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One way of dealing with the question “what is philosophy?” is to ask what a philosopher is – or should be. For Nietzsche, this is a fundamental issue. He often frames the question in genetic terms: How does one become a philosopher? Giving an answer to this question is the task of the “natural history” (Naturgeschichte) of the free spirit. It is not an impersonal question: Nietzsche himself functions as the model for the “free spirit” (or “superior man”) whose “natural history” he intends to write (§ 1). Focusing on the writing process that led to Beyond Good and Evil, the present chapter reconstructs this project and its metaphilosophical implications (§ 2), asking whether this “natural history” can be qualified as naturalistic (§ 3). In the writings of 1888, questions about Nietzsche himself and his personal role in history come to take the place of general issues concerning the philosopher and his task. The conclusion of the chapter will briefly address this shift.
My main aim in this chapter is to clarify Nietzsche’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and the natural and physical sciences. I focus on Nietzsche’s free spirit writings. I begin by showing that Nietzsche’s free spirit project requires the development of a new type of philosophers who can experiment, and who will therefore be able to create and legislate new values. I suggest that the experimentation requirement entails a relationship of dynamic co-constitution between philosophy and the sciences, in which philosophy and the sciences act as partners in a continuous process of experimentation. I claim that adopting this approach to understanding the relationship between philosophy and the sciences in Nietzsche’s free spirit writings strengthens the case for an aesthetic naturalist interpretation of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences in Nietzsche. I also claim that this approach helps to explain why Nietzsche makes both positive and negative remarks about the natural and physical sciences in his free spirit writings, and why his position is consistent.
Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history.
Human, All Too Human marked Friedrich Nietzsche's transition from the philologist and cultural critic he had been into the kind of philosopher and writer he came to be. Nietzsche had long yearned, and continued to yearn throughout his productive life, for a higher humanity with a worth great enough to warrant the affirmation of life even in the absence of any transcendently supplied meaning. The publication of Human, All Too Human completed Nietzsche's estrangement from his erstwhile scholarly profession, from which he officially retired shortly thereafter. The expression Nietzsche adopted to characterize the kind of thinker and human being he conceived himself to have become, or at any rate to have been on the way to becoming, at the time of Human, All Too Human is that which he features in its subtitle: 'free spirit', Freigeist.
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