'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Nietzsche, therapy, eudaimonia
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August 8, 2006
In her review of Horst Hutter's Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices Jessica N. Berry queries the key category of therapy in Shaping the Future. She says:
The centrality Hutter accords this concept, I think, places an entirely appropriate emphasis on Nietzsche as a psychologist. Nietzsche surely understood himself in this way--indeed, as "a psychologist without equal"--but in a philosophical climate that is mostly hostile to empirical psychology, this facet of Nietzsche's thought is too often downplayed. Appreciating properly the value Nietzsche himself places upon psychological insight, however, depends once again on our having grasped precisely what gains such insight should yield.
She asks: What kinds of therapeutic methods and results does Hutter take Nietzsche to have in mind?
Berry rightly questions a pop psychology or marxist interpretation of therapy and says that a more promising
possibility for understanding the notion of therapy in Shaping the Future, given the link Hutter would like to forge between Nietzsche and his predecessors in antiquity, would involve reading Nietzsche as a eudaimonist. She adds:
It is unfortunate that eudaimonism as such gets no discussion here, but that in itself is symptomatic of one final, though critical, shortcoming of this book. From the first page, Hutter makes bold claims about the importance of the Greeks for Nietzsche. However, his exegesis does not provide a full enough picture of the ancients to whom Nietzsche is supposedly so indebted: Hutter makes interpretive claims about figures from the Pre-Platonic philosophers through the Hellenistic schools, but gives the reader virtually no textual references with which to anchor his sometimes highly controversial readings.
Berry says that according to Hutter, Nietzsche is in some respects an Epicurean, in some respects his views are "Platonic-Aristotelian", elsewhere Hutter claims the influence of Socrates, Empedocles, Hippocrates, and Hesiod. But in none of these cases does he discuss or provide references to the ancient texts; rarely do we even see references to Nietzsche's remarks on these figures. At most, the author should claim resemblance to these Greek thinkers, and that only in qualified respects; there is insufficient textual support for some of the very ambitious interpretations of ancient figures offered by Hutter.
Isn't Nietzsche working more in the Stoic tradition of philosophical therapy?
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I'd have thought the Greek influence on Nietzsche was not obscure or problematical. He despised Socrates for having subverted those philosophers now dismissively lumped as "pre-Socratic." His slim volume Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks shows him comfortably conversant with his heroes. Both Neitzsche's testimony and his preference for Process over Being reveal him to be a thoroughgoing Heraclitan. As to the therapeutic aspect of philosophy, I suspect Neitzsche sought in the work itself, much as Heidegger found it in the revelation of Being through the reflective activity of conscious beings. Neitzsche, more metaphysican than moralist, would have made a poor Stoic.