This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy of values and his account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science.
The “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche's most controversial philosophical concepts. In this article I argue that the will to power ties in directly with Nietzsche's naturalistic discussion of normativity. The link between the will to power and normativity cannot be explained, however, along the lines of a psychological reading of Nietzsche's naturalism; rather, Nietzsche's naturalism is rooted in contemporary biological discussions. Biology comes first, psychology second. With the notion of a will to power Nietzsche seeks to describe the linkages between the natural and normative in a way that falls neither into the trap of physicalist reductionism, nor into the trap of idealist metaphysics: how can we obtain an understanding of the emergence of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects, conceptual commitments, and also cells and organs, that make us natural beings?
This essay discusses the nature of (old and new) national monuments in post-apartheid South Africa which even now, twenty years after the first free elections, remains a democracy in transition. The discourse of monumentalism in transitional political systems is marked by concrete political interests that, in the case of South Africa, are centered on questions of race and citizenship as well as on territorial claims. Monumentalism in South Africa is inextricably linked to the spatial organization of political community, before and after apartheid, and as such it runs parallel to developments in public law and constitutionalism. On the one hand, officially sanctioned forms of monumentalism, such as the Voortrekker Monument, the Taal Monument, or Pretoria's Freedom Park, tend to camouflage the political and social tensions of post-apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, new forms of monumentalism create accidental and liminal spaces that expose the political paradoxes and historical ambiguities of the new South Africa as in the case of the spatial relationship between the Women's Monument and the cooling towers of the power station, painted with ANC motifs, in the urban landscape of Bloemfontein.
Focusing on the close connection between Friedrich Nietzsche's historical thought and the discourse of German historicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues in a thick contextual reading that Nietzsche's second “Untimely Meditation,” Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (1874), needs to be understood as a reflection on the political dimension of historical consciousness, outlining what I shall term a “critical historicism.” In contrast to the standard emphasis on Nietzsche's presumed aestheticism, he is shown to react to rather specific developments within the contemporary intellectual context, such as the establishment of specific historical foundation myths for a new German nation state, exemplified by the public monuments and commemorations of the 1870s, the effect of such foundation myths on the political imagination of historical scholarship, and the intellectual antagonism between Basel's “antimodernism” and the German nation state.
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History Christian J. Emden Frontmatter More information A natural history of moral communities 237 Sovereign individuals and the ethic of responsibility 248 The task of genealogy 260 "To translate humanity back into nature" 269 6 The idea of Europe and the limits of genealogy 286 "The creation of the European individual" 287 Beyond the modern nation state 299 Political realities in Imperial Germany 308 Modernity and the limits of genealogy 316 Bibliography 324 Index 366 Contents x
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