Replies

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

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.

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.

Story as Self

What might be the basis of the temporal story linking a subject’s manifestations and transformations, if there is no stable core or substantial self “behind” or “before” our deeds, such that our selves lie within our deeds? So asks Robert Pippin in Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. I explore the ways in which a story can find its basis in both “the self” and “the world.” Noting that Nietzsche insists on the separation (lack of causality) between thoughts, deeds, and the image we have of a given deed, I suggest that stories, when wielded consciously, are themselves deeds that can serve to magnify, reduce, or alter the images of previous or future deeds, based on what the interactions between our environment and our "true need" allows us to do. I note that they are often themselves inventions, not needing to be the result of factual occurrences in the world. Seen in this way, stories are a powerful tool for self- and world-transformation, and can enable us to create beautiful versions of ourselves that may not always be or feel initially “true.”

Cursing the Curse:Nietzsche on the Machiavellianism of Pity: Reading The Antichrist 2-7 in Light of Ecce Homo

The specific focus of this paper is exegesis of the critique of pity in AC 2-7 by means of the autobiographical account in Ecce Homo of the destructive intrusion of pity on him in Wise/4. There he lists three cases of pity's intrusions: into his great destiny, into his solitude of recovering from wounding in (spiritual) warfare, and into his privileged right to a heavy guilt. As we trace these three cases back to their locations in the chapter where they are first introduced, it can be seen that all are cases of his evolution to Mehrleben, thus to make his critique of pity's intrusion the criticism that it vengefully sought to thwart his evolutionary development. He states that his experience from these cases gives him the right to make a generlization about pity. These cases then become the autobiographical foundation of his criticism of pity in AC 7 that it is hostile to life in thwarting evolutionary development. The more general aim of the paper is to fix the relationship of EH to AC as introduction as the relationship of autobiography as epistemology to the unmasking psychology of Christianity in AC, in this case and several other cases cited. This is to bring the relationship into line with what Nietzsche himself claims for it in his letter to Naumann of November 6, 1888 and to counter the view that the relationship is merely instrumental in EH serving to secure a good reception for AC and, accordingly, was a work of less importance to Nietzsche than was AC.