Abstract

In Nietzsche's Teaching, Laurence Lampert "attempts something that has not been done before. In setting out to follow the new route opened by Nietzsche, I retrace Zarathustra's path serially through all the events and speeches of Thus Spoke Zarathustra". For the most part, Lampert completes this ambitious project in impressive fashion: with a painstaking eye for the detail and nuance of Zarathustra, Lampert has produced a systematic, chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche's most enigmatic--and hitherto most inaccessible--work. Lampert's greatest achievement here is to salvage Zarathustra from the scrap-heap of popular philosophy and make sense of the book as a coherent and original contribution to moral and political philosophy. Resisting the popular trend toward deconstructing Zarathustra and "exposing" it as radically discontinuous or anti-philosophical, Lampert renders a faithful interpretation of Zarathustra based on his careful explication of the text's unified dramatic structure. Throughout Nietzsche's Teaching, Lampert traces Nietzsche's thematic and metaphorical allusions to Plato and the New Testament, and explains Nietzsche's teaching via illuminating comparisons to the foundational projects of Bacon, Descartes, and Heidegger, thus displaying an enviable knowledge of the history of philosophy.