A Look Into the Depths of Goethe's Faust

Communication Education, 2020

We possess art lest we perish of the truth

Conservative Judaism, 2012

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2016

In this paper, I take it to be uncontroversial that increasingly into his philosophical career, Nietzsche believed human greatness to be an appropriately valuable goal, at least for certain types of people. But while Nietzsche's repeated paradigms of greatness include figures as seemingly diverse as Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cesare Borgia, Julius Caesar, it is unclear precisely what great-making property (or properties) Nietzsche considers these figures to share. I consider two possible approaches which have shaped the terrain of the secondary literature on this controversial matter: greatness as a matter of internal properties (character traits); or external properties (achievements). I discuss the arguments for each view here, resulting with my own view being that both achievements and traits of character are at least necessary for what Nietzsche understands greatness to consist in. I then consider a distinction between actual and potential greatness in order to explore further necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions of Nietzsche's positive ideal. While my aim in this paper is primarily exegetical, I hope to draw upon contemporary issues in value theory surrounding the nature of achievement which are of interest to ethicists more broadly.

Review of Matt Ridley's' The Origins of Virtue

The question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people they will be.… We do not want to breed well-being in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature.