How to Read Nietzsche (review)

To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Spring–Summer 1875, 5:[178]

Guidebooks on art, literature, and philosophy are an ever-exploding phenomenon; they are read more perhaps than the actual works of whatever figures are being summarized, which is one of their significant if not pernicious dangers. Norton’s How to Read series is edited by Simon Critchley, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and includes books on Shakespeare, Sade, Freud, and most recently Derrida. More perhaps than any other figure in the series, Nietzsche presents the greatest challenge and the hardest questions. Recalling Nietzsche’s comments that books written “for all the world are always foul-smelling books” (BGE 30) and that “not only writing but also thinking” (Z:1 “On Reading and Writing”) will be corrupted once all learn how to read may have made Ansell-Pearson bristle when writing this volume. In the foreword, Critchley notes that the series is based on a simple but novel idea, which is to ameliorate the dearth of often inadequate secondhand introductory books and replace them with intimate encounters with a thinker’s ideas. The book is not to be an attenuated compilation of classic ideas but, instead, what Nietzsche would refer to as fishhooks, instigating readers to pursue their own discoveries, though accompanied by skilled, to further employ the fishing metaphor, piscators. Ansell-Pearson is our Captain Ahab, and Nietzsche, the whale of whales he is pursuing.

To disrupt customary modes of thought and to think differently is, one might say, the beginning of thought. Nietzsche, as Ansell-Pearson notes in his introduction, continuously provokes us not only into thinking differently but also into thinking the most exigent and discriminating thoughts. It is a philosophy of precipices and summits, and through our encounter with such thoughts, Nietzsche seems to want to provoke in us transformations, though he knows much in us is granite and cannot be transformed. What we cannot transform, though, we must love as fervently as we love our ecstasies, which are not without their degree of pain. In guiding us through Nietzsche, Ansell-Pearson elucidates the tasks Nietzsche set for us in each of his texts. To understand such tasks demands that we read Nietzsche a certain way, and Ansell-Pearson fulfills that demand through becoming a cow, that is, he practices “reading as an art of rumination” (GM P).

To read Nietzsche is not, however, a placid affair; one must confront the terrifying dimension of his thought, and Ansell-Pearson does not recoil from that darkness but, rather, boldly explores it. Noting that philosophy for Nietzsche, unlike Aristotle, does not begin with wonder but with horror, Ansell-Pearson commences with a crucial and striking interpretation. Rarely is Nietzsche’s focus on horror emphasized, and both analytic and Continental commentators often neglect it. The tragic realization is that existence is simultaneously horrifying and absurd, and it is Silenus who utters the crushing assessment that it would have been best for us had we not be born at all and to die as soon as possible would be the next best thing. Thus begins Nietzsche’s battle, which might be characterized as a lifelong agon with Silenus, who perhaps more than Homer, Socrates, or Christ had to be confronted and overcome. For even if Christianity is overcome, Silenus would still remain. He is the fierce specter haunting Nietzsche, whose philosophy in part is an antidote to Silenus’s exceedingly nihilistic vision of existence. From this pivot, and it is a decisive one to travel from, the journey through Nietzsche’s philosophy is initiated. It is philosophy as sublimity, thus one that requires great courage to live up to. It does not suffer optimists like Socrates but demands figures like Zarathustra or the Übermensch, free spirits capable of confronting the pessimistic dimension of existence and not being overcome by resignation, loving life in its horrific and questionable entirety.

In ten...