Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition
- Nietzsche and the “Classical”: Traditional and Innovative Features of Nietzsche's Usage, with Special Reference to Goethe
- Conflict and Repose: Dialectics of the Greek Ideal in Nietzsche and Winckelmann
- Nietzsche's Ontological Roots in Goethe's Classicism
- Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity as a Return to (German) Classicism
- The Dioscuri: Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition
from Section 5 - German Classicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition
- Nietzsche and the “Classical”: Traditional and Innovative Features of Nietzsche's Usage, with Special Reference to Goethe
- Conflict and Repose: Dialectics of the Greek Ideal in Nietzsche and Winckelmann
- Nietzsche's Ontological Roots in Goethe's Classicism
- Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity as a Return to (German) Classicism
- The Dioscuri: Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Several years ago, Karl Christ and Suzanne Marchand argued, on different occasions, that the German reception of antiquity is marked by three general factors which shaped the philological enterprise throughout the 1800s: a tendency toward aesthetic idealization, the demand for rigorous scholarship, and an ideological appropriation of antiquity. Although it might be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to disentangle these three factors, they each represent a complex, semiconscious, cognitive field that develops as a reaction to very specific historical and intellectual circumstances. Irrespective of whether we approach antiquity from an aesthetic point of view, from a scholarly perspective, or in terms of the political imaginaire, what is at stake is the attempt to (re-)formulate the relationship between antiquity and modernity, or, more generally, between past and present. Although this problem is as old as antiquity itself, it leads to far-reaching questions within the discourse of classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany, which perceives itself as both “scientific” and “historicist” at the same time.
As a professor of Greek language and literature who taught at the University of Basel and the local Pädagogium, Nietzsche was certainly unable to avoid this problem, and his own attempts to come to terms with the idea of “antiquity” as a cultural point of reference led him substantially to rethink the notion of a “classical tradition” against the background of its fragile conceptual foundations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nietzsche and AntiquityHis Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, pp. 372 - 390Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004