Naam: Rob Compaijen
Studentnummer: 0401250
Reflective report Nietzsche-seminar 14-09-2007
In his article ‘Vom “Arzt der Cultur” zum “Arzt und Kranker in einer Person”. Eine
Hypothese zur Entwicklung Nietzsches als Philosoph der Kultur(en)’ Paul van Tongeren, as
the title makes clear, shows and explains the evolution of Nietzsche’s conception of culture.
Paul van Tongeren suggests that one way of understanding this evolution is to pay particular
attention to the ways Nietzsche formulates questions from The Birth of Tragedy up to 1886.
The main question addressed in his article is: how do the terms ‘philosophy/philosopher’ and
‘culture’ relate to each other in Nietzsche’s thinking? This question is answered in two parts:
first, the Nietzschean philosopher becomes a physician not only of culture, but also of
himself; and second, by being a physician of himself, he incorporates culture within himself,
that is, he no longer diagnoses culture from without, but from within. He becomes a
laboratory where culture experiments with itself.
The article’s first section (‘Nietzsches Sprachgebrauch m.B. auf sein Denken über die
Kultur’) first explores where Nietzsche refers to his thinking in terms of ‘philosophy of
culture’. Though there are some hints to be found, the phrase ‘Philosophie der Cultur’ is not
used as such in Nietzsche’s published works. The only occurrence is to be found in a
Nachlass sketch, in which ‘Philosophie der Cultur’ is the title of the first chapter of
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I. Interestingly enough, it is the only chapter title which
Nietzsche will modify for the published version.
Van Tongeren notices another interesting point. As we know, Jenseits von Gut und Böse
was originally planned as a new version of Menschliches I. There are obviously strong
similarities between these works, but a central difference is that the title of the fifth chapter of
Menschliches (‘Anzeichen höherer und niederer Cultur’) has changed into ‘Der freie Geist’ as
the title of the second chapter in Jenseits. The chapter in Menschliches is about culture, the
corresponding chapter in Jenseits about morals. Moreover, we notice that the fifth chapter has
become the second chapter: ‘Cultur’, as a theme, has disappeared from the centre of the book.
These modifications raise the following questions: What has happened between Menschliches
and Jenseits? How did the ‘Philosoph der Cultur’ become ‘Freie Geist’ and what does this
shift tell us about the relation between philosophy/philosopher and culture?
In the article’s second section (‘Der Arzt der Kultur’) Van Tongeren emphasises the
importance of the metaphor of the philosopher as a physician of culture in Nietzsche’s works.
This metaphor seems to be a recurrent image in Nietzsche’s thinking. We notice in Jenseits a
combination of the metaphor of the philosopher as a physician of culture with the idea of the
‘Freie Geist’ – the latter is described by Nietzsche as a ‘philosophische[r] Arzt im
ausnahmsweisen Sinne des Wortes’. How does this metaphor help us to understand the
development of Nietzsche’s thinking about culture?
The third section (‘Nietzsches Fragezeichen’) concentrates upon the shift from ‘Arzt der
Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’ and focuses on Nietzsche’s questions to analyse this evolution. This
overview and exploration of Nietzsche’s questions throughout his works between 1872 and
1886 highlights that between Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (no
quotation marks for books’ titles) on the one hand, and the fifth book of Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft and the newly added prefaces on the other, something crucial changes in
Nietzsche’s questions. Paul van Tongeren shows that it is highly questionable whether Die
Geburt and the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen entail real questions. Indeed, the questions
Nietzsche raises in these books seem stylistic devices. They are rhetorical questions to which
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the authors knows already the answer. Van Tongeren notes that Nietzsche’s questions reach
their accomplished form expectedly in the aphoristic books. In Menschliches, for example, the
formulation of questions seems to become more and more compulsive. Nietzsche becomes
more and more aware of the questions he discerns within himself. He writes down questions
he does not answer. Moreover, his questions become the object of further questions and reach
the point where Nietzsche becomes a question to himself. He becomes a battle place of
opposing drives, ‘der Trieb zum Leben’ and ‘der Trieb zur Erkenntnis’. The main question for
Nietzsche thus becomes: ‘Inwieweit verträgt die Wahrheit die Einverleibung?’. In Die
fröhliche Wissenschaft V and in the new prefaces, Nietzsche has won the ‘battle’ and is now
able to fully incorporate the problem explicitly made in the question ‘Inwieweit verträgt die
Wahrheit die Einverleibung?’. Although Also sprach Zarathustra entails the highest number
of question marks and for that reason would be worth exploring, the author explains that such
an analysis cannot be adequately developed within his paper.
The fourth section (‘Nietzsche – Philosoph…’) applies the development of Nietzsche’s
questions to his evolution from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’. Van Tongeren characterises
this development as a healing process . The author distinguishes three stages in this process:
first, Nietzsche was in his early writings mainly a physician analysing the symptoms of
sickness in culture, and not a physician for himself; second, (in the prefaces of 1886)
Nietzsche writes that he starts noticing that the sickness he aims to cure is his sickness also;
third, this makes him realise that curing is not the complete disappearance of sickness, but the
right relation to it.
In the fifth section (‘…der Kultur(en)?’) the author articulates the connection between
the previous explorations and discoveries and the theme of culture. He writes that in
Nietzsche’s development the meaning of culture has changed also. Culture, for the early
Nietzsche, was the totality of expressions of a people. Culture is now internalized; Nietzsche
becomes culture for himself. As a philosopher he becomes a laboratory of culture. Here
culture investigates and experiments with itself. From 1886 onwards Nietzsche writes anew
about culture in a way he did in his early writings. The singularity of the ‘Freie Geist’, which
is reached with the shift of the meaning of culture in 1886, is also an expression of the
writings after 1886. The ‘Freie Geist’ has become an individual who cannot be compared to
any other individual, as he has become radically different.
Discussion
1. Methodology
On a more general level it could be asked whether the focus on questions is indeed a good
method to understand the development from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’. Why choose
questions (and question marks) instead of, for example, exclamation marks or suspension
points? Is it not an arbitrary choice, and doesn’t it turn the article into two greatly different
sections: section three (‘Nietzsches Fragezeichen’) and the rest of the article?
The author’s reply is that the analysis of Nietzsche’s questions perfectly mirrors and explains
his development from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’. Another argument for using
questions instead of, for instance, exclamation marks or suspension points is that questions are
absolutely intrinsic to philosophy in general, and to Nietzsche’s thinking in particular. This
essentiality justifies the detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s questions.
2. The freedom of the ‘Freie Geist’
A first point of criticism is that characterizing the development of the philosopher as a process
from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’ through the growing compulsiveness of his questions is
not easily compatible with the freedom of the ‘Freie Geist’. Indeed, what does being free
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mean when one is subjected to more and more ‘life threatening’ – as the author puts it –
questions?
Van Tongeren replies that the philosopher is on his way to becoming the ‘Freie Geist’. He
cannot be (entirely) free, because he is not the ‘Freie Geist’ yet. The freedom of the ‘Freie
Geist’ could be characterized as his way to deal with the danger of falling apart into countless
pieces. Nietzsche described freedom once as dancing within chains, so freedom and
compulsion do not exclude each other. Moreover, at the end of this process we find that the
‘Freie Geist’ – who has internalized all the questions – is ‘Einverleibung’. He is free because
there is no distinction between the questions and their questioner. Here the question about
what his freedom consists of cannot be answered; he cannot speak about his condition after
the ‘Einverleibung’.
A further objection is that this does not do justice to the notion of freedom, because the latter
is usually understood as being freed from something. But, as Van Tongeren explains, the
‘Freie Geist’ surely is not freed from his questions.
3. ‘Einverleibung’
A third point of criticism is the emphasis the author puts on the term ‘Einverleibung’. Can it
actually be claimed that it is a main theme in Nietzsche’s works around 1886, since the
explicit mention of the notion of ‘Einverleibung’ disappears from Nietzsche’s works after
1881-1882?
Van Tongeren draws the attention upon the fact that when Nietzsche writes about the
‘Einverleibung’ of truth, he has not actually incorporated it. The term disappears after 18811882 because from then on he had incorporated it and, therefore, could not write about it. It is
therefore not a misinterpretation to state that it was an essential theme for Nietzsche in 1886.
4. The Nietzschean conception of sickness
A fourth point of criticism is the way the author uses and understands the notion of sickness.
He claims that for Nietzsche, sickness is, in a sense, a positive aspect – something which
makes health possible. This is understandable when this meaning of ‘sickness’ is conceived as
an internal phenomenon, as the author makes clear in his article. But if we differentiate
between a ‘culture inside’ and ‘culture outside’, as Van Tongeren does, it becomes
problematic to consider Nietzsche’s view of sickness as being positive. For instance, we find
in Nietzsche’s later writings fierce criticism against the sickness of Christian culture. These
attacks seem to condemn this kind of sickness altogether, or at least, they tell us that the
blending of health and sickness should be avoided. To which extent is this interpretation of
sickness then entirely different from a one-sided and naïve conception of health? Is the
concept of ‘sickness’ for Nietzsche not more layered than the author claims it to be?
Van Tongeren replies that it is in the first place impossible to divide essentially between
Nietzsche’s early and late conception of sickness. Nietzsche sees sickness as a threat to
plurality. Health, then, means imposing a certain form on the plurality: keeping it together.
This, however, does not mean that health destroys this plurality – the latter keeps existing. In
the second place, the later texts should be understood as a form of Nietzsche’s
experimentation with himself: ‘Now that I’ve incorporated the truth, what will happen when I
start fighting the sickness within me?’ This answer shows an important assumption: when
Nietzsche talks about the sickness of Christianity he does not refer to Christianity outside
himself, but to the Christianity as he discovers it in himself. Moreover, and in line with
Nietzsche’s fascination with the Pre-socratic philosophers, the significance of these
Nietzschean polemical texts should be sought in their actually being said, not so much in their
inherent meaning. Van Tongeren states that as such, a text that says Christianity, as a
sickness, should be cut away out of oneself, should be understood as having its meaning in
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being said. The emphasis is laid not on what this text literally means, but on what it might
mean that it is indeed Nietzsche who says this. This is completely in line with Nietzsche’s
conviction that one’s attitude is more important than one’s convictions.
5. The ‘Wille zur Macht’
A fifth objection concerns the insufficient attention the paper gives to ‘Wille zur Macht’. If
the development of the Nietzschean philosopher from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’ is as
fundamental as Van Tongenren claims it to be, he should have taken more into account the
essential concept of ‘Wille zur Macht’ to make clear how it fits into the development he
sketches. Moreover, the notion of ‘sickness’ is not understandable without the ‘Wille zur
Macht’.
The answer Van Tongeren gives is based on the supposition that the ‘Wille zur Macht’ can be
conceived as an aspect of self-experimentation of the later Nietzsche. The author’s argument
according to which section 36 of Jenseits presents ‘Wille zur Macht’ as a hypothesis while his
unpublished note for this aphorism refers to it in a more assertive way, might not be however
a fully convincing explanation for not discussing ‘Wille zur Macht’ in his article.
6. Other remarks
Another objection is that Zur Genealogie der Moral does not fit into the development Van
Tongeren describes: On the one hand, he states that through the years the questions Nietzsche
is subjected to, become ever more pressing and compulsive, while, on the other hand, Zur
Genealogie der Moral does not contain the kind of questioning that Jenseits does.
Van Tongeren’s article rests heavily on the assumption that the philosopher who undergoes
the transition from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’ is Nietzsche himself. The development
from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’ is shown and supported through the development of the
questions which Nietzsche asks himself. This hypothesis is crucial for the article’s
argumentation. If this assumption is ill-grounded, the article’s point becomes weak. The
article does not justify enough the identification of Nietzsche with the ‘Freie Geist’. This
identification might be fully legitimate, but the article should have provided some arguments
for it. Even if the author stresses that the question of the identification between Nietzsche and
the ‘Freie Geist’ is a central interpretative issue, he does not yet offer a fully satisfactory
answer.
As Van Tongeren notices, the theme of the fifth chapter of Jenseits has changed from culture
in the fifth chapter in Menschliches, to a discussion about the natural history of morals.
Though he is right to underscore that culture has disappeared, he does not explain why morals
has become the main issue. What could this mean? What could this tell us about Nietzsche’s
evolution from ‘Arzt der Cultur’ to ‘Freie Geist’?
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