Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety

Abstract

After Marx but in a profoundly different way, Nietzsche would set German idealism on its head, proposing to philosophize out of what he called the great intelligence of the body. Adopting a critical phenomenalism, Nietzsche reproved Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will with its intellectualist ascetic response. He repondered the latter’s noumenal Will as an infinity of “hermeneutic” forces, which governed aristocratically, in view of life and creativity. When forced back into themselves under sociohistoric conditions, these forces were res-senties and re-experienced as anxiety and fear. This morbid cultural situation might gradually be reversed by a “transvaluation” of values following the death of God. It was Scheler who explored a psychology of resentment, where anxiety formed the core of the European complex.