Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices

Can philosophy offer not just doctrines and academic theories, but “therapies” and concrete ways of re-orienting one’s mode of living? Horst Hutter argues that this is precisely what was offered by ancient schools of philosophy, and that this original goal of philosophizing is renewed most authentically in modern philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche. Hence, according to Hutter’s provocative reading, Nietzsche, in his efforts to become “the philosophical therapist of his culture,” expresses his profound fidelity to the original purposes of philosophy as conceived by the philosophers of antiquity.

Horst Hutter is unique among political theorists today in combining a deep knowledge of modern thought with a sympathetic understanding of the philosophical schools of late antiquity. In this challenging book he applies to Nietzsche Pierre Hadot’s notion of philosophy as askesis or a discipline of reshaping oneself in all respects of both body and soul. The result is a Nietzsche rescued from postmodernism and closer than supposed to classical philosophy. Sometimes critical but always sympathetic, insisting on the undiminished urgency of Nietzsche’s critique of modern life, Hutter provides a model reading of an indispensable thinker.

Horst Hutter’s Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices is the wise work of a serious disciple.

Hutter argues that the root and branch of Nietzsche’s philosophy is classical Greek, that Nietzsche’s perspective is accompanied by ‘ascetic practices’, thus ways of not only viewing life but also ways of living life. Hutter may have shown us the way Nietzsche would have wanted us to view his work. In my opinion, this is a profound and important work.