Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition
- Nietzsche and the “Classical”: Traditional and Innovative Features of Nietzsche's Usage, with Special Reference to Goethe
- Conflict and Repose: Dialectics of the Greek Ideal in Nietzsche and Winckelmann
- Nietzsche's Ontological Roots in Goethe's Classicism
- Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity as a Return to (German) Classicism
- The Dioscuri: Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity as a Return to (German) Classicism
from Section 5 - German Classicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition
- Nietzsche and the “Classical”: Traditional and Innovative Features of Nietzsche's Usage, with Special Reference to Goethe
- Conflict and Repose: Dialectics of the Greek Ideal in Nietzsche and Winckelmann
- Nietzsche's Ontological Roots in Goethe's Classicism
- Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity as a Return to (German) Classicism
- The Dioscuri: Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
People always talk of the study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says, turn your attention to the real world, and try to express it—for that is what the ancients did.
What is classicism? Goethe believed he knew the answer: as he put it in one of his maxims and aphorisms, Klassisch ist das Gesunde, romantisch das Kranke (“Classicism is healthy, Romanticism is sick”). And in conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann on 2 April 1829, he expanded on his famous definition of “classicism,” and his distinction between it and “Romanticism,” with reference to the concepts of “sickness” and “health”:
I call the classic healthy, the Romantic sickly. In this sense, the Nibelungenlied is as classic as the Iliad, for both are vigorous and healthy. Most modern productions are Romantic—not because they are new; but because they are weak, morbid, and sickly. And the antique is classic—not because it is old; but because it is strong, fresh, joyous, and healthy.
This definition of “classicism” had a clear influence on Nietzsche, who regarded the conversations with Eckermann, as opposed to Luther's translation of the Bible (BGE §247), as “the best German book there is” (HA II Wanderer and his Shadow §109). And in Nietzsche's writings we also find a complex engagement with the values of classicism, and an interpretation of cultural phenomena in terms of a matrix of sickness and health.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Nietzsche and AntiquityHis Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, pp. 441 - 457Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004