b.2 Comparative Efforts

While still studying, in Leipzig, Nietzsche closed a letter to a friend of his by the following postscript:

NB. Das bedeutendste philosophische Werk, was in den letzten Jahrzehnten erschienen ist, ist unzweifelhaft Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, über das ich eine bogenlange Lobrede schreiben könnte. Kant, Schopenhauer und dies Buch von Lange - mehr brauche ich nicht. (KGB I/2, Dezember 1866, 184.)

Kant’s, Schopenhauer’s and Lange’s texts are, undoubtedly, among the ones to be taken into consideration in reading Nietzsche, while there are good reasons to read him with an eye on certain clarifying texts written without his ever knowing them or those published after his death. The connection to immediate predecessors is important, most of all, because it helps to assess Nietzsche’s contributions in, and to, the intellectual milieu he had to confront. One may profit from a passage in Menschliches:

Irrthum der Philosophen. - Der Philosoph glaubt, der Werth seiner Philosophie liege im Ganzen, im Bau: die Nachwelt findet ihn im Stein, mit dem er baute und mit dem, von da an, noch oft und besser gebaut wird: also darin, dass jener Bau zerstört werden kann und doch noch als Material Werth hat.

(MA II/1, 201, KSA 2, 466.)

Whereas historiography presented not that wide a selection of Nietzsche readings, analogies between Nietzsche and other thinkers are drawn in literature, from passing juxtapositions to detailed studies, with a richness equivalent to the amount of interpretative options made available in the course of his

reception. I shall make no attempt at exhausting the abundance, in the possibilities of thinking in terms of

“Nietzsche and X”, or “X and Nietzsche”, but merely record some main lines and curiosities of this type of locating. I shall point at overrepresented and underrepresented pairings and groupings.

After finishing Geburt der Tragödie Nietzsche set out to investigate early Greek thinkers. He explains his strategy, to his friend Rohde, by describing “eine schöne Kategorientafel” of his own. According to this classification, Nietzsche differentiates between “Hauptkerl, Vorläufer und Nachläufer!” For instance, Parmenides is Hauptkerl, while Xenophanes is his Vorläufer and Zeno his Nachläufer. (KGB II/3, Juni 1872, 10.) In this respect, assessments of Nietzsche’s “predecessors” or “heirs” should not be dismissed as anything utterly un-Nietzschean.

The tendency to see Nietzsche predominantly among German “Schopenhauerians” was particularly persistent in the early phases of the reception. In 1888, Moritz Brasch integrated Nietzsche into his story of the contemporary philosophy by referring to him as “undoubtedly one of the most interesting and attracting physiognomists out of a whole group of Schopenhauerians”⁵⁴⁴. While Nietzsche and Eduard von Hartmann were seen as “the two great pioneers of the philosophy of life”⁵⁴⁵, von Hartmann himself listed Nietzsche, along with Frauenstädt, Bahnsen, Peters and Hamerling, as Schopenhauer’s “readers and admirers”, before setting out to present his own synthesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer⁵⁴⁶. Apart from direct attachment to Schopenhauer, early comparisons were eagerly made between Nietzsche and such characters as Darwin, Stirner and Bakunin⁵⁴⁷.

In later times, Schopenhauer is almost always mentioned as the source back to which Nietzsche’s interest in volition, the unconscious and metaphysics of music are to be traced. Bryan Magee, for instance, says that Nietzsche cannot be understood unless by way of Schopenhauer. In his opinion, Nietzsche adopted Schopenhauer’s basic conviction of the being as energy but went on to tie this to a Darwinized struggle for survival.⁵⁴⁸ Nick Land writes about Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “philosophical tap-root” in whom

“the approach to the ’noumenon’ as an energetic unconscious begins to be assembled, and interpreting the noumenon as will generates a discourse that is not speculative, phenomenological, or meditative, but diagnostic. It is this type of thinking that resources Nietzsche’s genealogy of inhuman desire, which feeds in turn into Bataille’s base materialism, for which ’noumenon’ is addressed as impersonal death and an unconscious drive.”⁵⁴⁹

Wagner’s share, in contrast, has typically been treated in biographical terms and it has seldom amounted beyond establishing obvious aesthetical influences and affinities. One could contend that whatever Wagner had to say on the things that interested Nietzsche was dramatized Schopenhauerianism. But Nietzsche did spend quite some time in digesting Wagner’s entire output, including the non-musical texts, and can be seen as exploiting many of the motives Wagner put forth whether in notes or letters.⁵⁵⁰ An early commentator found that Nietzsche always remained in the opera master’s spell and was driven, because of him, toward an artistically conceived transcendence⁵⁵¹. Elsewhere, Nietzsche is related to Wagner and Schopenhauer with the help of Jakob Burckhardt, in a sense that these four thinkers are

united in discovering the “dark, tragic, pessimistic” legacy of the ancients⁵⁵².

It seems that only after rising among the Western classics, Nietzsche became available as the other term in more flexible pairings. If Schopenhauer is widely seen as Nietzsche’s point of departure and Wagner, sometimes, as the important figure in redirecting and intensifying his interests, it is, say, Empedocle, Protagoras, Pyrrho, Callicles, Thrasymachus, Hume, Rousseau, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marx, pragmatists, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Camus who feature as nominees for a philosophical brother he never had.

When it comes to the Greeks, Tracy B. Strong has said that Nietzsche did not long for a retreat to the ancient order but insisted on studying its formation, because of the structural lesson it might give for today⁵⁵³. It is said that what he inherited from the pre-Socratic philosophers was a notion of the world as a problem, as a paradigm of contradiction and tension⁵⁵⁴. Since Empedocle was so “radically undefinable and ubiquitous”, he became Nietzsche’s special favorite⁵⁵⁵. Yet, apart from what may be the most commonly mentioned figure, Heracleitus, Nietzsche was also, early on, compared to, say, such ancient thinkers as Democrit, Xenophanes, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, Zenon of Elea and others⁵⁵⁶. More rarely,

Nietzsche’s stress on such things as ’excellence’ or ’virtue’ cause interpreters to relate his ethical thought with that of Aristotle⁵⁵⁷. Nietzsche has been depicted as standing beside Epicur, too. He welcomed the latter’s non-metaphysical interpretation of nature as a continuation of the pre-Socratic tradition⁵⁵⁸.

One observer asserts that Nietzsche concurs with Protagoras in “that man is the measure of all things”

and that “moral valuations remain matters of opinion”. Yet, his “deconstruction of the philosophical tradition entails that sophistry need not be saddled with the bad reputation it has acquired as a result of that tradition.”⁵⁵⁹ Another commentator speaks of Gorgias as Nietzsche’s forerunner⁵⁶⁰. Yet, the

“fundamental difference” between Nietzsche and the sophists has been seen in the way the former’s view of human action involves “the necessity of meaning” against “arbitrarity and capriciousness”⁵⁶¹.

Occasionally, Nietzsche has been likened to the other extremist thinkers Plato described, notably Callicles and Thrasymachus⁵⁶². Yet, it has been argued that while “Thrasymachus would have agreed with

Nietzsche that only weaklings go in for justice”, “Nietzsche thinks that the so-called virtue of Justice [...]

is a device of the weak for preventing the strong from getting too great an advantage over them” and

“Thrasymachus, on the contrary, thinks that Justice is a device of the strong for keeping the weak in their place”⁵⁶³. According to a differing opinion, Nietzsche is more in agreement with Plato than with

Thrasymachus or Callicles⁵⁶⁴.

In Manfred Riedel’s opinion, Nietzsche’s fascination with the Greeks shows itself particularly strongly in the way he was caught by the reflection of the “birth of thinking”. It dealt with the Ur-Sprung of reason

from its sensual basis. Logical thought has distanced itself so long that it denies its point of departure.

The duality of intuitive and rational, or of the Heraclitian and Anaxagoric, elements is attached to language. Riedel says that as Nietzsche begins to comprehend words as phonetico-auditive signs, he is already probing a view that attempts to do justice to the power of translation, metaphor and allegory beside the communicative pressure of a conceptualized language. He is working towards an originary view of nous as listening to the symbolic structure of logos.⁵⁶⁵

To move back toward the modern times one can consult a commentator drawing an analogy between

“[t]he aphoristic discourse of Pascal and Nietzsche” both “dissolving the philosophical seriousness.”⁵⁶⁶ Max Horkheimer preferred to emphasize more the similarity, especially in the early Nietzsche, with Montaigne⁵⁶⁷. And, in Gadamer’s view, Nietzsche joins Montaigne and Pascal in the group of “great moralists”⁵⁶⁸.

With Rousseau, Nietzsche is reported to have shared the quest for authenticity, despite his gradually evolved aversion towards Rousseau’s sentimentalism⁵⁶⁹. Stated otherwise, although he came to reject Rousseau, Nietzsche saw, very much like him, the barbaric thrust within culture itself⁵⁷⁰. Nietzsche’s basic difference from Rousseau is found to be in his being an “ontologist of life and nature” as opposed to being a moralist or a philosopher of right. It is said that Nietzsche’s lacking awareness of Rousseau’s ideas lead him, ultimately, to see the Frenchman as but a continuator of Christianity.⁵⁷¹

Of other French philosophers, Nietzsche’s less known contemporary, Jean-Marie Guyau, was brought close to him in some interpretations. Sometimes, the link between the two was established by speaking about Guyau as “the French Nietzsche”⁵⁷². In Franz Brentano’s opinion, Nietzsche’s self-analyses resembled the ones by La Rochefoucauld and de Mandeville⁵⁷³. Much later, Foucault has brought up Mallarmé’s name⁵⁷⁴.

As for the home ground, it has been said that Nietzsche is, along with Kant and Hegel, “the third member of the great triumvirate of German philosophy” and, for that matter, the most “modern and flamboyant”

of the three⁵⁷⁵. For Kant experts, Nietzsche has sometimes presented a tedious case. S. I. M. Duplessis, for instance, speaks about Nietzsche’s “orgiastic intuitionism”, “intuitionistic dynamism”, “narcissism”,

“dualism” and “irrationalism” as blinding, for Nietzsche himself and for his commentators, the essential indebtedness to Kant: ”It need not surprise us that he was also one of the few to take note of the realistic trend in Kant’s philosophy”.⁵⁷⁶

On the other hand, Kant’s emphasis on the spontaneity of the act of cogito or ich-denke has been compared to Nietzsche’s anti-cogitational will to power⁵⁷⁷. One commentator has expressed the link by

saying that for Nietzsche it was mainly about self-critique of the Kantian critique and had more to do with grasping the consequences of Kant’s agnosticism than dwelling on the complexities of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft⁵⁷⁸. Alternatively phrased, “Kant’s interpretation of the world, Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world and his critique of the former are all [...] possible perspectives, “language games” that the world plays with us and that we play with the world; experiments whose failure or success can never be guaranteed”⁵⁷⁹.

Odo Marquard, for one, is of the opinion that Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer on the road from Kant’s transcendentalism toward a philosophy of the will, and came to attack the metaphysical remnants in both of his forerunners⁵⁸⁰. What Heinz Röttges, in turn, has to say about the relationship between Kant and Nietzsche has direct bearing on the problematic of the present study. He thinks that where “Kant’s philosophy reaches its peak” in the battle against nihilism as the “falling apart of the moments of the dialectic of the enlightenment”, Nietzsche no longer believes in the possibility of reconciliation between science and ethics or necessity and freedom.⁵⁸¹

One of the most extensive studies on Nietzsche’s relationship with Kant is Olivier Reboul’s Nietzsche critique de Kant (1974). Coming up with a plurality of shared points of departure and similar trains of thought, Reboul’s main is that Nietzsche is to been as the continuator of Kant’s critical philosophy and, thereby, also a critic of that very philosophy. Reboul says that Nietzsche did not ignore Kant’s ideas but, on the contrary, took seriously his most profound aspirations.⁵⁸² Similar idea of further enhancing the critical enterprise, is developed in Friedrich Kaulbach’s writings on the Kant inspiration in Nietzsche⁵⁸³.

There are those, too, who emphasize more the ultra-idealist connection. Michael Allen Gillespie describes Nietzsche’s career as a shift from an essentially Fichtean position toward Schelling’s

naturalizing and divinizing tendencies, yet remaining within the confines of the subjectivist voluntarism developed by these two predecessors⁵⁸⁴. In fact, the historiographer Falckenberg took Nietzsche, in 1876, to be a renovator of Fichte as seen through “Schopenhauerian lenses”⁵⁸⁵.

Schelling’s name points to the romantic controversy. Nietzsche’s confrontation with Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel and others raises the question of his relationship to German romanticism. In an anthology on relativism, Nietzsche is held responsible for its “romantic source”, since he “distilled” an atmosphere of counter-enlightenment and laid the groundwork for the idea that “reality is socially constructed”⁵⁸⁶. Another recent account seeks to lay bare Nietzsche as “masked romantic” who failed to “purge himself of” the inevitable pressures of this cultural force. Nietzsche’s romanticism is, in this view, differentiated into the common features of transformation, linkage between the sublime and the frightening, life as vital forces, heroism, total revaluation, search for command and ambivalence toward femininity.⁵⁸⁷ Much

earlier, one critic wrote that Nietzsche stands for “[t]he answer to and the negation of the Idealistic and Romanticist philosophy of history in Germany”, yet that his “worship of the Great Man” was “one point in common with the Romanticists”.⁵⁸⁸

Studying Nietzsche’s commitment to romanticism has shown that the coat of a romanticist looks only as good on him as it fits badly⁵⁸⁹. If his criticisms of romanticism merely strengthen his bonds to it, there is his peculiar “anti-romantic irony” that can be seen as effectively marking his distance⁵⁹⁰. In his thorough study on the German tradition from Novalis onward, Michael Neumann writes that by his elucidations of both reason and “its other” Nietzsche “radicalizes the enlightened as well as the romanticist positions”.

Schopenhauer mediated to Nietzsche the scenery of Wackenroder, Tieck and Hoffmann. In Neumann’s careful differentiations, Nietzsche is treated as “the terminating metamorphosis of German romanticism”, in which this tradition meets “its translation in the horizon of the modern”.⁵⁹¹

One way to place Nietzsche in the history of his tribe is to look at the developments of the German theory and practice of tragedy. Where Benno von Wiese once accommodated Nietzsche, in the epilogue of his story from Lessing onwards, as the one who draw the extreme conclusions from von Kleist’s, Hölderlin’s, Grillparzer’s, Grabbe’s, Büchner’s and Hebbel’s increasingly nihilistic understanding of the human condition⁵⁹², Massimo Cacciari has, more recently, spoken of how “the real problem of tragedy”

had been discovered by Schiller and Goethe and further developed by Hölderlin, was, thereafter,

“presented in all its negativity by Nietzsche”⁵⁹³.

The emphasis on the historical philosophizing was a dominating current in the mid-19th-century Germany. Schnädelbach has spoken about three kinds of Historismus: a positivism in human sciences accumulating facts; a relativist theorizing of historical variation; a view of history as a principle.

According to Schnädelbach, the normative character of history was universally reproduced from Hegel to Marx, and it was only later that historical thinking was attached to the idea of loss of valid and obligating points of reference.⁵⁹⁴

The third kind of historicism, history as a principle, was critical of Hegel but remained close to him by affirming the developmental imperative and denying only the absolute synthesis of historicalness and systematicity. This “historical school” was led by Leopold von Ranke whose student Jakob Burckhardt was to be a major influence for Nietzsche. Burckhardt reaffirmed the school’s crucial claim of the preconceptions conditioning historical events. Yet, he differed from its main stream in questioning the centrality of political history and the existence of world historical ideas.⁵⁹⁵

In this light, Nietzsche’s ambivalent relation to Hegel should not be too surprising. Werner Stegmaier has

addressed this issue and he describes how Nietzsche became, “step by step”, closer to appreciating Hegel’s preparatory achievements⁵⁹⁶. And even at the early stages, as Nietzsche was tackling with the problems of historicity and attacking Hegel, he was, in Volker Gerhardt’s phrase, “standing closer to him than what he knew”⁵⁹⁷. For instance, Hegel’s concentration on a “single drive” as accountable for the varieties of human action has been seen as anticipating Nietzsche. Moreover, his handling of “the otherworldliness of Christianity both as a response to failure and an insurance against success” has been taken as “adumbrating” Nietzsche.⁵⁹⁸ Another way to approach the relationship, is offered by a critic who says that Nietzsche could move from Kant’s rigid rationalism toward a more dynamic conception of experience, while Hegel could not be similarly overcome, or bypassed, because Hegel’s, as also Nietzsche’s, concept of reason includes the unreason, or the prerational drives and impulses⁵⁹⁹.

Elsewhere, Hegel’s picture of Christianity, in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, is described as similar to Nietzsche’s depiction, in Genealogie. This is because both thinkers are taken to have emphasized the notion of self-overcoming.⁶⁰⁰ Finally, Stephen Houlgate’s book, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (1986), is a rare comparative effort. It seeks to demonstrate Hegel’s superiority in handling a number of issues that are, nowadays, often thought to be genuinely Nietzschean⁶⁰¹. Richard J. Bernstein has located Nietzsche in the aftermath of Hegel by comparing him to others deviating from the

established custom: ”If one takes a broader view of the development of philosophy, we can see that the cluster of issues concerning action has dominated philosophic concern since the demise of Hegel. Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Peirce all agree that Hegel fails to do justice to what is distinctive about human action, and each in his own way sought to provide a more adequate account.”⁶⁰²

Anthony Quinton calls Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche “the great nineteenth century

irrationalist anti-Hegelians” who had their effect on the fact that the whole century of continental thought consists of rejections of Hegel⁶⁰³. Often enough, Nietzsche is named among other thinkers collectively labelled as “post-Hegelians”⁶⁰⁴. In Karl Jasper’s view, from 1938, the utterly unclassifiable Nietzsche can only be coupled with Kierkegaard and Pascal⁶⁰⁵. In the 50's, Jaspers came to speak of the crucial triple of Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard as the great critics of traditional philosophy⁶⁰⁶. In about the same time, in a similar spirit, Hannah Arendt singled out Marx, Nietzsche and Bergson as the three critics of

rationalist calculus, avatars of the homo faber and action-based philosophy of life⁶⁰⁷. Later on, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky have been mentioned as the “great enemies of the enlightenment”⁶⁰⁸. This has not prevented others from insisting on Nietzsche’s kinship with, and indebtedness to, the great luminaries, such as Voltaire⁶⁰⁹.

Richard Rorty, being a “patriot pragmatist”, says that he would like to see Nietzsche as accompanying such American thinkers as Emerson, James and Dewey⁶¹⁰. Emerson was a major source for the young