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Patrick Hassan, Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 278 pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781009380287.
Reviewed by Julian Young, Wake Forest University and University of Auckland
A familiar way of writing a book about Nietzsche is to follow a particular topic through the corpus: art, religion, or truth, for instance. Patrick Hassan’s topic is pessimism. This is a good choice. Nothing is more central to Nietzsche than his “struggle” against the pessimism of his always revered “educator”, Arthur Schopenhauer. What is distinctive of Hassan’s discussion, however, is that he focusses not on Schopenhauer, but on the post-Schopenhauerian pessimists of whom Nietzsche had some knowledge: philosophers such as Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, and Philipp Mainländer. The confrontation between neo-Schopenhauerians such as these and critics such as Eugen Dühring constituted the “pessimism dispute” that endured from Schopenhauer’s death in 1860 until the end of the century. Though Nietzsche hardly even mentions such…
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