Abstract
This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche’s early “philological” work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873’s Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, the first section analyzes Nietzsche’s statement that history’s principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten. I argue that it is not at all the subjective character of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or ‘being attuned’ to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or ‘nature’ to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal, i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves.
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Notes
Although, Nietzsche does not use the term ‘Nihilismus’ in the early period with which we are here concerned, he is already diagnosing a sickness, a listlessness and groundlessness, in his contemporary European (often especially German) culture, clearly anticipating his later more technical conception of nihilism.
See Haar (1993, pp. 30–33). He writes that the death of God is the loss “Non seulement de tout ideal, mais toute intelligibilité, de toute idée. Avec Dieu disparait la guarantie d’un monde intelligible, la garantie aussi de toutes les identities stables, y compris celle du moi” (p. 32).
This is often accompanied by the recognition of Nietzsche’s then unconventional prioritizing of the figures from the archaic period (mid-eighth to early-fifth century B.C.E.) over figures of the classical period (fifth to fourth century B.C.E.), which I discuss briefly below. Elizabeth Rawson writes representatively, “The Greece [Nietzsche] loves is the Greece of the sixth and early fifth centuries, naïve and spontaneous, productive of great aristocratic individuals—the lyric poets, the early philosophers.” See Rawson (1969, p. 330).
Habermas (1993, p. 126). In his defense, at another point in the same text, Habermas seems to argue compellingly for a futural, in his terms “utopian,” Nietzschean project. He cites Nietzsche’s well-known remark from “The Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in which he characterizes the past as “oracular” and indicates that only as “masterbuilders of the future” are we able to interpret its pronouncements (UB II, KSA 1, 294/§6). Habermas then concludes, “This utopian attitude, directed to the god who is coming, distinguishes Nietzsche’s undertaking from the reactionary call of ‘Back to the origins!’” (1993, p. 87).
Earlier in “We Philogists” (WP, KSA 8, 11–130), Nietzsche states even more strongly: “My goal is: To breed a full enmity between our contemporary ‘culture’ and antiquity. Whoever wishes to serve the former must hate the latter” (WP, KSA 8, 33/3[68]).
In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche rejects the attitudes toward the Greeks of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment-leaning classicists are the “learned philistines of our day” who imagine the Greeks as “sober and precocious technicians and cheerful ones,” while the Romantics are the “unscholarly fantasts” who prefer to see the Greeks as “having lived in self-indulgent suspension, sounding, breathing, and feeling” (PTZG, KSA 1, 805/§1). Nietzsche declares both incapable of explaining the profound influence the Greeks have subsequently enjoyed in the West.
Porter (2000, p. 20).
Porter (2000, p. 230).
Porter (2000, p. 20).
Porter (2000, p. 240).
In a letter to his mother and sister of February 15th, 1873, Nietzsche writes, “Besides, I have been busy, and if health and the Easter vacation permit, then I will be finished with a new book before summer. The title will probably be Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks” (KSAB 4, 122–123/No. 295). He also suggests elsewhere different titles, including “The Last Philosopher,” “The Philosopher,” and “The Philosopher as Cultural Physician.” Nietzsche explicitly refers to this project as “a companion piece to the Birth” in a letter to Carl von Gersdorf a few weeks later on March 2nd (KSAB 4, 132/No. 298). See Nietzsche (1979, pp. xviii–xxiii). Given this, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks can be illuminated and filled out through careful comparison to The Birth of Tragedy. In addition, we will be able to employ as supplementary material the related lecture course entitled “The Pre-Platonic Philosophers,” which Nietzsche delivered in some form four times over the course of this period (1869, 1872, 1873, and 1876). This has been published in English in Nietzsche (2006).
In considering the birth and decline of tragedy, of course, the decisive transition occurs with the figure Socrates and the “aesthetic Socratism” of Euripides. We can only speculate here about the interpretation of Socrates as pre-Platonic thinker in Philosophy in the Tragic Age, that discussion having been left unfinished, but we might at least observe that the different points of decisive transformation in philosophy and tragedy (Plato for the former and Socrates for the latter) need not entail an inconsistency. It is perfectly possible that Socrates remains a pre-Platonic thinker insofar as his philosophical project represents the last great, direct, and inspired response to Nature’s unfolding, even if the dialectical mode that Socrates requires of himself and others in responding to this unfolding brings about the death of tragedy through the excising of the Dionysian.
On the unorthodox, but not completely unprecedented, character of Nietzsche’s evaluation of the pre-Socratic thinkers, see Porter’s (2000, pp. 226–248) assault on the “myth” that Nietzsche discovered a “counter-classical antiquity” and was the lone and prophetic champion of the archaic Greek thinkers, a myth he sees originating with Oehler’s (1904).
In his inaugural address upon taking up the chair in philology at Basel in 1869, Nietzsche delivered a lecture entitled “On Homer’s Personality (Persönlichkeit),” distributed later under the title “Homer and Classical Philology.” The text for this can be found in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe edited by Colli and Montinari (1988), Band 2, 248–269. This investigation of the Homeric personality differs quite significantly from his later project in Philosophy in the Tragic Age insofar as Nietzsche is responding in the earlier work specifically to the scholarly dispute concerning whether the Homeric epics were composed by a single genius poet or by multiple poets, and thus the notion of “personality” is here initially little more than a marker for an individual author. However, Nietzsche already writes of the long-standing, even ancient concern with the identity of the author of the Iliad and Odyssey as a topic in relation to which scholars “for the first time perceived the wonderful capacity of the soul of a people to represent the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of a personality” (1988, p. 255). Although, slight, there is a resonance between the phenomenological and non-subjective conception of personality that we find in Philosophy and the Tragic Age and the claim here that the personality of Homer, posited at the base of his poetic works, would function as a representation of the “conditions (Bedingungen)” of a culture’s morals and beliefs. Furthermore, Nietzsche ultimately posits a personality at the base of these poetic works, although one distinct from the synthesizer he associates with the name “Homer,” and he speaks here of the “songs that sprang up naturally in the poet’s mind and were written down with instinctive power” (1988, p. 264). Again, we find an early foreshadowing in this complex of personality, a “natural” source of poetry, and the “instinctive” relation between the poet and the source.
Oehler (1910). For Oehler, Nietzsche is interested in recovering from our tradition the “[m]ächtige, selbstbewusste, sebltsichere Persönlichkeiten,” the “Schöpfer großer Weltkonzeptionen,” “Finder neuer Lebenswerte” (1910, p. 5), and “Sprecher ihrer Zeit” (1910, p. 6)—those figures who provided their contemporaries with models and impulses for self-examination and self-transformation. Indeed, according to Oehler, “[f]ür die Gegenwart hat Nietzsche diese Bedeutung erlangt” (1910, p. 29). Because his analysis remains at the psychological level, not plumbing the extra-subjective depths of these personalities and thereby exposing the ambivalent and troubling aspects (the abyssal disorder at their base and the non-virtuous origins of their virtue), Oehler misses the complex significance Nietzsche intended these past personalities to possess as well as the complexity of Nietzsche’s own self-presentation. There are some anthemic strains in Nietzsche’s rhetoric that point toward hero-worship to be sure, but these are always tempered with irony, mockery, menace, and a multiplicity of other perspectives. If Oehler is right, and Nietzsche did become this kind of a model for his contemporaries, this was contrary to Nietzsche’s intentions. On Nietzsche’s interest in these early historical exemplars, see also Wilkerson (2006), especially Chap. 2.
“Translator’s Preface,” in Nietzsche (2006, p. xxvii).
During his middle period, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche diagnoses the moral abstemiousness and “selflessness” of late-modernity as arising from “a weakened, thin, extinguished, self-denying, and self-disowning personality (Persönlichkeit),” which he remarks (echoing the discussion in §1–2 of Philosophy in the Tragic Age) “is no longer fit for anything good,” and “least of all fit for philosophy” (FW, KSA 3, 577/§345).
Martin Heidegger surely misses the real radicality of Nietzsche’s turn to “personality” in approaching the pre-Platonic thinkers. In his essay, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” Heidegger remarks disparagingly that, “Der junge Nietzsche gewinnt zwar in seiner Weise ein lebendgies Verhältnis zur Persönlichkeit der vorplatonischen Philosophen, seine Auslegungen der Texte sind aber durchaus herkömmlich, wenn nicht gar oberflächlich” (1950/1992, p. 298/323). Heidegger’s dismissive attitude results from his sense that attentiveness to “Persönlichkeit” amounts to a merely psychological, rather than ontological approach, which would impose an anachronistic notion of modern subjectivity on Greek thought. Against such approaches, In Einführung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger states straightforwardly, “Bei den Griechen gab es noch keine Persönlichkeiten.” (1953/1998, p. 114). See also Heidegger (2003, pp. 121–134). Here Heidegger relates Nietzsche’s concept of Persönlichkeit in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life to the determination of the human as zoon logon echon, to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, and to Kant’s grounding of human personality in Vernünftigkeit.
Although, the valence is slightly different and the emphasis is on the moral/immoral ground out of which the supposed rational or philosophical arises, nonetheless the association between philosophical thinking, personality, and the growth of a plant from out of a certain soil recurs in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche writes there that every great philosophy has been “the self-confession of its creator and a kind of involuntary and unselfconscious memoire; in that, the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the original life-seed from which the whole plant has grown (den eigentlichen Lebenskeim ausmachten, aus dem jedesmal die ganze Pflanze gewachesen ist)” (JGB, KSA 5, 19–20/§6). My thanks to Alan Schrift, who was kind enough to read a draft of this essay, for suggesting this connection.
Nietzsche (1962, p. 23).
Heidegger (1927/1993, p. 134, pp. 134–142). For a further discussion of Angst or ‘anxiety’ as a Grundstimmung or ‘fundamental attunement,’ see “Was ist die Metaphysik?,” in Heidegger (1967, pp. 1–19), and for a discussion of the role of θαυμάζειν or ‘wonder’ as the original Grundstimmung of philosophy in Greek thought, see Heidegger (1984, pp. 151–190). For extremely helpful discussions of Heidegger’s understanding of Stimmung, see Haar (1988, pp. 265–283), and K. Held, “Fundamental Moods and Heidegger’s Critique of Contemporary Culture,” in Sallis (1993, pp. 286–303).
Nietzsche sometimes approaches this exposure in the context of critiquing the great faith moderns had placed in the power and truth of “consciousness (Bewußtsein).” However, it is important to realize that, just as his discussion of Stimmung effectively dissolves the subject/object division and radicalizes the notion of the subject, his discussion of the conscious and unconscious effectively dissolves this distinction and exceeds the purely psychological. See especially his discussion in “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense” (“WL,” KSA I, 875–877) and later the section of his Gay Science entitled “Consciousness” (FW, KSA 3, 382–383/§11). Also, for a thorough treatment of this theme over the course of Nietzsche’s career, although psychological in its focus, see Gödde (2002, pp. 154–194), the discussion of the early period is especially relevant here (pp. 160–168).
Both in the Nachlass notes from this period and in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche indicates that he has reflected a great deal on the phenomenon of Stimmung. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche mobilizes Schiller’s notion of musikalische Stimmung to reject the established categorization of Archilochus as a “subjective artist,” arguing that the ‘musical attunement’ that precedes Archilochus’ poetic production is not a merely internal occurrence, but an ecstatic, externalizing/penetrating occurrence, whereby “he has become first, as Dionysian artist, wholly one with the primal unity, with its pain and contradiction” (GT, KSA I, 43/§5). Below we turn to the kind of “primal unity” that might be characterized by “pain and contradiction.”
With this deepening of Nietzsche’s approach to pre-Platonic personalities through reflection on his employment of Stimmung or ‘attunement,’ I believe we are able to answer John Sallis’ worry that, “Perhaps, even, the emphasis on personality has the effect of obscuring the early Greek engagement with tragic disclosure” (1991, p. 101). Although, Sallis himself goes on to suggest that this is not entirely the case, I hope in the following section to show that it is even precisely by way of his focus on a radicalized notion of personality that Nietzsche believes he can encounter the tragic aspect of pre-Platonic philosophical thought, which is to say, its creative response to an abyssal and valueless world. In the Nachlass from Summer 1872 to the beginning of 1873, there is a section titled, “The philosopher of tragic recognition,” in which Nietzsche declares this willful and acknowledged creativity to be the very essence of tragic thought—“One must will the illusion itself—therein lies the tragic” (KAS 7, 428/19 [35]).
In The Birth of Tragedy, Stimmung involves a non-subject/object ordered relation between thought and world (GT, KSA 1, 42–45/§5). Indeed, the Apollonian drive toward ‘appearance or semblance (Schein),’ insofar as this belongs to Nature itself (GT, KSA 1, 27–28/§1, 38–39/§4), involves the breakdown of the distinction between appearance and being that Nietzsche will state directly later on. He writes for instance in The Gay Science, in the section entitled, “Der Bewusstsein vom Scheine,” “What is ‘appearance (Schein)’ to me now! Truly not the opposite of an essence (eines Wesens). What do I know to say of any essence except only the predicates of its appearance! Clearly it is not a dead mask, that one could place upon an unknown ‘x,’ and also take it off! Appearance is for me the active and living itself (das Wirkende und Lebende)” (FW, KSA 1, 417/§54).
Sarah Kofman, in her essay on Heraclitus’ status as ὁ σκοτεινός or ‘the obscure one,’ points out that Nietzsche’s insistence on ‘intuition’ as the initial and in a sense privileged philosophical mode of relating to the world does not leave the binary ‘intuitive understanding’ versus ‘rational or reflective understanding’ untouched as it inverts it. Rather, Nietzsche effects a displacement of this binary to a different register, such that these are simply two modes of relating to the world, neither able to claim any superior ‘truth,’ for truth now means something altogether different (namely, a great or creative response to the provocation of phusis) (46–47). See Kofman (1987, pp. 39–55).
In a note from the period of Philosophy in the Tragic Age’s composition, we find an outline of the trajectory of early Greek thought where Nietzsche summarizes each pre-Platonic thinker’s central characteristic. Next to the name ‘Thales’ he writes, “Freedom from Myth (Freiheit vom Mythus)” (KSA 7, 421/19[18]). It is also interesting to note that next to Socrates he writes simply “Love and Education (Liebe und Bilding)” (KSA 7, 422/19[18]).
See Guthrie (1950, pp. 223–231). Guthrie distinguishes two modes of prophecy, “sane” and “mad or inspired,” and identifies the mode of the Trophonian oracle as the latter. It is also interesting to note the connection he makes between such prophetic madness and the earth—“The underground sanctuary of Trophonios was a manteion, and where this sort of prophecy is practiced, it will usually be found that an earth-spirit is at the bottom of it” (p. 229). Here the earth and the chthonic deities would seem to be associated with the concealing, disordering, and disruptive moment in phusis, which we will discuss in what follows. Guthrie does not, however, remark on what distinguishes the Trophonian oracle from other manteia—the immediacy and direct exposure that characterizes its mode of consultation.
See Pausanias (1935, 9.39.3ff.). Pausanias gives here a full description of the site and the rituals of, as well as the traumatizing effect of consulting, the oracle of Trophonius. Herodotus includes the Cave of Trophonius among the many oracles consulted by the Lydian king Chroesus, out of concern for fending off the Persian threat (Histories, 1.46.1) and he also tells the story of the emissary of a Greek general who bribes a man to consult the oracle for him, presumably out of fear (Histories, 8.133.1). Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds compares his fear at entering Socrates’ “Thinkery” to the fear of a petitioner consulting the oracle of Trophonius (Clouds, 506). Finally, Plutarch in his Symposium offers the (probably wholly invented and even here second-hand) account of Timarchos, who in his encounter with Trophonius saw a “Platonic” vision of heaven and hell and was instructed in the soul’s escape from the body—he likens the experience to a blow to the head (VII.5.3). Albert Schachter, in his entry on Trophonius, states of the katabasis, “The experience was spectacular, frightening, notorius, and expensive.” See Schacter (1996, p. 1556). Also, see the description of the preliminary rituals in Fabian (1979, p. 987), and Harrison (1903/1966, pp. 578–580).
Mihailo Djuric argues that, for Nietzsche, a certain “philosophical pathos,” which is nothing other than the “pathos of truth,” is operative throughout the entire history of philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel. In his estimation, Nietzsche’s radicality resides in his project, from early on in his career, of critiquing this pathos, and the exclusive “Streben nach Wahrheit” that arises from it, “als eigenartigen Wahnsinn” (p. 237). I am in agreement with the fairly straightforward thesis of Djuric’s published lecture, although I would argue that in Nietzsche’s early work on the pre-Platonics, he sees a different pathos at work, a pathos of phusis and, as we shall see, this involves an altogether different notion of ‘truth.’ See Djuric (1989, pp. 221–241).
Ingrid Hennemann Barale offers an interpretation of the relation between Nietzsche’s rejection of the modern focus on subjectivity and early Romantic aesthetic theory, in which she sees a fundamental parallel in their insistence on an ecstatic and, thus, externalized conception of the subject. Indeed, she makes the claim that, “Der Leitgedanke, der Nietzsches gesamtes Werk durchzieht, ist die Idee der ursprünglich abgründigen Natur der Subjektivität, die Künstler und Kunsttheoretiker des XVIII. Jahrhunderts so sehr in Verlegenheit gebracht hatte” (pp. 172–173). Although, I am in no position to judge the validity of her claim concerning this influence, I am in full agreement with her that his identification of an originally abyssal subject, which I link to his conception of “personality” in Philosophy in the Tragic Age, is central to Nietzsche’s early “anti-klassische” interpretation of the Greeks. See Barale (1989, pp. 158–181).
The pre-Platonic personalities Nietzsche uncovers can even be seen to point ahead to Georges Bataille’s Nietzsche-inspired “project,” especially as it is discussed throughout La somme athéologique (L’expérience interieure, Le coupable, and Sur Nietzsche) and in “anguish (angoisse)” that is “inner experience.” See Bataille (1973, pp. 8–189); for an overt connection between this project and Nietzsche, see Bataille (1973, pp. 9–182).
Rudolf Rehn, in his very brief treatment of three central themes in Philosophy in the Tragic Age, nicely emphasizes the way in which this imaginative and creative production of order aligns with Nietzsche’s repeated claim in The Birth of Tragedy that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the existence of world justified (gerechtfertigt)” (GT, KSA 1, 17/Pref. §5, see also 56–57/§7). Rehn writes, “Die innere Zerissenheit des theoretischen Menschen, der an der chaotischen, in kein (logisches) System zu bringenden Vielheit der Dingen leidet, ist nur die Kunst zu heilen, die keine Erklärung sucht, wo es keine Erklärung gibt, die nicht analysiert, sondern zusammen-schaut” (p. 40). See Rehn (1992, pp. 37–45).
Sallis sums up this liminal phenomenology at stake in Nietzsche’s interpretation, writing “In tragedy and in the thought of the early Greek philosophers the phenomenon is the same: it is that phenomenon that, strictly speaking, is no phenomenon at all but rather the unrepresentable abyss that tragedy lets shine in the distance as sublime” (1991, p. 102).
For a fundamental and illuminating discussion of force as phenomenality, see the introduction to Lee (2004, pp. 1–6), and for a fine study of this dynamic at work in Greek thought, specifically Hesiod’s Theogony, Plato’s Phaedo, and Aristotle’s Physics, see the first Chap. 9–33.
Opposing “humanistic” interpretations of the Greeks in the unpublished 1872 essay, “Homer’s Contest,” Nietzsche writes, “If we speak of humanity, it is on the basic assumption that it should be that which separates the human from nature and is his mark of distinction. But in reality there is no such separation: ‘natural’ characteristics and those called specifically ‘human’ have grown together inextricably. Man, in his highest, finest powers, is all nature and carries nature’s uncanny dual character in himself. Those capacities of his which are terrible and are viewed as inhuman are perhaps, indeed, the fertile soil from which alone all humanity, in feelings, deeds, and works, can grow forth” (“HW,” KSA I, 783–792).
In addition to the above-indicated substantive parallels between the opposition of the Dionysian and Apollonian in The Birth of Tragedy and phusis in Philosophy and the Tragic Age of the Greeks, there is evidence in the Nachlass that Nietzsche saw a connection between these two vocabularies and that he even used them interchangeably at times. In the Winter of 1872–1873, constructing one of his many chapter outlines for the projected treatment of the pre-Platonics, Nietzsche writes: “Chapter I. The Greeks as Philosophers. The sixth century. The miracle-men (Wundermänner). The Contest (Wettkampf). The Dionysian” (KSA 8, 538, #23[3]).
Pace Heidegger, who finds in Nietzsche’s “inverted Platonism” (a term Nietzsche is already using in 1870) and “will to power” a simple inversion of basic terms and thus a philosophy that fails to break free from the principles of metaphysics. See Heidegger (1961), especially “Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis” (Bd. 1, p. 473–658) and “Nietzsches Metaphysik” (Bd. 2, pp. 257–333).
Contra many interpreters of The Birth of Tragedy who understand the Dionysian as a direct echo of the Kantian Ding an sich or the Schopenhaurian “world will.” Although, in the later preface, the 1886 “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche does acknowledge the deficiency of the Schopenhauerian and thus residually Kantian vocabulary employed in his first book, he does not concede that his thought of the Dionysian amounted to a (ultimately inaccessible) metaphysical substrate or noumenal realm. For compelling rejections of any such approach, see Sallis (1991, p. 71), and Allison (1981, pp. 295–310).
Michel Foucault’s basic interpretation of the kind of “origin” Nietzschean genealogy aims to uncover and activate and his recognition that this is not located in the past per se, but in what Foucault will call the “history of the present” are consistent with my findings here. See Foucault (1971, pp. 145–172). For a critical discussion of Foucault’s interpretation, see Pizer (1970).
For a discussion of the essential relation between the phenomenological and hermeneutic methods, see §7, “Die phänomenologische Methode der Untersuchung,” in Heidegger (1927/1993, pp. 27–39). See also II.1.§3.B., “Heideggers Entwurf einer hermeneutischen Phänomenologie,” in Gadamer (1960, pp. 258–269). More generally, it should be quite clear that the complex Nietzschean thinking of history discussed here resonates with the hermeneutic approach to Überlieferung or ‘inherited tradition, traditionary text,’ insofar as neither pole of the interpretive relation, either text or interpreter, is primary, but it is the proper relation of these to one another that occasions successful interpretation. A special mention might even be made here of Gadamer’s insistence on the essential moment of disruption, negativity, and even pain in the Erfahrung of “historically affected consciousness.” See II.2.§3.B., “Der Begriff der Erfahrung und das Wesen der hermeneutischen Erfahrung,” 352–368. On this connection, see Schrift (1990).
Gilles Deleuze makes evident that Nietzschean genealogical philosophy (and early Nietzschean philology by my extension) is never disinterested in its evaluation of the past, but always involved, as a force contending against other forces and creating by overcoming opposition. He identifies therefore a complex relation to origin. Contra the Habermasian criticism, Deleuze sees Nietzsche as attacking “la haute idée de fondement, qui lasse les valeurs indifférentes a leur propre origin,” but this amounts to a radicalization or de-simplification of the very notion of origin. Thus, “Généalogie veut dire à la fois valeur de l’origine et origine des valeurs…Généalogie signifie l’élément differéntiel des valeurs dont découle leur valeur elle-même. Généalogie veut donc dire origine ou naissance, mais aussi difference ou distance dans l’origine” (1962, pp. 2–3). Given this, we must not see the critique of our traditional and inherited values as a moment separate from the creation of new values. These are, rather, one and the same in the contestation that is Nietzschean genealogical or philological thinking. See Deleuze (1962), esp. the section entitled “La concept de la genealogie” in Part One, “La tragique.”
This is a sentiment Nietzsche repeatedly expresses, but very precisely in “The Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life,” where he writes, “The speech of the past is always oracular speech: Only as masterbuilders of the future, as those who know the present will you understand it” (UB II, KSA 1, 294/§6). See also the section of The Gay Science entitled “Nur als Schaffende!” (FW, KSA 3, 422/§58).
“Zukunftsphilologie!” was the title of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff’s acerbic review of The Birth of Tragedy, an obvious play on Wagner’s grandiose notion of Zukunftsmusik, which was intended to mock the book’s overt praise for Wagner as the modern resurgence of profoundly tragic art, as well as to indicate that whatever Nietzsche is up to, it does not qualify as philology by any then present measure. See Wilamovitz-Möllendorf (1969, pp. 27–55). Nietzsche is able to take up and affirm the term according to the complex and radical notion of philology we have uncovered here.
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Kirkland, S.D. Nietzsche and drawing near to the personalities of the pre-Platonic Greeks. Cont Philos Rev 44, 417–437 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9199-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9199-0