The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

Nietzsche wrote in 1870 while preparing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), “Science, art, and philosophy are now growing into one another so much in me that I shall in any case give birth to a centaur one day.” The project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art Nietzsche adumbrates here actually gets realized in The Birth of Tragedy, explaining the work’s distinctive character. It is a project whose origins lay with Friedrich Schlegel, the leading German Romantic philosopher, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schlegel had warded off the obvious objection to incorporating art into philosophy/science that this would falsify the latter by championing a radical general skepticism about the veracity of cognition. Nietzsche takes over this aspect of Schlegel’s project as well. Moreover, this whole project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art in light of a radical general skepticism survives after The Birth of Tragedy to reappear in different, more refined permutations throughout Nietzsche’s later works, constituting an indispensable key both to their character – in particular, their metaphysical-epistemological framework – and to their development. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the viability of the project, especially concerning the question of whether or not the radical general skepticism on which it rests is coherent.

This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.

For much of history, from the dawn of Greek historiography to the postmodern 1970s, genealogy has been synonymous with continuity of origins and blood identity, and therefore closely connected with the concepts of the classic and the canon. Yet, during the last half century, specially thanks to the Nietzschean and Foucauldian philosophical deployment, it has shed its narrative garb to become an agent of discontinuity, and thus the nemesis of the classic and the canon. Many scholars have analyzed the modern development of genealogies after Nietzsche’s alleged foundational statement and its Foucauldian reception. But none of them has provided a systematic history of the trajectory of this concept, from antiquity to the present. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by providing a history of the concept of genealogy and its associated ideas, delving specifically into its historiographical uses, and connecting it to the four previous concepts discussed in the book. I will, specifically, emphasize its polysemy, try to locate what has remained and what has changed in this long trajectory, and explain the (only recently) radically opposed nature (nemesis) between the concepts of genealogy and canon – and the implications that this opposition brings to historiography.

This chapter addresses Nietzsche’s early exposure to pessimistic thought from the late 1860s to early 1870s, and aims to elucidate his philosophical articulation of pessimism as an individual and cultural problem to be solved. It argues against the view that Nietzsche was, at this time, a straightforward Schopenhauerian and pessimist. The chapter pays special attention to the ‘problem of quietism’, interpreting The Birth of Tragedy as concerned to speak to this problem, distinguishing Nietzsche’s strategy from competing strategies offered by the likes of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Bahnsen, as well as pessimism’s opponents. After interpreting the notion of an artistic ‘justification’ as a solely pragmatic one for Nietzsche, the chapter ends with a discussion of the Untimely Meditations and Nietzsche’s evident early concern for the problem of suffering’s meaning.

This chapter addresses why and how, if it is true that pessimism is a psychological condition as opposed to a philosophical belief, Nietzsche takes there to be a requirement to combat pessimism in ways other than the rational-dialectical manner prevalent among philosophers hitherto. The chapter first offers a conceptual analysis of the closely related but distinct notion(s) of ‘nihilism’, before then arguing how the notorious idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ is, contrary to some contemporary interpretations, specifically deployed by Nietzsche as a response to pessimism. The chapter ends by elucidating Nietzsche’s reversion to the view of The Birth of Tragedy that aesthetic experience is solely capable of facilitating life affirmation, and how aesthetic value is not only distinct but also in tension with moral value.

This chapter presents and assesses Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in terms of how its hedonic axiology has levelling-down effects on the perfectionist values he cared most deeply about, namely, creativity and achievement. Starting from Nietzsche’s repeated claims that suffering is in some way extrinsically tied to ‘greatness’, the chapter considers Nietzschean arguments for its value through an analysis of the role of ‘admiration’ and the doctrine of will to power. The philosophical force of these ideas is then considered in light of Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between human flourishing and a naturalistic psychology. Seeking to improve upon dominant views in the secondary literature, the chapter then investigates the specific extrinsic relation Nietzsche takes there to be between suffering and greatness, arguing that an analysis of his ‘pessimism of strength’ suggests that it ought to be construed as constitutive rather than instrumental. The chapter ends by attempting to provide a solution to the ‘scope problem’ raised in Chapter 5.

This chapter is the first of three that centre upon Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in his mature philosophy of the 1880s. It presents Nietzsche’s psychological critique of pessimism as symptomatic of a particular calibration of one’s ‘drives’ that produces fatigue and a world-directed ressentiment. The chapter gives special attention to the crucial similarities and differences between Nietzsche’s psychological reduction of pessimism and those of the degeneration theorists, and the English psychologist James Sully, arguing that Nietzsche’s own position is subtly unique and, in some ways, more plausible. The final sections of the chapter address (1) Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Christianity as the pinnacle manifestation of pessimistic sentiment and (2) the problem of the ‘scope’ of Nietzsche’s psychological reduction.

The first section of this chapter explores Nietzsche’s attempt to explain the origins and continued prominence of metaphysical philosophy in terms of the utility it produces. It argues that Nietzsche takes seriously Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’, but explains this more precisely as a form of narcissistic impulse. The second section of the chapter aims to address Nietzsche’s seeming ambivalence over whether ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’ is a fundamental and static feature of the human condition, or whether it is acquired and, therefore, in principle eradicable via a new naturalistic and ‘historical’ philosophy. The final section of the chapter situates Nietzsche’s views on science, suffering, and progress in the context of the ‘social question’, arguing that the Nietzsche of the late 1870s is closer to the likes of Marx and Dühring in taking suffering to be capable of being significantly reduced, thus ejecting the need for art and religion to endow it with meaning.

This chapter introduces the problem of pessimism, its intellectual and social origins, and where Nietzsche fits into the ‘pessimism dispute’ of 1860–1900. It argues that the current secondary literature on Nietzsche has tended to overlook the historical context in which he was writing, often treating his thoughts on pessimism in isolation from the texts beyond those of Schopenhauer that he was reading on the matter. The chapter ends by laying out the structure of the forthcoming chapters.

This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s shift towards a naturalistic methodology in the late 1870s offers him an axiological and epistemic apparatus that radically alters his philosophical articulation of pessimism, and consequently affects his attitude towards it. The chapter argues that contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has largely overlooked the importance of Human, All Too Human as a crucial stage of Nietzsche’s development in approaching the question of the value of existence. By exploring the influence of Paul Rée, Eugen Dühring, and the neo-Kantians, it introduces Nietzsche’s own ‘frame of reference’ argument against pessimism as a metaphysical view, and distinguishes between different possible interpretations of it.

This chapter aims to disentangle some the different views that have often been associated with the term ‘pessimism’. This includes the claims that (1) there is no historical progress; (2) this world is the worst of all possible worlds; (3) happiness is impossible; and (4) life is not worth living. The last thesis is identified as the central concern of the ‘pessimism dispute’, and three different justifications for it are presented. The final section of the chapter considers the expression of pessimism throughout human history and culture, with special attention paid to Schopenhauer’s analysis of religion.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.