Lecture (LEC)

• Above class open to graduates only
• TOPIC: Nietzsche's "Revaluation of All Values"

This seminar will consider Nietzsche's diagnosis of modern morality as a spiritual pathology that is ultimately "nihilistic," but which also opens up the possibility of radically new kinds of values and ways of valuing. Nietzsche's critique is directed not merely against the Christian "morality of pity," but also Platonic/Kantian conceptions of reason, agency, and freedom. For Nietzsche, all these notions are deeply "life-denying." Supposedly, these conceptions are aspects of the obsessive self-reflectiveness resulting from the ways that modern political and legal institutions stifle and deform our fundamental "will-to-power." What then would it mean for us to come to value in a way that is truly life-affirming, given how thoroughly such reflectiveness has saturated and transformed modern forms of subjectivity? Our focus will be on Nietzsche's later works, especially Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and especially The Genealogy of Morals. If time permits, we will also look at the development of central Nietzschean themes by Bernard Williams (particularly Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness).