Friedrich Nietzsche

This article considers Max Minden Ribeiro’s critical examination of Mattia Riccardi’s Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology (2021). Minden Ribeiro claims that Riccardi’s development of this view involves a doubling both of instances of consciousness and of kinds of consciousness, and he advocates instead for a same-order interpretation of Nietzsche, which need invoke only a single instance and kind of consciousness. This article concedes several of Minden Ribeiro’s results, while taking issue with his interpretation of key points in Nietzsche’s texts. In the end, (...) the article argues, while Minden Ribeiro’s case constitutes a partial correction of Riccardi’s interpretation of Nietzsche on consciousness, its results are thinner than Minden Ribeiro intends. (shrink)

This article argues not only that Nietzsche saw reverence (Ehrfurcht) as a virtue to be included as part of a set of virtues for a particular type of individual, but also, and more radically, that Nietzsche took reverence to be a cardinal virtue—a virtue upon which all other virtues hinge—and that Nietzsche wanted to cultivate reverence, to one degree or another, in every type. The article examines the related textual and philosophical context in which it makes sense for Nietzsche to (...) elevate reverence in the way suggested. Then, reinforcing this claim, it traces the Sophist origin of Nietzsche’s thinking about reverence, showing how Nietzsche’s understanding resembles the mythological account of reverence given by the Sophist Protagoras. This ancient influence upon a central theme of Nietzsche’s work has not been recognized before. (shrink)

This article replies to Max Minden Ribeiro’s critique of the view of consciousness I attribute to Nietzsche in my 2021 monograph, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology, and to João Constâncio’s comments on that critique, in which he agrees with several of Minden Ribeiro’s conclusions and raises his own questions about my reading of Nietzsche on the social character of reflective consciousness. First, this article argues that Minden Ribeiro’s same-order self-representational reading lacks textual support. Hence, Nietzsche is more plausibly read as a higher-order (...) theorist. At the same time, this article defends my own hybrid higher-order reading by arguing that Nietzsche is committed—as Constâncio used to agree—not only to reflective consciousness but also to phenomenal consciousness. Second, by clarifying in which sense Nietzsche takes reflective consciousness to be social, this article responds to Constâncio’s complaint that my book neglects Nietzsche’s insights about the constitutive sociality of human mindedness. (shrink)

The doctrine of eternal recurrence (ER), understood as a cosmological theory, violates the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII): if cycles of events are supposed to recur qualitatively identically, then there is actually only one cycle. Given Nietzsche’s views about logical principles, this conflict may not be too worrisome—were it not for the fact that he does seem to apply the principle within cycles. This article suggests that this apparent conflict can be reconciled by applying a weakened version of (...) PII that has been proposed on independent grounds in more recent philosophy. It allows for the possibility of qualitatively identical but numerically distinct events by employing a special kind of (“weakly discerning”) relations. It turns out that Paul Loeb’s proposal of relations of “recurrence awareness” between cycles is of the kind required by the weakened PII and thus serves to reconcile ER with the principle. (shrink)

“lisez: Nietzsche”. Remarks on Nietzsche’s Last Book. From the perspective of textual criticism, Nietzsche’s last book Ecce Homo – written in 1888, but published for the first time only in 1908 – is as ambiguous as it is controversial. Although Nietzsche completed Ecce Homo, a close reading that focuses on his writing strategies reveals a more fragmentary status. As such, Ecce Homo continues to provide complex editorial and philological problems that undercut any straightforward reading of the book: focusing on Ecce (...) Homo’s paratext highlights how Nietzsche reads himself, thus complicating the relationship between his writings and their reception. (shrink)

Let Judas be constituted by Meursault (Camus' "Stranger") in dispositions / Let Judas' friend ask him to betray Christ and bear infamy on behalf of him who cannot be placated / Let Judas in his Meursault-ness tolerate absurdly too much not to disappoint his friend who is relentless in his pursuit and request. Meursault Version of Judas undergoes theatrical but loyal friendship. His words and his acts are the same. But his thoughts and his words are diametrically opposite. ------ Nietzsche's (...) notion of Camel/Lion/Child metamorphoses constitutes a lens through which we can examine texts. Meursault is Camel emulating Child. (shrink)

In his essay, Tobias Endres devotes himself to the theoretical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which continues to have a reputation for self-contradiction, albeit an affirmed one. While this problem is increasingly losing importance in recent and most recent Nietzsche research, the study attempts to dispel the accusation of performative self-contradiction and genetic fallacy. In contrast to the readings inspired by analytical philosophy, however, Nietzsche's metaphilosophy is not understood exclusively as a contribution to classical epistemology, but as a variant of philosophical (...) hermeneutics. -/- In 1968, Jürgen Habermas stated that Nietzsche had “nothing contagious left”. However, the history of the reception and impact of Nietzsche's thought has clearly refuted this judgment. The first volume of the Critical Complete Edition had been published just one year earlier. This marked the beginning of a path that led to Nietzsche no longer being read primarily as an outsider, but as a classic of Western philosophy. While this path was previously a rather Franco-German affair, the edition and the Anglo-American reception of the 1990s contributed to the internationalization of Nietzsche research. Today, Nietzsche is read globally and as one of the most influential philosophers of modernity. (shrink)

---- I ---- Once upon a time, there was a most elegant lady who had a most majestic dog on leash standing but distracted by something other than the dog. The dog struggled impossibly but forcefully to loose free and chase a most ordinary rabbit. ------ II ------ Another time the elegant lady dines at a fancy restaurant. Then she was walking on the sidewalk when she encountered an ordinary homeless in the state of minimal energy giving all in to (...) gravity. She gave him her left-over. He nodded or something. Then she cheerfully and vigorously and most innocently and heartwarmingly and charmingly wished the homeless guy a GREAT night. ----- III ----- IF the rabbit and the homeless guy are the same ordinary entity, and the elegant entity is to represent acutely concentrated political power and the Majestic entity is to represent the free market THEN a fair contract would be: ask for food and security and shelter in exchange for mindless work and give up money or capital and the privilege of procreation. Excursus: cryptocurrency features the rabid dog. (shrink)

This article critically examines two claims Mattia Riccardi ascribes to Nietzsche in his 2021 book Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. The first is that Nietzsche’s main notion of consciousness should be interpreted as Rconsciousness. Rconsciousness is an awareness of a mental state or process that is achieved when that state is linguistically interpreted by another state. This article finds that Riccardi’s account commits to two instances of states becoming conscious and to two kinds of consciousness. The second claim is that Nietzsche advances (...) a pluralism about consciousness, endorsing a perceptual form of consciousness, Pconsciousness, and a qualitative consciousness of sensations, Qconsciousness. As Riccardi’s account offers no criteria for what it takes to be conscious per se, it is unclear what the pluralism he ascribes to Nietzsche amounts to. Moreover, this article finds that Nietzsche offers no positive reason to conceive any candidate mental phenomena as conscious other than those that are linguistically-reflexively conscious. (shrink)

An der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften entsteht der erste umfassende historische und kritische Kommentar zum Werk Friedrich Nietzsches. Obwohl Nietzsche zu den wirkungsmächtigsten Denkern der Moderne gehört, fehlte bisher ein übergreifender Kommentar zu seinem Gesamtwerk, der die philosophischen, historischen und literarischen Voraussetzungen und Kontexte erschliesst. Für die künftige Nietzsche-Forschung bildet dieser Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches.

Friedrich Nietzsche est connu pour être un philosophe atypique, optant pour un type de communication philosophique qui se démarque nettement des traditions qui le précèdent. En outre, plus qu'une simple question autour de l'exposition de ses idées, le problème de la communication chez Nietzsche engage toute sa pensée, tant sur la forme que sur le fond. Le présent ouvrage s'attèle à montrer que la philosophie de Nietzsche est un questionnement incessant autour de la possibilité de la communication, soit en tant (...) qu'art, soit en tant que besoin, soit en tant que défi. Par cette triple perspective se comprend le problème du tragique dans son œuvre, mais également celui du corps aussi bien que celui de la culture et des valeurs."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

"Nietzsche et Heidegger, ça a été le choc philosophique! Mais je n'ai jamais rien écrit sur Heidegger et je n'ai écrit sur Nietzsche qu'un tout petit article ; ce sont pourtant les deux auteurs que j'ai le plus lus", dira Michel Foucault à la fin de sa vie. Puis, il précise : "Je crois que c'est important d'avoir un petit nombre d'auteurs avec lesquels on pense, avec lesquels on travaille, mais sur lesquels on n'écrit pas." Les Cours, conférences et travaux (...) sont des témoignages inédits du "travail" de Foucault avec Nietzsche. Ces textes datent des deux grandes périodes de sa vie intellectuelle : d'abord le début des années 1950, quand il s'intéresse à Hegel et à la phénoménologie, ainsi qu'au marxisme. Le jeune Foucault expérimente alors de nouvelles approches pour développer une philosophie fondée sur l'expérience et l'analyse du discours. Ensuite, après la publication des Mots et les Choses en 1966, lorsque Foucault revient avec élan à Nietzsche pour élaborer sa propre méthode généalogique, relançant ainsi son projet d'une histoire de la vérité et du dire vrai. C'est à travers la confrontation avec Nietzsche que Foucault aura construit sa propre manière de philosopher. Ces Cours, conférences et travaux sont indispensables pour comprendre comment Foucault a lu Nietzsche, en particulier au moment décisif où il le découvre. Ils sont essentiels pour saisir le Nietzsche de Foucault."--Back cover. (shrink)

This book focuses on Nietzsche's method of genealogy and shows how Nietzsche uses genealogical methods to render us less obscure to ourselves, to liberate us from value systems that no longer serve our interests, and to demonstrate how we might become less prone to guilt and shame.

A new interpretation of what is arguably Nietzsche's most neglected work.

For readers both acquainted with and new to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche NOW! frames and explains Nietzsche’s thinking on topics of immediate contemporary concern and relevance. Wallis unpacks Nietzsche’s complex philosophy with a deft, empathetic, and brilliantly subtle analysis of the views of the Great Immoralist on democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other momentous topics. Throughout, Wallis includes ample extracts from Nietzsche himself. -/- In Nietzsche NOW! Wallis takes readers on a sometimes counterintuitive, always revelatory journey to (...) grasp the relevance of Nietzsche for our contentious times. Nietzsche NOW! contains Wallis’s original German translations of Nietzsche’s writings from the critical edition along with insights drawn from a decades-long close study of Nietzsche’s works and their academic reception. -/- Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist’s Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. (shrink)

The notion of poethics has been used to approach the way in which forms of language and forms of life are interdependent and to reveal the ethical dimension of poetics. However, the interaction must go both ways; there must not only be an ethical dimension to poetics, but also a poetic dimension to ethics. To what extent is ethics dependent on poetics? In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s life-affirming ethics can be understood only in this poethical framework. The specificity (...) of Nietzsche’s ethics, and why it is so difficult to locate on the spectrum of ethical theories, lies in the fact that his ethics is a poetics. By focusing mainly on The Gay Science, I explore the interaction between ethics and poetics that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s ethical thought. Both poetics and ethics involve the question of value, and a poetic ethics (a poethics) reveals that the creation of ethical value is something necessarily poetic. Nietzsche’s ethics of creation is not a mere theory, but a poetic way of life. (shrink)

This article offers an account of Nietzschean decadence as a psycho-physiological condition characterized by a failure of psychic integration—a failure Nietzsche thinks precludes genuine agency, since the psychic integration the decadent fails to achieve is necessary for agency. As part of this account, this article develops an interpretation of an underexplored but crucial form of decadence: repressed decadence. Exploring this variety of Nietzschean decadence both enables us to make sense of the case of Wagner’s alleged decadence and adds nuance to (...) predominance models of Nietzschean unity. After developing this account, the article argues that Nietzsche finds decadence especially problematic when it disempowers (or obstructs the empowerment of) the individual who suffers from it, even if only in the long run. The article concludes by demonstrating that in (rare) cases in which decadence facilitates individual empowerment, Nietzsche evaluates it positively, finding such a condition worthy of affirmation. (shrink)

After having held through much of his career the view that our senses and our intellect falsify the world, Nietzsche published in Twilight of the Idols the claim that the senses do not lie at all. A preparation for this apparent change of mind has often been seen in BGE 15, where Nietzsche seems to recommend “sensualism,” at least for scientists working on the physiology of the senses. I try to characterize in some detail what “sensualism” means by drawing on (...) contemporary discussions and suggest a clarifying reading of the argument in BGE 15. Nietzsche’s attitude towards sensualism, however, is ambivalent. It is a suitable view to hold for scientists engaged in accomplishing “coarse tasks.” But there is a nobler way of doing science, exemplified by Copernicus and Boscovich who “triumphed over the senses.” I explicate this more nuanced attitude towards sensualism and suggest that the senses do not lie insofar as they show us change, that is, temporal relations between events, while they do lie about the events themselves. This happens to be a view that the eminent physiologist of the senses, Helmholtz, had arrived at in 1867. (shrink)

According to some, humanity’s search to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” fuels the creative fires that forge all of civilization’s great religious, spiritual, and philosophical texts. But how seriously should we take the question? In the following paper, I provide an implexic genealogical analysis of the cognitive structures that make the very articulation of the question possible. After outlining my procedure, my paper begins by explaining the main components of a genealogical inquiry. Next, I examine Camus’s (...) and Nagel’s respective analyses of philosophical absurdity, paying particular attention to their different evaluations of avatars of the absurd, such as the myth of Sisyphus. Finally, I demonstrate how we may complete Nagel’s solution to the absurd (which counsels that whenever the seeming meaninglessness of life is raised in consciousness, we address it with an ironic smile) by providing an evolutionary pathway of how the cognitive scaffolding required to ask the question about life’s meaning arose. I argue that by reframing philosophical absurdity, we see the phenomenon in a different light. In this very reframing, we may become free from the malaise often connected to avatars for the absurd. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) criticized Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the heirs of his philosophical edifice for their enslavement to the ascetic ideal. At times, Nietzsche’s ascetic priest functions as a representative of Kant. However, Kant confronted accusations of promoting asceticism in his own time from thinkers like Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). In his replies, Kant not only clarified his disregard for the “monkish asceticism” of which he was accused, but he employed the term “ascetic” positively in *The Metaphysics of Morals* to detail (...) a regimen for self-cultivation, in the process delineating acceptable and unacceptable expressions of asceticism. This paper examines the topic of asceticism in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, arguing that Nietzsche, like Kant, also delineates acceptable and unacceptable expressions of asceticism. Additionally, I argue that these permissible forms of asceticism in Kant and Nietzsche align with their respective visions for the requisite discipline necessary for achieving the highest ends of humanity. In the process of this comparative analysis, this paper aims to illustrate the nuance and complexity of this topic within Kant and Nietzsche studies. (shrink)

My paper proposes a tentative framework of bio-existential semiotics based on a reading of Peirce, Darwin, Heidegger, Tarasti, and others. According to this view, there is an evolutionary continuum to life. Human beings are natural organisms and they exhibit many similar bio-existential phenomena. Natural evolution also produces the anthropological, societal and global semiotic processes that constitute cultural evolution as an outgrowth. In the bio-existential perspective, the world is composed of imperfect systems and imperfect consciousnesses where every lifeform must struggle for (...) its existence. Every “Dasein” must face the fact that it must die because it cannot comprehend or control the universe in its totality. This is why life and existence are “tragic” phenomena. Every bio-existential Dasein is a partial comprehension of the universe, and the only way the universe can comprehend itself is through these partial perspectives, which are born to imperfection and die in imperfection, but whose imperfection is of the essence of the universe. This is why bio-existentialism makes for a “tragic” perspective: we are mortals, and all mortals must die. Nonetheless, there is also hope and optimism in this view of life. In conceiving of existence as having certain universal principles that extend from biology to sociology, semioticians and philosophers can formulate new ways of looking at the world. Together with scientists and artists, they can hopefully work towards a better – or at least more refined – ethical attitude towards science, nature and society. (shrink)

The courage to use one's own reason is an invitation to take more actions---implicating excessive use of agency, even under rampant false consciousness manufactured by mass media and technological priorities. If one does nothing and gains nothing by doing nothing, one is not subject to any evaluation or interpretation. Modernity is an ongoing incessant festival of cruel hermeneutic sacrificial.

This article explores the nuanced interaction early Nietzsche affords towards the thought and mission of the Christian priest in The Birth of Tragedy and its associated The Dionysiac Worldview. In terms of positive engagement, first, Nietzsche’s project of ‘justification’, central to these works, can be seen as pertaining to the project of the Christian priest, as Nietzsche understands him. Second, Nietzsche chooses to characterise and demonstrate his preferred ‘justifications’, the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’, by paralleling and borrowing from historical efforts of (...) theodicy formulated by the priest. Third, Nietzsche’s self-embraced project to revive a ‘Tragic’ culture, to ‘hallow’ the Dionysian, tracks the repeated historical role he attributes to the priest. Fourth, and here by way of critical engagement, Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘Socratic’ justification, again paralleling elements from Christian theodicy, anticipates what will become Nietzsche’s mature, no longer nuanced, hostile stance towards the thought and function of the Christian priest figure. (shrink)

A key contention of Nietzsche's philosophy is that art helps us affirm life. A common reading holds that it does so by paving over, concealing, or beautifying life's undesirable features. This interpretation is unsatisfactory for two main reasons: Nietzsche suggests that art should foreground what is ‘ugly’ about existence, and he sees thoroughgoing honesty about life's character as a requirement on genuine affirmation. The paper presents an alternative reading. According to this reading, artworks depicting something terrible give us a feeling (...) of fearlessness or courage by enabling an extraordinary state of affective distance from their content. The value of art lies in the fact that the aesthetic state resembles and invites us to pursue a psychic condition Nietzsche valorises. In making this case, the paper reveals a surprising continuity between an important strand in nineteenth-century aesthetic thought and contemporary distance theories of aesthetic engagement. It also casts new light on Nietzsche's famous criticisms of Kant's notion of disinterested aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)