Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century

Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions

Robert C. Holub

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812295146
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place. Robert C. Holub counters this narrative, arguing that Nietzsche was very well attuned to the events and issues of his era and responded to them frequently in his writings. Organized around nine important questions circulating in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century presents a thorough investigation of Nietzsche's familiarity with contemporary life, his contact with and comments on these various questions, and the sources from which he gathered his knowledge.Holub begins his analysis with Nietzsche's views on education, nationhood, and the working-class movement, turns to questions of women and women's emancipation, colonialism, and Jews and Judaism, and looks at Nietzsche's dealings with evolutionary biology, cosmological theories, and the new "science" of eugenics. He shows how Nietzsche, although infrequently read during his lifetime, formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries, and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in the nineteenth century. Throughout his examination, Holub finds that, against conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was only indirectly in conversation with the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes through German idealism, and that the books and individuals central to his development were more obscure writers, most of whom have long since been forgotten.This book thus sheds light on Nietzsche's thought as enmeshed in a web of nineteenth-century discourses and offers new insights into his interactive method of engaging with the philosophical universe of his time.

Chapter 1

The Education Question

During the early 1870s, Nietzsche was preoccupied with two large areas of interest, as he drifted away from the academic life and his professional studies in classical philology. The first was the perceived renaissance in German and European culture spearheaded by the genial and charismatic personality of the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Indeed, much of Nietzsche’s writing and thought during the first half of the 1870s was directly related to Wagner and to mutual concerns, such as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). During these years, the effect on Nietzsche of Wagner as a person and of the Wagnerian cult on his life can hardly be exaggerated. After Nietzsche ceased activity in classical scholarship, almost everything he published until the appearance of Human, All Too Human (1878) was directly or indirectly inspired by his association with the composer. Although his first nonphilological work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), can be conceived as an attempt to unite his classical education with his veneration of Wagner, it resonated only with Wagner and Wagnerians, and was almost completely neglected by conventional scholars of ancient Greece. The first Untimely Meditation, which was an attack on the liberal Hegelian David Strauß (1808–1874), can be conceived as a commission from Wagner: it seems Strauß had supported one of Wagner’s musical rivals in Munich for the post of orchestral conductor [Kapellmeister], and the Meister had convinced his enthusiastic young supporter to act as a tool for revenge because Strauß had opposed him.¹ Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), although not about Wagner, was an essay on the philosophical link between Nietzsche and Wagner; indeed, at their very first meeting in 1868 Schopenhauer had been one of the topics of conversation, and their mutual admiration for the philosopher of pessimism continued until their friendship ended. The final Meditation, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), which was sent special delivery to Wagner in July of 1876, a month before the opening of the new opera house, is obviously celebratory in character—although the attentive reader can already detect some of the misgivings that would surface more openly in Nietzsche’s later writings on the composer.

In Nietzsche’s private life, Wagner assumed a prominent place almost immediately. Two months after he met Wagner, Nietzsche wrote to his friend and fellow classicist Erwin Rohde (1845–1898) about his experience and expressed an admiration that would last well into the mid-1870s: “I have extreme confidence that we can agree entirely about a genius who appears to me like an insoluble problem and whom I make new efforts to understand year in and year out: this genius is Richard Wagner.” For Nietzsche, Wagner is the “living illustration” of what Schopenhauer meant when he used the word genius, and it is evident that his worship of Wagner goes hand in hand with his adulation of Schopenhauer (9 December 1868, Nr. 604, KSB 2.352). In his correspondence during the next eight years, Nietzsche would frequently allude to his visits to Wagner and his wife Cosima,² the plans for Bayreuth, and Wagnerian music. Nietzsche’s entire mental economy and social life were arranged for many years around Wagner and Wagnerians. Nietzsche reported to Rohde in January 1869 that upon learning of his appointment to the extraordinary professorship at Basel, he spent the entire afternoon walking around singing melodies from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (Nr. 608, KSB 2.359). A few years later, obviously feeling that as a professor he was not contributing enough to the “cause,” he contemplated resigning his position at Basel to embark on a lecture tour throughout Germany promoting Wagner and his works. Nietzsche traveled to Bayreuth in May of 1872 for the official ceremony laying the cornerstone for the Bayreuth opera house. In early October of 1873, he was evidently asked to provide some written material that could be used for fundraising, and although he first tried to convince Rohde to undertake this task (18 October 1873, Nr. 319, KSB 4.167), he actually did compose an “Admonition to the Germans” in late October as a propaganda piece for the Wagnerian mission. In this pamphlet, which was evidently rejected by the Wagnerians,³ Nietzsche tried to convince his reader that the building of the Bayreuth opera house is not simply the enterprise of a small group, but rather an important cultural undertaking for the “benefit and the honor of the German spirit and of the German name.” Wagner is apostrophized as “the great, valiant, indomitable, unflagging warrior,” whose ideas, as they are manifested in Bayreuth, have reached “their last and final form and a truly victorious perfection” (MD, KSA 1.893–94). Indeed, most of Nietzsche’s closest friends in the 1870s—and even some people with whom he remained on good terms after his break with Wagner—he either met through Wagner or Wagnerians, or himself introduced to the Wagner circle. In these years of Wagnerian discipleship, the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner was not one of equals, however, as it may appear today. Although Nietzsche’s last essay on Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, produced in 1888 and published after Nietzsche had lapsed into insanity, would try to convince the reader that the two men possess equal stature, this parity existed only in Nietzsche’s mind. When they met, Wagner was fifty-five years old and had already completed several major operas known throughout Europe; Nietzsche was a twenty-four-year-old philology student. When Wagner died in 1883, Nietzsche was still identified chiefly as a Wagnerian, no matter how much in his own mind he had distanced himself from Bayreuth. Much has been written on the relationship between the two men, but the fact is that Wagner was considerably more important for Nietzsche, right up until his final moments of sanity, than Nietzsche was for Wagner.⁴

A second and related large area of concern that occupies Nietzsche’s thoughts and activity during the early and mid-1870s is education and the educational system. That Nietzsche was concerned with schools and universities is really not very surprising: outside of his brief stints in the military in 1867–68 and in 1870, he had been either a student or a teacher at a high school or at a university since he enrolled in a German Gymnasium in 1855. For many years, Nietzsche’s life had an academic trajectory: educated in a private preparatory institute and then for three years at Naumburg’s Cathedral Gymnasium before transferring to Pforta, where young men were groomed for university studies and often for careers as scholars,⁵ Nietzsche was set on a path, even before he reached his teens, that involved an intimate involvement with traditional educational institutions. Furthermore, his concern with education was intimately connected with his cliquish and—at times—fanatic enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and Wagner. We can best understand the connection between Nietzsche’s two primary areas of interest if we consider the German notion of Bildung. Translated often as “education” and connected intimately with the goals of the German educational system, Bildung actually refers to a general acculturation that may or may not be achieved through formal institutions. It was the central goal for the neo-humanist educational philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who was the founder of the University of Berlin and the chief architect of educational reform in Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Humboldt and for Nietzsche, Bildung relates to the culture of a society as much as it does to its system of training and instruction, and Nietzsche was certainly not alone in measuring the achievements of Germany in the 1870s by examining the quality of Bildung among his peers. Indeed, the deficiencies Nietzsche noted in the culture of the Second Reich were in large part responsible for his embrace of Richard Wagner and a cultural mission he believed would rival the excellences of the ancient world that he had come to admire so much in his studies. Bildung thus forms a bridge between culture and pedagogy, and these latter two notions are intimately connected in the German mind; even today the ministry in charge of education is most commonly called the “cultural ministry” [Kultusministerium]. In devoting himself to the spread of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s music, Nietzsche was convinced that he was promoting a culture worthy of the newly established Second Empire and its political power. In criticizing the present condition of the schools—in particular those devoted to higher education and the preparation for university study—and in suggesting the necessity for a drastic reorientation, he was affirming a cultural objective consonant with his philosophical perspective.

This cultural objective was in harmony with his philological views as well, and although Nietzsche had largely abandoned activity in scholarship surrounding the ancient world by 1872, his admiration for central aspects of the classical tradition remained undiminished. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche’s notion of cultural excellence was largely defined by his views of ancient Greece prior to the advent of Socrates as a philosopher and Euripides as a playwright. His hope for the newly unified German Reich, as well as his later criticism of Germany, was always connected with a cultural ideal derived from the Hellenic world. Nietzsche, as much as anyone in his generation, is the heir of a German “Grecophilia” that had been such an important feature in the intellectual atmosphere since the latter part of the eighteenth century.⁶ This tradition, which had been established in the writings of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) and the classicism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), was taken on a somewhat different path by Nietzsche, who emphasized agon (struggle), inequality, and slavery in Greek life, as well as Dionysian excesses. But Nietzsche, like his idealist predecessors, looked to the ancients for a paradigm of excellence and achievement in the contemporary world. Any time he wants to cite a counterillustration to the cultural depravity or pretentiousness he felt was pervasive in his own era, he looks to the ancient world. A large part of Nietzsche’s frustration, particularly in his early years, is thus related to the disappointment he feels when Germany falls short of realizing the reincarnation of Greek culture in the modern world. His impatience with his contemporaries stems from their failure to understand that their recently achieved political unity means nothing if it is not accompanied by cultural achievements that will rival those of Hellenic society. Thus in the second of his Untimely Meditations, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), he upbraids his compatriots⁷ for their myopic and smug contentment with the unification following the Franco-Prussian War and the attendant superficiality in cultural values. “I shall explicitly set down my testimony here,” he writes at the close of the fourth section, “that it is German unity in that highest sense for which we strive and strive far more ardently than political reunification, the unity of the German spirit and life after the annihilation of the opposition of form and content, of inwardness and convention” (HL 4, KSA 1.278). This essay—to which we shall turn in more detail later in this chapter—is thus an admonition to Germany—although Nietzsche was a resident of Switzerland at the time, he obviously still felt himself to be a German—that the real work remained unaccomplished despite victory on the battlefield. Unlike his Enlightenment predecessors, he is centrally concerned not with a regeneration of humankind or the propagation of democratic institutions, but with a rebirth of “true culture,” the restoration of health, and the recovery of instincts and integrity (HL 4, KSA 1.275) in Germany. In this Meditation from early 1874, he is still exhorting and agitating for Germany to become Greece; as the years progressed and his disappointment with his countrymen mounted, his invectives against Germany became sharper, and his tolerance for the failure to effect a modern turn toward ancient values diminished drastically.

Nietzsche’s Experience with Educational Institutions

The thematic concentration in Nietzsche’s university training and subsequent scholarship, as well as his musical enthusiasm and cultural engagement for the Wagnerian cause, intersect conveniently with his pedagogical critiques and reveilles. Already in November of 1870, we find him contemplating a critique of the Prussian educational system. Writing to his friend Carl von Gersdorff (1844–1904) following his own discharge from military service as a medic—shortly after joining the military, Nietzsche contracted dysentery and diphtheria and spent most of September and October 1870 recuperating—he confesses that he has grave concerns about cultural developments in Germany. He recognizes that Prussia is the leading political power in the German federation and in what will become a newly united German state, but writes that he considers “Prussia a highly dangerous power for culture.” His determination to “expose” Prussian education “publicly” is obviously conceived as a way to counter or correct the perils he senses in Prussian hegemony (Nr. 107, KSB 3.155). Nietzsche’s critique was not produced immediately; he first had to complete work on The Birth of Tragedy, but immediately after its publication at the beginning of 1872, he returns to the project he had evidently conceived while recuperating from the illnesses contracted during the Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche kept his word: he did “expose” Prussian education “publicly.” His critique of contemporary education and his suggestions for reform were delivered forcefully and provocatively in a lecture series Nietzsche agreed to give with the title “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.”⁸ Delivered from January to March in 1872⁹ in the auditorium of the university museum in Basel as public and popular events—not university and academic lectures—these five lectures were his first sustained effort to deal with education, its possibilities, and its importance for the creation of greatness in German culture.¹⁰ By all accounts they were a huge success.¹¹ According to Nietzsche, approximately three hundred people attended each lecture, and this enthusiastic response probably contributed to his initial intention to publish them as a small volume.¹² Although he eventually decided that they were not ready for dissemination in print, the notions he develops in them are echoed often in his subsequent writings, especially the second and third essays of his Untimely Meditations. These lectures, therefore, provide important insight into perhaps the most important facet of Nietzsche’s early professional life, his pedagogical engagement at institutions in Basel, and his main cultural concern, the Wagnerian rebirth of German and European art; and despite his resignation from the teaching profession in 1879 and his increasing pessimism with regard to educational reform, we can still find echoes of his early critique of education and of his adherence to the notion of Bildung in his writings from the last year of his life. It is probably fair to say that he never relinquished this Humboldtian ideal, although he gradually became convinced that it could not be achieved through the state and its educational institutions.

The fact that Nietzsche was delivering public lectures for the citizens of Basel and that he was taking up topics related to educational institutions was neither unusual nor untimely. It was common for professors to offer presentations to the general public, and Nietzsche himself had already done so with his inaugural lecture in 1869 on “Homer and Classical Philology,” which was likewise given in the auditorium of the city museum, and with two subsequent lectures in 1870 on classical topics in the identical venue.¹³ In Basel there was a significant patrician and highly educated class that attended lectures on various learned topics. Nietzsche’s specific theme, educational institutions and how they can be improved, was a quite common topic in his era, especially with the rapidly shifting patterns of education in Germany during the nineteenth century. There were scores of articles, essays, and pamphlets dealing with the Gymnasium, as well as the Realschule,¹⁴ and although Nietzsche makes no reference to specific essays, we know that he was familiar with at least a portion of the vast literature on education produced in his time. Nor was it exceptional that a noted philosopher or scholar would deal with these issues. A few years after Nietzsche’s lecture series in Basel, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), the target of Nietzsche’s derision in the second Untimely Meditation, advocated in print for a unified type of secondary school that would combine the traditional, classical Gymnasium and the more practically oriented Realschule;¹⁵ noted scientists, such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) or Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), contributed their views urging more attention to the natural sciences in secondary schools;¹⁶ Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), like Nietzsche, wrote about the need for genuine education to counteract the wayward tendencies of modernity;¹⁷ and the philosopher and later Nobelist Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926), who had been Nietzsche’s colleague at Basel in 1871 before moving to Jena three years later, wrote several essays collected under the title “The Struggle for the Gymnasium,” in which he defends the focus on the ancient world in secondary education.¹⁸

What was perhaps a bit unusual in Nietzsche’s lectures is that they do not culminate in concrete plans for the reform of the educational system. As Nietzsche notes in the preface to his lectures, his auditors should not expect “at the close, as a result, tables. I do not promise,” he continues, “tables and new hourly course plans for the Gymnasium and the Realschulen,” and while he professes to admire those who have acquired such a sovereign overview that they can produce “the most sterile regulations and the most elegant tables,” he will not similarly satisfy “table enthusiasts” in his book.¹⁹ With these remarks, Nietzsche is referring to the many contemporary articles and essays on education that argue for modification of the attention devoted to one subject or another and include a course plan in a tabular conclusion to a discursive argument. But Nietzsche’s contribution to educational theory and practice differs most from those he read in the narrative he constructs for critiquing current practice and discussing directions for reform. The lectures are framed as a modification on Socratic dialogues. Nietzsche portrays himself as a young student at Bonn, who goes with a friend on a late summer day to practice shooting pistols.²⁰ Arriving at the edge of a forest, the friends encounter an older man accompanied by a dog and a younger companion. The older man, who is referred to as “the philosopher,” and who is very ...