Reception Of Nietzsche Research Articles

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.

O conceito de vivência (Erlebnis) em Nietzsche: gênese, significado e recepção

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o conceito de vivência (Erlebnis) na filosofia de Nietzsche, desde o seu primeiro emprego em língua alemã, seu significado e a recepção que Nietzsche faz da palavra no interior da sua filosofia. O conceito de Erlebnis, particularmente caro à filosofia de Nietzsche, mas também à fenomenologia, possui originariamente uma tríplice significação: a) a imediatez (Unmittelbarkeit) entre homem e mundo; b) a significabilidade (Bedeutsamkeit) para o caráter global da existência; e c) a incomensurabilidade (Inkommensurabilität) do conteúdo da própria vivência, conferindo a ela também uma dimensão estética. A tríplice significação de Erlebnis implica na sua estreita associação a pathos.

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

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

Nietzsche's Teacher: The Invisible Rhetor

Due to its favorable reception circa 1970, the essay “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has solidified Nietzsche's monumental status within the field of rhetoric and writing studies, allowing those inheriting this perspective to put the essay to use without attending to its intertextual background. This article argues that examining the intertextual reception of Nietzsche's essay will not only disclose an invisible, and hence unacknowledged rhetor—Arthur Schopenhauer—hiding in the shadows of Nietzsche's fragmentary essay; doing so will also reveal to what degree this monument's preservation requires its background to remain forgotten.

Nietzsche no Rio da Prata (1900-1950)

Minha atual pesquisa concentra-se nos primeiros leitores do Rio da Prata de Nietzsche, entre o final do séc. XIX até meados do séc. XX. Tenho me ocupado com a recepção de seu pensamento na margem oriental do Rio da Prata, mais especificamente no contexto do modernismo. O romancista Carlos Reyles e o ensaísta José Enrique Rodó, são dois exemplos claros das questões e interesses que motivaram a leitura de Nietzsche em 1900 na costa uruguaia, num contexto em que a crise europeia de fin-de-siècle encontrava significativos ecos nestas latitudes. Ao mesmo tempo na margem Argentina, entre os muitos leitores do filósofo, me interessa em especial Jorge Luis Borges, a quem dedico agora minha pesquisa, reconstruindo os segmentos pertinentes da sua "biblioteca ideal". Desta forma, minha exposição centra-se, em precisar as características comuns e específicas desta recepção de Nietzsche, assim como, os pressupostos (metodológicos, de enfoque, etc.) do meu trabalho no contexto dos estudos sobre Nietzsche

Observações sobre a recepção de Nietzsche em Portugal: passando por Pessoa até finais da década de noventa do século XX

Este artigo procura analisar a recepção da filosofia de Nietzsche em Portugal. Percorrendo um amplo espectro, visa a apontar as fortes marcas do pensamento nietzschiano na cultura portuguesa.

Grillaert, Nel. What the God-Seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche's üÜbermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (review)

Grillaert, Nel. What the God-Seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche's üÜbermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (review)

What the God-Seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche's ‘übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance

What the God-Seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche's ‘übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance

On psychodynamics of personal value-judgements - Nietzsche's theory of resentment and its reception by Karl Jaspers and Kurt Schneider.

A hundred years ago when Karl Jaspers was introducing psychological understanding to psychiatry the founder of the school of Heidelberg spoke of Friedrich Nietzsche as one of the "greatest" psychologists. Especially his theory of resentment with its core thesis unconscious prejudices were influencing our behaviour was able to illuminate the complex structure of human will. Taking into account this horizon of psychiatric history of ideas the presentation wants to persecute the following three questions: 1) Why the postulate which Nietzsche was giving on cultural prejudices of our thoughts, feelings and acts was so provocative so that many of the classical thinkers of psychological understanding were taking it up according to the needs of their disciplines sociology, psychology, psychiatry and philosophy? 2) What were the results of this inspiring theory which could be especially seen in the works of Karl Jaspers and Kurt Schneider? In other words: What were the aspects in which they agreed in their reception of Nietzsche and what were the points in which the two psychiatrists of the school of Heidelberg differed in the way they took the theory of resentment into account for their psychological understanding? 3) What could be the actual significance of the historical fact that Nietzsche and in his footsteps Max Weber were taking deep influence on psychiatric thinking around 1900?

Nietzsches Denkweg: Theologie – Darwinismus – Nihilismus. By Edith Düsing

Nietzsches Denkweg: Theologie – Darwinismus – Nihilismus. By Edith Düsing

Les traductions françaises de Nietzsche – en Europe

Based on an ideological restricted national point of view, the numerous studies on the reception of Nietzsche have not answered the question of the quantity and the rapidity of the French translations of his works. The aim of this article is to try to solve this old but still acute problem in comparing their publication with the German editions and with the translations in other european languages from 1892 till 1910.

Nietzsche and the rebirth of the tragic

Witt, Mary Ann Frese, ed. and the Rebirth of the Tragic. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. 255 pp. $ 52.50 hardback. While the discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings in both and political thought have made substantial advances over the last two decades or so, it is quite remarkable that the reception of within the field of literary studies has barely changed since the early 1980s. To be sure, there have been exceptions, such as Barbara von Reibnitz's ground-breaking commentary on Die Geburt der Tragodie, published in 1992, and, most recently, Paul Bishop's and R. H. Stephenson's volume on Friedrick and Weimar Classicism (2007). But, at least in the English-speaking world, much literary scholarship concerned with remains somewhat unsatisfying. The current volume is no exception here. The common theme of the nine essays collected here is the reception of Nietzsche's notion of the in 2()th-century literature and film, starting with August Strindberg and Gabriele D'Annunzio and ending with Jean-Luc Godard's acclaimed film Prenom Carmen (1983). Most of the essays present a thorough reception history that seeks to trace the direct influence of Nietzsche's anti-Aristotelian notion of the which favors the aesthetic event over the plot or mythos. Mary Ann Frese Witt's introduction surveys the development of Nietzsche's thought on Greek tragedy, emphasizing in particular the latter 's interest in the Dionysian origin of the drama, i.e., its origin in religious ritual. From the perspective of feminist literary criticism, she presents the Dionysian as a female cultural principle in order to conclude that Die Geburt der Tragodie is marked by a tangle of tropes of sex, birth, gender, and culture (18) - a theme she also follows in her essay on Gabriele D'Annunzio's reading of as privileging the aesthetic over the ethical (98). Given this perhaps slightly superficial assessment of the central ideas of Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie, which generally lacks historical con textualiza tion, it is also not surprising that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's middle name is missing and that Lebensphilosophie is strangely reduced to an anti-bourgeois youth movement (11-12). In contrast, the following essays are mainly focused on the reception of Nietzsche's notion of the tragic. Michael Stern, for instance, reads Nietzsche's writings, such as Also sprach Zarathustra, as a literary performance of his idea of the tragic, noting that Nietzscheen [. . .] is the story of the ironic subject of modernity (43) at the center of which stands the idea of self-overcoming as a process. Tracing Nietzsche's influence on Strindberg's novellas and his later dramatic production, he convincingly argues that a subjectivity lies at the heart of the latter. Along similar lines, John Burt Foster Jr. presents us with a detailed and nuanced reading of W B. Yeats's poems as lyrical 'translations' of Nietzsche centered on the idea of a Dionysian tragic joy (104), while Edith W Clowes examines how existentialist Russian from the 1910s to the late 1980s regarded Nietzsche's writings, at times from a religious angle, as focused on a philosophy of tragedy that is akin to poetry (126). …

The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler's 'Heroic Realism'

The role of Nietzsche's philosophy in the National Socialist ideological nexus remains to be fully understood. Postwar attempts to 'de-nazify' Nietzsche have obscured the historical and intellectual links between Nietzschean philosophy and National Socialist politics behind generic claims of misinterpretation. Using the prominent National Socialist philosopher Alfred Baeumler as a prism, this article is an attempt to shed a more nuanced light on the Nietzsche/National Socialist synthesis. Baeumler's portrait of Nietzsche as the envoy of a new spirit of 'heroic realism' served as a crucial counterpoint for the Nietzsche reception in the Third Reich. An analysis of its origins, impact and reception affords a particularly illuminating perspective on the darker side of Nietzsche's historical legacy.

Translating Nietzsche, Mediating Literature: Alexander Tille and the Limits of Anglo-German Intercultural Transfer

Dr. Alexander Tille (1866–1912) was one of the key-figures in Anglo-German intercultural transfer towards the end of the 19th century. As a lecturer in German at Glasgow University he was the first to translate and edit Nietzsche’s work into English. Writers such as W. B. Yeats were influenced by Nietzsche and used Tille’s translations. Tille’s social Darwinist reading of the philosopher’s oeuvre, however, had a narrowing impact on the reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-Saxon world for decades. Through numerous publications Tille disseminated knowledge about British authors (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wordsworth) in Germany and about German authors (e.g., Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) in Britain. His role as mediator also extended into areas such as history, religion, and industry. During the Boer war, however, Tille’s outspoken pro-German nationalism brought him in conflict with his British host society. After being physically attacked by his students he returned to Germany and published a highly anglophobic monograph. Tille personifies the paradox of Anglo-German relations in the pre-war years, which deteriorated despite an increase in intercultural transfer and knowledge about the respective Other.

Freedom, Naming, Nobility: The Convergence of Rhetorical and Political Theory in Nietzsche's Philosophy

Philosophers political scientists alike have habitually overlooked Friedrich Nietzsche's contributions to modern political theory, the sum of which constitutes a remarkably original alternative to the conventional precepts of both liberalism democracy. Few of the discussions of Nietzsche's politics are long, Bruce Detwiler writes, and those are (with some notable recent exceptions) tend to be of low quality, often inspired more by the political passions of the day than by any commitment to dispassionate analysis of the subject at hand (1990, 1). The Third Reich's enthusiastic appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, the pall it cast over his subsequent reputation, explains much about why scholars for decades shied away from validating his distinctive contributions to modern political philosophy. Even Nietzsche's intellectual redeemers, however, complicated matters in this regard. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche's esteemed biographer translator, rescued his subject from historical political disrepute by maintaining, in Keith Ansell-Pearson's summation, that Nietzsche was not a political thinker at all, but someone who was mainly concerned with the fate of the solitary, isolated individual removed from the cares concerns of the social world (1994, l).1 During the 1970s 1980s, French poststructuralist philosophers challenged Kaufmann 's standard interpretation of Nietzsche by pursuing the broad implications of Nietzsche's insights on language. Such insights scandalized longstanding beliefs in the priority of truth reason over linguistic artifice thus amounted to a withering critique of the very foundations of Western metaphysics rational empiricism.2 The resultant Anglo-American reception of this so-called new Nietzsche, which lionized his contributions to modern views of language, truth, aesthetics, nonetheless replicated Kaufmann's tendency to underestimate Nietzsche's uniquely valuable political insights.3 Owing to these receptions of Nietzsche's thought, modern commentators have frequently dismissed his political philosophy for its alleged naivete

Dionysus or Apollo? The Heteronym António Mora as Moment of Nietzsche's Reception by Pessoa

While no books by Nietzsche were found in his library, there is evidence that Fernando Pessoa was strongly influenced, positively and negatively, by secondary readings of his work. Pessoa's minor heteronym, António Mora, appears to be modelled on a popular conception of Nietzsche, and follows earlier heteronyms in rejecting Christianity as being against nature, and favouring instead classical paganism. However, Mora differs from some other commentators at the time of the First World War in identifying Prussian militarism as in a direct line of descent from Nietzsche. This article argues that although influenced by Nietzsche, Pessoa had a limited understanding of his philosophy, seeing only the wild Dionysian side, untamed by the more optimistic Apollonian reading of humanity. Apesar da ausência de obras de Nietzsche na biblioteca de Fernando Pessoa, existem indícios de uma forte influência, tanto positiva como negativa, através de leituras de segunda mão. O seu heterónimo menor, António Mora, parece moldado por uma concepção popular de Nietzsche, seguindo os heterónimos anteriores ao favorecer um paganismo clássico em detrimento do cristianismo, visto como anti-natural. Contudo, Mora afasta-se de vários críticos da época da I Guerra Mundial, identificando o militarismo prussiano justamente com o pensamento nietzschiano. Este artigo argumenta que, embora influenciado por Nietzsche, Pessoa tinha uma compreensão limitada da sua filosofia, restrita ao lado dionisíaco e desenfreado da vida, alheia à visão apolínea e optimista da humanidade.

Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell'arte e decadence (review)

Reviewed by: Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell’arte e decadence João Tiago Proença Chiara Piazzesi . Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell’arte e decadence. Lecce: Conti Editore, 2003. 300 pp. ISBN 88-87143-86-2. Euros 17.50. Whereas most recent Nietzsche studies have concentrated on a systematic approach, Italian scholars have privileged a historical approach in the wake of the groundbreaking Colli/Montinari partnership. Chiara Piazzesi's research belongs to this tradition. Nietzsche: Fisiologia dell'arte e decadence focuses on French interpretations of Nietzschean décadence (especially in art) from 1883 onward. Piazzesi traces some key ideas Nietzsche borrowed from Paul Bourget, whose writings he read attentively (she even reproduces the passages Nietzsche underlined in his copies of Bourget's work), as well as from Brunetière and Deprez. Bourget presents a theory of décadence that embraces European culture as a whole, taking French literature as his main object (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Taine, Renan, the brothers Goncourt, and Stendhal, among others). It is particularly interesting to follow Piazzesi's argument showing how Nietzsche immediately applied what he read to Wagner. This points the way to how Nietzsche read the French critics: not passively but, rather, actively. He had already anticipated much of what he found in their books in his Untimely Meditations, a fact to which Piazzesi draws the reader's attention, although Untimely meditations are outside her scope. In this constellation, two authors create their own force field: Baudelaire and Wagner. They are symptoms of the contemporary condition, and in them, the forces and weaknesses of fin de siècle art become visible: odium vitae, expressivity at all costs, shock effects, autonomy of the parts, hysterical sensuality and spirituality, and so on. These features, condemned by the Right, would be recovered by the Left in the early twentieth century: one only has to think of Benjamin's theory of shock, for instance. In the end, Piazzesi demonstrates how unmistakably Baudelaire wins over Wagner. In section 8 of the last chapter, "L'arte della 'redenzione': La decadence come misticismo e sensualità," the author points out the main differences in Nietzsche's appraisal of both. Baudelaire has a saner relation to sensuality and sexuality, in spite of his Catholicism, because he recognizes the will to power inherent in them; but Wagner represses sensuality in order to seduce with an irresistible strength. The negation of sensuality, the exaltation of chastity, is more pathological than any kind of sensuality, as Piazzesi [End Page 92] demonstrates by citing several of Nietzsche's references to both men in the published works as well as the Nachlaß. She also offers a reading of the concept of the will to power in order to analyze the physiology of art. The will to power, she contends, marks a new understanding of the theories of the French critics, placing décadence in a new light. Nietzsche privileged the metaphors of digestion, nutrition, and nourishment to explain what décadence is—a disharmony of forces in the individual, a pathological condition of the organism—so that judgments proper to the décadent become the dominant values. The same reactions happen in the arts. Immobility, not to react, is the décadent's reaction. He feels how precarious his existence is, and so he cannot afford to waste his last remaining strength trying to configure reality. But art, as the specific vanity of man, requires man to have the power to see reality as perfect, and that necessitates an extreme effort that subjects reality to a simplified vision. In this inebriate condition lies the main difference with respect to The Birth of Tragedy. There, Dionysian intoxication is a static vision of the whole that Apollonian illusion would overcome to make life bearable. In Nietzsche's final aesthetics, intoxication is itself life affirming and life enhancing. Piazzesi's reconstruction is a valuable study, enabling the reader to understand not only Nietzsche's reception of French critics but also his aesthetics as it developed in a "physiological" way. João Tiago Proença Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem/Universidade Nova de Lisboa Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University

Nietzsche Reception as “Philosopher of Führermenschen” in the Main Nazi Newspaper

Nietzsche Reception as “Philosopher of Führermenschen” in the Main Nazi Newspaper

Nietzsche and Ree: A Star Friendship (review)

Reviewed by: Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship Anthony K. Jensen Robin Small . Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 247 pp. ISBN 0-199-27807-5. Cloth. $45.00. Robin Small's new monograph is an example of the increasing tendency in Nietzsche scholarship to engage seriously both nineteenth-century traditions and contemporary discourses in science and philosophy in order to best explicate Nietzsche's thought. In doing so throughout Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship, Small avoids two chief temptations. First, he does not treat Nietzsche's biographical and ideological context simply to pronounce "that's where Nietzsche got it!" Rather, with an eye critical of generalized appropriations, Small presents the relationship of Nietzsche and Paul Rée as a "Star Friendship"—a period of mutual development in which each thinker's assumptions were questioned, refined, and often enough criticized by the other, from the height of their reciprocal admiration until the time of their relationship's breaking. Second, Small resists forcing Nietzsche to speak with our twenty-first-century terms. His discussion of Nietzsche's and Rée's aphoristic style is contextualized in the language of the French moralists, whereas a description of their positions on determinism and moral responsibility is tied together with references to their reading of Dühring and Lamarck. Doing so circumvents a tendency to codify Nietzsche in the technical jargon of either postmodern or analytical discourses that can only awkwardly accommodate his thought. [End Page 72] Small's method is to book-end the intertwining development in Nietzsche's and Rée's respective philosophies between lengthy discussions of the historical and biographical details surrounding them. Chapters 1–3 characterize the intellectual environment in which Nietzsche found himself during the early 1870s, outlining his growing dissatisfaction with the Wagner circle, with transcendentalist interpretations of Schopenhauer, and with the academic discipline of classical philology. These factors, combined with his budding interest in naturalism and the contemporary scientific landscape, readied Nietzsche for a new friendship and a stimulating new intellectual circle. This he found in the company of Rée and Malwida von Meysenbug during their year spent together in Sorrento. It was from 1876 to 1877 that Nietzsche's thought underwent a rather significant development toward what he called "Réealism," when Rée's impact is felt in the freshly naturalized perspectives on morality, epistemology, and science found in Nietzsche's Human All-Too-Human. Upon Nietzsche's return to Basel in 1877, old friends like Wagner and Erwin Rohde were disappointed to see returned to them an almost completely new Nietzsche, a champion of "cool and ironic skepticism" (31). Chapters 8, 9, and 12 illustrate the fateful breakup between Nietzsche, Rée, and Lou Salomé and the consequences this entailed for the early reception of Nietzsche. Small acknowledges the documented biographies of the emotional but nonerotic triangle among the three thinkers. His own explanation adds a theoretical dimension. Some of the increasing rancor between Rée and Nietzsche was due to the new developments in Nietzsche's thought away from "Réealism" combined with an unfortunate stagnation of Rée's creative capacities. By 1883, Nietzsche had already envisioned the Eternal Recurrence, while Rée was considered a man "with no ideals, no goals, no obligations, no instincts, content simply to be Lou's companion, if not her servant" (148–49). The gap in the two men's ideas was no longer bridgeable by approximately equal intellectual abilities. But Small's book is more than biographical. Having already made significant gains in "contextualizing" Nietzsche in his last monograph (Nietzsche in Context [Ashgate, 2001]), Small utilizes the positions of those contemporary authors Nietzsche and Rée read thoroughly in order to better define their own positions, sometimes in agreement with and sometimes in opposition to those sources. An example is Small's discussion of morality. In the period of Human All-Too-Human,Rée and Nietzsche agreed that moral phenomena like holiness, altruism, and asceticism ought to be explained on the basis of a psychological naturalism that seeks to uncover the material drives and impulses that lie under the surface...

Max Weber entre liberalismo y republicanismo

This article attempts to analyze the differences between social democracy and political democracy as modern processes, as these were understood by Max Weber. The archetype of modernity resides, from this point of view, in a convergence of both processes, as occurred in countries like the USA and Great Britain. Weber's diagnosis is that, whereas social democracy can be organized around liberal arguments, political democracy cannot advance without republican concepts like those of virtue, rigour, responsability and representation. For Weber, these values could only become present in Germany thanks to an adequate and democratic reception of Nietzsche, and in some way this reception could make sense of the former's work.