The Catastrophe of the Ascetic Ideals from an Intercultural Perspective. Science, Asceticism and Nihilism in GM III 27. This article aims to clarify the meaning and strategic position of the parentheses on the development of philosophy in India in GM III 27. Nietzsche’s reference to the philosophical development in India reveals his intercultural considerations and helps clarify the relations between science and ascetic ideal as a moment of the historical-genealogical reconstitution of European nihilism. I argue that honest forms of atheism (...) and science contain the core of the ascetic ideal and that the critique of nihilism is therefore inevitably self-referential. Nietzsche’s intercultural view sheds new light on important current philosophical questions such as the scope of Giorgio Agamben’s homo-sacer-project and on the prospects of non-European philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

This essay argues that although political thinkers frequently draw on his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche has not been read as a ‘thinker of politics’ in his own regard because the Euro-American field of political thought owes its very notion of ‘politics’ to the conceptual heritage Nietzsche's project directly challenges. The first part of the essay traces the prevailing conception of politics to Aristotle, in whose view politics is the quintessentially human ( anthropos) activity of organising collective life through reason/speech ( logos). (...) The second part presents Nietzsche's project as a novel type of political naturalism, one which replaces the two Aristotelian axioms underpinning standard construals of politics, namely logocentrism and anthropocentrism. For Nietzsche, politics is not a unique, intra-species behaviour of certain bipedal primates, but the relational power dynamics present in all of nature, humans included. Nietzsche's political naturalism thereby gifts us an image of politics befitting the thoroughly entangled, volatile world we urgently have to come to terms with today. (shrink)

Die Hauptthese dieses Buches ist es, Krankheit und Gesundheit mit Nietzsche auf zwei verschiedenen Ebenen zu denken, nämlich als Ereignisse des Willens zur Macht in einem zirkulär-relationalen Modell, in dem sie sich gegenseitig behaupten, sowie die Metaebene der Konzeptualisierung anzuerkennen. Es behandelt die Schwierigkeit des begrifflichen Denkens, diese Ereignisse einzuholen, und diskutiert kritisch Modellbildungen, die darauf hinauslaufen, dass Krankheit zu überwinden und als lineares singuläres Ereignis zu verstehen sei. In Nietzsches Spätwerk wird die Figur des "dionysischen Künstlers" als Idealisierung der (...) Gesundheit gemäß seiner interpretierenden Sichtweise der Welt dargestellt. Die Relevanz des Buches liegt darin, eine Analyse der Begriffe von Gesundheit und Krankheit (tragischer und schlechter Pessimismus) in direkter Beziehung zu leiblichen Vorgängen vorzulegen, die sich von metaphysisch-dialektischen Voraussetzungen befreit. Zu diesem Zweck widmet die Untersuchung sich einer intertextuellen Lektüre der fünf Vorreden, die Nietzsche 1886/87 zu seinen früheren Schriften verfasste, und verknüpft sie mit der Interpretation des Nachlasses und weiterer Veröffentlichungen aus seiner letzten Schaffensphase. (shrink)

After meeting in Zurich, Nikos Kazantzakis and Elli Lambridi undertook a number of Nietzsche pilgrimages in Switzerland together in 1918, beginning with a trip to Silvaplana. At the time, Kazantzakis had written a thesis on Nietzsche and had translated The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Greek, while Elli Lambridi was enrolled in a PhD in philosophy at the University of Zurich writing on Aristotle. They continually debated the nature of the philosopher-type in relation to Nietzsche and Dionysianism, (...) and this philosophical engagement is the central topic of this paper. Lambridi envisaged a Dionysian philosopher fully engaged in an ethical and natural life within a community of others and also envisaged a derived politics of affirmative communal responsibility. Kazantzakis considered that the philosopher should take a much more Apolline, spiritually focused and solitary path, continually ascending toward heroic self-redemption. As well as examining their recorded exchanges, this paper also addresses the fictional resumption of their relationship in The New People, a novel which Lambridi wrote some time after Kazantzakis’ death. In the novel, they resume their discussion of the philosopher-type in 2118, in an eternal recurrence event. In the end, the male character, Petros, learns that the grounding event of a Dionysian Nietzscheanism is an instinctive promise of responsibility for the future of others. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology aims to discover what makes us human, but it has produced accounts that exclude some members of our species. It relies often on a non-naturalistic “philosophy of consciousness” and locates humanity in the cognitive capacity to objectively represent things, to reason teleologically and use tools, to use symbols and language, or to be self-conscious and question existence. This work pursues an alternative, thoroughly naturalistic philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Arnold Gehlen. Combining Gehlen’s theory of our behaviorally-detached and (...) culturally-determined impulses with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, affect, sexuality, and social institutions, the present work locates the human within the unique structure of human feeling. This produces a truly inclusive account of “the human as the other” or Homo alter. The human is deeply and thoroughly dependent on affective, bodily, communicative bonds, in which others appear as sources of meaning, norms, pleasure, and approbation and disapprobation. This socio-biological account of the human makes institutionality central to our form of life but rejects any political anthropology that attempts to use human nature to prescribe a necessary form to institutions such as the home. Such a social and affective account of the human produces a novel approach to the affect of shame as the feeling of institutional rejection. Ultimately, this work uses philosophical anthropology to combat dehumanization. Our unique form of dependency on others and institutions is present, for example, in infants and the severely disabled who may not possess the forms of consciousness and cognition that traditionally are identified with being human. (shrink)

Antinaturalistic Strategies in Beyond Good and Evil. Naturalistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought ultimately appeal to two arguments. On the one hand, when tracing various human phenomena back to processes sufficiently explicable by the natural sciences, it would appear that Nietzsche was pursuing a de facto naturalization program. On the other hand, in BGE 230, the need for the naturalization of human beings as a whole is often interpreted as an argument de jure. After outlining some basic features of contemporary naturalism (...) and showing its incompatibility with Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue in this paper that neither the de jure nor the de facto argument can be understood in a naturalistic sense. The task of “translating man back into nature” in BGE 230 is indeed turned against a point of view held by “old metaphysical bird-catchers.” An analysis of the manuscript and a comparison of it with the preface to HH I, in which this figure is used in the opposite sense, suggests rather that Nietzsche conceives of the renaturalization of the human in a deceptive way, that is, as one of those numerous “snares and nets for unwary birds” scattered throughout his works. Widening this view, a similar dynamic arises with respect to the de facto argument. In the concluding section, I highlight how, in On the Prejudices of Philosophers, certain naturalization operations are countered by as many arguments to the contrary. Such sudden shifts in perspective seem to indicate, at least in Beyond Good and Evil, a desire to subvert naturalism from within. (shrink)

Even in its limited state-based form, human law owes its existence to the natural physical world with its self-created value systems. What is understood as human law is grounded in human-nonhuman entanglements, themselves a subset of a multi-dimensional natural nomos consisting of the intricately connected normative worlds of animals, plants, earth, and cosmos. Complex and intersecting plural normative fields include those associated with the nonliving world, the multiple ontological worlds produced by life forms, and the many strata of human becoming (...) – cultural, cognitive, social, and representational. As plural the nomos contains many irreducible dimensions. Normative fields intersect, hybridise, and clash; they can mutually strengthen and also negate other normativities. In this article, I set out and explore some dimensions of the plural nomos with a focus on living beings, notably the connectedness of being, knowing and normativity. The living nomos co-emerges with being and with the embodied knowledge of even the simplest forms of life. Life is both cognitive and normative; living beings inherit ancestral norms but, in living and adapting, life creates new norms, biological, cultural, and behavioural. The living-knowing being is always normative – produced by the norming processes and constraints of life and matter at large. Normative elements are a critical part of the ontological and epistemological embeddedness of human beings in more than human worlds. Before law (or knowledge) can be about life, it is also of or from life. Expanding the analytical frame of law in this way is one method by which we might reshape western narratives of law, with the aims of promoting better openness to First Nations laws, discouraging western cultural superiority and human exceptionalism, and moving toward a more eco-sensitive view of the continuity between human law-culture-society and the natural world. (shrink)

Nietzsche kritikuoja religines gamtos (Natur) interpretacijas ir pasisako už „žmonijos natūralizaciją“. Sąvokos „gamta“ ar „prigimtis“ (Natur) Nietzschės darbuose neturi aiškaus, sisteminio apibrėžimo, todėl jų interpretacijos šio filosofo tyrimuose yra prieštaringos. Išryškėja dvi priešingos perspektyvos: Vanessa Lemm gamtą interpretuoja kaip dionisišką chaosą, skatinantį emancipacinį vyraujančių idėjų atmetimą, o Costinas Alamariu – kaip aristokratišką phusis, ugdančią aukštesnius žmogiškuosius tipus. Šiame straipsnyje teigiama, kad šie iš pirmo žvilgsnio prieštaringi požiūriai yra suderinami. Nietzsche pasitelkia gamtos kaip chaoso sampratą kritikuoti antropocentristines pažiūras, pristatydamas gamtos supratimo, (...) atsieto nuo žmogiškos perspektyvos, galimybę. Darbe analizuojama ir kritikuojama Lemm šios koncepcijos iliustracija pasitelkiant lyčių skirtumus. Galiausiai, teigiama, jog Alamariu interpretacija atitinka vėlesnius, Nietzschės tyrinėjimuose dažnai ignoruojamus, pozityvius šio filosofo etinius-politinius siekius, susijusius su aukštesnių žmogiškųjų tipų ugdymu. (shrink)