On the difficult case of loving life: Plato's Symposium and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

A simple but significant historical fact has been overlooked in interpretations of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. In making eternal recurrence the standard for the affirmation and love of life, Nietzsche accepts an understanding of love developed in Plato's Symposium: love means ‘wanting to possess the good forever’. I argue that Plato develops two distinct types of love, which remain in tension with one another. I then show that a corresponding tension arises in Nietzsche's work when we consider eternal recurrence as the love of life. By making love central in the phrase ‘love of life’, and by allowing Plato's thoughts on love to inform the love of life that Nietzsche expresses in the thought of eternal recurrence, I show that Nietzsche's dramatic presentations of the eternal recurrence do not present us with a test, but in revealing an incompatibility between loving something in life and loving life in its entirety, they present the tragic conflict in the task of life affirmation.     

Remarks about the Nietzschean dancing God

Nietzsche and (or beyond) Christianity: a worn-out and almost banal problem? In this article I argue that this topic goes far beyond a mere opposition between Christians and Nietzscheans. I want to show that the actual issue concerns Nietzsche's attempt to overcome the moral hegemony within Christianity. In this context, Nietzsche's project is not to eradicate religion but to define a new religious space. I have organised this discussion by conceiving the present article around a sentence extracted from Thus spoke Zarathustra. I first analyse the text in its syntactic and rhetorical composition. Nietzsche's very strategy (or trick?) resides in undermining the Christian discourse from the inside: he argues that Christian morality is not inspired by a cheerful affirmation of life but by its vindictive negation. I further show that Nietzsche puts at stake the Christian striving for a justification of life and consequently its incapacity of accepting the question-mark of existence. Within his radical critique, Nietzsche points to an authentic attitude towards life, an attitude which I have designated with the metaphor of the dancing God.     

Vulnerability and the Sovereign Individual: Nussbaum and Nietzsche on the role of agency and vulnerability in personhood

In her paper Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism, Martha Nussbaum argues that Nietzsche's philosophical project can be seen in part as an attempt to ‘bring about a revival of Stoic values of self-command and self-transformation’. She argues that, to his detriment, Nietzsche's ‘Sovereign Individual’ epitomises a kind of stoic ideal of inner strength and self-sufficiency that ‘goes beyond Stoicism’ in its valorisation of radical self emancipation from the contingencies of life and from our own human vulnerability. Nussbaum thus urges us to question whether the picture of strength in Nietzsche's Sovereign Individual is really a picture of human strength at which we would be willing to, or at which we ought to, aim. In this paper I take up Nussbaum's challenge, arguing that Nietzsche's Sovereign Individual is both less stoical and provides us with a far more attractive picture of personhood than Nussbaum suggests.     

Spinoza and Nietzsche on Freedom Empowerment and Affirmation

Against much of the philosophical tradition, Spinoza and Nietzsche defend an understanding of freedom opposed to free will and formulated as an ethical ideal consisting in a transition from a smaller to a greater power of acting. Starting from a shared commitment to necessity and radical immanence, they present freedom as a passage to a greater power of self‐determination and self‐expression of the body. Nevertheless, the continuities between their power ontologies and their respective commitments to a life of knowledge break down in their discussion of the various possible manifestations of power. I will argue that Nietzsche's distinctive formulation of power as struggle between wills to power enables him to formulate the question of the qualitative dimension of empowerment in a way that is foreign to Spinoza's rational determinism. While acknowledging the profound similarities, I will argue that we must see Nietzsche's discussion of affirmation as the culmination of his disagreement with his predecessor on the topic of freedom and empowerment.     

The Birth of Tragedy and The Trauma of Birth

This article examines the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Rank in terms of Harold Bloom's notion of an "anxiety of influence." Like the "strong poets" in Bloom's theory, each of these innovators needed to resolve his ambivalence toward precursors to create new theories and approaches. Nietzsche and Rank are seen as "premature births," thinkers before their time; both went beyond their own early works and attempted self-creation. Through an emphasis on affirmation of life despite death's inevitability, both were able to free themselves creatively. Rank drew from Nietzsche's philosophy and his example in developing an early existential psychotherapy.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Militant Modern Atheism

Militant modern atheism, whose most eloquent champion is Richard Dawkins, provides an effective and necessary critique of fundamentalist forms of religion and their role in political life, both within states and across national boundaries. Because it is also presented as a more general attack on religion (tout court), it has provoked a severe reaction from scholars who regard its conception of religion as shallow and narrow. My aim is to examine this debate, identifying insights and oversights on both sides. Two distinct conceptions of religion are in play. For Dawkins and his allies (most notably Dan Dennett) religions are grounded in doctrines, propositions about supernatural entities, events and processes which the devout believe. Their beliefs prompt them to actions, which they support or rationalize by reference to the doctrines. Dawkins and Dennett view the acceptance of the doctrines as resting on cognitive misfiring — these are delusions to be outgrown or spells to be broken. By contrast, the religious scholars who criticize the militant atheists often view religion as centered in social practices that inform and enrich human lives. To the extent that there are doctrines that atheists might subject to epistemic evaluation, these are to be viewed as pieces of scaffolding, that are, in principle, dispensable. I argue that militant modern atheism is incomplete (and likely counter‐productive) so long as it fails to attend systematically to the roles religion fulfills in human lives. Yet it is important to achieve public clarity about the literal falsehood of the doctrines on which fundamentalists rely. The challenge is to develop a well‐articulated and convincing version of secular humanism. Meeting that challenge is, I claim, one of the central problems of philosophy today.     

Darwin, Design and Dawkins’ Dilemma

Richard Dawkins has a dilemma when it comes to design arguments. On the one hand, he maintains that it was Darwin who killed off design and so implies that his rejection of design depends upon the findings of modern science. On the other hand, he follows Hume when he claims that appealing to a designer does not explain anything and so implies that rejection of design need not be based on the findings of modern science. These contrasting approaches lead to the following dilemma: if he claims that Darwinism is necessary for rejecting design, he has no satisfactory response to design arguments based on the order in the laws of physics or the fine-tuning of the physical constants; alternatively, if Humean arguments are doing most of the work, this would undermine one of his main contentions, that atheism is justified by science and especially by evolution. In any case, his Humean arguments do not provide a more secure basis for his atheism because they are seriously flawed. A particular problem is that his argument for the improbability of theism rests on a highly questionable application of probability theory since, even if it were sound, it would only establish that the prior probability of God’s existence is low, a conclusion which is compatible with the posterior probability of God’s existence being high.     

Camus and Nihilism

Camus published an essay entitled ??Nietzsche and Nihilism,?? which was later incorporated into The Rebel. Camus' aim was to assess Nietzsche's response to the problem of nihilism. My aim is to do the same with Camus. The paper explores Camus' engagement with nihilism through its two major modalities: with respect to the individual and the question of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, and with respect to the collective and the question of murder in The Rebel. While a Nietzschean influence thoroughly suffuses both books, it is in the second that Camus' most explicit, and most critical, engagement with the German philosopher takes place. The crux of Camus' critique of Nietzsche is that the absolute affirmation of existence he proposes as a response to nihilism cannot say ??no?? to murder. In the terms of Camus' discussion in The Rebel, Nietzsche's philosophy is thus culpable in the straying of rebellion from its own foundations and its slide into bloody revolution. First, the paper argues that Camus' criticisms of Nietzsche are misplaced. Camus focuses his analysis on sections of the problematic text The Will to Power and misses important sections of Nietzsche's published texts which in fact support the condemnation of revolution which is the project of The Rebel. However, the paper argues that Camus moves beyond Nietzsche in radically democratizing the response to nihilism. While Nietzsche's hopes for the creation of meaning are focused on exceptional individuals, Camus insists that any response to nihilism needs to be accessible to the average person. Such a move is laudable, but it raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the type of problem nihilism is, and how these might be addressed.     

Critical Notice: Paul Russell's The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism,Naturalism, and Irreligion (OUP 2008)

In The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (2008), Paul Russell makes a strong case for the claim that “The primary aim of Hume's series of skeptical arguments, as developed and distributed throughout the Treatise, is to discredit the doctrines and dogmas of Christian philosophy and theology with a view toward redirecting our philosophical investigations to areas of ‘common life,’ with the particular aim of advancing ‘the science of man’” (2008, 290). Understanding Hume in this way, according to Russell, sheds light on the “ultimate riddle” of the Treatise: “is it possible to reconcile Hume's (extreme) skeptical principles and conclusions with his aim to advance the ‘science of man’” (2008, 3)? Or does Hume's skepticism undermine his “secular, scientific account of the foundations of moral life in human nature” (290)? Russell's controversial thesis is that “the irreligious nature of Hume's fundamental intentions in the Treatise” is essential to solving the riddle (11). Russell makes a compelling case for Hume's irreligion as well as his atheism. Contrary to this interpretation I argue that Hume is an irreligious theist and not an atheist.     

It's a Wonderful Life: Reflections on Wittgenstein's Last Words

On his deathbed, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, upon hearing that his friends were coming for a visit, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.” Malcolm found this puzzling, given that Wittgenstein seemed to be fiercely unhappy. I find my way into these words against the backdrop of the Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life and Wittgenstein's famous remark, to wit, “Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” Along the way I discuss Plato's praise of wonder, Nietzsche's attack on science, and Kierkegaard's remark about finding the sublime in the pedestrian. I conclude that Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life insofar as he was fully awake to wonder, what I call the wonder of our words.     

‘Pain Always Asks for a Cause’: Nietzsche and Explanation

Those who have emphasised Nietzsche's naturalism have often claimed that he emulates natural scientific methods by offering causal explanations of psychological, social, and moral phenomena. In order to render Nietzsche's method consistent with his methodology, such readers of Nietzsche have also claimed that his objections to the use of causal explanations are based on a limited scepticism concerning the veracity of causal explanations. My contention is that proponents of this reading are wrong about both Nietzsche's methodology and his method. I argue for this by: first, showing that Nietzsche was suspicious of causal explanations not only on sceptical grounds but also for reasons provided by his psychological analysis of our tendency to look for causes; and second, arguing for a non‐causal interpretation of Nietzsche's approach to psychological explanation.     

Atheism in religious clothing? Accounting for atheist interventions in the public sphere

In this paper I review several recent attempts to recast atheism in religious form in Canada, the US and the UK. First, several atheists have argued for the redefinition of atheism as a creed deserving of religious protections from the state. Second, various atheist ‘churches’ have gained publicity in recent years, in part due to their appropriation of the Protestant church format and the rhetoric of religious association. Both of these expressions of atheism stand in marked contradiction to older forms of atheism which emerged in response to (and rejection of) Christianity in the West, and they also stand in contrast to popular forms of atheism today, of the kind espoused by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. As a result, the cases reviewed here represent the ways in which contemporary atheist movements constitute several different counterpublics, and they mark a significant change in the state’s acknowledgement of atheism as a positive form of belief.     

Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche,Freud, and the east

Nietzsche's work reveals a gradual reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism, coming to view the latter no longer as an anaesthetising religious neurosis, but as a methodology for negation that inspires a conquest over ressentiment, a healing of internalized division, and a celebrative existence. This trend was influenced by his relationship to Schopenhauer and Deussen, and his own personal maturation. Both the source of this philosophy and the reasons for Nietzsche's failure to realise it in his own life are traced to conflictual intrapsychic oppositions in his own parental internalizations. Freud's central concepts (the unconscious, instinctual repression, neurosis, internalized good and bad parental objects, and the discontents of civilization) were modeled on Nietzsche's thinking. Yet Freud rejected oriental mysticism and its somatic focus as regressive. His failure to take up Nietzsche's eventual insight into Buddhism, and his consequent pessimism, are attributable to his personal and theoretical resistance to the issue of the early symbiotic union of mother and infant.     

Transcendental Aspects,Ontological Commitments and Naturalistic Elements in Nietzsche's Thought

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways – as transcendental, naturalistic or proto‐deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge (his so‐called error theory). This paper examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy whilst fully taking into account the error theory (interpreted non‐literally, as a hyperbolic warning against uncritical forms of realism). In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori.     

On the self-undermining functionality critique of morality

Nietzsche's injunction to examine “the value of values” can be heard in a pragmatic key, as inviting us to consider not whether certain values are true, but what they do for us. This oddly neglected pragmatic approach to Nietzsche now receives authoritative support from Bernard Reginster's new book, which offers a compelling and notably cohesive interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. In this essay, I reconstruct Reginster's account of Nietzsche's critique of morality as a “self-undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it: (i) Is there room within an etiological conception of function for the notion of self-undermining functionality? (ii) If Nietzsche's critique is internal and based solely on the function it ascribes to morality, where does that critique derive its normative significance from? (iii) Does Reginster's account not make out ascetic morality to be more universally dysfunctional than it is, given that some priestly types have done remarkably well out of morality?     

Hobbes's Challenge to Descartes,Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal God

This paper brings new work to bear on the perennial question about Hobbes's atheism to show that as a debate about scepticism it is falsely framed. Hobbes, like fellow members of the Mersenne circle, Descartes and Gassendi, was no sceptic, but rather concerned to rescue physics and metaphysics from radical scepticism by exploring corporealism. In his early letter of November 1640, Hobbes had issued a provocative challenge to Descartes to abandon metaphysical dualism and subscribe to a ‘corporeal God’; a provocation to which the Frenchman angrily responded, but was perhaps importantly influenced. Hobbes's minimal realism was consonant with atheism, to which Descartes felt he was being forced. Moreover, Hobbes was unrelenting in his battle against Cartesian dualism, for which he saw Robert Boyle's experimental science as a surrogate.     

Nietzsche's Pluralism about Consciousness

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche's view on consciousness is best captured by distinguishing different notions of consciousness. In other words, I propose that Nietzsche should be read as endorsing pluralism about consciousness. First, I consider the notion that is preeminent in his work and argue that the only kind of consciousness which may fit the characterization Nietzsche provides of this dominant notion is self-consciousness (^Sconsciousness). Second, I argue that in light of Nietzsche's treatment of perceptions and sensations we should conclude that he takes each of such state types to involve a specific kind of consciousness which differs from ^Sconsciousness. I label these two additional kinds of consciousness perceptual consciousness (^Pconsciousness) and qualitative consciousness (^Qconsciousness), respectively. I conclude the paper with some remarks on how, in Nietzsche's picture, these three different kinds of consciousness might relate.     

Nietzsche on the sociality of emotional experience

In this paper, I explore the sociality of emotional experience in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, I describe four key mechanisms through which an individual's sociocultural context shapes her emotional experience on Nietzsche's view—emotional contagion as habitual affective mimicry, the production of emotions' felt character through the assimilation of dominant social beliefs and norms, affective interpretation à la Christopher Fowles, and the imposition of dominant notions of emotional appropriateness—fleshing out a dimension of Nietzsche's thought which is largely taken for granted but remains undertreated. After detailing these mechanisms, I argue that attending to the sociality of emotional experience in Nietzsche's thought is crucial not only for understanding key elements of his moral psychology (including certain of his reflections on freedom and self-transformation), but also for understanding his interpretation of nihilism as a psychological-affective phenomenon produced by the society to which one belongs. On Nietzsche's view, attending to the sociality of emotion helps individuals recognize the way in which the sociocultural contexts they inhabit might undermine their flourishing—and also helps them envision the conditions (especially sociocultural conditions) requisite for healthier, more empowering emotional lives.     

Nietzsche's Meta-axiology: Against the Sceptical Readings

In this paper, I treat the question of the meta-axiological standing of Nietzsche's own values, in the service of which he criticizes morality. Does Nietzsche, I ask, regard his perfectionistic valorization of human excellence and cultural flourishing over other ideals to have genuine evaluative standing, in the sense of being correct, or at least adequate to a matter-of-fact? My goal in this paper is modest, but important: it is not to attribute to Nietzsche some sophisticated meta-axiological view, because I am doubtful that he has one. It is, however, to show that Nietzsche's texts do not necessitate the sceptical meta-axiological positions that have been attributed to him in the recent secondary literature. And it is thereby to suggest that we need not give up on the idea that Nietzsche takes the values he champions to have genuine evaluative standing – not because he has some sophisticated realist theory to this effect, but in a more philosophically unreflective way.