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Reviewed by:
  • Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition ed. by Paul Bishop
  • Charles Bambach
Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, edited by Paul Bishop. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2004. 518 pp. ISBN: HB: 978-1-57113282-6. Hardcover, £55.00 / $95.00.

The hermeneutic thicket surrounding the question of Nietzsche and the Greeks is both dense and forbidding. Every attempt to pose this question confronts a wide range of difficult issues. Who is “Nietzsche”? Which “Greeks”? What range of concerns? methods? disciplinary boundaries? How to think the relation between the early Nietzsche of the Basel years and the later Nietzsche post-Zarathustra? Where to turn for help in working through the palimpsest of interpretations that have formed the Nietzschebild in our time? To simply raise such questions proves inadequate, of course, to the task of effecting a shift in the way Nietzsche scholars approach this topic. There is little consensus on what “the” Greeks mean for Nietzsche despite the recognition that they exerted an extraordinary influence on his work. Within the last decade and a half, there have been several important works that have appeared addressing the question of Nietzsche and the Greeks, especially those by Hubert Cancik, James I. Porter, Günther Wohlfart, and Enrico Müller.1 Still, there is hardly one work that we can turn to as anything like a magisterial account of this imposing topic.

It is against this background that Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition was conceived. Paul Bishop, the editor of the volume, is a recognized Nietzsche scholar and author of an important book, Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. The thirty-one papers delivered at the 2002 conference for the Friedrich Nietzsche Society held at the University of Glasgow titled “Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition” make up the book. Bishop organizes these essays into five sections; section 1, “The Classical Greeks,” includes essays on Nietzsche’s relation to Homer (James I. Porter), Pindar (John Hamilton), Aristotle (Peter Yates), and Democritus (Jessica Berry), as well as one on polytheism (Albert Henrichs) in addition to three others (Neville Morley on history, Marx, and the classics; Nicholas Martin on Gobineau and classical theories of race; and Martin Ruehl on Wagner, Burckhardt, and the Greek state—all of which seem to belong under a different rubric). The second section, “Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics and Stoics” includes essays on Heraclitus (Simon Gillham), Orphism (Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet, and Isabelle Vanden Poel), and the Stoics (R. O. Elveton), as well as two essays on the Cynics (R. Bracht Branham and Anthony Jensen). Section 3 of this collection centers on Nietzsche’s relationship with the Platonic tradition (essays by Laurence Lampert, Thomas Meyer, John Moore, Thomas Brobjer, and David McNeill). The last two sections of the book entitled “Contestations” and “German Classicism” are more wide-ranging and diverse in both focus and theme. Here Dylan Jaggard explores the early and later Nietzsche’s interpretation of Dionysus, yet the other essays in section 4 have, I find, only marginal relevance to the topic of Nietzsche and antiquity. By comparison, section 5, titled “German Classicism,” is one of the strongest sections of the book with uniformly important contributions from Christian Emden, Herman Siemens, Dirk Held, Friedrich Ufers-Mark Cohen, and Paul Bishop on Nietzsche’s relation to Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Humboldt, and other writers from the era of German classicism. Alan Cardew’s wonderful essay on Nietzsche and Rohde rounds out this section in fine fashion.

I am well aware that this kind of brief résumé of the book’s extensive contributions can hardly do justice to the diversity of approaches here or to their specific interpretive perspectives. Despite this, what a review can achieve is a verdict on whether this collection makes its case for the significance of Greek thought and culture in Nietzsche’s philosophy. And on that issue I would argue that it certainly does. [End Page 113]

Whether one seeks to explore the meaning of will to power, eternal recurrence, great politics, the meaning of art, the innocence of becoming, tragic necessity, or Zarathustra’s teachings, one inevitably has to...

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