Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 7, TT25)
Tuesday 10 June, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Ryle Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU, San Bernardino): Emotional Dominance in Nietzsche
Title:Emotional Dominance in Nietzsche
Abstract: Throughout his work, Nietzsche evinces a keen interest in the psychosocial mechanisms through which our psychic and affective lives are transformed. I begin my talk by describing a selection of these mechanisms, focusing on the way in which Nietzsche thinks both (1) our assimilation of dominant social norms and values and (2) our deployment of emotion concepts and narratives to make sense of our affective lives fragment and complicate the human psyche. While Nietzsche typically focuses on the negative effects of such mechanisms (resulting from their ability to produce psycho-physiological “decadence” and weaken the will more generally), he also recognizes their positive potential. First, Nietzsche thinks that the psychic tension such mechanisms produce can be generative, facilitating the individual’s long-term growth. Second, since Nietzschean “greatness [Größe]” involves becoming “just as multiple as whole, just as wide as full” (BGE 212), such mechanisms potentially conduce to greatness of soul. I close by suggesting that attending to these mechanisms and their potential allows us to recognize a more central role for affectivity in Nietzsche’s transformative agenda—and in his philosophical psychology more generally—than is acknowledged by dominant contemporary accounts of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology, which make agency, the will, and control central.
