Best known for having declared the death of God, Nietzsche was a thinker thoroughly absorbed in the Christian tradition in which he was born and raised. Yet while the atheist Nietzsche is well known, the pious Nietzsche is seldom recognized and rarely understood. Redeeming Nietzsche examines the residual theologian in the most vociferous of atheists. Giles Fraser demonstrates that although Nietzsche rejected God, he remained obsessed with the question of human salvation. Examining his accounts of art, truth, morality and eternity, Nietzsche's thought is revealed to be
While the atheist Nietzsche is well known, the pious Nietzsche is seldom recognised and understood. Fraser traces the failures of Nietzsche's salvation theology to an inability to face the depths of human suffering.
Bruce Ellis Benson puts forward the surprising idea that Nietzsche was never a godless nihilist, but was instead deeply religious. But how does Nietzsche affirm life and faith in the midst of decadence and decay? Benson looks carefully at Nietzsche's life history and views of three decadents, Socrates, Wagner, and Paul, to come to grips with his pietistic turn. Key to this understanding is Benson's interpretation of the powerful effect that Nietzsche thinks music has on the human spirit. Benson claims that Nietzsche's improvisations at the piano were emblematic of the Dionysian or frenzied, ecstatic state he sought, but was ultimately unable to achieve, before he descended into madness. For its insights into questions of faith, decadence, and transcendence, this book is an important contribution to Nietzsche studies, philosophy, and religion.
Nietzsche's philosophy - at once revolutionary, erudite and deep - reaches into all spheres of the arts. Well into a second century of influence, the profundity of his ideas and the complexity of his writings still determine Nietzsche's power to engage his readers. His first book, "The Birth of Tragedy", presents us with a lively inquiry into the existential meaning of Greek tragedy. We are confronted with the idea that the awful truth of our existence can be revealed through tragic art, whereby our relationship to the world transfigures from pessimistic despair into sublime elation and affirmation. It is a landmark text in his oeuvre and remains an important book both for newcomers to Nietzsche and those wishing to enrich their appreciation of his mature writings. "Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy" provides a clear account of the text and explores the philosophical, literary and historical influences bearing upon it. Each chapter examines part of the text, explaining the ideas presented and assessing relevant scholarly points of interpretation. The book will be an invaluable guide to readers in Philosophy, Literary Studies and Classics coming to "The Birth of Tragedy" for the first time.
In Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming Without a Self, André van der Braak engages Nietzsche in a dialogue with four representatives of the Buddhist Zen tradition: Nagarjuna (c. 150-250), Linji (d. 860), Dogen (1200-1253), and Nishitani (1900-1990).In doing so, he reveals Nietzsche's thought as a philosophy of continuous self-overcoming, in which even the notion of "self" has been overcome. Van der Braak begins by analyzing Nietzsche's relationship to Buddhism and status as a transcultural thinker,recalling research on Nietzsche and Zen to date and setting out the basic argument of the study. He continues by examining the practices of self-overcoming in Nietzsche and Zen, comparing Nietzsche's radical skepticism with that of Nagarjuna and comparingNietzsche's approach to truth to Linji's. Nietzsche's methods of self-overcoming are compared to Dogen's zazen, or sitting meditation practice, and Dogen's notion of forgetting the self. These comparisons and others build van der Braak's case for acriticism of Nietzsche informed by the ideas of Zen Buddhism and a criticism of Zen Buddhism seen through the Western lens of Nietzsche - coalescing into one world philosophy. This treatment, focusing on one of the most fruitful areas of research withincontemporary comparative and intercultural philosophy, will be useful to Nietzsche scholars, continental philosophers, and comparative philosophers.
We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places. Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.
This treatment is the first to comprehensively address the issue of where Nietzsche stands in relation to environment, and it will contribute to the 'greening' of Nietzsche. Using a philological method Del Caro reveals the ecumenical Nietzsche whose doctrines are strategies for responsible and creative partnership between humans and earth. The major doctrines are shown to be organically related to early writings linked to paganism, the quotidian, and the closest things of Human, All Too Human. Perspective is shifted from time to place in the eternal recurrence of the same, and from power to empowerment in The Will to Power.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche revive an ancient approach to ethics that evaluates different ways of life considered as a whole. Comparing and contrasting their respective ideals of faith and individual sovereignty, this work reveals a valuable new path for contemporary ethics.
The first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra--an important and difficult text and the only book Nietzsche ever wrote with characters, events, setting, and a plot. Laurence Lampert's chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche's magnum opus clarifies not only Zarathustra's narrative structure but also the development of Nietzsche's thinking as a whole. "An impressive piece of scholarship. Insofar as it solves the riddle of Zarathustra in an unprecedented fashion, this study serves as an invaluable resource for all serious students of Nietzsche's philosophy. Lampert's persuasive and thorough interpretation is bound to spark a revival of interest in Zarathustra and raise the standards of Nietzsche scholarship in general."--Daniel W. Conway, Review of Metaphysics "A book of scholarship, filled with passion and concern for its text."--Tracy B. Strong, Review of Politics "This is the first genuine textual commentary on Zarathustra in English, and therewith a genuine reader's guide. It makes a significant and original contribution to its field."--Werner J. Dannhauser, Cornell University "This is a very valuable and carefully wrought study of a very complex and subtle poetic-philosophical work that provides access to Nietzsche's style of presenting his thought, as well as to his passionately affirmed values. Lampert's commentary and analysis of Zarathustra is so thorough and detailed. . . that it is the most useful English-language companion to Nietzsche's 'edifying' and intriguing work."--Choice Selected as one of Choice's outstanding academic books for 1988
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.
