Manuel Dries

Nietzsche's Critique of Staticism Manuel Dries Part 1: Time, History, Method Nietzsche's Cultural Criticism and his Historical Methodology 23 Andrea Orsucci Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams 35 Raymond Geuss The Late Nietzsche's Fundamental Critique of Historical Scholarship 51 Thomas H. Brobjer Part II: Genealogy, Time, Becoming Nietzsche's Timely Genealogy: An Exercise in Anti-Reductionist Naturalism 63 Tinneke Beeckman From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism 75 R. Kevin Hill Nietzsche's Problem of the Past 87 John Richardson Towards Adualism: Becoming and Nihilism in Nietzsche's Philosophy 113 Mamuel Dries Part III: Eternal Recurrence, Meaning, Agency Shocking Time: Reading Eternal Recurrence Literally 149 Lawrence J. Hatab Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption 163 Paul S. Loeb Nietzsche and the Temporality of (Self-)Legislation I91 Herman W. Siemens Part IV: Nietzsche's Contemporaries Geschichte or Historie? Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Philological Studies 213 Anthonyl K. Jensen 'An Uncanny Re-Awakening': Nietzsche's Renascence of the Renaissance out of the Spirit of Jacob Burckhardt 231 Martin A. Ruehl Part V: Tragic and Musical Time Metaphysical and Historical Claims in The Birth of Tragedy 275 Katherine Harloe Nietzsche's Musical Conception of Time 291 Jonathan R. Cohen.

Nietzsche's thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical community as well as to philosophers of a more phenomenological and hermeneutic background. The volume aims to appeal to both communities of scholars as it seeks to deepen the growing interest and appreciation of Nietzsche's contribution to our understanding of the mind. The 16 essays by leading Nietzsche scholars examine Nietzsche's understanding of consciousness and investigate its continuities with current developments in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, neuroethics, psychology, linguistics, and metaphysics. Recent work in philosophy of mind emphasises non-reductive approaches to consciousness and self-consciousness. The mental is understood as always already embodied as well as situated or embedded in and emerging from a complex system. Nietzsche's thoroughly naturalistic philosophy has received renewed attention as it challenges any reductivist attempt to understand the mental exclusively as a physical phenomenon using the methods of the natural sciences. His understanding of nature and the physical, informed by but not reducible to the natural sciences of his time, is highly idiosyncratic. It posits the mental at several levels, from unconscious and proto-conscious drives, affects and emotions, to reflective, higher-order conscious states, intentionality and language.

The centrality of the embodiment of mind, self, and values for the later Nietzsche is widely acknowledged. Here, I reconstrue Nietzsche’s HL to show that he uses his drive model of the mind already in this early text. The “historical sickness” central to HL is diagnosed in the form of failures of embodiment and drive control. First, I argue that a precursor to Nietzsche’s figure of “the last human” is already the target in HL. Second, I offer working definitions for terms such as “drives,” “affects,” and “values,” which are crucial to Nietzsche’s heuristic diagnostic framework. I then focus on the neglected passage that contrasts the medieval memento mori with a modern memento vivere, showing that the former functions as an embodied mechanism of willing and self-control, which Nietzsche claims the moderns have been unsuccessful in replacing. Finally, I draw on recent research in embodied cognition and identify two causes—“overload” and “semantic embodiment”— of the modern “historical sickness” that undermines flourishing.

This paper considers three general dilemmas that tend to undermine successful configurations of unity: the either/or dilemma, the synthesis dilemma and the relativism dilemma. It argues that, in his aesthetic writings, Schiller’s critique of Kantian dualisms leads him to an adualistic conception of unity that operates with a different, more inclusive approach to opposition and unification. In order to clarify Schiller’s innovative and often misunderstood position, the paper draws on the disjunctive logic recently developed by Friedrich Kümmel.

This article answers some criticisms raised against How hard is it to create values? and offers a further formulation of the hard problem of value. Section 1 addresses the objection that Nietzsche’s criterion of life is too vague to serve as a useful value standard. Section 2 expands on the important idea of appreciating the difference among value perspectives. Sections 3 and 4 present the “hard problem of value” as a challenge for Nietzschean value agonism and value nihilism respectively. Section 5 offers a further formulation of the “hard problem of value”: a thought experiment about Mary, an expert, anti-realist value creator, whose values may or may not lack some qualities, analogous to Mary, the colour scientist of the “knowledge argument”.

This paper examines what Nietzsche might mean by the proposition that “values are created”. It further raises the issue whether there is a hard problem of value creation analogous to the “hard problem” in the philosophy of mind. Nietzsche could be seen as a philosopher who tried to shift people’s views about values away from any realist-objectivist intuitions. He was optimistic that these views could be eliminated, and that eventually most or all would come to conceive of values as created. It is shown that Nietzsche rejects value realism in favour of a compelling antirealist conception of value, which he takes to be superior due to one specific property of values, their “aliveness”. If there is a hard problem of value, however, and for the realist any created value simply does not count as a value, it is unclear if Nietzsche’s conception is constructive.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Nietzsche’s transvaluation project refers not to a mere inversion or negation of a set of nihilism-prone, Judeo-Christian values but, instead, to a different conception of what a value is and how it functions. Traditional values function within a standard logical framework and claim legitimacy and “bindingness” based on exogenous authority with absolute extension. Nietzsche regards this framework as unnecessarily reductive in its attempted exclusion of contradiction and real opposition among competing values. I propose a nonstandard, dialetheic model of valuation that requires a value to be both true and false as well as neither true nor false. In our Europe, life is no longer quite so uncertain, contingent, nonsensical. [...] The power man has achieved now allows a reduction of those means of discipline of which the moral interpretation was the strongest. — KSA 12:5[71] The logic of our conscious thinking is only a crude and facilitated form of the thinking needed by our organism [...] A simultaneity-thinking [ein Zugleichdenken], for example, is needed of which we have hardly an inkling. [...] We are still growing continually, our sense of time and place, etc., is still developing. — KSA 11:34[124]

This volume presents new essays exploring important aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy in connection with two major themes: mind and nature. A team of leading experts address questions including: What is Nietzsche's conception of mind? How does mind relate with the nature? And what is Nietzsche's conception of nature? They all express the thought that Nietzsche's views on these matters are of great philosophical value, either because those views are consonant with contemporary thinking to a greater or lesser extent or because they represent a rich alternative to contemporary attitudes

This chapter provides summaries of the chapter of this book and introduces the major themes and debates addressed in the volume. Discussed are Nietzsche’s metaphysics; his philosophy of mind in light of contemporary views; the question of panpsychism of Beyond Good and Evil 36; the rejection of dualism in favour of monism, in particular a monism of value; Nietzsche’s positions on consciousness and embodied cognition in light of recent cognitive science; a conception of freedom and agency based on an intrinsically motivating; embodied sense of self-efficacy; a Nietzschean account of valuing understood as drive-induced affective orientations of which an agent approves; the idea of ressentiment conceived as a process of intentional, not reflectively strategic, self-deception about one’s own conscious mental states; and a defence of a Nietzschean naturalism.

This article examines Nietzsche’s analysis of the phenomenology of agent causation. Sense of agent causation, our sense of self-efficacy, is tenacious because it originates, according to Nietzsche’s hypothesis, in the embodied and situated experience of effort in overcoming resistances. It arises at the level of the organism and is sustained by higher-order cognitive functions. Based on this hypothesis, Nietzsche regards the sense of self as emerging from a homeostatic system of drives and affects that unify such as to maintain self-efficacy levels. He relies on the same hypothesis to explain the emergence of an ascetic moral system and its specific, interpretive-affective ‘mechanism of willing’. The article aligns Nietzsche’s account of agent causation with Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy studies and Antonio Damasio’s recent account of self-systems as homeostatic systems.

For Nietzsche’s hypothesis of a threat of nihilism to be intelligible, this chapter attributes to him at least three assumptions that underpin his philosophical project: (1) what there is, is becoming (and not being), (2) most (if not all) strongly believe in being, and (3) nihilism is a function of the belief in being. This chapter argues that Nietzsche held two doctrines of becoming: one more radical, which he believes is required to fend off nihilism, and one much more moderate—the ontology of relations he develops under the label ‘will to power’. Based on the latter he attempts (but ultimately fails) to develop an ‘adualistic’—neither monistic nor dualistic—practice of thought, a ‘simultaneity-thinking’ ("Zugleich-Denken") that would no longer be subject to nihilism.