Nietzsches Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (review)

274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY however, that his presentation of Marx's views leaves a good deal to be desired at various points.2 Ollman acknowledges that he has "sought to go beyond Marx in explaining the relations in Marxism" (p. 237). It is necessary to do this, because much of Marx's philosophical scheme is never made entirely explicit---or, at any rate, is never clearly and fully spelled out--by Marx himself, but rather is largely implicit in what he says as he deals with various matters, and emerges only in provocative and intriguing but frustratingly brief outlines and sketches in his early writings and in a few places in some of his later works. As Ollman "goes beyond Marx" to explain him, the results are sometimes sound and illuminating, sometimes dubious, and sometimes mixed (as in the case of his emphasis upon the doctrine of "internal relations"). He also acknowledges that his study is "one-sided." By this he means that he concentrates on Marx's "theory of alienation," at the expense of certain of his "other major theories, and of the materialist conception of history in general" (p. 231). This is not too damaging a defect; Marx may be fruitfully approached from a number of angles, of which Ollman's is one of the most fruitful. What is more damaging, given Ollman's aims, is that his analysis of Marx's "theory of alienation" itsel] is "one-sided," in that it stresses the first element of what I have called Marx's "social individualism" while neglecting the second. In the same paragraph on page 231, Ollman says (presumably with a sigh): "So much has been done in presenting Marxism, and so much remains to be done." Indeed. RICHARD SCHACHT University o/ Illinois, Urbana--Champaign Nietzsches Kritik der praktischen Vernun/t. By Bernhard Bueb. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1970. Pp. 225. DM 25) The variety of interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy seems to confirm his notion of the perspectival nature of human knowledge or the value-interpretations that underlie all philosophical thought. In this interesting study Bernhard Bueb tries to interrelate what he calls Nietzsche's "moral philosophy," the concept of nihilism and the will to power. Although it is said that Nietzsche's ethical reflections are presented in the form of a Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, that Kant's critical consciousness is subjected to a new critique, very little attention is actually paid to the concept of practical reason or to Kant's thought. The actual content of this scholarly analysis of Nietzsche's thought deals with the forging of an ethics of "self-overcoming" in the fire of a nihilism which is 2 And so, I might add, does his conclusion at the end of the book, which seems almost designed to dissipate much of the good will of many non-Marxist philosophers toward it and toward Marx that Ollman labors so mightily throughout it to create. He writes: "And once we accept Marx's statement of the problem [of alienation in capitalist society], we have gone the greater part of the distance toward admitting his answer, an answer that transforms all but the most passive observers into agents of revolutionary change. It is in this way that studying Marx serves to make Marxism necessary" (p. 248). Since Ollman has just joined hands with "the present youth rebellion" a few pages earlier (on the grounds that while "this great movement of protest is not itself a revolution . . . by helping to change the workers of tomorrow it does--together with the coming capitalist crises and the next and succeeding imperialist war--make such a revolution possible" [pp. 243--44]), that he should conclude on this note comes as no real surprise. As a non-revolutionary who nonetheless finds much of value in Marx and hopes others will come to do so as well, however, I could wish that he had resisted the impulse to confront his audience of serious students of philosophy (for such his readership will be, at least for the most part) with the choice of either rejecting Marx's analysis of the nature and causes of alienation, taking to the streets, or admitting to...