Agonist Spring 2020

Bildungsroman” is “consciously constructed” because, though Nietzsche did
not know all of the details of the three free spirit works before he began, he
did plan out (at least by the time of the publication of HH in 1878) its main
“plot points,” as it were – the ascetically motivated commitment to the will
to truth begun in HH, a critique of moral prejudices set out in D, and a selfovercoming
of a moralized conception of the will to truth in the final work
(which in the end becomes the famous “death of God” passage in GS 125), and
the subsequent need to return to tragic art. 2 Meyer’s long introduction (pp.
3—81) explains and lays out his argument for the position, and subsequent
chapters present in detail his reading of each of Nietzsche’s middle period
books.
The introduction is an interpretive tour de force, and in many ways the
strongest part of the book. The appeal of his approach is clear – if Meyer is
right, then the reading of a book like HH becomes considerably less confusing.
Part of the struggle any reader of Nietzsche’s corpus must have had with
that work is that the positions it espouses break sharply from ones Nietzsche
took up earlier and later in his career; and yet one cannot simply dismiss it,
because it takes but a moment to see that it is written with the same verve and
incisiveness that mark all of Nietzsche’s other works. 3 What was needed, as
now seems obvious in retrospect, was a way to capture Nietzsche’s ambivalent
presence in the book. Meyer provides that – HH is the beginning of an
educative project, but one where Nietzsche himself is the one being educated.
He is present as the Nietzsche who consciously takes on an absolute commitment
to truth-seeking in its modern form (i.e., by means of modern natural
science, not transcendent metaphysics); but he is also present as the author of
2 One of the more interesting and controversial theses of Meyer’s book is that the call
is actually just as much to comic art as tragic, and that Nietzsche in fact responds to that
call, too, in his works of 1888. I will not focus on that aspect of his thesis in this review, but
interested readers should consult chapter 8, and Meyer 2018.
3 Though, of course, some have tried. Laurence Lampert has suggested that Nietzsche
in effect disowned HH in 1886 (see Lampert 2017). Meyer responds to Lampert (to my mind,
persuasively) on pp. 24—26.
the free spirit project who knows already that such a commitment will prove
to be self-undermining.
Meyer marshals an impressive array of circumstantial evidence, with the
goal of showing that his approach is the best potential candidate for understanding
the works. He appeals to three kinds of evidence – (1) ex post
evidence from Nietzsche’s later works suggesting that he saw the contents
of the free spirit works as unified and building to a Selbstaufhebung of the
will to truth; 4 (2) ex ante evidence, showing that the stage of thought Nietzsche
reached by the end of the free spirit works had already been sketched
out in some detail in Nietzsche’s earlier works; 5 and finally, (3) contemporaneous
evidence, especially from Nietzsche’s letters and unpublished drafts,
plans, and sketches from the middle period, showing that Nietzsche wrote
them rapidly, often conceiving of them as direct sequels or continuations of
each other, and throughout with the plan that they would be written in some
sense for himself rather than for others. The overall effect of the evidence is
strong – Meyer’s approach allows him not just to tell a satisfying narrative of
Nietzsche’s development from 1875—1882, but to do so in a way that makes
philosophical (and not merely biographical) sense of the transition from the
early to the middle period, and doesn’t simply dismiss Nietzsche’s later descriptions
of that development, as scholars before him have tended to do.
It is not a knock-down argument, and the evidence is all technically equivocal;
Meyer himself admits that there is no smoking gun passage which proves
that Nietzsche was, before the publication of HH, planning the project Meyer
describes. But he nonetheless achieves his goal – his is clearly the most con-
4 The most important passages are the sections in EH discussing the free spirit works,
the prefaces added to the second editions of those works in 1886—7, and the discussion of
the self-overcoming of Christian morality in GM III:27. Also important are two letters to
Nietzsche’s publisher Fritzsch in 1886 (KSB 7:730 and 740).
5 Here, the key passages are BT 18, the early unpublished essays TL and PTA (all three of
which sketch versions of the idea of the self-undermining of the will to truth), and SE on the
need for self-education.
3
184 185
4