Nietzsche und die Religionen. Transkulturelle Perspektiven seines Bildungs- und Denkweges by Johann Figl, and: Nietzsche—Meditationen. Das Kloster, das Meer und die “neue” Unendlichkeit by Johann Figl (review)

“Nietzsche and Religion” is not an unusual topic in Nietzsche scholarship. Yet most studies on this topic limit themselves to his relationship to Christianity or Buddhism. Few people have systematically examined Nietzsche’s reception of other non-Christian religions. Johann Figl’s 2007 monograph Nietzsche und die Religionen. Transkulturelle Perspektiven seines Bildungs- und Denkweges fills this gap. While most recent publications concerning Nietzsche’s relationship to religions are philosophically oriented, Figl’s book takes a strictly historical approach. It not only is a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s knowledge of various religions and their influence on his philosophy, but also aims to outline the early history of Religionswissenschaft reflected in Nietzsche’s Bildungsweg. Such an ambitious project requires intimate knowledge of Nietzsche’s life and thought as well as nineteenth-century German scholarship in which he was trained. Figl, an expert on Nietzsche as well as religious studies, is one of the few scholars who can take on such a task. The outcome, Nietzsche und die Religionen (henceforth NR), meets our expectations.

After a short introduction in which Figl explains the aims and structure of his book, NR is organized into four chapters. These four chapters can be divided into two main parts. The first part, which includes the first three chapters, offers a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche’s extensive occupation with non-European cultures and non-Christian religions, first while he was a school and university student and later as a professor of philology in Basel. As the subtitle indicates, one of Figl’s major commitments in this book is that a transcultural dimension is fundamental to Nietzsche’s entire philosophical project. In the second part, constituted by the fourth chapter, Figl engages with the issue of how this transcultural dimension is reflected in Nietzsche’s published writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to his later works. These four chapters are followed by a catalogue of sources and documents concerning Nietzsche’s education and reading, a bibliography, and a general index to the book, all of which provide many useful avenues for further study.

Figl is not alone in emphasizing Nietzsche’s cultural pluralism. In his 1996 monograph Orient—Okzident. Nietzsches Versuch einer Loslösung vom europäischen Weltbild (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), for instance, Andrea Orsucci also takes Nietzsche’s opposition to Eurocentrism as his point of departure. Both Figl and Orsucci maintain that Nietzsche’s understanding of cultures and religions is a product of the intellectual atmosphere of Nietzsche’s own age. However, unlike Orsucci, who emphasizes the radical breaks in Nietzsche’s thinking about religions, Figl focuses upon the continuity of Nietzsche’s development. Although he agrees with Orsucci that Nietzsche’s reception of nineteenth-century religious, anthropological, and ethnological research during his Basel years contributed significantly to his anti-Eurocentrism, Figl goes one step further by seeking to trace the transcultural tendency in the high school and university education the young Nietzsche received. This reconstruction, in my opinion, is the most valuable part of NR. For this subject is, in spite of its great importance for our understanding of Nietzsche’s religious thought (as Figl shows in his book), barely touched on in Nietzsche scholarship.

In order to paint a vivid picture of Nietzsche’s religious education, Figl delves into a diverse range of primary and secondary sources, which include Nietzsche’s school essays, philological publications, and posthumous notations (as the editor of KGW I, Figl has extensive knowledge of the entire body of Nietzsche’s early writings); the books in the library of Schulpforta and in Nietzsche’s personal library that may have influenced the young Nietzsche; the textbooks he used; the yearly reports of the programs of...