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The amount of writing on Nietzsche in English alone is now
growing at a rate that is both a tribute and a threat. The most magisterial book on
him, by someone deeply sympathetic yet firmly critical, is Erich Heller’s The Importance of Nietzsche (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1988). A book somewhat similar in tone, but following patiently
through Nietzsche’s development, is F. A. Lea’s The Tragic
Philosopher (Athlone Press, London, 1993). Originally published in
1957, it is a trailblazing work, written, like Heller’s and unlike almost everyone
else’s, with notable grace and a Nietzschean passion. Unfortunately Lea uses old and
discredited translations for quotation; and he ends surprisingly by finding that
Nietzsche rediscovered the teachings of Christ and Paul for our time. Walter Kaufmann’s
ill-organized
transformation of Nietzsche into a liberal humanist has its place in the history of
Nietzsche reception (Nietzsche 4th edn, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1974).
Of more recent works, the most acclaimed, often setting new
standards in detailed analytic working-through of Nietzsche’s positions, is
Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1985). It is a demanding but rewarding
book, but Nehamas relies too heavily on unpublished notebooks of Nietzsche’s. More
impressive still, as I have indicated in the text, is Henry Staten’s Nietzsche’s Voice (Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
NY, 1990), a moving and profound series of meditations on some basic themes in
Nietzsche. A less demanding and more critical work on an aspect of Nietzsche which
has received little in the way of book-length attention is Julian Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1992). Young finds a lot to be indignant about, but his
criticisms, in their downrightness, are thought-provoking. A full-length book on
BT by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern is Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1981), which leaves no stone unturned, so far as the biographical
background, the accuracy of Nietzsche’s account of Ancient Greece, and so on, are
concerned. The essence of the work itself, and the source of its fascination, eludes
them, but this is a mine of absorbing information. Nietzsche’s politics, or rather
his seeming lack of them, are dealt with at length in two overlong but
intermittently helpful books, both rather badly written. Tracy Strong’s Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration
(expanded edn, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988)
ranges very widely, and contains a particularly bizarre account of the Eternal
Recurrence. Mark Warren’s Nietzsche and Political
Thought (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988) distinguishes between
what Nietzsche’s political views, never presented systematically, were, and what
they should have been, from the standpoint of the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory.
There are many collections of essays by various commentators:
one that has some excellent contributions to the reading of particular books is
Reading Nietzsche, edited by Robert C.
Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Oxford University Press, 1988). The way that
Nietzsche tends to be read in France now is usefully illustrated in a book of
translations of Derrida, Klossowski, Deleuze, and so on: The
New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison (Delta, 1977). I find
Gilles Deleuze’s celebrated Nietzsche and
Philosophy (trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Athlone Press, London, 1983) quite
wild about Nietzsche, but interesting about Deleuze. Many people swear by it. And
we
are in for an invasion of works from France, where Nietzsche has been
idiosyncratically cultivated since World War II.
