In this latest book Nietzsche scholar Maudemarie Clark draws together fourteen of her earlier papers, eleven of them previously published. She offers this collection as an overview of the current conceptual territory of debate within Nietzsche scholarship on ethics and politics. There is a certain unifying theme to all of these various papers, though they cover a wide variety of topics. Clark ties them together under two rather surprising theses: regarding politics, Nietzsche is much less conservative regarding equality, feminism, homosexuality, and other social issues than he is generally found to be by major scholars in this field; and regarding ethics, Nietzsche is less comprehensively critical of morality than he is generally thought to be, a misunderstanding grounded in a broad misunderstanding of what Nietzsche means by morality.

Clark denies that the aim of the book is to simply rescue Nietzsche from the shocking positions usually attributed to him, such as extreme skepticism, extreme in moralism, and extreme conservatism. Rather, she states, she seeks to simply make sense of Nietzsche’s often cryptic language and extreme ideas expressed throughout his texts. She is merely trying to figure out the meaning behind it all, but what she ends up discovering in every case is a much less radical Nietzsche than we think we know.

Ah! The problem of interpreting Nietzsche! This is a thorny thicket from which few escape unscathed. A general rejection of the facile validity of interpretations is expressed by Nietzsche himself when he states in Genealogy of Morals “what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are”; and interpretations of things are ” almost always mistaken and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress, and quite foreign to their nature” (GM II:12). Nonetheless, Clark gives it a commendable try!

In the field of ethics, Clarke argues in this volume against the broadly shared positions of the most renowned of Nietzsche scholars. Beginning with Walter Kaufmann and Robert Solomon, top scholars in the field have believed that Nietzsche’s famed “immorality” comprises a rejection only of a particular form of morality but not of morality itself. Clark’s treatment of this issue offers an informative survey of current interpretive scholarship on the question of Nietzsche’s immoralism, as she seeks to demonstrate that each definition is tainted by the personal values of the scholar-interpreter. Philippa Foot interprets Nietzsche to be rejecting the values of justice and the common good, belying her own preference for these values at the heart of her morality. Alexander Nehamas sees Nietzsche rejecting only universal values in his love for the distinguished individual. Frithjof Bergmann locates the essential ingredient of morality that Nietzsche rejects in the notion that human beings have free will. Clarke argues that each of these scholars defines Nietzsche’s position in relation to their own preferred definitions of morality.

Clark argues that there is no need to interpret Nietzsche by turning to our own values, because Nietzsche furnishes in his own words a complete analysis of morality. Nietzsche offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of morality in a unified account in the Genealogy of Morals. So Clark returns to this work with the aim of understanding, not the use of the word morality so much as the object picked out by the use of that word. She finds that GM is written to demonstrate that both the word and the concept are products of a complicated history where many elements have been woven together over a great length of time such that each is tightly entangled with the rest and it is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of any one element without the others or to view their synthesis either in the phenomenon or in the concept of morality. Clark’s analysis concludes that Nietzsche’s immoralism is not directed against a concern for justice, the common good, universal values, freedom, duty, or guilt, since “non-moral” versions of each of these are possible and indeed it is the major goal of the Genealogy of Morals to bring these alternative possibilities to light. So what does Nietzsche’s immorality reject? Drawing from Nietzsche’s own distinction between a wider and a narrower sense of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (30), Clark locates Nietzsche’s immoralism in a rejection of only the narrower sense of the moral whose nature and development is the subject of theGenealogy of Morals.

This book is rich in detail and compelling argument and covers a wide variety of themes. I will endeavor to share only some of the highlights here. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is Clark’s reconsideration of Nietzsche’s alleged misogyny. In the paper “Nietzsche’s Misogyny,” Clark draws upon fascinating facts from Nietzsche’s life (“psychologizing” him, as the familiar criticism goes) to argue that Nietzsche speaks harshly against women through the psychological lens of his own ressentiment. But what she concludes is compelling: that Nietzsche, that “most self-aware of men”, knows well that he suffered ressentiment following the affair with his beloved Salomé that ended so badly for him (she ran off and married his best friend, a familiar enough tale), and thus his virulent misogyny should be taken in the light of a critical self-exposure of the effects of ressentiment. Clark sees Nietzsche seeing through his own ressentiment and warning his readers of this in Beyond Good and Evil VII.

Clark works her way through many of the extreme views voiced in Nietzsche’s texts (regarding feminism, homosexuality, democracy, and many more) that result in Nietzsche’s often being categorized in the camp of extreme conservatism, showing in each case that Nietzsche leans far more left in his political and social sympathies than he is usually portrayed in much of the secondary literature.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book is Clark’s careful reconsideration of Nietzsche’s highest value–the flourishing of community or the outstanding individual? Seasoned Nietzsche scholars will want to add this work to their libraries, but students of this philosopher will also find it a wonderful introduction to the current debates in Nietzsche scholarship. The book is accessible by specialist and lay reader alike.

© 2015 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D. (Philosophy), Professor, North Carolina A&T State University.