Jarkko S. Tuusvuori Nietzsche & Nihilism
Exploring a Revolutionary Conception of Philosophical Conceptuality
Academic dissertation Faculty of Arts
University of Helsinki 2000
ISBN 951-45-9135-6 (PDF version) Helsingin yliopiston verkkojulkaisut Helsinki 2000
ABSTRACT
In the present study, the philosophical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) is examined from a concept critical point of view. This is to say that Nietzsche’s conception of the nature and role of
concepts is elucidated with an eye on the implications of this conception for understanding his work as a whole. It will be argued that ’nihilism’, as one of Nietzsche’s key concepts, involves the crisis of
conceiving and the challenge of reconceiving.
Nietzsche’s frequent assaults on concepts are not interpreted as embodying an overall anticonceptual position with certain nonconceptual, preconceptual or extraconceptual preferences. Instead, his reconceptualization of philosophical conceptuality has to do with the way concepts need no longer be seen as unnatural entities or vehicles of alienation. They stand close to other human inclinations and, further, to other natural processes, albeit their entwinement with words - the other aspect underlined in this reconceptualization - greatly complicates grasping their function.
Close reading of the new critical edition of Nietzsche’s works, coupled with an exceptionally strong emphasis on the inexhaustible variety of interpretative options actualized in the course of a century of critical reception, enable an overview of the philosopher’s multifaceted œuvre. While there can hardly be said to have been any single dominant reading of Nietzsche that ought now to be revised, the intense problematization of philosophical conceptuality in his writings has not yet been properly acknowledged and elaborated. Neither has it been appropriately recognized that there is a specifically conceptual dimension to the question of nihilism which is worth investigating. Once the conceptual questions, and the special role of nihilism in them, are better understood, Nietzsche’s readers are better off in trying to make sense of this fascinating and disturbing philosopher’s impact on a wide range of contemporary issues.
To Sara
Zuletzt, meine liebe Lou, die alte tiefe herzliche Bitte: werden Sie, die Sie sind! Erst hat man Noth, sich von seinen Ketten zu emancipiren, und schließlich muß man sich noch von dieser Emancipation
emancipiren! Es hat Jeder von uns, wenn auch in sehr verschiedener Weise an der Ketten-Krankheit zu laboriren, auch nachdem er die Ketten zerbrochen hat.
Von Herzem Ihrem Schicksal gewogen - denn ich liebe auch in Ihnen meine Hoffnungen.
F.N.
(KGB III/1, August 1882, 247-8.)
FOREWORD
Nietzsche’s entire corpus and the vast amount of commentary with a great diversity of interpretations are best approached from what I shall call the concept critical point of view. It will be my objective to show that better than other options it makes sense of Nietzsche’s inventions both as to their mutual interplay and their relations with the philosophical tradition. The concept critical treatment seeks to give an account of the philosopher’s key concepts, while interrogating the peculiar ways that these and, a fortiori, the very concept of concept, are conceptualized. In this manner, nihilism will be shown to stand out from Nietzsche’s contributions to reconceiving philosophical conceptuality, since it self-reflectively turns upon the practice of conceiving.
What can be demanded from any viable new approach is that it is capable of maintaining contacts, both cooperative and critical, with alternative interpretations. The promise of the concept critical perspective lies in the way it involves the opportunity to attend to all sorts of conceptualizations, in a variety of more or less philosophically oriented currents, traditions and disciplines, as well as to the serious (philosophical, scientific, technical, artistic, religious, political or other) doubts concerning the possibility, worth or meaningfulness of concepts.
The concept critical approach is designed to be rehearsed in investigating Nietzsche’s thought without claims to either suffocating oneness or paralyzing chaos. Most important, however, it is utilized to make a case for Nietzsche as one of the founders of such a critical strategy.
There are three decisive steps to be taken. Nietzsche’s writings have to be shown to lend themselves, apart from whatever else they may deal with, to an interrogation of the character and limits of
conceiving. His innovations must be successfully interpreted as conceptual creations that point back to the problematic process of conceptualization. Finally, nihilism has to be investigated both as one more member in the group of those concepts and as the prominent embodiment of the crisis and revolutionary change in the philosophical conception of conceptuality.
Before outlining the structure of my study I would like to lay down two interrelated principles that will reappear during the exploration. In the epigraph of the present work, attention is paid to the need to free oneself from all kinds of ties that bind. As if that was not enough, one is further urged to liberate oneself from the liberation thus achieved. This is because total emancipation leaves one with nothing to emancipate from, which is a state as illusory as it is also nihilistic.
I shall repeat, in the course of my study, the notion of the ’emancipation from emancipation’ to account for the Nietzschean tendency to operate with power-related conceptualization. Along with the issues of tyranny, slavery and liberty involved in certain conceptions, and the challenge of arriving at an interested and active practice of thinking, ’emancipation from emancipation’ also aptly characterizes Nietzsche’s self-reflective, self-critical and self-ironical ways of doing philosophy where first order moves can always be expected to be checked by a second order problematization. The concept critical approach assumes the task of bearing out this distinctive feature of his work.
Closely allied to the concept of the double emancipation there is the question of the ’revolutionary’ and the ’radical’. My choice of examining Nietzsche’s texts with a constant stress on the issues of
conceptuality surely makes some readers doubt that the forceful or the energetic part of this exceptional thinker is being neutralized by academic conventions. At the same time, it may lead other observers to suspect that a provocative writer famous, in the main, for his creative virtuosity or political misjudgment is being marketed as a serious philosopher worthy of academic assessment. That is why I wish to
express that I do not see it as worth trying, or ultimately even possible, through any approach, to tame Nietzsche’s texts or to play down what is subversive in them. But I do attempt to show that the revolutionary in his philosophy is, to a great extent, about a radicalism that is intimately related to conceptual problems. These include the one about the concept ’radical’. In other words, I aim to demonstrate how Nietzsche’s philosophy revolves around its own constraints and its own effects and, by extension, around the task of radically rethinking the business of philosophy.
It was to his friend Lou von Salomé that Nietzsche expressed his notion of the emancipation of emancipation. While one can only guess the extent to which it may have annoyed this emancipated woman, one can take a look at how Nietzsche came to characterize her. Apart from admitting that she
“ist bei weitem der klügste Mensch, den ich kennen lernte” (KGB III/1, Februar 1883, 337), Nietzsche wrote like this:
Lou ist das begabteste, nachdenkendste Geschöpf, das man sich denken kann, natürlich hat sie auch bedenkliche Eigenschaften. Auch ich habe solche. Indessen das Schöne an bedenklichen Eigenschaften ist, daß sie zu denken geben, wie der Name sagt. Natürlich nur für Denker.
(KGB III/1, Januar/Februar 1884, 468.)
For better or worse, Nietzsche thought that thinking causes second thoughts in a thinker. His own questioning, at least, was questionable even for himself: ”Ich bin einer der Wenigen, die kein Bedenken tragen, sich zu compromittiren: eine sehr bedenkliche Art Mensch!” (KGB III/5, Juli 1888, 370.)
Ten years before, he had spoken of his becoming sick of a metaphysical “Kampf mit der Vernunft gegen die Vernunft” ( KGB II/5, Juli 1878, 338).Yet, it is not hard to see that Nietzsche’s task was to think about thinking, even though and just because “wir sind im Grunde umgekehrt geschult, nämlich beim Denken nicht an’s Denken zu denken” (N Juni-Juli 1885 38 [1], KSA 11, 595-6). My handling of Nietzsche’s thought will underscore self-reflectiveness and radicalism. These two tend to compromize and denigrate each other, yet they contain what may well be Nietzsche’s most remarkable philosophical achievement.
Further, I would like to enhance a view in which the radical and the revolutionary in Nietzsche are seen as dealing with the extreme, the utmost, the terminal, only as they also point to an emancipation from any emancipation achieved in the daring voyages into the outer limits of thought. What is at stake is a kind of radicalized balance where it becomes as important to avoid conventions as to stay critical to any all too easy deviations from them, and most important to examine conventions. This is the reason for speaking, as I do in my title, of “exploring”. “Exploration” conveys traveling out in order to examine;
weighing; searching out in order to investigate; probing a wound; letting or making to flow. To explore is not to let boldness take over the ability to assess, nor to let caution weaken the disposition to find out new things.
In the spirit of the two principles - double emancipation and radicalized balance - , it is my contention that Nietzsche’s thought is approachable from a plurality of angles. If the crudest of alternatives were the modern assortment of historico-critical accounts of either psychological or social variety, logico- analytical reconstructions and phenomenologico-hermeneutical interpretations, all on the one hand, and the postmodern collection of textual strategies, on the other, I would hold that much of Nietzsche’s radical ventures could well be illuminated by the means of each of these interpretative options.
Moreover, I see many new points of contact and plenty of reciprocity yet to be discovered here.
Accordingly, I shall draw from a variety of interpretative traditions. However, the uniquely radical, the peculiarly revolutionary, in those Nietzschean ventures, is precisely that they require, from any method, intense self-problematization for that method to work and to be refined. Since Nietzsche’s philosophical importance, as I construe it, consists in his relentless inquiry into the nature and role of conceptuality, his work presents a test for all approaches to come to terms with a singular thinking activity and, simultaneously, with the fundamental presuppositions underlying these approaches.
Chapter one will contain a discussion of Nietzsche’s life and writings. An overview of the ways his biography has been shaped will be offered (I.a) to create a frame of reference for subsequent reflections that rely, in part, on the awareness of different situations in Nietzsche’s life and on their interpretations
by himself and by others. The same reason applies to the need to introduce Nietzsche’s books (I.b) and the significant questions related to the long and winding history and the present state of the
philosopher’s literary estate (I.c). In this last section of the first chapter, I shall also bring forward my reasons for offering all the quotations in the original German form.
Apart from supplying a more or less conventional background for the study, this chapter has special objectives dictated by my emphasis on concepts. With the help of commentary by Nietzsche and his readers, the relationship of life and work, as well as the one between individual works and the whole corpus, will be discussed. Nietzsche’s fate will be contextualized in the general debate on nihilism as a collapse of conceptualization. Moreover, it is the concern for conceiving ’life’ and the family of concepts related to writing and productivity that counts the most. In underscoring the conceptual challenge of ’Nietzsche’, the first chapter already exemplifies, to an extent, my concept critical approach.
My uncommonly strong emphasis on the need to canvass the wealth of the reactions to, and
reappropriations of, Nietzsche’s legacy is at its strongest in chapter II. In the opening section, there is a concise narrative of the philosopher’s critical reception from the late 19th century to the present day.
The next two sections illustrate linkages that have been established between Nietzsche and a variety of other thinkers and traditions (II.b) and of the more specific approaches to his work (II.c). To close the chapter, I shall distinguish the most important debates in the contemporary Nietzsche scholarship (II.d).
Again, there is not just the fairly conventional attempt to set the stage for more detailed and targeted analyses. In part, chapter II is an effort to reconstruct a highly interesting piece of history into a semi- independent part of the study. Yet, the specific reason for my accentuation of reception is this. I aim to introduce the concept critical approach as willing and able to both learn from all the others and,
possibly, to contribute to their improvement. Any emphasis that claims to be “conceptual” can only expect to be rejected, unless it is linked with an understanding of the inexhaustible aspects of
Nietzsche’s work and the variegated character of the Nietzsche scholarship. The best way to test such an understanding is to try and demonstrate the very richness in the field.
Chapter III is a methodological inquiry into the special demands of a Nietzsche research with a proposition for one suitable itinerary. At first, prospects for a fruitful sense of synthesizing and orchestrating Nietzsche’s dispersed mass of writing are discussed and the topic of conceptualization prepared by discussing the one of forms, systems and wholes (III.a). To begin to clarify the chosen manner of coping with his philosophical transactions, an endeavor is made to elaborate the multifaceted conceptual problematic as it appears in the issue of the vocabulary of conceiving (and of Begriff and
Konzeption) (III.b.1), and in the question of the concept of concept (III.b.2).
By “conceptual problematic” I mean, first of all, the way that philosophers often underline the necessity of concepts but can much less often agree upon what these really are. In more historical terms, the post- Kantian situation in philosophy is characterized by the double indispensability and inconceivability of concepts. One facet of this condition is that there is a large consensus of the importance of language in conception (although it now seems to be weakening from the influence of certain trends in cognitive science), yet there is very little interest in the manifold of the very language of conceiving. Another thing is that conceptuality is the home ground of philosophy, yet it cannot claim it all by itself but has to share it with ordinary life, special sciences, marketing and even certain forms of art and religion. A study of the concept of ’concept’, of the relations between concept and non-concept, ought to belong to the heart of philosophy. This has been underscored by philosophers as diverse as Theodor W.
Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Rosen, each in their peculiar ways.
From these elucidations, I shall move on to make sense of the concept critical approach (III.c). It takes its motivation from the simple notion that a philosopher’s conception of ’concept’ is the key to the philosopher’s concepts of ’philosophy’ and of other things from α to ω. While the analytical question bears on the manner in which a given philosopher conceives the nature and role of ’concept’, the historical question relates to the way a given concept is conceptualized in the course of its career and how this path cuts across the paths of different philosophers. Exploiting, in the main, the contributions of Morris Weitz and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the concept critical approach seeks, then, to combine the analytical interest in concepts with the concept historical one. Given the conceptual problematic, the concept critical approach will be as interested in countering or avoiding concepts as it is in expressly forming and endorsing them. Possibilities of this approach are briefly discussed with respect to
phenomenology, pragmatism and Marx, while certain connections to Nietzsche are already established.
In chapter IV, the methodological considerations are put to play in exploring Nietzsche. The first test consists of discussing both the previous views of his position in conceptual matters (IV.a.1) and his historical precursors as philosophers of conceptuality (IV.a.2). Although the general feeling remains that Nietzsche is more like a philosopher of symbols, intuitions or words than a philosopher of
concepts, the debate over his relationship to conceptuality is much more colorful and multidimensional than that. Likewise, the historical context of his work with the contributions of Goethe, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Lange, Spir, Hegel and Teichmüller (to name those who will be consulted) contains abundant insights into the nature of ’the conceptual’.
Subsequently, outlines are a drawn for the Nietzschean concept criticism by tracing the early stages of
his thought (IV.b.1) and by closely attending to the later reflections (IV.b.2). While these interrogations deal with mostly posthumous material, they will be followed by a reassessment of Nietzsche’s books from the specifically concept critical perspective (IV.b.3). Section IV.b is, then, my attempt to demonstrate just how pervasive the conceptual problematic is Nietzsche’s œuvre. Although the argument for the published books as more or less conceptual confrontations, with their respective topics, already involves appreciation of the inherent reconstructive features, it is in the next section that the more positive or affirmative dimension to Nietzsche’s philosophy of concepts will be exposed.
First, the project of deconstructing the barrier between natural and conceptual (in the sense of unnatural) processes will be considered (IV.c.1). As to Nietzsche’s famous creations - including perspectivism, genealogy, will to power, eternal return, overhuman - , Dionysus is chosen to be treated as a case study of his peculiar kind of conceptualizing (IV.c.2). Thirdly, Nietzsche’s elaborations of the nature and role of concepts will be summed up with a special emphasis on their historico-philosophical significance (IV.c.3).
Two dimensions of Nietzsche’s philosophy of conceptuality will be particularly dealt with in this chapter. On the one hand, there is a kind of ecology of conception, as the proper post-Darwinian philosophical view of the process of perceiving and taking cognizance. On the other hand, there is the model of the linguistically and historically approachable conceptual shift, as a grand cultural and social event. Both dimensions can be explored with the help of Nietzsche’s explicitly conceptual reflections.
Undoubtedly, chapter IV is the most decisive part of the present study. It contains my case for the
’concept critical Nietzsche’. In the midst of the novel standpoints that I hope I’ll be able to establish and the plurality of fresh insights that I strive to put forth, this is the most significant new thing about this exploration.
In consequence, chapter V with its investigation of nihilism, does not so much struggle to come up with unfamiliar things about this concept but to reinterpret its more or less well known properties with the help of the new conceptual problematic. On the other hand, to treat nihilism in terms of the utmost test of conceiving requires one to focus on important aspects of its historical and analytical character that have seldom been recognized. What is more, I aim to show that if there was no such thing as ’nihilism’, there would be much less reason to dwell on the philosophical issue of the conceptual and the non- conceptual.
The chapter offers a general history (V.a.1) and analytical overview (V.a.2) of nihilism. Nietzsche is situated in both contexts (V.a.3). Thereafter, various proposals for the proper treatment of the pairing
’Nietzsche and nihilism’ (V.b.1) are considered, before the concept critical approach can be actively utilized. The goal is to have it communicate with other readings, while making a new case for nihilism as the philosopher’s most decisive conceptual creation (V.b.2). Moreover, it will be argued that nihilism, more effectively than other concepts, sheds light on the tension between the advantages and disadvantages of concepts and, most of all, on the process of conceptuality (V.b.3).
Section V.b consists of a set of concise close readings of Nietzsche’s texts with an eye on the way they bring conceptual considerations to bear on the issue of nihilism and, conversely, the meditations on nihilism to affect the question of concepts. In a more openhanded fashion again, the chapter is finished with an attempt to illustrate the dynamics on reconceptualization as the revolutionary in Nietzsche’s philosophy. This is by done by interrogating what it could mean for ’conceptuality’, if ’nihilism’ - as marking the condition of (at least seemingly) “no concepts to make sense of experience” - would be taken as the central concept of Nietzsche’s thought. It is here that the whole exploration will be gone through in an alternative form, the torturous problems rounded off again and the main steps of the argument rehearsed in a different mode. (V.c).
In the “Concluding Remark”, key points of the study are briefly repeated.
My thanks go to the following institutions for having supported my research projects and professional activities in the past few years after the graduation: Emil Aaltosen säätiö, Jenny ja Antti Wihurin säätiö, Helsingin yliopiston 350-vuotisrahasto, Koneen säätiö, Leo ja Regina Wainstainin säätiö, Suomalais- ruotsalainen kulttuurisäätiö. Further, I wish to express my thankfulness for my teachers in philosophy, Professor Ilkka Niiniluoto, Professor Ingmar Pörn and Dr. Esa Saarinen.
Dr. Sami Pihlström read the manuscript and made important comments for which I am grateful. Many other philosophical acquaintances of mine in Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and elsewhere, as well as the fine people that I have been lucky enough to work with during the philosophy courses I have given, should all know that I appreciate their efforts in enlightening, criticizing and encouraging me. Other friends and family members, too, deserve my sincere thanks. In a late and difficult phase of the study, crucial background assistance was generously provided by Hannu Lehti, Olli Koistinen, Hanna-Mari Laine, Juho Leikas and Petri Heliniemi. I thank you all.
Finally, my thanks go to Outi Hollender for showing me the awful truth of how sweet life can be.
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS : REFERENCES TO NIETZSCHE’S TEXTS KGW Nietzsche. Kritische Werke, Hg. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari.
de GRUYTER, Berlin 1967ff.
KSA Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Hg. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino
Montinari (1980). 2., durchgesehene Aufl. DTV/de GRUYTER, München/Berlin 1988.
KGB Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hg. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari. de GRUYTER, Berlin 1972ff.
AC Der Antichrist
DD Dionysos-Dithyramben
EH Ecce Homo
“Wiswb” : Warum ich so weise bin
“Wiskb” : Warum ich so klug bin
“WisgBs” : Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe
“WisSb” : Warum ich ein Schicksal bin FW Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft
GD Götzen-Dämmerung
“SuP” : Sprüche und Pfeile
“DpdS” : Das Problem des Sokrates
“DvidP” : Die “Vernunft” in der Philosophie
“WdwWezFw” : Wie die “wahre Welt” endlich zur fabel wurde
“MaW” : Moral als Widernatur
“DvgI” : Die vier grossen Irrthümer
“DvdM” : Die “Verbesserer” der Menschheit
“WdDa” : Was den Deutschen abgeht
“SeU” : Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen
“WidAv” : Was ich den Alten verdanke GM Zur Genealogie der Moral
GT Die Geburt der Tragödie “VeS” : Versuch einer Selbstkritik IM Idyllen aus Messina
M Morgenröthe
JGB Jenseits von Gut und Böse MA I Menschliches Allzumenschliches
MA II/1 Anhang. Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche MA II/2 Der Wanderer und sein Schatten
N Nachlass Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873 Nachgelassene Fragmente 1864-1889
Lecture Courses and Other Material NCW Nietzsche contra Wagner
UB Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen
UB I David Strauss der Bekenner und Schriftsteller UB II Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben UB III Schopenhauer als Erzieher
UB IV Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
W Der Fall Wagner
“N” : Nachschrift
“ZN” : Zweite Nachschrift
“E” : Epilog
Z Also sprach Zarathustra
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
FOREWORD 5
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 12
I NIETZSCHE - LIFE & WORK 15
I.a Life 15
I.b Works 47
I.c Editions 87
II 100 YEARS OF NIETZSCHE RECEPTION 100
II.a Reception History 102
II.b Varieties of Localizing 128
II.b.1 Histories of Philosophy II.b.2 Comparative Efforts
II.c Interpretative Traditions 151
II.c.1 Metaphysical & Antimetaphysical Readings II.c.2 Existential Readings
II.c.3 Analytical Readings II.c.4 Aesthetical Readings II.c.5 Psychological Readings II.c.6 Pedagogical Readings
II.c.7 Cultural & Anthropological Readings II.c.8 Linguistic Readings
II.c.9 Feminist Readings
II.c.10 Political & Social Readings II.c.11 Legal Readings
II.c.12 Ethical Readings II.c.13 Theological Readings II.c.14 Ecological Readings
II.d Key Debates 193
II.d.1 Quarrel over Philosophy
II.d.2 Quarrel over Metaphysics & Subject
II.d.3 Quarrel over Contradiction & Thematization
III CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMATIC &
CONCEPT CRITICAL APPROACH 221
III.a Questions of Form 228
III.b Conceptual Problematic 257
III.b.1 Vocabularies of Conceiving III.b.2 Concept of Concept
III.b.3 Philosophical Issue of Conceptuality
III.c Concept Critical Approach 305
IV NIETZSCHE & CONCEPTS 328
IV.a Background 329
IV.a.1 Previous Views
IV.a.2 Nietzsche’s Forerunners
IV.b Critique of Concepts 358
IV.b.1 Early Criticisms IV.b.2 Later Reflections
IV.b.3 The Books Reconsidered
IV.c Reconceptualization of Philosophical Conceptuality 439 IV.c.1 Conceptual Regeneration
IV.c.2 Crucial Conceptions - The Case of Dionysus IV.c.3 Nietzsche, Concepts, Philosophy
V NIHILISM & NIETZSCHE 539
V.a Reconstructing & Differentiating Nihilism 543 V.a.1 Conceptual History
V.a.2 Analytical Uses of Nihilism V.a.3 Nietzsche’s Place in Nihilism
V.b Interpreting Nietzsche & Nihilism 583
V.b.1 Previous Views
V.b.2 Concept Critical Treatment
V.b.3 Nihilism as Conceptual Problematic
V.c Circumscription - On the Dynamics of Conceptualization 628
CONCLUDING REMARK 684
NOTES 687
LITERATURE 779
I NIETZSCHE: LIFE & WORK
Mir besteht mein Leben jetzt in dem Wunsche, daß es mit allen Dingen anders stehn möge, als ich sie begreife; und daß mir Jemand meine “Wahrheiten”
unglaubwürdig mache (KGB III/3, Juli 1885, 63).
I.a Life
Die Welt ist ersichtlich mit wenig Vernunft eingerichtet, das merkt man, wenn man seinen
ogenannten “Lebenslauf” studirt: es “läuft”, ja! das Leben läuft, und kommt bald hier, bald da an
(KGB III/3, Oktober 1886, 273).
What happened to Nietzsche in Turin, in the first days of the year 1889, has been described with the German word Zusammenbruch1. The philosopher did not die but suffered a breakdown. Literally, zusammen-brechen means to crack conjointly or to shrink together. Hence, the words “col-lapse” and
“im-plosion” are perhaps its nearest equivalents in English. To come to nothing in this way is to fall apart on itself, to perish through, as it were, a maximum of contraction. This point in Nietzsche’s life where he could, to use an apt colloquialism, neither get nor keep it together anymore was also the beginning of his explosive effect on posterity. It was the start for Nietzsche’s making a name for himself, of his becoming a condensed sign in a series of rapidly disseminating discourses.
In Nietzsche’s notes, there is a remark on the fall of the kingdom of Israel as a Zusammenbruch (N November 1887 - März 1888 11 [377], 172). Zusammenbruch is also the word by which observers characterized, for example, the ruin of the imperial Germany in the closing of the First World War2. More recently, German newspapers used it as they reported about the events, in Eastern and Central Europe during the late 1980's, as the dominant forces were crumbling and tumbling down3.
Since he would discuss the notion of a unified Europe4 (see, e.g., JGB 256, KSA 3, 201-4; cf. MA II/2 215, KSA 2, 647-50; N August-September 1885 41 [7], KSA 11, 681-2; FW 357, KSA 3, 599), Nietzsche might have been inclined to say that processes of disintegration were unavoidable for reintegration to have its way. In any case, studying him certainly became a different thing, as the division of Europe into opposing blocks lost a considerable amount of its determinacy. From the other end of this broad historical perspective, Nietzsche has been seen as the personification of the “absolute point of culmination” of the “destructive tendencies” developing after the Zusammenbruch of the era of
Napoleon and during the subsequent period of Umbruch or regeneration5.
Toward the end of the Second World War, the social theorist Alfred Weber came to refer, with the very same word, to a catastrophe he also called nihilism. What is striking is that he spoke about Nietzsche’s Zusammenbruch simultaneously with the contemporary Zusammenbruch of society, civilization, ideals and values, as all these have been known in the West.6 Later, a student of his discussed, in one and the same text, the complete Zusammenbruch of 1945, the Zusammenbruch of the world of Goethean ideals and Nietzsche’s Zusammenbruch in Turin7.
Among the distinguished analysts of nihilism, Hermann Rauschning has spoken of the three initial generations to have witnessed this late modern crisis. The fin de siècle generation matured in the era of nihilism as “the overwhelming event of” Zusammenbrüche. It is defined by romantic enthusiasm and an individualist sense of liberation. This being the prevailing experience until 1914, it was followed by the second nihilism of disillusionment and materialist adjustment to the “reality of a factual
Zusammenbruch” or “the Zusammenbruch of outer order with an awareness that there was nothing that could create order”. The final stage was reached, as the “basis of faith was more extensively”
zusammengebrochen and technology became the only authority “before nothingness”. In Rauschning’s opinion, Nietzsche was both “the prophet” and “the revolutionary” of nihilism behind these
developments. His was a revolution from within: “acceleration and radicalization of an inner dissolution [Zersetzung]” bring about external Zusammenbrüche.8
The setting does not always have to be so distinctively social or political, yet Rauschning’s account finds an echo in many other interpretations of nihilism. Its psycho-historical features resemble one of the earliest attempts at articulating the issue. In his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1885), Paul Bourget spoke of “an epoch of religious and metaphysical crash“. The French word here is
effondrement meaning pretty much the same as Zusammenbruch. According to Bourget, both the 17th century “general credo regulating each conscience” and the 18th century “force of negation” were lost.
As a result, the modern mentality was left with but a sense of disillusioned scepticism.9
The power of nihilistic sensibility in the literary sphere is reaffirmed in Bruno Hillebrand’s 1991 monograph on the developments of aesthetical nihilisms. Hillebrand located their modernist origins in the Zusammenbruch of, and the Ausbruch from, “the compulsion of systems”, with the Aufbruch
“toward the new coasts”. He described Nietzsche “as the first to have detected the catastrophe of a total Weltzusammenbruch, of the falling apart [Zerfall] of the metaphysical horizon of meaning”.10
Apart from, if also related to, the politics and aesthetics of nihilism, Wilhelm Weischedel has been
concerned with the religious dimension. He, too, records Nietzsche’s Zusammenbruch before moving on to the general implications of nihilism. He seeks to clarify Nietzsche’s philosophical analysis of nihilism as the discernment of the way Christianity was crushed by an inherent conflict. As Weischedel explains it, Nietzsche’s work on nihilism amounts to the insight of the Zusammenbruch of Christianity as a specific world-view and a system of morality. The self-undoing took place as the Weltanschauung lost its connection to life, on the one hand, yet having cherished, on the other hand, a truthfulness ardent enough to finally expose its own perversion.11
Although the topic of Zusammenbruch contains much that is nationally alarming for the Germans, it has not escaped from English-speaking critics12. Glen T. Martin, for one, treats nihilism as Nietzsche’s experience of “a deep-sea change in the psyche and spirit of Western humanity”. It stands for the modern “metaphysical crisis” or “crisis of meaning” that results in “disintegration” menacing “the very meaning of our language and the everyday certainties in which our lives are immersed”.13 Michael Hinz, for another, chooses his words in line with the original German debate. He even offers a fresh synonym for the key word by identifying Nietzsche’s double task as follows: to fight nihilism and to embark upon
“repairing, or in some sense overcoming, the current dilapidated state of Western civilization”14.
The discourse of dilapidation or Zusammenbruch - with the aspects of Ausbruch, Aufbruch and Umbruch - involves major changes in all areas of human activity. What the specific instances of the entire discourse share with one another is the sense of disrupted communication between old and new ways of conceiving things and of guiding action. Nietzsche’s notion ’death of god’, in particular, has been related to both a general nihilistic downfall of traditions15 and to “the destruction of λόγος”16.
While it is said that Nietzsche’s global mission was to usher people to remodel their lives and values after the Zusammenbruch of “old orders”17, the local Turinese episode has come to symbolize the tragic redemption involved in such transformations. There is hardly a better way to grasp the concept ’the Nietzschean’ than by acknowledging the way the character of the succumbent philosopher is taken to represent the course of the Western culture as a whole. The analogy works both ways: 20th-century nightmares seem to require Nietzsche as an ingredient in the explanatory basis, just as he appears to make sense only through the horrific annals of the period. Individual biography could not be more glamorously wedded to general history writing. As for the former chronicle, it could read as follows.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in a little Saxon town called Röcken. It had become, after the international agreements in Vienna, part of Prussia. The son was christened after the emperor. Nietzsche’s father, a Lutheran priest, died of a brain damage and its long complications in 1849. Soon thereafter, Nietzsche’s younger brother passed away. Friedrich moved with his mother
Franziska (1826-1897) and sister Elisabeth (1846-1935) to a nearby Naumburg. He developed an early and keen interest in literature, poetry, drama, ancient Greece and, most of all, in music. Apart from mother and sister, Nietzsche spent much time with his grandmother and two aunts, and with friends such as Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug. In 1858, he entered Schulpforta, near Naumburg, an
institution renowned for such earlier pupils as Fichte, Schlegel and Novalis. He made friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. In 1864, he moved on to Bonn to study theology and philology. In his letters, the student told about attending lectures on politics and philosophy, too. He also wrote about his doubts as to the practitioners of theology. (KGB I/2, November 1864 & Mai & Februar 1865, 18 &
58-9 & 49.)
After an academic year by Rhine, Nietzsche followed the philology professor, Friedrich Ritschl, in Leipzig. He stayed there until 1869, excluding the period of military service as an artillerist stationed in his home town. One year’s voluntary service was interrupted, when Nietzsche hurt himself badly in a riding accident. While recovering, he wrote to a friend the following words that mirror the frequent double emphasis, in Nietzsche’s texts, on the bodily and the lexical:
Die Eiterung dauert fort, der Brustbeinknochen ist angegriffen, und heute hat mir sogar der Arzt eine Operation in kaum zweifelhafte Nähe gestellt. Es handelt sich nämlich um die Abstoßung eines ganzen Knochenstücks; dazu wird man die Weichteile aufschneiden müssen und dann den angegriffnen Knochen, nämlich das Brustbein “reduzieren”, wie sich der Arzt ausdrückte, scilicet “absägen”. Ist man aber erst unter dem Messer und der Säge der Operateure, so weißt Du auch, an wie einem dünnen Faden das Ding hängt, so man Leben nennt. Da kommt ein Eiterfieberchen - verloschen ist das kleine Licht. [...] Nie wird einem die Hinfälligkeit des Daseins so ad oculos demonstrirt, als wenn man so ein
Stückchen aus seinem Skelett zu sehen bekommt.
(KGB I/2, Juni 1868, 289.)
In Leipzig, Nietzsche came across Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, was attracted to the rising German nationalism, co-founded a philological society, worked on a number of Greek texts and met Richard Wagner. His friends included the philologist Erwin Rohde and the philosopher Heinrich Romundt.
From the spring of 1869 on, Nietzsche was professor in classical philology, Pädagogium teacher and Swiss citizen in Basel. He frequented the Wagners and their upper class acquaintances, notably Malwida von Meysenbug and Reinhardt von Seydlitz. The closest of friends he was with the historian of religion, professor Franz Overbeck and Romundt, now Privatdozent in Basel. He spent time with the much respected cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt, too. Through correspondence and occasional reunions, he stayed in contact with his old student comrades, Gersdorff, Deussen and Rohde. And even though conflicts kept on recurring, he continued to meet and to exchange letters with his mother and sister as
well.
In 1870, Nietzsche took part in the Franco-Prussian war as an infirmary, and got seriously ill. Even before the war was over, he came to doubt the German power politics, yet supported the German cultural cause in his first few books from 1872 onward. As a philologist, his promising career was practically over by his first book in 1872, and the same can be said of his tone poetry, too. When it comes to the friendship with Wagner, the decisive break was the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. By the late 1870's, Nietzsche’s health was turning to ever worse. In his holidays, he sought to treat himself by trying different diets and varied climates: Italian and French Riviera, in the winter, and the Swiss Alps, in the summertime, with short visits in Naumburg and elsewhere. In 1879, Nietzsche resigned from his office in Basel and lived the next decade as a senior citizen restlessly seeking for a place to live and write. During the 1880's, he saw his friends, now including especially Overbeck, the composer Heinrich Köselitz and Heinrich von Stein, only quite rarely. Yet, he was an active correspondent. In 1882, he met, thanks to the earlier acquaintances von Meysenbug and the philosopher Paul Rée, a young Russian intellectual Lou von Salomé. Rée, Salomé and Nietzsche shared together a short creative period of time until Nietzsche dropped out, or was dropped out, of the triple.
Nietzsche lived in various locations, most notably in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, and in Nizza. His health forced him to move back and forth between them, and he was ultimately satisfied with neither of them.
In May 1888, just over a half year before the Zusammenbruch, he wrote from the wonderful Turin that
in mir ein Hauptbegriff des Lebens geradezu ausgelöscht ist, der Begriff “Zukunft”
(KGB III/5, 318).
It has been said, quite recently, that “Nietzsche addresses a future that he believes will be able to hear him as his own time cannot; and we are that future”18. Indeed, in June 1887, Nietzsche writes to his friend Overbeck about a coming generation, “dieselbe, in welcher die großen Probleme, an denen ich leide, so gewiß ich auch durch sie und um ihretwillen noch lebe, leibhaft werden müssen und in That und Wille übergehn müssen” (KGB III/5, 103). As for the last events of the philosopher - the concept of his immediate ’future’ right after May 1888 - they have become rather familiar, albeit often told inaccurately. An Italian account, from about one month after the death, presented as based on an interview with the philosopher’s hosts, told that things ran smoothly in Turin until Nietzsche started talking peculiarly about the king and the queen paying a visit to his room. Later, by the river Po, the landlord had seen him in the midst of a crowd accompanied by two policemen. According to the story, Nietzsche had thrown himself in the arms of his host who was being informed by other people that the
professor was caught near the university in an intense hug with a horse. Having got some rest, Nietzsche played the piano, unerringly Wagner, and got drunk from a glass of barbera. Moments of clarity and weirdness alternated. When Overbeck came, the two friends embraced in tears.19
Overbeck escorted Nietzsche to Basel. After psychiatric examination, Nietzsche traveled further to Jena with his mother. The eleven and a half years from his Zusammenbruch onward Nietzsche spent, mostly and increasingly, in an unproductive state. After sixteen months in Jena, the incurable Nietzsche was sent home in Naumburg. When the mother died, a few years later, the sister took Nietzsche to Weimar where he died on August 25, 1900.
After a “chronicle” such as this, it can at once be affirmed that writing about Nietzsche’s life has taken place under particularly heavy ideological pressures. The most glaring case is the deifying campaign carried out by his sister Elisabeth Förster. Working in a close connection to the rising forces of the far right, Förster did to Nietzsche’s biography what she did to his posthumous works (see I.c). She created an image of an actually available hero. In one of her biographical efforts, Förster wrote about her inability to mention anything that was “shadowy” about his brother shining so bright.20 It took a long time to expose her violations and to question her authority. Even those of the early commentators critical to the “devotedness” in Förster’s stance toward Nietzsche, would emphasize the incomparable intimacy. The idea was faithfulness made her into a reliable source from which to draw all the essentials in the formation of the philosopher.21
Since Förster’s corrupt ways have been exposed, she has been on the verge of becoming a scapegoat for everything that is questionable in Nietzsche. Ridding one’s readings off from her policies seems sometimes to involve a belief that one is thus freed from all interpretative exploitation. To escape such an unfortunate new prejudice, one critic has said that there is an affinity between Förster’s murderous handling of the Nietzschean pluralities and the way the contemporary academic research murderously reduces Nietzsche’s complexity22.
Be that as it may, emancipation from emancipation is called for. All biographical efforts are to be critically examined. Curt Paul Janz’s sympathetic work is recognized as the most balanced and most trustworthy undertaking in this field. It is instructive to briefly compare it to Anacleto Verrecchia’s project. His, in turn, is an overtly antipathetic account of the background of Nietzsche’s last years. It may be said to represent a more rebellious and, in a scholarly sense, more partial work.23
Nietzsche was, on Janz’s view, an agreeable person; on Verrecchia’s estimation, not very nice. Janz tells that Nietzsche took good care of his appearance; Verrecchia reports that he didn’t look good. Janz sees
him as desperately seeking for a human touch; Verrecchia describes him as a self-sufficient, windowless monad. Janz’s Nietzsche was especially friendly to women; Verrecchia’s Nietzsche wanted nothing but money from them. He was made of passions, says Janz; he never gave in to passions, says Verrechia.
He valued nothing like experience (Janz); he lacked direct experience altogether (Verrechia). According to Janz, Nietzsche went through impossible sufferings; Verrecchia undermines the severity of his hard times and stresses the compulsion to complain. For Janz, Nietzsche sacrificed himself to a serious task;
for Verrecchia, his safe bourgeois existence was strictly regulated by the clock and the barometer. Janz regards the philosopher as prominently a tragic figure; Verrecchia is happy to talk about a tragic farce.24
These pair statements might be taken to depict different sides of one and the same person, multifaceted as any human being, yet it is hard to pretend to be able to fully agree with both Janz and Verrecchia.
Janz is decidedly sober and moderate, and can perhaps be accused of only rendering Nietzsche somewhat too intelligible and too neatly tragic. Verrecchia spoils the case he is trying to make by resorting to overwrought satire and unfair one-sidedness, while he, quite specifically, claims to be concentrating on a critical and scientific business of demythologizing25.
One crucial difference between Janz and Verrecchia lies in the way they proceed from characterizing the person to describing the way he thought. What Janz sees as really outstanding in Nietzsche, is the ability to adapt to various ways of thinking without turning into a plagiarist: he always thought further from whatever “original” he discovered26. Verrecchia holds that Nietzsche is in no sense original but an
“originalist”: he either repeated old dogmas or offered previously established thoughts in new clothing27. However, it is perhaps precisely where the sympathetic and the antipathetic reading seem to diverge the most that they also converge the most. What I mean is that both biographers speak in the authority of one who has gone through a breathtaking number of documents pertaining to the daily transactions of an individual and putatively achieved a position from where to judge and explain these actions.
As Sander Gilman, another expert on Nietzsche’s life, puts it, Nietzsche was himself “one of the masters of modern autobiographical self-analysis”28. Books like Ecce homo and Der Fall Wagner are milestones in this tradition. Yet, Nietzsche’s letters offer additional material. I shall have a look at them in order to show how Janz and Verrecchia may not have fully appreciated the valuable point made by Gilman.
The habit of lamenting that Verrecchia detects in Nietzsche is easily demonstrated: “ich bin zuletzt überhaupt ein ungenügsamer Mensch” (KGB III/1, November 1882, 280). In his letters from the Pforta school, the adolescent Nietzsche frequently writes about all sorts of things he is lacking, people he is missing, his bad health and the poor weather. Later, as a student, he would moan about the constant shortage of money. After arriving in Basel, the young professor lets his correspondents know about the
pressures of making acquaintance with so many new faces. From the late 1870's on, the vagabond Nietzsche’s letters are filled with descriptions of his physico-socio-mental misery. He would make lists of his inconveniences including distress, sadness, uncertainty, depression and inactivity. There were headache, cold, fever, diarrhea, insomnia, loss of appetite, dizziness, torpor and weakness. (KGB III/5, Mai & Juni 1887, 69 & 93.)
Thus, complaints do form a considerable part of Nietzsche’s utterances. However, Verrecchia not only underestimates the seriousness of many of the sufferings known to have beset the philosopher’s life, but he also overlooks the instances of well being: ”[i]ch bin jetzt der dankbarste Mensch der Welt” (KGB III/5, Oktober 1888, 453). Moreover, he does not pay attention to the way Nietzsche also comforts and encourages his correspondents (see, e.g., KGB III/3, Februar 1886; III/5 Dezember 1887, 215) and how he apologizes for the excessive dwelling upon his own affairs (KGB III/1, April 1884, 498).
Most crucially, Verrecchia entirely ignores the writer’s sensitivity to writing about his condition. While Nietzsche calls his life Hundeleben, Hundeexistenz and “unwürdige jämmerliche Dasein” (KGB III/3, November 1885, Oktober 1886, 116, 275), he also deplores his too many complaints (KGB III/1, Dezember 1883, 462). He would say how stupid, debasing and even revolting it is to dwell on one’s own grief and dissatisfaction (KGB II/3, April 1874, 214 & III/1 Juli 1883, 415 & III/3 Februar 1886, 154). Nietzsche describes his complaint as a sickness within sickness (KGB III/1, Februar 1884, 472).
When it comes to Janz’s stress on the desperate search of contact, that is also well enough fleshed out in the letters. There is a self-reference to a highly social person being forced to isolation (KGB III/3, Januar 1886, 136). Friends appear only in the form of letters, which makes them look like Platonic shadows (KGB II/3, Oktober 1872, 57). Deprivation, or the “Freiheit von Beruf, Weib, Kind, Gesellschaft, Vaterland, Glauben u.s.w. u.s.w.”, as the requirement of the philosophus radicalis, threatens anyone who is “ein lebendiges Wesen und nicht bloß eine Analysirmaschine und ein
Objektivations-Apparat” (KGB III/3, November 1886, 282). It is the “lautlose, nunmehr tausendfachte Einsamkeit” that is the worst, because it has “etwas über alle Begriffe Furchtbares, daran kann der Stärkste zu Grunde gehn - ach, und ich bin nicht “der Stärkste”!” (KGB III/5, Juni 1887, 93-4). Yet, these sorts of utterances are counterpoised by humorous and empathetic ones. Moreover, both the miserable and the joyous expressions are conditioned by a second order reflection upon them. What is the most important is that, in Nietzsche’s more or less tragic letters, distance is taken to the very idea of being a tragic character. In a comforting letter to the friend Köselitz, he writes:
Der Mangel an Gesundheit, an Geld, an Ansehn, an Liebe, an Schutz - und dabei nicht zum tragischen Brummbär werden: dies ist die Paradoxie unsres jetzigen Zustands, sein
Problem (KGB III/5, Februar 1888, 239).
Nietzsche’s contributions to modern autobiography practically escape from his biographers. It is the larger philosophical significance of those contributions that needs to be elucidated. In his introductory book on philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband writes as follows: “Practical human life is permeated and determined by the prescientific concepts, restored in language, that naively develop through the common apprehension [Vorstellen]. These representations [Vorstellungen] are reformed and made precise by special sciences to fulfill the relevant needs of oversight, order and mastery. Yet, in philosophy, they continue to present a task of forming problems and conducting studies. Just as life, with its prescientific concepts, gives material for any scientific work, so do life and sciences together offer, in their prescientific and prephilosophical concepts, material for the work of philosophy.”29 Two years before these lines were written, Bertrand Russell had identified the distinguishing feature of philosophy as its ability to “examine critically the principles employed in science and in daily life”. The critical and interrogative force of philosophy is, in Russell’s opinion, likely to “increase the interest of the world”. This is because it shows “the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life”.30
One gathers that the connection between everyday life and scientific research was philosophically important to eminent representatives of, broadly speaking, the phenomenological tradition and the analytic school, respectively. It will be among the goals of this study to show the extent to which Nietzsche stands apart from the kind of belief in pre-conceptual Lebenswelt, manifest in both Windelband’s and Russell’s stance. The above reference to the “concept” of future as one’s “main concept” of life gives the clue. Nonetheless, I would also underline here that Nietzsche’s letters provide a wealth of material for considering the question that these two philosophers identified, namely the one concerning the philosophical within the ordinary.
In particular, what may be said to be characteristic of Nietzsche is that the issue of ’life’ stays close not just to his explicit descriptions of the nature of philosophy but to his actual practice of philosophizing.
Not only could he become joyous over at having a fish bone painfully stuck in his throat, because of
“eine Abundanz von Symbolik und Sinn in dieser physiologischen Niederträchtigkeit” (KGB III/5 Oktober 1887, 178). He would also make a source of inspiration and a field of interrogation of his long term and full time torments.
The point is made that the elementary awareness of the way things take on a fundamentally divergent shape, according to whatever shape one is in at the moment of perception, has a bearing on
philosophical thinking: ”die Gesundheit ist [...] wiedergekommen, mit dem “besseren” Wetter, denn der
Begriff “gut” ist für Meteorologen und Philosophen impraktikabel” (KGB III/5 September 1888, 425).
It is that “sonderlich wir Philosophen, die wir allzugeneigt sind, unsere schlechten Erlebnisse zu
generalisiren und dem gesamten Leben in die Rechnung zu schreiben, haben sehr dankbar zu sein, wenn wir ein gutes gegen ein schlechtes Erlebnis eingetauscht bekommen: - nun, wir generalisiren auch diese Erfahrung vielleicht etwas unbesonnen, aber das ist weniger gefährlich” (KGB III/3, Januar 1886, 130).
Part of the Nietzschean conception of philosophy is to stay alert to the bad habits of philosophizing.
The claim of some commentators that Nietzsche’s praise of ’health’ is explainable in terms of his own poor condition31 is made as if no such intense Problematik of health/sickness and ways of thinking was not there in his texts as there evidently is. Already by April 1874, Nietzsche felt himself free to speak about his artwork, his “Philosophie der Krankheit” (KGB II/3, 217). Later, recovering in a spa in order to go back to teach again, he wrote that “[v]iel Schmerzen [...] waren inzwischen mein Loos, ihr Ertragen meine Hauptthätigkeit” (KGB II/5 August 1877, 264). He spoke later about a philosopher’s illness as an argument against that philosopher’s philosophy (KGB III/3, November 1885, 113).
In accordance with these sorts of reflections, Kathleen Marie Higgins combines “Nietzsche’s tragic worldview” with the way life’s “[f]olly and nonsense” are “constant companions” of his Zarathustra. It is about, so Higgins, “experiencing the oddities and accidents of which life is full” in a way that is “not dictated by our recognition of their facilitative or obstructive function”. If there is also room for one to
“simultaneously enjoy them immediately”, there is room for “taking a complex attitude toward the experiences of our lives”.32
In his recent defence of Nietzsche’s “radical individualism”, a dominant theme in the early reception33, Leslie Paul Thiele said that Nietzsche’s work amounts to a “philosophical argument” for this very position. Thiele goes on to add that Nietzsche also had an “individualist argument” to support his philosophy which, in turn, is tantamount to “his life”.34 I would withdraw from making a case for Nietzsche’s individualism, for the reason that it excludes important features of his thinking. Yet, I think that Thiele’s suggestion about the philosophy / life connection is fruitful. What I have tried to intimate, however, is that taking Gilman’s point about Nietzsche’s mastery in self-analysis seriously would mean something more specific than that. It means ruminating, while reflecting upon Nietzsche’s life, the Nietzschean analyses given of it. It means investigating the whole discourse of ’life’ that commences in his texts and is extended by all those texts to which Nietzsche’s writings relate. To put it more strongly, and with less emphasis on what must sound like an excessively literary point, this discourse is identified with Nietzsche’s life, in as much as an individual is immersed to social reality by the necessarily public exchange of signs.
In a fragment by Nietzsche, “Egoismus” is refuted as an instance of erroneous assumption of an isolated individuality. It is “sociale Einübung” that always already regulates personal views - even the solitary
“Denken über uns, das Empfinden für und gegen uns, der Kampf in uns”- as the “Gesellschaft” is internalized. In this context, it is specifically said that, as a consequence of socialization, “wir sind der Kosmos, soweit wir ihn begriffen oder geträumt haben”. In other words, conceptualization, or even the dreamy conceiving, transforms the “Einzigkeit des ego” into a processual and conflictual “Mehrheit”
that is one with the rest of the world. (N Herbst 1880 6 [80], KSA 9, 215-6.)
Based on this quotation, talking about the ’discourse’ of life, in Nietzsche’s texts, is not implying anything removed from the historical economic and political forces that condition thought. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s perhaps more or less surprising stress on the social constraints precludes a division into separate spheres of life and literature. Alexander Nehamas has made the boldest
interpretation of this issue. He says about Nietzsche that “[n]o one has managed to bring life closer to literature than he did”. Nietzsche’s work/life is handled as an “effort to create an artwork out of himself, a literary character who is a philosopher”35.
What I just quoted and said about socialization as an element of thought does not fit particularly well to Nehamas’s underlining of Nietzsche’s aestheticism. Offering a provocative and helpful instrument of interpretation of the linkage, and even identification, between the lively and the literary, Nehamas is about to lose sight of the social dimension to Nietzsche’s thought. Nonetheless, I find his insight to be advantageous in the way it manages to reintroduce the discourse of ’life’ back to the debate over Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is to the former development of these controversies that I shall turn next.
Now, Nietzsche’s thought was, early on, seen to be one of the first philosophies of life ever set forth. In any case, Max Scheler saw it this way, albeit with a qualification: “Friedrich Nietzsche did not yet possess a “philosophy of life” [”Philosophie des Lebens”]. In spite of that, he hovers over the modern attempts [at such a philosophy] like a secret tutelary spirit.” Accordingly, Scheler finds, in Nietzsche’s pathbreaking talk of das Leben and in his conception of life as an active stream flowing upwards or downwards, an anticipation of Dilthey, Bergson and other later theorists.36
Among Nietzsche’s early readers, thinkers as diverse as Rudolf Steiner, Georg Simmel and Moritz Schlick all emphasized his introduction of Leben to philosophy. From Steiner’s writings, Nietzsche comes through as an astute student of thisworldly life who takes his inspiration “from the most
powerful, the most immediate impulses of life” and, ultimately, aims over and above, and out of, life37. Simmel, in turn, presents Nietzsche as starting from Schopenhauer’s notion of striving or struggle, yet turning this desperate seeking for an inexistent goal into an evolutionarily reconceived view of life as a
growing and heightening end in itself38. Schlick, too, held that Nietzsche, at his “wisest”, identified the meaning of life with life itself and rejected the alternatives of seeing it “under the aspect of purpose”39.
Even a rudimentary awareness of the differences among the three commentators just mentioned is enough to suggest that the issue of ’the philosophy of life’ is a tricky one. Sometimes,
phenomenological discovery of the Lebenswelt has been related to Nietzsche’s undertaking40. Partly through Dilthey and Scheler, Heidegger came to transform elements of the problematic into his peculiar fundamental ontology. But Heidegger’s thought, in turn, was to explicitly distance itself, and to
dissociate Nietzsche’s thinking, too, from what had already become more or less distinctive school, or a group of schools, under the title ’life philosophy’41. The situation is made even more confusing by the rather common manner of including Heidegger among the “partisans of Lebensphilosophie”42.
There could hardly be anything more rewarding than to study just how the questions of ’life’,
’philosophy’ and ’philosophy of life’ come out of Nietzsche’s texts. Here, I wish merely to indicate the way to this direction. After his retirement from Basel, Nietzsche did once refer to his task “als
Philosoph des Lebens“. In this letter, he told about the need to retreat from, and to return to, the company of other people. He told about having got sick through two forms of metaphysics. There was the philosophical “Vernebelung alles Wahren und Einfachen, der Kampf mit der Vernunft gegen die Vernunft”, and there was the Wagnerian “Barockkunst der Überspannung und der verherrlichten Maßlosigkeit”. (KGB II/5, Juli 1878, 337-8.) These remarks can be compared to Nietzsche’s later one about his “Bürde eines Lebenslooses, zu dem ein Philosoph einmal verurtheilt ist”. The philosopher’s lot involves what Nietzsche characterized as a condition concerning anyone who “sein Leben durch Werke sanktionirt”. Nietzsche described it as his Kunststück “das Leben immer mehr zu vereinfachen”.
As he expressed it, he had “für meine Lebensweise keine andere Kritik als das Maaß meiner Arbeits- Kraft”. (KGB III/5, März & April & Juli & September 1888, 272 & 284 & 378 & 435.)
Yet, all this frequent and forceful meditation on the issue of ’life’ and ’philosophy’ has not been the primary reason for Nietzsche’s being connected to the “philosophy of life”. Nor is it the way the
speaker of the book Ecce homo displays a gift of telling “mir mein Leben” (EH [preface], KSA 6, 263).
It is, rather, the frequency and force of Nietzsche’s term Leben taken to expose his position in the post- Darwinian thought. Selectively speaking, there is the volume with the title Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben and the dramatic character called Leben, in Also sprach Zarathustra, with verses of its own to utter, including the one, in particular, about life as “Wille zur Macht” (UB II, KSA 1, 243-334; Z II/12, KSA 4, 148-9).
In attunement with biologists and other natural scientists of his day, as well as with earlier philosophers
of nature, Nietzsche tended to view the complex organic and inorganic processes of interaction as involving some pattern, or a rhythm. In my view, two primary reasons for his continuing, and
disturbing, association with Lebensphilosophie are these. Nietzsche’s writings contain a good deal on the issue of ’life’ caught, in a given habitat, in the process of increasing vigorousness or decay. These speculations, in turn, contribute to reflections over a naturalistic conception of societal relations. (GT 15 & UB IV 4, KSA 1, 100 & 448; Z “V” 3, KSA 4, 15; JGB 259, KSA 5, 207-8; GM II 11, KSA 5, 312-3; W “V” & “E”, KSA 6, 12 & 50; GD 2 & 3, KSA 6, 67-73 & 78; AC 24 & 43, KSA 6, 192-3 &
217; EH esp. 1:1 & 3:2:4, KSA 6, 265 & 313.)
Nietzsche was, indeed, lined up with Lebensphilosophen43. Among this loose grouping, Simmel, Dilthey, Henri Bergson and Rudolf Eucken kept company with many more notoriously obscure characters all the way from Eugen Dühring through Ludvig Klages up until Oswald Spengler44. Oscar Ewald’s Präludien zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (1903), as an early explicit, yet certainly little known, version of this type of thinking, was openly built, to a great extent, on Nietzsche’s insights45. These insights were gained from sources the comprehensive tracing of which cannot be a project meaningfully assumed here. In the broadest of terms, what is at stake is the adaptation of the species
’philosopher’ to its environment modeled by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In chapter II.b, I shall discuss the question of locating Nietzsche in the field of thought and come back to some of these aspects. I hope it won’t blur the very complexity of the issue if I single out here two thinkers that are discussed in many of the Nietzschean passages where the concept of ’life’ is under scrutiny. In other words, as I mention Dühring and Herbert Spencer, I do not mean to neglect the importance of, say, either the Greeks or Spinoza, Goethe or Schopenhauer, in Nietzsche’s background, but only to establish a perspective that allows a preliminary sense of the problematic.
Spencer might be regarded as a contemporary thinker winding up in trouble with the Darwinian legacy (to which Spencer, of course, both contributed and reacted). As the modern science began to shift the human being from the position of the created and appointed master of nature to the one of an evolved animal with a good hand, philosophers would either cling to old ways of conceiving the basis of moral action or, in one way or another, adjust their views to the naturalized frame of reference. Spencer chose the second alternative and reinterpreted moral issues in evolutionary terms related to the preservation of both the individual and the species. I think that Nietzsche’s harsh words on the British thinker should not blind one from seeing that Spencer’s laudable turn toward combining evolution and philosophy in also recognized.
Nietzsche’s references to him contain recognition of the liberating effects of this new stance. Yet, for the most part, they are rejective and reproachful. The more polemical, the cruder line of criticism
concerns Spencer’s “décadent” dream of the “Sieg des Altruismus” (GD 8:37, KSA 6, 139), while the subtler and more moderate critique involves the way he “fabelt” about once and for all reconciliating egotistic and altruistic impulses (FW 373, KSA 3, 625). What I find the most important, among the remarks on Spencer, is encapsulated in a note from 1880. There, Spencer’s (and Mill’s) achievement is granted but the practice of “moralischen Empfindungen zu formuliren“ is contrasted with the more pressing problem of “wirklich anders einmal empfinden zu können und Besonnenheit hinterher zu haben, um dies zu analysiren!” (N Ende 1880 7 [247], KSA 9, 368-9.)
One finds the notion of the ’emancipation from emancipation’ in action here. Liberation from an aged way of perceiving and conceiving moral aspects requires a further liberation from the liberation. It requires a step toward making sense of the perception / conception itself. Since moral considerations have permeated all apprehension, the idea of immorality is primarily an idea involving reconstruction of the basic perceptual and cognitive setting.
When it comes to Dühring, I would hold that specifying Nietzsche’s relationship to this thinker would be an even urgent challenge for the contemporary research. In the late 19th-century Germany, Dühring was one of the most famous philosophers. As Spencer, in Britain, and Comte, in France, Dühring came to shape, to a great extent, the international positivist current to fit the intellectual climate in his home country. He is a largely forgotten theorist with enough prominence to have once become the shared target of both Engels and Nietzsche, while these two Friedrichs did not know each other. What is more, for all his philosophical and economic training, Dühring was a populist and an active political debater.
Written in the summer of 1875, Nietzsche’s notes contain a substantial commentary on Dühring’s breakthrough book, Der Werth des Lebens. In fact, the commentary is a text exceeding the size of any other single sustained discussion in Nietzsche’s fragmented literary estate. Dühring’s book had defined
’life’ as a mixture of “perceptions [Empfindungen] and imagination [Gemüthsbewegungen]”. It had propagated explicit “practical materialism”. It had warned against “speculative Nichtsthun”, Nichtigkeit, or even Nichtscultus, among the religious and philosophical mystics and praised “healthy” and “heroic”
Lebensauffassung and Lebensbehandlung against, in particular, the Judaism.46
Regarding Nietzsche’s early inheritance of Schopenhauer’s nirwanism and Byron’s pessimism, Dühring’s polemic against passivism and negativism was relevant indeed. Moreover, regarding his subsequent preoccupation with the questions of sickness and health, inactivity and pragmatism, nihilism and value, and the negation or the affirmation of life, the book was clearly of considerable importance.
The indebtedness is even acknowledged, in Nietzsche’s later book where Dühring is also vehemently attacked for his unsatisfactory account of the origin of justice and for his antisemitism (GM II 11 & III
