Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysian Versus Christian Values by Thomas H. Brobjer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysian Versus Christian Values by Thomas H. Brobjer Charles P. Rodger Thomas H. Brobjer. Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysian Versus Christian Values. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Pp. viii + 210. Hardback, $115.00. It is difficult to review a book so rich in consequences and seemingly sui generis. To categorize it as the work of a "lumper" or "splitter," for example, would only confuse matters. Granted, Brobjer dismisses The Will to Power as the tendentious forgery of Nietzsche's sister. Methodologically, he also appears as a "moderate" splitter who provides a close textual reading and draws on the Nachlass only so far as this serves to elucidate the claims Nietzsche made in his published works. Nonetheless, Brobjer's central hypothesis might, albeit falsely, suggest that he is an old-fashioned lumper, for he holds that Mazzino Montinari was wrong to claim Nietzsche abandoned his plans for a Hauptwerk ("Nietzsches Nachlaß von 1885 bis 1888 oder Textkritik und Wille zur Macht," in Nietzsche Lesen [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982], 92–119). Granted, Montinari admitted that after abandoning plans for The Will to Power, Nietzsche did, in the fall of 1888, entertain a new plan for a four-volume Hauptwerk titled The Revaluation of All Values. According to these plans, The Antichrist would be its first volume, followed by The Free Spirit, containing a critique of philosophy as a nihilistic movement; The Immoralist, containing a critique of morality and its dangers; and Dionysos Philosophos. Nonetheless, Montinari claimed, these plans also collapsed when, sometime after mid-November 1888, Nietzsche decided to make The Antichrist into the whole of The Revaluation of All Values. Indeed, Montinari's hypothesis was that Nietzsche finally realized, at the last minute, that the work of the past five years and what he had previously regarded as his life task was untenable and, having published everything he could salvage from his failed Hauptwerk project, "Nietzsche's collapse in Turin came when he had literally finished with everything" (12, emphasis in the original). To Brobjer, however, "this claim seems both psychologically improbable and, in regard to Nietzsche's intention to write a Hauptwerk, simply wrong" (12). Yet despite Brobjer having demonstrated in a number of articles published over the past decades that the evidence is not only too thin and ambiguous to sustain Montinari's hypothesis, but that it contradicts his timeline (92–94), scholars continue to treat Montinari's conclusions as established fact, and moreover treat all "discussions and considerations of a magnum opus … as hypothetical and old-fashioned" (12). But if so, why should the present study, wherein Brobjer advances this same thesis, not also fall on deaf ears? The answer is surprising: Ecce Homo. The Druckmanuskript shows that both the final chapter headings and the majority of the final text of Ecce Homo were established prior to mid-November, and, while Nietzsche continued to make additions and alterations to Ecce Homo up until a day before his collapse, his revisions to the completed portions of the text were only "minor" (21). Since, even according to Montinari's timeline, the vast majority of Ecce Homo was thus written at a time when Nietzsche still incontrovertibly intended that The Antichrist would constitute only the first volume of The Revaluation of All Values (47), nothing can possibly speak against examining whether Ecce Homo might retain at least traces of Nietzsche's original plans for his Hauptwerk. To the contrary, a great deal speaks for it. After all, the conventional interpretation of Ecce Homo as a "backward-looking autobiography" (5) has hardly borne fruit; read as a summary of Nietzsche's life and writings, Ecce Homo is so "elliptic, paradoxical, absurd" (48), and so contorted by excessive self-praise and praise for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that the text is incoherent and unusable for its supposed purpose. Yet Nietzsche explicitly told his publisher that his intention was merely to tell of his life and works "in snatches" (3), and that Ecce Homo was being composed with the "intention to give this work the same form and appearance which that magnum opus [Hauptwerk] will have, to...