Who is frederick niche

Others Hussain take Nietzsche to be advocating a fictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciously invented contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy our needs as valuing creatures, even though all evaluative claims are strictly speaking false. First, while a few passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as some kind of legislative fiat e.

Second, a great many of the passages esp. GS 78, , , , connect value creation to artistic creation, suggesting that Nietzsche took artistic creation and aesthetic value as an important paradigm or metaphor for his account of values and value creation more generally. While some Soll attack this entire idea as confused, other scholars have called on these passages as support for either fictionalist or subjective realist interpretations.

In addition to showing that not all value creation leads to results that Nietzsche would endorse, this observation leads to interesting questions—e. If so, what differentiates the two modes? Can we say anything about which is to be preferred? Nietzsche praises many different values, and in the main, he does not follow the stereotypically philosophical strategy of deriving his evaluative judgments from one or a few foundational principles. A well-known passage appears near the opening of the late work, The Antichrist :.

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. That doctrine seems to include the proposal that creatures like us or more broadly: all life, or even all things period aim at the enhancement of their power—and then further, that this fact entails that enhanced power is good for us or for everything.

The same conception has been developed by Paul Katsafanas , who argues that, qua agents, we are ineluctably committed to valuing power because a Reginster-style will to power is a constitutive condition on acting at all.

His account thereby contributes to the constitutivist strategy in ethics pioneered by Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman , On this view, what Nietzsche values is power understood as a tendency toward growth, strength, domination, or expansion Schacht —88; Hussain Leiter is surely right to raise worries about the Millian reconstruction. Nietzsche apparently takes us to be committed to a wide diversity of first order aims, which raises prima facie doubts about the idea that for him all willing really takes power as its first-order aim as the Millian argument would require.

It is not clear that this view can avoid the objection rooted in the possibility of pessimism i. Given his engagement with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche should have been sensitive to the worry. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati : let that be my love henceforth!

I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

GS Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish…. Let us look away. After that penultimate section, Nietzsche quotes the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which returns repeatedly to the same theme of affirmation see, e. That critique is directed in large measure against aspects of morality that turn the agent against herself—or more broadly, against the side of Christianity that condemns earthly existence, demanding that we repent of it as the price of admission to a different, superior plane of being.

What is wrong with these views, according to Nietzsche, is that they negate our life, instead of affirming it. The affirmation of life can be framed as the rejection of nihilism, so understood. For Nietzsche, that involves a two-sided project: it should both undermine values by reference to which the world could not honestly be affirmed, while also articulating the values exemplified by life and the world that make them affirmable.

Readers interested in this issue about the compatibility of Nietzschean affirmation with Nietzschean critique should also consult Huddleston, forthcoming a, which reaches a more diffident conclusion than this entry.

If we are to affirm our life and the world, however, we had better be honest about what they are really like. Endorsing things under some illusory Panglossian description is not affirmation, but self-delusion. How much truth does a spirit endure , how much truth does it dare?

More and more that became for me the real measure of value. EH Pref. Some texts present truthfulness as a kind of personal commitment—one tied to particular projects and a way of life in which Nietzsche happens to have invested. For example, in GS 2 Nietzsche expresses bewilderment in the face of people who do not value honesty:. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience.

No, life has not disappointed me… ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment for the seeker for knowledge…. Indeed, he assigns the highest cultural importance to the experiment testing whether such a life can be well lived:. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors now clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.

Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer the question by experiment.

To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. A second strand of texts emphasizes connections between truthfulness and courage , thereby valorizing honesty as the manifestation of an overall virtuous character marked by resoluteness, determination, and spiritual strength.

Such wishful thinking is not only cognitively corrupt, for Nietzsche, but a troubling manifestation of irresolution and cowardice. Finally, it is worth noting that even when Nietzsche raises doubts about this commitment to truthfulness, his very questions are clearly motivated by the central importance of that value. But even in the face of such worries, Nietzsche does not simply give up on truthfulness.

But if truthfulness is a core value for Nietzsche, he is nevertheless famous for insisting that we also need illusion to live well. From the beginning of his career to the end, he insisted on the irreplaceable value of art precisely because of its power to ensconce us in illusion. Art and artistry carry value for Nietzsche both as a straightforward first-order matter, and also as a source of higher-order lessons about how to create value more generally. But Nietzsche is just as invested in the first-order evaluative point that what makes a life admirable includes its aesthetic features.

One last point deserves special mention. Significantly, the opposition here is not just the one emphasized in The Birth of Tragedy —that the substantive truth about the world might be disturbing enough to demand some artistic salve that helps us cope.

Nietzsche raises a more specific worry about the deleterious effects of the virtue of honesty—about the will to truth, rather than what is true—and artistry is wheeled in to alleviate them, as well:. If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable.

Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. Those views would entail that the basic conditions of cognition prevent our ever knowing things as they really are, independently of us see Anderson , ; Hussain ; and the entry on Friedrich Albert Lange.

But while those are the immediate allusions, Nietzsche also endorses more general ideas with similar implications—e. What is most important, however, is the structure of the thought in GS So it seems that the values Nietzsche endorses conflict with one another, and that very fact is crucial to the value they have for us Anderson — This strand of thought continues to receive strong emphasis in recent interpretations—see, e.

As Reginster shows, what opposes Nietzschean freedom of spirit is fanaticism , understood as a vehement commitment to some faith or value-set given from without, which is motivated by a need to believe in something because one lacks the self-determination to think for oneself GS A variety of scholars have recently explored the resources of this line of thought in Nietzsche; Anderson surveys the literature, and notable contributions include Ridley b , Pippin , , Reginster , Katsafanas b, , , , and especially the papers in Gemes and May We have seen that Nietzsche promotes a number of different values.

In some cases, these values reinforce one another. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we may neither err nor hit upon the truth singly.

GM Pref. For example, the account of honesty and artistry explored in sections 3. Each simple thing or complex event is linked, inextricably, to a near infinite number of others, also demonstrating the possibilities of their happenings.

If all of these possibilities could be presented in such a way as to account for their relationships and probabilities, as for example on a marvelously complex set of dice, then it could be shown that each of these possibilities will necessarily occur, and re-occur, given that the game of dice continues a sufficient length of time. Next, Nietzsche considers the nature of temporal limits and duration. He proposes that no beginning or end of time can be determined, absolutely, in thought.

No matter what sort of temporal limits are set by the imagination, questions concerning what lies beyond these limits never demonstrably cease.

Time is infinite with this model, but filled by a finite number of material possibilities, recurring eternally in the never-ending play of the great cosmic game of chance. What intuition led Nietzsche to interpret the cosmos as having no inherent meaning, as if it were playing itself out and repeating itself in eternally recurring cycles, in the endless creation and destruction of force-points without purpose? How does this curious temporal model relate to the living of life?

In his philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche grounds eternal recurrence in his own experiences by relating an anecdote regarding, supposedly, its first appearance to him in thought. It is important to note that at the time of this discovery, Nietzsche was bringing his work on The Gay Science to a close and beginning to sketch out a plan for Zarathustra. The greatest weight. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

How would the logic of this new temporal model alter our experiences of factual life? Would such a thought diminish the willfulness of those who grasp it? Would it diminish our willingness to make normative decisions?

What would we lose by accepting the doctrine of this teaching? What would we gain? It seems strange that Nietzsche would place so much dramatic emphasis on this temporal form of determinism. If all of our worldly strivings and cravings were revealed, in the logic of eternal recurrence, to be no more than illusions, if every contingent fact of creation and destruction were understood to have merely repeated itself without end, if everything that happens, as it happens, both re-inscribes and anticipates its own eternal recurrence, what would be the affect on our dispositions, on our capacities to strive and create?

Would we be crushed by this eternal comedy? Or, could we somehow find it liberating? Even though Nietzsche has envisioned a temporal model of existence seemingly depriving us of the freedom to act in unique ways, we should not fail to catch sight of the qualitative differences the doctrine nevertheless leaves open for the living. The logic of eternity determines every contingent fact in each cycle of recurrence.

That is, each recurrence is quantitatively the same. The quality of that recurrence, however, seems to remain an open question. What if the thought took hold of us? If we indeed understood ourselves to be bound by fate and thus having no freedom from the eternal logic of things, could we yet summon love for that fate, to embrace a kind of freedom for becoming that person we are?

Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! Even some of the most enthusiastic Nietzsche commentators have, like Kaufmann, deemed it unworthy of serious reflection. The presentation of this idea, however, leaves room for much doubt concerning the literal meaning of these claims, as does the paucity of direct references to the doctrine in other works intended for publication.

Nevertheless, intellectual histories pursuing the question of how Nietzsche has been placed into the service of all sorts of political interests are an important part of Nietzsche scholarship. While an exhaustive survey of the way this key issue has been addressed in the scholarship would be difficult in this context, a few influential readings may be briefly mentioned.

Nietzsche had many casual associates and a few close friends while in school and as a professor in Basel. On both levels of this complex issue, the work of Martin Heidegger looms paramount. However, the plausibility of this reading has come into question almost from the moment the full extent of it was made known in the s and 60s. Nevertheless, the question remains open whether Nietzsche does not already leave the metaphysical dimensions of any problems essentially and intentionally behind in his conception of the cosmos.

Notable works by Schacht, Clark, Conway, and Leiter fall into this category. In a loosely related movement, many commentators bring Nietzsche into dialogue with the tradition by concentrating on aspects of his work relevant to particular philosophical issues, such as the problem of truth, the development of a natural history of morals, a philosophical consideration of moral psychology, problems concerning subjectivity and logo-centrism, theories of language, and many others.

Due to these suspicions, moreover, common Nietzschean themes such as historical nihilism, Dionysianism, tragedy, and play, as well as cosmological readings of will to power, and eternal recurrence are downplayed in Anglo-American treatments, in favor of bringing out more traditional sorts of philosophical problems such as truth and knowledge, values and morality, and human consciousness.

Nietzsche reception in the United States has been determined by a unique set of circumstances, as portrayed by Schacht and others. The next stage of Nietzsche reception in the U. So successful was Kaufmann in this regard, that Anglo-American readers had difficulty seeing Nietzsche in any other light, and philosophers who found existentialism shallow regarded Nietzsche with the same disdain.

In such a light, Schacht sees his work on Nietzsche as an attempt to bridge this institutional divide, as do other Anglo-American readers. The work of Rorty may certainly be characterized in this manner.

Despite these attempts, tensions remain between Anglo-American readers who cultivate a neo-pragmatic version of Nietzsche and those who, by comparison, seem too comfortable accepting uncritically the problematic aspects of the Continental interpretation.

The following list is by no means exhaustive. A number of these writings are available to English readers, and a few are accessible in a variety of editions, either as supplements to the major works or as part of assorted critical editions. The following list offers a sample of these writings. A firsthand and secondhand biographical narrative may be followed in the collected letters of Nietzsche and his associates:.

The following list is by no means comprehensive, nor does it purport to represent all of the major themes prevalent in Nietzsche scholarship today.

It is designed for the reader seeking to learn more about the intellectual history of Nietzsche reception in the twentieth century. In addition to a typically large number full-length manuscripts on Nietzsche published every year, scholarly works in English may be found in general, academic periodicals focused on Continental philosophy, ethical theory, critical theory, the history of ideas and similar themes. In addition, some major journals are devoted entirely to Nietzsche and aligned topics.

Related both to the issue of orthodoxy and to the backlash against multiplicity in Nietzsche interpretation, the value of having so many outlets available for Nietzsche commentators has even been questioned. The following journals are devoted specifically to Nietzsche studies. Dale Wilkerson Email: dale. Friedrich Nietzsche — Nietzsche was a German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic.

The following division is typical: i. Post—the later period Nietzsche transitions into a new period with the conclusion of The Gay Science Book IV and his next published work, the novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, produced in four parts between and The Human Exemplar How and why do nihilism and the pessimism of weakness prevail in modernity?

Again, from the notebook of Will to Power, aphorism 27 , we find two conditions for this situation: 1. Will to Power The exemplar expresses hope not granted from metaphysical illusions. Zarathustra answers: Listen to my teaching, you wisest men! References and Further Reading a. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 24 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke , ed.

At the present time, the project remains unfinished. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, Hollingdale Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, The four essays of this work are available separately in other editions Human, All Too Human Menschliches, Allzumenschliches [vol. The later editions of this translation contain a helpful index. Walter Kaufman New York: Vintage, Hollingdale, New York: Penguin, Hollingdale New York: Penguin, Nietzsche contra Wagner Nietzsche contra Wagner , , first published , trans.

Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche , ed. Walter Kaufmann New York: Viking, Keith Ansell-Pearson; trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Marianne Cowan Washington, D. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Die vorplatonischen Philosophen , lectures during various semesters at Basel from to ; ed. II, part 4 , ed. Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations vol. Bernd Magnus; trans.

Richard T. Walter Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale New York: Vintage, Writings from the Late Notebooks writings from the Nachlass , ed.

Biographies A firsthand and secondhand biographical narrative may be followed in the collected letters of Nietzsche and his associates: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche , ed.

Gilman, trans. David J. The following list includes a few of the most well known biographies in English.

Overall, he advocated the return to master morality, because in his mind it provided a more powerful and autonomous framework for ethics than slave morality. God remains dead. And we have killed him. The God that had been the foundation upon which all European morality and metaphysics had been based for millennia was increasingly brought into question, by the Enlightenment and the accompanying trends toward secularization.

As much as Nietzsche balked against the simple morality of religious institutions, the death of God entailed for him the potential for an extremely dangerous widespread loss of meaning. The danger is that people will stop searching for meaning, and will simply acquiesce to the meaningless of existence.

On the other hand, however, Nietzsche saw great opportunity in this collapse of religious ethics and metaphysics. Humanity would prove its strength if it could confront nihilism and find a way through it to forge new truths, meanings, and ideals.

One way Nietzsche suggests we fight the malaise is to do things that make us feel powerful. Honestly, it gets kind of weird:. What is bad? What is happiness? That said, Nietzsche also makes rather disturbing comments like:. And one shall help them to do so. Another way Nietzsche saw of dealing with the creeping nihilism was affirmation.

He lays out the meaning of this very clearly in The Gay Science :. Amor fati : let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.

German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx published 'The Communist Manifesto' and 'Das Kapital,' anticapitalist works that form the basis of Marxism. Max Weber was a 19th-century German sociologist and one of the founders of modern sociology. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century. His best-known work is the 'Critique of Pure Reason.

German mechanical engineer Karl Benz designed and built the first practical automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine. Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher in the 17th century, was best known for his book 'Leviathan' and his political views on society. Alain LeRoy Locke was a philosopher best known for his writing on and support of the Harlem Renaissance. Joseph Goebbels served as minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler — a position from which he spread the Nazi message.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is known for his writings on good and evil, the end of religion in modern society and the concept of a "super-man.