On the Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Self-Help Literature (original) (raw)
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Nietzsche's Prefaces as Practices of Self-Care
Although Nietzsche scholars have paid close attention to his aphoristic and rhetorical style, few have focused on his practice of writing prefaces. In this paper, I engage in a close reading of Nietzsche's prefaces and identify five themes present in his earlier and later prefaces: (1) he speaks directly to his readers, (2) he stresses the necessity of slow and careful reading, (3) he encourages readers to trust themselves, (4) he refers to himself as a herald, and (5) he uses combative and polemical language to describe his work. Given these themes, I conclude that Nietzsche's preface writing project constitutes a practice of self-care as described by Foucault in " Technologies of the Self " and " The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. " A philosopher: oh, a being who is frequently running away from himself, frequently afraid of himself—but too curious not to always come back to himself. —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future The Early Prefaces
Self-Help, Moral Philosophy, and the Moral Present
Human Studies, 2015
In this paper I argue that the lack of interest, among analytic moral philosophers, in the contingencies of our moral present, produces an impoverished moral philosophy, unable to address the moral problems and quandaries of ordinary people. What is needed to remedy this is a broadening of the scope of the moral philosopher’s thought to include a rich attention to moral phenomena of the present. One such phenomenon, attended to by sociologists and critical journalists over the past few decades, is the contemporary proliferating genre of psychologically oriented self-help literature. I display a range of sociological responses to self-help in order to point out aspects of morality that are made visible in these discussions, whereas they often remain invisible in standard moral philosophy. The aim is not to suggest a specific methodology for including such material into philosophical discussions, but rather to urge philosophers to reconsider the range of materials they attend to in their work, in order to produce a more lively engagement with and understanding of contemporary morality.
Philosophy in the Service of Life: Nietzsche and the Practical Employment of Thought
As a result of his critique of the pretentions of knowledge, the 18th Century German philosophy Immanuel Kant showed that the metaphysical ideas of God and the substantial soul are beyond the scope of any possible theoretical knowledge but necessarily be postulated by the practical (i.e. moral) reason of any rational being. In other words, even though we cannot know whether God and a substantial soul exist, we must posit their existence because of our rationally based ethical commitments. In this presentation, I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche takes Kant’s insight about the need to postulate certain truths on the basis of our ethical/practical commitments and concludes that philosophy’s task in general, whether the philosopher is conscious of it or not, is to create ideas that serve practical, rather than theoretical, interests. The goal of our theoretical interests, what Nietzsche collectively calls the will to truth, are limited by his perspectival critique of knowledge, leaving our practical interests to shape the world with which we have cognitive contact, the world as it is from our idiosyncratic perspective. Unlike Kant who held that practical reason gives the will a categorical imperative, i.e. an imperative that applies universally and unconditionally, the dictates of our practical interest are neither necessary/unconditional nor universal. Rather, they are contingent on the type of person one is, which for Nietzsche is determined by the complex of various drives and passions that constitute the body. Given the contingency of the dictates of our practical interest, the way we cognize the world on the basis of that interest will differ depending on the particular set of drives and passions an individual embodies. Philosophy’s task is to create ways of conceptualizing the world that promote a particular kind of life, one that allows an individual, given their “type,” to flourish. This is in contrast to the traditional view of philosophy’s task, which conceives of the philosopher as searching for and perhaps attaining eternal, absolute truths about reality as it is in itself, i.e. apart from any particular, limited perspective on it. With the focus of philosophy on cognizing the world in such a way so that a certain type can flourish, allowing the individual to fully affirm his or her own existence and because of this Nietzsche believes that it is able to overcome the nihilistic will to truth that has characterized philosophy to date and thereby will be the philosophy of the future.
Nietzsche's Post-Classical Therapy
ABSTRACT In The Gay Science, Nietzsche develops his account of the role philosophy should play in the making of a human life. Nietzsche adopts the common Hellenistic position that the goal of philosophy is eudaimonia or human flourishing. Whereas he endorses the therapeutic orientation of Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, Nietzsche characterises Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism as failed therapies: they reinforce the philosophical sicknesses they purport to cure. He objects to both the form and content of Hellenistic therapies: because they adopt a single, universal ideal of human flourishing, they fail to account for the full scope of human diversity; and, by adopting ataraxia or tranquillity as the goal of philosophical practice, they contract, deaden, and impoverish the lives of their practitioners. Nietzsche’s alternative post-Classical therapy seeks to redress the failures of previous eudaimonistic philosophies. To achieve this end Nietzsche suggests we need to experiment with different beliefs and practices to test the bounds of what we can successfully ‘incorporate’ into a flourishing life. In this essay we chart a third way between (i) naturalistic interpretations of Nietzsche as a philosopher who prescribes moral laws on the basis of stable natural facts and (ii) artistic and postmodern interpretations that see him as an advocate of the ex nihilo creation of values. In contrast to both, we argue that Nietzsche works to discover the natural limits of value creation through experimentation. For Nietzsche value experimentation holds the key to human flourishing.
of abstract: Book-marking the self: the rituals of buying and reading self-help
Women's Studies in Communication
Many commentators have argued that contemporary society has become increasing reflexive and with this a return in interest with the self-as both an ontological property that can be 'rediscovered' by the atomised social actor, and as an existential project or lifestyle complete with a set of 'life skills ' (e.g. Foucault, 1988, Giddens, 1991. This objectification of the 'self' in late modernity has taken many forms but this paper would like to address the increasing psychological nature of the self as a prescriptive discourse through the global cultural industry of self-help books. Self-help and self-awareness books have had a consistently high rating in the American bestseller lists over the past thirty years with domestic sales reaching $9.6 billion in 2006. This strong consumptive relationship with self-help books is not an exclusively American phenomenon but can also be found to be on the increase in Britain, Japan, China, and India to name a few. Despite the huge popularity of self-help books, the practice of buying and reading self-help books and the many anecdotal claims made by their readers that these books have 'changed' their lives the phenomenon of self-help has received very little scholarly attention. In this paper I would like to redress this academic blind spot and investigate the impact that self-help books and their message of self-knowledge and self-awareness have on their atomised reader. A discursive analysis of self-help books will be undertaken with the purpose of exposing the ideological claims of self-help books. This alternative interpretative framework will be tested against the views and responses of regular self-help readers. By combining these two methods it is hoped to expose the nature of self-help books and locate the place that the search for self-knowledge and self-care have acquired in contemporary society.
Going to School with Friedrich Nietzsche: The Self in Service of Noble Culture
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2014
To understand Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming and to determine its true import for contemporary education, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche’s view of the self that is to be overcome. Nevertheless, previous interpretations of self-overcoming in the journals of the philosophy of education have lacked serious engagement with the Nietzschean self. I devote the first part of this paper to redressing this neglect and arguing for a view of the Nietzschean self as an assemblage of ontologically basic affects which have been guided and modulated by the incorporation of perspectives. This interpretation has important consequences for self-overcoming, for it constrains the individual’s conscious agency to operations on perspectives. In light of this view I then advance a competing conception of self-overcoming and discuss some of the shortcomings of antecedent interpretations. Although previous interpreters have done their part to exhaust the characteristic actions of self-overcoming, I argue that they have either exaggerated the deleteriousness of social influence in the formation of the authentic individual, or else ignore it altogether. In the final part I reconsider the debate over the democratic or aristocratic nature of Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming. Interestingly, self-overcoming cannot be labeled strictly as either, and out of this ambiguity grows the role of the school as an agent of cultural transformation.
Notes on the Importance of Nietzsche
2016
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche adalah seorang filsuf Jerman yang cukup ternama dan berpengaruh. Lahir di Leipzig, Jerman, tahun 1844, lewat tulisantulisannya yang memiliki gaya dan tema yang berbeda dengan penulis lain, Nietzsche menyampaikan kritikannya terhadap kehidupan dan berbagai sistem yang diciptakan oleh manusia tentang moralitas dan kebenaran. Pikiran Nietzsche dinilai bertentangan dengan pendapat filsuf lain, seperti Immanuel Kant dan Plato. Namun, pikiran-pikirannya tersebut, terbukti telah membawa pengaruh cukup besar terhadap pemikir-pemikir lain, terutama dari aliran post-strukturalisme. Oleh karena itu, dapat dikatakan, Nietzsche adalah pelopor dalam aliran post-strukturalisme, yang mempengaruhi pemikir-pemikir berikutnya, seperti Michele Foucault dan Jacques Derrida. Kata kunci : Nietzsche, Post-Strukturalis, Foucault, Derrida
The rise of psy discourse has been the subject of considerable academic attention, but one of its most popular and visible forms, the self-help book, has received comparatively little attention. This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of a selection of relationship manuals; it examines the ways in which they set up a relation of the reader’s self to itself, and it explores the ethical valorizations and teleologies therein. The emphasis on the relationship with the self, and the development of mastery over the emotions advocated in the books, is related to the values held in liberal democratic societies.
Self-Help: The Oxymoron of Our Age Introduction
Nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused. 1 Carl Jung might have formulated this aphorism with regard to psychic illness and the dangers of naïve interpretation but it applies equally well to complicated and potentially fatal physical illnesses which defy attempts at establishing direct causation. Carl Jung's Modern Man In Search Of A Soul provides a highly insightful look at the lack of a sense of meaning in life which he claims is the crisis that guarantees all the other social crises that man faced in the 20 th century and which have shown no signs of abatement in the 21 st . Taking Modern Man as the starting point, this essay will seek to establish the link between the crisis of meaning in life that Jung elucidated and the need of people suffering from illness to find meaning and purpose behind their illness because, ultimately, regaining health is not the only concern of the ill. As Bernie Siegel very succinctly phrases it in his best-selling book, Love, Medicine and Miracles: 'Getting well is not the only goal. Even more important is learning to live without fear, to be at peace with life, and ultimately death.' 2 This essay aims to evaluate the insistently optimistic attitude towards life-threatening illnesses such as cancer that is espoused by the growing body of literature on self-help and alternative, holistic therapies and the relationship between the self and the illness that these self-help books help cultivate. A term such as self-help is ambiguous and has been used in a variety of contexts; for the purposes of this essay self-help will refer to the healthy-minded outlook and insistent optimism towards serious and often incurable illnesses that is popularised by authors such as Bernie Siegel and Norman Cousins. These eulogise a program of self-healing; the aim of these guides is to release our 'vis medicatrix naturae' 3 or the healing power that we contain within ourselves as Norman Cousins described in his pathography, Anatomy of an Illness, one