Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy

by Robert B. Pippin

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most elusive thinkers in the philosophical tradition. His highly unusual style and insistence on what remains hidden or unsaid in his writing make pinning him to a particular position tricky. Nonetheless, certain readings of his work have become standard and influential. In this major new interpretation of Nietzsche’s work, Robert B. Pippin challenges various traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says that his writing can best be understood as a kind of psychology.

Pippin traces this idea of Nietzsche as a psychologist to his admiration for the French moralists: La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Stendhal, and especially Montaigne. In distinction from philosophers, Pippin shows, these writers avoided grand metaphysical theories in favor of reflections on life as lived and experienced. Aligning himself with this project, Nietzsche sought to make psychology “the queen of the sciences” and the “path to the fundamental problems.” Pippin contends that Nietzsche’s singular prose was an essential part of this goal, and so he organizes the book around four of Nietzsche’s most important images and metaphors: that truth could be a woman, that a science could be gay, that God could have died, and that an agent is as much one with his act as lightning is with its flash.

Expanded from a series of lectures Pippin delivered at the Collège de France, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy offers a brilliant, novel, and accessible reading of this seminal thinker.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, German Literature

139 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2010

About the author

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Διόνυσος Ελευθέριος · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is difficult to say in a sentence just what Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy sets out to do. After all, Pippin himself says that, given the kinds of claims that Nietzsche makes about how Nietzsche is to be read, that is, given the claims that Nietzsche makes in his "metapassages," "there are even occasional attempts to develop an esoteric reading of Nietzsche, but by and large his frequent warnings that almost everything of importance in his writing is unsaid, ironic, or 'in question marks' have received little notice" (xiv). But this statement is itself something of an esoteric claim, because Pippin doesn't actually say that he is setting out to draw notice to those warnings (though by mentioning them, he seems to be doing just that). It is something I suppose we are to infer. The problem of characterizing Pippin's book is also complicated when he says that what he is "primarily interested in are four Nietzschean figurative claims or images—that truth could be a woman, that science could be gay, that God could die, and that there is no 'lightning' separate from its 'flash'—and why it is a set of literary tropes that carry so much of the freight" (xvii). But this statement is itself something of a figurative claim or image, and we don't know from this beginning why Pippin himself needs a literary trope to carry so much of his freight. And finally, in foreshadowing the features of the chapters we are about to read, he only indicates that what he is doing is wanting "to look" (xvi) at those various features (and even this we must infer, for "to look" is the main verb that comes after "chapter 1," but which must be ungrammatically extended to complete the statements which are otherwise only fragments separated by semicolons about the other chapters in this sentence). We are not told what we might find once we look, but just that we are about to look, with him as he wants to look. So does the body of Pippin's book compensate his readers for the clever devices and somewhat obscure remarks found, not in his "Introduction," but, as he has called it, his "Introductory Remarks"? I suppose to some extent. It seems to me that his basic aim to add some nuance to a handful of Nietzschean concepts is more or less accomplished (though even some of these claims are certainly more than questionable, for instance, when he says that "such notions as 'the will to power' and 'the eternal return of the same' belong on this list [the list of 'endless pictures and images']" and "are not independent philosophical explanations of the meaning of the list" [69-70], a claim that is simply false). Despite these mere minor gains, the book is marred, in my reading of it, on the one hand by the somewhat frequent disobedience to his own early suggestion that Nietzsche's work offers "resistance to incorporation into traditional philosophical theory" (xv), for example—and there are more than one—when he says "Nietzsche did not have available (and would certainly not have used) contemporary language about the pragmatics of intentionality to make this point about 'primordiality'" (24), but which is an incorporation into a "traditional philosophical theory" which he nevertheless still finds "useful," and on the other hand by the regular inclusion of negative comments (though certainly mild by historical standards) made about the author of his subject. One example should suffice. Pippin says that though Zarathustra "may have been cured of his 'illness,' his despair about mankind,...it is not at all clear that Nietzsche ever was, and it would be an interesting but independent question to pursue the implications of that failure, especially since I believe Nietzsche was well aware of it" (12). Well aware of what? Well aware of that failure? What failure? The failure to be cured from a despair about mankind? What Pippin first states as a mere possibility, i.e., "not clear," becomes the failure for which an interesting study should be made, a failure that is so certain to Pippin that he can first try not to say but then ends up saying that "Nietzsche was well aware of it" too. Are the few gains in this book worth the work? Perhaps. But only perhaps.

[Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explains pretty well, why psychology should once again become the queen of sciences, how a science can be gay, and why we ought not be one of the “Egyptian youths” :)

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not that good. I'm not sure how much of interest he establishes in this slim monograph.

[Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

incipit tragoedia, incipit parodia

[Lynne Huffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting interpretation of Nietzsche through eros and psychology as first philosophy (rather than epistemology or metaphysics).