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)

La Grèce de l’Antiquité fournit une toile de fond à l’entreprise de Nietzsche dans la Généalogie de la morale. La connaissance approfondie que le philologue en avait lui a donné accès à une pluralité de jugements de valeurs, antérieurs à la domination du christianisme et de la morale qui en est sortie. Au moyen d’une investigation de la poésie de Théognis, citée dans la Généalogie de la morale, mais aussi de la pensée sophistique et de la médecine hippocratique (absentes de (...) la Généalogie), on montre ici dans quelle mesure les perspectives ouvertes par Nietzsche sont fécondes pour la compréhension des questions morales dans l’Antiquité grecque. (shrink)

If ethical reflection on which concepts to use has an avatar, it must be Nietzsche, who took more seriously than most the question of what concepts one should live by, and regarded many of our inherited concepts as deeply problematic. Moreover, his eschewal of traditional attempts to derive the one right set of concepts from timeless rational foundations renders his conceptual ethics strikingly modern, raising the prospect of a Nietzschean alternative to Wittgensteinian non-foundationalism. Yet Nietzsche appears to engage in two (...) seemingly contrary modes of concept evaluation: one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express. I offer an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes and accounts for Nietzsche’s seemingly bifurcating interests. His fundamental concern is with the effects concepts are likely to have going forward, and it is precisely this concern that motivates his preoccupation with what concepts express. He evaluates concepts by asking for whom they have a point, working back from a concept via the need it fills to the conditions that engender that need and thereby render the concept pointful. For a concept to be pointful is for it to serve the concerns of its users through its effects. But even when it is not pointful, a concept expresses the presuppositions of its pointfulness, which we can work back to by asking who would have need of such a concept. What emerges is a powerful approach to conceptual ethics that looks beyond the formal virtues and vices of concepts at the presuppositions we buy into by using them. (shrink)

En partant de la présence remarquablement insistante du pronom « nous » (wir, uns) dans la Généalogie, l’article interroge la signification philosophique de cet usage répété et de ses diverses variations. On défend l’hypothèse que le « nous » – celui des « hommes de connaissance », mais aussi ses autres avatars – est, d’une part, l’incarnation pronominale de la dimension plurielle et collective du projet de la généalogie et que, d’autre part, il fonctionne dans l’écriture nietzschéenne comme un opérateur (...) perspectiviste de la méthode généalogique, qui permet à celle-ci de prendre au sérieux la tâche nouvelle de ce projet collectif, tout en déjouant l’idéal ascétique de la connaissance de soi. (shrink)

This paper argues that Nietzsche is deliberately imprecise in his characterization of what he calls the slave revolt in morality. In particular, none of the people or groups he nominates as instigators of the slave revolt, namely, Jewish priests, the Jewish people, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul, were literally slaves. Analysis of Nietzsche's texts, including his usage of the term “slaves,” and his sources concerning those he nominates as the instigators of the slave revolt, make clear that Nietzsche knew none (...) of these were literally slaves. He calls it a slave revolt because he means that the propagators of that revolt preached what he takes to be the slavish values, including, humility, compassion, obedience, and lack of egoism. He uses the high loaded term “slave” both to disparage those values and, most importantly, to bring home to his readers the message that they, as inheritors of Judeo‐Christian values, actual adhere to and practice the debased slavish values preached, but not necessarily practiced, by the original instigators of the slave revolt. For Nietzsche, his readers are strangers to themselves, thus he notes “slavery is everywhere visible, although it does not call itself as such.”. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill, whose relevance for Nietzsche’s late work has been documented by recent research, is not directly mentioned in On the Genealogy or Morality (1887). This article argues that Mill’s On Liberty (1859) nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the Genealogy. Following a source-based methodology, three major references demonstrate how Nietzsche used On Liberty as a resource as he initiated and developed his own exploration into the origin of morality. After tracing Nietzsche’s reading of Mill through (...) pencil marks in his copy of On Liberty, I discuss the reappearance of Mill’s motives and terminology as well as the explanatory power of Mill as a source for the respective sections in the Genealogy. It becomes clear to what extent Nietzsche adapts Mill and how he turns Mill’s own weapons against him through skillful transformations. The article concludes that instead of delivering the “better” Mill, Nietzsche builds up a fruitful tension between a then-common take on morality and its transgression. (shrink)