NIETZSCHE

Placing Nietzsche in the context of nineteenth-century philosophy is dif…cult for several major and interrelated reasons. First, Nietzsche was not a conventional philosopher. Not only was he not trained as a philosopher – his doctorate and his …rst and only academic position, at the University of Basel, were in philology. More importantly, he had little time for philosophy as an academic discipline; he eschewed many of its principal concerns such as metaphysics and epistemology. Even moral philosophy, especially as practised in the Anglo-American context, is far from Nietzsche’s central concerns – after all, how many moral philosophers are concerned with nihilism and the af…rmation of life, arguably Nietzsche’s central concerns? Nietzsche was more inclined to diagnose why one would take metaphysics and epistemology seriously than to actually seek answers to the questions typically raised by metaphysicians and epistemologists. Thus he often characterized himself …rst and foremost as a psychologist rather than a philosopher; in Ecce Homo Nietzsche says “[t] hat a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings is perhaps the …rst insight reached by a good reader” (Ecce Homo, EH: “Why I Write Such Good Books,” 5). Second, against the trend of nineteenth-century optimism Nietzsche rejected many of the central tenets of Enlightenment thought (the value of reason, the value of science, the value of truth, the inevitability of progress). Indeed, to a certain extent (which we shall examine later), Nietzsche belonged to an esoteric, and now largely lost, line of nineteenth-century thought which might be labelled degenerationist. Third, for a long time Nietzsche’s in¶uence was primarily felt outside of philosophy, by psychoanalysts, for instance Adler and, arguably, Freud, and by writers, for instance, Rilke and Mann; and then mostly in the twentiethrather than the nineteenth century-as Nietzsche presciently said of himself “some are born posthumously.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Nietzsche is what might be called a local rather than a global thinker. Traditionally philosophers have sought …nal answers to so-called perennial questions, “What is truth?,” “What is knowledge?,” “What is the good life?,” and the like. The answers, once achieved, are meant to have scope over all time and all situations. Nietzsche’s thought tends to be much more local, addressing such questions as “What is the value of truth for this kind of person?,” “What is the meaning of the ascetic

ideal for that kind of person?” For those who think globally this often tends to lead to the conclusion that Nietzsche’s philosophy is rife with contradictions; here he denies the value of truth and champions the need for illusions, there he extols the search for truth; here he laments that asceticism is a form of life denial, there he extols asceticism as a form of life af…rmation. In reading Nietzsche one must keep in mind that he nearly always has a speci…c target in mind, so that when he praises X he has in mind one target and when he criticizes X he has another target in mind. For instance, in The Genealogy of Morality, a work that today is often treated as his canonical text, he praises the ascetic ideal where it is indulged by a certain type of philosopher as a means for avoiding worldly distractions so he can concentrate on his true task of giving birth to new thoughts and values; yet in the same work he vili…es the ascetic ideal where it is used by certain religious types as a means of denying, indeed slandering the world. Thus for Nietzsche, unlike most philosophers, it is typically pointless to ask does he value the search for truth, since for Nietzsche the question will always be “what does the search for truth mean” in this given context. Even Nietzsche’s infamous condemnation of Judeo-Christian values needs to be relevantly contextualized. After all, he is not claiming that those values must be totally destroyed or that they are bad for everyone. Rather, he is claiming that there are certain types of people for whom those values are inimical. This allows him to acknowledge that for other kinds of people, admittedly people he typically deems to be of little interest, Christianity allows for the fullest possible expression they are capable of. Thus he says such things as “the ideas of the herd should rule in the herd – but not reach out beyond it” (KSA: 12.273, repr. WP: 287; see also BGE: 61). Nevertheless, against all this we should note that as a trained philologist Nietzsche was well versed in the work of the ancient philosophers. Beside his knowledge of Aristotle and Plato, he had excellent knowledge of the pre-Socratics. Furthermore, as an eclectic philosophical autodidact, he had detailed knowledge of Schopenhauer, even if his knowledge of, for example, Kant, Hegel and Hume was less solid. More importantly, while Nietzsche does not …t times where philosophy is becoming an ever more technical specialized subject, his central concerns are close to the perennial, if now unfashionable, philosophical question of what is a good life. Finally, his in¶uence on philosophers has been steadily increasing; on the continent ever since he was taken up by Heidegger, and in the Anglo-American world since philosophers such as Arthur Danto, Philippa Foot and more recently Bernard Williams have claimed that Nietzsche can be seen as addressing, even challenging some of analytic philosophers’ central concerns. We will return to address Nietzsche’s relation to philosophy later, in considering his ideas about the death of God, perspectivism, will to power, sublimation, eternal recurrence, af…rmation of life, and his notion of the self. For now we will focus on getting an overview of Nietzsche’s central concerns and then looking at the particulars of his intellectual career. It might be claimed that nihilism and its overcoming is the central focus of Nietzsche’s philosophy (cf. Reginster 2006 and May 1999). This way of putting things, while essentially correct, needs to be coupled with an awareness of the fact that

Nietzsche did not always have nihilism clearly in his sights. Rather, he slowly came to see the diagnosing and overcoming of nihilism as his central concern. Nietzsche scholars are generally agreed in dividing Nietzsche’s writings into three periods. The …rst period, from 1872-7, might aptly be called the romantic period. The chief writings of this period are The Birth of Tragedy, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (unpublished in Nietzsche’s lifetime), and The Untimely Meditations. Simplifying, we may say his central normative concern of this period is that of the prospect of cultural renewal, and in particular cultural renewal in Germany. This is a concern he inherited from the German romantics, in particular from the early Goethe and Hölderlin, and one that was shared with his early mentor Richard Wagner. From Schopenhauer he took over a Kantian metaphysics through which he tended to frame his normative concerns. The middle period, from 1878 to 1882, has often been called the positivist period. Here Nietzsche seeks primarily to understand the nature of man. Here too there is some gesturing at a normative agenda, though the content of that normative project, as witnessed by his vague talk of the need for free spirits, is far from clear. The chief writings of this period are Daybreak, Human All Too Human and The Gay Science. The last period, from 1883 to 1888, might aptly be called the anti-moralist period. Here Nietzsche recognizes the inevitable tyranny of philistine culture and attempts to lessen the hold of what he regards as the deeply nihilistic Judeo-Christian values which sustain that culture, in the hope of fostering conditions that might allow rare individuals to rise above it. The principal works of this period are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, The Anti-Christ, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo. Throughout his career it is generally normative concerns that drive Nietzsche’s thought. To a large degree metaphysics and epistemology are only his concerns to the extent that they are relevant to his various normative projects. Regarding the overall trajectory of his normative thought we might say that in his early romantic period he optimistically aimed for general cultural renewal. His message, in particular his naive assumption that his compatriots, fresh from the victory of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, would recognize the lack of genuine culture that af¶icted Germany, fell stillborn: Telling a victorious Germany, one that saw itself as replacing France as the new powerhouse of Europe, that it had no culture was a message almost guaranteed to …nd no audience. His middle period may then be seen as a kind of retrenchment where Nietzsche seeks psychological insight into human nature allowing him a deeper insight into why his earlier message could not be heard. His …nal period, weighted with a pessimistic assessment of human nature which posited a deep nihilism to be at the centre of Europe’s Judeo-Christian values, aims at the more limited end of …nding the means for a few special individuals to overcome nihilism and attain new cultural heights.