Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

Drawing on Nietzsche s prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to a fresh view of his later thinking. The book s primary aim is to displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche s reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he liberated himself from metaphysics. A subsidiary aim is to decenter the view that fastens onto The Birth of Tragedy as a dramatic turning point in Nietzsche s thought. For Nietzsche, questions about the religion, art, and history of the classical world are bound up with fundamental questions about knowledge, culture, history, and the status of the subject. From his early writings, Nietzsche finds it difficult to separate questions about modernity from those about antiquity. Nor are the problems of classical philology ever far from his mind, even toward the end of his career. By showing how frequently the later Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to provoke reflection on the adequacy of current characterizations of Nietzsche, and not just to raise questions about the periodization of his life and thought.