Volume 54, Issue 1

“lisez: Nietzsche”. Remarks on Nietzsche’s Last Book. From the perspective of textual criticism, Nietzsche’s last book Ecce Homo  – written in 1888, but published for the first time only in 1908 – is as ambiguous as it is controversial. Although Nietzsche completed Ecce Homo , a close reading that focuses on his writing strategies reveals a more fragmentary status. As such, Ecce Homo continues to provide complex editorial and philological problems that undercut any straightforward reading of the book: focusing on Ecce Homo’ s paratext highlights how Nietzsche reads himself, thus complicating the relationship between his writings and their reception.

Light from the Night: Nietzsche’s Philosophical Reevaluation of Light. On the Night Song in Za II. The Night Song in the Second Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra has been much admired, most of all by Nietzsche himself, as a unique lament about his loneliness in the “language of love.” At the same time, it seems to be proof of an extreme self-aggrandizement, a pathological megalomania. In both cases, the philosophical meaning of the Night Song is passed over. It arises from the Enlightenment metaphors of light and night as their reversal in nihilism: nihilism, the loss of all certainties from a universal and all-illuminating reason, liberates us from the illusions of this reason in favor of a new orientation, the certainties of which individuals must “create” for themselves. Moreover, the individuals suffer from the different superiorities and inferiorities of their orientations, their “rank orders,” and must now try to gain each other through love, or at least in the language of love, as the unreserved encounter of individuals. In the Night Song , Nietzsche has Zarathustra, to whom he ascribes the highest superiority of orientation, experience a personal crisis of orientation, regain his cheerfulness in the following Dance Song and his “will” to elevate humanity as a whole in the Funeral Song .

The Saturnalia of Poetry in The Gay Science . In 1882, The Gay Science was the first of Nietzsche’s works to include a large number of poems by the philosopher, a practice he owned up to in 1887 with the addition of Songs of Prince Vogelfrei . However, whether the texts are prose or poetry, the author never fails to parody, criticize – or even condemn – the artists and their art. The aim of this contribution is to highlight the role played by the simultaneity of such criticism and poetic practice: to reverse the ancillary position that poetry has held since the advent of theoretical optimism and, in so doing, to redefine its nature, role and status. This key step marks the transition from theory to practice in Nietzsche’s project of transvaluation.

After having held through much of his career the view that our senses and our intellect falsify the world, Nietzsche published in Twilight of the Idols the claim that the senses do not lie at all. A preparation for this apparent change of mind has often been seen in BGE 15, where Nietzsche seems to recommend “sensualism,” at least for scientists working on the physiology of the senses. I try to characterize in some detail what “sensualism” means by drawing on contemporary discussions and suggest a clarifying reading of the argument in BGE 15. Nietzsche’s attitude towards sensualism, however, is ambivalent. It is a suitable view to hold for scientists engaged in accomplishing “coarse tasks.” But there is a nobler way of doing science, exemplified by Copernicus and Boscovich who “triumphed over the senses.” I explicate this more nuanced attitude towards sensualism and suggest that the senses do not lie insofar as they show us change , that is, temporal relations between events, while they do lie about the events themselves. This happens to be a view that the eminent physiologist of the senses, Helmholtz, had arrived at in 1867.

Nietzsche’s portrait of Jesus as a lovesick knower of the heart in BGE 269 aligns the problems of Christian love with some of Nietzsche’s critical remarks about erotic love in the Free Spirit works. In this paper, I will examine the nuances of Nietzsche’s criticisms of erotic and of Christian love and demonstrate that in their failures, they also contain potential for forms of love that Nietzsche celebrates: self-love, friendship, and amor fati. Finally, I consider Beyond Good and Evil in the context of Book IX, arguing that the chapter does not resolve with Dionysus as Nietzsche’s final response to Jesus, but instead that the duality between them marks different kinds of deficiencies regarding love, to which Nietzsche responds with his Zarathustra.

This article presents a close reading of BGE 27 and 28, which concern how to read philosophical books and the kind of friendship such reading makes possible. In BGE 27, Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds of readers who have different paces of thought and life, comparable to rivers, frogs and tortoises. While he implies a hierarchy by saying some are “at best” comparable to frogs, he does not state explicitly which type is best. Most commentators assume “rivers” are ideal, but the article argues that Nietzsche is deliberately misleading; though he provokes this misinterpretation, he actually implies that “tortoises” are the best readers. Tortoise-like readers are often posthumous, reading authors who are already dead, but they enjoy a kind of friendship with the deceased unavailable to most contemporaries, who lack the right “nature.” The transition from BGE 27 to 28 reflects the shift from “good friends” among the living to true friends among the dead. The article also explores the idea of posthumous friendship in Nietzsche more broadly and suggests that his ideal of friendship as “shared joy” ( Mitfreude ), rather than “compassion” or “shared suffering” ( Mitleid ), is best realized in posthumous friendship with philosophers, which takes the form almost exclusively of shared joy.

Nietzsche as a Twenty-First-Century Church Father? The first section, “Nietzsche as a Theologian,” reflects on whether Nietzsche can be described as a theologian and which theological positions he represented (image of God, ethics, Christology, soteriology). The second section, “Nietzsche’s Influence on Theology,” presents the reception of Nietzsche in twentieth-century theology, particularly with regard to the concept of truth, the image of God, orientation toward this world, secularization, and anthropology. The third section, “What Theology and the Church Can Learn from Nietzsche Today,” argues that Nietzsche can provide important suggestions for twenty-first-century theology, especially with regard to overcoming a purely historicizing approach, regaining competence in the critique of ideology, a necessary critique of moralization, a search for new forms of spirituality, and overcoming trivializing images of God.

The Nietzsche-Foucault relationship has been the subject of extensive scholarship, highlighting their affinity. In contrast, this paper foregrounds what I take to be their most significant point of divergence: it compares Nietzsche’s naturalist to Foucault’s culturalist axiomatic of power. First, I introduce a minor, naturalist tradition in the philosophy of power that culminates with Nietzsche. Second, I show how Foucault revolutionized the field of political thought and analysis by drawing on Nietzsche’s critique of logocentrism, and in so doing introduced a different and significantly more expansive image of politics. Third, I survey Foucault’s key writings on power to support the claim that the contrast between Nietzsche and Foucault can be described in terms of a contrast between naturalism and culturalism. Finally, I follow this theme in the writings of “new materialist” thinkers and their ambiguous reception of Foucault. Although Foucault is often read as politicizing Nietzsche, his circumscribing of power-relations to intra-human relations alone, and thereby confining politics to human cultures, in effect led to him depoliticizing Nietzsche.

Postal Delivery for Nietzsche Dionysos. On Ecce Homo, Why I Am So Wise 3 . A more authentic text of Ecce Homo appeared for the first time in KGW/KSA, thanks to the discovery of Why I Am So Wise 3 in Peter Gast’s estate. The found manuscript was a copy made by Heinrich Köselitz, alias Peter Gast, of a manuscript which Nietzsche had sent to C. G. Naumann for printing shortly before his collapse. Later, the manuscript was presumably destroyed. According to Naumann and Köselitz, the destroyed original dated from the end of December 1888. Montinari adopted this dating, but a preliminary draft preserved in the late Nachlass proves that the new text for Why I Am So Wise 3 was actually not written until the beginning of January 1889. From this new dating, we should take another look at Nietzsche’s last changes to the text of Ecce Homo . The reason for Nietzsche’s brutal reckoning with his mother and sister in Why I Am So Wise 3 must have been his mother’s New Year’s letter. The enigmatic postal delivery of a Dionysus head was possibly a frontispiece of Karl Frenzel in the January issue of the journal Die Gesellschaft .

Carl Fuchs (1838–1922). A Musician in the Circle of Arthur Schopenhauer, Hugo Riemann, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The musician, music writer and composer Carl Fuchs was associated with the inner circle of friends around Friedrich Nietzsche and has always been seen as a follower of Arthur Schopenhauer and the famous lexicographer Hugo Riemann. However, the relation was much more differentiated with respect to the doctrine of musical phrasing and the metrics in music and poetry. Fuchs was an esteemed writer of music books on theoretical, aesthetic, and philosophical issues. These publications (especially his early dissertation) aroused Nietzsche’s interest and opened a long-lasting friendship documented by the correspondence between 1873 and 1888. Based on the accessible sources, this contribution will shed new light on the biographical relations and internal intellectual connections between Schopenhauer, Nietzsche/Wagner, and Riemann.

Celsus of Alexandria’s second-century invectives against the politics and culture of Christianity share prominent features with the problem of ressentiment as it emerges in Nietzsche’s analysis of Christianity as characterized by feelings of revenge and hatred. Against this background, it is possible to suggest that Nietzsche’s views of Christianity continue Celsus’s much earlier criticism of Christianity. This pertains especially to the relationship between Church and state, since the Church tends to impose itself on issues that fall within the purview of the secular state. Both Celsus and Nietzsche, thus, highlight the subversive nature of Christianity in their respective critiques, and it is thus subversive nature of Christianity’s relationship to the state that can be seen as a trigger of the ressentiment described by Nietzsche.

Tracing Thrasymachus. On a Reference to Plato’s Republic in GM I 9. This article examines an intertextual reference to Plato’s Republic (336b–e) in GM I 9. In addition to lexical and semantic parallels, it highlights structural and philosophical differences, focusing on the motifs of silence and interruption. By comparing Thrasymachus’s outburst in Republic  I with the interjection of the „Democrat“ in GM I 9, the article reveals Nietzsche’s subtle appropriation and transformation of the Platonic dialogue form. Rather than endorsing Thrasymachus’s position, Nietzsche reconfigures the dialogical frame to stage the clash of opposing value systems and to question the legitimacy of philosophical justification itself, thus performing a critical, anti-Platonic reflection on moral discourse.

Virtually all of the volumes under discussion in this essay accept that Nietzsche’s philosophical project is of a naturalistic kind. Where they differ is with regard to a) the extent and orientation of such naturalism, b) the import of such naturalism with regard to Nietzsche’s critique of morality, c) philosophy’s relationship to the natural sciences, and d) the potential metaphysical underpinnings of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Although most, albeit not all, of the contributions discussed in this review essay situate themselves in the tradition of analytic philosophy, I will argue that the debate about Nietzsche’s naturalism, and also about the nature of Nietzsche’s specific way of doing philosophy, opens the door to a postanalytic perspective. Against this background, the unproductive distinction between “analytic” and “continental” interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings thankfully begins to lose relevance.

This essay begins with a warning: Nietzsche has not been understood. What parades as interpretation is John Sallis’ “deceptive intelligibility” – a hall of mirrors masquerading as clarity, engineered to bury Nietzsche’s philosophical sabotage. Nietzsche’s thought, like quantum theory, explodes causality, truth, and identity – not metaphorically, but ontologically. His aphorisms do not simply describe the world; they interfere with it. They collapse the observer into the observed, entangling meaning with force, knowledge with will, thought with becoming. He is not a philosopher of answers but of ruptures – epistemic fractures that reverberate across disciplines and time. Art, science, philosophy and myth combust into co-authored vortices – no maps, only collisions of perspective. From Heraclitus to Heisenberg, from tragic myth to wave-particle paradoxes, Nietzsche’s legacy emerges as a gravitational field – disabling our coordinates, annihilating philosophical ground. The five outstanding explorations of Nietzsche’s philosophy reviewed here do not explain Nietzsche; they accelerate his destabilizing charge, colliding at the edges of interpretation to generate new hybrids of thought. Against the fixity of meaning, Nietzsche offers a reality in superposition. The question is no longer what Nietzsche meant, but how much conceptual collapse we can endure when we stop containing him. To understand Nietzsche is not simply to interpret, but to embrace Nietzschean singularity.

Historical and Critical Commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Works. After almost fourteen years, the critical commentaries of Nietzsche’s published works is close to completion. Focused on a philologically detailed historical reconstruction of his published works, these critical commentaries, initially intended and extremely useful as a reference work, allow for a new and systematic overview of available scholarship, but they also open the door to new interpretations of Nietzsche’s works. Offering a substantially more detailed view of the different versions of these texts than the KGW or KSA, the critical commentaries underscore the open nature of Nietzsche’s thinking, clearly showing that each text, even after publication, always remains a work in progress. As Nietzsche’s published works proceed, they are marked by a continual self-reflection and an approach to philosophy that focuses on asking questions rather than on solving specific problems, thus integrating the reader into the process of philosophical thinking. As such, the commentaries clearly highlight that Nietzsche foregrounds the performative dimension of philosophical reflection.

Human, All Too Human , Dawn and The Wanderer and His Shadow . Assigned to Nietzsche’s so-called “middle period,” Human, All Too Human and Dawn have received much less attention than many of his early or later works. Several recent publications attempt to correct this, including the four volumes discussed in this review essay. There are a number of recurring themes, such as Nietzsche’s writing style and the question whether, and to what extent, The Wanderer and His Shadow should be regarded as a separate work within Nietzsche’s œuvre. While Abbey as well as Ansell-Pearson and Bamford take a more general approach that seeks to provide an introductory overview of Nietzsche’s middle period, Brücker as well and Boehm and Villwock are focused specifically on The Wanderer and His Shadow , addressing the meaning of the metaphor of “wanderer and shadow” throughout Nietzsche’s work.

New Publications on Nietzsche’s The Antichrist and the „Revaluation of All Values“. Recent publications on The Antichrist and the „revaluation of all values“ reflect a growing interest in the philosophical depth of Nietzsche’s late writings. Among the five discussed works, three explicitly engage with the philosophical content of The Antichrist (Conway 2019, Meier 2019, Bishop 2022), while the others interpret the motif of a „revaluation of all values“ either as a description of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole (Guo 2022) or in the context of an unwritten magnum opus (Brobjer 2021). This review brings these approaches into dialogue with research that the authors either consult in a highly selective manner or disregard entirely. Regarding The Antichrist , it becomes particularly evident that neglecting this research often leads to the repetition of aporetic positions.

Bringing into dialogue the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche cannot do without investigating pessimism and eternity – issues to which both thinkers attached great significance. The authors analysed in this essay, Martin Morgenstern and Christopher Janaway, partly touch on such issues. Unfortunately, both perpetuate the long-standing opposition between Schopenhauer’s supposed hopeless pessimism and Nietzsche’s life-affirming philosophy. In contrast, I will show how this opposition is no longer tenable. During aesthetic contemplation, Schopenhauer’s genius finds a way to take an interest in the world despite its evils. The genius exhibits a passionate engagement with knowledge, allowing aesthetic affects to come into play, just as Nietzsche’s artist intensifies and multiplies the affects to achieve a more comprehensive perspective on reality. The shared attitudes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche towards knowledge reveal deep and often overlooked connections among their philosophical systems. It is in the realm of aesthetics that pessimism and eternity can come together.