Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many of these criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas; for that reason, he is often associated with a group of late modern thinkers (including Marx and Freud) who advanced a “hermeneutics of suspicion” against traditional values (see Foucault [1964] 1990, Ricoeur [1965] 1970, Leiter 2004). Nietzsche also used his psychological analyses to support original theories about the nature of the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values that he thought would promote cultural renewal and improve social and psychological life by comparison to life under the traditional values he criticized.
This apparent conflict in the texts has encouraged competing interpretations, with commentators emphasizing the strands in Nietzsche to which they have more philosophical sympathy. For example, strongly naturalist interpreters like Brian Leiter (2007, 2015, 2019) and Matthias Risse (2007) focus on Nietzsches skepticism about the will and the pure soul to reject any Kantian-style source of agency that can stand apart from and direct the persons basic drives or fundamental nature. Somewhat similarly, readers attracted by a Cartesian conception of consciousness as the essence of the mental, but repelled by Cartesian dualism, highlight Nietzsches emphasis on the importance of the body (GM III, 16; Z I, 4) to suggest that his apparent claims about psychology should be heard instead as a kind of physiology of drives that rejects mental psychology
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Riccardi (2018, 2021) argues for a more nuanced view, in which the conscious self runs in parallel to the more fundamental bodily self. Attacking unity rather than mentality, a group of readers interested in Nietzsches agonistic conception of politics tends to emphasize his similarly agonistic, internally contested, conception of the self (Hatab 1995, 2018; Acampora 2013). In a diametrically opposed direction from those first three, Sebastian Gardner (2009) insists that, while Nietzsche was sometimes tempted by skepticism about a self which can stand back from the solicitations of inclination and control them, his own doctrines about the creation of value and self-overcoming in fact commit him to something like a Kantian transcendental ego, despite his protestations to the contrary.
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Nietzsches actual psychological explanations rely heavily on appeals to sub-personal psychological attitudes. As Janaway (2009: 52) observes, a great many different kinds of attitude enter these accounts (including not only the standard beliefs and desires of current-day moral psychology, but also wills, feelings, sensations, moods, imaginings, memories, valuations, convictions, and more), but arguably the core attitudes that do the most work for him are drives and affects. These attitude types have been intensively studied in recent work (see esp. Richardson 1996, 2020; Katsafanas 2011b, 2013, 2016; Alfano 2019; Leiter 2019; and Riccardi 2021; see also Anderson 2012a, Clark and Dudrick 2015, Creasy 2020). While much remains controversial, it is helpful to think of drives as dispositions toward general patterns of activity; they aim at activity of the relevant sort (e.g., an eating drive, a drive for power), and they also represent some more specific object or occasion of the activity
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g., this ice cream, or overcoming a particular problem in the course of writing a paper).
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