Abstract

A brief preface to the Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche announces the aims of the ambitious series of which this volume is a part: to provide students and nonspecialists with a handy reference volume and to help them overcome the “intimidation” they often feel when encountering a difficult thinker for the first time. Unlike the other volumes that I have seen in the Companion series, this one truly is pitched to the undergraduate and/or popular market. Of the 11 articles, only 4 are grouped under the rubric “Nietzsche as Philosopher,” although Tracy B. Strong’s essay, “Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation,” and Jörg Salaquarda’s “Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition”—both listed under part II, “The Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’s Life and Works”—in their analysis of Nietzsche’s politics and his critique of religion certainly strike philosophical, or at least theoretical, poses. So, we have 6 articles out of eleven, roughly 191 out of 403 pages, that are devoted to the analysis, or at least discussion, of Nietzsche’s philosophy as such. The remaining articles treat broadly biographical topics and Nietzsche’s reception: in the 20th Century in general, in France, and in East Asia. This proportion, sadly, echoes the larger structure of the Nietzsche legend, which often expresses a desire to explain Nietzsche’s philosophy by means of certain biographical details, and which is in fact the central topic of R.J. Hollingdale’s contribution to this volume, “The Hero as Outsider.” That the devotion of such a disproportionate amount of space to what are arguably tangential issues is not inevitable is proven by the splendid Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett, in which one article each is devoted to Spinoza’s life and his reception, with the remaining eight articles organized according to major topics in Spinoza’s philosophy: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, politics, critique of religion, et cetera, thus giving us a proper 8/2 proportion in favor of philosophy—and this vis-à-vis a philosopher with his own “extra-philosophical” legend. Of course, the Nietzsche question is complicated by National Socialism, among other things.