Nietzsche's Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (review)

The texts that make up Nietzsche's middle period, especially Human, All Too Human and Dawn, still suffer from relative neglect in comparison with the treatment lavished on earlier texts such as The Birth of Tragedy and later texts such as On the Genealogy of Morality. Indeed, there are certain parts of Dawn that have hardly been studied at all in English-speaking Nietzsche scholarship. This makes the study by Paul Franco a very welcome addition to the literature on Nietzsche. Franco sees himself as building on the work of commentators such as Ruth Abbey, who pioneered the study of the middle period Nietzsche in English-speaking scholarship. However, his aim is not simply to plug a hole in the scholarly work on Nietzsche but rather to open up a Nietzsche that is quite different from the widespread image of him, namely, a Nietzsche who is a friend of reason, science, and the Enlightenment and who praises the virtues of modesty and moderation in contrast to Dionysian excess and frenzy. Of course, Franco recognizes that this conception of the middle-period Nietzsche requires elaboration, since Nietzsche imparts his own singular and unique meanings to the notions of reason and the Enlightenment.

Franco divides his text into a prologue (the birth of a free spirit) and four main parts: a part on Human All Too Human, which focuses on the problem of culture, a part on Dawn, which focuses on the topic of morality, a part on The Gay Science, which focuses on the task of incorporating knowledge, and a final part on Nietzsche's mature philosophy. According to Franco's reading, Human, All Too Human is to be conceived as a transitional work in which the knowledge-seeking free spirit takes over from the artist-spirit as the herald of cultural renewal. According to the author, it is the theme of culture that provides the key to the book as a whole and the axis around which the reflections on metaphysics, religion, art, and morality revolve. He argues that the chief weakness of Nietzsche's earlier treatment of culture, which he shares with Romanticism in general, lies in its inability to provide the unity and wholeness it so desperately seeks and yearns for. Now, the future of culture is to be based on knowledge and science, not on religion or art. Dawn is read as a "complete breakthrough" (xi), in which morality moves to center stage (and the author's thesis of how this takes place differs from that advanced by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter in their introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of Daybreak) and in which the main polemical target of the book is the utilitarianism of his friend Paul Rée and Herbert Spencer, which is taken to task for failing to develop knowledge of the irrational origins of morality and for threatening to reduce humanity to sand or bland mediocrity. In contrast to Human, All Too Human, in which the conquest of the passions is advocated along with a new stoicism, in Daybreak there is now heralded the passion of knowledge itself. Nietzsche wants us to delight in the restlessness of the quest for knowledge and in the same way that the lover delights in his unrequited love: we seek knowledge in spite of the fact that it brings suffering with it. Indeed, it is this that makes it a passion (91). The author notes how the theme of "the plowshare"—the original title of both Human, All Too Human and Daybreak—is put to work in the book, with the image denoting the theme of "universal benefaction" that lies at the heart of it (57). Nietzsche thinks that his taking to task of morality will have fruitful consequences for both the good human being and the evil human being, for both the humble and the mighty. Although Nietzsche continues to espouse the unaccountability...