Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together?

Nietzsche wrote the philosophical work for which he is most famous while he was coming apart at the seams. The circumstances of Nietzsche's dramatic psychological disintegration make his writing, while popular, often hard for readers to understand. Elijah Millgram here argues for a new framework for making sense of Nietzsche-one that transforms the way we read him. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? argues that Nietzsche's late works (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards) should not be read as straightforwardly endorsing a consistent or systematic set of philosophical claims. Rather, these late works display Nietzsche living through a series of different personalities or philosophical perspectives. Each perspective embodies a different way of seeing the world, deploys different values, highlights certain features while occluding others, and is motivated by a different dominant drive. What one perspective emphasizes can be left out by another; what one perspective presents as valuable can be seen as neutral or even as damaging from another; what engenders the appearance of coherence or order in one perspective can do the opposite in another. Millgram claims that insofar as each human life embodies a perspective, and insofar as each of Nietzsche's late texts exhibits a distinct perspective, we can think of each of the late works as written by a different author. Millgram provides seven such readings of Nietzsche's most famous later works, and two concluding chapters discuss Nietzsche's perspectivism, as well as the account Nietzsche gives of why his very difficult life was nonetheless one that he could look back on without regret.

Table of Contents:
1 Why Read About Nietzsche, Instead of Just Reading Nietzsche Himself? 2 Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist? 3 Who Was the Author of Nietzsche's Zarathustra? First Interlude: What Was Nietzsche's Genealogy? 4 Who Was Nietzsche's "Good European"? (How to Read Beyond Good and Evil) Appendix: Unpacking BGE §15 Second Interlude: Was Nietzsche a Nazi? 5 Who Was Nietzsche's Convalescent? (How to Read The Gay Science) 6 Who Was Nietzsche's Psychologist? (How to Read Twilight of the Idols) Third Interlude: Are We Interpreting Nietzsche the Right Way? 7 Who Was Nietzsche's Antichrist? 8 Who Wrote Nietzsche's Autobiography? 9 What Was Nietzsche's Perspectivism? Appendix: Truth and Lie 10 What Was Nietzsche's Tragedy? 11 What Is the Meaning of Life? Bibliography

About the Author :
Elijah Millgram is E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. A former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Guggenheim Foundation, he thinks mainly about rationality and about the meaning of life. His most recent book is John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life.

Review :
A strikingly original book. It stakes out a unique position in Nietzsche scholarship; the readings are always illuminating. The analyses of drives, perspectives, the institutionalization of values, and of unified and disunified selfhood are particularly rich and should spark discussion among Nietzsche scholars. One of the best monographs I've read in recent years. Elijah Millgram offers us a very challenging and powerful reading of Nietzsche. The book deserves to make a substantial impact, both within Nietzsche studies and more broadly in philosophy. Millgram's approach is highly unusual; he forces us to pay serious attention to the authorial voices, or personae, that Nietzsche adopted in his various works, and to ask after the point of those bravura performances. His large-scale argument-that they operated collectively as Nietzsche's creative way of coping with his own psychological disintegration-is sure to be controversial, but Millgram shows that there is considerable intrinsic philosophical insight to be gained from this way of thinking about Nietzsche.