Nietzsche humanist

214 Pages·1998·0.764 MB·English

by  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Pavur, Claude Nicholas, Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

Nietzsche
Humanist
Claude Nicholas Pavur
Marquette Studies in Philosophy
No. 15
Andrew Tallon, Series Editor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pavur, Claude Nicholas, 1952-
Nietzsche humanist / Claude Nicholas Pavur.
p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 15)
ISBN 0-87462-614-5
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 2. Humanism.
I. Title. II. Series: Marquette studies in philosophy ; #15.
B3317.P3 1998
193—dc21 97-45329
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior permission of the publisher.
Contents
Preface .................................................................................5
Acknowledgments................................................................7
Dedication...........................................................................8
1: Reading Nietzsche, Knowing Humanism.........................9
2: Nietzsche’s Humanist Genealogy....................................27
3: In the Region of Likeness: Family Resemblances............55
4: A Single Web of Meaning ..............................................77
5: All in One: Horizon, Goal, and Doctrine.......................95
6: Nietzsche the Terrible...................................................147
7: Reprise and Ascent.......................................................173
Nietzsche’s Works.............................................................193
Bibliography ....................................................................195
Index ...............................................................................207

Preface
Supposing Nietzsche is a humanist—what then? Are there not
grounds for the suspicion that we have not been well enough attuned
to the ancient dimensions of our own identities to know what to do
with this knowledge? Does our age’s preference for the novel and the
revolutionary mean that unmasking Nietzsche this way will amount
to his inevitable diminishment—and might that not be for the best,
after all?
We may have needed to see him—and in his later years he may
have felt the need to present himself—as the radical overturner of all
things, as the beginning of a new millenium. We do want to feel that
things are moving forward, do we not? And if they leap forward,
then so much the better! But self-presentation as dramatic as
Nietzsche’s makes us wonder. Might it have been a strategy for ob-
taining a readership, one worked out during years of increasing isola-
tion? Or was it perhaps compensatory grandeur for his utter neglect,
or therapeutic ventilation, or the beginning of his breakdown? It is
not at all impossible that he was simply caught up in a creative whirl-
wind as he fashioned his own Galatea, and that his intellectual art
began to operate independently, following its own dynamics and se-
ducing the artist whithersoever it willed. Or maybe the author was
simply collapsing, as any mortal would, under the rush of a breath-
taking in-breaking vision that he indeed was the first of the race to
behold.
Perhaps, too, his late visions were deeply implicated in a long-la-
bored upward-and-downward spiralling climb through many and
many a beloved text—ah, through many a beloved meaning—to-
ward what he had hoped would be his own beatitude. In that case,
this “unmasking” might result not in the diminishment but in the
expansion of Nietzsche’s own meaning.
At least we have had a convenient screen that would allow us to use
him for certain ends. And that, of course, has a certain legitimacy.
But Nietzsche the classical scholar? Nietzsche the humanistic pietist?!
The true companion of those recidivists Schopenhauer and Wagner,
not to mention Emerson and Montaigne, Petrarch and Erasmus, or
Plutarch and Seneca?
Do we recognize this Nietzsche? Should we?
6 Claude N. Pavur
2
As we near the hundreth anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, it may
be time for a revaluation of the revaluator, time to shake some of the
amnesia that haunts our submodernist culture with its penchant for
parody. We need to take another look at one whose dark thunderings
and frenzied lightning bolts have provided son et lumière for each
succeeding generation in the twentieth century. No doubt he intended
to pull us from the arms of some collective Morpheus—using to that
end music that was itself usually entrancing, though not always me-
lodious, not always harmonious. His influence has been staggering,
but has it “worked”? Maybe the opera is not yet over. We should not,
prematurely confident, assume that we have heard it all. Even if we
have, we may need to replay it several times in order to come to
appreciate it. Philology is the art of slow reading, as Nietzsche re-
minds us. It also is the art of reading widely and the art of reading
repeatedly.
There may be more magic here than we had at first suspected,
more than we were ready to confess that we actually like—or de-
plore. At any rate, the right praise, the right blame are impossible
apart from an adequate hearing. But can we discover Nietzsche now?
His manner has made us suspicious. Did he hide himself in order to
be discovered? Certainly he has eluded us, this man of knowledge, to
the extent that we have not come to know ourselves. Perhaps his life
and work were designed as a parable that would trick us into self-
discovery.
3
I hope that this essay has some value for students seeking to under-
stand modernity, and also for all readers of Nietzsche, be they naïve,
amateur, casual, or professional. In addition, I address those who
want to sharpen and deepen their conception of Western humanism
as it is generally but not always explicitly understood. At the end of
this study, I will raise certain relevant issues of contemporary culture
and education that affect us all. It is in light of these larger concerns
that these pages may offer something to all those who profess the
humanities, from philologists to philosophers.
St. Louis, Missouri
January 19, 1997
Nietzsche As Humanist 7
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my many conversation partners at Emory Univer-
sity, especially Walter Adamson, R. Bracht Branham, Daniel Carrere,
Herb Golder, Robert Paul, Louis Ruprecht, Jr., and James Winches-
ter. I am also much indebted to Walter Ong and to Daniel Conway
for helpful advice and encouragement. The Society of Jesus and the
Woodruff family of Atlanta provided the necessary support for this
project, and the National Endowment for the Humanities contrib-
uted to it by making possible my attendance at a summer Nietzsche-
seminar directed by Richard Schacht at the University of Illinois in
1991. The resources of Saint Louis University, and the generous spirit
of the Jesuit Hall Jesuit Community assured that this work would be
brought to completion. My special thanks to A. James Blumeyer,
Edward O’Brien, and Anthony Daly for their patient assistance. My
colleagues in and around Saint Louis University’s Department of
Modern and Classical Languages and its Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies deserve credit for keeping my inspiration alive. I
also acknowledge and thank from my heart the several translators
whose careful philological efforts have enabled me to undertake this
work.
Any product of human labor is a paltry, pitiful thing in compari-
son with those lasting gifts that we receive through the sacrifices made
in the context of family life. I acknowledge here that my greatest
debt is and always will be to my whole family, and especially to my
parents for their abundant kindnesses to me, early, middle, and late.
To Edward John Pavur, Sr., and to Gertrude Gentilich Pavur, first
and best of all my teachers, I dedicate this book.
...learn to read me well—!
Nietzsche, The Dawn
The Bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not
know how to use them.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
1
Reading Nietzsche Knowing Humanism
“What kind of a man are you?! Don’t you even like dolphins?” Zorba
asks his scholarly companion.
“Who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?” the dis-
ciples wonder aloud about the prophetic stranger in their midst.
We scholars and disciples can hardly refrain from posing similar
questions of identity and genre with regard to that enfant terrible,
Friedrich Nietzsche, once we have gotten to know something of him.
In the traditions of contemporary literature, philosophy, and social,
cultural, and psychological reflection, he seems to lie under every
cover. He has become part of the very self-image of modernity and
post-modernity. Many thinkers do not doubt that our self-
understanding would limp if we failed to engage with his ubiquitous
spirit. But hard to lose, Nietzsche remains elusive. Questions of iden-
tity and type nag at us as this centaur and mercurial masquerader
proclaims “At bottom I am every name in history” while demanding
“Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all do not mistake
me for someone else” and asking “Have I been understood?” (1954,
686; 1969, 217; 335). Such utterances echo all the more insistently
as we swim about in the ink-dark sea of interpretations that have
teemed forth left and right, most of them finding good support from
the wealth of Nietzsche’s styles, opinions, arguments, and moods.
For example, is he radically nihilistic or radically anti-nihilistic? Per-
ceptive readers can certainly argue either side, as Arthur Danto and
Walter Kaufmann once proved (Berman, 1988). To what extent, then,
can we say that Nietzsche’s writings reveal a discernible set of posi-
tions and concerns on a related range of questions and problems? To
identify him as a chameleon is not quite enough. Even under the
assumption that the author has assumed strikingly different masks,
we might ask about the one who has chosen to assume just these
masks—the one who is inevitably defined in quite a meaningful way
by these particular choices. Why might he have made them? If he is
a Proteus who changes into an astounding range of terrible shapes,
can we possibly, like Odysseus, hold on long enough to know the
god himself?
10 Claude N. Pavur: Nietzsche Humanist
Beyond the question of his importance for our times, we have good
reasons for not abandoning the search for an integrated understand-
ing. First and foremost among these is our constitutional investment
in the search for coherence, postmodern enthusiasms notwithstand-
ing. We naturally tend to perceive things as wholes. We try to un-
derstand any intelligible connections, setting them out on our own
grids. At least thus argue gestaltists, structuralists, intentionality ana-
lysts, and common human experience. If we suspect that greater ac-
curacy or closure is possible and do not abandon the subject matter
under investigation, we will continue to be frustrated until we achieve
what we deem to be within our grasp. In the case of Nietzsche, we
desire to end the “cognitive dissonance” that results both from the author’s
contradictions and from the interpreters’ disagreements: a coherent un-
derstanding of Nietzsche will entail a better evaluation of the secondary
literature as well as of the corpus that is our main concern. Of course,
some critics would be eager to suggest that the search that we are under-
taking is a vain one. It has been proposed that
Nietzsche was above all an experimentalist, who tried out ideas as he
tried on styles, not so much later rejecting them as moving beyond
them, occasionally reaching back and borrowing from them. There is
no Nietzschean überhaupt, no single theme, and those that are most
often promoted to fill this role—the übermensch, the will to power,
and eternal recurrence—do not bear even slight scholarly scrutiny. There
are, of course, grand and personal concerns that permeate Nietzsche’s
work—the nature of morality, the pathetic motives of much moral
and Christian thinking, the historical role of Socrates, the Greeks, and
Jesus—but there is hardly a single theme or set of themes that tie the
entire corpus together…. While his work certainly adds up to a life-
long masterpiece, his philosophy is not of a piece.” (Solomon and
Higgins, 1988, 7-8)
The point does not appear to be unreasonable, but it merits our sus-
picion until we can confirm it for ourselves. Too many have sensed
and found some type of coherence for us to simply accept this state-
ment without question. In fact its very words paradoxically point to
the feasibility of the alternative view: some idea of wholeness is evoked
by the idea of permeating concerns and by the image of a “life-long
masterpiece.” Even while he affirmed that this profuse variety of
Nietzsche’s intellectual eruptions was the leading interpretive diffi-
culty, Karl Jaspers maintained that this material was not therefore
diffuse and random. Rather, these thoughts were deeply connected
in a way that a reader could not suspect from any collection of iso-