Posted: April 29th, 2015

Friedrich Nietzsche

The task at hand is to choose ONE or TWO of the provided tutorial questions from a week before the due date of the exercise and answer it by using lecture material and the tutorial reading. The objective is to encourage you to learn how to engage in a deep reading of theoretical texts. You will need to demonstrate a clear and deep appreciation of the text as a whole by placing your answer to the chosen question in the context of an interpretation of the author’s central purposes and themes. This understanding will be aided by further reading beyond the required readings and lecture. Your essays must be properly referenced throughout, and you must provide a bibliography at the end of the essay. Do not use lecture slides/notes as references! 550 words are not much. You will need to be concise and get straight to the point. We are not asking for a summary of a theorist’s work: we are asking you to engage with a particular issue or claim raised by the text and work out a specific idea about modern societies as developed by a theorist and to reflect on it.

Required Reading: Nietzsche, Friedrich (1984), ‘Signs of Higher and Lower Culture’, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press.

Note: I suggest that you concentrate on the first part of this reading (sections 224 to 261).
Tutorial Questions

1) What is Nietzsche’s attitude to societies bound by a common faith?
2) What is the task of the educator and what place does ‘wounding’ the individual have in it?
3) What does Nietzsche mean by the free spirit? In what sense is it possible to release ourselves from tradition?
4) In what sense is the bound spirit supposed to be a ‘strong character’? What is Nietzsche’s attitude to this kind of strength?
5) What does Nietzsche have against the ‘warm sympathetic heart’ ?
6) How does modern Christianity stultify modern dynamism?
7) What is Nietzsche’s attitude to the ‘miracle’ of education and why?
8) Nietzsche evokes a fearful vision of humanity’s retreat to an ‘animalistic’ state to the point of being ‘apelike’. What would this mean according to him and what is our only hope?
9) We cannot go back to the old system, we have burnt our bridges behind us. Interpret and discuss.

Further Readings:
Detwiler, Bruce (1990), Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Pippin, Robert (1999), Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: on the dissatisfactions of European high culture, Malden, MA., Blackwell (Chapter 4).
Love, Nancy S. (1986), Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity, New York, Columbia University Press (Chapters 1 and 7).
Ansell-Pearson, Keith (ed.) (1991), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, London, Routledge (Chapters 7 and 12).
Ackermann, Robert (1990), Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press.
Conway, Daniel (1997), Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of Idols, New York, Cambridge University Press.