Generally speaking, philosophers do not make good subjects for biographies. As with poets, what really matters about philosophers is all to be found in their books; unlike poets, their extracurricular activities are seldom sordid or spectacular enough to be interesting. The archetypal philosopher remains Immanuel Kant, whose afternoon strolls around Koenigsberg were so regular that neighbors allegedly set their watches by him. When a philosopher’s biography becomes an object of fascination in its own right, it is generally a sign that he has done something disreputable or sinister – like Heidegger’s involvement with the Third Reich, which has given rise to a flurry of biographical studies in recent years.

In this, as in so many other things, Friedrich Nietzsche is an exception. As he himself declared, Nietzsche was not exactly a philosopher, at least not as that calling had been defined in the classic period of German idealism. Unlike Kant or Hegel, Nietzsche never taught philosophy in a university; his most fruitful period as a thinker came after he had resigned his chair in classical philology, at the University of Basel, and become a peripatetic, completely independent writer. What’s more, Nietzsche’s thought is more like an aesthetic creation than a systematic doctrine. Like an artist, what he offers is a record of experience, transformed by literary art; his works are aphorisms and essays, even poems, rather than treatises. Indeed, he taught that the only thing of value in any philosopher is what remains after his “system” has been refuted: the individual cast of his thought, his way of being in the world.

That is one reason why Nietzsche has proved an inexhaustible subject for biographies, of which Curtis Cate’s “Friedrich Nietzsche” (Overlook, 689 pages, $37.50) is the latest. The other reason is the uncanny arc of his story, full of ironies that a novelist would reject as too melodramatic. Throughout the 1880s Nietzsche issued a stream of what are now recognized as classics of modern thought, from “Human, All Too Human” through “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “Beyond Good and Evil,” climaxing in “The Anti-Christ,” “The Twilight of the Idols” and “Ecce Homo” – all written in one year.

He remained almost totally unknown: The three volumes of “Zarathustra,” for example, sold fewer than 100 copies each. Then, suddenly, his reputation began to skyrocket, so that he became, by the turn of the century, the most fashionable and influential thinker in Europe. But Nietzsche was not able to enjoy this vindication, which he had always longed for and believed in. For at the beginning of 1889, he went spectacularly and irreversibly insane, the result of a syphilitic infection contracted decades earlier. Though he lived until 1900, he spent the last decade of his life in complete imbecility, unable to speak or understand what was going on around him.

No wonder Thomas Mann used Nietzsche’s life as the ghostly template for the doomed composer Adrian Leverkuhn, in “Doctor Faustus,” and no wonder he continues to attract excellent biographers, including Rudiger Safranski, whose German life was translated in 2001, and Lesley Chamberlain, whose “Nietzsche in Turin” focused on his annus mirabilis of 1888. This legacy sets the bar very high for any new life of Nietzsche. The only good reason to add another title to the crowded field is to advance some strong interpretation of his life or work, or the relation between the two. Curtis Cate’s new biography lacks the intellectual and narrative shape to sustain its 600 dense pages.

Mr. Cate, who has previously written the lives of several French novelists (including George Sand and Andre Malraux), does not convey enough of the drama or pathos of what is, in fact, an intensely moving story. Instead, he slogs through Nietzsche’s life, offering diffuse summaries of each new book and a seemingly complete record of each journey and illness, of which there were very many.

There have been a number of Nietzsches over the last century, from the strenuous nihilist of the fin-de-siecle, to the war prophet of National Socialism, to the playful relativist of postmodernism. Mr. Cate’s Nietzsche is none of these, but a rather familiar kind of cultural elitist. What in Nietzsche’s work most appeals to Mr. Cate is the aristocratic disdain for mass man, with his greed for bread and circuses. When Cate’s own voice breaks into the narrative, it is usually to imagine what Nietzsche would make of recent phenomena like “aggressively crude ‘rap’ singing” or the sentimental mourning for Princess Diana.

This is certainly a valid reading of Nietzsche, whose ethics and aesthetics alike make commonness the worst of sins. “We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater,” he complained in “On the Genealogy of Morals. “We suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more indifferent.” But it is not the most interesting or the truest reading, and Mr. Cate’s vision of an irritable Nietzsche does not make sufficiently clear why his “philosophy with a hammer” has been so powerful, for both good and evil.

Mr. Cate passes rapidly over what most readers would consider the crucial points in Nietzsche’s thought – the death of God, as expressed in the terrible parable of the madman in the marketplace; the radical perspectivism that results from the conception of life as will-to-power; and the moral challenge of the eternal recurrence, which demands a human nature able to live every moment again and again, without regret. More problematic, for a biography, his account lacks drama. Quoting extensively from Nietzsche’s letters, and closely following his peregrinations around Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, Mr. Cate never loses track of where Nietzsche is; the larger arc of his story, however, often gets lost.

Surely what is most striking about Nietzsche’s life is the tragicomic disparity between his work – with its constant praise of strength, power, grace, mastery – and his actual predicament as a neurotic invalid, who seldom spent a week without taking to his bed with a migraine. This contradiction appears especially in Nietzsche’s relations with women: The cynic who wrote that a man should always approach a woman with whip in hand was generally unable to approach women at all. Mr. Cate’s account of Nietzsche’s tangled relations with the awful Lou Salome makes this point clearly, and is one of the high points of this biography. Most of the time, however, Mr. Cate’s “Friedrich Nietzsche” does not capture enough of what Mann called the “suffering and greatness” of a doomed, triumphant life.