eJournals Colloquia Germanica 52/3-4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2021
523-4

Robert C. Holub: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century. Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. 536 pp. $ 85.00

31
2021
Steven D. Martinson
cg523-40398
the fulfillment of “self” along a continuum between totalitarian distopia and Kant’s utopian “kingdom of the ends�” I am certain that the reader will find this groundbreaking study to be as rewarding as I have� Truman State University Ernst Ralf Hintz Robert C. Holub: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century. Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. 536 pp. $ 85.00. The nine chapters that constitute Robert Holub’s book on Nietzsche in the nineteenth century focus on questions of Education, Germans, Society, Women, Colonialization, Jews, Evolution, Cosmology, and Eugenics� The volume positions Nietzsche within “the discursive universe of the late nineteenth century in Europe, but in particular in Germany,” aiming “to understand how and what Nietzsche learned from these discourses, and how his thought then participated in the larger concerns of the era” (7)� Holub’s Nietzsche is not primarily a thinker who debates philosophical questions raised by the ancients, Kant, or German idealist philosophers� As Thomas Brobjer observed, Nietzsche’s library did not contain a single work by Hegel, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Kant, even though Nietzsche began to draft a dissertation on the latter� Holub’s research shows very clearly that Nietzsche responded to a large variety of discourses, some of which may seem to be quite uninteresting in themselves� He refused “to distinguish between the abstract and the historical, the philosophical and the mundane” (7)� Some may find it surprising that “[m]ost often he [Nietzsche] possessed only a partial view of a complex situation, and he was apt to draw conclusions from a paucity of information, his own ‘insights’ into human psychology, and personal predilections frequently influenced by perceived allies or foes” (219)� Taking Holub’s view of Nietzsche seriously should curb the overenthusiasm for the (self-fashioned) philosopher and ferocious critic� Holub notes the work of several scholars who have concentrated on the writings and numerous contemporary developments upon which Nietzsche drew, such as Thomas H� Brobjer, Christian J� Emden, Gregory Moore, and Robin Small� By comparison, however, Holub’s book is much larger, wider, and diverse in scope� We learn that, with but few exceptions, Nietzsche did not engage in heated Auseinandersetzungen with the most influential philosophers either of his own or former times� Hence, “an understanding of several of his [Nietzsche’s] main convictions and propositions is possible only if we pay sufficient 398 Reviews attention to the discourses [‘written or spoken communication of debate’] in which he participated” (3)� To be sure, Holub cannot be expected to cover every discourse in which Nietzsche’s writings are entangled� He states his purpose clearly and achieves it exceedingly well� As a result of his approach, Holub is able to uncover numerous, also unexpected turns in Nietzsche’s attention� I mention only a few� The scholarship of the legal historian Josef Kohler on comparative law had significant influence on Nietzsche, as is evident from his heavily marked copy of Law as a Cultural Phenomenon (1885)� To be sure, we know about Nietzsche’s close reading of Friedrich Albert Lange’s The History of Materialism and Critique of Its Contemporary Significance, although that interest is still quite remarkable� The discussion of thermodynamics (380) and the idea of the conservation of energy supported the notion of eternal recurrence� From the time of writing The Dawn in August 1881 on, however, Nietzsche no longer made any reference to the idea� Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power owes much to Maximilian Drossbach’s On the Apparent and Real Causes of Occurrences in the World (1884)� As is evident also from Holub’s book on Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem (Princeton UP, 2016), since his days at the university in Leipzig, Nietzsche “harbored and expressed views on Jewry and the Jewish religion that contain clichéd notions common to his peers”; in fact, he “never relinquished stereotypical attitudes about Jews” (311)� However, Nietzsche was neither völkisch nor racist� Holub’s discussion of the colonial question is certainly one of the most original chapters in the book� Whether or not Nietzsche’s remarks on eugenics “were made in the context of growing European reflection on degeneration, evolution, and biological solutions to social issues” (452), they are especially troubling� For the sake of brevity, I have selected the question of women as a representative example of Holub’s approach to, and Auseinandersetzungen with Nietzsche’s writings� Curiously, Nietzsche’s critical, derogatory comments about women were not directed against the intellectual women he knew personally, Resa von Schirnhofer, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Malwida von Meysenbug, and his sister, Elisabeth� And, yet, Nietzsche’s private remarks about women, which are found largely on the pages of his literary estate (Nachlass), are demeaning and cruel� “Instead of looking exclusively to the private realm [i�e�, Nietzsche’s biography] for an explanation,” however, Holub considers, again, the historical context (217)� Nietzsche’s “most venomous remarks” were reserved for the idea of the emancipation of women (215), which were quite well spread in his day� Indeed, as Holub points out repeatedly, “he [Nietzsche] was much more a citizen of his own era than he and his critics concede” (218)� As is the case with the majority of questions Holub investigates, the question of women “became part of a complex nexus of movements and concepts in Nietzsche’s thought of the Reviews 399 1880s that defined the [presumed and supposed] ills of the modern world” (217)� It may be surprising to learn that Nietzsche’s work is often duplicitous� Unlike in his social life, to which the women he knew attest, in his writings, Nietzsche “assumes an almost completely different personality, adopting the persona of a haughty, combative, intemperate polemicist” (216)� Regarding Nietzsche’s whip remark, I suggest that the whip was not meant for the man but for the woman� See the photograph of Lou Andreas-Salomé with whip in hand and Nietzsche and Paul Rèe as “horses” pulling her wagon� Nietzsche himself choreographed the setting� He also dragged an unwilling Paul Rèe into the scene� My main reservation does not concern the quality of Holub’s highly interesting account or even the majority of conclusions he draws� It has to do with the absence of attention to the work of the early Nietzsche� By “early,” Holub means the Nietzsche of the 1870s on� Like so many scholars and philosophers, he goes no further back into Nietzsche’s life and writings than the time of his appointment as a professor of classical philology in Basel� But scholarship on young Nietzsche by Schmidt, Young, Hödl, and Blue, among several others, has been available for some time� My question is whether or not “Nietzsche” can be understood by focusing only on the later work without taking into account his early and earliest writings, including the sizeable body of poetry, prose, and dramas in the four-volume Nachgelassene Aufzeichnungen� Although one will have to swim against the tide of philosophers who have claimed “Nietzsche” as their own as Holub does, I believe that accounting for the work of early Nietzsche must necessarily alter views of the later “Nietzsche�” The impact of the son of a Lutheran pastor on his Gesamtwerk has not been adequately investigated� Indeed, in the light of the influence of the protestant tradition on Nietzsche, the titles Ecce Homo [Pontius Pilate’s words to Christ] and Der Antichrist [The Anti-Christian] cry out for reappraisal in the light of the writer’s Erziehung, subsequent Bildung, and, I would argue, later Anti-Bildung� Holub’s book is very well researched and well-written� It also contains a wealth of information about other writers and developments in the nineteenth century that is important in itself� Holub’s conclusions will not satisfy everyone� But that is as it should be� A relatively minor quibble is the small font size of the print which was probably required in order to drive down the cost of the publication of Holub’s voluminous 536-page book� Holub’s contribution to Nietzsche research is of considerable weight� Nietzsche scholars will need to engage Holub’s findings squarely� Future scholarship will be remiss if it averts attention away from the book� University of Arizona Steven D. Martinson 400 Reviews