Nietzscheforschung 14. "Nietzsche und Europa—Nietzsche in Europa" (review)

The yearbook Nietzscheforschung is published on behalf of the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft and contains contributions from its Nietzsche workshop and the annual conference in Naumburg, Germany. This source leads to a wide range of treated topics as well as to some stylistic and qualitative variations between the single texts. Although the title of the volume suggests a kind of main issue, it presents in fact five quite different sections: "I. Laudation and Acceptance Speech of the Nietzsche Award," "II. Nietzsche and Europe—Nietzsche in Europe," "III. Nietzsche and the Religions," "IV. Articles," and "V. Reviews."

I. The Nietzsche Award

Rüdiger Görner's laudation for Silvio Vietta, who was awarded the Nietzsche Prize 2006, is entitled "The Day After Tomorrow in the Once Upon a Time or How Modern Is Modernity?" The modern spirit consists of many aspects and nuances that could be compared to short novels. Görner characterizes Vietta as the animating learned narrator of these novels: an intellectual aware of his own cultural traditional backgrounds and an exponent of European cultural poetics. Within the framework of his occupation with modern literature, its experimental aesthetics, and its contribution to the generation of the European consciousness, Vietta delivered a fundamental treatise on Nietzsche's critique of culture.

In his acceptance speech, Silvio Vietta proposes a "European thinking with Nietzsche" on the basis of a critical and open-minded reading of his works. He calls Nietzsche symptomatic insofar as he had "experienced the pain of modernity, its loss of meaning, the 'death of god,' the appearance and propagation of idolized substitutes, modernity in general as completion and fulfilment of the history of Western metaphysics" (23). What we can learn from this "man of pain," a representative of modernism with his "eloquent misapprehensions," says Vietta, is a concept that dismisses racism and hegemonic nationalism. The self-styled "good European" is a modern thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment, but with the symptoms of decadence and disease that he himself associates with Romanticism. Nietzsche analyzes and embodies the whole transitoriness of mankind in modern times. The reception of his ideas in the twentieth century, often subject to misreading and misuse, shows nevertheless how clearly the challenge Nietzsche delivered remains the same: to open up "the possibility of self-formation and transformation" (28) by means of human rationality.

II. Nietzsche and Europe—Nietzsche in Europe

Hans-Martin Gerlach's title begins with the quote "We must now continue this enlightenment . . . " (D 197), but the subtitle points to a bigger issue: "Friedrich Nietzsche and the European Enlightenment." It is accepted today that Nietzsche is at least as much an heir to German Romanticism as he is to the European Enlightenment. And it is clear that he saw modern man in a cultural situation and state of mind that are much too complex and complicated for him to be able to emancipate himself from the strictly rational concepts of the Enlightenment. Gerlach seems to be aware of these problems but nevertheless intends to show how Nietzsche pursues the ideas of the Enlightenment in a framework of a "self-criticism of the Enlightenment" and "a permanent open project," taking enlightenment as an endless process. Gerlach rehearses the contradictions in Nietzsche's attitude (traditional morality, religious dogmatism, political chauvinism, etc.) and suggests comparing them to Kant's sapere aude! —"Have the courage to reason for yourself." But that must remain an unsatisfying characterization for a Nietzschean enlightenment program unless we recall that Nietzsche's understanding of the concepts "courage" and "reason" differ in crucial ways from Kant's. Gerlach therefore cannot explain why Nietzsche, unlike the classical exemplars of the European Enlightenment, is very critical of general progress, addressing only a small group instead of the whole of mankind with his ideas for a revaluation of values and the conditions for it to emerge.

Enno Rudolph in "Nietzsche's Europe" argues that Judaism, Christianity, and traditional philosophy since Plato are the...