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Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist

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I've been reading Nietzsche for over four years now (which is about one fifth of my lifetime) and I still find this by far the best book on the subject (in second place is a book called "What Nietzsche means" by one George Morgan - first published in 1939!). Peter Berkowitz analyses, criticizes and, in this way, almost f i n a l i z e s Nietzsche's thought as he shows in which way Nietzsche's failures, too, contribute to his overall achievement, which is to show a n d j u s t i f y the limits of man's power over his own destiny. By all means read it: it is a milestone in modern thinking and will still be read in a hundred year's time.

I read this book immediately after finishing Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Berkowitz presents Nietzsche's philosophy in a way not often undertaken. He emphasizes the ethics that Nietzsche holds, despite his lack of belief in God. I enjoyed this because I felt, while reading Nietzsche, that he did not imply the death of morality with the death of God. Berkowitz does a fine job of proving this point.

Berkowitz does a good job undermining (a) the "new Nietzsche" of recent French theory and the postmodern politics of identity and difference; and (b) the "old Nietzsche" cavalierly dismissed as a nihilist and relativist. Where Berkowitz falls way short is in failing to understand how and why Nietzsche "relies" on traditional notions he allegedly "repudiates" (e.g., nature, reason, morality). Nietzsche is not interested in repudiation but transfiguration. You can't transfigure what isn't first "figured" (life and values as they have been). What Berkowitz calls the "contest of [irreconcilable] extremes" at the heart of Nietzsche's thought is actually the context in which Nietzsche argues for a life-affirming morality beyond the life-denying ethics of what we would call "traditional values." One may like the venerable truths Berkowitz favors. But how ironic to turn Nietzsche, of all thinkers, into a virtual pretext for arguing traditional values!