Customer Reviews

Nietzsche: Life as Literature

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Nietzsche's "aestheticist" turn, in Alexander Nehamas's ingenious exposition, is twofold. First, he interpreted the entire world as an enormous literary text. Secondly, he was preoccupied by creating, through the medium of his texts, a specific personality, which as Nehamas contends, was Nietzsche himself. He argues that Nietzsche's key ideas, such as the will to power, nihilism, his view of truth, his ideas on cruelty, the overman and the dreadful doctrine of the eternal recurrence (which Nehamas interprets as a psychological, as opposed to cosmological, conception) were all fused into Nietzsche's aestheticist model of "self-creation". In a move of apocalyptic boldness, Nehamas claims that the figure of the overman which Nietzsche held in such high regard, was actually Nietzsche himself as he fashioned himself through his texts, a unique individual who affirmed the sum-total of life, which includes, of course, the suffering entailed in living. The literary analogues that Nehamas uses to illustrate Nietzsche's fundamental concepts are highly illuminating. Above all, Nehamas implies that theoretical knowledge is empty compared to the radical philosophy pursued by Nietzsche, which resulted in a synthetic merging of life with art. This philosophy, combining self-reference with self-creation was why Nietzsche was, and is, "the first Modernist as well as the last Romantic." Along with Walter Kaufmann's "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ", this book is possibly the best book on Nietzsche available in English.

Granted, Nehamas' reading of Nietzsche's corpus as a literary 'text,' yields a number of interesting results, particularly in his analysis of Nietzsche's conception of 'How to Become What One Is.' But I wonder just how interested in literature Nehamas really is here-he spends the bulk of this volume discussing Nietzsche's perspectivism (which is an unusually elegant and clear explication) and his distrust of traditional conceptualizations of truth. Yet he wavers on key positions, such as the eternal return and will to power. Nehamas fails to push the perspective of Zarathustra as a literary creation far enough. Nietzsche's positive reevaluation of all values lies in the possibility of artistic creation as an overcoming of nihilism. His analysis degenerates into uninteresting snobbery in the section on Beyond Good and Evil where he describes Nietzsche as a 'monstrosity,' and 'vague.' This is simply the inability on Nehamas' part to unify the thoughts of a thinker whose work so consistently resists unification.

What's objectionable about this book? It doesn't intelligently express the Dionysiac effect of Nietzsche's thought only but whets the mind's appetite for more also. So I give it a four-star rating.

Can anyone who concludes a scholarly work about Nietzsche by dismissing him as a "miserable little man" really be trusted to give a balanced assessment of the great philosopher? No, Alexander Nehamas can't.

To him, Nietzsche was "[c]ruel and heartless, neither protective nor respectful of the sensibilities of others." The pathetic curmudgeon was "[d]isdainful and contemptuous of the values and lives of most people....[and] has offended and hurt many and will doubtless continue to do so in the future." (Speaking of contempt, in a 1998 interview Nehamas struck another low blow against Nietzsche by deriding him as a "philosopher of adolescence.") In the last, schoolmarmish pages of this book, he continues to chide Nietzsche for his "cruelty, his attacks on many of our ideas and values, on our habits and sensibilities."

To whom is Nehamas referring when he pompously invokes this royal "our"? Did Nietzsche really hold all of his readers' ideas, values, habits, and sensibilities in contempt...or just those of certain readers like Nehamas and other sissified academic leftists of his ilk, whom he despised in his own day as careerists or worse?

Poor Prof. Nehamas. He apparently expects Nietzsche to have maintained a tone of measured politesse while single-handedly changing the course of moral philosophy and profoundly affecting the aesthetic milieu of the 20th century and beyond. I guess it wasn't easy for Nietzsche to remain sensitive to everyone's feelings when he was philosophizing with a hammer.

Nietzsche would no doubt be gratified that such whining--clear evidence of slave morality--comes from no less an eminence than the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton. This in itself proves Nietzsche's prescience. He would point out that, for him, launching "attacks" on herd animals like Prof. Nehamas was both a cardinal pursuit and an exquisite pleasure. More than a century after his death, Nietzsche still has the power to upset the more weak-stomached of the scholarly horde.

Unless you're a Nietzsche-hater, avoid this unsympathetic, condescending tome!

While Michael Tanner's criticism of this book in his Nietzsche is valid (Nehamas does quote way too much from The Will to Power), it is by far the only book on Nietzsche that I own that actually suggests how to use Nietzsche's philosophy in life. Who cares that the world is the will to power is a fact? This book suggests that perspectivism, will to power and surviving the thought of eternal recurrence are ways of thinking in which we can enhance our lives.

I am not a philosopher by training, but have read some of the classics in the field by sheer enjoyment, some Plato, some Aristotle, others also. But none impressed me more than Nietzsche, from whose opera I have savored many books: Genealogy of Morals (fantastic), Zarathustra (enigmatic), Antichrist (outraging), Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil (don't die without reading this; if you don't read German, try Walter Kaufman's translations), and some parts of Dawn, Gay Science and Human-all-too-Human. I also read a couple of biographies. FN was a profound thinker, one of the most brilliant of all time, IMHO. And he was also a sad, lonely and pathetic man, a kind of Van Gogh in Philosophy. And this turns him also into an exceedingly interesting character. The central thesis of Nehamas book is that FN tried to build a character out of himself through his multi-style books. This character, a "free spirit", a "philosopher" in a very particular sense, or the übermensch if you will, is the common voice behind the many different literary styles he used, from the academic to the poetic to the prophetic. Nehamas wrote a very interesting book. I enjoyed it a lot and I thank him for giving me a new and surprising perspective on one of my preferred authors. And his prose does not lack a touch of drama, which is adequate to his subject, but is also unexpected in a technical book about modern philosophy. I recommend Nehamas strongly to anyone interested in Nietzsche.

Strongly influenced by an analytical interpretation of Nietzsche from Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher Nehamas does more harm to Nietzsche than good. Nehamas's own "creative" interpretation of Nietzsche is utterly irresponsible. Interpreting Nietzsche analytical only makes Nietzsche's moral properties run amok. Nehamas interprets Nietzsche like most Christians interpret the Bible: He takes away a few things he can use, dirties and confounds the remainder and reviles the whole. Nietzsche asserts, rather than believes, that "untruth" is indeed a condition of life. But he does not assert any kind of "theory of truth," as Nehamas would have us to believe. Nietzsche's moral philosophy is Descartian - doubting to believe to discover one's own perspective of truth - not a dogmatic religious truth! His intent is rather, to give us his perspective to help us discover truth in ourselves, not in Nietzsche, himself.

This is one of the most well known hatchet jobs done on Nietzsche over the last two decades in hopes of selling the idea that Nietzsche is a postmodernist -- that is, a person who buys into the notion that the world is a text, or that text is everything, or that there is nothing outside the text, or some other grotesque expansion of the power of words. But Nietzsche is not one of those types. Indeed, 'there is nothing outside the text' is one of those pieces of philosophical insanity that can only be compared to other such pieces: like Parmenides belief that nothing moves, or Barkeley's belief that there is no such thing as matter, or Palto's belief that things do not have their properties, or Kant's belief that because we have categories we cannot know, and so on.
Nehamas and postmodernism are outgrowths of German Idealism. Nietzsche rejected that school. Almost everything he fought he called 'idealism' at one point or another in hiw career. He thought of German philosophy as a flight from reality, and a coward's philosophy designed to make a big show and distract everyone from how paltry and small minded one's German soul really was. The very notion of life as literature is self-contradictory. But, of course, like all postmodern theorists, Nehamas is un-selfcritical. His rectitude is all that matters. Like all postmodernists, he demands that we sacrifice our knowledge in order to accept an absurdity. His absurdity: that a pretend Nietzsche is of the same value as the real Nietzsche -- that imaginary and real are equal.

This is an enjoyable read and presumes a thorough familiarity with Nietzsche's work. Without it you will not appreciate the balanced and graceful way in which Nehamas resolves some of the apparent contradictions inherent in Nietzsche's corpus. Some of the other reviewers suggest Nehamas denigrating Nietzsche's ideas. That is entirely false. In fact, Nehemas writes near the end of this book that Nietzsche's ideas in conjunction with the way he lived his life are "deeply admirable." Even if one doesn't agree with the central thesis of the book, that Nietzsche's ideas fit best into a literary model of the world, one can still come away with a much clearer understanding of the philosopher and a greater appreciation for his thoughts.

Nehamas' book is, in its elegance and fluidity, an exemplary misrepresentation of Nietzsche's principal concerns and ultimate positions. It is an exceptionally digestible manifestation of what Nietzsche characterizes as "intellectual uncleanliness," and is thus a book of evidentiary value for diagnosticians of the "postmodernist" Zeitgeist which continues to foster a peculiarly resonant form of intellectual obscurantism as well as much mischief in the intercourse of actual ideas.

For a work of standard-bearing excellence in Nietzsche scholarship, read Maudemarie Clark's "Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy."