Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture

Abstract

Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture"In 1872 Nietzsche shocked the European philological community with the publication of e Birth of Tragedy. In this fervid rst book Nietzsche looked to ancient Greek culture in the hope of nding the path to a revitalization of modern German culture. Cultural health was at this point unquestionably his paramount concern. Yet postwar Nietzsche scholarship has typically held that a er his Untimely Meditations which followed soon a er, Nietzsche's philosophy took a sharply individualist turn-an interpretation largely due to Walter Kaufmann's noble and in uential e ort to counter the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche by stressing Nietzsche's anti-political individualism and downplaying his seemingly more noxious Kulturphilosophie. But even a er Nietzsche gave up on the idea of German culture as something blessed with inner truth and greatness and pregnant with the potential for renewed splendor-heaping scorn instead on the Germans and their newlyfounded Reich-he still, I argue, continued to take culture, as a collective social achievement, to be something of prime importance. Indeed, it is for this reason that he took the ourishing of great individuals-especially artists and intellectuals-to be vital. eir singularity and their excellence redeems the decadent cultural landscape from the bovine blight of the "last man" and the self-satis ed, uncreative, and barren mediocrity he represents. My dissertation uses Nietzsche's perfectionistic ideal of a ourishing culture as a point of departure for investigating many of the central themes in his work: his criticism of the ideals enshrined in conventional morality; his attack on Christianity; his celebration of individual human excellence and cultural accomplishment; his lamentations about cultural decline; his troubling remarks about the need for slavery ("in some sense or other") if a society is to ourish; and his grand ambitions for a "revaluation of all values." i

Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique

“…As a form of criticism, it is not unique to Adorno. It has important anticipations in Nietzsche (see Huddleston: 2018) and arguably in Hegel as well, in his analyses of Geist's self-understandings and misunderstandings in various of its forms of life. With Nietzsche, we begin to see more of the turn to a hermeneutics of the covert, finding hidden meanings beneath the apparently simple surface: what seems like a worldview of love is actually one of hate, one of ascetic renunciation actually one of world-hatred, and so forth.…”

Nietzsche’s conceptual ethics

“…Guided by 9 These are, as I say, general modes of evaluation, each broadly shared across one of two internally diverse clusters of views. For examples of views in the first cluster, see notably Leiter (2015), Richardson (2020), andReginster (2021); for the second, see especially Huddleston (2015Huddleston ( , 2019, who draws on Nehamas (1985, and Pippin (1991, 83-85), and see also Owen (2018, 74). 10 Though this did apparently not prevent him from forgetting he had written it a year later.…”

Nietzsche on the good of cultural change

“…I suspect that just as Nietzsche does not have in mind a well‐specified model of the ideal great individual, 28 he does not have a unique vision of the ideal society and the legal and ethical codes it would live by. If, as Huddleston persuasively argues, Nietzsche views a culture as “a massive piece of collectively‐embodied art” (Huddleston, 2019, p. 48), then it is just as impossible to specify in advance what the great societies of the future will look like as to describe the details of great works of art that have not yet been produced. Great cultures and their moments of glory are, like great individuals and artworks, “a fortunate accident” ( A 3), “the highest little strokes of luck and transfigurations of human life that briefly light up here and there” ( BGE 224).…”

“…23 23 Huddleston (2019) insightfully explores and elaborates this metaphor, especially in Chapter 3, and discusses its implications for Nietzsche's conception of human flourishing in Chapter 6. Berkowitz (2003) also emphasizes the artistry involved in Nietzsche's conception of lawgiving. …”