Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (review)

148 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35: a JANUARY 1997 Stirner, "our atheists are pious people," since modern socialist humanism offers nothing more than the old Christian agenda: repression of concrete individual interests for the sake of abstract ideals. As Marx has it, Stirner is a Hegelian who joined Hegel in a total critique of all "fixed ideas." These ideas, in their most abstract and oppressive forms, are such mental abstractions as "Humanity," "Mankind," "God," and "State." Stirner designated himself , and anyone else who could work free from modern political pieties, as an EinZiger--a self-defining "Unique One," incapable of being subsumed into a higher meaning or idea. Despite the many editions of his work, Stirner's work is litde appreciated among tenured academics, finding a more sympathetic readership among displaced and, from a Marxist perspective, "alienated" intellectuals. He nevertheless remains as one of the primal theoretical sources of that antipolitical posture sometimes termed "anarchistic individualism." This edition of Stirner's Ego is distinguished from all others not only by Leopold's fine Introduction, but also by his remarkably extensive and expert annotation--over sixty pages under the heading of "Biographical and other notes on the text." This section is followed by an exhaustive index of subjects and names. As the heading indicates, Leopold's annotations, although many do deal with textual and translational clarifications, are more often brief biographical sketches. These informative notes provide a rich historical and personal context within which the reader can better understand Stirner's world and his project. Previous editions of the Ego have contained few or no annotations, and only rarely an index (e.g., the last North American edition, the 1963 edition of the Libertarian Book Club was sparsely annotated, poorly introduced , and had no index at all). In sum, this edition is, without qualification, the best, and is likely to remain so for many years. Leopold's intelligent editorial contributions will allow future readers of the Ego, if not to subscribe to Stirner's radical critique of modern humanism, at least to understand it more fully. LAWRENCE S. STEPELEVICH ViUanova University Peter Berkowitz. Nietzsche:The Ethics of an Immoralist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 313 . Cloth, $35.oo. This is an impressive and very rich study of several important works of Nietzsche. Berkowitz engages with Nietzsche's thought in a deep, satisfying, and detailed way, taking us through the texts, but without getting us so bogged down in them that we cannot readily get a sense of the underlying structure and the important ideas. The detail is important, not because without detail aspects of a putative overall argumentative structure would be lost or hidden, but because the detail reveals the wealth of insights and observations which, taken together, provide a sense of the coherent yet brilliant mosaic that is Nietzsche's work. However, to make coherent sense of Nietzsche 's writings taken as a whole is very hard work, especially if one does not indulge in BOOK REVIEWS 149 the practice, deplored by Berkowitz (lO), of picking and choosing texts which suit. When Berkowitz reveals to the reader a remark such as "O Zarathustra, your fruit is ripe but you are not ripe for your fruit," the reader gets a sense of just how difficult it is to describe Nietzsche's notion of the "first rank" of human being, and in fact how deeply contextual is Nietzsche's thought. This is of course not at all to accept a claim whose falsity Berkowitz's own work admirably displays: "all interpretations are equally contestable"; "the only meaning of Nietzsche's books is the one the reader makes" (xi). According to Berkowitz, Nietzsche has a "robust conviction that there is an order of rank among souls and a health proper to the soul" (4). He acknowledges the tension in Nietzsche's thought between that idea and the idea that morality is "an outgrowth or projection of desire and will" (6). But the tension is ultimately resolvable. The idea of ethics as an outgrowth of the will culminates in "the ethics of creativity" but, as Berkowitz argues, that ethics is itself criticizable from the standpoint of nature: Nietzsche "appeals to...