A more severe morality
Nietzsche's affirmative ethics
pp. 69-89
in: Yirmiyahu Yovel (ed), Nietzsche as affirmative thinker, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
A mad dog, foaming at the moustache and snarling at the world; that is how the American artist David Levine portrays Friedrich Nietzsche in his well-known caricature in The New York Review of Books. It is not so different in its malicious intent, nor further wrong in its interpretation of Nietzsche, than a good number of scholarly works. This is indeed the traditional portrait — the unconsummated consummate immoralist, the personally gentle even timid arch-destroyer. Of course, Nietzsche himself made adolescent comments about his own destructiveness not infrequently — throughout the whole of Ecce Homo, for example. Nevertheless, these give a false impression of his intentions as well as of the good philosophical sense to be made of his works.
