Paul A. Swift’s Becoming Nietzsche: Early Reflections on Democritus, Schopenhauer, and Kant advances a precise scholarly claim: that the conceptual profile of the young Nietzsche between 1866 and 1868 is legible as a disciplined set of problems and methods forged through sustained confrontation with three different figures—Democritus, Schopenhauer, and Kant—and that these confrontations yield determinate shifts in Nietzsche’s understanding of science, metaphysics, aesthetic experience, and the limits of teleological explanation. By reconstructing the composition sequence of notes, aborted projects, and programmatic sketches—especially the planned dissertation Teleology Since Kant—Swift demonstrates how Nietzsche’s earliest philosophical procedures merge into an experimental practice whose internal tensions anticipate, without collapsing into, the later critiques of Platonism and the later diagnostics of nihilism. The distinctive contribution lies in a demonstration that these early engagements already configure an anti-Platonic style of explanation and a method for transposing metaphysical claims into aesthetic, physiological, and historical registers.
The book’s outer frame is explicit and concrete. Swift begins by clarifying the archival and editorial situation of Nietzsche’s early materials, marking the difference between writings that Nietzsche prepared for circulation and those he left as working documents. This framing introduces two methodological commitments. First, published texts are privileged when adjudicating doctrine; second, surviving notes from 1866–1868 are mined to illuminate formation, not to manufacture finished positions. The distinction matters because the young Nietzsche’s projects in these years include outlines that do not culminate in a book but do articulate recurring problem-complexes. Swift’s introduction insists that the Will to Power notebooks—decades later in origin and posthumously merged by others—should not supply a template for reading the early period. Instead, the archival microfilms and the philological writings surrounding the mid-1860s provide the chronological backbone. From the beginning of 1866 to autumn 1868, Swift treats Nietzsche’s studies as an apprenticeship in problems: the reach of mechanistic explanation, the sense in which aesthetic judgment might respond to the world’s organization without legislating it, the analogies and limits between organic purposiveness and conceptual teleology, the status of metaphysical language once purged of ontological pretension, and the pressure exerted by cultural fact—Greek music, myth, and rhetorical education—on any adequate account of cognition.
The composition sequence is reconstructed with care. Nietzsche’s first intensive cluster centers on Democritus and the historiography of atomism. Swift reads the Democritean dossier as Nietzsche’s early test of how a philosophical position can be stabilized when its purported objects (atoms, void, causal necessity) outrun direct presentation. The historical questioning of Greek sources becomes a method for interrogating the grammar of purportedly fundamental entities. Swift sees Nietzsche letting philology and conceptual analysis cross-corroborate: the atom is an explanatory idealization with rhetorical effects, and the narrative by which it is inherited is itself a technique for authorizing a style of causality. The evidence shows a young scholar who neither rejects nor canonizes atomism; he interrogates the conceptual utility of positing indivisible units as a way of managing explanatory economy. On Swift’s reading, this work establishes a model that will persist: metaphysical posits are assessed by how they reorganize experience and inquiry rather than by a putative correspondence to hidden things. What is textually secured is the linkage Nietzsche explicitly draws between a historical account of doctrines and a functional account of their cognitive uses; what is inferential is the full scope of the atom’s status as an ideal object, since the notes do not yield a system but rather a procedural skepticism that takes rhetorical and pedagogical form.
The Schopenhauer cluster then enters as a double intensification. First, Schopenhauer provides Nietzsche with a philosophical voice that sanctions unfashionable questions: what it would mean to describe the world through a principle of striving, what it would mean to designate aesthetic experience as a suspension of practical compulsion, and how philosophy might reclaim seriousness by refusing polite evasions around suffering and illusion. Second, Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation offers Nietzsche an apparatus for differentiating modes of access to the real: representation as the grid of intelligibility, will as the energetic substratum, and aesthetic contemplation as a rare configuration in which the compulsion of willing is temporarily eased. Swift shows that Nietzsche fastens onto Schopenhauer’s criteria for seriousness and integrity, not as dogma to be adopted but as a measure of inquiry. The young scholar’s admiration is documented: invective against academic complacency, a tone that combines moral-intellectual courage with scorn for prettified metaphysics, and a recommendation of the arts as registers of truth that are not reducible to propositional content. Swift’s textual base anchors these attributions in Nietzsche’s own remarks about Schopenhauer’s hybrid philosopher-poet profile, and in his retrieval of the arts as non-inferential access points to the dynamics of life. Where the evidence is thinner, Swift marks it: an explicit doctrine of will at this stage cannot be reconstructed as a settled position; Nietzsche’s later elaborations on willing exceed the mid-1860s materials. The book acknowledges that further engagement with Nietzsche’s philological writings in the same window could have helped clarify how his account of “will” interacts with linguistic form and rhetorical pedagogy. Yet within the scope of the available documents, Swift’s argument that Nietzsche learned from Schopenhauer how to treat metaphysical discourse as a coded physiology and a mood-laden optics is textually supported.
Kant enters by way of a concrete project: Teleology Since Kant, a dissertation Nietzsche begins in early 1868. Swift’s central claim is that this project is neither antiquarian nor a rehearsal of familiar Kantiana; it is the young Nietzsche’s instrument for probing how judgment secures itself when concepts outstrip determinate cognition. The Critique of Judgment thereby becomes crucial. Swift sifts the drafts to show that Nietzsche’s interest is twofold. There is the problem of purposiveness in nature: how to interpret the organization of living beings without smuggling in a supernatural artisan. There is the problem of aesthetic judgment: how to account for a non-conceptual, non-moral apprehension of form that nonetheless exhibits a universalizing aspiration. Swift reads these as convergent. Teleological talk becomes a reflective vocabulary that guides investigation in biology and physiology without committing metaphysically to providential design; aesthetic judgment becomes an index of how the understanding and imagination cooperate in a way that discloses structure while suspending the demand for determinate proof. The Darwinian context is not absent here—Swift notes Nietzsche’s attentiveness to selection and survival as background pressure—but the argument remains Kantian in method: to preserve the heuristic gains of teleology in the life sciences while refusing a transcendent architect. Textually secured in Nietzsche’s notes is the translational maneuver: terms like purposiveness are domesticated into methodological rules for inquiry; they are no longer statements of the world’s inner intent. Swift infers, with restraint, that the young Nietzsche already uses a Kant-inspired division of labor between the context of discovery and the context of ontological claim, thereby clearing a space for a future critique of metaphysical projection.
The three clusters—Democritus, Schopenhauer, Kant—are not parallel columns of influence. Swift stages them as a dynamic sequence in which each reconfigures the import of the others. Democritus trains Nietzsche to read metaphysical doctrines as techniques of explanation with histories. Schopenhauer prescribes a measure for philosophical seriousness and introduces a grammar in which art has cognitive breadth and metaphysical language speaks in the register of force. Kant supplies the reflective architecture that turns teleology from a dogma into a rule of method and that ratifies aesthetic judgment as a disciplined way of meeting the world without appropriation. Swift’s study shows these combining into a practice of conceptual transposition: terms migrate from ontological to methodological, from declarative to diagnostic, from sermon to physiology of culture. The sequence is compositionally grounded in the order of Nietzsche’s engagements, and the merger is evidenced by the increasing clarity with which later notes sift earlier commitments: what had looked like claims about the world’s furniture are re-read as claims about the equipment of inquiry.
From this point the study gathers its energies into a culminating arc, the place in which Swift’s reconstruction takes on the dimensions of a fourth movement. While the book’s chapters are distributed among the three named figures, Swift builds toward a fourth argumentative “book” in which the stakes of metaphysics and the first stirrings of nihilism come into explicit view. The emphasis on this fourth movement is justified by the dossier itself: references to metaphysics saturate the Schopenhauer material and are reorganized under the Kantian problem of reflective judgment; intimations of nihilism emerge in the descriptions of loss of self and the experience of diminished meaning in a world pictured through abstract mechanism. Swift’s thesis is that Nietzsche’s method in these years already contains a twofold discipline toward the metaphysical impulse. On the one hand, it refuses to license metaphysics as a doctrine of entities beyond appearance; on the other hand, it redeploys metaphysical vocabulary as a physiognomic index of valuation, mood, and historical situation. In this way metaphysics becomes an archive of how a culture registers its needs and fears, and also a set of instruments that can be aesthetically recoded. The young Nietzsche’s attention to Greek music, to the eye–ear polarity in apprehending phenomena, and to the aesthetic constellation that will become Apollonian and Dionysian supports this reading. Swift shows that already in these files Nietzsche experiments with an eye metaphysics and an ear metaphysics as competing allegories of access, and that the preference for one or the other conveys more than sense modality; it discloses a comprehensive comportment toward form, intensity, distance, and fusion.
Within this fourth movement, nihilism appears not yet as a doctrine about values but as phenomenological pressure. Swift highlights early descriptions of experiences in which the self is overrun or thinned out, experiences for which discursive language proves inadequate. These passages matter because they link a growing suspicion of declarative metaphysics to a diagnostic insight: where the world is taken to be exhausted by mechanical description or where the will’s striving is interpreted only as blind compulsion, the structures that render meaning resilient begin to erode. The materials do not yield a worked-out theory of nihilism; Swift carefully restrains the claim. What is textually secured is the register of crisis—passages that trace a diminished fit between inherited metaphysical images and lived experience, and that gesture toward the risk of a world insufficiently articulated by value-sensitive forms. What is inferential is the name “nihilism” itself as a self-conscious category in Nietzsche’s hand at this date; the documents allow us to see the structure of the problem without authorizing terminological finality. The methodological upshot nevertheless holds: if metaphysical claims are transposed into aesthetic, physiological, and historical keys, then the pathologies of metaphysical life—its muffled despair, its hunger for guarantees—can be met by reorganizing attention, education, and art, rather than by introducing a new catalogue of supersensible items.
Swift’s treatment of teleology provides a second entry into the fourth movement. Nietzsche’s dissertation-plan explores whether teleological language in biology functions as a rule for inquiry. Swift shows that this exploration undermines two temptations at once. The first is theological: the urge to treat purposiveness as evidence of a world designer. The second is eliminativist: the urge to erase purposiveness from the language of science as so much superstition. Nietzsche’s notes, as Swift reconstructs them, locate purposiveness within reflective judgment. This preserves its heuristic force for investigating organic systems—where part–whole relations, feedback, and functional organization must be modeled—while binding it to the empirical and conceptual disciplines that test models against phenomena. Swift’s analysis demonstrates that for the young Nietzsche, form is a problem to be solved within experience, and purpose is a regulative orientation that guides modeling. This matters for metaphysics because the same translational maneuver moves terms like substance, cause, and will from declarative ontological status to methodological or interpretive use. Metaphysics thereby continues, but as a clarified practice that knows the scope of its claims and the conditions of their intelligibility.
The confrontation with Platonism is a steady undertone. Swift does not caricature Plato; he isolates the Platonic gesture that promises stable being behind flux, and the pedagogical culture that prizes truths distant from sensation and risk. Against this backdrop, Swift reads Nietzsche’s admiration for Greek musical culture and tragedy, and his retrieval of the arts as sites of non-moral and non-cognitive disclosure, as already implicated in an anti-Platonic shift. The evidence here is rich: reflections on the Greek ear, the role of rhythm and tone in organizing experience, the sense that language inherits and ossifies these earlier, more immediate forms of orientation. The early Nietzsche, as Swift presents him, experiments with an education of the senses that would acquaint the philosopher with modulations of form prior to conceptual fixation. This experimentation is not a flight from science; it is a proposal for the order of operations in which concepts are instructed by an aesthetics of attention. The anti-Platonic result is that the measure of philosophical seriousness moves from fidelity to an otherworldly order to integrity in accounting for our embodied, temporal, and cultural condition. On this point Swift’s textual basis is secure, even while the polemical name “Platonism” remains, at this date, a heuristic stand-in for a family of oppositions that Nietzsche will later name with greater precision.
The path through Democritus returns in the fourth movement as a critique of reduction without dismissing mechanism’s explanatory power. Swift shows the young Nietzsche borrowing from atomism an ideal of clarity—train explanation on simple, combinable elements—and simultaneously measuring the loss incurred when such clarity is bought at the price of music, myth, and the physiognomy of forces. The result is a two-register practice: learn what mechanism can settle, and learn what it cannot ask because its grammar forbids such questions. Swift’s central interpretive move is to read the oscillation between admiration and suspicion as Nietzsche’s apprenticeship in a hybrid method: philological sobriety when tracking claims through texts and traditions; experimental audacity when translating metaphysical residue into aesthetic and physiological hypotheses.
The status of the “will” is a case where Swift proceeds with methodological caution. He catalogues the places where the young Nietzsche describes will as a name for force, striving, or inner drive, and he juxtaposes these with notes that recode will in terms of language, habit, or the interpretive overlays of culture. The Schopenhauerian inheritance is evident; so are the incipient departures. Swift folds this material into the larger argument by returning to the Kantian lesson: terms that tempt us to posit hidden things are to be read as rules for organizing experience. Will functions, in this pocket of the dossier, as a schema for linking physiological excitation, attention, and valuation. Where the textual density supports a bolder claim, Swift makes it: Nietzsche is already exploring ways to break the dualism of representation and thing-in-itself by inserting art, rhetoric, and music between sensation and concept. Where the dossier is thinner, Swift registers it and refrains from turning the mid-1860s will-talk into the later doctrines of will to power. The acknowledgment that Nietzsche’s other comments on the will could have been engaged further—especially by consulting philological texts from the same period—appears within Swift’s own framing and, as a limitation, clarifies the book’s scope rather than undermining its result.
An important feature of Swift’s method is that he treats aesthetic judgment as neither ornament nor supplement. It becomes a test case for the larger claim that cognition has more forms than propositional assertion and that culture educates cognition by refining receptive capacities. The young Nietzsche’s attention to rhythm, tone, and the sensuous order of Greek life is presented as a set of empirical cues for how judgment without concept might nevertheless disclose form and organize comportment. Swift excavates here a subtle continuity: the same discipline that keeps teleology heuristic in biology also keeps metaphysical language heuristic in philosophy. Both are rules of sustained attention to patterns in experience; both are answerable to correction through further experience and historical learning; neither is licensed to project a transcendent entity. The consequence for metaphysics is decisive. Metaphysical speech becomes a controlled form of exposure to world-structure, conducted through symbols, myths, and artworks, and disciplined by comparative philology and physiology. The consequence for nihilism is equally decisive. Once the metaphysical gesture is disciplined in this way, the default routes to despair—either through the collapse of old ontologies or through the suffocation of meaning by reductive models—are both defused and redescribed: the problem is no longer that there are no transcendent guarantees; the problem is how to educate sensibility such that it can sustain meaning in a world rightly purged of guarantees.
Swift’s handling of Darwin and the life sciences is measured. Nietzsche’s proximity to the publication of On the Origin of Species is flagged to explain the salience of purposiveness and adaptation in the dissertation plan. The claim that Nietzsche privileges survival talk over other energetic accounts is resisted; Swift shows instead that the young Nietzsche experiments with selection language while keeping his horizon trained on form, organization, and expression. Where survival could tempt one to a flat economizing of life, Swift’s Nietzsche lets aesthetic vocabulary—appearance, semblance, display—re-enter the description of organisms as structures that do more than persist; they pattern intensities. This refusal to overlearn Darwin is not a rejection of Darwin’s models; it is a filtration by which those models are admitted into a broader practice of description where physiology, history, and art are of equal dignity when they teach us how form holds.
Throughout, Swift calibrates the evidentiary burden. When he asserts that Democritus trains Nietzsche to read metaphysics historically, he provides the notes that tether atomism to rhetorical pedagogy. When he asserts that Schopenhauer gives Nietzsche a standard of seriousness, he provides Nietzsche’s explicit praise for the older philosopher’s moral courage and his fusion of metaphysics and art. When he asserts that Kant’s Critique of Judgment guides the dissertation’s treatment of teleology, he cites passages in which purposiveness is explicitly described as a rule of investigation rather than a fact about things in themselves. When he reconstructs the fourth movement around metaphysics and nihilism, he distinguishes firmly: the documents warrant the claim that metaphysical language is being repurposed into aesthetic and physiological rules; they warrant the claim that experiences of diminishment and inadequacy of language are front of mind; they do not warrant the claim that Nietzsche is already deploying a fully theorized concept of nihilism. The temptation to import the later vocabulary is acknowledged and refused; the structural affinities are explained as anticipations and formats rather than as doctrines already signed.
One of the most compelling through-lines in Swift’s narrative is the way judgment becomes a hinge across domains. In philology, judgment compares, weighs, and contextualizes. In science, judgment models, tests, and revises. In aesthetics, judgment apprehends form without concept and ascribes a universal communicability to that apprehension. Swift merges these together to propose that the early Nietzsche is apprenticing himself to a practice of cultured judgment in which the philosopher’s first task is to learn what counts as an appearance, what counts as an organization of phenomena, what counts as a compelling display. The practical corollary is educational. Plato’s curriculum ascends from shadow to form; Nietzsche’s reformed curriculum, as Swift extracts it from the dossiers, trains attention in the density of appearances so that form is learned within appearance through art, history, and physiology. This education is what Swift sees Nietzsche preparing against the later crises of meaning: it produces sensibilities that do not require metaphysical guarantees and yet are not condemned to thin description.
The study also clarifies an often-misunderstood point about Nietzsche’s relation to truth. Swift’s materials show a young scholar already distinguishing truth from assertion. Truth is not salary for sentences but a trait of successful contact with pattern, organization, and power—the Gestalt that holds in experience and can be taught, shared, and contested. Aesthetic judgment is a regimented way of making such contact. Teleological language, properly domesticated, is another. Metaphysical vocabulary, recoded as diagnostic, is yet another. In each case, truth is disciplined by exposure to the world and by historical learning, and it is carried by forms that exceed the declarative sentence: musical structure, mythic figure, symbolic opposition, pedagogical practice. Swift’s argument is not that the early Nietzsche already affirms a perspectivism; it is that he is learning to treat perspectives as the media in which worldly structure becomes available.
The anti-Platonic impulse thus becomes a disciplined anthropology of philosophy. The philosopher is a historically situated animal with a specific sensory and cultural apparatus. Plato’s promise of stable being is reconceived as a symptom of this animal’s need; the promise’s power is explained by its fit with educational and rhetorical economies. Swift’s Nietzsche is sensitive to the grandeur of the Platonic project even while he displaces its thesis: form is to be learned within appearance by reconstructing the uses of metaphysical language and by educating judgment through art. The argument then loops back to Democritus and Schopenhauer to illustrate how even the most abstract doctrines bear the mark of their cultural and physiological milieus. Atomism’s elegance is a cultural taste for simplicity codified into ontology. Schopenhauer’s will is a moral-psychological lexicon harvested into metaphysics. Both can be rescued from dogmatism by rewriting their claims as rules for attention and styles of description.
Swift’s closing idea places metaphysics and nihilism together under the rubric of method. Metaphysics survives as a repertoire for articulating intensities, relations, and forms that experience alone cannot inventory without guidance. Nihilism, emerging as a felt deficit when inherited repertoires fail, is addressed not by replacing one set with another but by building new repertoires: re-educating attention, composing new myths, listening again to the sonic order of experience, training comparative judgment across histories and sciences. The young Nietzsche’s dossier does not deliver the program in full. It does, as Swift rigorously shows, supply the tools for it and the early trials of their use. The study’s scholarly stake is secured by the documents; its distinctive contribution is to read those documents as a sequence of problem-solving exercises whose results compose a fourth movement where metaphysics becomes method and the earliest pressures of nihilism are recognized as educational problems before they become judge’s sentences on value.
If the reader expects a finalized theory of will, they will not find it here; Swift’s caution is principled, and the files do not bear a doctrine’s weight. If the reader expects a comprehensive engagement with every philological text from 1867, they will see why Swift’s focus remains narrow: the aim is to reconstruct the philosopher-in-formation rather than the scholar’s full curriculum vitae. What the reader receives instead is an argument that fuses conceptual exposition with source-based warrant, tracks how the Democritean, Schopenhauerian, and Kantian paths combine into a practice of cultured judgment, and shows how this reasoning expands into a fourth movement in which metaphysics and nihilism are re-specified as problems of method, education, and aesthetic articulation. The book illuminates a trajectory because it treats becoming as a disciplined sequence of attempts—and because it keeps the record of those attempts distinct from the rhetoric of retrospective triumph. In closing, the clarification Swift offers is both sober and generative: the young Nietzsche did not yet possess the later vocabulary that would scandalize Europe, yet he had already built the workshop in which those later instruments would be forged, and the tools he fashioned there—historical philology, reflective teleology, aesthetic judgment, and diagnostic metaphysics—remain serviceable for readers who want to study how a philosopher becomes what he is.
Simon Gros 
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