Double review: Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil ; Christa Davis Acampora and Keith Ansell Pearson, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader’s Guide (original) (raw)

These two books differ in many respects. Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil treats Nietzsche as an eccentric contemporary anglophone philosopher. The authors see themselves on the winning side of a contest of interpretations between readers of a "truth-friendly Nietzsche" (2) and their opponents, the "postmodernists" (1). Now that this battle has been won, the friends of truth are left with the task of expounding Nietzsche's philosophical positions and aligning them with their appearances in the texts. Nietzsche's prima facie commitments lie with some form of "empiricism and naturalism" (89); in fact, his position would be very "close to positivism" (71) were it not for his reflections on mind and value that turn out to redeem, for him, "the normative aspirations of traditional philosophy" (9). The challenge that the authors set themselves, then, is explaining two sets of deviations: how Nietzsche could have written so very badly given his interest in advancing philosophical positions, and why Nietzsche would have departed from positivism. The book restricts itself primarily to what is called "BGE One" (10)-the Preface and first part of Beyond Good and Evil, which is "more like a philosophical treatise" (10)-and it consists largely in the exegetical labors required to show that, despite exoteric appearances, the work esoterically presents coherent and sustained argumentation. The payoff of all this is not merely the exegetical work, however, but a non-naturalist conception of the "soul" in terms of a power psychology. Clark and Dudrick's guiding interpretive thread is Nietzsche's identification of a "magnificent tension of the spirit" (26) in the Preface of Beyond Good and Evil. A tension, they reason, requires two opposing forces. By "spirit" they understand Nietzsche to mean "'conscious thought,' especially of the philosophical variety" (11; cf. 28), so the forces in question should be philosophical in nature, or at least contribute to an explanation of the emergence of philosophical beliefs. They find the two opposing forces, then, in the will to truth and in what they call "the will to value" (30) or alternately "the 'value drive,' the drive to see the world in terms of one's values or ideals" (47; cf. 37, 67, 131). The two forces produce, by way of a complicated dialectic, the new conception of the soul. Enhancement of the will to truth, on one hand, leads to the overcoming of dogmatism on the other. Such a one-sided will to truth pro