Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

Interpreters have long recognized that there is a problem about determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is. Some of his remarks appear to favor a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. Interpreters typically view these as incompatible theses and try to show that one or the other apparent thesis is merely apparent. The problem of determining which of two incompatible theses Aristotle believes is the Dilemmatic Problem of Happiness. But the arguments that rival interpretations amass exert pressure to think that Aristotle really is committed to both of the allegedly incompatible claims. The problem of showing how he can coherently endorse both is the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Any dialectically satisfactory interpretation of Aristotles theory of happiness must solve it. None has done so. It cannot be solved while laboring under the weight of three common assumptions. Chapters 2–4 argue for the falsity of those assumptions and provide materials for constructing a solution to the Conjunctive Problem.