I’ve just finished two recommended and well regarded books on Nietzsche.
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski
👎 👎 This book fails on both accounts. As a biography, it’s bad; it jumps around in his timeline randomly and chaotically, references events that are only explained or elaborated several pages later, etc. And as for an exploration of Nietzsche’s philosophy, it sheds less light on it than Nietzsche’s own writings.
Nietzsche’s System by John Richardson
👍 👍 This book led to a paradigm shift In Nietzsche scholarship. Despite Nietzsche’s own claims that he was an anti-systemic anti-moral anti-metaphysics philosopher — a view that dominated Nietzsche scholarship until the late 90s — this book made a compelling case that Nietzsche’s philosophy — namely his will to power thesis — claims a systemic truth about essence (ie an ontology) that is temporally specified but above all differentially realized, generating values that ultimately ground an ethics in which the metaphysical project itself gets ranked highest. 🤯
So much about Nietzsche’s philosophy (for example, his archetypes of master, slave, and overman) make so much more sense to me now, while also striking me as far less icky than they originally did.
