Nietzsche

...He also documents, in moving detail, the extraordinary physical pain (headaches, eye ailments, vomiting) which Nietzsche suffered throughout his life, and the endless series of attempted cures, the remedial baths, cold-water treatments, bloodlettings, mountain seclusions, and dietary remedies...

...STEPHEN darst has written for the New York Times, Harper's, and other journals...

...His work speaks with increasing urgency to psychologists, poets, literary critics, and theologians...

...To interpret the turns in Nietzsche's life and thought, Hayman frequently relies on an oversimplified etiology...

...For example, in his chapter on Human All Too Human Hayman notes that For Nietzsche a philosopher's ideas were less important than the quality of his striving towards existence on a philosophical or su-prahistorical plane...

...Moritz to meet Elisabeth in Chur...

...Hayman's method is to counterpoint his narrative with remarks, more often descriptive than analytical, on the content of the books Nietzsche was writing at the time...

...FRANCINE CARDMAN teaches historical theology at Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass...

...DiPIERO is a poet and translator who teaches at Northwestern University...

...Hayman also notes the frequency of mountain and desert metaphors in Nietzsche's earlier work, especially in Zarathustra, but he stops short of analyzing the critical importance of Nietzsche's poetry of self-overcoming...

...The hero was one who dared to convert intense negativity into a positive life force...

...His intense preoccupation with the discipline of will and with the essentially creative nature of disease has incidentally turned him into one of the most notorious cases in the pathology of modernism...

...For instance, at one point he notes that "at the crossroads of Nietzsche's development it was nearly always illness that took charge.'' True as far as it goes...

...He is the editor of Concepts of Health and Disease (Addison-Wesley...

...To explain the strain of misogyny in Nietzsche's work as reflexive sublimation is not enough...

...This attitude...

...In short, he must be a hero, as Schopenhauer had been...

...But we still haven't received a detailed (and necessary) analysis of Nietzsche's "radical reassessment" of conventional moral categories, nor does such analysis appear elsewhere in the book...

...W.S...

...One of the major tasks of Nietzsche's earlier biographers was to correct the false image coined by the philosopher's sister Elisabeth and further debased by Nazi propaganda...

...Ronald Hayman Nietzsche "Nietzsche's psychological observations were leading him to a radical reassessment of conventional assumptions about virtues and vices.'' There follows a brief paraphrase of Nietzsche's revaluation of "vanity," which leads in turn to a terse critique of Plato's belief in the abolition of private property, prompting Hayman to observe that "Marxism was based on the same fallacy.'' Then comes a brief critique of Marxist theory...

...Ronald Hayman's intention in his new biography is first of all to establish a correct and orderly sequence of events, a calendar life...

...One cannot gain a clear view of Nietzsche's life of mind without a deep understanding of the concepts of ressentiment, self-overcoming, "going under," and (most notoriously perhaps) "hardness...

...Hayman unfortunately slights these, and he is too quick to view Nietzsche's words and actions according to the familiar psychoanalytical paradigms often put forth to explain an obsessive or deviant behavior: oedipal stress, sublimated eroticism, latent sado-masochism, and so forth...

...His materials are plentiful and are therefore quite useful to any student of Nietzsche's life, but the mass of data never coheres as an eloquent biographical argument...

...this inverted vitalism entailed rigorous solitude, a heroic concentration of intellectual and physical energies...

...W. S. Di Piero SINCE Nietzsche's death in 1900, his influence has extended far beyond the boundaries of conventional philosophy...

...But Hayman's analysis of both the biographical and intellectual materials is often so superficial that Nietzsche's career is presented as a compilation of episodic anecdotes...

...A man's character is worth a hundred systems...

...His intention clearly is to reconstruct the life of mind as it is lived out...

...is explicit in one of Nietzsche's unpublished notes...

...The accretion of details-the knitting of fact, quote, and paraphrase-turns to Hayman's advantage in tracing the development of Nietzsche's heroic solitude, which reached its first peak in Zarathustra...

...To what extent did Nietzsche view his relationships with women as contests, tests of self-overcoming, applications of moral revaluation...

...More than just a historical figure, Nietzsche is also a "case...

...In his letters he spoke of his "physical way of thinking," by which his entire organism passionately engaged his intellectual project...

...Drawing heavily on materials in the Nietzsche archives and translating from many of Nietzsche's letters and from work no longer readily available in translation, Hay man intelligently reconstructs, on a day by day basis, Nietzsche's early years, his schooling, his encounters with Burckhardt, Wagner, and others, and his wanderings across Europe...

...MICHAEL TRUE, professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, contributed to the recently published War or Peace?: The Search for New Answers (Orbis...

...These passing observations, each important but each underdeveloped, are then abruptly punctuated by fact: "On September 17 Nietzsche left St...

...So are his discussions of the other women in Nietzsche's life...

...In keeping with his vision of philosophy as an autobiographical task, Nietzsche perceived himself as a didact, prophet, cultural psychologist, and moral revolutionist whose ideas were pitched toward actualization...

...This is the biographical datum, the telling coincidence, but it falls short of connecting Nietzsche's attitude toward his own sickliness with his valuation of will and REVIEWERS ARTHUR L. CAPLAN is an Associate for the Humanities at the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences in Hastings, New York...

...The chapter on Lou Salome, along with Cosima Wagner the most important woman in Nietzsche's life, is extremely informative and at times moving, but Hayman's analysis of the termination of the relationship is reticent and inconclusive...

...There is something in a philosopher there can never be in a philosophy: the origin of many philosophies - the great man...

...This restoration work was carried out by Walter Kaufmann, though neither he nor Hollingdale, Nietzsche's other biographer in English, scrutinized the ordinary details of Nietzsche's life...

...But he never quite arrives at a whole portrait of the evolution and fusion of will, moral disposition, erotic engagement, workaday habits, cultural memory and intellectual discipline which go to make up human temperament.ke up human temperament...

...Here as elsewhere Hayman acts as an accurate guide to the difficult and painful chronology of Nietzsche's life...

...self-determination...

...He believed moreover that every great philosophy is "the confession of its author and a kind of involuntary, unconscious memoir...