Logica della valutazione et etica naturalistica in Dewey (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 273 The Achilles heel of Nietzsche's Gift is its circumvention of many of Nietzsche's purely philosophical analyses and especially the avoidance of the Nachlass. The affirmations of Thus Spake Zarathustra (comic or otherwise) would surely be more dramatic if seen against the background of Nietzsche's incredible analyses of the origin and nature of nihilism in The Will to Power. Alderman carps about Heidegger's abuse of the Nachlass and the notion that der Wille zur Macht is a cosmological process and disputes his claim that in the idea of eternal recurrence Nietzsche gives "spiritualized" expression to the spirit of revenge against time (p. 169). While one is not compelled to accept Heidegger's self-referential interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, he was certainly wise to attend carefully to the unpublished notes of the Nachlass. For, many of the themes that can be found in these notes (especially the speculations about physical theory and "cosmology," the theory of fictionalism, and the humanization of nature) were not part of Nietzsche's "later" thought, but were themes he first discovered, and was fascinated by, before he wrote his first major work, Die Geburt der Tragi)die. z If one looks, as our author does, to a single work as the key to the philosophy of a thinker, one misses the complex development of his thought and loses sight of the internal dialectic that leads a philosopher to conclusions. In the case of so dialectical a thinker as Nietzsche, this would be a neglect of the "drama" of his philosophical evolution. In addition, such an approach to Nietzsche as Alderman adopts presents problems when, on occasion, he tries to find relationships between Zarathustra and other major works. For, the attempt to find clear lines of relationship is not really very successful. Whether talk of Nietzsche's so-called "metareflections " or "metathoughtful reflections" really helps us understand "what Nietzsche meant" is doubtful; especially when his poetic language says what he means as clearly as Alderman thinks it does. Nietzsche's Gift is a sympathetic and sensitive interpretation of Thus Spake Zarathustra that is, unfortunately, not as reliable when it leaves the "'peaks" of poetic imagery and enters other rooms in Nietzsche's mansion. It is spirited and lively in tone and an interesting perspective on the experiential basis and goal of a complex thinker. GEORGE J. STACK S UN Y, Brockport Vincenzo Milanesi. Logica della valutazione et etica naturalistica in Dewey. Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1977, Pp. vi + 200. L. 4,000. This is an excellent exposition of the relation between Dewey's naturalistic science of moral judgment or valuation and his conceptions of experience, inquiry, and transaction. 2 In a leiter to his friend, Gersdorff, written in August, 1866, Nietzsche praises F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus as offering infinitely more than its title suggests. In this massive work are found numerous references to, and quotations from the work of, physical theorists, philosophers of nature {Ernest Mach, Du Bois-Reymond, BiJchner, Moleschott, Boscovich and others) and, of course, the running commentary of l..ange himself (whom Nietzsche characterizes as a Naturforscher ). The concern with "mechanics," concepts of "force," the "dynamic interpretation of nature," and a host of related matters in the Nachlass is derived from Nietzsche's reading of Lange's Opus and is not at all part of his soi-distant "later" thought, l.ange's Geschichte des Materialismus was a "treasure-house" to which Nietzsche often returned for inspiration and one in which he first found posed the question of the relationship of the scienfitic interpretation of the world to a philosophical understanding of man and his world (cf. Werke in Drei Btinden, ed. K. Schlechta [Munich, 1966], III, p. 970). 274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Milanesi, in an introductory chapter, surveys the long and heated controversies provoked by Dewey's earlier works, especially by his insistence that means and ends cannot be separated, being aspects of a single process of valuation, that values are practical facts not transcendental, and that "the logical conditions of a scienfitic treatment of morality" are those of experimental judgment. Then he analyzes carefully Human Natttre and Conduct as the best statement of...