I followed up the Rawls book with this book about Nietzsche from Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series. Its strengths and weaknesses are a mirror image of the Rawls book. Whereas Rawls gave a solid description of the philosopher's ideas with a minimum of style, Nietzsche is a stylishly written book that doesn't really include details about the philosopher's positions. It is really more an impression of Nietzsche than an introduction to this thought. However, I did enjoy Tanner's provocative style, which fits his subject.
The first chapter talks about how "people of the most astonishingly discrepant and various views have sought to find justification for them" in Nietzsche. So perhaps it is not surprising that the impression I came away with is that Nietzsche is largely a pessimistic pragmatist. That is, he recognizes that our views (especially our moral views) have no objective foundation and that we have to choose to live our lives in a way that best comports with our desires. The biggest difference between him and his near contemporary William James is in their temperament: Nietzsche was a cranky pessimist molded under the influence of Schopenhauer, and also steeped in the emotive style of Romanticism. The fact that we have no real foundations tended to drive him to despair, which he fought against by trying to cultivate its opposite, rapture.
I am also left with the impression that I would not care for reading Nietzsche. He lacks an organized system or organized presentation of his views. On the other hand, I find Schopenhauer's unrelenting pessimism to be hilarious, so maybe I'd enjoy Nietzsche's as well.
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