A stoicism for our time?

REVIEW ARTICLES "Rare Impressions." Nietzsche's Philologica: A Review of the Colli-Montinari Critical Edition* Nietzsches Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe ["KGW"], ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Abt. 2: Bd 1. Philologische Schriften (1867-1873), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), VIII +382 pp. Bd. 2. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (SS 1869-WS 1869/70); Anhang: Nachschriften von Vorlesungen Nietzches, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), XI + 446 pp. Bd. 3. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (SS 1870-SS 1871), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), VI + 441 pp. Bd. 4. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS 1871/72-WS 1874/75), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), VI + 637 pp. Bd. 5. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS 1874/75-WS 1878/79), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), VI + 527 pp. Few things can be more important to understanding Nietzsche than understanding his views of classical antiquity. To do this, sooner or later one must come to grips with his early formation as a classicist. And there can be no better way to learn about this subject than to read what he wrote at the time. Fortunately for us, Nietzsche was a compulsive note-taker during his student years at Bonn and Leipzig and then later while he was a professor at Basel, in addition to producing several volumes of correspondence and a few autobiographical sketches. There is more than enough material for a first-hand assessment. Ironically, his publications in philology seem like opera minora in comparison. And yet what stands out about these latter is how remarkably * Many thanks to Wolfgang Haase and Glenn Most for comments on an earlier draft, and to archivist Wolfgang Ritschel in Weimar for helpful clarifications. Abbreviations (see also "References," below p. 430): BAW: Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritischeGesamtausgabe,5 vols., 1933-. Ed. Hans-Joachim Metre et al., M~inchen: Beck. GA: GroJ3oktav-Ausgabe.Nietzsches Werke, 12 vols., 1895-97. Ed. Fritz Koegel et al., Leipzig: C. G. Naumann (2nd ed.: 20 vols., 1899-1926. Ed. Elisabeth F6rster-Nietzsche, Leipzig: C. G. Naumann [1899-1909]; Leipzig: Kr6ner [1909-1926]). KGW: Nietzsche: Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe,1967--. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin--New York: Waiter de Gruyter. KGB: Nietzsche: Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1975--. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin--New York: Walter de Gruyter. 410 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 short a period of time they actually span. Nietzsche started teaching at Basel only in the summer semester (beginning of May end of July) of 1869. His last publication as a philologist came in 1873, while his last review appeared already in 1870. The record seems slim indeed. On the other hand, Nietzsche was only twenty-three when he began publishing in the field in 1867 and only twenty-eight when he halted, at an age when most classicists today are just beginning their careers. He accomplished as much in this brief compass as most mature philologists, even in the nineteenth century, could boast to have done in a comparable time span. What potential Nietzsche might have realized had he persisted as a scholar is anyone's guess, but he at least deserves to be remembered in the history of philology as the gifted and promising classicist that he was--surely as one of the more promising and least realized classicists of all time. His record of publications testify to this alone. 1 His notebooks back up the claim still further, for they are a mine of projects imagined but never carried out. A history of classical scholarship that awarded points to classicists on the basis of imagination--as it were, an imaginary history of classical scholarship--would have to rank Nietzsche among the stars in its galaxy. As it happens, you will look nearly in vain for mentions of his name in the definitive histories of the field, even though several of his findings have made their way, often namelessly, into the main stream of classical scholarship. Thus, to Nietzsche must be accorded a final paradoxical honor: that of being the least remembered--or most repressed--scholar in the history of classics. But let us return to the record we have. The Materials: An Overview The first volume, which brings together the complete record of Nietzsche's publications in philology, is the slimmest by far. During these early years, Nietzsche published a total of six articles (amounting to three hundred and sixty-odd printed pages in the edition under review) and eight reviews (a few pages each), these latter dating from 1868 to 1870. The articles, most of which appeared in Rheinisches Museum, the journal edited by his mentor Friedrich Ritschl, are as follows: "Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung" (1867); "Beitr/ige zur Kritik der griechischen Lyriker I. Der Danae Klage" (1868); "De Laertii Diogenis fontibus" (1868/69), "Analecta Laertiana" (1870); "Beitr/ige zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes" (1870, appearing as a "Gratulationsschrift des Paedagogiums zu Basel," which contributed to Nietzsche's elevation to the rank of "Ordinarius" [full professor] in the same year);2 "Homer und die klassische Philologie" (his Antrittsvorlesung from 1869, published by a vanity press with a limited circulation); "Der Florentinische Tractat fiber Homer und Hesiod, ihr Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf" (Parts I-II, 1870; Parts III-IV, 1873); and "Certamen quod dicitur Homeri et Hesiodi" (an edition of the Certamen, published in 1871 in the Acta societatis philologae Lipsiensis edited by Ritschl). All eight reviews appeared in the Literarisches Centralblattfar Deutschland, edited by Friedrich Zarncke in Leipzig. 1. 2. See Barnes 1986 on the Laertiana. See Stroux 1925, 66-67, for the official documentation, which states as the reason for Nietzsche's nomination, "Zur Anerkennung seiner bisherigen Leistungen," and from which was struck the telling qualification, expressed in draft only, "ungeachtet seiner Jugend" (ibid., p. 66, n. 1). Nietzsche was plainly a rising star in the field, and his retention (beyond the recognition that was due to him) must have been a major concern of his employers in Basel. Review Articles 411 The remaining four volumes present notes for lecture courses, in chronological sequence, representing the entire span of Nietzsche's teaching career. Their range is impressive, but only partially indicative of the full range of Nietzsche's research interests, his vast learning, or his teaching: 3 Aeschylus' Choephori, Greek Lyric, Latin Grammar (v. 2); Sophocles, Cicero's Academica, Greek Metrics and Rhythrnics, Encyclopedia of Classical Philology (v. 3); Introduction to the Platonic Dialogues, Latin Epigraphy, The Preplatonic Philosophers, Ancient Rhetoric (including Aristotle) (v. 4); History of Greek Literature; Greek Worship (v. 5). These are fatter volumes, and frequently chaotic as well--that is, when the lecture notes do not take the form of a continuous narrative in fair copy. Vols. 4 and 5 consist entirely of such semi-finished materials. An appendix to v. 2 contains transcripts to three lectures that were found among Nietzsche's papers and prepared by students; but these latter, while less fragmentary than the least finished of Nietzsche's notes, are not necessarily more flowing than the more semi-finished lectures, which themselves can consist of continuous prose but can often be telegraphic as well. Apart from the disorderliness of some of the notes, there is a further difficulty that besets a good number of the lectures. Nietzsche's notebooks were arranged by lecture theme, not by date. His procedure was that of any teacher: he would reuse old notes and supplement them at will, whether by adding to them progressively or by filling in the pages he had deliberately left blank in his notebooks the first time through. While a convenience for himself, this can prove a headache for scholars combing through the Nachlass. One consequence is that lectures taught several times over the course of the years make for compendious materials of often uncertain provenance and form. There are problems in dating the materials in relative terms, given the lack of internal evidence for dates, and there are difficulties in assessing the nature and function of the intercalations. Titles and subtitles or section-heads (where they exist) can be troubling as well: these can fail to tally with announced titles and can change over the course of a notebook. There are also problems in absolute dating, because we do not always know whether a course announced for a semester actually took place (whereas we do know about such defections in other cases). Complicating matters further is the fact that a given set of lecture notes could serve either for university-level teaching or for instruction at the "Pffdagogium'-level. This latter was aimed at university-bound students in a post-gymnasial, three-year long preparatory school, where members of the philosophical faculty at the University of Basel were required to devote two thirds of their energy4 - a practice that, while of obvious 3. 4. Not represented in the published notes are the courses he gave on Homer, Hesiod, Theognis, Thucydides; Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Eumenides, and Prometheus; Euripides' Bacchae,Medea, and Alcestis; Aristophanes, Xenophon, Demosthenes' Philippics, Theocritus, or the directed readings ("Privatlekt~ire') in Isocrates, Lucian, Plato, and others (see Nietzsche's "Semesterund Jahresberichte" in Gutzwiller 1951; also Janz 1974; see further KGW 2.7.1:571-79), although some of these areas may have been resumed in the later lectures on Greek literature. Presumably, these notebooks have been lost. A complete catalogue and tabulation of the preserved and non-existent materials would be essential to have. (Glenn Most suggests per litt. that although notes made by students from Nietzsche's courses are available in the archives in Weimar, "we cannot be sure that there are not such materials in other archives in Germany, Israel, and the USA. Only if these were all systematically collected could there be a claim to making a definitive edition.") See Gutzwiller 1951, 151-55, who calls this phase a "hi,here Mittelschule" (151), in the absence of a more adequate term. 412 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 value, unfortunately is unknown in the modern curricula in Europe or in the States, except on a voluntary, informal basis. And while the level of the P4dagogium was bound to be high, it would necessarily have fallen short of expectations at the university level. Whether Nietzsche's notes reflect this range is impossible to say; by all accounts, he was a rigorous and demanding teacher at both levels. 5 Finally, there are problems of format within the notes (to be discussed presently). A case in point, illustrative of the full gamut of these difficulties, is provided by the first set of notes printed in KGW (2.2:1-104), a lecture on the Choephori taught successively on seven occasions: four times between 1869 and 1872, once in 1874, and then twice in a single academic year (1877-1878). The title in KGW is given as "Prolegomena zu den Choephoren des Aeschylus." Presumably, this stems from Nietzsche's notebook (here, as elsewhere, my direct experience of the archived materials is limited to a few cases, and this is not one of them); the title is in any case quasi-confirmed b y the opening sentence of the notebook. Yet the course title in the official Basel record for 1869 (as given by Janz) reads "Vorl. Aeschylos Choephoren," while the Pfidagogium record (SS 1870) reads "Literarhistorische Ubersicht zum griechischen Drama an Beispielen: Aeschylos Agamemnon und Choephoren; Sophokles Elektra; Euripides Bacchen und Medea." The 1874 SS version taught at the university may have been a seminar or lecture (no distinction is made in the record); the courses from 1877/78 (WS) and 1878 (SS) bear the same title as the 1869 lecture course, but are n o w announced as being in "seminar" format. H o w the same set of notes could serve these diverse contexts is anything but clear, which takes us some w a y towards understanding w h y Nietzsche's lecture notes are as chaotic as they often are, as the editors also observe (2.1:vii), but no closer to understanding the genesis of these materials. Sticking to our example, Nietzsche's notes start off with a short preamble that concludes with a general outline in seven parts. As with other lectures (e.g., those on rhythm and meter), Nietzsche's original core lectures are the most organized and articulated of the lot, while later accretions lose sight of these initial contours. In the present case, the numeration of the outline is followed for thirty pages, but then the order breaks d o w n with "Zus/itze" (supplements) assigned b y Bornmann to "1872/ 1874" (pp. 30-32). The sequence resumes, or rather backtracks, with "Trilogie" (pp. 3234), then with a relatively short section, "<Zu den Choephoren> "6 (pp. 34--44), which embraces several subheadings ("<Zu den Choephoren>, .... Die Choephoren. Betrachtungen ~iber den Kiinstlerischen Stil des Aischylos," "Ueber die Choephoren des ~schylus. mit der gr6t~ten Theaterwirkung'), and finally gives over to "<Kommentar zu den Choephoren> [1869-74]" (pp. 45-104), a (generally) lemmatic, sequential and wideranging commentary on the play. From this somewhat typical example one gets a rough sense of what Nietzsche's lectures must for the most part have been like: general scholarly and philological discussion of overarching issues, obeying a crisply delineated, methodical order (here guided, interestingly, by the order of topics typically listed in Alexandrian argumenta but absent from the codices of this play; Nietzsche's method thus represents something of a speculative recreation of, and inquiry into, Hellenistic philology and its habits of reading), 7 with a brief interlude on aesthetic 5. 6. 7. Cf. his letter to Rohde of 30 April 1870: "I've also told them [his Pddagogium-level students] more than one ordinarily gets to hear about in school" (KGB 2.1:119, no. 76). Here and in the following angle brackets mark editorial insertions. "Faruns muff das Ziel sein, den Standpunkt der Alexandriner wieder zu gewinnen" ("For us the Review Articles 413 questions of Nietzsche's own making, was followed by a blow-by-blow commentary in the best tradition of m o d e m textual philology. And if Nietzsche's notes are any indication, he will have diverged from his magisterial lecturing in the grand German style in only one respect: he got beyond the prologue of the drama, and indeed covered the whole of the play! The question is, of course, what kind of indication Nietzsche's lecture notes (or rather, notebooks) can be said to represent, and h o w closely these mapped onto his actual practice. New Perspectives The Choephori notes are typical of Nietzsche's lecture notebooks in one further respect. As he drifts away from his outline, his thoughts become more ambitious and less tidy. The digression on aesthetic questions mentioned above is a case in point. It is in these moments that another side of Nietzsche reveals itself, less the teacher than the writer, or perhaps just the dreamer. At one point in the middle of this segment on "Wirkung," a list of topics in staccato form appears suddenly and vertically on the page: "Die Gliederung der Trag6die. / Die Tetralogie / Die Bedeutung des Chors. / Religion des Aeschylus. / Die Rollenverteilung. / Das Theater. / Leben des Aeschylus" (p. 38). All pretence to coherence with the previous game-plan is gone here. And if we seem to be in the midst of a n e w outline, we are---only n o w it seems that we are reading the table of contents of a book in the making, as the next entry further suggests: "Einleitung: Versuch, den/ischyleischen Kunststil, im Vergleich mit Soph. u. Eurip. nachzuweisen." What appeared over the past few pages as section headings to a particularly fascinating interlude n o w have the feel of competing book titles that Nietzsche is trying on for size, as much for their look as for anything else ("Die Choephoren. Betrachtungen ~iber den K/.instlerischen Stil des Aischylos," p. 35; "Ueber die Choephoren des Aschylus. mit der gr6t~ten Theaterwirkung," p. 36s; this casting about for titles is typical of Nietzsche's notebooks), 9 while possibly including attempts at a visualization of the very name of Aeschylus, whose orthography wanders here and there (in a w a y that is typical for German scholarship of the period). And suddenly we remember that we are (perhaps) somewhere between 1869 and 1872, at a time when Nietzsche was brewing the broth that w o u l d eventually turn out as The Birth of Tragedy, and w o u l d simultaneously seal his fate as a classical scholar. In this interlude Nietzsche is plainly exploring the sensibilities of Aeschylus the artist and contrasting 8. 9. goal has to be regaining the vantage-point of the Alexandrians," p. 29)--this, in line with his revival of Wolfian philology, as announced in his inaugural lecture on Homer (1869) and visibly put to work elsewhere in his writings. Nietzsche will break with this procedure in a few pages, however (see below). The point is that these are mutually exclusive titles that look in different directions rather than being subordinated to a unified lecture plan. Contrast earlier lecture headings, e.g., "I. Der Inhalt der Choephoren" (p. 5), "Zusammensetzung der Chors" (p. 21). Nietzsche could of course be exploring alternative lecture directions, starting off in each case from scratch. As in the lectures on rhythm, which evolve into a series of never completed book-projects. Cf. KGW 2.3:323 and 331, where in the midst of a contemplated book entitled "Rhythmische Untersuchungen von Friedrich Nietzsche" we find a number of alternative plans and titles sketched out. This often telling obsession with imagined (or imaginary) titles and outlines continued throughout Nietzsche's life, and the subject would be worth a study of its own. 414 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 them in his mind with those of the two other great tragedians. He is groping after something like an Aeschylean "uncanny," a dramaturgy of gloom and terror---one that is manifestly unclassical (all this is in line, at least superficially, with The Birth of Tragedy). 1~ Compare the following note: Ueber die Choephoren des Aschylus. mit der griJflten Theaterwirkung. Das k~instlerische Problem der Mittelstellung. Naivitfit ihrer Li~sung. Kein Gewissensconyqikt. Nichts Hamletisches. 2. Die Figuren u. Bilder. Keine Individuen, sondern Typen, Scenenweise 3. Reihenfolge der Scenen. Das U n h e i m I i c h e festgehalten, d. triiber, lurchstare, Grab, 11 der schwarze Trauerzug, abendlich, Ahnung des Todes u. der Rache, Trfiume, qbo~'co~t 6~ "r ohne jeden Punkt, List. Chthonisch ist das Drama ~o ' Ep~t~ X0<6wE> Die Scenen streng symmetrisch. Das Drama ohne Perspektive. Scene um Scene wirdgleichbehandelt. A l l e S c e n e n g l e i c h n a h e u n d a u s f ~ i h r l i c h . . [...] Orest wird wahnsinnig, das unheimliche grojqe Tuch als Hintergrund. Das Tuch vielleicht mit F a c k e l n beleuchtet. (Die Soph. Electra ist ganz morgendlich ) (p. 36; Nietzsche's emphasis). On the Choephori of Aeschylus. with the greatest theatrical effect. The artistic problem of the middle position [in the trilogy]. Naivet6 of its solution. No agony of conscience. Nothing Hamlet-like. 2. Figures and images. No individuals, only types, generic scenes. 3. Sequence of the scenes. The uncanny [is] firmly maintained, the gloomy, frightening tomb, the black dirge procession, nighttime, presentiment of death and revenge, dreams, q~o~z0~t 5~ ~ pointlessly so, intrigue. The drama is chthonic 0~ ' Ep~t~ X0<6vtE>. The scenes rigorously symmetrical. The drama lacks perspective. Scene after scene is treated in the same way. . 10. Cf. p. 38 on Aeschylus' "life" and "style"; also p. 35; and cf. BT w167 on the deeper and darker metaphysical attractions that lurk in the background of Aeschylean drama, "the astounding depth of [...] terror" (it is Titanic, anti-Olympian, and literally chthonic: Tartarean), that not even Aeschylus' interpretation of Greek myth can fully "exhaust." A closer reading of BT would want to query the supposed "anti-classicism" of Nietzsche in this work and elsewhere, for starters by querying its premise---namely, its simplification of the phenomenon of "classicism" itself, as though it were all sweetness and light. One would have to look no further than to the founders of German classicism, e.g., Winckelmann, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Karl Philipp Moritz. 11. Corrected, "furchtsam," would have to read "furchtsam<e>" (or "furchtsam<.>"). "Trtiber" likewise should have read "trabe" to be grammatical. Nietzsche seems to have been nodding here, as he frequently does in his no doubt hastily composed notes. Presumably, the editorial decision to represent Nietzsche's ms., warts and all (not without some inconsistency: the Greek in two sentences away is editorially supplemented, while supplements to the Review Articles 415 All the scenes are equally near and detailed. [..3 Orestes goes mad, the eery [unheimliche] large cloth as background. The cloth perhaps illuminated with torches. (The Soph[oclean] Electra is entirely matutinal). Nietzsche's lectures from the time are filled with such intensely compressed moments, which make one want to go back over the rest to look for the clues to their existence in even the least promising stretches of text. And as a rule, Nietzsche's career can be traced through the shape of his lecture notes. The notes typically begin in sober philological fashion, but then modulate quickly into envisioned publications, while becoming more imaginative and in places fantastical. The publications that do result, by contrast, tend to emulate the tone of the initial classroom lectures: they may turn on provocative theses, but they are comparatively restrained and in their form utterly conventional. It is no wonder that the majority of Nietzsche's ideas never saw the light of day. His ideas went well beyond the generic constraints of the contemporary research publication. His notebooks, the lecture notebooks included, were the place where he toyed with new imaginary possibilities. They show his mind at work as he is playing with, and not only within, the limits of accepted scholarly practice. To judge Nietzsche by his published scholarship alone would be to gain an impoverished impression of his mind at the time. But the reverse is true as well: the radical elements of his publications, which exist but are subdued, emerge clearly only against the background of his notebook experimentations. The question, put simply, is whether notebooks contain lecture notes or notes of another kind. The answer may be anything but simple. Nietzsche was, if nothing else, a very ambitious young scholar of seemingly unbounded energy, in addition to being a restless innovator and a passionate writer. Every problem he turned to became a project ("eine gr~J3ere Aufgabe") and a potential publication (whether an in-depth substantive article or a short monographic essay--a distinction that means more to us than it did to him, though this was partly characteristic of the scholarship of his age). And although it would be tempting to assert but impossible to establish whether Nietzsche imagined--and abandoned--more projects than any other scholar of his generation, the list of his never finished achievements is staggering. But this also poses a problem for understanding the notebooks. His notes to "<Einleitung in das Studium der platonischen Dialoge>," from 1871/72, appear (like all the volumes in question) in a volume entitled "Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen." The designation may be true but it also seems false, or inapt. One h u n d r e d and fortyeight printed pages into this notebook, which had proceeded dialogue by dialogue but in no obvious order, there comes a full page break, then we read: "Im ersten Capitel mit den Probl. allgemein bekannt gemacht, auf m e i n e These hingewiesen. Um das L e b e n recht zu verstehen, massen wir ein p s y c h o I o g . Gesammtbild als Regulativ haben" ("In the first chapter [one has been] made generally aware of the probl[ems, and] referred to my thesis. In order to understand [Plato's] life correctly we need a comprehensive psycholog[ical] image [of the philosopher] as a regulative [construction]"; Nietzsche's emphasis). Blank space follows, then comes, centered, Capitel II. Platons Philosophie als HauptzeugniJ3 far den Menschen Plato [Abriss der Philosophie Platon's.] 416 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 Chapter II. Plato's P h i l o s o p h y as Main Evidence for Plato the M a n [Outline of Plato's Philosophy.] More notes resume, n o w i n d e e d of a m o r e general and fascinating nature. Nietzsche here is plying his t r a d e m a r k philology-by-Persi~nlichkeit, w h i c h h e applied with brilliant success to Theognis (or m o r e correctly, to Theognis' final redactor), to Democritus, to the H o m e r i c Question, and (later on) to the Presocratics. "Gesamtbild als Regulativ" pretty m u c h sums u p the gist of this philological method, w h i c h is heuristic, selfconstraining, and fanciful at once. 12 But the question remains: Do Nietzsche's notes on Plato represent lecture notes or an envisaged publication project? A n d h o w d o these t w o activities relate to each other? 13 Of course, one big question not answered b y the notes is h o w they w e r e actually u s e d in the classroom. For the reasons just mentioned, it m i g h t be h a z a r d o u s to try to d e d u c e too m u c h about Nietzsche's teaching style f r o m his notebooks. On the other hand, it w o u l d be w r o n g to d e n y any connection. Nietzsche frequently prefaces his lectures with large, imaginative invitations to his hearers. His notes sometimes p u r s u e these perspectives (as in the case of the Choephori). It is h a r d to believe that Nietzsche denied himself or his students the pleasures of the intellectual chase in the classroom. But there is more. Nietzsche's flights of imagination are for the m o s t part not into the E m p y r e a n heights of the Classics. H e was in w a y s a counter-classical thinker, or rather, and more simply, a counter-thinker, a lover of h e t e r o d o x y ; he despised the mecha- German are found, for example, on pp. 20, 21 and 22, etc.), is to be discussed in the "Nachbericht," with corrections and uncertainties flagged in the "ApparatbKnde." The editors of BAW were more interventionist in their presentation of Nietzsche's notebooks, and made generous use of supplemental brackets throughout, with the welcome result that one can judge the text at a glance: the presence or absence of the editor's hand is immediately to be felt. 12. As Glenn Most reminds me, it would take five decades and another philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, to complete this project of rhyming Plato the man with Plato's philosophy, in his final and in many ways his life-work, Platon, 2 vols., 2nd ed., 1920; v. 1: Leben und Werke. With one important difference: as Wilamowitz wrote to Jaeger, "Sie wissen also, dass ich Platon den Menschen suche, nicht den Philosophen," whereby he meant to investigate Plato's humane philosophy, whose "Hauptziel," as he saw it, was "die Seele des Menschen zu ihrem Heile zu fiihren" (see generally Mansfeld's excellent article on "Wilamowitz' Ciceronian Philosophy," 1985; esp. 179, 188, 217). Nietzsche, by contrast, sought to rhyme the whole of Platonic philosophy with the mind of Plato within a single psychological portrait, through a consideration of that mind's deepest-seated "drives." This tendency would issue in positions like those famously expressed in Beyond Good and Evil w167 but these in turn merely restate his earlier views of the same problem. See generally the 1873 essay, "Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen" and the Democritea from 1867--68, in BAW 3 and4. 13. Not to be discounted is the possibility that he envisaged, or at least fantasized, publishing his lecture notes, as with the "Einleitung in die Trag6die des Sophocles" (the official lecture title), which is prefaced in the present edition by a facsimile of Nietzsche's decorative title page, which reads, in a script as flamboyant as its projected title, "AFdETATPE. Zur Geschichte der griechischen Tragoedie. Vorlesungen von Friedrich Nietzsche" (KGW 2.3: 1-3). A separate outline of a never executed plan in seventeen sections, "Einleitung zum Oedipus rex," appears sketched out at the tail end of the notes (p. 57). It is obviously connected, but exactly how? Review Articles 417 nized assumptions of the professional scholar, and he aspired to a different kind of philology, what he called, long before Wilamowitz flung the epithet at him as an insult, a "philology of the future. "14 Without tracing out the contours of that outsized project here we can note that one of its elements, indeed one of the techniques at Nietzsche's disposal and used for opening up vistas onto the as yet invisible future or possible futures of the study of the classics, was to scandalize his audience, to unseat their expectations and in this w a y to bring them to think more critically about what they knew and the w a y they were supposed to know it--in a word, about their disciplinary formation. This is the devilish side of Nietzsche that occasionally makes itself heard in the Nachlass and in correspondence from the time, but that is everywhere to be felt once you scratch beneath the surface of his writings. Thus, he could proudly write to his mentor Friedrich Ritschl that in the spring of 1869, in his first semester at Basel he was "infecting" his pupils in the Piidagogium with "philosophy" (he was teaching Plato's Phaedo at the time). 15 The same conspiratorial glee is evident in another letter, this time from 7 June of 1871, where he discloses to Erwin Rohde, "I am n o w giving my lecture, 'Einleitung und Encyclopadie', to the amazement of my audience, who can scarcely recognize themselves in the picture of the ideal philologist that I am sketching. "16 Nietzsche clearly enjoyed shocking his students out of their complacency, whether by stretching the customary boundaries of philology to include philosophy (his habitual instinct), or by warning his students, in the same lecture series, that in order to be complete classicists what they first had to become was completely "modern"; that in order to understand antiquity they first had to acquaint themselves with modern thought, by consuming heavy doses of Winckelmann, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Kant, and in this w a y develop their receptive and "aesthetic" faculties (their "Sch~nheitstrieb"); that they had, in other words, to cultivate anachronism, to become thoroughly familiar with a characteristically modern notion of "das Klassische," before being able to detect it in the ancients; only so, only once they had learned to "feel the differences" between past and present (or between what they knew and the w a y they knew it) could they embark on the project of imaginative investment and immersion ("Hineinleben') in the ancient world. H o w anyone was supposed to do all of that without stumbling into a painful performative contradiction is unclear. But what is clear is that these paradoxes were the daily bread of Nietzsche's thinking, which must have found its w a y into his teaching on more than one occasion. The Choephori lectures again help establish this point and allow us to extrapolate some of what Nietzsche's procedure in the "Encyclop/idie" course must have been like. In a short passage from these earlier notes Nietzsche actually scripts in his theatrical cues, in what appears to be an introductory segment to a lecture. The passage is worth citing in toto, so rare, informative, and unusual a glimpse into Nietzsche's teaching style in the classroom, whether real or imagined by himself, does it provide: 17 14. Letter of 2 June 1868 to Paul Deussen (KGB 1.2: 284, no. 573), where the phrase is used with reference to Jacob Bemays, "the most brilliant representative of a philology of the future [einer Philologie der Zukunft] (i.e., the next generation after Ritschl, Haupt, Lehrs, Bergk, Mommsen, etc.)." 15. 10 May 1869 (KGB 2.1:7, no. 3). 16. KGB 2.1:197, no. 135. 17. There are, to be sure, reports by his former students (see Gutzwiller 1951 and Gilman, ed. 1981), but these, produced retrospectively and usually after his psychic collapse, must be used with care. 418 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 Niemand unter uns hat die Orestie gesehen, niemand geh~rt: es ist ein m~ihsames E r r a t h e n der Dinge niJthig, die, bei der Auffahrung, leicht u. einfach sind. Hier ein Versuch, sie als w i r k l i c h zu betrachten: was ich da geschaut habe, erzf&le ich. Natfirlich wird vieles Phantasterei sein. Aber erst massen wir eine W i r k u n g haben, von ihr aus k~nnen wir eine Meinung vom Kiinstler bekommen. Ich will nicht als Antiker im Theater sitzen, sondern als Moderner: meine Beobachtungen m~gen kleinlich sein erst muJ~ ich reich iiber alles wundern, um nachher alles zu begreifen. Ich habe einen bestimmten Eindruck yon den Choephoren u. den will ich schildern. Aber was geht uns, werdet ihr sagen, mein Eindruck an? Warum verweise ich euch nicht auf den eurigen? Aufs Werk?--Ein Eindruck ist etwas Seltnes. Um ihn zu gewinnen, ist so viel hinzu zu addiren, was nicht jeder will und kann. Man sollte nicht iiber Gedichte reden, wie Sokrates im Protagoras sagt. Aber ich will einmal untersuchen, was dieser Tr i e b e i g e n t l i c h w e r t h i s t . A n einem Beispiele. Resultat: im Einzelnen werdet ihr Recht behalten: aber im Ganzen ist es eine Frechheit. Wie wenig ist dort zu erkennen, wo das Erkennen erst anffingt werthvoll zu sein! Das kann unmiJglich Ziel einer Wissenschaft sein! Kritik der Conjekturalkritik. No one among us has seen the Oresteia; no one has heard it: an elaborate and backbreaking guesswork is required to understand things that would have been simple and easy [to follow] at the performance. Here goes one attempt to view things as real: I will tell you what I saw there. Naturally, much of this will be sheer fantasy. But we need to experience an effect; once we have that we can form an opinion about the artist. I want to sit in the theater not as an ancient but as a modem: my observations may well be pedantic; [but] at first I have to wonder at everything so as to comprehend it all afterward. I have a certain impression of the Choephori and this is what I want to describe. But what does it matter to us, you will say, what my impression is? Why don't I appeal to yours? Or to the work?--An impression is something rare. To attain it one has to add so much which not everyone is able and willing to do. One shouldn't talk about poems, as Socrates says in the Protagoras. But I want to investigate for once what this impulse ["Trieb;" viz., to discuss poetry, especially Greek poetry] is really worth. Through one example [sc., the Choephori]. Result: you students will be proved right in the particulars [if you don't follow my approach]: but on the whole, it [sc., the standard approach] is an act of insolence. H o w little there is to know at that point where knowledge first starts to be of value! That cannot possibly be the goal of a science! Critique of conjectural criticism) 8 (KGW 2.2:34-35) 18. The brackets represent my best guess as to Nietzsche's meaning. The alternatives ("[if you do follow my approach]...[my approach]") seem less likely given the sequel ("How little there is to know...!," etc.), but are equally plausible when taken independently of the sequel. Review Articles 419 The lecture not only gives us a glimpse of Nietzsche's lecture style, it shows a total coherence between his proposed "philology of the future" and whatever he wanted to put into practice. 19 However else we may describe it, Nietzsche's philology of the future is a skeptical philology in the sense of being a self-doubting practice; it puts to the test the certainties of philological tradition and exacerbates, even plays upon, its inbred tradition of uncertainty--to which Nietzsche responds, here, with his "critique of criticism." The lectures and notebooks on rhythm and meter (1870-71) are founded on such a critique. The premise and conclusion of these rarely analyzed notes on the rhythm of the Greek language is the incommensurability of ancient and m o d e m sensibilities to time. What the notebooks on rhythm purport to give is "a history of sensations" and especially of the sense of time. This history Nietzsche finds to be irrecuperable inasmuch as the m o d e m sensibility to dynamic rhythm, based on accentual measures and the rhythmical ictus (intensio vocis), is constitutionally unfit to grasp the products of the ancient sense of time, which he argues are quantitative and proportional in their architectonics (and thus totally lacking the ictus as a marker of rhythm). Once again, Nietzsche is exploring the paradoxes of classical philology, and so his theory is as much a rneta-critical one as it is a positive (albeit skeptical) contribution to the history of an ancient field. At stake in the background to the essays are theoretical reflections on temporality, history, and sensation, as well as the relation between force and force's limits. These inquiries flow directly into The Birth of Tragedy, into Nietzsche's general conceptions of historiographical and recuperative writing (evident most prominently in a text like the famous third essay of Human, All Too Human, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History"), and eventually into the late doctrine of "the will to power." But they do so in unexpected ways. It was Nietzsche's original intention to include in The Birth of Tragedy a section devoted to rhythm; in its place, we find a few stray comments on rhythm (mainly in connection with Apollo), but also implicitly a wholesale and covert adaptation of Nietzsche's thesis from the lecture notes, which profoundly throws into doubt any straightforward reading of the later work (for instance, any reading which wishes to view the Dionysian as a valorized physiological or metaphysical condition, and not as an allegory for a dubious idealism retrojected from the present onto antiquity). This is hardly the only instance in which Nietzsche's early notes undermine the narrative premises of The Birth of Tragedy. To take up one example in this connection: a problem 19. Note how Nietzsche has contravened his own earlier stated purpose, which was to reconstruct tragedy from the perspective of the Alexandrians (see above, p. 412, n. 7). The program here is as paradoxical as that of the "Encyclopedia." On the other hand, the approximation of tragedy's first audience through imaginative Hineinleben, a standard element of nineteenth-century German philology, from Wolf to Hermann, Boeckh, and on, is written into the problem of textual criticism from the start. Cf. ibid., p. 30, where the aim of conjectural criticism, Nietzsche writes, is "to establish what is corrupt, unintelligible, ungrammatical, unmetrical, illogical, unaesthetic," and to "cure the damage." All this necessarily entails a "subjective element": "to see the possibilities is a matter of an imagination that is soaked in the language and usages of the poet, in his intuitions." In this light, what I have been calling the aesthetic "interlude" in the Choephori lectures seems less of an interlude perhaps and more of a natural progression--albeit of an originally more complex and evidently unstable position. Here, Nietzsche has pushed the implicit anachronism of philological hermeneutics out into the open. 420 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 raised explicitly by the notes and sub rosa in The Birth of Tragedy is that of periodization, namely the historical characterization of Greek Dionysian rhythms. Although Nietzsche gives no absolute dates for the incipit of the Dionysian rhythms in the notes, he does date them in a relative way, and this is revealing. In the first notebook, he associates them with early cultic practices (2.3:112-13). In the final notebook, the same rhythms, notable for their exploitation of rhythmic changes and "dissonances in timemeasures" (329), are more closely dated. They appear to be a later, and in any case post-quantitative, development in musical sensibility: Das antike Musikwesen ist zu reconstruiren: der mimische Tanz, die &p~tov~(x, der ~n)0~t6~. Wesentliche Unterschiede in der sog. Melodie, im Rh. u. auch im Tanze bei den Neueren. Der Ton wirkt urspriinglich (bei der kitharod. Musik) im Sinne eines Zeitmessers. Es ist das Wesen der T o n I e i t e r n aufzudecken (schfirfstes Gefiihl fiir die H~henproportionen). Weshalb die Griechen die ViertelstiJne verwenden konnten ? Die Harmonie war bei ihnen nicht in das Reich der Symbolik gezogen. Herstellung der antiken Symbolik. Die dionysischen Neuerungen in Tonart, in Rhythmus (die The nature of ancient music must be reconstructed: the mimetic dance, harmonia [viz., musical scales], rhythmos. Essential differences in so-called "melody," in rhythm, and also in dancing, in the practices of the moderns. Originally (in citharodic music), the note functions as a measure of time. The nature of the scales needs to be discovered (acutest feeling for proportions of height [viz., of intervals]). 2~ Why could the Greeks deploy the quarter-tones? Harm o n y was not drawn into the realm of the symbolic for them. Establishment of the classical symbolics. The Dionysian innovations in tonality, in rhythm (alogia?) (322; emphasis of "scales" in original). Dionysianism, an "innovation" (Neuerung)? The chronology is elusive, or better yet, symbolic. Presumably, the cults mentioned earlier are archaic and post-Homeric, and yet the aesthetic system that the Dionysian "innovations" act against is patently quantitative and classical. For the same reason, the Dionysian innovations, said to be "in tonality," are likely to be just of tonality, as contrasted with the essentially temporal character of the classical note and its corresponding scales (Tonleitern), which, due to their peculiar restrictions, are not "tonal" in the modern or relatively more modern and "Dionysian" sense of the word. The Dionysian phenomenon emerges against the backdrop of the classical order of things, as its corruption. That it does represent this very change, or its incipient moment, is corroborated by a passage from The Birth of Tragedy where Nietzsche comes at the problem once again. The correspondence between the two texts, unexpected as it is, is astonishing. There, Nietzsche is concerned to underscore the innovative character of the Dionysian 20. That is, of "Tonh~he" (differences in pitch and in relative position on a scale), viz., of the "H~henverhfiltnisse der TiJne," conceived as vertical/spatial "Raumdifferenzen" (p. 321), and ultimately as horizontal/linear intervals of time in sound ("Zeitriiume'). Nietzsche's understanding is influenced by the fourth-century musicologist, Aristoxenus of Tarentum (cf. Elementa Harmonica 2.15), whose theory of rhythm he is claiming to reconstruct in these notes. Review Articles 421 reveries, wherein one is reminded that "pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us": Der Gesang und die Gebfirdensprache solcher zwiefach gestimmter Schwffrmer war far die homerisch-griechische Welt etwas Neues und Unerhi~rtes: und insbesondere erregte ihr die dionysische M u s i k Schrecken und Grausen. Wenn die Musik scheinbar bereits als eine apollinische Kunst bekannt war, so war sie dies doch nur, genau genommen, als Wellenschlag des Rhythmus, dessen bildnerische Kraft zur Darstellung apollinischer Zustfinde entwickelt wurde. Die Musik des Apollo war dorische Architektonik in TiJnen, aber in nur angedeuteten T~nen, wie sie der Kithara zu eigen sind. Behutsam ist gerade das Element, als unapollinisch, ferngehalten, das den Charakter der dionysischen Musik und damit der Musik ~iberhaupt ausmacht, die erschatternde Gewalt des Tones, der einheitliche Strom des Melos und die durchaus unvergleichliche Welt der Harmonie. (KGW 3.1:29) The song and pantomime of such dually-minded revelers was something new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Greek world; and the Dionysian music in particular excited awe and terror. If music, as it would seem, had been known previously as an Apollinian art, it was so, strictly speaking, only as the wave beat of rhythm, whose formative power was developed for the representation of Apollinian states. The music of Apollo was Doric architectonics in tones, but in tones that were merely suggestive, such as those of the cithara. The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is carefully excluded as un-Apollinian--namely the emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of the melody, and the utterly incomparable world of harmony. (BT w trans. Kaufmann; all but first emphasis added) The parallels between the two accounts of change are remarkably close. Again, the innovations appear to take place in a post-Homeric but still archaic Greek world; yet the aesthetic regime that is overturned is the Apollinian, classical, and (quite plainly) quantitative system of rhythmic proportions. And again, it is tonality, or vocality, that paves the way for change. 21 Stately proportions yield to dynamic, "pathological" movements. Temporally defined rhythm yields to "music" in a n e w and unheard-of sense of the word, connected n o w with melodic and harmonic structures. That sense is a thoroughly familiar one, at least to Nietzsche's contemporary world. 22 From a musicological perspective, Dionysianism plainly appears to be a postclassical phenomenon, if not in historical time, then surely in tendency. Can Dionysianism possibly be associated with the decline of classical sensibilities, that is to say, with 21. See KGW 2.3:11 ("Einleitung in die Trag6die des Sophocles" [SS 1870]) for the contrast between the "lawful architectonic character of music" ("Apollinian") versus "the pure musicality, indeed pathologicalness, of the tone" or "note" ("Dionysian"). 22. Cf. also KGW 2.2:158-59, lecture notes on "The Greek Lyric Poets," here the section on the Greek dithyrambists. What this latter historical account establishes is that any innovations that bring the dithyramb to the realm of alogia in the ecstatic sense can only refer to the degenerate phase of the dithyramb. And it is only in this phase that Dionysianism becomes recognizably palpable. 422 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 the advent of the modern sensibility, whether as its prelude or its harbinger? The notebooks on rhythm and The Birth of Tragedy itself suggest that it can. The progression described in both is towards music in a thoroughly and unmistakably modern sense. It captures the moment when "the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony [in Rhythmik, Dynamik und Harmonie]" (BT w emphasis added; trans, rood.). And these last, being the principal ingredients of the modern sensibility to time, are for Nietzsche thoroughly out of place in any account of Greek quantiative rhythmics, which represents the classical sense of time. Nietzsche knows very well the difference between "Greek music as compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us" (BT w which is to say, "the utterly incomparable world of harmony" (BT w Hence, "The more we draw on modern music for understanding [Greek] metrics, the further we estrange ourselves from the reality of metrics in antiquity" (letter to Ritschl of 30 December 1870; KGB 2.1:173, no. 117; cf. KGW 2.3:399). Nietzsche's account of Dionysian music in The Birth of Tragedy is an anachronism, and self-advertisingly so. Surely the hope expressed in that work for a return adfontes and to a musical spirit that could be reclaimed today as "ours" is overshadowed by the very sorts of impossibility that Nietzsche is demonstrating in his lectures on rhythm at the very moment he is composing his first book. Similar points are made in the "Encyclopedia of Classical Philology," which contains further parallels to and further dramatic reversals of the narrative surface of The Birth of Tragedy. The task of sorting out all of this material is immense. One final example will have to suffice to bring the point home. In two intercalated pages from the "Encyclopedia" notes, wrongly numbered by the editors as a footnote (414--16 n. 37; see figs. 1-3), in which Nietzsche details the genesis and transformations of the Greek gods, we read at one point: Die GiJtterwelt der SchiJnheit erzeugt zu ihrer Ergf&zung die chthonischen Gottheiten. Diese, an sich gestaltoser u. dem Begriff verwandter, siegen immer mehr u. verfliichtigen die ganze olymp. Welt saint den Heroen zu Symbolen i h r e r Geheimnisse. The divine world of beauty [viz., Olympus] gives birth to the chthonic divinities [viz., the "horrible" ["schrecklich'] world of "Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Hermes, Hecate, and the Erinyes," and "then Dionysus," p. 413] as its own supplement. These latter, more formless in themselves ["an sich'] and closer to the Concept, increasingly gain the upper hand and [then] cause the whole Olympian world to vanish together with the heroes, as symbols of their [sc., the chthonic gods' own] secrets. What is so fascinating about this entry, not available in the earlier edition (GA, v. 17), is the reversed genealogy it introduces into Nietzsche's proposed evolutionary scheme, rupturing it from within: the striking claim about the invention--the aesthetic crea t i o n - o f the dark chthonic divinities (among w h o m the younger god Dionysus figures with increasing prominence) out of the brighter Olympian world, the origination of the mysteries and of a realm beyond (Jenseits), not to mention ecstatic orgies, initially absent from the scene (p. 413)--in short, the invention of the Dionysian godhead out of an Apollinian framework. The implications for The Birth of Tragedy are immense, and too great to be discussed here. Either we have to say that Nietzsche suddenly changed Review Articles 423 Fig. 1: Ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-416 n. 37 (from Lecture w 19, "Uber Religion und Mythologie der Alten," of Encyclopfidie der klassischen Philologie und Einleitung in das Studium derselben [1871/1873-74 (?)]. The numerations in the top right corners of the first two pages ("115" and "116," "117" and "118") are archival paginations, the second series replacing the first. Not shown is archival page 113/114, the preceding, and sparsely filled, right-hand page, which contains the material printed as "n. 36" and "n. 38" in KGW 2.3:414 and 416. Signature no. GSA 71/87. Photo: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar. his mind about the birth of Greek mythology and about the primacy or parity of Apollo and Dionysus; or we can look for clues to corroborate this reversal in The Birth of Tragedy itself. A third possibility, not precluded by the second, is that Nietzsche was an opportunist in his arguments, which he could adjust and turn around at will. If so, then further revisions in our interpretations of his writings are called for. What the lectures also add is a glimpse into the scholarly background to Nietzsche's first and 424 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 Fig. 2: Ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-16, n. 37 (cont.). Signature no. GSA 71/87. Photo: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar. fatal b o o k for in both places he is manipulating paradigms familiar from K. O. Miiller, Preller, Welcker, and others (see also Reibnitz 1992). The point again is not only that Nietzsche's philological notebooks throw an interesting light on his development as a thinker. They throw up fundamental questions about how we are to understand what has been--perhaps all too naively--received as his philosophical thinking beyond philology. Plainly, the philological notebooks, much of which have been available for decades, can no longer be considered optional reading. These are just a few of the highlights from the philologica in the KGW edition. No mention has been made of the lectures on the "Preplatonic" (not: "Presocratic") philosophers (the distinction ought to flag our attention), which contains valuable discussions not only of Heraclitus and Parmenides, but of Leucippus and Democritus, two of Review Articles 425 Fig. 3: Top third of ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-16, n. 37 (cont.). Signature no. Photo: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar. the most neglected Preplatonic philosophers in the scholarship on Nietzsche's thought at any point in his career (all the more remarkably, given that Nietzsche filled copious notebooks between 1867 and 1869 in an attempt to reconstruct the lineaments of the Democritean corpus, and given the importance of atomism to his subsequent philosophical reflections, right down to his final jottings). Merely mentioned, above, were the titles pertaining to Hesiod, which have a significant bearing on the later writings, both the Aryanized treatment of Prometheus in BT w (which has provoked more silence than discussion, but which needs to be read against the background of Nietzsche's general knowledge of Hesiod's retelling of the myth; see esp. KGW 2.2:350-72, which nicely complements notes in KSA 7 and in BAW 5) and the puzzling interlude in GM I:11 (1887), which repeats verbatim some of the earlier philologica. The treatment of the Semitic foundations of Greek worship (KGW 2.5:377--83) and the treatment of Theognis (ibid., 2.1) are equally relevant here. The lectures on classical rhetoric (KGW 2.5) have, to be sure, attracted notice of late. The phenomenon is a notable instance of the selective appropriation of Nietzsche's philology, a willingness to reclaim his "pre-critical" thought when it is convenient to do so (e.g., where his lectures seem to match the linguistic turn of poststructuralist literary theory), but only under these conditions. 23 At any rate, the notebooks on rhetoric are here published in a definitive form 24 and will be indispensable to a reassessment of this side of Nietzsche's activities (to which the studies on Latin Grammar are no less relevant). Each of these early lectures enlarges our view of Nietzsche's classical imagination, throwing light on it from unexpected angles. We can watch as Nietzsche makes inroads into the territories that will become familiar from The Birth of Tragedy and the later writings. But more importantly, what we discover are the ways in which Nietzsche's endlessly restless thought is never content to be grasped still; it does not permit reductions of itself. Not only do the lecture notes almost without fail stand in the w a y of the apparent "dogmas" of the published writings in various ways (not least of all in their very tentativeness); they teach us how the published writings stand, as it 23. See Porter 1993; Most 1994. 24. See Bierl and Calder 1992. 426 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 were, in their own way, how they are diffractive lenses rather than clear views on a final position that can only reductively be labeled "Nietzsche's." In a word, Nietzsche's early notebook activity bears an uncanny resemblance to the aphoristic and kaleidoscopic writings of the "mature" Nietzsche, while simultaneously calling into question the interpretive reductions of that later material that have come to be the accepted academic orthodoxies about him. Taking the full measure of the philologica also reminds us that the endless and fruitless debates over the relative merits of his Nachlass and the published writings, triggered by the heated politics surrounding the editions of The Will to Power, rests on the illegitimate assumption that Nietzsche's writings are at any time "finished." Nietzsche's most polished writings are fragmentary and also restless, "a mobile army of metaphors" (itself a self-defeating metaphor). 25 And so, too, reading the fragmentary and ever-changing notebooks of the early Nietzsche is a useful training in discovering new modes of reading Nietzsche's writings generally, as it were the philology of Nietzsche: from them, we can learn to listen for the nuances of his shifting voices, his theatrics and even histrionics; his mimickry, his tentativeness, his opportunism; and above all his untiring and ferocious capacity to wield the jagged blade of criticism against himself. A revised view of the whole corpus of Nietzsche's thought is thus made obligatory by an attentive reading of the philologica. Not that such a revision wouldn't be possible in the absence of the philologica: it would be. But ingrained habits of reading are difficult to throw off, and there can be no greater incentive to doing so than being confronted with so much strangeness in the midst of so much apparent familiarity--and with so much familiarity in the midst of so much apparent strangeness: for the philological notebooks, while in some respects presenting challenges to later Nietzscheanisms, are in other respects uncanny anticipations of Nietzche's later argumentative styles. Tapping into these moments of strangeness and unpacking their fullest implications for Nietzsche's views of philology and philosophy, art and science, and the culture of modernity (his initial and never-ending concerns), are the uncharted territories of future Nietzsche scholarship. Some Final Question Marks This edition of Nietzsche's lectures and published philologica is a good one, and all in all better (especially, more complete) than its earliest predecessor, vols. 17-19 of the Kr6ner edition (GA) from 1910-13. The editors have filled in lacunae where only selections were published previously (notably, the notebooks on Sophocles, the Encyclopedia, rhythm, and rhetoric), and they print lectures never published before (on Aeschylus' Choephori, Cicero, Latin grammar, and Latin epigraphy). 26 Whether improvements have been made in deciphering Nietzsche's notes is not easy to assess from a distance (there are differences, most evidently in punctuation), but presumably they have been made, building on the competent work of earlier editors, who included the likes of Otto Crusius and Wilhelm Nestle, and given the advances in the fund of knowledge about Nietzsche's Nachlass that have been made since, including the first attempt at a new critical edition, the unfinished Beck edition in five volumes (BAW), 25. The phrase "ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern," etc., is from the essay, "Ueber Wahrheit und Lfige irn aussermoralischen Sinne" (1873), KGW 3.2:374. 26. With the exception of the brief excerpts printed in the "Anhang" to GA 19:385-407. For the policy of the editors of the GA philologica, see the "Nachwort" by O. Crusius and W. Nestle, ibid., p. 416-18. Review Articles 427 to which KGW as a whole stands in the direct line of succession. 27 The BAW undertaking was begun in 1933, supervised by the classicist H.-J. Mette (who also sought to put some semblance of order in the archives, developing the manuscript enumeration that is still in use today), and interrupted by the Second World War. That said, the KGW edition thus far remains an incomplete guide to Nietzsche's philologica for a number of reasons. In the first place, the volumes lack an apparatus, annotations of any kind, and any editorial commentary (which GA at least gestured toward). What we get instead are brief prefaces to each volume and a promissory note in the first volume that tells us that "Nachberichte" and "ApparatbKnde" are planned (as with other volumes of KGW). What is more (or less), the volumes are unindexed, an unnecessary inconvenience (these, too, will come in a comprehensive index at the end of the philologica section). In all of these respects, the edition as it stands is editorially speaking inferior to the edition it will eventually replace, the Beck edition. The focus of BAW, moreover, is the notebooks d o w n to 1869, and most prominently the research notebooks, which cover the various projects in Theognis, Democritus, Diogenes Laertius, Homer, and Hesiod, some of which issued in publications. For this reason, BAW will remain indispensable until it is replaced by a future set of KGW volumes, which are already underway. 28 And until then, the only comparandum remains GA, which now, it can be said, has at last been definitively replaced. Beyond the question of incompleteness, there are other problems of a more alarming kind. In one place, comparison with the earlier GA edition reveals a discrepancy in the two texts. Where GA 17:329 reads: "Denn eine Thatsache ist etwas Unendliches, nie viJllig Reproducirbares," the KGW editors print (2.3:344): " . . . ein v~llig Reproduzirbares." Orthography aside (Nietzsche was capable of writing Reproducirbares or -zirbares), which reading is right? The logic of the statement suits the GA reading best: facts are endless for the same reason that they are never fully reproducible, because of their ongoing constitution in the contemporary present. But what is alarming here is the quiet revision of the earlier reading and the looming possibility that one of the two readings could be a mistranscription of Nietzsche's hand. And even supposing the KGW reading were correct as a transcription, does that make it correct as a text? Might not Nietzsche have made a slip of the pen? 29 Presumably the "Nachbericht" will shed light on questions of this kind, but the ultimate decision is one that can be made by no editor. A second telltale sign of editorial tampering is the use of footnotes in the printed Encyclopedia lecture, where Nietzsche's ms. simply shows insertions. In question are rather annotations written onto the blank sides of a notebook, as mentioned above and as illustrated by figs. 1-3. Just what the status of these annotations is meant to be and when they were added is unclear: they may be afterthoughts, clarifications in glosslike form, cues for oral delivery, or genuine intercalations written after the fact. In the minority of cases they have a kind of footnoting function, viz., that of providing bibliographical references (but such references can appear in the "body" of the text as well). To judge from the handwriting and from the ink, in the present case it appears that the annotations are probably contemporary with the lecture notes, but a more 27. KGW 2.2 literally picks up where BAW 6 (1945), extant only in corrected proof-form, left off. See KGW 2.2:x: "Far die Aischylos-Vorlesungen sind filters die vorsichtigen Integrationen von C. Koch ~ibernommen worden," etc. 28. The juvenilia of BAW vols. 1-2 have been partially replaced by KGW 1.1 (ed. J. Figl, 1995). 29. See p. 414, n. 11 above. 428 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 experienced eye than mine w o u l d be n e e d e d to confirm this. The editorial a p p a r a t u s of KGW, thin as it is, gives n o indication that any of this is a problem. It obviously is. 3~ A third, related p r o b l e m has to d o with dating. Consider again the Encyclopedia. A l t h o u g h a n n o u n c e d for the Winter Semester of 1873/4, official records confirming that the second lecture actually took place are lacking. W h a t w e h a v e is a letter from 7 N o v e m b e r 1873 to Gersdorff in which Nietzsche s o m e w h a t m y s t e r i o u s l y writes, "I'm reading m y lectures o n Plato and u n l o a d i n g the other one [ich wdlze das andere ab], which likewise has f o u n d takers [a sensitive point after the debacle of The Birth of Tragedy], in favor of m y eyes," w h i c h w e r e already starting to fail h i m (KGB 2.3:176, no. 325). W h e n w e turn to Janz 1974 for a second opinion, w e find that his results are both equivocal and inconsistent. In one s u m m a r y table (p. 199), he concludes on the basis of Nietzsche's testimony, a n d in the confirming light of a letter f r o m Gersdorff from 29 M a y 1874 (KGB 2.4:479--80, no. 544), that the second lecture n e v e r took place: "nicht abgehalten (trotz Teilnehmern)." In another table (p. 203), he writes, "SS 1871; evtl. [possibly] WS 73/74." The editors of K G W 2.3 follow the latter formulation, w i t h o u t c o m m e n t (p. 339). It is doubtful, in v i e w of the letter to Gersdorff alone, that Nietzsche w o u l d h a v e revised the lectures in 1873/4 e v e n if he r e p e a t e d them, w h i c h seems rather unlikely. I take it that the n o t e b o o k w e h a v e represents the original lecture, with annotations dating from the same semester. H o w m a n y other p r o b l e m s of this kind are lurking in KGW? 31 A m o r e general p r o b l e m is one that I t o u c h e d on above, n a m e l y the characterization of the notebooks themselves, reflected in the v e r y title given to this Abteilung of the edition. It is at times painfully unclear h o w the existing texts of Nietzsche's earliest Nachlass stand in relation to each other. By far the clearest rival to the lecture materials are the materials f o u n d in BAW (which are at times excerpted, and for this reason alone u r g e n t l y n e e d to be reedited, or rather m o r e fully published). The BAW v o l u m e s are not "Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen'; they are notes k e p t b y Nietzsche as he d e v e l o p e d 30. Consider the text of figs. 1-3. What is baffling about this entry is the way it appears fullborn on the page. By far the longest and most complex addition to the lectures (it is a tightly structured lecture in miniature), it miraculously takes up the two and a third interleaved sides that were left free as Nietzsche entered his running text into the notebook. (Was he working from a draft that was then discarded? The same might be asked of the entire lecture, which is nearly in fair copy.) Unlike the other addenda to the text, however, this one is in an untidy hand, as if written in haste or excitement. (Presumably, the entry numbered "n. 38" in KGW, but which appears two blank sides earlier, was entered out of sequence because the empty space available in the vicinity of its proper sedes was taken up by the lengthier addendum, viz. by "n. 37." If we could determine that n. 38 was created at the time of the lecture in which it is recorded we would have a further argument that n. 37 dates to the time of the rest of the lecture and is not a later product [see discussion above].) Whatever the explanation, the text in question is one of the more fascinating bits of ratiocination and narrative in Nietzsche's philological notebooks. 31. A minor point are the occasional problems in Greek diacritical marks (e. g., 2.4:276: ajdikiva which appears correctly as ajdikiva two lines earlier), which may be due either to an editorial mistake or a mistake by Nietzsche, one that has been faithfully reprinted (absent, however, any warning, e.g. "[sic]") in this edition. Pace Bierl and Calder 1992, who make no allowances for these alternative possibilities, even if the mistakes are Nietzsche's they cannot be used to indict his excellent command of Greek any more than his far more frequent and sometimes egregious errors in German can be used to indict his command of his native tongue (see p. 414, n. 11 above). Review Articles 429 his various research projects and publications. But as we have seen, the distinction can be a weak one. The lecture notes spill over into imagined publications; they overlap with the research notebooks, at times substantively (as in the case of the Presocratics), when not methodologically (passim). And to make matters worse, there are note materials printed in KGW 3.3-4, and 4.1-3 (Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1869-79) that are plainly an extension of the BAW and KGW philological materials--although deciding which is which simply points to the problem again. 32 Finally, and most interestingly of all, the philologica in places can be indistinguishable from the more properly philosophical notes, in addition to cohabiting, on occasion, the same notebooks (a phenomenon already found in BAW and one that would need to be born in mind in any reedition of all the notebooks: it is of capital importance to know, where possible, the sequence, or just physical proximity, of Nietzsche's ideas: what prompted him to write down what and where?). 33 The result is that a comprehensive study of Nietzsche's philology cannot ignore the BAW edition and must further triangulate between this, the KGW philologica, and KGW vols. 3 and 4. In short, a uniform, standard edition of Nietzsche's philologica is a long way off. And a comprehensive view of the puzzling relationship between Nietzsche's philological and his philosophical thinking is still a thing of the future. But there are grounds for optimism. Despite Bornmann's untimely death in 1997, and despite the fact that the future direction of the critical edition is uncertain (plans to abandon the existing KGW model for a diplomatic edition, at least in the complex and controversial final Nachlass, are underway), the edition of juvenilia and philologica will carry on and its goals will be reached. Much remains to be done, and it will take years before the materials that could provide the basis for a more definitive solution to the puzzle of the classicist and the philosopher in Nietzsche will become available. Significantly more light has been shed on the problem thanks to the present edition. And there is good reason to hope that Nietzsche's earliest writings will some day become as important, and even as controversial, as his final scribblings on the will to power. To sum up, the neglect of Nietzsche's formation as a classicist on both sides of the divide in his reception, pre- and post-Birth of Tragedy, is astonishing. Nietzsche's paralipornena in philology exerted an underground, posthumous influence on the history of scholarship that we can only now begin to detail. 34 With the reissuing of his philologi32. These texts (not "fragments") are simply entries from notebooks that happen to coincide, in time and often in theme, with Nietzsche's philological remains. 33. Determining the habits of his notetaking and especially notemaking activity ought to define one of the future research foci in the study of Nietzsche. 34. Maas's metrics (Maas 1923) owes far more to Nietzsche than its central thesis. See further Cancik 1995 and Cancik-Lindemaier 1995 and 1999 on various aspects of the reception of Nietzsche in German educational circles, popular and higher. The famous Naumburg gathering convoked by Jaeger in 1930 around the theme of "das Klassische," effectively consolidating the so-called "Third Humanist" movement, actually fulfills a plan for such a conference laid out in a letter of Nietzsche's from 1872. Conspiring with Rohde against Wilamowitz, in response to the latter's attack on The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposes, "You could explain, say at the beginning [of your public riposte], why you are appealing to W. directly, and why you are not appealing, for example, to a meeting of classicists ["Philologenversammlung"; the reference is to the regular national meeting of German classical scholars, later replaced by the Fachtagungen of which the Naumburg meeting in 1930 was the fourth in a new series founded in 1924; see Jaeger 1931, v]: [namely,] that at present we utterly lack a high-level forum for the supremely ideal realization of our studies of antiquity [daft es uns 430 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 ca in a more perfect form there is even less of an excuse to ignore the "pre-critical" Nietzsche any longer. A n d while a reevaluation of his philology is n e e d e d in order to situate him more clearly in relation to---not " w i t h i n " - - t h e field, the still greater task will be putting the Nietzsche of the later decades, especially the 1880s, back into touch w i t h the Nietzsche w h o lived a n d t h o u g h t in broad and ambitious w a y s prior to The Birth of Tragedy. 35 After all, Greek and Roman antiquity remained as central to Nietzsche's thinking in 1888 as it was in 1868. W h a t is more, although this is not as well recognized, Nietzsche frequently p l u n d e r e d his philological notebooks from the 1860s a n d 1870s for ideas that he then carried over, sometimes verbatim, into his later notebooks, or into his later correspondence, or into his published writings, w h e t h e r to defend or develop them. Surely if Nietzsche felt he needed to consult his o w n philological notebooks in later life, so should we. James I. Porter Department of Classical Studies and Program in Comparative Literature University of Michigan, A n n Arbor References Behler, Ernst, 1998. "Nietzsche's Antiquity" (review article on Cancik 1995), IJCT 4.3: 433--449. Bierl, Anton and William M. Calder III, 1992. "Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Abrifl der Geschichte der Beredsamkeit, A New Edition," Nietzsche-Studien 21: 363-89. Barnes, Jonathan. 1986. "Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius," Nietzsche-Studien 15: 16--40. Cancik, Hubert, 1995. Nietzsches Antike. Vorlesung, Stuttgart. Cancik, Hubert, and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier (with Roswitha Wollkopf), 1995. "Der Einfluff Friedrich Nietzsches auf klassische Philologen in Deutschland bis 1945: Philologen am Nietzsche-Archiv (I)," in: Hellmut Flashar, ed. (with Sabine Vogt), Altertumswissenschaft in den 20er Jahren : Neue Fragen und Impulse, Stuttgart, pp. 381-402. (Rpt. in Cancik and CancikLindemaier, 1999, pp. 231-49.) .1999. Philolog und Kultfigur: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine Antike in Deutschland, Stuttgart. Gilman, Sander L., ed., with Ingeborg Reichenbach, 1981. Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, Bonn. Gutzwiller, Hans, 1951. "Friedrich Nietzsches Lehrtfitigkeit am Basler Pfidagogium 1869-1876," Basler Zeitschrift fiir Geschichte und Altertumskunde 50: 148-224. Jaeger, Werner, ed., 1931. Das Problem des Klassischen und die Antike. Acht Vortrfige gehalten auf der Fachtagung der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft zu Naumburg 1930, Leipzig. (Rpt. Darmstadt 1961.) Janz, Curt Paul 1974. "Friedrich Nietzsches Akademische Lehrta'tigkeit in Basel 1869-1879," Nietzsche-Studien 3: 192-203. Maas, Paul, 1923. "Griechische Metrik," in Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Alfred Gercke and Eduard Norden, vol. 1, Berlin, no. 7:1-32. [English as Greek Metre, translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford 1962.] jetzt ganz an einem h~chsten Forum fiir die idealsten Wirkungen unserer Alterthumsstudien fehlt]" (KGB 2.3:12, no. 230). It is not impossible that this letter was known to Jaeger, who at the tender age of twenty-six became Nietzsche's distant successor at Basel, and whose inaugural lecture from December 1914 ("Philologie und Historie"), as is known, seems to allude to Nietzsche's own inaugural lecture from 1869. Nietzsche's spirit hovers over the conference (and the place) in more ways than one. See esp. Schadewaldt's contribution in Jaeger 1931. 35. For a good beginning, see Cancik 1995; with review by Behler 1998. Review Articles 431 Mansfeld, Jaap, 1985. "Wilamowitz' Ciceronian Philosophy," in: Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, ed. William M. Calder III, Hellmut Flashar, and Theodor Lindken, Darmstadt, pp. 178-221. Most, Glenn W., 1994. "< ~ >: Die Quellen von Nietzsches Rhetorik-Vorlessung," in: 'CentaurenGeburten': Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, ed. Tilman Borsche, Frederico Gerratana, and Aldo Venturelli, Mongographien und Text zur Nietzsche-Forschung 27, Berlin, pp. 17-46. Porter, James I., 1994. "Nietzsche's Rhetoric: Theory and Strategy," Philosophy and Rhetoric 27.3: 218-244. Reibnitz, Barbara von, 1992. Ein Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsche, "Die Geburt der Trag~die aus dem Geiste der Musik" (Kap. 1-12), Stuttgart. Stroux, Johannes, 1923. Nietzsches Professur in Basel, Jena. Beginning Again: New Use for Old Vitruvius R. D. Dripps, The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1997), XII + 154 pp. Beginning again grants us freedom f r o m . . , the seemingly purposeless but relentless unfolding of history, and the supposed irreversibility of science [in order to] place the present within the more optimistic paradigms that we devise . . . . This is exactly what is offered by revisiting Vitruvius's tale of origins. 1 The author, a professor of architecture w h o reacts adversely to the "quality of current [i.e. postmodern] architectural discourse," has returned to the architectural treatise that is revered as the lone survival from antiquity, De Architectura Libri X, widely known in English as Vitruvius's "Ten Books of Architecture. "2 Professor Dripps' w o r k is neither an appreciation of, nor even a commentary on, the substantial Vitruvian books, which exceed three hundred pages in modern editions. Rather, the author has selected a brief passage for consideration. His approach is not philological; rather than seeking original meaning in historical context, he offers a subjective interpretation, proposing possible implications today. The genre is the exegetic tradition of sermons based on sacred texts; the given passage becomes a mere point of departure for theoretical musing. The new book may be viewed as a compilation of meditative essays. This mode initially suggests a quasi-religious orientation that seems to be further confirmed by subsequent development. Ultimately, the author requires less reason than faith. Lest readers of our journal decline to pursue this exercise further, they may be assured that The First House is not merely idiosyncratic speculation but in a larger context represents the position of an architectural faction today. The views are contro1. 2. Summary observation of R. D. Dripps in his Epilogue to the subject work, 88. R. D. Dripps is the T. David Fitzgibbon Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Vitruvii de Architectura Libri Decem (Vitruvius: The Ten Books of Architecture) appear in many editions and translations. Well known is the English translation by Morris Hicky Morgan from the 1899 Rose and Mueller Latin edition, widely available in reprint (New York: Dover, 1960.) 432 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 versial, however. Some critics have rejected Dripps' argument. 3 Regardless of its validity, consideration here provides a point of departure for discussion of the classical tradition as presently viewed by some factions of architectural thought. Dripps' statement of purpose, which we have quoted at the outset, reveals his position relative to architectural discourse today and more broadly to the current cultural climate. Postmodern reaction to the orthodox modernism of the early and mid-twentieth century entails much ferment and little consensus--a condition that generally characterizes postmodernist discourse in the humanities. One may sympathize with a sense of loss shared by many w h o knew the relative certitude of the modernist ideology. One may not, however, share the author's pessimism regarding "the seemingly purposeless but relentless unfolding of history, and the supposed irreversibility of science"--a bleak outlook not universal today when, indeed, a more optimistic, Hegelian worldview is alive and well, as evidenced by the welcome reception in the United States of recent works by Francis Fukuyama. 4 Given Professor Dripps' attitudes about history and science, his quest for a new beginning may be understandable, even if his method may be questionable. Why does he return to Vitruvius? Implicit seems to be recognition in the ancient text of "archetypal authority [as] the most stable foundation for human existence" (11). We may likewise value historical rootedness, but may prefer to be grounded without a tap root of patriarchal authority; we also may recognize that Vitruvius was not the ultimate progenitor of architecture. As much time separated the Roman writer from the Egyptian Imhoptep, the first architect of record, as separates Vitruvius from us. The Roman was not so close to origins as some at our distance might suppose. Indeed, other theorists have observed that the Egyptians were not the only pre-classical ancients, s Others have viewed the imperial Roman architecture of Vitruvius's time as already decadent. 6 Still others have viewed earlier Greek work as defective. 7 It is a mere accident of history that the Vitruvian text happens to be the oldest known architectural treatise. In truth, it was written at the mid-point of architectural history as we know it, and was composed in context of a particular agenda of the moment. Professor Dripps recognizes that Vitruvius's work was "written specifically for the use of the emperor Augustus" (4), but Dripps does not develop the implications of 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Jeremy Melvin, "Making Too Much of Vitruvius," The Architects' Journal, 206.17 (November 1997): 60. This London-based journal may be expected to retain the more orthodox modernist views that characterize present British architecture in general. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press; Toronto and New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992); Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: The Free Press, 1995); The Great Disruption (New York: The Free Press, 1999). Fukuyama's articles, appearing in prominent national journals, have been widely read and discussed; he also has spoken in the United States on National Public Radio. Joseph Rykwert discusses notions of the "ancients" in On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972). Vico regarded the Scythians, Chaldeans, and Chinese together with the Egyptians as the four great "gentile" nations (Rykwert, 61). Piranesi, writing in the eighteenth century, viewed Roman emulation of Greek work as a late development that was superficially decorative (Rykwert, 56). Lodoli, Memmo, and Paoli regarded Greek adaptation of primitive timber construction in stone as inferior to masonry building practice of the Egyptians and Phoenicians (Rykwert, 56). Review Articles 433 political patronage as motivation that may have conditioned the Vitruvian polemic. Vitruvius was a practicing architect, doing both military and civilian work, and Augustus was the preeminent client for Roman architects. In recent years the very term, "Vitruvian," has acquired a pejorative political connotation in Italy. 8 Regardless of specific and real historical context, w h y does antiquity itself appeal to a postmodern architectural theorist? " . . . The perennial objective of the treatise writer or theoretician has been to establish an architecture whose authority has been sanctioned by a first cause" (21). Lest the quest for a "first cause" for constructing buildings seem grandiose, recall that Dripps believes architecture to be the "most stable foundation for human existence" (11). He is inclined to such pretentious hyperbole, sometimes hardly comprehensible, telling us for instance that "architecture is the making of the human understanding of the world," whatever that may mean (18). Disregarding such impassioned excess, the author clearly is appropriating the historical Vitruvius for postmodern use. In a word, he is using Vitruvius. For what purpose? Note that Dripps does not propose that we should learn from the ancients, but rather that we should use their priority to endorse " . . . the more optimistic paradigms that we devise" (88, emphasis added.) Professor Dripps has selected as text for his sermon the three paragraphs that open the first chapter of Book Two--the poetic myth about origin of the house: Homines vetere more ut ferae in silvis et speluncis et nemoribus nascebantur ciboque agresti vescendo vitam exigebant . . . . The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare . . . . 9 Although Dripps does not contest the fantastic aspect of this tale, surely fictitious, he would have us honor it as myth, regarding myth to be as valid as fact. Although it may not be a genuine Roman myth, he w o u l d like to have the Vitruvian tale become our myth. From the outset, a quasi-religious quest for faith is apparent. Professor Dripps might seem to bring to his quest the sort of Jungian mystique favored by the Eliade-Campbell schooU ~ Implied seems to be the view that underlying and relating folk myths is some transcendent quality, an essential humanity. On closer reading, the author seems to argue, in terms of modern pragmatism, that if myths be useful, they may as well be true. He wishes not merely to understand historical myths, but also to appropriate a Vitruvian pseudo-myth to validate his agenda, two thousand years later. Dripps notes that "the degree to which any paradigm can remain valid is directly related to its continuing ability to offer a cogent account of the world" (25). In other words, validity is correlated with utility. Again, "it is important to recognize that a paradigm's existence is more dependent on prior paradigms than a 8. Charles Davis, "2000 anni di Vitruvio [edited by] Luigi Vagnetti [book review]," Society of Architectural Historians Journal, 39 (October 1980): 251. 9. Morris Hicky Morgan translation. 10. Mircea Eliade is represented in the Dripps bibliography by five works from the 1950s and '60s. The more popular and prolific writer, Joseph Campbell, whose works appeared during the next two decades, is not represented, nor is the psychologist, even more prolific, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), whose views of myth were seminal. 434 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 response to external actuality" (25). Assembled, the Dripps argument becomes: " . . . Paradigms that we d e v i s e . . , can remain v a l i d . . . [if] more dependent on prior paradigms than a response to external actuality." Although he appeals to the wisdom of the ancients, this line of thought seems to be product of a twentieth-century, relativist epistemology, if not moreover of the calculated propaganda of the mass media culture. The author's orientation likewise is conveyed by his contention that " . . . The most profound understanding of the world is possible only when we might have invente d - - o r reinvented--that world" (32). 11 What is the world that Dripps wants to invent--or reinvent? Why has he chosen this Vitruvian text? The reason is not merely the venerability of an ancient authority. It was not the text that has generated the author's position; rather the author has appropriated the text because of a position held a priori. Professor Dripps represents a school of architectural theory that links many faculties of architecture, largely in the northeastern United States. 12 He acknowledges the influence of several of his teachers w h o are identified with the several institutions and other scholars whose work has been favored by many in those faculties (xi, xii). 13 What is common to this school is not the Jungian mystique of myth, although that aspect may appear occasionally; other values and concerns shared by the school comprise its common ground. These interests led Dripps to adopt myth as a device, and to select the Vitruvian myth to validate the position of the school. Among the teachers acknowledged by the author is Cornell University Professor Emeritus Colin Rowe, who introduced a generation of graduate students to appreciation for historic urban spaces. Professor Rowe led his students beyond the sterile doctrines of modern city planning, which was largely conceptual in theory and diagrammatic in practice; he encouraged students to discover the perceptual qualities of historic urban places, generally European. Due largely to Colin Rowe's influence, the Cornell University graduate program in Urban Design thrived. Some of his students in turn became teachers, carrying their particular orientation to several schools of architecture, especially in mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. One of these young professors of architecture, Michael Dennis, was author of a book that not only acknowledged debt to Colin Rowe, but perhaps even more than his mentor's writing, 11. This observation derives from R. G. Collingwood, who in turn presented Vico's notion (Collingwood, The Idea of History [London: Oxford 1946], 64). There is an important distinction, of course, between the internal, psychological condition and the external, objective reality. Many postmodern theorists blur the distinction, maintaining, in effect, that reality is no more than a mental construct. 12. The school may be viewed as representing the tradition of High Modem architecture, now itself a historic style that is viewed by its proponents as "classic." A well-known representative of this school whose work may be known to readers of this journal is Richard Meier, architect of the Getty Center, Los Angeles. The historic modem architect most revered by this school is Le Corbusier (who designed a building for Harvard University). Many of the institutions linked by this affinity belong to the "Ivy League" of older, eastern universities. 13. Graduates of certain institutions find affinity in programs of similar orientation. Young professors often move from institution to institution, as do deans. The later Werner Seligmann came as dean to the Syracuse University School of Architecture from Cornell University, and his successor, Bruce Abbey (mentioned by the author as a teacher) from the University of Virginia. Visiting professors often lecture or stay for an interim to teach at one and then another school, cross-fertilizing their programs. Review Articles 435 evidenced an architectural integration of European historic precedent and Cornellian urban design theory) 4 Without attempting here a definitive presentation of that theory, it may suffice to characterize the position of these architectural theorists as revisionist modern; without breaking radically with twentieth-century architectural development, proponents sought to integrate aspects of more historic architecture--particularly use of volumetric space (internalized space that is contained as a spatial figure, in contrast to modernist unconfined, non-figural space). A major contributor to theory of this school has been the British architect Alan Colquhoun, who has been visiting professor at American universities and whose Modernity and the Classical Tradition by its very title suggests the revisionist nature of the movement as well as its relevance to readers of this journal. 15 Academic programs conducted by American universities in European cities not only introduced students to historic places, but acquainted many American faculty members who accompanied them for semesters or years abroad. After several decades, the European influence has become marked in many architectural schools, especially in the east. Contemporary European theorists or architectural practitioners, although frequent visitors, have had less effect than has direct experience by American students and faculty of historic buildings, urban spaces, and gardens in Europe. This rapprochement of anti-historic modernist architectural theory with historic precedent has been gradual occurring over decades; it continues to be a slow integration, not a sudden fashion, and should not be confused with a more general cultural development known vaguely as "postmodernism." That trend has been centered on the humanities and has been largely linguistic. While there has been some trendy appropriation in architectural circles, in the main there has been little genuine discourse between mostly conceptual literary theorists and mostly perceptual architects. Although some schools of architecture have engaged in bizarre postmodern exercises, more sedate faculties of many eastern institutions have retained a modified modernist position that has integrated increased appreciation for historical precedent. Therein lies the rub. Why has Professor Dripps needed an appeal to Vitruvian myth? Why, if the evolutionary rapprochement were working, would there be need for "a new beginning"? Revisionist modernism has failed to find a coherent theory. The very notion of a historically attuned modernism is an oxymoron. The inherent contradiction derives not so obviously from the original, anti-historical stance of the modern movement; that might have been overcome in time. What proves more intractable is a fundamental divergence between two ways of seeing and of thinking that resist melding into a new alloy. Readers of this journal may understand the deep dichotomy by analogy to Greek and Roman sensibilities. Although the casual observer may see only stylistic similarities between Greek and Roman architecture, both being regarded as "classical," fuller understanding reveals fundamental differences between them. It is more important to understand their alien intentions than to recognize their accidental appearances. Whereas Rome assimilated a Mediterranean architectural tradition of earthen con14. Michael Dennis, Court & Garden: From the French H6tel to the City of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986). 15. Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, 1980-1987 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989). 436 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 struction, developing a formal language natural to masonry, the Greeks evolved an architectural language from timber construction (only belatedly recast in stone). Whereas earthen forms became extended mass or plane, timber yielded discrete, linear components. A fundamental difference in presumption about h o w buildings were to be made naturally resulted in essentially divergent architectures. The Greek notion of form was essentially additive, the whole being an assemblage of discrete parts. A Greek building was an accretion of components. Romans, like Egyptians before them, viewed form differently. Earth, even when transformed into Roman brick or poured concrete, is plastic and indeterminate in shape, yielding continuous walls, which builders extended overhead into planar vaults. Earthen construction returns us to the cave. Just as the Egyptians created internalized buildings, where interior had priority over exterior, so continued the Romans. Like a grand sequence of Roman public buildings and forums, an Egyptian temple had been a series of enclosed spaces; it had little external identity; its exterior was largely mute wall. Similarly, Hagia Sophia is virtually all interior; without, it has hardly any external presence beyond its profile on the horizon. Perhaps the most iconic of all Roman works was Hadrian's Pantheon: in effect from without it is but a massive tank; its unbroken exterior walls and dome, however, contain within a great interior space that may warrant rare architectural use of that superlative term, "sublime." In contrast, Ictinos' Parthenon had no perceptual interior; it was virtually a solid block within (as perceived by most Athenians) with all of its architecture externalized. It was the Egyptian temple turned inside out. Vincent Scully has observed that the Greek temple was an embodiment of the god, which is to say that it was individuated as a discrete object, detached from its environsJ 6 Temple precincts might contain several structures, but always they remained independent objects, perhaps artfully arranged, but never so integrated with one another as to lose their identity. This was the Greek w a y of seeing--articulating each part of an assemblage. The Greeks were object-fixated. Their intention was to refine these objects, not to transcend their separateness by fusing them into larger totalities. Greek cities were mere aggregations of separate elements. The Greeks had not the capacity, in terms of a visual language of form, to become urbane. 17 The Romans, in contrast, were essentially urbane. Their accomplishment was not in refining unique objects, but in organizing multiple elements into larger, coherent wholes--whether a city or an army. Even a rural villa such as Hadrian's at Tivoli was internalized, like a complex city. In a word, the Romans designed space, to be experienced within, whereas the Greeks perfected objects, to be viewed from without. Europe's designed townscapes are Roman, not Greek. When American architects experienced not only Roman fora but Italian gardens--not only French gardens but spatially complex and articulate French hStel interiors--they discovered a formal int e n t i o n - t h e shaping of internal space at odds with the modernist notion of an undefined, continuous external-internal space. The introduction of an urbanist aesthetic to architectural theory presented a dilemma. The language of modernist architecture was Greek--not in superficial style, of 16. Vincent Scully, Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 39, 49. 17. Distinction between Greek and Roman paradigms blurred in the Hellenistic period. About the middle of the fifth century BC the vitality of the Greek temple as perfected object waned, while cities became more consciously designed with figural public spaces (Scully, 99 ff.). Review Articles 437 course, but more essentially in its intention. "Modern" architecture was similarly object-fixated; architecture became the assemblage of components, carefully retaining the articulation of their individuality. The great modern architect and architectural theorist, Le Corbusier, in his influential Vers Une Architecture, on page after page mated illustrations of Greek temples and modern automobiles. As a very perceptive artist, he could see their kindred identity as assemblages of components, whereas most observers, seeing only superficial style, found the juxtaposition merely shocking. Le Corbusier stated that "l'architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magniJique des volumes assembleds sous la lumi~re" ("architecture is the masterly play of masses assembled in light"). 18 These masses he abstracted as elemental forms, geometric blocks assembled into buildings. 19 Even when looking at Roman architecture he saw merely solid geometric objects; if the interior of the Pantheon was illustrated, apparently it was not because it was a powerful space, but because it represented a pure sphere. 2~ The unresolved problem for modernist-urbanist architects has been, on the one hand, their modernist architectural language, constrained by the Greek paradigm, coupled with their concern for the shaping of space, in the Roman, urban tradition. The Greek tools have been inadequate for the Roman task. The interior space of the Pantheon is powerful precisely because it is contained by continuous surface of floor, w a l l and dome. It is a cavern, hollowed from a ponderous, earthen mass. One would not expect the Athenian Ictinos, regardless of the finesse of his Parthenon, given his limited formal language, to produce Hadrian's Pantheon--nor would Le Corbusier do anything of the kind. Confronting this dilemma, the reason for wishing a "new beginning" becomes more apparent, as does the reason for choosing the Vitruvian text; it is not merely about the origins of architecture, but more particularly proposes that the origin of architecture was a communal undertaking, when primitive men gathered in a clearing--trope for an urban space--hollowed from the dense forest, like a cave hollowed from the earth. It is the Roman sensibility. Neither Vitruvius nor Dripps have been persuaded by the more likely scenario that originally some parents pulled a few branches together to shelter their children, making the original primitive hut (and subsequently to cut logs and build timber houses for families)-~a more reasonable Greekmodernist view--because both Vitruvius and Dripps have shared the Roman, urbanist agenda. Both architects (and probably patron Augustus) cared about facilitating the urban life of crowds, and about representing the collective form of the community in its urban environment. Professor Dripps does not cast the architectural problem so specifically in terms of ends related to means; accordingly, he does not prescribe a solution beyond implying, with his "new beginning," a questioning of accepted paradigms. In contrast, architect Michael Dennis has confronted the problem of integrating the Greek and Roman paradigms, brilliantly resolving the dilemma in the project for the Art Museum for the University of California at Santa Barbara--a work unbuilt, but warranting wider recognition as a new historical paradigm. 21 In retrospect the Santa Barbara Museum design may emerge as the pivotal architectural idea of the 1980s. 18. 19. 20. 21. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: l~ditions Vincent, Fr6al, n.d.), 16. Le Corbusier, 128. Le Corbusier, 126. Jeffrey Clark was co-designer with Michael Dennis of the 1983 project, illustrated in Dennis 223-225. 438 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 Dripps' approach is neither particularly historical nor critical, but is more poetic and, as suggested initially, religious. While he has not invoked particular deities, his reverence for m y t h colors the work. One senses in the pragmatic approach his need for grounding practice in more transcendent principle, even if the principle itself be grounded only in h u m a n need for it. This pragmatic tautology may not be rationally compelling, and one may dismiss invention of myths as merely the comforting therapy of religion, but Professor Dripps' poetic intuitions surmount this sort of criticism. He conveys deep concern and sensitive perceptions in fine, if occasionally inflated, prose. His text is complemented by evocative drawings, equally poetic. Readers of this journal who are not architectural specialists may react favorably to these qualities, but may find most relevant the relation of the work and its representation of current architectural issues to the classical tradition. Readers interested in a more scholarly study of many theories and myths about the origin of architecture in antiquity may turn to Joseph Rykwert's work. 22 Paul Malo Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture Syracuse University A Stoicism for Our Time? Lawrence C. Becker, A N e w Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217 PP. Stoicism is hot these days. When Epictetus' Stoicism provides the deliverance of two of the three main characters in the most recent work of novelist Tom Wolfe, 1 it is evident that its impact has reached beyond scholarly circles and into the literary imagination of popular culture. Within academe, Stoicism has won a new convert: the contemporary moral philosopher Lawrence C. Becket. In A N e w Stoicism (Princeton, 1998), Becker makes a daring, creative use of the ancient Graeco-Roman heritage of the Stoa to outline a rigorously conceived, technically sophisticated, contemporary version of stoicism (deliberately uncapitalized by Becker). His project is not an attempt to reconstruct any ancient version of stoicism, but rather is "an investigation of neglected possibilities, written by a stoic who is merely trying to show a skeptical audience that his ethical theory is philosophically viable" (7). Notice that Becker openly declares his allegiance to stoicism. This approach has three salutary effects. First, he can embrace most of the tough doctrines of the ancient Stoic tradition. This imparts refreshing candor and unusual directness to his project. In contrast to Becker's explicit identification with the stoic camp, classical scholars whose studies of 22. Dripps mentions On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History and other Rykwert works in his bibliography, and in his Acknowledgements recognizes Rykwert's influence, but absence of reference to Rykwert's studies in the narrative itself is a conspicuous omission. 1. A Man in Full (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998). Charlie Croker, the principal character, is converted to Stoicism by Conrad Hensley. The third main character, Roger 'Too' White, pursues political power, not Stoic wisdom. Review Articles 439 ancient Stoic philosophy show an appreciation for its theoretical strengths invariably either implicitly or explicitly disavow stoicism. 2 Second, Becker is free to reinterpret or modify other ancient Stoic doctrines, and even to abandon those few that have been scientifically discredited and, he believes, are eliminable from stoic ethical theory. For instance, he rejects stoic theology altogether by abandoning the metaphysical doctrine that the universe should be understood as a purposive, rational being. By m o d e m scientific consensus, a teleological physics and biology is insupportable. Consequently Becker needs no doctrine of cosmic telos to prop up his neostoicism. On the other hand, he defends the eudaimonist basis of stoic ethical theory while rejecting the fashionable claim that ethics is autonomous, being derived from either a priori principles, sentiment, utility, rights, duties, or contractual arrangements. Becker also commendably attacks the rampant caricature of the stoic sage as emotionally detached, capable merely of endurance and resignation, but quite incapable of joy. 3 Third, Becker can employ sophisticated logical notation to construct a calculus for normative logic that perspicuously demonstrates how normative propositions can be generated, and thus how stoic practical reasoning might operate in concreto. Serious attention to logic testifies to Becker's fidelity to the Chrysippan tradition within the Stoa, though on most doctrinal controversies Becker sides with Posidonius. The neostoicism that emerges is a challenging secularized form of ethical naturalism informed by contemporary cosmology and by developmental psychology, and advanced with vitality and flair. The first chapter, scarcely longer than a page, galvanizes the reader from the outset. Becker decries how, after enjoying five centuries of prominence in Greek and Roman antiquity, "stoic ethics was pillaged by theology and effaced by evangelical and imperial Christianity" (3). He explains how the only shards of stoic doctrines that survived into the Middle Ages were the analgesics used in pastoral counseling, the military, and what then passed for medicine and psychotherapy. 4 Later, the significant challenges to stoic metaphysics were presented by m o d e m science and by the rise of ethical theories hostile to eudaimonism. Philosophy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Becker laments, ultimately scuttled the stoic project by fobbing off the fact-value distinction to the social sciences and by ushering in nonnaturalism, noncognitivism, intuitionism, constructivism, the coherentist interpretation of moral truth, pluralism, relativism, irony, and dogmatism about natural duties and the intrinsic moral worth of h u m a n beings. He concludes Chapter I by bemoaning the fact that the only groups that now say anything in favor of stoicism are soldiers who prefer stoic psychotherapy to morphine and mood enhancers, logicians who appreciate stoic work 2. 3. 4. A.A. Long, for example, declares "I am not.., offering neo-Stoicism as the philosophy for our time," Stoic Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 177. For more balanced studies, see G. B. Kerferd, "What does the wise man know?" in J. M. Rist (ed.), The Stoics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 125-136; Margaret E. Reesor, "The Stoic Wise Man," Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy V (1989): 107-123, with respondent's "Commentary" by Wolfgang Haase, ibid., 124-134; A. A. Long, Stoic Studies, 85-106 and 167-171; and William O. Stephens, "Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XIV (1996): 193-210. See Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic tradition from antiquity to the early Middle Ages, 2 vols., Studies in the history of Christian thought 34-35 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1985; 2nd ed. ibid. 1990). 440 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 on the propositional calculus, and Hellenists w h o argue that the ancient stoics' ethical doctrines were not (for their time) foolish (3-4). A modernized neostoicism that strips away those features of ancient Stoicism long since discredited by science and philosophy is outlined in Chapter 2. Becker imagines a treatise in which virtue, happiness, and the good life are identified with living well in terms of the available resources. Living well in this sense is the product of following the final, all-things-considered normative propositions of practical reason. These normative propositions cannot be constructed a priori, but rather depend crucially upon the fullest available knowledge of the natural world. Construction of these propositions always begins with what is possible for a particular agent with a particular history, character, and range of choices. Thus such particulars are generalized only to the extent that agents have a common history, nature, and situation. These propositions, such a book would show, rarely ratify the agent's narrow self-interest; rather, in typical cases following them means realigning or overriding many of one's dearest wishes. The book would describe a character-building regime for this purpose which emphasizes control of one's mental states as a means of overcoming obstacles to living well. It would also discuss h o w natural endowments and circumstances determine whether living well is compatible with intense longing, passionate commitments, grand gestures, and reckless adventure, or whether it always requires the bland, cautious existence described in contemptuous essays on stoicism. Becker writes: That book would be in the stoic tradition, in the sense that it put forward a cluster of doctrines traceable to central elements of classical stoic ethics. It would be eudaimonistic, in identifying the good life or happiness with flourishing--with being excellent-of-one's-kind. It would be intellectualistic, in identifying virtue with rationality--with carrying out the normative propositions of practical reason. It would be naturalistic, in its insistence that facts about the natural world were the substance of practical deliberation. And because the book would argue that virtuous conduct was always the same one thing (namely, conformity to practical reason), the b o o k like the stoics, would propound the formal unity of the virtues. Moreover, the book's focus on the full particularity of each agent could be seen as a remnant of the stoic notion of a role for each of us in the grand system of nature. The emphasis on self-mastery would also be familiar. (5-6) Becker adds that his book "is less ambitious than the one we have just imagined, but it is in the same line of work" (6). This two-and-a-half-page chapter ends with the warning that he is offering neither an exposition nor a defense of ancient stoic texts. Instead, his examination of such texts so as to justify calling his project stoic is placed in commentaries appended to subsequent chapters. Toward the end of this article I will return to discuss the success of his attempted justification. In Chapter 3 Becker aims to convince readers w h o are dubious of the idea that a contemporary revival of stoic ethics should be undertaken at all. He begins by arguing that ethics is independent of religion (8) but is not an autonomous discipline because it has no unique method or subject matter. He argues that neostoic ethics is subordinate to all branches of rational inquiry and science because it cannot do its normative work until all relevant empirical descriptions of the facts of the natural world are in hand. Hence, since the natural sciences reject the anthropocentric view of the cosmos, neo- Review Articles 441 stoics follow the scientific consensus that the universe is unimaginably large and old, and in constant evolutionary change. Neostoics also grant that there is no evidence that our galaxy, planet, or species is central to any cosmic process, and that there is no evidence that the natural history of earthly life is of any cosmic significance. From these and other facts about existing values, preferences, projects, commitments, and conventions, h u m a n agents construct normative propositions about what we ought to do or be all-things-considered. Thus, in its general purpose, stoic ethics is like other advice-giving endeavors, such as etiquette, coaching, medicine, and psychotherapy. So although ethics does not have its own special subject area or form of reasoning--and so is the last and least branch of h u m a n inquiry---Becker contends that it is also the first and foremost h u m a n enterprise since only its normativity is all-inclusive (9). For Becker, "stoic moral training aims to develop in each agent the disposition to seek social roles, conventions, and institutions in which she has more rather than less control of her own life, unless having less can be shown to make a countervailing contribution toward a good life for her" (19). Moreover, stoic training aims to enable agents to salvage some form of good life under adversity, and to handle sudden, massive changes in our circumstances. Since full integration of our many commitments, projects, and endeavors requires superlative development of our agency powers, practical reasoning all-things-considered necessarily plays a dominant role. In his commentary to Chapter 3, Becker explains that he chooses not to use Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius because of their preoccupation with quasi-theology, moral training, therapy, and the notion that everyone has a 'role' in a cosmic plan (22-23). Becker's choice to discard Epictetus and Marcus on this score is unfortunate because, among other philosophical strengths a closer reading of these thinkers can provide, it overlooks a powerful distinction between what is 'up to us' and what is 'not up to us'. This fundamental dichotomy is entirely devoid of unwanted theological taint and was used by Epictetus with tremendous leverage in illustrating h o w a Stoic reflects on practical matters. Becker examines the relationship between physics and ethics in ancient Stoicism, and argues for a non-reductive physicalism as the m o d e m version of the ancient Stoics' particularism and corporealism. Moreover, he reminds readers that "stoics are perfectly aware of the importance of all of the things people ordinarily count as goods" and "are not committed to the position that pleasurable affects, friendship, and so on are merely instrumental or 'extrinsic' goods" (29). The stoics, Becker explains, have a unitary rather than a plural conception of the good life. Stoics hold that whether goods are diverse or not, there is only one set of them sufficient for making a life good. This set, the final end, stoics hold, is virtue, and is alone what is necessary and sufficient for a good life. Yet at the same time Becker allows that stoic sages in different circumstances and ages will organize their virtuous lives and pursue their chosen projects and activities in quite diverse ways. Chapter 4 contains a formal description of the normative practical logic sketched informally in the first three chapters. Becker identifies four axioms that he claims make his normative logic definitively stoic. The Axiom of Encompassrnent: the exercise of our agency through practical intelligence, including practical reasoning all-things-considered, is the most comprehensive and controlling of our endeavors. The Axiom of Finality: there is no reasoned assessment endeavor external to the exercise of practical reasoning all-things-considered. The Axiom of Moral Priority: norms generated by the exercise of practical reasoning all-things-considered are superordinate to all others. The Axiom of Futility: agents are required not to make direct attempts to do (or be) 442 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 something that is logically, theoretically, or practically impossible. Becker could have strengthened his account of the Axiom of Futility by linking it to the ancient Stoic doctrine of what is 'up to us' and what is 'not up to us'. In Chapter 5, Becker wisely reinterprets the stoic slogan 'follow nature' to mean follow the facts. All the discernible facts about the physical and social world we act in, and all the available facts about the particular situation of individual agents must be had prior to deliberation about norms. Normative conclusions are constructed, then, a posteriori from this plethora of facts. As our empirical knowledge of the facts changes, so too must our normative propositions be adjusted to fit those changes. Becker's case for neostoicism is again compelling. Stoic ethical theory is not enslaved by nature, gods, emperors, or the status quo. Stoics have been slaves (and emperors), but have opposed the institution of slavery. Stoics have lived in parochial settings, but have argued for cosmopolitan politics and universal moral norms. Stoics have accepted the facts of oppression and danger for what they are, but have fought to the death. Stoics have adjusted to a changing world, but have also committed suicide as a matter of principle. Following nature--following the facts--is not quietism, conformity, or passivity. Nor is it romanticism. Stoics do not confuse virtue with genius, heroism with metaphysical rebellion, nobility with contempt for the mundane, emotion with passion, passion with loss of control, loss of control with largeness of spirit, victory with triumph, or tragedy with death. (43--44) The remaining sections of this chapter are packed full of dense, conceptually rich, often suggestive but highly technical discussion. The discussion of heteronomous endeavors, autonomous agency, and freedom would have been better illuminated had Becker been more generous with examples. But his explication of how stoics can avoid fatalism "by taking human freedom to consist in the determinative effect we have, through the exercise of our agency, on what happens in our lives--including what happens with regard to the exercise of our agency itself" (65) is appealing. Becker emphasizes the considerable causal powers of h u m a n agency and maintains that, on the stoic view, a life without metaphysical liberty can still be a life of undiminished virtue and happiness. Consequently, the riddle of causal determinism is rendered unimportant given the aims of stoic ethics. In articulating the sense in which stoicism is a form of ethical naturalism, Becker follows Annas 5 in his commentary to Chapter 5. He also characterizes as the linchpin of the stoic account of moral development the concept of oikeiosis and the cradle argument--the psychological process by which humans develop from initial narrow self-interest in infancy to being motivated by universal moral theory in adulthood. Becker persuasively contends that neostoic psychology is congruous with contemporary 'textbook variety' psychological theory. The many wonderfully illustrative examples in Chapter 6 make for almost sprightly reading compared to the theoretical thickets of Chapter 5. Neostoics hold that virtue consists in perfected agency, which does not admit of degrees, while the exercise of agency (virtuous activity) does admit of degrees. Becker attributes the seemingly in5. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Review Articles 443 tractable disputes between Kantians, utilitarians, contractarians, intuitionists, and other non-stoic theorists to their overly simple or even formal accounts of agency. He proceeds to offer a schematic description of agency as a material reality that "emerges in the normal course of psychological development, beginning with the behavior of infants in the cradle" (83). This cradle argument emphasizes the recursive, hegemonic nature of agency and suggests the futility of using extremely reductive or abstract notions of its constitutive elements for the purposes of ethical theory. Becker's account shines. The lucidity of the following passage is characteristic of the analysis of this chapter. Consider the response of a toddler who trips and falls suddenly, skinning his knee. What will he do if his mother shows happy surprise, scoops him up encouragingly in her arms in a way that reinforces his interest in playing, distracts him momentarily by straightening his shirt, and then helps him examine the wound with clinical interest? By contrast, what will he do if his mother shrieks in alarm, scoops him up protectively in a way that focuses his attention on his pain, and mirrors his fear and pain by responding sympathetically to his cries? We have all seen the difference, and it is a remarkable one. It is a difference not only in how much (or whether) the toddlers cry and stop playing to devote themselves to this new endeavor, but evidently in how much pain they experience as well. (97) Becker forcefully propounds stoic physicalism in holding that the circumstances of healthy agency are a subset of the circumstances of physical health. And just as an agent is routinely motivated to preserve her or his health, so too will he or she endeavor to perfect her agency. Becker introduces a helpful distinction between health, fitness, and virtuosity. Whereas fitness is excellence for a given circumstance or purpose, virtuosity is the maximization of various properties of fitness. He quite plausibly maintains that agents persistently prefer fitness to health and virtuosity to fitness. Fitness in the case of agency, he explains, results from increasing the scope, strength, speed, accuracy, stability, control, and effectiveness of one's powers of deliberation and choice for practical purposes generally. Virtuoso agency, in turn, is as versatile and adaptable as is required for the optimization of the agent's practically possible endeavors. Ideal agency is this virtuoso agency--an ability developed to the limit of h u m a n capability, not merely to the limit of a given agent's capability. Becker convincingly argues that virtuoso agents are made, not born. They are made by having to learn to cope with passion, fear, pain, loss, depression, disappointment, malevolence, failure, and their opposites. So even a loose approximation of ideal agency will require a long, full, complex, challenging, and worldly life (108). To exercise one's agency one must aim, through practical reasoning, at the global optimization of one's current and future projects. Developing the strong norms corresponding to the usual notions of wisdom, justice, benevolence, courage, temperance, and other such traits is a necessary condition for developing one's agency from health to fitness to virtuosity. Becker concludes that for a healthy agent, regardless of her circumstances, virtue as a set of dispositional powers is unconditionally a good, right up to the moment of death. Moreover, virtue is the only unconditional good. This is because over the course of their psychological development, healthy agents develop a superordinate affection for virtue--for the exercise of the sort of agency that optimally coordinates, integrates, 444 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 and implements their endeavors. And once virtue becomes healthy agents' most comprehensive and controlling endeavor, its value for them will be incommensurable with that of other good things in the sense that nothing will be an adequate substitute for virtue (121-122). Commenting on Chapter 6, Becker contends that stoic moral psychology satisfies Flanagan's account of minimal psychological realism. 6 I think Becker succeeds in showing that the motivational structure needed to pursue the ideal of the sage is practically possible, and that achieving the ideal is theoretically possible. Yet he dodges a tough question when he concedes that "it is of course true that it is impossible to exercise agency at all when our stock of external goods falls below some minimum level" (128). What, we must ask, counts as a 'minimum level'? If tennis is one of m y endeavors and I lack either a partner to play with or enough money to buy indoor court time through the winter, is m y agency partially thwarted? Or is Becker's 'minimum level' the fewest possible calories of food per day I need to avoid persistent fainting while pursuing a couple of very low energy, solitary endeavors? Becker neglects to even approximate what minimum stock of external goods is required to exercise agency at all. And when a stoic's stock of external goods does fall below this unspecified minimum, does suicide then become required, advisable, or indifferent? Some account of the criteria that recommend suicide in Becker's neostoic framework is needed in this discussion but is provided neither here nor elsewhere. His appropriation of a Dickinson poem, 7 on the other h a n g is quite effective in the defense of his view that passions generated by true beliefs are not ruled out by stoic doctrine. Only passions that are infantile, bestial unintegrated, or incapacitating preclude perfecting one's agency. Indeed, Becker's contention that stoic sages ought to be passionately affected by virtue, and surpassingly so, since they perceive it to be surpassingly valuable (132), is intriguing. In Chapter 7 Becker argues that happiness as understood by mature and fit agents is a property of whole lives, not of transient mental states. The sage, he supposes, will want the biological completion of her life to coincide with its biographical completion. The good life for the sage is unified and replete with activity that exemplifies the virtuosic exercise of practical intelligence in every context, from local to global. Becker softens the stoic doctrine that pleasure adds nothing to the virtuous, happy life by holding that pleasures add no virtue to the virtuous life, but they do add nonagency goods to it. Thus the virtuous life with nonagency pleasures is reasonably enough preferred to the virtuous life that lacks them. Becker uses an aeronautical analogy to illustrate how agency "is a balance between our dispositional ability to maneuver effectively toward our goals, responding with practical intelligence to salient events along the way, and our dispositional resistance to being deflected by the shifting winds of impulse and circumstance" (142). He presents a fine example of how a grieving nurse can quickly release her despair in the face of an emergency in order to act from her healthy agency. Neostoics endorse the ability to exercise or recapture such control whenever practical intelligence calls for it, though luxuriating in passion is sometimes perfectly harmless. The ancient Stoics demanded extirpation of all violent passions (pathe) while sanctioning what they called eupatheiai or "good emotional states'. So Becker is not beyond the pale, as some may think, in rejecting the idea that 6. 7. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). T.H. Johnson (ed.), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), poem 249. Review Articles 445 the sage is unfeeling. 8 He concedes that sages suffer on the rack, but they differ from the rest of us in their virtuosic abilities to resist the defeat of their agency under conditions that would defeat merely fit agents. The commentary to Chapter 7 contains lengthy quotations from Long and Sedley 9 on Stoic eudaimonism and from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Book V on the thesis that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Becker rejects a very robust form of the idea of the connectedness of all parts of the sage's life that would preclude spontaneous fun or morally indifferent hobbies. While he holds that sages are attentive to, and act on, the norms generated in all the contexts in which their lives are embedded, from local to global, he insists that nothing in his neostoicism entails that a virtuous life must be an abundantly social or political one. On this point Becker's neostoicism has drawn criticism for failing to prescribe any particular solutions to the question of h o w societies and their economies should be organized so as to be just. The complaint continues that both Becker's neostoic and the ancient Stoics suffer from this dearth of political theory because both emphasize reforming individuals as moral agents functioning within institutions rather than criticizing those institutions themselves. 1~ Becker might reply by insisting that social institutions are derivative since "all actual endeavors, no matter h o w complex and social, are at bottom facts about the conduct and character of individual agents" (47). Yet I think he has an even better reply. Becker appears to have missed another opportunity to avail himself of Epictetus' basic distinction between what is 'up to us' and what is 'not up to us.' Individuals, he could argue, are well situated to pursue their o w n affairs and to try to conduct their own lives justly as things within their power. In sharp contrast, very few (or none) are in a position to reshape entire institutions, rearrange whole economic systems, transform governments, and restructure societies so that they are just. The apolitical stoic could thus maintain that he is not mindlessly embracing the status quo, but rather seriously heeding the Axiom of Futility with regard to largescale political reform. Is Becket's neostoicism stoic enough? He has abandoned some stoic doctrines: virtue is the only good; the universe is a providentially organized, rational being; all h u m a n emotions must be extirpated. He has also omitted the Stoic doctrine of suicide and the distinction between what is and what is not up to us. Is the system he is left with really stoicism? One critic claims that Becker's is a "Stoicism eviscerated. "n But in so far as he is firmly committed to an uncompromising rationalism in the conduct of one's life and a naturalism that follows the facts afforded by our best available empirical science, his project is indeed arguably and interestingly within the Stoic philosophical tradition. After all, Stoicism was itself reinterpreted and refashioned by its ancient proponents, who occasionally disagreed with one another. Becker has at the very least made a serious case for calling his system 'stoicism' by offering careful rationales for each of the doctrines he retains, revises, or rejects. Critics who disagree cannot simply complain that since his system lacks doctrines x, y, or z, it just isn't Stoicism. The issue is whether what Becker offers is what a stoicism at the end of the twentieth century w o u l d 8. 9. See my "Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves" (cited in n. 3 above). A.A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10. R.W. Sharpies, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.11.12. 11. Victoria Voytko, Ancient Philosophy 19:1 (Spring 1999): 195-199. 446 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000 look like. His critics must then either enter the debate, engage with the details of his account, wrestle with his arguments, and construct their own alternative versions of neostoicism, or quietly allow Becker to label his system as he pleases. Though the majority of its opponents from antiquity on typically resorted to caricature in order to vilify stoic philosophy, Becker has done much more than demonstrate that "stoicism does not license stupidity" (157). A New Stoicism is a vigorously argued manifesto that explodes this m y ~ s t o i c s can hope---for good. Becker deserves praise for producing an exciting, sophisticated, and promising outline to be fleshed out by other ethicists similarly emboldened to call themselves stoics. William O. Stephens Departments of Philosophy and of Classical and Near Eastern Studies Creighton University