Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This essay focuses on a programme of a Shakespearean revue entitled ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (1941) in the possession of the Wolfson Centre for Archival Research, Library of Birmingham. Billed as a ‘Dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Call to Great Britain in Time of War’, the show was a brainchild of eminent Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) and featured such warlike set pieces as ‘This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ (King John) and John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ oration (Richard II). Knight performed all the main roles. He was convinced of Britain’s imperial destiny and of the central importance of Shakespeare (‘a national prophet’) in it. Indeed, Knight’s interpretation of the playwright informed his wartime assertion about Britain’s imperial mission and the significance of the monarchy. ‘This Sceptred Isle’ was, however, hardly a typical piece of British wartime propaganda, considering that its creator was an admirer of Nietzsche, whose ideas were appropriated by Nazism. This essay aims to explore Knight’s idiosyncratic thinking underlying the programme of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ in order to clarify how the admirer of Nietzsche and Nazism created a polemics of British patriotism with recourse to Shakespeare.

In this chapter, I argue that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is of central importance to the theory and practice of moral education in the 21st century. To make this case, I examine an oft-neglected text of Nietzsche’s early philosophical work: Schopenhauer as Educator. I argue that this text advances a theory of moral education with three key components: (i) a view about the particular cultural context of moral education in modernity, (ii) a conception of the proper aims of moral education, and (iii) an account of the appropriate pedagogical methods of moral education. I then discuss the kind of theory Nietzsche advances. I show that Nietzsche’s theory fits within a broadly exemplarist outlook, though it expands the standard theory and practice of exemplarist moral education in important ways. I argue that Nietzsche’s theory of moral education suggests two novel forms of exemplarist motivation – self-exemplarism and fallibilistic exemplarism – and further specifies the psychological conditions for moral aspiration and transformation to occur in educational spaces.

Mikhal Oklot surveys the hazards of imposing philosophical readings on Chekhov while also probing his engagement with specific philosophical traditions – Stoicism, Cynicism, materialism – and the distinct resonance of his moral perspective with such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and especially Schopenhauer as a key interlocutor and influence.

Teaching Shakespeare and Moral Agency begins with respect for the unschooled insights students express and supports their emotional engagement with the plays. Students were asked to set aside historical context and to engage directly with the resistant structure of the text. Building from their own background knowledge and the spontaneity of their response, it is then possible to develop their preliminary insights into a more rigorous understanding of the moral seriousness of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Contrasting styles of moral inquiry can then be used to put questions of this kind into a philosophical context. Required philosophical reading included Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Erasmus, Enchiridion; Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Morals; Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. These ethical encounters between contemporary readers and Shakespeare’s fictional universe often turn out to be profoundly disturbing. To illustrate the ethical distress provoked in these encounters the chapter builds on student responses to Isabella’s moment of decision in Measure for Measure: “More than our brother is our chastity.” What students discover from this program is a distinctively Shakespearean account of virtue ethics - conflicted, panoramic in scope and grounded in the concrete immediacy of experience.

The modern period (1800–1500) saw important innovations as philosophy of music moved in dramatically different directions. The first innovation was the incorporation of philosophy of music into philosophical systems, either absolute idealist or Marxist. These philosophers also held that music provides important insights into reality. In this stream of philosophy of music are found the seeds of Continental philosophy of music. The other, diametrically opposed, development was the rapid rise of formalist approaches to philosophy of music. These writers stressed the autonomy of musical beauty. A third stream within modern philosophy of music is continuous with earlier thinking about music. It opposed formalism without adopting a grand weltanschauung. Ontology of musical works emerges as a topic for philosophical discussion. Thinkers discussed include Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Nicolai Hartmann, Carroll C. Pratt, Susanne Langer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), R. G. Collingwood and Roman Ingarden.

Willpower is often understood as a muscle of the mind that we can learn to flex. The perennial philosophical problems of weakness of the will and freedom of the will. But as science reminds us, everything has a cause, and this includes our will. These conclusions accord well with our phenomenological experiences. Most of what we do is governed by habits. We act as we come to do what a certain situation calls for. As a result there can be no such thing as self-determination. We can never have power over ourselves. The historical overview focuses on the crisis of willpower at the turn of the twentieth century. Factory labor, standing to attention, and the mechanization of life resulted in neurasthenia and other mental afflictions. Dreams of daredevilry, colonialism, and war were ways to break free and restore freedom of movement. The illusion of national self-determination.

Judith Norman takes up the complicated question of feminism in WWR. Political critiques of the history of philosophy frequently accuse philosophers of illegitimately universalizing a particular view of subjectivity – unwittingly normalizing a parochial conception of human nature, for instance. Although this is a critique that can undoubtedly be extended to Schopenhauer, it is striking that Nietzsche, drawing largely on metaphysical resources derived from Schopenhauer, was one of the first to really recognize and contest this illegitimate philosophical strategy. Norman looks at the extent to which Schopenhauer anticipated Nietzsche in this project of tracing a genealogy of the subject within a metaphysics of will, closely examining Schopenhauer’s fraught discussion of sexual difference in “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This leads her to the question of the ontological status of sexual difference, and whether this cleft in nature registers at the level of transcendental subjectivity, and the consequences for Schopenhauer’s view of the subject, the question of women readers of the text, and women subjects of philosophy in general.

Alone among texts analyzed, Soumission describes no battlefields. Civil war diffuses into street violence. The electoral crisis, in which the Muslim Brotherhood prevents the National Front from coming to power, is handled behind the scenes. The Roman tradition’s tropes, however, frame France’s social dysfunction as raging civil war: a republic fails and an oriental empire modeled on ancient Rome takes its place. Allusion – streets in Paris, squares encoding Roman institutions, towns commemorating Crusade battles – retells France’s dystopian future as a rerun of history since Augustus imposed peace through empire. The novel’s protagonist faces a personal crisis as he relives the life of his research interest, Huysmans: the paradigm of decadence converted to Catholicism. His perverse conversion, however, exposes the present refoundation as a return to a decadent political theology. Soumission’s Muslims, all nativist converts who establish a Nietzschean empire of domination, aim above all to subject women. Once again, orientalism projects onto an apparently foreign other the abjection residing within the self. The novel’s poetics accuse us of hypocrisy if we think we are any better.

A study of Homer in conjunction with Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche confirms that Homer was a philosophic thinker and that he plays an illuminating role in the thought of each of the three political philosophers. This study also shows that there are many ways of living a philosophic life; that philosophers may present themselves in different guises depending on the political, religious, and intellectual circumstances they may find themselves in; that their most fundamental choice is whether or not to present themselves explicitly as philosophers; and that therefore we must broaden our understanding of who a philosopher is beyond those who explicitly present themselves as philosophers and consider the possibility that a number of poets, statesmen, historians, and even theologians of the past may also be philosophers in their own right.

Homer plays an important but overlooked role in the history of political philosophy. Plato criticizes the philosophic tradition founded by Homer and establishes a new one in its place; Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two leading philosophic critics of Plato, invoke Homer in their arguments against Plato and his legacy.

Nietzsche criticizes Plato for having praised the philosophic life in such a way as to deprive the active political and military life of the honor and vitality it enjoyed in the Greek culture founded by Homer and therefore seems to call for a reversal of the moral and political legacy of Platonism and Christianity and a revival of Homeric culture. But Nietzsche ultimately criticizes Plato more seriously, not for explicitly celebrating the philosophic life as the best way of life for a human being, but rather for presenting the philosopher as a champion of morality and religion and thereby obscuring the skeptical nature of the philosopher and he therefore seeks, through his rhetorical presentation of philosophy as emphatically opposed to morality and religion, to reintroduce the radical moral and religious skepticism of philosophy to a world that has lost sight of it.

In the epilogue, I offer a coda on the pursuit of leisure. While schools (teachers and administrators) can make strides toward cultivating leisure in students, the art of leisure is fundamentally a subjective task. It is learning how to be a person – how to live with and contend with the angels and demons that plague human existence.

This chapter examines Nietzsche’s thoughts regarding physically destructive struggle (Vernichtungskampf) and, more specifically, war. I contest the exclusively agonistic reading of his philosophy by showing that throughout his writings Nietzsche gives a wide variety of reasons as to why we ought to value mortal forms of combat. I further argue that many of these arguments are underpinned by a quasi-Schopenhauerian ontology of violent conflict. According to this ontology, the impetus to engage in physically destructive struggle is untransformable. Hence, war is ineluctable because humans are defined by an irresistible drive for violent conflict. The periodic release of this ever-accumulating urge is in Nietzsche’s view socially cathartic, and to this extent enables flourishing. This is problematic for his agonistic readers, however, since they take Nietzsche to be pursuing the transformation of destructive into constructive struggle. My solution to this apparent contradiction is to suggest that Nietzsche’s problematic conception of destructive conflict is for the most part confined to his early writings. As he moves away from Schopenhauer and toward the natural sciences, he reconceives destructive conflict as the contingent expression of a general impulse to overpower others – one that can obtain discharge in nonviolent modes of conflict.

According to Nietzsche, modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this chapter, I examine the form of conflict that he prescribes in his Untimely Meditations (UM) as a remedy to this condition of disintegration. I argue that he develops a quasi-Schopenhauerian model of how healthy holism arises – that is to say, a model that presupposes the existence of metaphysical essences or Ideas that teleologically organize entities from within. Such essences establish holism by means of selectively overpowering and assimilating the opposed entities that they need in order to materially realize themselves. On the basis of this analysis, I reject agonistic readings of UM,arguing that Nietzsche endorses exploitation and exclusion in a way that is sharply at odds with his conception of the agon. I conclude the chapter with an account of how Nietzsche’s eventual rejection of metaphysics (in his middle and later writings) undermines the metaphysical presuppositions that condition the synthetic program that he outlines in UM.

This chapter analyzes how the later Nietzsche proposes we resolve the pathological fragmentation that he sees threatening both modern individuals and communities. I reconstruct how, within his theory of the will to power, he develops a novel account of healthy organization – one purged of the problematic metaphysical presuppositions that compromised his earlier synthetic program (outlined in Chapter 3). Against his agonistic readers, I argue that his later theory of organization still comprises a combination of instrumentalization and exclusion that renders it incompatible with his notion of agonal conflict. I examine how he concretely applies this abstract theory of organization to the problems of individual and collective disintegration. With regard to his account of self-cultivation, I contest those who construe Nietzsche as a thinker who prescribes the sublimation, but not the elimination, of troublesome psychological drives. With regard to his theory of collective organization, I take issue with both his agonistic and his radical aristocratic readers. My contention is that each group of interpreters unduly distorts Nietzsche’s political outlook, making it appear either far softer or more brutal than is in fact the case.

The book concludes with a summary of how the greater part of Nietzsche’s mature thoughts on conflict form a systematic whole. In other words, we review how he can be said to prescribe destructive, agonistic, exploitative and exclusionary forms of conflict under distinct yet compatible sets of conditions. I then survey some of the ethical implications of this study, and gesture toward how, in light of our findings, we might profitably reformulate our conception of conflict. Though I advance a systematic reading of Nietzsche’s writings in this book, I do not wish to give the impression that my reading is free of remainders; I therefore close by highlighting some of the anomalies and tensions generated by my exegesis.

This chapter explores Nietzsche’s endorsement of agonal conflict (Wettkampf). I address three points of contention in the critical literature. First, commentators disagree about the relation of agon to physically destructive conflict. While some claim that the Nietzschean agon is distinctly nonviolent, others maintain that it includes physically destructive forms of conflict (such as war, for example). Second, there is disagreement regarding the social inclusivity of Nietzsche’s ideal agon: some claim that he wants agonal relations to be democratically realized across the breadth of society; others, though, maintain that he confines his endorsement to an aristocratic minority. Finally, there is disagreement regarding the means by which Nietzsche thinks that agonal moderation is concretely realized. Some maintain that such conflict merely requires a self-initiated shift of attitude on the part of the individual contestants; others, however, submit that agonal restraint can only be imposed externally, by means of fashioning a balance of powers within which contending parties are too equally matched to domineer over one another. I argue that for Nietzsche (a) agon is categorically nonviolent; (b) all can participate in some form of agonal contest; and (c) agonal restraint is founded upon a combination of self-restraint and externally imposed restraint.