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Reviewed by:
  • Nietzsche-Wörterbuch, vol. 1: Abbreviatur–einfach
  • Marco Brusotti
    Translated by Lisa Marie Anderson
Nietzsche Research Group under the direction of Paul van TongerenGerd SchankHerman Siemens, eds. Nietzsche-Wörterbuch, vol. 1: Abbreviatur–einfach. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2004. xxxii + 763 pp. ISBN: 3-11-017186-4.

Although Nietzsche says that “we … are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (TI “Reason” 5), he also emphasizes repeatedly how much depends, for him, on a new, personal idiom. Hence his claim that with GM, he has “invented a new gesture of language for these things which are new in every respect” (Nietzsche to Carl Spitteler, 10 February 1888) or, in contrast, the somewhat inaccurate self-criticism that he did not yet dare in BT to “allow [himself] a particular language for such particular ideas and ventures” (BT P:6). “The price of being an artist,” he writes another time, “is that one perceives that which non-artists call ‘form’ as content, as ‘the thing itself’” (KSA 13:11[3]). The preface to the Nietzsche-Wörterbuch, whose first volume is now available, begins with Nietzsche’s challenge, “Take your language seriously!” and the authors indeed make the language of the philologist and philosopher a “holy obligation,” as Nietzsche calls it. Charged with this responsibility is the Nietzsche Research Group, led by Paul van Tongeren and based in the Faculty of Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen, whose many members are listed in the preface (ix-x). The group represents an international network of Nietzsche researchers, whose conferences and seminars have already stimulated much reflection about Nietzsche’s language, even before the appearance of this first volume.

Back when the possibilities of electronic editing could hardly have been imagined, Mazzino Montinari was often asked whether he was planning a subject index for KGW, such as had been included in earlier editions. Users were plagued at that time primarily with simple search problems, which were then better solved by the Nietzsche CD-ROM in 1995. By the time Wolfgang Müller-Lauter declared, a year before the appearance of the CD-ROM, that a Nietzsche dictionary would have to “explain the central philosophical vocabulary” of the philosopher “in a historic and systematic manner,” these search problems were no longer in the foreground.1 Thus, comparatively speaking, expectations and needs have changed gradually over time. A subject index is no longer necessary, and a dictionary must now answer questions for which a digital search alone provides important help but not an answer. This is the task of the new Nietzsche-Wörterbuch. It offers, among other things, an analytically organized overview of the semantic possibilities of each word; a wealth of information from the history of language, literature, and ideas; annotations relating to historical context and the history of Nietzsche reception; and, not least, philosophical interpretations.

The editors estimate Nietzsche’s aggregate vocabulary to be in the order of thirty thousand words. From a first extensive collection of twelve thousand keywords, they gradually chose two thousand candidates and arrived finally at about five hundred entries to be elucidated in the Nietzsche-Wörterbuch, provisionally in four volumes. The first volume contains sixty-seven of them (from “Abbreviatur” to “einfach”). Perhaps inadvertently, the publisher’s brochure estimates a dictionary with three hundred entries, which could indeed be accommodated in four volumes. But it will likely be difficult to fit five hundred there, unless the later volumes are divided into parts.

The dictionary’s approach is primarily a semasiological one; the signifiant serves as the entry, and the concept itself is secondary. The dictionary seeks not only to unlock Nietzsche’s philosophical terminology but also to convey literary and linguistic insights into Nietzsche’s usage, work that goes well beyond the ambit of a pure history of ideas. Rather than simply elucidating his “basic concepts,” the dictionary investigates his language far more extensively. This is a rewarding enterprise when dealing with a philosopher who often prefers a swarm of synonyms and images to a clear-cut, fixed technical term. It demands both philosophical and linguistic competence. The trio of editors consists of two philosophers, Paul van Tongeren and Herman Siemens, and...

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