Review of Six Recent Books about Nietzsche

Michael Taber
St. Mary's College of Maryland


[Appeared in Literature and Theology, vol. 8, no. 1, March 1994, Oxford University Press, pp. 113-115]


Blondel, Eric, Nietzsche: The Body as Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, translated by Sen Hand, (London: The Athlone Press), 1991, 353pp.

Del Caro, Adrian, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University), 1989, 314pp.

Hunt, Lester H., Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, (London: Routledge), 1991, 200 pp.

Schrift, Alan D., Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, (New York: Routledge), 1990, 249pp.

Staten, Henry, Nietzsche's Voice, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press), 1990, 223pp.

White, Alan, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, (New York: Routledge), 1990, 188pp.

A special challenge in understanding Nietzsche is that after settling what his views are on various issues, we must confront apparent contradictions between what he endorses and his criticisms of others. Of these six recent books on Nietzsche, two attempt the first level of interpretation, and four concern efforts to prevent Nietzsche's hammer from breaking itself.

One aim of Hunt's book is to examine the normative views of Nietzsche on their own, separate from their metaphysical import. Hunt succeeds in this, which helps to integrate the study of Nietzsche into the academic specialty of ethics. Hunt also believes that Nietzsche was not inimical to philosophical argumentation, but chose to omit such argumentation in order to force readers to come up with their own arguments for or against Nietzsche's views. Although this approach makes Nietzsche more traditional than he really is (Nietzsche frequently supports his views, but most commonly with his innovative ad hominem psychologizing about the motivations for accepting alternative positions), it has the interpretive benefit of keeping us from dismissing difficulties in Nietzsche as unanalyzable due to him existing beyond logic.

Hunt helpfully builds toward discussing the compatibility of exploitation with Nietzsche's account of virtue. He argues affirmatively, but construes this as the strong pursuing virtue while living on a welfare system funded by the economic activity of the many. Hunt seems to think that what is wrong with fascist terror is primarily economic exploitation.

Hunt proposes that we import to Nietzsche a "liberalism with teeth" which would allow us to accept most of Nietzsche's views about virtue. This is similar to Alan White's suggestion, although White approaches the problem of exploitation less from the issue of virtue than from meaningfulness, the key to which White finds in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence interpreted as a psychological, not cosmological, hypothesis. White interestingly reads Nietzsche's doctrine as describing a transcending of the self in each moment (not a transcending of one's past). What is recurring and non-linear about this is that since I cannot lose my past, what is created each moment is, in part, a resurrection of my past.

White believes that exploitation is incompatible with the real Nietzsche, because the despot is a dogmatist who sets down one life for all to live, and that this violates the open-endedness essential to Nietzsche's view of meaningfulness. He is clearly right about some despots. I am not optimistic, however, that White's Nietzsche could condemn a despot who thinks that he is choosing only for himself, and who fully accepts that if others choose differently, they are free to overpower him. White justifiably worries that he makes Nietzsche into a "bland combination of individualism and tolerance" (p.137), and thus White claims to find in Nietzsche a liberalism much like that which Hunt feels the need to import into Nietzsche's views.

Blondel and Del Caro set out in their books to solve apparent inconsistencies which arise when Nietzsche's theory is applied to itself. Blondel wants to explain how Nietzsche can insist that language is metaphor and illusion and yet continue to use language. Del Caro discusses how Nietzsche can criticize romanticism and yet endorse a view which can be fairly called romantic.

Blondel's is the larger question, and requires broader brushstrokes. Yet his treatment is meticulously tied to Nietzsche's texts with numerous endnotes. Blondel documents well Nietzsche's alternating praise and disdain for philology, and postulates that these apparent vacillations are explainable by Nietzsche's view that philology is a good destructive tool but lacks strength to build anew. Although this would be a tidy explanation, it ignores the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche uses philology to propose both the diagnosis and the cure. Blondel emphasizes what Nietzsche says about philology, at the expense of how he sometimes uses it.

Blondel ultimately proposes that Nietzsche envisions philosophy as a genealogy "that consists in relating cultural phenomena back to the body..." (p.258), and especially back to the senses of smell and hearing, as opposed to the less visceral and more remote vision preferred by other philosophers. Blondel is not clear, however, about what this "relating back" consists in: are some genealogies better than others? What are the implications of this for the illusoriness of language?

Del Caro's explanandum is really not such a problem. It is true that Nietzsche advocates using creativity (as opposed to a conceptual or linguistic system) to achieve humanity's potential. It is also true that Nietzsche has some blistering attacks on romanticism as a symptom both of needing tranquility to dull suffering and of viewing nature as a ready-made vestment of value into which we must slip. But there is really no tension between these positions, and any apparent tension arises only when we work at the level of the label "romantic" instead of trying to look deeper.

But Del Caro's book is better than this. He has produced a rich intellectual history of the connections between Nietzsche and romanticism, idealism, classicism, and realism, and his relation to such thinkers as Rousseau, Goethe, Novalis, Schlegel, and Wagner. His excellent discussion of Nietzsche's views on nature provides an important corrective to those thinkers who try to read into Nietzsche some environmental love for the natural world.

Staten's book asks the general question of how to treat contradictions into which Nietzsche gets himself. He resists waving them aside by appeal to Nietzsche's perspectivism, and instead proposes a "psycho-dialectical" approach, by which, it turns out, he means nothing more than noting Nietzsche's ambivalence on many issues. For example, Staten notes the structural similarity between the resentment of the weak and the masters' enjoyment of inflicting suffering on the weak for debts unpaid. He places this in a larger pattern of "transcendental ressentiment," in which Nietzsche is saying no to something (namely, the Platonic and Christian world-view) for which he has an involuntary admiration (p.50). This approach may satisfy some, but strikes me as providing raw material to be explained by those with temperaments of the first four authors discussed here.

Schrift's book attempts to navigate the Scylla of dogmatic systemization of Nietzsche (personified by Heidegger) and the Charbydis of relativistic license (Derrida). Schrift succeeds in making Heidegger and Derrida accessible to the uninitiated, and he has some good arguments against their interpretations of Nietzsche. But why take his arguments against Heidegger's attempt to systematize Nietzsche as an argument against all such attempts? Against deconstruction Schrift argues that any plausible interpretation of Nietzsche must affirm life. He thinks there is a plurality of possible interpretations which meet this standard, none of which can be better than any other. This pluralism is his safe route between hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Does Schrift envision this as a general interpretive strategy for all thinkers, even Augustine and Schopenhauer (like the deconstruction that he admittedly comes close to)? We do not know. If we restrict it to Nietzsche, there are still problems with Schrift's standard. Is the sine qua non of each interpretation that all life is to be affirmed, or is it sufficient that some life be affirmed at the expense of others? Can it be said that Oehler and the Nazis misinterpreted Nietzsche?

Whether one is primarily interested in Nietzsche for what he has to say about morality or meaningfulness, or for his implications about what it is to interpret a text, he is a thinker we all have in common, and yet he allows us in our readings of him to differentiate ourselves from each other, as these six books indicate.


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