One of the very few matters of nearly universal agreement with respect to Nietzsche interpretation, one that bridges the great analytic/continental divide, is that Nietzsche was offering some sort of account of freedom, in contradistinction to the ‘ascetic’ or ‘slavish’ ways of the past. What remains in dispute is the character of this account. In this paper I present Nietzsche’s account of fre...

On 13 November 1888, Nietzsche wrote to his close friend Franz Overbeck1 about Ecce Homo: ‘an absolutely important book, gives some psychological and even biographical details about me and my writings; people will at last see me. The tone of the work, one of gay detachment fraught with a sense of destiny, as is everything I write’ (1996: 324). Ecce Homo, an attempt at an autobiography, was conc...

Both Nietzsche, as the nineteenth century wound down, and Foucault in the last third of the twentieth century, responded to, and sought a way out of, a profound cultural crisis. Nietzsche first signaled the eruption of that crisis with his proclamation of the death of God,1 and eighty years later Foucault confronted the deepening impact of that same crisis. For Nietzsche, the death of God, in t...

Along with Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche can be read as a great theorist and critic of modernity who carried out a "ruthless criticism of all that exists" (Marx 1975c [1843]: 142). His powerful broadsides against religion, morality, and philosophy deploy a mixture of Enlightenment-inspired criticism and anti-Enlightenment vitalism to attack the life-negating aspects of modern culture. In addition, ...

Nietzsche was one of the most prominent figures of the 20th century. First considered as an artist, he was then first treated as a philosopher by Heidegger. Nietzsche is often said to represent a turning point in modern philosophy, the culmination but also the end of western philosophy. Can then Nietzsche be seen as the first post-modern philosopher? To what extent does he represent the post-mo...

“Another thing I don’t like to hear,” Nietzsche wrote, “is the infamous ‘and’ [ein berüchtigtes ‘und’): the Germans talk of ‘Goethe and Schiller’ [...] and with my own ears, although only from university professors, I have heard talk of ‘Schopenhauer and Hartmann’...”. So what, one wonders, would he have made of “Nietzsche and Freud” ― a conjunction which, in the words of Paul-Laurent Assoun, “...

A connection is often made between postmodernism and nihilism, but the full meaning of such a connection is rarely explored. The contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo is one of the few philosophers to have devoted much work to explaining this connection. Vattimo extrapolates the relevance of Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism for the postmodern condition, arguing that the concept of the p...

1I use the following standard acronyms when citing Nietzsche’s texts: TheAntichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE);TheBirth of Tragedy (BT);TheCase ofWagner (CW);Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); On the Genealogy of Morality (GM); The Gay Science (GS); Human, All-Too-Human (HH); Nietzsche contra Wagner (NCW); Twilight of the Idols (TI); Untimely Meditations (UM); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z). I cite...

This analysis comments on Bernstein's lack of clear understanding of subjectivity, based on his book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Bernstein limits his interpretation of subjectivity to thinkers such as Gadamer and Habermas. The authors analyze the ideas of classic scholars such as Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche. Husserl put forward his notion of...