b.1 Histories of Philosophy

Probably the first extensive history of philosophy to have accommodated Nietzsche was Richard Falckenberg’s Geschichte der neueren Philosophie that appeared in 1886. The needed linkage between the grand tradition and the newcomer was established by making Nietzsche stand close to the

Schopenhauerian pessimism. In addition, he was referred to as the one who admired Wagner with the most understanding. More philosophically estimated, Falckenberg detected, in Nietzsche, a turn from Voltaire to Rousseau.⁴⁹⁴ In later editions, Falckenberg emphasized how this “highly talented man”

constantly leaned toward renaissance naturalism and resisted idealism⁴⁹⁵.

In 1898, Wilhelm Dilthey lectured on the Zeitgeist and discerned three basic features. These were secular realism, linkage of knowledge/domination and vanishing of the notion of an unchangeable social order. In Dilthey’s view, Fichtean or Schillerian pathos was no longer feasible in circumstances where new kinds of mixed techniques prevail. The hegemony of scientific spirit and the voidness of consciousness presented novel necessities. Even though he says that Spinoza, Hobbes, Feuerbach and Stirner had already played enough with limitless possibilities of the spirit so that “history did not need Nietzsche”, Dilthey places Nietzsche behind both the new philosophical attitude and the current artistic stance of gloomy and proud pessimism.⁴⁹⁶

At the same time, Rudolf Eucken, who had held the chair of philosophy in Basel until the early 1870's

and was later awarded with Nobel Prize in literature, made room for Nietzsche in his overview of

philosophical developments. Eucken depicts a situation where the enlightenment had split into rationalist and irrationalist romanticism, which, in turn, had given way to a new kind of realism. It is against this neorealism, extracted from Comtean positivism, modern theory of evolution and social democracy, that he puts Nietzsche’s new Sturm und Drang. According to Eucken, Nietzsche’s stance rose from

“profound dissatisfaction” with everything petty bourgeois, only to declare “the self’s proud liberation from the domination of the non-self”. Eucken appreciates Nietzsche’s “free and sensitively moving spirit”

that one should detriment by turning it into formulas but he deplores the one-sided cavilling and inability to find positive faith.⁴⁹⁷

Curt Friedlein’s Geschichte der Philosophie (1913) describes Nietzsche as the late romanticist meeting point of “the principle of life of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, the not just philosophical

representations of the ancient Greeks and the stimuli of scientific biology”. What worried Nietzsche, so Friedlein, was the decadent dissolution of the will to power within an individual or a collective.⁴⁹⁸

By 1915, Clement C. J. Webb had passed to print his account of the philosophical tradition. Webb says that Nietzsche deified Schopenhauer’s ’will to live’. This will was transformed into a call for a “more robust affirmation”, where tenderness, pity and resignation were absent.⁴⁹⁹

A German textbook from this period located Nietzsche among “objectivists”. While there are the versions of “perfectionism” and “evolutionism”, Nietzsche is best seen in connection with the third one,

“naturalism” with its background in Stoics and Rousseau. Together with this move, the book recognizes Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “joy that is rooted in activity”.⁵⁰⁰ It may be of interest to note that, in at least one German piece of philosophical historiography, Nietzsche does not appear at all, though for explicitly given editorial reasons⁵⁰¹.

John Herman Randall Jr., in turn, wrote on The Making of the Modern Mind (1920). In this book, Nietzsche is placed at the junction where social Darwinism was given “an idealistic turn”. Randall acknowledges his “greatness” and writes that it was only in him that evolution was taken “seriously as furnishing a moral standard for life”, which made it necessary to “develop a whole new set of specific ideals and values”. Nietzsche’s message is said to be that it no longer was about adapting “to our present environment, but to the conditions of further success and power over nature”. On Randall’s reading, he was misperceived as justifying brutality or deifying the commercial greed, rather than comprehended as offering “prerequisite of future divinity”. Nietzsche’s was “a great romantic struggle for the better days to come”, for “a select band of heroes” representing “the true flower of humanity”.⁵⁰²

In Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy (1926), Nietzsche is said to have meant for philosophy what Wagner had stood for music: the peak of romanticism. In flashier terms, he is reported to have been Darwin’s son and Bismarck’s brother. Nietzsche’s critical attacks were, in Durant’s opinion, just a way to pay back to those he owed the most. Durant describes Nietzsche as a boyishly insolent and girlishly mild nature, yet fit for preaching Germany’s rising power. He lacked, says the historian, humbleness but paid for his genius what could have been the highest price ever. Durant concludes by giving some credit to a thinker after whose sweep the philosophical atmosphere in Europe is cleaner and fresher.⁵⁰³

Ralph Barton Perry restates, in his history book, the Darwin connection but says that the Englishman’s influence on Nietzsche was limited. Although he introduces Nietzsche under the heading “Vitalism, voluntarism, pragmatism”, Perry finds his ultimate goal to be “a kind of intellectual aristocracy”.⁵⁰⁴ In Sweden, Alf Ahlberg registered Nietzsche as a “romantic naturalist”, while in Finland, J. E. Salomaa let the “aristocratic individualist”, the problematizer of value and culture, enter the scene after the 19th century systems of philosophy⁵⁰⁵. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Egon Friedell, in his Kulturgeschichte, accommodated Nietzsche in the tradition of Christian thinking⁵⁰⁶.

Ernst von Aster’s history of philosophy, from 1932, locates Nietzsche, once again, among the

reappropriators of Darwinism, this time with a stress on a pragmatic theory of truth. The latter was, so von Aster, not accomplished solely by the Anglo-Saxon thinkers, but by Nietzsche and Vaihinger, as well.⁵⁰⁷ Horace M. Kallen, in turn, speaks of Nietzsche in the context of “continental transformations of aesthetical Darwinism”. He sacrificed himself for the needed relief from cultural degeneration.⁵⁰⁸

A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1945) displays its author taking a few steps backwards from his previous formulations on Nietzsche. Bertrand Russell relates, in this book, Nietzsche to aristocratic anarchism, underlines his unacceptable aversion of love and says that it was partly his own fault that the world had turned into his nightmare. Yet, he underscores the fact that Nietzsche was no nationalist and no antisemitist. According to Russell, Nietzsche’s importance lies primarily in ethics and, secondarily, in his historical criticisms.⁵⁰⁹

Hugh Miller reaffirms, in his 1947 historical treatise, the contact between Darwin and Nietzsche. The latter is to be counted among the very first to have grasped the “radical implications of the evolutionary science”. Nietzsche is probably better than what is told, says Miller, but his neurotic endorsement of an individual who could “ignore morality and sanctions” was evidently reminiscent of the unsound

amoralism of both Hobbes and Rousseau, Fichte and Schopenhauer. As such, it is risky material for a

“casual reader”. For Miller, Nietzsche’s greatest advantage is to have developed the early Greek thinking

into an “affirmation of radical discontinuity in nature”.⁵¹⁰

At the same time, I. M. Bochenski’s overview of the current philosophical situation and its origins places Nietzsche in the irratíonalist succession of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Nietzsche’s novelty is the Darwinian emphasis on vital instincts which merits the label of both “historicism” and “biologism”.

Moreover, Bochenski is already in the position to say that Nietzsche has “supplied existentialism with many of its fundamental aims”.⁵¹¹

George Boas, for his part, denied Nietzsche’s being a “Neo-Darwinian, though his philosophy could be assimilated to that vague lyrical creed”. Nietzsche is to be seen as a successor of German voluntarism that had developed from Kant’s third critique through Fichte and Schelling to Schopenhauer.⁵¹²

Crane Brinton’s overall presentation of Ideas and Men, from 1950, incorporates a picture of Nietzsche where the sincere and impassionate posture of a sensitive moralist is recognized only in order to be contrasted with a more sinister side of his work. According to Brinton, Nietzsche did, in fact, wrote the programme for the far right totalitarianism.⁵¹³

The next year, Frederick Mayer’s A History of Modern Philosophy was released. It contained a very different valuation: “What others saw in a superficial and inadequate way, he described in profound and comprehensive terms.” This praise did not prevent Mayer from questioning some of Nietzsche’s

inventions or from ridiculing some features of his character. In general terms, Mayer sees Nietzsche, his Schopenhauerian, voluntaristic, emotionalistic, Darwinist and other “anti-intellectual strains”

notwithstanding, as an adversary of romanticism and a follower of Voltaire. Moreover, he cannot be classed as an idealist any more than as a materialist. What is underscored the most, in this book, is Nietzsche’s foresight: “Our century is still trying to answer him. So far his insight has been uncanny.

Science has not made a new utopia; peace has not been realized; the struggle for power has been intensified more than ever before, and Western culture seems to be disintegrating.”⁵¹⁴

Although Hans Joachim Störig addresses larger audiences than the academic world, in his Weltgeschichte der Philosophie (1950), the assessment of Nietzsche’s putatively questionable moral, social and political nature is silently abandoned for a more doxographic approach. Störig says that Nietzsche stood in a similar relation to Schopenhauer as Schopenhauer did to Kant: pupil, follower, adversary. In Störig’s view, Nietzsche is to be understood as anti-metaphysician, anti-moralist, anti-democrat, anti-feminist, anti-intellectualist, anti-pessimist and anti-Christ who took on the enterprise of forging new values after the old ones had collapsed.⁵¹⁵ Störig’s general policy of pinpointing Nietzsche can be seen as shared in W. T. Jones’ A History of Western Philosophy (1952). Together with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche appears

there as the disobedient pupils in the school of Kant’s philosophy.⁵¹⁶

Sterling P. Lamprecht’s history of philosophy was released in 1955. Nietzsche is now offered as a prophet who had most effectively revealed “the inadequacy of a morality of mediocrity”. Lamprecht claims that Nietzsche did not care about metaphysics and epistemology but championed

Lebensphilosophie with “ejaculative” aphorisms that were sometimes witty, “trenchant and meaty”, sometimes deliberately provocative and contradictory but passionately honest. In this reading,

Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant, as well as his objections to Darwin and Huxley, are not to be overlooked.

The more lasting impulses, in turn, are Schopenhauer, from whom Nietzsche is said to have deviated in not accepting will’s universal effectiveness, and, most of all, the Greeks.⁵¹⁷

To check up on the field of general historiography, there are, in the 50's, R. R. Palmer’s and Joel Colton’s A History of the Modern World and Golo Mann’s Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20.

Jahrhunderts both taking note of Nietzsche. Palmer and Colton write about those who later developed totalitarian rules and drew from Nietzsche “who, safe and civilized, had declared that men should live dangerously, avoid the flabby weakness of too much thought, throw themselves with red-blooded vigor into a life of action”. The writers discover, in Nietzsche, “a new form of paganism” that could be seen as expressing “with unshrinking frankness many ideas implied in the outlook of his day”.⁵¹⁸ By contrast, Mann’s Nietzsche is the exceptionally rebellious philosopher attacking the conservative, conventionalist and nationalist German empire from his lonesome, untimely standpoint⁵¹⁹.

Something of Mann’s interpretation may be detected in Gordon A. Craig’s Europe Since 1815 (1961):

”With the eloquence of an Old Testament prophet, Nietzsche excoriated what he considered to be the true characteristics of the age - mediocrity, vulgarity, materialism, love of power - and was unimpressed by Germany’s economic prosperity, which he felt sapped the people’s will, or by the achievement of its universities, where what he called “the de-spiritualizing influence of our current science-industry”

prevailed.” According to Craig, Nietzsche’s criticisms may seem “unnecessary harsh” of the German situation in Bismarck’s time, but “less so of William II’s”.⁵²⁰

As for the outlines of the Palmer/Colton policy of locating Nietzsche, they are reaffirmed in, say, Carlton J. H. Hayes’s Contemporary Europe Since 1870. Hayes writes about “the significance of the

Schopenhauer-Nietzsche development”, about a ““realism” based on appetite and passion”. He says that

“it could be utilized to explain, even to excuse or extol, the behavior of “supermen” among nationalist statesmen and industrial capitalists, and so to justify assaults on supernatural religion and conventional morality. And it was so utilized by an increasing number of persons, especially after 1900. It became a factor in the “realism” that helped to pave the way to world war and dictatorship.”⁵²¹ In the same

attunement, David Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon (1957) depicts Nietzsche as providing with “an ethic that chimed well with the current rivalry between states for wealth and territory, and also with the impending notions of relativity”⁵²².

H. Stuart Hughes, in his historical study on the European social thought, holds that it was, in the 1890's or early 1900's, the neo-romantic and neo-mystic writers who yearned for a “turn toward the subjective”,

“who established the cult of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as the literary heralds of the new era”. This generation experienced itself as “reaching back over a half-century gap to restore to honor those values of the imagination” that the previous generation “had scorned and neglected”. However, Hughes says that it is “surely misleading” to describe Nietzsche as a neo-romantic, since that would do “less than justice to the critical and Socratic elements in his thought”. For Hughes’ purposes, Nietzsche stands as the prime model for later thinkers, such as Bergson, Freud and James, “whose central concern was the problem of unconscious motivation”.⁵²³

Two broad Scandinavian idea historical works, from the same time, testify to the persistence of vitalistic lines of interpretation. In one, Nietzsche is subsumed under the heading “Scientific positivism” and portrayed as the philosopher of value who let biological concerns, the obsession of ’life’, penetrate his thought⁵²⁴. In the other, the inheritor of Schopenhauer is told of as having asserted “the given life in its clear and complete nakedness”⁵²⁵. Nietzsche is subsumed under the rubric of “philosophy of life” in Johann Eduard Erdmann’s and Vergilius Ferm’s respective accounts of the philosophical tradition, too⁵²⁶.

Julián Marías brings the vitalistic emphases into the 1960's and, unlike many of those previously stressing similar aspects, he wholeheartedly appreciates “the discovery of life” by Nietzsche, as by Kierkegaard, too. In his Historia de la filosofia, he writes: ”The most important elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy are his idea of life and his awareness of the existence of vital values, that is, values which pertain

specifically to human life. The expression vital values contains two of the ideas which came to dominate later philosophy. Nietzsche is the source of the philosophy of value and the philosophy of life.”⁵²⁷

Depending on the viewpoint, Johannes Hirschberger’s strategy of locating Nietzsche can be seen as anticipating Foucault, Grli… and others, or as reappropriating older, Jaspersian or otherwise, synthetic heresies. In any case, his Kleine Philosophiegeschichte (1961) presents Nietzsche, although with disapproval, as “the third subversive spirit of the 19th century” beside Marx and Kierkegaard⁵²⁸.

Frederick C. Copleston directs the scene as follows. There are the idealistic systems of Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and Hegel to be replaced by a reaction against all metaphysical idealism by Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. What is left after their critiques is a much more decomposite situation. There are, first

of all, Lange’s and Häckel’s non-dialectic materialism, secondly, Cassirer’s and Dilthey’s neo-Kantianism and, thirdly, the recovery of metaphysics embodied in Fechner, Lotze, Wundt, Driesch and Eucken. For Copleston, Nietzsche’s is a thought centered on a spiritual crisis and expressed in the disconcerting, non-academic way representing, in the main, anti-Darwinist pragmatism.⁵²⁹

John Passmore’s work A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957/1966), situates Nietzsche under the rubric

“Pragmatism and Its European Analogues”. In this setting, Nietzsche comes out as a radical exploiter and developer of the ideas that make up to a devastating critique of reason or intellectualism. Passmore mentions F. A. Lange as Nietzsches important predecessor. Most of all, however, he underlines

Nietzsche’s commitments to cultural regeneration and criticism of lifestyles.⁵³⁰

In 1968, William S. Sahakian, for his part, reaffirms the interpretation of Nietzsche as a representative of

“evolutionary naturalism” accompanied by Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Bergson and Alexander.

Nietzsche’s special bent is, according to Sahakian’s historiography, “rugged individualism” and a longing for a master race in the spirit of “might makes right”.⁵³¹

Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the developments in moral theory has Nietzsche stand side by side with Kierkegaard. They were the ones to face the becoming implausible of Kant’s categorial imperative and Hegel’s free and rational individual. MacIntyre regards Nietzsche as trying to give historical and

psychological grounds for the moral void, to expose false candidates for a new morality and to surmount the limitations of previous moral systems for a new mode of life.⁵³² The linkage between Nietzsche and the question of morality is emphasized in Roger Scruton’s historiography, too. Scruton places him beside Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard marking the key reactions to Hegelian idealism.⁵³³

The official Marxist-Leninist historiography of philosophy attached great weight on the centrality of a

“philosophy of life” for Nietzsche. This was identified with irrationalism, voluntarism and hostility toward the working class. A conception of Nietzsche was advocated where he was seen as drawing together all the subjective-idealistic tendencies of the late 19th century.⁵³⁴

Herbert Schnädelbach, in his book on German philosophy since Hegel, published in 1983, presents Nietzsche as a critic of historicism operating in the confines of Lebensphilosophie. He specifies that whereas Schopenhauer could oppose historicism as but idealistic speculation, Nietzsche had to face it as full blown school with scientific prestige.⁵³⁵

In Emanuele Severino’s historical analysis, Nietzsche has a key role in exemplifying the contemporary dissolution of “every definite truth” and “every permanent and unchangeable structure of reality”⁵³⁶.

Similarly enough, what is most strongly underlined in Volker Spierling’s historical work is Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics⁵³⁷.

Gunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje’s Filosofihistorie (1987) depicts Nietzsche as practicing his own kind of pragmatism. The authors compare him to Kierkegaard, because these two despised the masses and the self-content bourgeois, and to Socrates, because they both cherish contradiction. Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is said to revolve around “a grand attempt at offering a psychological explanation for the moral phenomena”, while his epistemology is related to the notion of interpretation and the bond between knowledge and interest.⁵³⁸

D. W. Hamlyn stresses “the emphasis on life and the role of art-forms in dealing with the problems to which life may give rise” as probably “the most prominent theme” in Nietzsche. Apart from “preaching a sermon”, Hamlyn’s Nietzsche develops a relativist epistemological view “emphasizing a radical

subjectivity” reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s existentialism. Nevertheless, he allows considerable social significance for Nietzsche’s linguistic grip. All in all, Hamlyn says that Nietzsche’s was “a romanticism

subjectivity” reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s existentialism. Nevertheless, he allows considerable social significance for Nietzsche’s linguistic grip. All in all, Hamlyn says that Nietzsche’s was “a romanticism

In document Nietzsche & Nihilism : Exploring a Revolutionary Conception of Philosophical Conceptuality (sivua 129-138)