Nietzsche's System

by John Richardson

This book argues, against recent interpretations, that Nietzsche does in fact have a metaphysical system --but that this is to his credit. Rather than renouncing philosophy's traditional project, he still aspires to find and state essential truths , both descriptive and valuative, about us and the world. These basic thoughts organize and inform everything he writes; by examining them closely we can find the larger structure and unifying sense of his strikingly diverse views. With rigor and conceptual specificity, Richardson examines the will-to-power ontology and maps the values that emerge from it. He also considers the significance of Nietzsche's famous break with Plato--replacing the concept of "being" with that of "becoming." By its conservative method, this book tries to do better justice to the truly radical force of Nietzsche's ideas--to demonstrate more exactly their novelty and interest.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

John Richardson is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is a co-editor of Nietzsche (2001) in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just because Nietzsche claimed he was anti-systematic, doesn't mean there isn't a system to his work.

[Pundapog · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant solutions and insights on all aspects of Nietzsche's system.

Illustrates that the rhyme of Nietzsche's work is secondary to its reason.

[Paul Hampson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had wondered if a detailed working out of the doctrine of the Will to Power would be published. Despite 'decisive refutations' of the doctrine as a product of the mature Nietzsche (Montinari, Clark, Leiter,) and the (to my mind unconvincing) attempts to use the doctrine (Schrift - argument too weak, Deleuze - argument lacks detail), Richardson bravely attempts to see where the doctrine might lead us if we take it to be central to Nietzsche's work.
Some of the reading is unpleasant, since the attempts to cleave the Will to Power from some of Nietzsche's more notorious passages, accusations of anti-semitism, sexism, etc, would be seen to have less weight than writers such as Kaufmann would have it. However, Richardson's work is of immense value to Nietzsche scholarship.
The question of whether the will to power is a central thesis of the mature Nietzsche, I suspect, must be answered negatively. But that by no means entails that we should only consider the mature works, nor refuse to consider the substantial fertility in the idea of the Will to Power. (Speaking for myself, I prefer the Tractatus to the Investigations, Word and Object to The Roots of Reference).

A fantastic book.