrality of life affirmation to Nietzsche's thought. What makes Reginster's book new and original is his systematic approach—his attempt to isolate a core of Nietzsche's philosophy and show how everything else, especially the affirmation of life, is related to it. This article challenges the systematicity Reginster finds in Nietzsche's work; above all, it rejects Reginster's claim that what has led to nihilism is the condemnation of suffering, a view Nietzsche is said to inherit from Schopenhauer. I raise questions about how much of Schopenhauer's view Nietzsche in fact retains and about how well Reginster's account of affirmation fits with Nietzsche's account of the will to power, which, as I have argued elsewhere, has played an essential part in producing all the things Nietzsche values.

Normativity for Nietzschean Free Spirits

A significant portion of recent literature on Nietzsche is devoted to his metaethical views, both critical and positive. This article explores one aspect of his positive metaethics. The specific thesis defended is that Nietzsche is, or is plausibly cast as, a reasons internalist. This, very roughly, is the view that what an agent has normative reason to do depends on that agent's motivational repertoire. Section I sketches some of the metaethical terrain most relevant to Nietzsche's organising ethical project, his “revaluation of all values”, and lays out three “design-requirements” that an adequate account of Nietzsche's metaethical views must satisfy. Section II introduces the basic internalist position. Sections III–IV provide textual support for the internalist reading of Nietzsche, with Section V showing how it meets each of the design-requirements. Section VI concludes by showing how the internalist apparatus also illuminates Nietzsche's views about the process of revaluing values.

All Too Human: "Animal Wisdom" in Nietzsche's Account of the Good Life

In this paper I argue that a certain understanding of “animality” – or that a certain problematization of the traditional human-animal hierarchy and divide – is central to Nietzsche’s account of the good life. Nietzsche’s philosophical project is primarily directed against those “metaphysical oppositions of values” that traditionally structure how we think, feel and live, and in this paper I submit that, for Nietzsche, the classical opposition between the human and the animal is the most basic and the most pernicious, for it undergirds the oppositional hierarchy between rationality and irrationality that has turned human life against itself. I draw primarily from Nietzsche’s second “Untimely Meditation” and from a passage from Daybreak in order to make the case that, for Nietzsche, we must reject any facile ontological opposition between human beings and non-human animals and that we must recognize and live in consonance with the “animal” conditions of our existence: human beings must recuperate and reintegrate rather than suppress their “animality” in order to thrive. For Nietzsche, we can say that virtue is a certain cultivated balance between our “humanity” and our “animality.”