Nietzsche and Modern German Thought
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0415044421
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Nietzsche is no longer a marginal figure in the study of philosophy. This collection of specially commissioned essays reflects the emergence of a serious interest amongst philosophers, sociologists and political theorists. By considering Nietzsche's ideas in the context of the modern philosophical tradition from which it emerged, his importance in contemporary thought is refined and reaffirmed.
Modern German thought begins with Kant and has rarely escaped his influence. It is with respect to this Kantian heritage that this volume examines Nietzsche. These essays critically consider Nietzsche's relation to Kant and the post-Kantian tradition. In broad terms it is his relation to the domains of knowledge, ethics and aesthetics, that is through the three Kantian critiques, that Nietzsche's thought is illuminated. This allows a surprising variety of areas and questions, both about Nietzsche and about philosophy to be investigated.
doesn’t mean that we must assume that such unities exist. We have borrowed the concept of unity from our ‘ego’-concept—our oldest article of faith. We would never have formed the concept ‘thing’ if we did not take ourselves to be unities. At present… we are firmly convinced that our I-concept does not guarantee any real unity.18 What Lange insinuated in Nietzsche’s mind was the idea that categories such as unity, substance, being, object, cause, etc., were basically convenient hypothetical
concerned with describing the ‘pluralility of interpretations’ of the world in the sciences. Unfortunately he often intermixes these two levels of discourse in his notes. The problem of the relation between phenomena and things-inthemselves found in Kant’s thought is replicated in the various scientific interpretations of the world. In order for our intellect to grasp the distinction between the essence of things (according to the sciences) and the phenomenal world we experience, he observes, it
WP MA KSA UdW BAW The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W.Kaufmann, Vintage, 1967. Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Daybreak, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1982. The Gay Science, trans. W.Kaufmann, Random House, 1974. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin, 1969. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W.Kaufmann, Random House, 1966. The Twilight of
that having a sense of power over one’s self and one’s environment is dependent on the experience of a free will. It is a perspective shared by Nietzsche when he argues 168 Nietzsche and Modern German Thought that the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking but, above all, an ‘affect of command’ (BGE 19). Considered in such terms the ‘will’, Nietzsche says, is ‘the distinguishing feature of sovereignty and of strength’ (GS 347). Rousseau’s understanding of the will, however, is
Sittlichkeit der Sitte) produce the fruit of the sovereign individual, an individual which is autonomous and ‘supraethical’ (übersittlich): autonomous and ethical are mutually exclusive in the sense that to be autonomous is to be beyond the standpoint of customs within which there is no scope for individuality (OGM II, 2).39 Thus, Nietzsche speaks of the emancipated individual who is master of a free will and who has earned the ‘right to make promises’. The story which Nietzsche narrates of how