Friedrich Nietzsche (review translation) (original) (raw)

The meaning of life according to Nietzsche

WordPress, 2022

In the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes reference to a tightrope walker to demonstrate the perilous journey of humanity from ape to Superman The question of what meaning our lives might have was a major one for Nietzsche. While he is often mistaken for a nihilist, he was in fact quite the opposite. Indeed, much of his work is concerned with the problem of overcoming nihilism despite the slew of problems that drive people towards it.

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (review)

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2006

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that "gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" (BGE, § 6). 1 In a letter to Brandes dated 10 April 1888, Nietzsche also writes, "the person who does not find himself addressed personally by [my] work will probably have nothing more to do with me." 2 Perhaps more than any other philosopher of the modern period, Nietzsche invites the kind of "highly personal" Biographie seines Denkens that Rüdiger Safranski offers in his crisply written Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography.As the translator, Shelly Frisch rightly notes in her preface to the English edition, that "Safranski excels at the art of philosophical narration" (14). With a graceful and eloquent narrative, he weaves together "subtle, yet riveting, descriptions of the major junctures in Nietzsche's life that served to mark turning points in his [Nietzsche's] philosophical orientation" (14). Moreover, Safranski brings "the facts of [Nietzsche's] life" to bear on the narrative only insofar as they "shed light" on the development of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking. These "facts" include such well-know events as the death of Nietzsche's "outstanding father" at an early age, which "brought [Nietzsche] under the exclusive care of women, thus depriving him of male supervision, which he sorely missed" (32); Nietzsche's often strained relationship with the women in his life, especially his mother and sister; his service in the Franco-Prussian war (70); the "wild years" in Tribschen and Bayreuth with Wagner and Cosima (85-154); the "intellectual ménage a trois" with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé (245-75); and his "highly aggressive impromptu proposal of marriage to Mathilde Trampedach" (250). The major drawback of Safranski's "philosophical biography" approach is that it tends to focus almost exclusively on the earlier stages in the development of Nietzsche's thinking (when the biographical events in his life were more interesting), and it gives short shrift to the astonishingly productive later years of 1883-88, when Nietzsche wrote most of his mature philosophical works, but when the biographical events of his life were less than extraordinary. As a consequence, Safranski leaves the reader with an unbalanced view of the full range of Nietzsche's writings: earlier works such as the Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, and the Untimely Meditations are discussed in great detail, while Nietzsche's later (and, arguably, better) works such as Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols are mentioned only in passing. Still, the one redeeming virtue of Safranski's book is that it focuses on the intriguing, but often overlooked, concept of "self-configuration" or "self-fashioning" (Selbstgestaltung), and it treats this concept as a unifying thread that runs throughout the maze of Nietzsche's various multifarious writings. As a result, Safranski successfully connects Nietzsche's "highly personal philosophy" to the multifaceted "maneuvers of self-configuration" (298) and to what Safranski sees as the overall Nietzschean project of "fashioning one's own identity" in an otherwise meaningless world (41). As Nietzsche writes, "It is a measure of the degree of strength of the will to what extent one can do without [fixed] meaning in things [and] to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one learns to fashion a small portion of it oneself " (WP, § 585A). 3 Chapter 8, in particular, focuses on the main theme of self-fashioning and on what Safranski (quoting Nietzsche) calls making "a whole person of ourselves" (185; HAH I, 95). 4 According to Safranski, Nietzsche felt that this "quest for wholeness" was the "loftiest task that any individual could achieve in a lifetime" (185). Echoing Pierre Hadot's notion of "philosophy as a way of life," Safranski claims that Nietzsche's entire life "was a testing ground for thought" (181). 5 Nietzsche tried to fashion his life so as to "render his life a quotable basis for his thought" (181). As he

Querying Nietzsche's Influence and Meaning Today

Babette Babich, 'Querying Nietzsches Influence and Meaning Today' in: Ekaterina Polyakova and Yulia Sineokaya, eds., Фридрих Ницше: наследие и проект. М.: Культурная революция, / Friedrich Nietzsche: Heritage and Prospects (Moscow, Cultural Revolution, 2018), pp. 391-406.

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.

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

Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung

AGONAL PERSPECTIVES ON NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY O CRITICAL TRANSVALUATION, 2021

The chapters of this book draw in different ways on published and unpublished material, as indicated below.The author would like to thank the publishers for permitting the use of published material. Chapter 1i sb asedo narevised version of "Nietzsche'sH ammer: Philosophy,D estruction, or TheA rt of Limited Warfare",i n Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 60/2,1 998, pp. 321-347. Chapter 2i sb asedo nar evised and expanded version of the chapter "Nietzsche'sAgon",first published in TheNietzschean Mind,ed.