RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

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

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di FIRENZE - FILOLOGIA MODERNA - FIRENZE(FI)

Research Unit Leader

Vivetta VIVARELLI

Description

Vivetta Vivarelli, the coordinator of the Florence unit, has recently completed the translation of the volumes of the Italian edition of Nietzsches'letters starting from the year 1885. She is currently working on the related scholarly commentary with Giuliano Campioni and Renate Müller Buck, who is also preparing with Holger Schmid the parallel German edition. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin, De Gruyter). The two volumes should be ready within the next two years. The major task of the Florence unit is the publication of the fifth volume based on the text established by Colli and Montinari: KGB, III/3 (de Gruyter) (1885-1886): 116 letters (about 297 pages) and KGB, III/5 (de Gruyter) (1887-1889): 477 letters (about 603 pages). Altogether: 593 letters for about 900 pages of text. The huge dimension of this work (twice the previous one) entails a long investigation for the compilation of the scholarly commentary of the italian edition. The research for the most should take place at the Weimar's archives and libraries.
The last part of the letters (1885-1889) correspond to a crucial moment in Nietzsche's thought. During this period he worked restlessly on a new edition of some of his works and wrote important texts such as the fourth part of "Zarathustra", "Beyond good and evil", the fifth book of "The Gay Science", "Genealogy of Morals", "Twilight of Idols", "The Antichrist", "Ecce homo". Nietzsche's letters offer in addition very important information concerning key events relating to his life, the years in Turin, the discovery of Dostojevski, his relationship to Brandes, Taine and Strindberg, his notes written after the breakdown in January 1889. Although the mask is the main theme of the letters between 1885-87, later his tone became euphoric, due to the growth of his celebrity after the lectures of Georg Brandes in Copenhagen. For this edition of the letters the Florentine team proposes to undertake a careful reconstruction of the cultural background concerning especially the philosophical and scientific problems, which interested Nietzsche during his last phase. We will proceed systematically to identify sources ("Quellenforschung") and readings of Nietzsche in order to create an italian that has a broader scope then the German one. In this context it is a of primary importance to investigate Nietzsche's relation to science and critical positivism, or empiriocriticism. The coordinator of the Florence unit has identified several sources of Nietzsche's readings of Ernst mach and Richard Avenarius in the late phase of his works. It would therefore be worthwhile to further investigate the quaterly journal "Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie", founded 1877 and edited by Richard Avenarius, with the assistance of Nietzsche's friend Max Heinze and Wilhelm Wund (later Ernst Mach was editor for a period). The journal published articles about "scientific philosophy" including many on epistemology and on the relation between psychology, natural science and philosophy.
Other members of the group are engaged on a research on the aphorisms hidden in the letters and on the analysis of the period in which Freud's thought was also developed. Freud was related to Nietzsche non only through significant links and mediators (such as Lou von Salomé, Brandes and Paneth), but also because they shared the same cultural and scientifical background (both red works on psychology, physiology, biology, anthropology, and neurology by scientists of the nineteenth century.