Nietzsche's Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading by Matthew Meyer (review)

Recent years have seen increased interest in Friedrich Nietzsche's middle period works, as scholars have turned to Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science in exploring Nietzsche's turn toward naturalism and the roots of his mature criticisms of morality. Entering that conversation, Matthew Meyer offers an ambitious challenge to how we read these texts. Often viewed as a series of disconnected intellectual experiments that evince Nietzsche's rapid, not always linear, development over the period of their publication, the middle period works are, Meyer argues, instead best understood as a consciously constructed dialectical Bildungsroman or narrative of self-education. That is, without having every detail worked out, Nietzsche sets out from the beginning with a plan for a single literary unit that will tell the broadly Hegelian story of the free spirit's self-overcoming of truth, his trajectory from scientific truth seeker who spurns art in Human, All Too Human to, in The Gay Science, the joyful proponent of an aesthetic justification of existence in which the sciences are preserved but only in an instrumental role. For Meyer, the free spirit works are similar to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in being composed and published separately while remaining a single literary unit, and similar to Descartes's Meditations in being consciously constructed to lead the reader through a process of intellectual development mapped out ahead of time.

In two introductory chapters, Meyer situates his reading within the Anglo-American literature and then develops three types of evidence in support of his reading: evidence from early writings in which many of Nietzsche's middle and mature views are already present in nascent form; contemporaneous middle period evidence from notes, letters, and the compositional history of his works that suggest that as he produces them, Nietzsche conceives of the middle period books as importantly unified; and evidence from Nietzsche's later writings in which he describes his middle period works in ways consistent with Meyer's thesis. Much of the argument is detailed and defended in these chapters, and subsequent chapters move chronologically through the middle period works themselves, showing the upshot of Meyer's interpretive approach.

In many ways, this is an impressive book. Meyer's identification of problems in the secondary literature is clear and persuasive. His attempt to identify the unity underlying the middle period works rightfully questions the common strategy of mining them for this or that aphorism without taking account of Nietzsche's meticulous efforts in composing and sequencing his books. In addition, Meyer impressively negotiates the line between intellectual history and substantive, close readings of Nietzsche's texts.

Meyer's thesis is provocative, his defense detailed, yet in the end his core claims are often not adequately established. In many places, the evidence adduced is consistent with Meyer's thesis while failing to render it the best explanation available. For instance, Meyer does well to make clear the rootedness of many of Nietzsche's mature views in his earliest works, for example the self-overcoming of truth already in The Birth of Tragedy. But while Meyer sees this and other examples as establishing that Nietzsche already had in hand the mature views that would define The Gay Science and subsequent works and so could have, at the time of Human, All Too Human, envisioned the finish line of a consciously constructed narrative of self-education that would arrive at these views, the fact that Nietzsche held versions of mature views in his early works is just as consistent with the view according to which the middle period works, especially Human, All Too Human, are something of an odd turn after which Nietzsche returns to his previous concerns.

Perhaps most importantly, Meyer's revised account of the development of Nietzsche's philosophy leaves little room to view Beyond Good and Evil or On the Genealogy of Morality as essential texts, since one of the central projects Nietzsche works through in those books, namely the self-overcoming of...