Why read Nietzsche--especially if you're
convinced that his worldview is
fundamentally false and his influence on
philosophy harmful? Why should you spend
time and effort trying to understand
what he said? Here are five quick reasons
why I read Nietzsche and why I assign
him to my students to read.
First, Nietzsche is one of the most important
thinkers of the 19th century. It's really
impossible to understand the 20th
century without grasping Nietzsche.
He's deeply influential upon psychology and
upon the existentialist movement.
Thinkers like Heidegger and Freud 
take a tremendous amount from Nietzsche.
You need to understand
Nietzsche for his historical
significance if nothing else. Second,
Nietzsche is a careful reader of the
ancients; he finds things in them that
other thinkers had not found. And he
comes up with some very creative
interpretations that are worth our
attention--his work in The Birth of
Tragedy, on the Dionysian spirit
of ancient drama, for example.
Third, Nietzsche is partly right
on some things. He is an excellent
diagnostician of the problems of
modernity, and his criticisms of Kant and
others often are very telling. As with
any other author, when we find that
there's something true in him we need to
recognize and appropriate it and bring
it into our own philosophical view of
the world. This is akin to the children
of Israel carrying off the treasures of
Egypt. If there's truth in Nietzsche, well
then it belongs to us, it belongs to all
of us, and we should go seek it out and
appropriate it. Fourth, Nietzsche is in
fact mostly wrong, but in order to know
how he's wrong and be able to critique
his errors, we must grasp his thought
accurately and thoroughly, and we can
only do that by giving him a sympathetic
reading. Fifth, Nietzsche is a fun writer
to read. He has a fantastic style, he's
very witty, he has a strong personality
which comes out in everything he writes.
And so just for the pure enjoyment of
the energy and life that he brings to
his writing, he's worth reading for those
reasons.
Nietzsche also pioneers, as it were, a new
way of doing philosophy, and that's
something that we can only encounter if
we enter into his thought and encounter
Nietzsche the man and see what he's
trying to do, even if in the end we
fundamentally disagree with the value
and wisdom of that project. So that's my
quick overview of five reasons to read
Nietzsche. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
