This essay examines Nietzsche’s thought on hatred in the light of the realist and perfectionist impulses of his philosophy. Drawing on remarks scattered across his writings, both unpublished and published, it seeks to reconstruct the “philosophy of hatred‘ that, as he himself observed, “has not yet been written‘. In S1 it is shown that hatred is a necessary ingredient in Nietzsche’s dynamic and pluralist ontology of conflict. Hatred plays an indispensable role in the drive to assimilate or incorporate other life-forms (...) into life’s struggle for expansion and self-overcoming. According to Nietzsche’s philosophical physiology, hatred is greatest where struggle and the resistance to assimilation are greatest; that is, among equal powers. It is also distinguished from revulsion and contempt, since these are attached to the process of excretion, not assimilation. What is more, since genuine hatred serves to assimilate what is more or less equal, it is bound up with love, understood as attraction and the desire to appropriate what we wish to make our own; this is one of several ways in which the opposition between love and hate is overcome. But for Nietzsche, hatred can take a variety of forms, and his distinctive claim is that it need not be a destructive force, but can take creative forms. Two different forms of creative hatred are then examined: an active agonal hatred inter pares that allows for an affirmative pride in one’s enemy ; and the reactive hatred of the “spirit of revenge‘ that gives birth to slave morality. Attending to Nietzsche’s argumentation on the etymological relations between “hatred‘ and “ugliness‘, one can distinguish genuine hatred inter pares, affirmative and creative, from contempt towards what is inferior from a position of strength, and from hatred-as-ressentiment towards what is superior from a position of weakness. Nietzsche’s analysis of the creative hatred that gave birth to slave morality reveals its destructive core in the “imaginary revenge‘ that degrades its noble opponent, raising the problem: How to respond constructively to the necessity of hatred and conflict implied by Nietzsche’s ontology? In the final section, two responses to this problem are considered: on the one hand to seek ways to “improve‘ hatred by drawing on its idealising powers for constructive ends; on the other hand, to use physiological self-knowledge to correct the errors intrinsic to hatred and cultivate an episteme beyond love and hate. These responses can pull in different directions, but they can also be co-ordinated in a way that addresses the realist and perfectionist impulses in Nietzsche’s philosophy. (shrink)

This essay investigates the thought of self-overcoming (Selbst-Überwindung, sich überwinden) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and its relation to Nietzsche’s Emersonian perfectionism in Schopenhauer as Educator. It is a conceptual study focused on key passages on self-overcoming in Zarathustra and related problems – most notably how to combine the demand for boundless affirmation with the demand for total critique in Nietzsche’s project of critical transvaluation. The main thesis is that Zarathustra’s response depends on his addressees: with regard to the mob, the (...) rabble or Gesindel, he advocates a limit in negation under the sign of mildness (Milde); with regard to others engaged in self-overcoming, he advocates a limited negation in the form of love-hate. Connections with the perfectionism of Schopenhauer as Educator are made throughout the essay, which then draws them together in a comparative analysis of self-overcoming in Zarathustra and Nietzsche’s untimely perfectionism. The essay closes with some methodological reflections on the risks and benefits of its “prismatic” approach, focused on key passages in relation to other works in abstraction from the overall composition and narrative of the book. (shrink)

Nietzsche's legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzsche's political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly, Villa, (...) van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines. (shrink)

This paper examines the therapeutic implications of Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment and revenge as our signature malady. §I examines the obstacles to a therapeutic reading of Nietzsche's thought, including his anti-teleological tendencies and the value he places on sickness. Then there is the energetic problem of finding resources to tackle ressentiment, given the volitional exhaustion of modern nihilism. Finally, the self-referential implications of Nietzsche's critique of slave values threaten to trap his thought in a futile ressentiment against ressentiment. If the (...) impulse to cure or redeem us from revenge through critical destruction repeats the logic of revenge, then the challenge for a therapeutic reading is to think through the transformation of revenge on the basis of repetition.An agonal reading of Nietzsche's philosophical practice is proposed to tackle these problems in §II. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nietzsche's Socio‐Physiology and the Question of Sovereignty Nietzsche versus Liberalism on Freedom and Resistance Freedom and Resistance in Nietzsche's Later Thought On the Necessity of Conflict for Freedom: Nietzsche's Critique of the Subject.

Nietzsche's strengths as a critic are widely acknowledged, but his peculiar style of critique is usually ignored as rhetoric, or dismissed as violent or simply incoherent. In this book, Nietzsche's concept of the agon or Wettkampf, a measured and productive form of conflict inspired by ancient Greek culture, is advanced as the dynamic and organising principle of his philosophical practice, enabling us to make sense of his critical confrontations and the much disputed concept of transvaluation or Umwertung. Agonal perspectives are (...) cast on a number of key problems in his thought across a broad range of texts. Topics and problems treated include: critical history and the need for a limit in the negation of the past; Nietzsche contra Socrates and the problem of closure; Nietzsche contra humanism and the problem of humanity; Nietzsche contra Kant on genius and legislation; the problem of self-legislation in relation to life and temporality; Nietzsche's sense of community in its articulation with law, and the normativity of taste; ressentiment and the question of therapy in Nietzsche and Freud; and the problem of total affirmation in relation to critique. (shrink)

The question antagonism, struggle and dissensus, their place, limits and value for democracy, has divided deliberative from agonistic theories, and remains the main source of the impasse between them. This open access book seeks to break this impasse by going back to their sources in Kant and Nietzsche, and reframes them as philosophers of conflict. For both philosophers, conflict is part of the 'deep structure' of reality at all levels, and their reflections on its constitutive, constructive and destructive potentials raise (...) fundamental questions that democratic theories ill afford to ignore. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Dutch Research Council. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche's work. The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche's ontology of conflict; Nietzsche's conception of the agon; and Nietzsche's warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche's understanding of (...) resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict. Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche's thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice. (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)