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Reviewed by:
  • Nietzsche und die Weimarer Klassik
  • Paul Bishop
Hans-Gerd von Seggern . Nietzsche und die Weimarer Klassik. Tübingen: Francke, 2005. 167 pp. € 48 (Paperback). ISBN 3-7720-8081-2.

In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter" (on which Lacan famously drew to expound his notion of the symbolic order), the "missing" letter is hidden precisely because it has been placed in the most obvious position (hanging on a card rack below the mantlepiece). As Hans-Gerd von Seggern suggests in this compelling study, the intellectual affinities between Nietzsche and Weimar classicism have been similarly occluded from the eyes of many commentators, blinded by what Mazzino Montinari called "Wirkung ohne Werk," the domination of Nietzsche's reception by slogans and catch phrases rather than by close textual analysis (9). Von Seggern uses the term Weimar classicism to cover both Schiller's systematic presentation of aesthetics and Goethe's "in ihrer Formenvielfalt einzigartigen theoretisierenden Essays, Dialoge, Fragmente etc.," an anticipation of Nietzsche's own aphoristic, metaphoric philosophy, which nevertheless stand "in einem dichten Feld von Ver-weisungszusammenhängen im Kontext der zeitgenössischen ästhetischen Debatten" (15). That contemporary intellectual background includes not just the debate on tragedy between Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and Lessing (57), but also the Pantheism Controversy, ignited by Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza (63–67). Von Seggern argues that the early Nietzsche is opposed to Kant's antithesis of sensuousness and [End Page 81] rationality, Hegel's optimistic belief in progress, and Schopenhauer's ethic of the denial of the will to life (47). To put it another way, Nietzsche aligns himself with Schiller's critique of Kant, and Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Unzeitgemäße Be-trachtungen develop themes found in Schiller's theoretical writings (47). Moreover, Nietzsche's rejection of any "moral" purpose to art places him in proximity to Goethe's conception of aesthetic autonomy – for example, in his "Nachlese zu Aristoteles Poetik" (1827), where he interprets katharsis in terms of "diese aussöhnende Abrundung, welche [...] von allen poetischen Werken gefordert wird" (cf. 49, 60). According to von Seggern, this conception of the autonomy of art (what Kant called the "immanent purposiveness" of beauty) reflects an antiteleological point of view that derives from Goethe's reading of Spinoza. In fact, Spinoza, whom Goethe read intensively in the period Winter 1784 to Spring 1786, emerges as a central figure in von Seggern's argument. After all, Nietzsche read Spinoza's Ethics (mediated through Kuno Fischer's Geschichte der neuern Philosophie) just prior to composing Zarathustra (1882–1884), and he associated Spinoza with Goethe on several occasions (109). Just as Nietzsche used Goethe as a counterfigure to Wagner's musical aesthetics (91, 103), so he embraced the conception of "die gött-liche Goethische Gottnatur" (cited 93), an echo of the pantheism found in Spinoza ("deus sive natura"). And on two occasions Nietzsche cites Goethe's version – in the form of Philine's question in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, "und wenn ich dich liebe, was geht's dich an?" – of Spinoza's qui Deum amat, conari non potest, ut Deus ipsum contra amet (Ethics, part 5, proposition 19) in the course of his own critique of Christianity (103–04). Elsewhere, Nietzsche uses melancholy as a metaphor for, as Spinoza might say, human bondage to the strength of the (reactive) affects (124), to which he contrasts cheerfulness, an emotion of which we can, according to Spinoza (Ethics, Part 4, prop. 42), never have an excess (136). Hinting, in his reference in a footnote to Epicurus as a precursor to Nietzsche as "a sharer of joy" (133), at an even longer philosophical tradition, von Seggern reads the section "Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften" (from Zarathustra, part 1) in the light of Nietzsche's reception of Spinoza, itself strongly influenced by Goethe's aesthetic but also ethical Spinozism (139). For just as Goethe's antiteleological (and ultimately Spinozist) conception of aesthetic autonomy seeks to unite freedom and necessity (59–60, 140), so Nietzsche argues in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (§213) that, in the artist, necessity and "freedom of the will" become one (141).

Thus, on von Seggern's account, Nietzsche understands life...

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