Nietzsche's Practical Experimentalism: Agonism & Tragedy in Nietzsche's Positive Ethics

In this thesis I reconstruct Nietzsche’s positive ethics by identifying and examining what I call his typology of practices. I argue that analysing Nietzsche’s typology of practices provides a rich, substantive account of his positive ethics. I proceed by proposing a general framework that aims to reflect and explain how Nietzsche comes to evaluate certain types of practices positively. I argue that two enduring ethical criteria guide his assessments: a practice’s capacity to promote the development of individual character by facilitating and guiding the expression of human drives, and its capacity to generate enduring sensations of existential affirmation.