Porter 1999

REVIEW ARTICLES
"Rare Impressions." Nietzsche's Philologica: A Review of the

Colli-Montinari Critical Edition*
Nietzsches Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe ["KGW"], ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Mon-
tinari, Abt. 2:
Bd 1. Philologische Schriften (1867-1873), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella

(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), VIII +382 pp.
Bd. 2. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (SS 1869-WS 1869/70); Anhang: Nachschriften von
Vorlesungen Nietzches, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 1993), XI + 446 pp.
Bd. 3. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (SS 1870-SS 1871), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario
Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), VI + 441 pp.
Bd. 4. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS 1871/72-WS 1874/75), ed. Fritz Bornmann and
Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), VI + 637 pp.
Bd. 5. Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS 1874/75-WS 1878/79), ed. Fritz Bornmann and
Mario Carpitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), VI + 527 pp.
Few things can be more important to understanding Nietzsche than understanding his
views of classical antiquity. To do this, sooner or later one must come to grips with his
early formation as a classicist. And there can be no better way to learn about this
subject than to read what he wrote at the time. Fortunately for us, Nietzsche was a
compulsive note-taker during his student years at Bonn and Leipzig and then later
while he was a professor at Basel, in addition to producing several volumes of corre-
spondence and a few autobiographical sketches. There is more than enough material
for a first-hand assessment. Ironically, his publications in philology seem like opera
minora in comparison. And yet what stands out about these latter is how remarkably
* Many thanks to Wolfgang Haase and Glenn Most for comments on an earlier draft, and to
archivist Wolfgang Ritschel in Weimar for helpful clarifications.
Abbreviations (see also "References," below p. 430):

BAW: Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritischeGesamtausgabe,5 vols., 1933-. Ed.
Hans-Joachim Metre et al., M~inchen: Beck.
GA: GroJ3oktav-Ausgabe.Nietzsches Werke, 12 vols., 1895-97. Ed. Fritz Koegel et al., Leipzig: C. G.
Naumann (2nd ed.: 20 vols., 1899-1926. Ed. Elisabeth F6rster-Nietzsche, Leipzig: C. G.
Naumann [1899-1909]; Leipzig: Kr6ner [1909-1926]).
KGW: Nietzsche: Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe,1967--. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montin-
ari, Berlin--New York: Waiter de Gruyter.
KGB: Nietzsche: Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1975--. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari, Berlin--New York: Walter de Gruyter.
410 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2000
short a period of time they actually span. Nietzsche started teaching at Basel only in
the summer semester (beginning of May end of July) of 1869. His last publication as
a philologist came in 1873, while his last review appeared already in 1870. The record
seems slim indeed. On the other hand, Nietzsche was only twenty-three when he
began publishing in the field in 1867 and only twenty-eight when he halted, at an age
when most classicists today are just beginning their careers. He accomplished as much
in this brief compass as most mature philologists, even in the nineteenth century,
could boast to have done in a comparable time span. What potential Nietzsche might
have realized had he persisted as a scholar is anyone's guess, but he at least deserves
to be remembered in the history of philology as the gifted and promising classicist that
he was--surely as one of the more promising and least realized classicists of all time.
His record of publications testify to this alone. 1 His notebooks back up the claim still
further, for they are a mine of projects imagined but never carried out. A history of
classical scholarship that awarded points to classicists on the basis of imagination--as
it were, an imaginary history of classical scholarship--would have to rank Nietzsche
among the stars in its galaxy. As it happens, you will look nearly in vain for mentions
of his name in the definitive histories of the field, even though several of his findings
have made their way, often namelessly, into the main stream of classical scholarship.
Thus, to Nietzsche must be accorded a final paradoxical honor: that of being the least
remembered--or most repressed--scholar in the history of classics. But let us return to
the record we have.
The Materials: An Overview
The first volume, which brings together the complete record of Nietzsche's publi-
cations in philology, is the slimmest by far. During these early years, Nietzsche pub-
lished a total of six articles (amounting to three hundred and sixty-odd printed pages
in the edition under review) and eight reviews (a few pages each), these latter dating
from 1868 to 1870. The articles, most of which appeared in Rheinisches Museum, the
journal edited by his mentor Friedrich Ritschl, are as follows: "Zur Geschichte der
Theognideischen Spruchsammlung" (1867); "Beitr/ige zur Kritik der griechischen Lyri-
ker I. Der Danae Klage" (1868); "De Laertii Diogenis fontibus" (1868/69), "Analecta
Laertiana" (1870); "Beitr/ige zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes" (1870,
appearing as a "Gratulationsschrift des Paedagogiums zu Basel," which contributed to
Nietzsche's elevation to the rank of "Ordinarius" [full professor] in the same year);2
"Homer und die klassische Philologie" (his Antrittsvorlesung from 1869, published by
a vanity press with a limited circulation); "Der Florentinische Tractat fiber Homer und
Hesiod, ihr Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf" (Parts I-II, 1870; Parts III-IV, 1873); and
"Certamen quod dicitur Homeri et Hesiodi" (an edition of the Certamen, published in
1871 in the Acta societatis philologae Lipsiensis edited by Ritschl). All eight reviews
appeared in the Literarisches Centralblattfar Deutschland, edited by Friedrich Zarncke in
Leipzig.
1. See Barnes 1986 on the Laertiana.

2. See Stroux 1925, 66-67, for the official documentation, which states as the reason for Nie-
tzsche's nomination, "Zur Anerkennung seiner bisherigen Leistungen," and from which was
struck the telling qualification, expressed in draft only, "ungeachtet seiner Jugend" (ibid., p.
66, n. 1). Nietzsche was plainly a rising star in the field, and his retention (beyond the
recognition that was due to him) must have been a major concern of his employers in Basel.
Review Articles 411
The remaining four volumes present notes for lecture courses, in chronological
sequence, representing the entire span of Nietzsche's teaching career. Their range is
impressive, but only partially indicative of the full range of Nietzsche's research inter-
ests, his vast learning, or his teaching: 3 Aeschylus' Choephori, Greek Lyric, Latin Gram-
mar (v. 2); Sophocles, Cicero's Academica, Greek Metrics and Rhythrnics, Encyclopedia
of Classical Philology (v. 3); Introduction to the Platonic Dialogues, Latin Epigraphy,
The Preplatonic Philosophers, Ancient Rhetoric (including Aristotle) (v. 4); History of
Greek Literature; Greek Worship (v. 5). These are fatter volumes, and frequently cha-
otic as well--that is, when the lecture notes do not take the form of a continuous
narrative in fair copy. Vols. 4 and 5 consist entirely of such semi-finished materials. An
appendix to v. 2 contains transcripts to three lectures that were found among Nie-
tzsche's papers and prepared by students; but these latter, while less fragmentary than
the least finished of Nietzsche's notes, are not necessarily more flowing than the more
semi-finished lectures, which themselves can consist of continuous prose but can often
be telegraphic as well. Apart from the disorderliness of some of the notes, there is a
further difficulty that besets a good number of the lectures. Nietzsche's notebooks
were arranged by lecture theme, not by date. His procedure was that of any teacher:
he would reuse old notes and supplement them at will, whether by adding to them
progressively or by filling in the pages he had deliberately left blank in his notebooks
the first time through. While a convenience for himself, this can prove a headache for
scholars combing through the Nachlass. One consequence is that lectures taught sever-
al times over the course of the years make for compendious materials of often uncer-
tain provenance and form. There are problems in dating the materials in relative
terms, given the lack of internal evidence for dates, and there are difficulties in assess-
ing the nature and function of the intercalations. Titles and subtitles or section-heads
(where they exist) can be troubling as well: these can fail to tally with announced titles
and can change over the course of a notebook. There are also problems in absolute
dating, because we do not always know whether a course announced for a semester
actually took place (whereas we do know about such defections in other cases). Com-
plicating matters further is the fact that a given set of lecture notes could serve either
for university-level teaching or for instruction at the "Pffdagogium'-level. This latter
was aimed at university-bound students in a post-gymnasial, three-year long prepara-
tory school, where members of the philosophical faculty at the University of Basel
were required to devote two thirds of their energy4 - a practice that, while of obvious
3. Not represented in the published notes are the courses he gave on Homer, Hesiod, Theogn-
is, Thucydides; Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Eumenides, and Prometheus; Euripides' Bacchae,Medea,
and Alcestis; Aristophanes, Xenophon, Demosthenes' Philippics, Theocritus, or the directed
readings ("Privatlekt~ire') in Isocrates, Lucian, Plato, and others (see Nietzsche's "Semester-
und Jahresberichte" in Gutzwiller 1951; also Janz 1974; see further KGW 2.7.1:571-79),
although some of these areas may have been resumed in the later lectures on Greek litera-
ture. Presumably, these notebooks have been lost. A complete catalogue and tabulation of
the preserved and non-existent materials would be essential to have. (Glenn Most suggests
per litt. that although notes made by students from Nietzsche's courses are available in the
archives in Weimar, "we cannot be sure that there are not such materials in other archives
in Germany, Israel, and the USA. Only if these were all systematically collected could there
be a claim to making a definitive edition.")
4. See Gutzwiller 1951, 151-55, who calls this phase a "hi,here Mittelschule" (151), in the ab-
sence of a more adequate term.
value, unfortunately is unknown in the modern curricula in Europe or in the States,

except on a voluntary, informal basis. And while the level of the P4dagogium was
bound to be high, it would necessarily have fallen short of expectations at the universi-
ty level. Whether Nietzsche's notes reflect this range is impossible to say; by all ac-
counts, he was a rigorous and demanding teacher at both levels. 5 Finally, there are
problems of format within the notes (to be discussed presently).
A case in point, illustrative of the full gamut of these difficulties, is provided by
the first set of notes printed in KGW (2.2:1-104), a lecture on the Choephori taught
successively on seven occasions: four times between 1869 and 1872, once in 1874, and
then twice in a single academic year (1877-1878). The title in KGW is given as "Prole-
gomena zu den Choephoren des Aeschylus." Presumably, this stems from Nietzsche's
notebook (here, as elsewhere, my direct experience of the archived materials is limited
to a few cases, and this is not one of them); the title is in any case quasi-confirmed b y
the opening sentence of the notebook. Yet the course title in the official Basel record
for 1869 (as given by Janz) reads "Vorl. Aeschylos Choephoren," while the Pfidagogium
record (SS 1870) reads "Literarhistorische Ubersicht zum griechischen Drama an
Beispielen: Aeschylos Agamemnon und Choephoren; Sophokles Elektra; Euripides Bac-
chen und Medea." The 1874 SS version taught at the university may have been a semi-
nar or lecture (no distinction is made in the record); the courses from 1877/78 (WS)
and 1878 (SS) bear the same title as the 1869 lecture course, but are n o w announced as
being in "seminar" format. H o w the same set of notes could serve these diverse con-
texts is anything but clear, which takes us some w a y towards understanding w h y
Nietzsche's lecture notes are as chaotic as they often are, as the editors also observe
(2.1:vii), but no closer to understanding the genesis of these materials.
Sticking to our example, Nietzsche's notes start off with a short preamble that
concludes with a general outline in seven parts. As with other lectures (e.g., those on
rhythm and meter), Nietzsche's original core lectures are the most organized and
articulated of the lot, while later accretions lose sight of these initial contours. In the
present case, the numeration of the outline is followed for thirty pages, but then the
order breaks d o w n with "Zus/itze" (supplements) assigned b y Bornmann to "1872/
1874" (pp. 30-32). The sequence resumes, or rather backtracks, with "Trilogie" (pp. 32-
34), then with a relatively short section, "<Zu den Choephoren> "6 (pp. 34--44), which
embraces several subheadings ("<Zu den Choephoren>, .... Die Choephoren. Betrach-
tungen ~iber den Kiinstlerischen Stil des Aischylos," "Ueber die Choephoren des ~schy-
lus. mit der gr6t~ten Theaterwirkung'), and finally gives over to "<Kommentar zu den
Choephoren> [1869-74]" (pp. 45-104), a (generally) lemmatic, sequential and wide-
ranging commentary on the play. From this somewhat typical example one gets a
rough sense of what Nietzsche's lectures must for the most part have been like: gener-
al scholarly and philological discussion of overarching issues, obeying a crisply delin-
eated, methodical order (here guided, interestingly, by the order of topics typically
listed in Alexandrian argumenta but absent from the codices of this play; Nietzsche's
method thus represents something of a speculative recreation of, and inquiry into,
Hellenistic philology and its habits of reading), 7 with a brief interlude on aesthetic
5. Cf. his letter to Rohde of 30 April 1870: "I've also told them [his Pddagogium-level students]
more than one ordinarily gets to hear about in school" (KGB 2.1:119, no. 76).
6. Here and in the following angle brackets mark editorial insertions.
7. "Faruns muff das Ziel sein, den Standpunkt der Alexandriner wieder zu gewinnen" ("For us the
Review Articles 413
questions of Nietzsche's own making, was followed by a blow-by-blow commentary

in the best tradition of m o d e m textual philology. And if Nietzsche's notes are any
indication, he will have diverged from his magisterial lecturing in the grand German
style in only one respect: he got beyond the prologue of the drama, and indeed cov-
ered the whole of the play! The question is, of course, what kind of indication Nie-
tzsche's lecture notes (or rather, notebooks) can be said to represent, and h o w closely
these mapped onto his actual practice.
New Perspectives
The Choephori notes are typical of Nietzsche's lecture notebooks in one further
respect. As he drifts away from his outline, his thoughts become more ambitious and
less tidy. The digression on aesthetic questions mentioned above is a case in point. It is
in these moments that another side of Nietzsche reveals itself, less the teacher than the
writer, or perhaps just the dreamer. At one point in the middle of this segment on
"Wirkung," a list of topics in staccato form appears suddenly and vertically on the
page: "Die Gliederung der Trag6die. / Die Tetralogie / Die Bedeutung des Chors. /
Religion des Aeschylus. / Die Rollenverteilung. / Das Theater. / Leben des Aeschy-
lus" (p. 38). All pretence to coherence with the previous game-plan is gone here. And
if we seem to be in the midst of a n e w outline, we are---only n o w it seems that we are
reading the table of contents of a book in the making, as the next entry further sug-
gests: "Einleitung: Versuch, den/ischyleischen Kunststil, im Vergleich mit Soph. u.
Eurip. nachzuweisen." What appeared over the past few pages as section headings to
a particularly fascinating interlude n o w have the feel of competing book titles that
Nietzsche is trying on for size, as much for their look as for anything else ("Die
Choephoren. Betrachtungen ~iber den K/.instlerischen Stil des Aischylos," p. 35; "Ueber
die Choephoren des Aschylus. mit der gr6t~ten Theaterwirkung," p. 36s; this casting
about for titles is typical of Nietzsche's notebooks), 9 while possibly including attempts
at a visualization of the very name of Aeschylus, whose orthography wanders here
and there (in a w a y that is typical for German scholarship of the period). And sudden-
ly we remember that we are (perhaps) somewhere between 1869 and 1872, at a time
when Nietzsche was brewing the broth that w o u l d eventually turn out as The Birth of
Tragedy, and w o u l d simultaneously seal his fate as a classical scholar. In this interlude
Nietzsche is plainly exploring the sensibilities of Aeschylus the artist and contrasting
goal has to be regaining the vantage-point of the Alexandrians," p. 29)--this, in line with
his revival of Wolfian philology, as announced in his inaugural lecture on Homer (1869)
and visibly put to work elsewhere in his writings. Nietzsche will break with this procedure
in a few pages, however (see below).
8. The point is that these are mutually exclusive titles that look in different directions rather
than being subordinated to a unified lecture plan. Contrast earlier lecture headings, e.g., "I.
Der Inhalt der Choephoren" (p. 5), "Zusammensetzung der Chors" (p. 21). Nietzsche could
of course be exploring alternative lecture directions, starting off in each case from scratch.
9. As in the lectures on rhythm, which evolve into a series of never completed book-projects.
Cf. KGW 2.3:323 and 331, where in the midst of a contemplated book entitled "Rhythmische
Untersuchungen von Friedrich Nietzsche" we find a number of alternative plans and titles
sketched out. This often telling obsession with imagined (or imaginary) titles and outlines
continued throughout Nietzsche's life, and the subject would be worth a study of its own.
them in his mind with those of the two other great tragedians. He is groping after
something like an Aeschylean "uncanny," a dramaturgy of gloom and terror---one
that is manifestly unclassical (all this is in line, at least superficially, with The Birth of
Tragedy). 1~ Compare the following note:
Ueber die Choephoren des Aschylus.

mit der griJflten Theaterwirkung.
. Das k~instlerische Problem der Mittelstellung. Naivitfit ihrer Li~sung. Kein Gewis-
sensconyqikt. Nichts Hamletisches.
2. Die Figuren u. Bilder. Keine Individuen, sondern Typen, Scenenweise
3. Reihenfolge der Scenen. Das U n h e i m I i c h e festgehalten, d. triiber, lurch-
stare, Grab, 11 der schwarze Trauerzug, abendlich, Ahnung des Todes u. der
Rache, Trfiume, qbo~'co~t 6~ "r ohne jeden Punkt, List. Chthonisch ist das
Drama ~o ' Ep~t~ X0<6wE>
Die Scenen streng symmetrisch. Das Drama ohne Perspektive. Scene um Scene
wirdgleichbehandelt. A l l e S c e n e n g l e i c h n a h e u n d a u s f ~ i h r l i c h .
[...]
Orest wird wahnsinnig, das unheimliche grojqe Tuch als Hintergrund. Das Tuch
vielleicht mit F a c k e l n beleuchtet.
(Die Soph. Electra ist ganz morgendlich ) (p. 36; Nietzsche's emphasis).
On the Choephori of Aeschylus.

with the greatest theatrical effect.
. The artistic problem of the middle position [in the trilogy]. Naivet6 of its
solution. No agony of conscience. Nothing Hamlet-like.
2. Figures and images. No individuals, only types, generic scenes.
3. Sequence of the scenes. The uncanny [is] firmly maintained, the gloomy,
frightening tomb, the black dirge procession, nighttime, presentiment of
death and revenge, dreams, q~o~z0~t 5~ ~ pointlessly so, intrigue. The
drama is chthonic 0~ ' Ep~t~ X0<6vtE>. The scenes rigorously symmetrical.
The drama lacks perspective. Scene after scene is treated in the same way.
10. Cf. p. 38 on Aeschylus' "life" and "style"; also p. 35; and cf. BT w167 on the deeper and
darker metaphysical attractions that lurk in the background of Aeschylean drama, "the
astounding depth of [...] terror" (it is Titanic, anti-Olympian, and literally chthonic: Tartare-
an), that not even Aeschylus' interpretation of Greek myth can fully "exhaust." A closer
reading of BT would want to query the supposed "anti-classicism" of Nietzsche in this
work and elsewhere, for starters by querying its premise---namely, its simplification of the
phenomenon of "classicism" itself, as though it were all sweetness and light. One would
have to look no further than to the founders of German classicism, e.g., Winckelmann,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Karl Philipp Moritz.
11. Corrected, "furchtsam," would have to read "furchtsam<e>" (or "furchtsam<.>"). "Trtiber"
likewise should have read "trabe" to be grammatical. Nietzsche seems to have been nod-
ding here, as he frequently does in his no doubt hastily composed notes. Presumably, the
editorial decision to represent Nietzsche's ms., warts and all (not without some inconsisten-
cy: the Greek in two sentences away is editorially supplemented, while supplements to the
Review Articles 415
All the scenes are equally near and detailed.

[..3
Orestes goes mad, the eery [unheimliche] large cloth as background. The
cloth perhaps illuminated with torches.
(The Soph[oclean] Electra is entirely matutinal).
Nietzsche's lectures from the time are filled with such intensely compressed mo-
ments, which make one want to go back over the rest to look for the clues to their
existence in even the least promising stretches of text. And as a rule, Nietzsche's career
can be traced through the shape of his lecture notes. The notes typically begin in sober
philological fashion, but then modulate quickly into envisioned publications, while
becoming more imaginative and in places fantastical. The publications that do result,
by contrast, tend to emulate the tone of the initial classroom lectures: they may turn on
provocative theses, but they are comparatively restrained and in their form utterly
conventional. It is no wonder that the majority of Nietzsche's ideas never saw the light
of day. His ideas went well beyond the generic constraints of the contemporary re-
search publication. His notebooks, the lecture notebooks included, were the place
where he toyed with new imaginary possibilities. They show his mind at work as he is
playing with, and not only within, the limits of accepted scholarly practice. To judge
Nietzsche by his published scholarship alone would be to gain an impoverished im-
pression of his mind at the time. But the reverse is true as well: the radical elements of
his publications, which exist but are subdued, emerge clearly only against the back-
ground of his notebook experimentations. The question, put simply, is whether note-
books contain lecture notes or notes of another kind. The answer may be anything but
simple.
Nietzsche was, if nothing else, a very ambitious young scholar of seemingly un-
bounded energy, in addition to being a restless innovator and a passionate writer.
Every problem he turned to became a project ("eine gr~J3ere Aufgabe") and a potential
publication (whether an in-depth substantive article or a short monographic essay--a
distinction that means more to us than it did to him, though this was partly character-
istic of the scholarship of his age). And although it would be tempting to assert but
impossible to establish whether Nietzsche imagined--and abandoned--more projects
than any other scholar of his generation, the list of his never finished achievements is
staggering. But this also poses a problem for understanding the notebooks. His notes
to "<Einleitung in das Studium der platonischen Dialoge>," from 1871/72, appear
(like all the volumes in question) in a volume entitled "Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen."
The designation may be true but it also seems false, or inapt. One h u n d r e d and forty-
eight printed pages into this notebook, which had proceeded dialogue by dialogue but
in no obvious order, there comes a full page break, then we read: "Im ersten Capitel mit
den Probl. allgemein bekannt gemacht, auf m e i n e These hingewiesen. Um das L e b e n recht
zu verstehen, massen wir ein p s y c h o I o g . Gesammtbild als Regulativ haben" ("In the first
chapter [one has been] made generally aware of the probl[ems, and] referred to my
thesis. In order to understand [Plato's] life correctly we need a comprehensive
psycholog[ical] image [of the philosopher] as a regulative [construction]"; Nietzsche's
emphasis). Blank space follows, then comes, centered,
Capitel II. Platons Philosophie als HauptzeugniJ3 far den Menschen Plato
[Abriss der Philosophie Platon's.]
Chapter II. Plato's P h i l o s o p h y as Main Evidence for Plato the M a n

[Outline of Plato's Philosophy.]
More notes resume, n o w i n d e e d of a m o r e general and fascinating nature. Nietzsche

here is plying his t r a d e m a r k philology-by-Persi~nlichkeit, w h i c h h e applied with bril-
liant success to Theognis (or m o r e correctly, to Theognis' final redactor), to Democri-
tus, to the H o m e r i c Question, and (later on) to the Presocratics. "Gesamtbild als Regula-
tiv" pretty m u c h sums u p the gist of this philological method, w h i c h is heuristic, self-
constraining, and fanciful at once. 12 But the question remains: Do Nietzsche's notes on
Plato represent lecture notes or an envisaged publication project? A n d h o w d o these
t w o activities relate to each other? 13
Of course, one big question not answered b y the notes is h o w they w e r e actually
u s e d in the classroom. For the reasons just mentioned, it m i g h t be h a z a r d o u s to try to
d e d u c e too m u c h about Nietzsche's teaching style f r o m his notebooks. On the other
hand, it w o u l d be w r o n g to d e n y any connection. Nietzsche frequently prefaces his
lectures with large, imaginative invitations to his hearers. His notes sometimes p u r s u e
these perspectives (as in the case of the Choephori). It is h a r d to believe that Nietzsche
denied himself or his students the pleasures of the intellectual chase in the classroom.
But there is more. Nietzsche's flights of imagination are for the m o s t part not into the
E m p y r e a n heights of the Classics. H e was in w a y s a counter-classical thinker, or rath-
er, and more simply, a counter-thinker, a lover of h e t e r o d o x y ; he despised the mecha-
German are found, for example, on pp. 20, 21 and 22, etc.), is to be discussed in the
"Nachbericht," with corrections and uncertainties flagged in the "ApparatbKnde." The edi-
tors of BAW were more interventionist in their presentation of Nietzsche's notebooks, and
made generous use of supplemental brackets throughout, with the welcome result that one
can judge the text at a glance: the presence or absence of the editor's hand is immediately to
be felt.
12. As Glenn Most reminds me, it would take five decades and another philologist, Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, to complete this project of rhyming Plato the man with Plato's
philosophy, in his final and in many ways his life-work, Platon, 2 vols., 2nd ed., 1920; v. 1:
Leben und Werke. With one important difference: as Wilamowitz wrote to Jaeger, "Sie wissen
also, dass ich Platon den Menschen suche, nicht den Philosophen," whereby he meant to investi-
gate Plato's humane philosophy, whose "Hauptziel," as he saw it, was "die Seele des Menschen
zu ihrem Heile zu fiihren" (see generally Mansfeld's excellent article on "Wilamowitz' Cicero-
nian Philosophy," 1985; esp. 179, 188, 217). Nietzsche, by contrast, sought to rhyme the
whole of Platonic philosophy with the mind of Plato within a single psychological portrait,
through a consideration of that mind's deepest-seated "drives." This tendency would issue
in positions like those famously expressed in Beyond Good and Evil w167 but these in turn
merely restate his earlier views of the same problem. See generally the 1873 essay, "Die
Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen" and the Democritea from 1867--68, in BAW
3 and4.
13. Not to be discounted is the possibility that he envisaged, or at least fantasized, publishing
his lecture notes, as with the "Einleitung in die Trag6die des Sophocles" (the official lecture
title), which is prefaced in the present edition by a facsimile of Nietzsche's decorative title
page, which reads, in a script as flamboyant as its projected title, "AFdETATPE. Zur Ge-
schichte der griechischen Tragoedie. Vorlesungen von Friedrich Nietzsche" (KGW 2.3: 1-3).
A separate outline of a never executed plan in seventeen sections, "Einleitung zum Oedipus
rex," appears sketched out at the tail end of the notes (p. 57). It is obviously connected, but
exactly how?
Review Articles 417
nized assumptions of the professional scholar, and he aspired to a different kind of

philology, what he called, long before Wilamowitz flung the epithet at him as an
insult, a "philology of the future. "14 Without tracing out the contours of that outsized
project here we can note that one of its elements, indeed one of the techniques at
Nietzsche's disposal and used for opening up vistas onto the as yet invisible future or
possible futures of the study of the classics, was to scandalize his audience, to unseat
their expectations and in this w a y to bring them to think more critically about what
they knew and the w a y they were supposed to know it--in a word, about their
disciplinary formation. This is the devilish side of Nietzsche that occasionally makes
itself heard in the Nachlass and in correspondence from the time, but that is every-
where to be felt once you scratch beneath the surface of his writings. Thus, he could
proudly write to his mentor Friedrich Ritschl that in the spring of 1869, in his first
semester at Basel he was "infecting" his pupils in the Piidagogium with "philosophy"
(he was teaching Plato's Phaedo at the time). 15 The same conspiratorial glee is evident
in another letter, this time from 7 June of 1871, where he discloses to Erwin Rohde, "I
am n o w giving my lecture, 'Einleitung und Encyclopadie', to the amazement of my
audience, who can scarcely recognize themselves in the picture of the ideal philologist
that I am sketching. "16 Nietzsche clearly enjoyed shocking his students out of their
complacency, whether by stretching the customary boundaries of philology to include
philosophy (his habitual instinct), or by warning his students, in the same lecture
series, that in order to be complete classicists what they first had to become was
completely "modern"; that in order to understand antiquity they first had to acquaint
themselves with modern thought, by consuming heavy doses of Winckelmann, Les-
sing, Schiller, Goethe, and Kant, and in this w a y develop their receptive and "aesthet-
ic" faculties (their "Sch~nheitstrieb"); that they had, in other words, to cultivate anach-
ronism, to become thoroughly familiar with a characteristically modern notion of "das
Klassische," before being able to detect it in the ancients; only so, only once they had
learned to "feel the differences" between past and present (or between what they
knew and the w a y they knew it) could they embark on the project of imaginative
investment and immersion ("Hineinleben') in the ancient world. H o w anyone was
supposed to do all of that without stumbling into a painful performative contradiction
is unclear. But what is clear is that these paradoxes were the daily bread of Nietzsche's
thinking, which must have found its w a y into his teaching on more than one occasion.
The Choephori lectures again help establish this point and allow us to extrapolate
some of what Nietzsche's procedure in the "Encyclop/idie" course must have been like. In
a short passage from these earlier notes Nietzsche actually scripts in his theatrical
cues, in what appears to be an introductory segment to a lecture. The passage is worth
citing in toto, so rare, informative, and unusual a glimpse into Nietzsche's teaching
style in the classroom, whether real or imagined by himself, does it provide: 17
14. Letter of 2 June 1868 to Paul Deussen (KGB 1.2: 284, no. 573), where the phrase is used with
reference to Jacob Bemays, "the most brilliant representative of a philology of the future
[einer Philologie der Zukunft] (i.e., the next generation after Ritschl, Haupt, Lehrs, Bergk,
Mommsen, etc.)."
15. 10 May 1869 (KGB 2.1:7, no. 3).
16. KGB 2.1:197, no. 135.
17. There are, to be sure, reports by his former students (see Gutzwiller 1951 and Gilman, ed.
1981), but these, produced retrospectively and usually after his psychic collapse, must be
used with care.
Niemand unter uns hat die Orestie gesehen, niemand geh~rt: es ist ein m~ih-
sames E r r a t h e n der Dinge niJthig, die, bei der Auffahrung, leicht u. einfach sind.
Hier ein Versuch, sie als w i r k l i c h zu betrachten: was ich da geschaut habe,
erzf&le ich. Natfirlich wird vieles Phantasterei sein. Aber erst massen wir eine
W i r k u n g haben, von ihr aus k~nnen wir eine Meinung vom Kiinstler bekommen.
Ich will nicht als Antiker im Theater sitzen, sondern als Moderner: meine Beobacht-
ungen m~gen kleinlich sein erst muJ~ ich reich iiber alles wundern, um nachher alles
zu begreifen.
Ich habe einen bestimmten Eindruck yon den Choephoren u. den will ich schil-
dern. Aber was geht uns, werdet ihr sagen, mein Eindruck an? Warum verweise ich
euch nicht auf den eurigen? Aufs Werk?--Ein Eindruck ist etwas Seltnes. Um ihn
zu gewinnen, ist so viel hinzu zu addiren, was nicht jeder will und kann.
Man sollte nicht iiber Gedichte reden, wie Sokrates im Protagoras sagt. Aber ich
will einmal untersuchen, was dieser Tr i e b e i g e n t l i c h w e r t h i s t . A n
einem Beispiele.
Resultat: im Einzelnen werdet ihr Recht behalten: aber im Ganzen ist es eine
Frechheit. Wie wenig ist dort zu erkennen, wo das Erkennen erst anffingt werth-
voll zu sein! Das kann unmiJglich Ziel einer Wissenschaft sein! Kritik der Conjek-
turalkritik.
No one among us has seen the Oresteia; no one has heard it: an elaborate
and backbreaking guesswork is required to understand things that would
have been simple and easy [to follow] at the performance. Here goes one
attempt to view things as real: I will tell you what I saw there. Naturally,
much of this will be sheer fantasy. But we need to experience an effect; once
we have that we can form an opinion about the artist. I want to sit in the
theater not as an ancient but as a modem: my observations may well be
pedantic; [but] at first I have to wonder at everything so as to comprehend it
all afterward.
I have a certain impression of the Choephori and this is what I want to
describe. But what does it matter to us, you will say, what my impression is?
Why don't I appeal to yours? Or to the work?--An impression is something
rare. To attain it one has to add so much which not everyone is able and
willing to do.
One shouldn't talk about poems, as Socrates says in the Protagoras. But I
want to investigate for once what this impulse ["Trieb;" viz., to discuss
poetry, especially Greek poetry] is really worth. Through one example [sc.,
the Choephori].
Result: you students will be proved right in the particulars [if you don't
follow my approach]: but on the whole, it [sc., the standard approach] is
an act of insolence. H o w little there is to know at that point where knowl-
edge first starts to be of value! That cannot possibly be the goal of a
science! Critique of conjectural criticism) 8 (KGW 2.2:34-35)
18. The brackets represent my best guess as to Nietzsche's meaning. The alternatives ("[if you
do follow my approach]...[my approach]") seem less likely given the sequel ("How little
there is to know...!," etc.), but are equally plausible when taken independently of the
sequel.
Review Articles 419
The lecture not only gives us a glimpse of Nietzsche's lecture style, it shows a total
coherence between his proposed "philology of the future" and whatever he wanted to
put into practice. 19 However else we may describe it, Nietzsche's philology of the
future is a skeptical philology in the sense of being a self-doubting practice; it puts to
the test the certainties of philological tradition and exacerbates, even plays upon, its
inbred tradition of uncertainty--to which Nietzsche responds, here, with his "critique
of criticism."
The lectures and notebooks on rhythm and meter (1870-71) are founded on such
a critique. The premise and conclusion of these rarely analyzed notes on the rhythm of
the Greek language is the incommensurability of ancient and m o d e m sensibilities to
time. What the notebooks on rhythm purport to give is "a history of sensations" and
especially of the sense of time. This history Nietzsche finds to be irrecuperable inas-
much as the m o d e m sensibility to dynamic rhythm, based on accentual measures and
the rhythmical ictus (intensio vocis), is constitutionally unfit to grasp the products of
the ancient sense of time, which he argues are quantitative and proportional in their
architectonics (and thus totally lacking the ictus as a marker of rhythm). Once again,
Nietzsche is exploring the paradoxes of classical philology, and so his theory is as
much a rneta-critical one as it is a positive (albeit skeptical) contribution to the history
of an ancient field. At stake in the background to the essays are theoretical reflections
on temporality, history, and sensation, as well as the relation between force and force's
limits. These inquiries flow directly into The Birth of Tragedy, into Nietzsche's general
conceptions of historiographical and recuperative writing (evident most prominently
in a text like the famous third essay of Human, All Too Human, "On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History"), and eventually into the late doctrine of "the will to pow-
er." But they do so in unexpected ways.
It was Nietzsche's original intention to include in The Birth of Tragedy a section
devoted to rhythm; in its place, we find a few stray comments on rhythm (mainly in
connection with Apollo), but also implicitly a wholesale and covert adaptation of
Nietzsche's thesis from the lecture notes, which profoundly throws into doubt any
straightforward reading of the later work (for instance, any reading which wishes to
view the Dionysian as a valorized physiological or metaphysical condition, and not as
an allegory for a dubious idealism retrojected from the present onto antiquity). This is
hardly the only instance in which Nietzsche's early notes undermine the narrative
premises of The Birth of Tragedy. To take up one example in this connection: a problem
19. Note how Nietzsche has contravened his own earlier stated purpose, which was to recon-
struct tragedy from the perspective of the Alexandrians (see above, p. 412, n. 7). The program
here is as paradoxical as that of the "Encyclopedia." On the other hand, the approximation
of tragedy's first audience through imaginative Hineinleben, a standard element of nine-
teenth-century German philology, from Wolf to Hermann, Boeckh, and on, is written into
the problem of textual criticism from the start. Cf. ibid., p. 30, where the aim of conjectural
criticism, Nietzsche writes, is "to establish what is corrupt, unintelligible, ungrammatical,
unmetrical, illogical, unaesthetic," and to "cure the damage." All this necessarily entails a
"subjective element": "to see the possibilities is a matter of an imagination that is soaked in
the language and usages of the poet, in his intuitions." In this light, what I have been calling
the aesthetic "interlude" in the Choephori lectures seems less of an interlude perhaps and
more of a natural progression--albeit of an originally more complex and evidently unstable
position. Here, Nietzsche has pushed the implicit anachronism of philological hermeneutics
out into the open.
raised explicitly by the notes and sub rosa in The Birth of Tragedy is that of periodiza-
tion, namely the historical characterization of Greek Dionysian rhythms. Although
Nietzsche gives no absolute dates for the incipit of the Dionysian rhythms in the notes,
he does date them in a relative way, and this is revealing. In the first notebook, he
associates them with early cultic practices (2.3:112-13). In the final notebook, the same
rhythms, notable for their exploitation of rhythmic changes and "dissonances in time-
measures" (329), are more closely dated. They appear to be a later, and in any case
post-quantitative, development in musical sensibility:
Das antike Musikwesen ist zu reconstruiren: der mimische Tanz, die &p~tov~(x, der
~n)0~t6~. Wesentliche Unterschiede in der sog. Melodie, im Rh. u. auch im Tanze bei
den Neueren. Der Ton wirkt urspriinglich (bei der kitharod. Musik) im Sinne eines
Zeitmessers. Es ist das Wesen der T o n I e i t e r n aufzudecken (schfirfstes Gefiihl fiir
die H~henproportionen). Weshalb die Griechen die ViertelstiJne verwenden konnten ?
Die Harmonie war bei ihnen nicht in das Reich der Symbolik gezogen. Herstellung
der antiken Symbolik. Die dionysischen Neuerungen in Tonart, in Rhythmus (die
The nature of ancient music must be reconstructed: the mimetic dance, har-
monia [viz., musical scales], rhythmos. Essential differences in so-called "mel-
ody," in rhythm, and also in dancing, in the practices of the moderns. Origi-
nally (in citharodic music), the note functions as a measure of time. The nature of
the scales needs to be discovered (acutest feeling for proportions of height
[viz., of intervals]). 2~ Why could the Greeks deploy the quarter-tones? Har-
m o n y was not drawn into the realm of the symbolic for them. Establishment
of the classical symbolics. The Dionysian innovations in tonality, in rhythm (alo-
gia?) (322; emphasis of "scales" in original).
Dionysianism, an "innovation" (Neuerung)? The chronology is elusive, or better yet,

symbolic. Presumably, the cults mentioned earlier are archaic and post-Homeric, and
yet the aesthetic system that the Dionysian "innovations" act against is patently quan-
titative and classical. For the same reason, the Dionysian innovations, said to be "in
tonality," are likely to be just of tonality, as contrasted with the essentially temporal
character of the classical note and its corresponding scales (Tonleitern), which, due to
their peculiar restrictions, are not "tonal" in the modern or relatively more modern
and "Dionysian" sense of the word. The Dionysian phenomenon emerges against the
backdrop of the classical order of things, as its corruption.
That it does represent this very change, or its incipient moment, is corroborated
by a passage from The Birth of Tragedy where Nietzsche comes at the problem once
again. The correspondence between the two texts, unexpected as it is, is astonishing.
There, Nietzsche is concerned to underscore the innovative character of the Dionysian
20. That is, of "Tonh~he" (differences in pitch and in relative position on a scale), viz., of the
"H~henverhfiltnisse der TiJne," conceived as vertical/spatial "Raumdifferenzen" (p. 321), and
ultimately as horizontal/linear intervals of time in sound ("Zeitriiume'). Nietzsche's under-
standing is influenced by the fourth-century musicologist, Aristoxenus of Tarentum (cf.
Elementa Harmonica 2.15), whose theory of rhythm he is claiming to reconstruct in these
notes.
Review Articles 421
reveries, wherein one is reminded that "pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds
of agony from us":
Der Gesang und die Gebfirdensprache solcher zwiefach gestimmter Schwffrmer war
far die homerisch-griechische Welt etwas Neues und Unerhi~rtes: und insbesondere
erregte ihr die dionysische M u s i k Schrecken und Grausen. Wenn die Musik schei-
nbar bereits als eine apollinische Kunst bekannt war, so war sie dies doch nur, genau
genommen, als Wellenschlag des Rhythmus, dessen bildnerische Kraft zur Darstel-
lung apollinischer Zustfinde entwickelt wurde. Die Musik des Apollo war dorische
Architektonik in TiJnen, aber in nur angedeuteten T~nen, wie sie der Kithara zu
eigen sind. Behutsam ist gerade das Element, als unapollinisch, ferngehalten, das
den Charakter der dionysischen Musik und damit der Musik ~iberhaupt ausmacht,
die erschatternde Gewalt des Tones, der einheitliche Strom des Melos und die
durchaus unvergleichliche Welt der Harmonie. (KGW 3.1:29)
The song and pantomime of such dually-minded revelers was something

new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Greek world; and the Dionysian music
in particular excited awe and terror. If music, as it would seem, had been
known previously as an Apollinian art, it was so, strictly speaking, only as the
wave beat of rhythm, whose formative power was developed for the repre-
sentation of Apollinian states. The music of Apollo was Doric architectonics
in tones, but in tones that were merely suggestive, such as those of the cithara.
The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of
music in general) is carefully excluded as un-Apollinian--namely the emo-
tional power of the tone, the uniform flow of the melody, and the utterly
incomparable world of harmony. (BT w trans. Kaufmann; all but first empha-
sis added)
The parallels between the two accounts of change are remarkably close. Again, the
innovations appear to take place in a post-Homeric but still archaic Greek world; yet
the aesthetic regime that is overturned is the Apollinian, classical, and (quite plainly)
quantitative system of rhythmic proportions. And again, it is tonality, or vocality, that
paves the way for change. 21 Stately proportions yield to dynamic, "pathological" move-
ments. Temporally defined rhythm yields to "music" in a n e w and unheard-of sense
of the word, connected n o w with melodic and harmonic structures. That sense is a
thoroughly familiar one, at least to Nietzsche's contemporary world. 22
From a musicological perspective, Dionysianism plainly appears to be a post-
classical phenomenon, if not in historical time, then surely in tendency. Can Dionysian-
ism possibly be associated with the decline of classical sensibilities, that is to say, with
21. See KGW 2.3:11 ("Einleitung in die Trag6die des Sophocles" [SS 1870]) for the contrast
between the "lawful architectonic character of music" ("Apollinian") versus "the pure mu-
sicality, indeed pathologicalness, of the tone" or "note" ("Dionysian").
22. Cf. also KGW 2.2:158-59, lecture notes on "The Greek Lyric Poets," here the section on the
Greek dithyrambists. What this latter historical account establishes is that any innovations
that bring the dithyramb to the realm of alogia in the ecstatic sense can only refer to the
degenerate phase of the dithyramb. And it is only in this phase that Dionysianism becomes
recognizably palpable.
the advent of the modern sensibility, whether as its prelude or its harbinger? The
notebooks on rhythm and The Birth of Tragedy itself suggest that it can. The progres-
sion described in both is towards music in a thoroughly and unmistakably modern
sense. It captures the moment when "the other symbolic powers suddenly press for-
ward, particularly those of music, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony [in Rhythmik, Dy-
namik und Harmonie]" (BT w emphasis added; trans, rood.). And these last, being the
principal ingredients of the modern sensibility to time, are for Nietzsche thoroughly
out of place in any account of Greek quantiative rhythmics, which represents the
classical sense of time. Nietzsche knows very well the difference between "Greek
music as compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us" (BT
w which is to say, "the utterly incomparable world of harmony" (BT w Hence,
"The more we draw on modern music for understanding [Greek] metrics, the further
we estrange ourselves from the reality of metrics in antiquity" (letter to Ritschl of 30
December 1870; KGB 2.1:173, no. 117; cf. KGW 2.3:399). Nietzsche's account of Diony-
sian music in The Birth of Tragedy is an anachronism, and self-advertisingly so. Surely
the hope expressed in that work for a return adfontes and to a musical spirit that could
be reclaimed today as "ours" is overshadowed by the very sorts of impossibility that
Nietzsche is demonstrating in his lectures on rhythm at the very moment he is com-
posing his first book. Similar points are made in the "Encyclopedia of Classical Philol-
ogy," which contains further parallels to and further dramatic reversals of the narra-
tive surface of The Birth of Tragedy. The task of sorting out all of this material is
immense.
One final example will have to suffice to bring the point home. In two intercalated
pages from the "Encyclopedia" notes, wrongly numbered by the editors as a footnote
(414--16 n. 37; see figs. 1-3), in which Nietzsche details the genesis and transformations
of the Greek gods, we read at one point:
Die GiJtterwelt der SchiJnheit erzeugt zu ihrer Ergf&zung die chthonischen Gott-
heiten. Diese, an sich gestaltoser u. dem Begriff verwandter, siegen immer mehr u.
verfliichtigen die ganze olymp. Welt saint den Heroen zu Symbolen i h r e r Geheim-
nisse.
The divine world of beauty [viz., Olympus] gives birth to the chthonic divin-
ities [viz., the "horrible" ["schrecklich'] world of "Hades, Persephone, Deme-
ter, Hermes, Hecate, and the Erinyes," and "then Dionysus," p. 413] as its
own supplement. These latter, more formless in themselves ["an sich'] and
closer to the Concept, increasingly gain the upper hand and [then] cause the
whole Olympian world to vanish together with the heroes, as symbols of
their [sc., the chthonic gods' own] secrets.
What is so fascinating about this entry, not available in the earlier edition (GA, v. 17),
is the reversed genealogy it introduces into Nietzsche's proposed evolutionary scheme,
rupturing it from within: the striking claim about the invention--the aesthetic cre-
a t i o n - o f the dark chthonic divinities (among w h o m the younger god Dionysus fig-
ures with increasing prominence) out of the brighter Olympian world, the origination
of the mysteries and of a realm beyond (Jenseits), not to mention ecstatic orgies, initially
absent from the scene (p. 413)--in short, the invention of the Dionysian godhead out of
an Apollinian framework. The implications for The Birth of Tragedy are immense, and
too great to be discussed here. Either we have to say that Nietzsche suddenly changed
Review Articles 423
Fig. 1: Ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-416 n. 37 (from Lecture w 19, "Uber Religion und
Mythologie der Alten," of Encyclopfidie der klassischen Philologie und Einleitung in das
Studium derselben [1871/1873-74 (?)]. The numerations in the top right corners of the
first two pages ("115" and "116," "117" and "118") are archival paginations, the sec-
ond series replacing the first. Not shown is archival page 113/114, the preceding, and
sparsely filled, right-hand page, which contains the material printed as "n. 36" and "n.
38" in KGW 2.3:414 and 416. Signature no. GSA 71/87. Photo: Stiftung Weimarer
Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar.
his mind about the birth of Greek mythology and about the primacy or parity of
Apollo and Dionysus; or we can look for clues to corroborate this reversal in The Birth
of Tragedy itself. A third possibility, not precluded by the second, is that Nietzsche was
an opportunist in his arguments, which he could adjust and turn around at will. If so,
then further revisions in our interpretations of his writings are called for. What the
lectures also add is a glimpse into the scholarly background to Nietzsche's first and
Fig. 2: Ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-16, n. 37 (cont.). Signature no. GSA 71/87. Photo:
Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar.
fatal b o o k for in both places he is manipulating paradigms familiar from K. O. Miiller,
Preller, Welcker, and others (see also Reibnitz 1992). The point again is not only that
Nietzsche's philological notebooks throw an interesting light on his development as a
thinker. They throw up fundamental questions about how we are to understand what
has been--perhaps all too naively--received as his philosophical thinking beyond
philology. Plainly, the philological notebooks, much of which have been available for
decades, can no longer be considered optional reading.
These are just a few of the highlights from the philologica in the KGW edition. No
mention has been made of the lectures on the "Preplatonic" (not: "Presocratic") philos-
ophers (the distinction ought to flag our attention), which contains valuable discus-
sions not only of Heraclitus and Parmenides, but of Leucippus and Democritus, two of
Review Articles 425
Fig. 3: Top third of ms. page from KGW 2.3:414-16, n. 37 (cont.). Signature no. Photo:
Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar.
the most neglected Preplatonic philosophers in the scholarship on Nietzsche's thought

at any point in his career (all the more remarkably, given that Nietzsche filled copious
notebooks between 1867 and 1869 in an attempt to reconstruct the lineaments of the
Democritean corpus, and given the importance of atomism to his subsequent philo-
sophical reflections, right down to his final jottings). Merely mentioned, above, were
the titles pertaining to Hesiod, which have a significant bearing on the later writings,
both the Aryanized treatment of Prometheus in BT w (which has provoked more
silence than discussion, but which needs to be read against the background of Nie-
tzsche's general knowledge of Hesiod's retelling of the myth; see esp. KGW 2.2:350-72,
which nicely complements notes in KSA 7 and in BAW 5) and the puzzling interlude
in GM I:11 (1887), which repeats verbatim some of the earlier philologica. The treat-
ment of the Semitic foundations of Greek worship (KGW 2.5:377--83) and the treatment
of Theognis (ibid., 2.1) are equally relevant here. The lectures on classical rhetoric
(KGW 2.5) have, to be sure, attracted notice of late. The phenomenon is a notable
instance of the selective appropriation of Nietzsche's philology, a willingness to re-
claim his "pre-critical" thought when it is convenient to do so (e.g., where his lectures
seem to match the linguistic turn of poststructuralist literary theory), but only under
these conditions. 23 At any rate, the notebooks on rhetoric are here published in a
definitive form 24 and will be indispensable to a reassessment of this side of Nietzsche's
activities (to which the studies on Latin Grammar are no less relevant).
Each of these early lectures enlarges our view of Nietzsche's classical imagination,
throwing light on it from unexpected angles. We can watch as Nietzsche makes in-
roads into the territories that will become familiar from The Birth of Tragedy and the
later writings. But more importantly, what we discover are the ways in which Nie-
tzsche's endlessly restless thought is never content to be grasped still; it does not
permit reductions of itself. Not only do the lecture notes almost without fail stand in
the w a y of the apparent "dogmas" of the published writings in various ways (not least
of all in their very tentativeness); they teach us how the published writings stand, as it
23. See Porter 1993; Most 1994.
24. See Bierl and Calder 1992.
were, in their own way, how they are diffractive lenses rather than clear views on a
final position that can only reductively be labeled "Nietzsche's." In a word, Nietzsche's
early notebook activity bears an uncanny resemblance to the aphoristic and kaleido-
scopic writings of the "mature" Nietzsche, while simultaneously calling into question
the interpretive reductions of that later material that have come to be the accepted
academic orthodoxies about him. Taking the full measure of the philologica also re-
minds us that the endless and fruitless debates over the relative merits of his Nachlass
and the published writings, triggered by the heated politics surrounding the editions
of The Will to Power, rests on the illegitimate assumption that Nietzsche's writings are
at any time "finished." Nietzsche's most polished writings are fragmentary and also
restless, "a mobile army of metaphors" (itself a self-defeating metaphor). 25 And so,
too, reading the fragmentary and ever-changing notebooks of the early Nietzsche is a
useful training in discovering new modes of reading Nietzsche's writings generally, as
it were the philology of Nietzsche: from them, we can learn to listen for the nuances of
his shifting voices, his theatrics and even histrionics; his mimickry, his tentativeness,
his opportunism; and above all his untiring and ferocious capacity to wield the jagged
blade of criticism against himself. A revised view of the whole corpus of Nietzsche's
thought is thus made obligatory by an attentive reading of the philologica. Not that
such a revision wouldn't be possible in the absence of the philologica: it would be. But
ingrained habits of reading are difficult to throw off, and there can be no greater
incentive to doing so than being confronted with so much strangeness in the midst of
so much apparent familiarity--and with so much familiarity in the midst of so much
apparent strangeness: for the philological notebooks, while in some respects present-
ing challenges to later Nietzscheanisms, are in other respects uncanny anticipations of
Nietzche's later argumentative styles. Tapping into these moments of strangeness and
unpacking their fullest implications for Nietzsche's views of philology and philoso-
phy, art and science, and the culture of modernity (his initial and never-ending con-
cerns), are the uncharted territories of future Nietzsche scholarship.
Some Final Question Marks
This edition of Nietzsche's lectures and published philologica is a good one, and
all in all better (especially, more complete) than its earliest predecessor, vols. 17-19 of
the Kr6ner edition (GA) from 1910-13. The editors have filled in lacunae where only
selections were published previously (notably, the notebooks on Sophocles, the Ency-
clopedia, rhythm, and rhetoric), and they print lectures never published before (on
Aeschylus' Choephori, Cicero, Latin grammar, and Latin epigraphy). 26 Whether im-
provements have been made in deciphering Nietzsche's notes is not easy to assess
from a distance (there are differences, most evidently in punctuation), but presumably
they have been made, building on the competent work of earlier editors, who included
the likes of Otto Crusius and Wilhelm Nestle, and given the advances in the fund of
knowledge about Nietzsche's Nachlass that have been made since, including the first
attempt at a new critical edition, the unfinished Beck edition in five volumes (BAW),
25. The phrase "ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern," etc., is from the essay, "Ueber Wahrheit
und Lfige irn aussermoralischen Sinne" (1873), KGW 3.2:374.
26. With the exception of the brief excerpts printed in the "Anhang" to GA 19:385-407. For the
policy of the editors of the GA philologica, see the "Nachwort" by O. Crusius and W.
Nestle, ibid., p. 416-18.
Review Articles 427
to which KGW as a whole stands in the direct line of succession. 27 The BAW under-
taking was begun in 1933, supervised by the classicist H.-J. Mette (who also sought to
put some semblance of order in the archives, developing the manuscript enumeration
that is still in use today), and interrupted by the Second World War. That said, the
KGW edition thus far remains an incomplete guide to Nietzsche's philologica for a
number of reasons. In the first place, the volumes lack an apparatus, annotations of
any kind, and any editorial commentary (which GA at least gestured toward). What
we get instead are brief prefaces to each volume and a promissory note in the first
volume that tells us that "Nachberichte" and "ApparatbKnde" are planned (as with
other volumes of KGW). What is more (or less), the volumes are unindexed, an unnec-
essary inconvenience (these, too, will come in a comprehensive index at the end of the
philologica section). In all of these respects, the edition as it stands is editorially speak-
ing inferior to the edition it will eventually replace, the Beck edition. The focus of
BAW, moreover, is the notebooks d o w n to 1869, and most prominently the research
notebooks, which cover the various projects in Theognis, Democritus, Diogenes Laer-
tius, Homer, and Hesiod, some of which issued in publications. For this reason, BAW
will remain indispensable until it is replaced by a future set of KGW volumes, which
are already underway. 28 And until then, the only comparandum remains GA, which
now, it can be said, has at last been definitively replaced.
Beyond the question of incompleteness, there are other problems of a more alarm-
ing kind. In one place, comparison with the earlier GA edition reveals a discrepancy in
the two texts. Where GA 17:329 reads: "Denn eine Thatsache ist etwas Unendliches, nie
viJllig Reproducirbares," the KGW editors print (2.3:344): " . . . ein v~llig Reproduzirbares."
Orthography aside (Nietzsche was capable of writing Reproducirbares or -zirbares), which
reading is right? The logic of the statement suits the GA reading best: facts are endless
for the same reason that they are never fully reproducible, because of their ongoing
constitution in the contemporary present. But what is alarming here is the quiet revi-
sion of the earlier reading and the looming possibility that one of the two readings
could be a mistranscription of Nietzsche's hand. And even supposing the KGW read-
ing were correct as a transcription, does that make it correct as a text? Might not
Nietzsche have made a slip of the pen? 29 Presumably the "Nachbericht" will shed
light on questions of this kind, but the ultimate decision is one that can be made by no
editor.
A second telltale sign of editorial tampering is the use of footnotes in the printed
Encyclopedia lecture, where Nietzsche's ms. simply shows insertions. In question are
rather annotations written onto the blank sides of a notebook, as mentioned above and
as illustrated by figs. 1-3. Just what the status of these annotations is meant to be and
when they were added is unclear: they may be afterthoughts, clarifications in gloss-
like form, cues for oral delivery, or genuine intercalations written after the fact. In the
minority of cases they have a kind of footnoting function, viz., that of providing
bibliographical references (but such references can appear in the "body" of the text as
well). To judge from the handwriting and from the ink, in the present case it appears
that the annotations are probably contemporary with the lecture notes, but a more
27. KGW 2.2 literally picks up where BAW 6 (1945), extant only in corrected proof-form, left
off. See KGW 2.2:x: "Far die Aischylos-Vorlesungen sind filters die vorsichtigen Integrationen von
C. Koch ~ibernommen worden," etc.
28. The juvenilia of BAW vols. 1-2 have been partially replaced by KGW 1.1 (ed. J. Figl, 1995).
29. See p. 414, n. 11 above.
experienced eye than mine w o u l d be n e e d e d to confirm this. The editorial a p p a r a t u s of

KGW, thin as it is, gives n o indication that any of this is a problem. It obviously is. 3~
A third, related p r o b l e m has to d o with dating. Consider again the Encyclopedia.
A l t h o u g h a n n o u n c e d for the Winter Semester of 1873/4, official records confirming
that the second lecture actually took place are lacking. W h a t w e h a v e is a letter from 7
N o v e m b e r 1873 to Gersdorff in which Nietzsche s o m e w h a t m y s t e r i o u s l y writes, "I'm
reading m y lectures o n Plato and u n l o a d i n g the other one [ich wdlze das andere ab],
which likewise has f o u n d takers [a sensitive point after the debacle of The Birth of
Tragedy], in favor of m y eyes," w h i c h w e r e already starting to fail h i m (KGB 2.3:176,
no. 325). W h e n w e turn to Janz 1974 for a second opinion, w e find that his results are
both equivocal and inconsistent. In one s u m m a r y table (p. 199), he concludes on the
basis of Nietzsche's testimony, a n d in the confirming light of a letter f r o m Gersdorff
from 29 M a y 1874 (KGB 2.4:479--80, no. 544), that the second lecture n e v e r took place:
"nicht abgehalten (trotz Teilnehmern)." In another table (p. 203), he writes, "SS 1871; evtl.
[possibly] WS 73/74." The editors of K G W 2.3 follow the latter formulation, w i t h o u t
c o m m e n t (p. 339). It is doubtful, in v i e w of the letter to Gersdorff alone, that Nietzsche
w o u l d h a v e revised the lectures in 1873/4 e v e n if he r e p e a t e d them, w h i c h seems
rather unlikely. I take it that the n o t e b o o k w e h a v e represents the original lecture, with
annotations dating from the same semester. H o w m a n y other p r o b l e m s of this kind
are lurking in KGW? 31
A m o r e general p r o b l e m is one that I t o u c h e d on above, n a m e l y the characteriza-
tion of the notebooks themselves, reflected in the v e r y title given to this Abteilung of
the edition. It is at times painfully unclear h o w the existing texts of Nietzsche's earliest
Nachlass stand in relation to each other. By far the clearest rival to the lecture materials
are the materials f o u n d in BAW (which are at times excerpted, and for this reason
alone u r g e n t l y n e e d to be reedited, or rather m o r e fully published). The BAW v o l u m e s
are not "Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen'; they are notes k e p t b y Nietzsche as he d e v e l o p e d
30. Consider the text of figs. 1-3. What is baffling about this entry is the way it appears full-
born on the page. By far the longest and most complex addition to the lectures (it is a tightly
structured lecture in miniature), it miraculously takes up the two and a third interleaved
sides that were left free as Nietzsche entered his running text into the notebook. (Was he
working from a draft that was then discarded? The same might be asked of the entire
lecture, which is nearly in fair copy.) Unlike the other addenda to the text, however, this
one is in an untidy hand, as if written in haste or excitement. (Presumably, the entry
numbered "n. 38" in KGW, but which appears two blank sides earlier, was entered out of
sequence because the empty space available in the vicinity of its proper sedes was taken up
by the lengthier addendum, viz. by "n. 37." If we could determine that n. 38 was created at
the time of the lecture in which it is recorded we would have a further argument that n. 37
dates to the time of the rest of the lecture and is not a later product [see discussion above].)
Whatever the explanation, the text in question is one of the more fascinating bits of ratioci-
nation and narrative in Nietzsche's philological notebooks.
31. A minor point are the occasional problems in Greek diacritical marks (e. g., 2.4:276: ajdikiva
which appears correctly as ajdikiva two lines earlier), which may be due either to an
editorial mistake or a mistake by Nietzsche, one that has been faithfully reprinted (absent,
however, any warning, e.g. "[sic]") in this edition. Pace Bierl and Calder 1992, who make no
allowances for these alternative possibilities, even if the mistakes are Nietzsche's they can-
not be used to indict his excellent command of Greek any more than his far more frequent
and sometimes egregious errors in German can be used to indict his command of his native
tongue (see p. 414, n. 11 above).
Review Articles 429
his various research projects and publications. But as we have seen, the distinction can
be a weak one. The lecture notes spill over into imagined publications; they overlap
with the research notebooks, at times substantively (as in the case of the Presocratics),
when not methodologically (passim). And to make matters worse, there are note mate-
rials printed in KGW 3.3-4, and 4.1-3 (Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1869-79) that are plain-
ly an extension of the BAW and KGW philological materials--although deciding which
is which simply points to the problem again. 32 Finally, and most interestingly of all,
the philologica in places can be indistinguishable from the more properly philosophi-
cal notes, in addition to cohabiting, on occasion, the same notebooks (a phenomenon
already found in BAW and one that would need to be born in mind in any reedition of
all the notebooks: it is of capital importance to know, where possible, the sequence, or
just physical proximity, of Nietzsche's ideas: what prompted him to write down what
and where?). 33 The result is that a comprehensive study of Nietzsche's philology
cannot ignore the BAW edition and must further triangulate between this, the KGW
philologica, and KGW vols. 3 and 4. In short, a uniform, standard edition of Nie-
tzsche's philologica is a long way off. And a comprehensive view of the puzzling
relationship between Nietzsche's philological and his philosophical thinking is still a
thing of the future. But there are grounds for optimism. Despite Bornmann's untimely
death in 1997, and despite the fact that the future direction of the critical edition is
uncertain (plans to abandon the existing KGW model for a diplomatic edition, at least
in the complex and controversial final Nachlass, are underway), the edition of juvenil-
ia and philologica will carry on and its goals will be reached. Much remains to be
done, and it will take years before the materials that could provide the basis for a more
definitive solution to the puzzle of the classicist and the philosopher in Nietzsche will
become available. Significantly more light has been shed on the problem thanks to the
present edition. And there is good reason to hope that Nietzsche's earliest writings
will some day become as important, and even as controversial, as his final scribblings
on the will to power.
To sum up, the neglect of Nietzsche's formation as a classicist on both sides of the
divide in his reception, pre- and post-Birth of Tragedy, is astonishing. Nietzsche's parali-
pornena in philology exerted an underground, posthumous influence on the history of
scholarship that we can only now begin to detail. 34 With the reissuing of his philologi-
32. These texts (not "fragments") are simply entries from notebooks that happen to coincide, in
time and often in theme, with Nietzsche's philological remains.
33. Determining the habits of his notetaking and especially notemaking activity ought to define
one of the future research foci in the study of Nietzsche.
34. Maas's metrics (Maas 1923) owes far more to Nietzsche than its central thesis. See further
Cancik 1995 and Cancik-Lindemaier 1995 and 1999 on various aspects of the reception of
Nietzsche in German educational circles, popular and higher. The famous Naumburg gath-
ering convoked by Jaeger in 1930 around the theme of "das Klassische," effectively consoli-
dating the so-called "Third Humanist" movement, actually fulfills a plan for such a confer-
ence laid out in a letter of Nietzsche's from 1872. Conspiring with Rohde against Wilamow-
itz, in response to the latter's attack on The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposes, "You could
explain, say at the beginning [of your public riposte], why you are appealing to W. directly,
and why you are not appealing, for example, to a meeting of classicists ["Philologenversamm-
lung"; the reference is to the regular national meeting of German classical scholars, later
replaced by the Fachtagungen of which the Naumburg meeting in 1930 was the fourth in a
new series founded in 1924; see Jaeger 1931, v]: [namely,] that at present we utterly lack a
high-level forum for the supremely ideal realization of our studies of antiquity [daft es uns
ca in a more perfect form there is even less of an excuse to ignore the "pre-critical"
Nietzsche any longer. A n d while a reevaluation of his philology is n e e d e d in order to
situate him more clearly in relation to---not " w i t h i n " - - t h e field, the still greater task
will be putting the Nietzsche of the later decades, especially the 1880s, back into touch
w i t h the Nietzsche w h o lived a n d t h o u g h t in broad and ambitious w a y s prior to The
Birth of Tragedy. 35 After all, Greek and Roman antiquity remained as central to Nie-
tzsche's thinking in 1888 as it was in 1868. W h a t is more, although this is not as well
recognized, Nietzsche frequently p l u n d e r e d his philological notebooks from the 1860s
a n d 1870s for ideas that he then carried over, sometimes verbatim, into his later note-
books, or into his later correspondence, or into his published writings, w h e t h e r to
defend or develop them. Surely if Nietzsche felt he needed to consult his o w n philo-
logical notebooks in later life, so should we.
James I. Porter
Department of Classical Studies and
Program in Comparative Literature
University of Michigan, A n n Arbor
References
Behler, Ernst, 1998. "Nietzsche's Antiquity" (review article on Cancik 1995), IJCT 4.3: 433--449.
Bierl, Anton and William M. Calder III, 1992. "Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Abrifl der Geschichte der
Beredsamkeit, A New Edition," Nietzsche-Studien 21: 363-89.
Barnes, Jonathan. 1986. "Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius," Nietzsche-Studien 15: 16--40.
Cancik, Hubert, 1995. Nietzsches Antike. Vorlesung, Stuttgart.
Cancik, Hubert, and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier (with Roswitha Wollkopf), 1995. "Der Ein-
fluff Friedrich Nietzsches auf klassische Philologen in Deutschland bis 1945: Philologen am Nie-
tzsche-Archiv (I)," in: Hellmut Flashar, ed. (with Sabine Vogt), Altertumswissenschaft in den
20er Jahren : Neue Fragen und Impulse, Stuttgart, pp. 381-402. (Rpt. in Cancik and Cancik-
Lindemaier, 1999, pp. 231-49.)
.1999. Philolog und Kultfigur: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine Antike in Deutschland, Stuttgart.
Gilman, Sander L., ed., with Ingeborg Reichenbach, 1981. Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, Bonn.
Gutzwiller, Hans, 1951. "Friedrich Nietzsches Lehrtfitigkeit am Basler Pfidagogium 1869-1876," Basler
Zeitschrift fiir Geschichte und Altertumskunde 50: 148-224.
Jaeger, Werner, ed., 1931. Das Problem des Klassischen und die Antike. Acht Vortrfige gehalten auf der
Fachtagung der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft zu Naumburg 1930, Leipzig. (Rpt. Darmstadt
1961.)
Janz, Curt Paul 1974. "Friedrich Nietzsches Akademische Lehrta'tigkeit in Basel 1869-1879," Nie-
tzsche-Studien 3: 192-203.
Maas, Paul, 1923. "Griechische Metrik," in Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Alfred Ger-
cke and Eduard Norden, vol. 1, Berlin, no. 7:1-32. [English as Greek Metre, translated by
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford 1962.]
jetzt ganz an einem h~chsten Forum fiir die idealsten Wirkungen unserer Alterthumsstudien fehlt]"
(KGB 2.3:12, no. 230). It is not impossible that this letter was known to Jaeger, who at the
tender age of twenty-six became Nietzsche's distant successor at Basel, and whose inaugu-
ral lecture from December 1914 ("Philologie und Historie"), as is known, seems to allude to
Nietzsche's own inaugural lecture from 1869. Nietzsche's spirit hovers over the conference
(and the place) in more ways than one. See esp. Schadewaldt's contribution in Jaeger 1931.
35. For a good beginning, see Cancik 1995; with review by Behler 1998.
Review Articles 431
Mansfeld, Jaap, 1985. "Wilamowitz' Ciceronian Philosophy," in: Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, ed.
William M. Calder III, Hellmut Flashar, and Theodor Lindken, Darmstadt, pp. 178-221.
Most, Glenn W., 1994. "< ~ >: Die Quellen von Nietzsches Rhetorik-Vorlessung," in: 'Centauren-
Geburten': Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, ed. Tilman Borsche,
Frederico Gerratana, and Aldo Venturelli, Mongographien und Text zur Nietzsche-Forschung
27, Berlin, pp. 17-46.
Porter, James I., 1994. "Nietzsche's Rhetoric: Theory and Strategy," Philosophy and Rhetoric 27.3:
218-244.
Reibnitz, Barbara von, 1992. Ein Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsche, "Die Geburt der Trag~die aus
dem Geiste der Musik" (Kap. 1-12), Stuttgart.
Stroux, Johannes, 1923. Nietzsches Professur in Basel, Jena.
Beginning Again: New Use for Old Vitruvius
R. D. Dripps, The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture (Cambridge,
Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1997), XII + 154 pp.
Beginning again grants us freedom f r o m . . , the seemingly purposeless but

relentless unfolding of history, and the supposed irreversibility of science [in
order to] place the present within the more optimistic paradigms that we
devise . . . . This is exactly what is offered by revisiting Vitruvius's tale of
origins. 1
The author, a professor of architecture w h o reacts adversely to the "quality of current

[i.e. postmodern] architectural discourse," has returned to the architectural treatise
that is revered as the lone survival from antiquity, De Architectura Libri X, widely
known in English as Vitruvius's "Ten Books of Architecture. "2 Professor Dripps' w o r k
is neither an appreciation of, nor even a commentary on, the substantial Vitruvian
books, which exceed three hundred pages in modern editions. Rather, the author has
selected a brief passage for consideration. His approach is not philological; rather than
seeking original meaning in historical context, he offers a subjective interpretation,
proposing possible implications today. The genre is the exegetic tradition of sermons
based on sacred texts; the given passage becomes a mere point of departure for theo-
retical musing. The new book may be viewed as a compilation of meditative essays.
This mode initially suggests a quasi-religious orientation that seems to be further
confirmed by subsequent development. Ultimately, the author requires less reason
than faith.
Lest readers of our journal decline to pursue this exercise further, they may be
assured that The First House is not merely idiosyncratic speculation but in a larger
context represents the position of an architectural faction today. The views are contro-
1. Summary observation of R. D. Dripps in his Epilogue to the subject work, 88.

2. R. D. Dripps is the T. David Fitzgibbon Professor of Architecture at the University of
Virginia. Vitruvii de Architectura Libri Decem (Vitruvius: The Ten Books of Architecture) appear
in many editions and translations. Well known is the English translation by Morris Hicky
Morgan from the 1899 Rose and Mueller Latin edition, widely available in reprint (New
York: Dover, 1960.)
versial, however. Some critics have rejected Dripps' argument. 3 Regardless of its va-
lidity, consideration here provides a point of departure for discussion of the classical
tradition as presently viewed by some factions of architectural thought.
Dripps' statement of purpose, which we have quoted at the outset, reveals his
position relative to architectural discourse today and more broadly to the current
cultural climate. Postmodern reaction to the orthodox modernism of the early and
mid-twentieth century entails much ferment and little consensus--a condition that
generally characterizes postmodernist discourse in the humanities. One may sympa-
thize with a sense of loss shared by many w h o knew the relative certitude of the
modernist ideology. One may not, however, share the author's pessimism regarding
"the seemingly purposeless but relentless unfolding of history, and the supposed irre-
versibility of science"--a bleak outlook not universal today when, indeed, a more
optimistic, Hegelian worldview is alive and well, as evidenced by the welcome recep-
tion in the United States of recent works by Francis Fukuyama. 4
Given Professor Dripps' attitudes about history and science, his quest for a new
beginning may be understandable, even if his method may be questionable. Why does
he return to Vitruvius? Implicit seems to be recognition in the ancient text of "arche-
typal authority [as] the most stable foundation for human existence" (11). We may
likewise value historical rootedness, but may prefer to be grounded without a tap root
of patriarchal authority; we also may recognize that Vitruvius was not the ultimate
progenitor of architecture. As much time separated the Roman writer from the Egyp-
tian Imhoptep, the first architect of record, as separates Vitruvius from us. The Roman
was not so close to origins as some at our distance might suppose. Indeed, other
theorists have observed that the Egyptians were not the only pre-classical ancients, s
Others have viewed the imperial Roman architecture of Vitruvius's time as already
decadent. 6 Still others have viewed earlier Greek work as defective. 7 It is a mere
accident of history that the Vitruvian text happens to be the oldest known architectural
treatise. In truth, it was written at the mid-point of architectural history as we know it,
and was composed in context of a particular agenda of the moment.
Professor Dripps recognizes that Vitruvius's work was "written specifically for
the use of the emperor Augustus" (4), but Dripps does not develop the implications of
3. Jeremy Melvin, "Making Too Much of Vitruvius," The Architects' Journal, 206.17 (November
1997): 60. This London-based journal may be expected to retain the more orthodox modern-
ist views that characterize present British architecture in general.
4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press; Toronto
and New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992); Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Pros-
perity (New York: The Free Press, 1995); The Great Disruption (New York: The Free Press,
1999). Fukuyama's articles, appearing in prominent national journals, have been widely
read and discussed; he also has spoken in the United States on National Public Radio.
5. Joseph Rykwert discusses notions of the "ancients" in On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea
of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972). Vico
regarded the Scythians, Chaldeans, and Chinese together with the Egyptians as the four
great "gentile" nations (Rykwert, 61).
6. Piranesi, writing in the eighteenth century, viewed Roman emulation of Greek work as a
late development that was superficially decorative (Rykwert, 56).
7. Lodoli, Memmo, and Paoli regarded Greek adaptation of primitive timber construction in
stone as inferior to masonry building practice of the Egyptians and Phoenicians (Rykwert,
56).
Review Articles 433
political patronage as motivation that may have conditioned the Vitruvian polemic.
Vitruvius was a practicing architect, doing both military and civilian work, and Au-
gustus was the preeminent client for Roman architects. In recent years the very term,
"Vitruvian," has acquired a pejorative political connotation in Italy. 8
Regardless of specific and real historical context, w h y does antiquity itself appeal
to a postmodern architectural theorist? " . . . The perennial objective of the treatise
writer or theoretician has been to establish an architecture whose authority has been
sanctioned by a first cause" (21). Lest the quest for a "first cause" for constructing
buildings seem grandiose, recall that Dripps believes architecture to be the "most
stable foundation for human existence" (11). He is inclined to such pretentious hyper-
bole, sometimes hardly comprehensible, telling us for instance that "architecture is the
making of the human understanding of the world," whatever that may mean (18).
Disregarding such impassioned excess, the author clearly is appropriating the histori-
cal Vitruvius for postmodern use. In a word, he is using Vitruvius. For what purpose?
Note that Dripps does not propose that we should learn from the ancients, but rather
that we should use their priority to endorse " . . . the more optimistic paradigms that
we devise" (88, emphasis added.)
Professor Dripps has selected as text for his sermon the three paragraphs that
open the first chapter of Book Two--the poetic myth about origin of the house:
Homines vetere more ut ferae in silvis et speluncis et nemoribus nascebantur ciboque

agresti vescendo vitam exigebant . . . .
The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves,
and lived on savage fare . . . . 9
Although Dripps does not contest the fantastic aspect of this tale, surely fictitious, he
would have us honor it as myth, regarding myth to be as valid as fact. Although it
may not be a genuine Roman myth, he w o u l d like to have the Vitruvian tale become
our myth. From the outset, a quasi-religious quest for faith is apparent.
Professor Dripps might seem to bring to his quest the sort of Jungian mystique
favored by the Eliade-Campbell schooU ~ Implied seems to be the view that underly-
ing and relating folk myths is some transcendent quality, an essential humanity. On
closer reading, the author seems to argue, in terms of modern pragmatism, that if
myths be useful, they may as well be true. He wishes not merely to understand histori-
cal myths, but also to appropriate a Vitruvian pseudo-myth to validate his agenda,
two thousand years later. Dripps notes that "the degree to which any paradigm can
remain valid is directly related to its continuing ability to offer a cogent account of the
world" (25). In other words, validity is correlated with utility. Again, "it is important
to recognize that a paradigm's existence is more dependent on prior paradigms than a
8. Charles Davis, "2000 anni di Vitruvio [edited by] Luigi Vagnetti [book review]," Society of
Architectural Historians Journal, 39 (October 1980): 251.
9. Morris Hicky Morgan translation.
10. Mircea Eliade is represented in the Dripps bibliography by five works from the 1950s and
'60s. The more popular and prolific writer, Joseph Campbell, whose works appeared during
the next two decades, is not represented, nor is the psychologist, even more prolific, Carl
Gustav Jung (1875-1961), whose views of myth were seminal.
response to external actuality" (25). Assembled, the Dripps argument becomes: " . . . Par-
adigms that we d e v i s e . . , can remain v a l i d . . . [if] more dependent on prior para-
digms than a response to external actuality." Although he appeals to the wisdom of
the ancients, this line of thought seems to be product of a twentieth-century, relativist
epistemology, if not moreover of the calculated propaganda of the mass media culture.
The author's orientation likewise is conveyed by his contention that " . . . The most
profound understanding of the world is possible only when we might have invent-
e d - - o r reinvented--that world" (32). 11
What is the world that Dripps wants to invent--or reinvent? Why has he chosen
this Vitruvian text? The reason is not merely the venerability of an ancient authority. It
was not the text that has generated the author's position; rather the author has appro-
priated the text because of a position held a priori. Professor Dripps represents a school
of architectural theory that links many faculties of architecture, largely in the north-
eastern United States. 12 He acknowledges the influence of several of his teachers w h o
are identified with the several institutions and other scholars whose work has been
favored by many in those faculties (xi, xii). 13 What is common to this school is not the
Jungian mystique of myth, although that aspect may appear occasionally; other values
and concerns shared by the school comprise its common ground. These interests led
Dripps to adopt myth as a device, and to select the Vitruvian myth to validate the
position of the school.
Among the teachers acknowledged by the author is Cornell University Professor
Emeritus Colin Rowe, who introduced a generation of graduate students to apprecia-
tion for historic urban spaces. Professor Rowe led his students beyond the sterile
doctrines of modern city planning, which was largely conceptual in theory and dia-
grammatic in practice; he encouraged students to discover the perceptual qualities of
historic urban places, generally European. Due largely to Colin Rowe's influence, the
Cornell University graduate program in Urban Design thrived. Some of his students in
turn became teachers, carrying their particular orientation to several schools of archi-
tecture, especially in mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. One of these young
professors of architecture, Michael Dennis, was author of a book that not only ac-
knowledged debt to Colin Rowe, but perhaps even more than his mentor's writing,
11. This observation derives from R. G. Collingwood, who in turn presented Vico's notion
(Collingwood, The Idea of History [London: Oxford 1946], 64). There is an important distinc-
tion, of course, between the internal, psychological condition and the external, objective
reality. Many postmodern theorists blur the distinction, maintaining, in effect, that reality is
no more than a mental construct.
12. The school may be viewed as representing the tradition of High Modem architecture, now
itself a historic style that is viewed by its proponents as "classic." A well-known representa-
tive of this school whose work may be known to readers of this journal is Richard Meier,
architect of the Getty Center, Los Angeles. The historic modem architect most revered by
this school is Le Corbusier (who designed a building for Harvard University). Many of the
institutions linked by this affinity belong to the "Ivy League" of older, eastern universities.
13. Graduates of certain institutions find affinity in programs of similar orientation. Young
professors often move from institution to institution, as do deans. The later Werner Selig-
mann came as dean to the Syracuse University School of Architecture from Cornell Univer-
sity, and his successor, Bruce Abbey (mentioned by the author as a teacher) from the
University of Virginia. Visiting professors often lecture or stay for an interim to teach at one
and then another school, cross-fertilizing their programs.
Review Articles 435
evidenced an architectural integration of European historic precedent and Cornellian

urban design theory) 4
Without attempting here a definitive presentation of that theory, it may suffice to
characterize the position of these architectural theorists as revisionist modern; without
breaking radically with twentieth-century architectural development, proponents sought
to integrate aspects of more historic architecture--particularly use of volumetric space
(internalized space that is contained as a spatial figure, in contrast to modernist uncon-
fined, non-figural space).
A major contributor to theory of this school has been the British architect Alan
Colquhoun, who has been visiting professor at American universities and whose Mo-
dernity and the Classical Tradition by its very title suggests the revisionist nature of the
movement as well as its relevance to readers of this journal. 15 Academic programs
conducted by American universities in European cities not only introduced students
to historic places, but acquainted many American faculty members who accompanied
them for semesters or years abroad. After several decades, the European influence has
become marked in many architectural schools, especially in the east. Contemporary
European theorists or architectural practitioners, although frequent visitors, have had
less effect than has direct experience by American students and faculty of historic
buildings, urban spaces, and gardens in Europe.
This rapprochement of anti-historic modernist architectural theory with historic
precedent has been gradual occurring over decades; it continues to be a slow integra-
tion, not a sudden fashion, and should not be confused with a more general cultural
development known vaguely as "postmodernism." That trend has been centered on
the humanities and has been largely linguistic. While there has been some trendy
appropriation in architectural circles, in the main there has been little genuine dis-
course between mostly conceptual literary theorists and mostly perceptual architects.
Although some schools of architecture have engaged in bizarre postmodern exercises,
more sedate faculties of many eastern institutions have retained a modified modernist
position that has integrated increased appreciation for historical precedent.
Therein lies the rub. Why has Professor Dripps needed an appeal to Vitruvian
myth? Why, if the evolutionary rapprochement were working, would there be need
for "a new beginning"? Revisionist modernism has failed to find a coherent theory.
The very notion of a historically attuned modernism is an oxymoron. The inherent
contradiction derives not so obviously from the original, anti-historical stance of the
modern movement; that might have been overcome in time. What proves more intrac-
table is a fundamental divergence between two ways of seeing and of thinking that
resist melding into a new alloy.
Readers of this journal may understand the deep dichotomy by analogy to Greek
and Roman sensibilities. Although the casual observer may see only stylistic similari-
ties between Greek and Roman architecture, both being regarded as "classical," fuller
understanding reveals fundamental differences between them. It is more important to
understand their alien intentions than to recognize their accidental appearances.
Whereas Rome assimilated a Mediterranean architectural tradition of earthen con-
14. Michael Dennis, Court & Garden: From the French H6tel to the City of Modern Architecture
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986).
15. Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, 1980-1987 (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989).
struction, developing a formal language natural to masonry, the Greeks evolved an

architectural language from timber construction (only belatedly recast in stone). Whereas
earthen forms became extended mass or plane, timber yielded discrete, linear compo-
nents. A fundamental difference in presumption about h o w buildings were to be made
naturally resulted in essentially divergent architectures. The Greek notion of form was
essentially additive, the whole being an assemblage of discrete parts. A Greek building
was an accretion of components. Romans, like Egyptians before them, viewed form
differently. Earth, even when transformed into Roman brick or poured concrete, is
plastic and indeterminate in shape, yielding continuous walls, which builders extend-
ed overhead into planar vaults. Earthen construction returns us to the cave.
Just as the Egyptians created internalized buildings, where interior had priority
over exterior, so continued the Romans. Like a grand sequence of Roman public build-
ings and forums, an Egyptian temple had been a series of enclosed spaces; it had little
external identity; its exterior was largely mute wall. Similarly, Hagia Sophia is virtual-
ly all interior; without, it has hardly any external presence beyond its profile on the
horizon. Perhaps the most iconic of all Roman works was Hadrian's Pantheon: in
effect from without it is but a massive tank; its unbroken exterior walls and dome,
however, contain within a great interior space that may warrant rare architectural use
of that superlative term, "sublime." In contrast, Ictinos' Parthenon had no perceptual
interior; it was virtually a solid block within (as perceived by most Athenians) with all
of its architecture externalized. It was the Egyptian temple turned inside out.
Vincent Scully has observed that the Greek temple was an embodiment of the
god, which is to say that it was individuated as a discrete object, detached from its
environsJ 6 Temple precincts might contain several structures, but always they re-
mained independent objects, perhaps artfully arranged, but never so integrated with
one another as to lose their identity. This was the Greek w a y of seeing--articulating
each part of an assemblage. The Greeks were object-fixated. Their intention was to
refine these objects, not to transcend their separateness by fusing them into larger
totalities. Greek cities were mere aggregations of separate elements. The Greeks had
not the capacity, in terms of a visual language of form, to become urbane. 17
The Romans, in contrast, were essentially urbane. Their accomplishment was not
in refining unique objects, but in organizing multiple elements into larger, coherent
wholes--whether a city or an army. Even a rural villa such as Hadrian's at Tivoli was
internalized, like a complex city. In a word, the Romans designed space, to be experi-
enced within, whereas the Greeks perfected objects, to be viewed from without.
Europe's designed townscapes are Roman, not Greek. When American architects
experienced not only Roman fora but Italian gardens--not only French gardens but
spatially complex and articulate French hStel interiors--they discovered a formal in-
t e n t i o n - t h e shaping of internal space at odds with the modernist notion of an unde-
fined, continuous external-internal space.
The introduction of an urbanist aesthetic to architectural theory presented a di-
lemma. The language of modernist architecture was Greek--not in superficial style, of
16. Vincent Scully, Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1991), 39, 49.
17. Distinction between Greek and Roman paradigms blurred in the Hellenistic period. About
the middle of the fifth century BC the vitality of the Greek temple as perfected object
waned, while cities became more consciously designed with figural public spaces (Scully,
99 ff.).
Review Articles 437
course, but more essentially in its intention. "Modern" architecture was similarly ob-
ject-fixated; architecture became the assemblage of components, carefully retaining the
articulation of their individuality. The great modern architect and architectural theo-
rist, Le Corbusier, in his influential Vers Une Architecture, on page after page mated
illustrations of Greek temples and modern automobiles. As a very perceptive artist, he
could see their kindred identity as assemblages of components, whereas most observ-
ers, seeing only superficial style, found the juxtaposition merely shocking.
Le Corbusier stated that "l'architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magniJique des
volumes assembleds sous la lumi~re" ("architecture is the masterly play of masses assem-
bled in light"). 18 These masses he abstracted as elemental forms, geometric blocks
assembled into buildings. 19 Even when looking at Roman architecture he saw merely
solid geometric objects; if the interior of the Pantheon was illustrated, apparently it
was not because it was a powerful space, but because it represented a pure sphere. 2~
The unresolved problem for modernist-urbanist architects has been, on the one
hand, their modernist architectural language, constrained by the Greek paradigm,
coupled with their concern for the shaping of space, in the Roman, urban tradition.
The Greek tools have been inadequate for the Roman task. The interior space of the
Pantheon is powerful precisely because it is contained by continuous surface of floor,
w a l l and dome. It is a cavern, hollowed from a ponderous, earthen mass. One would
not expect the Athenian Ictinos, regardless of the finesse of his Parthenon, given his
limited formal language, to produce Hadrian's Pantheon--nor would Le Corbusier do
anything of the kind.
Confronting this dilemma, the reason for wishing a "new beginning" becomes
more apparent, as does the reason for choosing the Vitruvian text; it is not merely
about the origins of architecture, but more particularly proposes that the origin of
architecture was a communal undertaking, when primitive men gathered in a clear-
ing--trope for an urban space--hollowed from the dense forest, like a cave hollowed
from the earth. It is the Roman sensibility. Neither Vitruvius nor Dripps have been
persuaded by the more likely scenario that originally some parents pulled a few branch-
es together to shelter their children, making the original primitive hut (and subse-
quently to cut logs and build timber houses for families)-~a more reasonable Greek-
modernist view--because both Vitruvius and Dripps have shared the Roman, urbanist
agenda. Both architects (and probably patron Augustus) cared about facilitating the
urban life of crowds, and about representing the collective form of the community in
its urban environment.
Professor Dripps does not cast the architectural problem so specifically in terms
of ends related to means; accordingly, he does not prescribe a solution beyond imply-
ing, with his "new beginning," a questioning of accepted paradigms. In contrast, archi-
tect Michael Dennis has confronted the problem of integrating the Greek and Roman
paradigms, brilliantly resolving the dilemma in the project for the Art Museum for the
University of California at Santa Barbara--a work unbuilt, but warranting wider rec-
ognition as a new historical paradigm. 21 In retrospect the Santa Barbara Museum
design may emerge as the pivotal architectural idea of the 1980s.
18. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: l~ditions Vincent, Fr6al, n.d.), 16.
19. Le Corbusier, 128.
20. Le Corbusier, 126.
21. Jeffrey Clark was co-designer with Michael Dennis of the 1983 project, illustrated in Dennis
223-225.
Dripps' approach is neither particularly historical nor critical, but is more poetic
and, as suggested initially, religious. While he has not invoked particular deities, his
reverence for m y t h colors the work. One senses in the pragmatic approach his need for
grounding practice in more transcendent principle, even if the principle itself be ground-
ed only in h u m a n need for it. This pragmatic tautology may not be rationally compel-
ling, and one may dismiss invention of myths as merely the comforting therapy of
religion, but Professor Dripps' poetic intuitions surmount this sort of criticism. He
conveys deep concern and sensitive perceptions in fine, if occasionally inflated, prose.
His text is complemented by evocative drawings, equally poetic. Readers of this jour-
nal who are not architectural specialists may react favorably to these qualities, but
may find most relevant the relation of the work and its representation of current
architectural issues to the classical tradition. Readers interested in a more scholarly
study of many theories and myths about the origin of architecture in antiquity may
turn to Joseph Rykwert's work. 22
Paul Malo
Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture
Syracuse University
A Stoicism for Our Time?
Lawrence C. Becker, A N e w Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217

PP.
Stoicism is hot these days. When Epictetus' Stoicism provides the deliverance of two
of the three main characters in the most recent work of novelist Tom Wolfe, 1 it is
evident that its impact has reached beyond scholarly circles and into the literary imag-
ination of popular culture. Within academe, Stoicism has won a new convert: the
contemporary moral philosopher Lawrence C. Becket. In A N e w Stoicism (Princeton,
1998), Becker makes a daring, creative use of the ancient Graeco-Roman heritage of the
Stoa to outline a rigorously conceived, technically sophisticated, contemporary version
of stoicism (deliberately uncapitalized by Becker). His project is not an attempt to
reconstruct any ancient version of stoicism, but rather is "an investigation of neglected
possibilities, written by a stoic who is merely trying to show a skeptical audience that
his ethical theory is philosophically viable" (7). Notice that Becker openly declares his
allegiance to stoicism. This approach has three salutary effects.
First, he can embrace most of the tough doctrines of the ancient Stoic tradition.
This imparts refreshing candor and unusual directness to his project. In contrast to
Becker's explicit identification with the stoic camp, classical scholars whose studies of
22. Dripps mentions On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural
History and other Rykwert works in his bibliography, and in his Acknowledgements recog-
nizes Rykwert's influence, but absence of reference to Rykwert's studies in the narrative
itself is a conspicuous omission.
1. A Man in Full (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998). Charlie Croker, the principal charac-
ter, is converted to Stoicism by Conrad Hensley. The third main character, Roger 'Too'
White, pursues political power, not Stoic wisdom.
Review Articles 439
ancient Stoic philosophy show an appreciation for its theoretical strengths invariably
either implicitly or explicitly disavow stoicism. 2
Second, Becker is free to reinterpret or modify other ancient Stoic doctrines, and
even to abandon those few that have been scientifically discredited and, he believes,
are eliminable from stoic ethical theory. For instance, he rejects stoic theology altogeth-
er by abandoning the metaphysical doctrine that the universe should be understood as
a purposive, rational being. By m o d e m scientific consensus, a teleological physics and
biology is insupportable. Consequently Becker needs no doctrine of cosmic telos to
prop up his neostoicism. On the other hand, he defends the eudaimonist basis of stoic
ethical theory while rejecting the fashionable claim that ethics is autonomous, being
derived from either a priori principles, sentiment, utility, rights, duties, or contractual
arrangements. Becker also commendably attacks the rampant caricature of the stoic
sage as emotionally detached, capable merely of endurance and resignation, but quite
incapable of joy. 3
Third, Becker can employ sophisticated logical notation to construct a calculus for
normative logic that perspicuously demonstrates how normative propositions can be
generated, and thus how stoic practical reasoning might operate in concreto. Serious
attention to logic testifies to Becker's fidelity to the Chrysippan tradition within the
Stoa, though on most doctrinal controversies Becker sides with Posidonius. The neos-
toicism that emerges is a challenging secularized form of ethical naturalism informed
by contemporary cosmology and by developmental psychology, and advanced with
vitality and flair.
The first chapter, scarcely longer than a page, galvanizes the reader from the
outset. Becker decries how, after enjoying five centuries of prominence in Greek and
Roman antiquity, "stoic ethics was pillaged by theology and effaced by evangelical
and imperial Christianity" (3). He explains how the only shards of stoic doctrines that
survived into the Middle Ages were the analgesics used in pastoral counseling, the
military, and what then passed for medicine and psychotherapy. 4 Later, the signifi-
cant challenges to stoic metaphysics were presented by m o d e m science and by the rise
of ethical theories hostile to eudaimonism. Philosophy in the late nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, Becker laments, ultimately scuttled the stoic project by fobbing off the
fact-value distinction to the social sciences and by ushering in nonnaturalism, noncog-
nitivism, intuitionism, constructivism, the coherentist interpretation of moral truth,
pluralism, relativism, irony, and dogmatism about natural duties and the intrinsic
moral worth of h u m a n beings. He concludes Chapter I by bemoaning the fact that the
only groups that now say anything in favor of stoicism are soldiers who prefer stoic
psychotherapy to morphine and mood enhancers, logicians who appreciate stoic work
2. A.A. Long, for example, declares "I am not.., offering neo-Stoicism as the philosophy for
our time," Stoic Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 177.
3. For more balanced studies, see G. B. Kerferd, "What does the wise man know?" in J. M. Rist
(ed.), The Stoics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 125-136; Margaret E. Ree-
sor, "The Stoic Wise Man," Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy V
(1989): 107-123, with respondent's "Commentary" by Wolfgang Haase, ibid., 124-134; A. A.
Long, Stoic Studies, 85-106 and 167-171; and William O. Stephens, "Epictetus on How the
Stoic Sage Loves," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XIV (1996): 193-210.
4. See Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic tradition from antiquity to the early Middle Ages, 2 vols., Studies
in the history of Christian thought 34-35 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1985; 2nd ed. ibid.
1990).
on the propositional calculus, and Hellenists w h o argue that the ancient stoics' ethical
doctrines were not (for their time) foolish (3-4).
A modernized neostoicism that strips away those features of ancient Stoicism
long since discredited by science and philosophy is outlined in Chapter 2. Becker
imagines a treatise in which virtue, happiness, and the good life are identified with
living well in terms of the available resources. Living well in this sense is the product
of following the final, all-things-considered normative propositions of practical reason.
These normative propositions cannot be constructed a priori, but rather depend cru-
cially upon the fullest available knowledge of the natural world. Construction of these
propositions always begins with what is possible for a particular agent with a particu-
lar history, character, and range of choices. Thus such particulars are generalized only
to the extent that agents have a common history, nature, and situation. These proposi-
tions, such a book would show, rarely ratify the agent's narrow self-interest; rather, in
typical cases following them means realigning or overriding many of one's dearest
wishes. The book would describe a character-building regime for this purpose which
emphasizes control of one's mental states as a means of overcoming obstacles to living
well. It would also discuss h o w natural endowments and circumstances determine
whether living well is compatible with intense longing, passionate commitments, grand
gestures, and reckless adventure, or whether it always requires the bland, cautious
existence described in contemptuous essays on stoicism. Becker writes:
That book would be in the stoic tradition, in the sense that it put forward a
cluster of doctrines traceable to central elements of classical stoic ethics. It
would be eudaimonistic, in identifying the good life or happiness with flour-
ishing--with being excellent-of-one's-kind. It would be intellectualistic, in
identifying virtue with rationality--with carrying out the normative proposi-
tions of practical reason. It would be naturalistic, in its insistence that facts
about the natural world were the substance of practical deliberation. And
because the book would argue that virtuous conduct was always the same
one thing (namely, conformity to practical reason), the b o o k like the stoics,
would propound the formal unity of the virtues. Moreover, the book's focus
on the full particularity of each agent could be seen as a remnant of the stoic
notion of a role for each of us in the grand system of nature. The emphasis on
self-mastery would also be familiar. (5-6)
Becker adds that his book "is less ambitious than the one we have just imagined, but it
is in the same line of work" (6). This two-and-a-half-page chapter ends with the warn-
ing that he is offering neither an exposition nor a defense of ancient stoic texts. Instead,
his examination of such texts so as to justify calling his project stoic is placed in
commentaries appended to subsequent chapters. Toward the end of this article I will
return to discuss the success of his attempted justification.
In Chapter 3 Becker aims to convince readers w h o are dubious of the idea that a
contemporary revival of stoic ethics should be undertaken at all. He begins by arguing
that ethics is independent of religion (8) but is not an autonomous discipline because it
has no unique method or subject matter. He argues that neostoic ethics is subordinate
to all branches of rational inquiry and science because it cannot do its normative work
until all relevant empirical descriptions of the facts of the natural world are in hand.
Hence, since the natural sciences reject the anthropocentric view of the cosmos, neo-
Review Articles 441
stoics follow the scientific consensus that the universe is unimaginably large and old,
and in constant evolutionary change. Neostoics also grant that there is no evidence
that our galaxy, planet, or species is central to any cosmic process, and that there is no
evidence that the natural history of earthly life is of any cosmic significance. From
these and other facts about existing values, preferences, projects, commitments, and
conventions, h u m a n agents construct normative propositions about what we ought to
do or be all-things-considered. Thus, in its general purpose, stoic ethics is like other
advice-giving endeavors, such as etiquette, coaching, medicine, and psychotherapy. So
although ethics does not have its own special subject area or form of reasoning--and
so is the last and least branch of h u m a n inquiry---Becker contends that it is also the
first and foremost h u m a n enterprise since only its normativity is all-inclusive (9). For
Becker, "stoic moral training aims to develop in each agent the disposition to seek
social roles, conventions, and institutions in which she has more rather than less con-
trol of her own life, unless having less can be shown to make a countervailing contri-
bution toward a good life for her" (19). Moreover, stoic training aims to enable agents
to salvage some form of good life under adversity, and to handle sudden, massive
changes in our circumstances. Since full integration of our many commitments, projects,
and endeavors requires superlative development of our agency powers, practical rea-
soning all-things-considered necessarily plays a dominant role.
In his commentary to Chapter 3, Becker explains that he chooses not to use Epi-
ctetus and Marcus Aurelius because of their preoccupation with quasi-theology, moral
training, therapy, and the notion that everyone has a 'role' in a cosmic plan (22-23).
Becker's choice to discard Epictetus and Marcus on this score is unfortunate because,
among other philosophical strengths a closer reading of these thinkers can provide, it
overlooks a powerful distinction between what is 'up to us' and what is 'not up to us'.
This fundamental dichotomy is entirely devoid of unwanted theological taint and was
used by Epictetus with tremendous leverage in illustrating h o w a Stoic reflects on
practical matters. Becker examines the relationship between physics and ethics in an-
cient Stoicism, and argues for a non-reductive physicalism as the m o d e m version of
the ancient Stoics' particularism and corporealism. Moreover, he reminds readers that
"stoics are perfectly aware of the importance of all of the things people ordinarily
count as goods" and "are not committed to the position that pleasurable affects, friend-
ship, and so on are merely instrumental or 'extrinsic' goods" (29). The stoics, Becker
explains, have a unitary rather than a plural conception of the good life. Stoics hold
that whether goods are diverse or not, there is only one set of them sufficient for
making a life good. This set, the final end, stoics hold, is virtue, and is alone what is
necessary and sufficient for a good life. Yet at the same time Becker allows that stoic
sages in different circumstances and ages will organize their virtuous lives and pursue
their chosen projects and activities in quite diverse ways.
Chapter 4 contains a formal description of the normative practical logic sketched
informally in the first three chapters. Becker identifies four axioms that he claims make
his normative logic definitively stoic. The Axiom of Encompassrnent: the exercise of
our agency through practical intelligence, including practical reasoning all-things-con-
sidered, is the most comprehensive and controlling of our endeavors. The Axiom of
Finality: there is no reasoned assessment endeavor external to the exercise of practical
reasoning all-things-considered. The Axiom of Moral Priority: norms generated by the
exercise of practical reasoning all-things-considered are superordinate to all others.
The Axiom of Futility: agents are required not to make direct attempts to do (or be)
something that is logically, theoretically, or practically impossible. Becker could have

strengthened his account of the Axiom of Futility by linking it to the ancient Stoic
doctrine of what is 'up to us' and what is 'not up to us'.
In Chapter 5, Becker wisely reinterprets the stoic slogan 'follow nature' to mean
follow the facts. All the discernible facts about the physical and social world we act in,
and all the available facts about the particular situation of individual agents must be
had prior to deliberation about norms. Normative conclusions are constructed, then, a
posteriori from this plethora of facts. As our empirical knowledge of the facts changes,
so too must our normative propositions be adjusted to fit those changes. Becker's case
for neostoicism is again compelling.
Stoic ethical theory is not enslaved by nature, gods, emperors, or the status
quo. Stoics have been slaves (and emperors), but have opposed the institu-
tion of slavery. Stoics have lived in parochial settings, but have argued for
cosmopolitan politics and universal moral norms. Stoics have accepted the
facts of oppression and danger for what they are, but have fought to the
death. Stoics have adjusted to a changing world, but have also committed
suicide as a matter of principle. Following nature--following the facts--is
not quietism, conformity, or passivity.
Nor is it romanticism. Stoics do not confuse virtue with genius, heroism
with metaphysical rebellion, nobility with contempt for the mundane, emo-
tion with passion, passion with loss of control, loss of control with largeness
of spirit, victory with triumph, or tragedy with death. (43--44)
The remaining sections of this chapter are packed full of dense, conceptually rich,
often suggestive but highly technical discussion. The discussion of heteronomous en-
deavors, autonomous agency, and freedom would have been better illuminated had
Becker been more generous with examples. But his explication of how stoics can avoid
fatalism "by taking human freedom to consist in the determinative effect we have,
through the exercise of our agency, on what happens in our lives--including what
happens with regard to the exercise of our agency itself" (65) is appealing. Becker emphasiz-
es the considerable causal powers of h u m a n agency and maintains that, on the stoic
view, a life without metaphysical liberty can still be a life of undiminished virtue and
happiness. Consequently, the riddle of causal determinism is rendered unimportant
given the aims of stoic ethics.
In articulating the sense in which stoicism is a form of ethical naturalism, Becker
follows Annas 5 in his commentary to Chapter 5. He also characterizes as the linchpin
of the stoic account of moral development the concept of oikeiosis and the cradle
argument--the psychological process by which humans develop from initial narrow
self-interest in infancy to being motivated by universal moral theory in adulthood.
Becker persuasively contends that neostoic psychology is congruous with contempo-
rary 'textbook variety' psychological theory.
The many wonderfully illustrative examples in Chapter 6 make for almost sprightly
reading compared to the theoretical thickets of Chapter 5. Neostoics hold that virtue
consists in perfected agency, which does not admit of degrees, while the exercise of
agency (virtuous activity) does admit of degrees. Becker attributes the seemingly in-
5. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Review Articles 443
tractable disputes between Kantians, utilitarians, contractarians, intuitionists, and oth-

er non-stoic theorists to their overly simple or even formal accounts of agency. He
proceeds to offer a schematic description of agency as a material reality that "emerges
in the normal course of psychological development, beginning with the behavior of
infants in the cradle" (83). This cradle argument emphasizes the recursive, hegemonic
nature of agency and suggests the futility of using extremely reductive or abstract
notions of its constitutive elements for the purposes of ethical theory. Becker's account
shines. The lucidity of the following passage is characteristic of the analysis of this
chapter.
Consider the response of a toddler who trips and falls suddenly, skinning his
knee. What will he do if his mother shows happy surprise, scoops him up
encouragingly in her arms in a way that reinforces his interest in playing,
distracts him momentarily by straightening his shirt, and then helps him
examine the wound with clinical interest? By contrast, what will he do if his
mother shrieks in alarm, scoops him up protectively in a way that focuses his
attention on his pain, and mirrors his fear and pain by responding sympa-
thetically to his cries? We have all seen the difference, and it is a remarkable
one. It is a difference not only in how much (or whether) the toddlers cry and
stop playing to devote themselves to this new endeavor, but evidently in
how much pain they experience as well. (97)
Becker forcefully propounds stoic physicalism in holding that the circumstances

of healthy agency are a subset of the circumstances of physical health. And just as an
agent is routinely motivated to preserve her or his health, so too will he or she endeav-
or to perfect her agency. Becker introduces a helpful distinction between health, fit-
ness, and virtuosity. Whereas fitness is excellence for a given circumstance or purpose,
virtuosity is the maximization of various properties of fitness. He quite plausibly
maintains that agents persistently prefer fitness to health and virtuosity to fitness.
Fitness in the case of agency, he explains, results from increasing the scope, strength,
speed, accuracy, stability, control, and effectiveness of one's powers of deliberation
and choice for practical purposes generally. Virtuoso agency, in turn, is as versatile
and adaptable as is required for the optimization of the agent's practically possible
endeavors. Ideal agency is this virtuoso agency--an ability developed to the limit of
h u m a n capability, not merely to the limit of a given agent's capability. Becker convinc-
ingly argues that virtuoso agents are made, not born. They are made by having to
learn to cope with passion, fear, pain, loss, depression, disappointment, malevolence,
failure, and their opposites. So even a loose approximation of ideal agency will require
a long, full, complex, challenging, and worldly life (108). To exercise one's agency one
must aim, through practical reasoning, at the global optimization of one's current and
future projects. Developing the strong norms corresponding to the usual notions of
wisdom, justice, benevolence, courage, temperance, and other such traits is a necessary
condition for developing one's agency from health to fitness to virtuosity. Becker
concludes that for a healthy agent, regardless of her circumstances, virtue as a set of
dispositional powers is unconditionally a good, right up to the moment of death.
Moreover, virtue is the only unconditional good. This is because over the course of
their psychological development, healthy agents develop a superordinate affection for
virtue--for the exercise of the sort of agency that optimally coordinates, integrates,
and implements their endeavors. And once virtue becomes healthy agents' most com-
prehensive and controlling endeavor, its value for them will be incommensurable with
that of other good things in the sense that nothing will be an adequate substitute for
virtue (121-122).
Commenting on Chapter 6, Becker contends that stoic moral psychology satisfies
Flanagan's account of minimal psychological realism. 6 I think Becker succeeds in show-
ing that the motivational structure needed to pursue the ideal of the sage is practically
possible, and that achieving the ideal is theoretically possible. Yet he dodges a tough
question when he concedes that "it is of course true that it is impossible to exercise
agency at all when our stock of external goods falls below some minimum level" (128).
What, we must ask, counts as a 'minimum level'? If tennis is one of m y endeavors and
I lack either a partner to play with or enough money to buy indoor court time through
the winter, is m y agency partially thwarted? Or is Becker's 'minimum level' the fewest
possible calories of food per day I need to avoid persistent fainting while pursuing a
couple of very low energy, solitary endeavors? Becker neglects to even approximate
what minimum stock of external goods is required to exercise agency at all. And when
a stoic's stock of external goods does fall below this unspecified minimum, does suicide
then become required, advisable, or indifferent? Some account of the criteria that
recommend suicide in Becker's neostoic framework is needed in this discussion but is
provided neither here nor elsewhere.
His appropriation of a Dickinson poem, 7 on the other h a n g is quite effective in
the defense of his view that passions generated by true beliefs are not ruled out by
stoic doctrine. Only passions that are infantile, bestial unintegrated, or incapacitating
preclude perfecting one's agency. Indeed, Becker's contention that stoic sages ought to
be passionately affected by virtue, and surpassingly so, since they perceive it to be
surpassingly valuable (132), is intriguing.
In Chapter 7 Becker argues that happiness as understood by mature and fit agents
is a property of whole lives, not of transient mental states. The sage, he supposes, will
want the biological completion of her life to coincide with its biographical completion.
The good life for the sage is unified and replete with activity that exemplifies the
virtuosic exercise of practical intelligence in every context, from local to global. Becker
softens the stoic doctrine that pleasure adds nothing to the virtuous, happy life by
holding that pleasures add no virtue to the virtuous life, but they do add nonagency
goods to it. Thus the virtuous life with nonagency pleasures is reasonably enough
preferred to the virtuous life that lacks them. Becker uses an aeronautical analogy to
illustrate how agency "is a balance between our dispositional ability to maneuver
effectively toward our goals, responding with practical intelligence to salient events
along the way, and our dispositional resistance to being deflected by the shifting
winds of impulse and circumstance" (142). He presents a fine example of how a
grieving nurse can quickly release her despair in the face of an emergency in order to
act from her healthy agency. Neostoics endorse the ability to exercise or recapture
such control whenever practical intelligence calls for it, though luxuriating in passion
is sometimes perfectly harmless. The ancient Stoics demanded extirpation of all vio-
lent passions (pathe) while sanctioning what they called eupatheiai or "good emotional
states'. So Becker is not beyond the pale, as some may think, in rejecting the idea that
6. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
7. T.H. Johnson (ed.), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960),
poem 249.
Review Articles 445
the sage is unfeeling. 8 He concedes that sages suffer on the rack, but they differ from
the rest of us in their virtuosic abilities to resist the defeat of their agency under
conditions that would defeat merely fit agents.
The commentary to Chapter 7 contains lengthy quotations from Long and Sed-
ley 9 on Stoic eudaimonism and from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Book V on the
thesis that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Becker rejects a very robust form of the
idea of the connectedness of all parts of the sage's life that would preclude spontane-
ous fun or morally indifferent hobbies. While he holds that sages are attentive to, and
act on, the norms generated in all the contexts in which their lives are embedded, from
local to global, he insists that nothing in his neostoicism entails that a virtuous life
must be an abundantly social or political one.
On this point Becker's neostoicism has drawn criticism for failing to prescribe any
particular solutions to the question of h o w societies and their economies should be
organized so as to be just. The complaint continues that both Becker's neostoic and the
ancient Stoics suffer from this dearth of political theory because both emphasize re-
forming individuals as moral agents functioning within institutions rather than criticiz-
ing those institutions themselves. 1~ Becker might reply by insisting that social institu-
tions are derivative since "all actual endeavors, no matter h o w complex and social, are
at bottom facts about the conduct and character of individual agents" (47). Yet I think
he has an even better reply. Becker appears to have missed another opportunity to
avail himself of Epictetus' basic distinction between what is 'up to us' and what is 'not
up to us.' Individuals, he could argue, are well situated to pursue their o w n affairs and
to try to conduct their own lives justly as things within their power. In sharp contrast,
very few (or none) are in a position to reshape entire institutions, rearrange whole
economic systems, transform governments, and restructure societies so that they are
just. The apolitical stoic could thus maintain that he is not mindlessly embracing the
status quo, but rather seriously heeding the Axiom of Futility with regard to large-
scale political reform.
Is Becket's neostoicism stoic enough? He has abandoned some stoic doctrines:
virtue is the only good; the universe is a providentially organized, rational being; all
h u m a n emotions must be extirpated. He has also omitted the Stoic doctrine of suicide
and the distinction between what is and what is not up to us. Is the system he is left
with really stoicism? One critic claims that Becker's is a "Stoicism eviscerated. "n But
in so far as he is firmly committed to an uncompromising rationalism in the conduct of
one's life and a naturalism that follows the facts afforded by our best available empiri-
cal science, his project is indeed arguably and interestingly within the Stoic philosophi-
cal tradition. After all, Stoicism was itself reinterpreted and refashioned by its ancient
proponents, who occasionally disagreed with one another. Becker has at the very least
made a serious case for calling his system 'stoicism' by offering careful rationales for
each of the doctrines he retains, revises, or rejects. Critics who disagree cannot simply
complain that since his system lacks doctrines x, y, or z, it just isn't Stoicism. The issue
is whether what Becker offers is what a stoicism at the end of the twentieth century w o u l d
8. See my "Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves" (cited in n. 3 above).

9. A.A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
10. R.W. Sharpies, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.11.12.
11. Victoria Voytko, Ancient Philosophy 19:1 (Spring 1999): 195-199.
look like. His critics must then either enter the debate, engage with the details of his
account, wrestle with his arguments, and construct their own alternative versions of
neostoicism, or quietly allow Becker to label his system as he pleases.
Though the majority of its opponents from antiquity on typically resorted to
caricature in order to vilify stoic philosophy, Becker has done much more than demon-
strate that "stoicism does not license stupidity" (157). A New Stoicism is a vigorously
argued manifesto that explodes this m y ~ s t o i c s can hope---for good. Becker de-
serves praise for producing an exciting, sophisticated, and promising outline to be
fleshed out by other ethicists similarly emboldened to call themselves stoics.
William O. Stephens
Departments of Philosophy and of
Classical and Near Eastern Studies
Creighton University

Porter 1999

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REVIEW ARTICLES

"Rare Impressions." Nietzsche's Philologica: A Review of the

Bd 1. Philologische Schriften (1867-1873), ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella

Abbreviations (see also "References," below p. 430):

The Materials: An Overview

1. See Barnes 1986 on the Laertiana.

value, unfortunately is unknown in the modern curricula in Europe or in the States,

questions of Nietzsche's own making, was followed by a blow-by-blow commentary

Ueber die Choephoren des Aschylus.

On the Choephori of Aeschylus.

All the scenes are equally near and detailed.

Chapter II. Plato's P h i l o s o p h y as Main Evidence for Plato the M a n

More notes resume, n o w i n d e e d of a m o r e general and fascinating nature. Nietzsche

nized assumptions of the professional scholar, and he aspired to a different kind of

Dionysianism, an "innovation" (Neuerung)? The chronology is elusive, or better yet,

The song and pantomime of such dually-minded revelers was something

the most neglected Preplatonic philosophers in the scholarship on Nietzsche's thought

Some Final Question Marks

experienced eye than mine w o u l d be n e e d e d to confirm this. The editorial a p p a r a t u s of

Beginning Again: New Use for Old Vitruvius

Beginning again grants us freedom f r o m . . , the seemingly purposeless but

The author, a professor of architecture w h o reacts adversely to the "quality of current

1. Summary observation of R. D. Dripps in his Epilogue to the subject work, 88.

Homines vetere more ut ferae in silvis et speluncis et nemoribus nascebantur ciboque

evidenced an architectural integration of European historic precedent and Cornellian

struction, developing a formal language natural to masonry, the Greeks evolved an

A Stoicism for Our Time?

Lawrence C. Becker, A N e w Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217

something that is logically, theoretically, or practically impossible. Becker could have

tractable disputes between Kantians, utilitarians, contractarians, intuitionists, and oth-

Becker forcefully propounds stoic physicalism in holding that the circumstances

8. See my "Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves" (cited in n. 3 above).

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