Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a fascinating and powerful thinker whom I do not think I discuss enough in this place. But someone asked a question on Quora thus: whether there was anyone who continued Nietzsche's work in something akin to the way in which Hegel continued that of Kant. There are many ways I might have gone about answering it. To be quite honest, the querent actually mentioned how "Kant" had continued the work of "Hegel". That is a chronological absurdity of course, so I presume that Kant (1724 -1804) and Hegel (1770 - 1831) were simply reversed in the question by typographical haste. If as I suspect the querent meant to ask about a continuance of Nietzsche in the manner of the continuance of Kant by Hegel, we also have to consider what kind of continuance THAT is. I infer that the querent meant not someone calling him/herself a Nietzschean and dedicated to exegesis of a Master, but someone who continued-with-a-difference. So I repl...
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At Quora recently I found this question: Is Nietzsche's will to power a historical precursor to William James' pragmatism? I answered: You probably have in mind James “will to believe” here, rather than pragmatism more generally. If so, the first necessary response is that the two speculations, about will to power and will to believe, were underway at about the same time, so neither can logically be said to be a precursor to the other. They may mirror one another, because they come from analogous circumstances. Nietzsche was trying to survive a bout with Schopenhauerian pessimism by getting THROUGH it and coming out the other side. James was trying to survive a bout with his own personalized pessimism, what he called the “religion of the sick soul,” also by passing through it and finding what he could on the other side. So we get on the one hand Nietzsche’s will to power, where power (German “macht”) means something like self-actualization. And we get on the other hand James’ w...
The NDPR has two new reviews of book about Nietzsche up. One concerns FN's "philosophical psychology." The book is the work of Mattei Riccardi. The review comes to us from Christopher Fowles, of the University of Oxford. I will merely drop in this passage from Fowles: Consciousness has been the locus of much discussion regarding Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind, and not without reason. The inadequacy of conscious thought and the threat posed by the misunderstandings it engenders are central themes in Nietzsche’s mature writings. Furthermore, his remarks are perplexing. Nietzsche presents consciousness as at once a danger—error-strewn, superficial, misleading—and a nullity, of little consequence in contrast to the sub-conscious interplay of drives and affects. One might reasonably wonder if these can be reconciled without Nietzsche being guilty of some egregiously misleading overstatement. Riccardi’s picture, however, promises a solution. Nietzsche, we are told, should b...
It shouldn't be news by now that this was a hijacking,. But in case I have young readers who might have fallen for the myth of a Neitzsche/Nazi connection at some point, here's a link to a fine discussion. https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/how-the-nazis-hijacked-nietzsche-and-how-it-can-happen-to-anybody?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral
The philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter recently wrote summarily, "Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche." For some of us in the peanut gallery, this raises the question: what the heck is a Straussian? The term arose in political philosophy and was in use back in the early 1970s, around the time Leo Strauss co-edited a textbook on the history of political philosophy with Joseph Cropsey. The term "Straussian" suggests several things. First, it is an approach to the classic texts of political philosophy that presumes that nearly every important philosopher in the canon was hiding something. Thus, texts must be read for their esoteric meaning. Second, related to this, the esoteric meaning was often irreligious. Political philosophy is full of thinkers who are in fact atheists but who have to hide the fact. Third, related to this in turn, Straussians suggest that these thinkers were right to hide the fact. Their own premise is that there is no God,...
Nietzsche was thinking, I submit, of the whole line of canonical classical Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus when he wrote as follows: "What gives these men the right to be considered philosophers, unlike the other astronomers, geographers and doctors who were active especially in the latter half of the period, was their common assumption that the world possessed some kind of integral unity and determinability which could be understood and explained in rational terms. "
Regular readers will know that I often owe my material for this blog to Brian Leiter, of the University of Chicago, and more pertinently (just now) proprietor of the wonderful philosophy blog Leiter Reports. This will be another example. Here is a piece of an essay on the interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy that Leiter published back in 1992. He has recently posted it on his blog, indicating that he still believes it worth discussing (there are many things I was writing in 1992 of which I would not say the same, of which I will never be posting here.) So ... this is Leiter, controverting one important interpretation of Nietzsche: Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as a Literature offers an elegant synthesis of themes from other (then au courant) readings of Nietzsche by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Paul DeMan, and Richard Rorty. He effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Neham...
As promised, a more personal follow-up to the encyclopedia-derived material of yesterday. It interests me because it relates, in an ambivalent way, to the controversy over "compatibilism." Intuitively most people (but not most philosophers, or I would guess most neurologists) would say that a person can only be blamed for an action if she could have done otherwise. So if there are no actions as to which one can accurately say that she could have done otherwise, she is not responsible for anything, there is no real distinction between actions per se and mere events. Given a thorough going determinism, then, conventional notions of moral responsibility, of perhaps of morality itself, go out the window. That inference is, as I say, intuitively appealing but very controversial. Back on Feb. 9th I shared with you a recent survey of contemporary academic philosophers on this subject among many others. It indicated that a clear majority of those asked said that they are ...
Friedrich Nietzsche often uses the word "morality" in a pejorative sense, but sometimes uses it for a system of values that he is promoting himself, a re-valued system of values. This causes some confusion. Accordingly, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses the initials MPS, for "morality in a pejorative sense" in an article on Nietzschean themes in moral and political philosophy. What Nietzsche despised about MPS boils down to three presumptions: that human beings are free and so morally responsible for our actions; that the human self is transparent, so some of us can make coherent judgment about why others have acted as they have; and that human selves are sufficiently similar for it to be possible to announce a single moral code for all. Nietzsche targets the first of these, for example, when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil that "the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd," and that MPS requires that absurdit...
I've discussed trolley problems before. This is a new version, in a new philosophical context. One common issue in the philosophy of religion is: does religious belief help people act morally? If so, how? Nietzsche famously contended that the "death of God" had great implications for morality, for the transvaluation of values, implications which he welcomed. Many theists accept that judgment, but dis-value what Nietzsche valued. Many atheists and agnostics deny that there is any such implication. One interpretation of Nietzsche's somewhat cryptic comments on the subject is that the idea of equality -- that my life is worth as much as yours, or in a variant that no quantitative comparison can or should be made between my life's value and yours -- is a religious presumption at heart. It depends upon the background notion that we are all alike creatures of the same Creator and it will not long outlast the death of that idea. In that spirit, Brian Leite...
Recently I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc. Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
My recent reading (although in this case it is more like a skimming) includes a work on Heidegger's philosophy, by Herman Philipse. Philipse is concerned, among much else, with the differences between Heidegger and an important precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Heidegger criticized Nietzsche, and Philipse believes the criticisms were ill-founded, and that Nietzsche was the greater philosopher of the two. Here's a link: Google Books. I merely "skim" works on, or within, the continental traditional of philosophy these days, because life is too short, and it is the Anglo-American tradition that deserves such time as I can give to more careful reading. Still, for those of you who may judge differently, here is a sample of Philipse: "Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche aims at answering two questions: (1) What is Nietzsche's fundamental stance ... within the history of Western metaphysics? and (2) did Nietzsche ask the proper question of philosoph...
Somebody recently asked me what was Germany "going through" during the peak of Friedrich Nietzsche's literary productivity. I thought it was an oddly worded question, but I'll answer it anyway. Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900, his years of flourishing were the 1880s, the decade of THE GAY SCIENCE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, THE CASE OF WAGNER, etc. The end of that decade saw his descent into incoherence and madness. For social/political context, let's back up a bit. In 1871 Prussia, under the leadership of the Hohenzollern family and their minister, Otto von Bismarck, declared the creation of the German Empire, comprising the northern German-speaking states (Austria was deliberately excluded). This was what would later be known as the Second Reich, following upon the death of the Holy Roman Empire early in the 19th century, the so-called First Reich. The 1870s as a whole is remembered for the Kulturkampf , a deliberate at...