School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe ethics of self cultivation : Nietzsche's middle works( 2004)This thesis examines Nietzsche's middle works in order to challenge those views that dismiss Nietzschean self-cultivation as a symptom of unadulterated narcissism. It aims to develop a far more balanced and refined conception of his idea of self-cultivation by re-examining the much neglected free-spirit trilogy of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. Contra Nietzsche's critics, it argues that the kind of self-cultivation he proposes involves a Cynic/Stoic work on the self that enables the subject to bear separation and solitude without resentment. The thesis aims to show that Nietzsche develops an ethics of self-cultivation that draws on the model of Hellenistic and Roman Stoic philosophical therapeia. It suggests that he renovates this therapeutic tradition through his own critical, psychoanalytic insights into narcissism and its transformations. It reconstructs Nietzsche's ethics of self-cultivation in terms of his psychological analysis of the pathological symptoms of narcissism and its healthy or positive transformations. In charting Nietzsche's course from pathological narcissism to mature individualism this thesis reconstructs the philosophical and psychological basis of his critique of Rousseau and Schopenhauer's ethics of pitie/Mitleid, his use and analysis of comedy and humour in his critical, deflationary treatment of the malady of omnipotence, and his exploration of the idea of friendship as a positive counterpoint to damaged forms of intersubjectivity.