<i>Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works Scott Jenkins Michael Ure . Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008. xiv + 269 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1996-9. Cloth, $80. Nietzsche's middle works certainly have not received the attention they deserve. Too often they are written off as a mistaken turn to positivism or treated only as imperfect formulations of the provocative views in ethics, metaphysics, and moral psychology that we find in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. Michael Ure's Nietzsche's Therapy aims to remedy this situation. He argues that in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first edition of The Gay Science we find a distinctively "moderate" Nietzsche who advocates and practices the art of self-cultivation through providing his reader with a range of penetrating psychological analyses. This Nietzsche, on Ure's reading, has deep affinities with the Stoics and with Freud. Accordingly, the stated aim of the book as a whole is to illuminate "the nature and purpose of Nietzsche's conception of self-cultivation by showing its conceptual and ethical affinities to Stoicism and its invention of the conceptual territory now occupied by psychoanalysis" (13). Ure's reading of the middle writings succeeds in directing our attention to this moderate Nietzsche, whose accounts of self-evasion, vanity, and the multiple roles of humor in a human life mark him as a psychologist of the first rank. But this book comes up short in other ways. The notion of self-cultivation that Ure sees in Nietzsche is not as clear as it might be. More important, instead of describing how Nietzsche's work anticipates central notions in Freud, Ure tends to read Nietzsche through Freud, sometimes obscuring what is distinctive in Nietzsche through his extensive employment of Freudian terminology. Similar problems arise in Ure's discussions of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Stoicism. Chapter 1 is largely an examination of Alexander Nehamas's account of Nietzsche as an advocate of philosophy as the art of living. Ure criticizes Nehamas on a number of points, two of which are particularly worth discussing here. First, he argues that Nehamas overestimates the importance of literature for the sort of self-cultivation that Nietzsche means to recommend to us. In opposition to Nehamas's claim that the art of living is practiced primarily in writing, Ure maintains that for Nietzsche a philosopher succeeds in cultivating and creating himself only if he actually lives in a particular manner. In support of this claim Ure appeals almost exclusively to Nietzsche's third Untimely Meditation, "Schopenhauer as Educator," where Nietzsche clearly does recommend Schopenhauer as a model of a philosophical life largely on the basis of how he lived. But this appeal to SE weakens Ure's case, both because the essay lies outside Nietzsche's middle works (as Ure divides Nietzsche's writings) and because the portrait of Schopenhauer we find there arises from Nietzsche's engagement with his writings. Ure also maintains that Nehamas's attribution to Nietzsche of an aestheticist model of self-cultivation, which takes the unity and originality of literary figures as its ideal, is an imposition of modernism of the sort Nietzsche opposes. But passages from the middle works seem to support this aestheticist approach. Consider, for example, Nietzsche's well-known praise of those who "give style" to their character through surveying their strengths and weaknesses and fitting them into "an artistic plan" (GS 290). Here it seems uncontroversial that Nietzsche takes art as a model for life. A second point of criticism partially remedies this weakness in the case against Nehamas. Ure notes that the sort of self-cultivation that Nehamas attributes to Nietzsche seems to require that we possess a great degree of control over our lives, which is at odds with Nietzsche's emphasis on the influence of mere chance (GS 277). Indeed, Ure notes that in some contexts Nietzsche aims to explain our belief in the complete freedom of the will through appeal to human pride and the feeling of power (46; see D 128). This suggests to Ure that possessing the ideal of being...