Aaron Ridley

This paper offers an account of Nietzsche's re-evaluation of values that seeks to satisfy two desiderata, both important if Nietzsche's project is to stand a chance of success. The first is that Nietzsche's re-evaluations must be capable of being understood as authoritative by those whose values are subject to re-evaluation. The second is that Nietzsche's project must not falsify the values being re-evaluated, by, for example, misrepresenting intrinsic values as instrumental values. Given this, five possible forms of re-evaluation are distinguished, and, of these, four are argued both to satisfy the specified desiderata and to feature more or less prominently in Nietzsche's later work. The conclusion of the paper is therefore that Nietzsche's project has at least the right general shape to succeed, and that the reasons for this depend upon acknowledging the importance of the desiderata and of the distinctions to which the paper draws attention

Discussion of the relations between ethics and aesthetics has tended to focus on issues concerning judgement: for example, philosophers have often asked whether, or to what extent, ethical considerations of one sort or another should inform aesthetic verdicts. Much less discussed, however, have been the relations between these two domains in their practical aspects. In this paper, I try to defuse a cluster of reasons for believing that practical competence in the ethical domain and practical competence in the aesthetic domain must be understood as importantly, or structurally, distinct from one another

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This_ GuideBook _introduces and assesses: Nietzsche's life and the background to his writings on art the ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including _The_ _Birth of Tragedy_, _Human, All Too Human_ and _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ Nietzsche's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought. This _GuideBook_ will be essential reading for all students coming to Nietzsche for the first time

Many philosophers have been interested in aesthetics, but Collingwood was passionate about art. His theories were never merely theoretical: aesthetics for him was a vivid, vibrant thing, to be experienced immediately in worked paint and in sculptured stones, in poetry and music. Art and life were no dichotomy for Collingwood - for how could you have one without the other? Works of art were created in and for the real world, to be enjoyed by real people, to enchant to enhance. Aaron Ridley's fascinating introduction opens up the work of this most rewarding of aesthetic thinkers, tracing his thought from its philosophic origins through to its practical consequence and ethical implications. The man who saw art as 'the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind' had a sense of its urgent importance which we ignore at our peril today

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead.

It seems natural to suppose that Artur Schnabel’s occasionally inaccurate performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier would have been even better had it been accurate throughout. In the present paper I defend this supposition against a sceptical argument which purports to show that we have no good reason to believe it. The sceptical argument, which draws on some plausible-seeming thoughts about aesthetic properties, concludes that, because we cannot know whether this or that (as-yet-unachieved) musical result is so much as possible, we have no good reason to suppose that the accurate version of Schnabel’s performance should be preferred to Schnabel’s own. In attempting to defuse this sceptical argument, I open up, and begin to explore, some new and potentially interesting questions about musical creativity and about the species of rationality that it requires and exhibits

Nietzsche claims that we are fated to be as we are. He also claims, however, that we can create ourselves. To many commentators these twin commitments have seemed self-contradictory or paradoxical. The argument of this paper, by contrast, is that, despite appearances, there is no paradox here, nor even a tension between Nietzsche's two claims. Instead, when properly interpreted these claims turn out to be intimately related to one another, so that our fatedness emerges as integral to our capacity to become self-creators. The paper also offers, in the course of undermining a false alternative that is deeply entrenched in the philosophical tradition, a reading of Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati that actually – and perhaps uniquely – makes full sense of section 276 of The Gay Science, the chief source for this aspect of his thought.

This paper offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s well known unpublished remark, ‘Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ I argue that it is not helpful to construe this remark as a claim to the effect that art falsifies the truth by, for example, peddling lies or deceptions. Rather, I suggest, the remark should be taken to refer to the various ways in which art can present us with the truth in such a manner that we do not perish of it. And of these ways, I argue, the most interesting is that in which art facilitates awareness of putatively ugly truths while actually abolishing their ugliness: a striking discussion of this possibility is to be found in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. I conclude that, overall, Nietzsche is best understood as a conditional cognitivist—as someone who thinks of truth as valuable, but not as valuable no matter what; and I suggest that what makes his position interesting and distinctive is the alethic pessimism that runs through his version of cognitivism.

Nietzsche's late works are brilliant and uncompromising, and stand as monuments to his lucidity, rigour, and style. This volume combines, for the first time in English, five of these works: The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and The Case of Wagner. Here, Nietzsche takes on some of his greatest adversaries: traditional religion, contemporary culture, and above all his one-time hero, the composer Richard Wagner. His writing is simultaneously critical and creative, putting into practice his alternative philosophical vision, which, after more than a hundred years, still retains its startling novelty and audacity. These new translations aim to capture something of the style and rhythm of the original German, so that the reader can get a sense of Nietzsche as not just a philosopher but also a consummate artist, capable of 'dancing with his pen', and as untimely as he claims to be.

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead

Aaron Ridley explores Nietzsche's mature ethical thought as expressed in his masterpiece On the Genealogy of Morals. Taking seriously the use that Nietzsche makes of human types, Ridley arranges his book thematically around the six characters who loom largest in that work—the slave, the priest, the philosopher, the artist, the scientist, and the noble. By elucidating what the Genealogy says about these figures, he achieves a persuasive new assessment of Nietzsche's ethics. Ridley's intellectually supple interpretation reveals Nietzsche's ethical position to be deeper and more interesting than is often supposed: the relation, for instance, between Nietzsche's ideal of the noble and the ascetic or priestly conscience does not emerge as a stark opposition but as a rich interplay between the tensions inherent in each. Equally, he shows that certain under-appreciated confusions in Nietzsche's thought reveal much about the positive aspects of the philosopher's moral vision. The only book devoted entirely to the Genealogy, Nietzsche's Conscience offers a sympathetic but tough-minded critical reading of the philosopher's most important work. Delivered in clear and vigorous language and employing a broadly analytical approach, Ridley's commentary makes Nietzsche's reflections on morality more accessible than they have been hitherto

This article focuses on how aesthetic values permeate Nietzsche’s philosophy. Artistry is not confined to the creation of conventional works of art but occurs in the form-giving that is essential to all human forms of life. Since Nietzsche was committed to the view that the world is in some basic sense chaotic and meaningless, he held that only by imposing forms can we create a cognizable world. This close association between the conditions of life itself and the aesthetic activity of giving form belies that Kantian conception that any appreciation of aesthetic phenomena is essentially disinterested.

For a century there has been a divergence between what music theorists say music is about and what the ordinary listener actually experiences. Music theory has insisted on a separation of musical experience from the experience of emotions, from the passions. Yet a passionate experience of music is just what most ordinary listeners have. Charting a new course through the minefield of contemporary philosophy of music, Aaron Ridley provides a coherent defense of the ordinary listener's beliefs. Focusing on instrumental music in the classical Western canon, Ridley defends the commonsense position on music and attempts to return the experience of music to the ordinary listener. He argues that, through a sympathetic experience of certain musical gestures, the listener is able to grasp the passions of which the music is expressive. If the passions are properly understood, he contends, there is a place for passion in a philosophical understanding of music. Similarly, the expression of passion may properly be considered part of the value of the music we hear.