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This volume is by the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He presents Nietzsche by multitudinous quotations and interpretations under twelve chapter headings: On Reading Nietzsche, Horizons, The Will to Power, Man, The Standard of Revaluation, The Geneology of Modern Morals, The Morals in Revolution, Art and Artist, The Revaluation of Truth, The Music of Chaos, Dionysos, The Rise and Fall of Cultures, and a Philosophy of the Future.
The author has turned out a valuable work, not in that he shows what Nietzsche means, but that he presents in a single volume much of Nietzsche. The reviewer feels that with Spinoza whose work was openly systematized, it is relatively safe to use an excerpt as typical. With Nietzsche, however, such a method is hazardous, for Nietzsche was a poet-philosopher and one does not know him unless one has gone through his whole mass of writings. Preciously few really know him in his entirety and so a host of ignorantly originated damnings and adulations are bandied about. If one were to use the excerpt method one could find Nietzsche to support almost any credo, doctrine, or schism. One cannot blame Nietzsche for who carries his banner. On the other hand in our plagiaristic age, there probably is no one who has been more plagiarized than Nietzsche. He stands as a towering beacon of the nineteenth century. His influence has been extremely potent through many generations of readers and writers. He is a tornado of sunshine in a tenement district. He was not a neurotic—who has not something of what are called neurotic traits? Even at this early date one may say that the glow of his genius will carry through the twenty-first century and mayhap longer.
He was consumed by his own fire. To modern psychiatrists it may be interesting to note that Freud flatters him on no less than five occasions; the term id is avowedly the end result of a triple pass—Nietzsche to Groddeck to Freud; many of the most significant concepts used today in the f