In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion
  • Rebecca Bamford
Julian Young . Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 230. Paper, $29.99.

Readers might be forgiven raised eyebrows on first noting the title of Julian Young's book. Young's chief and surprising claim is that, even though Nietzsche "rejects the God of [End Page 488] Christianity, he is not anti-religious," and that he is "above all a religious thinker" (201), whose atheism only applies in the case of the Christian God (2), and whose early "religious communitarianism" or "Wagnerianism" persist throughout the texts (1). Young defines Nietzsche's early thought as communitarian by virtue of concern with the flourishing of the community as a whole, and as religious given Nietzsche's view that a people cannot flourish or indeed truly be a community without a "festive, communal" religion (1). Nietzsche is seen as broadly in step with the anti-modernist tradition of "Volkish" thinking in nineteenth-century Germany, but as rejecting "genuinely wicked" aspects of Volkish thinking that might prompt his identification as the "godfather of Nazism" (201–02). While tempting even to Young himself, however, his discussion of Nietzsche cannot simply be summarized by the Heideggerian "slogan" that only a god can save us (179).

Young's argument rests, to a significant extent, on the strength of his reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche's religious communitarianism is rightly taken to emerge, via two of his key Schopenhauerianisms (pessimism, and the distinction between the metaphysically real and dreamlike appearances), as the solution to the problem of nihilism posed by the myth-lessness of modern culture (32–33, 179). Symptoms of myth-lessness include a loss of cultural unity and community, and the agitated quest for meaning in the face of death (14–15, 29, 32). Nietzsche's solution crystallizes in his call for a modern replacement of the role played by religious myth, "tragic myth and the tragic festival," for the Greeks (33). Nietzsche's acceptance of the Christian God's death, which Young's reading—rightly, in my opinion—identifies even as early as The Birth of Tragedy, is therefore no celebration of the disappearance of religion from our culture: it is a call for a religious revival to reinvigorate our culture (32–33, 210).

Tracing this path through Nietzsche's subsequent writings in a manner familiar to readers of his Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (1992), Young links his claim for Nietzsche as religious communitarian with an argument against previous individualist interpretations of Nietzsche either as having little to say of communal life because it is not his "department," or as seeing the proper role of society as a "support-system" for the "production of übermenschlich types" (2–3). Nietzsche, Young suggests, is far more concerned with the flourishing of the community than of the individual: his religious communitarianism prompts his cosmopolitanism, global cultural community transporting us beyond "national cultures of earlier times and the age of comparisons" (82).

The objection that communitarianism is incompatible with cosmopolitanism is countered by an appeal to Nietzsche's definition of human greatness, in section 212 of Beyond Good and Evil, as a unity, or wholeness, in multiplicity (214–15). Supporting evidence for compatibility is garnered from Nietzsche's admiring remarks on the unifying power of the medieval Church as a ruling structure, for instance in the third essay of the Untimely Meditations, and in section 358, book five of The Gay Science (44, 98–99, 214–15)—though tantalizing mentions of J. M. Coetzee's affinity with Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a long aberration (100), of the works of contemporaries such as Cecil Rhodes and Robert Baden-Powell (128), and of the notion of synthesis between West and East (144), hint at unresolved questions concerning the contemporary meaning and status of global "good Europeanism" with respect to (post-) colonial cultural flourishing.

Young's discussion also re-opens the case for attending to continuities across Nietzsche's texts. However, while he argues effectively for Nietzsche's religious communitarianism as continuous, he is less comfortable in tracing continuity through Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His discomfort at the "aberration...

pdf

Share