Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects

Friedrich Nietzsche was Less Well-Read in the history of philosophy than were many of his peers in the pantheon, whether Hegel before him or Heidegger after, but he was not for that reason any less hesitant to pronounce judgment on the worth of the other great philosophers: Plato was “boring”; Descartes was “superficial”; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke signify “a debasement and lowering of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century”; Kant was an “idiot” and a “catastrophic spider,” etc.1 Against this overarching trend of negativity, his uncharacteristically positive response to one thinker, a thinker who initially appears to us as quite different from him, is all the more surprising. In the summer of ..