Joseph Swenson

Few would dispute that Nietzsche writes differently than most philosophers, especially when judged by the standards of contemporary philosophical writing. There is plenty of dispute, however, about why Nietzsche has chosen to present his thinking in the ways that he does. When one turns to much recent Nietzsche scholarship, it would appear that the literary quality of his writing is often treated as something that is merely accidental rather than integral to his philosophical project. Here one finds a working assumption that it is possible to paraphrase Nietzsche’s unconventional style of writing into more conventional forms of philosophical prose without losing sight of the philosophical goals that he is trying to achieve. This paper argues that this working assumption underappreciates the fact that Nietzsche’s chosen style of writing is intended to perform a variety of functions within his philosophy. One underappreciated function of Nietzsche’s writing, I will argue, aims to promote a radical disruption and revaluation of his readers’ basic habitual attitudes towards their experience of their own lives. Such therapeutic and transformative experiences, I conclude, are not only basic to Nietzsche’s philosophical project but are also intimately connected to the literary quality of his writing and cannot easily survive philosophical paraphrase.

ABSTRACT Nietzsche sometimes offers the elusive suggestion that his psychology is not just original, but inaugural: a “first” in the field of philosophy. This article argues that a clue to his inaugural ambitions is discovered in his novel use of sublimation as a concept that engages in both a genealogical critique and a therapeutic reassessment of the basic prejudices of value dualism that he claims constitute the evaluative core of the Western tradition. Genealogically, sublimation provides Nietzsche with a new structure of naturalistic narrative that explains how traditionally opposed values actually share a common natural origin. Therapeutically, Nietzsche's various sublimation narratives serve to qualify the effects of his own naturalistic critique by revealing how and why our animal bodies and drives can now be practically affirmed as a new source of human dignity.

I argue that John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience offers a contextual approach to aesthetic experience that could benefit contemporary contextual definitions of art. It is well known that many philosophers who employ contextual definitions of art (most notably, George Dickie) also argue that traditional conceptions of aesthetic experience are obsolete because they fail to distinguish art from non-art when confronted with hard cases like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. While questions of perceptual indiscernibility are a problem for many traditional theories of aesthetic experience, I argue they are not a problem for Dewey. Dewey’s account of experience is not only compatible with Dickie’s ‘institutional theory’ but Dewey’s oft criticized notion of ‘an experience’ additionally brings a needed evaluative component to contextual definitions by showing how appeals to our experience of the theoretical, historical, and institutional contexts of the ‘artworld’ can better explain how something like a urinal can become worthy of aesthetic appreciation.