Nietzsche by Peter Berkowitz
Once regarded as a conservative critic of culture, then enlisted by the court theoreticians of Nazism, Nietzsche has come to be revered by post-modern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who revealed the perspectival character of all knowledge and broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy. This text challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsche's philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought. Berkowitz argues that Nietzsche's thought is rooted in extreme and conflicting opinions about metaphysics and human nature. Discovering a deep unity in Nietzsche's work by exploring the structure and argumentative movement of a wide range of his books, Berkowitz show that Nietzsche is a moral and political philosopher in the Socratic sense whose governing question is "What is the best life?" Nietzsche, Berkowitz argues, puts forward a severe and aristocratic ethics, an ethics of creativity, that demands that the few human beings who are capable acquire a fundamental understanding of and attain total mastery over the world. Following the path of Nietzsche's thought, Berkowitz shows that this mastery, which represents a suprapolitical form of rule and entails a radical denigration of political life, is, from Nietzsche's own perspective, neither desirable nor attainable.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he chairs the Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law. He was cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, has served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, and is a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780674624429 |
| ISBN 10 | 0674624424 |
| Title | Nietzsche |
| Author | Peter Berkowitz |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
| Year published | 1995-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 336 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |