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Nietzsche again?" Nietzsche professionally studied chorus in Greek tragedy, but never heard a wail quite like this. If the question does not sound forth in choral harmony, it is certainly uttered by a multitude of voices. The phenomenon of "Nietzsche again" gives rise to bewilderment, consternation, and exasperation on the part of the many who see his name everywhere and do not know why. In (dulcet or otherwise) antiphonal response, we may warble that the justification for attending to Nietzsche lies in his sheer influence, regardless of our judgment on the quality of his thought or on various particulars of Nietzsche interpretation. If we do not find him intellectually momentous, at least we might call him a momentous event in intellectual culture.
It is true that attending to him primarily on account of his influence tends to inflate or, at least, perpetuate interest and to reinforce, and not simply to acknowledge, the status quo in Nietzshean investigations. Be that as it may, Nietzsche remains big business. We might expect anything to emerge from it, but presumably there yet remain innocent souls in our world who will be surprised to find a pious Nietzsche amongst its products. Still, Bruce Ellis Benson has produced him in Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. That is tendentiously put, for Benson aspires not to forge an image of his subject in the furnace of intellectual construction but rather to describe the authentic Nietzsche. How does he do it?
The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to pursue a way of life is rightly called "piety" when we observe the continuities between Nietzsche's background Pietism and his later quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines. The form remains where the content changes. In pursuit of what changes, Nietzsche sought out a musical ask sis. Benson explores this carefully. Ask sis is a form of spiritual exercise in self-transformation. It is not identical with asceticism, which carries connotations of bodily denial. It is affirmative of bodily life as well as negative toward spiritual sickness and the enemy of decadence, also carefully explored by the author, which Nietzsche self-consciously fought in himself. Music was a vital and central force in Nietzsche's life, but for those Greeks whom Nietzsche so loved and to whom he was so indebted, it was a far more basic force than we tend to imagine when we hear the word "music." For Nietzsche, music forms the soul; it effects a profound spiritual formation. As far as he was concerned, once he had shrugged off the baleful influence of Wagner, music assumed its proper office of fostering spiritual health and cheerfulness, which is to say, a form of life. Pietism was a heartfelt way of life. In sum: Nietzsche sought to know, follow, pray to Dionysus, god of Life, through a musical ask sis, and, in doing so, he transplanted a form of Pietism onto the soil of Dionysus or, better, cultivated the apparently alien form of Dionysus on the soil of native Pietism. He may not have succeeded in overcoming his childhood Pietism. But it is what Nietzsche was about, even if he did not fully know it.
Benson's volume is interestingly written and clearly argued. Both very broadly and on many points of detail, the thesis is cogently delivered. It is tempting to suppose that it is only a slight exaggeration to say that no two readers of Nietzsche are likely to be agreed about very much in Nietzsche interpretation. However, this reviewer, like the author, is impressed by Lou Salomé's insistence on the religious force that drove Nietzsche's thought.[1] Whether by deliberate design or by virtue of the cumulative force of his study, Benson conveys the pathos of Nietzsche's mental collapse in the light of what he interprets as his religious quest, even if he is bound to be, as he admits, speculative and suggestive at this point.
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