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Nietzsche's Philosophy of History

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jnietstud.45.3.0364

1538-4594

Christian J. Emden,

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel

This tightly argued and elegantly written book is the first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's philosophy of history. This might be surprising, since much has been written about Nietzsche's historical perspective, his own historical studies in the field of classical scholarship, and the historical orientation of his philosophical project. Genealogy certainly contributes to the wider historicization of reason and culture that can be observed throughout the nineteenth century, but Nietzsche's project also differed markedly from the mainstream historicism as it was practiced at German universities in ways that typically combined the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Bildung and Hegel's “cunning of reason” with Theodor Mommsen's notion of Großwissenschaft. But as a form of “historical philosophizing,” genealogy also draws much inspiration from its immediate intellectual context, a context characterized by the dominance of historical studies.Nietzsche is both untimely and a child of the nineteenth century, and it is precisely in this respect that Anthony K. Jensen's study allows us to clearly recognize Nietzsche as perhaps the first properly post-Hegelian philosopher of history—a philosopher of history who is surprisingly neo-Kantian. Moreover, focusing on both Nietzsche's critique of traditional historical theory and his alternative project, but also on the way in which he anticipates theoretical developments that take place in the twentieth century, Jensen's study admirably bridges the unfruitful gap between “analytical” and “continental” approaches to the philosophy of history. While the themes he discusses, together with his keen attention for source material, might easily be seen as belonging to the continental tradition—whatever that might be in the imagination of American analytical philosophers—the theoretical framework within which much of his argument about Nietzsche as an untimely philosopher of history gains momentum is shaped by a profound interest in causation, causal explanation, inference, and so on. This is, indeed, one of the strengths of Jensen's study.Exhibiting an enviable command of both primary and secondary sources, Jensen develops his argument by focusing on the question of objectivity and the value of historical description and explanation. Starting out with Nietzsche's earliest historical studies as a schoolboy about the Ostrogoth King Ermanarich and then his later editorial criticism as a student at Bonn and Leipzig of Theognis of Megara and Diogenes Laertius, Jensen convincingly argues in the first chapter that Nietzsche's early work is marked by a “skeptical realism” (3). The latter does not fit the common distinction between Wortphilologie and Sachphilologie as it was established, in the nineteenth century, by the schools of Gottfried Hermann, on the one hand, and August Boeckh, on the other. Although Nietzsche would often criticize his own philological teachers, such as Otto Jahn in Bonn, Jensen highlights in the second chapter that these attacks had little to do with their historical method. After all, it was precisely Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl who provided him with the necessary tools to overcome the distinction between Wortphilologie and Sachphilologie. In his attempt to reach beyond the positivist representational realism of historical studies, however, Nietzsche, under the influence of Schopenhauer, also went one step too far, as he himself later realized. It is a great merit of Jensen's study that he shows, in the third chapter, how The Birth of Tragedy might constitute a radical break with prevalent paradigms of historical and philosophical scholarship, but its reliance on aesthetic intuition was bound to overshadow the otherwise crucial insights Nietzsche was able to deliver into the cultural function of Greek tragedy.It is this overreach that Nietzsche increasingly seeks to correct in subsequent years when he develops, in the Untimely Meditations as much as in Human, All Too Human, more sophisticated forms of historical criticism that take into account both the psychology and the cultural standpoint of the historical observer. Jensen, in this respect, is quite right to suggest in the fourth and fifth chapters of his study that Nietzsche's much proclaimed aestheticism does not run quite as deeply as often assumed; Nietzsche is more interested in the epistemological problems of historical representation than in turning the past into poetry, or life into literature. The critical historian of the second Untimely Meditation, for instance, emerges as a check against both aestheticist overreach and representationalist overconfidence; as such, the critical historian is a step on the road to genealogy (84). The model of Nietzsche's critical historian also implies a psychological attitude toward the past that resembles the ataraxía of the Greek statesman and Renaissance ruler but that also foreshadows the stance Nietzsche's genealogy has to take vis-à-vis the metaphysical tradition. Although Jensen, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, does not follow up on the ethical and political implications this might have for the overall outlook of Nietzsche's project, he clearly shows that, even though Nietzsche does not explicitly return to the models of the second Untimely Meditation, his subsequent work continues to follow its broader conclusion: a subjectless and value-neutral understanding of history is simply an impossible undertaking.Jensen might only all too quickly glance at how such insights play out in Nietzsche's own historical scholarship, such as his Basel lectures on the history of Greek literature or his Encyclopedia of Classical Philology (92–94), but he is able to show with great clarity that Nietzsche's post-Hegelian stance partakes in the wider neo-Kantian reorientation of German philosophical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. This, indeed, is a crucial insight of Jensen's study: the epistemological backbone of Nietzsche's philosophical project is much closer to the first generation of neo-Kantians than most current commentators allow. Nietzsche's claim that historical knowledge cannot be value-neutral not only mirrors Heinrich Rickert's position a few decades later, but Nietzsche's underlying critique of representationalism directly draws on those “post-Kantian naturalists” who, like Helmholtz and Friedrich Albert Lange, really make up the first generation of neo-Kantians (130).Although it seems somewhat implausible that the University of Basel's history department really rivaled that of Berlin (i), it is the intellectual context in Basel that allows Nietzsche to formulate an epistemologically interesting alternative to the dominant historical and philosophical paradigms in imperial Germany. Jensen convincingly shows how Nietzsche pits the theoretical underpinnings of Basel cultural history, exemplified by Johann Jacob Bachofen, Jacob Burckhardt, and Franz Overbeck, against Hegel's populist heirs, in particular David Friedrich Strauss and Eduard von Hartmann (97–118)—heirs whose positivist and optimistic accounts of a grand historical teleology had not quite learned the lessons Hegel had offered in the introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history. In contrast, Nietzsche's emphasis on the question of value for historical knowledge, as much as his recognition of the importance of psychology, leads him to conceive of the task of historiography along the lines of a history of mentalities that, not unlike Burckhardt's approach, would focus on “typological traits” (114). Whatever historical facts there might be, they are relevant only because they are always already of a normative kind.Nietzsche's awareness of the complexity of historical knowledge and representation distances his account clearly from a merely antimodern cultural criticism, but it also undercuts the liberal hopes that were part of some aspects of Berlin Geschichtswissenschaft. His demand for a “historical philosophizing”—which was central to Human, All Too Human and that still shaped his later works like Beyond Good and Evil—not only emphasized the inherently perspectival character of historical knowledge, but also showed that the value and meaning of historical knowledge could not be found in a simplistic realism that aimed to show how the past really was. While he accepts causal models of historical explanation, his interest in the psychology of historical agents and observers prevents him from adopting a positivist understanding of the motivation of historical agents. Causality, thus, implies both complexity and chancy causation, and it is Nietzsche's much underappreciated reading of Martin Drossbach that allows him to move beyond a discussion of causality that had largely been shaped by Kant and Hume (162). At the same time, however, this brings Nietzsche's philosophy of history into a difficult position: historical representation is both meaningful and (or rather: because) it fails to represent the past as it really was. Nietzsche, as Jensen summarizes this position, “is an ontological realist but an anti-realist about historical representation” (142), and this brings him into close proximity with more recent theoretical positions, such as that of Frank Ankersmit (145).The combination of a representational anti-realism with a perspectival theory of explanation, Jensen plausibly argues, is the crucial point of Nietzsche's philosophy of history. This combination allowed Nietzsche—for instance, in The Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, which are the subject of the final two chapters—to overcome both the simplified Hegelianism of the Berlin historians and his own earlier misstep that replaced historical knowledge with aesthetic intuition. Genealogy, then, allows for a “historically contingent anti-realist representation” (157) that examines under which conditions and circumstances the emergence of values, and thus of meaning, is possible; genealogy describes a historical space of possibilities. Even though genealogy can be counterfactual, it is itself meaningful and has value since its task is to persuade others of the truth claims inherent in the space of possibilities it outlines. As such, it avoids postmodern value relativism without, however, giving in to the false promises of a positivist understanding of historical knowledge.Jensen's book is an important contribution that both clarifies and complicates our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy of history. Any account of Nietzsche's “historical philosophizing,” and of his genealogical project, will have to take Jensen's insights on board.