Zarathustra's Moral Tyranny: Spectres of Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach - Hardcover

by Francesca Cauchi (Author)

By way of a sustained interrogation of Zarathustra's doctrine of self-overcoming, Francesca Cauchi lays bare the asceticism underlying the prescriptive injunctions set forth in the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These injunctions fall under three heads: self-legislation, self-denial and self-sacrifice, which are shown to bear striking affinities with concepts first formulated by Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach. In Cauchi's new reading, the Kantian rational will, the Hegelian 'labour of the negative' and Feuerbach's indivisible trinity of love, sacrifice and suffering are seen to resurface in Zarathustra as the agents of a ferocious and self-eviscerating doctrine of self-overcoming that exhibits all the attributes of a moral tyranny.

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Presents Nietzsche's Zarathustra as a moral tyrant whose ethics are more exacting than the Christian morals they are intended to supplant By way of a sustained interrogation of Zarathustra's doctrine of self-overcoming, Francesca Cauchi lays bare the asceticism underlying the prescriptive injunctions set out in the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These injunctions fall under three heads: self-legislation, self-denial and self-sacrifice, which are shown to bear striking affinities with concepts first formulated by Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach. In Cauchi's new reading, the Kantian rational will, the Hegelian 'labour of the negative' and Feuerbach's indivisible trinity of love, sacrifice and suffering are seen to resurface in Zarathustra as the agents of a ferocious and self-eviscerating doctrine of self-overcoming that exhibits all the attributes of a moral tyranny. Francesca Cauchi is Associate Professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and this is her second monograph on Nietzsche's confessional, self-parodic and metaphor-laden confection Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Author Biography

Francesca Cauchi is an Associate Professor National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She is the author of Zarathustra contra Zarathustra: The Tragic Buffoon (Ashgate, 1998), reissued under the Routledge imprint in September 2018. She has published many articles in peer-review journals including Philological Quarterly, Journal of European Studies and Oxford German Studies.