Second Reply to Professor Anderson

In the fall 2011 issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Professor Mark Anderson published an article "Telling the Same Story of Nietzsche's Life," which pointed out certain similarities between the biographical half of my Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography and Curtis Cate's earlier biography titled Friedrich Nietzsche. I have already responded to this article in JNS, expressing regret at the overlaps. Here I should like to amplify my earlier remarks and be more specific as to remedial action.

What are reproduced in my work are occasional phrases of Cate's, never a complete sentence. Out of a book of approximately 370,000 words, the total number of words involved is less than 300. In the discussion of Anderson's article together with my reply that was published alongside them, Daniel Blue takes note of this fact. Although he is no admirer of my book (in an earlier issue of the JNS he authored a highly critical review of its philosophical content), he observes that "there is no mistaking" the fact that of the 260 pages of the book devoted to biography rather than philosophy, "the vast majority are in language surely Young's own."¹

That certain of Cate's phrases appeared in my book is entirely due to my inexperience and carelessness as a biographer. Sometimes a phrase just stuck in my head, appropriated so completely by me that it seemed to be my own. The main problem, however, was this. Cate was where I first began to try to grasp the facts of Nietzsche's life. Consequently, my notes on his book were written four or five years before I began to write the biography itself. Coming across a phrase in my notes I too quickly took it to be a précis of my reading of Cate whereas it now transpires that occasionally it was Cate's own phrase. Trained as I am to be on guard against unacknowledged use of other people's ideas, I was too relaxed when it came to the manner of reporting biographical facts. Without properly thinking about it, I tended to assume—wrongly—that the manner of reporting humdrum historical facts no more counts as intellectual property than the manner of reporting a bus timetable. Since Cate appeared in my bibliography I assumed it would be obvious that I had used him as a source of basic historical data. This was naïve and thoughtless. But to see that no conscious dishonesty could have been involved one only needs to ask: what possible advantage could I have expected from using a phrase of Cate's rather than a paraphrase of it? It is not, for example, a difficult matter to describe the arrangement of the school grounds in Schulpforta in one's own words, particularly if, as I have, one has been there (see my acknowledgments).²

Explanation aside, there is no doubt that the unacknowledged appearance of phrases from Cate's work represents a serious scholarly failing. With this in mind I have created a list of all of Cate's phrases that appear in my book. Where there are such phrases, two remedies will be effected: the passage as a whole will be acknowledged as indebted to Cate and the phrases will be removed by paraphrase. Very occasionally I will retain a phrase, but then it will be within quotation marks and with acknowledgment. These corrections will be inserted as an erratum slip in remaining stock of the work and will be incorporated in any future reprints or new editions.

In addition to highlighting the recycling of phrases from Cate, Professor Anderson also makes the more nebulous claim that elements of Cate's " narrative structure" appear in my biography. Now even where the order in which one narrates events or the selection of quotations from original sources is suggested by someone else's work, I do not believe that one is required to acknowledge this fact. And I do not believe that Professor Anderson believes this either. The implicit and ambitious point of his citing examples of alleged structural similarity seems to be to suggest, as...