The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Scarcely a week goes by without the publication of a new volume devoted to the interpretation of Nietzsche's thinking. Indeed, even those passionately devoted to the study of Nietzsche will be hard-pressed to keep up with this literature. It seems to us that Horst Hutter's volume stands out from this legion because the complex strands of his reading of Nietzsche converge around the project of self-fashioning, predicated on a series of ascetic practices or techniques of the self. Hutter forcefully demonstrates how these practices are themselves linked to

a particular reading of Nietzsche's writings which as such compels a performative intervention in his texts. Readings become creative rewritings of the texts guided by an impulse to self-shaping that is awakened by the aural-musical potential of Nietzsche's language for persuasion. Persuasion works subliminally, "infectiously," by using the "doctrines" conveyed as sign-functions that provoke the destruction of inherited personal "identities" and enable the construction of new ones.

(201)

Nietzsche's "doctrines" are not viewed as propositional truths about the "real" world but as "'attempts' and 'temptations' that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves . . ." (2). They are challenges and provocations. If we accept Hutter's claim, then the way in which we read Nietzsche is dramatically transformed: his purported doctrines become tropes of persuasion, not an account of how things really are. If we read Hutter as he reads Nietzsche, then his own account of Nietzsche's thinking is an assay, an attempt, rather than a hermeneutic claim that he has gotten Nietzsche "right." For Hutter, then, Nietzsche's philosophy is an art of living, in the sense that it has recently been given by Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, or Alexander Nehamas, rather than "a set of 'true' propositions about the world" or "a set of keys to the solving of logical puzzles . . ." (9).¹

According to Hutter, for Nietzsche, truths are conceived not "as something to be found, but as something to be created and willed" (125). The question of truth arises for Hutter in two very different senses than it does for Anglo-American linguistic philosophy. First, it presents in the form of the quest "to answer the questions of what one should do and how one should live if one believes Nietzsche's interpretation of the world to be 'true' and valid" (9). Second, inasmuch as becoming what Hutter terms "artists of living" (128), we "demonstrate" Nietzsche's "truths" by the way in which we shape our own futures and become our own lawgivers. As Nietzsche puts it in his Zarathustra: "Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?" (Z 175). As we shall see, for Hutter, this entails first unmaking ourselves, overcoming the identities that our culture has stamped upon us, and then actually fashioning a self, or what he terms "'individual' self-creation" (3). Indeed, Hutter claims that "[w]e cannot begin to understand Nietzsche if we do not see his writings as expressions of a personal quest for autonomy and wisdom that call upon readers to engage in a similar struggle. We need to achieve personal sovereignty for ourselves and must imitate Nietzsche by engaging in our personal quest" (xiii).

Before we proceed to a discussion of that complex of issues, however, something more needs to be said about how Hutter sees any interpretation of Nietzsche, including his own. On the one hand, [End Page 83] Hutter points out that "Nietzsche's opus is a veritable labyrinth that permits many interpretations. . . . My focus on ascetic techniques is my particular Ariadne thread out of the Nietzschean labyrinth . . ." (4). Moreover, adapting Nietzsche's perspectivism to his own reading, Hutter acknowledges that his exposition of Nietzsche is but one possible interpretation. Yet there are moments when that very mode of reading Nietzsche seems to be...