Zarathustra's moral tyranny: Spectres of Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach

217 Pages·2.741 MB·English

by  Francesca Cauchi.

Zarathustra’s Moral Tyranny
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Every smallest step in the field of free thought, of a life shaped
personally, has always had to be fought for with spiritual and
bodily tortures . . . there is in fact no more important subject
than the age-old tragedy of the martyrs who wanted to stir up the
swamp. Nothing has been more dearly bought than that little
bit of human reason and the feeling of freedom which now
constitutes our pride.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, §18
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Zarathustra’s Moral
Tyranny
Spectres of Kant, Hegel
and Feuerbach
Francesca Cauchi
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge
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works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Francesca Cauchi, 2022
Cover image: Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), Caspar David
Friedrich, 1798, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Google Art Project
Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
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Typeset in 11/13 Foundry Sans and Foundry Old Style
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printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 3995 0431 7 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 3995 0433 1 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 3995 0434 8 (epub)
The right of Francesca Cauchi to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations and Translations x
Introduction 1
The naturalist-normative problem 2
The morality problem 9
Max Stirner and the ‘tyranny of mind’ 15
Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach 18
1 Nietzsche’s Ascetic Morality 29
Pitting a ‘morality of reason’ against the Christian
morality of feeling 31
Nietzsche’s self-eviscerating ‘morality of sacrifice’ 38
Do ‘free-spirited moralists’ have the right to
inflict their cruelty on others? 41
Austerity and artifice 47
2 The Kantian Rational Will and the Tyranny of
Self-Overcoming 63
Autonomy and universality 65
Creator-destroyers and hammer-wielding
legislators 70
Shattering the Christian table of values 76
Erkenntniss and the hard labour of reorienting
the affects 81
Reverence and martyrdom: willing the Übermensch 88
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viii zarathustra’s moral tyranny
3 Hegel’s ‘Labour of the Negative’ and the Lacerations
of Self-Negation 101
Affirmative negation and Deleuzian derision 102
Spirit’s ‘labour of the negative’ 107
Practical freedom and the planting of thought
into the passions 114
Spirit’s vicious cycle of bitter deaths and
interminable resurrections 119
4 The Bitter Cup of Pure Love: Feuerbach and Zarathustra 137
Reclaiming the ‘divine’ powers of human greatness 138
Love as a human absolute 143
Christ’s Passion and Zarathustra’s sacrificial love 148
An excursus on self-love and the I and thou of
compassion 152
Conclusion 171
Zarathustra’s violent rhetoric of truth incorporation 172
Zarathustra’s moral tyranny 175
Bibliography 181
Index 193
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Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank my brother, Anthony Cauchi, for
meticulously proofreading the manuscript and Trevor Hope
for his invaluable feedback at the critical book proposal
stage. I would also like to thank Claus-Artur Scheier,
Stephen Houlgate, Tom Bailey and Dan Conway for giving
so generously of their to time to read and comment on earlier
drafts of either one or several of the chapters contained in
this book. I would further like to thank Nisreen Salti for
securing scanned copies of vital secondary sources that I
was unable to source elsewhere and Philip Koh for bringing
to my attention a number of scholarly works on theology
that would otherwise have remained unknown to me. I am
also indebted to the two anonymous readers who provided
detailed and constructive comments on early drafts of
Chapters 2 and 3. Last, but not least, I would like to thank
Alper Alp for attending to all my grocery needs during
the pandemic so that I could focus on the task in hand –
not, I hasten to add, the task of self-overcoming.
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