Nietzsches Kulturkritik zwischen Philologie und Philosophie by Carlo Gentili (review)

Carlo Gentili’s book, first published in Italian in 2001 (Nietzsche, Il Mulino), covers Nietzsche’s entire philosophical production. It may be characterized as an introductory book, for some fundamental issues in Nietzsche’s philosophy are explained in detail. But Gentili also discusses these issues from a very particular perspective—namely, the criticism of culture elaborated from philological and philosophical perspectives. The book’s five chapters are structured as follows.

The first chapter treats the close relation between philosophy and philology, focusing on Nietzsche’s special interest in the latter, as well as on the role that philology played throughout the 1860s and 1870s in German culture (11). Gentili’s claim regarding the link between philology and philosophy is that, for Nietzsche, “each and every philological activity should be surrounded and enclosed by a philosophical world view” (30; translations from Gentili’s book are my own). For, from The Birth of Tragedy to The Antichrist, Nietzsche always took an interest in philology, constantly articulated with the criticism of culture and the educational system, and from the classical perspectives that he derived from his schooling at Pforta and from debates over German national identity of the time. The central concept here is that of Bildung, under the influences of such figures as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Schiller, and the meaning that the notion had gradually acquired in combining concerns for German identity with the Greek emphasis on philology, poetry, philosophy, and so on. Although here he focuses on texts prior to The Birth of Tragedy, Gentili also emphasizes how some themes found in them—such as the epic poem “Ermanaric’s Death” (33) and the “redemption from the past” (39)—also unfold in Nietzsche’s late reflections.

The second chapter considers how, in pursuing his criticism of culture from The Birth of Tragedy to the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche’s critical axis shifts from philology to philosophy. This chapter has a double structure. On the one hand, there is a critical genealogy of the figure of Dionysus, with which Gentili indicates the sources that influenced Nietzsche—for instance, Karl Otfried Müller, Jacob Bernays, and Paul Yorck von Wartenburg (46–51)—along with the ways the figure is employed in Nietzsche’s writings and its critical meaning. On the other hand, Gentili underlines the criticism of culture from the perspective of “untimeliness [Unzeitgemäßheit],” defined in the foreword to the second Untimely in terms of “classical philology in our time” as the requirement “to act—against time and thus on the time and hopefully in favor of a coming time” (KSA 1, p. 247). This notion of untimeliness is articulated in light of the figure of the “genius.” Following Humboldt’s model, Nietzsche claims that a genuine culture is capable of a “unity of artistic style in all expressions of life of a people” (KSA 1, p. 274; Gentili, 81). It is in this context that Gentili places Nietzsche’s attack on David Strauss, the “Bildungsphilisterei” and the “historical illness.” But Gentili also highlights the importance of a culture that was facing its “Restoration,” insofar as it could produce the genius, see history as an instrument for criticism, and face the contemporary issues that Nietzsche had before him (cf. 102)—a background issue of the third Untimely and the Mahnruf an die Deutschen pamphlet. Gentili’s “digression” relating “style” and “great style” clearly explains the close connection that he sees between Nietzsche’s early writings and later works.

In the third chapter, Gentili focuses on the idea of Nietzsche as an “Aufklärer,” whose supposed “turn” would inaugurate a “new phase of his thought” (123) with Human, All Too Human. Gentili focuses on two issues here: the function of science and the extent of Nietzsche’s criticism of morality. In an intensive dialogue with important treatments of the first issue, like Eugen Fink’s, Gentili argues that Nietzsche’s enlightened reconsideration of his earlier positions is less a “reversal” than...