Nietzsche scholarship has changed dramatically over the last 40 years. At the beginning of this period, the axes of debate often involved questions of Nietzsche’s overall coherence and his fascist sympathies or inclinations. By now, few doubt that the aphoristic style that Nietzsche deployed was closely connected to a consistent set of philosophical views. And fewer still would claim that his thought was in any way sympathetic to nationalism or anti-Semitism as political orientations. If questions about the political implications of his highly unusual philosophical views remain prominent in Nietzsche scholarship, these debates nonetheless take place in an atmosphere of respect and attention that is fundamentally different from what obtained in that earlier period.

Although many scholars can claim a hand in this transformation, Michael Gillespie is surely one of the more notable. Nietzsche’s New Seas, a collection that he edited in 1988 with Tracy Strong, marked a turning point in Nietzsche’s reception in the English-speaking world. His later book, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (1994), made an important contribution to this scholarship by connecting, and distinguishing, Nietzsche to and from a theological tradition that was not widely recognized in the English-language literature. His work shows a comfortable familiarity with this vast scholarship as well as with Nietzsche’s own writings.

In Nietzsche’s Final Teaching, Gillespie gathers together essays written over the course of 30 years, along with significant new material, to make two bold claims about Nietzsche’s late philosophy. Gillespie accepts a common division of his writings into three periods and, though drawing on all of them, he is most concerned with the last one, stretching from 1881 to Nietzsche’s final mental collapse in 1889. Periodization is connected to substance here in that Gillespie’s first claim is that Nietzsche’s final period dates from the day in 1881, recorded in his notebooks, when he first wrote of the “eternal recurrence of the same.” This idea, Gillespie contends, “was in his view the greatest of all ideas and the turning point of history” (p. 5). The eternal recurrence, Gillespie writes, “gave his final teaching its coherence and direction” (p. x)—and all the other late Nietzschean concepts (like the will to power, the übermensch, and the revaluation of all values) can only be understood in the context of eternal recurrence.

This claim is controversial because Nietzsche actually published very little about eternal recurrence, though more material from his notebooks has become available in recent decades as his vast Nachlass has been edited. Briefly put, the eternal recurrence is the idea that, time being infinite and matter being finite, all arrangements of matter must repeatedly recur. To will any moment in time then, if one is honest, requires willing them all since all moments and events are connected in an unbreakable chain. A powerful idea, if it were true—but is it? “From Nietzsche’s point of view,” Gillespie writes, “we cannot possibly know whether it is true or false.” Nonetheless “to affirm the eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s view is to affirm all forms of life. . . . [It] is thus to be supremely alive, to be in fact the voice of life itself” (p. 68). This test of affirmation, Gillespie argues, is the foundation for everything else in the late Nietzsche, and it is the Nietzschean replacement for the Platonic metaphysics which has (mis)guided Europe for two thousand years.

Quite a lot in this interpretation hangs on the claim that Nietzsche’s intended final work remained unwritten. Nietzsche spoke many times, in his notebooks, of a book he planned called The Revaluation of All Values that would introduce, in depth, the idea of eternal recurrence, which is otherwise barely mentioned in the published writings beyond Thus Spoke Zarathustra. By the end of 1888, however, seemingly aware of his impending breakdown, Nietzsche insisted that his very last works, including Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, either were the Revaluation or contained its central claims. This might have been wishful thinking—but after the publication of his notebooks and letters, we have an answer to the question of whether the unpublished Nietzsche contained important ideas that he withheld from the public: On the whole, while there are arguments and formulations that do not appear in the published work, there is not really a hidden book of ideas to be found there.

Gillespie makes a lot of Nietzsche’s occasionally expressed wish to learn more about modern physics so that he could perhaps vindicate the ontology that the eternal recurrence would appear to require. But he seems just as happy that Nietzsche never carried out this wish, since the eternal recurrence is, to him, a very dark doctrine that requires not just that we tolerate the evil in the world for the sake of the good but that we actively will it: “To will the eternal recurrence means not merely accepting the murder and torture of children as necessary, but also committing those murders and carrying out that torture, and even more importantly, wanting to do so” (p. 55; emphasis original). This is a test of affirmation that only a monster could pass, and it is hard to understand why even an übermensch would consider doing so. But is this the only way to put things?

Before answering, I want to consider Gillespie’s second claim, which stands in some tension with the first. In two essays at the center of the book, he proposes that Nietzsche’s recognized devotion to music is even more extreme than we normally understand. It is well known that Nietzsche, in his early years, saw Wagner’s music as a potentially redemptive force in European culture. While he gave up this view in the 1880s, his devotion to music itself continued and perhaps even intensified. Nietzsche referred to the ideal philosopher as a “musical Socrates” and, Gillespie claims, “Nietzsche employs musical forms to coordinate [his] various aphorisms within a larger whole” (p. 90). Indeed, these essays argue that both Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo are, in fact, “musical” compositions in the traditional sonata form.

Gillespie goes to great lengths to vindicate these claims, including some that seem frankly ridiculous to me (like the argument that the number of words in the preface to Twilight above and below a quotation are meant to indicate that the work is in “3/4 time” [p. 95]). But numerology aside, the broader claim that Nietzsche saw his books as akin to musical compositions strikes me as entirely plausible and illuminating. It answers the old question of just what Nietzsche understood the structure of his aphoristic texts to be, if not simply a compilation of his notebooks. More importantly, it explains, to a degree, just how Nietzsche understood philosophy to be possible after his critique of language, rationality, and the Socratic dialectic on which all Western reasoning had previously relied.

Although Gillespie claims otherwise, however, it seems to me that the fundamental musicality of Nietzsche’s works creates problems for the argument that they are meant to foist upon us the terrible weight of eternal recurrence. Music, for Nietzsche, is all about spontaneity and lightness; recurrence is the weight created by the chains of causality in their unbearable inevitability. But whenever Nietzsche compares these two phenomena, it is clear enough which is the most “real” to him. In the fifth book of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote that “an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a ‘scientific’ estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, 1974, pp. 335–36).

Real “music” for Nietzsche escapes all calculation and predictability—a great sonata may have a predictable structure but its contents must be surprising and individual to have any value. Gillespie’s book has just these qualities—even if his attempts to hammer Nietzsche’s thoughts on recurrence into a singular teaching of doom sometimes strike an unpersuasive note.