“Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself” (I.iii).
Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida)
This was the last week of my course, and the topic was the “affirmation of life” and how we can better understand what Nietzsche means by “affirmation” and by “life” on the basis of his drive psychology.
Unlike prior weeks, this week was a bit more discussion oriented, especially since my own views on the matter have been very unsettled. The assigned passages are meant to lay out a puzzle: on the one hand, Nietzsche urges us to affirm life, while on the other hand, Nietzsche claims that value judgments for or against life cannot be true.
Are such value judgments not true because these value judgments are necessarily false or because they are neither true nor false? In either case, by affirming life, is Nietzsche making a value judgment and going against his own words or is he doing something else?
Reading and comments for week 12: http://bit.ly/ICngPp
Having spent the last ten weeks looking at the unconscious and at its effects on conscious mental life, this week we will turn to consciousness to isolate what exactly its role is according to Nietzsche.
In this regard, Nietzsche seems to associate consciousness, in the sense of “self-awareness” of mental states, with the need to communicate, a need which arises from our organization into societies. This need to communicate supposedly requires that we can operate with generalities: words, ideas, concepts. Most of the difficult passages under discussion are from The Gay Science.
Reading and comments for week 11: http://bit.ly/HTUf0c
This week’s reading begins by looking at Nietzsche’s notion of the weak and the strong will (BGE 21). These two seem to be differentiated by their capacity for self-control, and while the former lacks the focusing power of a master drive, the latter maintains self-control through a central, master drive.
However, the strong will (along with its capacity for self-control and its master drive) can be attributed to two kinds of soul: the tyrannical soul of an ascetic and the mastered soul of an artist. Both kinds of soul are possessed of a strong will, but Nietzsche distinguishes between the two of them on the basis of their relation between the master drive and the subservient drives. In tyranny, the master drive asphyxiates the lesser drives. In mastery, the master drive sublimates the lesser drives.
Thus, we will investigate this week how Nietzsche’s psychology can potentially explain the degrees and varieties of self-control that a person can have.
Reading and comments for week 10: http://bit.ly/IKhMPf
Maudemarie Clark’s book, co-authored with David Dudrick, has been anticipated for the past decade. Finally, it will be published and available for purchase at the end of this Summer and is even available for pre-order
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been previously given a near final draft of the manuscript to read, and I’d like to briefly mention some of the highlights of this monograph.
The book is divided into two parts: “The Will to Truth and the Will to Value” and “The Will to Power”, and as the authors explain in the introduction, the entirety of their monograph is largely focused on the Preface and Part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil which encompasses Nietzsche’s theoretical philosophy (while they take Parts 2-9, which are not focused on in their monograph, to encompass Nietzsche’s practical philosophy).
Of the two parts of their monograph, the first part deals with the tension between the will to truth and the will to value. Against skeptical and postmodernist readings of Nietzsche’s first aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil, the authors’ spend some time discussing how, to the contrary, Nietzsche is very much a friend of truth (those aphorisms don’t have to be read as him denouncing the value of truth). According to the authors, what Nietzsche actually wants to draw out in those starting aphorisms is that he sees a long running tension between the will to find and instill things with value and the will to know how things really are. There is, in many cases, a conflict of interest and desire, and the will to truth frequently finds itself in tension with the will to value. This tension is the tension that Nietzsche mentions in his preface with the metaphor of the bow, the tension that he calls the “magnificent tension of the spirit” (BGE P).
What would you answer to the question: if there was an anthology devoted to Nietzsche’s philosophy of agency and action, which articles would be contained therein?
Post suggestions in the comments, and I’ll try to break them up into hypothetical chapters.
This week’s reading looks at three things: Nietzsche’s analysis of the will, the model of effective agency that Nietzsche criticizes, and three models of effective agency that interpreters have offered as Nietzsche’s own. The first of these latter models is Leiter’s epiphenomenal model, the second is Leiter’s secondary cause model and its variant by Katsafanas, and the third is my own teleological model. We will look at passages that support each of the models and discuss both the textual and philosophical plausibility of each of them for ascribing them to Nietzsche.
Reading and comments for week 9: http://bit.ly/HNQVE5
Background reading:
(i) Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will”.
(ii) Harry Frankfurt, “The Problem of Action”.
Recently published in February 2012 is the new Blackwell Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Vandenabeele.
See the Wiley-Blackwell page for this anthology here: http://bit.ly/H45n7K
I have yet to delve into this volume as I’ve been in the midst of a busy final semester at Berkeley, but I’d like to mention some articles that look interesting from just glancing at the table of contents.
First of all, Gemes, Janaway, and Reginster are all first-rate Nietzsche scholars, and so I’d expect their articles on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to be especially insightful.
Both Gemes and Janaway have co-authored the article, “Life-denial versus Life-Affirmation: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Pessimism and Asceticism”. Janaway is not only a first-rate Nietzsche scholar but also a first-rate Schopenhauer scholar, so I look forward to what he and his co-author have to say in regard to life-denial and life-affirmation.
Reginster has also provided ingenious insights into the parallels between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his monograph The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, and in this anthology he has authored the article, “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner”, which I expect will include more insights into the depth and breadth of Schopenhauer’s influence on the latter two.
Paul Guyer, an exceptional Kant scholar, is also published in the anthology with an article titled, “Perception and Understanding: Schopenhauer, Reid, Kant”.
Julian Young is organizing an upcoming Nietzsche conference at Wake Forest University, which will take place on April 15-17, 2012. The main topic of the conference will be the relationship between exceptional individuals and society at large that Nietzsche envisages:
A prominent issue embraced by the conference theme is the question of whether Nietzsche is to be read as arguing that the community should exist for the sake of the exceptional individual or as arguing the opposite, that the exceptional individual should exist for the sake of the community.
Brian Leiter notes on his blog that he will be presenting a paper there along with other important and prominent Nietzsche scholars, including papers by: Maudemarie Clark, John Richardson, Ken Gemes, and Jessica Berry.
Website: http://nietzsche.events.wfu.edu
This week’s reading looks at Nietzsche’s claim that even our most detached capacity, reflective deliberation, is incapable of avoiding the powerful influence of our drives. We begin with some passages by Kant, Nagel, and Korsgaard that argue for the impartiality of reflection and how it could be used to give us objective reasons for action. Following this are various passages from Nietzsche that discuss (i) the influence of the drives on our reflective thought and describe (ii) our inescapability from the influence of our drives.
Reading and comments for week 8: http://bit.ly/y0PY5G
Kieran Setiya, philosophy professor at Pittsburgh University, has been interviewed by 3:AM on Anscombe and the philosophy of action. This is a really great interview that is worth checking out. Throughout the interview he also discusses and mentions Davidson, McDowell, the space of reasons, the space of natural laws, and his prior and forthcoming work in ethics. He ends by mentioning how he is, in his forthcoming book, grappling with the uncomfortable idea of the absence of an absolute, an absolute with the potential to objectively ground our morality.
Interview: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-anscombe-intended-other-puzzles
Academics from various disparate disciplines (including philosophy, developmental psychology, primatology, biology/neuroscience) are organizing themselves this Summer in Italy to discuss where morality comes from:
Debates about the origin of human morality have gone through many phases, but ever since Darwin’s The Descent of Man, they have included evolutionary accounts or opposition to such accounts. One of the central issues has been the sharp line that some scholars draw between humans and other life forms using morality as principal demarcation. In this view human moral behavior is often defined in opposition to the natural “instincts,” or as a tool to keep those instincts under control. […] New findings in [various fields of research][…] have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behavior is continuous with animals social instincts.
Now I wonder: what would Nietzsche say about this? because it seems like something would be curious to discuss and something that concerned his own readings and writings. Furthermore, I’d like to see what the speakers might describe as capable of distinguishing animal morality from human morality (because there does seem to be some difference). Too bad there isn’t a Nietzsche scholar presenting.
Dates: June 17-22, 2012
Website: http://www.evolutionofmorality.it
I just found out about what appears to be a great new podcast series by Peter Adamson titled, the “History of Philosophy without any gaps”. Take a look at it here:
Prof. Neil Sinhababu, who studied Nietzsche under Brian Leiter and co-edited the awesome anthology, Nietzsche and Morality, gave a talk at Boise State University on “Zarathustra’s Metaethics” which is available in its entirety here:
Article: http://philpapers.org/rec/SINZM#.T1fDtDCSL0Q.twitter
Video: http://bit.ly/wUCeuU
Brian Leiter will be at the University of California, Riverside on March 7th, 2012, to give the 2012 Magnus Lecture, which is a part of a lecture series that focuses on advanced topics in Nietzsche studies.
The lecture is titled: “Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects”.
(See BGE 187 for the aphorism from which the title is drawn.)
I assume that Maudemarie Clark will be there, though I will update when the description of the lecture series is updated with more information (click here).
I am presently down in Orange County and will be attending the lecture tomorrow at Riverside.
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