Pringle-Pattison on The Life and Opinions of Friedrich Nietzsche (original) (raw)

FAREWELL DEAR FRITZ: a tribute to Friedrich Nietzsche

IGDS eBooks, 2025

This book is about two diametrically opposed approaches to the truth--introspection and extrospection. Introspection was the mature approach of the famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. While this approach led to profound insights into his personal psychology, it prevented him from reaching his goal of revaluing all societal values, and it proved so traumatic that it caused the great thinker to lose his sanity. This high-risk, low-reward approach is contrasted with one in which truth is sought through an exploration of the outside world--namely the dynamic life-system, or strategic logos--enabling, among many other things, an understanding of the way societal values are formulated. In one of his last books "Nietzsche contra Wagner" (1888/1895), Nietzsche wrote about Wagner and himself that: "we are antipodes". The same could be said of Nietzsche and me. Yet this difference does not diminish the warmth of feeling I have for Fritz (as he was known to family and close friends), nor the immense respect I have for his dangerous and painful odyssey in search of the truth.

Anti-Nietzsche : A Critique of Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s irrational doctrines have contributed to the emergence of self-destructive extremism on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The realization of his Übermensch ideal is not about achieving greatness as an individual but rather about greatness as a collective whole, specifically as a European empire. His philosophy stands in stark contrast to genuine conservatism, which is rooted in Christian principles. Keywords: conservatism, perspectivism, traditionalism, New Right, identitarian, postmodernism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, extremism, antisemitism, will to power, logos, Christianity.

The Philosophy of Nietzsche by Reiner Schürmann, Lecture Notes for Courses at New School for Social Research

Diaphanes Verlag - https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/the-philosophy-of-nietzsche-4692, 2020

Nietzsche praised Kant for having “annihilated Socratism,” for exhibiting all ideals as essentially unattainable, and for having exposed himself to the despair of truth—all essential traits Nietzsche claimed for his own thinking. At the same time, the existentialist philosopher remained highly critical of Kant. This volume of Reiner Schürmann’s lectures unpacks Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards Kant, in particular positioning Nietzsche’s claim to have brought an end to German idealism against the backdrop of the Kantian transcendental-critical tradition. Rather than simply compare the two philosophers, Schürmann’s lectures help us to understand the consequences Nietzsche derived from Kantian concepts, as well as the wider horizon within which Nietzsche’s ideas arose and can best be shown to apply. According to Schürmann’s trenchant reading: if Nietzsche was indeed “fatal” to Western philosophy, as he claimed, he was so in large part because of the Kantian transcendental thinking from which he inherited the very elements and tools of his criticism.

Review of �Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography�

Essays in Philosophy, 2003

Maybe we did not need another book on Nietzsche. The philosopher who famously despised scholarship and scholars has been the occasion of more ink spilled by academics than perhaps any other thinker of the modern period. And although much of the recent work on Nietzsche should be counted among the best books yet written on his thought-I am thinking of Kathleen Higgins' Comic Relief (2000), for example, and Brian Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality (2002)-one sometimes wonders if there is anything original left to say about what already has been so overwrought. But then along comes a book like Safranski's Nietzsche and the great German iconoclast (that's Nietzsche, not Safranski) is fresh for us again. Safranski is good at this: his well-received biographies of Schopenhauer and Heidegger were similarly refreshing books to read, tying together the life and thought of those two figures in a way that no one had successfully done before (indeed, when speaking of either Schopenhauer or Heidegger, one tends to avoid discussing their lives-especially in Heidegger's case). And although it is true that we have several good and-in the work of Curt Paul Janz, for exampleeven excellent biographies of Nietzsche, Safranski is the first to tease the strange and often shocking philosophical ideas of Nietzsche out of his rather comparatively mild and conservative life.

Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil Laurence Lampert New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, x + 320 pp., $40.00

Dialogue, 2005

After publishing at his own expense the fourth and final part of his Thus Spake Zarathustra in May of 1885, Nietzsche faced a quite unprecedented literaryphilosophical task. What does one who has just published, in his considered opinion, the greatest thing ever written in German, or indeed in any language, a book that puts the Vedas, the Divine Comedy, and the works of Shakespeare and Goethe entirely in the shade, do for an encore? What does he write next, supposing he is bold, or foolish, enough to write anything? In the event, Nietzsche was surprisingly quick to provide the few dozen illuminati who thought well, or at all, of his work with Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) in 1886. And now, fifteen years after the publication of his much admired Zarathustra's Teaching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), Laurence Lampert presents us with its natural follow-up, an interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. Beyond Good and Evilis probably the most widely read and taught of Nietzsche's works. Less gnomic and bombastic than Zarathustra, more compact and accessibly organized than the great middle works (Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), less dense and self-involved than the pamphlet-sized quintet from 1888 (Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Ecce Homo), and more comprehensive than either the blistering "supplement" to it, On the Genealogy of Morality, or the writings of the Basel period, The Birth of Tragedy, and the Untimely Meditations, BGE is the obvious answer to questions such as: "Which work of Nietzsche's should we put on the PhD qualifying exam list?" or "What should I read to get a sense of what Nietzsche's philosophy is all about?" So, a book-length treatment of the work ought to be an especially welcome addition to the Nietzsche section of the library. Of this booklength treatment, however, the best I can say is that people who like this sort of thing will no doubt like it. By "this sort of thing," I mean "philosophical work in thrall to the ideas of Leo Strauss." In the spirit of Peter Cook's miner-who would have preferred a career in the judiciary and shows a positively Moorean fastidiousness in his concern to distinguish the sweeping generalization that "you get a load of riff raff down the mine" (to which he will not commit himself) from the singular proposition that "I had a load of riff raff down my mine," for which he claims to have ample empirical evidence-let me say at the outset that, while I am unqualified to speak of the soundness, truth, or interest of the thought of Leo Strauss, I find that it has not in the present case proven very helpful. Nietzsche's task, according to Lampert, was twofold, encompassing the achievement of "a comprehensive perspective on the world and on the human disposition toward the world" (p. 1), the task of philosophy, and the securing of "a place for that perspective in the lived world of human culture" (ibid.), the task of political philosophy. Following the master, Lampert sees this distinction of tasks reflected in the organization of BGE, which, on the Strauss-Lampert model, begins with three sections-on the prejudices of philosophers, the free mind or spirit (derfreie Geist), and the religious life or nature (das religiose Wesen)-devoted to articulating the comprehensive perspective constitutive of philosophy, and ends with five