Review: Book Reviews
Reviewed Work(s): The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Thought by
Krzysztof Michalski, Benjamin Paloff and Espen Hammer
Review by: Keith Ansell-Pearson
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn 2013), pp. 497-500
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.44.3.0497
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Book Reviews 497
Several of the authors—Ansell-Pearson, Gillespie, and Corngold—hold that Nietzsche defended an
“unashamedly elitist ‘radical aristocratism’” against the “Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality,
and fraternity” (121). If one holds the first type of nihilism, that Western modernity culminates
in nihilism, and this nihilism can be overcome, then one may be led to emphasize the aristocratic
political and military elements in Nietzsche. The future masters of Europe provide the promise
of a new culture that can generate a healthy affirmation of life. Ansell-Pearson defends this view
through an illuminating contrast with a thinker contemporary to Nietzsche, whom Nietzsche read
and admired for his “immoralism”—Jean-Marie Guyau. However, Guyau rose only to the level
of a “free thinker” in Nietzsche’s mind, not yet a “free spirit.” This essay makes an important
contribution to our understanding of Nietzsche in his historical context.
Michael Gillespie also understands nihilism as an affliction of liberal democracy that can
be cured through the breeding of a “martial aristocracy” (20). Gillespie’s thoughtful essay situates Nietzsche’s views alongside Plato’s as common responses to a basic political problem, the
necessity of violence to found and maintain a political community. Such violence is best carried
out by a class of trained warriors, yet this class itself endangers the political community with
its brute strength and power. Gillespie makes a compelling case that what distinguishes Plato
and Nietzsche is that the former developed a systematic mechanism for “soften[ing] the warrior
class,” whereas Nietzsche fails to describe how the warriors will emerge and how their power
can be moderated (25).
By contrast, Robert Guay offers an excellent rejoinder to these aristocratic readings by interpreting Nietzsche as an “anti-political” thinker. Guay understands nihilism in the third sense
described above—that for Nietzsche the world is not fully rational—and hence adopts a much
more moderate understanding of Nietzsche’s remedy for this inescapable problem. Guay argues
that there is a fundamental tension in human existence between the external influences and causes
of the human will and our inner experience of our own freedom and creativity. The relationship
between world and agent is shot through with contingency, yet the modern state attempts to do
the impossible, to confer complete control on the part of human agency. As such, Guay suggests,
Nietzsche turns away from politics and embraces an ironic and “tragicomic” approach to life
that affirms contingency (165).
In sum, Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future contains several excellent essays
on a rather neglected but crucial topic. I wish the authors had been more explicit about defining
nihilism and had recognized the competing notions of nihilism in their essays. However, several
of the essays provide invaluable insight into many facets of this multifaceted term in Nietzsche.
Jeffrey Church
University of Houston
jchurch@uh.edu
Note
1. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage,
1976), sections 2, 11.
Krzysztof Michalski, trans. Benjamin Paloff, The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of
Nietzsche’s Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 231 pp. ISBN: 978-0-691-14346-0.
Cloth, £39.50/£27.95.
Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011. 260 pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-00500-6. Cloth, £90.00/£55.00.
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498 Book Reviews
According to Krzysztof Michalski, Nietzsche’s intellectual project, from start to finish, has an
overarching and unifying theme, namely a reflection on time, including the passing of human life,
the emergence of new things, and the general finitude of existence. For him, then, it is possible to
organize Nietzsche’s thought into a coherent whole around the concept of “eternity,” where eternity
signifies a dimension of time, indeed, the core of it, its essence and engine. Typically, we think of
eternity as a refutation of time and of becoming, signaling an infinite prolongation. The author,
however, wishes to show that eternity is what can explain the transformation of the present into the
past and that it comes to the fore not outside the flow of time but in it.
The book couples this meditation on time as eternity with incisive and original accounts of
other great philosophical themes, such as love and death. Michalski is particularly illuminating
on death, making use of texts from literature as well as from philosophy. As he notes, death is not
the next step in life, but a step into the abyss since it is a radical interruption of the continuity of
existence. As he writes in his preface, “Death does not fit what I know; our confrontation with
death places us before a wall of incomprehension. Before a mystery” (vii). As a force of disruption,
death and love are perhaps comparable: “Death and love reveal the fundamental discontinuity of
our bodily presence in the world” (viii). The author locates a moment or an interval in time when
everything we are and do is brought into suspense and, in the blink of an eye (the Augenblick),
the chance of a new beginning arises. For him, this is what eternity essentially names. It is what
allows for the world to pass and to become, and as such it can be said to characterize our lives in
terms of their corporeal reality. Because of the eternity in time we are unable to unite any single
moment of life into one, content-filled totality, so that it amounts to a fundamental diversification
of a life. Michalski quotes Nietzsche when he writes that eternal life is not another transcendent
life but the very life we live.
In short, the essential feature of a life is that it is marked by discontinuity, and is this not the
essential challenge presented to a life? If it is, then why is it so common to regard the essential
discontinuity of life as a sickness to be treated? According to Michalski, Nietzsche calls this pathology “nihilism,” locating it in history as science and in science in general, but also in morality and
religion: morality seeks to provide a totalizing account of good and evil, while religion takes God
for absolute truth. We seem to be creatures who want continuity in our lives but who also prize, on
occasion, discontinuity (since we are offered the chance of a new beginning). To think and work
through this conundrum we necessarily have recourse to metaphor and Michalski suggests that
Nietzsche’s central metaphor is that of fire or the “flame of eternity,” which, as he rightly notes,
is an ancient metaphor for comprehending an essential dimension of life, if not its most essential
one. Recognition of this can lead to some far-reaching insights, as when the author contends that
the desire for the superhuman or overman “is inscribed in the very act of life: it defines life, it is life
itself, its constant disquiet, which cannot be quieted” (162).
As is perhaps evident to the reader, Michalski’s study is as much poetic meditation as it is a work
of philosophical engagement. With this book we are in the welcome presence of a gifted writer as
well as a philosophically literate mind. The book is essentially made up of nine essays, and taken
together, they provide a series of highly instructive meditations on core existential themes in
Nietzsche, such as the meaning of time, love, and death. In addition, the author makes a valuable
contribution to our understanding of core doctrines in Nietzsche, notably the death of God, nihilism, and eternal recurrence. I concur with the author when he contends that Nietzsche is primarily
engaged in philosophical therapy. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a rejection of the world around us and
an attempt to find a way out of the crisis and an attempt at liberation. For Nietzsche, the author
claims, the world is sick and humanity is in need of liberation from a deep malaise, which he calls
nihilism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is seen to arise “from rejection, from outrage at the world, and
from the pain that the world causes” (14). Furthermore, we will come to understand the world as
it is only when we learn to deal with this pain and recognize its power. The essential demand here
is that we respond to the problem of nihilism. Philosophy is said to lead us to the overcoming of
nihilism and ultimately to “affirmative creation” (15). Although there is much here that I agree
with, I wish the author had developed a more nuanced appreciation of Nietzsche on nihilism.
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Book Reviews 499
For Nietzsche nihilism has multiple meanings and manifestations (there are active, passive,
and ecstatic nihilisms, for example); it is not necessarily something to be judged as bad and to
lament (it entails a necessary working through); and it can also work as a valuable “purifying”
movement (Nietzsche will at times write in favor of a “contagious nihilism”). In some senses it
is necessary perhaps to save Nietzsche from the charge of being a nihilist, but not in all senses.
In this book, though, Michalski provides a thought-provoking study of important, if surprisingly neglected, existential themes in Nietzsche, including time, mortality, and finitude. He is a
graceful writer as well as a thinker of subtlety and depth and, as such, offers an engaging guide
to these topics in Nietzsche.
In his wide-ranging study, Espen Hammer seeks to illuminate the philosophy of time in some
major currents of post-Kantian thought, including figures such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
(to whom two chapters are devoted), Heidegger, and Adorno. His interest is not in time as an
object of metaphysics but rather what it means to exist as a temporal being or agent. Several of
the authors he deals with, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno, lament the hegemony of
clock time within modern life, locating within it a homogenizing power that deprives life of any
sense of significance. Of course, an essential contrast can be made between Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche: where the one offers a melancholic response to time’s passing, even refusing to accept
finitude and transience (since they are held not to be truly real), the other builds a thinking of time
on the basis of an affirmation and as a condition of any serious notion of “becoming.” But does
Nietzsche’s attempt to radically rethink time and desire withstand critical scrutiny? According to
Hammer, it does not since, he contends, “The re-directing of desire towards the transient world
becomes a narcissistic game incapable of overcoming the problem of nihilism” (9). In short, there
is no acknowledgment or recognition of the “other” in Nietzsche and that would serve to disrupt
the sovereign certainties and creations of a narcissistic ego as represented, according to Hammer,
in Nietzsche’s figure of the Űbermensch. Nietzsche’s philosophy is, therefore, too focused on the
value of unhampered creation, especially self-creation. Of course, Nietzsche has been roundly
criticized on numerous occasions, including by feminist readers of Nietzsche such as Luce Irigaray
(in her text The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche), for espousing a philosophy of creation and
affirmation centered on the self. Nietzsche’s model of creation is that of the artist who shuns all
external authority. The problem with this radical rejection of authority is that it deprives us of
any measure by which the creations of the artist-philosopher can be valued, even by himself or
herself. This means that the creations of the philosopher-artist, who is a legislative type, threaten
to become arbitrary and lacking in historical weight, with the result that the experiences they give
rise to risk being empty: “There is no authority behind them with reference to which they can be
justified as worthy of our attention and interest” (159). Hammer also has the worry, shared by
many readers of Nietzsche, that eternal recurrence has abhorrent consequences: “Is he not asking
us to condone moral evil, and indeed even encouraging us to rejoice in its return? [. . .] I cannot
want my own life to return without wanting the world in which my life has unfolded, as well as
the history of this world, to return” (158).
Hammer is a serious and instructive reader of key developments in post-Kantian European
philosophy, and he has an important story to tell about attempts to rethink temporality within this
tradition. However, his readings are often quickly executed, and I would have liked much more
concerted engagements with key figures, such as Nietzsche. Although his reading of Nietzsche is
pertinent and thought-provoking in places, it also strikes me as superficially executed (it is often
imprecise and even inaccurate: at one point the second of his “Untimely Meditations” is given a
date of 1876, while Nietzsche is said to be influenced by Pythagorean doctrine from 1881 onward,
when it is already referred to in the 1874 meditation On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life).
He has neither read recent important literature on the key texts that he focuses his attention on, such
as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, nor engaged with the most recent contributions on the core doctrines
such as eternal recurrence or the politics of agonism in Nietzsche. More fundamentally, he fails to
recognize that the main problem he is locating in Nietzsche’s thinking––the crisis of authority––is
itself thematized as a major problem within philosophical modernity by Nietzsche himself, notably
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500 Book Reviews
in Zarathustra, and in ways that he could have more productively engaged with. Having made this
criticism, let me stress the extent to which this is a highly instructive and valuable study of the
phenomenon of temporality in Kant and key strands of post-Kantian thought.
Keith Ansell-Pearson
University of Warwick
k.j.ansell-pearson@warwick.ac.uk
Christian J. Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008. 386 pp. ISBN: 9780521880565. Cloth, €80.99/£107.
In Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, Christian Emden explores “Nietzsche’s response
to the historical and political culture in Europe in the age of the modern nation state” (xi). The book is
volume 88 of the Ideas in Context series (edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully). Emden’s goal
is to position Nietzsche firmly in the history of modern political thought, starting from the belief that
“Nietzsche’s intellectual and political environment plays a prominent role in his historical thought
and his understanding of the political” (xi). Emden argues that Nietzsche’s political philosophy is
one of “political realism” in contrast to the ideological fault lines of modern political culture. What
I would like to learn, then, is what Nietzsche’s political realism looks like––for example, with respect
to his concern for Europe’s future, expressed in the figure of “the good European”; what Emden’s
contextual approach adds to more philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche’s political thought; and
what the present value of Nietzsche’s political realism (based on his view of life as will to power)
might be, particularly for contemporary Europe.
Emden delineates in six chapters Nietzsche’s politico-philosophical development from his s tudent
years in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogy of the late 1880s (chap. 5) and to
his “good Europeanism” (chap. 6) as responses to the “failure of neo-humanism” (chap. 1), the
“formation of Imperial Germany” (chap. 2), “the crisis of historical culture” (chap. 3), and the rise
of cultural anthropology (chap. 4).
In the first chapter, Emden argues that in order to make a valid assessment of modernity, Nietzsche
continuously emphasized the importance of historical knowledge and that he owed this insight to
his philological studies, which he conducted under the direction of Jahn and Ritschl. Their classical studies were “embedded in a political program, largely due to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s role in
the Prussian state: neo-humanist ideals of Bildung can only have an effect once they are part of an
institutional setting” (29). Remarkably, Emden claims this without considering Nietzsche’s sharp
criticism of the “historical sense,” which he addressed specifically in HL. He also claims that the
striving for an “ideal humanity” by means of classical studies was a “political” ideal (rather than
a purely aesthetic and cultural one) by stating that “the nostalgic vision of Greek antiquity [. . .]
contains a utopian dimension that, almost automatically, politicized any appreciation of antiquity”
(30, emphasis mine) and by addressing Nietzsche’s main philosophical topic (“modernity”) as
“a European political culture” (303). Emden does not problematize these statements in light of
Nietzsche’s repeated claims that culture and state are opposites, that culture should remain as remote
as possible from politics, and that he was the last “anti-political” German (see references below).
Instead, Emden states that “the presumed centrality of the aesthetic that is invariably attributed to his
writings is in need of much revision” (96) without clarifying why it is important that the presumed
centrality of the aesthetic in Nietzsche’s philosophy be revised.
In chapter 2, Emden argues that Nietzsche’s historical method took an “anthropological turn” in
the early 1870s, which continued to influence his genealogical work of the 1880s, suggesting (rather
than proving on the basis of comparative and textual analysis) that this was under the direction of
his Basel colleagues Burckhardt, Bachofen, and Overbeck. Interesting is Emden’s reference to the
fact that Nietzsche submitted his lecture on Socrates and Tragedy to the Preussische Jahrbuch for
publication. This magazine was edited by Von Treitschke, who was also a close friend of Overbeck
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