RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

The legacies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: archival texts, digital editions, and libraries.

University Co-ordinator

Università di PISA - FILOSOFIA - PISA(PI)

Research Unit Leader

Giuliano CAMPIONI

Description

The program of the operative unit proposes to carry forward the task of publishing, with commentary, the posthumous manuscripts of Friedrich Nietzsche, within the framework of the Colli-Montinari edition, in German and Italian, of the writings and correspondence of the philosopher. To this end, the Pisan unit has the following goals:
A) The translation and publication of an ample selection of N.'s Basel lectures; research toward the preparation of the apparatus for the second section of the Colli-Montinari critical edition (KGW, de Gruyter), and for the three planned tomes of volume two of the Italian edition ("Opere" Adelphi).
B) The publication of volumes VIII-XV of the Frammenti Postumi (1880-1885), in the context of the new edition of all the posth. fragments of N.
A) The text established for the Basel lectures is that of Abt. II of the KGW, edit. by Carpitella and Bornmann, which includes, as well as the philolog. writings published by N. (Bd. II/1, 1983), the lectures he delivered at Basel from the summer semester of 1869 to the winter semester of 1878-79 (voll. II/2,1993; II/3, 1993; II/4 1995; II/5, 1995). The three large tomes planned for volume two of the Italian edition will translate almost every text of this section. Section I of KGW, currently in the final stages of preparation, is being edited by Figl with the collaboration of Hödl (Wien): part of the material in this section is important for the understanding of the philolog. work of N. at Basel. In giving final form to the text and the Nachbericht, Figl is making use of the results recorded in the apparatus of the two tomes (1998 and 2001) of the "Scritti giovanili" contained in vol. I of the "Opere" and edit. by Campioni and Carpitella. A working group coordinated and directed by Most and Campioni is working on the preparation of the apparatus criticus of both the German and Italian editions of the lectures, and on the translation for the Italian edition. The unit will focus in particular on N.'s lectures on rhetoric, on the Greek tragedians, on the history of literature, and on the introduction to philology. N.'s notes for his Basel courses are preserved at Weimar, together with some transcriptions made by his students. Only a tiny part of these manuscripts was published (1910-1913) in the last three voll. of the first major edition of N.'s works ("GOA"), edit. within the N.-Archiv itself. The complete and philolog.ly rigorous publication of all N.'s youthful writings, including the philolog. ones, began only in 1934, when the complete historical-critical edition was launched; and because the war intervened, this project came to a halt at the threshhold of the Basel period. During his Basel decade (1869-1879), N. carried a heavy teaching load at both the University and the high school (the gymnasium-lyceum). The topics he covered included the formal aspects of philology — the interpretation of texts, conjectural criticism, metrics, and historical grammar (comprising its place in comparative linguistics) — as well as the substantial ones: courses on Homer, Hesiod, the Greek lyric poets, the three tragedians, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Demosthenes, the pre-Platonic philosophers, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and religious antiquities. His ongoing critical reflection on contemporary philolog. practice formed a binding element. In his lectures for 1874-75, N. sought a broad and original synthesis of "The history of Greek literature"; this included a theoretical approach to the relationship between language and literature, between literature and other artistic forms, between prose and poetry, as well as the themes of oral culture, authorship, readership, and the places and moments of literature (theatre, symposium, courtroom, etc.). Today the scholarly accomplishment of N. is no longer automatically discounted, and even in his studies of the Basel period, including his university courses, it is possible to highlight, as Bornmann has done, traits of originality, both in method and result, that elevate them above the level of pure compilations. The texts of his lectures, furnished integrally and correctly for the first time, are of great importance, moreover, for a more nuanced and complex assessment of N.'s relationship to philology. There is a complex relation of interaction and conflictuality between his philolog. practise (understood almost as a 'second nature', extorted through force against 'free' inclinations which he regarded as dangerous), and the birth of his philosoph. identity, as his first philosoph. strivings from the Leipzig period reveal. In N. — and this includes N. the lecturer — it is possible to follow his precocious break with Wagner and his subsequent turn to the ethnology and anthropology of his time as instruments with which to penetrate the ancient world. Several lecture courses deal with the themes of language and rhetoric, and signify an evident turn with respect to the metaphysics of art. These themes have played a large part in recent and current interpretations of N.'s philosophy. In his lectures "Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie", N. thematizes the necessity of philosoph. training for philology, outlining the type an "untimely" philologist. As philologist and as promoter of a 'rebirth' of the Greek world in Germany, N.'s model of reference was the Italian Renaissance. His initial hostility towards it, inspired by Wagner, was followed a freer and more open estimation: an evolution traceable, with all the complexity of its experimental movement, in the posthum. materials. The influence of Burckhardt makes itself particularly felt in the progressive unfolding of his judgment (see Campioni 1998 and 2001).
B) The scholarly labor devoted to the publication of N.'s "Frammenti Postumi" for the years 1869-1879, edited by Campioni (collaborators: Fornari and Zavatta) is of value for the determination of the text and apparatus criticus of the Basel lectures. For the first time, the apparatus records the linkage between N.'s private notebooks and the Basel lectures, supplying numerous elements towards an adequate exploration and valorization of these posth. materials. As a laboratory of ideas, the fragments make it possible for us to restore a dimension absent from the published texts, and reconstruct lines of thought that often do not emerge from a reading of the latter. For example, the fragments for the period covered in the two volumes in course of publication (1872-74) reveal how the hostility with which academic circles and official philology greeted "The Birth of Tragedy", far from shutting N. up within the magic circle of the Wagnerian world, drove him instead to audacious philosoph. speculation that gave rise to writings of decisive importance, though they remained unpublished, for the development of his thought. These include "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks" and "On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense." At this period N. made a radical philosoph. turn, which these fragments alone succeed in restoring in all its complexity, allowing the reader to enter the portals of a vast and engaged project, never completed, which was meant to treat "the artistic impulse in the form of philosophy", accounting for the creative, "artistic" character of perception and knowledge. But the fragments also show N.'s renewed attention to current developments in science and philosophy, revealed in such original philosoph. elaborations as the "theory of temporal atoms", in which is embedded a "theory of perception". Between spring 1873 and the beginning of 1874, the philosopher began work on the first of his "Unfashionable Observations", an ambitious project for a critique of contemporary culture that extends down to the period of "Human, All Too Human". Although only a small part of it was realized, the posth. materials allow us to reconstruct it in its originally conceived dimensions. We discover how, as early as the beginning of 1874, he arrives at strongly negative conclusions while working on an "unfashionable observation" on Wagner. This striking contrast with the position N. continued to maintain officially during this period permits deeper analysis of his liberatory passage (still often misunderstood today) from "Wagnerism" to "Antiwagnerism". Likewise, N. entrusts to the fragments for the years 1875-79, in more a complex, often experimental, manner, the flow of his thinking on the "free spirit", and the philosophy of morning. The Research Unit intends to publish the following volumes before the end of 2007: Vol. 7: Beginning of 1880 – Autumn 1880; Vol. 8: End of 1880 – Spring-Autumn 1881; Vol. 9: Autumn 1881 – Summer 1882; Vol. 10: July-August 1882– Winter 1882-83; vol. 11: Spring-Summer 1883 – Summer-Autumn 1883; vol. 12: Autumn 1883 – Winter 1883-84; vol. 13: Spring 1884 – Summer-Autumn 1884; vol. 14: Summer-Autumn 1884 –April-June 1885; vol.15: May-July 1885 – Autumn 1885. These fragments (contained in Abt. V and VII of KGW and "Opere") span N.'s central years, in which he published "Dawn", "The Gay Science", and the four parts of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." They make it possible to follow the movements and the context of the genesis and elaboration of the works published by N.. Sometimes, moreover, essential philosophemes are formulate and elaborated only in the posth. fragments from this period. A telling example: only in the posth. notes is the eternal return given more articulated definition and greater clarification, deriving from N.'s reading at this period (which includes Dühring, Nägeli, Caspari, Vogt, Liebmann, Lasswitz, Reuschle, Fick, Proctor, Mayer). It suffices to mention Heft M III 1, not used by the philosopher for writings he published. Just as important is the presence of the themes of physiology, psychology, and decadence, to which N. gained access mainly through French authors. The German Nachbericht is gathered in the final volumes of each section, and is still in course of publication. Already in 1969 Montinari published the volume of apparatus for Abt. IV (1875-79, KGW IV/4). In 1984-85 there followed two tomes of apparatus for Abt. VII, (fragments 1882-85). For section VI /4 a volume of notes and commentary to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (edited by Haase and Montinari) came out in 1992; and one for "Dawn" (edited by Haase and Kohlenbach, with the collaboration of Brusotti), in 2003. More recently, the edition KGW has been augmented by a IX Abt. (Der handschr. Nachlaβ ab Frühjahr 1885 in differenzierter Transkription, edit. by Haase and Kohlenbach, Bd.1-3 u. Bd.4, 2001 and 2004), which offers a complete decipherment and (diplomatic) transcription of the notebooks, suppressing the division among fragments, occasional notes, and first drafts, in order to restore, visually and thoroughly, the posth. materials from a period which has given rise to much controversy about the arbitrary compilation of posth. fragments under the title "The Will to Power". Work on Abt. IX complements the Colli-Montinari text of the fragments from the last period. The new edition of the "Posth. Fragments" is intended to take account of the totality of these results and researches, and offer the Italian public a more complete and up-to-date overview than that available to the German public. 20 volumes are planned (plus a final volume of criteria, concordances, indices, and a list of N.'s reading as recorded in the posthumous fragments). They will present the text established by Colli-Montinari in a translation revised (as regards errors, lapses, failure to italicize) and standardizing, as far as possible, the most important terms. The revision of the text takes into account, above all, the corrections of errors of transcription of the manuscripts reported in the volumes of Nachbericht (where available) to the German edition, which will serve to update and complete, with the results of international research, the "Notizie e note". In other cases, and in cases in which doubts and problems arise, the transcriptions are checked against the manuscripts in Weimar. The edition includes all the poetic fragments in their chronological order; a portion of these had been published under the title "Poesie postume"1882-88, along with the "Ditirambi di Dioniso", in "Opere" VI/4. The fragments brought to light subsequently and published in the apparatus of the German edition as "Nachträge" have been reintegrated, through comparison with the description of the manuscripts, in the text of the present Italian edition in chronological order. Where these Nachträge appeared less significant, having the character of occasional personal notes, the text is given or summarized in the notes, just as the notes record the presence in the manuscript of sketches and plans of letters, and other personal notes of an external or casual nature. The new edition re-establishes the order of the fragments and aligns it with the German edition in cases in which there was a divergence, thus re-establishing chronological order. Another source of fragmentary material is reflections made by N. in the margins of books he was reading, or excerpts copied from such books, often with no indication of the source. The "Notizie e note" bring up to date the apparatus on the sources with reference to N.'s readings in the period in which the fragments were drafted, taking into account the catalogue of N.'s library (Berlin 2003), the apparatuses, and the stream of specialized works in the field of N.-Forschung, to which many members of the Pisa unit are contributors, along with various scholars, Italian and international, who have worked in close contact with them for a long time. For example, in close cooperation with the project presented here, and with the Italian edition, the Sociedad Española de Estudios sobre Nietzsche (SEDEN), in particular in the persons of D. Sanchez Meca and S. Guervos (both of the Pisa Unit), is launching the first Spanish-language edition of N.'s Escritos Postumos (1869-89). Additionally, Th. Brobjer (of the Pisa Unit), is editing a Swedish edition of Nietzsche's works (Samlade Skrifter, Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag, 2002 and ff.). The posthum. material is of fundamental importance for illuminating, from a genetic perspective, many Nietzschean theories, and the compositional iter of the works. Viewed in their dynamic relationship with the context and the published works, the posthum. fragments are the diary of an intense intellectual life in its complexity and its unfolding: they are the laboratory in which N. tried out various possible lines of development, of which only some flow into the published writings. This edition is intended to make available the totality of these texts, in its completeness and relative autonomy.
2. At the same time, in coordination with the Florence Unit, the Pisa Unit is planning to complete the Epistolario (Adelphi ) by furnishing the two missing tomes (vol. 5/1 and V/2: January 1885 -January 1889), during the period 2005-2006.
3. Work on the German and Italian editions makes possible the effective pursuit of one of the objectives of the Pisan research unit: to assemble and make available the sources of N.'s reading, in the context of what Montinari defined as the "ideal library". The new edition of the Fragments is meant to include a final volume which will comprise all the sources that have been excavated from the posthum. material. The sources inventoried by individual members of the group will also be made available on electronic support. Interpretive efforts naturally continue in parallel with the editorial labor, with the publication of essays and monographs dedicated to N., to his relationship to his own points of reference, and more generally, to the setting of Germany in the XIX century.