A review of Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Christopher Janaway proposes to “transmit something of the richness and reward to be found in reading Nietzsche’s texts themselves” (p. 2). In the hands of a scholar less skilled than Janaway, such a proclamation would be a red flag to the philosophical reader that a lot of bad paraphrase and mimicry of Nietzsche’s writing style was in the offing. There is, happily, none of the latter, and very little of the former, in this intelligent and illuminating book, which aims to defend two rather precise theses about reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: first, that Nietzsche’s method of writing is intended to engage the reader emotionally or affectively; and second, that such affective engagement is a necessary precondition for altering the reader’s views about evaluative questions — that “without the rhetorical provocations, without the revelation of what we find gruesome, shaming, embarrassing, comforting, and heart-warming we would neither comprehend nor be able to revalue our current values” (p. 4; cf. pp. 96-98).
June 4, 2008 at 9:08 am
Excellent points! I remember reading most of Nietzsche’s works one summer and noticing this compared to the other philosophy writers, especially the Americans with their pragmatism. It is a solid argument, for you have to bring the reader into the argument emotionally if you want to change their belief or values around a certain topic.