Het Europese nihilisme: Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren by Paul van Tongeren (review)

Although “nihilism” is one of the key themes in Nietzsche studies, Paul van Tongeren’s Het Europese nihilisme: Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren (European Nihilism: Friedrich Nietzsche on a Threat That Nobody Seems to Care About) reconsiders its significance in a way that stands out for its scope, originality, and philological precision. His subtitle not only poses the question of why “we” in general do not seem to care about the threat of nihilism, but also suggests that Nietzsche commentary has largely overlooked the problem as a problem. For Van Tongeren, then, what is at stake in the book is a reconsideration of the problem Nietzsche confronts us with.

Although his book is ambitious in scope, Van Tongeren proceeds with care. The first chapter presents a selection of both published and unpublished texts dating from the period in which Nietzsche’s thought on nihilism came into fruition, 1885–88. Van Tongeren stays close to these texts in later chapters, resisting the tendency to “summarize” Nietzsche’s views by indiscriminately drawing on a wide variety of aphorisms. First, though, he investigates the historical, cultural, and intellectual background of “nihilism” as a concept and an issue before Nietzsche’s time (chap. 2) and further sketches the development of Nietzsche’s thought on nihilism, highlighting the semantic relations between the concepts of pessimism, decadence, and nihilism (chap. 3). In the main chapter, “Nietzsche’s ‘Theory’ of Nihilism,” Van Tongeren does not so much formulate Nietzsche’s “theory” as specify the diverse ways in which Nietzsche discovers and diagnoses nihilism as a problem in which he is (not) implicated. In addition, he offers a critical reflection on the reception of the theme (chap. 5), before addressing the questions of why no one seems to care about the problem of nihilism and how one could possibly answer it, also in light of Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles and Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot (chap. 6).

“The core problem of nihilism [Der Kern des Nihilismus],” claims Van Tongeren elsewhere, “lies in the fact that the will to truth undermines itself, but inevitably re-emerges in this process of self-overcoming” (Paul van Tongeren, “‘Ich’ bin darin [. . .] ‘Ego ipsissimus [. . .] ego ipsissimum.’ Nietzsches philosophische experimente mit der literarischen form der Vorrede,” Nietzsche-Studien 41 [2012]: 13; my translation; see also Het Europese nihilisme, 198–99). Het Europese nihilisme can best be seen as a more substantial elaboration on this problem, which he has been exploring ever since the publication of Die Moral von Nietzsches Moralkritik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989). Its significance lies in Van Tongeren’s reconsideration of the status of critique, self-critique, and the self-overcoming (Selbstaufhebung) of morality in Nietzsche’s work.

Note that Nietzsche’s critiques are often supposed to liberate us from conformism, external authorities, general moral rules, and so on, for the affirmation and cultivation of something untouched by that which is criticized, such as more deeply rooted or authentic values, drives, or character traits. On such a reading, the scope of Enlightenment critique may be extended in order to encompass a wider domain of moral prejudices, but its scheme is basically reproduced: the critic unambiguously distinguishes herself from the object of critique by retreating to a standpoint over and against it. As a result, what is criticized can easily be externalized, for it was only loosely ours in the first place. According to Van Tongeren, in contrast, Nietzsche finds himself embedded within the moral tradition precisely by the questioning that is supposed to be liberating. As a critic, he does not unambiguously step outside of what he criticizes. Nietzsche’s problem, therefore, is not that we usually follow rather abstract, moral rules of conduct that make us forget ourselves. Rather, Van Tongeren claims, it is that we have incorporated Christian morality, which itself eventually demanded the sacrifice of the Christian articles of faith...