Nietzsche and the German Tradition

Nietzsche and the German Tradition

von Nicholas Martin

1. Auflage

Nietzsche and the German Tradition – Martin schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2003

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 060 6

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Nietzsche and the German Tradition – Martin Notes on Contributors

CHRISTA DAVIS ACAMPORA is Assistant Professor of Phil- osophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has published numerous articles on Nietzsche in a variety of publications, including Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Nietzsche- forschung, and International Studies in Philosophy. She is the co- editor, with Ralph Acampora, of A Nietzschean Bestiary: Animality Beyond Docial and Brutal, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield.

THOMAS H. BROBJER lectures in the history of ideas at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character (Uppsala 1995). He has published extensively on different aspects of Nietzsche’s reading and extant library, in the following journals and others: Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Nietzsche-Studien, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, New Nietzsche Studies and Inter- national Studies in Philosophy. He has also contributed to a number of books on Nietzsche.

DANIEL W. CONWAY is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely on topics in political philosophy, contem- porary European philosophy, and nineteenth-century philosophy. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game (CUP 1997) and Nietzsche and the Political (Routledge 1997). He is also the editor of Nietzsche: Critical Assessments (Routledge 1998), and the co-editor of Nietzsche, Philosophy, and the Arts (CUP 1998).

MALCOLM HUMBLE studied Modern Languages at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and was a Research Fellow there from 1966 to 1969. He was Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews xii from 1969 to 2001. His publications include articles on Anglo- German literary relations, the reception of Nietzsche and Brecht, exile literature (1933–45), GDR literature, and (with Raymond Furness) A Companion to Twentieth Century German Literature (Routledge 1991, 21997) and Introduction to German Literature 1871–1990 (Routledge 1994).

CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes in philosophical aesthetics and the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His publications include Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (OUP 1989), Schopenhauer (OUP 1994), and Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (OUP 1995). He is editor of the collections Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (OUP 1998) and The Cambridge Companion to Schopen- hauer (CUP 1999).

DUNCAN LARGE is Senior Lecturer in German at University of Wales, Swansea, and Chairman of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society. He is the author of Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (OUP 2001), co-editor (with Keith Ansell-Pearson) of The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell 2003), guest editor of ‘Nietzsche and German Literature’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 13 (Spring 1997), and has translated Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (Athlone and Stanford UP 1993), as well as Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (OUP 1998) and Ecce Homo (OUP 2003). He is currently completing a monograph on Nietzsche’s Renaissance Figures.

NICHOLAS MARTIN is Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics (OUP 1996) and the translator of Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction (Athlone and Stanford UP 2002). He has published articles on Nietzsche in German Life and Letters, Nietzscheforschung, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, History of Euro- pean Ideas, and the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent xiii publication on Nietzsche is ‘“Fighting a Philosophy”: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War’, Modern Language Review, 98 (2003).

BEN MORGAN is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford. His research interests include German intellectual history, German cinema and twentieth-century German philosophy. He has published widely on medieval mysticism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and the films of Fritz Lang and Leni Riefenstahl.

GERD SCHANK studied linguistics, and German and Romance philology at Freiburg. Since 1977 he has been a lecturer at the University of Nijmegen (since 1988 in the Department of Philosophy, where he is a member of the Nietzsche Dictionary Project). His publications include: ‘Rasse’ und ‘Züchtung’ bei Nietzsche (de Gruyter 2000); Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten: Eine philologische und philosophische Studie zu Nietzsches ‘Ecce homo’ (Lang 1993); and ‘Dionysos und Ariadne im Gespräch: Subjektauflösung und Mehrstimmigkeit in Nietzsches Philosophie’, Tijdschrift voor Filo- sofie, 53 (1991).

HANS-GERD von SEGGERN studied German literature, philosophy, and history in Berlin (Freie Universität) and Vienna from 1989–97. He held a Ph.D. scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (1999–2001) and is completing a thesis on Nietzsche and Weimar classicism. Publications: Nietzsches Philosophie des Scheins (VDG 1999); ‘Allen Tinten-Fischen feind: Metaphern der Melancholie in Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra’, Nietzscheforschung, 9 (2002); ‘Die Aura im Zeitalter ihrer theoretischen Beliebigkeit: Überlegungen zu einer untoten ästhetischen Kategorie’, in Renate Reschke (ed.), Ästhetik. Ephemeres und Historisches (Kovač 2002). xiv

PAUL J. M. van TONGEREN is Professor of Philosophical Ethics at the University of Nijmegen and Extraordinary Professor of Ethics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He is Director of the Nietzsche Research Group at Nijmegen, which is preparing a Nietzsche Dictionary (Nietzsche-Wörterbuch). He has recently published Re- interpreting Modern Culture. An Introduction to Nietzsche’s Phil- osophy (Purdue UP 2000).

JIM URPETH is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Greenwich, London. His research interests include Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. He is currently completing two books: From Kant to Deleuze: The Renaturalisation of Aesthetics; and Nietzsche and French Religious Atheism. He was co-editor (with John Lippitt) of Nietzsche and the Divine (Clinamen 2000) and guest editor of ‘Nietzsche and Religion’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 19 (Spring 2000). His other publications include ‘“Noble” Ascesis: Between Nietzsche and Foucault’, New Nietzsche Studies, 2 (1998), and ‘A “Sacred” Thrill: Presentation and Affectivity in the Analytic of the Sublime’, in Rehberg and Jones (eds), The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy (Clinamen 2000). Preface

Nietzsche and the German Tradition. To those persuaded that Nietzsche is the anti-German, antitraditional thinker par excellence, this title may well appear contradictory. Just how potentially contradictory (but also fruitful) it is, can be gauged by recasting it as a series of questions, emphasising each word in turn: Nietzsche and the German Tradition? Nietzsche and the German Tradition? Nietzsche and the German Tradition? Nietzsche and the German Tradition? Nietzsche and the German Tradition? Even without perplexed exclamation marks, each of these questions highlights different aspects of a central problem discussed in this collection of essays. This problem is the tension between Nietzsche’s desire for a new beginning, a clean slate for (hu)mankind and his keen awareness that nineteenth-century humans are not a tabula rasa. Nietzsche himself is, of course, no different to his contemporaries. As he constantly reminds us, he carries an accumulated weight of psychological, cultural, political, religious and academic baggage. Much of Nietzsche’s intellectual effort involves sorting through this ‘traditional’ baggage, attempting both to discard items likely to impede the journey and to repack those with the potential to enhance it. A difficulty for his interpreters is that Nietzsche’s criteria for sorting, discarding and repacking tradition(s) undergo significant, though not constant, mutations. This problem and its near-neighbour, the question of the extent to which Nietzsche and his legacies – and the study of them – have themselves become a ‘tradition’, are illuminated from a variety of perspectives in this volume. The contributors represent a wide range of disciplines (philosophy, cultural studies, the history of ideas, linguistics, history, and German studies), and they bring a refreshing diversity of methodological approaches to bear on the theme of Nietzsche and the German tradition. xvi

The essays collected here, with the exception of the editor’s, were first presented at the 7th Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, which was held at the University of St Andrews in September 1997. All have since been revised and updated to take account of subsequent developments in Nietzsche studies and other relevant areas of scholarship. The conference itself attracted some sixty delegates, including nine from Scotland, eighteen from other parts of the UK, ten from other EU countries, and eleven from North America, as well as participants from South Africa, Australia and Switzerland.1 Three distinct, yet often overlapping, lines of inquiry emerged at the conference and are, quite naturally, reflected in this volume. The first is the investigation of Nietzsche’s own engagement with various German traditions, including his battle with the tradition of German classical scholarship, re-assessed here by Christa Davis Acampora. Nietzsche’s appropriation and reworking of German aesthetic traditions, particularly the ‘classical’ tradition of Schiller and Goethe, is the focus of Hans-Gerd von Seggern’s essay. Duncan Large presents an illuminating and persuasive re-assessment of Nietzsche’s ambivalent attitude to Martin Luther and to the tradition of German Protestantism he inaugurated. In his remarkably well-documented contribution, which is based, in part, on an exhaustive study of Nietzsche’s library in Weimar, Thomas H. Brobjer traces Nietzsche’s reading (and non-reading) of the German philosophical tradition from Leibniz to Marx. In his careful reconstruction of a question central to an understanding of Nietzsche’s outlook, Christopher Janaway dispels many myths and misconceptions surrounding Nietzsche’s complex attitude to Schopenhauer. Janaway rejects conventional arguments that Nietzsche is initially ‘for’ and then ‘against’ Schopen-

1 For an account of the conference proceedings, which includes brief summaries of many of the papers presented, see Uschi Nussbaumer-Benz, ‘Bericht über die 7. und 8. Konferenz der englischen Friedrich Nietzsche Society’, Nietzsche- forschung, 5 (2000), 393–97. xvii hauer, arguing instead, on the basis of firm textual evidence, that Nietzsche is able to reconcile these opposites. The second line of inquiry pursued in this volume is an investigation of Nietzsche’s attitudes to his German present. Daniel W. Conway’s lucid essay, ‘Nietzsche’s Germano-mania’, resists suggestions that Nietzsche can be easily pigeonholed as anti-German and philo-Semitic, by demonstrating the complex and often paradoxical nature of his pronouncements on Germans, ‘Europeans’ and Jews. Nietzsche’s Prussian past and upbringing, and the impact of these on his personality (and his philosophy, its Siamese twin) are examined by Ben Morgan in his essay. The scars of this past are revealed in Nietzsche’s most intemperate text, The Antichrist, in his ‘frightened pursuit of mastery’. The third important area investigated in this collection is what might be called the Nietzschean ‘tradition’, in other words Nietzsche’s legacy, or legacies, as well as writing about him since c. 1890. Jim Urpeth’s essay extends and amplifies Nietzsche’s speculations on taste and aesthetic disinterestedness, by examining (and challenging) them through the prism of Heidegger’s aesthetic theory. Malcolm Humble’s thoughtful essay underscores the importance of Nietzsche to left-wing writers in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Humble shows how highly Nietzsche was regarded by Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig, for example, and demonstrates how, when in exile in the 1930s, these writers attempted to preserve and project an alternative image of Nietzsche to the one being paraded in Nazi Germany. Though none of the essays here engages exclusively with the thorny and emotionally charged issue of the National Socialists’ use and abuse of Nietzsche, the issue is inevitably a subtext. Both Gerd Schank’s and Paul J. M. van Tongeren’s essays tackle and clarify issues in Nietzsche’s thought which have led to (mis)appropriations, namely, his views on race and breeding, and his ‘naturalism’. Another darker aspect of the Nietzschean ‘tradition’ is discussed in Nicholas Martin’s essay on the interpretation of Nietzsche in the GDR. xviii

The attentive reader will notice that the essays in this collection do not fall into these three lines of inquiry as neatly as has been suggested here. S/he will also see that there is healthy disagreement between contributors on a number of points. The essays presented here point to no collective conclusion. It would be strange, and strangely disappointing, if they did. They do, however, contribute to a better understanding both of the extent to which Nietzsche problematises ‘tradition’ and of the problems, and opportunities, arising from the Nietzschean ‘tradition(s)’ of the past hundred years.