Professors Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins invalidate the spurious rumors surrounding Nietzsche, for example, that he was insane, misogynistic, nihilistic, anti-Semitic, power-mad, relativistic, and amoral.
We investigate how Nietzsche's method of explaining human beliefs and practices in terms of personality and character (as opposed to justifying them through reason) enabled him to refute Socratic assumptions, English utilitarianism, Christian compassion, and Schopenhauerian pessimism. Nietzsche's procedures were similar to those used by Dostoyevsky, Marx, Freud, and, ironically, the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard.
With this infamous pronouncement, Nietzsche seeks not to condemn true spirituality, but to question the mindset that insists on eternity, that is obsessed with unity and coherence, and that demands predictability and justice in a world that is neither predictable or just. Nietzsche never fully escapes his Lutheran upbringing, which shapes his ideas about Christian hypocrisy and passivity, and influences his "war" on guilt and sin.
Nietzsche virtually worshipped the pre-Socratic period in ancient Greece, in particular, the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles and the philosopher Heraclitus. Are they the source of his whole philosophy? Moreover, why did Nietzsche rail so harshly against Socrates's and Plato's celebration of reason and accuse Euripides of "murdering" tragedy?
Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is especially noteworthy for its brilliant analysis of the creative tension between the cults of rational Apollo and ecstatic Dionysus in pre-Socratic Greece. How did Nietzsche contrast tragedy, which accepts suffering and makes something beautiful out of it, with Platonic, Socratic, and Christian thought, which he accuses of trying to deny the meaning of suffering by invoking a superior, otherworldly life?
Schopenhauer, the severe pessimist, is a looming presence in Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche felt the weight of Schopenhauer's pessimism, and struggled to counter it by embracing "cheerfulness," creative passion, and an aesthetic viewpoint.
Why did Nietzsche feel such a sense of close identification with the ancient prophets Jesus, Socrates, and Zarathustra (Zoroaster)? What was Nietzsche up to in his oddest but best-known book, the Biblical parody Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which introduces the concept of the Übermensch and its evolutionary alternative, the "last man"?
In some sense a Romantic thinker, Nietzsche went against the grain of Enlightenment philosophy by debunking the primacy of reason in human life and defending instinct and passion. How did Nietzsche anticipate Freud's notion of the unconscious?
We subject to analysis Nietzsche's eccentric style of writing and argument, including his use of aphorisms, personal attacks, and appeals to emotion. We also scrutinize Nietzsche's often-exaggerated views about truth and interpretation.
Here is a still-closer look at Nietzsche's inconsistent ideas about truth and interpretation. These include his assessment of science at various stages of his work, and his pragmatic "perspectivism," which rejects the idea that there is a privileged, objective, absolute, or "God's eye view" of reality.
Now we turn to Nietzsche's politics, including his harsh views on socialism and democracy, his subtle views on freedom and free will, his celebration of fate, and his notorious views on the "great man." Accordingly, we discuss Nietzsche's mixed view of Darwin's theory of evolution, how Hegel both anticipated and countered some of Nietzsche's main concerns, and how Nietzsche and Kierkegaard reveal themselves to be kindred spirits in their reaction to Hegel.
What were Nietzsche's ideas about the connection between personality, morality, and philosophy? What insights does he offer into the motivations underlying compassion? Is Nietzsche explaining rather than justifying (or attacking) morality?
Was Nietzsche misanthropic and misogynistic? How do his ideas on love and friendship, which he saw as intimately related, compare to those of his predecessors, especially Plato and Aristotle? Does Nietzsche, properly understood, actually anticipate many of the theses of contemporary feminism?
Professor Kathleen Higgins examines the claim that Nietzsche was a misogynist. She parses some of Nietzsche's most famous (or notorious) remarks about women, and suggests that they are not the blatantly sexist utterances they are often thought to be.
Professors Solomon and Higgins catalog those thinkers whom Nietzsche most admired, and those whom he attacked.
Nietzsche believed that any understanding of human affairs is necessarily grounded in a particular time and culture. What was his view of history and its uses and abuses? How did he interpret Hegel and Darwin? What hopes for human evolution did he harbor? What is the source and shape of his concern with what is conducive to and what is destructive of life?
Is Nietzsche himself a nihilist, or is his entire philosophy in fact an attack on nihilism? Why did he denounce as "decadent" such things as truth, religious belief, egalitarianism, reason, otherworldliness, and, particularly, asceticism?
Why did Nietzsche refuse to think of values as being either objective or subjective? Why did he hold that values are earthly and culture- and species-specific? Why did he argue that, in the final analysis, there are only healthy and unhealthy values, and that modern values are unhealthy?
Is Nietzsche's notorious "immoralism" actually an embrace of Homeric ethics? How is it that in his ethical system, personal virtue and character count far more than rational rules and principles, and selfishness and morality are not mutually exclusive?
We examine the books Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), wherein Nietzsche details his conception of master versus slave morality. His Genealogy of Morals is an attempt to uncover and evaluate the historical roots of these two types of morality. This lecture also examines the idea of "resentment," which provides the basis of Nietzsche's moral psychology.
We continue our discussion of Nietzsche's idea of resentment, adding to it his ideas about revenge and justice. We revisit his condemnation of asceticism, the self-denial that is often a part of extreme religious practice, in light of these new ideas.
This lecture considers two of Nietzsche's alleged "doctrines": the Will to Power and the over-man. It analyzes the psychological significance of the former, as well as its Schopenhauerian origins. Then it links the two doctrines by analyzing the Übermensch as the full manifestation of the will to power.
We conclude by extending our scrutiny of three of Nietzsche's most famous doctrines: the Will to Power, the Übermensch, and the eternal recurrence of the same. Finally, we evaluate Nietzsche's emphasis on "saying 'yes!' to life."