Gorfu Contra Nietzsche is a book of integrity because it is written by a man of integrity. Books don’t write themselves, and what a person is, is so much more important than what he writes about. A philosopher’s life is a more critical measure of his worth than his books.

Moreover, what a philosopher writes can only be taken seriously if it addresses important issues in life. This book is to be taken very seriously because it discusses human values with a sense of urgency. This is exactly what Nietzsche himself did. And the issue between Gorfu and Nietzsche is about what has value and how people should live their lives.

I can’t think of anything more worth doing than reading a book like this, a book that makes life worth living by examining it, in the spirit of Socrates. It is depressing for me personally, to live in a society of people who ignore this kind of book and instead, dribble away their time following the adolescent antics of celebrities, watching abominations on the evening news, and striving to acquire buns of steel.

Gorfu sees Nietzsche much as Nietzsche saw himself, as an advocate of the reversal of traditional morality. Moralists of all religions have always advocated the limitation of egoism out of sympathy for other people. Nietzsche seemed to consider this to be unnatural and harmful to the human race. Nietzsche, not only identified the Will to Power as the basic human drive, but considered even its cruelest form of expression as a perfectly acceptable, and preferable element in the economy of human life.

There are many strands to Nietzsche’s thoughts on values. The more positive elements are the advocacy of individuality and an intolerance of sham. But the essential ethics was the unlimited self-aggrandizement. As Nietzsche well knew, sages throughout all time have seen this as precisely the wrong way to live.

So at issue here is the most basic question of how a person should live, whether he should give vent to all of his selfish drives or should consider the interests of other people to be as important as his own. A great deal has been said about this essential question. Nietzsche is perhaps the most eloquent opponent of the teaching of traditional wisdom. And Gorfu presents an inspired defense of the goodness that all the sages have taught as the Way.

The bottom line is that Nietzsche’s view is precisely upside down, for the greatest human beings are precisely the kindest, and the smallest human beings are precisely the most selfish. I really wouldn’t know what to say to anyone who does not see this. I can see more value in Nietzsche’s work than Gorfu does. I personally cannot form a coherent concept of Nietzsche as a person because his thoughts combine elements that I admire greatly with elements that I abhor. I believe that Nietzsche was a great philosopher who went horribly wrong. I do not condemn him as Gorfu does. But concerning the issues raised in this book, I am completely on Gorfu’s side.

Fred Strohm, Ph. D.

Doctor of Philosophy.