Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look

This book challenges the common view that Nietzsche passed through several discrete periods of thought, each based on a different set of values, and that his work can best be understood as a collection of isolated insights. Through close textual analysis, Robert John Ackermann attempts to expose the underlying unity and consistency in Nietzche's thought that has long been over-looked. According to Ackermann, Nietzsche's philosophy is grounded in a single vision, an image of ancient Greece in which Hellenic nobles created a space for life by constructing aesthetic buttresses against the terrifying power of Dionysian flux. While he recognized that the same constructions would not work in his own culturally exhausted society, Nietzsche believed that the strategy of the Greeks could be recovered through the exercise of will to power and an awareness of Eternal Return. Nietzsche's "Uebermenschen" are thus to be understood as philosophically purified Greek nobles, struggling against Dionysian terror in the modern world. Yet in the end, Ackermann contends, even the "Uebermenschen" seem doomed to failure.
For by Nietzsche's own severe logic, the power of the Dionysian in the modern world is so great that nothing can successfully resist it. Ackermann examines this problem and discusses the "aporias" into which Nietzsche's monistic philosophy must ultimately fall.