Nietzsche's Understanding Research Articles

Behold the Man, again: What Nietzsche hopes his Readers will see in 'Ecce Homo'

The title of Nietzsche's autobiography, Ecce Homo, repeats (and echoes) the famous di-rective issued by Pilate, the provincial governor of Judea, to the crowd assembled outside the pretorium. While we know, more or less, what Pilate intended the crowd to behold—viz. the unremarkable humanity of the innocent prisoner Jesus—it is not entirely clear what Nietzsche expects his readers to behold in his autobiography. Despite imploring his read-ers not to mistake him for another, Nietzsche presents himself in Ecce Homo as nearly indistinguishable from the "moralists" whom he identifies as the targets of his criticism. The key to understanding how "one becomes what one is" lies in Nietzsche's understanding that both he and Jesus have improbably emerged in excess of the disciplinary regimes that formed them. The defiance displayed by Jesus at John 19:5 thus alerts us to the corre-sponding emergence of Nietzsche—as the "first immoralist"—from the morality he has outgrown.

Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer on Art and Truth

ABSTRACT Part of Plato’s complaint about the cognitive status of art cites the pollution of aesthetic cognition by the affective side of our natures. Schopenhauer, by contrast, takes aesthetic cognition to transcend (some of) the limitations of everyday cognition precisely because in it agents become the “pure, will-less subject of cognition” (WWR I 219). On the orthodox reading of his later philosophy, Nietzsche scorns Plato and Schopenhauer’s association of the value of art with its truthfulness. I challenge the orthodox reading and argue that one strand of art’s value is its penetrative cognitive power. In contrast to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche understands this cognitive power to result from the embracing and exploitation of the affects in the artistic process rather than their extirpation.

VERDADE POR CONVENIÊNCIA: A COMPLEXA RELAÇÃO ENTRE A BUSCA PELA VERDADE E A NATUREZA HUMANA

The History of Philosophy shows that the human being has always seek for the truth, understood as the essence of reality. Nietzsche, laing himself over this question, tries to show that the human being creates the “truth” for reasons of survival and conservation, thus developing what he calls the will to truth. Such a will substantiates the science and signifies a need for something to be taken as truth. For him, the human being, actually, does not seek for the truth for love of it, aiming, only, for its pleasant consequences. Nietzsche understands that this will to truth needs to undergo a critique. In view of this, the question is: where does this impulse to the truth come from?

Aestheticism and the Others: The Social Dimension of Nietzsche's Views on Self-Fashioning

In this article, I shall explore the social dimension of Friedrich Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning, focusing on the interpretation offered by Alexander Nehamas. First, I shall briefly present Nehamas's understanding of Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning and the overall significance of their social aspects. Then I shall investigate the necessity of the audience to assess one's attempt at self-fashioning. Furthermore, I shall explore how one's pursuit of self-fashioning is influenced by and influences other similar efforts. Finally, the article will reveal the role of contest in the phenomenon of influence.

Nietzsche comme Bouddha de l'Europe, ou De l'Affinité des "Contraires"

According to a common caricature, Nietzsche cuts the figure of an anti-Buddha who advocates a type of life affirmation that is the contrary of Buddhist or Schopenhauerian life negation. In this paper, I seek to demonstrate, through a rigorous study of some of his later works—most notably Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Antichrist (1905[1888]), and Ecce Homo (1908[1888])—that Nietzsche does not at all present himself as an anti-Buddha stricto sensu, or as a figure whose teaching is diametrically opposed to that of the Indian master. The late Nietzsche, more precisely, does not conceive of amor fati and nirvāṇa as opposed ethical poles—or negatives of one another. On the contrary, certain texts in Ecce Homo and The Antichrist make it clear that there are significant affinities between amor fati and nirvāṇa as Nietzsche understands it, with respect to both the relationship to the self (seeing oneself "as a fatum") and to the other (overcoming ressentiment) that it implies. This, I conclude, lends credence to Nietzsche's infamous hypothesis according to which, contrary to appearances, all ethical ideals might in fact be "insidiously consanguine, linked up, knotted with that bad thing which seems to be their contrary" (Beyond Good and Evil, §2, KSA 5:17).

Nietzsche’s Confrontation with Christianity via the Body and History

In this article I argue that Nietzsche understands history as physiological history and that he takes the history of the body that he advances to be a repudiation of Christianity. Nietzsche’s body is the body as a coalition of drives (Triebe); in Antichrist, Nietzsche records Paul’s attempt to write the body out of history. The death of God represents a dawning self-awareness on the part of the body, such that Christianity’s disembodied history becomes untenable, providing an opening for Nietzsche’s form of history to assert itself at Christianity’s expense. However, I challenge the degree to which Nietzsche’s own sense of history is actually anti-Christian. I do this by initiating a dialogue between Nietzsche’s history and that presented in Augustine’s City of God, asking whether The City of God really is guilty of the suppression of the body of which Nietzsche accuses Paul and, by extension, Christianity. Through this intertextual engagement, we see there is a stronger Christian vestige in Nietzsche’s historical outlook than he is willing to admit. For both Nietzsche and Augustine, the truly historical paradigm depends on a certain asceticism that is not only a prescriptive or ethical stance but a deep conviction about the way things are. If we understand Nietzsche on his own terms, he might even be said to have radicalized Augustine’s Christian asceticism in his engagement of the body and history, by making the suffering of the body eternal.

The Challenge of Nietzsche: How to Approach His Thought

The Challenge of Nietzsche: How to Approach His Thought

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

The Body and the Completion of Metaphysics: A Critical Analysis of Heidegger’s Nietzsche

Abstract In this essay, I examine Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, focusing centrally on his understanding of the Nietzschean “body.” Nietzsche’s status as the culminating figure of Western metaphysics depends on the notion that the body, in Nietzsche’s thought, is the last Western subject. I confirm Heidegger’s sense of the importance of the Nietzschean body, and, in particular, the centrality of the word “incorporation” (Einverleibung), to a proper understanding of Nietzsche. I argue, however, through a critique of Heidegger’s own understanding of “incorporation” in Nietzsche’s work, that an investigation of the body in Nietzsche does not reveal him to be an unwilling participant in the metaphysical tradition beyond which Heidegger seeks to move; rather, we should see in the Nietzschean body a human finitude that has more resonances in Heidegger’s own thought than Heidegger would care to admit. Ultimately, I show, an investigation of the actual dynamics of the Nietzschean body, as read through the careful tracing of the word “incorporation” to which Heidegger invites us, yields a fundamentally delimited body that operates according to what we might call a kind of physiological asceticism.

Nietzsche, Plato and Aristotle on Priests and Moneymakers

AbstractHaving started with a harsh critique of the “contemptible money economy” (UM III, SE 4), Nietzsche subsequently travelled back in time in order to discern the origins of its values and to formulate goals that would “transcend money and money-making” (UM III, SE 6). Having traced the “greed of the moneymaker” back to theressentimentof the “ascetic priest” (GM III 10–5), Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry culminated in his discussion of the slave revolt in morality. A particular feature pertaining respectively to the domains of material debts and moral guilt was their reliance on an enduring revaluation of values. The manner in which Nietzsche connects the moneymaker’s world of material debts to the priest’s domain of the slave morality reveals a number of striking structural parallels to Plato’s, and to some extent Aristotle’s, discussion of the uneasy accommodation between democracy and moneymaking. Highlighting and exploring these similarities, which remain largely overlooked in the current scholarship, adds to our understanding of Nietzsche’s undertaking.

The Dionysian and the Aesthetics of the Impossible: Contributions of the Young Nietzsche to the Modern Fantastic

The Dionysian and the Aesthetics of the Impossible: Contributions of the Young Nietzsche to the Modern Fantastic Patricia García “L’inexpliqué nous séduit, surtout l’inexplicable.” (Montorgueil 319)1 The Dionysian Vision of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) In 1872, Nietzsche released The Birth of Tragedy, his first published work on the philosophy of art. Much more than a simple aesthetic treatise, The Birth of Tragedy presented a critique of modern German culture and a reflection on the relationship between art and life, as well as an attempt to identify an antidote for what Nietzsche regarded as modern decadence. A central dimension of the book was Nietzsche’s perspective on the origin of the Greek tragedy, which argued for the importance of its reinterpretation in the context of modernity. The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT) raised many of the concerns that Nietzsche would later reformulate and refute but to which he would ultimately return. Nietzsche himself considered this work to be an early exploration of his philosophical intuitions, as he acknowledged in his prefatory essay “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (henceforth “ASC”), which he published fourteen years after the original edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Among the key philosophical explorations was the concept of the Dionysian, which Nietzsche used to frame his attack on Christian morality, on the “hatred of the ‘world,’ a curse of affect, fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond, invented in order better to slander this world” (“ASC” 9). The Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy later came to be regarded by critics as an early formulation of an anti-Christian attitude, challenging the morality that Nietzsche considered as contaminating Western culture through its refusal to celebrate [End Page 319] life as worth living in itself, rather than as a preparation for death. The harsh criticism that Nietzsche himself directed at his early work does not invalidate the value of many of the ideas he presented. One of the most innovative aspects of The Birth of Tragedy was its comparative method. The study of Greek Antiquity, specifically of Greek tragedy, was superimposed onto the philosopher’s contemporary period in order to develop a critique of the present. Nietzsche’s combination of metaphysics, cultural anthropology, and philosophy was met with resistance from his peers, and yet the transcendence and transgression of traditional boundaries between academic disciplines and methods that characterize The Birth of Tragedy renders this work a model of comparative literary thinking. In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi refer to The Birth of Tragedy as “a major early example of comparative study as a mode of oppositional cultural criticism, blending linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis to pose a stark challenge to the moral norms, and the intellectual protocols, of his day” (27). Following Nietzsche’s comparative spirit, this article offers an interpretation of the Dionysian as the foundation of fantastic literature, the latter understood here as an aesthetic phenomenon that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a critique of rationalist optimism. The main thesis of The Birth of Tragedy is apparent from the first sentence of this work. The opening passage contains some of the most important concepts, indebted to Schopenhauer, concepts to which Nietzsche, in an echo of the Wagnerian style of motif recurrence, later returns: We will have achieved much for the discipline of aesthetics when we have arrived not only at the logical insight but also at the immediate certainty of the view that the continuing development of arts is tied to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, which are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation. (BT 19; emphasis in original) A key thesis of this book concerns two fundamental and opposing impulses in the understanding of artistic practice: the Dionysian and Apollonian. As the work develops, it becomes clear that these antagonistic concepts define the essence not only of art but also that of the human being. The young Nietzsche understands art as a human metaphysical activity; the Dionysian and Apollonian are thus...

Seeking Nietzsche’s Great Tree of Humanity: The Overhuman and Powers’s The Overstory

This essay reconstructs Nietzsche’s ecological and environmental thought by focusing on his idea of the human-earth (Menschen-Erde) and his deep concern for the natural world. It then articulates these thoughts in a coordinate reading of Richard Powers’s environmentally focused novel The Overstory (2019). Nietzsche understands that the human position on the Earth is precarious and that we are in danger of injuring our fragile environmental surround. I attempt to clarify the contemporary relevance of this thought by showing how his diagnosis chimes with current ecological thinking. Nietzsche saw not only dangers but opportunities in the relation of humans to their environment. His writings as well as his daily life exhibit intense interest in trees and forests. He foresaw that too much forest clearing could endanger the climate, leading to excessive warming. Nietzsche also imagined that the humans might foster a “great tree of humanity” (WS 188-89), a green expansion of their environment, and Zarathustra anticipates living in the world as a garden (Z “The Convalescent”). Richard Powers’s The Overstory speaks to a time that is much more deeply informed about our precarious ecological situation. The novelist dramatizes this in a narrative that brings together a number of disparate individuals, drawn to defend an old-growth US West Coast forest from the state-supported depradations of industrial logging. These figures learn about “the secret life of trees,” their mutual dependence and communication, as they experiment with a new life high among the branches. Their different fates pose a variety of questions relevant to Nietzsche’s ideas for a transvalued Earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche as a Hero of Pathographies Written on the Territory of Russian Empire

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychoanalysis was just emerging and the tradition of writing psychoanalytic biographies (psychobiographies) did not yet exist, the genre of pathography was widespread among psychiatrists, who considered the life of a prominent figure through the prism of his or her disease. One of the heroes of the number of pathological investigations was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose figure and philosophical views instigated wide interest. This tendency was manifested among the psychiatrists working in the Russian Empire, including the territory of contemporary Ukraine. The analysis of Nietzsche’s illness and creativity, proposed by a psychiatrist from Odessa Ivan Khmelevskyi, helps to clarify the historical boundaries between the pathography and psychobiography. The current article for the first time attempts to reproduce the basic data on the life and research activities of this now almost forgotten psychiatrist. The specificity of I. Khmelevskyi’s views on F. Nietzsche becomes more obvious due to the consideration of the position of Vladimir Chyzh, another Russian psychiatrist who was also interested in the figure and ideas of the German philosopher. It is shown that the pathographies of F. Nietzsche, proposed by I. Khmelevskyi and V. Chyzh, reflected both some features of the development of the genre and general trends in understanding of Nietzsche’s figure and teachings within the Russian context. It is shown that V. Chyzh and I. Khmelevskyi, like many scientists of their time, shared some ideas about evolution and degeneration, which are now considered outdated. At the same time, it has been shown that both psychiatrists confronted with the philosophy and figure of F. Nietzsche were forced to limit the explanatory ambitions of psychiatry and avoid the usual for pathographers of that time tendency to consider genius as a pathology. It is also noted that the fact of Nietzsche’s illness, if not overemphasized, can be accepted to the philosophical discourse of the present time.

Henri de Lubac’s “Mystical Confrontation” with Nietzsche

AbstractHenri de Lubac is well‐known for his critical writings on atheist humanists like Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he saw as the most formidable opponent of Christianity. However, few have appreciated the extent to which de Lubac’s confrontation with Nietzsche provided him with an additional motive for creatively retrieving early Christian sources. This article examines de Lubac’s engagement with Nietzsche across his career, focusing on his interpretation of Nietzsche as a mystic. It demonstrates how de Lubac’s understanding of Nietzsche’s mysticism is informed by his resistance to anti‐Semitism and his critique of rationalism in the contemporary French Church. It also shows how this confrontation occasioned some of de Lubac’s most important thoughts on the apologetic value of the Catholic mystical tradition. De Lubac’s response to Nietzsche, therefore, has significant implications for understanding his theology as a whole and the nature of Christian engagement with contemporary atheism.

Unamuno on making oneself indispensable and having the strength to long for immortality

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life.

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...

Platão e Nietzsche, um conflito entre acrasia e vontade de poder

This research proposal deals with a possible relationship between the Platonic concept of acrasia and the nietzschean concept of will to power. What is specific to the constitution of both terms, has a common root, does not have a conduct of different use, only a philosophical position on the implementation of such an approach, that is, a matter of perspective. A research will be divided into different moments, in order to validate a conjecture proposal. In the first instance, export Plato's panoramic mode and understanding of the problem of acrasia as an anomaly that would lead to an excess and therefore harmful conduct for individuals and society. In a second moment, expose Nietzsche's understanding of the will to power, as constituted by himself and with life value, seeking to show a possible choice between the two terms, correlating them with a human conduct and proposing a similarity between the two. thoughts of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

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).

Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction

<i>Nietzsche's</i> The Gay Science: <i>An Introduction</i>