Friedrich Nietzsche: Neue Wege der Forschung eds. by Christian Niemeyer et al. (review)

According to Christian Niemeyer, professor of social education in Dresden, Germany, we are currently witnessing “a crisis of overproduction” in Nietzsche research. For several years, an “actual Nietzsche industry” has provided “a plethora of introductions, commentaries, monographs, readers, and editions for an apparently still hungry audience” (10). Though acknowledging that there are many important books among them, Niemeyer, first, deplores the fact that many “postmodern” interpreters mistake Nietzsche’s programmatic lack of system as carte blanche for ignoring scholarly methods and thereby arbitrarily producing a “highly idiosyncratic Nietzsche” (16). Second, he harshly criticizes two prominent “schools” of German scholarship that are dominated by the philosophical “gate keepers” of Nietzsche research (9), namely Volker Gerhardt and Werner Stegmaier. Niemeyer complains that they, along with their many doctoral students, ignore or refuse to discuss alternative methods and readings of Nietzsche. His third point of criticism is directed against Anglo-American research, which, in his perception, fails to consult the critical edition of Nietzsche’s letters as well as the early German publishing history of Nietzsche’s works and correspondences.

Therefore, Niemeyer and his (former) assistants have selected ten essays that they consider conform to the rules of good scholarly practice and represent the most relevant approaches to Nietzsche research. The articles, mainly of German-language scholarship, were written over the course of the past thirty years and mostly published in Nietzsche-Studien and Nietzscheforschung. They are arranged under five headings, beginning with “Biographically Oriented Research.” In his foreword, Niemeyer emphasizes the importance of considering Nietzsche’s biography in order to interpret his work. As I agree with him on this point, I find his selection most unfortunate, since both opening essays confuse biographically oriented hermeneutics with the questionable method of arbitrary psychologism.

In her 1995 essay “The Alchemists’ Trick to Make Gold from Feces,” Pia Daniela Volz deals with the “special odor” (43) in Nietzsche’s use of metaphors. She points out that Nietzsche deems human beings omnivorous animals that greedily devour whatever they find tasty and useful. Though physically disgusted by their excrements, Nietzsche observes them being mentally quite generous and shameless: “We dung mankind with the undigested matters of our mind and experience” (KSA 9:14[13]). Thus, Nietzsche warns against “dyspeptic authors who only write when they cannot digest something” and “try unconsciously to disgust the reader” (AOM 152). By contrast, “writing should always indicate a victory, indeed a conquest of oneself which must be communicated to others for their benefit” (AOM 152). Nietzsche illustrates the difficulties of this self-conquest by means of a literary dialogue. In The Gay Science, he gives insight into his struggle with “nature’s call” of all writing, with which he is “annoyed or ashamed” (GS 93).

Volz interprets these metaphors as symptoms of Nietzsche’s “regression toward pre-genital, oral, and anal stages” (49). After the outbreak of the “progressive paralysis,” his latent “coprophilia” utterly broke through. She confirms her diagnosis by means of the patient register of the Jena psychiatric clinic, according to which Nietzsche smeared his excrements, wrapped them in paper, put them into drawers, and even ate them. Applying Freud’s theory of the “developmental-psychological significance of the anal complex” to “the psychodynamics” of Nietzsche’s “psychosexual development” (48), Volz infers that the early loss of his father caused Nietzsche’s “neurotic depression” and the “inability to evolve a mature object love” in terms of a “sexually satisfying relationship.” His “emotional ambiguities” after the “unfortunate outcome of the Lou-affair” drove him “close to suicide” and forced him into the “desperate search for a creative solution” (49).

Volz demonstrates this by means of a letter to Franz Overbeck from 1882, wherein Nietzsche says that he would be lost if he did not invent the alchemists’ trick of making gold from feces (cf. KSB 6, p. 312). Given that the transmutation of inferior material...