Politics, Ethics, and Philosophical Anthropology: Charles Maurras and Giovanni Papini, Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler

One of the earliest of the French thinkers who responded to Nietzsche is Charles Maurras. While Nietzsche served as an opportunity for Maurras to condemn developments in his contemporary society and in Christianity, he did not engage with the specific aims of Nietzschean philosophy or with the coherence of this thought. An anti-Germanic outlook links Maurras with Giovanni Papini, whose Il Crepusculo dei filosofi collects a number of Nietzschean themes and relates them to the central idea of the acceptance of life. Papini identifies a “fundamental contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought between the total acceptance of life and the affirmative will to change or transform humankind. In his foreword to his Ethik of 1916, Nicolai Hartmann presents the reader with Nietzsche as “a solitary figure” who “warn[s] us with his startling assertion that we have never yet known what good and evil are.” Hartmann recast his own project in terms of “a synthesis of ancient and modern ethics,” declaring that this synthesis was “the task of our age.” The background to Max Scheler’s engagement with Nietzsche is his work on phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Behind the entire project of philosophical anthropology lies the essential Nietzschean intuition that the human being is an animal that can make promises.