Nietzsche's View Research Articles

The Aesthetic Justification of Existence: Nietzsche on the Beauty of Exemplary Lives

ABSTRACT A disagreement about the nature of Nietzsche's “aesthetic justification of existence” has recently emerged in the literature. In this essay, I argue that the disagreement stems from a common but mistaken assumption that Nietzsche focuses on works of art to justify life. Instead, in the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche shifts to the beauty of exemplary individuals to justify life. Through an examination of the Kantian practical arguments in the Untimely Meditations, I show how the scholarly debate can be overcome and suggest that Nietzsche's early period views can illuminate the basis of some of his late period ideals, such as the overman and philosopher of the future.

Nietzsche's Thumbscrew: Honesty as Virtue and Value Standard

ABSTRACT Much has been made of the apparent tensions in Nietzsche's ethical and metaethical views. In this essay I examine a kind of value standard available to Nietzsche that is present in his work. I offer an interpretation of honesty as both a Nietzschean virtue and a means of ethical assessment. Despite Nietzsche's well-known criticisms of truth, he upholds honesty as the only remaining virtue of his free spirits. Honesty has been treated in the literature primarily in the contexts of truth or life affirmation, but I argue that we should instead recognize honesty as a virtue within the context of valuing. I defend honesty as a distinct kind of truthfulness and sincerity involving what I call confrontation. The seeds of Nietzsche's mature view are first evident in his work on tragedy, then developed further in Zarathustra, ultimately revealing a constraint on valuing that is essential to Nietzsche's broader normative projects.

Genealogy and the Structure of Interpretation

ABSTRACT In this article, I consider how Nietzsche's history of morality in On the Genealogy of Morality is relevant to his critique of morality. I argue that, on Nietzsche's view, morality's history is a guide to whether and where we should expect to find coherence in our current moral practice. It helps us “structure our interpretation” of morality. History is relevant to critique because it reveals that morality is unlikely to have the kind of coherence required by many of its defenders. After defending this account of how Nietzsche's historical claims are relevant to his critique, I use the account to explain why Nietzsche's genealogy mixes fact and fiction.

Richard Schacht's Nietzsche

ABSTRACT In this article, written for a panel presentation celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Schacht's Nietzsche, I examine the perspective from which Schacht wrote his 1983 book. That perspective, I argue, accounts for many virtues of the book, including Schacht's convincing treatment of Nietzsche as a philosopher who deserved to be taken seriously and, in its amazing thoroughness, his demonstration that Nietzsche's thought could be organized using the sort of framework one would use for other great philosophers. But it also accounts for certain commitments that differ substantially from mine; in particular, in its extensive reliance on Nietzsche's unpublished material, and in its neglect of the genealogy of Nietzsche's views and questions of his style, which I take to be more central.

Nietzsche Apostle

Nietzsche Apostle

Naturalism, Causality, and Nietzsche's Conception of Science

ABSTRACT There is a disagreement over how to understand Nietzsche's view of science. According to what I call the Negative View, Nietzsche thinks science should be reconceived or superseded by another discourse, such as art, because it is nihilistic. By contrast, what I call the Positive View holds that Nietzsche does not think science is nihilistic, so he denies that it should be reinterpreted or overcome. Interestingly, defenders of each position can appeal to Nietzsche's understanding of naturalism to support their interpretation. I argue that Nietzsche embraces a social constructivist conception of causality that renders his naturalism incompatible with the views of naturalism attributed to him by the two dominant readings.

“Der Faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus”: Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche

“Der Faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus”: Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

Reply to Graham Parkes: Nietzsche as Zebra: With both Egoistic Antibuddha and Nonegoistic Bodhisattva Stripes

Reply to Graham Parkes: Nietzsche as Zebra: With both Egoistic Antibuddha and Nonegoistic Bodhisattva Stripes

Against Nietzsche's ‘Theory’ of the Drives

ABSTRACT:Nietzsche, we are often told, had an account of ‘self’ or ‘mind’ or a ‘philosophical psychology’, in which what he calls our ‘drives’ play a highly significant role. This underpins not merely his understanding of mind—in particular, of consciousness and action—but also his positive ethics, be they understood as authenticity, freedom, (self-)knowledge, autonomy, self-creation, or power. But Nietzsche did not have anything like a coherent account of ‘the drives’ according to which the self, the relationship between thought and action, or consciousness could be explained; consequently, he did not have a stable account of drives on which his positive ethics could rest. By this, I do not mean that his account is incomplete or that it is philosophically indefensible: both would leave open, misleadingly, the possibility of a rational reconstruction of Nietzsche's views; both would already assume more unity and coherence than we find in his texts. Specifically, as I show through detailed analysis, Nietzsche provides varied and inconsistent accounts of (1) what a ‘drive’ is, (2) how much we can know about drives, and (3) the relationship between drives and conscious deliberations about action. I conclude by questioning the hunt for a Nietzschean theory: is this the best way to be reading him?

Origin as a grimase: Nietzsche's view of genealogy

Classical understanding of genealogy sees it as a process of tracing an origin though lineage: a search for the beginning. It descends all the way to the first ancestor and tends to take the very beginning out of the lineage, to consider it as something atemporal, something that is created in itself, that has no origin, but produces one. That atemporal beginning is considered necessary. Since it has no origin, it has no context to come out of. Nietzsche's genealogy, however, shows that the beginning is always arbitrary: it is always contextual, because it has its own history. There is always something that precedes that which is seen as an original, someone who is 'more first' than the first. Establishing a beginning is always a matter of convention. Classical genealogy de-contextualizes the beginning, while Nietzsche's genealogy does exactly the opposite: it puts it in a context, it contextualizes it. The consequences of Nietzsche's understanding of genealogy, as Foucault shows us, bring not only a radically different understanding of a method, but also crucially affect the understanding of the Greek arche - the basic principal that transcends time and any historical context. Genealogy shows how precisely that context determines even what is considered to be originless - something that escapes every context.

NIETZSCHE AND/OR/VERSUS DARWIN

This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche's thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel — names commonly associated with Darwin — they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche's thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation of Darwin's views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin's class-based racism, but Nietzsche's argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average (rather than of the exceptional) man. This insight drives Nietzsche's view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Übermensch, which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian (second century) and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources.

Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten

Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader's Guide

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader's Guide

Self-Interpreting Selves: Comments on Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the legacy of Alexander Nehamas's 1985 book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. I concentrate on his basic claim that “Nietzsche's model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relation to the world turns out to be interpretation.” The criticisms of this notion that I raise have to do with whether this “model” accounts for the way Nietzsche understands self-knowledge and self-realization. I note as well the dangers of too aestheticized a view of Nietzsche's enterprise.

On the Need for Dionysian Education in Schools Today

Although much has been written about Friedrich Nietzsche's views on education over the years, and much has also been written about Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, very little attention has been given to the meaning of, and need for, Dionysian education. In this article, Sean Steel attempts to begin that project. Drawing Nietzsche's articulation of the Dionysian, Apollonian, and anti-Dionysian into the orbit of broader scholarship on Dionysus, Steel invites readers to think about what a Dionysian education might look like in a modern-day school setting, as well as to consider what challenges exist for the implementation of such a vision of education.

Der französische Nietzsche

Der französische Nietzsche

Misunderstanding Epicurus? A Nietzschean Identification

ABSTRACT This article considers aspects of Nietzsche's identification with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, focusing in particular upon how Epicurus's antiteleology (his denial of an ultimate metaphysical principle) was significant for Nietzsche's views on religion and knowledge. I make a case for the claim that Nietzsche's practice of philosophy, specifically his perspectivism, was influenced by Epicurus's practice of multiple explanations, a form of scientific explanation rooted in ethics and antiteleology. In conclusion, I examine the ways in which Nietzsche's manner of reading Epicurus may cause us to revise our interpretations of not only the Greek thinker but also elements of Nietzsche's own identification with that thinker.