Abstract This article examines Nietzsche’s early notebooks (1854–56), focusing on his engagement with the Crimean War as a formative moment in the development of his historical imagination. Through an analysis of drawings, maps, games, musical fragments, and poetry, it reconstructs the gradual transformation of his interest from imaginative play to increasingly precise forms of historical representation. Particular attention is devoted to notebooks DFGA/Mp-V-1 to DFGA/Mp-V-5, whose chronology can be established through internal evidence and contemporary newspapers. Read alongside theatrical performances, cartography, and other forms of popular visual culture available in mid-nineteenth-century Naumburg, these materials reveal how the young Nietzsche actively appropriated the media through which contemporary warfare was experienced and interpreted. The article argues that the Crimean notebooks document the emergence of a distinctive historical imagination, in which play, visual culture, and documentary inquiry converge. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the cultural processes through which Nietzsche transformed contemporary events into objects of historical reflection.
Abstract Nietzsche’s engagement with the natural sciences significantly shaped his philosophical ideas, contrary to Martin Heidegger’s dismissal of Nietzsche’s scientific interests as an “aberration.” While the impact of various scientific disciplines on Nietzsche’s philosophy has been thoroughly explored, the specific role of geology, with its theories about the Earth, is still not investigated. In this article, I highlight Nietzsche’s early fascination with geology, the incorporation of geological concepts into his philosophy, and the effect of geological theories on his ideas about history, time, and creation. Nietzsche’s main philosophical thought, the “eternal return of the same,” emerged as he observed a pyramidal stone in the Engadin Valley, a geological formation that bore witness to the Earth’s history. It was a thought that did not need any extraterrestrial or godlike explanation and that was in line with James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795). For Nietzsche, it was not the thought as such that was important, but how such a thought could compel humans to rethink their existence, prompting a revaluation of human life.
Abstract This review discusses five new contributions addressing Nietzsche’s relation to literature: two critical editions, two collected volumes, and one monograph. In discussing these recent publications, the article examines the current state of discourse within the field of Nietzsche scholarship with regard to his literary thought. This review evaluates the contributions under discussion with regard to their standing within this field, focusing on Nietzsche’s own literary styles, his sources and role models, but also his reception by other authors.
Pioneer, Stooge, Antipode. Nietzsche’s Position in the “First Cultural Science.” The term “ Erste Kulturwissenschaft ” refers to a constellation in intellectual history around 1900 that was characterized by work on boundary concepts and in border areas between disciplines and cultures. Although it does not represent a homogeneous movement, authors such as Freud, Warburg, Simmel, Benjamin, and Plessner – often belonging to the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie – share a historical-theoretical horizon that stands in contrast to the established epistemology of the humanities. Breaking with the institutional discourse of academic philosophy in Germany, Nietzsche can be considered one of the pioneers of this movement. The article examines Nietzsche’s role for the authors in question and their references to his writings, focusing mainly on Warburg and Benjamin. For Warburg, Nietzsche was a kind of mirror image throughout his life, while his relationship with him shifted from unbridled fascination to concern about being affected by an intense preoccupation with the orgiasm of ‘wild antiquity.’ Benjamin, who admired Nietzsche’s aphoristic writing, shared many of his interests, such as his criticism of petrified scientific concepts and the question of guilt and debt. Other authors, such as Simmel and Plessner, referred to Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, while Löwith’s works began to historicize Nietzsche and position his ideas in the history of philosophy.
This essay examines and evaluates the treatment of Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence in the recent monographs by Matthew Meyer and Neil Sinhababu. Both authors rightly reject the dominant interpretation of this theory as a counterfactual thought experiment and insist on taking Nietzsche's cosmological claims seriously, but they nevertheless continue a deflationary tradition that underestimates the ambitions of the theory. I argue that Nietzsche regarded eternal recurrence as a true cosmological hypothesis grounded in his naturalistic "de-deification" of nature, and that he took himself to possess proofs whose structure anticipates but has important advantages over Henri Poincar & eacute;'s recurrence theorem. This epistemic confidence underlies his presentation of eternal recurrence as the "supreme formula of life-affirmation" and demands a rigorous account of identity, repetition, and recurring finite time that is not appreciated by Meyer and Sinhababu.
Drawing on Nietzsche's daring definition of Plato's philosophy as an erotic contest in Twilight of the Idols (1889), I examine this conception in relation to Nietzsche's own philosophy and to his engagement with Platonic philosophy. I begin by applying Nietzsche's characterization of Plato's philosophy as an erotic contest to Plato's own writings. Plato grounds philosophy in the economy of the psyche by tying it to eros and the agonal drive. Although these drives are necessary, Plato insists that they should firmly remain under the control of reason, as any excess is highly dangerous. Nietzsche re-evaluated both the direction and the danger of these drives. The focus shifts from transcendence through rationality to thinking in accordance with the movement of life. Nietzsche replaces rational dialectics with experiments that incorporate extra-rational elements, the Versuch. However, simply replacing Plato's focus on the beyond with Nietzsche's focus on life would amount to an inverted Platonism that repeats the metaphysical closure that Nietzsche sought to avoid. Maintaining an agonal tension between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Plato prevents this closure and may be the most compelling way to transvaluate philosophy through "the prism of life."
Scholars have generally maintained that Nietzsche has little - and certainly little good - to say about happiness, labor, and the distinct values and needs of those not counted as "free spirits" or "masters." This article resists these commonplaces via a contextual investigation of Nietzsche's rich and extensive thought around the nineteenth-century social question. For Nietzsche this chiefly concerns the possible existence of the "happy worker": an unintelligent yet contented laborer who has accepted the impossibility of changing their situation. Nietzsche uses the happy worker to trace a narrative of decline from the serene slave class of Ancient Greece to the discontents and delusions of nineteenth-century Europe. In that it represents a structural ideal, a figure prior to ressentiment and nihilism, the construct of the happy worker also allows us to establish Nietzsche's overarching and affirmative concept of happiness as the contented acceptance of one's fate. Closely analyzing Nietzsche's harsh critiques of capitalism and socialism, this article asks precisely how they prevent the worker from being happy, before considering his proposed solutions to the social question, on the level of both individual and society.
This article considers the importance of Nietzsche's GM I 13 to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), arguing that Butler misreads Nietzsche's passage and exploring the implications of their misreading. I begin by placing Butler's reading in the context of French poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche that appear to have influenced Butler. I then turn to Butler's crucial invocation of GM I 13, showing how Nietzsche is claiming that consideration of the human being as a hierarchy of drives reveals our limitations when it comes to self-transformation - whereas Butler takes the lack of a "doer" behind the "deed" to be a thought that amplifies our capacity for self-transformation. Turning to Saba Mahmood's criticisms of Butler's account of the subversion of gender norms, I show how, without speaking of Nietzsche, Mahmood's critique highlights what Butler failed to register in Nietzsche: namely, that thinking of the gendered human being as embodied means acknowledging that the subversion of cultural norms must involve more than the disruption of repeated culturally significant acts. Rather, it must involve the potentially long, slow work of reengineering the body as a hierarchy of drives.
This essay argues that Nietzsche's concept of noble morality is grounded in accounts of experiences of gratitude (Dankbarkeit) that stand in parallel to the ethical role of charis (grace/gratitude) in the poetry of Theognis and Pindar. This is indicated directly by a note (Nachlass 1881, 11[297], KSA 9.555-6) in which Nietzsche paraphrases verse 72 of Pindar's Second Pythian Ode, genoi' oios ess & iacute; mathon, addressing its entirety (including the mathon, absent in Nietzsche's usual allusions to it). The note thematizes gratitude and self-development, suggesting an interpretation of the message of Pindar's ode as a call for the creation of the self through an effort of learning gratitude anew cyclically throughout life. Nietzsche's opposition between noble and base, alluding to Theognis' agathos and kakos, is accordingly determined by one's capability for gratitude. Building on these ancient sources, Nietzsche's noble gratitude unfolds as the incorporation of pain into overflowing joy, demanding the cyclical overcoming of vanity by pride through agon and a development of singular virtues, finally culminating in amor fati, the affirmation of eternal recurrence and Zarathustra's gift-giving virtue.
The Snake's Molting and Nietzsche's Styles. Nietzsche's philosophy becomes itself through a series of transformations and renewals. To describe this movement, Nietzsche uses a recurring metaphor: molting (H & auml;utung). Like the snake he likes so much, he writes to rid himself of his thoughts, leaving them behind and starting a new life. Writing is as much an experience of self-transformation as it is the result of this molting: the rigid skin left by the animal. Working on the occurrences of & laquo;molting & raquo; and its derivatives, I will use this metaphor to try to understand the variety of Nietzsche's styles.
Kant and the & laquo;Natural History & raquo; of European Morality. The Role of Kantian Morality in the Fifth Section of Beyond Good and Evil. At the outset of the fifth section of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche announces his intention to establish a & laquo;typology of morals & raquo; by translating moral phenomena into affects. Considered within the broader framework of the section, however, this typology serves a more specific purpose: the construction of a natural history of modern European morality, followed by its critical evaluation. Nietzsche indeed distinguishes between different & laquo;types & raquo; of morality, but only insofar as such distinctions contribute to the analysis of the morality of & laquo;today,& raquo; namely the dominant moral framework of Europe in his own time. In pursuing this analysis, Nietzsche appears to privilege the examination of a particular moral system: Kantian morality. Although Kant is explicitly mentioned only in BGE 187 and 188, the Kantian moral imperative permeates the entire fifth section. This article argues that Kantian morality functions both as Nietzsche's point of entry into the natural history of morality and as a key to understanding the internal dynamic governing & laquo;herd animal morality & raquo;, that is, modern European morality.
Of Philosophers and Free Spirits. New Publications on the Figure of the Free Spirit. This review essay examines recent scholarship on Nietzsche's figure of the free spirit, arguing that this figure is central for understanding his middle works and their response to the death of God. It first shows, with Barbara Neymeyr's commentary on the Untimely Meditations, how the free spirit emerges from Nietzsche's critique of philistinism and his evolving notion of justice as a dangerous yet indispensable virtue. It then uses Sebastian Kaufmann's extensive commentary on The Gay Science to clarify how the free spirit navigates a godless world through practices of critique, affirmation, and confrontation with the doctrines of the death of God and eternal recurrence. Finally, drawing on Matthew Meyer's and Michael Ure's monographs, the review contrasts systematic and therapeutic readings of the free spirit, highlighting both their strengths and their blind spots regarding style, narration, and metaphysical ambition. Overall, it contends that the free spirit condenses Nietzsche's philosophical project beyond any single work or period.
This paper attempts to resolve an exegetical tension in the debate on Nietzsche's conception of value by arguing the following claims. First, he is a kind of moderate pluralist about value who uses the "thriving/degeneration of life" or "increase/decrease in power" as a quantitative covering value for a plurality of drives with qualitatively different and irreducible objects of value. Second, he has a determinate evaluative scheme for "revaluating" or "rank ordering" the plurality of drives by differentiating between their contribution to the covering value in two ways. One way is by differentiating between a plurality of "instinctive" drives for objects with intrinsic/necessary value and a plurality of "non-instinctive" drives for objects with extrinsic/possible value. Another way is by differentiating between the plurality of drives in instances of conflict or comparison between their objects of value. The paper justifies the exegetical validity of this scheme by demonstrating its ability to reconcile some of Nietzsche's seemingly paradoxical evaluative remarks pertaining to the truth/falsity of morality and the value of the truth/falsity for morality, ascetic ideals as both an affirmation and negation of life, and all values as both expressing and lacking the will to power.
New Publications on Nietzsche and Politics . Nietzsche is one of the authors with the most intensive political reception, but also one of the most controversial. While the history of his political impact in the twentieth century has now been well researched, it is by no means complete, as the more recent publications discussed below show. The contributions in Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction shed a sometimes critical, sometimes polemical light on the Nietzsche reception among authors of the American „New Right,“ while Paul Stephan attempts to re-found a left-wing Nietzsche reception with Links–Nietzscheanismus . In contrast, the anthology Nietzsches Perspektiven des Politischen clearly broadens the focus and examines both systematic and historical contexts of Nietzsche’s political thought up to the present day. Finally, from a historical perspective, Stefan Breuer deals with the Nietzsche and Wagner cults up to 1933, focusing on both their development and their interconnectedness and placing them in the wider context of the right-wing intellectual movements of the era.
Bataille’s Parody of the Myth Based on Nietzsche’s Metaphorics. This study examines the significance of the statement: “The absence of myth is also a myth,” formulated by Georges Bataille for the 1947 Surrealist exhibition, “A New Myth,” in light of the metaphorical language of Nietzsche. At the center of the analysis is the thesis that in the postwar period Bataille moves away from the politically revolutionary strategy of re-mythologization which marked his work and biography throughout the 1930s and develops an aesthetically paradoxical position in which myth no longer functions as an affirmative collective narrative, but rather as a reflective figure within an enlightened and self-consciously fictional discourse. Based on a detailed analysis of The Sleepwalker’s Song from Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well as selected fragments from Nietzsche’s unpublished writings, the article shows how Bataille adopts Nietzsche’s metaphorical logic of paradox, the concept of “truthful appearance,” and the play with the absence to articulate an aesthetical critique of mythical ideology in modernity. In doing so, the text outlines a genealogy of an aesthetic theory of nihilism, in which myth and parody stand in a productive tension.
