Living With Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us

Rating:
Summary: Is there an editor in the house?
Review: Horrible writer. Someone should send the good professor Strunk's "The Elements of Style" for his birhtday. The man has never met a parenthesis he didn't like.

I'm not certain what " The Great Immoralist" has taught him but whatever it was, it wasn't how to keep the reader awake.

Rather ironic when one considers that is a study of the one philosopher since Plato who is a joy to read simply for the boldness and power of his style, the outrageous Freddy.

Worth 2 stars for the chapter on Nietszsche's virtues, as contrasted with Aristotle's. Fascinating.

Yes. both were moralists to the core and no, Nietszche wasn't a nihilist.

Wake me up when a second edition comes out that neither rambles nor repeats the same points endlessly.

Hmm...is that "Eternal Recurrence"?

(sigh)

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Introduction to a Great thinker
Review: Nietzsche once stated that there are no facts, but only interpretations. Judging from the volume of tomes written about him over the years, especially in the last 20 years, scholars seem to have taken him literally. There now exist a ton of interpretations, each claiming to reveal the "true" Nietzsche, based on some angle gleaned from his writings. For some0one familiar with Nietzsche, this presents no problem; but for the student coming to read Nietzsche for- the first time, the plethora of various interpretations can be so daunting as to possibly prove discouraging, which would be a great loss, for there is no greater intellectual pleasure than reading Nietzsche.

For those who are new to Nietzsche, this is the book for you. Rather than try to determine what Nietzsche is the "true" Nietzsche, Solomon instead looks at the Nietzsche who first appears to in his writings: the Nietzsche of the personal insight, the moralist who wants to give us another way to think about life, especially the inner life. The book most students begin with when encountering Nietzsche is "Thus Spake Zarathustra," a book profoundly about the inner life.

The book is also rewarding in that Solomon does not write like an academic, but rather with a free flowing style that captures the reader's attention and draws him to the points about the subject Solomon wishes to make. Solomon loves his subject and that enthusiasm is evident when reading the book, which makes it even harder to put down.

While I would strongly recommend this book to those who are new to Nietzsche, I can safely say that even the most well-read Nietzsche follower will find intellectual chestnuts worth the time throughout this volume. I can only say in passing that Solomon is the professor I wish I had when I took my first course on this great thinker.

Rating:
Summary: Just Awful
Review: Thewizardofuz is mostly just plain right in his review here. I agree that Solomon's discussions of virtue over the years are interesting. He has even sold them to banks and other corporations through his incarnation as a mass producer of business ethics seminars, books and tapes. But I can't rate the book very high simply due to the interestingness of this pass on what is an old topic for Solomon.

There are no significant analyses of any Nietzsche passages in this work. The only indented quotation in the whole book is a poem by somebody else. Another reviewer here senses a breezy style in Solomon. That is almost it I guess; Solomon's style does give the impression of breeziness. But look closely: the style here is a series of non-sequiturs. Almost none of his sentences belong in the order in which they appear.Nobody changes the topic like Solomon.

Solomon opened his only monograph on Nietzsche with the short-sighted thesis that Nietzsche not only uses fallacies intentionally, but manages to redeem them into non-fallacies too.

His Nietzsche does not seem to do much or to say much. Instead, Solomon is busy standing in for Nietzsche as though before a crowd of students, assuring them that Nietzsche accepts them as they are and does not deny them even one iota of their current moral prejudices. In Zarathustra's terms, Solomon thinks that Nietzsche pulls the cart of the masses, when in fact it is Solomon who pulls the cart of the masses, and then imagines that Nietzsche is just like him, and would, out of pity for youth, pretend that youth is special.

More worrisome yet is Solomon's notion that he can commit ad hominem fallacies because Nietzsche did. Which is worse: to think that you have a right to err (fallacy) for the sake of morals, or that you have a right to lie on their behalf? This is important because Solomon wants to commit ad hominem fallacies, and he wants to commit them against Nietzsche.

At least we know that Nietzsche rejected the philosophies that want to found for themselves a right to lie. That includes Plato and all of German Idealism for Nietzsche (EH:CW and EH IV).