This book is the first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. It argues that the four Meditations—which Nietzsche said “deserve the greatest attention for my development”—are not separate pieces, but instead form a unified philosophic narrative that constitutes his first attempt to diagnose and cure the spiritual ailments whose causes he traced to modern culture and science. Taking Nietzsche’s commentary on the four essays in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo as its interpretive guide, this book also shows that the Untimely Meditations contain early expositions of concepts like the last man, the overman, the new philosopher, the creation of values, and the malleability of nature—all staples of his later philosophy.
Nietzsche scholars have long been divided over whether Nietzsche is an aristocratic or a democratic thinker. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity overcomes this debate by proving both sides wrong. Jeffrey Church argues that in his early period writings, Nietzsche envisioned a cultural meritocracy that drew on the classical German tradition of Kant and Herder. The young Nietzsche's 'culture of humanity' synthesized the high and low, the genius and the people, the nation and humanity. Nietzsche's early ideal of culture can shed light on his mature period thought, since, Church argues, Nietzsche does not abandon this fundamental commitment to a cultural meritocracy. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity argues that Nietzsche's novel defense of culture can overcome some persisting problems in contemporary liberal theories of culture. As such, this book should interest Nietzsche scholars, political theorists and philosophers interested in modern thought, as well as contemporary thinkers concerned with the politics of culture.
This book provides a clear analysis of Nietzsche's controversial endorsement of conflict, struggle and war. It also elucidates many of his defining theories, including the will to power, the overman, and the eternal return.
If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.
Questioning the Enlightenment in Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Artaud challenges the cultural optimism of the Enlighten through an examination of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud. The Enlightenment was characterized, as Arnold put it, as “sweetness and light”. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud each pushed back against the optimism of the enlightenment through their writing and advanced the idea of cruelty as lying at the root of all human nature and culture. In this study, Statkiewicz explores the seemingly opposing notions of culture and cruelty within the works of these authors to discuss their complex relationship with one another.
Andrew Huddleston presents a striking challenge to the standard view of Nietzsche as the champion of the great individual, and preoccupied with his own quasi-artistic self-cultivation. Huddleston focuses on Nietzsche's idea of a flourishing culture to bring out the deep social and collectivist character of his thought.
Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklärer and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his ‘superman’ the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. In a work that constitutes the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo instead pursues a less reductive strategy. Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's anti-democratic thinking – his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics – he nevertheless refuses to treat these from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he restores Nietzsche’s works to their complex nineteenth-century context, and presents a more compelling account of the importance of Nietzsche as philosopher than can be expected from his many contemporary apologists. Translated by Gregor Benton. With an Introduction by Harrison Fluss. Originally published in Italian by Bollati Boringhieri Editore as Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, Turin, 2002.
Friedrich Nietzsche's complex connection to Charles Darwin has been much explored, and both scholarly and popular opinions have tended to assume a convergence in their thinking. In this study, Dirk Johnson challenges that assumption and takes seriously Nietzsche's own explicitly stated 'anti-Darwinism'. He argues for the importance of Darwin for the development of Nietzsche's philosophy, but he places emphasis on the antagonistic character of their relationship and suggests that Nietzsche's mature critique against Darwin represents the key to understanding his broader (anti-)Darwinian position. He also offers an original reinterpretation of the Genealogy of Morals, a text long considered sympathetic to Darwinian naturalism, but which he argues should be taken as Nietzsche's most sophisticated critique of both Darwin and his followers. His book will appeal to all who are interested in the philosophy of Nietzsche and its cultural context.
The four short works in Untimely Meditations were published by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876.They deal with such broad topics as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, strategies for cultural reform, the task of philosophy, the nature of education, and the relationship between art, science and life. They also include Nietzsche's earliest statement of his own understanding of human selfhood as a process of endlessly 'becoming who one is'. As Daniel Breazeale shows in his introduction to this new edition of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of the essays, these four early texts are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate many of the themes of his later writings. Nietzsche himself always cherished his Untimely Meditations and believed that they provide valuable evidence of his 'becoming and self-overcoming' and constitute a 'public pledge' concerning his own distinctive task as a philosopher.
"One of the most important works of German and European intellectual history published in years. . . . It will be welcomed by intellectual historians as a long overdue history of the multivalent reception and reworking of Nietzsche."—Jeffrey Herf, author of Reactionary Modernism
