American Nietzsche

American Nietzsche
Author: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226705811

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

Critical Affinities

Critical Affinities
Author: Jacqueline Scott
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791481212

Critical Affinities is the first book to explore the multifaceted relationship between the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and various dimensions of African American thought. Exploring the connections between these two unlikely interlocutors, the contributors focus on unmasking and understanding the root causes and racially inflected symptoms of various manifestations of cultural malaise. They contemplate the operative warrant for reconstituted conceptions of racial identity and recognize the existential and social recuperative potential of the will to power. In so doing, they simultaneously foster and exemplify a nuanced understanding of what both traditions regard as "the art of the cultural physician." The contributors connote daring scholarly attempts to explicate the ways in which clarifying the critical affinities between Nietzsche and various expressions of African American thought not only enriches our understanding of each, but also enhances our ability to realize the broader ends of advancing the prospects for social and psychological flourishing.

Hiking with Nietzsche

Hiking with Nietzsche
Author: John Kaag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374715742

"A stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. One of Lit Hub's 15 Books You Should Read in September and one of Outside's Best Books of Fall A revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys—one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag’s journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition. Just as Kaag’s acclaimed debut, American Philosophy: A Love Story, seamlessly wove together his philosophical discoveries with his search for meaning, Hiking with Nietzsche is a fascinating exploration not only of Nietzsche’s ideals but of how his experience of living relates to us as individuals in the twenty-first century. Bold, intimate, and rich with insight, Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are."

Nietzsche, Life as Literature

Nietzsche, Life as Literature
Author: Alexander Nehamas
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1985
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674624269

More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche's writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views--the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the bermensch, the master morality--often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers. Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche's views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together. Nehamas finally allows us to see that Nietzsche is creating a literary character out of himself, that he is, in effect, playing the role of Plato to his own Socrates. Nehamas discusses a number of opposing views, both American and European, of Nietzsche's texts and general project, and reaches a climactic solving of the main problems of Nietzsche interpretation in a step-by-step argument. In the process he takes up a set of very interesting questions in contemporary philosophy, such as moral relativism and scientific realism. This is a book of considerable breadth and elegance that will appeal to all curious readers of philosophy and literature.

Nietzsche and Pascal on Christianity

Nietzsche and Pascal on Christianity
Author: Charles M. Natoli
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 208
Release: 1985
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

Although Pascal was one of the small group of thinkers who influenced Nietzsche profoundly, and although Nietzsche claimed to have Pascal's blood running in his veins, Pascal did not succeed in getting him to share his intense preoccupation with the question of the truth of Christian belief. Not its truth but the value of its effects on mankind became the focus of Nietzsche's vitriolic anti-Christian polemics. This study, one of the very few on the Nietzsche/Pascal relationship, explores and appreciates the religious thought of each. It also assesses the nature and ground of their relationship and investigates the reasonableness of the Faith that divided them.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of History

Nietzsche's Philosophy of History
Author: Anthony K. Jensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107027322

An exposition of the development of Nietzsche's philosophy of history in its historical context and of its relevance to contemporary theories.

Individuality and Beyond

Individuality and Beyond
Author: Benedetta Zavatta
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190929219

Though few might think to connect the two figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson was an important influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, Emerson played a fundamental role in shaping Nietzsche's philosophical ideas on individualism, perfectionism, and the pursuit of virtue, as well as his critiques of social conditioning, religious dogmatism, and anti-natural morality. With Individuality and Beyond, Benedetta Zavatta offers the first philosophical interpretation of Emerson's influence on Nietzsche based on a sound philological analysis of previously unpublished materials from Nietzsche's private library. Nietzsche's collection reveals numerous copies of Emerson's essays covered with annotations and marginalia as Nietzsche revisited these works throughout his life. Through close-reading, Zavatta casts a new light on the ways in which Emerson's work informed Nietzsche's defining ideas of self-creation, the relation between fate and free will, overcoming morality of customs and achieving moral autonomy, and the transvaluation of such values as compassion and altruism. Zavatta organizes these concepts into two main lines of thought: the first concerns the development of the individual personality, or the achievement of intellectual and moral autonomy and original self-expression. The second, on the contrary, concerns the overcoming of individuality and the need to transcend a limited view of the world by continually questioning one's own values and engaging with opposing perspectives. Ultimately, Zavatta clarifies the surprising contributions that Emerson made to 20th century European philosophy. She provides a fresh portrait of Emerson as an American thinker long stereotyped as a na�ve idealist disinterested in the social issues of his day. Seen through the eyes of Nietzsche, his acute interpreter, Emerson becomes an incisive cultural critic, whose contributions underpin contemporary philosophy.

The Importance of Nietzsche

The Importance of Nietzsche
Author: Erich Heller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1988-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226326381

Contains ten essays detailing the importance and influence of Nietzsche's works.

Anti-Education

Anti-Education
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2015-12-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1590178947

AN NYRB Classics Original In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his ambitions. The genius of such thinkers and makers—the kind of genius that had emerged in ancient Greece—this alone was the touchstone for true understanding. But how was education to serve genius, especially in a modern society marked more and more by an unholy alliance between academic specialization, mass-market journalism, and the militarized state? Something more than sturdy scholarship was called for. A new way of teaching and questioning, a new philosophy . . . What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid, popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. Anti-Education presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the central challenges of the modern world.

Nietzsche on Art and Life

Nietzsche on Art and Life
Author: Daniel Came
Publisher:
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199545960

Nietzsche had a particular interest in the relationship between art and life, and in art's contribution to his philosophical aims—to identify the conditions of the affirmation of life, cultural renewal, and exemplary human living. These new essays demonstrate that understanding his engagement with art is essential for understanding his philosophy.