A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

For Nietzsche, as for Spinoza, to be human is to be part of nature, and nature itself is seen as having no final end in view. Nietzsche speaks less of freedom of will (which he sees as a historical fiction to bolster man's self-importance) than of strength or weakness of will, the aim being to achieve as far as possible mastery of ourselves and our circumstances. If put in these terms we are still at no great distance from Spinoza. Nietzsche lacks his predecessor's supreme trust in reason - rather, for him, reason is only one of the elements required, and scarcely the most important, to achieve self-mastery. Further, his radical individualism means that many of the qualities traditionally associated with the good life - including friendship, love and social relationships generally - are seen as so many distractions from the project of self-overcoming. 

Simon May is at pains to show that Nietzsche is not, as has sometimes been claimed, an existentialist - for him, we are not free to choose any values we wish; indeed, in an ultimate sense we are not free at all. We inherit our values from the particular society we live in; insofar as we can break away from them this is a matter of reason, knowledge and experience, and a matter of submitting ourselves to the greatest number of perspectives on life. 

Even then, given that we live in a particular historical period, we only have a limited number of perspectives available to us. Most famously, he attempts a "transvaluation of all values", but in order to do this he must show us how, historically, moralities are generated. His historical genealogies are not, as May allows, particularly convincing. Nietzsche, of course, sympathizes with the heroic morality which is loftily concerned only with exalting the good rather than delineating the bad, and has little concern with those of a lower caste who cannot rise to such a conception of the good. 

It is scarcely surprising if those so excluded should counter the heroic morality with a morality of their own which, for Nietzsche, values weakness and impotence instead of strength and power. This "slave-morality" is, of course, identified in a somewhat caricature-like fashion with Christian morals as such. As May shows, Nietzsche's analysis, though surely a historical travesty, is not simply a matter of championing the one against the other - he does, for example, allow that his slave-morality has brought about a more sophisticated and deeper awareness of selfhood than was possible with a heroic morality. But nonetheless Nietzsche's notion of justice remains a deeply unsatisfactory one: it is simply a matter of what is best for the "higher" man and to hell with all the rest who are incapable of a Nietzschean heroics of self-overcoming. 

May doesn't attempt to exculpate him here; certainly while this scarcely prescribes such evident evils as Nazism, it certainly opens the way for them. Central to Nietzsche's project is his assault on the notion of truth. Here there is a central divergence of interpretation in the literature. Whereas according to one tradition (predominantly French) Nietzsche is an out-and-out relativist, telling us that the truth is something forever unattainable, that language itself is metaphorical through and through, so that all we have is interpretations, another tradition of Nietzsche scholarship (predominantly Anglo-Saxon) sees him, apart from some pardonable exaggerations of language, to be essentially empiricist in the matter of truth. 

It has to be said that Nietzsche is not the most consistent or precise of philosophers, yet the latter view is surely the more viable one. For May, he does not say that truth is impossible, only that it is difficult to attain, and that what a society offers to us as truth may not in fact be so. We have, as he puts it, "no organ for knowledge" and are poorly equipped for arriving at profound truths. The discipline of science, for example, is one that is not natural to us, and it is no wonder that the truths of science are often counter-intuitive. Further, he suggests that we need not take it as an ultimate value - there may be values that are more important to us. Indeed, a measure of untruth may be necessary for our psychic survival. 

To be able to take the world as it seems, to believe in appearances, to "dare to be superficial" may be essential for a flourishing life, which may require too that we are able to deceive ourselves. If we need art it is "in order not to perish of the truth" - though, as May points out, this is only one part of Nietzsche's subtle analysis of aesthetic values. In his explicitly anti-religious stance, Nietzsche is concerned (as was Epicurus before him) to free us of the fears which he believes religion has instilled in us. He notes how the loss of belief in Christianity does not bring with it the abolition of Christian moral values - if God is dead, no one seems to have noticed. Atheism, that is, does not abolish guilt or bad conscience. 

For example, one thinks of the great Victorian sage, George Eliot (about whom Nietzsche is characteristically rude) who, speaking of God, immortality and duty, is alleged to have remarked "how unbelievable is the first, how inconceivable the second, and yet how pre-emptory and absolute the third". Nietzsche, by contrast, urges us to "live dangerously". If, however, he is no existentialist, his ethics is like theirs in being singularly empty of content. Morality exists as a project: good and bad remains to be established by experiments on ourselves. We cannot know in advance. 

This is a clear and informative account of Nietzsche's ideas, particularly valuable in taking the issue of truth as a central test of those ideas. Nietzsche is a particularly tricky thinker - maddeningly vague, often when he most needs to be precise, and sometimes more provocative than illuminating. May presents him as perhaps more systematic than he was, yet it is remarkable too how prescient he can be. Nietzsche's understanding of the self as a collection of warring drives rather than as a single coherent identity conforms not only with Freud, but with current ideas of the self, whilst his naturalism and his account of morality as a sort of collective illusion, accords well with current ideas in evolutionary biology. He is not a thinker one can trust - he has a partial and sometimes highly suspect understanding of ethics - but neither is he one we can afford to overlook. 

Review article by Roger Caldwell