Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life [Hardcover]

Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocated the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of lifes becoming on Earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche.

In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsches philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of studying life and in the Socratic ideal of an examined life and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.

This exciting collection of essays challenges existing interpretations of several key moments of Nietzsches philosophy, especially his understanding of biological life and what it means for human beings to affirm life. Individual chapters cast new light on his relationship to thinkers such as Darwin, Emerson, Empedocles, and Hegel. This immensely rich book should be read by everyone interested in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship!From his earliest work, where the philosophers task was to look at science through the optic of the artist, but also to look at art through the optic of life, to his final critiques of nihilism and the ascetic ideal for their inability to affirm or enhance life, Nietzsches thinking never strayed from the perspective of life. But what does Nietzsche mean by life? And what would it mean to affirm it? Rather than concede to the biological and evolutionary sciences the task of unlocking the secret codes of life, Vanessa Lemm brings together in this timells.