This is a marvelous accomplishment. Concise yet holistic, Tanner manages in just 100 pages to convey the iconoclastic brilliance of Nietzsche's thinking, and he does through an idiosyncratic, perspectival style commensurate to the philosopher under examination.
Highlights for me included:
An examination of Nietzsche’s first work, “The Birth of Tragedy, and in particular:
His delineation of the opposition between Apolline art (art that exemplifies the principium individuationis and the underlying existential need for certainty and order) and Dionysian art (art that foregrounds the underlying monism of reality, the metaphysical substrate of pleasure and pain that we as individuals are unable to bear), as well as the necessary and creative tension between the two;
And how this exploration announces the “central quest of his life: How can existence be made bearable, once we grasp what it is really like?”, as well as “a spirit which will defy all risks to oppose the moral interpretation and significance of existence”
Nietzsche’s undermining of truth, his emphasis on perspective, his exploration of the will to truth, and of the rationalizing nature of consciousness in service or an irrational nature of will and emotion. “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’ and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be”
Nietzsche’s ungrounding of morality throughout a number of his works, including:
his attack on those who define the goal of morality in terms of “the preservation and advancement of mankind”
his exposure of the unexamined historicity behind the “universal” moral grounds that his liberal contemporaries evinced
his exploration of the relationship between moral sentiment and the herd instinct
his characterization of the life-denying nature of Western, Judaic-Christian morality (i.e. the discovery of the inverse relationship between morality systems and the unconscious drives, instincts, and wills that comprise human nature that Freud would go on to admire in Nietzsche and further explore)
the nuanced examination of Judaic-Christian morality as the morality of slaves, inauthentically formed in opposition to the master morality that they loathed, and yet ultimately more powerful than it, and ultimately undermining itself in its exaltation of truth
The aporia at the heart of Nietzsche, his unresolved conflict between hating and loving life, and his inability to overcome the metaphysical impulse, as evidenced through his obsession with the “all-embracing” (and even world-resigning) attitude of Eternal Recurrence
Bravo, Michael!