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Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Robert C. Solomon
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Extract

Give style to your character, a great and rare art.

Nietzsche Gay Science (290)

What are we to make of Nietzsche? There has been an explosion of scholarship over the past twenty years, much of it revealing and insightful, a good deal of it controversial if not polemical. The controversy and polemics are for the most part straight from Nietzsche, of course, and the scholarly disputes over what he ‘really’ meant are rather innocuous and often academic compared with what Nietzsche meant (or might have meant) with his conscientiously inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole. We have been treated to extended debates about Nietzsche's politics, his attacks on Christianity and morality, his famed notion of the übermensch and his less lampooned (but more edifying) doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence’. We have recently heard Nietzsche reinterpreted as an analytic philosopher, as a deconstructionist, as a feminist, even as a closet Christian and a liberal. Stephen Aschheim suggests in his recent book that Nietzsche provides us with something like a Rorschach test, inviting readers with amazingly different commitments and ideologies to ‘make their own Nietzsche’ (as a Times Literary Supplement review bluntly put it). But there is another approach to Nietzsche, something quite different from interpreting him in terms of his various ‘theses’ and positions, unpacking his ‘system’ or repeating unhelpfully that he displayed no such coherence and consistency, something more than finding out ‘who’ Nietzsche is as opposed to what we have made out of him. The simplest way of getting at this alternative approach might be to ask, what Nietzsche would make of us? I grant that this is a bit cryptic, and it invites a variety of unflattering answers. But I think it is very much in the spirit of what he (and his spokesman Zarathustra) are all about. It is an intimately personal approach to Nietzsche, an approach that will, no doubt, be somewhat different for each and every one of us. But that, too, of course, is just what Nietzsche (and Zarathustra) would have demanded.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 44 , March 1999 , pp. 81 - 108
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1999

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References

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2 See, for example, Williams, Bernard review and critique of Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire, her analysis and praise of the Stoics precisely in terms of their providing such ‘moral advice’.Google Scholar

3 Collected and printed in The Will to Power, trans, and ed., Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Random House, 1969). The status of Nietzsche's unpublished notes (Nachlass) has been exhaustively debated and no doubt commented upon by virtually every commentator on Nietzsche. The best policy, it seems to me, is to trust Nietzsche's notes only when they are confirmed by (and thus reiterate, occasionally in more striking language) Nietzsche's published statements. In the case of external recurrence as a physical hypothesis, no such statements exist are to be found.Google Scholar

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7 As has often been noted, the phrase conies from Pindar.

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31 One does not have to believe Bertrand Russell here, but Schopenhauer's grumpy hedonism is indeed at odds with the pessimism of his philosophy. Nietzsche is much more insightful than Russell on this matter, needless to say. Whereas Russell simply dismissed Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had once idolised him. Accordingly, Nietzsche is also, at times, more scathing.Google Scholar

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39 Dionysus, as Nietzsche well knew, was also considered the great seducer (e.g. Euripides Bacchus).

40 Cf. the Marie von Bradke quote at the beginning of this section, ‘his pathologically delicate soul, overflowing with pity’, (op. cit.).

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56 As in Ayn Rand's derivative ‘virtue of selfishness’ (in The Virtue of Selfishness, New York: American Library, 1964).

57 This piece will appear in slightly different form in a book edited by Richard Schacht, also for Cambridge University Press, of essays on Nietzsche for Nietzsche's 150th birthday.