Nietzsche's Political Therapy

ABSTRACT In The Gay Science, Nietzsche develops his account of the role philosophy should play in the making of a human life. Nietzsche adopts the common Hellenistic position that the goal of philosophy is eudaimonia or human flourishing. Whereas he endorses the therapeutic orientation of Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, Nietzsche characterises Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism as failed therapies: they reinforce the philosophical sicknesses they purport to cure. He objects to both the form and content of Hellenistic therapies: because they adopt a single, universal ideal of human flourishing, they fail to account for the full scope of human diversity; and, by adopting ataraxia or tranquillity as the goal of philosophical practice, they contract, deaden, and impoverish the lives of their practitioners. Nietzsche’s alternative post-Classical therapy seeks to redress the failures of previous eudaimonistic philosophies. To achieve this end Nietzsche suggests we need to experiment with different beliefs and practices to test the bounds of what we can successfully ‘incorporate’ into a flourishing life. In this essay we chart a third way between (i) naturalistic interpretations of Nietzsche as a philosopher who prescribes moral laws on the basis of stable natural facts and (ii) artistic and postmodern interpretations that see him as an advocate of the ex nihilo creation of values. In contrast to both, we argue that Nietzsche works to discover the natural limits of value creation through experimentation. For Nietzsche value experimentation holds the key to human flourishing.

2023

This paper takes it starting point from the basic assertions of Martha Nussbaum’s 1997 paper “Is Nietzsche a political thinker?". In the paper she argues that seven criteria are necessary for a serious political philosophy: 1) understanding of material need; 2) procedural justification; 3) liberty and its worth; 4) racial, ethnic and religious difference; 5) gender and family; 6) justice between nations; and 7) moral psychology. She argues, that on the first six criteria, Nietzsche has nothing to offer but does make significant contributions on the seventh. In her estimation, then, we should forget about Nietzsche as a political thinker and instead focus on the enlightenment political philosophers he found to be so boring instead. Her basic conclusion is threefold: either Nietzsche is a racialist, inegalitarian, misogynistic, and elitist, he is puerile, or he is incoherent (Nussbaum 6-9). In opposition to Nussbaum's appraisal of Nietzsche's political thought, I argue that he is in fact a serious political thinker. To present the case I focus on the inclusion of Nussbaum's six criteria in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. My focus on this work is motivated by Nussbaum's own recognition that in this work Nietzsche makes numerous allusions to Plato's Republic, a seminal work of political thought in the tradition. Surprisingly, however, Nussbaum doesn't consider Zarathustra in her appraisal of the lack of political thought in Nietzsche.

A persistent attack on the Stoics has been the claim that really existing Stoics did not live up to their stringent theoretical demands. Schopenhauer inherits this criticism when he charges the Stoics with hypocrisy over their willingness to indulgence in so-called ‘preferred indifferents’ such as the food and wine of a Roman banquet, all the while denying their value. Nietzsche also criticises the Stoics for conduct incompatible with the theory of indifference but strikingly, claims that the Stoic life is more bitter, harsh, and hurtful than the theory of indifference suggests. Thus Nietzsche attacks not only the Stoic’s intellectual conscience, for living a life incompatible with Stoic theoretical commitments, but also the quality of such a life. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s differing criticisms of the Stoics are explained by an analysis of Stoicism as an art of living. I argue, following Sellars, that the Stoic conception of philosophy as an art of living allows a tripartite division between (i) a philosophical way of life (bíos), underpinned by (ii) theoretical discourse (logos), achieved through the use of (iii) philosophical exercises and training (áskēsis). Schopenhauer points to a supposed incompatibility between the Stoic life and Stoic theory, that the Stoic’s life betrays the positive regard in which they hold external goods. Nietzsche attacks the Stoic’s exercises as betraying an equally inappropriate negative regard for external goods. I argue that Nietzsche presents a more compelling case against Stoicism, since it is free of Schopenhauer’s expansive metaphysical commitments, and that his break with the Stoics motivates his development of an alternative philosophical way of life.

In this essay I provide an interpretation of the Übermensch in light of the cardinal conceptual and methodological importance of physiology in Nietzsche's thinking-not as an ideal type but as the ongoing overhuman process of physiological overcoming in which even the 'human being' is to be taken beyond the framework and typological construct of 'the human'. I argue that Nietzschean physiology is not primarily concerned with the language of man and its paradigm of the speaking or thinking subject, but rather with an overhuman physis and physiology of forces that make use and abuse of the human-in addition to nonhuman formations-as its material and medium of inscription hence articulation (a type-writing rather than a type, in this sense). Nietzsche privileges physis (growth, will-to-power) over logos (speech, human reason) in his physiology, and hence a-signifying forces over forces of (human, all too human) signification. In posing the political question of rule in terms of the physiological question of the production and direction of will-to-power, the overhuman appears to be Nietzsche's strategy for radically rethinking the place and the fate of human life-forms in relation to wider non-signifiying, nonconscious, non-human, often inhuman as well as transhuman 'form-shaping forces'. In the present arguments, I draw largely from François Laruelle's little-known tour-de-force, Nietzsche

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2009

ABSTRACT: This article examines Nietzsche’s engagement with Stoic philosophical therapy in the free spirit trilogy. I suggest that Nietzsche first turned to Stoicism in the late 1870s in his attempt to develop a philosophical therapy that might treat the injuries human beings suffer through fate or chance without recourse to the metaphysical theodicies discredited by Enlightenment skepticism and positivism. I argue that in HH and D Nietzsche adopts a conventional form of Stoic therapy. The article then shows how Nietzsche came to take a critical stance against Stoic therapy on the grounds that it entails a radical extirpation of the value judgments that underpin the emotions. Forthis reason, I claim that in GS he attempts to develop a rival philosophical therapy, one that aims to enable human beings to unconditionally affirm fate but without this affirmation entailing, as it does for the Stoics, the dissolutionof all emotional valuations. However, despite Nietzsche’s belief that he had fundamentally broken with Stoicism, I argue, first, that Nietzsche’s therapy in GS is deeply indebted to a “cosmic” model of Stoicism, which consists in the loving consent to the events that happen to us, and second, that he gives us no reasonable account of how it is possible to unconditionally affirm fate without adopting some form of Stoic indifference or apatheia .

H.W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds.) Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought, 2008

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2020

Preprint version of a review essay of Hugo Drogon's Nietzsche's Great Politics and Gary Shapiro's Nietzsche and the Earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of values offers an important account of contemporary culture. In this essay I will examine Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, drawing out Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. This essay is intended to demonstrate the ethical consequences that arise from his critique. For the person living along with the author of this paper, Nietzsche’s prophetic warnings still carry great weight in any effort to understand and relate to the personal and political world. Democracy has, by and large, become the new political hegemon, and with it the attending notions of community and equality are utilized in speech with little reflection as to what their meaning. After first laying out Nietzsche’s method and mode of critique, the essay will provide an analysis of the real, ethical complications summoned to mind by Nietzsche, concerns either forgotten or rendered un-important by their immediate assumption in the “post-modern” present.

Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2021