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Summary: Nietzsche: cruel, heartless, disdainful, contemptuous...?
Review: Can anyone who concludes a scholarly work about Nietzsche by dismissing him as a "miserable little man" really be trusted to give a balanced assessment of the great philosopher? No, Alexander Nehamas can't.
To him, Nietzsche was "[c]ruel and heartless, neither protective nor respectful of the sensibilities of others." The pathetic curmudgeon was "[d]isdainful and contemptuous of the values and lives of most people....[and] has offended and hurt many and will doubtless continue to do so in the future." (Speaking of contempt, in a 1998 interview Nehamas struck another low blow against Nietzsche by deriding him as a "philosopher of adolescence.") In the last, schoolmarmish pages of this book, he continues to chide Nietzsche for his "cruelty, his attacks on many of our ideas and values, on our habits and sensibilities."
To whom is Nehamas referring when he pompously invokes this royal "our"? Did Nietzsche really hold all of his readers' ideas, values, habits, and sensibilities in contempt...or just those of certain readers like Nehamas and other genteel academic leftists of his ilk, whom he despised in his own day as careerists or worse?
Poor Prof. Nehamas. He apparently expects Nietzsche to have maintained a tone of measured politesse while single-handedly changing the course of moral philosophy and profoundly affecting the aesthetic milieu of the 20th century and beyond. I guess it wasn't easy for Nietzsche to remain sensitive to everyone's feelings when he was philosophizing with a hammer.
Nietzsche would no doubt be gratified that such whining--clear evidence of slave morality--comes from no less an eminence than the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton. This in itself proves Nietzsche's prescience. He would point out that, for him, launching "attacks" on herd animals like Prof. Nehamas was both a cardinal pursuit and an exquisite pleasure. A century or so after his death, Nietzsche still has the power to upset the more weak-stomached of the scholarly horde.
Unless you're a Nietzsche-hater, avoid this unsympathetic, condescending tome!
Rating: 
Summary: There are better books than this one.
Review: Each chapter of Nehemas' book begins by problematizing an issue central to Nietzsche's philosophy. The way in which Nehemas problematizes these issues can make your head spin because he throws so many considerations at you all at once before finally resolving them in the last few pages. Although the ideas are good, they suffer from a poor presentation.
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Summary: Deep, and reads like a mistery novel
Review: I am not a philosopher by training, but have read some of the classics in the field by sheer enjoyment, some Plato, some Aristotle, others also. But none impressed me more than Nietzsche, from whose opera I have savored many books: Genealogy of Morals (fantastic), Zarathustra (enigmatic), Antichrist (outraging), Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil (don't die without reading this; if you don't read German, try Walter Kaufman's translations), and some parts of Dawn, Gay Science and Human-all-too-Human. I also read a couple of biographies. FN was a profound thinker, one of the most brilliant of all time, IMHO. And he was also a sad, lonely and pathetic man, a kind of Van Gogh in Philosophy. And this turns him also into an exceedingly interesting character. The central thesis of Nehamas book is that FN tried to build a character out of himself through his multi-style books. This character, a "free spirit", a "philosopher" in a very particular sense, or the übermensch if you will, is the common voice behind the many different literary styles he used, from the academic to the poetic to the prophetic. Nehamas wrote a very interesting book. I enjoyed it a lot and I thank him for giving me a new and surprising perspective on one of my preferred authors. And his prose does not lack a touch of drama, which is adequate to his subject, but is also unexpected in a technical book about modern philosophy. I recommend Nehamas strongly to anyone interested in Nietzsche.
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Summary: Ingenious reformulation of Nietzsche's key ideas
Review: Nietzsche's "aestheticist" turn, in Alexander Nehamas's ingenious exposition, is twofold. First, he interpreted the entire world as an enormous literary text. Secondly, he was preoccupied by creating, through the medium of his texts, a specific personality, which as Nehamas contends, was Nietzsche himself. He argues that Nietzsche's key ideas, such as the will to power, nihilism, his view of truth, his ideas on cruelty, the overman and the dreadful doctrine of the eternal recurrence (which Nehamas interprets as a psychological, as opposed to cosmological, conception) were all fused into Nietzsche's aestheticist model of "self-creation". In a move of apocalyptic boldness, Nehamas claims that the figure of the overman which Nietzsche held in such high regard, was actually Nietzsche himself as he fashioned himself through his texts, a unique individual who affirmed the sum-total of life, which includes, of course, the suffering entailed in living. The literary analogues that Nehamas uses to illustrate Nietzsche's fundamental concepts are highly illuminating. Above all, Nehamas implies that theoretical knowledge is empty compared to the radical philosophy pursued by Nietzsche, which resulted in a synthetic merging of life with art. This philosophy, combining self-reference with self-creation was why Nietzsche was, and is, "the first Modernist as well as the last Romantic." Along with Walter Kaufmann's "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ", this book is possibly the best book on Nietzsche available in English.
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Summary: How NOT to read Nietzsche
Review: Strongly influenced by an analytical interpretation of Nietzsche from Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher Nehamas does more harm to Nietzsche than good. Nehamas's own "creative" interpretation of Nietzsche is utterly irresponsible. Interpreting Nietzsche analytical only makes Nietzsche's moral properties run amok. Nehamas interprets Nietzsche like most Christians interpret the Bible: He takes away a few things he can use, dirties and confounds the remainder and reviles the whole. Nietzsche asserts, rather than believes, that "untruth" is indeed a condition of life. But he does not assert any kind of "theory of truth," as Nehamas would have us to believe. Nietzsche's moral philosophy is Descartian - doubting to believe to discover one's own perspective of truth - not a dogmatic religious truth! His intent is rather, to give us his perspective to help us discover truth in ourselves, not in Nietzsche, himself.
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Summary: How NOT to read Nietzsche
Review: Strongly influenced by an analytical interpretation of Nietzsche from Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher Nehamas does more harm to Nietzsche than good. Nehamas's own "creative" interpretation of Nietzsche is utterly irresponsible. Interpreting Nietzsche analytical only makes Nietzsche's moral properties run amok. Nehamas interprets Nietzsche like most Christians interpret the Bible: He takes away a few things he can use, dirties and confounds the remainder and reviles the whole. Nietzsche asserts, rather than believes, that "untruth" is indeed a condition of life. But he does not assert any kind of "theory of truth," as Nehamas would have us to believe. Nietzsche's moral philosophy is Descartian - doubting to believe to discover one's own perspective of truth - not a dogmatic religious truth! His intent is rather, to give us his perspective to help us discover truth in ourselves, not in Nietzsche, himself.
Rating: 
Summary: Some Content but Mostly Irrelevant
Review: This is one of the well known hatchet jobs done on Nietzsche over the last two decades in order to sell the idea that Nietzsche is a postmodernist -- a person who buys the Derridian line that there is nothing outside the text. But Nietzsche is not one of those types. Indeed, 'there is nothing outside the text' is one of those pieces of philosophical insanity that can only be compared to other such pieces: like Parmenides belief that nothing moves, or Barkeley's belief that there is no such thing as matter, or Palto's belief that things do not have their properties, and so on. The position Nehamas takes is an outgrowth of German Idealism, which is just Berkeley all over again. Nietzsche was a realist. He thought of German philosophy as a flight from reality, and a coward's philosophy designed to make a big show. The very notion of life as literature is self-contradictory. But, of course, like all postmodern theorists, Nehamas is un-selfcritical. His rectitude is all that matters, and it cannot be questioned.
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Summary: a book that deserves careful reading
Review: This now-famous book is probably the most original work on Nietzsche in English; it is about the very idea of interpretation as well as about Nietzsche.You may not agree with Mr. Nehamas's interpretation on Nietzsche, but you have to off-cap to Nehamas's striking originality.
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Summary: The best book on Nietzsche
Review: While Michael Tanner's criticism of this book in his Nietzsche is valid (Nehamas does quote way too much from The Will to Power), it is by far the only book on Nietzsche that I own that actually suggests how to use Nietzsche's philosophy in life. Who cares that the world is the will to power is a fact? This book suggests that perspectivism, will to power and surviving the thought of eternal recurrence are ways of thinking in which we can enhance our lives.
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