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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE WILL TO POWER
NIETZSCHE: LIFE AS LITERATURE. By Alexander Nehamas. Harvard
University Press. $17.50.
This is one of the best books published on Nietzsche in the
vogue that the philosopher has recently enjoyed. It is, in spite of its
title, not a biography. Nor does its author attempt to interpret the
whole Nietzschean corpus. Instead, Nehamas deals with a few of
Nietzsche's most important (and controversial) ideas in detail: his at–
tack upon morality, his perspectivism (theory of knowledge as inter–
pretation), the will to power, eternal recurrence, and so on. Surpris–
ingly enough, Nehamas has something new to say en each of these
topics, although he often presents it as corrective commentary upon
other writers. Nehamas treats Nietzsche's controversial ideas in dis–
crete essay-chapters, but he attempts to resolve their paradoxes and
conceptual difficulties within a general theory of Nietzsche's author–
ship. This is most original.
Nehamas argues that "Nietzsche's writing, and his thinking, is
essentially
hyperbolic," by which he means that Nietzsche made quite
conscious and systematic use of hyperbole in his later works . He
convincingly suggests that the great attention that has been paid to
Nietzsche's aphoristic writings is due to the fact that hyperbole works
so well in aphorism. But his suggestion may also explain why Nietz–
sche's other styles have been so difficult for many readers to ap–
preciate: the mock-biblical narrative of
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
for ex–
ample, or the self-congratulatory commentary of
Ecce Homo.
One
simply does not expect hyperbole in philosophic fiction or autobiog–
raphy. But why would Nietzsche use hyperbole so systematically?
And why did he adopt so many styles? According to Nehamas, the
answer is entwined in Nietzsche's perspectivism.
What Nehamas (and other analytic philosophers) call Nietz–
sche's perspectivism is the thesis that there is no truth, only inter–
pretation, and no "facts" or objective standards against which
various interpretations could be measured. According to Nietzsche,
"facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretation." Of course
Nietzsche's view is more interesting than that. In his effort to under–
mine truth, Nietzsche attacks science itself and goes on to assert that
the very will to truth and knowledge is a special case of a deeper will
to ignorance. And yet he did not hold that all interpretations are
