Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie by Marcus Andreas Born (review)

As early as 1941, George Allen Morgan wrote that Nietzsche’s thought is “saturated with the historical point of view.”¹ It is breathtaking how long it has taken scholarly writing on Nietzsche to catch up with Morgan and pay this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought the serious attention it deserves. Marcus Andreas Born’s study is therefore a very welcome development as a serious and engaged examination of Nietzsche’s “historical thought.”

As his subtitle indicates, Born’s approach focuses on Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy. He ties genealogy closely to history by suggesting that Nietzsche proposes genealogy as his way of revising, and improving on, existing approaches to history (18). For Born, as for Alexander Nehamas, genealogy “simply is history, correctly practiced,” but the criterion for correct practice is a radically new one set by Nietzsche, to be sharply distinguished from the way historians have carried on in the past.² Born both traces some of the genealogy that Nietzsche himself does and raises methodological questions about the nature of the genealogical approach itself. For him, genealogy is essentially perspectival. It thus gives rise to various problems classically associated with perspectivism, in particular the threat of self-contradiction or self-dissolution. If what is being asserted is merely one perspective among others, why take it seriously? It would seem that to make any special claim on behalf of such a perspective to be taken more seriously than competing perspectives would be self-defeating, since such a claim would itself turn out to have a perspectival character. For this set of problems Born proposes a bold new solution that invokes a conception of Feindesliebe, or “love of one’s enemy,” that he attributes to Nietzsche. As well as contributing to Nietzsche exegesis, then, Born presents a novel defense of what he takes to be Nietzsche’s distinctively perspectival approach.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “A Genealogy of Nihilism,” provides a detailed genealogical account of the connections between, in turn, Socratic intellectualism, the elevation of the will to truth to the highest ideal by Christianity, the resultant cultivation of truthfulness, and the development of nihilism through the corrosive effect that this truthfulness has on Christianity’s own claims to absoluteness. Born’s account shows up connections that might easily be missed across Nietzsche’s oeuvre. He gives an illuminating portrayal of Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates from The Birth of Tragedy to Twilight of the Idols and demonstrates the links between Nietzsche’s critique of (Second Temple) Judaism and of Pauline Christianity, which together form a continuous tradition that, according to Nietzsche, entirely circumvents the historical figure of Jesus, the “only Christian” (A 39). Again, his detailed and sensitive reading of the important Lenzerheide fragment lays out the connections between Christianity and nihilism (in its various forms), as well as the need to pass through nihilism in order to embark on the revaluation of all values.

Moving on from the exegetical Part 1, in Part 2, “Thinking History Without God,” Born lays out his conception of genealogy as a methodology. He presents genealogy as a distinctive method that recasts history in the wake of the death of God. Surprisingly, Born claims that, in response to the death of God, Nietzsche is concerned “in particular” (11) with a revised approach to history. Born is surely right that there must be epistemological consequences for historiography in the light of this event, which he plausibly explicates as the collapse of belief in an absolute guarantor of truth and value. It is less clear that Nietzsche saw himself as spurred on by it to formulate a new historical methodology. At least, he does not articulate such concerns with any frequency, and his most sustained discussion of such matters (the early “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”) is concerned principally with the “uses of history for life,” not with historical methodology an sich.

Born attributes to Nietzsche a radical form of perspectivism...