Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar classicism

Abstract

Bishop, Paul, and R.H. Stephenson. Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. 281 pp. $80.00 hardcover. The aim of Bishop's and Stephenson's study is to detail the influence on Nietzsche of Goethe's and Schiller's classicist aesthetic, an appreciation of which is deemed key to an adequate understanding of Nietzsche's thought. The two authors present their argument in separate chapters on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, on the period between 1881 and 1884 in which he conceived Zarathustra and wrote The Gay Science, and on Zarathustra itself. A fourth chapter widens the perspective by outlining the continuing influence of Weimar aesthetics on other authors ranging from Keats and Melville through Kafka and TS. Eliot to Adorno and Habermas. A lengthy appendix describes the genesis of Zarathustra independently of Goethe's and Schiller's influence. The book's introduction lays out what the authors mean by the aesthetics of Weimar Classicism. Its salient characteristic is the movement away from the general and toward the particular (13) of a sensual, this-worldly beauty. Its effect is to challenge any form of subordination to the abstract, be it instrumental reason or Romantic and religious mysticism. This challenge forms the bedrock of Goethe's and Schiller's doctrine-an gospel (97) inherited, the authors argue, by Nietzsche. Drawing knowledgeably on the works of Goethe and Schiller and on a wide range of sources from Nietzsche's oeuvre, including letters and fragments from throughout the Nachlass, this assiduously researched study gives a new resonance to numerous passages and to key terms in Nietzsche's writings. The authors compare the function of words such as Schein, veil, and play in The Birth of Tragedy to their use in Schiller's aesthetics in a variety of interesting ways (33ff.). They go on to read The Birth of Tragedy in view of Goethe's Faust, concentrating on the critique of science-like Faust, Nietzsche's Socrates confronts the limits of knowledge (37)-the triumph of life over pessimism, and the aesthetic heightening of anAugenblick that can carry the weight of eternity (42). They discern the Goethean notion otAugenhlick in Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence as expounded in The Gay Science and in Zarathustra. Exploring how Nietzsche's Augenblick resonates with Goethe's use of the term, the authors conclude that the eternal recurrence functions not just as a moral imperative, as has been previously argued, but as an imperative as well (82). …