Nietzsche and the Task of Philosophy

This dissertation is an attempt to reorient the study of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche around metaphilosophical questions: what is the proper task of philosophy, and, consequently, what relationship should philosophy bear to science? My thesis is that Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy is intentionally revisionary – his work is an attempt to make philosophers reconceive themselves as creators of value, and to own up to and embrace the cultural significance of that task.

After a brief introduction on Nietzsche’s immediate intellectual climate, I move on in the first chapter to a critical discussion of the naturalist interpretation of Nietzsche’s work advanced by Brian Leiter, which seeks to show that Nietzsche thinks that the method of philosophy ought to be continuous with that of the sciences. In the chapter, I demonstrate that the neglect of Nietzsche’s peculiar metaphilosophical ambitions that is consequent upon accepting Leiter’s interpretation threatens to undermine our ability to understand the most important features of Nietzsche’s work. The argumentative upshot is that the topic of naturalism is simply not a helpful lens through which to view Nietzsche’s work, if one wants to grasp what is distinctive about it.

In the second chapter, I put forward what I take to be a far more helpful lens through which to view Nietzsche’s work: his own revisionary conception of philosophical activity. I argue that his speculations on this issue remain remarkably consistent over the course of his career, and are central to each of the three traditionally demarcated “periods” of his thought – early, middle, and late. His conception is developed first out of his reaction to the “pre-Platonic” philosophers and Schopenhauer in the early period, is central to his understanding of the “free spirit” in the middle works, and is a central and explicit theme of his late masterpieces Beyond Good & Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality.

In the third and final chapter, I take up the topic of nihilism, which Nietzsche sees as the central problem that must be overcome by philosophers of the future. I develop an interpretation of nihilism as a psychological illness, the effect of which is an incapability to feel the inspiration from values that is needed for them to influence one’s action. This interpretation of nihilism, I argue, is both well-supported by the textual sources – in both the published works and the Nachlass – and a fruitful background against which to interpret some of the peculiar rhetorical goals Nietzsche sets himself, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among which are the ambition to “create” the audience who will be properly receptive to his writings.