Burckhardt and Nietzsche

 Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle in 1869 at the astonishingly early age of 24; Burckhardt was fifty, and had been teaching at the university since 1844, the year Nietzsche was born; he had been Professor of History since 1858.35 From the start Nietzsche admired his older colleague enormously; in 1870 he wrote to a friend:

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure which I would have liked you above all people to have shared, of hearing Jacob Burckhardt lec- ture. He gave a lecture without notes on Historical Greatness which lay entirely within the orbit of our thoughts and feelings. This very unusual middle-aged man does not, indeed, tend to falsify the truth, but to concealments, though on our confidential walks and talks he calls Schopenhauer ‘Our Philosopher’. I am attending his weekly lectures at the University on the study of history, and believe I am the only one of his sixty hearers who understands his profound train of thought with all its strange circumlocutions and abrupt breaks wherever the subject fringes on the problematical.

For the first time in my life I have enjoyed a lecture: and what is more, it is the sort of lecture I shall be able to give when I am older.36 In turn Burckhardt attended lectures of Nietzsche in 1872:

He is still in debt to us for the last, from which we awaited some solutions to the questions and lamentations that he threw out in such a grand and bold style ... He was quite delightful in places, and then again one heard a note of profound sadness, and I still don’t see how the auditores humanissimi are to derive comfort or explanations from it. One thing was clear: a man of great gifts who possesses everything at first hand and passes it on.

 They had in common their love of Schopenhauer: ‘The Philosopher’s credit has risen again these last weeks. Living here is one of his faithful, with whom I converse from time to time, as far as I can express myself in his language’ wrote Burckhardt about Nietzsche to a friend in 1870.

On the personal level, Nietzsche always maintained his admiration for Burckhardt, ‘our great teacher’: even after he left Basle in 1879, and as late as 1887, he continued to send him copies of his books from Untimely Essays (1873-6) to Human, All-too-Human (1879), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). But Burckhardt’s letters of thanks reveal his increasing distance from Nietzsche’s philosophy.39 Nietzsche was oblivious of this change in the feelings of ‘my honoured friend Jacob Burckhardt of Basle’ to whom ‘above all Basle owes its pre-eminence in the humanities’ as he describes him in Twilight of the Idols in 1889.40 Indeed Burckhardt was one of the recipients of his strange messages from Turin, written in late 1888 as he descended into insanity:

To my most honoured Jacob Burckhardt.

That was only a little joke, on account of which I overlook the tedium of having created a world. Now you are - thou art - our greatest teacher; for I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden balance of all things, we have in every part those who are above us ...

Dionysus

His last letter to Burckhardt began:

Dear Professor, In the end I would rather be a professor at Basle than God;
but I did not dare to press my private egoism so far as to abstain from the creation of the world.

It was this letter, arriving in early January 1889, which caused Burckhardt to consult Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck, who had the final responsibil- ity of bringing Nietzsche back to Basle and committing him to medical care.

In old age Burckhardt liked to distance himself from the ‘publicity stunt’ that Nietzsche had become; in 1896 at the age of 78 he wrote:

Moreover, since the philosophical vein is entirely wanting in me, I recognized from the time of his appointment here that my relations with him could not be of any help to him in this sense, and so they remained infrequent, though serious and friendly discussions. I never had any dealings with him in respect of Gewaltmenschen, the power maniacs, and do not even know whether he clung to this idea at the time when I still saw him fairly often; from the time when his illnesses began I only saw him very rarely.

 But there is no doubt that in the early seventies the two men were very close. Both of them refer to the delight they experienced in finding someone who shared the same veneration for ‘the Philosopher’ as they both called Schopenhauer; each was profoundly affected by the same distaste for the growth of Prussian power and the cultural consequences of the triumph of Germany over France in 1870. And intellectually each influenced the other in a variety of ways.

At first impression it is the differences between the two which are most striking, to the extent that it becomes clear that each reacted against the other, and essentially found the other useful in the process of clarifying his own ideas. Nietzsche’s belief in Burckhardt’s agreement with him was of course unverifiable since the latter’s views were expressed only in lectures, whereas his own were published. Thus he could claim that Burckhardt had accepted the great contrast between the Apollinian and Dionysian aspects of Greek culture:

Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basle, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks.42 he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. But in fact, whatever may have led Nietz- sche to believe this, there is little reference to Nietzsche’s theories in the surviving manuscripts of Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek culture, either in relation to Greek religion and Greek morals, or in relation to tragedy.

And indeed the whole argument of The Birth of Tragedy, with its attempt to relate ancient tragedy to the modern music of Wagner, can scarcely ever have appealed to Burckhardt, whose musical interests lay rather with Mozart and Verdi, and whose silence about Wagner hides a profound distaste for him.

Nietzsche had claimed that he was the only hearer to understand Burck- hardt’s lectures on the philosophy of history. In the 1870s Nietzsche was indeed struggling to free himself from the historical vision of his age. But his famous essay ‘On the use and abuse of history for life’, publishedindependently in 1874 and two years later in Untimely Essays, is essentially a statement of rejection of all that Burckhardt had stood for in those lectures, even if at one point he refers to Burckhardt’s description of the Italian Renaissance with approval.44 The modem age is viewed as suffering from a surfeit of history, produced for entertainment, which leads to self- irony and cynicism; like the Roman from the imperial age, the modem human being continually has his historical artists prepare for him the festival of a world’s fair. He has become a spectator who strolls about enjoying himself, and he has been reduced to a condition in which even great wars and great revolutions can scarcely change anything, even for a moment...

Or is it necessary to have a race of eunuchs to stand guard over the great historical world-harem? Certainly pure objectivity is quite becoming in eunuchs. It almost seems as if the task is to watch over history so that nothing will ever come of it but stories - but certainly no events!

Although Burckhardt might have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objectivity, the main criticisms surely relate to Burckhardt’s pose of the connoisseur and dilettante, writing and lecturing for the general public.

Now picture to yourself the present-day historical virtuoso: is he the most just man of his age? It is true, he has cultivated in himself a sensibility so tender and sensitive that absolutely nothing human is alien to him; his lyre can echo in kindred tones the sounds of the most diverse ages and persons; he has become an echoing passivity whose resonance, in turn, has a resounding effect on other passivities of the same sort, until ultimately the air of an age is filled with the buzzing counterpoint of such tender and kindred echoes. Yet it seems to me that only the harmonics, as it were, of that original historical note remain audible: the harshness and power of the original can no longer be divined in the thin and shrill sound of the lyre strings. Moreover the original tone usually awakened deeds, difficulties, and terrors, whereas this pure tone just lulls us to sleep and turns us into gentle epicures. It is as though the Eroica symphony had been arranged for two flutes and were intended for the benefit of dreaming opium smokers.

Burckhardt well understood that this was a criticism of himself, and replied to the gift of the book with a characteristic defence of ‘amateurism’:

In the first place my poor head has never been capable of reflecting, even at a distance, as you are able to do, upon final causes, the aims and the desirability of history. As teacher and professor I can, however, maintain that I have never taught history for the sake of what goes under the pompous title of World History, but essentially as a propaedeutic study: my task has been to put people in pos- session of the scaffolding which is indispensable if their further studies of whatever kind were not to be aimless. I have done everything I possibly could to lead them on to personal possession of the past - in whatever shape or form - and at least not to sicken them of it; I wanted them to be capable of picking the fruits for themselves; I never dreamt of training scholars and disciples in the narrower sense, but only wanted to make every member of my audience feel and know that everyone may and must appropriate those aspects of the past which appeal to him personally, and that there might be happiness in so doing. I know perfectly well that such an aim may be criticized as fostering amateurism, but that does not trouble me overmuch.

 Indeed for Burckhardt amateurism was part of his historical ideal:

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist. But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints. Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own speciality, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.48 Nietzsche in fact had refused to accept the central conception of Burck-hardt’s lectures on history, though he borrowed his tripartite division: his own theory of history sees it as divided into three types, monumental (greatmen), antiquarian (facts) and critical (moral judgments). These categories are very crude and offer no great insight, except that his excessive emphasis on the first, which is concerned with history as the record of the actions of great men, shows that he already viewed history primarily as the arena for a display of the power of the Übermensch or the free spirit. Although Burckhardt had indeed tackled the problem of the Great Man in history, he saw history as concerned, not with individuals or facts or moral judg- ments, but with the three fundamental forces whose interaction shaped the development of civilizations. Nietzsche’s own theory was concerned with the uses of history for his philosophy of revolutionary change in society;

Burckhardt might set him thinking, but, from Nietzsche’s point of view, he belonged in the historicist culture which must be destroyed.

What united them most was their common rejection of certain funda- mental principles of historicism. They both dismissed the attitudes of the so-called professional scholars: while Nietzsche was provoking his col- leagues and calling for a new philology related to the needs of a new vision of the world, Burckhardt was finding himself more and more at odds with the historical perception of the ‘viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’.49 Burckhardt must have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objec- tivity and historical neutrality as historical ideals. And behind this lay a common rejection of the importance of facts and events in history. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘The fact is always stupid and has at all times looked more like a calf than a god.’50 At precisely the same time Burckhardt was writing to a friend during the preparation of his lectures on Greek culture, and in relation to current political events:

To me, as a teacher of history, a very curious phenomenon has become clear: the sudden devaluation of all mere ‘events’ in the past. From now on in my lectures, I shall only emphasize cultural history, and retain nothing but the quite indispensable external scaffolding.

 At much the same time he wrote to a young historian:

I further advise you simply to omit the refuse of mere facts - not from your labour - but certainly from the presentation. One really only needs to use such facts as are characteristic of an idea, or a vivid mark of a time. Our nervous strength and our eyesight are too precious to waste on the study of external facts of the past,unless we are archivists, county historians or something of the sort.

This rejection of the tyranny of factual history was elevated by Burckhardt into one of the most powerful methodological challenges that positivist historiography has faced. In the lectures on Greek culture Burckhardt developed a formal rejection of the cult of the event:

One great advantage of studying cultural history is the certainty of the more important facts compared with those of history in the ordinary sense of narrated events - these are frequently uncertain, controversial, coloured, or, given the Greek talent for lying, entirely the invention of imagination or of self-interest. Cultural history by contrast possesses a primary degree of certainty, as it consists for the most part of material conveyed in an unintentional, disin- terested or even involuntary way by sources and monuments; they betray their secrets unconsciously and even, paradoxically, through fictitious elaborations, quite apart from the material details they may set out to record and glorify, and are thus doubly instructive for the cultural historian.

 Cultural history deals with phenomena which are ‘recurrent, constant, typical. It does not matter whether the stories which it uses are true, as long as they are believed to be true. And even a forgery is an important piece of evidence for the period that perpetrated it, since it reveals more clearly than a genuine article the conceptions and beliefs about the past of the age that created it. This principle of unconscious revelation through represen- tation derives ultimately from Schopenhauer’s conception of the world as representation; and it is one of the most powerful tools in the modern historian’s study of mentalities. As Burckhardt saw very clearly, it offers a solution to the sterile disputes of positivism as to whether a fact is true or false, and how such a proposition can be established: cultural history is primarily interested in beliefs and attitudes, rather than events - and false- hoods are therefore often more valuable than truths:

Even where a reported act did not really occur, or not in the way it is said to have occurred, the attitude that assumes it to have occurred, and in that manner, retains its value by virtue of the typicality of the statement.

It is this common attitude to the unimportance of the truth of events compared to the significance of beliefs or statements about events that seems to me to unite Burckhardt and Nietzsche as the founders of relativist and ‘post-modern’ historiography.

Apart from the creative enthusiasm which resulted from their meetings, undoubtedly the most significant specific idea about the Greek world that Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared was the belief in the importance of the ‘agonal’ aspect of Greek and (in Nietzsche’s case) modern culture. The realization that individual contest and the desire to be supreme lay at the centre of early Greek attitudes to the world is their joint discovery. Nietzsche seems to have realized the importance of the agon or contest, even before he arrived in Basle; but Burckhardt had already formulated it independently, and was busy working out in detail the consequences of this discovery for the understanding of every aspect of Greek culture.

 This is indeed the most important of all Burckhardt’s insights into the Greek mentality, and has proved continually fruitful in Greek history to the present day, where Greek ethical values are often seen as a conflict between competitive and cooperative virtues.56 It can also be said that the unorthodoxy of each contributed to liberating the thought of the other about the Greeks in this great creative period for both of them. Thus Nietzsche’s very critical approach to Socrates mirrors Burckhardt’s equally critical but ironic version of the standard myth. And both men share in very different ways a hatred of the Greek city-state and of Athenian democracy as destructive forces.

Oswyn Murray
Burckhardt - The Greeks and Greek Civilization