Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

2005 ◽  
pp. 209-234
Author(s):  
Rex Welshon
2020 ◽  
pp. 136248062097785
Author(s):  
Prashan Ranasinghe

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have much to offer criminology. To date, however, his work has been largely neglected in this scholarship. Taking this lacuna seriously, this article reads Nietzsche’s second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and explicates its importance to criminology. Specifically, focus is cast upon Nietzsche’s exposition of crime and particularly punishment, pertaining to the production of a calculating and calculable being upon whom pain and suffering can be inflicted and the ways that concerns over excesses of punishment come to be framed as problematic. Via this reading, it is claimed that On the Genealogy of Morals can serve, among others, as an important critique to many of the presuppositions that ground the classical school of criminology, epitomized in the work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. The article concludes by locating the importance of Nietzsche to penology specifically and criminology more broadly.


Author(s):  
Craig A. Boyd ◽  
Kevin Timpe

This concluding chapter highlights some criticisms of the virtues. David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both challenged the traditional construal of the virtues and their role. Hume’s approach to morality was based upon ‘moral sentiment’ where moral feelings were central to one’s deliberation about ethics and so one’s practical reason was simply a means to best secure the satisfaction of one’s various desires. Nietzsche argues that the traditional virtues are merely terms used and cultivated by the weak to control the strong. He draws up a ‘genealogy of morals’ and concludes that terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have no real meaning apart from self-descriptions of the people who employ them.


Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora ◽  
Derek La Shot

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a German philologist, philosopher, and iconoclast. He is best known for his controversial but powerful reevaluation of traditional Western morality, epistemology, and theology. His early academic career was devoted to philology, and he secured a professorship at Basel University at the age of twenty-four despite having failed to obtain his doctorate at Leipzig. He obtained most of his philosophical training outside of his speciality. His principle resources were Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, followed by Richard Wagner’s revolutionary music. Although he admired Schopenhauer’s stark premise that existence was a chaotic affair guided by a will to life, Nietzsche later replaced Schopenhauer’s embrace of ascetic "will-less-ness" as the only response to suffering with the "will to power": the idea that man "will rather will nothingness than not will" (Genealogy of Morals, III: sec. 1; emphasis in the original). His first book was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872; title altered in subsequent editions), which explained Greek tragedy by revealing the wrestling of two intellectual energies within it.


Author(s):  
Eric Lindstrom

Friedrich Nietzsche famously and mischievously begins the notorious Second Essay in On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) with an assertion that ties the proper breeding of mankind to the right to make promises. Nietzsche maintains: “[t]o breed an animal with the right to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is this not the real problem which man not only poses but also faces?” Nietzsche’s language challenges its reader from the start to comprehend its various possibilities of mood and mode, rhetoric and grammar: is it a bold statement of authorial values or an ironic insinuation meant to trap the bad conscience of civilized man? More simply, is it a “real” question or a rhetorical statement? The passage loses no time in deploying some of the soldiers in the army of poetical tropes that Nietzsche unmasks as the producers of truth in his equally well-known short piece, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (here prosopopoeia: speaking for nature).Based on this small sampling, already we can sense fully how the “literary” intensity and instability of Nietzsche’s style are embedded in his very conduct of philosophy. The question marks on which the two sentences of this opening salvo end (or sort of end, as there are original ellipses “…”) may not indicate a question has been posed at all for the reader directly to answer. No question, at least, has been posed from the quasi-naïve and open premise that we tend to call a question on equal (epistemological) footing or in (sociable) “good” faith. Not a “real” question from Nietzsche, then; but all the more a real problem. A driving interrogation in fact: in light of what the next sentence calls the “countervailing” and saving “force of forgetfulness,” the conduct of the human will in verbal action becomes “the real problem” we both pose and face as linguistic beings engaged by what Stanley Cavell understands in the term moral perfectionism.


Author(s):  
John Marmysz

This introductory chapter examines the “problem” of nihilism, beginning with its philosophical origins in the ideas of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. It is argued that film is an inherently nihilistic medium involving the evocation of illusory worlds cut loose from objective reality. This nihilism of film is distinguished from nihilism in film; the nihilistic content also present in some (but not all) movies. Criticisms of media nihilism by authors such as Thomas Hibbs and Darren Ambrose are examined. It is then argued, contrary to such critics, that cinematic nihilism is not necessarily degrading or destructive. Because the nihilism of film encourages audiences to linger in the presence of nihilism in film, cinematic nihilism potentially trains audiences to learn the positive lessons of nihilism while remaining safely detached from the sorts of dangers depicted on screen.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 238-262
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Brower

This article exploits a core defect in the phenomenology of sensation and self. Although phenomenology has made great strides in redeeming the body from cognitive solipsisms that often follow short-sighted readings of Descartes and Kant, it has not grappled with the specific kind of corporeal self-reflexivity that emerges in the oral sense of taste with the thoroughness it deserves. This path is illuminated by the works of Martin Luther, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida as they attempt to think through the specific phenomena accessible through the lips, tongue, and mouth. Their attempts are, in turn, supplemented with detours through Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The paper draws attention to the German distinction between Geschmack and Kosten as well as the role taste may play in relation to faith, the call to love, justice, and messianism. The messiah of love and justice will have been that one who proclaims: taste the flesh.


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