under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself

With his emphasis on the ‘revaluation of all values’, I argue that Nietzsche proposes a positive program designed to counteract this general decline in the cultural health of the West unleashed by the décadent and ressentimental instincts and their domination (for millennia) of the Western form of life (i.e., ‘culture-complex’) within different corruptive/degenerative paradigms. 'Apollo' symbolized the tendency to cover the horror of existence with pleasant illusions of beauty, while 'Socrates' represented the self-delusive capacity to transform existence into a secure intelligible world of order.īy means of an in-depth exegesis of the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Friedrich Nietzsche, my dissertation argues that the fundamental pathology afflicting Modernity in the West is not a crisis of values-whether valuelessness or value-anarchy (i.e., an axiological crisis)-as MacIntyre claims, but meaninglessness and will-lessness (i.e., a practical-existential crisis), the latter having profound cultural and political implications in Nietzsche’s view and prognosticating cultural passivity and total nihilism for the West. Based on his studies of ancient Greece, Nietzsche adapted a triad of personified metaphors to represent three different psychological mechanisms for dealing with the so-called 'horror of existence.' 'Dionysus' embodied the therapeutic affirmation of life in the face of pain, chaos, and destruction, and symbolized the primitive instinctual nature that is at the core of all cultural creations.

By understanding the philological context of Nietzsche's early work, one can better appreciate the existential psychology he created in the years prior to changing over to philosophy proper. In the course of demonstrating his new approach, Nietzsche transformed traditional philological studies into stimulating psychological analyses that were equally applicable to modern and ancient human behavior. Nietzsche wanted to replace mere 'arm-chair' scholarship with a new 'super-philological' approach, that studied antiquity in order to gain insights into contemporary problems and promoted decisive living action in the present. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist, but he rejected the pedantic and strict contemplative stance of his discipline.

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself