Nietzsche's Free Spirit Works

Between 1878 and 1882, Nietzsche published what he called 'the free spirit works': Human, All Too Human; Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Often approached as a mere assemblage of loosely connected aphorisms, these works are here re-interpreted as a coherent narrative of the steps Nietzsche takes in educating himself toward freedom that executes a dialectic between scientific truth-seeking and artistic life-affirmation. Matthew Meyer's new reading of these works not only provides a more convincing explanation of their content but also makes better sense of the relationship between them and Nietzsche's larger oeuvre. His argument shows how these texts can and should be read as a unified project even while they present multiple, in some cases conflicting, images of the free spirit. The book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Nietzsche's philosophy and especially to those puzzled about how to understand the peculiarities of the free spirit works.

'This is a superb intellectual history of Nietzsche's philosophical quest to emancipate his self-legislating spirit from the debilitating influences of metaphysics, religion, morality, and the scientific desire for truth at all costs.' Paul S. Loeb, University of Puget Sound, Washington, 'Matthew Meyer's ambitious and exciting new book … is not only the most illuminating study we now have of Nietzsche's middle period, but an important call to a very different way of approaching Nietzsche's whole oeuvre.' Agonist, '… genuinely thought-provoking … will stimulate productive discussions about the meaning and significance of Nietzsche's middle works for many years to come.' Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Matthew Meyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients (2014) and a co-editor of Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy (Cambridge, forthcoming).