At the start of his essay on André Malraux, the great Belgian-Australian sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys tells a most amusing story. A stranger to a village attends Sunday Mass, the local priest being famous for his eloquence. After the service, all the congregation except the stranger have been moved to tears. Asked why he was not similarly moved, the stranger replies, “I am not of this parish.”

Leys said that he was not of Malraux’s parish either: he did not admire him. When it comes to Nietzsche, I am not of this parish.

I grant that Nietzsche was brilliantly clever and was possessed of certain important insights, psychological and sociological, sometimes expressed with wit and pithiness reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld. His main insight was that the loss of religious belief would entail philosophical, social, and psychological problems more severe than most people realized at the time, but as far as I am aware he provided no new philosophical arguments against the existence of God, nor was he the first person to question the metaphysics of morality in a world without transcendent meaning. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” was written when Nietzsche was a very young boy:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full . . .
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Of course, Nietzsche proposed a solution to this existential impasse, though again, he was far from the first to do so; but I do not think that he can be absolved entirely from the accusation that his solution, if taken to mean what it appears to mean, could serve as a pretext for the worst imaginable conduct. Between what he sometimes wrote and what Himmler said in his infamous speech about the S.S.’s glorious work of mass extermination there is, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a family resemblance (though of course Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for all that was done by his most brutish of admirers). His exegetes in turn accuse those who take him literally of being unsophisticated and incapable of understanding his depths; but this reminds me of attempts to turn the seventy-two virgins into seventy-two raisins.

Some of Nietzsche’s ideas are distinctly second-rate. Is it a fact that there are no facts, only interpretations? It is certainly not a self-evident truth, nor is it self-contradictory to deny it, so it must be a fact. But if it is a fact, then the statement is false; but if the statement is not a fact, then it is likewise false. In other words, it is false.

Nietzsche’s attempt to undermine the very idea of truth strikes me as the kind of thing adolescents do when they try, by shocking Mom and Dad, to assert their independence. And while we are in the realm of interpretation, here is another: that the last phase of Nietzsche’s life, in which he went from extreme intellectual grandiosity while living in almost pathetically isolated circumstances to complete amentia, is compatible with, indeed typical of, General Paralysis of the Insane, a form of tertiary syphilis (for more on this, see W. Russell Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System, Oxford, fourth edition, 1951).

As to Nietzsche’s other great aperçu, that Socratic and Christian morality is a kind of revenge of the weak and inferior on the strong and superior, a slave morality, a weapon in the hands of the ambitious mediocrity, there is a slight element of truth in it. Indeed, this slight element seems paradoxically to have grown larger with secularization. Incontinent compassion towards anyone who claims for any reason to have suffered, that requires power to be placed in the hands of the compassionate in order to right the supposed wrong that caused the suffering, is a tendency of our time, heroic qualities such as fortitude being at a discount. But to take a small element of the truth as the whole of the truth is a common error of intellectuals who think that they have uncovered something new, and Nietzsche’s depiction of the cultural history of the last two millennia under the influence of Socratic and Christian morality reminds me of the conversation I had with my tree surgeon in France. He was complaining that young people these days didn’t want to work, and I said that people had probably been saying the same for two thousand years.

“Yes,” he replied, “two thousand years of good-for-nothings.”

This seems roughly to be Nietzsche’s summary of post-pre-Socratic European history.

A thinker can be important in more than one way. He may be original and illuminating (though originality is not a blessing in itself), or he may be important because he has a great influence on his society and successors. I think that Nietzsche was important in the second sense, but that his influence has been almost wholly baleful. His originality was in his mode and vehemence of expression, not in the underlying thought. He was one of the patron saints of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and I see in this neither intellectual nor moral advance.

He influenced a great variety of people, from the free-market fascist Ayn Rand, for whom superior types had the right and duty to ride roughshod over multitudes in pursuit of their self-proclaimed superior goals, all protestations to care for the welfare of others being but disguised egotism, to figures such as Foucault, for whom statements of truth were likewise instruments in the lust for power, except when he made them.

I doubt that the author of this gripping and most excellent book would agree with my assessment of Nietzsche’s worth, but in any case it is not intended as yet another assessment of Nietzsche as a philosopher. It is, rather, a fascinating piece of literary history. After the end of the Second World War, Nietzsche’s stock was very low. Who at that time could forget the photograph of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, compiler of Nietzsche’s last, and for a time most influential, book, The Will to Power, greeting the Fuehrer with an expression of malign but senile delight? Nietzsche was guilty by association, and two Italian intellectuals, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, set out to rescue Nietzsche from the Nazis. They were serious scholars, the former the teacher, mentor, and idol of the latter, and neither of them could be suspected of fascist sympathies.

Colli (1917–1979), a worshipper of ancient Greece and its literature, was not only apolitical, he was anti-political in the sense that he wanted constantly to fix his mind on higher matters; Montinari (1928–1986) initially followed his master, but under the influence of events, and the efflorescence of Gramsci after the downfall of Mussolini and the end of the war, became a communist, though a less and less enthusiastic one.

Nietzsche, like Colli after him, was a classicist and philologist, though a disillusioned one. Colli admired Nietzsche greatly and communicated his enthusiasm to Montinari, who was working in the publishing world. Eventually, they managed to persuade the Italian publishing firm Einaudi that a complete and accurate edition of Nietzsche was needed both in Italian and German (the French publisher Gallimard came along for the ride).

The enormous Nietzsche archive resided in Weimar, in the German Democratic Republic, whither it had been returned after the Soviets had captured it. Half of what Nietzsche wrote had never been published and consisted of manuscripts in handwriting that was difficult to decipher. These manuscripts, if deciphered and published, would help to establish what Nietzsche, whose writing was so gnomic and unsystematic, had really meant (though, of course, if there are only interpretations and no facts, as his French interpreters such as Foucault and Derrida took him to mean, he couldn’t really have meant anything).

Nietzsche, though, was a non-person in the G.D.R. The official attitude to him was that of Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and executioner (when he had the power to order executions) who argued that Nietzsche’s whole oeuvre was essentially an attack on socialism. Not even Nietzsche’s place of birth was commemorated with a plaque, and his books were certainly not available in the G.D.R.

Italy and the G.D.R. had no diplomatic relations, but, through his membership in and contacts with the Italian Communist Party, Montinari was able to gain access to the archive in Weimar, on condition that he never revealed to anyone in the G.D.R. that he was working on Nietzsche. He stayed for many years, beavering away for many hours a day in the archive, spied on for the Stasi by the literary scholar and specialist on Theodor Fontane Hans-Heinrich Reuter, who, having first studied literature in Germany during the Nazi regime and served in the Wehrmacht, was himself under surveillance. Reuter gave Montinari a clean bill of health, from the G.D.R.’s special point of view, Montinari being so pure a scholar that he had no time for suspect activities.

Colli, his collaborator on the project, stayed behind in Italy, visiting Montinari once a year. Life in the G.D.R. suited the latter, for he was inclined to asceticism and was provided with the little that he needed. He lived a life of austere privilege. Eventually, he fell in love with and married an East German woman and, his work completed, had difficulties in getting permission for her to leave with him when he returned to Italy.

Montinari and Colli were not always in agreement. By a painstaking trawl through Nietzsche’s notes and marginalia, Montinari discovered that Nietzsche had borrowed a good deal more of other people’s ideas than previously recognized, and that some of his originality consisted merely of having put the ideas together rather than of having had them in the first place. (It is a criticism of this book that the author does not give actual examples.) Colli asked what the point was of all this minute and convoluted investigative erudition. He told his collaborator that “You must always consider the fact that in our whole endeavor, two elements are central for me, namely ‘honoring’ Nietzsche and furthering his impact on the present.”

Since the whole object of the project was to reveal or discover what Nietzsche really thought, Colli’s letter to Montinari seems to me to display an almost religious faith in the value of Nietzsche’s thought. After all, you could not discern its value until you had discovered what it really was, and to desire to further its impact on the present beforehand was an extraordinarily reverential attitude to the man who was the object of the study, amounting almost to intellectual dishonesty.

There is no doubting the devotion to the memory and work of Nietzsche of these two men. In the economic sense it was disinterested, though clearly they both had a deep emotional investment in Nietzsche, for otherwise they could not have undertaken the work that they did. Their biographies are beautifully and movingly laid out in this book. I admire them for their lives, but I am still not of Nietzsche’s parish.