Living with Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us

Robert C. Solomon

ago 2003 · Oxford University Press

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Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most popular and controversial philosophers of the last 150 years. Narcissistic, idiosyncratic, hyperbolic, irreverent--never has a philosopher been appropriated, deconstructed, and scrutinized by such a disparate array of groups, movements, and schools of thought. Adored by many for his passionate ideas and iconoclastic style, he is also vilified for his lack of rigor, apparent cruelty, and disdain for moral decency. In Living with Nietzsche, Solomon suggests that we read Nietzsche from a very different point of view, as a provocative writer who means to transform the way we view our lives. This means taking Nietzsche personally. Rather than focus on the "true" Nietzsche or trying to determine "what Nietzsche really meant" by his seemingly random and often contradictory pronouncements about "the Big Questions" of philosophy, Solomon reminds us that Nietzsche is not a philosopher of abstract ideas but rather of the dazzling personal insight, the provocative challenge, the incisive personal probe. He does not try to reveal the eternal verities but he does powerfully affect his readers, goading them to see themselves in new and different ways. It is Nietzsche's compelling invitation to self-scrutiny that fascinates us, engages us, and guides us to a "rich inner life." Ultimately, Solomon argues, Nietzsche is an example as well as a promulgator of "passionate inwardness," a life distinguished by its rich passions, exquisite taste, and a sense of personal elegance and excellence.

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Robert C. Solomon is Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of more than twenty-five books including Passion for Wisdom (OUP, 1999), The Joy of Philosophy (OUP, 1999), What Nietzsche Really Said (2000), Introducing Philosophy (OUP, 2002), What is an Emotion? (OUP, 2002), Spirituality for the Skeptic (OUP, 2002), and Not Passion's Slave (OUP, 2002).