What a Philosopher Is

Becoming Nietzsche

Laurence Lampert

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226488257
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner's cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return?
 
With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche's journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and "Sanctus Januarius, " the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche's writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we've had yet of the philosopher's development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.
 

* 1 *

Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner

Nietzsche as a young philology professor in Basel wrote five books in the service of a thinker and of an artist he wanted to believe were greater than himself, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Advancing them, he believed, would advance German culture and Western culture as a whole, both of which he judged to be threatened by a modern spiritual and intellectual malaise. The first of these books, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, set out Nietzsche’s view of philosophy and art in the great events of the success and failure of Attic tragedy in the tragic age of the Greeks. In Attic tragedy, the aspiration and achievement of human thinking and making reached a peak pictured mythically in Prometheus: the deepest wisdom led to the most ambitious founding, the wise founding of a people, the people that Attic tragedy could have made out of the Athenians had it not failed fortuitously at its height. That first book was followed by four Untimely Meditations, untimely because they opposed modern times on behalf of a future framed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche laid out what a Philosopher is, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth what an Artist is. The four Untimely Meditations were to be the first of thirteen that would in their completeness demonstrate the necessity of overthrowing modernity and establishing the new philosophy and art. But Nietzsche brought his thirteen-book project to an abrupt end shortly after publishing the Wagner book in July 1876. That end meant in part a turn toward himself, toward the perspective he had been developing privately in workbooks and had “kept secret,” as he later said, for good reason: he judged that publishing such views would endanger the social order he advocated, not enhance it.

Chapter 1

The Birth of Tragedy: Prometheus the Knowing Maker of Culture

I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem . . . by mixing it up with the most modern things.

BT “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” 6

A False Start on the Right Problem

The first and remarkable sentences of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” display his assurance of the scope and nature of his work: he knew his thinking to be a European event of the first magnitude. Even this now “impossible book” had been grounded in “a question of the first rank,” as evidenced by the Europe-changing events in whose midst he places it. “While the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled across Europe,” the first major defeat of the French by the Prussian-Bavarian army on the sixth of August, 1870, the author “was sitting in some corner of the Alps,” in the Hotel Alpenclub in the Maderanertal, “writing down his thoughts about the Greeks,” his “Dionysian World View,” an essay partially taken up into The Birth of Tragedy. “A few weeks later” he was “under the walls of Metz” where the siege of August 19 through October 27 marked the decisive turning point in Germany’s favor; while performing the debilitating labor of a medical orderly he was “still obsessed with the question marks he had placed over the alleged ‘cheerfulness’ of the Greeks.” Finally, “in that extremely tense month when peace was being discussed in Versailles” from January 27 to February 26, 1871, he “made peace with himself” and, while recovering from the diphtheria and dysentery “which had brought him back from the field,” reached a settled and definitive view about the “Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” The Birth of Tragedy, like the Franco-Prussian War, is a turning point in European history; each shifted the European center of gravity from France to Germany and, with this book, to a young German thinker preoccupied with thoughts of the Greeks.1 This bravado, justified for us by how things turned out, is justified for Nietzsche by his book’s understanding of the role of philosophy in history: Socrates, his book argues, was “the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history” (BT 15). Beginning with his first book, Nietzsche stands to German history in its becoming European history as Athenian Socrates stood to the so-called world history his thinking initiated.

The first paragraph of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword ends by defining the profound cultural question with which his book inadequately wrestled: “The finest, most beautiful, most envied race of humans ever known, the people who made life seem most seductive, the Greeks—what? even they of all people needed tragedy? More even—art? To what end—Greek art?” The second paragraph divides that question about art and “the value of existence” into its three main features as articulated in his book—key aspects of Nietzsche’s lifework. First: is pessimism as expressed in Greek tragedy necessarily a sign of cultural decay, or is there a “pessimism of strength” that springs from “a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence”? Second: what is the meaning of “the immense phenomenon of the Dionysian,” that fundamental human experience out of which Greek tragedy sprang? Third: what is the meaning of the “things that gave rise to the death of tragedy,” of Socrates as a cultural event, or what is the meaning of “science itself, our science—what indeed is the meaning of all science, viewed as a symptom of life”? Driven to understand the spiritual situation of his age, Nietzsche from the beginning measured his present by the paradigm cultural events of the paradigm culture from which it sprang. And the features that mattered most were science and art, more narrowly Socrates and tragedy, more broadly truth and culture. As Nietzsche saw it in his first book, the problem of Socrates is the problem of the demise of the greatest of all cultures through an optimism about truth. The problem of Socrates is “the problem of science itself” (2), now also part of the urgent modern problem. How does science stand to healthy cultural life? Science arose first in colony cities of Greece and flourished in the healthiest cultural life ever, Athens in its age of tragedy; but, Nietzsche judged in 1871, science in the person of Socrates refused the Athenian celebration of tragic life and embraced mere optimism and good cheer at the promise knowledge offered. Fifteen years later, however, Nietzsche judged that his book, which “for the first time, grasped science as something problematic and questionable,” is “an impossible book . . . A first book in every bad sense of the word despite its old man’s problem,” the problem of truth and culture. Now he views his book with eyes that “are older and a hundred times more spoiled, but by no means colder.” With the same flaming intensity addressing the same issue, he can redefine the task: “to look at science through the optic of the artist, but the artist through that of life.” He does not say so here, but the optic of life he had ascertained from Life herself in the poetry of “The Dance Song” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra written three years earlier in 1883, Life who there suggests to Zarathustra that she is not “unfathomable.” If that’s the case, the artist in his highest task as the maker of culture can be looked at through the optic of life fathomed, and science can be looked at through the optic of the artist fathomed. In the compressed formula of the new foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that the problems his book raised about science and art—truth and culture—and inadequately answered he can now answer more adequately on the basis of what he discovered in the interim.

Nietzsche is merciless in setting out the faults of his book (2 and 3), and he is instructive in summarizing just how he treated the problem of the Dionysian (4 and 5). But it is when he restates the “task I was already daring to undertake with this book” (6) that he shows exactly what this first book aimed to initiate—and failed to initiate. He now very much regrets that he did not devise his own language for what was positive in his book but instead cast in the language of Kant and Schopenhauer “things which fundamentally ran counter to both the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer.” “But there is something much worse about the book that I regret even more than having obscured and ruined Dionysian intimations with Schopenhauerian formulas.” Worse even than ruining the way “Dionysos spoke to me”—and he “an initiate and disciple” of that god (4)? Much worse: “I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem that opened itself for me by mixing it up with the most modern things” (6). The stupendous Greek problem is the problem of truth and culture—truth as lived and celebrated in Athenian culture, in Attic tragedy, but driven from the Greek stage and from Greek life by Socrates who corrupted Euripides and Plato. Much worse even than ruining the intimations of the god Nietzsche celebrated is ruining the problem of truth and culture. How did he ruin it? By mixing up that stupendous Greek problem with contemporary, merely local things, two things, “the latest German music,” Wagner’s, and “fables about ‘the German character’” retailed by Wagner. Wagnerism was just a form of romanticism, “the most unGreek of all possible forms of art.” And the German spirit was abdicating any aspiration to rule Europe and instead pursuing mere politics in the service of “mediocrity, democracy, and ‘modern ideas’”—letting Europe in its modern enthusiasms rule the German spirit with its decaying, merely commercial ideals.

Nietzsche ends his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” with a literary device he had mastered: a little dialogue in which he lets a critic speak. His critic criticizes the author by quoting him to himself, accusing him of what he has just accused himself of: “Aber, mein Herr, what in the world is romanticism if your book is not romanticism?” Nietzsche pluralizes his critic and makes an appeal: “you young romantics” you, my young readers, do me the justice of recognizing this as a book of my youth: Yes, I spoke like a romantic, imagining that it was necessary to embrace a metaphysical comfort, but it’s you who are in danger now of falling prey as I did then to metaphysical comfort and ending “as romantics end . . . as Christians”—as Wagner ended. Nietzsche ruined the Greek problem of truth and culture with what now threatens to ruin his young reader—but he stands with them in facing this problem, so he addresses “my young friends” with a challenge: Learn a new, nonromantic, non-Christian art of comfort, the art of earthly comfort introduced by Zarathustra. The cure for the book he ruined is the cure he himself found and that others, the capable young, can now find by studying his books. His attempt at self-criticism ends by inviting to self-criticism the only readers who count for him, the passionate young who long as he longed and who, tempted by romanticism, must follow the course he followed.

For the 1886 edition of his first book Nietzsche not only added his new foreword but also changed its title: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music became The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism. This change demotes the first part of the title in favor of the second: pessimism and how to live it culturally is the genuine subject of his first book. Guided by his foreword, we can read that book to learn how he ruined the stupendous Greek problem of truth and culture by imagining, by dreaming, that the pessimistic truth, deadly truth, could be parried by a culture steeped in Wagnerian-Germanic illusion. The Greek problem continued to occupy Nietzsche throughout his thinking life as one of the permanent problems, but a permanent problem he believed his mature thinking had solved as far as a solution is at all possible. Guided by “Hellenism and Pessimism,” we can read his first book for its instruction on the nature of the Greek problem of truth and culture where truth is pessimism and culture is modern scientific society. Wagner cannot offer a genuine solution to the problem—can Nietzsche? As Hellenism and Pessimism, Nietzsche’s first book forces his reader to wonder how he could believe that he had achieved the genuine modern solution to that permanent problem, a Nietzsche and Pessimism solution that somehow matches for our time the Hellenism and Pessimism solution of Attic tragedy. The arc of Nietzsche’s thinking traced by his Forewords shows that he began in error on the greatest of all problems but began with the right problem.

Nietzsche’s final autobiographical comment on The Birth of Tragedy deserves notice before entering the book. It is the last sentence of “What I Owe to the Ancients” in Twilight of the Idols, a last summary of what he owes to the Greeks in particular before he ends with his quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He had just spoken of his understanding of Attic tragedy and the Dionysian as the expression of being “oneself the eternal joy of becoming” and he ends: “with that I touch again the point from which I first set out—the Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I take my stand again on the ground out of which my Wollen, my Können—my wanting, my being able—grows.” Out of that beginning this is what he became: “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of the eternal return . . .” Nietzsche’s last words on The Birth of Tragedy assign it its honored place within his body of writings: he owes it to these Greek beginnings that he became himself.

Attic Tragedy as the Model of Culture Formation

Nietzsche’s statement of what ruined his first book licenses us to plunder it for what survives his ruining it or what persists in Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of truth and culture.2 The early sections of The Birth of Tragedy articulate that problem in a way that makes the Greeks of the age of tragedy the paradigm culture. Earlier, Homeric Greeks had an Olympian serenity born of Apollo, “the luminous one,” the god of light, of measure, of semblance and wise calm (1). But anyone encountering “these Olympians with another religion in his heart,” anyone now, will be disappointed by the lack of “moral loftiness,” of “holiness or incorporeal spirituality, or a loving gaze filled with compassion” (3)—we will be disappointed because even post-Christian atheists bring Christian expectations to the Olympian gods. They puzzle us because everything about them “speaks to us only of an opulent, yes triumphant existence, in which everything in existence is divinized, regardless of whether it is good or evil.” But wait, Nietzsche says to a spectator turning away disappointed at this seeming moral indifference: “Don’t leave. Listen first to what popular Greek wisdom has to say about this inexplicably serene existence.” And he reports an ancient Greek legend told of King Midas. This ruler hunted in the forest for a long time for a certain wise being, “Silenus, companion of Dionysos,” but failed to catch him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands—when the ruler finally brought the wise man under his power—he posed the most serious of questions: “What is the very best and most excellent thing for human beings?” Dionysos’s wise companion, forced to violate his reticence, answers only after denouncing the folly of the king and his kind, who insist on knowing more than it is healthy to know: “Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why compel me to tell you what it would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• part 1  Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner
• part 2  A New Public Nietzsche: Enlightenment Optimist
• part 3  Nietzsche Enters His Mature Philosophy
• Conclusion. The Philosophy and Art of Nietzsche’s Maturity
• Works Cited
• Index
• Footnotes