Date of Award
Fall 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Philosophy
College
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
First Advisor
Sean Kirkland
Second Advisor
Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of the relation between Nietzsche’s drive psychology and his moral philosophy. While much of Nietzsche scholarship focuses on the theoretical aspect of Nietzsche’s psychology or, alternatively, on his claims for a new elitist morality and culture, I contend that much of what Nietzsche writes throughout his philosophical writings, and especially his late project of revaluation of all values, calls this theoretical versus practical divide into question. Indeed, I argue that Nietzsche’s late psychology of the will to power has a deeply moral and cultural-political valence. I advance my thesis in a twofold way. First, I offer a historical contextualization of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the tradition of German post-Kantian philosophy, with its notion of the primacy of the practical over the theoretical. Second, I develop a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s mature philosophical psychology and its ethical implications, as a distinctive development of that tradition. In the first two chapters, I show the extent to which the young Nietzsche was indebted to early German Romanticism, particularly as it pertains to his inquiry into the nature of human creativity and tragic beauty. I also show that Nietzsche’s turn, in his middle period (1877-1882), to moral psychology, while maintaining a form of transcendental philosophical commitment to human creativity, rejects the moral immediacy implicit in the Romantic notion of art. The second half of the dissertation, chapters three to five, expands on this reconception of creativity and the way it informs the structure of ethical and social life by looking at Nietzsche’s later writings (1883-1888). Here, my central interpretive contention is that Nietzsche conceives the psychology of the will to power in order to raise the essential problem of the value of our values and hence to open up the possibility for rethinking how we relate to our ideals.
Copyright
Copyright © 2026 Ludovico Zizzo
Recommended Citation
Zizzo, Ludovico, "THE ABYSS OF JUSTICE: NIETZSCHE’S PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE IDEAL LIFE" (2025). Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University. 114.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/theses-dissertations/114