For the sake of brevity, I will say merely that this translation was entirely successful in its aim to vulgarize Nietzsche's stylistic idiosyncracies for the sake of mass consumption. This is a beautiful book, and deserves a more sympathetic treatment. R.J. Hollingdale's translation is the best, but even Walter Kaufmann's is preferable to this one. It DOES matter!

In this book, Nietzsche is concerned with bringing about the end of those idols that have the "feet of clay." Much has grown hollow in the light of modern discoveries, and the old idols must fall. We are not to worry too much about what shall replace them, because Nietzsche's hammer is impatient to speak. And new values need room before they can flourish, so it is out with traditional (mis)conceptions for Nietzsche.

This book is an interesting insight into Nietzsche's, if not the human, psyche. He reveals the insecurity that must stalk those who fancy to be significant people (are you really the ideal/person you represent to be, or just an actor?) This book is also the origin of the famous "what does not destroy me, makes me stronger" maxim. It's a terse and impressive statement, but it is clearly not always true. You may not come out stronger out an illness or a psychologically traumatic experience. Nietzsche overvalues hardness and overestimates the power of the subconsiouss to motivate our actions. As a short and insightful book, however, this is still a great read.

Polt's is an accessible, readable, but faithful translation of a powerful book that summarizes Nietzsche's main thoughts...

The author pathetically debates meaningless questions such as the "soul", etc. This work has no place in a truly educated person's library.

... This book is a must read in order to understand the birth of liberal Protestant theology. Schleiermacher is a brilliant reaction to Kant's rational religion, with his theology of experience. One should read this in order to make sure your theology has heart.

However, Schleiermacher's solutions are wanting. In the 4th speech, he proposes that true religion can be found in small groups that are led by folks who have a closer connection to the divine than the members. In other words, let's go gather ourselves around some guru. Schleiermacher does not intend this, but in principle this idea does not exclude cases like the Branch Davidians, Hitler, etc. The later Schleiermacher of the Glaubenslehre is more self-conscious about theology's need to be continuous with tradition, while moving forward.

Read this book, then go read Barth's Word of God and the Word of Man.

This book, written by Schleiermacher in 1799 at the height of his involvement with the early German Romantics, was considered one of the most provocative and intriguing reads of its day. It continues to be read today because it retains that provocative and intriguing character. In an attempt to respond to Enlightenment critiques of religion, Schleiermacher creates an entirely novel manner of thinking and speaking about religion. In this book it is possible to see the beginnings of his creative and controversial move to ground religion, not in metaphysics or morals, but rather in feeling (or what he later will call immediate self-consciousness). The ripples of this move are still apparent in Protestant theology today. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in tracing the development of modern theology back to its roots. The Crouter translation is particularly good, and it expertly renders the 18th-century language into fluid, clear prose.

Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

Laon

NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

The author of _Zarathustra's secret_ takes us through the period encounter between Nietzsche and Wagner in a quite graphic tale of one of the first of the modern celebrity farces, that of Wagnerian ego and its hangers on. Although the account is well done, I should wonder if a clever cutpurse like Nietzsche was ever really subjugated and whether he didn't, despite an series of emotional shocks, achieve the net equivalent of going undercover as a Wagner disciple, to his profit or loss in unclear. For all the background music of the philosophic, more than musical, leitmotiv (Schopenhauer gave it away with fake hint, the 'will') this account of artistic overdrive twice over is a remarkable tale of psychological helplessness, in Wagner and Nietzsche. Anyway, worth reading.

The Real F.W. Nietzsche would never argue against dissent of his views. He, unlike Wagner, wanted no disciples. He wanted critical commentary, and above all, he wanted to be challenged. The reality is that he was challenged everyday to write, even in extreme pain and half blind. This translation is an admirable effort, but it does fall short in emphasis on what Nietzsche tried to (really) say. His odd, broken, and subtle humor has been lost in many English translations. In truth nothing other than the original German, read by an accomplished student of the language, can really give insight into his mind. This is the same problem that exists in Carl Jung's writings. In my humble opinion Kaufmann is still one of the best German/English translations available. Kaufmann dispels many previous myths associated with Nietzsche especially when it comes to National Socialism, and Darwinism, both of which Nietzsche himself despised. One last note on Nietzsche: His opinion of Noble Morality vs Slave Morality is true even more today.

Sometimes, as I channel surf past some WWF goon belting another with a chair, I can't help but feel that we suffer from the opposite of the problems Nietzsche discussed, and that a little more suffocating bourgeoisie-Christian 'good culture' couldn't hurt. But that's neither here nor there.

I believe this book is considered transitional Nietzsche, having been written after _The Birth of Tragedy_ but before _Beyond Good and Evil_, _The Genealogy of Morals_, et cetera. It consists of four essays: on David Strauss, history, Schopenhauer, and Wagner respectively. In my opinion the 'history' essay is the most interesting; Nietzsche asserts that too much awareness of history enervates the mind, robbing it of the raw vigor he considered so important. Not en entirely original thought, perhaps, but knowledgeably and poetically argued.

This translation seems to be clearly the best of the three I perused in the bookstore: the vocabulary is sharp, forceful, and true to what I know of the German. I don't think this is the place to begin one's study of Nietzsche, but if Walter Kaufmann's collections (The Portable Nietzsche, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche) don't give you your fill, you could certainly pick up this one next.

I take my title for this review from the final sentence of Nietzsche's essay on "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer." Nietzsche was finding himself in a troubling position, commenting on a work which was as subjective as it was without objective proof, while he was just an individual trying to make himself heard against the entire world, in order to adorn us with one more feather, "For as long, that is, as what was always timely -- and what today more than ever is timely and necessary -- is still considered unfashionable: speaking the truth." (p. 81) This masterly translation removes an element of contradiction which has tripped up those who used the title, "Untimely Meditations" for this book, as if we, of all people, didn't need to read it. Walter Kaufmann did not translate this early work by Nietzsche into English. While Kaufmann is widely recognized as having provided translations which were superior to what was previously available, Nietzsche in the original German ought to be considered better than any English version, and the truth with which Nietzsche was concerned in his essay on Strauss might have been particularly painful for any scholar who would like to remain at a high level in the esteem of his peers, for the insults in this work win every argument. From the first words of the first section, "Public opinion in Germany," (p. 5) Nietzsche displays a worry about "defeat -- indeed, the extirpation -- of the German spirit for the sake of the German Reich." (p. 5) Perhaps Kaufmann was never comfortable enough with the English language to make himself credible in a work that ends with a section on style: "perhaps Schopenhauer would give it the general title 'New Evidence for the Shoddy Jargon of Today,' for we might console David Strauss by saying . . . indeed, that some people write even more wretchedly than he does. . . . We do this because Strauss does not write as poorly as do the vilest of all the corrupters of German, the Hegelians and their crippled progeny." And Strauss of course, in Germany in 1873, was famous for providing the Germans with a guide to their beliefs and culture, much like the works of Walter Kaufmann on Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc., provide today's Americans with a view of individual self-control which seeks to guide public opinion above all, or over all, or whatever. Perhaps, given our current status as civilizers of Europe, Nietzsche might even maintain a view of the Americans who study his work in accord with what he said of Strauss, he "would by no means be dissatisfied if it were a bit more diabolical." (p. 20) This is only frighteningly inappropriate for those who see nothing but manipulation in matters of public opinion, which remains about as far from the truth as it can be stretched, and who are afraid of these things snapping back all over the place. I certainly think they are.

If there is a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche's philosophy, this is not it. It definitely wants to be comprehensive. It covers Nietzsche's views in most of the important areas of philosophy (with the suspicious exception of his politics). But it is not a *survey*, because it fails to offer anything like an integrated perspective on a whole -- just the sort of thing Nietzsche would have asked for, right?

To begin with, the prose is at times utterly inpenetrable. Vague pronoun references abound: he'll begin sentences talking about "these considerations" and "these reasons." My favorite is the beginning of a section on page 224:

"There are several sorts of considerations which are highly relevant to the comprehension of the lines along which Nietzsche seeks to direct our thinking by means of these notions."

Which notions? Which considerations? Oh, you mean the previous 223 pages.

Schacht also revels in his talk of "sorts" and "kinds" of things. He never talks about the things themselves: "And the sort of 'value' of which he speaks when viewing them from this perspective is one which he considers, in contrast to them, to have a kind of validity which they lack" (348). That was picked at random. No doubt this is partially Nietzsche's fault, who loves to talk about his "kind of philosopher." But Schacht takes "sort" and "kind" talk to new heights, perhaps offering some explanation of the unfortunate tendency in everyday parlance to use "kind of" and "sort of" as indications of uncertainty: "Yeah, I kind of want to go to the movies, but Nietzsche says that life is chaotic struggle, so I can't be sure if that's what I'll end up doing."

More important, however, is not the style of the book but the content. Of course, the sometimes unintelligble prose makes the content difficult to grasp at all: "The 'power-relationship' of which he speaks are to be thought of in terms of the establishment and modification of relations among the latter which reflect the specific character of whatever transformations of this sort have occurred among them" (228). Huh?

But then there is the content the book leaves out. The absence of any discussion of Nietzsche's politics is the most telling: much of the book is, after all, a whitewash of Nietzsche's many contradictions and shortcomings: Schacht works his hardest to eliminate all such contradictions by splitting hairs over language in a way that would make even Austin role over in his grave. And since Nietzsche's politics are probably most embarrassing to the left-wing intellectuals who wish to make him their postmodern vanguard, leaving them out is obviously the convenient thing to do. One looks in vain even for one mention of a concrete example of *the kind* (!) of man Nietzsche regarded as like unto the ubermensch (Napoleon, Alexander, Caeser Borgia, et al). Of course, concrete examples of just about *anything* are lacking from the rest of the book too, so maybe this is less an issue of intellectual dishonesty than it is of sloppy thinking.

It's funny that the major criticism Nietzsche scholars may be apt to make of this book is that it's too academic, an attempt to present Nietzsche's philosophy too systematically and too logically. Well, if this is systematic and logical according to those scholars, I'd hate to have to use their kitchen.

Richard Schacht's "Nietzsche" represents the next generation of Nietzsche interpretation after Walter Kaufmann's groundbreaking study, "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist." Schacht's book is far more philosophically sophisticated than was Kaufmann's. In it, Nietzsche gives surprising answers and new insights into the classical problems of philosophy (the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, value, morality, aesthetics, etc.). The book seems geared for a reader with some background in western philosophy, but not necessarily a background in Nietzsche. I have two criticisms: first, that Schacht's use of Nietzsche unpublished notebooks is unjustifiable and in many cases uncharitable. We should use the words Nietzsche himself decided to publish in determining his final views. The second criticism is that when Nietzsche is interpreted as an academic philosopher--as Schacht interprets him--we "lose the woods for the trees", so to speak, and are inclined to forget the Nietzsche that reminded us of our nihilistic predicament after the death of God, and that its remedy is in action, not words. Overall this book is essential for anyone interested in knowing how Nietzsche's mind came to bear on the classical problems of western philosophy.

The task itself was daunting, so it is understandable that the authors and illustrators had a hard time making Hegel accessible. Some things that are covered: Phenomenology, Dialectics, Hegel's life, and his influence on Heidegger. But what's missing are clear explanations, and a sense of why Hegel remains important, i.e., his relevance to today's philosophy and other fields (like Media Studies). Hegel himself is neigh impenetrable, but a book claiming to be a basic introduction should have been much clearer and integrative. The illustrations were also not particularly riveting and did not have any additional explanatory power.