The Will to Power:
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
This course is presented in a set of PART 1 and PART 2
Among shapers of contemporary thought, including Darwin, Marx, and Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche is the most mysterious and least understood. His aphorisms are widely quoted, but as both man and thinker he remains on the edge of our consciousness, an enigmatic figure "philosophizing with a hammer" and hurling unsettling challenges to some of our most cherished beliefs.
Who was this eccentric German genius? This lonely and chronically ill, yet passionate, daring, and complex seeker? Why are his brilliant insights so relevant for today? How did he become the most misinterpreted and unfairly maligned intellectual figure of the last two centuries?
Professor Robert Solomon of the University of Texas at Austin, joined in many lectures by his wife and fellow Nietzsche scholar, Professor Kathleen Higgins, takes us on an emotional journey of discovery into the heart and mind of this systematically unsystematic philosopher.
To provide shape and narrative flow to Nietzsche’s body of work—a hodgepodge of reflections, experiments, accusations, bits of psychoanalysis, church and secular history, advice to the lovelorn, moral reminders, and tidbits of gossip—the course is divided into two parts and twenty-four lectures. Each lecture focuses on the specific ideas that preoccupied Nietzsche, while tracing the profound themes that give shape and meaning to his oeuvre. In the process we discover that many of these themes—the quest for a higher quality of life, the role of creativity and passion, personal virtue and excellence, and human growth and development—form the very foundation of modern humanistic culture.
Lectures 1 through 3 provide a context within which we can better understand Nietzsche’s life and work. Professors Solomon and Higgins debunk the myths, rumors, and misunderstandings surrounding Nietzsche while connecting his thought to that of his predecessors Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and Schopenhauer and that of his near-contemporaries Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Marx, and Freud.
Lectures 4 through 8 explore Nietzsche’s subtle and complex critique of both religious belief and Greek rationalism. Here, Professors Solomon and Higgins reveal Nietzsche’s near-worship of pre-Socratic Greek culture and his championing of instinct, passion, and aestheticism. Also, we see Nietzsche’s ambivalent relationship to the thought of Socrates and Schopenhauer, and his strong identification with the ancient prophets Jesus and Zarathustra.
Lectures 9 through 11 focus on Nietzsche’s famous style, which deftly combines the majesty of the prophet, the force of the Homeric warrior, and the lyricism of the poet, but which nonetheless is rife with fallacies, inconsistencies, exaggerations, and scathing personal attacks.
In lectures 12 through 15, Professor Solomon takes a closer look at Nietzsche’s harsh but insightful criticisms of the intellectual currents of his time—Christian moralism, evolution, socialism, democracy, and nationalism. Here also we discover Nietzsche the "moral psychologist," who, with his contemporaries Hegel and Kierkegaard, revolutionized our understanding of the "human, all too human" motives that underlie our beliefs. Professor Higgins also considers the vexed topic of Nietzsche’s attitude toward women.
In Lectures 16 through 20, Professor Solomon pulls back and attempts to summarize Nietzche’s preoccupations. In a nod (and a wink) to our times, he compiles "top-ten lists" of both Nietzsche’s favorites and his favorite targets. You will be intrigued to see who makes both lists! Also in this section, we encounter Nietzsche the historicist and Nietzsche the "immoralist," and discover the source of his vitriolic personal attacks.
The final four lectures examine Nietzsche’s highly unorthodox "genealogy" of morality, as well as his most enduring image, that of the Übermensch (super-man or over-man), and the notion of the will to power. In addition, these culminating lectures, by exploring in depth Nietzsche’s complex ideas about master and slave morality, resentment, revenge, justice, asceticism, and eternal recurrence, reinforce the notion that behind all of this great thinker’s work is an affirmative fervor, a genuine spirituality, even a religious sensibility.
As you make your way through these lectures, you’ll discover that Nietzsche, even at his most polemical and offensive, exudes an unmistakable enthusiasm and love of life. In fact, you’ll see that his exhortation to learn to love and accept one’s own life, to make it better by becoming who one really is, forms the project that is the true core of his work.
If you haven’t already encountered Robert Solomon in our popular course, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, then prepare yourself for a superior intellectual experience. Dr. Solomon is the Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and the recipient of multiple awards for excellence in teaching, including a Fulbright Lecture Award and a Standard Oil Outstanding Teaching Award. His precise yet conversational style has won accolades from the thousands of students he’s taught. By expertly weaving biographical detail, abstract analysis, and humor, he constructs an engaging, well-rounded portrait of the most enigmatic, complex figure in all of philosophy.
This course represents Professor Higgins’s first work for The Teaching Company. We are confident that you will find her contributions highly illuminating and even invaluable.
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
2 audio sets
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