Volume 40, Number 4 · February 11, 1993
Nietzsche vs. Nietzsche
By James Joll
The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990
by Steven E. Aschheim
University of California Press, 337 pp., $40.00
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche
by Ben Macintyre
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $20.00
When Nietzsche Wept
by Irvin D. Yalom
Basic Books, 306 pp., $20.00
Of the three thinkers who have been among the most influential of the twentieth century—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—Marx has, for the moment at least, been cast aside and Freud no longer holds the unchallenged position he once had. That leaves Nietzsche, whose thought seems particularly appropriate to the fragmented, bewildered, and contradictory world of the 1990s. It is easier for Nietzsche to retain his influence because, unlike Marx or Freud, he did not leave a coherent body of doctrine about the course of history or the nature of man but rather a whole range of ideas about metaphysics, morals, art, history, and almost everything else. It is not that he was an unsystematic thinker; indeed there are passages in his work where systems are carried to their most shocking extremes. He was, like Rousseau, one of those writers whose own internal contradictions lend themselves to a variety of opposing interpretations, so that each reader finds in his work what he is looking for or what he thinks he needs.
Review, 4314 words
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