Publication date:
04 October 2012Length of book:
298 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
237x158mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739171660
When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Germany’s place in “international relations” (die Große Politik), the philosopher’s carefully cultivated “pose of untimeliness” is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F. Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche’s own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five discrete “Books,” a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of Nietzsche’s books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between “Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche” (named by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich. In “Preface to ‘A German Trilogy,’” Altman joins this book to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.
In this imaginative and refined commentary on Nietzsche's political thought, Altman provides an incisive critique of the achievement of Nietzsche, as well as his limitations. The work is the third volume of a trilogy on German political thought, following the author's earlier studies of Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. Utilizing Nietzsche's own aphoristic style as evinced in his Daybreak, the main arguments of the book are presented in the course of five chapters ("books") composed of 155 essays, 63 pages of notes, and other ancillary writings. The first chapter critiques Nietzsche as the classicist who looked to the past, but equally to the future, to evaluate the crisis of liberal institutions in his own time and place. Chapter 2 even more explicitly demonstrates Nietzsche's connection to the political world of the Second Reich. Nietzsche's criticisms of Plato, and his rather limited appreciation of Aristotle, are presented in chapter 3. Nietzsche's defense of aristocratic elitism and his assimilation and use of Platonic themes, especially dualism, are assessed convincingly by the author as well. The two final chapters place Nietzsche within the historical context of the Second Reich, providing insightful reflections on Nietzsche's influence during WW I. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.