Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist

Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist by Berkowitz, Peter. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780674624436.

Once regarded as a conservative critic of culture, then enlisted by the court theoreticians of Nazism, Nietzsche has come to be revered by postmodern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who revealed the perspectival character of all knowledge and broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy. In Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, Peter Berkowitz challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsches philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought. Berkowitz argues that Nietzsches thought is rooted in extreme and conflicting opinions about metaphysics and human nature. Discovering a deep unity in Nietzsches work by exploring the structure and argumentative movement of a wide range of his books, Berkowitz shows that Nietzsche is a moral and political philosopher in the Socratic sense whose governing question is, "What is the best life?" Nietzsche, Berkowitz argues, puts forward a severe and aristocratic ethics, an ethics of creativity, that demands that the few human beings who are capable acquire a fundamental understanding of and attain total mastery over the world. Following the path of Nietzsches thought, Berkowitz shows that this mastery, which represents a suprapolitical form of rule and entails a radical denigration of political life, is, from Nietzsches own perspective, neither desirable nor attainable. Out of the colorful and richly textured fabric of Nietzsches books, Peter Berkowitz weaves an interpretation of Nietzsches achievement that is at once respectful and skeptical, an interpretation that brings out the love of truth, the courage, and the yearning for the good that mark Nietzsches magisterial effort to live an examined life by giving an account of the best life.