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1 Nietzsche As Reader Introduction One can easily get the impression that Nietzsche, and especially the late Nietzsche, read little. He criticized reading as insufficiently life-affirming and Dionysian: “Early in the morning at the break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book—I call that vicious!” (EH, “Why I Am So Clever,” 8). He also criticized reading for making one reactive and forcing one to be concerned with the thoughts of others rather than with one’s own: “My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms philology: I was redeemed from the ‘book,’ for years I read nothing—the greatest favor I have ever done myself!—That deepest self, as it were buried and grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves (—and that is what reading means!) awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully—but at length it spoke again” (EH, “Human, All Too Human,” 4). This impression is strengthened by the fact that he mentioned very few contemporary and minor authors and titles in his books. He also explicitly claimed that he read little: “It does not perhaps lie in my nature to read much or many kinds of things: a reading room makes me ill. […] Caution, even toward new books is rather part of my instinct” (EH, “Why I Am So Clever,” 3).1 Concretely , he claimed in Ecce Homo that he could go months between his reading of books: “I have to reckon back half a year to catch myself with a book in my hand. But what was it?—An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les Sceptiques Grecs.”2 As suggested in a quotation above—and as a major leitmotif in his letters —his bad health (especially his poor eyesight) provides another reason to assume that he read little. This is how most philosophers and historians have treated Nietzsche: as an isolated profound thinker. Nietzsche as Reader  However, this impression and Nietzsche’s claims are to a large extent false. Nietzsche was, in fact, a rather substantial reader. This is true not only of his younger days but also of his entire life, including even his last active years before his mental collapse in January 1889. Nietzsche’s own words about his reading are not to be fully trusted. He seems to have wanted to appear more Dionysian and original than he actually was. His claim in Ecce Homo not to have held a book in his hand for half a year (since Brochard) was far from true, even if we interpret “catch myself with a book in my hand” as meaning that he had read all or most of the book. Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo between October 15 and November 4, 1888. He did not mention Brochard’s book in his letters, and therefore it is not certain when he read it. But his notebooks from the early spring contain notes from the book, and Nietzsche himself suggested that it was more than half a year earlier. During the period May to October 1888, Nietzsche was immensely active as an author and wrote Der Fall Wagner, Götzen-Dämmerung and Der Antichrist. Nonetheless, we have evidence that he read at least eight books during those months: Jacolliot, Spitteler, Stendhal, Nohl, Goncourts, Brandes, Féré, and Hehn. There is strong reason to assume that he read more than that, especially fiction, but we have no definite evidence of that. After claiming in Ecce Homo that he read little, Nietzsche stated: “I take flight almost always to the same books, really a small number, those books which have proved themselves precisely to me.”3 He went on to identify the books: “It is really a small number of older Frenchmen to whom I return again and again,” and he mentioned Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, and Racine. He then listed more recent French writers: Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre, and Guy de Maupassant. He also named Stendhal and Prosper Merimée. In the next section, he mentioned Heinrich Heine, Byron’s Manfred, and Shakespeare. This listing is not particularly informative or reliable. For example, no ancient authors are mentioned in spite of their importance to him, which can be seen by statements such as “the Graeco-Roman splendor, which was also a splendor of books […] some books for whose possession one would nowadays exchange half of some national literatures.”4 The reason for this is that Nietzsche...

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