A Companion to Nietzsche

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Keith Ansell Pearson

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444356175
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filosofía
• Categoría: Filosofía moderna

A Companion to Nietzsche provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, profiling the most recent research and trends in scholarship.

• Brings together an international roster of both rising stars and established scholars, including many of the leading commentators and interpreters of Nietzsche.
• Showcases the latest trends in Nietzsche scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche's philosophy of time, of nature, and of life.
• Includes clearly organized sections on Art, Nature, and Individuation; Nietzsche's New Philosophy of the Future; Eternal Recurrence, the Overhuman, and Nihilism; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; Evolution and Life.
• Features fresh treatments of Nietzsche's core and enigmatic doctrines.

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Friedrich Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Thought, Life, and Work

KEITH ANSELL PEARSON

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) exerted an extraordinary influence on twentieth-century thought and continues to be a major source of inspiration for work being done today in all the branches of philosophical inquiry. Nietzsche was first and foremost an intellectual revolutionary who sought to change the way we think about existence and how we actually live. To this end he constructed new tasks and projects and put forward new ways of interpreting and evaluating existence.

Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy, however, is a complex one. Nietzsche aptly characterized his manner of doing philosophy when, in a letter to a friend, he spoke of his “whole philosophical heterodoxy,”¹ Most of his texts are aphoristic in style, his meaning is deliberately enigmatic, and he plays all kinds of tricks on his readers. One commentator, Eugen Fink, has argued that the metaphors and images that abound in Nietzsche’s writings must be translated into thoughts if we are not to hear in them only an opulent, overloaded, and loquacious voice.² In spite of his heterodoxy and the difficulties presented by his philosophical style, Nietzsche’s influence on modern trajectories of thought has been enormous and he continues to be utilized for important philosophical ends. His ideas exerted an influence on almost every important intellectual movement of the last century, including existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Aspects of his thought have had an influence on major philosophical figures in both North America and Great Britain, including Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Bernard Williams. Today he is the subject of a wide array of philosophical treatments, having been adopted by philosophers both of so-called “analytical” persuasions and so-called “continental” ones. Philosophical appreciation of Nietzsche has perhaps never been in a healthier state. Today there are lively debates over every aspect of his thinking, and sophisticated academic studies of his ideas are published on a regular basis.This volume showcases the full range of work currently being done in the area of Nietzsche studies and appreciation. This includes close textual analysis and exegesis, the treatment of Nachlass material, clarification of aspects of his core doctrines and concepts, including some of the most difficult aspects, the consideration of Nietzsche’s ideas in relation to fundamental philosophical problems that continue to occupy the attention of philosophers, and critical engagement with these ideas. The volume profiles contemporary thinking on Nietzsche’s unpublished material and published texts and reflects trends in recent scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche’s naturalism and interest in his philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. There are instructive treatments of Nietzsche in relation to both established philosophical projects, such as phenomenology, and new ones, such as geophilosophy. The aim of the volume is essentially twofold: to illuminate core aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and to show the continuing relevance for philosophy of many of his ideas and projects and tasks. By way of an introduction to the essays that follow I wish to offer a synoptic guide to Nietzsche’s thought, life, and work.³

Early Life and Thought

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in Röcken, a tiny village near Lützen in Saxony. His father was a Lutheran pastor and was to die only five years after Nietzsche’s birth as a result of softening of the brain. The experience of death, of its brute eruption into life and the violent separations it effects, took place early in Nietzsche’s life, and the deaths of both his father and his brother Joseph (who was to die before his second birthday) continued to deeply affect Nietzsche throughout the course of his adolescent life and into maturity.

On the death of his father Nietzsche’s family, which included his mother, his sister Elisabeth, and two unmarried aunts, relocated to Naumburg. Nietzsche began learning to play the piano and composed his first philosophical essay, “On the Origin of Evil.” In 1858 he entered Pforta school in the Saale valley and was a student at this famous boarding school for six years. During this formative period of his youth he developed a love of various writers and poets, including Friedrich Hölderlin and Lord Byron. It is also during this period that he composed his first essay in classical philology and isolated pieces of philosophical reflection, such as “Fate and History.”

On his fifteenth birthday Nietzsche declared that he had been “seized” and taken over by an “inordinate desire for knowledge and universal enlightenment.” In an autobiographical fragment dated 1868/9 he reveals it was only in the final stages of his education at Pforta that he abandoned his artistic plans to be a musician and moved into the field of classical philology. He was motivated by a desire to have a counterweight to his changeable and restless inclinations. The science of philology on which he chose to focus his labors was one he could pursue with “cool impartiality, with cold logic, with regular work, without its results touching me at all deeply” (Nietzsche’s mature approach to the matter of knowledge could not be more different!).⁴ When he got to university Nietzsche realized that although he had been “well taught” at school he was also “badly educated”; he could think for himself but did not have the skills to express himself and he had “learned nothing of the educative influence of women.”⁵

In October 1864 Nietzsche commenced his undergraduate studies in theology and classical philology at Bonn University. He attended the lectures of the classicist Friedrich Ritschl, who was later to play an influential role in securing Nietzsche’s professorship at Basel. In his first year of university life he underwent the rite of passage offered by a duel and began his journey of alienation from his mother and sister by refusing to take communion. In 1865 he moved university to study just classical philology, following his teacher Ritschl to Leipzig. He speaks of his move from Bonn to Leipzig in a letter to his sister Elisabeth dated June 11, 1865, where he states that if a person wishes to achieve peace of mind and happiness then they should acquire faith, but if they want to be a disciple of truth, which can be “frightening and ugly,” then they need to search. In his second year of university he discovered Schopenhauer, who suited his melancholic disposition at the time, and in 1866 he found a veritable “treasure-chest” of riches in Friedrich Albert Lange’s magisterial study History of Materialism. In 1867 Leipzig University awarded him a prize for his study of Diogenes Laertius and he spent the third year of his university studies in military service.

In early 1869 Nietzsche, who had recently begun to feel disaffected with his chosen subject of study and research, was appointed to Basel University as Extraordinary Professor of Classical Philology (he was to apply for the Chair in Philosophy a few years later when it became vacant, but was not successful). Nietzsche assumed the role and duties of a professor at the age of 24 without completing his dissertation or postgraduate thesis.

Although Nietzsche often criticized the discipline of philology he had been trained in for its scholasticism and pedantry, the importance it places on the arts of reading and interpretation deeply informed his work. He repeatedly stresses the importance of knowing how to read well. He presents himself in untimely or unfashionable terms as a friend of slowness (lento) and as the teacher of slow reading. The contemporary age is an age of quickness; it no longer values slowness but seeks to hurry everything. Philology can be viewed as a venerable art that demands that its practitioners take time so as to become still and slow. More than anything it is an art that teaches one how to read well, which consists in reading slowly and deeply, and with the aid of which one looks and sees in a certain and specific manner: cautiously, observantly, “with doors left open” and “with delicate eyes and fingers” (D, preface, 5). Nietzsche believes that reading should be an art, for which rumination is required. He stresses that an aphorism has not been deciphered just because it has been read out; rather, an art of interpretation or exegesis needs to come into play. On Nietzsche’s specific art of the aphorism see the essay by Jill Marsden (chapter 2).

Nietzsche had made the personal acquaintance of Wagner in November 1868 in Leipzig, and he made his first visit to the composer and his mistress (later wife) Cosima von Bulow at their house “Tribschen” near Lucerne not long after his arrival in Basel in April 1869. Between 1869 and 1872 Nietzsche would make over 20 visits to Tribschen. Nietzsche became a devotee of Wagner and considered himself to be in the presence of genius. This devotion did not last, and in his later writings he approaches Wagner as a case study that offers instructive lessons in how to read the signs and symptoms of pathological modernity (CW, preface).

In 1870 and 1871 Nietzsche lectured on topics, such as Socrates and tragedy and the “Dionysian world-view,” that would form the basis of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. He had the intimation that he was about to give birth to a “centaur” with art, philosophy, and scholarship all growing together inside him. In the Franco-Prussian War Nietzsche served for a few weeks as a medical orderly, but was invalided out when he contracted dysentery and diphtheria himself; on his return to Basel he began to suffer from insomnia, and he was to suffer from serious bouts of ill health and migraine attacks throughout the rest of his life. He wrote most of The Birth of Tragedy while on convalescent leave from his university, in 1871, and it was published at the beginning of 1872. Upon its publication Nietzsche’s book met with vehement rejection by the philological community, and after being rejected by his mentor, Ritschl, Nietzsche had to admit that he had fallen from grace and was now ostracized from the guild of philologists. In 1873 Nietzsche worked on various projects, such as “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” the essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,” and his Untimely Meditations. Nietzsche planned several dozen of these but only four actually materialized, and he regarded the whole exercise of writing them as a way of extracting everything he saw as negative in himself.

The Birth of Tragedy begins by defining two competing but also complementary impulses in Greek culture, the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The first takes its name from Apollo, the god of light (der Scheinende, the shining one), dream, and prophecy, while the second takes its name from Dionysus, the god of intoxication and rapture (Rausch). While Apollo is associated with visible form, comprehensible knowledge, and moderation, Dionysus is linked with formless flux, mystical intuition, and excess. Furthermore, while the Apollonian world is one of distinct individuals, the Dionysian world is one where these separate individual identities have been dissolved and human beings find themselves reconciled with the elemental energies of nature. Through Dionysian rapture we become part of a single, living being with whose joy in eternal creation we are fused. In artistic terms, Apollo is the god of the plastic or representational arts (painting and sculpture) and has a strong association with architecture, while Dionysus is the god of the non-representational art of music. One of the innovative aspects of Nietzsche’s argument in the book is the way it contests the idealized image of the Greeks which had been handed down and which depicted ancient Greek culture as a culture of serenity and calm grandeur. Nietzsche seeks to show that the calm Apollonian surface of Greek art and culture is the product of a long and complex wrestling with the tragic insights afforded by the Dionysian state. In Nietzsche’s argument the monumental achievement of the Attic tragedy of the fifth century BC, contained in the work of tragedians like Aeschylus and Sophocles, amounts to a fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche’s book is a search for an adequate knowledge of the union between the two artistic powers (a union he calls a “mystery”) and of the origin (Ursprung) of Greek tragedy.

Nietzsche’s first book was a striking debut. Although it has several core ideas, the most fundamental thesis of the book is that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are the world and existence eternally justified.” But just how is this “aestheticist” conception of the world to be heard and understood? What kind of “justification” is intended? The essay by Daniel Came seeks to clarify the status of the unorthodox insight at the heart of the book. Came takes issue with the charge often leveled against Nietzsche’s position that it rests on a radical immoralism by arguing that, in fact, it has no moral implications. Furthermore, the “justification” of existence that is sought is epistemically neutral in the sense that it does not claim that existence is actually justified through aesthetic affirmation. Nietzsche affirms art because it embraces the need for illusion and semblance, as opposed to morality that seeks to deny the necessity of the perspectival and of interpretation, as well as its own implication in appearance and semblance (see BT, “Self-Criticism,” 5). An aesthetic affirmation of existence is only a problem for the moral view of the world that shuns all forms of illusion. From the “dangerous” perspective of the moral view of the world an artistic metaphysics is to be judged as something arbitrary, idle, and fantastic (“Self-Criticism,” 5).

Another important issue about Nietzsche’s first book concerns the nature and extent of Schopenhauer’s influence on it. In recent years Nietzsche studies in the English-speaking world has begun to develop a more scholarly appreciation of this issue, with the result that the questions are now posed and considered in a much more incisive and nuanced manner. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics rest on dividing the world into two fundamental dimensions: will and representation. He borrows the expression principium individuationis (principle of individuation) from scholastic thinking and uses it to denote the phenomenal world of time and space as that which gives us a plurality of coexistent and successive things (this is the world of representation and of individual things). By contrast, the will is the thing-in-itself and outside the order of time and space (this is to name the world’s real or genuine character). Because it also lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason (that which explains why something is what it is at a specific time and place), the will is equally groundless and can be said to be primordially “one” (not simply one as either an object or a concept). In their coming to be and perishing away individuals exist only as phenomena of the will (conceived as a “blind, irresistible urge”). Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (vol. 1, section 28), views the expression of the will in phenomena in Platonic terms: “the will is indivisible and wholly present in every phenomenon, although the degrees of its objectification [...] are very different”. Schopenhauer goes on to talk of the crystal, the plant, the animal, and man as examples of objectified will. Each species of life and every original force of inorganic nature has an empirical character, but this character is nothing more than the phenomenon (manifestation) of an underlying intelligible character, namely, an indivisible will that is outside time.⁶

Although Nietzsche’s argument in Birth of Tragedy relies heavily on the terms of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics it does not simply replicate them. Apollo is conceived as the “transfiguring genius” of the principium individuationis through whom “redemption in appearance” (Schein) can be attained. Dionysus, by contrast, stands for the bursting apart of the spell of this principium that provides the path to the innermost being of things. Nietzsche finds something “sublime” in the way the pleasure to be had from the “beauty of appearance” can be experienced through the Apollonian (BT 1). A different kind of sublime is opened up, however, through the Dionysian and the breakdown of cognitive forms it inaugurates (it is the sublime of “horror”). The play between the two opposing forces gives rise in Nietzsche’s text to a series of tensions between the one and the multiple, the sub-phenomenal and the phenomenal (the intelligible and the empirical realms), the desire for eternal life and the heroic trials of individuals. But Nietzsche gives equal weight to the two forces or powers, and he does not follow Schopenhauer in simply arguing for a mystical suppression of the will; rather, in the text we find Nietzsche attempting a justification of the plane of appearance and semblance (Schein) itself.

The essay by N...