Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub Babette Babich Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 524. Cloth, $85.00. What is the nineteenth century? If some historians of the "long" nineteenth century date its beginning back to 1750, does it end in 1900 or, as is said, in 1914 or, as one German historian reflects on the ongoing influence of the so-called "historical century," is it still ongoing? In [End Page 622] continental philosophy, the nineteenth century seems to have a certain durability, to take the case of Slavoj Žižek and other Hegelians like Robert Pippin. Is Nietzsche representative of his own times? Or is he, as he himself says, "posthumous"? Robert C. Holub's book introduces Nietzsche as "The Timely Meditator" (1), the better to contradict what Holub describes as Nietzsche's "conscious effort to present himself as an 'untimely' thinker" (1). Yet the question of the nineteenth century interested Nietzsche as a thinker of his times, timely and untimely, and as a Classicist, a professional theorist of history. In his key "untimely" meditation on The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche reminds the reader that it is "only out of the highest force [Kraft] of the present that one can interpret the past, only in the strongest exertion of your most noble qualities will you fathom what in the past is worth knowing and preserving. Like to like! Otherwise you will drag the past down to yourselves" (§6). In the penultimate section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes that the nineteenth century encompasses everything in the eighteenth century that produced a Goethe but now engenders only "a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, utter cluelessness" (§50). As a result: "Isn't the nineteenth century, especially at its conclusion, merely a strengthened, courser, eighteenth century, that is, a décadence-century?" (TI §50). Dismissing Nietzsche's scholarly formation as a philologist, which included classical hermeneutics, archaeology, and methodological discussions on how to set history on the path of a science (see Barthold Georg Niebuhr, whom Nietzsche cites in his own essay on history), while his book's chapters are conceived as a series of questions Holub does not engage Nietzsche's own "Homer Question," the inaugural lecture which defines Nietzsche's disciplinary—both philological as well as philosophical—"untimeliness." In consequence, Holub also fails to raise the question of the historical person, a key to a text left out of Holub's reading of Nietzsche's "timely" untimeliness, concerning the hermeneutic representation of the historical Jesus. Thus Nietzsche's first Untimely Meditation, on David Strauss (as confessor and author), articulates the Jesus question as the Homer question relevant for thinking both edification and education (significant for both Strauss and for Schopenhauer) along with the challenges of history (broadly: philology as Nietzsche understood it) for life, to which schematic whole Nietzsche would append Wagner. Holub's book is rich in learning, yet conspicuously has blinders, not least because Holub reads an author who was explicitly concerned with history throughout his thought while leaving aside that same author's specific formation in history. To this same extent, Holub's point of departure betrays a want of hermeneutic "method," to use a convention deriving from both Albrecht Ritschl and (again) Niebuhr as well as Nietzsche's own teacher, Friedrich Ritschl, who praised his student's methodological rigor. Holub also has a chapter on "The Evolution Question," along with "The Cosmological Question," and "The Eugenics Question." He begins it with a discussion of Nietzsche's Übermensch via George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (313), tricked out with reflections on Überwindung and übergehen, nodding to the same Walter Kaufmann everyone mentions, yet excluding reference to Nietzsche's formation in Classics, which might have taken Holub to the literary context Kaufmann references: Lucian's Kataplous, The Downward Journey—a reflection on the underworld for the ancient Greeks, complete with a reflection on the aesthetics of the "higher" human being to match the rhetoric of Nazi eugenics. Darwin fits such a scheme for the sake of superior breeding...