Vanessa Lemm (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262861
- eISBN:
- 9780823266524
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262861.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging ...
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Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life, and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.Less
Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life, and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.
Debra Bergoffen
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262861
- eISBN:
- 9780823266524
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262861.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This paper is (pre)occupied with two bodies: the body of the last man and the body of the Overman. As Nietzsche tells us that the Overman will appear only when the last man has disappeared, it ...
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This paper is (pre)occupied with two bodies: the body of the last man and the body of the Overman. As Nietzsche tells us that the Overman will appear only when the last man has disappeared, it examines the body of the last man to discern what this disappearance will entail. The body of the last man, as the embodiment of the ascetic ideals of Christianity and Platonism also embodies the misogyny of these Western traditions. This body refuses its materiality and vulnerability. It calls the body’s materiality and vulnerability «woman» and shuns her/it. It figures itself as autonomous, rational—without passion. By Nietzsche’s criteria of life affirmation, the last man’s body is a sick, if not dead body. How to transvaluate this body so that it may become the body of the Overman is the question. Taking up the themes of Luce Irigaray’s love letter to Nietzsche (Marine Lover) I propose the following thesis: the body of the Overman, the one who overcomes the last man of the ascetic ideal, will be a body that gives itself over to the chance and risks of the dice throw, a body that lives its vulnerabilities, its flesh, its becomings. It will be a body that sees through the fable of the patriarchal invulnerable body which anchors the last man’s project of securing a life of ordered happiness. It will be a woman’s body divested of its stigma. Turning to the woman’s body for clues to the overcoming of the body of the last man, takes us to the life affirming powers of the pregnant body. Here the descriptions of pregnancy of Irigaray and Kristeva alert us to the possibilities of an eternal return which instead of nauseating us with the demand that we affirm the return of the last man’s threat to life, challenges us to risk the illness of pregnancy and its threat to the stabilities of subjectivity, for the sake of the once more of life. My reading of Nietzsche finds that however blind he usually was to the ways in which his announcement of the Death of God and his critique of modernity were also and necessarily a critique of patriarchy, there are places in his texts, and not marginal places, where the figure of woman speaks both as critic of modernity and as an opening for the coming of the Overman. There is the supposing truth were a woman of the preface to Beyond Good and Evil. There are the women life and truth of Zarathustra. There is the woman on her wedding night of Gay Science 71, to name a few. Nietzsche’s women live the truth of their bodies in shock, shame and silence. Some of them whisper this truth to Zarathustra. Putting Nietzsche in conversation with Irigaray and Kristeva allows us to articulate this truth and to find the ways in which it cuts a path to the life affirming body of the Overman.Less
This paper is (pre)occupied with two bodies: the body of the last man and the body of the Overman. As Nietzsche tells us that the Overman will appear only when the last man has disappeared, it examines the body of the last man to discern what this disappearance will entail. The body of the last man, as the embodiment of the ascetic ideals of Christianity and Platonism also embodies the misogyny of these Western traditions. This body refuses its materiality and vulnerability. It calls the body’s materiality and vulnerability «woman» and shuns her/it. It figures itself as autonomous, rational—without passion. By Nietzsche’s criteria of life affirmation, the last man’s body is a sick, if not dead body. How to transvaluate this body so that it may become the body of the Overman is the question. Taking up the themes of Luce Irigaray’s love letter to Nietzsche (Marine Lover) I propose the following thesis: the body of the Overman, the one who overcomes the last man of the ascetic ideal, will be a body that gives itself over to the chance and risks of the dice throw, a body that lives its vulnerabilities, its flesh, its becomings. It will be a body that sees through the fable of the patriarchal invulnerable body which anchors the last man’s project of securing a life of ordered happiness. It will be a woman’s body divested of its stigma. Turning to the woman’s body for clues to the overcoming of the body of the last man, takes us to the life affirming powers of the pregnant body. Here the descriptions of pregnancy of Irigaray and Kristeva alert us to the possibilities of an eternal return which instead of nauseating us with the demand that we affirm the return of the last man’s threat to life, challenges us to risk the illness of pregnancy and its threat to the stabilities of subjectivity, for the sake of the once more of life. My reading of Nietzsche finds that however blind he usually was to the ways in which his announcement of the Death of God and his critique of modernity were also and necessarily a critique of patriarchy, there are places in his texts, and not marginal places, where the figure of woman speaks both as critic of modernity and as an opening for the coming of the Overman. There is the supposing truth were a woman of the preface to Beyond Good and Evil. There are the women life and truth of Zarathustra. There is the woman on her wedding night of Gay Science 71, to name a few. Nietzsche’s women live the truth of their bodies in shock, shame and silence. Some of them whisper this truth to Zarathustra. Putting Nietzsche in conversation with Irigaray and Kristeva allows us to articulate this truth and to find the ways in which it cuts a path to the life affirming body of the Overman.
Dieter Thomä
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262861
- eISBN:
- 9780823266524
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262861.003.0016
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Nietzsche’s critique of “neighborly love” is usually associated with his dismissal of Christian morality. It is much more fruitful though to see this critique as part of a positive task which ...
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Nietzsche’s critique of “neighborly love” is usually associated with his dismissal of Christian morality. It is much more fruitful though to see this critique as part of a positive task which consists in the exploration and appraisal of the “love to the furthest”. The distinction between the nearest and the furthest does not hint at spatial differences, but at temporality. The love of the furthest should not be read as a denigration of what is near to you but rather as an attempt to come to grips with the process of “becoming”. Nietzsche’s “falling in love with becoming” requires him to develop a new concept of a person that allows for self-affirmation or self-reliance as well as for “overcoming” the self or self-abandonment. This re-reading of personal identity goes along with a revised notion of sociality and sociability that dismisses self-complacency as blindly affirming the present or some kind of achieved status (or stasis) and seeks to do justice to the affirmation of becoming. Nietzsche’s considerations are deeply indebted to the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose “The soul becomes” could have also served as a fitting title for this paper. Elucidating Nietzsche’s relation to Emerson paves the way to a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming.Less
Nietzsche’s critique of “neighborly love” is usually associated with his dismissal of Christian morality. It is much more fruitful though to see this critique as part of a positive task which consists in the exploration and appraisal of the “love to the furthest”. The distinction between the nearest and the furthest does not hint at spatial differences, but at temporality. The love of the furthest should not be read as a denigration of what is near to you but rather as an attempt to come to grips with the process of “becoming”. Nietzsche’s “falling in love with becoming” requires him to develop a new concept of a person that allows for self-affirmation or self-reliance as well as for “overcoming” the self or self-abandonment. This re-reading of personal identity goes along with a revised notion of sociality and sociability that dismisses self-complacency as blindly affirming the present or some kind of achieved status (or stasis) and seeks to do justice to the affirmation of becoming. Nietzsche’s considerations are deeply indebted to the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose “The soul becomes” could have also served as a fitting title for this paper. Elucidating Nietzsche’s relation to Emerson paves the way to a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming.
