Book review: Nietzsche’s Culture War: The Unity of the Untimely Meditations

Shilo Brooks’ study on Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (UM) (1873-76) is one of the few scholarly works that examines all four of these early essays in combination. Even taken separately, there are fewer independent studies of the UM compared with The Birth of Tragedy (BT) (1872) and the middle works (1878-82), except for “The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” (HL) (1874), which has garnered the most critical attention. Brooks suggests a compelling reason to investigate all four works together. His organizing principle is reflected in his title: the four essays were individual constituents of a large-scale “culture war”—a philosophical Kulturkampf (p. 12)—that the young Nietzsche waged against Bismarck and the political, social, and cultural conditions in his newly established Reich. Brooks’ decision to treat all four pieces in a single monograph makes eminent sense, and the fact that Nietzsche assembled the essays under the title UM suggests he saw them as part of a common endeavor—or at least as reflective of a certain prevailing mindset at the time: “[W]hen viewed from the perspective of his later works, the critique of German culture featured in the Untimely Meditations and the plan Nietzsche sketches to revitalize it provide a holistic if early blueprint for his later attempt at a revaluation of values” (p. 15).

‘O Plato! Plato!’: Don Juan versus the Philosophers

Critics who take Byron seriously as a thinker tend to locate his personal philosophy within the history of scepticism. In Cantos I and II of Don Juan, Byronic doubting takes the form of a critique of idealism, with a particular focus on Plato. This essay argues that Byron’s scepticism has philosophical implications beyond the critique of Platonism, that it works also to undermine the major idealist movement of his day - German absolute idealism. Byron’s embodied ethic is evident both in the narrator’s comments and within the narrative of Juan’s affair with Haidée. The form this critique of idealism takes anticipates Nietzsche’s ‘revaluation of values’ as well as Derrida’s deconstruction in that it isolates a traditionally hierarchised pair of oppositions and revalues the hierarchy.

Internet memes we live by (and die by)

In the internet age, memes are at once products and driving forces of social practices. A meme contains a memetic message and a meme output, and boasts, if guided by a pragmatic way of thinking, several features, including but not limited to salience, frequency, adaptability, argumentativity, sociality, embeddedness, embodiedness, locality, relativity, emotionality and dynamicity. The current global COVID-19 pandemic serves as a fitting and timely touchstone to testify how human beings are surrounded by numerous good and evil memes in the online world, and how internet memes, as can be seen from the illustration of two specific memes, namely, the ‘stay home, stay safe’ meme and the ‘wear a mask’ meme, are impacting human life-worlds, online and offline, with their transformative power, be it constructive or destructive. Moreover, researching how memes plays a decisive part in internet-mediated interaction provides a lens of insight through which ‘deep states’ of human nature of both self and others can be uncovered and through which what Nietzsche called “a revaluation of values” is possible.

Choosing Values? Williams Contra Nietzsche

Amplifying Bernard Williams’ critique of the Nietzschean project of a revaluation of values, this paper mounts a critique of the idea that whether values will help us to live can serve as a criterion for choosing which values to live by. I explore why it might not serve as a criterion and highlight a number of further difficulties faced by the Nietzschean project. I then come to Nietzsche's defence, arguing that if we distinguish valuations from values, there is at least one form of the project which overcomes those difficulties. Finally, however, I show that even on this reading, the project must either fall prey to ‘Saint-Just's illusion’ or fall back into the problems it was supposed to escape. This highlights important difficulties faced by the Nietzschean project and its descendants while also explaining why Williams, who was so Nietzschean in other respects, remained wary of the revaluation of values as a project.

Moral Universality and Moral Nihilism: on the Meanings of the Contemporary Revaluation of Values

Modern thought is characterized by the attention to the revaluation of values. The idea of the absence of a single transcultural ethical “code” is given a moral meaning: it is seen as a condition for a dialogue that overcomes the repressive intentions of enlightenment univer­salism. This article examines the role of the moral universality idea in the formation of two types of moral nihilism that are significant for modern culture: a) first-order nihilism that re­jects the universality of specific moral concepts and b) second-order nihilism that rejects the universality of a pure moral law. In first-order nihilism, the appeal to the universality of duty serves as a means of overthrowing the universalist claims of prevailing morality. In second-order nihilism, the essential conflict in the structure of the idea of universality ends with the denial of the universality of duty. It is shown that a significant number of modern culture practices are determined by nihilism of the second order. The origins of this type of nihilism are investigated. We prove its connection with the ethical system of Kant, and, at the same time, with the will-to-power ethics of Nietzsche. The transition from Kant’s idea of universal duty to the denial of the universality of duty by Dostoevsky’s heroes is be­ing reconstructed. The analysis suggests that optimistic interpretations of the current plural situation are not justified. Without connecting the idea of universality to the idea of the ab­soluteness of moral requirements, the idea of a plurality of moral worlds leads not to a “dia­logue of different origins”, but to the gnostic construction of “multi-store humanity”.

Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of Play (1946)

This lecture from 1946 presents Eugen Fink’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Fink’s aim here is twofold: to work against the trend of psychologistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s work and to perform the philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche he finds lacking in his predecessors. Fink contends that play is the central intuition of Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically in his rejection of Western metaphysics’ insistence on being and presence. Drawing instead from Heraclitus, Nietzsche argues for an ontology of becoming characterized by the Dionysian as the temporalization of time and the Apollonian as temporalized in time. The play of becoming is thus the cosmic coming to be and passing away of appearance. Playing, as the creative projection of such a play-world of appearing and concealing, is central to understanding the Nietzschean theme of the will to power as the revaluation of values.

MEASUREMENT AND MULTIFACTORIAL ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ PATRIOTISM

The relevance of the work is based on internal and external causes. Internal reasons consist of the fundamental transformation and revaluation of values occurring in Russia. Patriotism is the foundation of responsibility for the preservation of spiritual values and the power of the country. External causes are the need to counter terrorism and conflicts in the world. The goal of the study is to measure the level of patriotism of students according to their gender, course, and department of the branch of Kuban State University in Slavyansk-on-Kuban. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to assess the quality of the questionnaire as a measuring tool and measure the level of patriotism of students on a linear scale. The theory of latent variables is used as the method of research, allowing to measure the level of patriotism on a linear scale.