Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2022
Scott Jenkins concentrates on the specific passion of self-contempt that plays such a large role in the Prologue of Nietzsche’s book where the Übermensch is introduced. This evaluative emotional state sounds unpleasant and unhealthy, but Scott shows why Nietzsche recommends it as a distinctive self-critical stance that is actually grounded in true self-love. We must be careful, Scott says, not to confuse it with the two familiar varieties of contempt discussed by Nietzsche, noble indifference and moral vengefulness. Instead, we should regard it as Nietzsche’s secular transposition of religious-ascetic contempt. Here we take a critical attitude toward our present state as falling short of a superior future ideal that lies within us which we love and yearn to realize. This is why Zarathustra says, paradoxically, that he loves humans and wants them to perish for the sake of a superior Übermensch species.
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