Nietzsche, Virtue and the Horror of Existence
Robert Solomon argues that Nietzsche is committed to a virtue ethic like Aristotle's. Solomon’s approach seems unaware of Nietzsche’s belief in the horror of existence. A life that contains as much suffering as Nietzsche expects a life to contain, could not be considered a good life by Aristotle. To go further, as Nietzsche does in his doctrines of eternal recurrence and amor fati, to advocate loving such a fate, to refuse to change the slightest detail, Aristotle would find debased. Nietzsche is committed to a virtue ethic, but not an Aristotelian one. I It has been argued that Nietzsche is committed to a virtue ethic. Solomon, for example, claims that Nietzsche is more like Aristotle than Kant. Aristotle’s ethics, he holds, is not one of rules and principles—especially not universal ones. It is concerned with excellence and is still involved with the Homeric warrior tradition. The purpose of such an ethic is to maximize people’s potential and that will always be unequal for