Overview
In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226923918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Contesting Nietzsche
By Christa Davis Acampora
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2013The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92390-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1Agon as Analytic, Diagnostic, and Antidote
1.1 VALUING ANIMALS
Nietzsche's interests in history and development led him to focus on the entwinement of nature and culture. He underscores precisely this relation at the head of his unpublished preface "Homer's Wettkampf," where he begins: "When one speaks of humanity, underlying this idea is the belief that it is humanity that separates and distinguishes human beings from nature. But, there is, in reality, no such distinction: the 'natural' qualities and those properly called 'human' grow inseparably. The human, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and bears within himself its uncanny dual character" (HC, p. 783). Such uncanniness is surely equally vexing today, although it takes different forms in contemporary discussions of philosophical naturalism. Nietzsche was greatly influenced by then emerging discussions of evolutionary biology and rapid developments in modern physiology, zoology, and neurology as well as applications of these ideas in theories of human cultural and social development. He was particularly keen to explore an agonistic relation between the cultural and the biological in the realm of values.
It is clear from his work that Nietzsche did not think the specific values we hold issue from some inherent value of the world as such: values are products of human creativity and ingenuity that develop historically and are preserved and transmitted culturally. This does not make them any less real. What we value, why we value in that way, and how we hold such values have immense consequences on a grand scale. Some values are enduring (e.g., the value of truth); others are relatively fleeting and rare. One possible way of organizing a historical account of human existence is to focus on shifts in evaluative axes, the major terms or poles of human cultural value. And Nietzsche thinks this perspective on history can hang together and is illuminating because it is characteristic of human beings that they seek value; they are valuing animals.
As Nietzsche gains familiarity with theories of evolutionary origins and development, both cultural and biological, he becomes increasingly intrigued by and concerned about what such accounts assume and imply about the ultimate value of existence. By this, I mean the presumed or suggested general end or ends of existence, what is supposed as that toward which human development is oriented, if not progressing, rather than some inherent value that life itself actually has. Even nonteleological accounts that do not regard such development as actual improvement still rely on philosophical assumptions that influence how such views characterize the causal mechanism of change—the concept of selection, for example, can smuggle in suspicious notions of agency (e.g., that some thing, some agent selects with some intent) and teleology even while endeavoring to avoid such implications. Moreover, there would seem to be an implicit value or set of values linked with what is identified as the basis of selection (e.g., the highest good) and the level(s) on which it occurs (species, organisms, parts of organisms). How we think about these matters is relevant to how we might regard the nature of this process and future human cultural as well as biological prospects. These are all critical concerns Nietzsche raises even as he maintains positive interest in evolutionary and developmental sciences and integrates dimensions of them in his conception of human nature.
In the sphere of cultural development, Nietzsche is particularly concerned about how culture and nature are entwined in characterizations of the natural history of morality, particularly in the tendency to focus on altruism as the allegedly advantageous trait that became part of our basic constitution when it was selected for its contribution to preserving the species more generally. This presumed biological advantage became the explanatory focus for the development of human morals, law, and society. Accounting for the development of altruism within an evolutionary framework that is supposed to favor self-preservation and its relation to the development of morality provides much grist for those "English psychologists" Nietzsche challenges at the beginning of Zur Genealogie der Moral, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5 below. This general concern endures in contemporary evolutionary ethics and cross-species studies of behavior. That evolutionary psycho-and neurobiology will mark the end of philosophical ethics is increasingly advanced in both popular and academic literature. Nietzsche's reflections are germane to such discussions and considerations of whether and to what extent such scientific views are free of ethical content or import. Nietzsche criticizes the association of value and advantage with conservation, that is, the preservation of existence. Thus, he considers the two dominant developments in (what he regards as Darwinian) evolutionary theory as valuing the extension of life above all else, positing as the highest goal life at all costs, and he challenges these suppositions. Moreover, he appears to think that human beings suffer acutely when cultural and biological axes of valuation are at odds or in conflict.
As a form of organized or stylized struggle, the ancient Greek model of contest—the agon—provides Nietzsche with some analytic measures to examine and evaluate forms of human cultural interaction for social adaptability. The most vivid historical example of agonism shows that certain contingent cultural conditions are essential to the efficacy of the agon for specific forms of productivity. For the agon to be an effective means of producing shared cultural values, the community itself must have significant involvement in virtually all its dimensions since it is the community that creates and sanctions the institutions or forums in which agonistic encounters can occur. Thus, it is the community and not any great individual competitor that founds this form of interaction. The community has this priority by virtue of the fact that it provides the conditions for the possibility of meaningful agonistic exchange—it provides the judges, the grounds for deciding outcomes, and the conditions for participation. And so the community defines and delimits the agonistic arena. As it facilitates and supports (or not) prospective competitors, relevant measures, and mechanisms to determine outcomes, it founds and grounds the ethos that supports the economy of agonistic exchange, which I shall elaborate below.
When Nietzsche examines monumental agonists and antagonists, he is analyzing organizations of values that make it possible for individuals to become who they are rather than simply lionizing or vilifying them. While it is true that individuals compete in the great agones he investigates, it is also the case that they all rise and fall on cultural conditions that make them possible and determine, in some large measure, their possible outcomes. This becomes clear in his nearly dialectical account of the trajectory of the development of agonism from Homer to Socrates to Paul and his self-assessment and conception of his own development in relation to his agon with Wagner. In each case, the connections between cultural conditions and the possibilities for action they provide are also essential to understanding his own projects.
1.2 "HOMER'S WETTKAMPF" AND THE GOOD OF THE SECOND ERIS
The locus classicus for Nietzsche's conception of the agon is the discussion in "Homer's Wettkampf." Prefiguring the notion that would years later make his Basel colleague Jacob Burckhardt famous, Nietzsche examines the s
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations and Citations of Nietzsche’s Works
Introduction
1 Agon as Analytic, Diagnostic, and Antidote 1.1 Valuing Animals
1.2 “Homer’s Wettkampf ” and the Good of the Second Eris
1.3 What Is an Agon? A Typology of Nietzsche’s Contests
1.4 Lessons from Pindar: The Economy of Agonistic Values and the Circulation of Power
1.5 The End of the Game: Hybris and Violence
1.6 Agon Model as Diagnostic
1.7 Wrestling with the Past: Nietzsche’s Agonistic Critique and Use of History
1.8 Introducing Nietzsche’s Agonists
2 Contesting Homer: The Poiesis of Value 2.1 Homer’s Contest as Exemplary Revaluation
2.2 The Apollinian (and the Dionysian): The Agon Begins
2.3 Deadly Modifi cations and the End of Agon
2.4 The Agon: Pessimism, Conservatism, and Racism
2.5 The Logic of the Contest
2.6 The “Ultimate Agony”: Agonistic Antipodes
3 Contesting Socrates: Nietzsche’s (Artful) Naturalism 3.1 Toward a “Superior Naturalism”
3.2 The Relation between Value and Inquiry
3.3 Toward the “Music-Practicing Socrates”
3.4 Semblance and Science
3.5 Artful Naturalism
3.6 Nietzsche’s Problem of Development and His Heraclitean Solution
3.7 The Subject Naturalized: Nietzsche’s Agonistic Model of the Soul
4 Contesting Paul: Toward an Ethos of Agonism 4.1 On the Possibility of Overcoming Morality
4.2 Fighting to the Death: The Agonies of Pauline Christianity
4.3 Confl icting Values and Worldviews
4.4 Sittlichkeit, Moral, and the Nature of Nietzsche’s Postmoralism
4.5 The (Moral) Subject Naturalized
4.6 “Das Thun ist Alles”
5 Contesting Wagner: How One Becomes What One Is 5.1 Becoming What One Is
5.2 The Promise and Problem of Wagner
5.3 Nietzsche’s Inheritance
5.4 Orders of Rank, Types, and Ruling Thoughts
5.5 Nietzsche as a Lover: Selfishness versus Selflessness
5.6 The Feeling of Power
5.7 Nietzsche’s Responsibility
5.8 Fighting Writing: Nietzsche’s Kriegs-Praxis
5.9 How One Becomes What One Is
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index