SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 156-158

Safranski, Rüdiger.Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Trans. Shelley Frisch. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Pp. 412.

There is a kind of madness, said Plato in the Phaedrus, that confers the gift of prophecy and that is "the source of the greatest blessings" for humanity. Twenty-two hundred years later, Friedrich Nietzsche not only echoed Plato's claim by noting that the mad have traditionally been regarded as the "mouthpieces" of truth, but tried to fashion his own life and work for just such a role.

Many would agree today that he was highly successful. Although Nietzsche was not declared clinically insane until the age of 44, 11 years before his death in 1900, most of the works for which he is famous today, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra to Ecce Homo, were written in a state of mind that was lucid but not especially sane. Out of the mouth of this foremost of modern madmen came "truths" to which the world has listened with rapt attention.

Yet, for all that, Nietzsche's prophecies have been treated like curses as much as blessings. Due partly to his sister Elisabeth's falsifications of his manuscripts after his breakdown, in order to make them conform to her own Nazi beliefs, and partly to his association, while still a young professor of classical philosophy, with the composer (and anti-Semite) Richard Wagner, Nietzsche's philosophy was for a long time interpreted as being fascistic and anti-Semitic. Nazi Alfred Rosenberg even went so far as to call Nietzsche "the father of National Socialism."

Today, of course, most scholars give such characterizations little credence, noting that Nietzsche unequivocally denounced anti-Semitism and German nationalism in his writings. Nonetheless, there remains a residue of mistrust and misgiving toward Nietzsche that no number of anti-fascist, anti-German quotes is likely to allay. This is true especially in countries such as England and the United States, where philosophy has typically taken forms contrary to Nietzsche's aphoristic, unsystematic, and non-logicist practice. Indeed, until the 1950s, when Walter Kaufmann performed the Herculean feat of restoring Nietzsche's reputation in English-speaking countries by translating and writing commentaries on his works, Nietzsche was scarcely regarded as a "philosopher" at all—and certainly not someone who needed to be taught.

Kaufmann may have succeeded in rescuing Nietzsche's reputation for a while, but beginning in the late sixties and seventies, it received another blow: Nietzsche's association with the "worst excesses" of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, an association nearly as damaging as the [End Page 156] purported links with the Nazis that had earlier been avowed. Moreover, like the latter association, this one is only partly justified. With the exception of Gilles Deleuze, no major French theorist coming out of the structuralist movement in the fifties and sixties wrote a substantive study of Nietzsche's work. It is true that the most influential French theorist in the United States, Jacques Derrida, has always championed Nietzsche's work in the most vociferous terms; but when one looks beneath the surface of such acclaim, one finds no substantive, extended discussion of Nietzsche such as can be found, in Derrida's works, with dozens of other writers and thinkers.

All of which is by way of showing why Rüdiger Safranski, a fiercely independent writer and critic who owes nothing to the academic communities of either Anglo-American philosophy or continental literary theory, is so well suited to write an intellectual biography of Nietzsche. Safranski is the author of widely acclaimed biographies of Schopenhauer and Heidegger, both of which stand Safranski in good stead for the purposes of writing about Nietzsche since Schopenhauer was Nietzsche's most important early influence and Heidegger wrote extensively on Nietzsche. What makes his biographies of Schopenhauer and Heidegger so good is that they manage to portray vividly and expertly the historical and philosophical contexts in which Schopenhauer and Heidegger lived and wrote. Indeed, if there is a major criticism to be made of this biography of Nietzsche, it is that Safranski does not do nearly...