What does nietzsche owe thucydides?

Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Volumn , Issue 42, 2011, Pages 32-50

  Jenkins, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

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EID: 81255158334     PISSN: 09688005     EISSN: 15384594     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. Translations of works by Nietzsche cited in this article include: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966); "On the Genealogy of Morals" and "Ecce Homo," trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969)
2. The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968); "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
3. Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
4. and Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
5. Nietzsche's engagement with Thucydides very likely began during his student years at Pforta, and he often taught Thucydides while in Basel. Thomas Brobjer discusses Nietzsche's readings of Thucydides in "Nietzsche's Relation to the Greek Sophists," Nietzsche-Studien 34 (2005): 256-77, at 264-65.
6. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1972); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 4. See especially BGE 259.
7. Compare Nietzsche's remarks on terminology that "swells one's pride" (BGE 230) and "pomp-and-virtue names" (BGE 295).
8. John Zumbrunnen discusses and dismisses this approach in "'Courage in the Face of Reality': Nietzsche's Admiration for Thucydides," Polity 35, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 237-63, at 248.
9. C. D. C. Reeve argues for this approach to Thucydides in "Thucydides on Human Nature," Political Theory 27, no. 4 (August 1999): 435-46.
10. Here I must skip over the question of how this discussion of forgetting relates to quite different treatments at D 126, GM I:2, and GM II:1.
11. This discussion anticipates the later account of morality as leading some persons to misjudge their own good. For an account of this later view, see Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and the Morality Critics," Ethics 107, no. 2 (January 1997): 250-85
12. Reeve ("Thucydides on Human Nature," 439-441) presents and defends an alternate translation of the "war is a stern teacher" passage (3.82). I follow Reeve in reading Thucydides as claiming that war "assimilates most people's passions to their conditions," or circumstances.
13. Cane notes that a close connection between moderate behavior and enlightened self-interest appears already in Herodotus and Sophocles. See Gregory Cane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 239-40.
14. Diodotus makes a similar claim in the Mytilenian Debate (3.46).
15. For further discussion of these views, see Reeve, "Thucydides on Human Nature," 440.
16. Hope is also a central theme in Raymond Geuss's account of Nietzsche's debt to Thucydides in his "Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams," in Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 219-33. Athenians are again described as refusing to face unnerving facts following the defeat at Syracuse (8.1).
17. See Geuss, "Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams," 224, for further discussion of this case. Nietzsche's published writings do not mention the role of hope in the History, but it is highly unlikely that Thucydides's account of hope escaped Nietzsche's attention during the years that he studied and taught the History. Nietzsche's account of oppressed Christians' hopeful belief in the next world (GM I:15) also fits this account exactly.
18. I discuss Nietzsche's notion of a will to truth, and its connection with intellectual conscience and wishful thinking, in "Nietzsche's Questions Concerning the Will to Truth," forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
19. This opposition between "science" and "morality," and its connection with Thucydides, is especially clear in the notebooks. See KSA 11:36[11] and 13:14[147].
20. At most, Goethe and Thucydides are both committed to what Leiter terms "M-naturalism" in his Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).
21. For a detailed discussion of how the narrator of GM exhibits the various tendencies of modern "knowers," see Elijah Millgram, "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75, no. 1 (July 2007): 92-110.
22. Nietzsche's remarks in GM might be read as the presentation of a more theoretical Aristotelian megalopsychos-a notion that would be more recognizable to his readers-but the similarities between this passage and the later discussion of Thucydides (TI "Ancients" 2) are certainly striking. For a very good discussion of Nietzsche's relation to Aristotle (which concludes with the judgment that Aristotle was too modern for Nietzsche's taste), see Thomas Brobjer, Nietzsche's Ethics of Character (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1995), 240-62.
23. Here I disagree with Mann's reading of D 168 as expressing Nietzsche's own judgment that Sophist culture must have been unsittlich. See Joel Mann, "Nietzsche's Interest and Enthusiasm for the Greek Sophists," Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003): 406-38, at 411-12.
24. Zumbrunnen ("'Courage in the Face of Reality,'" 241-42) provides evidence that in speaking of a "cure" from Platonism, Nietzsche may have in mind Thucydides's effect on him as a student at Pforta. I find it unlikely, though, that Nietzsche's talk of a cure is merely an extension of notions of physical health to Nietzsche's intellectual life