Guest Editor’s Note: “Nietzsche’s Philosophy and Values”

What is philosophy? What are values? What is the relation between philosophy and values? These are the principal questions introduced by Plato and taken up by Nietzsche in his bid to overthrow Plato’s legacy. Under the influence of Socrates, Plato prioritizes reason and goodness as the keys to answering these questions, but the “Darwinist” Nietzsche responds by emphasizing instead the instincts and the struggle for power. No one has done more to illuminate this response than John Richardson, and in this issue, we celebrate the publication of his third monograph on Nietzsche, entitled Nietzsche’s Values (Oxford University Press, 2020). In line with Nietzsche’s own agonistic conception of philosophical activity, we have asked three leading scholars who have been especially interested in Richardson’s work to examine, discuss, and interrogate the ideas in this new book: Tsarina Doyle, Robert Guay, and Paul Katsafanas. John has graciously agreed to offer some replies to their commentaries and evaluations. Many aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that once seemed especially odd or dubious have recently become more palatable due to the patient and persistent efforts of a community of dedicated scholars. For example, there is now less paradox associated with Nietzsche’s critique of truth and his perspectival approach to knowledge; there is less puzzlement about his emphasis on psychological drives and affects; and there is less controversy surrounding his conception of values and his genealogical investigation of morality. Maudemarie Clark should certainly be credited with much of this progress. Her analytical skills, hermeneutic sensitivity, and appreciation for contemporary philosophical sensibilities have helped us to understand aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that once seemed alien to the philosophical tradition. My essay examines and evaluates what I think is Clark’s most interesting and influential interpretive proposal. This is her claim that the start of Beyond Good and Evil shows how philosophers, including Nietzsche himself, cannot help but construct their pictures of the world in their own image and in the image of their preferred values.

Replies

Replies to the comments on Nietzsche's Values by Tsarina Doyle, Robert Guay, and Paul Katsafanas.

Nietzsche on Power and Value: A Response to John Richardson's Nietzsche's Values

The following article offers a critical appraisal of the central arguments of John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s Values. It contends that although the book provides a comprehensive and illuminating interpretation of Nietzsche’s naturalist approach to value, it overlooks the more essentialist dimensions of his account of power.

"Coulda Nietzsche Shoulda"

This paper argues that Richardson’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of evaluative privilege doesn’t work, and that the project that depends on it fails.

Review of Richardson's "Nietzsche's Values"

This article examines John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s Values. Richardson’s book is systematic in the very best sense. He patiently works through the apparently contrary claims that Nietzsche makes about each topic pertaining to values. In each chapter, Richardson shows that these apparently contrary claims are not only reconcilable, but are interlocking: they support one another, constituting an impressively unified analysis of the human condition. By the end of the book, Richardson produces a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s thought on values, will to power, life, consciousness, agency, freedom, culture, and religion. While the book is impressive, I critique Richardson’s treatment of four points. Section One argues that the form of internalism that Richardson attributes to Nietzsche is somewhat underspecified. Section Two asks whether Richardson’s version of internalism can account for the immense distance between what we do value and what we should value. There, I also raise some questions Richardson’s interpretation of will to power. Section Three suggests that Richardson’s reading of Nietzsche’s ethics is much closer to constitutivism than he acknowledges, and that fully endorsing constitutivism would resolve some of the problems that Richardson’s account otherwise faces. Section Four argues that Richardson’s distinction between animal drives and socially induced drives is problematic.

The Role of Values in Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy

The goal of this essay is to show how we might gain new insight into the meaning of Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical lessons at the start of Beyond Good and Evil. Maudemarie Clark’s interpretation of these lessons is prima facie plausible and has gained widespread acceptance in the Anglophone community of Nietzsche scholars. According to this reading, Nietzsche thinks that philosophers cannot help but project their preferred values into their theories of the world and he thinks that this is true of his own theory of the world as will to power. I argue that there are severe problems with Clark’s supporting textual evidence and that we should therefore reconsider how we usually think today about the role of values in Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy and about the epistemic status that he grants to his own philosophical theories.

Andre Bogart Szabo Art Images

see art images. My works on canvas celebrate concepts presented in Nietzsche's ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’ particularly the duality between Apollo and Dionysus (order/disorder, rational logic/amorous frenzy...consider Dionysus as presented in Euripedes’ The Bacchae). In addition, my work is inspired in part by the ‘excremental philosophy’ of Georges Bataille, a philosopher who wrote extensively on Nietzsche.

Book review: Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity

This volume makes a valuable contribution to Nietzsche scholarship by providing a single volume on one of Nietzsche’s texts, The Antichrist, with pieces from an array of prominent scholars. It calls attention to the importance of a work less often systematically treated in the scholarship than some others. The contributors to the volume represent a wide array of philosophical approaches to Nietzsche’s thought and offer a good sampling of the perspectives in Nietzsche scholarship. Conway has assembled an especially strong group of scholars who approach Nietzsche’s thought via political theory and those who have advanced our insight on Nietzsche’s political thought. This link among many of the essays helps to unify the volume and call attention to the political themes and long range aims of Nietzsche’s Antichrist.

Nietzsche's Pelagianism: Dionysus versus the Crucified

When Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo: “Theologically speaking - listen closely, for I rarely speak as a theologian - it was God himself who at the end of his days work lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God. - He had made everything too beautiful. - The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day.” (Ecce Homo, “Beyond Good and Evil,” §2) He is insinuating an alliance with an uncited source - Pelagianus Hereticus who believed there was no ‘original sin’ but that the will power of human beings could bring humanity to salvation. A method that bears stark affinities with Nietzsche’s writings on will to power in the sense that human will power wills a transcendence to what is, rather than the metaphysics of a transcendent God providing grace to those in need of salvation from above. This marks an interesting detour in church orthodoxy, a path not taken and one has to wonder that given Nietzsche’s reputation as a well read historian of ideas and theology whether he was writing a sort of theological exegesis through ressentiment. A history of ideas for the future through the eyes of those who lost as a kind of error, a kind of pathos. In this paper, I try to explore this treatment of Nietzsche’s work to bring a new interpretation onto his work, one that is hidden in plain sight in lieu of his work on pushing ethics beyond good and evil, his views on phantasmagoria, and the penultimate writings at the end of his productive years where he describes his writings as “Dionysus versus the Crucified.”

Book review: Nietzsche: filosofo della libertà

Nietzsche once opined that “a good review of a research book consists in better solving the problem that book advances” (KGW IV/2, 24 [53]). To some extent, Nietzsche’s ambitious conception of criticism aides in offering a review of Laura Langone’s Nietzsche: filosofo della libertà (Nietzsche: Philosopher of Freedom). Langone deals with a complex and centuries-old theme, as it appears and develops through the Nietzschean corpus: that of freedom. The book attempts to answer questions pertinent to this theme: can we become free? If so, how might we achieve this goal of freedom? What does being ‘free’ really mean, for Nietzsche? How might this freedom affect our lives?