Nietzsche and Friendship

by Willow Verkerk

In Nietzsche and Friendship , Willow Verkerk provides a new and provocative account of Nietzsche's philosophy which identifies him as an agonistic thinker concerned with the topics of love and friendship. She argues that Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship from Aristotle to Kant offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about friendship today. Through an examination of his free spirit texts, Human, All Too Human , Daybreak and The Gay Science together with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil , Verkerk unlocks key aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on friendship, love, 'woman', the self, self-overcoming, virtue, and character. She questions Nietzsche's misogyny, but also considers the emancipatory potential of his writing by brining him into dialogue with postmodern, feminist, and transgender thinkers. This book revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

200 pages, Hardcover

Published February 21, 2019

Reviews

[Uğur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although there is no chance of social isolation during the pandemic days, it is a very, very good feeling for some of us to turn to books while staying away from people, to read a new perspective and a new philosophical theory. Normally, an effort to translate an English work into Turkish would be exhausting, but when the opportunity is plentiful, translating the theoretical language becomes a separate pleasure.

Let's get to the content of the book, our author is a feminist activist and a lecturer working on philosophy in both Canada and England. and the works she had already done made a splash, and she started to write her books by conducting theoretical studies on two school names such as Karl Marx and Nietzsche. As we know, Marx attacked the system's political economy and analyzed it both in real terms and in theory, and analyzed the deadlocks of the system one by one. On the other hand, Nietzsche attacked the social and moral reflexes of the system and analyzed the corruption of the system as it is. and both have brought to light the contradiction of human nature and the source of human real unhappiness. Verkerk partially questions Nietzsche's mission at this point and especially criticizes Nietzsche's attitude towards women. However, he does not miss this (which made me very happy to have read my own ideas in a foreign language) He predicts that Nietzsche's libertarian ideas are a driving force at the point of feminist struggle, that feminist theorists are fed from Nietzsche and that Nietzsche's love, self, self-transcendence, virtue, character deals with friendship-friendship views on topics such as Likewise, at this point, Nietzsche does not contradict the women's struggle. The author has masterfully connected the subject. However, it also retains the freedom of criticism.

I hope this English work, in which he approaches Nietzsche with a very different perspective and interpretation, will be translated into Turkish and published soon.