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BOOK REVIEWS 695 any overarching account into which all these answers might be fit. The commentary itself provides both a translation of Fichte's text and the German original, interspersing commentary a few paragraphs at a time. Seidel has used the standard (and in many ways inadequate) English translation by Peter Heath and John Lachs, but in the commentary offers helpful observations about the ways in which the translation can mislead . One incidental result is that Seidel's volume provides a useful bilingual edition of a crucial piece of the Fichtean corpus. Unfortunately it does not quite live up to the advertisement of the publishers--to provide "well-edited basic texts." There are a number of glaring editorial errors in the presentation of Fichte's text; some of these (as, for instance the use of "X" in the place of "Ich" on page 28; the omission of the word "no" in the phrase "no more than" on page 5~) fundamentally obscure the force of the very arguments one had hoped to find illuminated. WAYNZ M. MARTIN Universityof California, San Diego Joan Stambaugh. The OtherNietzsche.SUNY Series in Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xii + a6o. Board, $44.5 o. Paper, $14.95. Joan Stambaugh's most recent volume is a collection of essays focused on what she considers to be several of the more positive directions Nietzsche's thought might lend to contemporary philosophical reflection. In a prefatory note, Prof. Stambaugh remarks that "everyone seems to have his or her own Nietzsche," characterizing the "two main continental interpretations" as broadly French and German. She then informs the reader that what occasioned the present series of essays was the attempt to explore "a Nietzsche relatively untouched by most of these interpretations," that is to say, another Nietzsche altogether. "I shall call the other Nietzsche: Nietzschethepoeticmystic." It is not until the end of the volume, however, that Prof. Stambaugh really engages the themes of poetry and mysticism, when she specifically relates them to the traditions of Eastern thought--which, as she notes, "has never made such a clear-cut distinction between philosophy and poetry and which abounds with so-called mysticism." It is altogether fitting that such an encounter with the "otherness" of this "other" Nietzsche should be held in reserve until the final chapter. By then, the issues which have been patiently discussed throughout the earlier chapters can be seen, collectively, in a much stronger light, one that provides a refreshing and strikingly creative reading of four particularly memorable sections from Zarathustra: "Before Sunrise," "On the Great Longing," "At Noon," and "The Drunken Song." Having distanced herself from the variety of conventional readings, Stambaugh nonetheless directly confronts what are generally held to be the negative aspects of Nietzsche's critique: the "loss of transcendence" and the "dethroning of reason." She argues that Nietzsche replaces the traditional notions of transcendence with an immanentist notion, one that "acquires the meaning of what man does," or what his future project will achieve. Such an approach stresses the "self-overcoming" of the individual, the "transformation" of existing values, and the "self-surpassing" of our historical and 696 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 cultural configurations. Likewise, Nietzsche's critique of rationality is more properly understood as a practical concern, one which seeks to establish the subtending motives that have directed the "vast overestimation of reason that has occured in Western philosophy." Far from seeing Nietzsche as a moral subjectivist or as an irrational anarchist--as some contemporary critics would, preferring a "return" to "enlightenment values"-what is rather at issue here is the extent to which reason has always been guided by practical concerns. As Descartes himself had remarked, the highest branches on the "tree of philosophy" are "medicine, mechanics, and morals," and the fruits of these branches are cultivated, after all, so as to enable us to live well, For Nietzsche, however, traditionally conceived rationality--in its broadest moral and metaphysical enterprises--has been guided all too long by resentment and revenge. Reason must find its new guide in a refashioned will, one which is affirmative of life and would "increase the fullness and power of...

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