Nietzsche - Philosophie de la légèreté

Nietzsche's philosophy is a philosophy of lightness, a lightness which doesn't consist in breaking with gravity but in controlling it: being light is being able to take charge of life, ie bearing and loving it, wanting it.This book is first devoted to Greek lightness for Nietzsche finds in Ancient Greece the pattern for an alleviation which enables to unload one's drives without denying oneself. The study of Greek culture is thus the starting point of a close analysis of the human, all-too-human things, ie an inquiry whose orientation is definitely antimetaphysical, ie antiplatonic, antischopenhauerian and antiwagnerian: Nietzsche first shows that alleviation in religion has a double face: on the one hand, religion makes man's heart heavy with sinfulness; on the other hand it lightens it with the fiction of a merciful God. True alleviation thus consists in freeing oneself from religious lightening, and proclaiming the radical innocence of everything. Nietzsche also criticizes alleviation in art, ie a romantic alleviation. He shows that like alleviation in religion it requires a previous heaviness. Therefore he praises a classical art and an aesthetic of lightness. Nietzsche eventually focuses on a philosophical alleviation of life, defined as a freeing of spirit. Such a definition leads him to develop the doctrine of the closest things, which consist of the organization of a dietary alleviation of life.

Auteur

Olivier Ponton, La Grand-Croix, France.

Texte du rabat

In 1875-79, Nietzsche turns to the philosophy of the "free spirit", elaborating thus an original ethic. Our aim here is both to analyse the formation of this new ethic and to show that this ethic can be defined as an ethic of self assertion and alleviation of life - an alleviation which doesn't consist in breaking with weightiness, but in controlling it and playing with it. The emergence of this philosophy of alleviation goes with a deep transformation of Nietzsche's ideas of religion, art and knowledge, as well as a transformation of his interpretation of Schopenhauer and Greek pessimism.