Shaping the Future

Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices

By (author) Horst Hutter

Publication date:

30 December 2005

Length of book:

242 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

236x164mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739111833

Shaping the Future maps out the ascetic practices of a Neitzschean way of life. Hutter structures his argument around the belief that Nietzsche, despite his ostensive enmity to Platonism and Socratism, understood himself to be a Socratic and someone called upon by fate to renew the Platonic task of being a philosophical legislator of modern souls, culture, and political society. Hutter also considers the paths of reasoning opened up by Pierre Hadot in his studies of ancient philosophers as teachers of life and not just as providers of "true" opinions and doctrines about the world.Shaping the Future applies the reasonings of Hadot to the work of Nietzsche, arguing that Nietzsche himself, throughout his philosophical career, conceived of doctrines as never identical to philosophy itself, but instead as a means of self-creation that had to be related to working on oneself. Hutter makes a great contribution to the study of Nietzsche and the growing movement that sees philosophy as a practical activity and way of life.
Hutter argues that the root and branch of Nietzsche's philosophy is classical Greek, that Nietzsche's perspective is accompanied by 'ascetic practices', thus ways of not only viewing life but also ways of living life. Hutter may have shown us the way Nietzsche would have wanted us to view his work. In my opinion, this is a profound and important work.