Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition


Book Description

Matthew Tones examines the early ontological development of the tragic disposition in Nietzsche's analysis of the pre-Platonic Greeks and its influence on Nietzsche's quest to discover a future nobility. This book fuses the popular reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist with nob...




Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition


Book Description

Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition exposes the role of tension in Nietzsche’s recovery, in his mature thought, of the Greek tragic disposition. Matthew Tones examines the ontological structure of the tragic disposition presented in Nietzsche's earliest work on the Greeks and then explores its presence in points of tension in the more mature concerns with nobility. In pursuing this ontological foundation, Tones builds upon the centrality of a naturalist argument derived from the influence of the pre-Platonic Greeks. He examines the ontological aspect of the tragic disposition, identified in Nietzsche’s earliest interpretations of Greek phusis and in the inherent tensions of the chthonic present in this hylemorphic foundation, to demonstrate the importance of tension to Nietzsche’s recovery of a new nobility. By bringing to light the functional importance of tension in the ontological for the Greeks, the book identifies varying points of tension present in different aspects of Nietzsche’s later work. Once these aspects are elaborated, the evolving influence of tension is shown to play a central role in the re-emergence of the noble who possesses the tragic disposition. With solid argumentation linking Nietzsche with the pre-Platonic Greek tradition, Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition brings new insights to studies of metaphysics, ontology, naturalism, and German, continental, and Greek philosophies.




Nietzsche and the Dionysian


Book Description

Nietzsche and the Dionysian argues that the shuddering mania of the affect associated with Dionysus in Nietzsche’s early work runs as a thread through his thought and is linked to an originary interruption of self-consciousness articulated by the philosophical companion. In this capacity, the companion can be considered a ‘mask of Dionysus’, or one who assumes the singular role of the transmitter of the most valuable affirmative affect and initiates a compulsion to respond which incorporates the otherness of the companion. In the context of such engagements, Nietzsche envisages ‘Dionysian’ or divine ‘madness’ within an optics of life, through which an affirmative ethics can be thought. The ethical response to the philosophical companion requires an affirmation of the plurality of life, formulated in the imperatives to be ‘true to the earth’ and ‘become who you are’. Such an ethics, compelled by the Dionysian affect, grounds any future for humanity in the affirmation of the earth and life.




The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche


Book Description

Provides comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of Nietzsche's philosophy, his key works and themes, his major influences and his legacy.




Nietzsche's Task


Book Description

When Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he told a friend that it was a book that would not be read properly until “around the year 2000.” Now Laurence Lampert sets out to fulfill this prophecy by providing a section by section interpretation of this philosophical masterpiece that emphasizes its unity and depth as a comprehensive new teaching on nature and humanity. According to Lampert, Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy that is ultimately affirmative, because it shows how philosophy can arrive at a defensible ontological account of the way of all beings. Nietzsche next argues that a new post-Christian religion can arise out of the affirmation of the world disclosed to philosophy. Then, turning to the implications of the new ontology for morality and politics, Nietzsche argues that these can be reconstituted on the fundamental insights of the new philosophy. Nietzsche’s comprehensive depiction of this anti-Platonic philosophy ends with a chapter on nobility, in which he contends that what can now be publicly celebrated as noble in our species are its highest achievements of mind and spirit.




Contesting Nietzsche


Book Description

A brilliant exploration of a significant and understudied aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas.




Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Art


Book Description

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This GuideBook introduces and assesses: Nietzsche's life and the background to his writings on art the ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought. This GuideBook will be essential reading for all students coming to Nietzsche for the first time.




Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation


Book Description

The first attempt at assessing the references to interpretation theory in the Nietzschean text.




The New Nietzsche


Book Description

The fifteen essays, written by such eminent scholars as Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, Klossowski, and Blanchot, focus on the Nietzschean concepts of the Will to Power, the Overman, and the Eternal Return, discuss Nietzsche's style, and deal with the religious implications of his ideas. Taken together they provide an indispensable foil to the interpretations available in most current American writing.




Nietzsche: Daybreak


Book Description

A new edition of this important work of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy.