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 It incorporates in the footnotes several references to the very illuminating, but so far unpublished, paper by Donald Rutherford (UC San Diego) on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Stoics and their conceptions of freedom, about which I'll write some more before too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

Two New Books on Nietzsche: One Introductory, One for Scholars and Advanced Students

The introductory volume is Charlie Huenemann's Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart, which he kindly sent me. I've been dipping in and out of different parts of it, and it is written in an inviting way for the novice but at the same time is clearly better-informed about recent scholarly literature than most introductions to Nietzsche. Signed comments from readers who have read more of the book are welcome.


The other is the edited volume by Ken Gemes and Simon May on Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. All the essays are, I believe, new, except my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will," which has appeared elsewhere. My contribution is unique in another way too in this volume, since it is, I believe, the only one to defend the view that Nietzsche denies the causality of the will, thus denies the autonomy or freedom of the will, and thus denies that people are in any meaningful sense free or morally responsible. The other contributors are Sebastian Gardner, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Robert Pippin, Simon May, John Richardson, Peter Poellner, Aaron Ridley, David Owen, Mathias Risse, and Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick. The "Birkbeck-Southampton" axis and its fascination with the "sovereign individual" looms large here; Gemes's paper is probably the best representative of this moralized reading of Nietzsche in the volume, and I will have more to say about it in papers I'm working on. But Clark & Dudrick offer a detailed response to my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" paper, Poellner's paper develops a very different (from the Birkbeck-Southampton axis) line about Nietzsche's idea of freedom, Gardner develops his "transcendental" reading of Nietzsche on the self (which is both hugely stimulating and suggestive and yet hugely implausible to my mind), while Risse examines the idea of eternal recurrence through a Freudian lens (Risse's paper is most removed from the main themes of the volume). I will probably write more about the Clark & Dudrick and Poellner papers later this summer as well. Only Katsafanas, of important writers on this topic, is absent from the volume, though his work is much discussed by contributors. In sum, I'm hopeful that this volume, together with the forthcoming Oxford FNS conference on related themes, will lead to some real philosophical progress on these issues in the next few years. (Of course, my hope is that the moralizing readings of Nietzsche will be decisively defeated, but we'll see!)

Again, signed reader comments on the essays in the Gemes & May volume are also welcome.

Riverside and 1st Annual Magnus Lecture by Maudemarie Clark

Last Saturday's event was quite instructive and rewarding, at least for me, though I think others too. Maudemarie Clark offered a new, close reading of section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil, rejecting her earlier claim from Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy that the skepticism about causation in that passage manifests his continued acceptance of the NeoKantian view that "cause" is a concept we impose upon our experience, and so not a feature of the world as it is in-itself. Instead, Clark argued, the passage manifests an essentially Humean view of causation, which is central to making sense of the reasons he gives for rejecting the idea of "unfree will" in the second half of the passage.

The reading was quite ingenious and provocative, but both Lanier Anderson and I were not convinced (though Anderson agreed with Clark that Nietzsche is something like a compatibilist about free will). We argued, in slightly different ways, that Clark had it right in the 1990 book, that the inescapably Kantian language--"'cause' and 'effect' are pure concepts," "in the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections'"--does indeed reflect a NeoKantian (Langean) skepticism about the status of claims about cause and effect. Against the Humean reading, Anderson made I thought the particularly telling point that even in BGE 21 Nietzsche identifies the concept of "sequence" as one we impose upon experience, rather than part of the noumenal world. But "sequence" of course is precisely what Humeans claim is delivered by experience, so allegedly the opposite of a conceptual imposition that structures experience!

At this point, Clark's paper is not slated for publication, though I expect some of these arguments will make their way into hers and David Dudrick's forthcoming book on Beyond Good and Evil. I will probably make use of some of the material from my comments on Clark, and my comments on Gemes and Poellner from last year's Pacific APA session on Nietzsche on freedom, in two essays I'm working on currently: the entry on Nietzsche for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Action and my essay for the September "Nietzsche and Mind" conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society at Oxford, which will be on the topic, "Who is Nietzsche's 'Sovereign Individual'? Nietzsche on Freedom and Agency," which will eventually end up in the CUP volume on the Genealogy that Simon May is preparing. One or both of these will make it on to SSRN in draft, at which point I'll solicit feedback here.

Bottom line, though, on Riverside was that it was a real treat to participate in such a serious and high-level discussion of Nietzsche. I learned a lot.

"Bernd Magnus Lecture" at UC Riverside by Maudemarie Clark, May 30th

I hope to see some readers there:


The First Annual Lecture in
The Bernd Magnus Lecture Series
Saturday, May 30th

Featured Speakers and Commentators:
The inaugural lecture will be given by Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside) with commentary from Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Lanier Anderson (Stanford University)

University of California, Riverside——HMNSS 1500

Conference Schedule
· 1:00: Welcome by John Fischer
· 1:30: Maudemarie Clark: ‘Nietzsche on Causality and Responsibility’
· 2:30: Break
· 2:45: Brian Leiter
· 3:15: Lanier Anderson’
· 3:45: Break
· 4:00: Q&A Session

For more information, please contact Mark Wrathall (mark.wrathall@ucr.edu)

"Nietzsche and Morality" Now Out in Paperback

I got my actual copies today, though Amazon reports not having it in stock yet, but it should be enroute. The volume contains original essays by Simon Blackburn, Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick, Thomas Hurka, Nadeem Hussain, Christopher Janaway, Joshua Knobe & Brian Leiter, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, Mathias Risse, Neil Sinhababu, and R. Jay Wallace.

From the reviews on the dustjacket:

"Nietzsche has a tendency to throw out themes and leave us the task of seeing how they cohere. Many of the essays in this book try to tie up apparent loose ends, and make him say what he should have said if he had followed his insights through. We are entering a new era of Nietzsche studies." Roger Caldwell, Philosophy Now

"This collection of essays contains some of the best recent work on Nietzsche and moral philosophy. The editors state that their aim is to present work that advances the understanding of Nietzsche's ethical views and demonstrates the relevance of those views to contemporary debates in normative ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology. In relation to these two ends, the collection is clearly a success. It presents very good historical scholarship as well as some first-rate work in moral philosophy that engages with the issues that concerned Nietzsche. The collection will certainly be of interest to moral philosophers and to those interested in the history of modern philosophy, and many of the essays should be regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche's engagement with morality."--Scott Jenkins, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"This volume constitutes a significant advance in the Nietzsche literature. It is among a handful of volumes that anyone with a serious interest in Nietzsche simply must read. It will also be rewarding for anyone who is interested in the way in which moral psychology and action theory bear on ethics." Paul Katsafanas, Mind

Another Friend of the Naturalist Reading of Nietzsche

Here (in French--a grad student at the Jean Nicod Institute).

The Last "Most Important" Philosopher Poll

Our man is trailing--brace yourself--Augustine! Help him out. More substantive postings coming as the term is coming to an end here.

Another Poll: Vote for Nietzsche!

Here. So far, Hegel is ahead of Nietzsche. Unbelievable!

More Polling Amusement: Rank Order Your Favorite Books About Nietzsche

Here. Obviously the list omits books that some might have included; I've tried to give a decent sampling of English, German, and French literature, though I've no doubt over-represented recent Anglophone literature just because it tends to be better and I follow it more carefully. Worthy candidates not included should be noted in the comment section, but the comment must be signed or it will not appear.