Nietzsche’s Final Teaching

Description

In the seven and a half years before his collapse into madness, Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the best-selling and most widely read philosophical work of all time, as well as six additional works that are today considered required reading for Western intellectuals. Together, these works mark the final period of Nietzsche’s thought, when he developed a new, more profound, and more systematic teaching rooted in the idea of the eternal recurrence, which he considered his deepest thought. Cutting against the grain of most current Nietzsche scholarship, Michael Allen Gillespie presents the thought of the late Nietzsche as Nietzsche himself intended, drawing not only on his published works but on the plans for the works he was unable to complete, which can be found throughout his notes and correspondence. Gillespie argues that the idea of the eternal recurrence transformed Nietzsche’s thinking from 1881 to 1889. It provided both the basis for his rejection of traditional metaphysics and the grounding for the new logic, ontology, theology, and anthropology he intended to create with the aim of a fundamental transformation of European civilization, a “revaluation of all values.” Nietzsche first broached the idea of the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but its failure to gain attention or public acceptance led him to present the idea again through a series of works intended to culminate in a never-completed magnum opus. Nietzsche believed this idea would enable the redemption of humanity. At the same time, he recognized its terrifying, apocalyptic consequences, since it would also produce wars of unprecedented ferocity and destruction. Through his careful analysis, Gillespie reveals a more radical and more dangerous Nietzsche than the humanistic or democratic Nietzsche we commonly think of today, but also a Nietzsche who was deeply at odds with the Nietzsche imagined to be the forefather of Fascism. Gillespie’s essays examine Nietzsche’s final teaching—its components and its political, philosophical, and theological significance. The book concludes with a critical examination and a reflection on its meaning for us today. Title Page......Page 3 Copyright Page......Page 4 CONTENTS......Page 5 Preface......Page 7 INTRODUCTION......Page 16 Nietzsche’s Deepest Thought......Page 17 NIHILISM AND THE SUPERHUMAN......Page 42 Nietzsche and the Anthropology of Nihilism......Page 43 Slouching toward Bethlehem to Be Born: On the Nature and Meaning of Nietzsche’s Übermensch......Page 58 NIETZSCHE AS TEACHER OF THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE......Page 79 What Was I Thinking? Nietzsche’s New Prefaces of 1886......Page 80 Nietzsche’s Musical Politics......Page 108 Life as Music: Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo......Page 149 NIETZSCHE’S FINAL TEACHING IN CONTEXT......Page 170 Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on Nihilism and the Superhuman......Page 171 Nietzsche and Plato on the Formation of a Warrior Aristocracy......Page 193 CONCLUSION......Page 214 What Remains......Page 215 List of Abbreviations......Page 236 Notes......Page 237 Index......Page 269