Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from his Letters (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 129 result of specific sorts of economic systems. The capitalist system, for example, prevents a man from maintaining a human relationship to his labor, and causes a man's relationships with other men to be mediated by a medium of exchange--money. Furthermore, "Logic [i.e., Hegel's logic of the a priori structure of society] is the money of the mind." With this last in mind, we can see that it is problematic for Schacht to object to Marx's substitution of soeiality for Hegel's conception of universality. In Marx's view, only this substitution will rid human life of the structure imposed upon it from outside which inhibits free spontaneous human relations. To put the matter in a way slanted toward Marx, to surrender to a universality, as is required in Hegel's second stage of alienation, is to surrender to an alien metaphysical abstraction; to reunite in sociality is to become part of a living fact. However we put the matter, there is a serious philosophical and political issue here at the root of the competing conceptions of alienation. Schacht really never faces the issue. In sum, Alienation is well worth reading for an intelligent first step toward an understanding of Hegel's concept of alienation. Marx scholars will, I think, be disappointed . t2. Dx'r~ Temple University Nietzsche: ,4 Self-Portrait from his Letters. Edited and translated by Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Pp. viii+196. $8.00) As the translator-editors put it in the opening sentence of their Preface: "This book tells the story of Nietzsche's life, and the narrator is Nietzsche himself"; and, we may add, he tells his story very well indeed. The problem of the translator-editors was twofold: A selection of letters or relevant parts of letters had to be made, and a translation had to be provided. The selection was a relatively easy matter. The translation, however, was something else. But here Fuss and Shapiro have done an excellent job. A collation with the German texts (where this was possible) shows not only that the translations are dependable (as too many translations of Nietzschean texts are not), but also that they reflect something of Nietzsche's own style. The letters cover the years 1866 to 1889. Footnote commentaries provide helpful information, setting the scene, as it were, for the letters or for particular passages in them. The letters themselves are followed by a chronological sketch of Nietzsche's works, by brief but sufficient biographies of the correspondents, by a bibliography of sources for the correspondence (and the letters came from many sources), and by biographical sources. An Index and five pages of portrait pictures complete this unique and amazingly successful "self-portrait" of Nietzsehe. W. H. WERKMEIST~R Florida State University ...