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  • Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future ed. by Jeffrey Metzger
  • Jeffrey Church
Jeffrey Metzger, ed., Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009. xi + 207 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84-706556-8. Cloth, £58.50. Paper, £19.99.

In his introduction, Jeffrey Metzger states that “at some point in the past 20 or 30 years … Nietzsche’s name [became] no longer associated primarily with nihilism” (1). Metzger is pointing to the increasing contemporary scholarly interest in Nietzsche’s epistemology, naturalism, and metaethics. The worthy aim of this volume is to ask us to examine once again the underlying philosophical problem to which these views are a response, namely, nihilism. This volume helpfully reminds us that Nietzsche’s philosophical motivation still requires clarification, and that we can only fully understand Nietzsche’s particular views by grasping Nietzsche’s fundamental philosophical aims.

As with so many edited volumes on Nietzsche, the essays are varied in quality and eclectic in approach. Though this volume focuses on the theme of nihilism in Nietzsche, the authors define nihilism in different ways. Accordingly, the reader does not benefit from a lengthy and systematic treatment of the topic as in Bernard Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life (2006), which also sought to retrieve the notion of nihilism in Nietzsche. Yet the variety of approaches in Metzger’s volume has the virtue of surveying the many meanings of nihilism present in Nietzsche’s texts.

What is nihilism? Nietzsche defines nihilism most famously in the collection of notes gathered as the Will to Power as when the “highest values devaluate themselves,” when the “idea of value-lessness, meaninglessness” confronts and torments one.1 The authors of Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future focus on these and other statements in the Will to Power (see Rosen, Corngold, Porter, Ansell-Pearson), as well as Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism in The Genealogy [End Page 495] of Morality (see Conway, Metzger). Despite focusing on similar textual material, however, these authors develop markedly different accounts.

Three interpretations of nihilism emerge in this volume. First, nihilism is a description of the state of a particular culture, namely, a culture whose value system has collapsed or self-destructed. The highest value in a culture—its vision of the good life—is revealed as worthless or illusory, such that the world at large appears meaningless and cruel from within this culture. The ascetic ideal, for instance, shuns this-worldly pleasures in favor of the truth to come, yet the ascetic ideal culminates in the knowledge that there is no truth to come, and hence the world is fundamentally empty and meaningless. Daniel Conway’s careful and insightful reading of essay III in The Genealogy of Morality offers a nice statement of this version of Nietzsche’s nihilism. In this understanding of nihilism, meaninglessness is a feature of a culture itself, which means that nihilism can be overcome through a transformation or “revaluation” of the culture. This transformation should produce a culture that affirms rather than denies life. The contribution of Conway’s piece is to elicit Nietzsche’s educative and rhetorical strategy for effecting this transformation. Conway discerns the “indirect communication” Nietzsche uses to draw free spirits out of the culture dominated by the ascetic ideal and to exhort them to “turn the destructive power of the ascetic ideal against itself” (83–84).

The second interpretation of nihilism is that of a philosophical view according to which rational thought can never find justification in the irrationality, chaos, and flux of being. Accordingly, all normative claims to authority are not a matter of finding and claiming truth, since there is no truth, but a matter of power relations among agents. Though Stanley Corngold and Geoff Waite employ this understanding of nihilism, Stanley Rosen’s article provides its clearest expression. According to Rosen, Nietzsche’s philosophy is the “culmination of modern epistemology,” which rejects “natural as well as transcendental metaphysics,” and hence rests all truth claims on the nature and structure of the human will (9). Rosen argues that this epistemology self-destructs in Nietzsche, for whom the will is the will to power. Yet power or force...

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