The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

As its title indicates, this book is a study of the trip Nietzsche made to Sorrento in 1876, after the Bayreuth festival and before the publication of Human, All Too Human. Paolo D’Iorio’s main thesis is that at Sorrento Nietzsche became a true philosopher, abandoning his metaphysics of art together with his commitment to the Wagnerian cause in order to develop his philosophy of the free spirit. [End Page 136] D’Iorio collects all of the available documents about the Sorrento trip, from Nietzsche’s allusions to his Italian experiences in his notebooks and subsequent works to letters to and from his traveling companions and memoirs of friends and acquaintances. The chief interest of the book lies in this philological work, which is characteristic of the Italian school to which D’Iorio belongs and will be of use to any scholar who wishes to study the transition from Nietzsche’s Basel years to the “trilogy of the free spirit” that begins with Human, All to Human of 1878.

D’Iorio’s subtitle, “genesis of the philosophy of the free spirit,” announces a genetical reading of Nietzsche’s post-1876 works. His methodology aims at tracing the emergence of important lines in Nietzsche’s thought during his Sorrento trip. Arguments in favor of this approach—and against the accusation of biographical reductionism—appear rather late in the book, with a reference to Mazzino Montinari’s famous statement that “Nietzsche’s thoughts and books are his life” (162). This conception of the intertwining of Nietzsche’s life and work allows D’Iorio to treat certain biographical events as philosophical experiences.

One important example of this is Nietzsche’s experience of hearing Genoa’s night bells in May 1877, which D’Iorio discusses in chapter 5. Here D’Iorio introduces the more theoretical concept of “Nietzschean epiphanies,” defined as moments of revelation in which Nietzsche perceives new semantic relations, along with their historical profundity and their future potentialities. Nietzsche’s notes on Genoa’s night bells are then read as an illustration of this logic, inasmuch as they condense a childhood memory (Röcken’s bells, evocative of the death of Nietzsche’s father), a literary prism (Schiller’s poem “Die Glocke” and the epilogue added by Goethe after Schiller’s death), and a philosophical reference (Plato’s famous claim that “nothing human is worthy of being taken very seriously”). D’Iorio convincingly shows that, by adding a “nonetheless” to these evocations of death and vanity in section 628 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche questions the inference from the transitoriness of human affairs to their lack of value. Indeed, D’Iorio even follows this important genetical thread through to the “heavy growling bell” that Zarathustra hears before whispering his doctrine of the eternal return in life’s ear, in book III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Thus, the thought of eternal recurrence itself appears ultimately to be Nietzsche’s answer to his Genoa “epiphany.”

However, the word “epiphany” carries several connotations that are extremely problematic in a Nietzschean context. Admittedly, D’Iorio tries to avoid some of them. But his comparison between Nietzsche and James Joyce creates other misunderstandings: even supposing we could forget the Christian theology of manifestation that seems to haunt the young Joyce’s texts, can we really include Nietzsche among adherents of an aesthetics of the “instant” (170) like Virginia Woolf? This would run the risk of ignoring Nietzsche’s rejection of any kind of immediate certainty or intellectual intuition. Moreover, the axiological suggestions of a term are no trifling matter in Nietzsche's philosophy, since they denote a particular genealogy and determine subsequent cultural effects. One must concede that concepts are needed to shed light on genetical processes in Nietzsche's work, but the central concept that D’Iorio proposes to this end is a controversial one.

Another important aspect of D...