Raymond Geuss

Politics and Value Nietzsche thinks that the state should serve culture rather than the other way around. The final reason for this, he thinks, is that any state must tacitly be based on an at least minimal and imaginary conception of the ‘equality’ of its members. However, only the original production of new values can permit individuals and societies to affirm themselves and thus lead a meaningful individual and collective life. Since the production of new values always takes place according to non-egalitarian principles in the realm of art, the demands of the state must remain subordinate to the conditions under which new art can be produced, that is to the cultural sphere.

Lecturing on Nietzsche. The essay queries the academic teaching concept of ‘lecturing’ against the backdrop of its author’s decades-long experience as a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge. Thereby, special emphasis is laid on Nietzsche’s reading habits which many students usually misjudge as Nietzsche favoured reading the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Xenophon, or Hesiod over reading Kant and Hegel. In such a way, the essay underlines the teaching potential of irritating exaggerations like, in the present case, the claim that Nietzsche never read Kant.

Outside Ethics brings together some of the most important and provocative works by one of the most creative philosophers writing today. Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, knowledge, and restrictions on actions that affect other people. He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics. Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have "gaps"--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure.