I want to commend to the attention of those interested in Nietzsche a new book by Bernard Reginster on The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard University Press, 2006), which I had the privilege of reading for the press some time ago. This is certainly a book that all students and scholars of Nietzsche will want to read. As I said to HUP:
Heidegger suggested a half-century ago that the problem of nihilism and the doctrine of the will to power were central to Nietzsche's philosophy, but only now, thanks to Reginster's elegantly crafted study, do we have a penetrating and systematic philosophical exposition of these themes and their interrelation. A particularly welcome feature of this new study is the way in which it situates the Nietzschean doctrines against the background of Schopenhauer's ideas and arguments; in so doing, it teaches the reader quite a lot about Schopenhauer and, in the process, sheds interesting new light on well-known ideas of Nietzsche's.
I am not sure I find Reginster's treatment of the doctrine of will to power more persuasive than John Richardson's in Nietzsche's System (OUP, 1996), but Reginster does a lovely job linking his reading to the problem of nihilism, and thus bringing out a different kind of "systematicity" to Nietzsche's views than that developed by Richardson.
The comments by Frederick Neuhouser and Martha Nussbaum on the book are also apt (though I infer Neuhouser hasn't been reading most of the secondary literature on Nietzsche when he says that "Reginster's convincing case for the coherence and systematicity of Nietzsche's thought goes against the grain of most contemporary interpretations, which see Nietzsche's thought as radically (and intentionally) fragmented, contradictory, and hostile to rationality and traditional philosophy," since most of the secondary literature that has generated discussion (and which Reginster himself discusses most)--Nehamas's 1985 book, Clark's 1990 book, Richardson's 1996 book, my 2002 book, Richardson's 2004 book--fall squarely on the side of finding "coherence and systematicity," albeit of rather different kinds).
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