Megill HistoricizingNietzscheParadoxes 1996

Review: Historicizing Nietzsche?
Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case

Reviewed Work(s): Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche's Moral and
Politicial Thought by Keith Ansell-Pearson: The Neitzche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990
by Steven E. Aschheim: Confrontations: Derrida/Heidegger/Nietzsche by Ernst Behler:
Neitzsche on Truth and Philosophy by Steven Taubeneck: Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche:
Creativity and the Anti-Romantic by Adrian Del Caro: Neitzsche and the Politics of
Aristocratic Radicalism by Bruce Detwiler: Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in
Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics by Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong:
Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue by Lester H. Hunt:
Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft
by Joachim Köhler: Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra: Clayton Koelb:
Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature by Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart and
Jean-Pierre Mileur: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology by Alistair Moles:
Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus by Ernst Nolte: Young Nietzsche: Becoming a
Genius by Carl Pletsch: Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between
Hermeneutics and Deconstruction by Alan D. Schrift: Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts,
Noise, and Women by Gary Shapiro: Nietzschean Narratives by Gary Shapiro: Thinker
on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism by Peter Sloterdijk: Reading Nietzsche by Robert C.
Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins: Nietzsche's Voice by Henry Staten: Left-Wing
Nietzscheanism: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920 by Seth Taylor:
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism by
Leslie Paul Thiele: Nietzsche and Political Thought by Mark warren: Within Nietzsche's
Labyrinth by Alan White: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art by Julian Young
Review by: Allan Megill
Source: The Journal of Modern History , Mar., 1996, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 114-
152
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2124335
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Review Article
Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons

of a Hard Case*
Allan Megill
University of Virginia
In short, what the old philologist says on the basis of the entire
philological experience [is]: there is no one true interpretation,
neither for poets, nor for musicians (a poet is absolutely no
authority on the sense of his verses: we have the most miraculous
evidence of how fluid and vague "meaning" is for them).
(FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE)'
* This review article examines a selection of books on Nietzsche published in 1988 and aft
The 1988 starting date is arbitrary, and the choice, from a much larger universe, of the follow
books for notice is at least partly so: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study
of Nietzsche's Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991); Steven E. Aschheim, The
Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley, 1992); Ernst Behler, Confrontations:
Derrida/Heidegger/Nietzsche, trans., with an afterword, by Steven Taubeneck (Stanford, Calif.,
1991); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990); Adrian Del
Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge, La., 1989);
Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago, 1990); Michael
Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy,
Aesthetics, and Politics (Chicago, 1988); Lester H. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue
(London, 1991); Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine
verschliisselte Botschaft (Nordlingen, 1989); Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist:
Essays Pro and Contra (Albany, N.Y., 1990); Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre
Mileur, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York, 1993); Alistair Moles,
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York, 1990); Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und
der Nietzscheanismus (Frankfurt, 1990); Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New
York, 1991); Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneu-
tics and Deconstruction (New York, 1990), Gary Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and
Women (Albany, N.Y., 1991); Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington, Ind., 1989);
Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, foreword
by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis, 1989); Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds.,
Reading Nietzsche (New York, 1988); Henry Staten, Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); Seth
Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920 (Berlin,
1990); Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic
Individualism (Princeton, N.J., 1990); Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1988); Alan White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York, 1990); and Julian
Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 1992). Drafts of this article were read, in part
or whole, by Alon Confino, Malachi Hacohen, John Holloran, Robert Holub, Janet Lungstrum,
George Mosse, Kelly Mulroney, Richard Rorty, Richard Schacht, Alan Schrift, Spencer Smith,
Walter Sokel, and Harwell Wells, among others. I thank my readers for their comments and regret
my inability to solve all problems.
1 Letter from Nietzsche to Carl Fuchs, August 26, 1888, translated and quoted by Ernst Behler,
Confrontations: Derrida/Heidegger/Nietzsche, trans., with an afterword, by Steven Taubeneck
[The Journal of Modern History 68 (March 1996): 114-152]

(D 1996 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/96/6801-0005$01.00
All rights reserved.

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Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case 115
To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of

signs, including the tempo of these signs-that is the meaning of
every style; and considering that the multiplicity of inward states
is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic
possibilities-the most multifarious art of style that has ever been
at the disposal of one man. (FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE)2
The literature on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is huge and growing.3 But the
size of the literature is of less interest than its diversity, which mirrors a diversity
in the Nietzsche corpus itself. One aim of the present essay is to inform readers
of the complex historical object, "Nietzsche," revealed by the nineteenth-century
texts and by the extant commentary on those texts. But this aim alone would not
justify a detailed examination of the Nietzsche literature here. A more compre-
hensive aim is to meditate on the problem of "historicization"-the problem, that
is, of accommodating an object to historical thinking. From a historiographical
point of view, Nietzsche is a hard case. He is so because historical thinking has not
been comfortable with multiplicity of meaning, and multiplicity of meaning
pervades Nietzsche's work and personae. The ideal of modem Western historiog-
raphy, having deep roots in the Western tradition, is convergence toward a single
authoritative account, or at least toward a single authoritative way of thinking.4
The ideal is not well accommodated to "the case of Nietzsche." It seems clear that
the tendency of historians in general and of intellectual historians in particular is
to think of the meanings they seek to describe or explain as relatively unambigu-
ous. Historians seem less well equipped than they might be to deal with
multiplicity of meaning. This is one reason why professional historians (of the
generic sort, rather than historians of art, music, and the like) hardly ever confront
complex aesthetic works. Nietzsche's claim (which is manifestly applicable to his
own textual project) that "there is no one true interpretation, neither for poets, nor
for musicians" and his presentation of self as embodying a "multiplicity of inward
states" and a "most multifarious art of style" suggest his status as a hard case.5 He
seems to stand opposed to the view that there is a single "true sense" to be
discovered.6
(Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 87, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 17 vols. (Berlin, 1975-93), 111-5:400.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), "Why I Write Su
Good Books," sec. 4, in his Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968).
3 For a brief overview of part of the territory, see Steven Taubeneck, "Nietzsche in North
America: Walter Kaufmann and After," in Behler, pp. 159-77. A useful bibliography is North
American Nietzsche Society, Nietzsche Scholarship in English: A Bibliography, 1968-1992,
comp. B. Bryan Hilliard, with a foreword by Richard Schacht, Nietzscheana no. 2 (Urbana, Ill.,
1992), corrected and extended by Nietzsche Scholarship in English: A Bibliography, 1968-1992,
Supplement, comp. B. Bryan Hilliard and Earl Nitschke, Nietzscheana no. 3 (Urbana, Ill., 1993).
4 As I argue in my " 'Grand Narrative' and the Discipline of History," in A New Philosophy
of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago, 1995), pp. 151-73, 263-71.
5 For an account of some parallel hard cases in art history, see James Elkins, "On Monstrously
Ambiguous Paintings," History and Theory 32 (1993): 227-47.
6 See, e.g., Francis Lieber, Legal and Political Hermeneutics, or Principles of Interpretation
and Construction in Law and Politics, enlarged ed. (Boston, 1839): "No sentence, or form of

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1 6 Megill
So that the reader will have some sense of the particularity of the object with
which we are here concerned, I begin with an account of one (among many) places
where Nietzsche apparently leaves his text open to a plurality of interpretations.
Next, I reflect on the implications of this plurality for the problem of "historiciz-
ing" Nietzsche-by which I mean the problem of subjecting him to the procedures
and preferred schemata of professional historians of the generic type. (I shall
henceforth refer to them as "disciplinary" historians.) Following that, in the most
extensive part of this article I canvass the Nietzsche literature itself. Here I
examine four approaches evident in the recent literature. Finally, and briefly, I
discuss some more general implications of the problems one encounters in the
attempt to historicize Nietzsche.
I. NIETZSCHE'S AMBIGUITY
The knowledge of Nietzsche possessed by historian-readers d'un certain age is apt

to derive from vaguely remembered reading in a few of Nietzsche's works; from
the popular image of Nietzsche, which emphasizes Ubermenschen, blond beasts,
and the will to power; and (countering the popular image) from recollections of
Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher Psychologist, Antichrist, which (in the
United States) was long the most influential commentary.7 Neither the popular
image nor Kaufmann's more benign image left room for ambiguity. Kaufmann
contended that Nietzsche's thought is held together by the notion of the will to
power, which Kaufmann saw not as violence against others but as "self-
overcoming," that is, as a mastering of one's own inner chaos.8 As Walter Sokel
has pointed out, Kaufmann offered an antiseptic, respectable Nietzsche-one who
would not offend American readers of the 1950s.9 By rescuing Nietzsche from his
association with Nazism and by depoliticizing him more generally, Kaufmann
made him usable in the struggle against the collectivist ideology of communism:
in this sense, Kaufmann's depoliticization of Nietzsche was itself a politicization.
Moreover, the definition of will to power as self-overcoming implied, on the level
of intimate personal life, an effort of containment that fitted the cultural mood of
America in the 1950s.
words, can have more than one 'true sense,' and this is the only one we have to inquire for. This
is the very basis of all interpretation. Interpretation without it has no meaning. Every man or body
of persons, making use of words, does so, in order to convey a certain meaning; and to find this
precise meaning is the object of all interpretation" (p. 86). To be sure, one could argue that radical
ambiguity is the "true sense" of Nietzsche-discovering, i.e., a single meaning, but finding it to
be equivocal. But such a move does not come to grips with what I take to be the
self-deconstructive radicality of Nietzsche's project.
7 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), 4th ed. (Prince-
ton, N.J., 1974).
8 For the contention that Nietzsche's work is coherent and unambiguous, see ibid., pp. 8,
12-18, 74-76, and elsewhere; for will to power as self-overcoming, see pp. 200-207, 211-27,
and elsewhere.
9 Walter H. Sokel, "Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufmann's Image of
Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 436-42, at 438-42.

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The Kaufmann era in Nietzsche interpretation is long over. In the early 1970s,
new interpretations of Nietzsche emerged that differed from Kaufmann's inter-
pretation in two important respects: first, they no longer tried to show that
Nietzsche's work formed a coherent whole; and second, they greatly emphasized
the textual complexity of that work, finding in it a richness and density that in their
view made it difficult to see the text as offering a single, determinate meaning.
Although it would be incorrect to say that most current interpreters of Nietzsche
advance these views, emphasis on the multiplicity and textual complexity of
Nietzsche's work is the most distinctive feature of Nietzsche interpretation in the
last twenty years.'0
Kaufmann insisted that Nietzsche's contradictions are only apparent and
disappear when one reads him properly." Many of Nietzsche's more recent
interpreters are far less confident that this is so. Some do retain the hope of
offering a "general" interpretation, but the more canny among them are careful to
emphasize how much any such interpretation leaves out. A key term is "fragmen-
tation."''2 Already in 1936, an "old" Nietzsche interpreter, Karl Jaspers, claimed
that "self-contradiction is the fundamental ingredient in Nietzsche's thought." '3
In the "new" Nietzsche interpretation, the sense that Nietzsche's work is not
subject to a single, overarching interpretation is closely tied to something absent
from Jaspers's discussion-namely, an emphasis on textual complexity.
The problem for the historian (and not only the historian) is how to come to
grips with the multiplicity and the textual complexity. Note again Nietzsche's
claim in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, to embrace a "multiplicity of inward
states" and to be the practitioner of "the most multifarious art of style."
Admittedly, in The Case of Wagner (also 1888) Nietzsche links fragmentation
("an anarchy of atoms") with "literary decadence," which might lead one to think
that he rejected fragmentation, for surely "decadence" is bad.14 But Nietzsche
writes in Ecce Homo that "apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the
10 For a brief account, see Taubeneck, pp. 165-77. For more extended reflections on what has
sometimes been called "the new Nietzsche," see Behler, pp. 49-76 and 107-36; and Alan D.
Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction
(New York, 1990), pp. 77-119. An early manifestation of "the new Nietzsche" was Centre
culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, Nietzsche aujourd'hui? 2 vols. (Paris, 1973). See also
David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York,
1977).
1 l Kaufmann, p. 14.
12 See Maurice Blanchot, "Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing," in his The Infinite Conver-
sation (1969), trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 151-70, discussed by Behler (n. 1
above), pp. 14-15.
13 Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Ac
trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson, Az., 1965), p. 10. Jaspers went on to
draw the conclusion that the interpreter of Nietzsche should be "forever dissatisfied until he has
also found the contradiction" to any assertion that Nietzsche makes. Jaspers's formulation is
excessive, but one can extract from it an indispensable methodological warning, namely, that one
is not justified in making the claim, "Nietzsche held that X is the case," unless one has canvassed
all the passages in his corpus in which the topic in question is addressed.
14 According to Friedrich Nietzsche, in literary decadence "life no longer dwells in the whole.
The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures

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118 Megill
opposite" ("Why I Am So Wise," sec. 2): thus he seems to identify himself as

both decadent and nondecadent, fragmentary and not. One might want to view the
matter in the light of his statement in Twilight of the Idols (likewise 1888) that
"one is fruitful only at the price of being rich in contradictions."'5 If one of our
aims as historians is to offer an account of Nietzsche's work that connects the
work to Nietzsche's original intention, the matter is made difficult by an author
who, paradoxically, seems to have had the intention of not allowing his intentions
to be seen, intending rather to "reserve one's three hundred foregrounds."'16
Because few historians will be familiar with Nietzsche's case, it makes sense to
preface the literature survey with an exemplification of the sort of difficulty that
Nietzsche's work raises. The purpose is not to offer a first-order Nietzsche
interpretation, but to underscore the difficulty of offering such an interpretation.
Consider the following passages from Ecce Homo.
a) In the preface, Nietzsche writes that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the "greatest
gift" ever given to mankind (preface, sec. 4). (He explains why it is the greatest
gift later, when he tells us that Zarathustra was "the first language for a new series
of experiences" and that "having understood six sentences from it-that is, to
have really experienced them-would raise one to a higher level of existence than
'modem' men could attain" ["Why I Write Such Good Books," sec. 1].)
b) At the beginning of the chapter "Why I Am a Destiny," he writes: "One day
my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous-a crisis
without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that
was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed
so far. I am no man, I am dynamite" (sec. 1).
c) Later in the same chapter, he writes: "The uncovering of Christian morality
is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. He that is enlightened about that,
is a force majeure, a destiny-he breaks the history of mankind in two" (sec. 8).
d) Finally, in the chapter "Why I Write Such Good Books," he claims that Thus
Spoke Zarathustra
stands altogether apart. Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has ever been done
from an equal excess of strength.... That a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable
to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is,
compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one who first creates truth, a
the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole" (The Case of Wagner:
Turinese Letter of May 1888, sec. 7, in Nietzsche, Basic Writings [n. 2 above]).
'S Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature," sec. 3, in The Porta
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968). The translation is altered by me to bring
it closer to the original German.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), trans. Walter Kaufmann, sec. 284, in
Nietzsche, Basic Writings. Compare the following Nachlaf3 fragment of 1885: "When I was
young, I met up with a dangerous deity, and I wouldn't like to tell anyone what then passed
through my mind, neither of the good nor of the evil things. So I learned at times to be silent; that
a person with backgrounds must have foregrounds, be it for himself or for others: because
foregrounds are necessary for one to recover from oneself, and to make it possible for others to
live with us" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, 25+ vols. [Berlin, 1967-], VII-3:218, no. 9506, my translation).

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world-governing spirit, a destiny-that the poets of the Veda are priests and not even
worthy of tying the shoelaces of a Zarathustra-that is the least thing and gives no idea
of the distance, of the azure solitude in which this work lives. ("Zarathustra," sec. 6)
How ought one to read these passages? They are problematic, for in them
Nietzsche appears to be making some utterly unreasonable claims. If someone
came to me and declared, "I am no man, I am dynamite, I break the history
of humankind in two," I would doubt that person's sanity. In the "case" of
Nietzsche, the author is no longer available to be examined (perhaps in some
ways he was never available, not even to himself). I want to consider briefly
four different ways of reading the above passages: straightforwardly, parodi-
cally, self-parodically, or in some combination of the preceding three.'7
Behind each way of reading stands a different account of why Nietzsche wrote
passages of this sort and a different interpretation of Nietzsche's project
generally:
a) A straightforward reading. The straightforward reading takes Nietz-
sche's words at face value. One assumes that Nietzsche really believed that
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was superior to the Veda and to the works of Dante,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, that (properly understood) it would transform all
language and experience, and that it marked a crisis that explodes all human
history, or at least breaks it in two. Who could believe such claims? Only a
madman: a megalomaniac.'8 Nietzsche went insane in early January 1889. If
read straightforwardly, the above statements suggest that he was already
showing signs of insanity in November 1888, when he wrote Ecce Homo.
Thus the philosopher Julian Young, a relentlessly straightforward reader,
declares in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art that Ecce Homo is "a mendacious,
deluded book" (p. 2).'9
b) A parodic reading. Alternatively, one can read the passages parodi-
cally, implying a critical attitude toward what is being parodized. There is
17 I do not mean to suggest that these are the only ways of reading the passages. The point is
not how many or which but, rather, that there is more than one and that the choice between them
is not readily determinable.
18 The diagnosis was first made by Nietzsche's teachei Friedrich Ritschl, in a diary entry in
which he reacted to Nietzsche's high opinion of The Birth of Tragedy (1872; quoted in Ronald
Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life [Harmondsworth, 1982], p. 146). The historian Heinrich von
Treitschke also attributed Gro,8/enwahn- "the most contemporary of burdens"-to Nietzsche, in
a letter of September 11, 1881, to Nietzsche's former Basel colleague (and continuing friend), the
historian of religion Franz Overbeck (Heinrich von Treitschke, Briefe, ed. Max Cornicelius, 3
vols. [Leipzig, 1913-19], 3:535).
19 Walter Kaufmann acknowledges the apparently mad aspects of Ecce Homo while deft
discounting them: "Of Nietzsche's last works, none has proved harder to understand than
Homo. The self-portrait is not naturalistic; hence, it was widely felt, it is clearly insane and to
disregarded. This prevalent view is ... false. The lack of naturalism is not proof of insanity bu
a triumph of style-of a piece with the best paintings of that time.... Nietzsche should be
compared with van Gogh" ("Editor's Introduction" to Ecce Homo, sec. 1, in Nietzsche, Bas
Writings, p. 658).

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120 Megill
internal evidence that supports our seeing Ecce Homo as, specifically, a
parody of Christianity: for example, Pontius Pilate spoke the words "Ecce
homo" (Behold the man) in introducing Jesus to the people (John 19:5), and
the claim that Zarathustra was the "greatest gift" echoes the Christian view
that Jesus was God's greatest gift. There is also evidence outside Ecce Homo,
from Nietzsche's writings of 1886 and after, showing his concern with parody.
Most strikingly, the first section of the preface (written 1886) to the second
edition of The Gay Science concludes with the words "incipit parodia": the
parody begins.20 If Nietzsche is engaged, in Ecce Homo, in parody, one can
acquit him of the megalomania suggested by the straightforward reading.
c) A self-parodic reading. There is some reason, however, to think that
Nietzsche is actually engaged not in parody but in self-parody. In self-parody,
the parodist parodizes himself, adopting a critical stance with regard to his
own parodic enterprise. Nietzschean self-parody-if self-parody it is-
connects with his attitude toward his erstwhile hero, Richard Wagner. In
Nietzsche devoted much thought to Wagner: he wrote The Case of Wagner and
compiled another book, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Wagner is present as a
preoccupation in Ecce Homo. Nietzsche's break with Wagner occurred in
1878. Nietzsche had long chafed under Wagner's sublime assumption that
Nietzsche should be merely a publicist for the Wagnerian cause. In 1876
Nietzsche had been offended by the vulgarity of the newly established
Bayreuth Festival. He was even more offended by Wagner's final composi-
tion, Parsifal: retelling the Grail story, it capitulated, in Nietzsche's view, to
the Christian moral system. Although Parsifal was first performed only in
1882, Wagner had already spoken of the work, and of his religious experi-
ences, to a distressed Nietzsche in October 1876, and he sent Nietzsche the
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to The Gay Science, 2d ed., trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York,
1974), sec. 1. The term Parodie or its cognates appears thirty times in the critical edition of
Nietzsche's works. In the period 1869-76 they appear eighteen times, invariably used in either
a neutral, descriptive way or negatively. In Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1878) and The
Wanderer and His Shadow (1879), they appear in a positive sense, as something to be practiced.
They are absent from Daybreak (1881) and from the first edition of The Gay Science
(1882)-perhaps because of Nietzsche's hope in this period that a real liberation might be
possible (I speculate, in part prompted by Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich
Nietzsche und seine verschliisselte Botschaft [Nordlingen, 1989], discussed in Sec. IIIA below).
But Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-84) is clearly parodic, and the terms reappear, positively, in
Nietzsche's works and Nachlaf3 of late 1886 through 1888. See Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe. I am indebted to Malcolm Brown, director of Academic Computing at
Dartmouth College, who entered the Werke into a data base and did a search for all occurrences
of Parodie and its cognates therein. De Gruyter and InteLex have jointly published an electronic
Nietzsches Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, which includes Nietzsche's published works as
they appear in de Gruyter's Kritische Studienausgabe, although following the chronological ordering
as found in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe. There is hope that the Kritische Gesamtausgabe itself,
which includes both published works and Nachlaf,g will also appear in electronic form (personal
communication from Mark Rooks of InteLex, October 1995 [70671.1673@compuserve.com]).

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text in early 1878. For his part, Wagner was offended by the too-independent
Human, All Too Human (1878).
In Toward the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche asks whether Wagner
meant Parsifal "seriously": "One might be tempted to suppose the reverse,
even to desire it-that the Wagnerian Parsifal was intended as a joke, as a
kind of epilogue and satyr play with which the tragedian Wagner wanted to
take leave of us, also of himself, above all of tragedy in a fitting manner
worthy of himself, namely with an extravagance of wanton parody of the
tragic itself.... Is Wagner's Parsifal his secret laughter of superiority at
himself, the triumph of his ultimate artist's freedom and artist's transcen-
dence? One could wish that it were.",2' If one were to interpret Ecce Homo in
the light of what Nietzsche writes in Toward the Genealogy of Morals about
Parsifal, Ecce Homo would appear not as a parody of Christianity but as a
parody of Nietzsche parodying Christianity. Having passed from tragedy to
parody, Nietzsche now goes a step further and plays the role of the "great
tragedian" who engages in a "secret laughter" at himself and his art.22 In
other words, the passages from Ecce Homo should be seen as self-parody.
Further, retroactively if not in its original intent, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
would also appear as self-parody.
d) Some combination of the above. But why should one think that
Nietzsche intended his words to be read in only one of the preceding ways?
He could equally well have intended them to be read in various ways-as, say,
both straightforward and parodic. There seems to be no certain way of
deciding between the four (or more) different readings.
II. NIETZSCHE AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICIZATION
The problem just articulated is a problem of description. It is a matter of answering

the question, "What was the actual character of Nietzsche's project?" Beyond the
descriptive question, the historian might well attempt to explain Nietzsche's
project-that is, to suggest why it arose. The historian would also wish to interpret
the project-that is, to suggest what significance it has within the framework of a
wider historical process continuing into the present. Finally, the historian would be
concerned to present evidence justifying his or her claims.23
In Nietzsche's case, many of the difficulties are situated at the most elemental
level, that of description. What was Nietzsche's project? Characteristically, the
disciplinary historian seeks insight by attempting to situate the thing that interests
21 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 3, in Nietzsche, Basic Writings.
22 I owe this suggestion to Joshua Himwich. Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre
Mileur make a closely similar suggestion in Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New
York, 1993), pp. 106, 217.
23 For the categories used here, see Allan Megill, "Recounting the Past: 'Description,'
Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627-53.

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her within its appropriate historical context. Context offers a means of controlling
description, eliminating descriptions that are implausible in the light of what we
know about that time and place. Historicizing Nietzsche would mean discovering
the context in terms of which his work should be read, which would allow us to
stabilize the description of his texts by offering a way of adjudicating between
competing readings, which would in turn help us to grasp his meaning for us, now.
But the form of Nietzsche's text and the character of his project make him
peculiarly resistant to this stabilizing enterprise. Part of the problem seems to be
that Nietzsche aimed at transforming his readers, so that, absent the transforma-
tion, something essential is missing. If free individual transformation is the
Nietzschean leitmotif, it is contradictory to the Nietzschean project to think of
history as a unity, and in consequence it is also contradictory to the project to think
of context in the singular. While nothing says that we ought to accept Nietzsche's
opinions in our examination of those opinions, the fact remains that Nietzsche's
project seems peculiarly resistant to historians' usual ways of thinking. Nietz-
sche's ambiguity makes him, for historians, a hard case.24
Accordingly, it might be concluded that Nietzsche ought not to be historicized
at all. This would not be an unusual conclusion, for disciplinary historians do leave
aside large areas of human experience. Given the aesthetic tenor of Nietzsche's
project-he does seem to have seen himself as an "artist philosopher" -it is
relevant to note again that disciplinary historians almost never choose to
investigate the complexities of artistic and literary works.25 Such works seem too
open to multiple interpretation, and too hard to connect in a well-established way
with social and political history, to lend themselves to disciplinary treatment. One
can think of the matter by visualizing two distinct and nonconvergent tracks: that
of sociopolitical events and existents and that of aesthetic products. For the most
part, disciplinary historians respond to the nonconvergence either by not dealing
with aesthetic products or by dealing with them in a reductive way: thus, in our
universities aesthetic products are almost always examined historically not in
history departments but in departments of literature, music, and art.26
Historicization is also made difficult by the fact that Nietzsche's texts breach the
boundaries of the historical discipline. Notoriously, in On the Uses and Disad-
vantages of History for Life (1874) Nietzsche attacked the ethos of academic
historiography.27 To subject Nietzsche to the procedures of professional histori-
ography without addressing his criticisms of that very tradition seems a strange
24 A less hard case is Sigmund Freud; see John E. Toews, "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud
in His Time and for Our Time," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 504-45. But even here,
sensitive historical interpretation leads to a pluralization of what historians too often think of as
the context. The pluralization is manifested in Toews's viewing of Freud in terms of four distinct,
albeit connected, contexts, which, it seems, he does not hierarchize.
25 The quoted material is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1968), sec. 795 (1885-86).
26 On the two tracks and the difficulty of relating them, see Martyn P. Thompson, "Receptio
Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning," History and Theory 32 (1993): 248-72, at
250-51.
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in his U
Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by J. P Stern (Cambridge, 1983), pp

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reticence. Such reticence prevails, for to respond adequately to Nietzsche's attack

would require theoretical argument, not mere assertion. But the historical
discipline does not offer resources adequate to sustain theoretical argument of that
sort, and so a response to Nietzsche would require going beyond the discipline's
boundaries.28 More generally, Nietzsche engages in a complex aesthetic and
philosophical project. The modes of thinking and research customarily practiced
in the discipline of history have made possible a remarkably rich reconstruction of
past events and existents. Those modes are less well adapted to the understanding
of problems in philosophy or aesthetics. The literary scholar Ernst Behler
suggests, in Confrontations, that "our ability to understand Nietzsche is inhibited
by the fact that his texts transgress the boundaries typically dividing academic
disciplines" (p. 2). If the historian cannot grasp what a philosophical or aesthetic
problem is, the resulting historicization of Nietzsche will scant the aesthetic-
philosophical core of Nietzsche's project and thus will be deeply misleading.
To be sure, intellectual historians have devised ways of confronting the work of
past theorists. But the most original theorists in their most original work tend to
be resistant to historical investigation as it is conventionally understood. It is
easier to historicize an object if the object possesses a certain mediocrity or
averageness. It is a matter, too, of the work's system of references. If the
references are to politics, or to some other discourse in which historians have
greatly interested themselves, contextualization is easier to accomplish than it is
when the references are to fields that historians do not ordinarily address.
One needs also to note Nietzsche's failure to fit the academic enterprise
generally. One might compare Nietzsche with his fellow classicist Erwin Rohde
(1845-98). Rohde was Nietzsche's bosom friend at Leipzig University and
remained close to him for some years thereafter. But Rohde followed the path of
academic respectability, whereas Nietzsche did not. As Kaufmann observes,
Rohde "married and began to raise a family, while Nietzsche turned to
Zarathustra."29 Nietzsche's antiacademic stance is a stumbling block for those
who approach him from a disciplinary and academic perspective; yet this is what
disciplinary academics, being what they are, must do. Academic writers on
Nietzsche often seem insensitive to his extremity. As Bernd Magnus, Stanley
Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, in Nietzsche's Case, observe of some of the
philosophical interpreters of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recufrence, they
convert what is "horrific and burdensome" in Nietzsche into "a stroll in the park
on a sunny afternoon" (p. 31). There is a need, on the contrary, to preserve some
sense of Nietzsche's radically antiacademic stance. Grasping Nietzsche in a
historically adequate way surely requires a dialectical sensitivity to what is non-
and antiacademic in him.
Academicized, the Nietzsche who appears in many recent studies-even some
of the best-is decidedly tame. When Alan White dedicates Within Nietzsche's
Labyrinth to "my two blond beasts" (his children), the dedication seems
28 What passes for "doing theory" within the discipline is usually a matter of retail
claims of some favored theorist.
29 Kaufmann (n. 7 above), pp. 24-25.

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124 Megill
incongruous. Similarly, the Nietzsche of Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche

and the Politics of the Soul seems nicely suited to the Quaker college where he
formerly taught, Swarthmore. There is little Angst and no thunder or lightning in
Carl Pletsch's Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius. Further, many studies portray
Nietzsche as a contributor to one or another academic field-most often,
philosophy. To the tame Nietzsche who emerges from the contexts of collegiate
and disciplinary activity one needs to juxtapose the "wild" Nietzsche offered by
a few of the nonacademic writers. The Nietzsche of Peter Sloterdijk's Thinker on
Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism practices a "centauric literature" that seeks to
explode academic convention. The Nietzsche of Joachim K6hler's Zarathustras
Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschliisselte Botschaft (Zarathustra's
secret: Friedrich Nietzsche and his coded message) is a deeply tormented man in
whom wildness and repression fight it out.
My claim is that if one is to historicize Nietzsche well-that is, if one is to come
to grips with the historical object, "Nietzsche"-one must not allow oneself to be
confined by the conventional boundaries of the historical discipline. There is a
dialectical relation between mode of investigation and object of investigation.
What is not present in the mode cannot be acknowledged in the object. And much
of "Nietzsche" is not present in the disciplinary mode. As an "artist philosopher,"
Nietzsche embraced concerns to which literary studies and philosophy are
somewhat better attuned than is history. As The Birth of Tragedy and Toward the
Genealogy of Morals show, he was a historian too, but an extradisciplinary one.
Finally, as already noted, his concerns seem also to have been transformative and
transgressive-"practical" in a radical sense of the term-and this fact, too, is not
easily addressed by the discipline, or by disciplines generally, or even by
interdisciplinarians.
In going beyond the boundaries of the discipline, one might be accused of being
unhistorical, of allowing "presentist" concerns to hold sway. Such objections can
be made by nonhistorians also. For example, in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art
Julian Young criticizes the Nietzsche interpretation of Alexander Nehamas, who
has emphasized Nietzsche's "perspectivism."30 The tangled issue of perspectiv-
ism cannot be discussed here. What is interesting is Young's offhanded observa-
tion that "Kaufmann's classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, and Anti-
christ [sic] contains no discussion at all of anything remotely resembling
Nehamas's 'perspectivism,' a fact which reminds us of the ease with which the
preoccupations of a particular age and writer are read into the history of
philosophy" (p. 161, n. 3). The question here is whether Kaufmann's Nietzsche
can be seen as a standard of historiographical purity, as Young seems to imply.
Kaufmann's Nietzsche is decidedly Kaufinann's Nietzsche, whatever his authori-
tative, objective-sounding style. Kaufmann's "take" on Nietzsche is replete with
"the preoccupations of a particular age and writer." It is not the "God's-eye view"
that, to a naive reading, it may appear to be. In fact, no version of Nietzsche is
30 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 1-4 and
passim. Nehamas's book, which presents in an unequivocal manner an interesting thesis-namely,
that Nietzsche was an "aestheticist"-is, among recent works, the one that is most widely and
vigorously discussed by current contributors to the literature.

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untainted by present-day considerations. The relevant issue is not the degree of

separation from the present that an interpretation manages. It is rather the degree
of care that the interpreter brings to the object and the degree of insight achieved.
The suggestion that there is some disaffinity between Nietzsche and the
historical discipline is confirmed when one looks at the credentials of the authors
and editors of the books listed at the beginning of this article. If, in order to have
clear criteria, one chooses to view as an accredited disciplinary historian anyone
possessing (a) a Ph.D. in history and (b) a position in a history department, two
persons, Steven Aschheim (The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990) and
Carl Pletsch (Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius), qualify, out of the twenty-
seven authors or editors. Strikingly, neither Aschheim nor Pletsch deals with the
culmination of Nietzsche's project, his work of the 1880s: Pletsch deals only with
Nietzsche's becoming a genius, leaving aside what Nietzsche did after he became
one, while Aschheim deals only with the reception of Nietzsche's work, not with
the work itself. If one loosens one's requirements and asks for only one of the two
criteria, only two new names appear, Seth Taylor (Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: The
Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920) and Ernst Nolte (Nietzsche und
der Nietzscheanismus).
Accordingly, if we are to make progress on the matter of historicizing Nietzsche
it will not do to look only at works by historians. Few such works exist, and many
of the works on Nietzsche by nonhistorians have merits arising from the
disciplinary sensitivities of their authors. Literary scholars tend to be more
sensitive than historians are to the textual complexity that, as I suggested in
Section I, is important in Nietzsche's work, and philosophers and political
theorists tend to be more sensitive to the theoretical complexity. Rather than
regarding studies by nonhistorians as unhistorical, we ought to consider what
insights such studies can offer to historical understanding.
III. THE NIETZSCHE LITERATURE
In the recent literature one can identify "biographical/contextual," "special,"

"general," and "reception" studies of Nietzsche. Although this categorization
does not capture the full complexity of the literature, it does serve as a rough and
ready organizing device, and it also generates some insights of its own. Other
distinctions can be imported into it-indeed, need to be, lest the schema flatten
out, into homogeneous contributions to a unified scholarly literature, works that
are often quite different. Let us consider each type of study in tum.
A. Biographical/Contextual Studies
As noted above, a characteristic move on the part of historians is to attempt to

situate a past object within an "appropriate" historical context or contexts. It is a
matter of establishing connections, with the aim of allowing the inquiring mind to
better describe, explain, and interpret the object. When the object is a past author,
one would hope to see connections made between the author's life and the works
and between the author's life and works taken together and the intellectual, social,
and political contexts of the time. One would hope that attention to such

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126 Megill
connections would generate interesting and persuasive answers to such questions

as, How and why did the author become the person that he or she became? and
How and why did the intellectual project take the shape that it did? These
questions and answers would mark out the ambit of biographical/contextual
studies, which, of the different types, are closest to what is conventionally seen as
historical investigation.
But Nietzsche has long proved a recalcitrant subject for biographical and
contextual study. His inner life is hard to plumb. Further, since the main reason
for being interested in Nietzsche's life is that he was the author of some
notable works, one looks for illuminating connections between life and works-
but they have been hard to find. Nietzsche's highly developed theme of
hiddenness has much to do with these difficulties. "Flee into concealment," he
advises philosophers in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), "and have your masks
and subtlety (Feinheit), that you may be mistaken for who you are not, or
feared a little." As we have seen, he insists that one "reserve one's three
hundred foregrounds." "Whatever is profound loves masks.... Every profound
spirit needs a mask.",31 Similarly, in book 5 (1887) of The Gay Science he
claims, in the guise of "the hermit," that when we appear in the ordinary
world-that is, "among people who are disguised without wanting to admit
it" -we, like them, "do what all prudent masks do, and in response to every
curiosity that does not concern our 'dress' we politely place a chair against the
door."32 Thus the inner life is concealed. The relation between the inner life
and the work is doubly concealed. Nietzsche does insist that a philosopher's
works and his life are intimately related, such that "every great philosophy so
far has been . .. the personal confession of its author."33 The point is self-
reflexive, yet Nietzsche resists its application to his own case. In Assorted
Opinions and Maxims (1879) he claims that "the worst readers of maxims are
the friends of their author when they are exercised to trace the general
observation back to the particular event to which the maxim owes its origin,"
for they do not receive "philosophical instruction" but only "the satisfaction of
a vulgar curiosity."34 Or, as he writes in Ecce Homo, "I am one thing, my
writings are another matter" ("Why I Write Such Good Books," sec. 1).
The depth of Nietzsche's reticence leads the historian to suspect that he is
hiding something. What significance might the hidden life have for the work?
How might it change our view of the work? To what extent, if any, might it explain
the work? These are difficult questions. And the challenge for current commen-
tators is increased by the fact that so many biographical studies of Nietzsche
already exist. It requires foolishness, arrogance, or perhaps some combination of
the two for any would-be biographer to think that in the course of retailing the
3' Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (n. 16 above), secs. 25, 284, 40.
32 Nietzsche, The Gay Science (n. 20 above), sec. 365.
33 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 6.
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Assorted Opinions and Maxims," in his Human, All Too Human: A
Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Erich Heller (Cambridge, 1986),
sec. 129.

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many known facts of Nietzsche's life one might be able to say new things that are
also important and true.35
The difficulty of moving from "life and works" to "wider context" is likewise
great. In his nicely titled Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, Adrian Del Caro puts his
finger on an important aspect of the difficulty when he notes Nietzsche's
relation-or nonrelation-to the notion of a historical generation. The generation,
for Dilthey, "is formed of an intimate circle of individuals who, through
dependence on the same great facts and changes which appeared during the age of
their impressionability are bound as a whole in spite of the difference of other
factors."36 Historians, especially intellectual historians, have often found the
concept of the generation useful for their contextualizing efforts.37 But as Del
Caro points out, Nietzsche does not readily fit into a "generation": he was
"'untimely' . . . by strict choice and as a matter of principle" (p. 3). In conse-
quence, the attempt to locate him within a generation tends to normalize and
familiarize a figure who is distinctly nonnormal and unfamiliar.38
In the face of these difficulties, how do the recent biographical/contextual
studies fare? Two studies, Carl Pletsch's Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius and
Joachim Kohler's Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine ver-
schliisselte Botschaft, provide an occasion for reflecting on both the general
problem of historicization and the specific problem of understanding Nietzsche.
Significantly, both are primarily biographical studies, their exposition of wider
contexts subordinated to the exposition of a life.
35 The competition is massive (although also, in some respects, disappointing). There is a

"Weimar" and a "Basel" tradition in Nietzsche biography, going back, respectively, to Elisabeth
Forster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1895-1904); and Carl
Albrecht Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft, 2 vols. (Jena,
1908). The most substantial recent biography is Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Biographie,
3 vols. (Munich, 1978-79). See also Werner Ross, Der dngstliche Adler: Friedrich Nietzsches
Leben (Stuttgart, 1980); and, in English, R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His
Philosophy (Baton Rouge, La., 1965); and Hayman (n. 18 above). Given the importance of
Kaufmann in English-language Nietzsche reception, one should also note Kaufmann, chap. 1,
"Nietzsche's Life as Background of His Thought," pp. 21-71. For another short biographical
study see Jaspers (n. 13 above), bk. 1, "Nietzsche's Life," pp. 27-117.
36 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens (Stuttgart, 1957), p. 37, quot
by Adrian Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge,
La., 1989), p. 3 (Del Caro's translation).
37 See, e.g., Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and Alan Spit
The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, N.J., 1987).
38 As is the case with Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche, "the Last Antipolitical German" (Bloom-
ington, Ind., 1987), pp. 30-58, who sees Nietzsche as a member of the German "generation of
1866." Bergmann is more persuasive in his discussion of the political situation contemporaneous
to Nietzsche than in his discussion of Nietzsche himself. He portrays a Nietzsche more benign,
and more politically engaged, than the sources warrant. Except at the beginning and at the end of
his career (before 1872 and in 1888), Nietzsche paid little attention to the politics of his time.
Ernst Nolte in Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Frankfurt, 1990)-a problematic book-is
correct in pointing out how many political events Nietzsche never referred to, either in his books
or in his extensive correspondence: the war in Tunis, the ending of the Kulturkampf; Bismarck's
tariff policy, the consolidation of the Third Republic in France, the parliamentary revolution of
1876 in Italy, or imperialism (p. 54). (Nietzsche did, of course, repeatedly anathematize
"democracy," as part of a generalized condemnation of the modem world.)

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128 Megill
Pletsch argues that Nietzsche was deeply affected by a nineteenth-century

"culture of genius" that helped inspire him to become a genius himself. Pletsch
is right in pointing out Nietzsche's highly developed sense of his own vocation.
Nietzsche was thus driven to his massive production of letters, notebook drafts,
and books, all accomplished before insanity stopped him at age forty-four. It also
seems true that in some sense Nietzsche made himself into a genius, as Pletsch
insists. But Young Nietzsche does not fill out the "becoming a genius" story in any
new and compelling way. The book comes across as rather flat, perhaps because
Pletsch seems to lack any dramatic involvement with the matters that concerned
Nietzsche. There is no deep knowledge of German literature (as there is in Del
Caro), and no deep concern with the theoretical issues that Nietzsche addressed (as
there is in some of the philosophers and political theorists writing on Nietzsche).
Nor do I find Pletsch well attuned to the personal dimension. Pletsch's claim that
Nietzsche developed into "an awesomely integrated personality" (p. 210) seems
to me mistaken, sustainable only if one does not look carefully at the supposedly
"integrated" Nietzsche of the 1880s. Pletsch barely touches on Nietzsche's life
after his disillusionment with the Bayreuth Festival in 1876.
Zarathustras Geheimnis forces, in contrast, a serious rethinking of Nietzsche
and his project. Although Kohler has a doctorate in philosophy, he is not an
academic but a journalist, writing ad usum Delphini. He lacks the solemnity and
reverence of the general run of academic authors, and he takes greater risks in
what he discusses and in what he chooses to claim. "Zarathustra's secret," he
argues, is homosexuality. Such a claim is not new, although Nietzsche's biogra-
phers characteristically address the matter only briefly and reticently.39 Some
contemporaries, and some later commentators, suggested that Nietzsche was (in
ascending order of intensity) unmanly, unconsciously homosexual, consciously
but not actively homosexual, or actively homosexual, however briefly and
surreptitiously. This last claim was made in 1908 by Paul Federn, a participant in
Freud's "Wednesday Circle." Indeed, as Kohler notes, Federn asserted that
Nietzsche was infected with syphilis in a male brothel in Genoa (p. xii).40 Kohler
makes it clear that Federn's assertions are completely unsubstantiated (pp. 350-
51), although, in what seems an attempt to attract a readership, he first mentions
the assertions 358 pages before making clear the lack of evidence.
However, the important question is not whether Nietzsche ever had sexual
relations with another male. Given that he was notoriously fastidious in bearing,
given that a deep taboo against homosexuality prevailed in his time in Protestant
German bourgeois society and elsewhere, and given that he had an overwhelming
concern for his fame and reputation, it would be surprising if he ever acted in an
overtly sexual way on his alleged homosexual desires. The question is rather what
went on in his head. Since he left no record of his sexual desires, one has to look
to other evidence.
39 For example, see Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York, 1991),
p. 78; Hayman, p. 11; and Janz, 1:173-74.
40 Federn's assertions are reported in Herman Hunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Protokoll
Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung, 4 vols. (Frankfurt, 1976), 1:337.

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One category of evidence consists of comments about Nietzsche made by

contemporaries. The comments tend to tell us as much about the observer as about
Nietzsche himself. Those emanating from the Wagner circle range from rude to
threatening. In 1874 Wagner recommended to the abstemious professor that he
socialize with women in his evening hours, not just with men; already in 1871
Cosima Wagner had found that Nietzsche's "truly unpleasant" reserve was "not
entirely natural" (pp. 175-76). In 1877 a physician (and enthusiastic Wagnerian)
consulted by Nietzsche, Otto Eiser, broke physician-patient confidentiality and
revealed to a member of Wagner's circle the results of his examination of
Nietzsche. Wagner responded with a letter to Eiser in which he declared that
Nietzsche's health problems were "consequences of masturbation" (pp. 179-80).
Eiser read Wagner's letter to Nietzsche, who exploded in rage, understanding-
rightly, Kohler contends-that Wagner's intent was to murder his reputation by
implying that he was a sexual pervert.41 Other comments, by non-Wagnerians,
seem prima facie more disinterested. For example, Nietzsche once invited a
German student who attended the University of Basel in the summer semester of
1876 for afternoon tea in his apartment. As the student was describing a Hans
Holbein self-portrait in the Basel museum, he was startled when Nietzsche
interrupted him to describe the mouth as "ein Mund zum Ktissen"-a mouth
made to be kissed (Kohler, p. 228).42 The student was also startled when, later,
Nietzsche abruptly invited him to come along on a vacation trip that he planned
to make to Italy (Kohler, pp. 229-30).43
Inferences about Nietzsche's sexuality can also be drawn from his friendships
and travels. It is well known that he had close friendships with two men, Erwin
Rohde and Paul Ree. Nietzsche's closeness with Rohde began in 1866, cooling in
the 1870s because their careers took them to different places and because of
Rohde's marriage in 1877. Nietzsche's friendship with Ree began in 1876, cooling
in the wake of their encounter with Lou von Salome in 1882. Kohler argues that
the latter friendship had a strong homosexual component. In October 1876
Nietzsche and Ree spent eighteen days in the small Swiss town of Bex, with its
baths and its charming location-a vacation that Ree, a year later, referred to as
"the honeymoon of our friendship. "44 Another year after that, Ree wrote that "we
should not have separated ourselves" and that "perhaps there arose a propitiously
41 Kohler takes issue with Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His
Century, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London, 1983), pp. 452-56; and Janz, 2:173-74, both of
whom maintain that Wagner was not accusing Nietzsche of having homosexual tendencies
(Kohler [n. 20 above], p. 185). Nietzsche himself understood otherwise, seeing Wagner as
accusing him of "unnatural excesses, with hints of pederasty" (Nietzsche to Heinrich Koselitz
[Peter Gast], April 21, 1883, in Nietzsche, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe 111-1:365).
42 Ludwig von Scheffler, "Wie ich Nietzsche kennen lernte," Neue Freie Presse (Vienna),
August 6 and 7, 1907, in Sander L. Gilman, ed., Conversations with Nietzsche, trans. David J.
Parent (New York, 1987), pp. 63-76, at p. 71. (Incidentally, the print in question is no longer
regarded as a self-portrait.)
43 Ibid., p. 74.
44 Paul Ree to Nietzsche, October 10, 1877, in Nietzsche, Briefwechsel (n. 1 above), 11-6/2:
717, quoted by Kohler, p. 259. On Bex, see Karl Baedeker, Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions
of Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol: Handbook for Travellers, 9th ed. (Leipzig, 1881), pp. 230-31.

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130 Megill
working animal magnetism between our corporibus. Forbidden to write more."45

Kohler argues that Re'e and Nietzsche, following the myth told by Plato, saw
themselves as two halves of a single soul. He further argues that they considered,
and renounced, sexual relations, thus acknowledging to each other that their
friendship had a strong homosexual component (pp. 259-63).
Kohler also links Nietzsche's alleged homosexuality to his travels. In the
philosophical literature it is a commonplace (not addressed by Pletsch) that the
early 1880s marked an important new turn in Nietzsche's thought: as Schacht puts
it, "prior to The Gay Science (1882) he was only on the way to becoming the
important philosopher he came to be."46 The early 1880s also marked a new turn
in Nietzsche's mode of life. In May 1879 he left Basel, retired at thirty-four on
grounds of ill health. From 1880-81 until the onset of his insanity he spent seven
winter seasons in the south-five in Italy and two nearby on the French Riviera.
Kohler argues that Italy was, for Nietzsche, the site of a "psychodrama of
self-liberation" (p. 272). According to K6hler, Nietzsche's discovery there of the
naked male body, living rather than in marble, helped him to achieve a "breakout
from the moral prison of central Europe" (p. 271). As Kohler reports, Nietzsche
insisted that Daybreak and The Gay Science needed to be experienced in order to
be understood. The experience in question, Kohler suggests, was of bodily
freedom and beauty. Kohler especially emphasizes a three-week visit to Sicily that
Nietzsche made in April 1882 (pp. 318-24). Why Nietzsche went to Sicily and
what he did once he got there are radically underdocumented. Kohler implies that
the visit had some connection with the presence (since 1878) in Taormina, near
Messina, of Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose photographs of naked and near-naked
young men, often in classical poses, were later to become well known among
aficionados of male beauty (pp. 313-16). To my knowledge, no evidence exists
linking von Gloeden and Nietzsche or establishing the exact nature of Nietzsche's
interests in Sicily. Nonetheless, Nietzsche could have found scantily clad young
men amusing themselves on the coast, and Kohler contends that this is indeed
what he was looking for.47
Kohler further argues that, out of fear for his reputation, Nietzsche concealed
what he had discovered. In Kohler's words, Nietzsche did not wish to be labeled
"Nietzsche, a pervert" (p. 426) and exposed to the crowd's scom. Accompanying
Kohler's reinterpretation of Nietzsche's life is a detailed rereading of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883-85), a work notoriously hard to make sense of: it has puzzled
generations of readers, and most philosophically inclined commentators have
simply left it aside. Kohler holds that the work is actually a highly coded account
of Nietzsche's experience of desire, liberation, and repression. Most important,
45 Ree to Nietzsche, October 15, 1878, in Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, 11-6/2:983, quoted by

Kohler, p. 258 (my translation).
46 Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), p. xiii; see also Jaspers (n. 13 above),
pp. 46-49. How do we know that Nietzsche only became an important philosopher in the 1 880s?
The answer is philosophical good taste; historiographical expertise alone is not sufficient.
47 There is a useful brief account of von Gloeden in Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the
Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London, 1993), pp. 143-52. Von Gloeden
turned to professional photography only in 1888, well after Nietzsche's visit to Sicily.

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Kohler holds that the section on "the blessed isles," where Zarathustra speaks o
the creation of the overman, evokes the vision of unconstrained male beauty tha
Nietzsche felt he had seen in the south generally and in Sicily in particular
(pp. 461-66).48 In Kohler's view, Zarathustra's well-known allusion to "hotter
souths than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all
clothes," has a quite literal referent.49 In sum, Zarathustra is a "soul and body
striptease" (p. 577) in which Nietzsche reveals his own conflicted desires-his
Unbehagen (discomfort) at living constrainedly within a still-Christian society, his
feelings of pain and horror (going back, indeed, to early childhood), and his
longing for beauty and friendship.
Various aspects of Nietzsche's work can be read as confirmations of Kohler's
thesis. Above all, might Nietzsche's attack on morality be a cunning attempt to
"de-moralize" acts that in common morality were regarded with horror? In
Toward the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche writes that "man's 'sinfulness' is not
a fact but merely the interpretation of a fact"; in Beyond Good and Evil he
declares that "there are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of
phenomena."50 Moreover, Nietzsche launched his attack on morality at the
beginning of the 1880s: his first important work along this line was Daybreak:
Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). His timing might well be
explained as (in part) a consequence of his (alleged) Italian experience. Consider,
too, Nietzsche's reference in Daybreak to Greek art, "the soul of which
is-passion for naked male beauty." This could be taken as merely a statement of
fact, but after Kohler one is inclined to read it in a more engaged way.5' Consid
also Nietzsche's claim in Beyond Good and Evil that "the degree and kind of a
man's sexuality reaches up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit": What of
Nietzsche's sexuality? one now asks.52 Further, although there is no explicit
homoeroticism in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche's image of the Greeks,
with its persistent strain of Dionysian Orgiasmus (countered by what one might
take as the closeting moment of Apollonian formalism), is consistent with
48 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 2, "Upon the Blessed Isles," in The Portable
Nietzsche (n. 15 above).
49 Ibid., pt. 3, "On Old and New Tablets," sec. 2. See also the unpublished text, "Zarathustra
Heilige Gelachter," in the Nachla/3 for summer 1883, in Nietzsche, Werke (n. 16 above), VII-
435-64: here Zarathustra refers to his longing "for the most southerly," where one can find "th
naked model [Bild] of a God" (p. 463).
50 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 16, anid Beyond Good and Evil, sec
108.
51 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J
Hollingdale, with an introduction by Michael Tanner (Cambridge, 1982), sec. 170. The
subsequent sentences, "It was only from that viewpoint that they were sensible of female beauty.
Thus their perspective on female beauty was quite different from ours," might then be seen as a
closeting move. See also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (n. 34 above), vol. 2, First Section,
sec. 218, where Nietzsche suggests that "for the modem man the Greeks facilitate the
communication of many things which are difficult or hazardous to communicate." Which things,
Fritz?
52 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 75. The passage first appears, in almost identical
form, in Nietzsche's Nachla/3 of summer-fall 1882, a fact that suggests that his concern with the
matter was persistent (see Werke, VII-1:86, nio. 275).

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132 Megill
Kohler's account of a wish for liberation simultaneously countered by subjection

to social constraint and repression. Finally, one notes a general theme of nakedness
in Nietzsche's work that might repay investigation.
It is clear that Kohler wrote Zarathustras Geheimnis out of a deep dissatisfac-
tion with Nietzsche's philosophical position and with "Nietzscheanism" more
generally. His underlying argument is that Nietzsche's philosophical project is
flawed by his concealment of what was really on his mind. The Nietzschean
Ubermensch stems from "the blessed isles": that is, the overman is a disguised
representation of Nietzsche's forbidden desire. Kohler's account of Nietzsche
serves a critical function: he seeks to deflate the politically charged notion of the
overman by exposing its actual roots. His sharply negative view of Nietzsche
makes his book quite atypical of most recent contributions to the literature.
Obviously, in using history for critical philosophical ends, Kohler does not
operate as a disciplinary historian. How adequate, then, is his study from a
disciplinary point of view? In my opinion, Kohler does establish that the claim that
Nietzsche was a man in confrontation with homosexual desire cannot simply be
dismissed.53 Yet the claim remains problematic in various ways. It is obvious that
the evidence is extremely weak. Further, there are contextual matters that Kohler
does not adequately attend to. For example, given nineteenth-century traditions of
friendship it may well be that Kohler overinterprets the Ree-Nietzsche relation;
similarly, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "rediscovery of the
body," in which Nietzsche obviously participated, did not have a uniformly
homosexual meaning. Sometimes Kohler deploys cultural meanings in what
strikes one as an anachronistic fashion. For example, I am not aware of any
evidence that Taormina was a known homosexual tourist attraction until a few
years after Nietzsche's short visit to Sicily in 1882; while Biskra, which Nietzsche
briefly planned to visit in the early 1 880s, likewise probably did not have the same
meaning for him as it had later for such visitors, in the 1890s, as Oscar Wilde and
Andre Gide. Similarly, Kohler reports (p. 461) that Nietzsche chose to move his
southern residence from Genoa to Nice because he could be incognito there
("Nice is big enough to hide me"); but it tells against the implication of big-city
sexual adventure that in virtually the same breath, in words that Kohler does not
quote, Nietzsche states his intention to live in Nice "like a worker and a monk."54
When one turns to evaluate Kohler's hybrid book in its guise as criticism, one
has to observe first that Thus Spoke Zarathustra indeed seems confused, clumsy,
53 As Kaufmann (n. 7 above) did. Responding to Wilhelm Stekel's assertion of 1917 that there
was an "unconscious homosexual component" in Nietzsche, Kaufmann claimed to have access
to Nietzsche's erotic dreams-a God's-eye view indeed: "His intellectual celebrations of male
friendship notwithstanding, the overheated and strained heterosexual imagery of Zarathustra,
especially in its poems, and Nietzsche's later requests for women in the asylum seem proof that
his dreams were of women" (Kaufmann, p. 34, n. 10).
54 Draft letter from Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, Nice, beginning of December 1883, in
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, 8 vols. (Berlin, 1986), 8:600.
The draft letter contradicts Bergmann's claim (n. 38 above) that by wintering in Nice (1884-85,
1887-88) Nietzsche was entering into "the hub of the new European social whirl" (p. 157), as
well as Bergmann's wider suggestion that, by wintering in the south, Nietzsche "accompanied the
locus of European power politics as it shifted southward to the Mediterranean basin" (p. 152). If
it was so, it was certainly not Nietzsche's intention.

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and opaque, and the posited effort at concealment would plausibly explain why
this is so. But Zarathustra can be read in different and perhaps more rewarding
ways: for example, in the works of 1886-88 one finds traces-perhaps more than
traces-of a lighter, self-parodizing attitude (Sec. I above). It may be that one is
taking too narrow a view of Nietzsche when one sees him as a philosopher whose
work was flawed by repression. It may be that he is better seen as a commentator
on repression, which is a major issue in twentieth-century Western culture and
perhaps an unavoidable issue altogether-yet a commentator so open and
ambivalent that he speaks both to those who, like Sigmund Freud, wished to retain
the repression (if in modified form) and those who, like Michel Foucault, wished
to thwart or evade it.
However Zarathustras Geheimnis is finally judged, it at least has the merit of
attempting to investigate the actual conditions of Nietzsche's life, a proceeding
that is rare in the recent Nietzsche literature. Biographical/contextual investigation is
surely important for understanding Nietzsche's work and significance. Kohler's work
helps us to see that important issues in Nietzsche's biography remain unsettled,
including, for example, his transition of the early 1880s. The matter is full of
uncertainties and requires an openness to the possibility that there are crucial things
that we will probably never know. Still, in all of this I would resist the claim that
biographical/contextual investigation is foundational for understanding the object,
"Nietzsche." It does not seem to me that biographical/contextual investigation will
necessarily provide answers to theoretical and critical questions, just as it does not seem
to me that theoretical and critical investigation will necessarily lead to good reconstruc-
tions of historical context. A certain element of intellectual disjunctiveness may well be
unavoidable, here as elsewhere.
B. Special Studies
By definition, biographical/contextual studies seek to relate an object-in this

case, "Nietzsche" -to its own time. Special studies, on the other hand, are
concerned with seeing how "Nietzsche" might contribute to discussions in
present-day scholarly fields. These fields are often greatly conflicted, and different
fields have different concerns and conventions. Not surprisingly, the different
studies are far from generating a single view.
A narrowly disciplinary historian might be inclined to see such studies as
unhistorical, for there is an obvious tension between trying to draw Nietzsche's
work into current discussion and trying to situate it within its own time. Yet the
appropriation of Nietzsche's work for present purposes is in some ways fitting.
The element of calculated obscurity in Nietzsche's texts (Sec. I) seems aimed at
making them available for use in the future in multiple ways. Nietzsche's apparent
spokesperson, Zarathustra, sought "fellow-creators" to "write new values on new
tablets."55 One can view the special studies of Nietzsche as part of the intellectual
Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history) of Nietzsche's project.
Almost without exception, special studies of Nietzsche come from one of three
academic fields: political theory, philosophy, and literary studies. In addition,
5 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, "Zarathustra's Prologue," sec. 9.

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134 Megill
besides single-authored books, many anthologies on Nietzsche have been pub-

lished recently. As a class the anthologies are of special interest, for two reasons.
First, there is a close affinity between the anthology form and the character of
Nietzsche's work. The anthologies are essay collections, with the different essays
going off in different directions. Nietzsche felt a particular regard for the genre of
the essay, since its tentative and experimental character allows one to reflect on
matters even when one does not feel able to come to a definitive conclusion. Thus
the multiplicity and shifting of perspectives that is so much a feature of
Nietzsche's intellectual corpus finds its parallel in the anthologies. Second, the fact
that a surprising number of anthologies on Nietzsche have recently been published
suggests an affinity between Nietzsche and the present intellectual moment. The
judgment by publishers that a demand exists follows from a feeling, widespread
within "the humanities," that Nietzsche is somehow relevant to a present moment
to which various names have been attached: poststructural, postfoundational,
postmodern. Although the feeling is vague and ill-defined it is no less real for
being so, and it clearly has implications for Nietzsche's historicization, adding an
unavoidable element of uncertainty.
Three anthologies can stand as representative of a larger universe: Nietzsche as
Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, edited by Clayton Koelb; Nietzsche's New
Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, edited by Michael
Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong; and Reading Nietzsche, edited by Robert C.
Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins.56
Of all the recent anthologies, Koelb's Nietzsche as Postmodernist most directly
addresses the question of the relation between Nietzsche and the present, allegedly
"postmodern," moment. The editor, a literary scholar, is on the mark when he
suggests that neither the question "What is 'Nietzsche'?" nor the question "What
is 'postmodernism'?" (p. 7) can be answered definitively. He is also on the mark
in noting that "it often appears as if no single 'Nietzsche' emerges for analysis"
and in suggesting that the Nietzsche corpus itself appears to be "a great anthology
assembled by an editor whose principles of selection have never been satisfacto-
rily explained. No one, certainly not Nietzsche himself, has produced an 'editor's
introduction' for this anthology" (pp. 7-8). Unsurprisingly, his authors disagree
with each other: some assimilate Nietzsche to an alleged "postmodern" moment,
while others hold him apart from such a moment. From a historian's point of view,
Koelb's anthology is interesting as an example of how closely the description of
56 Other anthologies include Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed., Nietzsche and Modern German
Thought (London, 1991); Sigrid Bauschinger, Susan L. Cocalis, and Sara Lennox, eds., Nietzsche
heute: Die Rezeption seines Werks nach 1968 (Bern, 1988); Peter J. Burgard, ed., Nietzsche and
the Feminine (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Tom Darby, Bela Egyed, and Ben Jones, eds., Nietzsche
and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language, and Politics (Ottawa, 1989);
?6lker Durr, Reinhold Grimm, and Kathy Harms, eds., Nietzsche: Literature and Values
(Madison, Wis., 1988); David Farrell Krell and David Wood, eds., Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects
of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation (London, 1988); Paul Patton, ed., Nietzsche, Feminism,
and Political Theory (London, 1993); Laurence A. Rickels, ed., Looking after Nietzsche (Albany,
N.Y., 1990); and Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's
"On the Genealogy of Morals" (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994).

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an object is tied to the place where the describer stands. In a more confident and
less self-questioning time, Kaufmann could articulate a unified and definitive-
seeming Nietzsche. Nietzsche "for our time" is different. Part of the historian's
task is surely to establish a Nietzsche (or Nietzsches) "for our time," yet one who
plausibly existed in an earlier time as well.
In Nietzsche's New Seas, the political theorists Michael Gillespie and Tracy
Strong pick up yet another aspect of the enigma and interest of "Nietzsche." Their
stated aim is to highlight what they see as the intimate relation in Nietzsche
between content and style, but what stands out just as clearly is the activist,
performative aspect of the Nietzsche interpretation they advance. Their concern is
with cultural practice-that is, with ways of living in the world now-and they
read Nietzsche with this concern sharply in view. Especially striking is the way in
which they and some of their contributors (notably Karsten Harries) develop the
Nietzschean theme of exploration and discovery. As Gillespie and Strong write:
"These essays ... try to chart the course that Nietzsche sets for humanity toward
new seas beyond the world bounded by the pillars of Hercules, the world of the
Western tradition.... Whether the voyage Nietzsche sends us on can end in the
joy and innocence of the blessed isles or in a shipwreck that maroons us on the
rocks of nihilism remains an open question" (p. 16). Evident is a strong contrast
with Kohler's much more literal and specific reading of Nietzsche's voyage to
"the blessed isles." Further, whereas Kohler sees Nietzsche's philosophy as
defective, Gillespie contends that Nietzsche was not at all "an unsuccessful
philosopher" (p. 118). Less stringent in their philosophical expectations than
Kohler, Gillespie and Strong offer a more metaphorical and open-and thus more
usable-Nietzsche. The disciplinary historian, with a conceptual image of a fixed
historical past and a commitment to exact factual research, will be inclined, at
least in principle, toward Kohler.
In Reading Nietzsche, edited by the philosophers Robert Solomon and Kathleen
Higgins, nine philosophers, a literary scholar, and a novelist each discuss one
aspect of Nietzsche's work (most choose a particular book). The anthology is
remarkable for the accessibility of its contributions; most striking is a hilarious
essay by the Swedish novelist Lars Gustafsson, "Dr. Nietzsche's Office Hours Are
between 10 and 12 A.M.," but there are other gems as well, and a general air of
clear intelligence applying itself to (relatively) manageable chunks of Nietzsche.
The book is of interest here for two reasons. First, because it is accessible to
nonexperts and not just to learned scholars, it reminds us that the chief aim of any
humanistic study is edification, acquired through reading, discussion, and reflec-
tion. A historicization of Nietzsche that loses sight of this aim is in a certain
measure without justification. Second, to evoke the story of the blind men and the
elephant, the book is a reminder that one's definition of "Nietzsche" depends
heavily on which of his works or on which aspects of his production one chooses
to focus. Once again, there seems to be no authoritative view that will enable us
to define the Nietzsche. As Solomon and Higgins suggest in their introduction,
"there is no Nietzschean iuberhaupt," no "single theme" that one can identify as
central (p. vii). Pushed hard enough, the multiplicity of themes could itself
become the unifying theme, but the Cheshire smile would then be lost.

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136 Megill
The sense of nonconvergence persists when one turns to the single-authored

studies. Those by political theorists are perhaps the most divergent, reflecting the
balkanized state of that subdiscipline. Four recent studies give a sampling of the
field: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche's
Moral and Political Thought; Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of
Aristocratic Radicalism; Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics
of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism; and Mark Warren, Nietzsche and
Political Thought. These studies have in common a detachment from the particular
circumstances of Nietzsche's life and time (the same is true of the studies by
philosophers and by literary scholars). The historian Peter Bergman has com-
mented negatively on the detachment, referring to the "abstract and ahistorical"
account of Nietzsche's politics offered by the political theorist Tracy Strong.57
Conversely, the political theorists allow us to see a reductionist tendency in the
historical approach. Without justifying his interpretive choice, Bergmann wrote as
if Nietzsche were primarily an untheoretical observer of the politics of his time:
untheoretical himself, Bergmann missed the theoretical dimension in Nietzsche.
Thus he did not discuss Nietzsche's early unpublished essays, "The Greek State"
(1871) and "Homer's Contest" (1872), evidently because they contained no
observations on contemporary European politics. Theory is characterized by the
search for a general view, going beyond the current situation, and in Nietzsche's
eyes the Greeks were relevant to Europe in the 1870s. Significantly, the political
theorists strongly pick up on the Greek connection.58
While the political theorists are all recognizably members of that tribe, they still
generate very different Nietzsches. Ansell-Pearson, in Nietzsche Contra Rousseau,
is close to an older "history of ideas" tradition. He carefully reflects on classic
texts and shows no interest in sociopolitical contexts or in less-than-classic texts.
His special emphasis is on the "fate of civilization" in Nietzsche and Rousseau,
which both authors saw as tied up with "history and the nature of time." In
Ansell-Pearson's reading, Nietzsche claimed that the Western philosophical
tradition had devalued life by devaluing "time and transience" (pp. 3-4).
Rousseau, in his first and second discourses and elsewhere, was concerned with
the problem of maintaining virtue against the ravages of time. Ansell-Pearson
argues that Nietzsche fell into "the same error ... of a monumentalistic reading of
history" that he warned against in Rousseau, for Nietzsche wished to subjugate
history to nature (p. 229). Ansell-Pearson thus gives us a "naturalistic" Nietzsche,
as distinguished from the "aestheticist" Nietzsche that some commentators have
emphasized.
57 Bergmann, p. 188, n. 2, criticizing Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of
Transfiguration (1975), expanded ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988).
58 See Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago, 1990
pp. 39-42; Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 66-69;
Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche's Moral and Political
Thought (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 213-14, and especially Strong, pp. 135-85. As Detwiler
observes, "we cannot assume that Nietzsche's political views are exhausted by an analysis of his
interaction with the politics of his time" (p. 207, n. 13).

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Ansell-Pearson also gives us a Nietzsche who embraced a "Machiavellian-

inspired immoral politics, which recognizes no limits" (p. 201). In this respect
Ansell-Pearson's Nietzsche resembles the Nietzsche of Detwiler's Nietzsche and
the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (both of whom stand in contrast to
Bergmann's benign antistatist). Detwiler finds Nietzsche's politics "intriguing but
odious" (p. 4), aiming at an authoritarian hierarchy (since this was the only kind
of society, Detwiler contends, that Nietzsche believed would allow the emergence
of higher human beings). Ansell-Pearson and Detwiler also resemble each other in
seeing Nietzsche's thought as unified. For Ansell-Pearson, the problem of history
and of time is "the fundamental leitmotif running through Nietzsche's work"
(p. 4). Detwiler, for his part, does not so much seek to establish the unity of
Nietzsche's thought as he assumes it: he discounts anomalies in Nietzsche's
assertions concerning politics and regards Nietzsche's political thought as a
logical outgrowth of his thought generally. Finally, although Ansell-Pearson and
Detwiler both acknowledge the shimmering ambiguity of Nietzsche's writing,
neither addresses what this might mean for describing his project.
Leslie Paul Thiele, in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, works in
a more supple manner. He claims to "wrestle" with Nietzsche, not to "fence" with
him. "Wrestling" suggests that the interpreter is more willing to put his own
stance and conclusions into question. Thiele is nicely aware of the limits that
Nietzsche's multiplicity places on his claims about Nietzsche: "Nietzsche wears
many masks. I submit a description of one of them" (p. 7). He emphasizes
Nietzsche's notion of "the soul as plurality," his conception of "the individual" as
"a battleground of competing drives," and his "changeability" in general (pp. 51,
62). In these emphases Thiele seems on track, historiographically and in other
ways. Where he falls down from a historian's point of view is in his treatment of
Nietzsche and "life." Thiele's stated aim is "to bring Nietzsche's thought to life
[i.e., to life for us], not bury it under the weight of the past" (p. 219). But Thiele
also claims to root Nietzsche's thought in Nietzsche's life. He criticizes Alexander
Nehamas for having failed, in Nietzsche: Life as Literature, "to account for the
primacy of the lived over the written experience" in Nietzsche (p. 133, n. 9). In
Thiele's view, Nehamas reduced Nietzsche's life to literature. Indeed, Thiele
contends that hitherto Nietzsche scholarship "has not breached the frontier that
separates works of politics, art, and philosophy from biography" (p. 7). It is
evident that such a frontier does exist, but Thiele has not managed to breach it
either. (Can it ever be wholly breached? I doubt it.) He offers an intelligent,
rewarding, remarkably accessible account of Nietzsche's brand of "heroic
individualism" and describes Nietzsche's various ideals-philosopher, artist,
saint, educator, overman. But he tells us little or nothing about the "lived
experience" of the actual specific person, Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems that
political theory does not know, perhaps cannot know, what biography is.
Historicization-understood as the imbedding of argument and text into a specific
past context-alerts us to a systematic omission.
In another absence, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul is far more
about "the soul" than about politics. Thiele notes Nietzsche's "choice of a

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138 Megill
political vocabulary to describe the soul of man" (p. 4), a choice that has
precedents going back to The Republic. But we ought not to mistake a precedent
for a justification. Mark Warren, in Nietzsche and Political Thought, adds a
systematically critical moment to the political theorists' consideration of Nietz-
sche: he is especially critical of Nietzsche's conflation of soul and state. He argues
that Nietzsche held unexamined-and mistaken-assumptions about the character
of modem society. Jettisoning these assumptions, Warren offers a revised
Nietzsche committed to "individuation, communal infersubjectivity, egalitarian-
ism, and pluralism." He concedes that these commitments do not represent "the
real Nietzsche"; rather, "they represent one Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who has
something to contribute to the development of critical postmodemism in political
thought" (p. 247).
In articulating this Nietzsche and in criticizing the "real" Nietzsche, Warren
shows himself to be an able theorist. But the obvious objection to his proceeding,
likely to be offered not only by historians but also by well-informed Nietzsche
scholars in any field, is that his Nietzsche is a historical falsification. Clearly,
Warren is miles away from the standards of disciplinary historical scholarship, but
his project nonetheless seems to me to be defensible (even though it is not
defensible as history). In the most general terms, we might ask what it is to
understand a past theorist historically. Such an understanding cannot help but
require a translation of the theoretical enterprise into the new, present-day context,
partly to make the enterprise understandable to its present-day recipients and
partly to do honor to the claim of theory to go beyond the particular context of its
articulation. In short, I would resist the strict historisant claim that the author's
context and experience should be seen as foundational for the extension of the
work into other contexts. Rather, as I noted at the end of Section IIIA, I see a gap
between the historical and the theoretical enterprise, making it impossible to get
to the latter, without a break, from the former. Warren has the merit of telling us
exactly what he is doing, namely, reflecting on "what [Nietzsche's] philosophy as
a whole implies for political thought today" (p. ix). His description of "Nietz-
sche" is schematic, but it is also congruent with the general sense in the literature
that the historical object, "Nietzsche," is deeply fissured: thus Warren discovers
two Nietzsches-roughly, a "right" Nietzsche who celebrates mastery over
others, and a "left" Nietzsche who is concemed with human agency-and insists
that "both exist and both are authentic" (pp. 207-8).
The ultimate theorists are the philosophers. Four recent philosophical studies
can stand for a larger universe of works: Alistair Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of
Nature and Cosmology; Lester H. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue; Julian
Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art; and Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth
and Philosophy. Three of these studies seek to explicate Nietzsche's views on
currently recognized philosophical problems, with the aim of enabling current
philosophers to draw stimulus and insight from his work. The concern with
demonstrating Nietzsche's philosophical relevance goes back to Kaufmann's
Nietzsche (1950), although, to be sure, Kaufmann was more preoccupied with
rehabilitating Nietzsche generally (by clearing him of the charge of being a
proto-Nazi) than he was with showing his relevance to philosophy specifically.

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Arthur C. Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965) was the first book in English
to take the demonstration of Nietzsche's philosophical relevance as its primary
aim.59 Currently, the preeminent work in this line is Schacht's Nietzsche (1983),
which is an attempt "to gain for [Nietzsche] the attention he deserves in our part
of the contemporary philosophical world." As Schacht notes, the enterprise
involves a dimming of the original "color" of Nietzsche's thinking.60 The
dimming would likely occur in any work of commentary, but the effect is
magnified in the field of analytic philosophy, with its highly instrumental
conception of language. Thus Schacht engages in a "filtering out"' of Nietzsche's
"rhetorical excesses," which he regards as "so much unfortunate static": he
largely passes over Nietzsche's "literary-philosophical efforts," for such work
"does not readily lend itself ... to the sort of analysis undertaken here." In short,
much of what is distinctive about Nietzsche's work is omitted in a search for "the
substance of his philosophical thought." 6'
The four more recent works considered here are all examples of the type of
Nietzsche interpretation ("straightforward" in character) that Schacht practices.
But each work has its particular cast. Taken together, they exemplify something
that Moles notes in the preface to Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and
Cosmology, namely, Nietzsche's capacity to generate a seemingly unending round
of divergent reflection on the part of dialectically active and engaged readers.
Clearly, this capacity makes the historicizing of Nietzsche a problem. One could
avoid the problem by leaving aside the theoretical and critical issues that
Nietzsche's writings address, but such avoidance would be strange, for we attend
to Nietzsche in the first place because he discussed those issues.
Of the four works, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology conforms
least well to the disciplinary standards of philosophy. Moles's nonconformity is
evident in those parts of his book where, hoping to cast light on the question of
whether Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence is a plausible theory, he
discusses recent cosmological research. Since the issue is an empirical one, and
since philosophy in its present-day form is generally confined to theoretical
curiosity, Moles comes off as not quite understanding the rules of the philosophy
game. But his empirical bent does give him some affinity with intellectual history.
He contends that Nietzsche was more deeply influenced by the scientific thinking
of his own day than has usually been thought, a contention that might well repay
further investigation by historians. He also offers some interesting aperqus, most
notably in his discussion, albeit rather brief, of the Nietzschean claim that "the
world is ... essentially multiplex.... The world is not a single entity, and not at
all a unity. .. . It is as if the world is essentially self-destructive, as if it embodied
a principle of contradiction" (p. 183). Moles does not address the consequences of
this claim, which could not fail to have self-reflexive implications for any thinker
59 Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1965). Arguably, Danto's book was
in this respect the English-language equivalent of Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, 2 vols.
(Pfullingen, 1961).
60 Schacht (n. 46 above), pp. xv-xvi, 530.
61 Ibid., pp. xiii-xv.

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140 Megill
holding it, and which, if true, would have an impact on how we ought to
understand history-including Nietzsche, as part of that history.
Hunt, in Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, also finds contradiction in
Nietzsche: specifically, a contradiction between "immoralist" and "legislating"
modes in Nietzsche's work. Hunt points out that Nietzsche's claims are often quite
different depending on whether he is attacking others' views or advancing his own.
Given Hunt's emphasis on contradiction, it is not surprising that, in contrast to
Detwiler, he sees Nietzsche's ethical-political philosophy as independent of his
views on other, "supposedly more fundamental" issues (p. xviii). Hunt finds a
"Nietzschean liberalism" in some of Nietzsche's writings (p. 65); he thus offers a
relatively benign view of Nietzsche, akin to Peter Bergmann's. But he also takes
note of Nietzsche's suggestion, late in his career, of the "three-caste" view of
society (philosophers, military leaders, ordinary people)-a view that figures
prominently in Ermst Nolte's vision, in Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus, of
Nietzsche the right-winger.
Clark in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy and Young in Nietzsche's
Philosophy ofArt find coherent Nietzsches, and in a common way: by arguing that
Nietzsche arrived at his "final" views on, respectively, epistemology and art late
in his career, and by finding these final views to be coherent. Of the four studies,
Clark's is the least likely to interest historians, who tend simply to presuppose
conceptions of truth, not think about them. Clark argues that Nietzsche moved
from an "early position," in which he questioned truth's existence (p. ix), to a
position, postdating Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in which he held that truths
really do exist. Clark thus rejects the wild or pseudowild "postmodem" Nietzsche
celebrated by the literary critic Paul de Man and others. While her conceptual
precision and her care in canvassing the extant interpretations of Nietzsche's
epistemology make Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy worthy of respect, the
historian is struck by the completely "intemal" character of the history it offers of
the development of Nietzsche's epistemological views. In the 1886 preface to The
Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche wrote of looking at "science in the perspective of the
artist" and "art in that of life."62 Art is missing from Clark's account, as is
Nietzsche's life. A hybrid historical/philosophical intelligence, relating what we
know of Nietzsche's life to what Clark tells us about his epistemological views,
might well add insight.
Julian Young, the author of an earlier study on Schopenhauer, brings his
knowledge of Schopenhauer to Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art. He also has
intelligent opinions on art, as we leam whenever he turns from explicating
Nietzsche to criticizing him. Young contends that Nietzsche adhered successively
to four different philosophies of art, articulated in The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
Human, All Too Human (1878 - 80), The Gay Science (1882, 1886), and the works
of his final year of productivity, 1888. Young further argues that Nietzsche's final
account of "the relation between art and life" marks, in some respects, a return to
his initial, Schopenhauerian view in The Birth of Tragedy, restoring "art and its
62 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," sec. 2, in

Nietzsche, Basic Writings (n. 2 above).

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creators" to "their former glory" (pp. 117-18). Young's book will be rewarding
to readers interested in Nietzsche and art. Yet, again, from the historian's point of
view there is an important absence. Although Young characterizes Nietzsche's
Philosophy of Art as a "philosophical biography," he quickly notes that the book
deals with "the life lived by Nietzsche in rather than outside of his writings"
(p. 2). A rather dusty bios, it must be said. It is good that Young admits it, rather
than claiming to write Nietzsche's real life. Still, the book raises puzzles,
unresolved by Young, to which an examination of the real life might well offer
solutions. Most obviously, the transitions from each Nietzschean philosophy of art
to the next beg to be explained in noninternalist ways, to supplement the
attenuated-even nonexistent-explanations that Young offers. Or consider
Young's account of The Gay Science. Criticizing Schacht's view that The Gay
Science really is, as its title suggests, joyous, Young retorts that (especially in bk.
5) "not Schacht's joyful affirmation of life but rather Spenglerian doom, envelops
it" (p. 112). Yet Young himself notes the tension between Nietzsche's excitement
in The Gay Science at voyaging into "open sea" and his criticism of that very
excitement (p. 111): characteristically, he discounts ambivalence even while
drawing attention to it.63 A better account might see the work as both joyful and
doom-laden-and perhaps other things as well. But why would Nietzsche make it
so? Can Nietzsche's life really be so irrelevant to the descriptive and explanatory
problem that Young helps us to see?
A general difficulty for Nietzsche's philosophical interpreters is that Nietzsche
again and again states philosophical claims without articulating fully (or at all)
supporting arguments.64 The interpreter is thus faced with a choice between jus
stating what Nietzsche said, and reconstructing the arguments. The choice, it
seems, is between a minimal Nietzsche and a reconstructed Nietzsche. Which
Nietzsche is historical? Which unhistorical? One might think that the minimal
Nietzsche is historiographically more pure, but this does not seem to be the case.65
The choice between the minimal and the reconstructed Nietzsche seems in part a
choice between different disciplinary subjectivities in the present. Philosophers
elaborate Nietzsche's philosophical positions with a view to what will be
interesting to philosophers. Historians omit philosophers' issues; thus Nietzsche
acquires something like the atheoretical frame of mind of a present-day historian,
as in other contexts he acquires something like the theoretical frame of mind of a
present-day philosopher. We should not think that the Nietzsche of the historians
is the historical Nietzsche. The search for the historical Nietzsche seems
"multiplex," not singular. Distinctions of quality exist, but these seem connected
63 Nietzsche, The Gay Science (n. 20 above), sec. 343.

64 As Nietzsche wrote in a discarded draft for Ecce Homo, "Silence is as much of an instinct
with me as is garrulity with our dear philosophers. I am brief; my readers themselves must
become long and comprehensive in order to bring up and together all that I have thought, and
thought deep down" (Basic Writings, p. 796). There are similar if (predictably) less garrulous
statements in the published writings.
65 Classically, the minimal Nietzsche was presented by George A. Morgan Jr., What Nietzsche
Means (Cambridge, Mass., 1941): it has often been noted that the title of Morgan's book ought
to have been "What Nietzsche Says."

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142 Megill
to intellectual virtues like precision and imagination, which are not specific to
particular fields.
When one then takes into account the special studies of a literary bent, the
picture becomes even more variegated, although Nietzsche's life, and the
sociopolitico-cultural context, continue to be left aside. Three studies are of
interest here: Adrian Del Caro's Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the
Anti-Romantic, and two works by Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives and
Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women. (Although Shapiro is a philoso-
pher by training, in these books he takes a literary tum.) We can characterize Del
Caro's Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche as "philological" in character, and the two
books by Shapiro as "textual."
Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche is informed by a wide knowledge of German
literature and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Del Caro aims
to see what Nietzsche meant by romanticism and why he came to regard romantic
qualities as objectionable. In pursuit of this aim, he attempts to establish what
Nietzsche could and did know about all the major romantic and pararomantic
thinkers. He relies on previous scholarship on this topic but is more systematic and
comprehensive than his predecessors. He finds that an important divergence
between Nietzsche and the romantics is that, whereas the romantics saw creativity
as culminating in the production of the work of art, Nietzsche saw it as
culminating in man himself. As this claim suggests, Del Caro regards Nietzsche as
a humanist, not as some sort of transhumanist or aestheticist.
We should not be surprised that Del Caro's carefully philological study
generates a rather conventional Nietzsche, rather than the extreme thinker some
have seen. His contextualization of Nietzsche (in relation to the literary tradition)
normalizes Nietzsche: the tendency here is to stress those elements that fit
Nietzsche into the context, not those that might exclude him from it. In particular,
while he says much about Nietzsche's views, he says nothing about the
peculiarities of the texts that were the mediums-and perhaps more than
mediums-of those views. He is well aware of Nietzsche's multiplicity and of the
resulting problem "of deriving a comprehensive Nietzschean perspective" (p. 7),
but he might have reflected more explicitly on the implications thereof. Further,
the historian cannot help but note the purely literary and intellectual character of
Del Caro's contextualization of Nietzsche, his almost total lack of interest in
society and politics or in biography. He does claim that "among the tendencies
contributing to Nietzsche's era," the three that were most important for the
development of his thought were "materialism and socialism as seen in the
writings of Marx, the writings of Darwin, and the founding of the Reich under
Prussian supremacy" (p. 10), but he does not actually examine the presence or
absence of these tendencies in Nietzsche's writings.66 On the biographical level,
he takes note of Nietzsche's "wandering lifestyle" of the 1880s and suggests that
it had a relation to his "main problem," namely, "Nietzsche himself" (p. 8), but
he then tums to purely intellectual history, barely to touch such matters again. As
66 In Nietzsche's Werke (n. 16 above), there is not a single reference to Marx.

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we see by now, this is hardly atypical; indeed, it is characteristic of a very large

part of the Nietzsche literature. It is an omission that suggests a place for historians
to make their own contribution.
In characterizing Gary Shapiro's approach to Nietzsche as "textual" I pay
honor to his attempt to come to grips with Nietzsche's textual complexity: in this
sense he is an atypical philosophical commentator on Nietzsche. In Nietzschean
Narratives his effort does not quite succeed. He waffles between two projects that
are not clearly distinguished: investigating the role of narrative in Nietzsche's
work and commenting on specific narratives. Nor is he careful about defining
narrative or about distinguishing it from such other literary elements as enuncia-
tion, rhetoric, and style. Overall, he seems to fall between the two disciplinary
stools of philosophy and literary studies, attempting a literary-critical project
without having a wide literary-critical erudition.
Yet, historiographically, Shapiro's work is interesting and suggestive. He does
irritate the historian by sometimes making unsubstantiated claims. For example,
he battles against an alleged misreading of Nietzsche's life: "Nietzsche is usually
portrayed as having lived an intensely solitary and painful life; much of the pain
is said to be that of loneliness itself." Against this view, Shapiro claims that
"Nietzsche was never in hiding" (p. 1). Vos preuves? It is a fact that Nietzsche was
often deeply reticent about letting his identity and whereabouts be known: here
Shapiro irritates by the glibness of his confidence. But he undeniably has an
inventive mind, and on occasion he strikes sparks. One occasion is when (inspired
in part by Jacques Derrida) he suggests that "the postal system and the railway
system" have something important to do with Nietzsche's project and that
"philology was doing to the literary and cultural tradition what the postal system
was doing to the presumed stable identities of work, residence, character, and the
customary shared understandings of daily life" (p. 2). An abductive reasoner
naturaliter, Shapiro seems unaware of how such a hypothesis might be develop
and tested, but it is the sort of hypothesis that could be grist for the historian's mill:
certainly, the post and tourism do seem to have been intertwined with Nietzsche's
life, especially in his Wanderjahre of the 1 880s. Yet the relation of Nietzsche to
nineteenth-century communication systems remains largely unexplored.67
As for Shapiro's Alcyone, it is in essence a meditation on three seemingly minor
themes in Nietzsche: gifts, parasitism, and the notion of the "halcyon [calm,
peaceful, quiet, undisturbed] tone." Shapiro pursues these themes, primarily in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, following a kind of disciplined free association. Because
he makes it explicit that this is what he is doing, and because, in any case, his
argument in Alcyone that there is a multiplicity of styles in Nietzsche is more
plausible than his argument in Nietzschean Narratives that we ought to view
67 For a background study, which does not mention Nietzsche, see James Buzard, The Beat
Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture, " 1800-1918 (New York, 1993).
Friedrich A. Kittler makes some suggestive comments on Nietzsche's relation to the telegraph and
the typewriter in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens
(Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 191-96.

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144 Megill
Nietzsche as a narrative writer, Alcyone seems in general to be the more

satisfactory work. Yet it is so much Shapiro's meditation on Nietzsche that it is
hard to see how it could be fitted into a project of historicization at all.
In sum, the various special studies of Nietzsche move off in sharply different
directions. Among the types of studies discussed here they are the furthest from
historians' concems. Historians should surely keep in mind the possibility of
historicizing them-most obviously, by reinvoking the grounding of Nietzsche's
writings in his life and times-but historicization may not invariably turn out to
be intellectually productive. It may well be that in the final analysis, a disjunction
between theory and history-not the grounding of the one in the other-will need
to be acknowledged. Certainly, to historicize Nietzsche studies in any singular
way, or to assume that only historicizing generates valid knowledge, would be to
diminish knowledge. The way to maximum knowledge does not seem to reside in
a dialectical synthesis serving up a single, authoritative view. At some level, it
seems a matter more of juxtaposition than of synthesis. At some level, only a
restraint from synthesis may be able to do justice to the singularity of the object
(which does not, however, mean that every view about Nietzsche is correct).
C. General Studies
"General" studies seek to elucidate Nietzsche's perspective as a whole. Among

recent works on Nietzsche, four seem especially appropriate for consideration
under the "general" heading: Alan White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth; Peter
Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism; Henry Staten, Nietzsche's
Voice; and Bemd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche's
Case: Philosophy as/and Literature. There is a leitmotif running through all four
studies, that of boundary-crossing: in their attempt to elucidate Nietzsche as a
whole, the authors are led to question the disciplinary boundaries that would
confine, and thus render partial, their own perspectives.
Alan White, in Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, emphasizes that he describes one
among many labyrinthine paths and that it is a path within Nietzsche's labyrinth
rather than through it. He takes seriously Nietzsche's claim that Thus Spoke
Zarathustra was his central work and that his later works were all " 'fish hooks,'
designed to pull readers out of the sea of dogmatic opinion and onto the shore from
which they may begin their ascent of Zarathustra's mountain" (p. 10). He writes
extensively on Zarathustra, although I find his discussion of that work less
interesting than his discussions of other parts of Nietzsche's corpus.
White was trained as a philosopher, and a customary move on his part is the
analytic one of identifying subcategories within a category (e.g., nihilism), trying
to tease out relations among the different subcategories, and in general trying to
shake our sense that we already knew what Nietzsche was getting at. However,
White's main concem is not analytic so much as it is interpretive. He is concemed,
that is, to carry Nietzsche over into "our" time and place-"us" being "educated,
late twentieth-century Westemers" (p. 146). In this light, he regards "Nietzsche's
labyrinth" as "our labyrinth" (p. 107). For help in his interpretive project, White
has recourse to recent literature-specifically, the work of Italo Calvino and Milan

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Kundera. Boundary crossing is risky, but White manages to pull it off: he retains
his philosopher's talent of precision even while transgressing into the realms of
literature and cultural commentary. His cross-boundary raids sometimes yield
interesting booty, as when he uses Kundera's account of Anna Karenina in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being for help in criticizing Nehamas's account of the
relations between life and literature in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (once more
Nehamas's book serves as a foil).
White admits that his is a domesticated Nietzsche: "I muffle, perhaps nearly
silence, Nietzsche's thunder and fireworks." White's Nietzsche is one who
"presents us with reasons for respecting others and encouraging diversity." White
finds that Nietzsche "does not ... illuminate our political action"; he tells us not
how to save the world, but how "to save ourselves from living lives that we will
come to view with regret rather than with pride" (p. 137). This is a good
Nietzsche, and (I think) one to be welcomed. Still, the historian misses the fire a
thunder and finds troubling the absence of a biographical and contextual
dimension. Is not the "good" Nietzsche simply too well adapted to what we
conceive to be our present needs? Is not one task of the historian that of
restoring-as much as possible-what in Nietzsche, qua historical figure, is
different from us, and perhaps troubling to us?
Peter Sloterdijk, in Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, articulates a
Nietzsche of a wilder sort. Sloterdijk writes outside the tradition of professional
philosophy, and outside the university generally. In this respect, Thinker on Stage,
although it is an essay of only a hundred pages, parallels Joachim Kohler's work.
Like White, Sloterdijk "hybridizes" philosophy and literature, but to a greater
degree. His Nietzsche is a "centauric" genius (p. 1), at home nowhere. The
centauric genius, Sloterdijk contends, seeks to liberate himself from the trap of
instrumental reason, while avoiding flight into counterenlightenment. Focusing on
The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Sloterdijk finds a Nietzsche who had an "inability to
be a specialist in any one discipline" (p. 6). Breaching professional boundaries, he
transformed Greek antiquity into something that was no longer "a guarantee for
reasonable moderation and proper bourgeois serenity" (p. 14). Instead, he brought
forth, although ambivalently, "the Dionysian force of vitality and sexuality"
(p. 16). In Sloterdijk's reading, Nietzsche is a "thinker on stage" in that he is both
seeker and teacher, revealing his quest and presenting it as an end in itself.
Sloterdijk's Nietzsche speaks (pace Pletsch) "from behind the pretense of the cult
of genius" (p. 11, my emphasis).
Clearly, Sloterdijk's is not a commentary in the authorized style. Yet his is a
legitimate reading of Nietzsche, in the sense that it is a Nietzschean reading: just
as The Birth of Tragedy was really about Nietzsche's present, so Sloterdijk's
commentary on The Birth of Tragedy is really about Sloterdijk's present. To be
sure, it now strikes us as, to some degree, an artifact of a certain tendency in
anarcho-leftist Westem German intellectual politics circa 1986, when the original
German edition was published. But its connection to that moment does not
invalidate it as a Nietzsche interpretation. In his brevity Sloterdijk zeroes in on
some important aspects of what we are probably justified in taking as one of the
historical Nietzsches. For example, his emphasis on Nietzsche's concern with

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146 Megill
masks is surely justified not only by the presence of masks in Greek tragedy but
also by the conditions of Nietzsche's own life. Sloterdijk also seems right in
emphasizing the dialectic between Nietzsche's need to escape from himself and
his need to find himself, especially after his break with Wagner and departure from
Basel. Nor are these the only places where Sloterdijk, a nonhistorian, seems to
evoke historical resonances.
Henry Staten, a professor of literature, shows himself in Nietzsche's Voice to be
yet another hybridizer. His reading of Nietzsche is in a broad sense Derridean: it
has a "family resemblance" to Derrida's reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatol-
ogy (p. 2, n. 2).68 Staten characterizes his reading as "deconstructive" or "psy-
chodialectic" and sees it as treating "the interaction between the libidinal
economy of a text and its logical and dialectical structures" (p. 2). One of the
reasons Nietzsche's Voice is best viewed as a general study is that Staten explicitly
confronts, in his "psychodialectic" reading, the question of whether and how
Nietzsche is to be taken as a whole. Staten acknowledges the question early in his
book, when he notes that one could say that "Nietzsche" is nothing but an
assemblage of multiple "subject positions or 'voices,' " or one could say "that
they are all inflections of one voice or masks of one persona" (Staten apparently
does not recall that "persona" means "mask," suggesting masks behind masks,
caves behind caves). Staten himself chooses to treat Nietzsche's text as a
" 'relative unity,' however problematic and fractured." Starting from this po
he asks what, in its "textual economy," allows it "to be heard in so many
ways" (pp. 5-6). He does not aim to refer the heterogeneity of Nietzsche's text
back to "some perfect originative freedom" but aims, instead, to elicit the
"constraints of textuality" at work in it (p. 7). These constraints constitute the
psychodialectic of Nietzsche's text.
Staten is both a careful reader and a precise conceptualizer, and his study is one
of the best under consideration here. His appendix alone, taking issue with the
literary critic Paul de Man's well-known deconstructive reading of The Birth of
Tragedy, is worth the price of admission, as is his account of the burgeoning
oscillations and reversals of Toward the Genealogy of Morals. But his psychodi-
alectic reading does not touch Nietzsche's life: he is concerned with "the texture
of Nietzsche's text" (p. 26) and not at all with the texture of his life. Indeed, Staten
deliberately refrains from any use of Nietzsche's letters, which in his view would
take him beyond the purely textual level ("intrinsic," "formalist") at which he
wants to work (p. 2, n. 3). The historian, concemed with such trivialities as the
empirical lives of people, their loves and hates, is disconcerted, and looks for hints
toward an extension of the psychodialectic from text to life. When Staten quotes
Nietzsche's claim in Beyond Good and Evil that "the degree and kind of a man's
sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit" (pp. 1-2), the historian
asks about Nietzsche's sexuality. Staten quotes Nietzsche's assertion in Ecce
Homo that "contrary capacities" dwelt within him and that he had attempted "to
mix nothing, to 'reconcile' nothing" (p. 22, quoting EH, "Why I Am So Clever,"
sec. 9), and the historian again is inclined to seek out a connection to the life. The
68 Jacques Denrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976).

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historian has a similar reaction to Staten's discussions of Nietzsche on asceticism

and on desire, of Nietzsche's exploration of sadomasochistic subjectivity, and of
Nietzsche's conception of "self-enjoyment," which according to Staten "in a way
names the central problem of Nietzsche's thought from beginning to end" (p. 88).
Staten evidently accepts Nietzsche's claim in Ecce Homo (contradicted elsewhere)
that "I am one thing, my writings are another matter" (EH, "Good Books," sec. 1).
In their coauthored work, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature,
Bemd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur go a step beyond the
hybridizing efforts of the other authors by coming together out of different
disciplines to write a single work. Magnus is a philosopher, an accredited
Nietzsche expert; Stewart and Mileur are literary scholars.69 Remarkably, Nietz-
sche's Case is not the disparate hash that it might have been. On the contrary, the
discussions of various parallel and collateral topics (ranging as far afield as
Renaissance literature) seem in almost every instance appropriate to "Nietzsche's
case." To a large extent, the authors have also succeeded in the project suggested
by the "as/and" of their subtitle-not merely adding literature to philosophy, but
doing philosophy in something like a literary mode. The project is difficult, in part
because of the intellectual range covered and in part because cross-disciplinary
collaboration is discouraged by the disciplinary divisions and commitment to
solitary research that prevail in the humanities. While White, Sloterdijk, and
Staten also bridge, in some degree, philosophy and literature, Nietzsche's Case is
in a class by itself.
A major argument of the book is that Nietzsche's central concepts-such as
perspectivism, will to power, and etemal recurrence-are what Magnus, Stewart,
and Mileur (with a nod to Stanley Fish) call "self-consuming concepts." That is,
in each case the notion "asserts a condition that it wishes to set aside" (p. 26). If
this is true-and I believe it is-it becomes extremely difficult to give determinate
content to any of the concepts in question. It follows that even to describe
"Nietzsche's thought," let alone to explain it, becomes problematic. Along the
same line, the authors note that Nietzsche "favors an accumulation of self-
sufficient insights, epigrams, maxims, aphorisms, fragments, and notes, which
require the reader to provide the missing logical ligatures, the connectives which
unify [Nietzsche's] books." In consequence, the object, "Nietzsche," becomes
"Nietzsche as-read-by-x-on-occasion-y" (p. 21). The ambiguity of concepts and
connectors would mean that there is no single, authoritative Nietzsche to be
grasped. The purist might object that Magnus, Stewart, and Mileur have allowed
their conviction that Nietzsche is relevant to what they see as the present-day
"crisis in the humanities" (p. 1) to overwhelm the task of presenting Nietzsche's
thought "wie es eigentlich gewesen." But the Nietzschean project seems to
demand precisely this sort of engagement.
Still, for all its merits, Nietzsche's Case lacks any explicit reflection on the
problem of historicizing Nietzsche. The authors conceive of their book as an
69 Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), along with
Schacht's Nietzsche and Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature (n. 30 above), were the three
most noteworthy books on Nietzsche by philosophers published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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attempt to start a dialogue between philosophy and literary criticism. Their method
is "to exploit the timeless simultaneity of a library," putting "philosophically
important" Nietzschean texts next to "theoretically significant" works of literature
(p. 140). They do not care whether their descriptions of Nietzsche fit together in
any sort of historical context. Nor are they interested in the explanation-seeking
question, which historians find important: Why did Nietzsche think and write as
he did? Their deeply textual focus is manifest. Like Staten, they fixate on
Nietzsche's "body of thought" (pp. 7-11) while leaving his real body to the
worms. Bodies molder, writings do not. They claim that Toward the Genealogy of
Morals is about writers, readers, and the relations between them (pp. 186-233),
where a historian would be inclined to claim that the work is about other things
as well. They claim that etemal recurrence is really about "the mastery of texts"
and that this mastery "is all that we can expect to master of life" (pp. 143-44);
here a historian might agree but would also be inclined to explore the contextual
and biographical dimensions of the claim.
One author, or one set of authors, can do only so much: it is then up to other
authors to do different things. As Schacht noted in his Nietzsche, "many sorts of
books" can and should be written about Nietzsche, and it would be silly to see the
writing of one kind of book as excluding other kinds.70 Magnus, Stewart, and
Mileur, and the other "centauric" authors, would surely agree. They would surely
also agree that there is no particular reason to stop at "philosophy plus literary
criticism." But none of this means that one can arrive at the real Nietzsche by pure
additivity, that is, by bringing into play all possible perspectives. First, there is no
guarantee that the number of possible perspectives is finite; and second, different
perspectives embody contradictory strengths (e.g., textual sensitivity, contextual
awareness, conceptual rigor), so that something will be cancelled out in the
addition. Against the richness of Nietzsche interpretation, the pallor of synthesis.
D. Reception Studies
Nor does a tum to the reception of Nietzsche's work suggest a way of arriving at
a synthesis, historical or otherwise, for the reception of the work has been just as
various as the work itself (if we are even justified any more in referring to "the
work itself"). I have already noted that historians tend (perhaps wisely, consid-
ering the difficulties) to shy away from the more complex and demanding aspects
of Nietzsche's work, indeed to shy away from Nietzsche generally. Once he is
safely insane they find him more manageable. The recent literature includes three
reception studies by historians. Two are marginal to the discipline: namely, the
"Nietzscheanismus" part of Ernst Nolte's Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus,
and Seth Taylor's revised dissertation, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of
German Expressionism, 1910-1920. More important is Steven E. Aschheim's The
Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. Yet, lest one think that Aschheim
exhausts the subject, one must also look at that legacy as it is described by the
70 Schacht (n. 46 above), p. xi.

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literary scholar Ernst Behler in Confrontations and by the philosopher Alan D.

Schrift in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: theirs is a Nietzsche
reception that does not stop in 1990 but continues into the present and future (so
that, in fact, both books are more than simply reception studies).
Ernst Nolte has long seen twentieth-century European history as characterized
by a "European civil war" between Left and Right.7' Nolte "historicizes"
everything in twentieth-century European history in terms of this overriding
Left/Right division. Among historians Nolte has become notorious for his role in
the Historikerstreit of 1985-86, when, applying his schema of Left/Right civil
war, he argued-without adequate supporting evidence (no such evidence
exists)-that Hitler's Holocaust was parallel and strictly comparable to Stalinist
atrocities and (by implication) that it was a defensive, preemptive strike against
such atrocities.72 Here, "historicization" acquired a distinctly pejorative reso-
nance. On the level of intellectual history, Nolte sees Marx and Nietzsche as
representing the two conflicting sides.73 Filling in the Nietzsche side of the
schema, in Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus Nolte portrays the "Nietzschean-
ism" of the period he covers-that is, up to 1914-as heavily right-wing and
nationalist. Not surprisingly, he locates the "center of active Nietzsche enthusi-
asm" at the official Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, presided over by Nietzsche's
sister (p. 209).
In contrast, Seth Taylor in Left-Wing Nietzscheans sees German Expressionism
of 1910-20 as the climax of "Nietzsche's antipolitical philosophy" and as
providing "the material to combat the militarism, authoritarianism, and illiberal-
ism of German society" (p. 3). Left-Wing Nietzscheanism corrects Nolte's mono-
chromatically right-wing Nietzsche, but the book is nonetheless limited in its
grasp. Taylor uses terms like "rationalism" and "relativism" without defining
them, as if their meanings were clear, while, on a more strictly historiographical
level, he shows no awareness of the rich discussion of the character of Wilhelmine
politics and society that historians have engaged in since the early 1980s. As for
the interpretation of Nietzsche's work itself, Taylor seems to waffle between two
views. On the one hand, he is well aware of the fact that Nietzsche's work "lent
itself to ... diversity of interpretation." Accordingly, Nietzsche was "protean"
(p. 27). Yet he also wants, it seems, to salvage Nietzsche for the Left-as when he
writes, in what seems a tone of reluctant admission, that "there are aphorisms in
71 See Ernst Nolte, Der europdische Btirgerkrieg, 1917-1945 (Berlin, 1987). The notion of
such a war is at least implicit in Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (1963;
reprint, New York, 1965), where Nolte is preoccupied by what he sees as the relationship, both
symbiotic and conflictual, between fascism and Marxism (see esp. 39-40, 51).
72 On the Historikerstreit, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust,
and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), especially chap. 3, "A Holocaust Like
the Others? Problems of Comparative History," pp. 66-99; on Nolte's thesis in particular, see
esp. pp. 66-67. See also Steven E. Aschheim's discussion of Nolte, in The Nietzsche Legacy in
Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), pp. 323-27.
73 The juxtaposition of Marx and Nietzsche is already to be found in Nolte, Three Faces of
Fascism, pp. 551-58.

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150 Megill
Nietzsche's writings which support a conservative and militaristic version of his

philosophy" (p. 58). He does not adequately justify his apparent view that the
left-wing versions of Nietzsche are more legitimate than the right-wing versions.
Aschheim's The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 is much superior to
the work of Nolte and Taylor. First, Aschheim is well aware of the wider
sociopolitical context of German history as it has emerged from discussion in the
historical discipline. His grasp of this historical context means that he never seems
simply to be summarizing one or another text or position. Second, and more
remarkably, Aschheim understands clearly the limits of his knowledge. In
particular, he renounces any claim to say anything about the true character of
Nietzsche's thought, except to note its undecidability. In his words, "Nietzsche's
work cannot be reduced to an essence nor can it be said to possess a single and
clear authoritative meaning.... There should be no set portrait of the 'authentic'
Nietzsche, nor dogmatic certainty as to his original intent" (p. 3). Previous studies
of Nietzsche reception, he holds, have adopted "a narrow essentialist framework,
classifying the various deployments either as deviations from or faithful repre-
sentations of the 'real' Nietzsche" (p. 309).
Aschheim's complete avoidance of the tasks of describing or explaining
Nietzsche's work frees him to concentrate on Nietzsche reception as a historical
object in its own right. He focuses on the relations between the various acts of
Nietzsche interpretation and the sociopolitical contexts within which those acts
were carried out. The resulting historicization is interesting to disciplinary
historians because it takes account of the "larger organizing political frames"
(p. 231) within which Nietzsche in Germany was being continually interpreted
and reinterpreted. It is interesting to Nietzsche scholars because it reminds them
that Nietzsche interpretation is influenced by its social and political contexts. For
example, Kaufmann's negative assessments of the Nietzsche interpretations of
Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger are well known. Aschheim reminds us that we
are able not only to assess Heidegger's and Jaspers's Nietzsche interpretations (as
Kaufmann does) but also to contextualize them. As Aschheim shows, Nietzsche
played an "axial role in the political and philosophical reality of the Third Reich"
(p. 256). One's view is enriched when one sees Jaspers's "epistemological"
interpretation of Nietzsche, and Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche as the
final thinker of a willful metaphysics, as (in part) Aesopian commentaries on the
Third Reich. Nor is Kaufmann-or Aschheim himself-exempt from such
contextualization in tum.
The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany is the best of the historians' studies of
Nietzsche. But Aschheim does not give us a single, authoritative Nietzsche: on the
contrary, he dissolves Nietzsche into Nietzsche interpretation. There is an irony
here: it is as if Aschheim, who is no Nietzschean, were operating in accordance
with Nietzsche's suggestion, in a Nachla,B fragment, that it is an "idle hypothesis"
to imagine "that things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from
interpretation and subjectivity."74 Nor does Aschheim give us the single,
authoritative context in terms of which Nietzsche-or his reception-ought to be
74 Nietzsche, The Will to Power (n. 25 above), sec. 560.

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interpreted. Careless readers might think that he does. But in leaving aside the
notion of a single, "real" Nietzsche, he undermines the notion of a single,
authoritative context-namely, that which is of interest to the disciplinary
historians.
Behler and Schrift exemplify the point. Their work does not invalidate
Aschheim's, but viewed together the different accounts suggest that there is no
such thing as "the Nietzsche legacy," in Germany or anywhere else. Behler's
account of Nietzsche reception, which looks only at intellectually serious work, is
far more selective than Aschheim's. In a few illuminating pages, Confrontations
covers the philosophers' reception of Nietzsche from the 1890s through the 1960s.
What is distinctive about Behler's book-beyond its unusually high level of
scholarly rigor and care-is the way in which he reads Nietzsche through the
indirection of readings of Heidegger and Derrida. The approach has its justifica-
tion in the fact that Heidegger and Derrida are arguably the two most consequen-
tial legatees of Nietzsche in the philosophical tradition. Aschheim focuses on a far
"lower" level of material. His focus is institutionally-that is to say,
contextually-determined: he confines his account to the kinds of material that
historians are comfortable with. Behler is more challenging: he invites the reader's
dialectical engagement with Nietzsche and his legatees. Yet Behler's approach is
clearly legitimate in a historical sense too: after all, Nietzsche did address his work
to future philosophers. The history of the serious engagement of philosophers with
Nietzsche is no less "historical" than the history of his ideological use.
Schrift, like Behler, approaches Nietzsche by indirection. He begins with an
account of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation, to which he proposes a "ludic"
alternative; he turns next to Derrida's use of Nietzsche to counter Heidegger; and
only in the third part does he turn to Nietzsche himself. A philosopher writes here,
not a historian. Yet, at the end, he suggests something that might help historians
also: "If Dionysus is Nietzsche's image of the intrepid multiplier of perspectives,
might not Ariadne's thread be the thread of philological rigor that insures that
these perspectives follow the walls of the labyrinthine text? Just as Dionysus can
master the labyrinth only with the assistance of Ariadne's thread, so too the
multiplication of perspectives can be used to master the text only with the
assistance of philological attention" (pp. 197-98). In his notion of philological
attention, Schrift is suggesting a procedural form of objectivity. Procedural
objectivity need not imply that all observers come together in the unity of a single
answer. At the same time, it can suggest a morality of care and attention that might
hold people together even when they disagree quite radically. In speaking of a
morality I diverge from anything that might be considered Nietzschean, given
Nietzsche's own rampant attack on the moral interpretation of the world.
IV. CONCLUSION
Can Nietzsche be historicized? The answer is obvious: of course he can. To subject

him to the procedures of historical investigation is to historicize him. But this
obvious answer is also trivial. The real question is how to historicize him-that is,

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152 Megill
what to do with him and how to do it. Historians do some things we

things less well. As suggested at various points in this article, the
literature makes us aware of some questions that historians might
of these have to do primarily with coming to a better understandi
aspects of Nietzsche's thought, and of his intellectual evolution, by
more carefully his life circumstances. Other questions are more broad
focus, as when we discover, through critically examining Kohler, t
uncertainties in our understanding of affective relations between
nineteenth century, or when Shapiro makes us aware of the potentia
examining the cultural significance of the new communication and t
systems of the time.
Clearly, though, Nietzsche ought not to be historicized in an exclus
as if there were only one way of historicizing him, only one historica
which to fit him, only one history worth mentioning. Nor ought we
the only legitimate way of confronting a past thinker, or a past objec
with historicizing intentions. Nietzsche, a "hard case," makes manife
that seems applicable to all historical understanding. Of course, no
are legitimate: the Nietzsche case surely makes this manifest too. Bu
of legitimate histories is greater than one. The point goes well b
specialized field of intellectual history; it covers history generally. R
ity, combined with the amazing capacities of present-day commun
make our age one of paradox and disjunction. Ours is also, in an e
sense, a rich age, for those who have the luck to live where civi
well-functioning markets hold sway. The conditions for enjoying th
richness are surely worthy of being aimed for where they do no
unimaginativeness (often not recognized as such) of the reduction of
understanding generally, to a single type is something to be rejected
rich history, and a rich understanding, that might serve as a model f
richness, just as (for similar reasons) one wants a rich literature.
The multiplicity of Nietzsche, qua historical, theoretical, and lit
reminds us of how variegated the world and our experience can b
multiplicity also reminds us that multiplicity is not unequivocally true or
benign-for there are morally questionable Nietzsches among the others. Thus, at
some level, an epistemological problem and a moral problem arise. Epistemologi-
cally, all we can do is engage in the open arguments of the various communities
of scholars to which we belong. As for the moral problem, one can only act in the
faith that openness of argument will lead also to a moral sensitivity and that the
same qualities that make for engaged discussion among scholars also contribute to
moral action among human beings.

14.139.227.82 on Tue, 19 Mar 2024 04:53:33 +00:00

Megill HistoricizingNietzscheParadoxes 1996

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Review: Historicizing Nietzsche?

Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2124335

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Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons

[The Journal of Modern History 68 (March 1996): 114-152]

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To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of

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The knowledge of Nietzsche possessed by historian-readers d'un certain age is apt

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opposite" ("Why I Am So Wise," sec. 2): thus he seems to identify himself as

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II. NIETZSCHE AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICIZATION

The problem just articulated is a problem of description. It is a matter of answering

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reticence. Such reticence prevails, for to respond adequately to Nietzsche's attack

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incongruous. Similarly, the Nietzsche of Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche

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untainted by present-day considerations. The relevant issue is not the degree of

III. THE NIETZSCHE LITERATURE

In the recent literature one can identify "biographical/contextual," "special,"

As noted above, a characteristic move on the part of historians is to attempt to

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connections would generate interesting and persuasive answers to such questions

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35 The competition is massive (although also, in some respects, disappointing). There is a

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Pletsch argues that Nietzsche was deeply affected by a nineteenth-century

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One category of evidence consists of comments about Nietzsche made by

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working animal magnetism between our corporibus. Forbidden to write more."45

45 Ree to Nietzsche, October 15, 1878, in Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, 11-6/2:983, quoted by

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Kohler's account of a wish for liberation simultaneously countered by subjection

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By definition, biographical/contextual studies seek to relate an object-in this

5 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, "Zarathustra's Prologue," sec. 9.

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besides single-authored books, many anthologies on Nietzsche have been pub-

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The sense of nonconvergence persists when one turns to the single-authored

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Ansell-Pearson also gives us a Nietzsche who embraced a "Machiavellian-

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62 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," sec. 2, in

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63 Nietzsche, The Gay Science (n. 20 above), sec. 343.

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66 In Nietzsche's Werke (n. 16 above), there is not a single reference to Marx.

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we see by now, this is hardly atypical; indeed, it is characteristic of a very large

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