Table Of ContentNietzsche and the Philosophers
“This volume proposes a major reassessment of Nietzsche’s position within
the history of philosophy. Each chapter—written by some of the foremost
scholars in the field—offers a novel interpretation of the role that specific
thinkers, from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, played in shaping
Nietzsche’s subversive and critical perspective on what philosophy is meant
to be. From Anaximander and Epicurus to Kant and Schopenhauer, includ-
ing Nietzsche’s reception of Buddhism and his lasting effect on current moral
philosophy, this volume presents a Nietzsche whose thought develops in
detailed conversation with the history of philosophy itself. Far from break-
ing with the philosophical tradition, Nietzsche thus emerges as a genuinely
modern thinker that seeks to write himself into this very tradition, highlight-
ing its contradictions and possibilities.”
— Christian J. Emden, Rice University, USA
Nietzsche is undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in
the history of philosophy. With ideas such as the overman, will to power, the
eternal recurrence, and perspectivism, Nietzsche challenges us to reconceive
how it is that we know and understand the world, and what it means to be
a human being. Further, in his works, he not only grapples with previous
great philosophers and their ideas, but he also calls into question and rede-
fines what it means to do philosophy. Nietzsche and the Philosophers, for
the first time, sets out to examine explicitly Nietzsche’s relationship to his
most important predecessors. This anthology includes essays by many of the
leading Nietzsche scholars, who discuss Nietzsche’s engagement with such
figures as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Socrates, Hume, Schopenhauer, Emerson,
Rousseau, and the Buddha. Anyone interested in Nietzsche or the history of
philosophy generally will find much of great interest in this volume.
Mark T. Conard is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marymount
Manhattan College in New York City. He’s the co-editor of The Simpsons
and Philosophy , and W oody Allen and Philosophy, both published by Open
Court Press, and is the editor of The Philosophy of Film Noir , T he Philoso-
phy of Neo-Noir, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese , The Philosophy of the
Coen Brothers , and The Philosophy of Spike Lee .
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
1 The Scotch Metaphysics
A Century of Enlightenment
George E. Davie
2 Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses
Philosophy, Literature, and Theology
George Pattison
3 Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value
of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy
Andrew Buchwalter
4 Hegel and Psychoanalysis
A New Interpretation of Phenomenology of Spirit
Molly Macdonald
5 Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness
A Kantian Perspective
Gabriele Gava
6 Mill’s A System of Logic
Critical Appraisals
Edited by Antis Loizides
7 Hegel on Beauty
Julia Peters
8 Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy
Edited by Gabriele Gava and Robert Stern
9 An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s O n the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life
Anthony K. Jensen
10 Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology
Edited by Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli
11 Nietzsche and the Philosophers
Edited by Mark T. Conard
Nietzsche and the Philosophers
Edited by Mark T. Conard
First published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Conard, Mark T., 1965– editor.
Title: Nietzsche and the philosophers / edited by Mark T. Conard.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series:
Routledge studies in nineteenth-century philsophy ; 11 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016038388 | ISBN 9781138233065 (hardback :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. |
Philosophers. | Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B3317 .N4493 2016 | DDC 193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038388
ISBN: 978-1-138-23306-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-31049-7 (ebk)
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Contents
Introduction 1
MARK T. CONARD
1 Nietzsche’s Place in the Aristotelian History of Philosophy 9
PAUL S. LOEB
2 Twilight of an Idol: Nietzsche’s Affirmation of Socrates 40
DANIEL CONWAY
3 Nietzsche’s Subversive Rewritings of P haedo -Platonism 63
MARK ANDERSON
4 Nietzsche and Anaximander: The Innocence of Becoming,
or Life Without a Mortgage 86
GARY SHAPIRO
5 The Pivot of Nihilism: Buddha Through Nietzsche’s Eyes 104
DOUGLAS L. BERGER
6 Nietzsche and Epicurus: In Search of the Heroic-Idyllic 121
KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON
7 Nietzsche and Hume on the Genealogy and Psychology
of Religion 146
MARK T. CONARD
8 Nietzsche’s Critique: Reading Kant’s Critical Philosophy 169
BABETTE BABICH
vi Contents
9 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: “For Me What Mattered
was the Human Being” 193
ANTHONY K. JENSEN
10 Emerson Recomposed: Nietzsche’s Uses of His American
‘Soul-Brother’ 211
DAVID LA ROCCA
11 Nietzsche and Bernard Williams: Pessimism, Naturalism,
and Truth 231
REX WELSHON
12 The Obstinance of Voice: Rousseau and Nietzsche
on Music, Language, and Human Association 258
TRACY B. STRONG
Contributors Bios 287
Index 291
Introduction
Mark T. Conard
“On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” the first chapter of B eyond Good and
Evil (itself subtitled “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”), begins fittingly
by questioning one of the philosopher’s hallmark prejudices, namely, the
value of searching for truth—or abiding by the “will to truth,” as Nietzsche
puts it. The section ends with Nietzsche claiming that psychology is now
“the path to the fundamental problems,” and, one is meant to suppose,
also its more promising solutions. 1 In between these bookends, Nietzsche
critiques the metaphysician’s faith in (seemingly) opposite values—among
them selflessness and selfishness, purity and lust; downgrades conscious
thinking; argues that logic is a kind of surface for physiology and nature;
and expresses a desire to replace the issue of truth and falsity with the ques-
tion of life-preservation. He questions the objectivity of philosophers, claim-
ing that they all aim at some morality. He undermines atomism and the
concept of an atomistic soul. He dispenses with “superfluous teleological
principles” (those that would give human life an ultimate meaning). And he
attacks “immediate certainties,” free will, and causality. As he moves along,
Nietzsche refers to (or hints at) Descartes, Protagoras, Kant, Schelling, Spi-
noza, Epicurus, Plato, Boscovich, Copernicus, Schopenhauer, and Locke.
To the neophyte (or the crusty old school philosopher who would have
no truck with anything that doesn’t contain backwards E’s and upside down
A’s), the chapter is likely to sound at worst like gibberish, and at best like a
random and loose collection of thoughts by someone of questionable san-
ity. But careful examination and study reveals that “On the Prejudices of
Philosophers,” in just twenty-three compact sections, is a well-connected
and well-developed chain of ideas and arguments expressed in aphorisms
that accomplishes two important things simultaneously: it encapsulates
Nietzsche’s sweeping and potentially devastating critique of the Western
philosophical tradition, and it articulates succinctly much of the mature
Nietzsche’s philosophical thought.
Since its beginnings in ancient Greece, and throughout the Western tradi-
tion, philosophy has attempted to be an all-encompassing investigation into
the most basic human problems. Philosophers have never wanted to leave
any question unasked or any premise unexamined. Philosophers respond to,
2 Mark T. Conard
and attempt to overcome or overturn, their predecessors’ claims; in doing
so, they often break the rules and thus alter and expand what philosophy
is. But they’ve always conducted these inquiries from within the tradition,
using the tools and concepts o f the tradition. Plato responded to Parmenides
and Heraclitus, and he followed in the footsteps of Socrates; Aristotle con-
tended with Plato; Aquinas gave Aristotle a Christian twist; Kant had to
address Aquinas and Hume; and so on.
In an important way, Nietzsche radicalized the mission of philosophy by
unearthing the unquestioned premises and assumptions of philosophy itself,
particularly those regarding the will to truth, the value of morality, and
the ethical heart of all traditional philosophy. He wanted to blow up (or
“deconstruct,” to use a more contemporary term) philosophy, but he did so
as a philosopher; and thus, he too expanded what philosophy is. His project,
as one might expect, required new methodologies: genealogy, the aphorism,
and a turn (or return) to psychology, for example. This questioning of the
presuppositions of traditional philosophers and the utilization of new meth-
odologies then led him to striking new content: becoming, perspectivism,
will-to-power, eternal return, the Ü bermensch .
To return to “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” and the thread of that
discussion: Nietzsche, using genealogy, critiques and undermines the central
presuppositions of traditional philosophy: hallmarks such as the will to truth,
logic, objectivity, and reason/consciousness—all of them long-considered the
primary tools for intellectual discovery. He explodes the myth of philosophy
as leaving no stone unturned, and troubles the image of the philosopher
as one who is engaged in the “examined life,” since the core of traditional
philosophy has, to that point, remained hidden: morality. He attacks belief
in the traditional and central philosophical notions of appearance/reality
and, more broadly, any kind of opposites (especially opposite values, like
truthfulness and deception). He doubts the ability of the philosopher—by
means of reason and logic—to discover “immediate certainties,” necessary
bits of foundational knowledge, like Descartes’s “I think” or Schopenhauer’s
“I will.” Nietzsche also undermines both atomism as a physical doctrine,
and, more importantly perhaps, what he calls the “soul atomism”—the age-
old belief in a unitary thing called the soul/self/reason/consciousness, some-
thing separate from the body. Thus, as a naturalist, he rejects any form of
transcendence or any notion of the supernatural.
Nietzsche embraces a reduction of philosophical thinking to psychological
processes, and ultimately to physiological “demands,” or “types” or “needs.”
Perhaps most devastatingly, he attacks the philosopher’s objectivity. Every
philosophical system, he argues, is the personal confession of the author,
growing out of his own physiological and psychological strength (or weak-
ness) and driven at the core by some morality, a nd constrained in its form by
the native language of the philosopher. Further, every philosophical system
almost necessarily must be superficial, since it arises out of conscious reflec-
tion, which always remains on the surface and contains the most abstract
Introduction 3
and therefore emptiest concepts possible (God, being, matter, etc.). Nietzsche
argues against any kind of mechanism and atomism in favor of his own
dynamic conception of becoming, which he characterizes as “will to power.”
That is, philosophy/morality/culture/religion are reducible to psychology,
which is in essence physiology—a domain in which we discover dynamic
centers of force that express this will to power.
So, to sum up, Nietzsche starts by questioning the primary assumptions
and premises of philosophy. He embraces a naturalistic reduction of phe-
nomena to those graspable or describable by physiology and the other natu-
ral sciences, and ultimately to centers of force exhibiting will to power; and,
then he ends by claiming that psychology (the logos of the “psyche,” which
he wants to re-conceive as “soul as multiplicity” and “soul as social structure
of the drives and affects”) is the new pathway to the most fundamental prob-
lems, given that it is “the doctrine of the development of the will to power.”
If all things are, at bottom, drives (“dynamic quanta”) which express will
to power, then psychology is the means to investigate, uncover, and examine
those realities, and thus to better describe and interpret everything that’s
built upon them, which means all human phenomena: culture, politics, reli-
gion, philosophy. Nietzsche is, as I noted, in sweeping terms attempting to
undermine the Western philosophical tradition and at the same time trying
to articulate his own vision of the proper methods for, and the premises and
the ultimate contents of, an investigation into the most fundamental issues
of human existence.
And he’s done all this as a philosopher, which is to say, he’s done it with
the characteristically Nietzschean sense of irony (if not outright contradic-
tion); for, if every philosophy is but the unconscious memoir of its author,
then doesn’t that apply to what Nietzsche is now telling us? And in this
attempt to “get it right,” isn’t Nietzsche himself driven by the will to truth? If
every philosopher is driven by ethical concerns, then isn’t Nietzsche himself
motivated by some core morality? And, in the wake of Nietzsche, aren’t we
to be suspicious that his “re-evaluation of values” is not itself just an expres-
sion of his physiology?
The mature Nietzsche is quite conscious of the fact that he’s attempting to
destroy philosophy (at least as it’s been conceived and practiced by the tra-
dition) as a philosopher. In section 2 of “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,”
he even heralds the advent of a new species of philosopher: those who will,
embracing his picture of things, concern themselves with “dangerous may-
bes,” for example, the possibility that good and noble things (the true, the
selfless) may well be inextricably tied to and involved with wicked things
(“deception, selfishness, and lust”). By undermining the tradition, sounding
out all the old, hollow idols, Nietzsche sees himself as preparing the way for
these bold new philosophers.
Thus, in a way, everything Nietzsche writes is a challenge to, or a rein-
terpretation of, traditional philosophy and its exemplars. Consequently, we
can’t hope to understand him without comprehending what—and who—he’s
