In his book, Paul E. Kirkland responds to those who claim that Nietzsche's philosophy offers only a critical or deconstructive project. Instead, he asserts that Nietzsche has his own affirmative project of overcoming modernity and inaugurating a new nobility. Nietzsche aims to realize this project through a variety of rhetorical tactics and believes it will come about only after an era of great wars and tyrannies that, according to the author, Nietzsche predicts but does not necessarily endorse.
The centerpiece of Kirkland's interpretation is Thus Spoke Zarathustra and particularly the eternal recurrence. The heart of this lengthy study, eternal recurrence is presented as the epitome of Nietzsche's affirmative teaching, the foundation for a new, life-affirming ethics, and the basis for the development of a “politics of contest” (Chapter 8). This politics of contest is the necessary corrective to a democratic age that values egalitarianism, certainty, and security above all that is elevated or noble. And, on Kirkland's reading, Nietzschean nobility prizes self-overcoming, affirmation of life, courage to confront one's own limitations as well as those of time and knowledge, and laughter at the necessarily inadequate and incomplete projects that human beings attempt to realize in the world.
There is beauty and insight in Kirkland's study, particularly in the careful examination of Zarathustra and its passages regarding eternal recurrence. Kirkland offers a graceful analysis of Nietzsche's understanding of friendship as enmity as the corrective to vengefulness (pp. 116–17), which becomes the basis of his insightful reading of Zarathustra's confrontation with the spirit of gravity as a kind of exemplary conflict that all life affirmers must undertake. This confrontation also symbolizes Zarathustra's (and Nietzsche's) challenge to modernity. Kirkland astutely notes that “[t]he spirit of gravity is at once the spirit of modernity, its reductionist science, its leveling drives, its universal standards for morality, and difficulty as such” (p. 157). Admirably, however, there is no fawning reverence of Zarathustra in this book: Kirkland aptly notes moments when Zarathustra stumbles and acknowledges the necessarily incomplete nature of this text. The author deftly shows from within Nietzsche's own terms what is to be admired in Zarathustra and what this character has yet to learn.
Other arguments in the study are less persuasive, however, particularly the concluding claims that laughter leads life-affirming philosophers back to human affairs (Chapter 9) and that Nietzsche uses a comedic art of writing to induce the self-overcoming of modernity (Chapter 10). The first seems more a wish than an argument. While it may be the case that “awareness” of the “comedy of human efforts need not refute the value of effort,” but rather “could call attention to the need for ever renewed effort to foster conditions for human nobility” (pp. 241–42, emphasis added), why should it do so? What necessity compels political action as the by-product of noble laughter? The second claim is weakened by a lack of examination of comedy itself, necessary in order to assess whether Nietzsche's style is comedic. Kirkland cites examples, such as the hyperbole of Ecce Homo or Nietzsche's declaration of his discipleship of Dionysus. That these examples are comic is not obvious, however, and there is a substantial literature on both Nietzsche's rhetorical posturing in Ecce Homo and his relationship with Dionysus—even more his relationship to comedy—that might dispute Kirkland's quick characterizations but is largely unexamined in this discussion. Even if Nietzsche is being comedic in these moments, it is nevertheless difficult to accept Kirkland's claim that Nietzsche's comedic writing is “a rhetorical method for provoking his readers to their own self-examination” (p. 265). Even explicitly political satire that pokes fun at its audience rarely moves members to self-reflection, much less self-overcoming.
There are methodological ambiguities with the study as well. It is unclear why Kirkland focuses on the texts he does or what he believes the overall relationships among Nietzsche's texts to be (the Antichrist[ian], despite being listed in the bibliography, is not cited; the Gay Science is rarely mentioned—a noteworthy omission given the concluding emphasis on laughter and comedy). Similarly, Kirkland is attentive to Nietzsche's use of masks and his character Zarathustra to convey his philosophical teachings. But it would have been helpful if there had been an interpretive principle offered by which we might discern when Nietzsche is employing masks, which ones he is using, or at what purposes they might aim.
The relative silence on methodology may be symptomatic of the book's seeming Straussian orientation, which tends to avoid making explicit its own approach or presuppositions but is discernible by the familiar narrative wherein philosophers use deception to communicate appropriate lessons to more and less deserving audiences, the less deserving of whom must be lied to in order to produce desirable political outcomes. Kirkland's book deploys a version of this narrative with regard to Nietzsche and also privileges the Platonic Socrates as the exemplary philosopher, Plato as the relevant context for philosophical inquiry and Straussian readers as the relevant interlocutors. While there is nothing wrong with a study taking a particular methodological position or making certain assumptions, it is better to make these explicit and justify them. This is especially the case when these presuppositions seem at odds with Nietzsche's philosophy, as when Kirkland takes for granted the distinction between human and animal (pp. 166–67) or the self-evident baseness of bodily needs (pp. 232–33). Sometimes a single sentence will provide the grist for a very large mill of speculative philosophical association, little of which seems anchored in the text (see, e.g., the discussions of nature, p. 196, and Thucydides, pp. 201–2). The study would have benefited from stronger substantiation of claims that many readers of Nietzsche might find controversial (e.g., Nietzsche advances a state-of-nature theory of human history [pp. 182–83]; modern democracy is the most complete expression of ressentiment [p. 186]).
These omissions are significant because they undercut important points. For example, Kirkland overlooks Nietzsche's explicit contempt for Shakespeare (Beyond Good and Evil, §224) in his discussion of Shakespearean tragedy and comedy in Chapter 9. In analyzing Zarathustra's courtship of Life (personified as a woman), Kirkland might have taken into consideration the bulk of this scene—including Zarathustra's whip brandishing at her—before privileging its sentimental conclusion (pp. 171–72). And he correctly notes the psychological character of will to power but neglects the radical deconstruction of subjectivity that results from this claim, a critique that might undermine his conscious and purposive presentation of Nietzsche's activity and that of the new nobility.
In the end, Nietzsche's Noble Aims is certainly important as a contribution to the field of political readings of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche studies will benefit from the proliferation of such interpretations located explicitly in political theory. I think that Kirkland's contribution would have been strengthened had its methodology been more transparent; such a justification would have provided a more robust framework to support his ambitious interpretation of Nietzsche.
