The role of practices in Nietzsche's affirmative ethics

Andre Okawara

In this work in progress seminar I will continue to reconstruct Nietzsche’s affirmative ethics, this time focusing on the concept of ‘practice’. In the framework I presented last year, drives and practices are seen as interacting to produce sensations. When a resulting sensation reflects affirmation, the product of the related drive and practice is evaluated as good. This time I will discuss how the concept of ‘practice’ has been viewed by 3 important readers of Nietzsche: Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Solomon, and Richard Schacht. I will argue that MacIntyre presents a useful historical account of ethical thinking, and that Solomon is right in correcting MacIntyre about Nietzsche’s place in this tradition. In doing so, Solomon finds a fruitful path for the study of practices in Nietzsche’s ethics, which he unfortunately does not follow. Schacht begins to explore this path, working out many important details of the role of practices in Nietzsche’s thinking. I will suggest some corrections to Schacht’s account and propose that agonism, tragedy, and intellectual honesty are the major practices grounding an account of Nietzsche’s ethics that is affirmative, substantively rich, and generalisable.