Friedrich Nietzsche and European Nihilism is a title that has lost the subtitle it had in the original Dutch, which would have ran something like this: “Friedrich Nietzsche on a threat that nobody appears concerned by”. It is almost an ironic turn of events: as if the publishers agreed so much with the subtitle's diagnosis that scrapping it was of no concern to them. Of course, this decision may be justified, for in the book we do find much of Nietzsche's work on nihilism: its historical background, its progenitors and shifting meanings, the sociocultural conditions that underlay and surround these shifts and the intellectual climate in which his thoughts grew. But the guiding question is always the same: what did Nietzsche apprehend that was so terrifying, and what, if anything, should our relation to his response be? To take this question off the front cover may obscure the foundational impetus to the book's existence, for it is on the very first page of the introduction that Van Tongeren puts the question to us: “why do we not seem worried by what Nietzsche believed to be the most ominous event of all times? [A]re we deaf and blind to what is taking place?”. And it is Van Tongeren's claim throughout that Nietzsche did hold that he had come upon something terrible, an intractable problem that does not seem to allow for resolution in the sphere of thought. In various parts of the book we find interactions with the “nihilistic problematic”: the notion that any question, any questioning, regarding the truth of certain thoughts upholds a type of reverence towards the truth even while it aims to displace it: “[w]e judge or despise the true human, with its lies and its fictions, in the name of the truth by which we manage to endure in life” (74). At a glance, and as the book mentions, this may not seem too bad: would it not be nice to be liberated from the false ideals that we mistakenly, confusedly, even reverently trust? Can we not, after deep reflection and introspection, rest assured once more that we have adequately figured out how to deal with “meaning” and “truth”? The book claims that Nietzsche would deny this and profess this to be the exact locus of the apparent shocking nature of the threat under consideration. In close readings of several aphorisms and unpublished notes, Van Tongeren continuously works towards a conclusion that suggests there is no adequate, and certainly no easy, solution to the problem nihilism poses. To this extent, Van Tongeren takes the English-speaking world's interaction with nihilism as a type of temporary psychological state that is to be overcome by some optimistic reflection as premature. There is no escaping it, except perhaps by Nietzsche's notion of something that is yet beyond the human, that will not see the terror that nihilism presents to us, for with the death of God comes not only the death of all other ideals, but also the ideals that sprung from them that we wish to cling to. In Van Tongeren's retelling, Nietzsche's account runs something like this: The world, we assume, has a goal. Humans interact with this projected telos to create meaning so as to protect ourselves from the burden of its actual absence. The realm of true being is transported to a new world, but in turn and in time, a will to truth shows this world to be drawn up out of psychological need: to provide protection from chaos, meaninglessness and impermanence. In this manner, the will to truth robs us of stability - in the drive towards truth, it transpires there is no ultimate meaning, no underlying unity, and no true reality. It could be proposed that the will to truth has then freed us from this burden: if these things are not there, should we not feel and be liberated? But we are not, because the recognition of the mendacity of our constructions effectively reminds us of the original need we had for stability and meaning in the first place. Our desire for truth gives us only illusions, and while we know them to be illusions, we still want the truth. Not only is life absurd, but our desire to escape this absurdity is itself part of life's absurdity. Van Tongeren holds that Nietzsche claims the desire for truth persists after the unmasking of the false constructions due to the long

中文翻译：

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弗里德里希·尼采与欧洲虚无主义

弗里德里希·尼采和欧洲虚无主义的标题已经失去了它原来的荷兰语中的副标题，该副标题的标题如下：“弗里德里希·尼采面临着没有人关注的威胁”。这几乎是一个具有讽刺意味的事件转折：好像出版商非常同意字幕的诊断，以至于报废与他们无关。当然，这一决定可能是有道理的，因为在本书中我们确实可以找到尼采关于虚无主义的许多著作：其历史背景，其祖先和变化的含义，支撑和围绕这些变化的社会文化条件以及他思想的思想环境。成长。但是指导性问题始终是相同的：尼采感到了什么那么恐怖，什么，如果有的话，我们对他的回应应该是什么？把这个问题从封面上删除掉可能会掩盖这本书存在的基本动力，因为范·唐格伦在导言的第一页上向我们提出了这个问题：“为什么我们似乎不担心尼采所相信的是有史以来最不祥的事件吗？[A]我们对正在发生的事情充耳不闻吗？”。范·汤根（Van Tongeren）始终声称尼采确实认为他遇到了一件可怕的事情，这是一个棘手的问题，似乎无法在思想领域解决。在本书的各个部分中，我们都发现了与“虚无问题”的互动：一种观念，即关于某些思想的真理的任何问题，任何质疑，即使旨在取代真理，也能保持一种对真理的崇敬：“以我们设法在生活中生存的真理的名义，审判或鄙视真实的人类，及其谎言和虚构的事物”（74）。乍一看，就像书中提到的那样，这似乎并不算太​​糟：从我们错误，困惑甚至是虔诚地信任的错误理想中解放出来，这不是很好吗？经过深刻的反思和内省之后，我们是否可以再一次放心，我们已充分弄清楚如何处理“意义”和“真相”？该书声称尼采会否认这一点，并声称这是所考虑威胁的明显震撼性的确切原因。在仔细阅读了几种格言和未发表的笔记时，范·汤格伦不断努力得出一个结论，表明没有任何办法可以解决虚无主义提出的问题，当然也没有容易解决的办法。在这个程度上 范·汤格伦（Van Tongeren）将讲英语的世界与虚无主义的互动视为一种暂时的心理状态，应通过一些乐观的反思来克服这种过早的状态。没有回避它的可能，除非尼采提出了一种超越人类的观念，否则这种观念将看不到虚无主义给我们带来的恐惧，因为随着神的死，不仅所有其他理想的死也随之而来。我们希望坚持的理想源于他们。在Van Tongeren的重述中，尼采的叙述是这样的：我们假设世界有目标。人类与这个预计的目的互动，以创造意义，从而保护自己免受实际缺失的负担。真实存在的领域被转移到了一个新世界，但随之而来的是，真理的意志表明，这个世界是出于心理需要而建立的：提供保护以免受混乱，无意义和无常。这样，对真理的意志剥夺了我们的稳定-在走向真理的过程中，它表现出没有最终的意义，根本的统一性和真实的现实。可以建议，真理的意志将我们从这种负担中解脱出来：如果这些事情不存在，我们是否不应该感到并被解放？但事实并非如此，因为对我们建筑结构的美性的认可有效地使我们想起了最初对稳定性和意义的最初需求。我们对真理的渴望只给我们幻想，虽然我们知道它们是幻想，但我们仍然想要真理。不仅生活荒谬，而且我们逃避这种荒诞的愿望本身就是生活荒谬的一部分。