In this article I analyse some moments of Nietzsche’s reception and influence between Europe and America (namely in Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Papini and Josiah Royce) from a pragmatist perspective, in order to show how a selective monism and a realist pluralism emerge from their interpretations of Nietzsche. On the basis of this historiographic and theoretical reconstruction, I emphasize that Nietzsche, through both his monism and his pluralism, can question any presumed irreversibility in the moral field. By recognising the subject’s possibility (...) of change, of reversing the only superficial irreversibility of its Da-sein, Nietzsche’s pragmatism in this sense represents a great theoretical achievement, indispensable for the definition of a new bio-anthropological paradigm, in which identity can effectively coexist with difference. (shrink)

The second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals introduces the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. Does this affirmative use of moral terminology reveal an unexpected affinity between Nietzsche’s thought and philosophical modernity? In the last decades, this issue has been at the heart of a vast and controversial debate. My analysis shows that, rather than throwing light on Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage of GM is due to a polemical intention. Implicitly, (...) Nietzsche rejects Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty of the individual’. The author of the Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1879) sees the most radical herald of this ‘sovereignty’ in Max Stirner. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Hartmann’s rejection and Stirner’s affirmation share a reductive conception of ‘sovereignty’. Reinterpreting and ‘revaluing’ Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views. In showing this, the paper gives a new answer to an old question; for already in the 1890s, Hartmann himself, accusing Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, raised the issue of the historical relationship between the two philosophers. More generally, the paper shows that Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’. (shrink)