Organized by Dr. Dr. Timon Boehm and Enes Sütütemiz, MA.
Weekly meetings will take place on Wednesdays 10 a.m. -12 p.m. (US Central Time), beginning on January 22, 2025. There will be 8 seminar sessions.
Content
“I am not a man, I am dynamite.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Following the thought-provoking seminar on Nietzsche’s late writings last year, we are thrilled to announce the second part of our Late Nietzsche Seminars, this time dedicated to his final enigmatic work: Ecce Homo. Written in 1888, at the height of his intellectual powers and just weeks before his tragic collapse, it is not a mere autobiography, but rather an autogenealogy, a text about the conditions that made Nietzsche the explosive philosopher he became. In this profoundly idiosyncratic text, Nietzsche revisits his most significant works, raising pressing questions about the relationship between author and text, self-stylization, self-commentary, work policy, and autofictionality—in a way that is itself artistic.
Conceived as a prelude to his unfinished magnum opus, the Revaluation of All Values, Ecce Homo reveals Nietzsche’s inner state as he stands poised on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough—one that threatens to shatter the very foundations of Western civilization. In this text, Nietzsche presents himself as “a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos,” heralding the audacious project of radical self-examination and the revaluation of humanity’s deepest truths. But how convincing is this? Isn’t the text, upon close reading, e.g., fraught with contradictions and paradoxes, such as: becoming what you are?
Through a close and careful reading of this hyperbolic text, we will examine how it serves as a philosophical compass, foreshadowing Nietzsche’s ultimate response to the contemporary crisis of meaning and orientation. In our interpretation, we will draw on Werner Stegmaier’s philosophy of orientation, his essay, “Nietzsche’s Self-Evaluation as the Destiny of Philosophy and Humanity,” and other secondary resources.
Besides the translations of Nietzsche’s Complete Works on Stanford University Press, we recommend Werner Stegmaier’s An Orientation to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Nashville: Orientations Press, 2022), which you can download for free from our website here. In addition, you can find various articles by Werner Stegmaier on Nietzsche here on our website. We will focus particularly on his paper “Nietzsche’s Self-Evaluation as the Destiny of Philosophy and Humanity,” where he comments on Nietzsche’s “Why I am a Destiny, 1” in Ecce Homo.
This seminar is discussion-based; this means participants are expected to read the respective passages before the sessions. The seminar is free, but the number of participants may be limited. Please apply by January 19, 2025, via the application form below by briefly explaining 1.) your professional and/or academic background, 2.) your philosophical interests, and 3.) your motivation for joining the seminar (max. 100 words per field).