If you don't know much about Nietzsche, then you should read this little book. I'm still reading it and I'm enjoying it very much!

Reading the newly pre-eminent translation of "The Genealogy of Morality" by Maudemarie Clark (a standard-bearer in Nietzsche scholarship) and Alan Swensen, a book regarded by Nietzsche himself as "a touchstone for what belongs to me," one may well wonder if, since its publication in 1887, much has been established in the genres of moral philosophy or moral psychology that is not merely an unwitting (or unacknowledged) footnote to the scintillating propositions, probabilities, and speculations this book.

For further corroborative and complementary work -- by a contemporary academic gifted with a matchless synthesis of eloquence, erudition, and psychological acuity -- see William Ian Miller's "Humiliation," "The Anatomy of Disgust," and his forthcoming "The Mystery of Courage."

His is an extradinary book, especially for an American writingabout German poetry. Mr. Grundlehner should write it (poetry andliterature)--not write about it. He writes with style and grace, and his potential is there for the reader to behold. A must read. Even Nietzsche would be proud.

This book is a translation of Stambaugh's doctoral dissertation written in Germany under the title _Untersuchungen zum Problem der Zeit bei Nietzsche_ in 1958. Much of what Stambaugh writes (which should be noted was in criticism of and opposition to contemporary Nietzsche scholarship at the time in Germany as represented by Lowith and Heidegger) would later become standard in Nietzsche studies through the publication of Deleuze's _Nietzsche et la philosophie_ in 1962: e.g., the resolution of the "conflict" of the so-called teleological character of the concept of will to power and the non-teleological eternal return by delineating Nietzsche's understanding of "will" as naturalistic and cosmological rather than anthropomorphic; the explication of Nietzshce's anti-Newtonian concept of space as relations of force rather than formal. Stambaugh provides a wealth of information and ingenious interpretation that cannot be touched upon in this limited space. The only issue I have is with her contention that Nietzsche's concept of time remains formal. I am not sure the agrument she presents throughout leads to this conclusion. But this is perhaps a mere semantic difference and need not contain the force of Nietzsche's thought of eternal return as such, which Stambaugh readily concedes.

If you are interested in understanding Nietzsche's ontological explications of will to power and eternal return this is the best book available in English.

Jasper's book is one of those books that you are so impressed by you work to memorize and apply in all thinking processes. His discription of existentialism in one's chaotic center of concealed knowledge with how we perceive reality is essential and the foundation behind all thinking in philosophy, science and religion.

Jasper speaks of all thinking within a horizon that can be transcended. All horizons being within a horizon he names "the encompassing," which can be seen in two modes, as all Being in itself, or as all Being within which we are. It is here within which we are, we perceive reality in three ways: by empirical existence, consciousness and spirit. In turn we use reason to formulate, objectify and create absolutes, yet at the same time we need to use our irrational concealed knowledge, that is, the dark ground and center, of all modes, the existenz, to allow our reason to be open and apart from mere intellectual indifference. All demarcations are relative, yet existenz without reason is unrelated to Transcendence. Each without the other loses the genuine continuity of Being, and therefore, the reliability ceases to be authentic.

Reason clarifies our existenz, while our existenz gives content to our reason. Jaspers also goes into the idea of communicating truth, the prioity and limits of ratonal thought and compares the ideas of Nietzsche and Kiergaard. The book is brilliant.

This book contains a thoughtful and provoking analysis of Nietzsche's influences on theology and philosophy. Leaving no one out, the book examines interpretations of Nietzsche's work from Heidegger to Bonhoeffer, Nehamas to Nussbaum. It is a monumental undertaking and extraordinarily useful in understanding the theological/philosophical dialogue concerning Nietzsche's intended atheism and its consequences.

F. A. Lea's THE TRAGIC PHILOSOPHER: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE is eminently fair and shows a depth of insight into Nietzsche's philosophy not often found even in the best of commentators. In my considered opinion, Lea's work (first published in 1957) rivals Walter Kaufmann's NIETZSCHE: PHILOSOPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST, ANTICHRIST (first published in 1950) as the best commentary on Nietzsche ever written. Lea's work is even better than Rudiger Safranski's NIETZSCHE: A PHILOSOPHICAL BIOGRAPHY (2002), an outstanding volume in its own right. Lea has the highest respect and appreciation for Nietzsche's accomplishments, but he does not shy away from criticizing Nietzsche, who, after finishing the Third Part of THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, began his slow, sad decline into nay-saying and insanity. A tragic philosopher indeed! According to Lea, Nietzsche misunderstood men like Jesus, the apostle Paul, and St. Augustine, and he provides convincing reasons for such an interpretation. In effect, Nietzsche, the man who struggled valiantly to be a Ja-sager (Yea-sayer) and overcome nihilism, at last succumbed to the demon of nihilism and the negative, destructive spirit of nay-saying. Nietzsche, asserts Lea, was much closer to Jesus, Paul, and Augustine than he realized. I recommend this book with the highest recommendation possible. It deserves a wide readership.

I've read "Untimely Meditations" in a few different translations, and Arrowsmith's is excellent (I have no German, not yet). But the special reasons to buy Arrowsmith's "Unmodern Observations" are (1)the translator was himself a man of enormous complexity and diverse gifts; and (2)at the end of the 1st Meditation ("David Strauss, Writer and Confessor"), Nietzsche appended a section analyzing the STYLE of Strauss' work, pointing out the mixed metaphors, cliches, bungled rhetorical flourishes, et cetera, with a more or less brutal intensity. Translating this appendix, which amounts to an essay on German literary style, is very daunting for obvious reasons, and most translators simply leave it out. Arrowsmith masterfully renders the whole thing, and when I read it in the library at Brandeis ten years ago I felt I was learning more about how to write than I had from any other book.

Suppose for a moment that we were able to travel back in time to the latter part of 19th century Germany. If we could do this, we would find an up and coming philosopher by the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who has recently befriended an aging composer; Wilhelm Richard Wagner. Thanks to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, we are able to make this impossible journey and breathe the crisp German air alongside this philosopher & composer.

The correspondence and friendship that developed between these two intellectual and artistic giants is examined in great detail by Fischer-Dieskau. We learn of their mutual love and admiration. We're let in on the jealousy that each of these egoists had for the other. Wagner would have liked to have been remembered as a great philosopher as well as a great composer. Nietzsche, likewise, would have liked to have been known to posterity as a great composer as well as an influential thinker.

Unfortunately, things did not work out that way. Fischer-Dieskau relays for us the letters of rejection that Hans von Bulow sent to the philosopher; the insults that ended Nietzsche's musical ambitions altogether. As a sidenote you can get some of Nietzsche's piano works @ Amazon.com...P>This is an opportunity to explore a friendship that is every bit as fascinating as that between Beethoven & Goethe. All of the intrigue of the famous splitting up & subsequent animosity, the wonderful discussions about Schopenhaur as well as Nietzsche's infatuation with Cosima Wagner - all if it is included in this biographical work. Anyone who has an interest in either of these men will benefit a great deal by reading this book.

I bought this book at a time when Nietzsche's works interested me much more than anything that real people had to say about Nietzsche. When I was a youth, a commission had been appointed to try to understand a series of riots, and my reading of Nietzsche was more sympathetic to those who had reasons for trying to demoralize the old order, a motive which I always have read into Nietzsche, than any professor would admit. But I was being ignored, along with my efforts to ridicule people who thought they could outsmart Nietzsche by being more moral or better educated in modern intellectual survival mechanisms. I wasn't talented enough, musically, to be a rock 'n' roller, (this was about the time someone at work told me I could play guitar, "But don't sing,") so it seemed natural to me that college professors weren't astute enough to make their criticisms of Nietzsche stick with me, particularly when rocking out seemed much closer to my escape mechanisms than the loss of self which I could experience by actually understanding Nietzsche in a sense that defied any explanation. I probably bought this book in 1995, when it seemed to be the newest work in the field on Nietzsche's relation to the feminine, and my luck in finding an attempt to plumb the deepest portions of that relationship through striking surveys of the psychological field of thought in this area was great. I believe this book is still in print, an accomplishment which has eluded a number of other works on this topic, and it really is time to start taking this one seriously.

My first great discovery in this book was its discussion of the comedians of the ascetic ideal. A lot of what I learned was in the notes at the end of the book, but Kelly Oliver clearly captured Nietzsche's relationship to the ascetic ideal on page 42 with her description, "Like the plundering soldier, he steals its armor and wears it mockingly, making fun of his enemy. By doing so, however, he is always also mocking himself. . . . This laughter is the only thing that sets the faker apart from the real thing." As a philosopher, Nietzsche definitely mocks himself, but picturing him as a plundering soldier, his laughter appears to be the most real thing about him, and any trouble that I have been in is a sure sign that I am too close to the truth on this point.

The other parts of this book which I could comment on might be considered equally troubling, but the index is helpful in tracking down where this book is really great, and my favorite entry, which might be considered a concept which summarizes the kind of confusion that this book is attempting to avoid more often than not, is metaforeplay.