Nietzsche and the tradition 1

Nietzsche and Modern Times: A study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche. Laurence Lampert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 475. £35.00

Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Peter Poellner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 320.     

克尔凯郭尔与尼采

当代哲学中两个富有特征的基本概念,“生存”和“存在”,最初是由尼采和克尔凯郭尔创造的。尼采的哲学思考始终围绕着“生存”的现象,克尔凯郭尔的思考活动不断深入“存在”的问题。因此,他们二人的兴趣都首先而且几乎只是指向人,指向人的生存和人的存在的。所以,他们的哲学不是一个以封闭方式包括人类学的形而上学体系,相反,其哲学活动的内在系统的基础完全在于将一切问题都概括为这样一个基本问题：“人是什么?”和人成为了什么。这样,二者的哲学都是在一种实验“心理学”的名义下的哲学人类学。     

Nietzsche and the dilemma of suffering

In this paper, we attempt to view a long-held assumption in nursing as mistaken. That is, that patient suffering is something to be overcome. Utilizing Nietzsche's statements on Amor Fati, we carefully examine the cultural assumptions behind our denigration of suffering, look at specific nursing examples of this situation, and attempt the beginnings of a discourse on what it would take for nurses to overcome their own predetermined views of suffering in order to better help their patients "own" their own suffering.     

Balthasar and the Eclipse of Nietzsche

This essay is about Hans Urs von Balthasar’s critical appropriation of Nietzsche as a prophetic and apocalyptic thinker whose thought presents a challenge to a tired European culture and a petrified form of Christianity. But it is also about a particular expiration date for this critical appropriation which can be dated to the 1940s. The bulk of the essay deals with two early texts of Balthasar in which Nietzsche is a dominant figure, that is, Balthasar’s dissertation, Geschichte des eschatologischen Problems in der modernen Literatur (1928) and Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939). The centrality of Nietzsche in these texts makes it all the more shocking that by the mid 1940s Balthasar’s engagement has essentially come to an end. The hypothesis put forward is not that the questions raised by Nietzsche have ceased to have pertinence, but that Heidegger, who had also from the beginning been an important figure for Balthasar, essentially takes over Nietzsche’s apocalyptic provocation and thereby eclipses him. Thereafter, Heidegger becomes not only the emblem of the best that Phenomenology can do, but also of a form of Nietzschianism that is more subtle and complex in its negotiations with Christianity and precisely for that reason more dangerous.     

Nietzsche and Amor Fati

Abstract: This paper identifies two central paradoxes threatening the notion of amor fati [love of fate]: it requires us to love a potentially repellent object (as fate entails significant negativity for us) and this, in the knowledge that our love will not modify our fate. Thus such love may seem impossible or pointless. I analyse the distinction between two different sorts of love (eros and agape) and the type of valuation they involve (in the first case, the object is loved because we value it; in the second, we value the object because we love it). I use this as a lens to interpret Nietzsche's cryptic pronouncements on amor fati and show that while an erotic reading is, up to a point, plausible, an agapic interpretation is preferable both for its own sake and because it allows for a resolution of the paradoxes initially identified. In doing so, I clarify the relation of amor fati to the eternal return on the one hand, and to Nietzsche's autobiographical remarks about suffering on the other. Finally, I examine a set of objections pertaining both to the sustainability and limits of amor fati, and to its status as an ideal.