The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  No metaphysical formulation can have more than relative validity because it attempts to arrive at a determinate totalization where only an overall coherence can be expected. Artistic and literary expressions of world-views remain important because they do not claim to be as totalizing and preserve more of the intuitive aspects of human experience that get lost in the abstractions of metaphysics. They provide a significant supplement to the human sciences as they attempt to fulfill their mission of producing reflective knowledge about historical life.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Dilthey

  Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi. 26 vols. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914–2006.

  Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Works. Edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Vol. 1, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1989); Vol. 2, Understanding the Human World (2010); Vol. 3, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (2002). Vol. 4, Hermeneutics and the Study of History (1996). Vol. 5, Poetry and Experience (1985). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Works on Dilthey

  Ermarth, Michael. Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. A comprehensive account of Dilthey’s thought with a good historical background.

  Lessing, Hans-Ulrich, Makkreel, Rudolf A., and Pozzo, Riccardo, eds. Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011. Nine essays on the continuing relevance of Dilthey’s thought.

  Makkreel, Rudolf A. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, 1992. A developmental examination of Dilthey’s philosophy that focuses on its relation to Kant’s first and third Critiques and highlights the role of reflection and judgment in historical understanding.

  Makkreel, Rudolf A. and Scanlon, John D. eds. Dilthey and Phenomenology. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1987. Exploration of Dilthey’s relation to phenomenology by ten international scholars.

  Mul, Jos de. The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life. Translated by Tony Burrett. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. A reconstruction of Dilthey’s ontology of life, highlighting the interpretive character of human existence, contingency, and narrativity.

  Owensby, Jacob. Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. A topical study focusing on Books 4–6 of the Introduction to the Human Sciences.

  Revue Internationale de Philosophie 57 (4) (2003). Issue featuring a collection of essays edited by Rudolf Makkreel, including essays by Jean Grondin, Hans Ineichen, Matthias Jung, Makkreel, Sylvie Mesure, Jos de Mul, Tom Rockmore, and Frithjof Rodi.

  Rodi, Frithjof, ed. Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983–2000. Each of the 12 volumes has a special theme such as the relation between Dilthey and the early Heidegger.

  Rodi, Frithjof and Lessing, Hans-Ulrich, eds. Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. A collection of classical essays on Dilthey by such thinkers as Scheler, Landgrebe, Bollnow, Plessner, Marcuse, Misch, Habermas, and Gadamer.

  Rodi, Frithjof. Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003. A series of essays stressing the structured nature of life and experience, and the importance of articulation and expression for Dilthey.

  * * *

  1 See Wilhelm Dilthey, Understanding the Human World, Selected Works, vol. 2, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 60. Further references to essays in this volume will be abbreviated as SW 2, followed by the page number.

  2 Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, Selected Works, vol. 1. ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 247. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as SW1, followed by the page number.

  3 Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, Selected Works, vol. 4, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 238. Further references to this volume will be abbreviated as SW4.

  4 Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works, vol. 3., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 238. Further references to this volume will be abbreviated as SW3.

  CHAPTER 10

  NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)

  BRIAN LEITER

  10.1 INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHE’S LIFE AND INTELLECTUAL FORMATION

  BORN in 1844 in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony, Friedrich Nietzsche was the son and grandson (on both sides of his family) of Lutheran pastors. After his father’s death in 1849, Nietzsche was raised primarily by the women in his family, his mother and older sister Elisabeth, as well as various aunts. He entered Pforta, Germany’s preeminent school for classical studies, in 1858, then enrolled in 1864 at the University of Bonn to study theology. A year later, he decided to change fields and followed the eminent classicist Friedrich Ritschl to the University of Leipzig, where Nietzsche distinguished himself as a brilliant student of classical philology. He earned appointment to the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1869, without a doctorate but on the strength of Ritschl’s recommendation alone. (He subsequently completed a thesis on Diogenes Laertius, a third-century commentator on early Greek philosophy.)

  Nietzsche served briefly, in 1870, as a medical orderly in the Franco–Prussian war, but ill health forced him out after only two months. His health problems grew progressively worse—‘uninterrupted three-day migraine[s]‌, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm’ (EH I: 1) is one description Nietzsche offers—until he was forced to retire from his teaching position in 1879. Nietzsche spent the remainder of his sane life as a pensioned invalid travelling between inns in Southern Europe both seeking respite from his physical ailments and composing his most celebrated works.

  In January 1889, after weeks of worsening symptoms, he suffered a mental collapse in Turin, and spent the rest of his life under the care of institutions, his mother, and, finally, his proto-Nazi sister Elisabeth. (Untreated syphilis from some 20 years earlier appears to be the most likely cause of his health problems.) Elisabeth did her best to exploit his growing fame, and even issued heavily edited editions of his work that omitted Nietzsche’s hostility towards both Germany and anti-semitism. By his death in 1900, Nietzsche was one of the most celebrated philosophers in Europe; by the start of World War I, the Kaiser issued German troops copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and over the next generation, every political party and every intellectual fashion fought to claim his legacy.

  No less important than the basic biographical facts of his life are the crucial intellectual influences: first, his deep scholarly engagement with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, and culture; and second, the two crucial books he discovered in the mid-1860s, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Friedrich A. Lange’s The History of Materialism. Let us consider these in turn.

  Nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of the modern discipline of classics (or classical philology, as it was then known), as it was of so many other modern academic fields. As a Wissenschaft, training in classical philology emphasized the development of rigorous scholarly methods that would guarantee the reliability of its results, from a thorough command of languages and primary source materials, to various tools and techniques for determining the provenance of source materials, evaluating their reliability, and fixing their meaning. Although Nietzsche—then under the influence of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner—made clear with his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, his impatience with the narrow cultural horizons of his professional colleagues, he never abandoned his high regard for their intellectual discipline, writing in one of his very last works of his admiration for ‘scholarly culture’, characterized by ‘scien
tific methods’ including ‘the great, the incomparable art of reading well’ (A: 59). Philology, for Nietzsche, represented that ‘art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation’ (A: 52).

  Even more important for understanding Nietzsche, however, is what he learned from his study of the ancients. Nietzsche’s philosophical loyalty was to the Presocratic philosophers (cf. WP 437, EH III: BT-3), including the ‘Sophists’ of the fifth century BC, an intellectual movement he interpreted broadly to include the great Greek historian Thucydides. Nietzsche admired Thucydides for his ‘courage in the face of reality’ (TI X: 2), that is, the courage to recognize the ‘immorality’ of the Greeks, their lust for power and glory, which he portrayed so unflinchingly in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Nietzsche viewed this kind of realistic appraisal of human motives as a hallmark of ‘the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists’ (TI X: 2), and he emulates their realism in his own commentary on human motives and affairs.

  But Nietzsche also admired other aspects of philosophy before Socrates, aspects that he finds especially well-represented by the Presocratic philosopher Thales. First, Thales, according to Nietzsche, tries to explain the observable world naturalistically, that is, ‘in language devoid of image or fable’, thus ‘show[ing] him[self] as a natural scientist’ (PTAG: 3). Yet at the same time—and this is the second important point about the Presocratics for Nietzsche—in Thales, ‘the man of wisdom [Weisheit] triumphs in turn over the man of science [Wissenschaft]’ (PT: 145), in the sense that, ‘Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost’ (PTAG: 3), whereas the genuine philosopher (in possession of Weisheit) pursues knowledge not ‘at any cost’, but only in the service of what the philosopher deems valuable: ‘Genuine philosophers’, as Nietzsche says, ‘are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!”’ (BGE 211). Nietzsche claims to find this insight in Thales, and it is one Nietzsche himself prizes throughout his work. As he puts it in the 1886 Preface to The Gay Science:

  [T]‌his will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us. …Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything. …

  Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. (GS Pref: 4)

  The Greeks understood that the ‘truth’ about the human situation is terrible, and that sometimes not knowing the truth is to be preferred. This amounts to scepticism not about truth, but about the value of always knowing the truth. That lesson from the Presocratics was only reinforced for Nietzsche by his reading of Schopenhauer, the second great intellectual influence on his philosophy.

  In 1865, he discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818, but which only came to great prominence some 20 years later, as a reaction against Hegel’s idealism took hold of German culture (Hegel himself had died in 1831, and it is unclear if Nietzsche ever read him). Nietzsche took from Schopenhauer a number of ideas, but the most important was the question how life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, could possibly be justified. Schopenhauer offered a ‘nihilistic’ verdict: that we would be better off dead.1 Nietzsche, throughout his philosophical career, wanted to resist that conclusion, all the time acknowledging the terrible truth about the inescapability of suffering. In addition, however, Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer’s idea of the unalterability of character, the idea that there is a certain psychic core of the person that remains largely unchanged throughout one’s life, even if it admits of some pruning—much as the seed of a tomato plant will necessarily give rise to nothing other than a tomato plant, though the quality of gardening will surely affect its final character.

  Schopenhauer’s naturalistic and fatalistic view of personality was reinforced for Nietzsche by another major intellectual discovery he made a year later in his reading of Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism. Lange was both a Neo-Kantian—part of the ‘back to Kant’ revival in German philosophy after the eclipse of Hegel—and a friend of the ‘materialist’ turn in German intellectual life, which comprised the other major part of the reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s (and which are associated today with Hermann von Helmholtz’s work in the 1840s and after). Materialism exploded on the intellectual scene in Germany in the 1850s in such volumes as Jacob Moleschott’s The Physiology of Food, Karl Vogt’s Blind Faith and Science, and Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter. Force and Matter was a particular sensation, which went through multiple editions and became a best-seller with its message, as Büchner put it, that ‘the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings.’ Nietzsche first learned of these German Materialists from Lange (though he subsequently began reading the main journal of the movement, Suggestions for Art, Life and Science), though Lange took the view (following Helmholtz) that the Materialist picture of man as determined by his physiological and biological nature actually vindicated Kant’s transcendental idealism by proving the dependence of our knowledge on the physiological peculiarities of the human sensory apparatus. We know from Nietzsche’s letters that he viewed Lange’s book as ‘undoubtedly the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades’ (Janz 1978 I: 198) and that in 1866, he declared, ‘Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange—I don’t need anything else’ (Janz 1978 I: 198).

  These myriad intellectual influences—the Sophists and Presocratics, Schopenhauer, German Materialism, Neo-Kantianism, among others—come together in Nietzsche’s work in sometimes surprising and not always wholly consistent ways. They seem to have wreaked particular mischief with his views about truth and knowledge, where his views may be more notable for their apparent incoherence than their philosophical interest; but they are essential for understanding his central contributions in ethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of mind and action.

  10.2 NIETZSCHE’S STYLE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY

  Before we turn to Nietzsche’s substantive philosophical contributions and claims, it is useful to say a word about the ‘style’ in which Nietzsche writes, a style that no doubt accounts for his immense popularity beyond the realms of academic philosophy. Nietzsche can be funny, sarcastic, rude, wicked, scholarly, offensive, clever, and scathing. He writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically, and always very personally. He eschews almost entirely the typical discursive form of philosophical writing: he almost never tries to persuade through the power of rational argumentation. Reading Spinoza or Kant, and then reading Nietzsche, one might be surprised to discover they are part of a single genre called ‘philosophy’, although there is considerable overlap in subject-matter. Yet in the course of examining philosophical subjects, Nietzsche will invoke historical, physiological, psychological, philological, and anthropological claims, and almost never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone set out a syllogism.

  Nietzsche’s philosophical style is no accident; it is precisely the approach one would expect him to adopt given his philosophical views about the nature of persons and reason. For Nietzsche, influenced as he was by Schopenhauer and the German Materialists, thinks the conscious and rational faculties of human beings play a relatively minor role in what they do, believe, and value; that far more important are their unconscious and subconscious affective and instincti
ve lives, as well as the physiological facts that explain the former. (We will return to this topic in the following paragraphs.) As Nietzsche puts the point early in Beyond Good and Evil, what inspires ‘mistrust and mockery’ of the great philosophers is that:

  They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic…while what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an ‘inspiration’ or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract—and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such. (BGE 5)

  Philosophical systems, then, are not the upshot of rational inquiry; the dialectical justifications for them are supplied after-the-fact. Instead, Nietzsche explains, ‘the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [e.g. the metaphysical system] has always grown’ and thus ‘there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher’, for his moral (and immoral) intentions ‘bear decided and decisive witness to who he is—which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other’ (BGE 6). Nietzsche, crucially, will not partake of this charade of offering post-hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses that simply reflect his evaluative judgments which, in turn, reflect the psychological facts about who he really is. To simplify a bit: since psychology determines values, and values determine philosophy, then to change people’s evaluative and philosophical views, one must affect their psychology, more precisely, their drives (drives being dispositions to have certain kinds of affective or emotional responses2). But non-rational drives can only be influenced through non-rational devices, including all the stylistic devices noted already: if you provoke, amuse, and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his or her affects, and thus can change the reader’s evaluative attitudes. The discursive mode of most philosophy, by contrast, is inert when it comes to reorienting the non-rational psyche—but reorienting the affects and values of at least some of his readers is a paramount concern for Nietzsche, as we will see.