Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy

by Pippin, Robert B.

• ISBN13: 9780226669755
• ISBN10: 0226669750
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most elusive thinkers in the philosophical tradition. His highly unusual style and insistence on what remains hidden or unsaid in his writing make pinning him to a particular position tricky. Nonetheless, certain readings of his work have become standard and influential. In this major new interpretation of Nietzsche's work, Robert B. Pippin challenges various traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says that his writing can best be understood as a kind of psychology. Pippin traces this idea of Nietzsche as a psychologist to his admiration for the French moralists: La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Stendhal, and especially Montaigne. In distinction from philosophers, Pippin shows, these writers avoided grand metaphysical theories in favor of reflections on life as lived and experienced. Aligning himself with this project, Nietzsche sought to make psychology "the queen of the sciences" and the "path to the fundamental problems." Pippin contends that Nietzsche's singular prose was an essential part of this goal, and so he organizes the book around four of Nietzsche's most important images and metaphors: that truth could be a woman, that a science could be gay, that God could have died, and that an agent is as much one with his act as lightning is with its flash. Expanded from a series of lectures Pippin delivered at the College de France,Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophyoffers a brilliant, novel, and accessible reading of this seminal thinker.

Author Biography

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several books, including Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion and The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of nearly a dozen books, including, most recently. Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introductory Remarks	p. xiii
Psychology as "the Queen of the Sciences"	p. 1
What Is a Gay Science?	p. 23
Modernity as a Psychological Problem	p. 45
"The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun ist alles]"	p. 67
The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception	p. 85
How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal	p. 105
Concluding Remarks	p. 121
References	p. 125
Index	p. 129
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.