Peter Stewart-Kroeker

Nietzsche is often thought to complement his critique of European values with a tragic vision of life promising cultural renewal. Peter Stewart-Kroeker argues that Nietzsche exposes this prospect as a fantasy symptomatic of Europe’s modern malaise. The ideal of “tragic culture” appeals to aspirations born of the same moral and religious beliefs it claims to overcome — beliefs in human mastery, redemptive suffering, and ascetic virtue — whose allure perpetuates delusions about progress. Rather than culminating in a new philosophical position, Nietzsche’s thought unsettles readers by subverting the very expectation of cultural renewal that it arouses. Nietzsche challenges Europeans to confront the destructiveness of their collective fantasy life and the desires that sustain it. He holds out the possibility that, by recognizing their attachment to ideals inherited from ancient Greek and Christian culture, they might learn to revalue their notion of progress and reorient their desires in light of a precarious future.

This article analyzes Nietzsche’s conception of sovereign selfhood by comparing the naturalist ideal of psychological enlightenment in Human, All Too Human with the aestheticist ideal of self-fashioning in The Gay Science. These strands have typically divided scholars, who tend to privilege one ideal over the other, while more recent commentators emphasize a synthetic “naturalist-aestheticist” model. By contrast, I argue that each strand ironically implicates the other, cutting both ways in what amounts to an immanent critique of sovereignty as a cultural value. This juxtaposition reveals Nietzsche as a critic of his bourgeois milieu who subverts a dominant value system rather than purveying alternative ideals.

Girard has argued that in the opposition between “Dionysus” and “the crucified,” Nietzsche contrasts Christian martyrdom that resolves violence through pacifism with pagan festivals that affirm violence by ritualizing it. In agreement with Girard, this article shows how Heidegger’s discussion of nihilism fails to ethically confront the violence of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, a criticism that applies equally to Deleuze. However, I argue that Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche confronts the violence in a manner that Girard fails to appreciate. Bataille interprets ritual sacrifice as a drama communicating the loss of identity experienced by those who contemplate the spectacle. Bataille demonstrates the complicity between Dionysian and Judeo-Christian martyrdom insofar as both implicate human beings in the violence of evil that the death of God consummates.

This article shows how the triumph of Socratic optimism in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is due to a slave revolt in morality that promulgates a religious faith in the value of scientific truth. This early argument parallels his critique of the ascetic ideal that infects science in The Genealogy of Morality. I draw out the resemblance between Socrates’s martyrdom in The Birth and Jesus’s crucifixion in the Genealogy in order to illuminate how ritual human sacrifice mythically immortalizes both figures, together inaugurating the ascetic ideals that Christianity will eventually unite. I discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of religious martyrdom and his explanation for the success of Christian Platonism, whose ascetic ideals ground the European value system that he is known for attacking.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy overcomes the opposition between scientific optimism and Schopenhauerian pessimism with the image of a music-making Socrates, who symbolizes the aesthetic affirmation of life. This article shows how the aesthetic ideal is an illusion whose metaphysical solace undermines itself in being recognized as such, thereby ceasing to be comforting. While I agree with recent commentaries that contest the pervasive Schopenhauerian reading of The Birth, most of these commentaries still support the view that Nietzsche wishes to communicate some fundamental truth about nature or meaning in life. By contrast, I argue that he treats any such truth as a cultural fiction that emerges from the poetic staging of reality, leaving us with a contradiction of appearances deprived of any intelligible ground.

In this paper, I discuss how Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerns the complicity between Christian morality and modern atheism. I unpack in what sense Schopenhauer’s ascetic denial of the will signifies a return to nothingness, what he calls the nihil negativum. I argue that Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism specifically targets Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition, the crucial stage of its intellectual history in which the scientific pursuit of truth finally unveils the ascetic will to nothingness that motivates it. I contend that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer anticipates current scholarly debates around the significance of the nihil negativum and offers a compelling objection against contemporary proponents of philosophical nihilism such as Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier.