THE IMPORTANCE OF HOMER IN NIETZSCHE

Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche attacks the weakness of the modern, Christian world in the name of antiquity: in the name of “the Romans [who] were the strong and the noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of”; and in the name, more generally, of “the classical ideal, of the noble mode of evaluating all things” and “of Greco-Roman splendor [Herrlichkeit]” (On the Genealogy of Morality¹ 1.16, 3.22).^[599] For “Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself”; “Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum - overnight it undid the tremendous deed of the Romans, who had won the ground for a great culture that would have time”; “The whole labor of the ancient world in vain....

¹ Henceforth referred to as GM.

² AsI mention in the Introduction, Note 19, I generally follow the translations of Kaufmann and the Cambridge University Press translations by Hollingdale, Nauckhoff, Diethe, and Norman, but I do at times alter them to make them more literal and to follow a bit more faithfully the German text of Nietzsche’s complete works (for example, the emphases), edited by Karl Schlechta. For the German text I have also consulted Nietzschesource.org, where one may find a digital version (edited by Paolo d’Iorio) of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.

³ Henceforth referred to as A.

compared with the Greeks and Romans” (Untimely Meditations^[600] 3.2).^[601] Accordingly, like Machiavelli, Nietzsche appears to call for a revival of ancient virtue, of the strong and noble ancient Greco-Roman world, to overthrow the weak and base modern Christian world: “Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer prepar­ation? More: must one not desire it with all one’s might? even will it? even promote it?” (GM 1.17).

Homer appears prominently in both Nietzsche’s early and mature intellectual life, both before and after he had freed himself from “what did not belong to my nature.”^[604] Nietzsche’s inaugural address as a profes­sor, which he delivered at the University of Basel on May 28, 1869, at the age of 24, was on Homer - Homer and Classical Philology.^{[605] [606]} Homer plays an important role in the early, significant but unpublished writing, “Homer’s Contest [Homers Wettkampf],^,,1° as well as in his unpublished piece, “The Greek State.” Aside from these writings, Nietzsche mentions Homer (or words derived from Homer) 71 times in the books he published or prepared for publication: 23 times in The Birth of Tragedy,¹¹ once in Untimely Meditations (1.4), and 47 times in his mature writings - 24 times in Human All Too Human,¹¹ 3 times in Dawn,¹ 6 times in The Gay Science,¹⁴ 5 times in Beyond Good and Evil,¹ 8 times in On the Genealogy of Morality,²⁶ and once in Twilight of the Idols.¹⁷ Nietzsche also mentions Homer 7 times in the collection of his notes customarily entitled Will to Power.¹⁸

In his inaugural lecture on Homer, Nietzsche defends the conventional philological view of his time, set forth in Germany most prominently by Friedrich August Wolf¹⁹ - that the Iliad and Odyssey were not composed by an individual poet named Homer but rather by generations of name­less Greeks - against the criticisms of Schiller and Goethe, who denounced Wolf and philologists as a whole for, in Schiller’s words, “scholarly barbarism [gelehrten Barbarei]" and for reducing the Iliad, in Goethe’s words, to “a mere patchwork [nur ein Flickwerk]" (HCP 869/ 254, 868/252).²⁰ Wolf had declared that “whether I contemplate the progress of the Greeks themselves or that of other races, I find it

¹¹ Henceforth referred to as BT.

15, 19. Nietzsche also mentions here Achilles three times (3, 5, 15) and Odysseus once (ιι).

¹² Henceforth referred to as HATH. 1:16, 1:45, 1:125,¹:¹54,¹:¹59, ∏211(2x), 1:262 (5x); (the first sequel, henceforth identified as the second section of the book, was entitled Assorted Opinions and Maxims) 2:173, 2:189 (2x), 2:212, 2:219, 2:220, 2:221; (The Wanderer and His Shadow, the second sequel which Nietzsche added to Human AU Too Human, henceforth identified as the third section of the book) 3:6, 3:113, 3:122, 3:140, 3:190. Nietzsche also mentions here Achilles three times (1:211 [2x], 1:261), Odysseus twice (2:219, 2:408), Circe (1:519), and Penelope (1:251). He refers to Odysseus once without naming him at 2:159.

¹³ Henceforth referred to as D. 189, 344, 544. Nietzsche also mentions Odysseus here seven times (199 [2x], 306, 321, 562 [3x]).

¹⁴ Henceforth referred to as GS. “Joke, Cunning, and Revenge” 5; ιι, 84, 302 (2x), 370. Nietzsche also refers here to Odysseus without naming him three times (11, 344, 372).

¹⁵ Henceforth referred to as BGE. 190, 224 (2x), 228, 238. Nietzsche also mentions Odysseus twice (96, 230) and Circe three times (208 [2], 229).

¹⁶ GM 1.11 (2x), 1.14, 2.7, 2.23, 3.4 (2x), 3.25. Nietzsche also mentions Achilles here three times (1.6, 3.4 [2x]).

¹⁷ Henceforth referred to as TI. 8.1. Nietzsche also mentions Circe here at 1.17. See also his references to Circe at EH 4.6; The Case of Wagner (henceforth referred to as CW), First Postscript; Nietzsche Contra Wagner (henceforth referred to as NCW) 7.2.

¹⁸ Henceforth referred to as WP. 137, 380, 427 (2x), 765, 845, 846. Nietzsche also mentions Odysseus here once (544).

¹⁹ See Porter 2004, 335-336; Graziosi 2016, 12-13.

²⁰ Translations of the lecture are my own, though I have consulted the 1910 translation by J.

Nietzsche evidently abandoned his Wolfian view of Homer some time after giving his lecture.²² For Homer, understood as a single poet who founded Greek culture, goes on to play a crucial role in Nietzsche’s thought, beginning to some extent in The Birth of Tragedy but especially in Human All Too Human.

Mazzino Montinari volume of Nietzsche’s Philologische Schriften (1867-1873) (Nietzsche 1982).

²¹ For a discussion of the Homeric question, see Ahrensdorf 2014, 5-19.

²² This shift seems to have been part of Nietzsche’s overall break with conventional classical philology. For example, the publication of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was met with a fierce attack by the classical scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff, who was also “the most important analyst” - “analyst” or “oralist” is the term customarily used to describe the school of Homeric scholarship that contends that the Homeric poems were a collections of poems composed by generations of illiterate bards - and “Wolfian” of his time (Young 2010, 151-152; Reinhardt 1997, 219). Wilamowitz-Moellendorff judged the Iliad to be “a wretched patchwork” (Whitman 1958, 2). according to which he judges and criticizes the modern, Christian world: “the Greek character [Wesen] that, as Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia, and Dionysus, as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is sure of our astonished veneration,” as Nietzsche affirms in his 1871 book The Birth of Tragedy (13); “The Greeks... became... the first-born and models of all future cultured nations [Kulturvolker],” as he remarks in his 1874 essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (UM 2.10)^[607]; “The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of human beings hitherto [bisherigen Menschen], those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks” as Nietzsche affirms in his 1886 preface, “Attempt at a Self Criticism” (1).^[608] Accordingly, as Nietzsche explains in his 1888 work Twilight of the Idols, “[t]he Greeks remain the first cultural event in history: they knew, they did, what was needed; Christianity...

it is the achievement of Homer to have liberated the Greeks from Asiatic pomp and dull character [dem dumpfen Wesen]... the danger of a relapse into the Asiatic hovered over the Greeks at all times, and now and then they were in fact as though inundated by a stream of mysticism and elemental savagery and darkness. We see them sink, we see Europe as it were flushed away and drowned - for Europe was very small in those days - but always they come to the light again, excellent swimmers and divers that they are, the nation [das Volk] of Odysseus. (HATH 1:262, 2:219)

It is thanks to the intellectually and humanly liberating education of the Greeks by Homer, thanks to the Homeric enlightenment, that the Greeks became the greatest of peoples, “the highest height” (BT 13). Insofar as Nietzsche seeks to revive the culture of the ancient Greeks - “ The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity hitherto” - he seeks to revive the culture created by Homer. And insofar as Nietzsche seeks to create a new culture in his own time that will match or even surpass the culture of the ancient Greeks - who are, after all, only the best of peoples “hitherto” - insofar, that is, as he understands himself, as a philosopher, to be “the man of the most comprehensive responsibility” who has “the future [Zukunft]^[610] of Europe on his conscience” and even “the conscience for the overall development of man [Gesamt- Entwicklung des Menschen],” Nietzsche would seem to take Homer, the most successful founder of a culture “hitherto,” as his model (BT.ASC.1; BGE 61, 251).^[611]

Nietzsche juxtaposes his tremendous admiration for Homer with a correspondingly harsh condemnation of Homer’s ancient critic, Plato. If, according to Nietzsche, Greece represents the clearest positive example of a healthy culture, Christianity, as we have seen, apparently represents the clearest negative example of an unhealthy culture. And Nietzsche associates Plato and also Socrates with the rise of Christianity and the subsequent degeneration of humanity: “Christianity is Platonism for the ‘people’” (BGE Preface); “that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine” (GS 344); “Socrates was a misunderstanding; the whole improvement-morality, including the Christian morality, was a misunderstanding.... To have to fight the instincts - that is the formula of decadence” (TI 2.11);

In that great calamity, Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler natures [den edleren Naturen] of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the “cross.”... And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the construction, system, and practice of the church! (TI 10.2 - ellipsis is in the text)

In speaking about his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in his last book, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche remarks, after explaining his thesis that Socrates was “an instrument of Greek disintegration,”

I was the first to see the real opposition: the degenerating instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, and all of idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence. (EC 3.BT.ι-2)

Accordingly, Nietzsche appears to present the opposition between Plato, who paved the way for Christianity, and Homer, who founded ancient Greece, as tantamount to an opposition between misunderstanding and enlightenment, decadence and health, even death and life: “Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism - there the ‘beyond’ of the best will, the great slanderer of life; here the more involuntary deifier [unfreiwillinger Vergdttlicher], the golden nature” (GM 3.25).^[612] If Homer is the model Nietzsche strives to imitate, Plato and Socrates would seem to be examples he altogether shuns.^[613]

Nietzsche’s ambiguous account of homer, plato, AND PHILOSOPHY

And yet, Nietzsche’s stance toward Homer and Plato proves, on closer examination, to be surprisingly ambiguous. For even though Nietzsche certainly sets forth powerful and memorably harsh critiques of Plato and also Socrates throughout his works,^[614] at times he singles out both Plato and Socrates for the highest praise. In a remarkable passage that reminds one of Machiavelli’s December 10, 1513, Letter to Vettori, Nietzsche confides to his readers:

The journey to Hades - I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and I will often be there again; and not only sheep have I sacrificed to be able to talk with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs were there who did not deny themselves to me as I sacrificed: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered by myself; from them will I accept being told what is right and what is wrong [Recht und Unrecht]; to them I want to listen when, in the process, they tell each other what is right and what is wrong. Whatever I say, resolve, think up for myself and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see theirs fixed upon me. (HATH 2:408)

While Plato is identified by Nietzsche here as one of his eight most important teachers, Homer is not. What is more, of Socrates, Nietzsche expresses the hope that

the time will come when, to develop oneself morally-rationally [sittlich- vernunftig], one will take up the Memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible.... The roads of the most diverse philosophic ways of life lead back to him; at bottom they are the ways of life of the diverse temperaments determined by reason and habit, and in all cases pointing with their peak toward joy in life and in one’s own self.... Socrates surpasses the founder of Christianity in having the merry kind of seriousness and that wisdom full of pranks which constitute the best state of the human soul. (HATH 3:86)^[615]

Even in Twilight of the Idols, in which he offers extremely harsh criticism for them both, he also offers high praise of Plato, and also of Socrates, “a great erotic,” for their account of the philosopher as one whose love of wisdom is a form of erotic passion:

Plato... says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy were there not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic frenzy [Taumel].... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism [philosophischen Erotik] of Plato? A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics.^[616]

In these passages Nietzsche praises Plato and Socrates not only for their wisdom but also for their capacity to express both fully and spiritually their erotic drive and hence to combine in a healthy, Greek, unChristian manner, reason and passion, soul and body, by means of a “philosophic eroticism.”^[617]

Furthermore, in stark contrast with Homer (and Machiavelli), who deliberately hide their philosophic lives and focus their readers’ attention on the active life of politics, Nietzsche, like Plato, explicitly and emphatic­ally celebrates the philosophic life as the best way of life. The “Free Minds” whom Nietzsche explicitly holds up as models for his readers throughout his mature writings - beginning with his book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Minds - are philosophic minds, free of all prejudices, including the prejudices of the philosophers; the Free Mind “demands reasons, the others faith [er fordert Grunde, die anderen Glauben]” (1:225); the Free Minds “live for the sake of knowledge alone” (1:291); they draw inspiration from “the heroism of even this free mind,” “Socrates” (1:433); they are “wanderers and philosophers” (1:638). Indeed, for Nietzsche, “a genuine philosopher” is “a genuinely independ­ent mind [ein wirklich auf sich gestellter Geist]” (GM 3.5). The Free Minds resemble such “royal and magnificent hermits of the mind [Einsiedler des Geistes]” as the philosophers “Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles”; for “we free, very free minds” are also “hermits” and Nietzsche suggests that he himself is a hermit of the mind as well (BGE 204, 230, 289; see also 283).

It is true that Nietzsche speaks of what he means by “philosophy” or “the philosopher” in an equivocal, seemingly contradictory manner in his writings. On the one hand, the philosopher is, as we have seen, devoted to the betterment of humanity through such political actions as founding cultures, as Homer did: “The philosopher as we understand him, we free minds... [is] the man of the most comprehensive responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit] for the over-all development of man” (BGE 61); “the philosopher... [is] the Caesarian cultivator and violent man [Gewaltmensch] of culture,” evidently capable of wielding power in a manner comparable to “Homeric heroes” who are also “violent men [Gewaltmenschen]” (BGE 207; D 189); “Genuine philosophers are com­manders and legislators.”^[618] On the other hand, philosophers are solitary, contemplative “hermits of the mind” as, according to Nietzsche, Plato was; philosophers are also “of necessity” “always” at odds with their society - as, it would seem, was the philosopher Socrates who was executed by Athens; “the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomor­row and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.”^[619]

In his perplexing presentation of the philosopher as both primarily political and primarily contemplative, Nietzsche reminds one of Plato, in the Republic, whose Socrates portrays the philosopher as one whose fulfilment lies in ruling a just society as king, in which “he himself will grow more and will save the common things together with the private things,” but also as one whose nature is best fulfilled outside of the inevitably ignorant and hostile “cave” of society, in a life of private, “divine... contemplation” (496d5-497a5, 517a8-520a4).^[620] Indeed, Nietzsche himself highlights this puzzling ambiguity in Plato, for while Nietzsche describes Plato in Beyond Good and Evil as one of “the royal and magnificent hermits of the mind,” he asserts in Human, All Too Human that “Plato was the incarnate desire to become the supreme philosophical lawgiver and founder of states” (1:261). And while in Dawn Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that, “filled with the ‘political drive [politischen Trieb]' as he himself says he was” to help found a Pan­Hellenic city in Sicily, “Plato intended to do for all the Greeks what Mohammed later did for his Arabs” (496), Nietzsche also claims later in Dawn, “two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted the supreme happiness [das hochste Gluck], not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods of the highest bliss [der letzten Seligkeiten]; they found it in know­ledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind [Verstandes]” (550). One might say then that, like Plato, Nietzsche pre­sents the philosopher in a deliberately paradoxical and thought­provoking manner - as one who strives above all to provide political guidance to humanity and as one who also strives above all to attain the happiness of the theoretical life for oneself - in order to encourage his readers to ponder for themselves the relation between politics and phil­osophy and between devotion to others and devotion to oneself.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche is unambiguous in holding up the philosopher, in whichever way he may understand the philosopher, as the model human (and even divine) being. For example, immediately after raising the question, “is greatness possible?” he implicitly answers that question by going on (to attempt) to explain what a philosopher is: “What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught” (BGE 212, 213; see also 292). Nietzsche also repeatedly identifies himself as “the last disciple” of the god “Dionysos,” and “Dionysos is a philoso­pher” (BGE 295).^[621] Accordingly, when Nietzsche declares in the title of his final work, Ecce Homo - “Behold, the Man” - he urges his readers to focus their attention, not on Jesus as Pontius Pilate in the Bible does (John 19:5); nor on such heroes of political and military life - such Gewaltmenschen - as Achilles, as Homer (and Machiavelli) do; but on himself, the philosopher Nietzsche:

Whoever knows how to breathe the air of my writings, knows that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger of catching cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous - but how calmly all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself! Philosophy, as I have so far understood it and lived it, is the voluntary life among ice and high mountains. (EH Preface 3)

Notwithstanding Nietzsche’s ferocious, powerful, and serious criticisms of Plato, and notwithstanding his great praise of Homer, in this one important respect, in his explicit and emphatic presentation of the phil­osopher as the exemplary human being, Nietzsche reveals himself to be a follower of Plato rather than of Homer.