Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Philosophy

1. Katharina Grätz / Sebastian Kaufmann (eds.), Nietzsche zwischen Philosophie und Literatur: Von der “Fröhlichen Wissenschaft” zu “Also sprach Zarathustra”. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2016, 442 pp., ISBN 978-3825366698.

2. Rüdiger Görner, Hat man mich verstanden? Denkästhetische Untersuchungen zu Nietzsches (Selbst-)Wahrnehmungen (Beiträge zu Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 19), Basel: Schwabe 2017, 216 pp., ISBN 978-3795636373.

3. Tobias Brücker, Auf dem Weg zur Philosophie: Friedrich Nietzsche schreibt “Der Wanderer und sein Schatten”. Paderborn: Fink 2019, 325 pp., ISBN 978-3846764053.

4. Gabriella Pelloni / Claus Zittel (eds.), Poetica in Permanenza: Studi su Nietzsche. Pisa: Edizioni ETS 2017, 306 pp., ISBN 978-8846749314.

In a letter to Georg Brandes from May 4, 1888, Nietzsche writes (commenting on the fact that his composition Hymn to Life has now been sent off to Copenhagen): “Wir Philosophen sind für nichts dankbarer, als wenn man uns mit den Künstlern verwechselt” (no. 1030, KSB 8.309). This playful, ironic remark captures the ambiguity of his relation to literature and aesthetic expression. He is obviously proud of his musical composition, telling Brandes in the same letter that he believes that it will soon be performed. But the remark also shows him speaking from the position of a philosopher for whom aesthetic appearance is precisely a mode of appearing, and perhaps even a mode of seduction in the service of his philosophy. We can follow Nietzsche’s preoccupation with the role and significance of style and presentation throughout his notebooks, in his later prefaces, and in the autobiography. In the notebooks from the summer of 1882, there is a section “Zur Lehre vom Stil” (Nachlass 1882, 1[109], KSA 10.38) in which he stresses the role of mastering gesture: “Man muß Alles, Länge und Kürze der Sätze, die Interpunktionen, die Wahl der Worte, die Pausen, die Reihenfolge der Argumente – als Gebärden empfinden lernen.” He clearly sought, and also considered himself to have achieved, a superior style in his command of the German language. When writing to Erwin Rohde in the winter of 1884 about Zarathustra (1883–1885), he exclaims, hyperbolically, that with this book he had brought the German language to its “completion”: “Es war, nach Luther und Goethe, noch ein dritter Schritt zu thun –; sieh zu, alter Herzens-Kamerad, ob Kraft, Geschmeidigkeit und Wohllaut je schon in unsrer Sprache so beieinander gewesen sind” (February 22, 1884, no. 490, KSB 6.479).

It was with the publication of Zarathustra and its exceptional literary success from the early 1890s onward, that Nietzsche became known as a Dichterphilosoph, read and admired in wide circles for his aesthetically accessible and enticing expression. But as his thinking became a topic of interpretation and exposition, from Brandes onward, the focus was on his doctrines and cultural critique of morals and religion, and not on the nature of his writing and style. The term Dichterphilosoph was instead often used to diminish his place in the history of philosophy in a more strictly disciplinary sense. When influential philosophers from the 1930s onward – Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in particular – sought to secure his place within a classical epistemological and metaphysical canon, it was not the Dichter-side of his achievement, but the Philosoph that was in focus, as precisely a philosopher of life, knowledge, and being. The post-war reception of Nietzsche in France, animated by a desire to transcend a Hegelian and phenomenological matrix, found a linguistic-constructivist Nietzsche whose views on language and the metaphorical transmission of reality pointed toward a post-systematic philosophy. But the interest was still largely directed toward his views on language and reality, rather than toward his literary and poetic means of expressing them. It is only in the last two decades that this latter aspect of Nietzsche’s work has really become the focus of research, interpretation, and debate, especially in the German-speaking world. A seminal work in this vein was Claus Zittel’s study Das Ästhetische Kalkül, first published in 2000.^[1] Its central argument was that previous interpretations of Zarathustra had either disparaged its philosophy by reducing it to a literary-mythological treatise, or it had sought to draw out its philosophical theses and doctrines without paying attention to its means of expression. Thus, such readings were “dichtungsblind.”^[2] In contrast, Zittel proposed a reading that could explore the “bedeutungskonstituierende ästhetische Verfahren” of the book, without thereby reducing its philosophical agenda to its formal-linguistic elements. This kind of approach seeks to combine literary theory and philosophy into a new kind of interpretative synthesis. Axel Pichler, a younger scholar working in a similar vein, refers to it as a “poesiological” approach.^[3]

1. This new orientation toward the aesthetics of Nietzsche’s thinking and toward the intricate connections between literature and philosophy in his work has inspired several collective efforts in recent years. In 2015 a conference was organized in Heidelberg by Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann on the topic “Nietzsche zwischen Philosophie und Literatur,” from which a volume was published with the same title. It comprises seventeen contributions from many of the most knowledgeable Nietzsche scholars in the German-speaking world, from both the older and the younger generation. In their preface the editors set the stage for the discussion by recalling the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature. Both in Parmenides and in Plato, as the founders of Western metaphysics, philosophical ideas are conveyed through literary representation. Or as they state: “das Denken ging gleichsam aus dem Dichten hervor” (16). Plato’s critique of the poets is part of a rivalry that has to do less with the aesthetic mode of discourse than with its relation to truth. Already with Aristotle the balance has shifted as philosophical prose secures a superior discursive position under which poetic expression is analysed as a sub-domain, as in his Poetics and Rhetoric.

Throughout its subsequent history, philosophy would make use of various different means of expression, from dialogue to autobiography, from systematic treatise to epigrams and aphorisms, and it gradually expanded its expressive force through new concepts, metaphors, and analogies. But it is only with German Romanticism that the relation between philosophy and literature, and thus what we could call the poetics of rationality, is posed as a philosophical question in its own right, leading to experiments with a “new mythology.” Despite the many attempts during the twentieth century to explore and transgress the boundary between philosophy and literature, by Heidegger not least, Nietzsche remains unique – the editors argue – for the way in which he uses literary means for philosophical purposes. In The Gay Science (1882/1887), for instance, he moves apparently seamlessly between literary and a scientific discourse, combining carefully crafted micro-analyses of morals and epistemology with sections of playful poetry. With Zarathustra he created a work that transcends all traditional genres with its combination of drama, satire, dialogue, dithyrambs, songs, hymns, and declamatory philosophical expositions. The aim of the volume is stated as follows: “die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Philosophie und Dichtkunst und der möglichen Erkenntnisleistung literarischer Schreibweisen für philosophisches Denken in der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft und im Zarathustra” (24).

The most substantial part of the volume concerns The Gay Science, which is explored from various angles that illuminate its composition, its combination of philosophy and poetry, stressing the relation between the first and second edition and the preface of the latter edition. Axel Pichler discusses it as a case of “prosopopeisches Denken,” the genesis of which he examines in minute detail from the viewpoint of surrounding material, notebooks, correspondences, and proofs. In a careful reading of this particular text, he highlights it as unique among the new prefaces from 1886 for how it ties together the earlier four parts with the fifth book and the new poems, providing an “autogenealogischen Selbstkommentar” (72). Pichler’s essay is also a defence of its own interpretative model and its relative merits, recognizing that ultimately it can only assist, not replace, a philosophical interpretation of the content. The detailed analysis of the emergence and significance of The Gay Science is highlighted further by Marco Brusotti. Guided by the correspondence between Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz concerning the last proofs, it reveals how the final changes in the manuscript display a deeper concern on the part of Nietzsche for how to understand and present himself at this stage. As Nietzsche sought to leave behind the image of “Freigeisterei,” Brusotti shows how his last-minute changes (some of which are quite extensive, notably in GS 107 and 127) introduce the topic of self-critique in reflecting on his earlier “Moralität der Erkenntnis” and “überstrengen Redlichkeit.” Andreas Urs Sommer’s contribution follows a similar argument, displaying the tensions within the composition of the second edition and how Nietzsche was vacillating between using the fifth book for Beyond Good and Evil of 1886 (to which it really belongs in terms of its content) or connecting it to books 1–4.

Christian Benne also recalls the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia (personification) in an essay that focuses on the first book of The Gay Science, especially the first aphorism, which he sees as a directive for how to read the entire text. He highlights its multivocal structure and how it establishes a link between The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the later writings through the lens of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Pointing beyond a standard philosophical positioning of tragedy at the centre of its affective and metaphysical aspirations, Benne sees how it opens the stage for a “gay science” and “waves of interminable laughter.” In an interesting essay, but whose relation to the overall theme of the volume is less clear, Robert Krause brings to light a source from Nietzsche’s library, Alfred Espinas’ Die tierischen Gesellschaften (1879). It explores an animal sociology that seems to have been an important source for the many animals that crowd Nietzsche’s texts. Krause shows, convincingly, how it also contributed to the development of Nietzsche’s understanding of life in general.

In a sophisticated contribution that aims for the core problematic, Thomas Forrer explores Nietzsche’s writing as a “Rhetorik der Zukunft.” He introduces his theme by highlighting an early note in the notebooks (Nachlass 1871, 9[133], KSA 7.323) on how “[d]ie Kunstgestalten sind realer als die Wirklichkeit.” Referring to an earlier analysis of mimesis by Hermann Koller on the different ways in which it need not necessarily be understood as an aesthetic re-presentation of what is at hand, he reclaims an original ancient sense of mimesis as a formation and anticipation of a reality in the making. He speaks of it as a “Mimesis der Ansteckung” and as a presentation without a definitive object. In thus stressing the creative side of mimesis, Forrer reads The Gay Science as a creative anticipation of Zarathustra, not merely as an “Übergang,” but as a “Paratext” oriented toward an unknown future. In Volker Gerhardt’s contribution, Nietzsche’s revolutionary impact on the discussion of the relation between philosophy and science is raised again, stressing how he manages to uproot what already then had been established as a more limited scope of philosophy within the systematic structure of academic scientific culture. The question of alienation and of the role of art and its connection to knowledge was reopened through his influential critique, notably in The Gay Science.

When Nietzsche’s aesthetic and poetic mode of philosophizing is in focus, readers tend to neglect how harshly he would also criticize the poets. In GS 84 he comments with sarcasm on how people are seduced into believing things as long as they are formulated in a poetic, rhythmical language, ending the aphorism by recalling Homer’s words “viel lügen die Dichter.” This inner tension between the attraction toward poetic, rhythmic discourse and the simultaneous critique of the poets is discussed and highlighted in a lucid essay by Renate Reschke. She demonstrates how the problem is first displayed in the essay On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense (1873) and continues to reverberate in the later writings when Nietzsche discusses the tendency to and even desire for poetically induced self-deception. The analysis complicates the reading proposed by Sebastian Kaufmann who stresses the way in which The Gay Science in particular takes leave of a traditional philosophical notion of truth, in favour of poetic creation, as a way for life to preserve itself in the face of an abysmal non-discursive reality and as a departure from a Wille zur Macht toward a Wille zum Schein (105). But in the one-sided affirmation of poetry over truth, he disregards too easily the many ways in which Nietzsche still upholds a reflexive conception of truth.^[4]

This points to the general problem when reading Nietzsche of how to read texts that often criticize what appears to constitute their own premises without reducing them to contradiction or paradox. The role and function of poetic means of expression in philosophy highlights this challenge, since Nietzsche, like Plato, is a poetic thinker who criticizes the poets. Helmut Heit touches on this question in his contribution when arguing that in Nietzsche the relation between the literary and the philosophical is not categorical but rather gradual. He develops this point in a careful interpretation of “Der Tolle Mensch” from The Gay Science and its proclamation of the death of God. It reads differently when we approach it not as a fixed doctrine but rather as a poetic configuration that speaks in the mode of “contingency.” Overall he stresses how Nietzsche through his famous parable “vermeidet die falsche Alternative zwischen poetischer Erregung und theoretischer Übertragung” (240).

Jakob Dellinger looks instead at GS 354, exploring how it has been used in recent debates within the Anglophone philosophical domain of the “philosophy of mind” where it is taken out of its literary-poetic context and explored as a definitive doctrine of the social function of consciousness. In an impressive and detailed exploration of this particular text, he shows how the restricted application of its philosophical content can benefit from a connection to its more complex literary shape and larger cultural-critical agenda. Through both of these contributions we are again reminded of how an attention to the literary-poetic composition of Nietzsche’s writing can bring us closer also to his philosophical-theoretical ideas. The same point is made in Barbara Neymeyr’s beautiful essay on how metaphors are what contribute to Nietzsche’s “experimentelle Denkformen” that cultivate “das heuristische Potential von Intuition, Intellekt und Phantasie im kreativen Sprachspiel” (331).

The editor Katharina Grätz introduces the second and shorter part of the book devoted to Zarathustra with a careful literary reading of the character of Zarathustra himself who is described as a “philosophisch-dichterischer Zwittercharakter” (359). She studies how this figure that Thomas Mann once critically referred to as “superficial” (“flach”) is developed, through inner dialogue, and also through a constant interaction with outer phenomena, with nature, animals, etc. She stresses the “polyphonic” mode of his discourse, concluding that he is “ein literarisches Konstrukt […], Name für ein Bündel von Rollen.” Also Friederike Günter’s interpretation shows how a literary perspective on Zarathustra can move us beyond the declamatory prophet and teacher and let us see instead how he constantly stumbles and fails and how human existence is portrayed more as “Bruchstück, Lahmfuß und Krüppel” (396).

This impressive volume ends with two essays by the senior scholars Wolfram Groddeck and Werner Stegmaier who both in their different ways have been important in opening up for these new modes of reading the Nietzschean text where careful philological interpretation is used in the service of exploring its philosophical content. Groddeck focuses on the dithyramb, which he places in its historical context of poetry for obscene festivals, showing how Nietzsche makes use of its form in some of his most sophisticated creations such as the Nachtlied. In a sensitive analysis of his use of meter, he argues that Nietzsche sometimes appears as not wanting to be understood by each and anyone, seeking a discourse that could instead communicate from soul to soul. In a fitting coda, Stegmaier focuses on the Mitternachtslied, highlighting it as a cipher for the future calling for a deeper responsibility for the earth.

As a volume of conference proceedings, the book is impressive for its list of authors and for the overall high quality of its contributions, but it would have merited a more complete editing, including an index that would have made it even more useful for future research.

2. In his collection of essays Hat man mich verstanden?, Rüdiger Görner, a professor of comparative literature in London, approaches Nietzsche through the lens of what he calls “denkästhetische Untersuchungen.” The term “aesthetics” is here partly used in the older sense of sensibility and in an interest in the bodily and physical aspects of intellectuality. This is displayed by paying attention to what Nietzsche himself says about the senses, not just sight and hearing, but also smell. But in its extension the analysis is reconnected to the question of style as a form of seduction. Görner recalls a letter to Lou von Salomé about how the style of a text should show “daß man an seine Gedanken glaubt, und sie nicht nur denkt, sondern empfindet” (August 8/24, 1882, no. 288, KSB 6.244). Thus he seeks to approach something that he refers to as “eine sinnlich-geistig vermittelte Seinserfahrung” (34). The book consists of thirteen chapters grouped into six different sections. Despite the title and the programmatic tone of the introduction, it does not, however, constitute a systematic treatment of its topic nor does it follow a consistent methodological approach. The impression is rather that of a collection of essays on various themes, texts, and their reception. The second chapter provides an illuminating analysis of the “halcyonic” in Zarathustra as a “tonaler Modus der Selbstbestimmung, der das Andere zum Eigenen werden lässt und das Eigene wiederum verfremdet” (49). The third chapter addresses the late prefaces from 1886 as a display of self-presentation and as such is very much related to the contributions by Pichler, Brusotti, and Sommer in the Grätz-Kaufmann volume.

In a separate section, Görner focuses on the reception of Nietzsche by Jean Améry and Imre Kertész. The latter apparently translated The Birth of Tragedy into Hungarian and, according to Görner, he preserved a lasting relation to Nietzsche, whose “Denken könnte man als das Aroma in Kertész’ Schaffen bezeichnen” (175), a surprising thesis which he explores. For Améry, who was explicitly critical about Nietzsche, notably his understanding of ressentiment, the issue is more complicated. Görner recounts the changing phases of Améry’s approach from outright rejection to a more nuanced perception in later writings partly mediated through his appreciation of (the Nietzschean) Foucault. The analysis is instructive but tarnished by a misguided accusation that Améry himself was led by ressentiment in his earlier critical assessment of Nietzsche’s concept.

In the final text of the book, Görner returns to his overall theme, citing the letter to Brandes quoted at the outset about seduction by art (187). Here he says that it was not the novel but rather the Platonic dialogue that was the ideal form for which Nietzsche sought to mix drama, epistle, essay, autobiography, in a “Poetisierung des Denkens” (190). Thus he was able to stage a unique form of “Gedankenballett” (192) as a “Poetik des Gehens, der Sinnlichkeit, einer erfühlten Rhythmik.” In short, according to Görner, Nietzsche did what he could in order precisely to “mit einem Künstler verwechselt werden zu können” as part of his aesthetic re-evaluation of thinking. The blending of style, voice, and expression that often confused interpreters was what he aspired to accomplish and what he also achieved.

3. The more sensuous and bodily aspects of the aesthetics of thought in Nietzsche are explored at length in Tobias Brücker’s impressive monograph on The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880) and the biographical conditions of its composition. As a work of textual biography it breaks new ground through its detailed micro-historical approach to what he refers to as the “materiale Entstehungsweise von Philosophie” (2), using both textual and social-historical archives. He compares himself to sociologists of science who explore the conditions for scientific discoveries by examining laboratories, institutions, and living conditions as well as letters and manuscripts, down to the details of the manual writing process. This approach is affiliated with a media-theoretical approach in German letters generally, and in Nietzsche research in particular, from Friedrich Kittler onward. But Brücker’s consistent application of this methodological framework and the detailed attention to Nietzsche’s biographical situation at the time of writing The Wanderer makes his study a unique and valuable contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, especially for anyone with a particular interest in this early phase when Nietzsche first steps forth as a free scholar and writer after his forced retirement. Brücker also has a wider philosophical agenda: to convey how during the particular phase of writing The Wanderer Nietzsche was more favourably disposed toward modern democratic political ideals. He traces this partly from the inspiration of English writers, notably from Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. They are said to have inspired him to a more open, “lockeren” style, a looser and more light-hearted form of writing. His basic idea is that The Wanderer, more than the previous Human, All Too Human (1878) of which it was later made an integral part, mirrors this new attitude that is also connected to a care for the self through diets and exercise.

In his use of the Nachlass, Brücker makes an important methodological point criticising Colli’s and Montinari’s established classification of the material from the notebooks. They claimed to be able to draw a clear line between what was considered as working notes for published entries and independent fragments, on the one hand, and practical matters, on the other, that concerned diet, travels, health, etc., thus concealing their standing as “Arbeitsmanuskripte im Kontext einer mobilen Schreibsituation und eines persönlichen Alltags” (18 f.).^[5] As an example of how this can play out, Brücker makes the point that the concrete background of the “Lehren der letzten Dinge” can in fact be traced to what can be found in the so-called Kurortsliteratur on diet and exercise that Nietzsche was also studying at this time (179). Another important and fascinating aspect of the study concerns the nature of the Swiss Engadin at the time of Nietzsche’s visit and the writing of the book. Within a few decades it had been transformed from a valley region with isolated mountain villages into a set of geographical nodes within a cosmopolitan modern culture of health tourism of which Nietzsche himself was also a part. In St. Moritz, Nietzsche found a landscape that suited his bodily and spiritual needs and permitted him to retrieve his voice as a writer; this was not just an eternal archaic mountain wilderness above and beyond contemporary civilization, but a cultural site on the critical fringe of what Brücker speaks of as a “Casino-Panorama” in an age of emerging mass-tourism.

Brücker adopts an intentionally mundane attitude with regard to the myth of Nietzsche as the prophet and seer in the mountains. The overall purpose is not just a critical stance, but it seeks to bring the reader closer to the actual process of Nietzsche’s unique writing under these specific circumstances. Whereas the neo-materialist penchant for minute practical detail sometimes tends to lead back only to old-fashioned biographical research, it proves its relevance here not least through the careful attention to the literal composition of the texts. Brücker makes a point of how Nietzsche integrates an inner dialogical structure and how he compensates for a lack of sensual gestures and tone through a creative use of diacritical graphic markers. He also makes a point of the fact that these texts are really composed in motion, during long walks, and how they seek to free themselves from the more stable style of the philosophical treatise, highlighting the genuine significance of Nietzsche’s own frequent references to how his books have been written “mit meinem ganzen Leib und Leben” (103) and in an “experimental” spirit.

An important part of the argument concerns the earlier mentioned question concerning Nietzsche’s politics during the time of The Wanderer. From its remarks on democracy as being a condition for a step toward peace and even a protection against tyranny and a dismantling of a hierarchical class society, Brücker makes the point that Nietzsche’s interest in health and diet and his aspiration to find a lighter and more open aphoristic style inspired by English-language writers can be connected to a shift of political inclination at this particular moment in his life. This question revolves around our reading and interpretation of the many remarks on democracy and modern social existence generally in The Wanderer. Brücker’s assessment highlights an ambiguity in Nietzsche’s position at this point that is not so much that of a philosopher-legislator, but rather that of an observer and interpreter of modern cultural-political forms. Arguing against Henning Ottmann and others, Brücker claims that at least during 1879 Nietzsche displayed a genuine interest in a “Sicherung der bürgerlichen Freiheit und Gleichheit,” even if yet based on a cultural-political agenda rather than a genuinely democratic one (207). Even if the text may not fully support the claim that this particular period contains such a distinct political agenda, the discussion is important as it invites a careful reading of these sections from Der Wanderer. Among the book’s merits should also be noted its many fascinating illustrations from photographs, facsimiles, and brochures that convey the atmosphere and situation of The Wanderer.

4. The fourth and last book to be covered in this review leads us back to its basic topic as initially presented in the Grätz-Kaufmann volume. It consists of another collection of essays from a symposium on Nietzsche and poetics organized the same year by Gabriella Pelloni and Claus Zittel collaborating between Stuttgart and Verona. In this bilingual volume (the contributions are in German and Italian) the central question is again how to understand the literary and poetic aspects of Nietzsche’s writings through a study of how he composes his texts with particular attention to the dialogical form and the problem of gesture. In a second part that could have formed the basis of a separate volume, the editors have gathered essays that treat the reception of Nietzsche by other writers, in some cases with surprising intertextual correspondences, as in Isolde Schiffermüller’s fascinating exploration of the resonance of Nietzsche in Kafka’s work. Another essay from this section especially worth mentioning is Susanna Zellini’s less surprising but illuminating analysis of the importance of Nietzsche for Adorno, in particular as a writer of aphoristic prose as an open form in contrast not only to the rational system but also to the nostalgia of the romantic fragment.

Claus Zittel’s own contribution to this volume, which is here presented in Italian translation, was published already in Nietzsche-Studien.^[6] It is a thorough and illuminating exploration of how Nietzsche both actualizes and breaks with the Platonic model, diverting from the instructive purpose, increasing the self-referential element, and ultimately leading the reader into a labyrinth. Pichler’s contribution, also in Italian, offers a different “poesiological” interpretation that recalls the theme of prosopoiesis from the other volume, but here centred on the self-critical preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Annamaria Lossi writes about the early courses on ancient rhetoric, stressing the influence of Gustav Gerber, but focusing in particular on how this early preoccupation with rhetoric can be read as a preparation for Nietzsche’s own role as writer. Lossi’s argument thus prepares the ground for Gabriella Pelloni’s chapter, which is one of the most rewarding essays in the volume, a study of the problem of “gesture” in Zarathustra. She manages to show in new and illuminating ways how Nietzsche’s proximity to musical expression permits him to work with tone, rhythm, and gesture to promote the expression of pathos and comportment. In a separate section, she also highlights the relevance of Max Kommerell’s analysis of Zarathustra from the early 1930s for first having posed the question of literary gesture. The politically questionable but aesthetically fascinating critic Max Kommerell reappears also in the second part of this collection in a highly readable essay by Chiara Conterno that recalls his analysis of Nietzsche in the context of hymnic German literature from Hölderlin onward. Citing several of Nietzsche’s own reflections on the art of style, Pelloni states that the phenomenon of gesture in Nietzsche has to do with an aspiration to combine the pre-linguistic with artistic form in the service of “eine alle Ausdrucksbereiche umfassende Artikulation innerer Dispositionen” (155). In sum, Nietzsche does not deliver all that much new philosophical content, but rather a “neue Vortragsart der Gedanken” (158). Through his mastery of style he accomplishes a “kontrollierte Steigerung, Ausdehnung und Konstruktion des Pathos und der Leidenschaft im Medium der Sprache” (166).

Her conclusion sums up well the orientation of this volume and the interest of its editors as well as those of the other works here under review. Readers of Nietzsche have reached a point in the ongoing interpretation and appropriation of his work at which the question of its literary form can no longer be separated from its content. Through this escalated attention to poetics, down to the graphic shape of the text, Nietzsche’s philosophical “message” is not displaced or diluted into formalisms. On the contrary, this orientation marks a heightened attention to the always dual aspect of his unique qualities as a philosophical writer. To see these dimensions, and to hear and feel their reverberations, requires a reader for whom he himself was calling out from early on when discussing in the preface to On theGenealogy of Morality (1887) the ability to read slowly and carefully like a philologist, but also as a “cow,” in other words to “ruminate”. This playful way of addressing future readers was often quoted, but perhaps it is only now that its message is really being heard through the attention to the composition of these extraordinary texts and through the awareness of how their ethics and metaphysics are inextricably tied to their poetics, their rhetoric, their rhythm, and their gesture.