Product Description

This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy.

Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity.

Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116845 in Books
• Published on: 1975-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 532 pages

Review
Mr. Kaufmann has produced what may be called the definitive study of Nietzsche's life and thought-an informed, scholarly, and lustrous work. -- Review

Review
Mr. Kaufmann has produced what may be called the definitive study of Nietzsche's life and thought-an informed, scholarly, and lustrous work.
(The New Yorker )

Customer Reviews

A Work of Genius
I found this book to be a great aid in understanding Nietzsche. Professor Walter Kaufmann does an admirable job describing the evolution of Nietzsche's philosophy, his anti-system yet systematic approach, the will to power, eternal recurrence and much more. I recommend reading at least Beyond Good and Evil before taking this on in order to get a feel for Nietzsche and his ideas.

Walter Kaufmann was arguably the best translator of Friedrich Nietzsche into any language and is responsible to a large extent for his rehabilitation after World War II. In contrast to those who attempt to trash Kaufmann (see especially the reviews to Will To Power) he was better equipped to interpret Nietzsche than the vast majority of amateur Nietzscheans today. First Kaufmann was German-born, meaning that he had a native ability with that language. Normally when choosing a translator it is the normal requirement that the target language - in the case of Nietzsche's German, English is the target language - is handled by a native speaker. Kaufmann was an exception to this rule in that his English was exceptional; his writing is better than most native English speakers. In addition to that he had the intuitive feel for Nietzsche's German that only a native speaker of that language could have. Consider too the cultural context. His generation was closer to Nietzsche's than ours, he grew up in and knew intimately the culture that had produced Nietzsche. With all this in mind, for someone to then come along, say a 30ish American with perhaps a smattering of High School German, and attempt to trash Kaufmann (all the while using his translations which one would expect were tainted) shows a distinct lack of intellectual consistency. In other words if Kaufmann is wrong, don't rely on his translation, go back to the original German yourself to make your argument, or give up the effort.

However I expect that the main reason to attack Kaufmann is political. Today there are those who wish to reclaim Nietzsche for the Nazis even after Kaufmann decisively demolished the arguments for that connection. Those who wish to portray Nietzsche as a racist who focused on breeding and bloodlines ignore what the man actually wrote and betray more about their own opinions than Friedrich Nietzsche's. Far from being a proto-Nazi, Nietzsche in his own words comes across more as the Anti-Hitler or rather more to the point Hitler was the Anti-Nietzsche. Is it so surprizing that German culture was capable of producing both? Although in Hitler's case, I find him more a product of the times, than of any particular culture.

Much has been made of the fact of Hitler's fascination with Nietzsche. As a young soldier he most likely read Zarathustra, which was issued in mass to German troops in World War I along with the Bible. Like most readers who start with that book and read nothing else of Nietzsche, he understood little of the man's ideas. As Kaufmann mentions on page 292, the Nazis got their racial theories not from Nietzsche, but from Hans F.K. Günther who in turn was greatly influenced by the American racists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard among others. Stoddard, a Harvard professor in the 1920's, is an interesting figure, in a certain perverse way, almost forgotten today except among white supremacists. His views (along with Grant's) on the Germans classified them as racially mixed with only a small quantity of superior "Nordic" blood. One wonders the influence this view had on Nazi policies and their fanatic and murderous efforts to "cleanse" foreign elements from their bloodlines. In fact Stoddard's influence on the Nazis clearly outweighs anything they got from Nietzsche, but while Stoddard is unacceptable today for mass consumption, Nietzsche's appeal goes on. Any attempt to link Nietzsche to the Nazis must be seen as the cheap political fascist trick it is.

Next Best Thing to Reading Nietzsche - 5* with reservations
As other reviewers have pointed out, with this book Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly resuscitated Nietzche's reputation in the English-speaking world. And, Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche's work are almost certainly the best available. This book is reasonably well written and lucid, and sets out a comprehensible interpretation of Nietzsche's work. If it weren't for H.L. Mencken's remarkably perceptive little book on Nietzsche published around the turn of the century (which I recommend), I'd say Kaufmann's book was the first really good thing on Nietzsche in English.

The polemics against other Nietzsche scholars are a little much. However, having read a number of the books of the Nietzsche-bashers Kaufman trashes, I tend to agree with him more than his critics, and in the context of the time they were written, I suppose they were not inappropriate.

Some reviewers have suggested Kaufmann lacks depth or sophistication, and there is some truth in this. I am told by a former Kaufmann student that he bragged of being the highest paid philosopher in America and took rather unseemly delight in the material trappings of his success. Nietzsche would have considered him kleinburgerlich.

It is mildly annoying that Kaufmann trashes every German edition of Nietzsche's work except the Musarion - a 1922 edition of which around 1,000 sets were printed. I was told only a hundred or so sets survived WWII and de-Nazification. I was fortunate enough to have access to it as graduate student at the University of California, but except for Kaufmann, I don't know of any sets in private hands. It is good, but almost inaccessible. I was the only one who had checked out several of the volumes, and in others I had to cut the pages.

While Kaufmann is a good introduction, as others have said, it's better to actually read Nietzsche yourself, preferably in German, because Nietzsche is one of the most exciting prose writers in German in the 19th century. Kaufmann's translations are accurate, and reasonable English, but cannot come close to the elegance of Nietzsche's German. I read Nietzsche mostly in German, but keep Kaufman's translations to hand when I have a question about the German.

Great milk!
I read this book in an attempt to start my education of Nietzsche and his philosophy. I thought, at first glance, that it was a biography and a great place to start. I may have been wrong.
This text is not a biography. It is not light reading. In fact, it was written by one of the foremost scholars on the life and philosophy of the difficult Nietzsche and Kaufmann is highly intelligent himself. Though I was able to slowly read through this text, and it did offer absolutely invaluable insights, I would not suggest it for the passive or novice reader.
The reader does get a sense of what kind of a person Nietzsche was but this book is mainly concerned with his writings and ideas. Many of the works Nietzsche wrote are highlighted and presented in depth. However, far beyond this discussion of the writings of Nietzsche is a discussion of his ideas and their relevance. In this case, Kaufmann attempts something rarely indulged--a discussion of the ideas and thoughts of one of the most brilliant and revolutionary philosophers of recent times.

This is meat not milk.