Nietzsche On Art And Life

Nietzsche was not interested in the nature of art as such, or in providing an aesthetic theory of a traditional sort. For he regarded the significance of art to lie not in l'art pour l'art, but in the role that it might play in enabling us positively to 'revalue' the world and human experience. This volume brings together a number of distinguished figures in contemporary Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship to examine his views on art and the aesthetic in the context of this wider philosophical project. All of the major themes of Nietzsche's aesthetics are discussed: art and the affirmation of life, the relationship between art and truth, music, tragedy, the nature of aesthetic experience, the role of art in Nietzsche's positive ethics, his critique of romanticism, and his ambivalent attitude towards Richard Wagner.

Nietzsche had a particular interest in the relationship between art and life, and in art's contribution to his philosophical aims—to identify the conditions of the affirmation of life, cultural renewal, and exemplary human living. These new essays demonstrate that understanding his engagement with art is essential for understanding his philosophy.

It is commonly known that Nietzsche is one of Plato's primary philosophical antagonists, yet there is no full-length treatment in English of their ideas in dialogue and debate. Plato and Nietzsche is an advanced introduction to these two thinkers, with original insights and arguments interspersed throughout the text. Through a rigorous exploration of their ideas on art, metaphysics, ethics, and the nature of philosophy, and by explaining and analyzing each man's distinctive approach, Mark Anderson demonstrates the many and varied ways they play off against one another. This book provides the background necessary to understanding the principle matters at issue between these two philosophers and to developing an awareness that Nietzsche's engagement with Plato is deeper and more nuanced than it is often presented as being.

This is a clear and lucid account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art.

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This GuideBook introduces and assesses: Nietzsche's life and the background to his writings on art the ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought. This GuideBook will be essential reading for all students coming to Nietzsche for the first time.

An international team of scholars offer a broad engagement with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. They discuss the main topics of his philosophy, under the headings of values, epistemology and metaphysics, and will to power. Other sections are devoted to his life, his relations to other philosophers, and his individual works.

More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche's writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views--the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the bermensch, the master morality--often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers. Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche's views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together. Nehamas finally allows us to see that Nietzsche is creating a literary character out of himself, that he is, in effect, playing the role of Plato to his own Socrates. Nehamas discusses a number of opposing views, both American and European, of Nietzsche's texts and general project, and reaches a climactic solving of the main problems of Nietzsche interpretation in a step-by-step argument. In the process he takes up a set of very interesting questions in contemporary philosophy, such as moral relativism and scientific realism. This is a book of considerable breadth and elegance that will appeal to all curious readers of philosophy and literature.