A review of a Nietzsche book in The New York Times is rare, and even rarer, it seems, is the decision to enlist a reviewer competent in the material. Although Curtis Cate's biography of Nietzsche appeared nearly two years ago, just today the Times has run a lengthy review of the book by the writer and novelist William Vollmann, who, best I can tell, has no expertise in the subject, and who certainly displays none in the review.
The review--predictably, I suppose, for the Times--concentrates mostly on gossip about Nietzsche's personal relations, and although there are breathless references to Nietzsche's "bravery," his "savagely independent intellect," and "his incomparable mind," there is almost no actual discussion of his philosophical ideas. The one exception comes towards the end, where Mr. Vollmann bizarrely ascribes to Nietzsche "a 'realism' which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral," a view which Nietzsche does not hold (and, of course, no text or passage is referenced in support). Is it really too much to expect that a lengthy review of a biography of a philosopher might say something (accurate) about the philosopher's ideas?
Our first hint that Mr. Vollmann is well out of his depth comes early on, when he praises Cate's summary of "the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted."
Aristotle?
Many figures from antiquity--Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Pyrrho--loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus. There are a mere handful of explicit references to Aristotle in Nietzsche's writings (even in the unpublished notebooks), and no extended discussion of the kind afforded Plato or Thales. And apart from some generally superficial speculations in the secondary literature about similarities between Aristotle's "great-souled man" and Nietzsche's idea of the "higher" or "noble" man--similarities nowhere remarked upon by Nietzsche himself--there is no scholarship supporting the idea that Aristotle is a significant philosopher for Nietzsche in any respect.
Perhaps aware that the waters he has entered are too deep and turbulent for his feeble stroke, Mr. Vollmann declares immediately after this peculiar Aristotle reference that Mr. Cate's summaries are "asking the world to pick nits. Nits will be picked. No matter." But thinking Aristotle matters for Nietzsche is no nit: it's the difference between knowing something about the subject matter (about the formative intellectual influences on the philosopher) and knowing next to nothing. Nits do not matter, but having some idea what one is talking about does in the life of the mind.
Lack of real familiarity with the subject is manifest at other places in Mr. Vollmann's review, in between the People magazine speculations and meaningless philosophical name-dropping (the silliest instance of the latter follows upon Mr. Vollmann's quoting Lou Salome accusing Nietzsche of wanting a physical menage-a-trois with her and Paul Ree; Mr. Vollmann adds: "Well, why not? Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato."). Mr. Vollmann repeats the standard story about Nietzsche's syphilis, apparently unaware of the detailed (and rather convincing) debunking of that explanation of Nietzsche's final collapse by a medical doctor, Richard Schain, in his 2001 book The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis. On the question of anti-semitism, Mr. Vollmann says, oddly, that "Nietzsche was plentiful in his praise of individual Jews," though such references to individuals are few and far between by comparison to Nietzsche's praise not for individuals, but for the Jewish people and Jewish culture.
Recent Comments