The fact that Bernard Williams' writing is at times compressed, intense, almost epigrammatic, is acknowledged by many different reviewers of his work. Are these just incidental features? Or do they ...have any philosophical significance? The aim of this article is to study those features of Williams' style as part of a stylistic method that I (and Williams) refer to as compression. In the course of my paper, I will reflect on the idea of compression as a stylistic method for doing more with less in philosophical (and musical) writing; then I will take an excursus on some properties of Nietzsche's aphoristic writing (properties that can be found in Williams' writing as well); finally, I will locate some stylistic affinities between Williams and Nietzsche: from the image they both use to describe their philosophical style to the use of different devices (rhetorical questions, the use of em‐dashes, humor…) they both employ—devices that embody a free spirit they revealed in their own writing and towards their own environment.
In The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of ...philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.
O autor resgata, em sua trajetória profissional, as origens de seu interesse atual por ideias do filósofo Friedrich Nietzsche. Em seguida, mediante a descrição de instantes significativos acontecidos ...no seio de um processo psicoterapêutico, explora articulações com o método psicodramático, em especial entre as noções de vontade de poder e espontaneidade. O procedimento genealógico, as proposições de eterno retorno e de perspectivismo são outras contribuições do filósofo das quais o autor tem se valido em sua prática, permeada por uma concepção trágica de mundo. Alerta, no entanto, para os cuidados necessários ao se fazer interlocuções entre diferentes campos de saber, sob o risco de se descaracterizar conceitos. Por fim, avalia que as conexões têm se mostrado fecundas.
Nietzsche on the good of cultural change Cristy, Rachel
European journal of philosophy,
December 2023, 2023-12-00, 20231201, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper attributes to Nietzsche a theory of cultural development according to which pyramid societies—steeply hierarchical societies following a unified morality—systematically alternate with ...motley societies, which emerge when pyramid societies encounter other cultures or allow their strict mores to relax. Motley societies contain multiple value systems due to individual innovation or intercultural contact, and are less stringent in dictating individuals' roles. Consequently, many people are torn between incompatible values and lack direction, so they are drawn to a morality of mediocrity, which offers the modest goals of comfort and conformity. However, the need to mediate between conflicting values also tends to yield exceptional individuals who create new values, and can reshape the society into a new pyramid society governed by those values. I argue that Nietzsche favors neither type of society at the expense of the other, but believes the alternation itself is valuable: a pyramid society develops a value system to its full potential; then, when it encounters alternative values, the extraordinary individuals in the resulting motley society synthesize the competing systems into a fuller vision of human flourishing.
The article examines two claims made by Antoine Panaïoti: (1) That both Nietzsche and Buddhists denounce the self as a misleading fiction. (2) That Buddhist compassion is close to a “compassion of ...strength” that Nietzsche approves. This article agrees with (1) and disagrees with (2). The descriptive metaphysical commitments of Nietzsche and Buddhism are subordinate to their divergent normative projects. Both reject a single, enduring, and independent self; but where Mahāyāna Buddhism advocates care or compassion toward all sentient beings, Nietzsche questions the value of compassion, holding that suffering is not bad in itself. Some recent commentators suggest that a text by the Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva offers an argument from “no‐self” to universal compassion. Nietzsche disputes this connection; and Śāntideva's Madhyamaka position, in which nothing has an intrinsic nature, cannot easily counter Nietzsche's claim that suffering is not intrinsically bad. Nietzsche's privileging of states of “becoming,” “discovering,” or “creating” oneself sets him deeply at odds with Buddhism. For Buddhists the fundamentally problematic attitude is a pre‐theoretical sense of self, “egoism,” or “self‐grasping” which is at the root of human craving. Agreeing with the philosophical claim that there is no self is not sufficient to dispel this pre‐theoretical orientation.
This article draws on the analysis of Roman law and on the Jewish tradition of lamentation to offer an original reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. According to Nietzsche, ...an archetype of a successful revolt against injustice is to be attributed to the Jews—as the ones who were able to carry out “the most spiritual revenge” against the Roman “masters” by transvaluing their values. The analysis of ancient Roman law helps to illuminate Nietzsche’s enigmatic account of the “law of the masters” against which the transvaluation of values takes place. Certain structural elements of the language of lament are then envisioned as a resource for leaving the Roman legal order behind and, surprisingly, for bringing out the very meaning of the modern conception of “rights.”
On the one hand, Nietzsche takes this playing field into account by absolutizing it in the thought of the "will to power" as the movement of all being in time; on the other hand, he undermines it in ...the thought of the "eternal return of the same" as time as such and thus leads it to its limit. To nadrobneje ponazarja podoba »vrat trenutka« iz Zaratustre, ki jih Fink interpretira kot »medsebojno udarjanje med glavami« ontologije (biti) in kozmologije (časa) oziroma kot preboj post-metafizične misli »celote sveta« v smislu »vse-obsegajoče, vseprinašajoče in vse-izbrisujoče časo-igre sveta« znotraj historičnega sveta. Nietzsche liebe auf eine geradezu unheimliche Art die Maske und sei doch „mehr", als seine Masken zu verstehen geben, „mehr" als ein moderner Sophist, „mehr" als (wie es in Zarathustras „Lied der Schwermut" heißt) „Nur Narr! Fink will sich dagegen an das „Einfache und Wesentliche" halten: „an Nietzsches Wort über das Sein" (Fink 1946, 27), er will also mit Nietzsche die Metaphysik und ihre Kerndisziplin - die Ontologie - „selbst zum Problem" (Fink 1951, 17) machen (so wie, nebenbei gesagt, Nietzsche das „Problem der Wissenschaft selbst" bei den Hörnern packen wollte).4 Nietzsche interessiert Fink also als ein Denker, bei dem sich durch die geschichtlichen Trajektorien, das Narrativ und die Sprache der Metaphysik hindurch - in ihrem Fragehorizont und doch zugleich über ihn hinaus - eine neue „ontologische Erfahrung" abzeichnet, also eine Erfahrung des Seins, in deren Voraussetzungshaftigkeit sich zugleich eine Zäsur, eine Art „meontische Epoche" (EFGA 3.3, Z-XVII/17b), einzeichnet.
Nietzsche's injunction to examine “the value of values” can be heard in a pragmatic key, as inviting us to consider not whether certain values are true, but what they do for us. This oddly neglected ...pragmatic approach to Nietzsche now receives authoritative support from Bernard Reginster's new book, which offers a compelling and notably cohesive interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. In this essay, I reconstruct Reginster's account of Nietzsche's critique of morality as a “self‐undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it: (i) Is there room within an etiological conception of function for the notion of self‐undermining functionality? (ii) If Nietzsche's critique is internal and based solely on the function it ascribes to morality, where does that critique derive its normative significance from? (iii) Does Reginster's account not make out ascetic morality to be more universally dysfunctional than it is, given that some priestly types have done remarkably well out of morality?
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