"Nietzsche did his philosophizing while he was coming apart at the seams. His writing is hard for readers to find their way around because he was all over the place when he produced it. But it's philosophy of coming apart at the seams and being all over the place, and also philosophy as a way of coping with that predicament-which makes it both fascinating and important. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? has three main tasks on its agenda. Nietzsche is hard to make sense of; this is a guide, a book that shows you how to read him for yourself. Second, Nietzsche coped with his disintegrating self by philosophizing, and so this is a work that takes up disunified agency through Nietzsche's own engagement with the topic. Third and finally, Nietzsche managed his fragmenting personality by inventing one after another meaning of life for himself; examining those inventions and the job they did for him is an occasion to ask what a meaning of life is for"--
Nietzsche wrote the philosophical work for which he is most famous while he was coming apart at the seams. The circumstances of Nietzsche's dramatic psychological disintegration make his writing, while popular, often hard for readers to understand. Elijah Millgram here argues for a new framework for making sense of Nietzsche-one that transforms the way we read him.
Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? argues that Nietzsche's late works (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards) should not be read as straightforwardly endorsing a consistent or systematic set of philosophical claims. Rather, these late works display Nietzsche living through a series of different personalities or philosophical perspectives. Each perspective embodies a different way of seeing the world, deploys different values, highlights certain features while occluding others, and is motivated by a different dominant drive. What one perspective emphasizes can be left out by another; what one perspective presents as valuable can be seen as neutral or even as damaging from another; what engenders the appearance of coherence or order in one perspective can do the opposite in another. Millgram claims that insofar as each human life embodies a perspective, and insofar as each of Nietzsche's late texts exhibits a distinct perspective, we can think of each of the late works as written
by a different author.
Millgram provides seven such readings of Nietzsche's most famous later works, and two concluding chapters discuss Nietzsche's perspectivism, as well as the account Nietzsche gives of why his very difficult life was nonetheless one that he could look back on without regret.
