Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:120 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY weapons," the emotive meanings of propaganda (p. 168). Thus his main distinctions between understanding and will, science and art, knowing and doing, civil and penal, were repeatedly blurred as his tactics shifted. Bentham's originality, says Mack, "lay just here, in putting moral insights to use by first incorporating them in a systematic analytic structure." Yet he "never fully explained what he intended to include under a 'logic of the will.' He began with individuals, their immediate pleasures and pains, and a Utilitarian rationale or consideration of consequences..." but the essential connective tissues were never sufficiently supplied (pp. 160-161). But at least the logic of the will and Bentham's bitter frustrations as a reformer combined to make him a radical democrat by 1790, and not, as the author clearly and for the first time demonstrates, because of the influence of James Mill some twenty years later. With a wealth of detail the author accompanies Bentham just beyond the mid-point of his odyssey, and fully justifies her admiration for what he attempted to do. She recognizes the obvious "gap between his ambition and his achievement," to which must be added the distance between his psychology and sociology and ours. Many of the questions he raised are still with us, and have even been sharpened, as the late David Baumgardt pointed out, by the logical positivists and the emotivists. In today's discussions, as he indicates, we are often confronted with a choice between but two alternatives: uncritical normative ethics and ethical or non-ethical psychology. Bentham offers at least the possibility of "basing ethics critically upon psychological observations." And Stevenson speaks of attitudes which can be "supported" by some "reasoned argument " (David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics oI Today [Princeton, New Jersey: 1952], pp. 137-150). Nothing in this excellent beginning leads the reader to expect the second volume to portray the completion by Bentham of the majestic structures which he planned and replanned. But a case has been made for a reassessment of Bentham as an adventurer, if not as a builder in philosophy, so that one looks forward to the next installment of his odyssey. HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College,Schenectady,New York Positives Antichristentum: Nietzsches Christusbild im Brennpunkt nachchristlicher Anthropologie. By Hermann Wein. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. Pp. 114. 9.50 G.) For understandable reasons, a definitive study of the philosophy of Nietzsche has never been written-and may never be written. Nietzsche's predilection for dialectics, the restless to-and-fro with which he at once affirms and negates virtually every cultural and intellectual phenomenon of the western world, including some products of his own creative imagination, is the despair even of those commentators who would heed his warning that there is no fixed center to his thought. Thus we have had interpretations of Nietzsche as atheist, as secular eschatologist, as nihilist, as cultural relativist, as Dionysian yea-sayer, as Darwinian eugenicist, and the like--none of them altogether mistaken, all of them, singly and collectively, beset by a frustrating one-sidedness. It would be too much to say that Professor Wein has succeeded where all others have [ailed. But he has managed to present more of a "whole" Nietzsche than have his prede- BOOK REVIEWS 121 r He has honored his own sound methodological precept that "only in a farspanning synopsis of what constitutes the aphoristically dispersed Nietzschean corpus does the contrapuntal order of this open, nonsystematic philosophy become apparent" (p. as). Nietzsche, Professor Wein insists, was not an out-and-out nihilist. But in the face of his wholesale negations of what the West has traditionally understood by and accepted as real, true, and valuable, what was left for Nietzsche to affirm? By way of answer, Wein devotes more than half of his book to a multiperspectival exegesis of Nietzsche's briefest and best-known pronouncement: "God is dead." In the first place, the pronouncement is an historical report. "God," a shorthand expression for the hierarchized meanings and values developed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, is all but extinct. Thus for Nietzsche the contemporary era is the epoch of the ascendancy of nihilism. In the second place...