Friedrich Nietzsche's “middle period” writings—Human, All-Too-Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, written between 1877 and 1882—are often regarded with puzzlement by readers. How does the Nietzsche who celebrates science and dedicates one of his books to Voltaire square with the Nietzsche of Dionysian ecstasy, the will to power, and the Übermensch? The middle period remains understudied, as it is often seen as an aberrant path Nietzsche abandons upon coming to maturity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Franco's excellent Nietzsche's Enlightenment makes two lasting contributions to our understanding of this period of Nietzsche's thought. First, he shows how the middle period is not a digression in Nietzsche's thought at all but rather a crucial stage in the development of his mature philosophy. As Franco puts it, “it is during the middle period that Nietzsche truly becomes Nietzsche” (xiv). Second, Franco successfully limns the philosophical concern that unifies these writings: to “erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit” (ix). What distinguishes this period is not “positivism,” as often thought, but rather a commitment to founding a form of culture grounded in the free pursuit of knowledge.

Franco interprets these texts not thematically, but rather chronologically. He devotes one chapter to each of Nietzsche's texts, arguing that Nietzsche is best understood by bringing to light the often obscure structure of his own works. This is not an easy task, as many parts of Nietzsche's middle writings do not have a discernible structure (see, for instance, the seemingly random collection of aphorisms in books 6 and 9 of Human, All Too Human, vol. 1). Franco's interpretations meet this challenge and then some: his chapters are models of careful close readings of the aims, organization, and arguments of the text. In addition, Franco supports his readings and clarifies what is obscure or undeveloped in Nietzsche's published writings with helpful snippets from Nietzsche's Nachlass (his unpublished notes) and his letters.

This chronological approach serves Franco's overall aims well. By proceeding text by text, Franco can track the development of Nietzsche's thought within the middle period itself, to bring out the changing ways in which Nietzsche is wrestling with his core middle period concerns. Though this approach has the drawback that it cannot achieve the thematic breadth of, for instance, Ruth Abbey's Nietzsche's Middle Period (Oxford University Press, 2000), Franco's discussions are nonetheless quite wide-ranging across major themes such as the origin and development of morality, the critique of romanticism and utilitarianism, the “error theory” of knowledge, and the nature of the self.

In his prologue, Franco begins his account with Nietzsche's early period. During this period, Franco shows, Nietzsche developed his central philosophical preoccupation, namely, to found a unified culture that serves as the precondition for “higher” human life. However, Franco argues, under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, Nietzsche held that the modern, endless accumulation of knowledge dooms culture by destroying the vivifying “myths” that unify a people. Art is the path to founding a people and to living the highest human life.

As is well known, Nietzsche set out in his Human, All-Too-Human to oppose the romantic figures of his youth. What Franco adds to the story, in chapter 1, are the philosophical motivations and consequences of Nietzsche's rejection of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Franco argues that for Nietzsche romanticism failed to incorporate the “modern spirit” and instead called for “self-conscious deception and myth-making” (16). For Franco, the middle period Nietzsche maintained his interest in forming a unified culture, but he shifted from seeing knowledge as enervating to understanding it as the basis for cultural advancement and indeed as the highest human activity. However, as Franco highlights, Nietzsche is ambivalent about the free spirit's culture of knowledge. Nietzsche does not ever become simply a French Enlightenment devotee, but instead claims that art (41), illusion (48), and even religion (52) play critical roles in directing culture.

In chapter 2, Franco brings out how Daybreak develops Nietzsche's middle period project one step further. In Daybreak, Nietzsche comes to see that the romantic cult of myth making is not the only threat to the advancement of culture. Enlightenment utilitarianism becomes Nietzsche's new target, as its “‘cult of philanthropy’ that seeks to eliminate all danger and suffering from life … threatens to abolish the individual and transform humanity into sand” (60). Nietzsche responds to his Enlightenment interlocutors, Franco shows, by encouraging a newfound “passion for knowledge” on the part of the free spirits. The passion for knowledge liberates the free spirits from the deadening uniformity of the pursuit of utility. Whereas this passion for knowledge in Daybreak is “tragic,” “arduous and full of danger,” what distinguishes The Gay Science, Franco contends in chapter 3, is its emphasis on the comedy of knowledge, that the free spirit is here “marked by a detached attitude that looks on the errors that have exerted such a powerful influence on human beings in the past as a ‘game’” (102).

In his final chapter, Franco offers an account of how the middle period concerns fundamentally shaped the development of Nietzsche's late period thought. Franco argues that the “Free Spirit Trilogy” culminates in the dangerous knowledge that “God is dead,” which engenders nihilism, a cultural “weightlessness” and aimlessness (156). The free spirit hence prepares the way for a higher, “redeeming” figure, the Übermensch, who is the central concern of the late period. Accordingly, Franco shows that the mature Nietzsche—the Nietzsche of the will to power and “blond beast”—continues, and does not repudiate, the middle Nietzsche's celebration of knowledge in human culture.

The only main argument I found unconvincing in Franco's book is that the middle period Nietzsche breaks from his earlier view to “indulge in self-conscious myths and life-enhancing illusions” (7). Whereas Nietzsche does indeed use terms such as “myth” and “illusion” approvingly in The Birth of Tragedy, he advocates these in the modern age not to turn away from scientific knowledge but because Nietzsche thinks scientific knowledge has reached its limits. For the early Nietzsche, rational knowledge comes to the discovery that it can never supply an answer to the highest purpose of human activity, a purpose that must be supplied by art and “illusion.” In other words, the early Nietzsche might not have been as unfriendly to knowledge as Franco suggests—the modern cultural exemplar is a “Socrates who makes music,” after all—but merely held that the pursuit of knowledge requires some nonrational basis to actuate it and give it a purpose. Indeed, the middle Nietzsche inherits these early concerns about art and culture providing necessary ethical guidance for modern peoples. The decisive break, Franco suggests, between early and middle Nietzsche is that Nietzsche detaches the justification for the “contemplative life” from all metaphysical illusion. Yet it remained unclear to me what then the justification of the contemplative life was for the middle Nietzsche, why ultimately “knowing … constitutes the supreme human activity” (54). Perhaps the philosophical transition from early to middle, then, might be better characterized as a shift of emphasis.

But this is a quibble. Insightful and rigorous, Nietzsche's Enlightenment is an essential companion to Nietzsche's middle works, one that at the same time helps illuminate the philosophical motivations of Nietzsche's thought as a whole.