Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading Matthew Meyer

Abstract

We still don’t know how to read Nietzsche’s books. This bizarre fact is true of them to a degree unmatched by the works of any other major historical figure in modern philosophy, perhaps in all of the history of philosophy. Of course, we know how to read the words Nietzsche wrote, and get something – often, very many things – out of them. We know, as it were, how to read in Nietzsche’s books. But the books themselves, as literary units, remain elusive. So much so, in fact, that earlier Anglophone commentators tended to throw up their hands. Arthur Danto suggested that Nietzsche’s books “give the appearance of having been assembled rather than composed” (Danto 1965, 19). In a similar vein, Richard Schacht says that they “consist chiefly in assemblages of rather loosely connected notes” (Schacht 1983, ix).