Living with Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us

To Live With Passion

At the outset of his study "Living with Nietzsche" (2006), the late Robert Solomon (1942 - 2007) offers a telling autobiographical detail that sets the tone for the book. After graduating from college in the 1960s, Solomon entered medical school at the University of Michigan and was unhappy with his studies. He heard the philosopher Frithjof Bergmann lecture on Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence, and this experience changed Solomon's life. "It provoked me into steeling myself with the philosophical resolve to take a close look at my life and my unhappiness and confusion and my larger role in the world." (p. 15) Following the lecture, Solomon withdrew from medical school and began graduate work in philosophy, a decision, he says, he never regretted. Solomon taught continental philosophy at the University of Texas for many years and wrote extensively about Nietzsche, existentialism, and the emotions.

Solomon's anecdote captures many themes of his study. For Solomon, Nietzsche is a thinker concerned with human life rather than abstract ideas. Nietzsche's goal was transformative, both for himself and his readers. He wanted to learn and to teach how to love life and to jar his readers into realizing and pursuing what they found valuable. Nietzsche stressed, against an abstract rationalistic and conformist spirit, the importance of passion - what a person cares about - in pursuing a life of value. He stressed the importance of taking risks and of changing situations that made one unhappy. Thus, as a young man Solomon realized that he did not wish to pursue his medical studies and dedicated himself to the life of philosophy. Solomon also came to reject the initial teaching of Nietzsche that led him to this realization. Solomon came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, while provocative, was obscure, unnecessary, and likely incorrect. It was a metaphysical teaching that Solomon concluded, after years of reflection, ran counter to what he primarily valued in Nietzsche. So in his book, Solomon takes judicious measure of this great philosopher. He tries to explain what Nietzsche has to teach, while separating out the components of Nietzsche's thought that Solomon finds metaphysical, hyperbolic, or incorrect.

Readers who disapprove of Nietzsche generally stress what they see as the nihilistic component of his thought. They see him as the "immoral, blasphemous, the sacrilegious" (p. 3) denying any form of rationality and any recognition of moral behavior beyond, perhaps, force. Solomon understands Nietzsche as transforming morality by celebrating a life of "rich passions, `deep' emotions, exquisite taste, and a sense of personal elegance and excellence." (P. 4) Thus, Solomon understands Nietzsche as opposed to universalizing tendencies in both metaphysics and ethics. Nietzsche denies any abstract and necessarily binding concept of truth and teaches both naturalism and perspectivism. He rejects both Kantian and utilitarian ethics while arriving at a teaching of the good life that is close, in some respects, to that of the ancient Greek skeptics and to the "virtue" ethics of Aristotle.

Solomon's book is a mixture of a passionate, transformative call to his readers of the type Nietzsche might have approved with detailed, sometimes difficult philosophical analysis. Thus the book will appeal to both the scholar and to those with a new interest in Nietzsche, but it will also frustrate both kinds of readers at times. The chapters remind me of concentric circles, as Solomon continually restates his understanding of Nietzsche with different emphases and at with varying degrees of abstraction. Thus, Solomon begins with an analysis of what he, unhappily, calls Nietzsche's "ad hominem" style of writing. Solomon aptly points out that Nietzsche was interested in what he called the "psychology" of belief. When this psychology was understood, for Nietzsche, abstract philosophical questions of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of certain doctrines would tend to fall away. Nietzsche's psychological approach led him to what is today called perspectivism - the claim that individuals see truth and ethics from their particular place and that if is impossible and undesirable to have an absolute theory of truth or ethics - or any theory at all. Nietzsche then tries to explain how this perspectivist approach does not lead to nihilism but to a revalued ethics and to the development of qualities in individuals that celebrate the place of passion, love, meaning, commitment, and honesty. In the central chapters of his book, Solomon develops a Nietzschean ethic that he compares in detail to Aristotle. In the concluding chapter of his study, Solomon compares Nietzsche to the existentialist thinkers he also admires, including Kierkegaard and Sartre. (Solomon appears to be much less fond of Heidegger). Nietzsche is sometimes distinguished from these thinkers due to his rejection of untrammeled free will, his teaching of amor fati (loving one's destiny), and his stress on character as determinative on one's actions. Besides offering a difficult discussion of the philosophical nature of agency, Solomon tries to show the important place personal responsibility has for Nietzsche, making him closer to Sartre and Kierkegaard than is sometimes realized.

Solomon does not hesitate to criticize Nietzsche or to discuss the many inconsistencies in his thought. Nietzsche was a profound and, provocative, if not always careful and consistent, thinker. Among other things, Solomon questions Nietzsche's teachings of the "will to power" as a metaphysical holdover from Schopenhauer, narrows the focus of Nietzsche's teaching of "resentment" as the basis for common understanding of ethics, takes issue with the spatial and metaphorical description of human passions as "drives", and rejects the confusing and metaphorical distinction between alleged "deep" and "shallow" values or ways of understanding. He explores the tensions between Nietzsche's "blaming" perspective, all-too-common in many people, and his perspectivism, which seems to counsel an approach minimizing the tendency to blame and to criticize others. Solomon sees the important teaching of Nietzsche to lie in the undermining of cant, in recognizing the centrality of a personal approach to philosophy, in the recognition of passion and sexuality, and in Nietzsche's central teaching of learning to love one's life and character.

Robin Friedman