Afterword

The Nietzsche I have tried to bring into view in this book is not primarily an exponent of certain philosophical doctrines that we can neatly bring into dialogue with contemporary discussions in meta-ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the like. This book’s Nietzsche is instead a philosopher of culture, concerned with diagnosing how Western culture has gone wrong and with putting forward an alternative ideal of what it could become. Although Nietzsche has a number of important philosophical insights for the former sort of contemporary debates, my interest is in Nietzsche in this role as a cultural critic. He offers a withering take on the Christian-moral tradition and the specter of the “last man” that we find ourselves caught between. However overblown his attack is, it is something to be taken seriously, if with several grains of salt. We should take even more seriously his guiding idea in the background that our ideals, institutions, and practices stand in need of such genealogy and critique. This is not to say, as a result of this reflection and scrutiny, that we will abandon these commitments entirely, but instead that we may come to treat them with greater suspicion and ambivalence than we hitherto have. This genealogy and critique—and style of genealogy and critique—is to my mind Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to philosophical thought....