Nietzsche: A Review Article

NIETZSCHE: A REVIEW ARTICLE FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WAS unlucky in his relationship with women, from the earliest stages of his life to the very end. Most of them either intentionally or, more often, unintentionally misunderstood or misinterpreted his thoughts and his works, even long after his death. The latest example of such-seemingly non-intentional-misinterpretation comes from the pen of Rose Pfeffer/ an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dowling (formerly Adelphi Suffolk) College. Acording to the biographical note on the jacket of her book, the author received her education at the University of Leipzig (in East Germany), where she majored in Germanic Languages and Literature, and at Columbia University, where she received her Ph. D. degree in Philosophy. It is a painful task to review a book that so grossly misses the mark. Any responsible review.er would like to dwell on the positive aspects of a new book on Nietzsche and deemphasize its negative points. Unfortunately, however, in this case the merits are few while the shortcomings and actual faults are many. A somewhat confused and confusing " Forword " by Professor James Gutmann of Columbia University is followed by the author's own Preface. Pfeffer expresses her satisfaction that some very recent studies have begun to acknowledge Nietzsche as a systematic philosopher but have failed to stress this point. . . . One important exception is Martin Heidegger's brilliant analysis, which emphasizes the systematic unity and interrelation of the major concepts in Nietzsche's philosophy. But Heidegger's penetrating interpretation is largely subjective and can be understood only in terms of his own philosophic views, as I will try to show in Part II of this book. (p. 14) As a matter of fact, this assertion is in no way borne out in Part II, for the simple reason that Pfeffer shows at best a nodding acquaintance with the philosophic position of Heidegger in general and with the two volumes of his Nietzsche lectures in particular. These lectures were published in 1961 by Neske in Pfullingen (West Germany). What is borne out is the author's failure to understand in depth either Heidegger or Nietzsche, and the epithet " sub1 Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus. By Rose Pfeffer (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 197~). Pp. ~97. $1~.00. ~~8 KURT F. REINHARDT jectivism" .applies to Pfeffer rather than to Heidegger, who in the early as well as in the later phases of his philosophic thought has been waging a valiant fight against subjectivism in philosophy. To this reviewer the simplistic manner in which Rose Pfeffer tries to reduce Heidegger's thinking to the level of the conventional lingo of what Schopenhauer aptly referred to as Die Professorenphilosophie der Philosophieprofessoren (the professorial philosophy of philosophy professors) appears pathetic. All the more so since the reviewer counts Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger among his most revered teachers at the University of Freiburg in the early twenties of this century. Rose Pfeffer herself admits that the claimed " unity " of Nietzsche's philosophic thought " grows out of multiplicity, change and complexity" (p. 14) and that it "remains open-ended and problematic." But she forthwith contradicts her own words by apodictically stating that those interpreters who call Nietzsche's philosophy "deliberately anti-systematic" are wrong. In her obviously unrepressible desire to impute to Nietzsche a hankering for "systematic thinking" she resorts to quoting a passage from Nietzsche's Literary Remains (the highly controversial Nachlass), dated December, 1888, that is, an idea jotted down at a time when Nietzsche was no longer in possession of his mental faculties, since the final collapse followed only a few weeks later! Thus the author tries in one or another way to force Nietzsche's " tragic world view " into the Procrustes-bed of a " system," without , however, being able to adduce any cogent arguments to support her claim. She even frankly confesses (p. 17) that her procedure " is, in some sense, an arbitrary one." It is revealing that she has to have frequent recourse to such expressions as " in my opinion," " I believe," " it is my conviction," " I contend," etc. On the same page she writes: Since, in my opinion, a systematic interconnectedness exists between Nietzsche's basic ideas, any other of these ideas [i...