misReading Nietzsche

Perhaps more than any philosophy written in the past few centuries, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche has given rise to controversy, misunderstanding, and dissent. Today Nietzsche is remembered as the revolutionary author of such polemical ideas as the death of God, the revaluation of values, the will to untruth, and the Übermensch. Yet is Nietzsche’s philosophy as atheistic, relativistic, nihilistic, and immoral as some commentators have claimed? Or ought we perhaps to give more credence to Nietzsche’s own assertion that one writes books “precisely to conceal what one harbors” (BGE, 9, 289)?

If “whatever is profound loves masks” (BGE, 2, 40) then might Nietzsche’s more daring claims be interpreted as clever masks behind which he conceals a deeper philosophy and on which he reveals a hidden truth? Is it not possible that the standard readings of Nietzsche are in fact misreadings—that his work invites misreading, that it is intentionally unclear, deceptive, disguised?

The goal of this volume is to reread Nietzsche for all that he shows and all that he hides. It is to dig deeper into his work in order to challenge misreadings of old and invite misreadings anew—as, indeed, his work itself calls for and demands.

M. Saverio Clemente is a husband and father of two. He lives in Massachusetts where he writes, studies, and teaches philosophy.


Bryan J. Cocchiara is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Brookdale Community College. He received his MA from Boston College in 2014, where he was a research fellow at The Lonergan Institute.

John Panteleimon Manoussakis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, and an Honorary Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy of the Australian Catholic University. He was born in Athens, Greece, and educated in the United States (PhD, Boston College). He is also a monastic ordained to the diaconate in 1995 and into the priesthood in 2011 (Archdiocese of Athens). His publications focus on philosophy of religion, phenomenology (in particular post-subjective anthropology in Heidegger and Marion), Plato and the Neo-Platonic tradition, and Patristics (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius and Maximus). He is the author of two books, editor of five volumes and he has published over thirty articles in English, Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.