The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  For things stand thus: the reduction and equalization of the European human conceals our greatest danger, for this sight makes tired…We see today nothing that wishes to become greater, we sense that things are still going downhill, downhill—into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more apathetic, more Chinese, more Christian—man, there is no doubt, is becoming ever “better”…Precisely here lies Europe’s doom—with the fear of man we have also forfeited the love of him, the reverence toward him, the hope for him, indeed the will to him. The sight of man now makes tired—what is nihilism today if it is not that?…We are tired of man…91

  Like Goethe, Nietzsche thought the Greeks were free from this particular pathology, and he similarly looked to them for inspiration and an alternative to contemporary European decadence.

  Throughout his career, Nietzsche praised and honored the Greeks, calling them “our luminous guides”92 and expressing a heartfelt kinship with them. His critiques of the decadence of modernity were made all the more vivid by its juxtaposition with antiquity. An unpublished fragment from 1875 refers to them as “the only people of genius in world history.”93 And still marveling at the “profundity” of the Hellenic attitude to life, he exclaims in the preface to The Gay Science, “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live […]!”94 As a trained classicist, he made his contributions to philology (though none of them were particularly groundbreaking or enduring):95 he published three lengthy studies on the Greek doxographer Diogenes Laertius and a study of the poet Theognis in the journal Rheinisches Museum (24 years of which he indexed in 1868); he lectured extensively on the pre-Platonic philosophers;96 and for several years he pursued the idea of producing a comprehensive and authoritative work on the atomist philosopher Democritus of Abdera. And he weighed in, as so many did, on the Homeric question, in lecture and in print, though for Nietzsche the real value of the engagement with the epics rested on their providing a window on an entirely different and otherwise unimaginable world with an entirely different scheme of valuation. The Greeks suggested to Nietzsche that morality could be lived differently than in his day. They were, if not “free” in the way Winckelmann envisioned, at any rate more “free spirited” than his contemporary Europeans.

  Crucially, however, Nietzsche kept inspiration at a healthy distance from imitation (which he recognized as, at any rate, a low form of achievement for an ideal).97 From his standpoint, the most damaging aspect of the Gräkomanie that had taken hold after Winckelmann was a tendency to anachronism that had fueled the insistence on imitation by allowing classicists to project contemporary values onto antiquity. The progress of philology as an independent discipline, which ought to have prevented such distortion, had in fact, according to Nietzsche, been given impetus by the idea that the classics were indispensable tools for the building of culture and restoration of faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings and the naturalness of civility and Enlightenment values.98 As a late heir to F. A. Wolf’s philological legacy, Nietzsche was in no position to indulge in such coarse nostalgia.99 At the height of Germany’s philhellenism, it was not uncommon to find the Greeks regarded as noble innocents of a sort, more capable than modern Europeans of living well, in the sense of living up to the moral ideal. In contrast to the Romans and the “inhuman, sanguinary games” that provided their entertainment, Winckelmann imagined that he saw in the Greeks of the classical era greater humanity and an abhorrence of cruelty as well as a superior reason.100 But Nietzsche followed Goethe in decisively rejecting such a view. Hellenic “freedom,” if there was such a thing, consisted not in freedom from temptation or the corrupting modern influences that prevented people living morally praiseworthy lives. Rather, it lay in freedom from the ideal itself.101

  As a corrective maneuver, Nietzsche drew a sharp contrast between the humane values of contemporary Europe and the human, all too human—even “immoral” and shamelessly brutal—Greeks, especially those of the earliest, Mycenaean age: “The human element [Das Menschliche] that the classics show us is not to be confused with the humane [dem Humanen]. The antithesis is to be strongly emphasized; what ails philology is its effort to smuggle in the humane.”102 To be sure, his was not the first such attack on the humanitarian ideals he would later identify as ascetic; Goethe once fretted in a letter to Fritz von Stein that “with the victory of humanitarianism the world would become one large hospital in which some human beings would nurse others.”103 And Nietzsche echoes his concern in the Genealogy: “That the sick not make the healthy sick […]—that should certainly be the highest viewpoint on earth:—but this would require above all else that the healthy remain separated from the sick, guarded even against the sight of the sick, that they not confuse themselves with the sick. Or would it perhaps be their task to be nurses or physicians?”104 But Nietzsche was emphatic that no individual or culture could achieve the “highest viewpoint on earth” without climbing up, and indeed over, its predecessors: “To surpass Greek culture by action—that is the task. But to do that, we must first know it.”105 Good philology was the best route to this end, but it was not without its pitfalls.

  Part of the problem was that, as late as 1869, when Nietzsche delivered his inaugural lecture on the Homeric question upon his appointment at the University of Basel, philology was still a fledgling discipline with a hybrid character and, by some accounts, an uncertain future. “At the present day,” Nietzsche said,

  no clear and consistent opinion seems to be held regarding classical philology. We are conscious of this in the circles of the learned just as much as among the followers of that science itself. The cause of this lies in its many-sided character, in the lack of an abstract unity, and in the inorganic aggregation of heterogeneous scientific activities which are connected with one another only by the name “philology.” It must be freely admitted that philology is to some extent borrowed from several other sciences, and is mixed together like a magic potion from the strangest liquids, metals, and bones. It may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival—an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behavior.106

  This situation gave rise to internal quarrels among philologists and, on Nietzsche’s account, even a tendency of those outside it to dismiss or derogate the enterprise altogether. Nietzsche charged that this attitude could be expected “wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the modern man falls down to worship himself, and where Hellenism is looked upon as a superseded and hence very insignificant point of view.”107 But even the most deeply committed enthusiasts of the classics saw in the razor-sharp tools of the new Altertumswissenschaft a potentially serious threat to their ideal of Hellenic harmony and freedom, resulting in a “surprising antagonism which philology has great cause to regret.”108 With Goethe and Schiller specifically in mind, Nietzsche reported, “many are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle of theirs.”109 For his part, Nietzsche refused to sacrifice the artistic impulse of philology to its scientific principles, or vice versa. In his inaugural lecture, he hinged the philology of the future on its success at effecting a reconciliation: “The entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity—which is perhaps only the magnificent blossoming of the Teutonic longing for the south—and the real antiquity.”110

  Nietzsche did not disdain the Hellenic ideal that dominated Weimar classicism; in fact, he warned soberly that “the sword of barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble dignity of the Hellene [die unsägliche Einfachheit und edle Würde des Hellenischen].”111 And yet he was keenly aware that all knowledge, and certainly knowledge of the history of antiq
uity, should serve life, and not the other way around. In many respects, Nietzsche’s early essay, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” sums up a century of anxiety about Germany’s debt to antiquity:

  Even if we Germans were in fact nothing but successors—we could not be anything greater or prouder than successors if we had appropriated such a culture and were the heirs and successors of that. What I mean by this—and it is all I mean—is that the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes for the future in both an individual and a nation, provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honor and our spur. What I do not mean, therefore, is that we should live as pale and stunted late descendants of strong graces coldly prolonging their life as antiquarians and gravediggers.112

  Nietzsche challenged directly both the possibility and the desirability of the continued attempt to resuscitate Greek antiquity. He recognized the attachment to the Greek ideal for what it was; namely, a not entirely healthy nostalgia for a heroic culture that was not to be replicated. Unlike Schiller, he recognized clearly that ancient and modern conceptions of the good could not be successfully hybridized, but unlike Kant he refused simply to deny the value of the Hellenic legacy for Germany. If the memory of antiquity could not be successfully repressed or extirpated, the only option was sublimation.

  By the close of the nineteenth century, few philosophers were as aware of the disillusioning effects of confronting one’s heroes face to face as Friedrich Nietzsche. In several of his major works, he devoted himself to solving the riddle of how a “will to truth,” a desire for knowledge, could have arisen in the human animal, whose happiness seems in so many ways to depend on illusion. His critique of Christianity includes the observation that the value placed upon truth and honesty by Christian morality—to the extent that it is effective and results in our pursuing and discovering truths, including some deeply unpalatable ones about our existential situation, and ourselves—can have nothing other than a deleterious effect on precisely those values and their metaphysical underpinnings. In other words, Nietzsche described the will to knowledge as ironically compromising itself—its progress and success inevitably undermine its foundations. As one expression of the will to knowledge, the success of philology in engaging honestly with the Greeks on their own terms was in no small part the beginning of the end of philosophical theories that depended so heavily on myths and misunderstandings of the Greeks as heroes, primitives, innocents, and incompetents. More careful engagement with Hellenic thought and culture is what killed the ideal and with it the obsession; philology—the same will to knowledge that pursued the Greeks throughout the age of Goethe—turned out, like wills to truth and knowledge do, to defeat the ideals that gave impetus to it. While an unvarnished view of Greece could not by itself furnish a new ideal for Germany, however, it could help clear the way for one. And Nietzsche’s contribution, which he would describe as the gift of “the first philologist,” is to have seen in the defeat of one ideal the possibility of others.113

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beiser, Frederick C. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  Beiser, Frederick C. Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

  Berry, Jessica N. “The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 588–625.

  Butler, E. M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (New York: Macmillan, 1935).

  Förster, Eckhart. “‘To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again’: Hölderlin and the ‘Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism’,” European Journal of Philosophy 3.2 (1995): 174–98.

  Frank, Manfred. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004).

  Hatfield, Henry. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

  Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: American Home Library Company, 1902).

  Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems, trans. Willard R. Trask and ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 2002): 1–133.

  Jenkyns, Richard. The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Duckworth & Co., 1982).

  Miller, R. D. Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom: A Study of Schiller’s Philosophical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

  Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Homer und die klassische Philologie” in Frühe Schriften, vol. 5: Schriften der letzten Leipziger und ersten Basler Zeit 1868–1869, ed. Carl Koch and Karl Schlechta (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994): 283–305.

  Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Nietzsche, Friedrich. “We Classicists,” trans. William Arrowsmith, in Unmodern Observations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  Patten, Alan. Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  Pinkard, Terry. Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  Porter, James I. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

  Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

  Richardson, Ruth Drucilla (ed.). Schleiermacher on Workings of the Knowing Mind (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).

  Sandys, John Edwin. A Short History of Classical Scholarship from the Sixth Century B.C. to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915).

  Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

  Schiller, Friedrich. “On Grace and Dignity,” in Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005).

  Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

  von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich. History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Alan Harris (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

  White, Nicholas. The Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

  Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. The History of Ancient Art I & II, trans. George Henry Lodge (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1880).

  Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (LaSalle: Open Court, 1987).

  * * *

  1 E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 6.

  2 Somewhat surprisingly, though, attempts continue to be made. The recent appearance of several hefty collections attests to the enduring interest and importance of nineteenth-century German philosophy: see, for example, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), ed. Allen W. Wood and Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011), and the Routledge
Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy, ed. Dean Moyar (London: Routledge, 2010). A third to a half of each of these collections is dedicated exclusively to the treatment of German figures and movements. But the philosophical reception of antiquity is neglected almost entirely by all three volumes. Greek thinkers are mentioned in passing, but only in the context of treating other topics or in connection with select figures; not a single essay in any of these collections is dedicated to a systematic treatment of their influence on Germany. I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that this is a serious oversight.

  3 Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Duckworth & Co., 1982), 10.

  4 I treat this issue at greater length in “The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 588–625. See also Nicholas White’s excellent study, The Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

  5 Butler, Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 80.

  6 See, for example, Paul Katsafanas, “Ethics,” Chapter 24 in this volume.

  7 J. J. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (LaSalle: Open Court, 1987), 5.