From Booklist
*Starred Review* Among the things Nietzsche smashed during a career doing philosophy with a hammer were his own prospects for a coherent life. The brilliant shards of that life invite scrutiny in this marvelously accessible biography. Cate recounts Nietzsche's story in a taut narrative, linking each epoch to shrewd commentaries on the works it incubated and highlighting the deep fissures that run through the philosopher's life and legacy. Such fissures yawn wide in the very personality of a thinker who scorns the comforts of orthodoxy in favor of never-ending warfare against dogmatism. In the epigrams and paradoxes with which Nietzsche wages his war, Cate acknowledges tensions, even antitheses. Thus, Nietzsche scathingly denounces Christianity yet admires passionate Christians such as Pascal and Dostoevsky. And even as he bewails the way the world has been "Jewified," Nietzsche pours contempt on anti-Semites. But beyond the contradictions, Cate discerns a literary intent (shattering complacency) and a philosophical doctrine (linking good to evil, truth to untruth). But neither literary artifice nor philosophic doctrine shields Nietzsche from the pain of real-life contradictions. The anti-nihilist who praises the godless life as a joyful dance finds his personal choreography taking him to the brink of suicide and then over the edge into insanity. The worst contradiction comes posthumously, when errant disciples (including his own sister) transform the foe of saber-rattling patriotism into a Nazi icon A compelling portrait of a much-maligned figure. Bill Ott
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Friedrich Nietzsche FROM THE PUBLISHER
Friedrich Nietzsche was, with little doubt, the most intensely personal, egotistically subjective, and fearlessly provocative thinker the Western world has yet seen. The protean diversity of his affirmations make him one of the most seminal and influential of modern philosophers, yet his often paradoxical statements can be properly understood only within the context of his restless, almost nomadic life.
Curtis Cate's new biography, written for the layperson rather than the academic, goes far towards clarifying Nietzsche's ideas and the reactions they elicited. The author does equal justice to the musical as well as philosophical influences to which Nietzshe was subjected, the subtle workings of his incomparable mind, and the acute physical suffering he combated from his adolescence until his final mental collapse of January 1889.
Cutting through the academic jargon and complexities to clear away stereotypical prejudices that have accumulated around Nietszche's name, Cate reveals a Nietzsche whose ideas continue to have prophetic relevance and incredible vibrancy today.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Cate (The War of the Two Emperors) has written a comprehensive and detailed biography of Friedrich Nietzsche that stresses not only the great philosopher's lasting indebtedness to Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner but also his complex relationships with his friends, publishers, and sister Elisabeth. It becomes most apparent that Nietzsche's solitary life was one of frequent wondering and suffering (e.g., severe eye aches, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and seizures), as well as changing moods, with intermittent periods of creative genius. Cate focuses on the iconoclastic value of two of Nietzsche's major works: Human, All Too Human and Thus Spake Zarathustra. Unfortunately, he presents only brief discussions of the basic ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy of overcoming: the will to power, the future overman, and the eternal recurrence of this same universe. Nevertheless, the reader is treated to numerous quotes from the thinker's books and letters, complemented by wonderful illustrations and extensive notes. Well balanced, insightful, and very readable, Cate's work is an outstanding biography that adds to recent studies from Lesley Chamberlain, Joachim Kohler, and Rudiger Safranski. Highly recommended for all academic and public libraries.-H. James Birx, SUNY at Geneseo Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
For the nonspecialist and philosophical adept as well: an accessible, anecdotally rich life of the "trenchant idealist" who turned philosophical idealism upside-down. Nietzsche's life (1844-1900) offers one of the great moments of philosophy, a cry of the wounded soul: just before suffering a final descent into mental illness in 1889, he happened upon a carter beating a nag in the streets of Genoa and flung his arms around the poor beast, protecting it from further abuse. Cate (Andre Malraux, 1997, etc.) notes that we will probably never know what happened next, inasmuch as the first printed account of the incident appeared a couple of years after the philosopher's death. Just so, much of Nietzsche's life has been the subject of speculation, especially on the matter of whether Nietzsche gave ideological aid and comfort to Nazism: some scholars hold that Nietzsche's evocation of the law-unto-himself "superman" gave Hitler and company certain ideas, whereas others believe that Nietzsche's protofascist sister willfully altered his writings after his death, "bringing out a thick anthology of his hastily jotted but so far unpublished notes under the inflammatory title The Will to Power." It does not help either argument, Cate notes, that Nietzsche himself was a disorderly writer easily capable of being misunderstood; but, he adds, Nietzsche had grounds for his unusual methods of composition and apothegmatic style, for he believed-correctly, as it turned out-that he was doomed to die young and did not have the time to be tidy. Such convictions also rationalize Nietzsche's inability to handle money, his restlessness, and his devotion to the life-celebrating but feather-ruffling habits of theDionysian personality type, an invention of Nietzsche's that found its most celebrated follower in the composer Richard Wagner. Cate carefully explains the development of Nietzsche's thought from Schopenhauerian acolyte to independent-and unique-thinker, some of whose most powerful work was penned before he was 30. A touch more readable than Ronald Hayman's Nietzsche (1980) and more current than Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974), both of which Cate complements but does not displace.
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