Nietzsche and Philosophy
Deleuze writes that the reception of Nietzsche’s thought has involved two key issues, those of whether it helped to prepare the way for fascism, and whether it deserves to be considered philosophy. Deleuze, who compares Nietzsche to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, considers Nietzsche as one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, crediting him with altering “both the theory and the practice of philosophy.” Deleuze argues that Nietzsche’s concepts, such as the will to power and the eternal return, have been generally misunderstood, the former as primarily concerning “wanting or seeking power”, and the latter as “the return of a particular arrangement of things after all the other arrangements have been realised … the return of the identical or the same”. Deleuze notes that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche twice denies that “the eternal return is a circle which makes the same return.” Deleuze also discusses the views of the philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger, and subjects such as dialectic.[1]
