L’art de bien lire: Nietzsche et la philologie ed. by Jean-François Balaudé, Patrick Wotling (review)

Based upon a colloquium held in October 2006, this book comprises fourteen essays concerning Nietzsche’s concept, evaluation, and practice of philology. Jean-François Balaudé and Patrick Wotling’s introduction gives an idea of the complicated relation between philology and philosophy in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. They point out that, although philology and philosophy might be seen as two distinct professions, connected also to different phases in Nietzsche’s life, the two are intimately related from the beginning and remain that way. The ultimate concern of the book, though, is Nietzsche’s notion of philosophy: can his understanding and practice of it be understood in terms of philology, namely, as the continuation of this discipline by different means? Crucial in this regard is the conceptualization of both philology and philosophy as an “art of reading properly,” its philosophical object being no longer limited to antiquity but extended to “reality” itself. This analysis of philosophy might explain why critical remarks by Nietzsche addressed at both disciplines can be found: as a philologist, Nietzsche attacks his colleagues for not being philosophical enough; as a philosopher, he accuses his fellow philosophers of a “lack of philology.” This presupposition constitutes the primary focus of the articles collected in this book.

The essays are structured in five parts. The first part, “Philology in Relation to Greek Culture,” does not immediately address the central question of the volume. Instead, it deals with two topics within the study of the Greeks relevant for Nietzsche’s philosophy, namely, “Socrates” and “tragic catharsis.” In this way, the traditional understanding of philology as the science of antiquity is kept in place, if only implicitly. Admittedly, the second essay, “Nietzsche et la katharsis tragique,” by Jean-François Balaudé, not only investigates Nietzsche’s interpretations of the Aristotelian notion of catharsis but also attempts to take this case as exemplary for the relation between philosophy and philology; yet this is clearly a secondary aim, as the essay leaves out any questions concerning the exact meaning of both methods for Nietzsche.

The very first essay of the collection, “Le Socrate monstrum de Friedrich Nietzsche,” by Giuliano Campioni (first published in Italian as “Il Socrate monstrum di Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Socrate in Occidente, ed. E. Lojacono [Florence: Le Monnier università, 2004], 242–96), does not even thematize the relevance of philology, which makes it a rather surprising opening essay. Campioni explores Nietzsche’s arguments against his colleagues in philology, especially Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, over the interpretation of the figure of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy and in his early lecture Socrates and Tragedy. He then continues by offering an outline of Nietzsche’s Socrates interpretations in his later works.

The second part of the book, “Philology and Psychology,” explores the connection between these two disciplines for Nietzsche. No explanation is given beforehand about how and why exactly psychology should obtain a prominent place in the discussion, but its significance is revealed over the course of the three essays. Robert Solomon’s “Nietzsche: le philologue comme psychologue ‘de la profondeur,’” deals with Nietzsche’s project of exploring the categories through which humans are able to understand the world. Since these are ultimately based on language and reveal nothing about the world but more about their creators, a proper philosopher is necessarily also a good psychologist and philologist, he claims.

Chiara Piazzesi’s “Pour une nouvelle conception du rapport entre théorie et pratique: la philologie comme éthique et méthodologie” continues in the same direction and presents an interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of philology as methodology and ethics. That is, rather than a theoretical tool to determine the static “absolute truth” about a text, philology is the practice of constantly relating oneself to the text, and thus abandoning the dichotomies between theory and practice, life and theory, and text and interpretation. It offers...