Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy ed. by Paul S. Loeb and Matthew Meyer (review)

This volume brings together well-established Nietzsche scholars working within diverse philosophical and stylistic frameworks to address the question of how Nietzsche understands philosophy. Specifically, Loeb and Meyer aim to investigate Nietzsche's answers to the following three questions: "What should philosophy be? How should philosophy be done? Why, or to what end, should philosophy be practiced?" (2–3). The question of what philosophy means for Nietzsche is arguably central to a great deal of existing secondary literature, from French interpreters of the 1960s and 1970s to the numerous contemporary volumes that take Nietzsche's style seriously as illuminating, rather than obfuscating, his philosophical project. This volume advances that conversation by raising the question of Nietzsche's metaphilosophy directly and in the context of a greatly expanded field of Nietzsche studies characterized by methodological pluralism. Given the wide range of philosophical debates animating contemporary Nietzsche studies, this book delivers a welcome reflective pause, allowing readers to consider contemporary debates in light of Nietzsche's own aims. Though argumentative moves are made a bit quickly in places, often because authors are drawing on arguments they have developed in detail elsewhere, on the whole the essays are well researched, interesting, and intelligent.

Meyer's essay tackles the problem of the variety of metaphilosophies espoused by Nietzsche throughout his career, unifying them around a dialectic between the will to truth and art. He offers a compelling explanation for why Nietzsche's early antithesis between Socratic philosophy and art bears such similarity to his later work while differing substantively from his attitudes in the free spirit works, explaining the more positivistic bent of those texts as part of Nietzsche's self-conscious strategy for demonstrating how philosophy overcomes the will to truth and becomes a form of art. This tension between truth and art is explored in several other essays. João Constâncio contrasts Nietzsche's interest in value creation with Spencerian positivism, arguing that Nietzsche's philosophy is an aesthetic activity requiring reflective taste, understood in a Kantian sense. Rebecca Bamford explores how the idea of experimentation in the free spirit works informs Nietzsche's philosophical project, and she argues that Nietzsche's naturalism, rather than being entirely consistent with the sciences, instead incorporates both truth and error as essential for human development.

Both Loeb and Marco Brusotti begin with Nietzsche's mature conception of the philosopher in Beyond Good and Evil §211 to show that Nietzsche's metaphilosophy hinges on the notion of the philosopher as a creator of values. Brusotti argues that BGE provides a natural history of the philosopher and associated figures such as the scholar, and he concludes by suggesting, without quite developing, the provocative idea that Nietzsche's autobiographical turn toward the end of his career represents an implosion of his metaphilosophy. Similarly, Loeb differentiates among the types related to the philosopher in BGE, but he advances an idiosyncratic interpretation of Zarathustra that will be familiar to many readers, arguing that the philosopher's new values are the organizing force pointing superior human beings toward self-sacrifice. Robert Pippin also focuses on the philosopher in BGE in order to consider the religious dimensions of Nietzschean philosophy. While Pippin's meditative style often enables novel insights, his essay here winds without reaching a clearing, and is thus not his strongest example of that style.

Antoine Panaïoti uses Nietzsche's metaphilosophy to critique the significant trend in Nietzsche scholarship of forcing Nietzschean ideas into the language of analytic philosophy and its attendant assumptions. Using two key metaphors from Nietzsche's early work, Panaïoti argues that philosophy, as an affirmative task, must guide the sciences rather than follow their lead. His broad critique of analytic interpreters of Nietzsche receives an implicit reply from other essays in the volume. Paul Katsafanas, for instance, pulls a compelling moral methodology out of Nietzsche's work in an essay...