The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism Book

Nietzsche's esoteric works lend themselves to enough misinterpretation and confusion that one should never turn down a chance to get clarification. This is a good book for that purpose

Bernard Reginster's 290 pages include a useful 20-page introduction and a surprisingly interesting footnote section at the end, also about 20 pages. The four chapters, or sections, of the book concentrate on Nietzsche's ethics.

Reginster emphasizes Nietzsche's two unprecedented contributions to ethics: the Will to Power and the Revaluation of Values. While referring to the interpretations other philosophers have given to Nietzsche's writings, his own focus is the context in which Nietzsche developed his ethics; for example, the importance of understanding Schopenhauer as the wall against which Nietzsche butts his head.

This context explains a lot: the source of modern moral despair, the emergence of nihilism from the ethics of compassion, and other modern ideas that Nietzsche took on. It gives meaning to the idea of becoming as a more important moral concept than being. It emphasizes Nietzsche's thought as a mindset rather than a morality, an appeal to the presumed facts of human nature, albeit from a masculine point of view. And it explains in detail the vital role of overcoming for Nietzsche's world view.

Nietzsche could easily be the philosopher of professional sports in the capitalist world if the people in sports cared one whit about philosophy in the first place. But the author takes time to explain many of the more cruel epigrams Nietzsche wrote -- the ones about the weak -- not to explain them away, but to give them an interesting and plausible context that doesn't come across in Nietzsche's own writing. The picture of Nietzsche that evolves in this book is that of a thinker more concerned with man's salvation right here on earth, not in some beyond; a philosopher trying single-handedly to reverse the damage inflicted on the human mind by what he saw as his century's bad philosophy added to two millenia of awful moral capitulation.

Reginster corrects much of what he considers the common misconstrual of Nietzsche's concepts and propositions. The author is clear and he makes the subject interesting. But however much Nietzsche may have been misunderstood, there can be no doubt as to the soil in which his philosophy found fertile ground. It's nice of Reginster to try to fix that.