Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nietzsche's Spiritual Exercises, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Nietzsche’s third Untimely Meditation, composed in 1874, Schopenhauer as Educator, reflects upon and describes a “spiritual exercise” not unlike the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, detailing tactics and including practical advice. Thus Nietzsche’s “spiritual exercises” correspond to the traditional practice of self-cultivation, self-education, characteristic of the Stoic philosophers but also influential for the Hellenistic neo-Platonic tradition, the church fathers, and St. Augustine, author of De Magistro and the Confessions. Beyond antiquity, spiritual exercises refer to a theological practice of selfcultivation and self-discipline.

Six Ways Of Looking At Anomalisa, David L. Smith

Journal of Religion & Film

Anomalisa is a parable about the nature of human fulfilment that explores the tension between other-worldly desire (the conviction that real life must be “elsewhere”) and the kind of fulfilment that comes from a more transparent relationship to things as they are. The film explores this religious theme not only through its story, but through the way the story comments on its own embodiment as a puppet show—a work of stop-motion animation. In this paper, I try to tease out the film’s complex reflections on the real and the artificial (in particular, on the ways that a desire for “the …

Nietzsche And Problem Of Nihilism, Zahra Meyboti

Theses and Dissertations

It is generally accepted that life-affirmation is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche’s aim is to affirm life despite all miseries for human beings conscious of the

horror and terror of existence and avoid nihilism. He is concerned with life affirmation

almost in all of his works, In my thesis I will consider how he involved with avoiding

nihilism to affirm life according to his two books, The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of

Morals.

Nietzsche's Signpost For Feminism, Sara N. Pope

Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the apparent misogyny and anti-feminism found in Part VII of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (BGE). Following an interpretation put forward by Maudemarie Clark, I argue that Nietzsche’s claims and observations about women are purposely reflective of the dubious metaphysical assumptions of dualism and essentialism maintained with respect to biological sex. Given this, we can see Nietzsche’s text as highlighting the effects of “cultural breeding” in the form of gender. Thus, this paper aims to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s characterizations of women and “woman’s emancipation” as an important signification of the culturally bred, latent discrimination of the sexes, …

Nietzsche's Autonomy, Responsibility, And Will Unification, Waylon Jennings Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The modern analytic’s conception of morality usually grounds the agent’s mo-rality in some conception of responsibility and autonomy. Friedrich Nietzsche agrees that morality should be grounded in responsibility and autonomy, however his con-ceptions of responsibility and autonomy are quite different from the modern analytic literature. In this paper, I present Nietzsche’s account of autonomy and responsibility. In part one, I describe Nietzsche’s beliefs about human nature and how the human psyche became disparate. The sovereign individual is also introduced as the Nie-tzschean ideal capable of autonomy and responsibility. The second part of the paper refines Nietzshce’s ideas concerning both the …

Harken Not To Wild Beasts: Between Rage And Eloquence In Saruman And Thrasymachus, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

One of the giant gaps in Tolkien scholarship has been to miss how deeply Saruman answers the age-old antagonism between rhetoric and philosophy. Like John Milton, Tolkien cannot bring himself to trust rhetoric. It threatens the unitary truth of a divinely-revealed moral order and, ironically, Tolkien applies great rhetorical skill to convince his reader of rhetoric’s illusionary nature. In this matter Tolkien has been largely successful, since few readers (if any) question the de-privileging of Saruman’s perspective. In the process, though, I suggest that Tolkien has developed in his master rhetorician a new relationship between rhetoric (eloquence) and rage ( …

Anarchy And Anti-Intellectualism: Reason, Foundationalism, And The Anarchist Tradition, Joaquin A. Pedroso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Some contemporary anarchist scholarship has rejected the Enlightenment-inspired reliance on reason that was supposedly central to classical anarchist thought and expanded the anarchist critique to address issues ignored by their classical predecessors. In making reason the object of critique, some contemporary anarchists expanded the anarchist framework to include critiques of domination residing outside the traditional power centers of the state, the capitalist firm, and the church thereby shedding light on the authoritarian tendencies inherent in the intellect itself.

Though contemporary anarchist scholarship has sought to apply this anti-authoritarian ethos to the realms of epistemology and ontology (by employing Michel Foucault’s …

Anthropocentrism And The Long-Term: Nietzsche As An Environmental Thinker, Andrew Nolan Hatley

Doctoral Dissertations

Nietzsche has been advanced as an authoritative support for nearly every political aim since his death in 1900. Recent work has focused on his potential to contribute to environmental ethics. I defend the view that Nietzsche can contribute to both environmental ethics and aesthetics, and moreover, that his philosophy cannot be fully understood without the conceptual resources of environmental philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of morality and positive ethical views cannot be understood independent of conceptual distinctions of anthropocentrism and topics such as future generations and biocentric discussions of axiology. Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature emerges from his rejection of both metaphysical and …

Life At The Meridian: The Subjectivity Of Ethics In The Works Of Albert Camus And Friedrich Nietzsche, Clancy E. Robledo

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

This paper endeavors to respond to the questions: can ethics can be unbound from its traditional rootedness in religious systems? If so, what contributions did Nietzsche make to liberate value from the shackles of Western morality? To what degree is Camus one of the “new philosophers” Nietzsche calls for in On the Genealogy of Morals?

In an attempt to demonstrate that ethics can and do exist vividly in the realm of the non-religious, this paper will begin by illustrating the metaphysical door Nietzsche opens through his use of aphorisms in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his investigation of the history …

Announcings, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The Annunciation is often thematized in the critical literature and foremost among these thematizations, recently to be sure, are feminist readings, which matter for this essay although this essay can only refer to these in passing.

The focal concern is personal correspondence and intimate address or intrigue. This essay thus offers a hermeneutic reading less of the presumptive purity of our perception of this painting, as indeed of its reception, involving a distinction to be noted between male and female subjects than it reviews a recollection of the divine inclination to beauty in both pagan, Greek, and Judaeo- Christian traditions. …

Amor Fati In Jaco Van Dormael's Film, Mr. Nobody, Rebecca L. Smith

Senior Theses and Projects

The argument in this thesis is how the philosophies of the German Frederich Nietzsche are portrayed throughout the Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael’s film Mr. Nobody (2009). Mr. Nobody is a film about every imaginable way one man’s life could unfold from every major and minor decision he makes. Nietzsche’s philosophy of Amor Fati, or love of fate, is portrayed by the film’s main character, Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto). Within the different quantum branches of Nemo’s life he portrays both the man of reason and the man of intuition; a topic central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the various timelines in …

The Vision Of Nietzsche, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

God is dead, there are no universal truths, no morality. We stand alone in the universe ... Nietzsche conjured up nihilism, embraced it, then discovered that this philosophy was untenable. But out of his struggle emerged his great redemptive vision - the will to power of the Superman. This powerful book presents an introduction to Nietzsche's life, while carefully selected excerpts from his writings show the development of his thinking. Finally Novak compares Nietzsche's ideal of the Superman with Buddhism's tried and tested notion of the Bodhisattva.

Nietzsche On Language And Our Pursuit Of Truth, Le Quyen Pham

The Expositor: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities

No abstract provided.

A Tightrope Over An Abyss: Humanity And The Lords Of Life, Timothy Francis Urban

The Graduate Review

The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson is a precursor to the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings have often admitted to the profound influence Emerson had on the latter's own philosophy. Both thinkers shared common ground in viewing philosophy and language as an active process, always in a state of becoming, where the subject is the sole creator of meaning. This paper argues that Emerson and Nietzsche recognized the liberating quality of language in the creation of one's subjectivity. Emerson and Nietzsche dismissed notions of objective knowledge by looking at how language is arbitrary, and, as such, …

A Philosophy Of The Antichrist In The Time Of The Anthropocenic Multitude: Preliminary Lexicon For The Conceptual Network, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This book chapter functions as a lexicon of terms and concepts related to Nietzsche and the philosophy of the Antichrist.

Beyond Dualism And Monism: Bergson’S Slanted Being, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There is an old but still unresolved debate pertaining to the question of Bergsonian monism or dualism. Scholars who think that Bergson is ultimately monist clash with those who claim that he has consistently maintained a dualist position. Others speak of contradiction and point out his failure to reconcile dualism with monism. What feeds on the debate is Bergson’s undeniable change of direction: while his first book is flagrantly dualist, his second book takes a sharp turn toward monism. Without denying the intricacy generated by the change of direction, this paper argues that the originality of his position is overlooked …

Forget Not The Whip! Nietzsche, Perspectivism, And Feminism: A Non-Apologist Interpretation Of Nietzsche’S Polemical Axiology, Jennifer L. Hudgens

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is notoriously a misogynist according to many feminists. In parallel, Nietzsche’s theory of value, perspectivism, is relativist according to many philosophers. However, I propose a counter-reading of both Nietzsche’s comments regarding women and his comments regarding perspective in which I interpret Nietzsche as neither misogynistic nor relativistic. I adopt a stance which is non-apologist, in that I do not merely wash my hands of Nietzsche’s apparently sexist remarks about women as Walter Kaufmann does, for example. Rather I demonstrate that Nietzsche is performing a polemical attack on a particular kind of naïve feminism which …

Farmville, Eternal Recurrence, And The Will-To-Power-Ups, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Nietzschean Ethics: One's Duty To Overcome, Emmanuel Hurtado

CMC Senior Theses

Abstract

In this paper, I will analyze Nietzsche’s argument for a moral error theory and examine the implications of his view. In order to arrive at the best possible interpretation I will heavily incorporate many passages from Nietzsche’s original works so that I can delve into a textual analysis of Nietzsche. Because Nietzsche is notoriously vague at times and often contradictory, I recognize that this is far from the only appropriate interpretation. However, I hope that it is one which has at least some intuitive appeal. Eventually, I hope to prove that despite his rejection of moral truths, Nietzsche’s theory …

Beginning In Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Mallarmé, Austen H. Hinkley

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project is focused on the theme of beginning. The first chapter is a reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as an attempt at beginning a new ontology that understands itself as a construct that must be, to quote Heidegger, “critical against itself.” The second chapter is a reading of three of Nietzsche's metaphors as a way of both examining and enacting a beginning. The third chapter is concerned with Mallarmé’s revolution of poetic form in Un coup de Dés, which enacts a new beginning on which the poem reflects through its images and form. Through an understanding of …

Practical Paradise: Ethics For A Modern Age, Anthony P. Davanzo

CMC Senior Theses

This play demonstrates an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy in practice. The main character experiences loss and confusion, however, through this struggle arrives at a discovery of profound truth. If you've ever wondered how to live your life in the best way possible, the main character believes he's found the answer.

Yearning For The Unhistorical: Nietzsche On Triumph And Coronation, Travis Brock Kennedy

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

No One Man Should Have All That Power: Rhetoric And Its Reception In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Philip Adam Torphy

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.