In a “brief but important digression” (218) in the middle of chapter 6 of his new book Nietzsche Pursued: Toward a Philosophy for the Future, Richard Schacht reflects on the meaning of the German verb auslegen. While Kaufmann translated it as “to interpret,” its more literal meaning, “laying out,” makes clear that Nietzsche is not “over-anthropomorphizing and over-intellectualizing” the will-to-power when he claims in On the Genealogy of Morals II:12 that the will-to-power (and with it no less than the essence of life) asserts itself in “spontaneous, assertive, expansive, newly arranging, newly directing and forming forces.” Rather than giving “new interpretations and directions,” as Kaufmann’s translation has it, Nietzsche is suggesting that the will-to-power expresses itself in arranging and organizing, configuring and reconfiguring activities that are more rudimentary, of the sort that “goes on at all levels of the organic” (219). The tweak in translation matters as it recognizes how Nietzsche is not a “peculiar philosophical idealist” but a “philosophical naturalizer” (219), one who looks closely to nature and the natural sciences in the articulation of his philosophy.

Nietzsche’s naturalism is a major theme of Nietzsche Pursued, picking up where the last chapter of Schacht’s Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy (Chicago, 2023) left off. But the brief digression reveals the thorough, reflective, and highly differentiated way with which Schacht approaches Nietzsche’s work. Schacht seeks to establish the main tenets of Nietzsche’s “kind of philosophy,” how they evolved over the years, and to challenge and correct common (mis)understandings of his work and his image especially in Anglo-Saxon philosophical circles.

Nietzsche Pursued contains seven main chapters and two addenda that work together but can also be read independently. Chapter 1 addresses Nietzsche’s “Post-Scientistic Naturalism” and the particular ways in which Nietzsche draws on the sciences of his day. Schacht characterizes Nietzsche’s philosophy as “science-linked but neither science-bound nor science-modeled” (3) and argues that Nietzsche’s naturalism is not reductionist but “more like a springboard” (26) from which Nietzsche’s philosophy responds to the demise of traditional metaphysics. Chapter 2 expands on the naturalism of what Schacht calls Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology. It focuses extensively on On the Genealogy of Morals, tracing the subtleties and twists of Nietzsche’s account of the social, political, cultural (interpretive), and biological forces that have shaped us modern humans and our sensibilities. Schacht defends some of the text’s more controversial statements on slave morality, blond beasts, and the “breeding” of new races, arguing that we ought not “to confuse messenger and message” (54) and that, following Nietzsche, we should accept humanity’s animality and seek “creative rather than merely destructive outlets for the aggressiveness that is for Nietzsche the heartbeat of vitality” (70). This chapter (and the first addendum to the book) explains some of Nietzsche’s politically most offensive statements as resulting from his reliance on Lamarck’s erroneous theory about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, a theory that was proven scientifically wrong only after Nietzsche employed these ideas in his socio-psychological speculations.

Chapter 3 shows how Nietzsche’s “Post-Subjectivist Perspectivism” evolved over time. While Nietzsche challenges “absolutist conceptions of ‘the world’ and of ‘truth’” (111), he does believe that a multiplicity of perspectives can help us “comprehend [phenomena] more adequately and understand them more fully” (100). Chapter 4 extends Nietzsche’s perspectivism to his “Post-Moralist Philosophy,” contending that the absence of a moral absolutism does not mean the absence of values but shifts the focus toward what Lebensformen (forms of life) and “socioculturally engendered possibilities” (141) values and norms ought to support.

Chapter 5 returns to the tricky question of Nietzsche’s “Post-Political Philosophy.” Schacht’s aim is not only to rescue Nietzsche’s politically charged ideas from their misappropriation by the Nazis but also to find political relevance in Nietzsche’s objection to democracy for its institutionalization of equality and in his apparent acceptance of social and economic “exploitation.” While Nietzsche “clearly is not advocating re-instituting the institution of ‘slavery’ in any particular historical form” (199), Schacht reads (and appears to agree with) Nietzsche as suggesting that for the “advancement of humanity” a “sort of slavery,” that is, compulsion in the form of convictions and faith, may well be “indispensable in certain human contexts” (203). If Schacht’s attempts at domesticating Nietzsche’s political thinking fall short, it is not because they misinterpret or misappropriate Nietzsche’s writings, but because they remain about as vague as Nietzsche himself on how, by whom, and at who’s expense such structures of compulsion might be implemented and institutionalized in modern, highly complex, and already highly compulsive (disciplinary in Foucault’s sense) societies.

Chapter 6 on Nietzsche’s “Post-Metaphysical Metaphysics” takes Nietzsche’s naturalism as the basis for his rejection of traditional metaphysics (Schacht briefly discusses Plato’s and Aristotle’s metaphysics and their legacy). Nietzsche’s naturalism challenges the dualisms of these thinkers and proves more “attuned (rather than oblivious) to the reality of ‘change’ and ‘becoming’” (232). Nietzsche’s post-metaphysics are not about seeking some immutable essence of reality; rather, Schacht argues, using a quite ingenious comparison, Nietzsche suggests that we should approach reality analogously to how we think about something like “excellence,” that is, as contingent, context-specific, and changing (see 244).

In chapter 7, the final chapter of the book, Schacht traces how Nietzsche’s understanding of music evolves from the idealism of the early years, to skepticism about the innate significance of music, to music becoming a “guiding light” for “finding our way to an affirmative revaluation of human life” (259), to warnings about the possible abuses of music that culminate in “scathing polemics” (262) against German music and in particular that of Wagner in his last writings. That Schacht puts music at the end of his extensive three-volume study of Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy indicates that it is also central to Schacht’s kind of Nietzsche—a Nietzsche who, not unlike music, ought to serve as a “guiding light” toward an affirmative revaluation of human life. Schacht suggests that our “spirituality, to the extent that we attain to some measure of it, might be thought of as the musicalization (and verbalization) of the sounds of our lives” (271, emphasis added). He seemingly extends similar honors to Nietzsche when in the chapter’s concluding paragraph he states that “there is no better guide to the understanding of the full character, reach, and richness of Nietzsche’s kind of naturalism than his thinking and writing about music” (278). As appealing as such uplifting characterizations of Nietzsche’s philosophy might be, they weaken a bit the critical Nietzsche whose scathing polemics and subversiveness resist organicist and spiritual framings of life and nature—the Nietzsche who can help us resist the (often dangerous) normative expectations attached to such framings.

Schacht’s Nietzsche Pursued serves as a valuable resource for anyone who would like to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy. Although cognizant of the extensive secondary literature on Nietzsche and the more theoretical debates and applications of Nietzsche in his post-structuralist and post-humanist reception, Schacht rarely engages these directly. Most readers will appreciate the avoidance of theoretical jargon this omission makes possible. The attempt to explain Nietzsche on his own terms and as a mostly coherent thinker, however, also comes at a price: it leads Schacht at times to elide some of Nietzsche’s sharper critical edges, soften the subversive potential of his philosophy, and forgo the opportunity to put Nietzsche and his naturalism in dialogue with twenty-first-century concerns about, for example, bio-politics and right-wing politics, gender, animal rights, ecological modes of thinking, or the pervasive cultural effects of (media) technologies.