VOLUME VI, ISSUE I & II, SPRING & FALL 2013
The consensus about Nietzsche is that he is constructivist, but not constructive. Iconoclastic, yes; the great negator, yes; embodying the subversion and radical critique of deconstruction with a pleasing individualism, yes. But is he someone who can help us? Who can heal people? Who can affirm? Not Nietzsche. This is despite the fact that many other philosophers, including complicated Continental philosophers, have their names routinely involved as tropes of affirmation: Heidegger lets us embrace being, Wittgenstein—the later—houses us in a reassuring plurality of language-games. Even the dark and skeptical Foucault was, at least in the 1980s, seen as affirming the realities of power. Even the later Derrida was, for a brief and absurd time, seen as an Uncle Cuddly of forgiveness. Nietzsche, perhaps the most brilliant of them all, yet left in an outsider limbo, where, admittedly as Coleridge would put it, “he on honey dew had fed/and drunk the milk of paradise,” but not to any affirmative end. This collection, though, presents a different Nietzsche, one reflecting the following magnificent quote from Human, All Too Human (Hollingdale translation): “In the history of mankind the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive, but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies—those which are called evil—are the cyclopean architects and roadmakers of humanity” (§246).
Horst Hutter has long been known as one of the most charismatic and innovative Nietzscheans. From his base in Montréal’s most experimental Anglophone University, Concordia, Hutter has roved far and wide, in a Nietzschean way living out his takes of instruction. No one would be more suited to edit a volume on Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Teaching. He is ably assisted by Eli Friedland, who contributes a really original essay to close out the volume, to which I will return in good time. The volume begins with a few essays devoted explicitly to the question of teaching, followed by more specialized essays which radiate out to specific areas or treat the question of teaching more abstractly. Nathalie Lachance sets the agenda in an essay positioned early on in the book when she argues that to turn Nietzsche from questioning constructivist to constructive builder one has to read Nietzsche against himself to understand his call for reading beyond books as a call for reading beyond his books, and often not to take what he says literally or as Gospel truth.
These essayists could be accused of wanting to rework Nietzsche, to make him palatable for a politically correct twenty-first century agenda. But, more truly, these essays answer the persistent question of why the readings of Nietzsche that earlier generations have offered us are so unsatisfying. Lachance’s essay, for instance, turns around customary conjectures that Nietzsche vaulted beyond the philology in which he had been trained by instead arguing that Nietzsche thought most philologists were simply bad philologists; a truly proficient philology would be eminently Nietzschean. So often, Nietzsche’s brashness and dynamism, his orientation towards action, have made people think that he was not au fond, what the root meaning of philology indicates: a lover of words.
..to continue reading entire article, please click below read more