Beyond selflessness: reading Nietzsche's Genealogy
Beyond selflessness: reading Nietzsche's Genealogy
Christopher Janaway presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's most studied work, On the Genealogy of Morality , and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. Arguing that Nietzsche's goal is to pursue psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, Beyond Selflessness is distinctive in that it also emphasizes the significance of Nietzsches rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly naturalist, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. In contrast to his opponents, Schopenhauer and Paul Rée, who both account for morality in terms of selflessness, Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. Janaway shows how, according to Nietzsches perspectivism, one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of ones feelings as possible to speak about it, and how Nietzsche seeks to enable us to feel differently': his provocation of the reader's affects helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepare the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life (as tested by the thought of eternal return) and the self-satisfaction to be attained by 'giving style to one's character'.
Contents
A Note on Translations and Abbreviations
1. Nietzsche's aims and targets
2. Reading Nietzsche's Preface
3. Naturalism and genealogy
4. Selflessness: the struggle with Schopenhauer
5. Nietzsche and Paul Rée on the origin of moral feelings
6. Good and evil: Nietzsche's artistic revaluation
7. Free will, autonomy, and the sovereign individual
8. Guilt, bad conscience, and self-punishment
9. Will to power in the Genealogy
10. Nietzsche's illustration of the art of exegesis
11. Disinterestedness and objectivity
12. Perspectival knowing and the affects
13. The ascetic ideal, meaning, and truth
14. Beyond selflessness
9780199279692
Janaway, Christopher
61c48538-365f-416f-b6f7-dfa4d4663475
12 July 2007
Janaway, Christopher
61c48538-365f-416f-b6f7-dfa4d4663475
Janaway, Christopher
(2007)
Beyond selflessness: reading Nietzsche's Genealogy
,
Oxford, UK.
Oxford University Press, 296pp.
Abstract
Christopher Janaway presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's most studied work, On the Genealogy of Morality , and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. Arguing that Nietzsche's goal is to pursue psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, Beyond Selflessness is distinctive in that it also emphasizes the significance of Nietzsches rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly naturalist, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. In contrast to his opponents, Schopenhauer and Paul Rée, who both account for morality in terms of selflessness, Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. Janaway shows how, according to Nietzsches perspectivism, one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of ones feelings as possible to speak about it, and how Nietzsche seeks to enable us to feel differently': his provocation of the reader's affects helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepare the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life (as tested by the thought of eternal return) and the self-satisfaction to be attained by 'giving style to one's character'.
Contents
A Note on Translations and Abbreviations
1. Nietzsche's aims and targets
2. Reading Nietzsche's Preface
3. Naturalism and genealogy
4. Selflessness: the struggle with Schopenhauer
5. Nietzsche and Paul Rée on the origin of moral feelings
6. Good and evil: Nietzsche's artistic revaluation
7. Free will, autonomy, and the sovereign individual
8. Guilt, bad conscience, and self-punishment
9. Will to power in the Genealogy
10. Nietzsche's illustration of the art of exegesis
11. Disinterestedness and objectivity
12. Perspectival knowing and the affects
13. The ascetic ideal, meaning, and truth
14. Beyond selflessness
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Published date: 12 July 2007
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Local EPrints ID: 47547
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/47547
ISBN: 9780199279692
PURE UUID: 5a5e3a28-e6fd-4f1a-8dfc-12a8a6268f17
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Date deposited: 03 Aug 2007
Last modified: 13 Sep 2024 01:38
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