Michael Forster

The seminar will explore aspects of Nietzsche’s theory of value, especially regarding morality and aesthetics, in the context of two major intellectual 19th-century influences on his thought:  naturalism (especially through Schopenhauer and German Materialism) and Romanticism.  The first half of the seminar (led by Leiter) will emphasize naturalistic themes in his understanding of morality in On the Genealogy of Morality and excerpts from Beyond Good and Evil.  The second half (led by Forster) will examine the influence of Romanticism, including in The Birth of Tragedy and selections from later works.  

The first half of the seminar will introduce major themes of Marx's philosophy-historical materialism, aspects of his economics relevant to his critique of capitalism, Marx's early theory of human nature and flourishing, and the theory of ideology (especially as applied to morality and law)-while the second half will consider the reception and development of Marx's ideas in 20th-century Continental European thought, with a particular focus on the theory of ideology (e.g., Lukacs, Gramsci, Sartre, Althusser) and the application of that theory to art and aesthetics (e.g., Adorno, Benjamin, Lifshits). (IV)

Hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, was developed in its modern form in Germany in the 18th- and early 19th-centuries by authors like Herder, F. Schlegel and Schleiermacher.  Later in the 19th-century, there emerged what Ricouer subsequently dubbed a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—an attempt to reveal the hidden meanings beneath the surface meanings people express—in figures like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.  In the first half of the seminar, we will give a close reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion, as well as consider in some detail Nietzsche’s remarks on perspectivism and interpretation.  In the second half of the seminar, we will then consider the historical background to this hermeneutics of suspicion in Romantic hermeneutics.  We will also give particular attention to the development of legal hermeneutics in Savigny and then, much later, through the work of Gadamer.   We will conclude by returning to the hermeneutics of suspicion, especially as illustrated by Marx. (I)

We will focus on Hegel’s philosophy of history and its influence on Marx’s historical materialism; and on Hegel’s critique of Christianity in the Early Theological Writings and also in the Phenomenology and its relation to Marx’s early theory of human nature in the 1840s and his critique of ideology. (I)

Nietzsche objects to Judeo-Christian morality (and its ‘ascetic’ analogues in non-Western traditions) because he argues it is a fatal obstacle to certain kinds of human flourishing and cultural excellence. This is closely connected to his opposition to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view that the inescapable fact of suffering renders life without value (a life without human excellence would, on Nietzsche’s view, lack value). These issues (and others, e.g., the nature of philosophy and tragedy, the conception of Dionysus) have antecedents in his early work as a scholar of antiquity and the influence of his Basel colleague, the important historian Jacob Burckhardt. Roughly the first five sessions will be devoted to reconstructing the “mature” Nietzsche’s view, as represented by the Genealogy, but also excerpts from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo. The remaining four sessions of the seminar will explore the historical background, in Greek literature and philosophy, the reception of Greek culture in German philosophy, and in the seminal work of his colleague Burckhardt. The ultimate goal is to reconstruct Nietzsche’s view from a philosophical point of view and, as importantly, in light of the historical context. (I)