It is hard to overestimate the importance of the terms “klassisch,” “das Klassische,” “Klassicismus,” and related words in Nietzsche's thought. They occur around 336 times in the Studienausgabe (KSA), with relatively concentrated use in the periods 1870–1876 (especially UM I) and 1887–1889. In their different contexts and meanings, they serve almost as an index of his chief concerns in different phases of his thought, from the critique of classical philology, the question of classical education (Bildung), the (self-)emancipation from nineteenth-century Romanticism (especially Schopenhauer and Wagner), the question of health and sickness, the critique of Christianity and “slave morality,” to the overcoming of nihilism through art as counter-movement.

Part 1 of this essay will offer a brief overview of the different, context-related meanings of these words in Nietzsche's vocabulary. Here, the main concern will be their relation to established usages. To what extent does Nietzsche follow traditional or established usages of “klassisch,” and to what extent does he depart from them with innovative or idiosyncratic meanings? In general innovative uses of “klassisch” occur either as polemical redefinitions of the concept in established uses, that is, as reversals (Umkehrungen) or as transvaluations (Umwertungen); or they occur in connection with specifically Nietzschean problems, motifs, and insights (for example, nihilism, master and slave moralities). It is Goethe, above all, who elicits Nietzsche's most concentrated and complex preoccupation with the classical, and in Part 2 I shall focus on this relation.