Friedrich Nietzsche zur Einführung by Werner Stegmaier (review)

The aim of Werner Stegmaier’s Friedrich Nietzsche zur Einführung (Introduction to Nietzsche) is to introduce readers to Nietzsche’s thinking without reducing it to general theses or “doctrines.” Stegmaier thus provides not only an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, but also a particular methodological approach to his works.

The first part of the book, “Nietzsche’s Experiences,” provides a condensed account of Nietzsche’s life, including information about his family, friends, and acquaintances, his health, his philosophical influences, and the circumstances under which he wrote some of his works. The second part, “Nietzsche’s Evaluations of the Significance of His Experiences for His Philosophizing,” shows that the first part is intended not only to present Nietzsche’s life, but also to establish ties between his life and his thinking. Stegmaier is well aware that such an approach could be (mis)interpreted as an effort to revive the reductively biographical tendencies that have dogged Nietzsche scholarship since its beginning, and he stresses repeatedly that this is not his intention: “[Nietzsche’s] self-liberation exceeded such biographical causes; this is why one cannot understand his philosophizing without his life, but also not by reducing it to his life” (64; translations from Stegmaier’s book are my own). Instead of providing “simple inferences from Nietzsche’s life to his work” (79), then, Stegmaier focuses on the remarks that Nietzsche makes about “himself” in his works, insisting that Nietzsche “very consciously brought his person, the personal conditions of his philosophizing, into play” (63).

Besides indicating Nietzsche’s most important influences, the third part of the book offers a broad account of the concerns of Nietzsche’s works, from Christianity, Hellenistic Greece, music, philosophy, history, literature, painting, and other graphic arts, to the natural sciences and medicine, psychology, neurology, and psychiatry (81–97). Stegmaier not only summarizes these influences and highlights their presence throughout Nietzsche’s work, but also shows how Nietzsche creatively incorporates diverse elements of them into his own thinking, in the manner of something like a philosophical autodidact.

The book’s pivotal point is the fourth part, “Nietzsche’s Forms of Philosophical Writing,” which treats Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic techniques of presenting his thinking. Stegmaier rightly emphasizes that Nietzsche reflects profoundly not only on what he writes, but also—and perhaps even more so—on how he writes. As Stegmaier puts it, in Nietzsche’s texts “[t]he forms of writing are not external to his philosophizing” (99). Stegmaier even traces this claim to Nietzsche’s letters, as a “[p]ersonal communication of his philosophizing” (113), although he argues that these are not a successful means of expressing Nietzsche’s thinking. Stegmaier offers a broad panorama of the manifold forms of writings used by Nietzsche, but focuses on the “aphorism books,” since, he claims, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil are not unorganized collections of short texts, but a form of philosophizing that reflects the rejection of an absolute, or nonperspectival, form of knowledge.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that Stegmaier warns the reader of an uncritical use of the Nachlass, by underlining the well-known, but often disregarded, “ceterum censeo” that “[t]he notes which [Nietzsche] wrote for himself should not be put on the same level as or above the (published) works” (112). One reason why the uncritical use of the Nachlass is problematic is that its “Notate” lack the formal shaping of the published texts, which allows Nietzsche to, among other things, interact playfully with his readers: “In most cases Nietzsche writes here [in the notebooks] without regard to the communication of his philosophizing and thus in the way familiar from the systems of metaphysics” (112). Indeed, Stegmaier claims that the assembling of passages from the published works, Nachlass and letters is the mistaken means by which scholars have been able to attribute general theses to Nietzsche and to generalize and systematize his thinking. He directs this criticism particularly against Heidegger, who reduced Nietzsche’s...