Keith Ansell-Pearson

The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light

T purpose of this essay is to provide a reading of Nietzsche’s first sketch of the thought of the eternal return of the same in order to illuminate some crucial, if often neglected, aspects of his figuration of the Übermensch, which I prefer to translate as ‘overhuman’. This sketch from August 1881, which has consequences for our reading of some crucial parts of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, foregrounds the specific set of problems that inform Nietzsche’s conception of a new, postmetaphysical humanity and that gets played out in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is possible to identify in Nietzsche’s texts several configurations of the overhuman. I will focus on the following two. The first is the figuration we find at work in the free-spirit trilogy (1878–82), where the overhuman denotes the change in the human that is called for with respect to the new tasks that confront modern humanity, such as the incorporation of truth and knowledge (GS 110), the purification of our opinions and valuations (HH 34, GS 335), and the renunciation of the first and last things of metaphysics (HH chapter 1, GS 285). The second is the figuration we find in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), where the overhuman denotes the human being that stands in a new temporal relation to existence and the earth (the first figuration continues to be fully at work in the text). When Nietzsche posits the overhuman as the ‘meaning’ (Sinn, sense and direction) of the earth, he has in mind a postmetaphysical human being. The extraordinary nature of this being is what we encounter in Nietzsche’s first sketch of the thought of eternal return.1

The Transfiguration of Existence and Sovereign Life: Sloterdijk and Nietzsche on Posthuman and Superhuman Futures

This essay provides a close reading of Sloterdijks book Thinker on Stage: Nietzsches Materialism (1989, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN). Sloterdijks book is itself a discussion of Nietzsches book The Birth of Tragedy, and the account offered here is a critical appreciation of both texts, focusing on the question of individual and collective existence. The essay looks at the question of the future of the human, raising the question of the superhuman alongside that of the posthuman. In doing so, it brings in other texts from Sloterdijk—especially “Rules for the human zoo”—and offers an account of Nietzsches work on these themes as a whole. The essay criticises some aspects of Sloterdijks appropriation, but more positively makes the case for retrieving the uniqueness of Nietzsches answers. Human existence cannot be corrected, but it can be transfigured.

Beyond the Human Condition: Bergson and Deleuze

In his interpretations of Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, Deleuze is engaged in the search for a superior human nature. In this essay my focus is on Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson and the attempt to think and go beyond the human condition. In his essay on Bergson and difference of 1956, in his lecture course on Creative Evolution of 1960, in his text of 1966 entitled Bergsonism, and in subsequent writings such as his collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze reveals his interest in Bergson’s effort to think beyond the human condition. This is perhaps expressed most remarkably and intriguingly in Bergsonism when Deleuze writes of the human as the being that has the capacity ‘of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express naturing Nature’ (Deleuze 1988: 107). In short, the question at hand is the following: how can the human become a creator equal to the whole movement of creation and invent a society of creators? How are we to think such a possibility? That is, by what means or methods of philosophy and of action can such a superior human nature become accessible to us? This is what I set out to explore and enlighten in this essay. I shall proceed by focusing largely on Bergson’s text of 1907, Creative Evolution, and shall draw heavily on Deleuze’s readings of this text as well as advancing my own interpretation of it and as one that endeavors to add support to Deleuze’s insights.

Heidegger's Decline: between Philosophy and Politics

Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious. (T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

Heroic-idyllic philosophizing : Nietzsche and the Epicurean tradition

This essay looks at Nietzsche in relation to the Epicurean tradition. It focuses on his middle period writings of 1878–82 – texts such as Human, all too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science – and seeks to show that an ethos of Epicurean enlightenment pervades these texts, with Epicurus celebrated for his teaching of modest pleasures and cultivation of philosophical serenity. For Nietzsche, Epicurus is one of the greatest human beings to have ever graced the earth and the inventor of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’. At the same time, Nietzsche claims to understand Epicurus differently to everybody else. The essay explores the main figurations of Epicurus we find in his middle period and concludes by taking a critical look at his later and more ambivalent reception of Epicurus.

Beyond obligation? : Jean-Marie Guyau on life and ethics

There is a tradition of modern French philosophy that contains valuable resources for thinking about the nature and limits of obligation and how a higher calling of life beyond obligation might be conceived. This is a tradition of an ethics of generosity whose best exemplar is perhaps Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and that extends in our own time to the writing of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95).

Science, Culture, and Free Spirit: A Study of Nietzsche's "Human, All-Too Human." (review)

Julian Young, 3. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Richard Schain, 4. The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001). Ernst Schubert, 5. Naumburg: Dom und Altstadt , photography by Fritz Hege, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Koehler und Ameling, 1989), 31. Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, 6. Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten , assembled by Raymond J. Benders and Stephen Oettermann, assisted by Hauke Reich and Sibylle Spiegel (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag [cloth]/Stiftung Weimarer Klassik bei Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag [paperback], 2000). Ibid., 594. 7. Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Education at the Naumburg Domgymnasium 8. 1855–1858,” Nietzsche-Studien 28 (1999): 302–22; Thomas H. Brobjer, “Why Did Nietzsche Receive a Scholarship to Study at Schulpforta?” Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001): 322–28. Klaus Goch, 9. Nietzsches Vater oder Die Katatstrophe des deutschen Protestantismus: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). Martin Pernet, 10. Das Christentum im Leben des jungen Friedrich Nietzsche , Studien zur Sozialwissenschaft, Bd. 79 (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989); Reiner Bohley, “Nietzsches christliche Erziehung,” Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 164–96; Reiner Bohley, “Nietzsches christliche Erziehung,” Nietzsche-Studien 18 (1989): 377–95. William Musgrave Calder III, “The Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle: New Documents and 11. a Reappraisal,” Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 214–54, esp. 240–47. Otto Ribbeck, 12. Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie , 2 vols., Neudruck der Ausgabe 1879–1881 (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1969).