This review, which will appear in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, concerns a very weak volume in the Cambridge Elements series; I assume other volumes in that series are more serious and more helpful to students. (On Stern's prior efforts, see this.) The first paragraph, a middle paragraph, and the last paragraph of the review:
This thin book, in the new Cambridge Elements series, purports to “introduce” Nietzsche’s ethics in his “late works,” meaning from 1886 until his breakdown in early January 1889. This period includes such major works as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, as well as very late works that show some signs of impending insanity, like The Antichrist. Stern never argues that the “late ethics” is discontinuous with Nietzsche’s pre-1886 writings about morality, he simply asserts it. According to Stern, Nietzsche’s late ethics consists of a descriptive thesis (“Power seeking….is biologically essential” for “living things” [6]) and a normative command (“it is ethical to further the goals of Life and it is unethical to impede them” [11]) [the "Life Theory"]. No text is ever adduced in which Nietzsche says the latter; we return to the ambiguous evidence for the former. Stern also claims, without any argument or evidence, that the “power-seeking force” is what Nietzsche variously calls “’Life,’ ‘nature,’ ‘will,’ ‘will to life’’ or the organic realm” (6) [footnote omitted]....
[A]s textual evidence for the Life Theory, Stern cites BGE 36, never noting--as Maudemarie Clark (a careful reader of texts) demonstrated thirty years ago (Clark 1990: 212-227)--that the argument Nietzsche there gives for the will to power as the “basic form of will,” from which “all organic functions” derive, invokes an explict premise (the “causality of the will”) that Nietzsche plainly rejected in the prior chapter of BGE! Obviously, then, Nietzsche cannot accept the conclusion of the argument that depends on the premise he rejects, so the passage is performing a different rhetorical function. None of this should be surprising when we remember that Stern’s Life Theory seems to be a perfect example of the mistake Nietzsche criticized the Stoics for in BGE 9, namely, offering arguments for a metaphysics of nature that was really nothing more than a projection of their own values on to nature. Stern’s flat-footed literalism leads him to miss all this, and to think that Nietzsche is “grounding” his values in supposed facts about life (i.e., making the same mistake as the Stoics), rather than engaging in the “legislation of values” (e.g., power is good) characteristic of “true” philosophers (BGE 211)....
In the end, what is most puzzling about this little volume is not that it is often wrong, relentlessly superficial, and philosophically flat-footed, although it is all of those things. Rather, it is that the author is so utterly uncurious about Nietzsche’s ideas that he cannot be bothered to ask even the simplest questions about texts whose meanings he repeatedly asserts are clear and obvious: he comes across as some presumptuous undergraduate who could not fathom how any meaning could lay beyond his limited grasp.
I usually only critique serious books by serious philosophers (e.g., my criticism of Paul Katsafanas's recent book), but since this book is in a series pitched to students and their teachers, I thought it was important to make clear how bad it was.
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