The Tragic Philosopher: A Study of Friedrich Nietzsche by F. A. Lea (review)

1~4 BOOK REVIEWS standards, we should constantly re-evaluate our work and stand ready for comparison with any other school, public or private. We cannot afford to go our own self-satisfied way, leaving it to our deposit of faith and our hoary traditions to see us through somehow or other. We have every reason to rejoice in the true faith that is ours but we can be recreant to that faith if we grow careless about the manner of its transmission, especially when our work is to train the future teachers of the faith. Why should we not then have an agency of our own which can, within the pattern set by the Sacred Congregation, propose minimum standards, check their fulfillment , make suggestions, and grant accreditation? We already have instruments at hand in the affiliation program of the Catholic University of America and in the potentialities of the National Catholic Educational Association. Why not plumb the possibilities? Then surely we can make great strides in the advancement of Catholic theological education. Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. JOHN P. McCoRMICK, S. S. The Tragic Philosopher: A Study of Friedrich Nietzsche. By F. A. LEA. New York: Philosophical Library, 1957. Pp. 354. $6.00. This is an interesting and useful one-volume introduction to the thought of Nietzsche. Written by one who is well aware of Nietzsche's power to attract the modern mind as well as repel the more traditional thinker, the book is a successful attempt to trace briefly the development of his thought from his philosophical conversion to Schopenhauer in 1865 to his mental breakdown after 1888. The author, following the historical flow of Nietzsche's life, views this intellectual development as one of three stages: (1) Romanticism; (2) The Conquest of Nihilism; and (3) The Transvaluation of All Values. The dominant features of each stage are shown by analyzing the more important ideas of the major works pertinent to each of the three periods. In this analysis Lea allows Nietzsche a good deal of self-expression by giving a large number of texts judiciously chosen from his books and letters. The work thus becomes a nicely arranged tapestry of Nietzsche texts interwoven with Lea criticism. The Nietzsche who emerges from these pages. is not a new one; those who know his works will readily recognize the des~iption, but the story is told with an engaging sympathy by an author determined to treat Nietzsche as a serious thinker who must be reckoned with in our day. Although not primarily interested in the external facts of the phi- BOOK REVIEWS 125 losopher's life, the author gives enough of these to sustain the intellectual growth. Lea emphasizes, and rightly so, the decisive effect Schopenhauer had on young Nietzsche at a critical moment in his life. Numbed by several painful experiences and without principles to guide him, for he had lost faith in his Protestant belief, Nietzsche was struggling to form for himself a philosophy of life when he began to read the "gloomy philosopher." Schopenhauer's concern with the harsh realities of existence, his denial of God, the analysis of the world as will to live, his glowing encomium of art-all these found an attentive response in the young reader. Quite naturally Lea designates this period as the Romanticism of Nietzsche, for it is during these years that he is absorbed in art and the philosophy of culture. And art, of course, at this period of his life meant the music of Wagner in whom Nietzsche saw "such an unconditioned ideality, such a noble seriousness, that near him I feel as if I were near the divine." It is during this romantic period, too, that Nietzsche became fascinated with the myth of Dionysus. In the story of the dismemberment of Dionysus' body, its distribution, and ultimate reconstitution he saw a constant drama of all human life in which a primal parcellation could be restored to unity through the agency of art. But Nietzsche was not one to remain long the disciple of any master nor long the friend of any man. Abandoning Schopenhauer and breaking with Wagner, he started a new stage in his...