Nietzsche und die Religionen. Transkulturelle Perspektiven seines Bildungs- und Denkweges, Nietzsche—Meditationen. Das Kloster, das Meer und die “neue” Unendlichkeit
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/jnietstud.46.3.0472
ISSN1538-4594
Autores Tópico(s)German Literature and Culture Studies
Resumo“Nietzsche and Religion” is not an unusual topic in Nietzsche scholarship. Yet most studies on this topic limit themselves to his relationship to Christianity or Buddhism. Few people have systematically examined Nietzsche’s reception of other non-Christian religions. Johann Figl’s 2007 monograph Nietzsche und die Religionen. Transkulturelle Perspektiven seines Bildungs- und Denkweges fills this gap. While most recent publications concerning Nietzsche’s relationship to religions are philosophically oriented, Figl’s book takes a strictly historical approach. It not only is a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s knowledge of various religions and their influence on his philosophy, but also aims to outline the early history of Religionswissenschaft reflected in Nietzsche’s Bildungsweg. Such an ambitious project requires intimate knowledge of Nietzsche’s life and thought as well as nineteenth-century German scholarship in which he was trained. Figl, an expert on Nietzsche as well as religious studies, is one of the few scholars who can take on such a task. The outcome, Nietzsche und die Religionen (henceforth NR), meets our expectations.After a short introduction in which Figl explains the aims and structure of his book, NR is organized into four chapters. These four chapters can be divided into two main parts. The first part, which includes the first three chapters, offers a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche’s extensive occupation with non-European cultures and non-Christian religions, first while he was a school and university student and later as a professor of philology in Basel. As the subtitle indicates, one of Figl’s major commitments in this book is that a transcultural dimension is fundamental to Nietzsche’s entire philosophical project. In the second part, constituted by the fourth chapter, Figl engages with the issue of how this transcultural dimension is reflected in Nietzsche’s published writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to his later works. These four chapters are followed by a catalogue of sources and documents concerning Nietzsche’s education and reading, a bibliography, and a general index to the book, all of which provide many useful avenues for further study.Figl is not alone in emphasizing Nietzsche’s cultural pluralism. In his 1996 monograph Orient—Okzident. Nietzsches Versuch einer Loslösung vom europäischen Weltbild (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), for instance, Andrea Orsucci also takes Nietzsche’s opposition to Eurocentrism as his point of departure. Both Figl and Orsucci maintain that Nietzsche’s understanding of cultures and religions is a product of the intellectual atmosphere of Nietzsche’s own age. However, unlike Orsucci, who emphasizes the radical breaks in Nietzsche’s thinking about religions, Figl focuses upon the continuity of Nietzsche’s development. Although he agrees with Orsucci that Nietzsche’s reception of nineteenth-century religious, anthropological, and ethnological research during his Basel years contributed significantly to his anti-Eurocentrism, Figl goes one step further by seeking to trace the transcultural tendency in the high school and university education the young Nietzsche received. This reconstruction, in my opinion, is the most valuable part of NR. For this subject is, in spite of its great importance for our understanding of Nietzsche’s religious thought (as Figl shows in his book), barely touched on in Nietzsche scholarship.In order to paint a vivid picture of Nietzsche’s religious education, Figl delves into a diverse range of primary and secondary sources, which include Nietzsche’s school essays, philological publications, and posthumous notations (as the editor of KGW I, Figl has extensive knowledge of the entire body of Nietzsche’s early writings); the books in the library of Schulpforta and in Nietzsche’s personal library that may have influenced the young Nietzsche; the textbooks he used; the yearly reports of the programs of study at Pforta; and the manuscripts of the notes Nietzsche made of the lectures he attended. Believing that the research of Nietzsche’s teachers (Karl August Koberstein, Wilhelm Corssen, Karl Heinrich August Steinhart, et al.) was integrated, more or less, into their classes, Figl also draws attention to their academic publications, which cover such topics as comparative grammar and the influence of Asia on the Platonic tradition. The value of these materials, according to Figl, is much more than biographical; they provide information concerning the context of Nietzsche’s thought and can sometimes correct previous misunderstandings of him. Figl’s historical investigation has revealed, for example, that Nietzsche’s first encounter with Zarathustra can be traced back to his reading of Welter’s Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte at Schulpforta—much earlier than was long supposed (NR, 71–72), and that, contra Montinari’s presumption that Nietzsche mentioned Zoroaster (alias Zarathustra) for the first time in 1870/1, the name Zoroaster appeared in Nietzsche’s philological notations as early as 1867 (NR, 164–65). Without denying that there are racist and Eurocentric elements in the textbooks Nietzsche used, Figl argues that these ideological prejudices are minimized by the image of the world conveyed in the philological-historical research of the nineteenth century that Nietzsche’s teachers communicated in their classes (and especially the research in the emerging field of Indo-European studies)—an image of the world in which Eastern culture is rendered of great worth (NR, 5). On the basis of an examination of Koberstein’s manuscripts and Nietzsche’s notes of Corssen’s lecture on history, Figl argues that Nietzsche gained some acquaintance with comparative linguistics, and more importantly, with the comparative approach to culture and religion while at Pforta (NR, 105ff. and 117ff.).As mentioned earlier, Figl attempts to locate Nietzsche’s engagement with religions in the broader context of the establishment of Religionswissenschaft as an independent discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Figl points out that, contrary to what Andreas Urs Sommer suggests, Nietzsche did use the term “Religionswissenschaft,” and that as early as 1868, Nietzsche had a clear concept of Religionswissenschaft, which was largely shaped by the work of figures such as Georg Curtius and Max Müller (NR, 202–14). Inspired by the conception of philology as Altertumswissenschaft, Curtius stressed that philology was not aimed at merely studying ancient texts, but designed as the study of the entirety of ancient culture, including ancient religions (NR, 218–19). On Figl’s reading, the idea that “the plurality of religions corresponds to the plurality of languages” is already explicit and central in Nietzsche’s concept of Religionswissenschaft (NR, 211). From Curtius and Müller, Nietzsche learned how comparative religion, an important branch of Religionswissenschaft, models itself on comparative linguistics (NR, 219–27). According to Figl, this comparative approach can constitute a ground for multiculturalism, which rejects a singular understanding of culture.That said, what Figl offers, it must be stressed, is an oversimplified account of the early history of comparative studies as exemplified by the work of Müller. In fact, Müller’s enthusiasm for the common origin of the Indo-European languages is connected with an intense interest in the Urgeschichte of the “Aryan” race. And his interpretation of myth aims to highlight the rationality of the ancestors of all European races, which would help to raise them, as Eric Csapo puts it, “well above the contemptible savages who inhabited other corners of the globe” (Theories of Mythology [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 22). Figl understates these unmistakably Eurocentric aspects of comparative studies. For example, after a several-page description of Curtius’s transcultural perspective, only a very brief remark near the end of the second chapter hints at a fuller story, where Figl notes that Curtius used discriminatory terminology to characterize the non-European peoples (NR, 224).NR touches upon several concepts central to Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as “eternal recurrence” and “the death of God.” Figl’s study has made clear that these concepts were not fashioned ex nihilo; they were based on the fusion of various sources. In addition to Greek sources (for example, Heraclitus), there is an Indian source of “eternal recurrence.” By referring to Nietzsche’s notation 13[3], which includes terms such as “wheel, water blister, hollow curvature” (KGW III 3, 393), Figl argues that from his reading of Carl Friedrich Koeppen’s book Die Religion des Buddha in the early 1870s, years before his intensive occupation with the idea of “eternal recurrence” in 1881, Nietzsche had learned about several Buddhist concepts, among which is the “cycle of existence” (samsara)—a Buddhist version of “eternal recurrence” (NR, 278–80). Figl also argues that the chief sources of inspiration for Nietzsche’s theory of the death of God are, inter alia, Müller’s Essays and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (NR, 301–4). He is right to draw attention to Nietzsche’s references to the death of Zeus, the death of Pan, and the death of Odin, which anticipate the famous statement by the madman in GS 125, and to emphasize that the theory of the death of God ties in with ancient polytheisms, as these references demonstrate (NR, 304–7). However, the so-called Zagreus myth, in which Dionysus Zagreus was murdered by the Titans and then restored to life, is not mentioned in NR, though it has a special relevance for Nietzsche’s theory. For Nietzsche, this myth is a representative example of the older conception of gods as mortal, which contrasts with the later picture of the immortal Olympians.In 2007, Figl also published a pamphlet of some 130 pages with the title Nietzsche—Meditationen (henceforth NM). Unlike NR, which is aimed at a specialist readership, this pamphlet is addressed to the general reader. Figl uses the term “meditation” not in the sense of certain religious practices, but in the sense of “contemplation.” More precisely, he applies it to designate “the contemplation of existence and its meaning and purpose” (NM, 7). NM is subtitled “The Monastery, the Sea, and the New Infinitude,” not only because these three themes play prominent roles in Nietzsche’s life and thought, but also because they are, as Figl states in the preface, “significant life experiences” for his wife to whom this book is dedicated (NM, 1).Figl divides his pamphlet into two major parts. The biographically oriented first part gives a brief survey of Nietzsche’s experiences regarding the monastery, the sea, and infinitude. According to Figl, Nietzsche’s six years at Pforta left him with a deeply imprinted understanding of the monastery, which emphasizes order, spirituality, intellectuality, and a combination of contemplative and practical life. Figl points out that Nietzsche, during a stay in Sorrento, established with his friends a kind of community that resembled such a monastery. After showing there is a close relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophy and nature by presenting his experiences of the sea in Sorrento, Figl turns to the conception of the new infinitude for which the sea is used as a metaphor. With this conception, he refers to individual life seen from the new perspective of the “eternal recurrence.” In the second part of this book, which was originally written for the radio broadcast “Gedanken zum Tag,” Figl attempts a very general introduction to Nietzsche’s central ideas and seeks to show how fertile these ideas can be for rethinking some serious problems of human existence, such as the meaning of death. In order to offer a useful resource to accompany his interpretation, after this brief introduction, Figl gives select original texts, which are conveniently organized with respect to the three key themes, in the appendix.Nietzsche und die Religionen is a substantial contribution to our understanding of Nietzsche. It will be of interest to all Nietzsche scholars and to students of the history of scholarship. And Nietzsche—Meditationen is a welcome attempt to write in a manner intelligible to the general reader and to make Nietzsche’s philosophy accessible to all.
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