This chapter contains sections titled: Beyond Good and Evil and the “Magnificent Tension of the Spirit” The Unveiled Truth: Preface to The Gay Science Beyond Good and Evil's “Tension of the Spirit” as it Appears in Gay Science 371 and 372 Gay Science 373 and 374: Values and Intentionality Spir's Relevance to Gay Science 373 and 374 Gay Science 374, in Light of Spir The Unveiled Truth, Revisited.

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's early essay “The Greek State” has been understood as unambiguous evidence of Nietzsche's “aristocratic radicalism,” that he rejected liberal democracy and advocated slavery, war, and the sacrifice of the many for the few. This article challenges the scholarly consensus. I argue that “The Greek State” critiques liberal culture, not its institutions, and it proposes modern functional alternatives to ancient practices of slavery and war. The broader aim of my article is to move beyond the debate between “aristocratic” and (...) “democratic” readings of Nietzsche's perfectionism. (shrink)

This collection of essays displays Charles Larmore’s exceptional ability to combine the best of analytic and Hegelian traditions of moral and political theory. This cross-pollination has produced a book that, as a whole, advances several important new proposals, especially regarding political liberalism and moral epistemology.

This chapter contains sections titled: Nietzsche's (Artful) Naturalism The Subject Naturalized Nietzsche's Artful Naturalism Toward an Ethos of the Agonized Subject.

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple (...) questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead. (shrink)

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple (...) questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead. (shrink)

Kant's remark may sound harsh to our modern sensibility but it raises an issue that is central to an understanding of Nietzsche's critique of "the democratic movement of our times" (BGE 203) and, thus, to an understanding of Nietzsche's salience for contemporary democratic theory. This issue is self-respect—and, more generally, the topic of duties to oneself. The relationship between this issue and democratic theory may not appear a wholly obvious one but, on Nietzsche's account, it is crucial to the kind (...) of equality that is expressed by democratic practices. Nietzsche's concern, I'll argue, is that "the democratic movement of our times" expresses a levelling mode of equality that undermines the conditions of self-respect in the relevant sense. Consequently, the aim of this article will be to elucidate Nietzsche's understanding of self-respect, to clarify the grounds on which he attacks "the democratic movement of our times" and to consider the relationship between these arguments and his advocacy of the agon as a model of cultural and political relations. It concludes by drawing out the implications of this interpretation of Nietzsche for democratic theory. (shrink)