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 Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions, by Robert C. Holub; pp. ix + 524. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, $85.00, £70.00. It is never and always a good time to return to the problem of Friedrich Nietzsche, the original alt-right provocateur. Nietzsche's allusive, aphoristic, witty, and devastatingly scornful writings, many of which were published after his 1889 lapse into syphilitic insanity, have inspired waves of opposing ideologies: from the modernists energized by his "revaluation of values," to the Nazis who emphasized his fury at social degeneration, to [End Page 338] the Heideggerian existentialists, to the post-structuralists who savored his poetic impasses (175–76). Part of the continued "vital[ity]" of Nietzsche's work, argues Robert C. Holub, can be traced to his unsystematic style, since its "fragmentary" and "diffuse" arguments about the will to power and the rottenness of liberal Western ethics leave it open to many critical interpretations (455). In his major new work, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions, Holub argues that many of Nietzsche's philosophies, timeless and oracular as they seemed, were actually in close dialogue with historical sources that have been neglected in most philosophical analyses. By consulting Nietzsche's unpublished writings as well as the annotated contents of his library, Holub reconstructs Nietzsche's specific engagement with contemporary controversies such as German unification and evolutionary theory. This painstaking bibliographic approach aims to complicate Nietzsche's own claim that his works were prophetically "untimely," a claim that has always seemed to be uncannily overdetermined by his posthumous influence (1). Though Nietzsche is often read as part of the European philosophical tradition, he "had little firsthand knowledge of modern philosophy" (8). Placing Nietzsche in the context of often-obscure mid-nineteenth-century German intellectuals diminishes his originality to a certain extent—we find that he "articulated positions shared by many contemporaries"—but also reveals subtle intellectual connections between such topics as German colonialism and anti-Semitism (6). Holub is less concerned with the dazzling stylistics of Nietzschean prose than with his intellectual sources, so the effect is to break Nietzsche's works down into a set of extremely detailed contextual nodes. (To be fair, some of Nietzsche's most popular works were compiled during his decade of insanity by his devoted and very anti-Semitic sister Elisabeth.) Because Nietzsche's work can have such a memoiristic intensity, many critics have found it productive to read it against his life's compelling events: the discipleship and then furious break with Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth circle, the failed threesome with Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paul Rée, and the final collapse into insanity in Turin, after which his catatonic form was draped ceremonially by his sister and photographed in the guise of a great genius. Nietzsche's indirect connection to the anti-Semitic Paraguayan colony of Nueva Germania, whose failure caused Nietzsche's brother-in-law Bernhard Förster to commit suicide, also makes a dramatic story. Holub's contribution to this tradition is to link those biographical events to Nietzsche's ongoing set of intellectual interests, showing how they inform his concerns without entirely determining them. Though these sources reveal Nietzsche as a searching and creative researcher, they also trace the moments when his thought is decisively shaped by a petty personal grudge or vanity, jarring against his diagnosis of ressentiment in others' politics. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to forgive Nietzsche for his toxic and cruel elitism. These revelations make Holub's book timely, not just in its historicist approach but also in its description of the corrosive intellectual effects of wounded vanity on a certain branch of conservative thought. Holub is relatively evenhanded in his descriptions of these poisonous ideologies—the effect is of a determined scholar using fireproof tongs to find the source of a hot lava vent—but it becomes clear that Nietzsche's megalomania and spite warp his thought almost from the beginning. Holub's analysis is divided into nine chapters, each constructing a narrative of Nietzsche...