The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil will be essential reading for Nietzsche scholars. It challenges the naturalism that prevails in much English-language commentary, defends a novel interpretation of Nietzsche's conceptions of the ‘self’ and ‘will’, and achieves levels of hermeneutic rigour rare in the field. It does so by focussing on a particularly important and obscure text, the first part of Beyond Good and Evil. The thesis of the first part of the book is that Nietzsche adopts only a qualified kind of naturalism, according to which natural scientific explanation determines the ontology and truth of all things except human beings’ judgements and agency. For Clark and Dudrick, this qualification is Nietzsche's attempt to reconcile truth, or explanation, with normativity, or justification—or, in the Nietzschean (and perhaps overly reified) terms they employ, to reconcile the ‘will to truth’ with the ‘will to value’. On their reading, then, Nietzsche not only criticises a priori knowledge claims for overstepping the boundaries of truth—an overenthusiastic, metaphysical ‘will to value’—but also warns against an unqualified naturalism that cannot grasp normativity—a clumsy, materialist ‘will to truth’.

Agency (philosophy) · Epistemology · Good and evil · Interpretation (philosophy) · Materialism · Metaphysics · Naturalism · Reading (process) · Soul · Value (mathematics) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy