In this article, the editor and scientific director of Nietzsche Source, Professor Paolo D'Iorio, aims at describing the two editions of Nietzsche’s work currently published on this scientific Web site Firstly, the critical edition, the Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe (eKGWB), which provides an electronic version of the German edition of Nietzsche's complete works, based on the critical text established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Secondly, the facsimile edition, the Digitale Faksimile-Gesamtausgabe (DFGA), which reproduces (...) all the documents relating to Nietzsche's life and work. Both editions can be consulted free of charge through the Internet and are regularly used by the German philosopher specialists around the world. (shrink)

The Anthology Which First Introduced Nietzsche to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1901, the result of several years of translation work by the very first generation of Nietzscheans in Britain and America, Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet is a comprehensive selection of Nietzsche's writings, from The Birth of Tragedy through to the final works of 1888. Arranged topically with reference to the original sources, the book still stands as one of the finest anthologies of (...) Nietzsche's writing in English and a worthwhile introduction to his thought on a wide range of subjects. This new edition also includes an appreciation of the editor and translator Thomas Common, whose tireless work promoting and translating Nietzsche over nearly twenty years was instrumental in bringing him to a wider audience. (shrink)

Presenting the entire German text of Nietzsche's lectures on rhetoric and language and his notes for them, as well as facing page English translations, this book fills an important gap in the philosopher's corpus. Until now unavailable or existing only in fragmentary form, the lectures represent a major portion of Nietzsche's achievement. Included are an extensive editors' introduction on the background of Nietzsche's understanding of rhetoric, and critical notes identifying his sources and independent contributions.

La Généalogie de la Morale appartient aux oeuvres de la maturité de Friedrich Nietzsche, puisqu'elle a été publiée en 1887, après Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra. Dans cet essai, le penseur allemand traite de philosophie morale, cherchant à retracer l'origine de nos conceptions morales: selon lui, les valeurs prennent leur source dans la morale chrétienne, qu'il tient pour une morale du ressentiment, une morale d'esclave, dont il faut se libérer: la morale du surhomme sera ainsi une morale de la libération. (...) Le livre est structuré en trois essais, ce qui le rend un peu plus accessible que certains oeuvres écrites en aphorismes et déliées, comme le Gai Savoir. (shrink)

Originally published as separate volumes as Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) andThe Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), the two works included here continue the aphoristic style begun in Volume I of Nietzsche's "Book for Free Spirits" and offer a window into the intellectual sources behind his evolution as a philosopher.

Hundreds of books and articles have been written on Nietzsche and anarchism, but the overwhelming number of them concern how later anarchists have viewed and have been inspired by, or have been critical of, Nietzsche. In the present contribution, I will instead emphasize how his views of anarchism changed, why he was so critical of anarchism and what were his main sources of knowledge of anarchism and the stimuli for his statements.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

While he did not believe in the idea of a perfect society and humanity, for Nietzsche development [Entwicklung] implied growth and intensification of the will to power of a single organism or a social organism. Development has no final goal or ‘purpose'. Nietzsche interpreted ‘struggle' differently from Darwin as evidence of the most basic sustaining quality of all life: ‘Herrschaft' [rule, government] or ‘Macht' [power]. Nietzsche's genealogical approach would contend that structural alterations in societal considerations are illusions, (...) since the foundation, the genealogy, remains the same. Nietzsche's reception of Darwin through the work of C. von Nägeli allows us to understand how his philosophy interacted with one of the most important scientific theories of his time. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(4) 2005:260-272. (shrink)

I do not recommend peace to you, but victory instead. Your work shall be a struggle, your peace shall be a victory!As can be seen from the epigraph, Nietzsche famously entreats his readers to pursue a life of struggle and victory as opposed to one of peace. This is not a singular occurrence. For instance, in a notebook entry of the same period, he calls for an "unleashing of struggle [Kampf]" with the objective of instigating sociocultural rejuvenation, thereby echoing (...) many of the social Darwinists of his day. But what specific kind of struggle does he think acts as the constitutive ground of a vibrant society? After all, the German term Kampf is underdetermined.... (shrink)

Introduction -/- 1 Précis -/- 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary -/- Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework -/- 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types 3.2.1 Drives 3.2.2 Instincts (...) 3.2.3 Types 3.3 The semantic neighborhood of drive, instinct, and type 3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types 3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions 3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzsche’s drive psychology 3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement 3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives 3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives 3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed? 3.5 Summary -/- 4 From types to virtues 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values 4.2.1 Virtues 4.2.2 Values 4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value 4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values 4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives 4.4.2 Nietzsche’s type-relative unity of virtue thesis 4.4.3 The type of the criminal 4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks 4.5 Summary -/- 5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Higher-order types 5.2.1 Social character construction 5.2.2 Reflexive character construction 5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning 5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms 5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning 5.4 Summary -/- Nietzschean virtues -/- 6 Curiosity 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology 6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions 6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry 6.5 Curiosity as a virtue 6.5.1 A preliminary characterization 6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works 6.6 Summary -/- 7 Courage 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology 7.3 Courage as a virtue 7.3.1 A preliminary characterization 7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works 7.4 Summary -/- 8 Pathos of distance 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology 8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance 8.4 Nietzsche on contempt 8.4.1 Spernere mundum 8.4.2 Spernere neminem 8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum 8.4.4 Spernere se sperni 8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers 8.5 Nietzsche on disgust 8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal 8.5.2 The danger of disgust 8.6 The pathos of distance 8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos 8.8 Summary -/- 9 Sense of humor 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy 9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions 9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor 9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry 9.3.3 Negation and inquiry 9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers 9.4 Summary -/- 10 Solitude 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship 10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude 10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude 10.5 Summary -/- Conclusion -/- 11 Conscience & integrity 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship 11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology 11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary 11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity 11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience 11.4.1 Conscience 11.4.2 Good conscience 11.4.3 Bad conscience 11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity 11.5 Summary -/- 12 Prospectus 12.1 Future directions in moral psychology 12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship 12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy . (shrink)

FOR NIETZSCHE, THERE IS NO TRUTH. WHAT THEN ARE WE TO SAY OF HIS DOCTRINES OF WILL TO POWER AND ETERNAL RECURRENCE WHICH SEEM TO BE HELD AS TRUTHS? THEY TOO ARE ILLUSIONS. BUT, IF SO, HOW CAN ONE HOLD THAT THESE ILLUSIONS ARE TO BE PREFERRED TO OTHER ILLUSIONS? BECAUSE THE HIGHEST STATE IS TO BE THE SOURCE OF ALL VALUE AND MEANING ONESELF WITHOUT RELYING ON AN INDEPENDENT STANDARD OF TRUTH.

The presence of Persian sources in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra has been a topic of debate for decades. This paper summarizes the main results of a comparative study of Nietzsche and the ancient Persian scripture Avestā. In addition to several secondary sources Nietzsche repeatedly encountered, there is strong evidence that he read Johann Friedrich Kleuker’s German translation of the Avestā texts reconstructed by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron. Analyzing Nietzsche’s diverse sources of Zoroastrianism as well as his knowledge (...) of this religion, this paper shows that many metaphors, references and claims in both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in Nietzsche’s notebooks can be traced back to Zoroastrianism. Taking these sources into consideration contributes significantly to our understanding of one of Nietzsche’s major works. (shrink)

Abstract: Nietzsche’s famously wrote that “consciousness is a surface” (EH, Why I am so clever, 9: 97). The aim of this paper is to make sense of this quite puzzling contention—Superficiality, for short. In doing this, I shall focus on two further claims—both to be found in Gay Science 354—which I take to substantiate Nietzsche’s endorsement of Superficiality. The first claim is that consciousness is superfluous—which I call the “superfluousness claim” (SC). The second claim is that consciousness is (...) the source of some deep falsification—which I call the “falsification claim” (FC). I shall start by considering Nietzsche’s notion of consciousness. Here, I shall argue that the kind of consciousness he is concerned with is in fact self-consciousness and that he put forward a higher-order theory of it. Then, I shall address the two claims. Regarding (FC), my proposal will be that, according to Nietzsche, the content of (self-)conscious mental states is falsified in virtue of its being articulated propositionally. Regarding (SC), I shall claim that it is best read as a weak version of epiphenomenalism about conscious causation. In addressing both points, I shall discuss in particular the influential reading of Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness offered by Katsafanas (2005). (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place. Robert C. Holub counters this narrative, arguing that Nietzsche was very well attuned to the events and issues of his era and responded to them frequently in his writings. Organized around nine important questions circulating in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science, Nietzsche in (...) the Nineteenth Century presents a thorough investigation of Nietzsche's familiarity with contemporary life, his contact with and comments on these various questions, and the sources from which he gathered his knowledge. Holub begins his analysis with Nietzsche's views on education, nationhood, and the working-class movement, turns to questions of women and women's emancipation, colonialism, and Jews and Judaism, and looks at Nietzsche's dealings with evolutionary biology, cosmological theories, and the new "science" of eugenics. He shows how Nietzsche, although infrequently read during his lifetime, formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries, and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in the nineteenth century. Throughout his examination, Holub finds that, against conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was only indirectly in conversation with the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes through German idealism, and that the books and individuals central to his development were more obscure writers, most of whom have long since been forgotten. This book thus sheds light on Nietzsche's thought as enmeshed in a web of nineteenth-century discourses and offers new insights into his interactive method of engaging with the philosophical universe of his time. (shrink)

Nietzsche understands that the world unfolds as a will to power. If we want to properly understand this cosmological perspective, we must start by attributing immanent activity not only to organisms, but also to beings called “inorganic”. With this in mind, in this article we examine, in an “ascending” way, the features of the vital becoming in both strata, that is, from the minerals, with their attractions and repulsions, until reaching the man himself and his conscious operations. All the (...) problems involved in this monistic perspective are approached from argumentations that are based on Nietzsche’s readings. Strauss, Dubois Reymond, Herzen, Spencer, Lange, Delfœuf, are some of the cited sources that allow this writing to give an account of how Nietzsche makes life prevail, beyond being, as the primordial phenomenon in all orders. (shrink)

Cet article offre une vue d’ensemble sur les Éléments pour la généalogie de la morale de Nietzsche. La genèse de l’œuvre est d’abord présentée, puis les sources que Nietzsche a exploitées pour ses réflexions sont examinées. Cet examen des sources est suivi d’une analyse de la conception, de la structure et du contenu de l’« écrit polémique » de Nietzsche. Les sections du livre sont présentées et commentées dans leur succession.

John Stuart Mill, whose relevance for Nietzsche’s late work has been documented by recent research, is not directly mentioned in On the Genealogy or Morality (1887). This article argues that Mill’s On Liberty (1859) nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the Genealogy. Following a source-based methodology, three major references demonstrate how Nietzsche used On Liberty as a resource as he initiated and developed his own exploration into the origin of morality. After tracing Nietzsche’s (...) reading of Mill through pencil marks in his copy of On Liberty, I discuss the reappearance of Mill’s motives and terminology as well as the explanatory power of Mill as a source for the respective sections in the Genealogy. It becomes clear to what extent Nietzsche adapts Mill and how he turns Mill’s own weapons against him through skillful transformations. The article concludes that instead of delivering the “better” Mill, Nietzsche builds up a fruitful tension between a then-common take on morality and its transgression. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Immoralism begins a two-volume critical reconstruction of a socialist, democratic, and non-liberal Nietzschean politics. Nietzsche’s ideal of amor fati (love of fate) cannot be individually adopted because it is incompatible with deep freedom of agency. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to an under-appreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology. We are driven not toward domination and conquest but toward resistance, contest, and play―a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation (...) of suffering. This incompatibilist, anti-teleological psychology leads to Nietzsche’s distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of cultural means of human improvement for a historical materialist politics of breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our political order’s material conditions. Politics becomes first philosophy: it is not grounded in moral values but is instead the very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, despite Nietzsche’s professed aristocratism, his immoralism offers a stronger foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservative politics at its very root: the belief in moral order, authority, and responsibility. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to (...) view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas. (shrink)

George J. Stack traces the sources of ideas and theories that have long been considered the exclusive province of Friedrich Nietzsche to the surprisingly radical writings of the American essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche and Emerson makes us see Emerson's writings in a new, more intensified light and presents a new perspective on Nietzsche's philosophy. Stack traces how the rich theoretical ideas and literary images of Emerson entered directly into the existential dimension of Nietzsche's (...) thought and hence into the stream of what has been considered a distinctively European intellectual movement. Book jacket. (shrink)

Cet article présente Nietzsche comme un héritier du courant Illuministe, qui perpétue la Tradition spirituelle, confluent des différentes traditions ésotériques et qui s'est développé dans l'ombre des Lumières triomphantes. Sous une carapace d'athéisme, on trouve dans l'œuvre du philosophe allemand des éléments hermétiques ou gnostiques qui permettent d'appréhender différemment son Dionysos ou sa volonté de puissance. Par ces aspects et au travers de l'ascétisme transvalué qu'il propose, Nietzsche est proche des conceptions du soufisme, la mystique qui a été (...) développée à partir des sources scripturaires de l'Islam. C'est ce que montre ensuite cet article en proposant une comparaison entre le surhomme nietzschéen et la figure de l'homme partait, « el insan el kamil » d'Ibn Arabi, un des plus célèbres théoriciens du soufisme. En conclusion, l'auteur se pose la question des écrits qui auraient pu mettre le philosophe allemand en contact avec la mystique musulmane. (shrink)

Bernard Yack seeks to identify and account for the development of a form of discontent held in common by a large number of European philosophers and social critics, including Rousseau, Schiller, the young Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Yack contends that these individuals, despite their profound disagreements, shared new perspectives on human freedom and history, and that these perspectives gave their discontent its peculiar breadth and intensity.

The multiple sources and functions of Heraclitus in Nietzsche’s writings should not be underestimated. Nietzsche’s early readings of Heraclitus are steeped in the Greek fragments, the doxographical tradition, and in philological scholarship. Hence, they are largely either fair interpretations of the extant fragments, clear translations of a select group of fragments into his own language, or improvisations based in part on a narrow subset of the spurious remarks set down in the doxographical tradition. Nietzsche’s later departures from (...) this tradition articulate an anti-metaphysical Heraclitus that he found in the Heraclitean fragments, which he takes to prefigure and later parrot his doctrines of becoming, the child, strife, chance, and eternal recurrence. For this reason, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is necessarily no objective, individual historical person, but at various times and to various degrees a copy, an appropriative invention, and a personal-philological-philosophical archetype filtered through the lenses of ancient Greek understandings of how he must have lived, given what he said and what philosophy is; nineteenth-century German philological reconstructions of Heraclitean thought; and Nietzsche’s own need for such a precursor to voice his own doctrines and thereby lend them heft against the Platonic tradition of metaphysical philosophy. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s name has become almost synonymous with militant atheism. Born into a pious Christian family, this son of a Lutheran pastor declared himself the Antichrist. But could this have been yet another of his masks of hardness? Nietzsche rarely revealed his innermost self in the published writings, and this can be gleaned mainly from his private letters and the accounts of friends. These sources bring to light the philosopher’s inner struggle with his own, deeply religious nature.Losing his father (...) at a young age was a calamity from which Nietzsche never recovered, and I argue that his famous thought-image “God is dead” was a transfiguration of the painful memory of this loss. In this essay, I trace Nietzsche’s tortuous path from an ardent devotee of God to a vociferous critic of Christianity, a path that was punctuated with veiled longings for a loving deity. Deep in his heart, he remained faithful to Christian ideals. Rather like Cordelia, the only truly loving daughter of King Lear, Nietzsche refused to utter words of intense affection and reverence, as these had been blatantly devalued and corrupted. Instead, he adopted a mask of a wrongdoer and a blasphemer who took not the punishment but the guilt.Nietzsche’s attitude to religion is discussed from the perspective of his life, his personality, and his mental condition. The discussion draws on psychoanalytical concepts of Freud, Erikson, Winnicott and Kohut. This is not an exclusive reading, but complementary to other studies in this field. (shrink)

Nietzsche's The Gay Science is a deeply personal book, yet also an important work of philosophy. Nietzsche conceives it as a philosophical autobiography, a record of his own self-transformation. In beautifully composed aphorisms he communicates his central experience of overcoming pessimism and recovering the capacity to affirm joyfully the tragedy of life. On the basis of his experiments in living, Nietzsche articulates his most famous philosophical concepts and images: the death of God, the exercise of eternal recurrence, (...) and the ideal of self-fashioning. This book explains the ancient and modern philosophical contexts that shape Nietzsche's central concern with the affirmation of life. It surveys Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, explains the pivotal place of The Gay Science as the source of his ideal of tragic joy, and shows how he revives an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life and the philosopher as physician. (shrink)

This article explores various conceptions of Nietzsche’s thoughts on autonomy. It distinguishes six main interpretive approaches, each with its own conception of autonomy: autonomy as spontaneous self-determination, in the sense of traditional free will; a “standard model” interpretation counting actions as autonomous when they are caused by rationalizing beliefs and desires; a view that traces autonomy to a Kantian transcendental subject; constitutivist theories that seek to explain the source of normativity by “deriving ethics from action”; “hierarchical model” interpretations (...) arguing that complex, higher-order attitudes “speak for the agent,” and thereby constitute her autonomy; and conceptions of autonomy as an ethical ideal. (shrink)

Nietzsche's notion of the Übermensch is one of his most famous. While he himself never defined or explained what he meant by it, many philosophical interpretations have been offered in secondary literature. None of these, however, has examined the significance of the notion for Nietzsche the man, and this essay therefore attempts to address this gap.The idea of the Übermensch occurred to Nietzsche rather suddenly in the winter of 1882-1883, when his life was in turmoil after yet (...) another deep personal setback. The early loss of his father had deprived Nietzsche of a meaningful “mirroring” and a chance to experience realistic, age appropriate disappointment. This left him with a lifelong tendency towards idealisation. It became his proverbial Achilles’ heel and the source of repeated disillusionments and sorrow. The Übermensch may thus have been a culmination of his impulse to create altars and worlds before which he could kneel. Trying to cope with his own vulnerability, Nietzsche evoked an ideal of the Übermensch, a mask of hardness that was designed, if unconsciously, to ward off any future assaults on his fragile self.The double aspect of Nietzsche's personality is explored in this essay. While a highly provocative, belligerent and uncompromising Nietzsche often emerges from his published works, a vulnerable, lonely and sometimes self-pitying Nietzsche lurks in his letters and the accounts of his friends and acquaintances. But could an “ideal of strength”, such as the Übermensch, serve as a protective mask for someone with a sensitive, passionate interior? Nietzsche's descent into madness would suggest that no ideal can be a substitute for human, all too human, compassion. (shrink)

Nietzsche claims that we are fated to be as we are. He also claims, however, that we can create ourselves. To many commentators these twin commitments have seemed self-contradictory or paradoxical. The argument of this paper, by contrast, is that, despite appearances, there is no paradox here, nor even a tension between Nietzsche's two claims. Instead, when properly interpreted these claims turn out to be intimately related to one another, so that our fatedness emerges as integral to our (...) capacity to become self-creators. The paper also offers, in the course of undermining a false alternative that is deeply entrenched in the philosophical tradition, a reading of Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati that actually – and perhaps uniquely – makes full sense of section 276 of The Gay Science, the chief source for this aspect of his thought. (shrink)

Nietzsche described himself as the first psychologist of the West. His interpreters, however, have seldom regarded his works as contributions to psychology. This book gives the psychological perspective a central role and uses it as a guide through Nietzsche's aphoristic maze toward the centre of his thought, method, aims and ramifications. Psychology thus serves as the path to his philosophy and leads to a reconstruction of his substantive theses, including the morality of positive power. By exploring Nietzsche's (...) depth psychology in detail, the book clarifies his basic purpose: to entice readers into uncovering and reactivating their own sources of creative power. (shrink)

Both an introduction to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, and a sustained commentary on his most famous work, On the Genealogy of Morality, this book has become the most widely used and debated secondary source on these topics over the past dozen years. Many of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas - the "slave revolt" in morals, the attack on free will, perspectivism, "will to power" and the "ascetic ideal" - are clearly analyzed and explained. The first edition established the centrality (...) of naturalism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, generating a substantial scholarly literature to which Leiter responds in an important new Postscript. In addition, Leiter has revised and refreshed the book throughout, taking into account new scholarly literature, and revising or clarifying his treatment of such topics as the objectivity of value, epiphenomenalism and consciousness, and the possibility of "autonomous" agency. (shrink)

Nietzsche is one of the most controversial and disputed philosophers, especially because of his association with Hitler and Nazism, but also through his upsetting philosophical decisions that deny the possibility of any morality centered on good and evil as absolute values in themselves. As for his association with Hitler, the sources prove that Nietzsche’s philosophy has nothing to do with the justification or support of the nationalist-socialist dictatorship. In addition, any connoisseur of his work can easily see that (...) Hitler does not fit at all with the description of the overman that Nietzsche conceptualizes and identifies with. As for morality, it seems to support a relativization of the values of good and evil until their dissolution, but a closer look can see that the morality of the masters accredited by Nietzsche is one of austerity, balance, respect, honor, dignity, of preferring loneliness to the amusement of the crowd. All these are values that even Christianity proposes. Lonely and incomprehensible, the master, Nietzsche lives a lifestyle similar to Christian ascetics. And just as the philosopher claims that the life of the masters should not be passed through the sieve of ordinary moral evaluations, who could judge in terms of “good” or “bad” the way the austere ones lived? (shrink)

Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner has long been a source of controversy and has given rise to a number of important studies, including this major breakthrough in Nietzsche scholarship, first published in 1982. In this work Hollinrake contends that the nature and extent of the anti-Wagnerian pastiche and polemic in _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ is arguably the most important factor in the association between the two. Thus Wagner, as the purveyor of a particular brand of Schopenhauerian pessimism, is here (...) revealed as one of the principle sources – and targets – of _Zarathustra_. Whilst addressed primarily to students of German Literature, this book will also be of interest to musicians, philosophers and students of the history of culture and ideas. (shrink)

In this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.

Conscience plays a crucial role in identifying, applying, and initiating actions chosen as right or wrong. In this paper, we pursue an answer to the question, Can bad conscience, as Nietzsche defines it, be overcome to form the ground for the creation of good conscience? Nietzsche identifies Christianity as the source of that which has to be overcome to help re-define human existence--overcoming self-destructive, bad conscience. To understand whether someone could (or even should) overcome and redefine his (...) or her existence, that is create good conscience like Nietzsche's Ubermensch, it is useful to consider the struggles of Allie Fox, the hero in Peter Weir's movie Mosquito Coast (1986). (shrink)

Nietzsche famously rails against Christian virtues such as humility and compassion. Yet he is well aware that historical Christians, especially those in positions of power, typically preached such values but did not practice them. This raises the question whom Nietzsche is really targeting in his animadversions against Christian virtues. The answer developed here is that his real targets are his contemporaries, including atheist, socialists such as Eugen Dühring, who, with their advocacy of egalitarian, democratic social and political policies, (...) are trying to implement the values Christians long preached but rarely practiced. In nominating moderns, including those who seek the realization of enlightenment liberal democratic values, rather than past Christians, as Nietzsche’s real targets we create space for reconciling Nietzsche’s claim that he accepts the past (as embodied in his doctrine of amor fati) with his project of seeking to open up new possibilities for the future. In the concluding sections the questions are raised to what extent do Nietzsche’s attacks on Christian virtues exhibit the very ressentiment he so vehemently criticises as a source of Christian values, and whether his criticism of the modern social and political implementation of those values is really supported by his own values. (shrink)

As of 1869, and throughout the entire period during which he wrote the essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”, published in 1874, Nietzsche was a classical philology professor at the University of Basel. During this period, he reflected critically on theoretical and methodological questions in his field, emphasizing that if the study of Antiquity is to be linked to the analysis and critique of the sources, it loses, through this, contact with its own time, becoming (...) knowledge that is out-of-touch with the fundamental questions of its time. Nietzsche proposes establishing a different relationship with the past than that of the modern scientist: whereas the latter sees history from the perspective purely of knowledge, the professor from the University of Basel seeks a model in the past that is able to instigate reflection on the present, establishing a confrontation between distinct cultures, with different sets of values, so as to create some distance with the thought processes that are crystallized in modern times. This article intends to show how Nietzsche, from his notions of unhistory and supra-history, sought to investigate the value of history, contrasting the concept of the past as pure knowledge with a concept linked to life and action, that is able to generate the future. (shrink)

This essay is an explanation of how the concept of the sublime is deployed by Nietzche in Dawn . This text represents a high point in Nietzche's thinking on the sublime. Nietzche, I show, wants us to purify ourselves of the origins and sources of our desire for the sublime because the higher feelings associated with it are bound up with humanity's investment in an imaginary world. However, he does not propose that we simply jettison the sublime but, rather, seek (...) new experiences of it and these will cenre on knowledge and our right to self-experimentation. I suggest that Nietzsche is in effect opening up new "spaces" and "times" for thinking. My interpretation aims to show in what way Nietzsche commits himself to fashioning new sublimities of philosophy, including expanding our appreciation of the beautiful. By focusing on the topic of the sublime I hope to reveal in what way Dawn represents an important moment in the evolution of Nietzsche's conception of the role and tasks of philosophy.Der Aufsatz untersucht, wie der Begriff des Erhabenen von Nietzsche in Morgenröhe verwendet wird, wo er einen Höhepunkt in Nietzsches Denken des Erhabenen bildet. Nietzsche will, so zeige ich, dass wir uns selbst von den Ursprüngen udn Quellen unseres strebens nach dem Erhabenen reinigen, weil die es begleitenden höheren Gefühle mit menschlichen Investionen in eine imaginäre Welt verbunden sind. Er will jedoch nicht, dass wir das Erhabene einfach über Bord werfen, sondern vielmehr nach neuen Erfahrungen des Erhabenen suchen, wobei das Wissen und unser Recht auf Selbstversuche dabei im Zentrum stehen. Ich meine, dass Nietzsche dadurch neue 'Räume' und 'Zeiten' für das Denken öffnet. Meine interpretation soll zeigen, auf welche Weise Neitzsche sich damit auf die Gestaltung neuer Sublimitäten der Philosophie festlegt, einschließlich der Erweiterrung unseres Gefallens am Schönen. Durch die Fokussierung auf das Erhabene hoff ich zeigen zu können, inwiefern Morgenröthe einen bedeutenden Moment in der Evolution von Nietzsches Auffassung über Rolle und Aufgaben der Philosophie darstellt. (shrink)

Despite the criticisms that Levinas addresses to Nietzsche throughout his writing, he also praises Nietzsche’s legacy. In Humanism of the Other, he indicates how the Nietzschean man is “‘reducing’ being, […] undoing by the non-saying of dance and laughter […] the worlds that weave the aphoristic verb that demolishes them; retiring from the time of aging […] by the thought of the eternal recurrence”. Interpreting Nietzsche’s ambiguous thought of the eternal recurrence as a source of youth, (...) Levinas brings to light the fertility of Nietzsche’s concept of temporality. The aim of this paper is first to render Nietzsche’s thought on time more explicit, focusing on his approach to eternal recurrence, and then to study Levinas’ own approach to time. In the end, it will be possible to understand better Levinas’ interpretation of Nietzsche, and to shed light on some important similarities between these two different approaches to time. (shrink)

Jason M. Wirth's Nietzsche and Other Buddhas is a thought-provoking work that lucidly engages elements of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to Buddhist, Kyōto School, and other philosophical sources.This book offers innovative and suggestive strategies for addressing questions of inter- and cross-cultural philosophy in a situation "after comparative philosophy" without an underlying fixed grounding to engage in comparison. Wirth describes in the introduction an interpretive strategy of "co-illuminating confrontation." It does not primarily rely on a comparison (...) between concepts, and does not remain within... (shrink)

This classic account of Nietzsche's thought, first published in 1957, is now available in paperback. It traces the development of Nietzsche's thought through all its principal phases, and stresses its relevance to our times. Squarely based on original literary and biographical sources, it avoids technicalities and obscure comparison. It is intended for the general reader rather than the specialist - above all for the reader who desires, as Nietzsche did, to clear his mind of cant.

Nietzsche’s late writings present a value opposition of health and decadence based in his conception of organic life. While this appears to be a moral ideal that risks the naturalistic fallacy of directly deriving norms from facts, it instead describes a meta-ethical ideal: the necessary conditions for any kind of moral agency. Nietzsche’s ideal of health not only evades but also dissolves the naturalistic fallacy by suggesting that the specific content of morality is irrelevant. If health is measured (...) by power over one’s drives rather than the environment, then the source of moral conflict—organic life’s essential tendency toward domination—is surmounted by successful integration of any moral norms, regardless of content. Nietzsche’s concept of health draws on his characterization of organic life as essentially ‘exploitation’: growth through domination of the environment (BGE 259, GM II: 12). In animals, power coincides with happiness, while health and decadence track the correspondence between instinct and happiness (TI II: 11). This simple picture is complicated by the Genealogy, where Nietzsche depicts human nature as an animal illness caused by civilization’s disruption of the natural correspondence of instinct and happiness. Civilization shapes this ‘sick animal’ into the distinctly human ‘sovereign individual’ (GM III: 13, II: 2), restoring the harmony of instinct and happiness in an internal hierarchy of drives. So, sovereign individuality is a distinctly human model of health. Although life is exploitation, human health does not coincide with greater environmental power, but rather an internal qualitative expansion of power: greater variety and tension among drives, greater ‘wholeness in diversity’ in the ‘social structure’ of the self (BGE 212, 12). Nonetheless, health is not a moral criterion, but instead the precondition of moral agency. The subordination of drives to a commanding hierarchy grounds the ability to uphold any moral principles at all, to make and keep promises to oneself and others. Moral agency coincides, in turn, with overcoming the source of moral conflict in organic life’s drive for growth. The unification of opposing drives provides pleasure in power over oneself rather than one’s environment, the ‘happiness of high tension’ among drives (BGE 260), and in environmental resistance, a need for ‘equal opponents’ (TI IX: 38, EH 1: 7). Consequently, Nietzsche’s meta-ethical ideal supports a moral pluralism that supports any moral content. Moral conflicts arise precisely to the degree individuals are incapable of achieving moral agency, but they dissolve as moral agency of any kind is more widely achieved. (shrink)

In Part One of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes that anyone who believes in “immediate certainties” such as “I think” encounters a series of “metaphysical questions”. The most important of these “problems of intellectual knowledge” concerns the existence of an ‘I’, as much as our believing it to be the cause of thinking. Therefore, any remark about our mental faculties directly follows from our defining what we could call the basic psychical unity, i.e. our view on higher-level psychical (...) functions is strictly related with the properties we attribute to the notion of ‘I’. As we know, the main ideas on this subject that Nietzsche states in his book from 1886 come from the neo-kantian views of Lange, Spir and Teichmüller, and we cannot forget the important (even if hidden) reference to Lichtenberg in § 17 of the same work. Nevertheless, Nietzsche seems to move beyond all these sources, and in many of his writings we can find a new definition of the ‘ego’, finally free from any reference to a thing in itself, and for this reason closer to the ideas of the Austrian scientist Ernst Mach. In this paper I shall carry these remarks out. I’ll show the main properties of the notion of ‘I’ Nietzsche concerns with in his writings and, therefore, the grounds of his view on the mind-body problem. Moreover, I will argue that, once we observe that Nietzsche looks at the ‘ego’ as a mere regulative fiction having no ontological value out of the chain of sensation and representation it brings together, we could find out the close similarity with the way Mach defines it in his Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886). This reference could help us to understand in a better way some statements Nietzsche wrote in his notebooks, and, secondly, to show how strictly was his philosophy of mind related with the main outcomes of 19th century science. Indeed, Nietzsche’s refusal of the belief “that there must necessarily be something that thinks” ‒ a view that results from the anti-metaphysical intent leading his naturalism ‒ seems to be one of the most important assumptions of the new born physiological psychology, an idea out of which many of the 20th century philosophical debates arose. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Aristophanes. Nietzsche dealt extensively with Aristophanes in his early work. This article reconstructs some of the sources and contexts of Nietzsche’s work on Aristophanes and, against the backdrop of the conventional image of Aristophanes in classical philology, pays tribute to Nietzsche’s farsighted social and political analysis of Attic comedy.

Nietzsche's infamous work Thus Spake Zarathustra is filled with a strange sense of religiosity that seems to run counter to the philosopher's usual polemics against religious faith. For some scholars, this book marks little but a mental decline in the great philosopher; for C. G. Jung, Zarathustra was an invaluable demonstration of the unconscious at work, one that illuminated both Nietzsche's psychology and spirituality and that of the modern world in general. The original two-volume edition of Jung's lively (...) seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra has been an important source for specialists in depth psychology. This new abridged paperback edition allows interested readers to participate with Jung as he probes the underlying meaning of Nietzsche's great work. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism , he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, (...) to the exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as "misarchism," or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the "exceptional beings" excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the "autonomous herd" and "mob rule." Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: "the self-overcoming of the human.". (shrink)