1. As evidence she quotes Gadamer's own statement (PAyg; PL57) that his call to a chair at Leipzig was a consequence of “high politics.” She does not explain, as Gadamer does in the following sentence, that the “high politics” consisted of a decision by the Nazis to cease imposing political criteria for academic appointments because they needed the work of the best scientists in the universities to win the war. Gadamer had enrolled earlier in a “rehabilitation” camp in order to keep his position as a dozent; he did not exhibit sufficient loyalty to or enthusiasm for the regime to obtain a higher position so long as there were political criteria. [BACK]

2. As he himself reports in “Heidegger's Later Philosophy,” Gadamer was surprised by the “turn” Heidegger's thought had taken in The Origin of the Work of Art (which circulated in manuscript form in Germany during the 1930-5, well before its official publication in 1954 [PHa 16; GW6:252]). Gadamer subsequently spent a great deal of time and effort coming to terms with the new direction Heidegger's thought had taken, an effort that culminated in the publication of Gadamer's masterwork,

3. Cf. Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Justice,” in Festivals of Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 95–105, and Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 78–82, for an argument to the contrary. “Gadamer did not explicitly say anything about the relevance of his analysis of Plato's Republic to the Nazi regime in which he wrote,” I observe. “It is not too difficult, however, to see the implicit critique. If philosophical inquiry constitutes the only basis of a true community, the regime then in power in Germany was clearly unjust” (82). [BACK]

4. In fact, there is a great deal of continuity in Gadamer's thought from beginning to end. In my chapter “Gadamer's Path,” in Postmodern Platos, 70–103, I have argued that he gradually, but only gradually, indicated the ways in which he came to disagree with his teacher Heidegger. [BACK]

5. Leo Strauss makes a similar argument about the insidious character of Machi-avelli's blasphemous suggestions in Thoughts on Machiavelli; Waite claims to be employing Strauss method (against Strauss's political commitments or ends). [BACK]

6. In his Philosophical Apprenticeships Gadamer reports that his piece on Plato and the poets had “been printed under the motto: ‘He who philosophizes is not at one with the premises of his time.’ This was well camouflaged as a quote from Goethe and thus not quite a heroic act. But it was also not an accommodation” [BACK]

7. Cf. Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1 957), and the acerbic critique of the same by Leo Strauss, reprinted in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 26–34. Gadamer indicates the source of the association between the sophists and “democratic” (although not, strictly speaking, “liberal”) politics when he observes that, as Glaucon makes clear at the beginning of Book II of the Republic in his restatement of Thrasymachus's contention that “justice” consists merely in the “advantage of the stronger,” “justice” in the form of law (or convention, nomos) merely represents the agreement of weak individuals to band together to protect themselves from depredations by the strong. The person who knows (or, like the sophists, can teach someone) how to persuade the many (majority) to enact what he wants as law is, therefore, most powerful. Although Glaucon's argument has often been compared to social contract theory, it is fundamentally different, inasmuch as it does not ground the justice or “right” of the government in the natural rights of each individual party to the contract, but makes law merely a matter of conventional right based effectively on the superior power of the greatest number. [BACK]

8. One could, for example, also have been a communist. [BACK]

10. “Certainly it remained difficult to keep the right balance, not to compromise oneself so far that one would be dismissed and yet still to remain recognizable to colleagues and students. That we somehow found the right balance was confirmed for us one day when it was said of us that we had only ‘loose sympathy’ with the new awakening. … I exposed myself a good deal, and when the new National Socialist Kampf organization replaced our self-serving union, I was severely slandered. … So it was that the objections of the Dozentenbund prevented the sought-after title of professor from being bestowed on me. … Of course I wanted to save my academic existence in Germany, but without making political concessions that could cost me the trust of my friends in the outer or inner emigration…. Finally I found a way. … I registered for my ‘rehabilitation’ voluntarily” (PAyG-yg). [BACK]

11. The examples are mine, not Waite's. [BACK]

12. Cf. The New Nietzsche, trans. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977) for a representative selection of essays and authors arguing for the new, more egalitarian interpretation. [BACK]

13. Waite refers to Leibniz, but it was Aristotle in Rhetoric (13543) who first defined the enthymeme as a form of argumentation especially suited to popular or political (as opposed to scientific) reasoning. However, in the section entitled “Why I Am a Destiny” in Ecce Homo Nietzsche denies that he ever spoke to the “rabble.” [BACK]

14. This is the problem Zarathustra faces in his relations with potential followers: how can a teacher exercise influence without corrupting his students? Gadamer treats the question in the essay on Zarathustra that Waite ignores. [BACK]

15. In Postmodern Platos, 10–32, 1 trace the ambiguous stance Nietzsche took toward Plato throughout his career. Sometimes Nietzsche claims to be overturning Plato; sometimes he suspects that Plato understood everything that Nietzsche himself was arguing. [BACK]

16. Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952), 30. [BACK]

17. In a letter he wrote to Karl Loewith in 1935 (translated and reprinted in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 [1988]: 183), Strauss explained that he thought Nietzsche wanted “to repeat antiquity … at the peak of modernity.” Strauss shared Nietzsche's desire; but Strauss had come to believe that the polemical character of Nietzsche's critique of modernity on the basis of probity (a scripturally based virtue) prevented him from realizing his intention. (Strauss explains the reasons Nietzsche's attempt is self-contradictory [and hence necessarily fails] in “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil,” reprinted in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], 175–91.) Waite believes that Nietzsche is succeeding surreptitiously, because, in contrast to Strauss, Waite objects to all forms of inequality or “elitism.” He does not concern himself with the character of the promised “Ubermensch.” [BACK]

18. Waite gives a rather inaccurate account of the conversation in which he seems to mistake the polite presentation of different views for agreement. Hork-heimer, Adorno, and Gadamer do agree that Nietzsche was a poetic writer. Adorno introduces the problem of the apparently contradictory reception of Nietzsche as a

19. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), Heidegger argued that Germany was caught between the “pincers” of the two technological superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. [BACK]

20. In Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 74–87, Derrida argues that the classical belief in the pure, undistorted communicability of ideas is based on the experience of hearing ourselves say what we think and concluding, therefore, that the expression and the thought occur simultaneously, in us as well as in the receiver. He begins Otobiogra-phies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et lapolitique du nompropre (Paris: Galilee, 1984) (The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V McDonald [New York: Schocken Books, 1985]) by quoting the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra “On Redemption” in which Zarathus-tra describes the fragmented, specialized human beings in whom one organ or talent has grown so disproportionately to all others that it almost overwhelms them, e.g., the little man attached to a huge ear, in arguing that Nietzsche was implicated in Nazi politics, partly because he could not posthumously control the use of his name or writings (especially by his sister). Authors leave a “trace” that acquires new meaning, a meaning they cannot control (although they try by means of their name—hence the “politics” or attempt to exercise power on subsequent generations of readers). [BACK]