In our most recent Orientations Press publication Nietzsche on the Art of Living: New Studies from the German-Speaking Nietzsche Research (2023) – download it here for free – Reinhard G. Mueller wrote the final concluding essay, entitled “Nietzsche’s Art of Living in the United States Today.” Since an art of living includes the skills of orientation, we have also added it to our essay series on “Orientations Skills in Everyday and Professional Life.”
The core idea of the art of living is to design and thus create one’s own life and future based on one’s own decisions; in Nietzsche’s terms: “to create ourselves, to sculpt a form out of all elements – is the task! Always that of a sculptor! Of a productive human being.” In this essay, Mueller argues that Nietzsche’s core philosophical reorientations concerning the art of living have been adopted in various parts of our contemporary world, especially in business, our everyday life, and the popular field of “self-growth,” for example by Anthony Robbins.
The essay addresses:
1. The Economic, Political, and ‘Spiritual’ Conditions for an Art of Living Today
2. Self Overcoming, Self-Design, and Identities in Institutions and Everyday Life
3. Incorporation and Habit Design
4. Nietzsche’s Art of Living in the Popular Field of ‘Self-Growth’: The Example of Anthony Robbins
To read this essay, click here.