Claire Kirwin

This chapter sketches an account of what is distinctive about reciprocated love between persons. Shared love, it is suggested, involves holding in a productive interplay two components that stand in an uneasy tension with each other. First, love involves a recognition of the distinctive value possessed by the other _as_ the particular subjectivity that she is. This aspect of love is unidirectional, running from lover to beloved, and it is compatible with the love’s being unrequited. Reciprocated love, however, is not merely a matter of this unidirectional state now running in both directions at once, for in addition to this there is also a second structure in play. As well as each taking the other’s personhood as the object of their loving gaze, the lovers also come together as subjects, turning a shared gaze toward the world in partnership. It is the difficulty involved in balancing these two aspects of love that gives rise to love’s characteristic forms of struggle and failure.

This paper argues that Nietzsche’s ethical thought involves a sustained concern with interpersonal relationships. Against the familiar image of the Nietzschean ‘great individual’ as a wholly solitary and self-sufficient figure, I show that Nietzsche’s conception of greatness includes as a crucial component that the great individual characteristically relate to others in distinctive ways. Drawing in particular on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I argue that Nietzsche sees his great individuals as being in need of one type of relationship in particular: the relationship of friendship with other great individuals. Understanding this positive form of relationship, and the contrast Nietzsche draws between it and another negative form of relationship, which he calls ‘love of the neighbor’, helps to illuminate central features of Nietzsche’s wider critique of morality and his positive ethical project. Finally, I argue that Nietzsche’s so-called ‘therapeutic’ uses of style are intended to serve a distinctive and very interesting purpose: via the medium of words on a page, he aims to constitute his distant future readers, or anyway certain select among them, as his ‘friends of the future’.

This chapter sketches an account of what is distinctive about reciprocated love between persons. Shared love, it is suggested, involves holding in a productive interplay two components that stand in an uneasy tension with each other. First, love involves a recognition of the distinctive value possessed by the other as the particular subjectivity that she is. This aspect of love is unidirectional, running from lover to beloved, and it is compatible with the love’s being unrequited. Reciprocated love, however, is not merely a matter of this unidirectional state now running in both directions at once, for in addition to this there is also a second structure in play. As well as each taking the other’s personhood as the object of their loving gaze, the lovers also come together as subjects, turning a shared gaze toward the world in partnership. It is the difficulty involved in balancing these two aspects of love that gives rise to love’s characteristic forms of struggle and failure.

There are many parts of our lives for which it seems perfectly right and proper that we differ from each other in our relation to value: we pursue different careers, choose different spouses, prefer different flavors of ice cream. Even the most robust of realists typically assumes that where this is so—where the value on the scene is properly ‘idiosyncratic’, as I put it—we cannot understand this value on a realist model, and must instead see it as deriving from the person’s attitudes or preferences. I argue that this assumption is mistaken, and that the phenomenon of idiosyncrasy is fully compatible with realism. The world contains many different forms of value, and we each possess different forms of ‘value-expertise’—different kinds and degrees of ability to experience, understand, and engage with that value. This model allows us to make sense of idiosyncrasy within a fully realist framework.

In his Philosophy of Devotion, Paul Katsafanas argues that some of our deepest, most identity-defining commitments are marked by “dialectical invulnerability” – that is, they are recalcitrant in the face of reflection that reveals them to be unjustified. If Katsafanas is right about this, it appears to undermine an account of identification offered by Richard Moran, since for Moran such recalcitrance is a mark of the attitude’s alienation. In these comments, I attempt to show what I think is right in Katsafanas’ account, while still defending the fundamental Moranian insight regarding the nature of identification and alienation.

Metaethical realists and anti‐realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first‐person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism.

Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher. Indeed, it is probably fair to say, as many commentators have, that he was an anti-systematic philosopher. It is harder to say what this means, and harder still to know how to deal with it when we aim to interpret his philosophy. For we wish to attribute to Nietzsche certain claims and positions, perhaps even arguments, and in doing so we generally prefer that these not contradict each other. And so as we attempt to understand “Nietzsche’s philosophy” as a coherent entity, we tend to find ourselves—for better or worse—heading down the path of systematizing that philosophy. Mattia Riccardi’s Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology is an impressive example of such a systematizing reading of Nietzsche. In developing his account of Nietzsche’s (mature) philosophy of mind, Riccardi acknowledges that Nietzsche’s own approach to this topic is “scattered” and “piecemeal” (5). What Riccardi aims to offer is a comprehensive reconstruction of the systematic account that Nietzsche, for whatever reason, did not explicitly give us. And what we are presented with here is a very systematic Nietzsche, one who offers a comprehensive and detailed account of the inner workings of the mind in terms of drives and affects and their relation (this is the topic of the book’s Part I, “Beneath the Surface”); consciousness—three different types of consciousness, to be precise—and the sense in which it is epiphenomenal (in Part II, “Mapping the Surface”); and the nature of the self, the possibility of self-knowledge, the nature of the will, and the relevance of all of this for the Nietzschean “ideal type” of human being (in Part III, “The Upshot”). [End Page 203]We might worry that such a systematic philosopher is no longer quite recognizable as Nietzsche—that in doing such comprehensive and systematic reconstructive work one is somehow leaving behind the Nietzsche who wrote not treatises but rather aphorisms, polemics, pseudo-biblical texts, and poetry. But Riccardi is upfront that what he is doing is reconstructive work of this kind and meticulous in showing how the positions he develops can plausibly be attributed to Nietzsche—or at the very least, that such positions can be constructed out of genuinely Nietzschean building blocks. ...

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is strikingly book‐ended by the theme of knowledge‐seeking: the Preface opens with the ominous claim that “[w]e are unknown to ourselves, we knowers”, and the Third Essay's climax is the assertion that scientific, scholarly activity does not stand in opposition to the ascetic ideal but is instead only that ideal's most recent and insidious instantiation. This feature of the text is absent from Reginster's The Will to Nothingness. Nonetheless, the interpretive machinery that Reginster develops in his reading of the Genealogy as a genealogy and critique of morality can also go a long way towards helping us to make sense of the text as, at the same time, a genealogy and critique of knowledge‐seeking. Making use of Reginster's account in this way serves to illuminate both the interpretive power and some of the limitations of his reading.

Reading Nietzsche’s many remarks on freedom and free will, we face a dilemma. On the one hand, Nietzsche levels vehement attacks against the idea of the freedom of the will in several places throughout his writing. On the other hand, he frequently describes the sorts of people he admires as ‘free’ in various respects, as ‘free spirits’, or as in possession of a ‘free will’. So does Nietzsche think that we are or perhaps could be free, or not? I argue that we ought to read these seemingly conflicting claims as part of one unified project, which is to try to understand what true freedom would look like. Nietzsche’s attacks on ‘free will’, I suggest, are not intended to establish that we are not free, but rather to show that a certain tempting picture of freedom is confused and totally inadequate for purpose. The positive half of Nietzsche’s project, then, should be read as his attempt to do a better job – to provide an account of freedom that better articulates what we were trying, via the confused picture, to get at.

Nietzsche’s interest in tragedy continues throughout his work. And yet scholarship on Nietzsche’s account of tragedy has focused almost exclusively on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy – a work which is in many ways discontinuous with his more mature philosophical views. In this paper, I aim to illuminate Nietzsche’s post-Birth of Tragedy views on tragedy by setting them in the context of a particular historical conversation. Ever since Plato banished the tragic poets from the kallipolis, various philosophers have attempted to respond to his challenge to offer a ‘defense of poetry’. What Nietzsche offers, I argue, is a distinctive form of response to Plato’s challenge. I show how Nietzsche takes seriously Plato’s worries, and even ends up in partial agreement with him: tragedy is not (unqualifiedly) valuable; it can be spiritually dangerous. Key to Nietzsche’s account is a distinction he draws between two types of tragic audience. For the ‘lower types’, tragedy is – as Plato feared – dangerous. For the ‘higher types’, however, tragedy can act as a regenerative force. Finally, I discuss a distinctive form of value that tragedy makes available to a modern audience: tragedy can act as a stimulus towards the process of the revaluation of values.

Anna Bergqvist claims that Frank Sibley—despite his own claims to the contrary—should be considered a particularist when it comes to aesthetics. In this paper I argue that whilst Sibley does hold many of the views that Dancy advances in his Ethics without Principles , Bergqvist is certainly wrong to present Sibley's position as ‘uncontroversially’ particularist. In fact, the relationship between Sibley's account of judgement in aesthetics and Dancy's ethical particularism serves to highlight several ambiguities involved in the particularist–generalist debate as Bergqvist presents it