Winner, 2022 R. J. Hollingdale Prize
Benoît Berthelier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
'The Meaning of the Earth: How to Read Nietzsche in the Anthropocene'
FNS is pleased to announce the recent publication of an article by R. J. Hollingdale Prize winner Benoît Berthelier. In this article, Berthelier argues against a dominant trend in the literature on Nietzsche and the environment that is mostly concerned with assessing Nietzsche’s relevance to environmental ethics. The author departs from this trend by showing that Nietzsche can hardly provide the kind of intrinsic value theory typically needed to ground an environmental ethic. The author then suggests that an environmentalist reading of Nietzsche has much to gain from closer attention to his concept of “earth” and briefly outlines the evolution of this concept throughout the Nietzschean corpus. The author concludes by coming back to Zarathustra’s mysterious claim that “the overhuman shall be the meaning of the earth” and clarifying how, though it should not be thought of as a new foundation for an environmental ethic, it might still be significant in the context of the Anthropocene.
Winner, 2017 R. J. Hollingdale Prize
Katie Brennan (Temple University)
'The Wisdom of Silenus'
This article discusses Nietzsche's response in The Birth of Tragedy (BT) to what he calls the wisdom of Silenus, that “the very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is to die soon.” I begin by analyzing the view that Silenus expresses a proto-Schopenhauerian truth about the world as “Will.” I then review Bernard Reginster's interpretation of the wisdom of Silenus as an early form of Nietzschean nihilism. As an alternative to these readings, I argue that, for Nietzsche, Silenus's wisdom addresses a crucial, existential dimension of ancient Greek tragic culture. I conclude by pointing out that, in BT, Nietzsche locates nihilism not in the wisdom of Silenus, but in the advent of Socratism.