Nietzsche and Greek Thought

163 Pages·1987·5.58 MB·English

by  V. Tejera (auth.)

NIETZSCHE AND GREEK THOUGHT
MARTINUS NIJHOFF PHILOSOPHY LIBRARY
VOLUME 24
Nietzsche and Greek
Thought
by
V. Tejera
State University of New York at Stony Brook
1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS
a member of the KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Tejera, Victorino.
Nietzsche and Greek thought.
(Martinus Nijhoff philosophy library; v. 24)
Bibliography: p.
Include. index.
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
2. Philosophy, Ancient. 1. Title. 11. Series.
83317.1'43 1987 193 86-33163
ISBN-13:978-94-010-8089-7 e-ISBN-13:978-94-009-3553-2
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3553-2
Copyright
© 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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the publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.O. Box 163, 3300 AD Dordrecht,
The Netherlands.
To
Jacob Kainen
Artist and Scholar
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Nietzsche's Philosophic Historiography 1
Nietzsche's Use of Intellectual History I
History and the Self-Definition of Humanity 10
II. Nietzsche on the Greek Decline 21
"Socrates" as a Symptom of the Greek Decline 21
III. Nietzsche on the Early Presocratics 33
Philosophy in "the Tragic Age" 33
Nietzsche on Anaximander 38
Nietzsche on Herakleitos 43
Nietzsche and Parmenides 47
IV. Positivism and Ecstasy 57
Rationality without Beauty, Release without Proportion 57
Poetry as Dianoia, Imagination as Rationality 64
V. Keeping Track of "Socrates" 71
The Socrates of the Pythagorizing and Oligarchal
Tradition 71
Nietzsche's Traditionalist Reading of Plato 80
VI. What Nietzsche Loved About Socrates 93
Nietzsche's Dialectic and Anti-Systematics 93
Plato's Socrates is Not a Twilit Idol 105
VII. The Tyranny of "Reason" 114
"Rationalism" and "Morality," Reason and Nature 114
Man's Fatedness is Existential 119
Nietzsche's Remarks on Aristotle, and the Tragic Sense 124
Epilogue 131
Bibliography 138
Index 150
Chapter I
Nietzsche's Philosophic Historiography
Nietzsche's Use of Intellectual History
Nietzsche's views of history and historiography are
just those that a "philosopher of life" and practitioner of
the art of cultural analysis would have. As a cultural
analyst, Nietzsche was philosophic in the sense that he
criticized values, institutions and ideas (both artistic and
religious) at the most reflective possible levels. Among the
connotations of "reflective" we must include both "self
reflective" and "practical," if we are to understand
Nietzsche. Under "practical" we must include "diagnostic,"
in the sense of examining patterns of conduct that
correspond to intellectual pathologies, on Nietzsche's
analysis. Because Nietzsche makes such abundant use of
ancient Greek thought in advancing his critique of the
ideas of his own time, we can contrast his practice of
intellectual history with his overt statements about the use
of history in "The Advantage and Disadvantage of History
for Life."
Now, Nietzsche felt that it was "only insofar as he
was the nursling of older ages like the Greek rather than a
child of the present age" that he had come to his
"untimely" insights.1 But he also believed that "only he
who is building the future has a right to judge the past"
(U AH 41). So, since "you can explain the past only by
what is most powerful in the present," it would follow for
1 The Use and Abuse of History, 1874 (N.Y.: Bobbs
Merrill) p.4. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil del' Historie far
das Leben, in Werke IlI.1, ed. Colli & Montinari.
2 NIETZSCHE AND GREEK THOUGHT
Nietzsche that: while the past is partly constitutive of the
present, only those who are seeking to overcome a present
which they understand and wish to change, are good
explainers of the human past. These are just those who
both have a historical consciousness and wish to use it
creatively.
But the historical sense prevalent in Nietzsche's
Germany looked like "a malignant fever" (UAH sec. 4) to
him and a "sign of decay. ,,2 So Nietzsche's book is a
criticism of the forms which historical consciousness had
taken in his day. But Nietzsche's work as a whole is itself
an expression of the reason why his age was obsessed with
history, namely, the hope that the past might provide
models of conduct for the present. This search for models,
Nietzsche believed, has both healthy and unhealthy forms.
But the hope itself, it should be noted, is a corollary of the
spreading disbelief to which Nietzsche is a decided
contributor. Many historians also hoped to uncover, in the
historical process itself, some pattern within which man's
salvation, or perfectibility, could be heralded as immanent
or possible. But Nietzsche's excursus on forgetfulness
which opens UAH is clearly a response to the overselling
of the historical sense by scholars and popularizers.
The concern of UAH is to identify both the deadly
and the liberating, or life-giving, aspects of history. It is
an aspect of Nietzsche's larger project of identifying the
ways in which mankind, in the interest of its own health,
could consciously recover its ability to grasp the world
mythically. As he was to say in The Genealogy of Morals,
"we have art in order not to die of the truth."3 But
2 Ecce Homo, 1888, tr. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics,
1979). Ecce Homo in Werke VI.3, ed. Colli & Montinari.
3 The Genealogy of Morals 1887, in Basic Writings ed.
Kaufmann (N.Y.: Modern Library, 1968).
Nietzsche's Philosophic Historiography 3
because "the critical-historical spirit of our culture has ...
made the previous existence of myth credible . . . only 1?y
means of scholarship," Nietzsche has to state in The Birth
0/ Tragedy that:
without myth every culture loses the healthy
natural power of its creativity: only a horizon
defined by myths completes and unifies a whole
cultural movement. Myth alone saves all powers
of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream
from aimless wanderings. The images of myth
have to be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic
guardians, under whose care the young soul grows
to maturity and whose signs help the adult
interpret his life and struggles. Even the state
knows no more powerful unwritten laws than
[those of] the mythical foundation.4
"Any people," Nietzsche claims, "any individual is
worthy only insofar as it is able to press the stamp of the
eternal upon its experience; for only then is it ...
demundanized (eotweltlicht) and able to show its
unconscious inner convictions about the relativity of time
and truth, i.e., about the metaphysical significance of life.
The opposite of this happens when a people begins to
comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical
bulwarks that gird it around" (BT 23).
So, the historical self -understanding that a people
can achieve for itself should not be any weaker in social
effectiveness than that once provided by the myths. It is
this desideratum that energizes Nietzsche's criticism of the
4 The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, in Basic Writings, op. cit.,
section 23. Die Geburt der Tragodie, in Werke Ill. 1 , ed.
Colli & Montinari.
4 NIETZSCHE AND GREEK THOUGHT
histories of his time. As he implies in U AH, a practice of
history which addresses the human condition at the level of
art can serve life as effectively as valid myth.5
The truth that Nietzsche is articulating is that the
ability to feel un historically , or mythically, and the ability
to feel historically are equally necessary to the health and
self -defini tion of an indi vid ual or cui ture. [Note the
implication of this, that to think unhistorically is to think
m ythicall y .]6
There is such a thing as a "super-historical"
standpoint. This is the "insider" view which dispenses with
history because it sees all action as inherently blind and
5 Unlike the beasts of the field, a human "goes into his
present" with leftovers from the past which influence his
behavior and affect his spirit. The pastless existence of
the beasts looks like paradise to man because it is
forgetfully free of this burden of determinants or
consciousness-penetrating residues. Forgetfulness, says
Nietzsche, is equated with blessedness because realizing the
fullness of the present moment is, for humans, a condition
of happiness. And too much memory dissolves the
forward texture of coming-to-be into a continual perishing
that paralyzes. "One who wished to feel everything
historically would be like a man forcing himself to refrain
from sleep." And, "there is a degree of sleeplessness, of
rumination, of 'historical sense,' that injures and finally
destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a
system of culture" (UAH p.7).
6 Nietzsche has to trust the "plastic power" of the culture
or the individual "to grow out of itself," to grow healthily.
Strong individuals will not be hurt by too much history,
just as, when they act, they act as if there were no past,
only the future they are concerned to shape.