Nietzsche

PHIL 599-01, TR 12:15–1:30

College Hall 324, Fall 2014

Nietzsche is among the most controversial modern philosophers; he is also among the most misunderstood. One source of this misunderstanding is that he began his career not as a professional philosopher, but rather as a classical philologist—that is, as a professor of Greek and Latin literature. His early writings testify to this identity. For example, the most of important of them, The Birth of Tragedy, is above all a theory of Greek culture, and especially its tragic drama. Without some prior familiarity with that culture and drama, its contribution is easily misunderstood. The same is true of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which anticipates so many of the moves Nietzsche will make in his later work. In its first few weeks, therefore, this course will introduce not only his early writings, but also some of theirGreek background.

Whatever his professional identity—and for the decade during which he produced his most impressive work he had no profession at all, save that of a lonely wanderer—Nietzsche was always a philosopher. As the first half of this course moves chronologically from his early writings through excerpts of his later books, we shall thus focus primarily on his philosophical views, discussing whether they are reasoned or rhetorical, traditional or idiosyncratic, prophetic or insane. Here are some of the topics to be considered: the existence, endurance, and purpose of things in the world, as well as the world itself; human consciousness, rationality, and language; our individuality, selfhood, and self-knowledge;free-will and determinism;love, resentment, and other emotions; science and truth, religion and morality, meaning and nihilism;time and eternity,virtue and vice, and the relationship between ontology and ethics; slaves and masters, war and democracy, women and marriage; and of course, Jews, Christians, and Germans.We shall sample nearly all of Nietzsche’s published books, and much of his juvenalia, complementing this broad survey of primary texts with recent scholarship on most of them and the philosophical questions they raise.

After this brisk survey, the second half of the course will focus exclusively on one book, the one Nietzsche considered his most important: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “To have understood, that is to say experienced, six sentences of that book,” wrote Nietzsche in retrospect, “would raise one to a higher level of mortals than modern man could attain to.” Without promising any such experience, this course willnonetheless cover more than six sentences of the book; indeed, we shall read all of it. Our guide will be a recent and celebrated scholarly monograph (Paul S. Loeb’s The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) about its central idea, the eternal return. According to Nietzsche, this idea would be crucial to the reinvention of our culture, but it too recalled ancient thinking. As we make our way through Nietzsche’s corpus, then, the shadow of ancient thought will never pass. Understanding better what he owed to the ancients, students in this course should be able to resolve some—if not all—of the controversy produced by this untimely thinker.

Teacher
Dr. Miller...... College 332
Office Phone………………..412-396-1291
Email Address...... / Texts
The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Blackwell, 2006).
A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Blackwell, 2009).
Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge, 2006).
The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Paul S. Loeb (Cambridge, 2010)

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