Nietzsche says that the worst readers are those “who proceed like plundering soldiers … picking up only those few things they can use … and blaspheming the whole” (HH II:I:137), and that the best readers are those who patiently develop an eye for the whole and know that reading must be practiced as an art – an art that “has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays” (GM P:8).

The prevailing tendency among contemporary scholars of Nietzsche's work, when expounding his views, is to refrain from concentrating on a single work. Nietzsche's corpus is often treated as if it were one enormous, disorganized text from which one can draw individual passages at will and consider them in isolation from their original home in a given work without cost to one's understanding of his thought. Arthur Danto begins his book Nietzsche as Philosopher with a candid defense of this procedure: