Richard Schacht’s Nietzsche

In this article, written for a panel presentation celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Schacht’s Nietzsche, I examine the perspective from which Schacht wrote his 1983 book. That perspective, I argue, accounts for many virtues of the book, including Schacht’s convincing treatment of Nietzsche as a philosopher who deserved to be taken seriously and, in its amazing thoroughness, his demonstration that Nietzsche’s thought could be organized using the sort of framework one would use for other great philosophers. But it also accounts for certain commitments that differ substantially from mine; in particular, in its extensive reliance on Nietzsche’s unpublished material, and in its neglect of the genealogy of Nietzsche’s views and questions of his style, which I take to be more central.