Verhexung

Nietzsche scholar Lanier Anderson will be giving the Bernd Magnus lecture this year at the University of California, Riverside. The lecture is titled, “What is the Nietzschean Self?”, and is based off his paper in this anthology.

Date: April 17, 2013
Location: University of California, Riverside
Program: http://bit.ly/117ZFeM

This lecture series has been quite exciting and has brought in many prominent Nietzsche scholars in the past and will continue to do so, putting them in conversation with Riverside’s excellent philosophy community.

“Error of free will. –”

“The whole ancient psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the desire of its architects (the priests at the head of the ancient community) to establish their right to inflict punishment – or to assign the right to God … People were considered ‘free’ so that they could be judged and punished – so that they could be guilty: consequently, every act had to be seen as coming from consciousness (– which made the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis into the very principle of psychology …).”

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After recommending three papers with which to begin reading Nietzsche scholarship, my friend responded with several questions, responses to which I wanted to address here. I thought others might find the discussion helpful or want to offer their own thoughts.

The papers I recommended were “The Will to Power” chapter of Reginster’s monograph, The Affirmation of Life, and both of Katsafanas’s “Value, Affect, Drive” and “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, Schiller”.

In reaction to these papers, the following questions arose:

(1) Why is there a limiting of the will to power to human psychology; can’t we understand all life as the will to overcome resistance?

(2) Is it possible to suppress drives (through habituation and training) or are they with us for good?

(3) Does Nietzsche’s distinction between life-affirming and life-denying apply to drives? (e.g., some of our drives are life-affirming and others not so)

(4) Is Nietzsche’s point in writing the way he does an attempt to elicit certain kinds of affections that will allow us to perceive the world and understand what’s valuable differently?

(5) Does the will-to-life/will-to-power distinction map onto life-affirming/life-denying or slave/master distinctions or not?

(6) Nietzsche talks about these blonde beasts of prey who subjugated the slavish to their will. Is Nietzsche giving an historical account (does he think this literally happened)?

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“Morality and religion can be exhaustively accounted for by the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing that something is true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes.”

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“Familiarizing something unfamiliar is comforting, reassuring, satisfying, and produces a feeling of power as well. Unfamiliar things are dangerous, anxiety-provoking, upsetting, – the primary instinct is to get rid of these painful states. […] So the causal instinct is conditioned and excited by feelings of fear. Whenever possible, the question ‘why?’ won’t point to the cause as such, but instead will point to a particular type of cause – a reassuring comforting cause.”

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“The error of imaginary causes. –”

“The ideas that were created by a certain physical condition were mistaken for the cause of that condition. […] Most of our general feelings – every type of inhibition, pressure, tension, explosions in the give and take of our organs, and particularly the state of nervus sympathicus [sympathetic nervous system] – excite our causal instinct: we want there to be a reason why we are in the particular state we are in, – why we are feeling good or bad.”

“It is never enough just to establish the fact that we are in a particular state: we only let this state register, – we only become conscious of it –, once we have assigned it a type of motivation. – The memory that unconsciously becomes activated in such cases is what leads back to earlier states of the same type and the associated causal interpretation, – not their causality.”

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“Error of False Causation. –”

“The will does not do anything any more, and so it does not explain anything any more either – it just accompanies processes, but it can be absent as well. The so-called ‘motive’: another error. Just a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an ‘after-the-fact’ that hides the antecedentia of an act more than it reveals them. Not to mention the I! That has become a fairy tale, a fiction, a play on words: it has stopped thinking, feeling, and willing altogether! … What follows from this? There are no mental causes whatsoever!”

“People projected their three ‘inner facts’ out of themselves and onto the world – the facts they believed in most fervently, the will, the mind, and the I. They took the concept of being from the concept of the I, they posited ‘things’ as beings in their own image, on the basis of their concept of I as cause.”

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After a long hiatus, taken to complete my undergraduate thesis and apply to graduate programs, I’m returning to our reading of Twilight of the Idols.

I will be updating the “contents” page so that it will be easier to access prior readings of particular aphorisms. I’ve also changed the purpose of the “bibliography” page to instead link to reviews of worthwhile secondary literature (which I will slowly expand).

I hope in time you will return here to share your own thoughts on both the Nietzsche passages and my readings as well.

Nietzsche scholar Helmut Heit, who works on Nietzsche’s philosophy of science and is presently doing research at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, is organizing a workshop on the topic of Nietzsche’s naturalism.

Date: April 5-6, 2013
Location: Institute for Advanced Study
Program: http://bit.ly/Y8enCy

The workshop will include talks by numerous prominent Nietzsche scholars, including Maudemarie Clark, John Richardson, Brian Leiter, Ken Gemes, Lanier Anderson, Richard Schacht, and Alexander Nehamas.

For more information, see the program link.

I’ve accepted an offer of admissions from Riverside’s philosophy doctoral program and will begin studies there in the fall.  During my visit, it became especially apparent that they are a department with considerable strengths across German philosophy (Kant, 19th and 20th-century) and the philosophy of action/agency (reflecting their strong PGR rankings in the related specialties).  I’m really excited to be part of their graduate student community, who take a rigorous and in-depth engagement with both Nietzsche’s writings and the secondary literature, and I’m also very excited to work with Maudemarie Clark. 

Paul Katsafanas is organizing his third annual “Workshop in Late Modern Philosophy”.

Date: October 11-12, 2013
Location: Boston University
Program: http://people.bu.edu/pkatsa/workshop.html

The workshop will include talks by Nietzsche scholars Paul Katsafanas and John Richardson.

Theme: “The theme for the 2013 workshop is history’s relevance for philosophy.  Speakers might address the role of historical, genealogical, and narrative explanation in philosophical arguments; the possibility that historical or genealogical arguments provide a unique method of philosophical critique; the way in which historical approaches to philosophy disclose new philosophical problems; the relevance of conjectural or fanciful histories in philosophical argumentation; and the views of particular philosophers, including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, on history’s relation to philosophy”.

Mark Alfano, recently appointed assistant professor at the University of Oregon, has posted a draft of his paper, “How One Becomes What One Is: The Empirical Support for Three Nietzschean Insights” on his blog here. Here’s Alfano’s provocative claim:

What I want to argue is that, in light of contemporary science, Nietzsche’s is the best-supported moral psychological theory in the history of philosophy.

The three Nietzschean insights that Alfano attempts to empirically support are:

(1) the social construction of character,
(2) the tenacity of the intentional,
(3) and the disunity of the self.

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Recently added to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer (which includes translation and editing from prominent Nietzsche and Schopenhauer scholar: Christopher Janaway) is this volume titled, Schopenhauer: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings.

The Cambridge volumes are sure to become the definite English translation. This volume in particular includes three works by Schopenhauer:

(1) On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason — in his later works, he reflects on this work as essential for understanding his other works.

(2) On Will in Nature — wherein he discusses the broad manifestations in natural phenomena of an underlying, striving will.

(3) On Vision and Colours — wherein he, taking influence from Goethe’s Theory of Colours, defends an account of color perception that is antagonist to the established Newtonian conception.

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Professor Ken Gemes will be presenting at Tilburg University (a school in the Netherlands) this coming February 18-19th, 2013, on two topics that are rarely placed together: Nietzsche and logic.  On the first day, his presentation will be on Hypothetico-Deductivsm versus Bayesianism.  On the second day, he will be discussing some Nietzschean perspectives on the value of truth.

For more details on the event: http://philevents.org/event/show/8889