"Nickolas Pappas has put his finger on the problem-Nietzsche's repeated failure to deliver a com-plete history, an entire causal explanation, to keep his appointments-and explains how this fail-ure is at the root of a learned disappointment that most of us have after studying Nietzsche. .. I can easily imagine this work becoming to future Nietzsche studies what Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche has been to scholarship so far."
"Nickolas Pappas's fresh and illuminating interpretations recall us to the seductive power of Nietzsche's writing, even as they insist on Nietzsche's failure to deliver on his ambitious philo-sophical promises. The Nietzsche Disappointment is no disappointment, but an original, first-rate, and welcome contribution to Nietzsche scholarship."
"Nickolas Pappas has not only written his book in a manner that does not betray Nietzsche, but also in a manner that makes much of the fact that Nietzsche was in constant and fruitful critical dialogue with the philosophical tradition. Pappas reads Nietzschean texts against and with those of Descartes, Plato, the New Testament, and Saint Augustine, resulting in a richer understand-ing both of Nietzsche and of those texts."
The Nietzsche Disappointment examines the workings of time in Nietzsche's philosophy. It asks how he explains the great changes that (according to him) turned the past into the present-catastrophic transformations of morality, language, human nature or that may yet make a desir-able future out of this sorry present age.
But after whetting his readers' appetites for past and future cataclysms, Nietzsche makes them seem impossible. What stops Nietzsche from telling the very stories that he wanted philos-ophy to attend to? Perhaps that question can't be answered without considering how Nietzsche understands his own place in the flow of time-considering, for instance, his wish to be an orig-inal philosopher.
The Nietzsche Disappointment is both critical and sympathetic. It interrogates Nietzsche in terms that he should understand; it closes by asking whether there is some way of being criti cal that is also self-critical. For then a good reading may free the reader from Nietzsche's person while continuing to confront the challenge he bequeathed to philosophy.
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