Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- An Impossible Virtue: Heraclitean Justice and Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
- Cults and Migrations: Nietzsche's Meditations on Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the Greek Mysteries
- Nietzsche's Cynicism: Uppercase or lowercase?
- Nietzsche's Unpublished Fragments on Ancient Cynicism: The First Night of Diogenes
- Nietzsche's Stoicism: The Depths Are Inside
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
An Impossible Virtue: Heraclitean Justice and Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
from Section 2 - Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- An Impossible Virtue: Heraclitean Justice and Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
- Cults and Migrations: Nietzsche's Meditations on Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the Greek Mysteries
- Nietzsche's Cynicism: Uppercase or lowercase?
- Nietzsche's Unpublished Fragments on Ancient Cynicism: The First Night of Diogenes
- Nietzsche's Stoicism: The Depths Are Inside
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
At the beginning of section six of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Nietzsche asks two questions of “modern man,” by which he means, in this context, contemporary historians and philologists. He asks, first, “whether on account of his well-known historical ‘objectivity’ [Objektivität] he has a right to call himself strong, that is to say just [gerecht], and just in a higher degree than men of other ages?” And second: “Is it true that this objectivity originates in an enhanced need and demand for justice [Gerechtigkeit]?” (UM II §6). Nietzsche uses the word “justice” here to refer both to the capacities of contemporary historians and to the adequacy of contemporary modes of historical explanation. He also implies a distinction between two conceptions of justice: justice as objectivity, the justice of the contemporary historian, and justice as strength, the kind of justice in which Nietzsche seems to be interested.
I shall attempt to clarify and explore this distinction here in four stages. First, I shall examine the way that Nietzsche uses his negative conception of justice as objectivity to underwrite each of the key distinctions that he makes in the opening sections of this second Untimely Meditation. Second, I shall briefly introduce the alternative conception of justice as strength, more specifically, justice as “an impossible virtue” (UM II §6), which Nietzsche develops in section six of the text.
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- Information
- Nietzsche and AntiquityHis Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, pp. 139 - 150Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004