Science, Life, and Art in Nietzsche’s Notes for ‘We Philologists’

International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-024-00676-y ARTICLE Science, Life, and Art in Nietzsche’s Notes for ‘We Philologists’ Neriojamil Palumbo1 Accepted: 27 July 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract The study retraces Nietzsche’s 1875 notes for the planned but never published Unfashionable Observation, We Philologists, through a specific focus on the topics of science, life and art in their close and seldom discussed interrelation. The questions that the investigation addresses are: what is the significance of Nietzsche’s problematisation of science in We Philologists for our interpretation of the topic in his later works? How should we interpret these notebooks in relation to his previous writings, on the one hand, and to his later treatment of themes like the deconstruction of Christianity, the critique of eudemonism or the historical genesis of the genius on the other? Framing the notebooks as unwittingly experimental precursors of Nietzsche’s aphoristic books, the article interprets the unique nuance of the notes as an opportunity to start shedding a different light on the discussion of these questions in Nietzsche’s later works. Science, life and art become thus the focal points of a more specific and circumscribed analysis of his early thought – reconnecting these topics to their tangible origins, and tracking their early development in the context of Nietzsche’s acclaimed switch from philology to philosophy and cultural criticism. Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works BAW  Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Ed. J. Mette et al., 5 vols., Munich, 1943 KGW  Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Ed. G. Colli et al., Berlin, 1967KGB  Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel, Ed. G. Colli et al., Berlin, 1975KSB  Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, Ed. G. Colli et al., 8 vols, Berlin, 1986 KSA  Kritische Studienausgabe, Ed. G. Colli et al., 15 vols, Berlin, 1988 Although Friedrich Nietzsche engaged with the problem of science in different phases of his career and from the most diverse angles and hermeneutical * Neriojamil Palumbo 1 School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Vol.:(0123456789) N. Palumbo perspectives, classical philology was in effect the only scientific discipline of which he had first-hand professional experience, and the one out of which he did elaborate his earliest reflections on science as model of knowledge, method of thought and way of life. If the publication of a heterodox treatise such as The Birth of Tragedy could well be considered as his main critical gesture towards the discipline, this critique assumed nonetheless many other forms, and it is possible to find its traces in lectures notes, letters and notebooks of the same years. Frequently obscured by other better-known works of the Basel period, Nietzsche’s most explicit and accomplished critique of philology appears in a series of short writings, dated between Spring and Summer 1875, that he was planning to collect in a fifth instalment of his Unfashionable Observations titled ‘Wir Philologen’.1 The project never did result in an actual publication, and the notebooks – collected today both in the fourth volume of the Colli-Montinari Kritische Gesamtausgabe2 and in the eighth volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe3 – have remained a seldom discussed segment of Nietzsche’s production, despite their striking conceptual and stylistic consistency, and although they represent a crucial moment of the philosopher’s endless dialogue with his earliest vocation.4 As reported by Hubert Cancik, whose commentaries on these notebooks remain the most extensive and perhaps most influential, Nietzsche was initially planning to shape the essay along the lines of the other Unfashionable Observations: namely, as a lengthy text divided in extended subsections – an outcome attained in part in what is now notebook seven, and in the transcription of notebook three, partly under Nietzsche’s dictation, by Carl von Gersdorff.5 The fact that it remained drafted in short aphoristic fragments, however, contributes to the bizarre effect by which the notes appear, retrospectively, as a stylistic experiment – as an unwitting anticipation of Nietzsche’s celebrated works of 1 Fifth or fourth? On the order of the writings comprising the Unfashionable Observations and their exact chronological collocation in relation to We Philologists see Cancik, ‘Philologie als Beruf‘’, pp. 84-87; Nietzsches Antike, pp. 94-95; ‘The Religion’, p. 265. The problem is also briefly addressed in Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, p. 47 – where Nietzsche is said to have abandoned his previous idea of publishing the Notizen in light of their merely personal value (cf. the letter to Rohde dated 7 October 1875, on which we shall return below). Similar remarks in Benne, Santini, ‘Nietzsche’, p. 191 – on whose reading the fifth (or fourth) Observation was never published ‘for good reasons’, amongst which they only name the fact that it became ‘obsolete’ in the context of Nietzsche’s life after his departure from academia. Notwithstanding these biographical and bibliographical details, however, the notes seem to enact an exercise in untimeliness in their own right: if the position of classical philology in the modern world was (and still is) inherently untimely, its critical discussion could not but embody and exacerbate this condition. Hereafter, all translations of articles and books in German except Nietzsche’s will be mine. 2 KGW, IV/1, pp. 85-203. Hereafter, the notes will only be referenced using their numeration as it appears in these pages – omitting both the volume name/numeration and the page number – and quoted in English translation from F. Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments, pp. 1-109. 3 KSA, VIII, pp. 1-127. 4 For a detailed survey of the sourced manuscripts see Cancik, ‘The Religion’, pp. 263-266 – in which material from 1876 is also included; Handwerk, ‘Translator’s Afterword’, pp. 558-559 – including instead notebooks 10 and 16 from the same period. 5 See Cancik, ‘‚Philologie als Beruf‘’, p. 90; Nietzsches Antike, pp. 95-96. Science, Life, and Art in Nietzsche’s Notes for ‘We… the following years where, nonetheless, both the topics and their discussion appear to a higher degree of urgency and personal involvement.6 In this study, I argue that the notes can be considered an important element in the evaluation of Nietzsche’s understanding of science, life and art in their indissoluble interconnection, and I retrace them with a particular focus on the passages where these topics seem to be more closely related. Reconsidering the significance of these notebooks in Nietzsche’s philosophical and existential path, the treatment takes advantage of the spontaneity of his private writings to shed light on problems that gained major complexity in later years but that, at this specific stage, showed a more personal nuance, and therefore a more s (...truncated)