Lexington Books
Pages: 242
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-0-7391-1183-3 • Hardback • December 2005 • $124.00 • (£95.00)
978-0-7391-1359-2 • Paperback • December 2005 • $51.99 • (£40.00)
978-0-7391-6088-6 • eBook • December 2005 • $49.00 • (£38.00)
Horst Hutter is professor of Political Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.
Chapter 1 Key to References
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3 Introduction: A Summary of Arguments
Chapter 4 Philosophy as Therapy and the Therapy of Philosophy
Chapter 5 Einsamkeitmehre - The Practices of Solitude
Chapter 6 The Dialectics of Solitude and Friendship
Chapter 7 Writing the Future, Reading the Self
Chapter 8 Nutrition and the Casuistry of Selfishness
Chapter 9 Dance and the Return of Dionysus
Chapter 10 Epilogues: Actio in Distans
Chapter 11 Selected Bibliography
Chapter 12 Index
Chapter 13 About the Author
Hutter argues that the root and branch of Nietzsche's philosophy is classical Greek, that Nietzsche's perspective is accompanied by 'ascetic practices', thus ways of not only viewing life but also ways of living life. Hutter may have shown us the way Nietzsche would have wanted us to view his work. In my opinion, this is a profound and important work.
— Tom Darby, Carleton University
Horst Hutter is unique among political theorists today in combining a deep knowledge of modern thought with a sympathetic understanding of the philosophical schools of late antiquity. In this challenging book he applies to Nietzsche Pierre Hadot's notion of philosophy as askesis or a discipline of reshaping oneself in all respects of both body and soul. The result is a Nietzsche rescued from postmodernism and closer than supposed to classical philosophy. Sometimes critical but always sympathetic, insisting on the undiminished urgency of Nietzsche's critique of modern life, Hutter provides a model reading of an indispensable thinker.
— Clifford Orwin, University of Toronto
A brilliant treatment of Nietzsche's thought as an exercise in philosophic therapy. Hutter brings the text alive in ways that are clear, consistently illuminating and often surprising. A valuable book both for the beginner and for the well-informed Nietzsche scholar.
— Susan Shell, Boston College
Horst Hutter's Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices is the wise work of a serious disciple.
— Nietzsche Circle
Can philosophy offer not just doctrines and academic theories, but "therapies" and concrete ways of re-orienting one's mode of living? Horst Hutter argues that this is precisely what was offered by ancient schools of philosophy, and that this original goal of philosophizing is renewed most authentically in modern philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche. Hence, according to Hutter's provocative reading, Nietzsche, in his efforts to become "the philosophical therapist of his culture," expresses his profound fidelity to the original purposes of philosophy as conceived by the philosophers of antiquity.
— Ronald Beiner, University of Toronto