Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocated the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on Earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche.
In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I: CONTESTING NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM
- 1 The Optics of Science, Art, and Life: How Tragedy Begins
- 2 Nietzsche, Nature, and Life Affirmation
- PART II: EVOLUTION, TELEOLOGY, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
- 3 Is Evolution Blind? On Nietzsche’s Reception of Darwin
- 4 Nietzsche and the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Teleology
- 5 Nietzsche’s Conception of “Necessity” and Its Relation to “Laws of Nature”
- PART III: JUSTICE AND THE LAW OF LIFE
- 6 Life and Justice in Nietzsche’s Conception of History
- 7 Life, Injustice, and Recurrence
- 8 Heeding the Law of Life: Receptivity, Submission, Hospitality
- PART IV: THE BECOMING OF A NEW BODY AND SENSIBILITY
- 9 Toward the Body of the Overman
- 10 Nietzsche’s Synaesthetic Epistemology and the Restitution of the Holistic Human
- 11 Nietzsche’s Naturalist Morality of Breeding: A Critique of Eugenics as Taming
- 12 An “Other Way of Being.” The Nietzschean “Animal”: Contributions to the Question of Biopolitics
- PART V: PURIFICATION AND THE FREEDOM OF DEATH
- 13 Nietzsche and the Transformation of Death
- 14 Becoming and Purification: Empedocles, Zarathustra’s Übermensch, and Lucian’s Tyrant
- PART VI: THE BECOMING OF THE SOUL: NOMADISM AND SELF - EXPERIMENT
- 15 “Falling in Love with Becoming”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Emerson
- 16 “We Are Experiments”: Nietzsche on Morality and Authenticity
- 17 States and Nomads: Hegel’s World and Nietzsche’s Earth
- Notes
- List of Contributors
- Index