Nietzsche's Free Spirit Works A Dialectical Reading

Between 1878 and 1882, Nietzsche published what he called 'the free spirit works': Human, All Too Human; Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Often approached as a mere assemblage of loosely connected aphorisms, these works are here re-interpreted as a coherent narrative of the steps Nietzsche takes in educating himself toward freedom that executes a dialectic between scientific truth-seeking and artistic life-affirmation. Matthew Meyer's new reading of these works not only provides a more convincing explanation of their content but also makes better sense of the relationship between them and Nietzsche's larger oeuvre. His argument shows how these texts can and should be read as a unified project even while they present multiple, in some cases conflicting, images of the free spirit. The book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Nietzsche's philosophy and especially to those puzzled about how to understand the peculiarities of the free spirit works.

Introduction; 1. Interpreting Nietzsche's free spirit works; 2. A defense of the dialectical reading; Part I. The Ascetic Camel: 3. For the love of truth: Human, All Too Human; 4. An Epicurean in exile: Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow; Part II. The Dragon-Slaying Lion: 5. Undermining the prejudices of morality: Daybreak; 6. The Selbstaufhebung of the will to truth: The Gay Science I–III; Part III. The Dionysian Child: 7. Incipit Tragoedia: from The Gay Science IV to Thus Spoke Zarathustra; 8. Incipit Parodia: from the free spirit to the philosophy of the future?

Matthew Meyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients (2014) and a co-editor of Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy (Cambridge, forthcoming).