PRAXIS SUR

Durante el semestre pasado, el maestro y colega Oscar Delgado divulgado este texto de Brian Leiter, dedicado a Nietzsche, figura cimera de la discusión en materia de filosofía y pensamiento político en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, y en lo que Marchart denomina el pensamiento posfundacional. Para inaugurar el nuevo año reproducimos este ensayo para deleite y discusión de nuestros cybervisitantes a quienes agradecemos su fidelidad y renovado interés. N de la R.

Brian Leiter on Nietzsche

Brian Leiter is Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Nietzsche on Morality and co-editor of several books on Nietzsche’s work. He has also published widely on topics in moral, political and legal philosophy, and runs the influential philosophy blog Leiter Reports

From: The Browser

Relativist, atheist, existentialist, Nazi. All have been said of Nietzsche, some with more reason than others. We asked a Nietzsche expert to explain the appeal of the controversial philosopher

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Nietzsche is one of your philosophical specialities. So how did you first become interested in him?

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It was a very precise moment. Easter Sunday 1982. I think it’s deliciously ironic that it was Easter Sunday. As an undergraduate I was taking a course called “Kant to 1900” with Richard Rorty at Princeton University, and the course included a couple of weeks on Nietzsche. So on that Sunday I began reading the Nietzsche assignment – it was actually a very early essay that Nietzsche never published, called “On Truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense”. I was very taken by it and from that moment on I became very interested in Nietzsche.

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What did you particularly like about him?

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I had actually become interested in philosophy from reading Sartre as a high school student in French classes. The essay Rorty assigned starts on a very existentialist note – and of course the writing was very evocative. At this point I was reading it in English but Walter Kaufman’s strength as a translator is that he captures the flavour of Nietzsche in English. He’s not the most literal translator but he is the most evocative. So it was a combination of the proto-existentialist themes and the style of the writing that I found very gripping. And that sense never left me – I still always enjoying reading and re-reading Nietzsche.

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We’re going to talk about five books you’d recommend for someone who’s interested but not an expert in Nietzsche. You’ve chosen a mixture of primary and secondary material. Would you say it’s best for readers to begin with the modern academic texts or should they go straight to Nietzsche first?

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I think it’s a question of whether they’ve had any exposure to philosophy. If somebody has not had much exposure to philosophy, then it might be best to start with the Safranski biography before going to the primary texts. The primary texts are certainly more fun and if you were to start with one of them, then Beyond Good and Evil would be a great choice, because it covers all the distinctive and important Nietzschean themes and as it’s broken into bite-size pieces you don’t get overwhelmed. But if you wanted someone to patiently introduce you then Safranski is good on that score.

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It seems like Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers whom lots of people who have never studied philosophy still enjoy reading. Why do you think he’s so appealing in this way?

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I think the most important reason to start with is that he’s a great writer, and that is not the norm in philosophy. He’s a great stylist, he’s funny, he’s interesting, he’s a bit wicked, he’s rude. And he touches on almost every aspect of human life and he has something to say about it that’s usually somewhat provocative and intriguing. I think that’s the crucial reason why Nietzsche is so popular. Indeed, he’s probably more popular outside academic philosophy because he’s so hostile to the main traditions in Western philosophy.

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Do you think people who haven’t studied philosophy can get quite a lot out of him? You might not really enjoy Spinoza’s Ethics, for instance, if you just picked it up randomly in a bookshop or in the library. Would you say that’s the case with Nieztsche?

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I think people without that philosophical background do miss quite a lot – because a lot of what is going on in Nietzsche is reaction to and sometimes implicit dialogue with earlier philosophers. If you don’t know any Kant or Plato or the pre-Socratics, you’re not going to understand a lot of what’s motivating Nietzsche, what he’s reacting against. You get a much richer appreciation of Nietzsche if you are reading him against the background of certain parts of the history of philosophy.

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Nietzsche himself was not trained in philosophy, he was trained in classics. But that included a great deal of study of ancient Greek philosophy. And then he taught himself a lot of other philosophy. Kant and Schopenhauer were particularly important to him.

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Are there any non-philosophers who have influenced the way you think about Nietzsche?

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I think what Thomas Mann wrote about Nietzsche, both directly and indirectly in The Magic Mountain, is very instructive. I think that’s also true of Herman Hesse and André Gide. I think people like Sartre and Camus believe Nietzsche is more of a proto-existentialist than he really is, although that wasn’t my view when I first encountered him in 1982.

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography

By Rüdiger Safranski, translator Shelley Frisch

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Let’s start with the Safranski book, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. There are absolutely loads of biographies of Nietzsche. Why did you go with this one in particular?

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I think the virtue of this book is that it has a detailed and readable narrative of the life, but it combines it with an introduction to the philosophical works, which is written at a very appropriate level for the beginner. That’s the main reason I picked the Safranski.

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The standard German biography of Nietzsche, by this guy Curt Paul Janz, is a three-volume tome that is exhaustive but it’s also exhausting. It’s a very good resource for scholars but not a delightful book for beginners.

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There’s a famous quote in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche says that despite philosophers’ claims about arguing rationally and aiming to find objective truth, all philosophy has really been a form of unconscious and involuntary autobiography. How do you think Nietzsche’s own life informs his philosophy, if at all?

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The influences of Nietzsche’s own life on the philosophy are very dramatic. Some of them have to do with the intellectual biography, of course – what he studied, what he read et cetera. But I think probably the crucial fact about Nietzsche’s life is that when he writes about suffering he’s not a tourist. He’s writing about something he knows very intimately. He understands from his own experience the effect of suffering on the mind, on creativity and on one’s attitude to life generally. And if there’s a central question in Nietzsche it’s the one he takes over from Schopenhauer – namely, how is it possible to justify life in the face of inevitable suffering? Schopenhauer comes up with a negative answer. He endorses something like a stereotype of the Buddhist view: The best thing would not to be born, but if you’re born the next best thing would be to die quickly. Nietzsche wants to repudiate that answer – partly through bringing about a re-evaluation of suffering and its significance.

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Could you give a sense of the suffering Nietzsche experienced and why his life was so difficult?

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He was the proverbial frail and sickly child. But the real trouble started in his early 30s, the 1870s, when he started to develop gradually more and more physical maladies – things that looked like migraines, with nausea, dizziness, and he would be bedridden. It got so severe that he had to retire from his teaching position at the age of 35. So he spent the remainder of his sane life, until his mental collapse in 1889, basically as an invalid travelling between different inns and hotels in and around Italy, Switzerland and southern France, trying to find a good climate, often writing, often walking when his health permitted, but often bedridden with excruciating headaches, vomiting, insomnia. He was trying every self-medication device of the late 19th century. He had a pretty miserable physical existence. His eyesight also started to fail him during this time. Through all this he usually managed to continue to write and read, despite these ailments. So he really knew what suffering was.

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In retrospect, there’s reasonably good evidence that he had probably at some point contracted syphilis and that the developing infection might have been responsible for these maladies. Though his father had also died at an early age, so there may have been some familial genetic component as well.

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Safranski himself is German, whereas the other two secondary texts you recommend are by American scholars. Is there a difference between the view of Nietzsche in German scholarship and in Anglo-American scholarship at present?

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My honest opinion is that, in general, I don’t think the German secondary literature on Nietzsche is as good as the English. This is partly due to different styles of philosophy, and partly due to the enormous, and I think unfortunate, influence in Germany of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. I think even people who are fans of Heidegger – I’m not – would admit that Heidegger’s Nietzsche is more about Heidegger than Nietzsche!