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News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education

Aug. 18, 2005

Will to Power

By Scott McLemee

For some time now, I have been collecting notes on the interaction between academics and journalists. In theory, at least, this relationship ought to be mutually beneficial — almost symbiotic. Scholars would provide sound information and authoritative commentary to reporters — who would then, in turn, perform the useful service of disseminating knowledge more broadly.

Intellectual Affairs

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So much for the theory. The practice is not nearly that sweet, to judge by the water-cooler conversation of either party, which often tends toward the insulting. From the mass-media side, the most concise example is probably H.L. Mencken’s passing reference to someone as “a professor, hence an embalmer.” And within the groves of academe itself, the very word “journalistic” is normally used as a kind of put-down.

There is a beautiful symmetry to the condescension. It’s enough to make an outsider — someone who belongs to neither tribe, but regularly visits each — wonder if some deep process of mutual-definition-by- mutual-exclusion might be going on. And so indeed I shall argue, one day, in a treatise considering the matter from various historical, sociological, and psychoanalytic vantage points. (This promises to be a book of no ordinary tedium.)

A fresh clipping has been added to my research file in the past couple of days, since reading Brian Leiter’s objection to a piece on Nietzsche appearing in last weekend’s issue of The New York Times Book Review. The paper asked the novelist and sometime magazine writer William Vollmann to review a biography of Nietzsche, instead of, let’s say, an American university professor possessing some expertise on the topic.

For example, the Times editors might well have gone to Leiter himself, a professor of philosophy at UT-Austin and the author of a book called Nietzsche on Morality, published three years ago by Routledge. And in a lot of ways, I can’t help wishing that they had. It would have made for a review more informative, and less embarrassingly inept, than the one that ran in the paper of record.

Vollmann’s essay is almost breathtaking in its badness. It manages to drag the conversation about Nietzsche back about 60 years by posing the question of whether or not Nietzsche was an anti-Semite or a proto-Nazi. He was not, nor is this a matter any serious person has discussed in a very long time. (The role of his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietsche, is an entirely different matter: Following his mental collapse, she managed to create a bizarre image of him as theorist of the Teutonic master-race, despite Nietzsche’s frequent and almost irrepressible outbursts of disgust at the German national character.)

And while it is not too surprising that a review of a biography of a philosopher would tend to focus on, well, his life — and even on his sex life, such as it was for the celibate Nietzsche — it is still reasonable to expect maybe a paragraph or two about his ideas. Vollmann never gets around to that. Instead, he offers only the murkiest of pangyrics to Nietzsche’s bravery and transgressive weirdness — as if he were a contestant in the some X Games of the mind, or maybe a prototype of Vollmann himself. (Full disclosure: I once reviewed, for the Times in fact, Vollmann’s meditation on the ethics of violence — a work of grand size, uncertain coherence, and sometimes baffling turgidity. That was six weeks of my life I will never get back.)

Leiter has, in short, good reason to object to the review. And there are grounds, too, for questioning how well the Times has served as (in his words) “a publication that aspires to provide intellectual uplift to its non-scholarly readers.”

Indeed, you don’t even have to be an academic to feel those reservations. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, many readers would spend their Saturday afternoons studying a weekly section of the Times called “Arts and Ideas,” trying to figure out where the ideas were.
By a nice paradox, though, the coverage of ideas improved, at least somewhat, after the “Arts and Ideas” section disappeared. (See, for example, the symposium inspired earlier this summer by a Times essay on early American history.)

So while reading Leiter’s complaint with much sympathy, I also found some questions taking shape about its assumptions — and about his way of pressing the point on Vollmann’s competence.
For one thing, Leiter takes it as a given that the best discussion of a book on Nietzsche would come from a scholar — preferably, it seems, a professor of philosophy. At this, however, certain alarm bells go off.

The last occasion Leiter had to mention The New York Times was shortly after the death of Jacques Derrida. His objection was not to the paper’s front-page obituary (a truly ignorant and poorly reported piece, by the way). Rather, Leiter was unhappy to find Derrida described as a philosopher. He assured his readers that Derrida was not one, and had never taken the least bit seriously within the profession, at least here in the United States.

I read that with great interest, and with the sense of discovery. It meant that Richard Rorty isn’t a philosopher, since he takes Derrida seriously. It also suggested that, say, DePaul University doesn’t actually have a philosophy program, despite appearances to the contrary. (After all, so many of the “philosophy” professors there are interested in deconstruction and the like.)

One would also have to deduce from Leiter’s article that the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy is playing a very subtle joke on prospective members when it lists Derrida as one of the topics of interest they might choose to circle on the form they fill out to join the organization.

An alternative reading, of course, is that some people have a stringent and proprietary sense of what is “real” philosophy, and who counts as a philosopher. And by an interesting coincidence, such people once ruled Nietzsche out of consideration altogether. Until the past few decades, he was regarded as an essayist, an aphorist, a brilliant literary artist — but by no means a serious philosopher. ("A stimulating thinker, but most unsound,” as Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, if memory serves.) The people who read Nietzsche in the United States a hundred years ago tended to be artists, anarchists, bohemians, and even (shudder) journalists. But not academic philosophers.

In short, it is not self-evident that the most suitable reviewer of a new book on Nietzsche would need to be a professor — let alone one who had published a book or two on him. (Once, the very idea would have been almost hopelessly impractical, because there were few, if any.) Assigning a biography of Nietzsche to a novelist instead of a scholar is hardly the case of malfeasance that Leiter suggests. If anything, Nietzsche himself might have approved: The idea of professors discussing his work would really have given the old invalid reason to recuperate.

Vollmann throws off a quick reference to “the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted.” And at this, Leiter really moves in for the kill.

“As every serious student of Nietzsche knows,” he writes, “Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus. There are a mere handful of explicit references to Aristotle in Nietzsche’s writings (even in the unpublished notebooks), and no extended discussion of the kind afforded Plato or Thales. And apart from some generally superficial speculations in the secondary literature about similarities between Aristotle’s ‘great-souled man’ and Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘higher’ or ‘noble’ man — similarities nowhere remarked upon by Nietzsche himself — there is no scholarship supporting the idea that Aristotle is a significant philosopher for Nietzsche in any respect.”

Reading this, I felt a vague mental itch. It kept getting stronger, and would not go away. For the idea that Aristotle was an important influence on Nietzsche appears in the work of the late Walter Kaufman — the professor of philosophy at Princeton University who re-translated Nietzsche in the 1950s and ’60s.

Kaufman published an intellectual biography that destroyed some of the pernicious myths about Nietzsche. He made the case for the coherence and substance of his work, and was merciless in criticizing earlier misinterpretations. He has had the same treatment himself, of course, at the hands of later scholars. But it was Kaufman, perhaps more than anyone else, who made it possible and even necessary for American professors of philosophy to take Nietzsche seriously.

So when Kaufman wrote that Nietzsche’s debt to Aristotle’s ethics was “considerable” .... well, maybe Leiter was right. Perhaps Kaufman was now just a case of someone making “superficial speculations in the secondary literature.” But for a nonspecialist reviewer such as Vollmann to echo it did not quite seem like an indictable offense.

So I wrote to Leiter, asking about all of this. In replying, Leiter sounded especially put out that Vollmann had cited both Schopenhauer and Aristotle as influences. (For those watching this game without a scorecard: Nobody doubts the importance of Schopenhauer for Nietzsche.)

“To reference ‘Schopenhauer and Aristotle’ together as important philosophical figures for Nietzsche — as Vollmann did — is, indeed, preposterous,” wrote Leiter in one message, “and indicative of the fact that Vollmann is obviously a tourist when it comes to reading Nietzsche. The strongest claim anyone has made (the one from Kaufmann) is that there is a kind of similarity between a notion in Aristotle and a notion in Nietzsche, but not even Kaufmann (1) showed that the similarity ran very deep; or (2) claimed that it arose from Aristotle’s influence upon Nietzsche.”

Well, actually, yes, Kaufman did make precisely that second claim. (He also quoted Nietzsche saying, “I honor Aristotle and honor him mostly highly...") And there is no real ground for construing the phrase “Schoenhauer and Aristotle” to mean “similarly and in equal measure.”

There are preposterous things in the writing of William Vollmann. But a stray reference to a possible intellectual influence on Nietzsche is by no means one of them. Nor, for that matter, is the novelist’s willingness to venture into a lair protected by fearsome dragons of the professoriat. I wish Vollmann had read more Nietzsche, and more scholarship on him than the biography he reviewed. But whatever else you can say about the guy, he’s not a pedant.

In fact, the whole situation leaves me wondering if the problem ought not be framed differently. There is, obviously, a difference between an article in a scholarly journal and one appearing in a publication ordinarily read during breakfast (or later, in, as the saying goes, “the smallest room in the house"). It need not be a difference in quality or intelligence. Newspapers could do well for themselves by finding more professors to write for them. And the latter would probably enjoy it, not in spite of the sense of slumming, but precisely because of it.

But does it follow that the best results would come from having philosophers review the philosophy books, historians review the history books, and so forth?

The arguments for doing so are obvious enough. But just as obvious are the disadvantages: Most readers would derive little benefit from intra-disciplinary disputes and niggling points of nuance spill over into the larger public arena.

It is probably a crazy dream, even something utopian, but here is the suggestion anyway. The Times Book Review (or some other such periodical) should from time to time give over an issue entirely to academic reviewers commenting on serious books — but with everyone obliged to review outside their specialty. Hand a batch of novels to a sociologist. Give some books on Iraq to an ethicist. Ask a physicist to write about a favorite book from childhood.

It might not be the best set of reviews ever published. But chances are it would be memorable — and an education for everybody.

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at Quick Study.

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Comments

Physicists For Surfing

“Ask a physicist to write about a favorite book from childhood.”

That might be a wide range of books. One physicist friend engineers roads, another programs and surfs.

Other thoughts:

1. Engaging read.

2. This would be kind of an academic “person on the street” thing, perhaps?

3. Unfortunately, as a professional writer, I see too much weird pontificating by “experts” out of their fields (e.g., economists on election night, politicians on the economy, the so-called “teach-in” that is more accurately a “preach-in"). Caution is suggested.

4. This reminds me of the famous Sunday Times Magazine article when they interviewed 20 well-known economists of all varieties (e.g., classical, Keynesian, supply-side, Maxist) about the global economy. The Times basically got 20 different approaches to the global economy. So much for one theory having “the truth, the facts.”

Bob A., at 6:50 am EDT on August 18, 2005

For the benefit of your readers who might like to know what I did say about the Vollmann review, the item is on-line here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/who_is_william_.html

Aristotle is, in fact, not a significant influence upon Nietzsche, and Kaufmann, in his well-known 1954 book, did not, in fact, show otherwise, though he did engage in “superficial speculation” on the subject, as I noted. The reference to Aristotle was but one of several pieces of evidence adduced of Mr. Vollmann’s ignorance of his subject-matter.

What I actuall wrote about Derrida (October 9, 2004) is the following: “I am, needless to say, with the vast majority of philosophers in thinking Derrida’s work of a philosophical nature was badly confused and pernicious in its influence, and in the substantial minority within that group who formed that opinion after actually reading his work. His preposterously stupid writings on Nietzsche were, of course, a particular source of annoyance. And even his more apparently scholarly work on, e.g., Husserl turns out to be rather poor, as J. Claude Evans showed more than a dozen years ago. Like the Straussians, Derrida and his followers tend to be willfully bad readers of texts. Fortunately, their influence has already faded from the scene in both North America and Europe.” None of this supports the claims the author makes about Richard Rorty not being a philosopher and the like.

Brian Leiter, at 8:14 am EDT on August 18, 2005

Reviews ‘R Us

Scott,

Great article. Bad suggestion about inter-disciplinary reviewers. *You* should review the next book on Nietzsche. And the Times should take on the challenging task of finding those rare, non-pedantic, non-strident academics who can write for a general audience. They do exist and could be further cultivated, I think.

Mary McKinney, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist & Academic Coach at http://www.SuccessfulAcademic.com, at 8:14 am EDT on August 18, 2005

Reviews ‘R Us

Let me amend my previous comment. I actually think that only a minority of academics are pedantic and strident. Many, many write extremely well and would contribute wonderfully to mainstream media. I only wish that such contributions, and “crossover” books were more valued by tenure review committees. I would like a world in which scholars were more widely read.

I also greatly value IHE’s forum for comments. It is great to be able to read Dr. Leiter’s response to Scott’s article since it provides us with the opportunity to learn more about the topic and decide for myself whether his blog posts have been unfairly characterized by Scott.

BTW, it was Dr. Leiter who insightfully sent me an email to point out that my previous comments were quite pejorative. Thank you for the feedback.

Mary McKinney, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist & Academic Coach at http://www.SuccessfulAcademic.com, at 9:06 am EDT on August 18, 2005

My apologies....

I included links to Prof. Leiter’s articles (and to a couple of other items) in this column. They seem to have vanished somewhere along the way. I am sorry if this was an inconvenience to anyone, and glad that he has made the links available in his response.

Readers should by all means follow the links and judge for themselves.

Scott McLemee, columnist at Inside Higher Ed, at 9:57 am EDT on August 18, 2005

Nietzsche, Aristotle, Derrida

A propos Dr. McKinney’s remark, the item of mine on Vollmann’s review (to which I supplied a link) was not a “response” to Scott McLemee’s article; his article was, in part, a response to my original item. I also did not think Mr. McLemee unfairly characterized the item on Vollmann and Nietzsche (whereas he did mischaracterize what I had written about Derrida: since I did not say that *all* philosophers share my low opinion of Derrida—just the “vast majority"—there are no grounds for imputing to me the view that Richard Rorty is not a philosopher, or that DePaul does not have a Philosophy Department).

I take small issue with only two points in Mr. McLemee’s discussion of Vollmann and Nietzsche (obviously he agrees with my basic verdict on the review). First, it is not the case that Vollmann’s reference to Aristotle was the central bit of evidence of Mr. Vollmann’s ignorance of his subject-matter, an impression the reader might have from Mr. McLemee’s presentation. I said it was only our “first hint” that Mr. Vollmann did not know much about Nietzsche, and then went on to note a variety of other instances in which he both wrongly or misleading characterizes Nietzsche’s views and facts about his life. If Mr. Vollmann’s greatest sin had been the strange inclusion of Aristotle as an important formative influence on Nietzsche it would not have been worth remarking upon.

Second, there is the more interesting, substantive point about Aristotle and Nietzsche. I had suggested in the e-mail correspondence from which Mr. McLemee quotes that he might consider asking anyone of a ten or so major Nietzsche scholars (I gave him names and institutional affiliations) whether they thought Aristotle was an important philosophical figure for Nietzsche. No doubt pressed for time, Mr. McLemee was presumably not able to follow through on this exercise. That leaves us, then, with Walter Kaufmann’s 1954 claim that Aristotle’s great-souled man was an important inspiration for Nietzsche’s ethics, a claim which has found little favor in the scholarly literature since (though, so as not to be pedantic, I won’t bombard the comments section here with citations).It was precisely this I was thinking of in remarking in my original piece that there has been some “superficial speculation” about Aristotle’s influence on Nietzsche, namely, from Kaufmann’s book a half-century go. And it is, indeed, superficial: Kaufmann, as was his wont, *asserted* influence, but did not demonstrate it either through historical evidence or through a systematic examination of the actual similarities (and, more importantly, dissimilarities) between the views in question. In re-reading my e-mail correspondence with Mr. McLemee, I see I should have changed one word: just as Kaufmann had not “showed that the similarity ran very deep,” he also had not “*showed* that it arose from Aristotle’s influence upon Nietzsche.” In fact, Mr. McLemee is right, Kaufmann did make the *claim*, but without anything even approaching satisfactory evidence. (As I told Mr. McLemee, I was e-mailing him from home, without the Kaufmann book at hand, and on this point my memory was mistaken.)

There is, though, the more fundamental point, emphasized in my original commentary on Mr. Vollmannn’s review. No one knowledgeable about Nietzsche thinks Aristotle is one of the significant philosophical influences on his thought. Thales, Plato, Socrates, Schopenhauer, Kant, Lange, are all clearly important (in very different ways to be sure); Aristotle is not. I have many controversial ideas about Nietzsche, but this is not one of them!

I do not think, by the way, that the NY Times should have commissioned a philosopher to write about this biography of Nietzsche; my only claim was that they should have commissioned someone more knowledgeable about Nietzsche than Mr. Vollmann. On this, Mr. McLemee and I appear to be in complete agreement.

Brian Leiter, at 10:21 am EDT on August 18, 2005

A writer who sometimes reviews for the New York Times told me that they do not allow books to be reviewed by anyone who is acquainted with the author, or who has even met the author personally. If true, this explains the reviews that appear to be written by people who are not only unacquainted with the author but unfamiliar with the author’s topic.

Jeremy Bangs, Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, at 4:14 pm EDT on August 18, 2005

Vollman should have been drummed out of polite literary society when he published his May 15, 2000 New Yorker article about how marvelous the Taliban was for Afghanistan, keeping all the bad elements in line, that sort of thing.

Interested readers can find my contribution to dispelling the bad blood between scholars and journalists here:http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0408/features/scholars-print.shtml

Rick Perlstein, at 9:08 pm EDT on August 18, 2005

Aristotle permeates Nietzsche

Apparently one needs to first understand Aristotle to realize his importance on Nietzsche work. Most of Nietzsche’s popular works are not scholarly articles, so one cannot count the number of references in footnotes to quantify who influenced Nietzsche the most. However in his lectures at Basle before he retired (at an early age, for health reasons), Aristotle and his works may be the philosopher most referenced by Nietzsche. It would certainly be a worthwhile exercise to poll Nietzsche scholars about the importance of Aristotle and not rely solely on one man’s opinion.

After a decade studying and lecturing on Nietzsche, Heidegger, a hugely influential philosopher and probably the most important commentator on Nietzsche last century, recommended to his students that they spend 15 years studying Aristotle before reading Nietzsche.

enowning, at 10:30 pm EDT on August 18, 2005

All Time Top Ten Nietzsche Scholars

Prof. Leiter—

I’ve been reading your blog as well as your writings on other websites (Butterflies & Wheels, Gourmet Report) for a little while now. On the whole, I’ve found them interesting and informative, especially since they provide a glimpse into what’s going on in the world of academic philosophy departments. However, there’s one thing about a number of your pieces that I’ve always found a little troubling, and I believe it’s on display in your posting on the Vollmann article and your comment here: that is, a tendency to appeal to the authority of the “Top Ten XXX Scholars” when it comes to deciding the importance/pertinence/reputation of a thinker, philosopher, or mere journalist. Although I don’t think you’ve ever really made the logical-fallacy type of appeal to authority before, it does seem like your estimation of certain articles (Vollman’s), or people (Derrida), is largely indebted to what the Top Ten Scholars in your field think.

This all sounds like an ad hominem. However, I really don’t intend it that way. I’m more interested in your response, than engaging in some dumb amateur-vs-professional turf war.

I’ll concede that obviously the issue is more complicated than I’ve sketched it out above. Scholars must rely on past work from trusted people in their field; so, in a sense, a scholar is always checking with his or her field’s Top Ten, whether to use them as support for an argument, or to critically engage with them in a refutation. But where’s the line between dogma and dissent? In other words, when do we begin to question the authority and the hierarchy of the Top Ten Scholars? How are the Top Ten Scholars even decided upon in the first place?

So, as I said before, Prof. Leiter, I’m especially interested in hearing what you have to say about all this. It seems like you’re on a quest to strengthen and delineate the field of philosophy as it currently stands in academia, whether it be with the Gourmet Report, the genealogy of philosophy (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/...cal_gourmet_report/index.html),which relies on linking together philosophers by using their thesis advisers, or even in simply claiming that certain people are outside the correct, real, true lineage of philosophy.

And yet, your area of expertise as a scholar is Nietzsche of all people — someone who, I think we can agree, had a rather vexed relationship with the officially sanctioned version of what proper philosophy is (not to mention, as Scott already has, his less than immediate reception into the philosophical community).

Do think there’s a conflict in any of your positions? Do you think that you being a Nietzsche scholar means that you’re more open to accepting a philosopher who would, at first glance, seem to be doing something completely different from the rest of the philosophical community (writing in a strange style; asking questions that haven’t been asked in a while, etc.)? Do you think that if you were a philosopher living in turn of the century Germany, you would embrace Nietzsche, or does it take time to accept ideas that, at the time, were as strange as his were?

JK, at 4:37 am EDT on August 19, 2005

Brief Reply to “JK”

What you describe as my positions are not, in fact, my positions, so the question of their conflict is not a question for me but for some hypothetical person and, in any case, quite tangential to the discussion here. I’d be happy to discuss my actual views on these tangential topics via e-mail.

Brian Leiter, at 9:06 am EDT on August 19, 2005

The Laws of Physics

As one of probably 10 working journalists who made it through the (cogent and well-written) Leiter piece and the ensuing (cogent and well-written) comments through a cross-link post to Romanesko and actually understood them — thanks to years in the academy...

I think the immutable laws of physics and the stronger-thanks-to-FN conventions of rhetoric are being neglected here.

The world is 120 inches.

Unless you are a tabloid like the NYT Book Review.

Then the world is about 70 inches, minus headline, subheads,pullout on how to buy the book, JPG of the book cover, BW photo of Fred, byline, tagline and relativity of public interest in philosophy biographies versus Lower East Side novels or the Civil War across the rest of the book, divided by the reviewer’s huge name recognition with the “general” reader.

In this world, time-space never aside:

Derrida is alwaysalreadyandisstill a lot of things. He was also a “philosopher".

The legitimate philosophical question of how Aristotle/all theories of “rationality” have been influenced by Nietzsche and his explosion of same, becomes “Nietzsche was influenced by Aristotle.”

The biggest assumption of the mass reading public, the rumor that “Nietzsche was a Nazi” must be addressed. Four grafs of in-depth, accurate and calibrated explanation were probably compressed to the offending drive-by.

And, like FN said, repeated times 1.2 million (the approximate number of Sunday New York Timeses produced), the “truth” created by the positive review will sustain funding for the Nietzsche industry amongst those who don’t know from Schoepenhauer but know they should or know they should at least support those who do through their foundations as they book flights to their third home somewhere.

To create truth, repetition.

Nietzche understood this. He taught us this.

In one of the books of aphorisms, he clearly says:

“The philosopher becomes a journalist.”

The world is 120 inches.

When professors understand this, they can be NYT book reviewers.

In the spirit of joy.

vina, Asst. Managing Editor, at 12:39 pm EDT on August 19, 2005

The Anonymous Comment on Aristotle, Above

Because a reader e-mailed inquiring about this comment, I thought an answer might be worth posting here. “Enowning” is perhaps anonymous for good reason: his claims about Nietzsche’s Basel lectures are just made up out of whole cloth. During the period in question, there are a grand total of five references to Aristotle (Thomas Brobjer of Uppsala has compiled the data), and a grand total of 21 references (most quite superficial and fleeting) throughout the entire Nietzschean corpus—compared to, for example, 135 references to Goethe, 74 to Plato, 122 to Schopehauer, and 58 to Socrates—which, of course, says nothing about the nature of the references and the extent to which they reflect a depth of philosophical engagement that is missing in almost every explicit mention of Aristotle.

Of course it is true that explicit references to a thinker are only a superficial measure of engagement with that thinker, but since “enowning” invoked the superficial measure, it is worth noting that s/he simply made up the facts. The importance of ancient scepticism to Nietzsche, for example, is poorly indicated by explicit references, but much clearer once one considers important lines of influence on Nietzsche (esp. Montaigne) and distinctive sceptical themes in his work.

Heidegger’s strange advice tells us more about his peculiar reading of Nietzsche than about Nietzsche himself. Given Heidegger’s systematic misreading of Nietzsche as a grand metaphysician, it is understandable that he would want the reading of Nietzsche to be done against the backdrop of a great metaphysical philosopher. John Richardson’s quite brilliant effort to salvage the Heideggerian style of reading Nietzsche brings out the utility of Aristotle in this regard, though even he does not make a false claim about historical influence. In any case, since even the partisans of Heidegger usually acknowledge that the master’s reading of Nietzsche is more instructive about Heidegger than Nietzsche, the more apt conclusion is that Heidegger was really telling us one needs to read Aristotle to understand what Heidegger is reacting against—which is no doubt true.

One interesting question this exchange raises, which perhaps Mr. McLemlee may want to address in the future, is how genuine scholarly debate fares in an environment in which the ignorant freely and confidently spread misinformation under the cover of anonymity.

Brian Leiter, at 3:50 pm EDT on August 22, 2005

But what about...

the Nietzsche quote that McLemee offers via Kaufmann. I think this is an important point that hasn’t been discussed:

(He [Kaufmann] also quoted Nietzsche saying, “I honor Aristotle and honor him mostly highly...")

This quote sounds familiar but I couldn’t track it down in Nietzsche so I may have acquired it via Kaufmann as well. As a result, I can’t judge it in context.

Does anyone know where this is drawn from?

Out of context this seems like indicative of a pretty significant influence on Nietzsche.

Nietzsche may however be stating this ironically. He could be saying something like “AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS, I honor Aristotle the most highly” and hoping that the reader will be able to figure out that, for Nietzsche, being the greatest among philosophers is no compliment.

On the other hand it seems like a little bit of a stretch to say that Aristotle wasn’t a significant philosophical figure for Nietzsche. Assuming that what he said in the above was true, it does suggest that Aristotle had at least some measure of influence on Nietzsche, whether that be reactionary or appreciative.

In addition it seems a little strange that Nietzsche, who we have to remember is a philologist by training, was not at all influenced by Aristotle. Don’t you think he probably peeked at the account of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics when he was writing The Birth of Tragedy?

Mark S., at 8:24 pm EDT on August 22, 2005

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