Nietzsche and the Philosophers

While every good philosopher engages a philosophical tradition in some way, the history of philosophy is more central to Nietzsche's work than to most. Insofar as a wide range of philosophers are implicated in a metaphysics and framework of values Nietzsche seeks to overturn, he is drawn into ongoing conversation with interlocutors spanning millennia. Moreover, as Mark Conard notes in the opening of this volume, Nietzsche engages the history of philosophy in order to critique the practice of philosophy itself. Nietzsche prepares a way for philosophers of the future, Conard suggests, by reinterpreting traditional philosophy and its exemplars (3). The motivation for this volume, which is devoted to Nietzsche's relationship to a number of individual philosophers, is thus apparent and uncomplicated, and the volume brings several seasoned scholars together to address the significance of Nietzsche's relationship to philosophers from a range of traditions and historical periods.Conard includes with the obviously essential figures (Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer) a group of less obvious ones (Aristotle, Anaximander, Bernard Williams), the blend of which makes for a dynamic volume. However, the selection of interlocutors is somewhat unguided. While this is largely a function of the enormous pool from which one might select in Nietzsche's case, a little more intentionality at this stage would have been desirable. For instance, were the volume restricted to philosophers with whom Nietzsche directly engaged, the lack of a feminine interlocutor for Nietzsche, though not inevitable, would be understandable. Yet the inclusion of Williams opens the field considerably, making the failure to find a feminine interlocutor more regrettable. These issues notwithstanding, Conard delivers a relevant and worthwhile volume.Paul Loeb's "Nietzsche's Place in the Aristotelian History of Philosophy" opens the volume with an appropriately comprehensive question about Nietzsche's relationship to the discipline of philosophy. Although Nietzsche's philosophical importance is now secure, scholars have previously questioned whether he even is a philosopher. Loeb lays out fifteen different reasons for this resistance and links each, point by point, to Aristotle's conception of the philosopher, in order to demonstrate that the problem is rooted in the dominance of an Aristotelian definition of philosophy. However, as Loeb also demonstrates in fifteen points, Nietzsche offers a new conception of philosophy that directly challenges the Aristotelian model. In addition to demonstrating the Aristotelian roots of the philosophical dismissal of Nietzsche, Loeb criticizes the shortsightedness of contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche that translate his thought into an Aristotelian mold by focusing on texts like The Will to Power and GM while giving less attention to Z, EH, and A. Loeb is sometimes overly bold. Using five criteria for philosophical importance enumerated at the beginning of the essay, he offers what are arguably too-quick assessments of the historical importance of a number of philosophers. Nevertheless, the essay is interesting, thorough, and erudite.Daniel Conway's "Twilight of an Idol: Nietzsche's Affirmation of Socrates" explores Nietzsche's relationship to the "decadent" Socrates in his later works. Beginning with Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates's claim in the Phaedo that he and Crito owe a cock to Asclepius, Conway draws attention to the way in which Nietzsche distinguishes Socrates's asceticism from that of the other "great sages" in TI. While many who emulate Socrates's ascetic self-mastery do so in order to continue life in a decadent state, Socrates achieved real self-mastery by wholeheartedly willing his own death, recognizing death as "the only doctor" for decadence. In this way, Socrates's final words deliver an ironic message across the millennia to heirs of his "improvement morality": improvement morality improves no one—no one, that is, except for the Nietzsche of EH, who receives Socrates's ironic message and sets about the task of the overcoming of morality. Thus, Conway says, Nietzsche affirms Socrates's role in setting a stage for Nietzsche himself to emerge as the first immoralist. Conway notes that we might flinch at this image of Nietzsche, but there is also some pleasure involved in flinching at this well-done, darkly ironic reading.Mark Anderson also focuses on Phaedo's dying Socrates, but the aim of his essay, "Nietzsche's Subversive Rewritings of Phaedo-Platonism," is to examine Nietzsche's portraits of Socrates as "subversive reimaginings and rewritings of Plato's dialogues." Anderson highlights Nietzsche's rewriting of Socrates's last words in both GS 340 and TI, his rewriting of the dying Socrates in BT, his revisitation of spiritual pregnancy in GM, and his portrait of the ideal philosopher in EH. These rewritings demonstrate Nietzsche's inversion of what Anderson calls "Phaedo-Platonism"—the Christianized Platonism at the heart of Nietzsche's critique. Distinguishing between inversion and rejection, Anderson considers Nietzsche's rich engagement with Plato as the donning of a mask, whereby Nietzsche employs Platonic terms and imagery for anti-Platonic ends. Nietzsche says that Plato wore the mask of Socrates, and Anderson notes that Nietzsche wears the mask of his adversary rather than a teacher. While this difference raises a question about the effectiveness of the mask metaphor in Nietzsche's case, these clear readings of Nietzsche's complex engagement with Plato are welcome.Gary Shapiro's "Nietzsche and Anaximander: The Innocence of Becoming, or Life Without a Mortgage" makes a compelling case that Anaximander, in claiming that things must pay the penalty for their injustice, is a perfect foil for Nietzsche in his declaration of the innocence of becoming. Shapiro takes a paraphrase of Anaximander's fragment concerning the penalty that things must pay for injustice in Zarathustra's speech on redemption to demonstrate that philosophy from its inception has been a mad revenge fantasy against time. An overlooked "allelois (to one another)" in Anaximander's fragment leads Shapiro to the provocative suggestion that Nietzsche understands credit and debt—what we owe one another—as a political manifestation of the indebtedness handed down by Anaximander. Nietzsche, in engaging Anaximander, looks to find a "way out of our millennia-old debt crisis" (102).In "The Pivot of Nihilism: Buddha through Nietzsche's Eyes," Douglas L. Berger argues that, despite claims in some Kyoto School literature of Nietzsche's affinities with Zen, Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is very far from early Buddhism. Turning to South Asian Buddhism, Berger shows that the Buddha's "middle path" aims between two extremes: an "eternalism" similar to what Nietzsche calls nihilism and a "nihilism" amounting to a naturalistic rejection of causal continuity and moral consequences that leads to valuing only the present. Berger suggests that Nietzsche himself would be a nihilist on the Buddha's terms and sees no possibility of reconciling the Buddhist ideal of arhant with Nietzsche's Übermensch. While space prevents a nuanced reading of Nietzsche's views on topics on which he is exposed to Buddhist critique, Berger weaves together several different conversations deftly, conveying the complexity of Nietzsche's relationship to Buddhism while also clearly delineating this non-affinity.Keith Ansell-Pearson's "Nietzsche and Epicurus: In Search of the Heroic-Idyllic" offers a thoughtful and rich reflection on the role of Epicurus in Nietzsche's middle period works. While Nietzsche's Epicureanism in this period emphasizes individual therapeutic practice rather than political revolution, this does not place the Epicurean garden entirely apart from political concerns; rather, it allows free spirits the self-cultivation that they will then share with the culture. Highlighting Nietzsche's interest in the "heroic-idyllic," exemplified by WS 295 "Et in Arcadia ego," Ansell-Pearson provides an interesting history of the Poussin painting at the heart of the aphorism, using that historical context to demonstrate how both the heroic and idyllic dimensions in Nietzsche's conception are Epicurean. While Nietzsche provides illuminating interpretations of Epicurus in the middle period, Ansell-Pearson thinks that Nietzsche's late depiction of a nihilistic Epicurus, as a foil for Dionysian joy, is not entirely fair.Conard's own essay, "Nietzsche and Hume on the Genealogy and Psychology of Religion," is a side-by-side comparative piece analyzing "parallels, overlaps, and divergences" in Nietzsche's and Hume's treatments of religion. While both reject the Christian conception of God, allowing for naturalistic conceptions of religion, Conard recognizes that Nietzsche is less concerned about the content of belief than he is the character of the values inscribed in the system of belief. Although the value of values is less squarely Hume's question, Conard shows affinities between Nietzsche and Hume in their estimation of the superiority of antiquity to Christian morality, quoting some passages by Hume on this issue that could easily be mistaken for Nietzsche. Finally, Conard reflects on Hume's and Nietzsche's psychology and physiology of religion, highlighting the uniqueness of Nietzsche's will to power. The straightforward comparison of the two is clear and helpful, though the focus on religion precludes a discussion of causality—arguably a rich issue on which to compare the two.Babette Babich reflects on Nietzsche's relationship to Kant in "Nietzsche's Critique: Reading Kant's Critical Philosophy." According to Babich, the Kantian noumenon constitutes for Nietzsche an abyssal reality, making philosophical nihilism the legacy of the first Critique. Moving to the second Critique, she suggests that Nietzsche engages Kant's moral philosophy in his idea of the sovereign individual and his right to make promises. Finally, Babich turns to Nietzsche's treatment of Kant's aesthetics of "disinterested interest," claiming that Nietzsche raises the question of style and taste "as a scientific question" (183). Here she seems to mean that the question of taste is always one of the particular interests informing our sensibilities. Nietzsche's estimation of interest in aesthetics is clear in his question in GM III:6 of whether Kant or Stendhal is correct about beauty, and Babich emphasizes here Nietzsche's claim that one must laugh a little at the expense of the Kantians. This laughter seems to inform the concluding gesture of the essay to Matthew Rampley's "dissonance of the modernist sublime" as a light response to Kantian nihilism as well as a response to readers who find nihilism in Nietzsche. Here, as throughout the essay, these provocative suggestions and their relationship to one another are not always clear.Anthony Jensen opens "Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: For Me What Mattered Was the Human Being" with a revisitation of the historical record, correcting some lore, originating in Nietzsche's own utterances, that has contributed to a misleading narrative according to which Nietzsche originally wholeheartedly embraced Schopenhauer and broke from him in the 1870s. The 1868 essay "Zur Schopenhauer," of course, brings this view into question. Jensen addresses Nietzsche's four major criticisms of Schopenhauer in that essay and then focuses his own argument on the differences between the Schopenhauerian will and Nietzsche's will to power. These concepts are neither merely different, nor positively opposed, Jensen argues, but instead operate on two fundamentally different levels of discourse (200). Whereas Schopenhauer wants to get to the metaphysical foundation of things, Nietzsche uses will to power as shorthand for a multiplicity of wills to which we cannot gain access.David La Rocca's "Emerson Recomposed: Nietzsche's Use of His American Soul-Brother" adds an essential component to a volume largely devoted to Nietzsche's influences by posing the question of what influence means. Taking Emerson's unclearly defined influence on Nietzsche as a case study, La Rocca demonstrates in an artfully composed essay that Emerson's remarks on influence illustrate the ways in which Nietzsche was influenced by Emerson. Though Nietzsche makes relatively few remarks on Emerson, LaRocca provides some reasons for thinking of Emerson's work as fuel for a fire that in burning conceals its source. On the whole, the reasons are compelling, but La Rocca arguably gets ahead of himself when he claims that one of Nietzsche's ambitions in "Schopenhauer as Educator" is "to negatively critique Schopenhauer as educator and find room for offering up Emerson as a more favorable tutor" (220). This surprising claim, argued for in a much more comprehensive fashion by James Conant, is adopted a little too quickly here."Nietzsche and Bernard Williams: Pessimism, Naturalism, and Truth" is the only essay in the volume to explore Nietzsche's work in relation to one of his posthumous readers. Here, Rex Welshon examines two dilemmas attributed by Williams to Nietzsche. The naturalism dilemma is that naturalism dissolves too much when it is scientifically reductive and too little when it allows metaphysical phenomena to count as natural. The truth dilemma is that the more we invest in learning the truth, the more impossible a single truth becomes. Both Nietzsche and Williams accept the second horn of this dilemma, Welshon says, but this slips into a more pernicious alethic relativism—all statements are true only indexed or relative to a perspective. In an effort to defend Nietzsche against Williams's critique of Nietzsche's position as too strong, Welshon says that Nietzsche can allow for certain perspectives to be better than others—namely, those that are "true across many human perspectives" (247). Yet this worry over truth misses an element of the conversation for Nietzsche, for whom judgments of better and worse are grounded not in broad consensus, but in the more complicated standard of the type of perspective and who speaks.Finally, in "The Obstinance of Voice: Rousseau and Nietzsche on Music, Language, and Human Association," Tracy Strong reflects on music, voice, and community in Nietzsche and Rousseau. Rousseau's appreciation for Italian opera, he writes, is related to his appreciation of Greek tragedy, since both demonstrate the relationship between music and language. Highlighting the entailed recitative, he shows that music speaks for that for which we have no words. Nietzsche, in BT, also emphasizes music as central to acknowledging our commonality with others, lending a democratic element to tragedy. In a move that is not entirely clear, Strong links these democratic elements to the exemplar of SE, a figure that Nietzsche frames in terms of love: "An exemplar . . . is the guide, one might say to 'becoming what you are.' This relation is called 'love'" (270). Strong goes all-in for love at this point, reading GS 334's "we must learn to love" not as a phenomenological description of how love happens, but rather as an ethical and political imperative for what we must now do. Love is essential to becoming what we are insofar as it draws us outward, allowing us to find that self that "lies immeasurably high above" us (SE 1). Strong clearly does not see this as the project of a solitary individual. Rather, he says, in emphasizing music, Nietzsche highlights a shared experience of being called to something for which we lack words. We might question whether Nietzsche, notoriously skeptical of love, really prioritizes it in this way for aesthetics and politics. Arguably, Strong emphasizes love a great deal more than Nietzsche does. Yet here a brief consideration of Strong's work on reading Nietzsche might be instructive ("In Defense of Rhetoric, Or How Hard It Is to Take a Writer Seriously: The Case of Nietzsche," Political Theory 41.4 2013: 507–32). Strong hardly takes his democratic Nietzsche as the only obvious interpretation. That there are other Nietzsches, and that they cannot be dismissed, is a result of Nietzsche's writing—styled intentionally to enable the reader's self-critical transformation. That Strong's long career of such transformative reading lands so solidly on love in this late essay gives us a good reason to give love in Nietzsche another look.