Nietzsche's Ideas Research Articles

The Evolution and Integration of Life and Theory in Foucault's Work on Power.

The article is a response to Kaldybekov and his colleague's, 2024 paper about Foucault's theory on power. I argue that it is difficult to understand Foucault's theory of power without looking into his intellectual life and experiences, especially his war experiences. The objective of my study is to show that there is a connection between Foucault's ideas about power and his own lived life, and that he always has been critical of totalitarian theories although he seems influenced by Marxist theories, early in his career. In the paper I show how he deals with this dilemma by incorporating some of Nietzsche's ideas into his thinking. To illustrate the connection between Foucault's lived life and his theories about power, I take a particular point of departure in Foucault's lecture series on psychiatric power in the 1970s and an interview conducted by the Italian journalist Trombadori.

Nietzschean Themes in Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse

Béla Tarr's last feature film The Turin Horse (2011) begins with a prologue that narrates Friedrich Nietzsche's mental breakdown in Turin in 1889, which was allegedly prompted by his witnessing a cab driver brutally whipping his horse. Nietzsche's name is not mentioned again in the film, and the viewer is left wondering what connection, if any, exists between the Nietzsche story and the film's narrative. Scholars often refer to one or another aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy when analysing Tarr's film. Yet, to date, no comprehensive study has been devoted to exploring the connection between The Turin Horse and Nietzsche's philosophy. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature. The first section examines the connection between the prologue and the film. In the second section, attention is given to the most evident connection between Tarr's film and Nietzsche's philosophy, namely the use of circularity and repetition in The Turin Horse and Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. The third section interprets the neighbour's monologue in light of Nietzsche's death of God. Finally, the fourth section is devoted to nihilism.

Ницше и християнството в български прочит (първата половина на ХХ век)

The article is an attempt to trace the reception of one specific aspect of Nietzsche's ideas in the Bulgarian cultural space – his attitude towards Christianity, and, in particular, his differentiated attitude towards the personality of Jesus and that of the Apostle Paul, i.e. to the teaching and to the institution. The research is also motivated by the current interest in the significance of the work of the Apostle Paul on the part of prominent contemporary philosophers. Attention is focused on the fact that in the Bulgarian philosophical thought of the first half of the 20th century, two books appeared whose titles begin with the prefix anti – “Antichrist by Yanko Yanev (1926) and Anti-Nietzsche” (1931/1932) by Lyuben Kazandzhiev. The polemic surrounding Kazandzhiev's book shows the highly emotional attitude towards Nietzsche (respectively towards his attitude towards Christianity) among the Bulgarian intellectual circles of the first half of the XXth century.

«Моя душа это – пыльная библиотека…»: систематизация и хаос как способы организации лирических текстов К. Вагинова

The article attempts to comprehend the genesis and development of the dichotomy of order and chaos in Konstantin Vaginov’s lyrics, establishes its relationship with the poet’s poetics of collecting and the bibliophilic practice. The focus is on the images of Apollo and Dionysus, reinterpreted in the Russian culture of modernism under the influence of Nietzsche’s aesthetic treatise The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. As the article shows, many turn-of-the-century writers turned to the Nietzschean idea of two principles. For instance, Alexander Blok urged to listen to the music of the revolution, that is, he saw the future of Russia in the Dionysian beginning. Andrei Bely clearly distinguished two models of the worldview, but did not decide which of them - Apollonian or Dionysian -would be more suitable for the country. The article expresses and substantiates the idea that Vaginov proposed his own interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept. The material for the study was the writer’s poems, as well as ego-documents, memoirs of contemporaries, and archival data. On representative examples of motive-shaped rows of chaos and its ordering (crowd / herd / swarm, books / shelves / libraries, etc.), the aesthetics of systematization in Vaginov’s poems is considered; its development is outlined in the “poet’s prose”. Methodologically, the article is based on Aleida Assmann’s works on cultural memory, as well as on classical philological works on the history of Russian literature of the 1920s. The article shows that in Vaginov’s works Apollo is presented as a symbol of the culture of the past, of the orderly world. The lyrical hero tries to preserve antiquity by referring to books; respectively, shelves and libraries act as attributes of the organized space of the past. Images of a swarm / round dance / crowd, etc. are used to describe chaotic modernity, that is, they are typical for the Dionysian beginning. However, the contact of the lyrical hero with the culture of the ancient world is far from always marked as positive. In some poems, the meeting with Apollo (the past) gives strength to the lyrical subject; in others, making a sacrifice in the name of the resurrection of the previous culture, the lyrical hero dies or suffers, which does not make sense: the past is irreversible. So Vaginov poses the question of the advisability of referring to the world of the past and the possible consequences of such interaction. Another feature of the poetics and aesthetics of Vaginov’s works is the lack of a clear separation of the Apollonian and Dionysian beginnings. For example, in the poem “I vse zh ya ne zhivoy...” [And Yet I’m Not Alive...], the lyrical hero stands under the Apollo foliage and at the same time compares himself to Prometheus chained to the lyric rock, whose image, according to Nietzsche, is one of the masks of Dionysus. In the same way, the motifs of chaos and order merge: opening the book, the lyrical hero is faced with a round dance of words, sounds, images, which in one case leads to inspiration and in the other to the loss of his own “self”. It is concluded that Vaginov does not take a definite position regarding (a) the nature of the influence of the past on the lyrical hero and (b) the orderliness of the past. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

"Infinitely Dangerous, Infinitely Saviour": Gabriel Marcel's Commentary on Nietzsche's "God is Dead" Statement

Gabriel Marcel's writings are intricately intertwined with Nietzsche's philosophy. As one of the most respected representatives of existential thought, Marcel acknowledges the significance of Nietzsche's ideas while recognizing that he grapples with a thinker who is both distant and very close. Marcel's references to Nietzsche's philosophy are linked with Nietzsche's statement "God is dead." For Marcel, the declaration of the "death of the divine" emerges as a theme that underscores both the magnitude and tragedy of Nietzsche. In this context, Marcel regards the contradictions in Nietzsche's philosophical thought as both dangerous and fruitful. This study will discuss the influence of Nietzsche on Gabriel Marcel's ideas and Marcel's interpretation of the phrase "God is Dead."

The paradox of tolerance in Western academia

The subject of the research is the modern educational environment of Western countries. The object of the study is the system of tolerance and the mechanisms of its functioning in the educational environment of Western countries. The author examines in detail the system of tolerance and the mechanisms of its functioning on the example of Western educational institutions. Since in the modern educational environment of the Euro-Atlantic states tolerance is perceived differently than in Russia, special attention is paid to the philosophical understanding of the current state of the phenomenon and its reflection by the Western scientific community. The author uses works of both philosophical and social, pedagogical orientation in order to reveal the main features through their prism. In the course of the study, it was found that the mechanisms of tolerance in the Western educational environment contradict the idea of tolerance for the Other. It was concluded that the boundaries of tolerance in Euro-Atlantic educational institutions are blurred: they are not clear either to the teaching staff or to the students themselves. The author traces the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment in the actions of minorities, constantly opposed to the majority, regardless of what rights and opportunities this majority gives them. The study also made it possible to identify the paradox of tolerance in the Western educational environment: although the struggle for the rights of the oppressed is officially proclaimed, the oppressed themselves avoid discussions on the topic of equal opportunities within the framework of the educational process, because the Western structure of tolerance allows them to avoid discussing pressing issues, while maintaining and even building on the benefits of a tolerant education system. In addition, the author found that Western society usually does not perceive tolerance as part of an individual's worldview, which leads to the fact that in the education of Western countries it becomes a socio-political tool.

Book review: The philosophy of person‐centred healthcare, By DerekMitchell, MichaelLoughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023. 201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8

Book review: The philosophy of person‐centred healthcare, By DerekMitchell, MichaelLoughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023. 201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8

Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values inAsrar-i-Khudî

AbstractWhile the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poemAsrar-i-Khudî(1915).

Vrednosti helenske kulture kao temelj Ničeove filozofije

The paper is examining Nietzsche's attempt to fuse his studies of antiquity with his critique of modernity. For Nietzsche, modernity is in a state of crisis. If we look at the intellectual relationship early Nietzsche develops with the Greek philosophers, it can be discovered the guiding problems motivating a good deal of Nietzsche's later work, but also and problem-solving strategies that marks the development of his whole philosophical journey. The aim of the work is to prove that the foundation of Nietzsche's philosophy is found in the value system of the ancient Greeks, while the central problem is culture, which he interprets through the prism of Greek cultural values that reconcile thinking, desire and the will to live with the will to power. Nietzsche claims that the Greeks have offered humanity exemplary models of cultural and individual developments. 'Heterogeneous' prePlatonic philosopher is essential to the homogeneity of Greek culture. Nietzsche's classicism amounts is criticism of his own times, but in the time is the base of his whole philosophical opuses. Nietzsche insists, modern Europe could not simply 'imitate the Greeks'. As individuals, the Greeks were psychologically healthier than the moderns were; they were emotionally stronger, in Nietzsche's view, more self-assured, less alienated from their own natures and from nature as such. They enjoyed these advantages because the common culture uniting the Greek world was stronger and more clearly defined, and this strength helped the Greeks find reliable answers to questions concerning the purpose of their being in the world. They knew, instinctually, why they existed, and in their various philosophies and tragic festivals, each of them affirmed to himself the meaning of his own particular existence, and by confirming the basic assumptions and worth of the culture's institutions, each of them affirmed the meaning of existence as such. The most significant problems and concepts arising in Nietzsche's philosophy developed through his engagement with Greek culture and thought and that for these reason studies of Nietzsche failing to take into account these problems and concepts from their origins run the risk of misconceiving Nietzsche's ideas by a considerable margin. Nietzsche does not reject not the tradition or modernity's inheritance of it. In Nietzsche's reading, Greek culture, like all flourishing types, understood the need for meaning, purpose, direction and goals, and responded to this need by 'toppling boundary stones', but also by constructing 'new religions and moralities'. Both responses are the function of such artistic, philosophical visions affected as they were in the age of Greek tragedy. Will to power serves him as a tool for understanding the conventional paths of modern scepticism and pessimism. Nietzsche's notion of self-overcoming contains the meaning of maturity and spiritual growth, based on ancient will to life. The key to the meaning of the will to power is Nietzsche's notion of self-overcoming after achieving maturity and power. The optimal will to power is realized in the ideal Übermensch based on ancient hero.

Philosophical and aesthetic meaning of the image / title of O. Dovzhenko’s film story “Enchanted Desna”

The Subject of the study is the philosophical and aesthetic aspect of the title of the film story “Enchanted Desna”. The purpose is to find out the author’s intention, clarify the problem and idea of the work based on deciphering its title. The established interpretations of “Enchanted Desna” in Dovzhenko studies need to be revised. The widespread understanding of this text in a populist way contradicts or at least does not include the interpretive possibilities provided by the author’s poetics. The need for its re-reading in the context of today makes the study relevant. Linguistic, aesthetic-typological, comparative, and phenomenological methods were used in the research. The novelty of the research lies in the original interpretation of the key image of the famous work. The Results. The starting point in the interpretation of Dovzhenko’s title is the semantics of the passive participle “enchanted” in connection with the image of the mirror and the motive of self-discovery. This story cannot be adequately understood outside the context of H. Skovoroda’s philosophical heritage. Indirectly through Skovoroda, Dovzhenko learns and develops Plato’s aesthetic ideas and the concept of calokagatia. He modernizes the ancient idea of beauty in the realm of creativity. Knowledge turns out to be identical to self-knowledge, the discovery of beauty is its creation. In accordance with the latest utopias, man is assigned the role of demiurge. If we take into account that beauty in this concept is identical to truth, then man (humanity) is also recognized as the creator of truth. Dovzhenko’s new humanism was nourished by the atmosphere of national Renaissance, Marxist and Nietzschean ideas. It is claimed that the central problem of the film story is the role of art in the formation of personality. “Enchanted Desna” is an image of art that immerses the soul in the processes of purification, personalization, self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, comprehension / creation of beauty-truth. The artist’s mission was to awaken in each person their alternative self, or, according to Skovoroda, the inner man with the help of art. In the future, it is necessary to find other versions of the image of the mirror of self-recognition in Ukrainian and foreign writers and to trace the influence of the magnum opus of the novelist Dovzhenko in the 60s.

Decolonising education. An exploration in Bolivian–German relations

AbstractIn this article I aim to contribute to a more multifaceted picture of what decolonising education can mean. I do this in the form of a case study of selected and intertwined Bolivian–German discourses and practices directed at the decolonisation of education in the wide sense of the term. First, I introduce Indigenist and ‘Indianist’ proposals, which are shaped, not least, by Nietzschean ideas. In a second step, I turn to some examples of German ‘Bildungsromane’ that are deeply entangled with Bolivian phenomena. Hence, the first part of the article is about decolonising the formerly colonised via education, whereas the second revolves around decolonising the former colonisers, but without the possibility for or the wish to identify completely clear-cut boundaries. It will thus become clearer how decolonising education can be understood as a relational phenomenon.

The Ubermensch in Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley Under Ground”: A Conceptual Analysis

This study analyzes Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley Under Ground ( 1970) in the light of the Ubermensche's suggested characteristics. The ideas set out by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) was a major stream in the development of contemporary thought. Nietzsche suggests in his philosophy that the driving force behind man's existence is his ambition to realize his own potential as a creative entity. The willingness is symbolized by Nietzsche's ideas to remake the universe and its values in accordance with one's own desires and perceptions according to his own codes is central to his philosophy. According to the research presented, Patricia Highsmith's writings—particularly the Ripley Novels, which have become rather popular—implied several aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy.

The hermeneutics of nietzscheanism: an analysis of the diversity of interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy through the prism of the evolution of Ernst Jünger's ideas

The essence of Nietzscheanism as a philosophical doctrine has never been characterized by a definite consistency or certainty. Instead "indirect followers" and interpreters of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy (since this thinker did not have direct followers or a particular school) resorted to a variety of interpretations of his concepts. Considering that, the hermeneutic aspect of the study not only of Nietzsche's texts, but also of his interpreters allows us to look at the hidden potential of the concepts of the German philosopher from a new point of view. In this research, we seek to focus on looking for Nietzschean roots in Ernst Jünger's creative legacy, tracing the transformation of his ideas along the author's intellectual path and showing how those ideas correlate with those of Friedrich Nietzsche himself and how they differ. As a reference point for any study of interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy, the author singles out many German philosopher concepts at the edge of various interpretations. Such central concepts in the article include the idea of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" principles (the first), the anthropological idea of " Overhuman" and the interrelated metaphysical triad of "will to power," "reevaluation of all values," and "eternal return." In addition, one of the leading motives of the 20th century, which can be traced to an attempt to read Nietzschean ideas, postulates their location at the junction of philosophical and political-ideological concepts. Analyzing the peculiar hermeneutic conflict of Nietzschean philosophy based on this phenomenon, the author turns to early attempts to understand and implement the ideas of the German thinker, which were carried out directly in Germany. This context is connected in the article with the formation of the foundations of the conservative revolution and the figure of Ernst Jünger since the interpretation of this thinker, to some extent, can be considered one of the first and, undoubtedly, the most resonant. In the course of the research, the author turns to Nietzsche's original texts, forming a kind of hermeneutic circle of the author and interpreters, interpreters and the interpreted, ultimately obtaining in this system the opportunity for a thorough and as independent as possible analysis of the original ideas, counting on the probability of reducing the error of one's interpretation due to paying attention to the entire interpretive field texts The considered ideas of Ernst Jünger demonstrate this thesis, expanding the contextual field of the Nietzschean Overman and the metaphysics of the Will to Power and giving these concepts in an interpreted form a particular social dimension along with the philosophical one, which provides a new context for the interpretation of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Come ordinare una biblioteca

The title of this book, by one of the great editors and publishers of our time, comes from its first and longest chapter: “How to Organize a Library.” In it, Calasso celebrates the “golden rule” proposed by Aby Warburg: “In the perfect library, when we look for a given book, we end up taking the one next to it, which would reveal itself even more useful than the one we were looking for.” It demands effort, knowledge, and sensibility to “curate” such a library, where each book maintains good neighborly relations with the others. Such a library is an oeuvre requiring constantly to be maintained and refreshed, because a book is never a self-contained, self-sufficient object. Each book is connected to others in myriad and surprising ways.Calasso applies this relational understanding of books in a very short chapter on, reputedly, the first book review ever written: Madame de Sablé’s little note of 1665 on her friend La Rochefoucauld's Maximes. In that book, which prefigures some of Nietzsche's ideas, La Rochefoucauld argues that “most often our virtues are nothing but disguised vices” (Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés). Before submitting her review to the Journal des Savants, which had been inaugurated only a few months earlier, Madame de Sablé sent it to La Rochefoucauld, asking him to amend it as needed or even to “throw it into the fire.” Calasso compares the original review and the corrected version that was eventually published. La Rochefoucauld erased many passages, making a short text (273 words) even shorter (189 words). In the process, he wiped out the first sentence, the most important, where Sablé summarized what she saw as the achievement of the Maximes: “It is a treatise about movements of the heart of man which we may say have been ignored until now” (C'est un traité des mouvements du cœur de l'homme, qu'on peut dire lui avoir été inconnus jusqu’à cette heure). Calasso comments: “Nothing more radical and more courageous could be written about the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. However, the author of the work did not hesitate to cancel those very words—perhaps to avoid frightening people, himself included.” In other words, Calasso suggests that Sablé understood the Maximes better than its author did. The culture of book reviewing ushered in by Madame de Sablé taught and continues to teach us that a book may be more than its author believes it to be. Indeed, every book is in need of attentive and penetrating readers to discover its latent potentialities.

Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the “New Materialist” Thought

Abstract In this article, I draw connections between Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism, his emphasis on the importance of the things “nearest” to us and often overlooked, and methodological issues in contemporary thought. In particular, the connection between “the devaluation of the highest values” and the task of transvaluation gives us a context for addressing nihilism as a crisis of orientation. I argue that Nietzsche's turn toward the “nearest” things as a new direction for philosophical thought seems to resonate with the priorities recently identified by Laura Marcus as the “keywords” of our time: “embodiment, affect, the quotidian, singularity, contingency, intimacy, precarity.” In order to pursue the deeper implications of this affinity, I consider some recent engagement with Nietzsche in new materialist writings. I claim that Nietzsche's ideas about the “nearest things,” properly understood, may provide these theories with resources to contest nihilism at the level of value, without reinstating an uncritical appeal to the authority of “lived experience.”

Мотивы из литературного творчества Федора Достоевского как нефилософское вдохновение в философии драмы Юзефа Тишнера

The main purpose of the article was to indicate the specific function in which the motifs from Dostoevsky's novel were used in the philosophy of Jozef Tischner. The basic questions that appear in Tischner's works concern the concept of man. In his writings, Tischner not only refers to the most important philosophers of the contemporary world. He also engages in polemics with them. The essence of his research is both the phenomenological aspect of research and frequent references to hermeneutic practices. Basic philosophical questions in Tischner concern both the very nature of man and contemporary threats to him. Tischner applies the phenomenological principle of the semantic autonomy of the literary text. Which essentially results in the lack of common points between philosophy and literature. However, following Ricoeur, he accepts the possibility of using an important literary text to create a philosophical metaphor. Tischner created an original concept of the human being as a dramatic being. In describing it, he used many metaphors from both the philosophy of dialogue and his own. The most interesting, however, concern man's wandering in the element of truth. At this point, recalling the figure of Raskolnikov, he created two important metaphors which allowed him to argue with the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The very application of a literary motif to create a philosophical metaphor allows Tischner to carry out very in-depth analyzes of the hypothetical state of affairs. As a result, using his own concept of “thinking from the depth of the metaphor”, he tries to follow the literary motive to indicate and discover philosophical contents that are anthropologically significant.

СЕМІОТИКА СУБ’ЄКТИВОВАНОГО ЛАНДШАФТУ В НАРАТИВНОМУ ДИСКУРСІ АНГЛІЙСЬКОГО РОМАНУ ХІХ СТ.

Semiotic relations between the homo sapiens and his/her topos or environment have recently become the focus of eminent or mediated fictional subjective modelling. In the course of research with the tools of the cultural discourse analysis (CDA), a range of communicative practices has been unveiled. These include among others verbalized images of the topi, descriptive outlines of the localities and directions, ways of showing, symbolic representations of typical animals, topographic lexis, verbal and non-verbal means of the visualization of the surroundings etc. The object of the research constitutes the semiotic potential of the “ethnic-physical nomenclature”, which presupposes the application of the cultural discourse analysis to the environment as a form of subjectivized reality of the human being. Victorian writers provide us with the well of unlimited material in this respect as the experiencing subject of pre-industrial England has been portrayed as a sensitive agency in the imaginative fictional narrative world. Therefore, Victorian’s world outlook becomes the research objective of ecocriticism, a new direction of critical discourse analysis. The aim of cultural discourse analysis in symbiosis with the ecocritical approach is to investigate ways and means of correlation of verbal and non-verbal discourses and their material and physical embodiment in culture. Ecocritical reference to the Victorian period has been considered prolific in terms of discursive means disclosing complicated relations of the approaching technological progress, great discoveries in the human physic and Nature. Positing the human being in the centre of all the animal species stressed a universal character of semiosis, where the global ecological view was put on the core of the scientific and fictional manifestation. A prominent example of this cosmological feeling is seen in a close correlation of the narratives with the setting and psychological foregrounding in the novel of George Eliot “Middlemarch”, where the main character Dorothy Brooke symbolizes the Nietzschean idea of eternal return, demonstrating clear awareness of George Eliot of the evolution of species multiplied by theological subtext.

Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy ed. by Paul S. Loeb and Matthew Meyer

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy ed. by Paul S. Loeb and Matthew Meyer Melanie Shepherd Paul S. Loeb and Matthew Meyer, editors. Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 284. Cloth, $99.99. This volume brings together well-established Nietzsche scholars working within diverse philosophical and stylistic frameworks to address the question of how Nietzsche understands philosophy. Specifically, Loeb and Meyer aim to investigate Nietzsche's answers to the following three questions: "What should philosophy be? How should philosophy be done? Why, or to what end, should philosophy be practiced?" (2–3). The question of what philosophy means for Nietzsche is arguably central to a great deal of existing secondary literature, from French interpreters of the 1960s and 1970s to the numerous contemporary volumes that take Nietzsche's style seriously as illuminating, rather than obfuscating, his philosophical project. This volume advances that conversation by raising the question of Nietzsche's metaphilosophy directly and in the context of a greatly expanded field of Nietzsche studies characterized by methodological pluralism. Given the wide range of philosophical debates animating contemporary Nietzsche studies, this book delivers a welcome reflective pause, allowing readers to consider contemporary debates in light of Nietzsche's own aims. Though argumentative moves are made a bit quickly in places, often because authors are drawing on arguments they have developed in detail elsewhere, on the whole the essays are well researched, interesting, and intelligent. Meyer's essay tackles the problem of the variety of metaphilosophies espoused by Nietzsche throughout his career, unifying them around a dialectic between the will to truth and art. He offers a compelling explanation for why Nietzsche's early antithesis between Socratic philosophy and art bears such similarity to his later work while differing substantively from his attitudes in the free spirit works, explaining the more positivistic bent of those texts as part of Nietzsche's self-conscious strategy for demonstrating how philosophy overcomes the will to truth and becomes a form of art. This tension between truth and art is explored in several other essays. João Constâncio contrasts Nietzsche's interest in value creation with Spencerian positivism, arguing that Nietzsche's philosophy is an aesthetic activity requiring reflective taste, understood in a Kantian sense. Rebecca Bamford explores how the idea of experimentation in the free spirit works informs Nietzsche's philosophical project, and she argues that Nietzsche's naturalism, rather than being entirely consistent with the sciences, instead incorporates both truth and error as essential for human development. Both Loeb and Marco Brusotti begin with Nietzsche's mature conception of the philosopher in Beyond Good and Evil §211 to show that Nietzsche's metaphilosophy hinges on the notion of the philosopher as a creator of values. Brusotti argues that BGE provides a natural history of the philosopher and associated figures such as the scholar, and he concludes by suggesting, without quite developing, the provocative idea that Nietzsche's autobiographical turn toward the end of his career represents an implosion of his metaphilosophy. Similarly, Loeb differentiates among the types related to the philosopher [End Page 337] in BGE, but he advances an idiosyncratic interpretation of Zarathustra that will be familiar to many readers, arguing that the philosopher's new values are the organizing force pointing superior human beings toward self-sacrifice. Robert Pippin also focuses on the philosopher in BGE in order to consider the religious dimensions of Nietzschean philosophy. While Pippin's meditative style often enables novel insights, his essay here winds without reaching a clearing, and is thus not his strongest example of that style. Antoine Panaïoti uses Nietzsche's metaphilosophy to critique the significant trend in Nietzsche scholarship of forcing Nietzschean ideas into the language of analytic philosophy and its attendant assumptions. Using two key metaphors from Nietzsche's early work, Panaïoti argues that philosophy, as an affirmative task, must guide the sciences rather than follow their lead. His broad critique of analytic interpreters of Nietzsche receives an implicit reply from other essays in the volume. Paul Katsafanas, for instance, pulls a compelling moral methodology out of Nietzsche's work in an essay...

Troubles with Reality and Order through the Imagination in a World of Disbelief and Disorder: Wallace Stevens and Supreme Fiction

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” - Sigmund Freud There have been a lot of writers throughout history who praised or criticized the world’s beauty and ways. They all had their ideas and advice for humanity. But America’s most celebrated twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens did not just rain down his ideas in his writings but took them as his motto for life. And he called the sum of his ideas ‘Supreme Fiction’. This Supreme Fiction, according to Stevens, is a supreme level of poetry that cleanses the mind and soul of its readers and reduces the hardships they have to face in real life. In other words, Supreme Fiction is Stevens’ replacement for the idea of God. Deeply influenced by the Nietzschean idea of the ‘Death of God’, Stevens wants to create a replacement for God for people to find comfort in a world of disbelief and disorder in the twentieth century.

Alfano, Mark. Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 314. $99.99 (cloth).

Alfano, Mark. <i>Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 314. $99.99 (cloth).