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  • Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction by Matthew Meyer
  • Joel E. Mann
Matthew Meyer, Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. xiii + 304 pp. isbn: 9781934078419. Cloth, $127.00.

For some years, Matthew Meyer has labored at a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre that understands his philosophical and literary output as a revival of a particularly (and particular) Greek mode of thought. This volume represents the culmination of much, but not all, of this previous work, and it serves also as a promise of future work in the same vein. The title, Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients, is therefore a trifle misleading: Meyer is not reading all of Nietzsche through all the ancients, but only some of Nietzsche through some of them. That is all for the good, so far as I am concerned, since I am usually suspicious of ambitions to resolve Nietzsche’s debt to antiquity in a single study.

Which Nietzsche, then, and which ancients? Meyer reads Nietzsche’s ontology and epistemology by the ancient fire of Heraclitus and Protagoras. Nietzsche’s infatuation with these two figures—one hesitates to say “philosophers,” but more on that momentarily—at various points in his career is well documented, if not well understood or received. I must confess at the outset a deep sympathy for just this sort of project, which I myself have wanted for years to undertake but have found myself unable, resigned instead to nibbling around the edges of Nietzsche scholarship, [End Page 497] gesturing dumbly at textual parallels and suggestive imagery. After poring over Meyer’s book, I understand better why this is the case. Like Meyer, I have grown up under the tutelage of Nietzsche’s analytic interpreters, who seek to return Nietzsche to respectability among the professional philosophy crowd. At the same time, many of these interpreters play up Nietzsche’s infatuation with the bad boys of the Western intellectual tradition. So Brian Leiter, who defends what Meyer calls a “point-of-view” version of perspectivism that privileges science as a route to real facts about the world. This version is grounded in a vision of Nietzsche as a naturalist, and Nietzsche’s evident passion for the Greek sophists is attributed to a reverence for his irreverent naturalist progenitors. This is not wrong, exactly, though the sophists have historically been associated with epistemological relativism, and relativism is usually thought to be incompatible with naturalism, which typically grants epistemic privilege to the results of the natural sciences. Leiter is adamant that Nietzsche’s interest in the sophists has nothing to do with relativism, and he leans on scholarship that tends to downplay the sophists’ relativistic streak. But while it is true that the sophists have been subject to more merciful and nuanced treatment by recent commentators, few such commentators would deny that, of all the sophists, one stands out as a flagrant and unrepentant relativist: Protagoras of Abdera. As Leiter and Meyer recognize, and as I have harped on in a few papers, Protagoras is the sophist nearest and dearest to Nietzsche’s heart. (See Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality [London: Routledge, 2002], 39–53 and 106–8; Meyer 24–33 and 153–58; Joel E. Mann, “Nietzsche’s Interest and Enthusiasm for the Greek Sophists,” Nietzsche-Studien 32 [2003]: 406–28; and Getty Lustila and Joel E. Mann, “A Model Sophist: Nietzsche on Protagoras and Thucydides,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 [2011]: 51–72.)

This leaves respectable analytic interpreters of Nietzsche with nothing but hard choices. We can, like Leiter, acknowledge the sophistic affinities but mute the relativism. Or we can follow the lead of Thomas Brobjer, who denies the affinities themselves. (See “Nietzsche’s Disinterest and Ambivalence toward the Greek Sophists,” International Studies in Philosophy 23 [2001]: 5–23; and his response to my 2003 essay in “Nietzsche’s Relation to the Greek Sophists,” Nietszche-Studien 34 [2005]: 255–76.) I have misgivings about both of these options (especially the latter) and so have spent the past few years fumbling about in the dark for traces of...

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