Bernard Reginster

This was a dense, complex argument that is difficult to summarize. The difficulty is probably with the subject material, because Nietzsche, as the author notes, is famously, possibly deliberately, obscure and indirect in his writings, and his central writings are epigrammatic and fragmentary. Prof. Reginster is clearly a master of all of Nietsche's works, and uses extensive quotes in his arguments. He states the central concerns of the philosophy as understanding the eternal recurrence and the will to power, as responses to identifying meaning in life without rejecting suffering and looking to an eternal reward to justify the difficulties that life entails.

Nietzsche can be thought of as a response to the despair of Shopenhauer and the philosophy of compassion that Schopenhauer used to shed some despair over meaninglessness of life. Nietzsche rejects compassion, the sense that suffering in others is shared, and thus makes sense, by embracing suffering in the will to power. The will to power seeks to suffer, because suffering is resistance to the will, and it is the overcoming of resistance to the will that satisfies the master and "overman". Suffering as the price of attaining eternal leisure is the goal of a slave. The eternal recurrence is a very difficult concept in Nietzsche's thought; it is not clear if it has a real meaning as a cosmological concept, or as a emotional concept. The idea that one will really re-live this life eternally has troublesome paradoxes - for instance, if the subject recalls that life has been relived that is not the same life as the first act, although recall is essential to the emotional meaning of the eternal recurrence. It might be interpreted as a affirmation - this I would do again - but that seems somewhat weak.

I spent a long time with this book, somewhat fitfully, late in evenings when the arguments and the wine would make me sleepy. I might return to Ecce Homo, as a brief re-reading of Nietzsche. I read the Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spake Zarathustra in college.… (más)