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Reviewed by:
  • Rhythmus beim frühen Nietzsche
  • Christian J. Emden
Friederike Felicitas Günther. Rhythmus beim frühen Nietzsche. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. ISBN 978-3-11-020490-2. €58.00/US$81.00.

Until fairly recently, Friedrich Nietzsche's early studies and lectures on rhythm and meter in ancient Greek language and literature, mainly written between 1869 and 1872, had not been discussed in quite the same detail as, for instance, his lecture notes on rhetoric. While both clearly highlight Nietzsche's interest in connecting his work in classical scholarship with wider philosophical concerns regarding the philosophy of language and the problem of culture, his studies of rhythm and meter are in many ways more difficult for readers without a background in classical studies. Not surprisingly, they were largely treated as a curious footnote to his work on Greek tragedy and to his wider concern with Greek culture, of interest mainly to classical scholars or Nietzsche biographers. This situation has changed considerably in more recent years, however, as work by James I. Porter and Fritz Bornmann, among others, has generated a broader interest in these notebooks and lectures. But attention has nevertheless remained focused on Nietzsche as a classical scholar—his theory of the ictus being of particular relevance in this context. It is the great merit of Friederike Felicitas Günther that, in her recently published study, she widens this perspective considerably, arguing in great detail, and quite convincingly, that Nietzsche's keen interest in rhythm and temporality is part of a more ambitious anthropologically oriented project: what is at stake here are the temporal and bodily foundations of normative cultural order. As Günther points out, Nietzsche realizes right from the beginning that the question of rhythm and time cannot be limited to language, or even music, but, rather, is connected to the question of culture itself. The normative structures of cultural order, in other words, can be detected in the latter's temporality.

Günther's study is, in short, a fine example of recent German scholarship in the field: philologically precise and clearly argued, elegantly written and displaying an enviable command of both Nietzsche's texts and their sources. The book falls into two parts, respectively dealing with [End Page 125] Nietzsche's discussion of rhythm in the context of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and with the way this discussion shapes his emerging critique of European modernity. Modernity's lack of what he describes in his first Untimely Meditation, "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873), as the "unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people" (DS 1) emerges as a lack of disciplined order, an order that was supposed to be still present in the temporal consciousness of ancient Greece.

Günther's book covers Nietzsche's thought roughly between 1869 and 1876; it provides lucid interpretations of Nietzsche's work as a classical scholar—mainly focusing on the book on tragedy and related writings—but also critical reassessments of other key texts, from the short essay "The Greek State" (1871) and the Untimely Meditations (1873–76) to his reflections on Richard Wagner and on Eugen Dühring's monistic notions of life and science. The argument rightly draws heavily on Nietzsche's own sources, including August Rossbach's and Rudolf Westphal's pathbreaking work on Greek rhythm; Gottfried Semper's studies on artistic style; and nineteenth-century music theory, from Eduard Hanslick, on the aesthetic side, to Hermann von Helmholtz, on the scientific side. It is the focus on these sources that, together with Nietzsche's own work during the 1870s, allows Günther to show how a specific period of ancient Greece is able to take shape in Nietzsche's mind as a counterideal to European modernity—a modernity that, in Nietzsche's view, needs to be corrected through strategies of disciplining the body, through Bildung, and through rethinking the cultural function of the aesthetic. Indeed, the normative order of culture is as much a question of aesthetics as it is of politics. But Nietzsche's opposition between ancient Greece and European modernity, Günther claims, also highlights the nature of human individuals...

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