Help Sought: Looking for a Nietzsche Quote

Nietzsche holds the typical naturalist's view that the correct explanation of the purportedly binding force of norms--epistemic, ethical, even logical--is to be given in entirely psychological terms: it is just that creatures like us "feel" that it would be wrong to believe what is unwarranted, or violate a logical canon. He has a particularly striking comment in this vein psychologizing logic. Might anyone have an idea where? I had thought in Nachlass material, but haven't found it, so perhaps elsewhere.

Many thanks.

New Nietzsche Biography by Julian Young

CUP has just published a new "philosophical biography" of Nietzsche by Julian Young (Wake Forest). It doesn't go quite to the Curt Janz level of mind-numbing detail, but it is certainly a comprehensive biography, like Safranski. Unlike Safranski, Young knows some philosophy and so his interpretive comments are more interesting. Young is the author, of course, of the contrarian but extremely interesting Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art and, more recently, of the less successful and plausible Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. It is very nice to have a philosopher with interesting ideas about Nietzsche write a biography. I think this will displace the Safranski volume for those interested in philosophy who want to learn about Nietzsche's life.

Where should a student wanting to work on Nietzsche go for a PhD in Philosophy?

Our earlier poll provides some ideas, but I want to supplement that with some narrative advice, of the kind I would give (and do give) to students.


Among the very top PhD programs in the Anglophone world, there are three viable choices for a student wanting to work on Nietzsche: New York University (with John Richardson and Tamsin Shaw), Princeton University (with Alexander Nehamas) and Stanford University (with Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain). I am not sure how hospitable these places are for students primarily interested in Nietzsche, given the dominant interests of the faculty and most of the students, but they deserve serious attention from prospective students: you will get an excellent philosophical education and you have good philosophers who can serve as advisors with respect to Nietzsche work. NYU, with Beatrice Longuenesse, and Stanford, with Dagfinn Follesdal (part-time), Michael Friedman and Allen Wood, also offer good breadth of coverage in post-Kantian philosophy. Oxford University, another outstanding philosophy faculty, is also worth a look these days: Peter Kail, a leading Hume scholar, is working quite a bit now on Nietzsche. Again, there is the question about how hospitable the environment would be, but there are other Oxford faculty with sympathetic interests related to Nietzsche or other figures in post-Kantian German and French philosophy, like Michael Inwood, Stephen Mulhall, and Katherine Morris.


Among strong, but not very top, PhD programs there are several additional choices I would recommend: Birkbeck College and University College in the University of London system; Brown University; University of California, Riverside; University of Chicago; and University of Warwick. In terms of sheer numbers, and diversity of approaches to Nietzsche, Chicago has the most faculty to offer across various units, and for a student also interested in ancient philosophy and/or wanting wide coverage of 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, Chicago has a great deal to offer. (Faculty interested in Nietzsche include James Conant and Michael Forster [Philosophy], Robert Gooding-Williams [Political Science], Brian Leiter and Martha Nussbaum [Law], Robert Pippin [Social Thought], and David Wellbery [German].)

Brown is stronger in most contemporary areas of philosophy (with a particularly good group in moral and political philosophy) than Chicago, but has less depth and breadth in post-Kantian philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-centuries. (The key faculty are Charles Larmore and Bernard Reginster.) University of California, Riverside also has a strong group in post-Kantian European philosophy, including Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche scholar, of course), Pierre Keller, Georgia Warnke, and Mark Wrathall, and UCR also offers solid, sometimes outstanding, coverage, across a range of contemporary areas of philosophical research, as well as in modern philosophy. University of Warwick has been a major up-and-coming department in the U.K. over the last decade, and is now solidly among the top ten U.K. programs. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Peter Poellner are the two main faculty interested in Nietzsche (their approaches are quite different, Poellner's being more likely to appeal to students with philosophy backgrounds), but other faculty do importnat work in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy (Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate, A.D. Smith).


Birkbeck has my good friend Ken Gemes, a very talented philosopher who has supervised a number of students working on Nietzsche, and the Nietzsche scholar Simon May is also around and available to students. Birkbeck's main strength tend to be in contemporary areas of Anglophone philosophy--like philosophy of language, mind and action--but bear in mind that within the U of London system one can also draw on scholars like Sebastian Gardner, Mark Kalderon, and Thomas Stern, who are all interested in Nietzsche, making UCL another good choice.

Boston University, which has strong coverage of 19th-century philosophy, has just appointed Paul Katsfanas (whose Nietzsche work is known to readers of this blog) to a tenure-track position. BU thus deserves to be on the map for students thinking about graduate work on Nietzsche. Finally, University of Southampton, though not a strong department overall, is attractive for a student interested in Nietzsche, with Christopher Janaway and Aaron Ridley in Philosophy, and David Owen in Politics.

Audio and Video of Keynote Sessions of the "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" Conference at Oxford in September...

...are now available.

Clarence Darrow on Nietzsche

This is from his famous summation by defense attorney Clarence Darrow, arguing against the death penalty for Nathaniel Leopold and Richard Loeb, two precocious teenagers who murdered another boy to show that they could do it. Leopold claimed inspiration from Nietzsche. Here is Darrow on Leopold:

He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them; a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. He wrote on the will to power. Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.

At seventeen, at sixteen, at eighteen, while healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or doing odd jobs, Babe [Leopold's nickname] was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it, at that early age.

Nietzsche held a contemptuous, scornful attitude to all those things which the young are taught as important in life; a fixing of new values which are not the values by which any normal child has ever yet been reared. Nietzsche's attitude is but a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.

Nietzsche says, "The morality of the master class is irritating to the taste of the present day because of its fundamental principle that a man has obligation only to his equals; that he may act to all of lower rank and to all that are foreign, as he pleases."

In other words, man has no obligations; he may do with all other men and all other boys, and all society, as he pleases. The superman was a creation of Nietzsche.

The supermanlike qualities lie not in their genius, but in their freedom from scruple. They rightly felt themselves to be above the law. What they thought was right, not because sanctioned by any law, beyond themselves, but because they did it. So the superman will be a law unto himself What he does will come from the will and superabundant power within him.

Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines. There isn't any question about the facts. Their own witnesses tell it and every one of our witnesses tell it. It was not a casual bit of philosophy with him; it was his life. He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen. There might have been others, but they were two, and two chums. The ordinary commands of society were not for him.

Many of us read this philosophy but know that it has no actual application to life; but not he. It became a part of his being. It was his philosophy. He lived it and practiced it; he thought it applied to him, and he could not have believed it excepting that it either caused a diseased mind or was the result of a diseased mind.

Here is a boy who by day and by night, in season and out, was talking of the superman, owing no obligations to anyone; whatever gave him pleasure he should do, believing it just as another man might believe a religion or any philosophical theory.

You remember that I asked Dr. Church about these religious cases and he said, "Yes, many people go to the insane asylum on account of them," that "they place a literal meaning on parables and believe them thoroughly"? I asked Dr. Church, whom again I say I believe to be an honest man, and an intelligent man, I asked him whether the same thing might be done or might come from a philosophical belie£ and he said, "If one believed it strongly enough."

And I asked him about Nietzsche. He said he knew something of Nietzsche, something of his responsibility for the war, for which he perhaps was not responsible. He said he knew something about his doctrines. I asked him what became of him, and he said he was insane for fifteen years just before the time of his death. His very doctrine is a species of insanity.

Here is a man, a wise man, perhaps not wise, but a brilliant, thoughtful man who has made his impress upon the world. Every student of philosophy knows him. His own doctrines made him a maniac. And here is a young boy, in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is a part of his life. It is his life. Do you suppose this mad act could have been done by him in any other way? What could he have to win from this homicide?

A boy with a beautiful home, with automobiles, a graduate of college, going to Europe, and then to study law at Harvard; as brilliant in intellect as any boy that you could find; a boy with every prospect that life might hold out to him; and yet he goes out and commits this weird, strange, wild, mad act, that he may die on the gallows or live in a prison cell until he dies of old age or disease.

He did it, obsessed of an idea, perhaps to some extent influenced by what has not been developed publicly in this case-perversions this case were present in the boy. Both signs of insanity, both, together with this act, proving a diseased mind..

Is there any question about what was responsible for him?

What else could be? A boy in his youth, with every promise that the world could hold. out before him, wealth and position and intellect, yes, genius, scholarship, nothing that he could not obtain, and he throws it away, and mounts the gallows or goes into a cell for life. It is too foolish to talk about. Can Your Honor imagine a sane brain doing it? Can you imagine it coming from anything but a diseased mind? Can you imagine it is any part of normality? And yet, Your Honor, you are asked to hang a boy of his age, abnormal, obsessed of dreams and visions, a philosophy that destroyed his life,
when there is no sort of question in the world as to what caused his downfall. I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up
together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.

Why should this boy's life be bound up with Frederick Nietzsche, who died thirty years ago, insane, in Germany? I don't know. I only know it is. I know that no man who ever wrote a line that I read failed to influence me to some extent. I know that every life I ever touched influenced me, and I influenced it; and that it is not given to me to unravel the infinite causes and say, "This is I, and this is you." I am responsible for so much; and you are responsible for so much. I know that in the infinite universe everything has its place and that the smallest particle is a part of all. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud.

Leopold was not, obviously, a good reader of Nietzsche, and Darrow is, of course, not engaged in Nietzsche scholarship, but trying to make the case for sparing the boys from the death penalty on account of psychological disturbance. Still, as popular readings of Nietzsche go, this one may have had more influence than most. Thoughts from readers?

Best Philosophical Articles/Books of the Decade

Readers can contribute their nominations here. Make sure to use a full name when you submit your comment. Let's make sure good articles/books related to Nietzsche and German philosophy more generally are represented. It was a pretty good decade in that regard, or so it seems to me.

More on "Nietzsche Source"

Here, a presentation recorded at the FNS meeting at Oxford this past September. (Thanks to Rob Sica for the link.) The keynote addresses were also recorded, and should be on-line before too long. I'll post a link when they are.

The Continental Traditions in Philosophy vs. "Party Line Continentalists"

A brave, anonymous soul posted the following nonsense on the thread about "Myths about Nietzsche," but it represents such a pernicious and widespread bit of self-deception that it warrants its own post. Our commenter begins:

This was an interesting talk, but I was saddned to hear Leiter take a snipe at the Postmodernists.

I did not take a "snipe" at postmodernism, I expressed a scholarly opinion, namely, that many postmodernist readers of Nietzsche (like Derrida and in a different way Foucault) misunderstand his views on truth and knowledge, in part because they rely too much on material Nietzsche did not publish, which expresses views it appears he rejected over time. This is, if anything, the consensus view in the scholarly community. But it is not a snipe. The anonymous author does not even address the scholarly issue. This is minor (though revealing), since the really good stuff is coming:

Like many Analytics, Leiter's attitude towards the Continentals (and especially towards the Postmodernists) is of barely concealed contempt. With few exceptions, Analytics tend to reduce the thought of their Continental/Postmodernist foes to easily dismissed, facile generalizations, instead of sincerely engaging in dialogue. Of course, the same could be said of many Continentals and Postmodernists, in regards to their attitude towards the Analytics. Much of the time the Analytics and Continentals really seem to be talking past one another.

I am not an "analytic." I do not even know what that means. I can certainly tell you the basics of Quine and Kripke, though I've read relatively little David Lewis; I think metaethics deals with important philosophical problems, but find most Anglophone normative theory embarrassing; I could give you a short lecture on the Gettier problem and the responses to it, but I think "analytic metaphysics" is a seriously wrong turn in the field and ignore it. I can also tell you the basics about Habermas, though I am not a fan and much prefer Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse; I think Derrida is a charlatan, and am sorry to see Foucault, whom I think is the most interesting diagnostician of the 'iron cage' of modernity since Weber, associated with him so often; I agree with Deleuze that phenomenology is our "modern scholasticism," but have a soft spot for Sartre. I enjoy Hume and Nietzsche, Spinoza and Marx, but haven't much affection for Leibniz or Hegel.


I am interested in philosophy and philosophical problems that crop up in various traditions, but often have an interest and existence that transcends them. But why is it so important to cabin me off as an "analytic" in contrast to the "Continentals" (who are then, wholly bizarrely, equated with Postmodernists by our commenter)? Who are these "Continentals"? If I have written extensively on Nietzsche, occasionally on Marx and Foucault; if I have taught Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, and Horkheimer with some frequency; if I have co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, and I am not a "Continental," then who is?

As I have noted before--and as The Oxford Handbook, I think, reflects--we are living in a Golden Age for scholarship on European philosophy after Kant. Someone who thinks there is a lot of "talking past one another" going on can't, obviously, be talking about the current state of scholarship on figures like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty--so what is the commenter talking about? Who are these mysterious "Continentals" since they are not me, Michael Rosen, Taylor Carman, Frederick Beiser, Peter Poellner, Sebastian Gardner, Julian Young, Raymond Geuss, Michael Forster, or any of the others working on and in various Continental traditions of philosophy?

As any actual scholar knows, there is no such thing as a "Continental tradition" in philosophy; rather, as Rosen and I noted in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook,

[P]hilosophy in Continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is best understood as a connected weave of traditions, some of which overlap, but no one of which dominates all the others. So, for example, German Idealism marks the immediate reception and criticism of Kant's philosophy in figures like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who use a comprehensive conception of reason to provide connected answers to a broad range of questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the theory of value. The breakdown of the German Idealist view was, in turn, of central importance in motivating Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and, more indirectly, Nietzsche. The reactions against Hegel's Idealism in the decades after his death in 1831 were, in fact, manifold; they included: (1) the German Materialism of the 1850s and 1860s in writers like Buchner, Moleschott, Czolbe, and Vogt (though with resonances in better-known philosophical figures like Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche), who took seriously the development of modern physiology, and advocated...the replacement of philosophy by science; (2) Marx's own repuditation of the domain of philosophy as the attempt to establish doctrines in metaphysics and
epistemology in favor of a political, critical and scientistic conception of philosophical method; and (3) the emergence of neo-Kantian thought in the latter years of the nineteenth century (e.g., Lotze, Helmholtz, Fischer, Cohen, Windelband, and Rickert) as a response to the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline ...

Most of the major twentieth-century developments in "Continental" philosophy can, in turn, be seen as responses to one or more of the nineteenth-century philosophical currents. Inasmuch as there is a Marxist tradition in philosophy, for example, it is marked by a dissatisfication with Marx's professed ideal of a scientific, historical approach to the study of society from which all philosophical questions have been purged, a dissatisfaction expressed in figures like Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and, finally, Habermas, who returns Kantian-style questions about justification to center stage. (The analytical Marxists in Anglophone philosophy end up, arguably, with a similar dissatisfaction.) Modern Phenomenology arose, like neo-Kantianism, in reaction to the development of modern psychology, in particular the attempt to reduce issues regarding the nature of thought, meaning, and logic to questions to be answered by an empirical scientific investigation of the facts of mental life....In the hands of Heidegger, however, the tradition is importantly transformed, with a new emphasis on the relationship between structures of meaning and the lived experience of particular individuals that inspired the French Existentialists (like Camus and Sartre) in their belief in the priority of 'existrence' over 'essence.'

Other important developments associated with Continental Europe in the twentieth-century do not map neatly on to the story sketched so far. The philosophical tradition we associate with 'Hermeneutics,' for example, which asserts the centrality and distinctiveness of interpretation for any understanding of language (and, hence, of human beings in whose lives language plays a constitutive role), intersects with both the German Idealist and the Phenomenological traditions and brings to them a distinctive set of issues regarding the relationship between language and thought, the nature of historical and social understanding, and the essential finitude of human
understanding, issues that are manifest in hermeneutically minded writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, including, Herder, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer.

So, too, 'Structuralism' was a movement initially not in philosophy, but in linguistics and the social sciences--associated with figures like Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and others--which placed emphasis on the explanatory autonomy of systems in contrast to psychological, historical, or teleological explanations. But once this idea was imported into philosophy and psychology itself (for instance, by Lacan and Foucault) the consequence took the form of the so-called 'death of the subject' out of which in turn the tendencies known as 'post-structuralism' and 'post-modernism' emerged (in figures like Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault again). In its most radical forms--informed by Heidegger and one (contentious) reading of Nietzsche--post-structurlism is best understood as a modern form of skepticism,
calling into question not just the possibility of objective truth but of determinate understanding.

This brief, introductory survey of positions, doctrines, and thinkers found on the European Continent after Kant should make clear that any unqualified talk of "Continental" as a kind of philosophy (a doctrine, a method, a set of problems) is ludicrous.

So what's really going on here when people, like the anonymous commenter (but many others, of course), speak of "Continental" or "Continentalists"? For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him). Since phenomenology, as it began with Husserl, has much in common with the origins of mid-20th-century analytic philosophy in Frege, there is, shall we say, a certain irony in demarcating the philosophical terrain this way, but it is especially ludicrous to denominate phenomenology-plus-poststructuralism "Continental" given that it effectively excludes the Frankfurt School, Marxism, German Idealism, and Nietzsche from the Continentalist camp. (Of course, that is not how the Party Line Continentalists understand what's going on here, but this is at least partly because their command of the history of European philosophy after Kant is often quite weak and idiosyncratic.)

Party Line Continentalists are very exercised about the fact that there are philosophical scholars of the Continental traditions who treat the figures of post-Kantian European philosophy as philosophers, without reading them through the lens and the methods of Heidegger and/or post-structuralism. Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists (Deleuze is an exception) were not, however, very good scholars or philosophical expositors, so it is not surprising that those with real training in philosophy and its history would not read the great figures of the Continental traditions in accord with the Party Line.


Now back to our anonymous commenter, who clearly is in the grips of Party Line Continentalists:

It's good that some of the Analytics are finally starting to get exposed to and grapple with some of the early Continentals, like Neitzsche and Heidegger. But, unfortunately, I think many of those Analytics either completely miss the point that the early Continentals are trying to make, or (worse) try to co-opt them in to the Analytic fold. I think the former is the case with Leiter, when he dismisses Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a mere parody.

It is indicative of the intellectual level of too many Party Line Continentals that they are such careless readers and listeners. I did not, in the interview, dismiss Zarathustra as a parody; I pointed out, rather, that Zarathustra is a parody of the Christ-figure (how could this not be obvious?), and the book a parody of The New Testament, with Zarathustra "preaching" an anti-Christian doctrine. I then pointed out that any careful interpretation of Zarathustra has to be alert to the parodic form, and thus careful in attributing what Zarathustra says to Nietzsche--a hermeneutic consideration especially relevant to appraising the meaning and significance of the image of the Overman.


"Analytic" philosophy as a substantive research program has been moribund for forty years or more, yet Party Line Continentalists know so little about the history of even recent philosophy, that they continue to think that there must be Party Line Analytics lined up against them. In fact, it is the entire history of philosophy and almost every major philosophical tradition prior to that launched by Heideggerian phenomenology that is lined up "against them," which is no doubt why Party Line Continentalists are so intent on misappropriating the term "Continental" for their sect and excluding other philosophers and scholars engaged with the Continental traditions from the Party.


Like most philosophers engaged with the Continental traditions in this Golden Age of philosophical scholarship, I am happy to be excluded from the Party. But I am not happy to see the Party Line discredit the philosophical figures I care about by associating them with their sectarian Party Line. But Party Line Continentalism has no business appropriating the name of a place that is the home to such a rich and philosophically interesting array of thinkers, most of whom do not have the all-too-common vices of the Party Line, such as obscurantism, careless reading, dialectical feebleness, and often ignornance of the history of philosophy.

The good news here is that Party Line Continentalism is, ironically enough, increasingly just an Anglophone phenomenon, confined to a handful of departments in the U.S. (e.g., Penn State, Stony Brook, DePaul, Memphis, Vanderbilt, the New School, Dusquesne), the U.K. (e.g., Middlesex and Dundee), and Australia (e.g., New South Wales). (Even these Party Line Continentalist departments are increasingly diverse, which is a welcome development!) On the European Continent itself, Party Line Continentalism is in retreat almost everywhere, as rigorous historical scholarship, that transcends national boundaries, and Anglophone-style philosophical work is increasingly dominant.

I am genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments, where lack of real depth in philosophy and its history does not matter. If, in addition, some of the unfortunate "fads" in Anglophone philosophy--and the trivial intellectual parochialism that often accompanies them--do not intervene, then we may really enter a period of philosophical scholarship in the Anglophone world in which "analytic" and "Continental" as terms of partisan battle are largely uintelligible to those drawn to the problems of philosophy.

UPDATE: Needless to say, comments are more likely to appear if signed.

Nietzsche on Wikipedia

Maybe some ambitious and web-savvy readers can clean up the Nietzsche entries, which are pretty bad!

Revised and Penultimate Draft of "Who is the 'Sovereign Individual?' Nietzsche on Freedom" Now On-Line

Here. It incorporates in the footnotes several references to the very illuminating, but so far unpublished, paper by Donald Rutherford (UC San Diego) on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Stoics and their conceptions of freedom, about which I'll write some more before too long.

Clark and Dudrick on BGE 19

Rob Sica and another correspondent (whose name I'm now forgetting, sorry!) had asked about my reply to Clark and Dudrick's reading of BGE 19 in the Gemes & May volume, in which they critique my reading in "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will." I have added a long footnote to the penultimate version of the paper on "Who is the Sovereign Individual?" (which should be on-line in a day or two) about their paper. I post that footnote here. I may write more about this on another occasion, but for those who might be interested:

Clark & Dudrick (2009) challenge my reading of BGE 19, and so I should say something briefly about why I find their alternative unpersuasive. The crux of their argument is to deem Nietzsche’s “phenomenology [of willing] simply implausible” (251), which then opens the door for them to re-read the passage as limited to “actions performed in opposition to temptation,” and thus as implicating “one’s commitments or values” (251). This reading, alas, finds no support in the text at all, and is motivated entirely by the claim that as a phenomenology of willing simpliciter, Nietzsche’s account is implausible, and so must be read otherwise. I do not find the account implausible (phenomenology does require careful introspection!), but even if one concurred with Clark & Dudrick about this, it would not follow that the passage has a meaning not to be found in the text: perhaps it is just bad phenomenology. But the evidence that Nietzsche holds the view of the will I attribute to him (Leiter 2007) is overwhelming, and BGE 19 as I read it fits nicely with the view that Nietzsche articulate elsewhere in his work (Clark and Dudrick confine their attention to this BGE passage). Curiously, Clark & Dudrick make an
issue (251 n. 3) out of my translation of “ich bin frei, ‘er’ muss gehorchen” as “I am free, ‘it’ must obey” instead of “he” must obey. While Kaufmann follows Clark & Dudrick on this point, Judith Norman (in the Cambridge edition) translates it as I do (“it”), and she is surely right to do so, for contrary to Clark & Dudrick’s claim that there is “no masculine noun in the passage for which the masculine pronoun substitutes,” it is, I would have thought, obvious in context that the “er” that obeys is the body (der Körper), which of course is a masculine noun.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" Conference Sept. 11-13

I wanted to write a few comments about the conference--or about the portion of it I managed to attend. For a variety of reasons, my stay in Oxford was a bit compressed, so I missed some of the keynotes that I would have liked to have heard (like Bernard Reginster's, Peter Poellner's and John Richardson's), and also some papers I would have liked to discuss, like Allison Merrick's on "historical sense" in Nietzsche, and Joao Constancio's on "Nietzsche on Freedom and the Unchangeability of Character." (Joao's paper is an interesting critique of my views in the "The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche" paper, and we had a useful discussion of it in the St. Peter's College bar; he's kindly sent it to me, and hopefully it will be generally available before long at which point we may discuss it here.)

It was very nice to meet in person a number of Nietzsche scholars, including some who regularly contribute comments here, like Charlie Huenemann and Timothy McWhirter. Because the quality of the papers was unusually high for an FNS event, there were, alas, a lot of conflicts. So while moderating a session which included Rex Welshon's illuminating discussion of Nietzsche and the neurosciences of consciousness and Peter Kail's (as always) masterful explication of Nietzsche's naturalism, I had to miss several papers I would have liked to hear in other sessions. So it goes. I did get to hear later Mario Brandhorst's paper on "Naturalism, Genealogy, and the Value of Morality," and due to some confusion about whether the other speakers for that session were there, we managed to have enough time to have a fruitful dialogue about it in Q&A. I caught some, but not all, of Gabriel Zamosc's very provocative argument about autonomy, sovereignty, and guilt. Galen Strawson gave a tour de force keynote on "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," though one that left a number of us wondering what this metaphysical Nietzsche has to do with Nietzsche the brilliant moral psychologist. My own plenary session led to a number of useful questions (and some naughty behavior by my dear friend Ken Gemes, with whom I've quarrelled about this topic for years now), though I am most indebted to Peter Kail for pointing out to me the need to tackle Spinoza--which led me, in turn, to this very good paper by Donald Rutherford, which I hope to discuss before long. (Rutherford, it seems to me, makes a stronger case for N's positive view of freedom, and its philosophical pedigree, than any of the recent contributors to the Gemes & May volume, so I hope he will publish it before too long. He did kindly give me permission to cite it in the final version of my own "sovereign individual" paper, which I'll have on-line before too long.)

Perhaps the philosophical highlight of the conference, though, wasn't on the official program: disputing at 4 in the morning in the St. Peter's College faculty lounge, with obligatory amounts of 'beverage,' whether or not David Wiggins had a good objection to projectivism with Peter Kail, Allison Merrick, and Christopher Sykes.

My congratulations to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries for organizing one of the best FNS events by everyone's appraisal. Others in attendance are welcome to add their comments on particularly notable papers, discussions, etc.

Myths about Nietzsche

I discuss them on Philosophy Bites. They are: the overman is a central idea in his philosophy; will to power is central to his philosophy; Nietzsche is a proto-postmodernist; and Nietzsche is an anti-semite.

I'm sure various Nietzsche scholars will disagree that these are all myths, but such is life in Nietzsche studies!

Who is the "Soverign Individual"? Nietzsche on Freedom

Sorry not to have gotten the draft of my paper for the FNS meeting at Oxford on-line before I left, but here it is. One serious lacuna in the current version (as Peter Kail rightly pointed out to me) is the failure to discuss Spinoza. But other comments are welcome, and soon, as I have to submit the final version by the end of the month for the Cambridge Critical Guide to the Genealogy.

In the discussion session, John Richardson (NYU) suggested that one familiar sense of freedom--not being subjected to the will of another--is in fact important for Nietzsche. I agreed that that sense of freedom is not a revisionary one, but I don't see the textual evidence that when Nietzsche writes about "freedom" it is this that he has in mind. Reader thoughts on this issue are also especially welcome.

I was sorry not to have been able to attend more of the FNS conference, which was an unusually good one, for which thanks and credit go to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries. I'll try to write a bit more about the conference by the weekend.

Abstracts for Papers at FNS Meeting at Oxford Next Week are Now Available

Here. I will post a draft of my own paper on SSRN before I depart for the conference. I also understand that the keynote sessions are likely to be filmed.

Announcing "Nietzsche Grid"

Carlos Ruiz (who uses the pen name Narziss), a student at Berkeley, has put together "Nietzsche Grid", which is potentially a very useful resource, but it also needs input from other Nietzsche students. The idea is to collect references to sections of the corpus that address various themes in his work. Narziss is also maintaining a blog for discussion and suggestions. I corresponded with Narziss about some possible thematic categories, but I am sure he would welcome input from readers of this blog about categories and ultimately about texts that belong under each category.

David Rosenthal on Consciousness

This useful summary of a recent paper by Rosenthal makes clear why students of Nietzsche should want to study Rosenthal's work on consciousness.

What is "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid"?

Dana Villa is a political theorist in the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame. In a review essay of some recent books on Nietzsche, he concludes with the following statement:

Nietzsche’s critique [of Christian-bourgeois civilization], however, fails to fit the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid—the very grid that
guides the analytic re-constructor. The result is that even the best analytic
Nietzsche literature (and Reginster’s book certainly falls into that category)
will tend to leave out the essential.

"Analytic" is, of course, a code word for a commentator who knows some philosophy and treats Nietzsche as a philosopher who has arguments and evidence. But put that to one side: what sense can be given to "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid" such that it is true that, for example, Reginster or me is committed to it, and that in virtue of that, are missing something "essential"? The answer may be (as I suspect) no sense at all, and that like talk of "analytic" this is really just code for something else. But what?

Signed comments only.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action

This is the penultimate draft of an essay for The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action being edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis, that should be out in 2010. I am still working on the issues here (and have worked on them previously, as some readers will recognize), and welcome comments--especially since there were significant space constraints in this piece, which will be less of a factor in the work-in-progress on these themes.

Draft Program for "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford This September Now Available

Here. A lot of interesting stuff, though I regret I am probably going to miss the Friday sessions. Abstracts are not available yet; I'll post a link when they are.