Reviewed by:

• Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings by Keith Ansell-Pearson
• Antoine Panaïoti

Keith Ansell-Pearson's latest book on Nietzsche is part of a broader genre in Nietzsche scholarship, which emerged roughly in the early 2000s and has been developing at a steadily accelerating pace since then. Call this the "middle period genre." Scholars whose work falls under this banner (e.g. Ruth Abbey, Paul Franco, Robert Pippin, and Michael Ure) tend to be historically trained "close readers" with strong German and a good understanding of the intricacies of Nietzsche's reception on the Old Continent (in stark contrast to the philologically unscrupulous, Analytic-chauvinist "Nietzschean philosopher" now ascendant in the field). What most fundamentally unites them, however, is a shared sense that the three books Nietzsche wrote roughly in the middle of his career deserve more attention than they have gotten so far. Human, All Too Human (1878–80), Dawn (1881), and The Gay Science (1882), they note, tend to be either neglected altogether or treated as mere preludes to Nietzsche's so-called mature works. But the primary impetus behind the middle period genre is not just of the bland "filling a gap in scholarship" variety; the central contention, rather, is that there are valuable things to learn from exploring Nietzsche's middle works in their own right as self-standing philosophical texts.

There are of course as many (more or less sensible) accounts of what exactly these valuable things may be as there are books devoted to the "middle Nietzsche." Ansell-Pearson, for his part, thinks the main benefits to be gained from exploring Nietzsche's middle writings concern Nietzsche's reflections on the nature of philosophy and his practice of a particular form of philosophy. In his estimation, "Nietzsche's search for philosophy attains some of its richest moments and insights in his middle writings" (14). Focusing on these, he claims, promises to deliver a new "appreciation of Nietzsche's thought, including its relation to philosophy and the history of philosophy" (3). Ansell-Pearson's middle Nietzsche, then, is concerned not with propounding doctrines (e.g. "everything eternally recurs"; "there are no facts, only interpretations"; "the world is Will to Power"), but rather with attempting, in a spirit of open-ended experimentalism, to figure out what it is that philosophy can do to and for a modern thinker who practices it sensitively and intelligently. What the middle Nietzsche seeks, in short, is what Pierre Hadot has called philosophy as a "way of life" (Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 3rd ed. [Paris: Albin Michel, 2003]), in contrast to the technical, theoretical, and strictly cognitive enterprise it has become as a result of its late institutionalization. Ansell-Pearson's central thesis, in this connection, is that between the years 1878 and 1882 Nietzsche found his way to "an ethos of Epicurean enlightenment" (3), namely a cheerful approach to the "study of nature" (9) designed to combat late modern disenchantment and open up new, experimental vistas in moral thought and practice.

Setting aside a few minor irritants—most notably, occasional overreliance on an idea or theme imported from Nietzsche's late writings, which is anachronistically treated as though it shows what Nietzsche was thinking some four to eight years earlier (which arguably violates the principles of the middle period genre)—Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy is an outstanding work of scholarship on the development of Nietzsche's thinking during the crucially formative period that preceded the composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). Particularly commendable is Ansell-Pearson's ability to show that while the middle works display an overall unity of concern (in sum: how to find meaning and value in life after the demise of religious and metaphysical fictions in the context of late European modernity), there are also important discontinuities in Nietzsche's thinking over the course of this period, and that this occurs even within what has come down to us as a single work, namely Human, All Too Human's 1887 edition (in which Nietzsche repackaged...

审核人：

• 尼采对哲学的探索：基思·安塞尔-皮尔逊的中间著作
• 安托万·帕纳约蒂

基思·安塞尔-皮尔森 (Keith Ansell-Pearson) 最新的尼采著作是尼采学术研究中更广泛的流派的一部分，该流派大约出现于 2000 年代初，此后一直以稳步加速的速度发展。称之为“中期流派”。其作品属于这一旗帜的学者（例如露丝·阿比、保罗·弗兰科、罗伯特·皮平和迈克尔·乌尔）往往是受过历史训练的“密切读者”，具有浓郁的德语，并且对尼采在旧大陆的接受的复杂性有很好的理解（在与现在在该领域占主导地位的语言学上肆无忌惮的分析沙文主义“尼采哲学家”形成鲜明对比）。然而，最根本地将他们团结起来的是，他们指出，Human, All Too Human (1878–80)、Dawn (1881) 和The Gay Science (1882) 往往要么被完全忽视，要么仅仅被视为尼采所谓成熟作品的前奏。但是，中期流派背后的主要推动力不仅仅是平淡的“填补学术空白”的种类；相反，中心论点是，从探索尼采的中间作品本身作为独立的哲学文本的权利中，可以学到一些有价值的东西。

当然，对于这些有价值的东西究竟是什么，有多少（或多或少合理）的描述，就像有多少本专门讨论“中间尼采”的书一样。Ansell-Pearson 认为，从探索尼采的中间著作中获得的主要好处涉及尼采对哲学本质的反思以及他对特定哲学形式的实践。据他估计，“尼采对哲学的探索在他的中间著作中获得了一些最丰富的时刻和洞察力”（14）。他声称，专注于这些，有望提供一种新的“对尼采思想的欣赏，包括它与哲学和哲学史的关系”（3）。那么，安塞尔-皮尔逊的中间尼采并不关心提出教义（例如“练习精神与哲学古董，第 3 版。[巴黎：阿尔宾·米歇尔，2003 年]），与技术、理论和严格认知的企业相比，它已成为制度化后期的结果。安塞尔-皮尔逊在这方面的中心论点是，在 1878 年至 1882 年间，尼采找到了通往“伊壁鸠鲁启蒙精神”（3）的道路，即一种对“自然研究”（9）的愉快方法，旨在对抗现代晚期的祛魅，并在道德思想和实践中开辟新的、实验性的视野。

撇开一些小刺激——最显着的是，偶尔过度依赖从尼采晚期作品中导入的想法或主题，这被不合时宜地对待，好像它显示了尼采在大约四到八年前的想法（这可以说违反了中间原则）时期体裁）——尼采的《哲学探寻》是关于尼采在创作《如此说话的查拉图斯特拉》之前的关键形成时期思想发展的杰出学术著作（1883-85）。特别值得称道的是安塞尔-皮尔森的能力表明，虽然中间作品表现出整体关注的统一性（总而言之：在欧洲晚期现代性的语境下，宗教和形而上学小说消亡后如何找到生活的意义和价值），这也是尼采在这一时期的思想中的重要不连续性，即使在我们作为一部作品，即人类，太人类的 1887 年版（尼采重新包装...