This is an in-depth academic study of the influence of Nietzsche on Jung. As an enthusiastic reader of both these men I found the book very interesting and thorough, but somewhat dry. It reads like a (very very good) PhD thesis. It is a shame the influence of Jung and Nietzsche on the author rarely rises to the surface!

Highly recommended to Jungians and Nietzscheans alike....

When this book first came out a couple of decades ago, it represented an early effort at recontextualizing an oeuvre that had always been seen as inapplicable to political considerations. Today, that apolitical version of Nietzsche is almost unthinkable, and Tracy Strong deserves a lion's share of the credit for that shift. If you're interested in any facet of Nietzsche's potential as a political thinker, this book is a must.

Strong's greatest strength is his ability and willingness to read both the befores and afters that have produced the Nietzsche we thought we knew. He returns to Nietzsche's prized works, from the Greeks onward (with specific attention to Nietzsche's fave pre-Socratic thinkers) and re-evaluates Nietzsche's appropriations of them. Simultaneously, Strong always keeps in mind the various ways in which those who came AFTER Nietzsche have read and mis-read these moments. Such insights go a long way toward making a re-reading of Nietzsche as much about our changing reading agendas as they are about Nietzsche's.

Strong also treats our past penchant for linking Nietzsche with darker politics, when we linked him with politics at all; the long-perceived relationship with fascism is given its airing here, but Strong convincingly prods the reader into regarding such strict alliances dubiously.

The thoroughness of this book is also impressive. Strong covers everything, and covers it well. While he often carefully sets the context every time he cites Nietzsche, though, "Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration" is still guilty of falling into a trap that endangers every book I've read on him: the tendency to regard his thought as one organic whole, always present, rather than as progressive or even disjointed moments. Because of this, Strong often adduces comments from the much later Nietzsche in order to illuminate statements made earlier in Nietzsche's career. It is disingenuous, because it implies--in a way that can't be right--that what Nietzsche thought in the 1870s was also what he thought in the 1890s.

The only other problem I have with Strong concerns some of the readings of more expressly literary texts. A background of political philosophy, with all of its emphases on explicit arguments and whether they bear scrutiny, reveals itself sometimes as a poor substitute for a more literary interest in what a text conceals as it reveals. As Strong revisits some of the more literary texts to which Nietzsche refers in "The Birth of Tragedy," for example--namely Homer, Greek tragedians, etc.--he reads every passage as a lesson-conveying declaration; this is problematic for Nietzsche, who invested far more at that stage of his thought in anti-coherence than in rational argumentation and presentation.

That aside, though, anyone interested in thinking about Nietzsche politically and in how Nietzsche can be thought of as political would do well to pick up a copy of Strong's book. It is clearly argued, well-written, and still provocative today.

No one can claim that German intellectual history is an easy subject to wade through; this treatise is a good introduction to the important role that Hegel played in the formation of later 19th century German thought. While the translation is a bit balky at points (translating from German to English is no easy task in academic works!) it gives a good introduction to the basic ideas behind some of the more seminal thinkers of the German intellectual milleau through the late 19th century and is a fine basis for moving on to other books on the periods following. It is at times a bit unclear; this is not a book for beginners or the generalist but one for those who are already somewhat familiar with philosophy and the terms of debate. Still recommended reading to understand more fully the foundations of the later German state and history.

The title should have been "Record of an Imaginary Encounter" for those of us who don't like reading prefaces and don't know enough about the two philosophers to realize they never actually met. I, having read biographies on Nietzsche before, was shocked to see him using arguments against Marx that I had read he hadn't come up with yet. I must say I was disappointed when I finally did read the preface. Something about Nietzsche and Marx cussing at each other and reveailing opium addictions in reality appeals to me. In spite of this, it gives a good summary of both philosopher's views and personalities, Nietzsche's personality as meek and Marx's quick-tempered. But, most importantly, Nietzshche is revealed, subtly so as not to anger neo-marxists, as the winner.

I would recommend any book which has a chapter on the comedians of the ascetic ideal. I believe that chapter 6 of this book presents the fullest treatment which Professor Daniel W. Conway has been able to publish on this topic. The section on "Knowledge: A Form of Asceticism" compares Nietzsche's use of the ideal to "a feedback loop invested with residual, and potentially productive, powers of self-denial." (p. 111) Of course this is a difficult book, as Conway pursues the idea to the point where the risk run by Nietzsche, "for example, nearly killed him . . . and it may ultimately have hastened his departure from sanity." (p. 118) This book should appeal to anyone whose political views have the same tendency, or whose views may have failed completely. Any failure which has been repeated so often that it has become funny ought to be compared to the contents of this book.

There are some wild readings of Nietzsche out there (nothing wrong with that), but in this book Danto works out of the British/American more conservative school of philosophy and tries to discover if there is a logical system to Nietzsche's works. Danto is one of the most readable philosophers out there, and is sensitive to the problems of systemizing Nietzsche. Overall a nice antidote to give to overzealous intellectuals who read a little Nietzsche and then feel qualified to start calling themselves one of the ubermensch.

Fredrich Nietzsche challenged all ideas that had not only come before him, but also those which proliferated during his own period. He "deconstructed" society and its "noble lies" in an attempt to show us that man "is something to be overcome." In this book, he attempted to debase all of society by proving that values and ethics are errors of humanity.

From this work by Nietzsche we can begin to understand "will to power" and the nihilism which, as Nietzsche believes, powers society.

This is an excellent book for anyone trying to understand what "nihilism" and the "will to knowledge and power" are. There is no philosopher who can explain this better than Nietzsche, nor is there a book that explains this better than "Nietzsche's Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge."

Quite a biography, NIETZSCHE, "THE LAST ANTIPOLITICAL GERMAN" by Peter Bergmann, published in 1987, is a historian's attempt to place Nietzsche's writings in the political setting that provides a context for whatever goal Nietzsche might have been driving at in each stage of his development. In the history of philosophy before Nietzsche, Hegel is usually considered an official university philosopher who wished to preserve the significance of theology without clinging to the godlike articles of faith that define God in the hearts of believers. Bergmann asserts that Nietzsche never studied any of Hegel's books, but formed opinions based upon a political context in which the philosophy of Hegel represented an intellectual point of view that only needed to be aped by official philosophers.

I picked this book off my shelf again, after all these years, to look for the modern parallels which, like "The new anarchism of the eighties, heralded by Prince Kropotkin, a scholarly, pacific type, became inarticulate in its love affair with dynamite." (p. 147). Writing about a situation which preceded our times by a hundred years, Bergmann examined Nietzsche's reactions to steps that the United States has recently used against Osama bin Laden.

"Bismarck put increasing pressure on Switzerland. In August 1881 Swiss authorities expelled Kropotkin after his return from a much-publicized international anarchist congress in London. Six months before, the newly elected President of the Swiss Confederacy had committed suicide, stung, it was said, by charges of his former radical friends that he was bargaining away the historic rights of Swiss asylum." (p. 147).

Chapter One, "The Anti-Motif" is short. Much interpretation of Nietzsche has already established that "Nietzsche's works have appropriately been read as a lifelong effort to fashion an `anti-self,' one that would free him from the claims of the initial self. Existentialists, concentrating on the struggles of the self, embraced what they perceived as Nietzsche's flight from the political." (p. 5). In Chapter Two, "The Clerical Son," maintains that "Nietzsche kept the dilemma of the clerical son before him throughout his life." (p. 29).

In our more modern age, dominated by the information provided through a secularized mass media, it might be difficult to picture the authority that Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) exercised in the Evangelical church within the provincial world of a small town. Modern presidents who picture their position as a minor miracle granted by God might appreciate such "Pietist theologians and country parsons" who "became the vigilant censors of thought and behavior. Ludwig enthusiastically greeted Friedrich Wilhelm IV's accession and his proclamation of the Christian state. . . . Among Prussia's six thousand Protestant clergymen, Ludwig would be one of the king's most ardent supporters, always believing in the bond between religion and politics." (p. 10). Nietzsche's mother was only seventeen when she married Ludwig, hardly educated, but "They fully shared each other's pietistic enthusiasm. Franziska's strict, simple piety would remain undisturbed throughout her life, with her letters of the 1890s still breathing the emotive and by then anachronistic Pietist language of mid-century." (p. 10).

Those in the 1840s who were expecting that "religion is once again and will in the immediate future be even more the axis around which the world will revolve" (p. 11) were surprised that "The revolution of 1848 would bring this era of religious politics to an abrupt end. Nietzsche's earliest recorded memories were of peasants near his village celebrating the outbreak of the revolution with red flags." (p. 11). "The protestant churches, it seemed, had lost their institutional hold over the populace, and in its stead the army had to secure monarchic authority." (p. 12).

Chapter Three, "The Generation of 1866," tracks "a mood of calamity" (p. 31) in which "the entire issue of Friedrich Wilhelm IV's madness and death was problematic," and the celebration of the coronation of Wilhelm I was described by Nietzsche as "terribly boring, the fireworks on the hill and the bonfire only a little less so, and then the whole evening. It was ghastly." (p. 31). Some people in Iraq seem to be overreacting to their liberation in 2003 from Saddam Hussein with a similar lack of enthusiasm for the American troops who can pull down statues, but then what? Those German young people who expected more opportunities to prosper in the growing federation of German states after the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, also experienced the Danish war which "concluded in a squalid struggle between Prussia and Austria over the spoils." (p. 37). In 1866, "Nietzsche found himself in the anomalous situation of being a Prussian in occupied Leipzig." (p. 47). After some involvement in politics, "Nietzsche left Leipzig to escape the cholera epidemic invading the city." (p. 48).

Chapter Four, "The Spectacle of Greatness," following some previous mention of Schopenhauer, examines the tension between the illegitimacy of the Bismarckian state and the Wagnerian movement toward the Bayreuth festival of 1876. As a young professor, Nietzsche was attempting to bring antiquity to life, and Johann Jacob Bachofen gets credit for "arcane studies of the mythological prehistory of the ancient world that included the novel thesis of an earlier matriarchal age." (p. 90). This should no longer be a surprise. According to Will Durant, THE LIFE OF GREECE, (1939) before Cecrops, who founded Athens, children did not know their own father. "The descendants of Cecrops ruled Athens as kings. The fourth in line was Erechtheus, . . . His grandson, Theseus, about 1250, merged the twelve demes or villages of Attica into one political unity, whose citizens, wherever they lived, were to be called Athenians." Our civilization is only 3400 years younger than that matriarchy, and with all the crazy things that men do, it is not too surprising that Nietzsche started life in a home ruled by his grandmother, who moved the family and let him stay in a back room after his father died.

My copy of this book had misprints or misbindings, with 60 pages missing and 60 pages repeating. Articles by Hollingdale, Kofman and Kaufmann were obliterated by repeatitions of other pages. Also, some of the articles included are very confusing, like Tossini's comments on Rorty vis-a-vis Nietzsche, Derrida's take on Heidegger/Nietzsche and that thing about Weber. But most, like the article on Deleuze and on Shamanic Nietzsche are very nice.

Composed of brief excerpts from letters throughout Nietzsche's life, this book reveals the human side of the brilliant, courageous, lonely, sick, and finally insane philosopher who so influenced 20th c. thought.