Hello Jim –

Mind you, Kaufmann is intelligent and did a lot to making Nietzsche as celebrated philosopher in the English speaking world. Keep in mind, though, that certain acedamians resent “Kaufmann’s Nietzsche,” and claim Kaufmann’s take has gained too much standing, and that other takes on Nietzsche are also valid and maybe more just. If you read Kaufmann’s books – I’ve read five of them – he takes the stance as a Jewish atheist who likes to criticize Christianity. Whenever comparing Homer to Moses, or the New Testament to the Old, he always sides with his Jewish forebears. Nietzsche did so himself much less consistently, for though he identified as an “anti-antisemitist,” yet he made some damning judgments against the Jews that cannot and should not be swept under the rug.

As far as patronizing tone, note his introduction to his translation of Zarathustra in which he says one key to the text is that Nietzsche was very lonely. He uses that to excuse Zarathustra. I think  Nietzsche would not have appreciated that. In his section on mysticism in his book of a critique of religion and philosophy, he quotes Nietzsche describing his experience of inspiration where he claims others have not felt this sort of thing in centuries. Kaufmann claims his experience is in fact common and adolescent.

You said “practicing scientific method will instill truthfulness.” You have already assumed, and not by any demonstration of the scientific method, that the scientific method establishes truth. It can’t prove itself, after all, so that truth is not scientific. Further, even if we grant that the scientific method can stand as AN apparatus for testing truth claims, is it the only or even the best? Are question of value and aesthetics scientific? Should they be? We may answer yes or no, but those questions and those answers are themselves NOT scientific, nor can they be.

You asked why Nietzsche didn’t use Occams Razor and cut out Eternal Recurrence from his morality of amor fati. Consider this: if Aesop didn’t write the fables but only the morals, would we know who Aesop is? You claim that celebrating our life and affirming every moment of our life would be just as effective and fitting whether or not we believed in the eternal recurrence. Do you suppose Christians could live the Christian ethic without believing in the threat of hell and the reward of heaven? I bet Christainity would never have become a world religion if it lacked the image of hell to scare people into believing. Freud and Marx gained instant popularity by claiming what they were doing was science. It was not and is not.

We are talking about rhetoric. Nietzsche was much more than a philosopher. He was also a writer. Like Emerson, whom he studied his whole life, he was primarily a poet, or artist, and not a philosopher concerned with syllogisms and rational argument – academic philosophy. Thank Ama for that!

Daniel