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Nietzsche in the Twenty-First Century

In a recent essay evaluating Nietzsche’s enduring relevance, the philosopher Volker Gerhardt writes, “Despite periodic doubts, Friedrich Nietzsche does indeed belong to the great thinkers. Even though his work remained unfinished in nearly every respect, and though many of his thoughts are exhausted in exalted gestures and there is in his writings not one insight which cannot be found somewhere else – despite all this, he has become a classic figure of philosophy.” Gerhardt’s claim about Nietzsche’s importance is qualified, if not altogether retracted, by the concessions he makes – Nietzsche is a “great thinker,” yet his work reaches almost no

conclusions, exhausts itself in “exalted gestures,” and is wholly unoriginal in substance, albeit not in literary form. This kind of back-handed praise, or reverent ambivalence, is surprisingly common in the reception of Nietzsche. One might ask: With friends like these, does Nietzsche need enemies? If Nietzsche indeed “belongs among the great thinkers,” it is important for us to show why he remains of enduring relevance over a century after his death – as an indispensable source of provocation and insight, not just as a skilled rhetorician and repackager of other people’s thoughts. This conference addresses the question of the enduring relevance of

Nietzsche’s thought and the many different, but overlapping and interlocking, “perspectives” (e.g. psychological, ethical, political, cultural, aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical) which he brings to bear on his own world and on the world in which we live today.