Abstract

As Jonathan Barnes has reflected along with Hugh Lloyd-Jones and David Lachterman among others in an older tradition, including Karl Reinhardt and, most recently, as Gherardo Ugolini and, in the broader tradition of philology, as Christian Benne has argued, it is worth questioning the convention that Nietzsche was ‘not really’ a classical philologist. Yet scholarly reception of Nietzsche continues to be conducted (even for exceptions such James Porter, Glenn Most, John Hamilton, even André Laks) on the same terms that informed Wilamowitz’ juvenile critique. As Nietzsche reproaches himself in his own “Versuch einer Selbstkritik” written to accompany the republication (unaltered) of his first book, the “ears” for his reading of antiquity seem not to have existed — as they do not seem to exist today.

Nietzsche — the Anti-Aristotle par excellence — insisted that Diogenes Laërtius, as Barnes explains, “is in fact night-porter to the history of Greek philosophy: no-one can enter unless Diogenes has given him the key.”  Nietzsche explicates, contra what can seem simply a pell-mell account of this and that, that the anecdotal is essential just owing to the lack of primary and secondary sources. Given the state of the doxa that happen to remain, our only access is via the person: “The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. That alone is what is forever irrefutable.”  Barnes notes this claim but without considering it, going on to track the promised number of anecdotes (Nietzsche promises to offer three in each case) although Nietzsche no more keeps to his count than does Diogenes Laërtius.

Of the Preplatonic thinkers Nietzsche writes: “It is a veritable misfortune that we have so little extant of the works of the ancient masters and that not a single one of their works was handed down to us complete.”  For Nietzsche, we cannot but err: offering scholarly judgments rather as one searches for one’s keys under the lamp-post owing more to the sheer abundance of light than for any likelihood of finding them in just that spot, ranking “with false standards, letting ourselves be disposed more favorably toward Plato and Aristotle by the sheer accident that they never lacked connoisseurs and copyists.” This happenstance inclines us to measure the rest of philosophy by their standards, unideal given their own efforts to eclipse those aspects of the past not seeming to culminate in themselves.

Nietzsche’s hermeneutic emphasis highlights the difference between our tastes (what seems right to us) by contrast with the effort to read the ancients on their own terms: “what philosophy was for them.”  By describing Plato as a “mix’t type,” utterly “unoriginal,” Nietzsche emphasizes the purity of thinkers before him such that philosophy in Greek antiquity is not estranged from itself whereas, beginning with Plato, philosophy goes into self-exile.  Thus Nietzsche’s reading of such ‘Preplatonics’ (hence including Socrates) by contrast with those Diels traditionally names the ‘Presocratics’ yields a range of useful insights beginning with a radical liberation from the Aristotelian-cum-Hegelian strictures of the doxographic tradition and not less the opportunity for critical historiography. 

Most informative can be Nietzsche’s proto-structuralist hermeneutics of the tripod (coincidentally relevant as we find ourselves in Delphi), his discussion of the ‘person’ (Homer, Archilochus) and his reading of Anaximander (as ethical thinker) and perhaps his (to this day still) pathbreaking discussion of Anaxagoras as leading Athenian philosopher [Hauptphilosoph] foregrounding his noble traits (especially for Pericles), and not less as model for Aristophanes’ Socrates, and, arguably, for Plato’s cosmology as such. Also of interest is the divine or useless character of philosophy and a reflection on Die mythische Vorstufe der Philosophie.

Key words: Preplatonics, διαδοχή, personality, historiography, Anaxagoras, uselessness