'The Socratic Justification of Existence: Nietzsche on Wissenschaft and Existential Meaning' (original) (raw)

Nietzsche's Struggle Against Pessimism

Cambridge University Press, 2023

On what grounds could life be made worth living, given its abundant suffering? Friedrich Nietzsche was among many who attempted to answer this question. While always seeking to resist pessimism, Nietzsche’s strategy for doing so, and the extent to which he was willing to concede conceptual grounds to pessimists, shifted dramat- ically over time. His reading of pessimists such as Eduard von Hartmann, Olga Plumacher, and Julius Bahnsen – as well as their critics, such as Eugen Duhring and James Sully – has been under- explored in the secondary literature, isolating him from his intellectual context. Patrick Hassan’s book seeks to correct this. After closely mapping Nietzsche’s philosophical development on to the relevant axiological and epistemological issues, it disentangles his various critiques of pessimism, elucidating how familiar Nietzschean themes (e.g., eternal recurrence, aesthetic justification, will to power, and his critique of Christianity) can and should be assessed against this philosophical backdrop.

Nietzsche Failed Engagement with Schopenhauer's Pessimism: An Analysis

Inquiry, 2019

While a common view in the literature is that Nietzsche cannot successfully argue against Schopenhauer’s pessimism, a detailed explanation of why this is so is lacking. In this paper I provide such a detailed analysis. Specifically, a consideration of three of Nietzsche’s strategies for a revaluation of pain and suffering reveals two problems: the problem of “the direction of revaluation” and the “dilemma of the intransigence of hedonism”. According to the first, the success of a revaluation cannot be guaranteed on strictly argumentative grounds and can in principle bring about a revaluation that proceeds in the opposite direction than the one desired. According to the second, Nietzsche‘s revaluations are of no significance since they either ground an un-Nietzschean affirmation of life, or they do not engage pessimism’s hedonistic perspective on the basis of which it condemns life. I then examine two strategies that Nietzsche can be seen to employ in his attempts to revalue the hedonistic perspective itself and explain why they too are unsatisfactory. The analysis illuminates the nature of the dialectical stand-off between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and clarifies the limitations of Nietzschean revaluations as a philosophical tool.

Nietzsche on Giving Life Sense: From Discourse to Practice

Ámbito de encuentros , 2019

This paper discusses Nietzsche’s thoughts on “giving sense” and “unity”. From his point of view one may understand nihilism as a lack of direction and goal (KSA 12, p. 350). It is important to stress, however that this lack is not an absence of content but rather a lack of organization.This point must not be overshadowed in the debate between two different perspectives concerning the intrinsic value of life in Nietzsche’s thought: either (i) life has an intrinsic value or (ii) human beings must give sense to life.As an example of the first perspective, one should consider G. Simmel’s Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where he insists that life for Nietzsche is an absolute value (University of Illinois Press, 1991, p. 76). In contrast, in R. Alejandro’s Nietzsche and the Drama of Historiobiography, Nietzsche’s philosophy is construed as “an attempt to endow life with the significance it lacks” (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011, p. 8).To incorporate the leitmotif of organization as sense and direction can shed light in these considerations.The creation of a unity from disperse elements is a constant topic in Nietzsche’s works. My take on the subject shares Müller-Lauter’s point of view that: “Only a plurality can be organized as a unity” (Müller-Lauter,W., Über Werden und Wille zur Macht, Berlin/New York,Walter de Gruyter, 1999, p. 39).

Nietzsche and the Perspective of Life

Social Science Research Network, 2009

Nietzsche clearly had problems with moralizers. He believed that those who advocate one lifestyle over another are doing nothing more than revealing their own psychological pathologies: Finally, let's consider how naïve it is in general to say, "Human beings should be such and such!" Reality shows us a captivating treasury of types, the exuberance of an evanescent play and alteration of forms. And some pathetic bystander of a moralist says to all this, "No! Human beings should be different"? … He even knows how human beings should be, this sanctimonious sniveler; he paints himself on the wall and pronounces, "ecce homo!"…(TI 5, 6) i From passages such as this one, we might well conclude that Nietzsche was an antirealist about moral values: values are relativized to individuals, or to certain perspectives, and nothing is morally valuable in and of itself. ii Support for this conclusion can also be found in Nietzsche's numerous remarks about values being inherent in a perspective, or about a perspective being nothing more than a certain structure of values.

Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism : Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi

2007

This dissertation is a study of the predominantly German pessimistic tradition in the philosophy of the late nineteenth century, and of Nietzsche’s complex relation to that tradition. The aim of the dissertation is firstly to analyse how pessimism came to be established as a philosophical concept by Schopenhauer and a later generation of pessimistic thinkers, and secondly to investigate how Nietzsche understood pessimism.In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that although the term pessimism was coined in 1759, and although it was used in a philosophical context by Schopenhauer in the 1840’s, it was not until Eugen Duhring and Eduard von Hartmann defined it in terms of the value of life in the late 1860’s that a clear conceptual content was attributed to pessimism. After Duhring and Hartmann, philosophical pessimism was generally understood as the notion that the value of life is negative, which means that non-existence is necessarily preferable to existence. This notion of ...