Nietzsche in Context

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Erratum

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2013.768396).

¹For a criticism of such views, see for example Ken Gemes, ‘Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62 (2001), 337–60, and Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics (Basingstoke, 2004), chapter 2.

²Of course, Nietzsche's thought is a source of many interesting ideas, and applying them in contemporary discussions is a perfectly legitimate task. Nonetheless, far too often, these authors’ efforts are not much more than attempts to translate Nietzsche into their own framework of various –isms. For example, this seems to be the case in many of the contributions to recent Nietzsche and Morality, edited by Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (Oxford, 2007). (Leiter, who was at the forefront of analytic philosophy's engagement with Nietzsche, co-authored with Joshua Knobe arguably the most interesting piece in this volume, on Nietzschean moral psychology.)

³This is exactly the expression Emden uses rather often in his book.

⁴‘Nietzsche's Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 663–93.

⁵Even more simplistic – and unnecessary – is the suggestion on page 19 that somebody might believe that Nietzsche ‘opposed all forms of reading and every form of reader’.

⁶Still, it is misleading to speak of ‘ahistorical analytical and postmodern readings’, for one can understand this point even in an ‘ahistorical reading’. See also note 65 on page 117. All parenthesised references are to page numbers in the book under review.

⁷See Nietzsche's letters to his mother (Franziska), Nice, 26 October 1886, Reinhardt von Seydlitz, same day, Franz Overbeck, next day, and his sister (Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche), 3 November 1886 [Nietzsche repeatedly calls Taine ‘Henri’]. Nietzsche mentions to von Seydlitz that Beyond Good and Evil ‘after all, is not a book even for them’; but he evidently felt them as the two closest living thinkers, as his letter to Erwin Rohde, Chur, 23 May 1887, clearly confirms. For Nietzsche's letters I have used Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe (KSB), edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York, 1986). All the references for these letters are by recipient's name, place and date: this allows the readers to check either KSB or Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGB), also edited by Colli and Montinari (Berlin and New York, 1975-), or any of numerous other editions (or selections) of Nietzsche's letters.

⁸Table 2 lists ‘philosophical titles unknown if and when read’, which explains why such chronologically structured book does not discuss Taine's study, though, as Brobjer notes, it is heavily annotated. Taine is not mentioned in the index, either. (Note that this example also points to a drawback of such a chronological structure: works for which Brobjer could not discover when Nietzsche read them are mostly left out, even when heavily annotated.)

⁹In his letter (draft) to von Seydlitz, Nice, just before 26 October 1886, Nietzsche speaks of his ‘three readers’: Bauer, Burckhardt and Taine, adding that ‘from them the first is dead’. He clearly decided, in his letters mentioned in n. 7 supra, that it is more appropriate to speak of his two live readers. Bruno Bauer in his Zur Orientierung über die Bismarck'sche Ära (Chemnitz, 1880), 287, calls Nietzsche ‘the German Montaigne, Pascal and Diderot’, as he criticises Treitschke's nationalism and recommends to historians to read Nietzsche, especially his first Untimely. Nietzsche remarked in a letter to Heinrich Köselitz, Genoa, 21 March 1881, that ‘there is little subtlety in such a praise’; yet he seemed later quite satisfied, as subsequent references in his correspondence, as well as Ecce Homo, ‘The Untimely Ones’, 2, show. Indeed, Bauer's articles can be found in three volumes of Schmeitzners Internationale Monatsschrift, present in Nietzsche's library (see Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek, edited by Giuliano Campioni, Paolo d'Iorio, Maria Cristina Fornari, Francesco Fronterotta and Andrea Orsucci (Berlin and New York, 2003), 682–83, 689); the first volume (which includes Bauer's Vorwort) is also mentioned twice in Nietzsche's letters. To avoid unnecessary repetition, Nietzsche's works will be referred to by their names only (without the author's name). For all of them, I have used Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari, second revised edition (Berlin and New York, 1988). I have consulted Cambridge translations of Nietzsche's works; however, all the translations are compared with the German original and amended where necessary. All of Nietzsche's works are, where available, referred to by section/chapter, as usual; where it is not, I provide page reference to KSA. All the Nachlaß is referred to from KSA, in customary fashion.

¹⁰Nietzsche's reading of Fortlage is Brobjer's discovery, as he underscores (note 20 at 135). Schopenhauer was covered on pages 407 to 423 of this work. Yet, neither this work, nor a journal discussing Schopenhauer that he read, nor even his own lecture notes, made any impression on Nietzsche (47), who was blissfully unaware of Schopenhauer prior to the bookshop discovery (retold also by Brobjer on page 29). Brobjer nevertheless comments: ‘Nonetheless, it is not unlikely that these first encounters could have facilitated Nietzsche's acceptance of Schopenhauer when he discovered him a few months later.’ (!)

¹¹It is indicative he is not even listed in the index.

¹²See especially Human, All Too Human, 261; compare Nachlaß, summer 1875, KSA 8: 6[14], Der griechische Staat, KSA 1, 776–77, Beyond Good and Evil, 28.

¹³This list, referring to number of appearances in KSA, is worthy to be reproduced: ‘Thales, 42, 1; Anaximander, 43, 4; Heraclitus, 119, 23; Xenophanes, 7, 0; Parmenides, 48, 4; Anaxagoras, 56, 5; Empedocles, 96, 10; Democritus, 62, 12; Pythagoras and Pythagorian, 76, 13.’ This gives ‘an idea of Nietzsche's relative interest of the individual pre-Socratics’, says Brobjer, and could be also compared with total references to ‘Socrates, 372; Plato, 382; and Epicurus, 118’ (note 33 at 141–42).

¹⁴ Twilight of the Idols, ‘What I Owe the Ancients’, 2. Note that the only thinker mentioned as a Sophist here is Thucydides, who surely does not qualify as a ‘philosophical influence’ by Brobjer's ‘conventional’ standards.

¹⁵See its Table des matières, 431–32. For an explicit differentiation between les sceptiques and the earlier les sophistes, see for example page 398. Brochard on page 3 recognises that there are “traces of scepticism” in “presocratic philosophers, particularly among the sophists”; however, even in his Introduction (pages 1–35) there is nothing to support Brobjer's claim.

¹⁶See Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek, edited by Campioni, d'Iorio, Fornari, Fronterotta and Orsucci, 154.

¹⁷Such an assertion, ‘on high praise of the Sophists’, is also reiterated by Brobjer in note 36 on page 236 (compare also Table 1 at 231), where he refers to Twilight, ‘Ancients’, 3 [instead of 2]. Indeed, Brobjer repeats the claim about Brochard and the sophists in his subsequent ‘Critical Aspects of Nietzsche's Relation to Politics and Democracy’, in Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought, edited by Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin and New York, 2008), 205–27 (220). He there further refers on this point (note 37) to his two previous articles from 2001 and 2005 – but it seems this amazing mistake has not been noticed since then.

¹⁸ Nietzsche's Knowledge of Philosophy: A Study and Survey of Nietzsche's Reading of and Relation to German, British, and French Philosophy. It looks like quite an overlap with this study! (Note this work has not been published since then, and apparently is not going to appear for at least some time.)

¹⁹ Nietzsche and the ‘English’: The Influence of British and American Thinking on His Philosophy (Amherst, 2007).

²⁰For an analysis of wunderbare Kongruenz between the two thinkers, underlying the importance of Schopenhauer, and pointing the anti-Hegelian view of history, see my ‘A “Wondrous Echo”: Burckhardt, Renaissance and Nietzsche's Political Thought’, in Nietzsche, Power and Politics, edited by Siemens and Roodt, 629–65 (section 3).

²¹See especially the indicative restatement on page 78.

²²Brobjer is not fully clear whether Nietzsche read Kritik der Urtheilskraft; on page 36 he seems to doubt Janz's ‘claim’ about it, and on page 37 he suggests ‘probably’; only when checking Tables 1 (195) and 3 (249) can we fully ascertain that he would agree on this point. (Note that Brobjer uses modern spelling, Urteilskraft, in the index and on page 36 (twice), and Urtheilskraft, contemporaneous, on pages 37 (thrice), 48, 195, 232, and 249.) In the tables, in fact, Brobjer suggests that Nietzsche also read Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1872 (Table 1, 202–03; Table 3, 249), which is clearly at odds with his main text (37 and the restatement, 78); while note 86 on page 129 allows for a possibility of its partial reading (page 203 argues exactly vice-versa, allowing the possibility that it is from the secondary literature). In fact, information given in note 86 strongly suggests Nietzsche read both Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Allgemeine Naturgeschichte.

²³See Nietzsche to Wilhelm Vischer[-Bilfinger], Basel, probably January 1871, that Brobjer refers to here. Why would we doubt the assertion about studying Kant and Schopenhauer from a man who is already an ordinarius in another discipline? (Brobjer's position, as a corollary, would imply Nietzsche was in fact lying to Vischer here.)

²⁴In fact, the comparison with Nietzsche's reading of Mill points to a very high likelihood of Nietzsche's reading of Kant; but Brobjer's conclusion is reverse, for the lack of indication that Nietzsche ever owned a work by Kant. He just leaves open the possibility that Nietzsche's reading of Kant ‘may have been much more extensive’.

²⁵ Genealogy of Morality, III, 6. The opposition is strongly pronounced: ‘Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?’

²⁶ Beyond Good and Evil, 39.

²⁷ Nachlaß, summer – autumn 1884, KSA 11: 26[397].

²⁸Stendhal is mentioned just in passing as a ‘literary’ influence (74, 103). On pages 7 and 8 Brobjer mentions Stendhal amongst the few writers that Nietzsche identified as his key readings, but this clearly does not impress him; note that on page 103, of the four literary authors mentioned as influences, only Stendhal does not get a footnote – though his ‘philosophical’ influence (as well as the overall) is greater than any of the other three. And though in the index Stendhal has ‘Marie-Henri Beyle’ added in brackets, the most significant reference to him mentioned – Nietzsche's letter saying how he almost exclusively communicates with dead men, ‘e.g. Galiani or Henri Beyle or Montaigne’ – is not listed there. Nietzsche acquired and read almost all of the eighteen volumes of Stendhal's Œuvres Complètes published by Michel Lévy Frères (Paris, 1853–1855); for the criticism of philosophie allemande (especially Kant), and suggestion of the alternative, Correspondance inédite, 2 vols (1855) is particularly important. The case of Stendhal also shows that Brobjer's claim that for ‘late’ Nietzsche (defined as 1883–1889) ‘we no longer see any positive philosophical influences on his thinking’ (95) is wrong.

²⁹ David Strauss, 7 demonstrates it is highly unlikely that Nietzsche had read Leviathan by that time (1873): Strauss ought to have ‘out of the bellum omnium contra omnes and the privileges of the strong boldly derived moral rules [Moralvorschriften] for life, though they would, surely, have to have origin in an inwardly fearless spirit, as that of Hobbes’. The strong has indeed few privileges in Hobbes’ construction – for even the weakest can kill the strongest, as Leviathan, chapter 13 resolutely underlines. (By 1886 Nietzsche might have read Leviathan, for the ‘quotation’ in Beyond Good and Evil, 294 clearly paraphrases Hobbes’ observation on laughter from chapter 6 – though it might also originate from a secondary source.) The famous syntagma from De cive is mentioned already in Der griechische Staat, KSA 1, 772.

³⁰Brobjer just mentions Pères et enfants (1863) – without giving the place of issue as he does otherwise. [Note that the usual English translation of Oтцы и дeти is, unlike French, imprecise.] Brobjer refers to Elisabeth Kuhn, Friedrich Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus (Berlin and New York, 1992), without any page reference; lacking this book, I have used her ‘Nietzsches Quelle des Nihilismus-Begriffs’, Nietzsche-Studien, 13 (1984), 253–78, which evidently served as a basis of the relevant part of the book, for it provides the same information Brobjer had on disposal. She gives only the year of issue; the book was published by Charpentier in Paris [reprints: 1865, 1876], its author being transcribed as Ivan Tourguenef.

³¹See Prosper Mérimée, ‘Lettre à l’éditeur’, in Tourguenef, Pères et enfants, I–IV; reference to le socialiste is on page III.

³²Nietzsche's first mentioning of nihilism is in Nachlaß, summer 1880, KSA 9: 4[103] and 4[108]. Kuhn, ‘Nietzsches Quelle’, 275, gives as a source for these two loci Pères et enfants and Mérimée's letter, and suggest as a possible additional source also Turgenev's Terres vierges (1877). For the last work that is indeed a question. However, the case of Pères et enfants is most convincing: Mérimée says in his letter (page II) that before one thought après Hegel in St. Petersburg; now, c'est Schopenhauer qui a la vogue – and in 4[103] Nietzsche notes that ‘the nihilists had Schopenhauer as a philosopher’. (Indeed, in chapter V, page 34, Paul Petrovitch also relates how ‘nous avions des hégeliens; maintenant ce sont des nihilistes’.) Of course, Oтцы и дeти popularised the term nihilism, and in this context it is clear that this work in its French translation, and its main hero, influenced note 4[108] mentioning die russischen Nihilisten and their ‘honest’ immorality. (Compare also Nietzsche to Köselitz, Marienbad, 18 July 1880, showing that during this summer he was reading Mérimée.)

³³Compare Nietzsche to Köselitz, Nice, 10 November 1887 and 15 January 1888; Nachlaß, November 1887 – March 1888, KSA 13: 11[341], 150.

³⁴See my ‘Wondrous Echo’, in Nietzsche, Power and Politics, edited by Siemens and Roodt, which closely examines all the issues on Nietzsche and Burckhardt discussed in this article.

³⁵Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, Basel, 7 November 1870. Nietzsche speaks of vertrauten Spaziergängen with Burckhardt, ‘friendly’ or ‘intimate’ walks; but this important adjective underlying Nietzsche's understanding of their relationship disappears in Emden's translation. Note that Emden does not refer to the letter by date, but only by volume and page in KGB, a general practice unhelpful towards the users of more commonly available KSB or another edition of Nietzsche's letters.

³⁶Jacob Burckhardt to Friedrich von Preen, Basel, 27 September 1870, in The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, translated and edited by Alexander Dru (London, 1955), 140.

³⁷Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie, 3 vols (München and Wien, 1978–1979), I, 381. The work is listed in Emden's bibliography.

³⁸Emden himself mentions (87) that Nietzsche attended the lectures ‘On the Study of History’ in the winter semester 1870/71; however these were not ‘public lectures’, as he states, but closed lectures for students, and Burckhardt's permission to attend was singular favour made only in Nietzsche's case. It seems Emden mixed these lectures with the public lectures on ‘Die Historische Größe’ that Nietzsche was attending in parallel at the Museum of Basel, and which are addressed in a quotation just below. Compare my ‘Wondrous Echo’, in Nietzsche, Power and Politics, edited by Siemens and Roodt, notes 3 and 4.

³⁹In Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen; see the English translation of Burckhardt's work, Reflections on History, translated by M.D.H. (London, 1943), 16–17, 211. My German is quite modest, while Emden is a native speaker; nonetheless, the quotation from the Nachlaß, spring – summer 1875, KSA 8: 5[58] (Emden quotes from the equivalent text in Kritischen Gesamtausgabe) seems to be partly inappropriately translated: ‘not dominated by general nonsense’ would be in this context a much better translation of ‘nicht von allgemeinen Flausen beherrscht’ than Emden's ‘not characterized by excuses’.

⁴⁰He refers to both of J.G.A. Pocock's chapters on Machiavelli from The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), but evidently just as an ‘embellishment’, for the sentence hardly captures Pocock's writing on Machiavelli, and particularly not chapter 8 on Discorsi and Arte della guerra, that covers majority of the pages Emden refers to.

⁴¹ Il Principe is quoted by page only, from the English translation in the Russell-Skinner variant; this, for readers most unhelpful practice (especially towards those unattached to an English-language university), is repeated in the cases of Schopenhauer, H. Spencer, Bayle, and others. Book series editors as well as journal editors should strongly discourage such practices, and insist on (additional) references by section, chapter, etc., where such more universal ways of referencing are available.

⁴²As one can see when checking all of Nietzsche's references to Herder via the KSA index.

⁴³Already Der griechische Staat, whose draft was composed in early 1871, contains very little regards for the ‘rules of right and wrong’, and Nietzsche must have formed such a Weltanschauung already in the 1860s. Indeed, this early essay already contains praise of the Renaissance Italians for the primacy of purely political considerations (KSA 1, 771). For Nietzsche's relationship towards Machiavelli, see my ‘Wondrous Echo’, in Nietzsche, Power and Politics, edited by Siemens and Roodt , section 1, passim.

⁴⁴Mentioned in the course of Emden's criticism of Nietzsche's view of Napoleon's Europe (305–06), which fails to address Nietzsche's own arguments, and misses his point. Emden's remark on Nietzsche's view on Napoleon (306), ‘highly ambivalent, often alternating between ridicule, criticism and reverence’, is a good indicator how superficial his approach to Nietzsche is. On Nietzsche and Napoleon, see my recent ‘Nietzsche's Napoleon: a Renaissance Man’, History of Political Thought, 33 (2012), 305–47.

⁴⁵Called Sadovà by Emden. The total Austro-Saxon losses (dead, wounded, missing, captured) were approximately twenty percent of their original force; Benedek withdrew the majority of his troops in relatively good order.

⁴⁶Emden claims 20,000 killed ‘in a few hours’, though the combined Franco-German casualties reach approximately that number with wounded included (and wounded always comprised the majority of the total casualties number in those times). He provides a reference (note 114) to Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War (Cambridge, 2003), 121–37; but the only number one finds there is ‘11,000 dead and wounded’ for the losing French (136). Of course, all such information is quite irrelevant for Emden's account; but as he produces it, one would at least expect accuracy.

⁴⁷In the Nachlaß, there are two instances when Nietzsche (autumn 1869, spring 1875) mentions Müller, referring to his history of Greek literature, but this plays no role in this archaeological context (and Emden does not bring it up).

⁴⁸From it, ‘some solutions’ were awaited, as Burckhardt points out in his letter to Arnold von Salis, Basel, 21 April 1872, in Letters of Burckhardt, edited by Dru, 146–47. Nietzsche went to recuperate to the Waadtland, but upon his return the sixth lecture was postponed ad infinitum.

⁴⁹ Ueber die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten, Introduction, KSA 1, 647, and Lecture I, KSA 1, 667. And, indeed, Nietzsche's audience was Basel's elite for whom the lectures were held. Emden is not clear whether the half percent of Nietzsche's age group refers to males only, and what should be understood under this term.

⁵⁰It is based on Emden's previous article: ‘Towards a Critical Historicism: History and Politics in Nietzsche's Second “Untimely Meditation”’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), 1–31.

⁵¹ On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Foreword; compare especially with Birth of Tragedy, 18, where Nietzsche quotes Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe.

⁵²Emden manages even to connect Germany's belated status as a colonial power with the essay (146)! (Note that Germany got its first colony only a decade after publication of the second Untimely. For more, compare 176–78, where German colonial aspirations are retold in some details.)

⁵³Nonetheless, on the very next page, Emden himself offers a quotation which shows well that he is wrong.

⁵⁴ Uses of History, 6 and 9.

⁵⁵Note that the section discussing monumental history is entitled ‘The Political Mobilization of Myth’!

⁵⁶We should remember that the essay finishes with Nietzsche's call to exceptional individuals to follow the Greeks, and his hope that this may lead to a formation of German culture.

⁵⁷Which Nietzsche – as one would expect – evidently cared very little about, otherwise Emden would probably point out a reference from a letter or similar: which he never does.

⁵⁸ Nachlaß, summer – autumn 1873, KSA 7: 29[38], 29[90], 29[97], 29[101], 29[102], 29[113]. The critical mode is introduced only in 29[115], to make a triad. Emden did not use at all the highly important notebook 29 (apart from a completely irrelevant point on Th. Mommsen presenting Cicero as a journalist (155)) – which helps to understand many nuances; nonetheless, the second Untimely itself should be enough to reach appropriate conclusions on the relative importance of the three modes of history.

⁵⁹The problem is not just Nietzsche's purported non-rejection of ‘modern political intuitions’, but also the implication that here follows for Weber: however, for him, ‘modern German nation state’ was very much in the focus of his political interest! See Wolfgang J. Mommsen's standard study, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1984) (even if it exaggerates the degree of Weber's nationalism).

⁶⁰Even a casual reader of the quoted Human, All Too Human, II: Assorted Opinions, 316 can notice that this is just Nietzsche's diagnosis, with no stance shown.

⁶¹Emden indeed mentions ‘The Greek State’ (120–21) and its warlike theme (albeit toning it down somewhat); however, he mentions it in the account just preceding his description of Nietzsche at Wörth, not after it – so the claim that Nietzsche's ‘actual experience’ of war was quite different from these ‘abstract speculations’ is not ‘ironic’ at all: Nietzsche wrote them after his return from the war!

⁶²Nietzsche ‘favored neither authoritarian rule nor liberal democracy’, as Emden puts it. The former case depends on the ruler or the ruling strata! (The latter is again watered down.) But as Emden seems to have mostly in mind Bismarck (though compare page 307 where Napoleon is also mentioned!), we should be aware that the German equivalent of the ‘authoritarian state’, Obrigkeitsstaat, was popularised only after Hugo Preuß's Das deutsche Volk und die Politik (Jena, 1915). (See P.M.R. Stirk, Twentieth-Century German Political Thought (Edinburgh, 2006), 44.) Which in turn means that Emden is using an anachronistic concept – and, furthermore, a concept in terms (or, spirit) of which Nietzsche himself never thought.

⁶³‘[…] who was to stand at the center of Karl Mannheim's studies in the sociology of knowledge during the 1920s.’ But neither is Nietzsche's future European same as Mannheim's later construct, neither is he ‘anticipating Foucault’ and ‘coming close’ to H. Arendt (304), nor can so many of his positions be equated with Weber's (notwithstanding substantial closeness to Nietzsche in the last instance). As in case mentioned in the previous note, Emden is going against Skinner's precepts and strong criticism from ‘Meaning and Understanding’ (1969), despite paying lip service to his contextualist methodology in the Introduction (15–16). (And even if one disagrees with Skinner, Nietzsche is not an ‘anticipator’ of Mannheim, Arendt and Foucault!)

⁶⁴‘Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.’ Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny?’, 1; similar descriptions (‘I am more dynamite than man’, ‘I am the most terrible dynamite’, etc.) appear in Nietzsche's letters from late November 1888 onwards. Nietzsche took this description from Dr Widmann's review of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled ‘Nietzsche's Dangerous Book’, Bund, 16 and 17 September 1886; he mentions it in several letters from late September; the one to Malwida von Meysenburg, Sils-Maria, 24 September 1886, contains a longer quotation. Nietzsche was clearly very keen about it; moreover, in a letter to Overbeck, Ruta Ligure, 12 October 1886, he expresses worries he may be bothered by police because of Widmann's review. For another similar understatement, compare Emden, 313 with Gay Science, 362.

⁶⁵Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’, in The Methodology of Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward E. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York, 1949), 49–112 (68).