Maudemarie Clark

Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life purports to fill a gap in our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophical project by explaining why Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement. Reginster is not alone in emphasizing the centrality of life affirmation to Nietzsche's thought. What makes Reginster's book new and original is his systematic approach—his attempt to isolate a core of Nietzsche's philosophy and show how everything else, especially the affirmation of life, is related to it. This article challenges the systematicity Reginster finds in Nietzsche's work; above all, it rejects Reginster's claim that what has led to nihilism is the condemnation of suffering, a view Nietzsche is said to inherit from Schopenhauer. I raise questions about how much of Schopenhauer's view Nietzsche in fact retains and about how well Reginster's account of affirmation fits with Nietzsche's account of the will to power, which, as I have argued elsewhere, has played an essential part in producing all the things Nietzsche values.

Notes and Discussions From the Nietzsche Archive: Concerning the Aphorism Explicated in Genealogy III When I first read a version of John Wilcox's "What Aphorism Does Nietzsche Explicate in Genealogy of Morals, Essay III?" over a year ago, I was completely convinced by the textual considerations he advances in support of his thesis that the third essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy is intended as a commentary on the aphorism that constitutes its first section, and not, contrary to the standard assumption, as a commentary on the epigraph from Zarathustra placed after the essay's title. I had one worry, however, that I was not at that point able to quiet. The annotations to the Genealogy in the Colli-Montinari Studienausgabe tell us that the printer's manuscript of GM III begins with what is now Section 9, that Section 1 was added later? Yet, Nietzsche tells us in Section 8 of the Preface that GM III is a commentary on the aphorism placed before it, and Colli-Montinari gives no indication that this section was added later. If it was not, however, Wilcox's thesis must be wrong. If the printer's manuscript contains Section 8 of the Preface, hence the announcement that GM III is a commentary on the aphorism placed at its beginning, but does not contain the first section of GM III, the latter cannot be the aphorism to which Nietzsche refers in the Preface. Fortunately, my..

This paper challenges a near universal assumption regarding the third treatise of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality : that its main concern is to explain the attraction or power of the ascetic ideal. I argue that GM III’s main concern is normative rather than descriptive-explanatory. An earlier paper argues that GM III’s leading question – What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? – is equivalent to the question: What is the value of the ascetic ideal? In the present paper, I interpret an aspect of GM III ignored in the earlier paper: the will to power principle of GM III 7, which seems to claim that all human behavior is to be explained in terms of the will to power. I argue that the principle’s true function is normative rather than explanatory: to indicate how philosophers are best or ideally or healthily constituted, in particular, regarding sexuality. I also offer a normative account of what Nietzsche means by ‘interpretation’ in GM III and an argument against the surprisingly well-accepted view that a Nietzschean philosopher would either have little interest in sexual activity or would resist whatever interest he or she had in it. I end with brief suggestions as to the positive contribution Nietzsche thinks sexuality makes to philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche haunts the modern world. His elusive writings with their characteristic combination of trenchant analysis of the modern predicament and suggestive but ambiguous proposals for dealing with it have fascinated generations of artists, scholars, critics, philosophers, and ordinary readers. Maudemarie Clark's highly original study gives a lucid and penetrating analytical account of all the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including his views on truth and language, his perspectivism, and his doctrines of the will-to-power and the eternal recurrence. The Nietzsche who emerges from these pages is a subtle and sophisticated philosopher, whose highly articulated views are of continuing interest as contributions to a whole range of philosphical issues. This remarkable reading of Nietzsche will interest not only philosophers, but also readers in neighbouring disciplines such as literature and intellectual history.

Although he finds in it an “ingenuity and daring” that is “remarkable,”1 Richard Schacht evidently does not like our book on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. We argue for an “esoteric” Nietzsche, one who sometimes writes in a way that is deliberately misleading, hence does not mean what he initially seems to mean. It can therefore take considerable work to uncover his true meaning. Schacht appears to find this offensive, as if one does not play such games in polite society, but lays all of one’s cards on the table. In any case, he spends most of his discussion objecting to this aspect of our book. He also has a number of other complaints, including that our Nietzsche is as “philosophically mainstream as can be.”2..