Nietzsche’s Ethics of Danger

In this paper, I elucidate Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethics of danger as a development from an ethics of affirmation to posit a practical reading of his ethical theory. Gay Science 341 contains the hypothetical scenario of the eternal return, and the way this is interpreted redirects one’s total reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy. My argument is that there is a vulnerability latent in identifying one’s response to the eternal return through exposing oneself to the danger implicit in this return; from simply affirming it, a more appropriate reaction I argue is the rage that is made explicit. This paper begins with the backdrop of our contemporary situation from the insights of Peter Sloterdijk and Nietzsche, followed by a review of Deleuze’s ethics of affirmation. I present the latter to situate the difficulty of articulating its practicality in the face of such a cynical condition. The last section develops Nietzsche’s ethics of danger. This I directly borrow from Tobias Kuehne, which I expound via other insights from Nietzsche’s philosophy. As a whole, my discussion of his ethics of danger is my attempt to articulate his ethical theory in a practical sense, away from the probable security offered by affirmation

Applied ethics · Ethical theory · Ethics of technology · Normative ethics · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophical Ethics and Theory