Nietzsche Myths

Philosophy Bites has an informative interview with Brian Leiter on myths about Nietzsche. The interview focuses on four main myths: the Ubermensch, Nietzsche's antisemitism, the Will to Power, and Nietzsche the postmodernist. Dispelling the notion that Nietzsche was an anti-Semite is obviously the most important in general, but for philosophers, lay and professional alike, clarifying the roles of the Ubermensch and Will to Power in his philosophy is very important as well.

I always thought it was fairly obvious that the Ubermensch was a tool to make a particular point in one particular book (the only book in which the concept of the overman has a significant role, Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and that, since Nietzsche himself seems to get rid of the Ubermensch in that very work, replacing him with the Eternal Return, focusing on the Ubermensch when interpreting Nietzsche was a sign of a very careless reader¹.

The Will to Power myth is even easier to dispell, since, as Leiter notes in the interview, Nietzsche only mentions it a few times in his published work, and the book with that title (which casual Nietzsche readers should probably not read at all) was published, after being cobbled together and heavily edited by his anti-Semite sister, against his wishes. Also, I wish Leiter had suggested that no one, even Heidegger fans, ever read Heidegger's multi-volume work on Nietzsche. It's the best way to get bad ideas about Nietzsche, even if you've read Nietzsche extensively.

As for the postmodernist Nietzsche, Leiter does an OK job of suggesting where this myth came from. My first serious readings of Nietzsche took place in a class on Nietzsche by Dan Brezeale, who, it just so happens, edited and published a bunch of Nietzsche's early, unpublished writing under the title Philosophy and Truth. So as you might imagine, we talked a lot about those early writings, including the essay that Leiter blames for the postmodernist reading of Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense" (Brezeale translates it as "Non-Moral Sense"). I like that essay, but Leiter's probably right, it hasn't helped. But I think he elides the role of one of Nietzsche's published works (Leiter highlights that the "On Truth and Lies" essay was never published), The Birth of Tragedy. Again, a careful reader of Nietzsche's will see that this early work was written and published when Nietzsche was under the spell of Schopenhauer, and more perniciously, Richard Wagner, a spell he began to cast off sometime between the Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human, and therefore not assign that work too much importance in interpreting Nietzsche's entire corpus². However, in my experience at least, the aestheticism that many readers find in The Birth of Tragedy has had a huge influence on the postmodernist reading of Nietzsche. But as it was a published work of Nietzsche's (we might also add a biased reading of the Part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil) that played a big role in the postmodernization of Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself shoulders some of the blame.

1 A careful reader might also note that Zarathustra says quite explicitly that there has never been an Ubermensch, and afterward, discovers the Eternal Return which says that everything that will be has been. This pretty much excludes the possibility of the Ubermensch doesn't it? Undoubtedly one of the reasons Zarathustra is initially so distraught at the idea of the Eternal Return.
2 Reading the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy would also help a anyone to understand the role that work should play in any interpretation of Nietzsche. It's probably not unimportant that he begins that "attempt at self-criticism" with the phrase (emphasis mine), "Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book", and later writes of it (emphasis still mine):

But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet—what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art—for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science—a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label.