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Da Nietzsche a Heidegger: Mondo classico e civiltà europea by Andrea Orsucci (review)

had not quite learned the lessons Hegel had offered in the introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history. In contrast, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the question of value for historical knowledge, as much as his recognition of the importance of psychology, leads him to conceive of the task of historiography along the lines of a history of mentalities that, not unlike Burckhardt’s approach, would focus on “typological traits” (114). Whatever historical facts there might be, they are relevant only because they are always already of a normative kind. Nietzsche’s awareness of the complexity of historical knowledge and representation distances his account clearly from a merely antimodern cultural criticism, but it also undercuts the liberal hopes that were part of some aspects of Berlin Geschichtswissenschaft. His demand for a “historical philosophizing”—which was central to Human, All Too Human and that still shaped his later works like Beyond Good and Evil—not only emphasized the inherently perspectival character of historical knowledge, but also showed that the value and meaning of historical knowledge could not be found in a simplistic realism that aimed to show how the past really was. While he accepts causal models of historical explanation, his interest in the psychology of historical agents and observers prevents him from adopting a positivist understanding of the motivation of historical agents. Causality, thus, implies both complexity and chancy causation, and it is Nietzsche’s much underappreciated reading of Martin Drossbach that allows him to move beyond a discussion of causality that had largely been shaped by Kant and Hume (162). At the same time, however, this brings Nietzsche’s philosophy of history into a difficult position: historical representation is both meaningful and (or rather: because) it fails to represent the past as it really was. Nietzsche, as Jensen summarizes this position, “is an ontological realist but an anti-realist about historical representation” (142), and this brings him into close proximity with more recent theoretical positions, such as that of Frank Ankersmit (145). The combination of a representational anti-realism with a perspectival theory of explanation, Jensen plausibly argues, is the crucial point of Nietzsche’s philosophy of history. This combination allowed Nietzsche—for instance, in The Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, which are the subject of the final two chapters—to overcome both the simplified Hegelianism of the Berlin historians and his own earlier misstep that replaced historical knowledge with aesthetic intuition. Genealogy, then, allows for a “historically contingent anti-realist representation” (157) that examines under which conditions and circumstances the emergence of values, and thus of meaning, is possible; genealogy describes a historical space of possibilities. Even though genealogy can be counterfactual, it is itself meaningful and has value since its task is to persuade others of the truth claims inherent in the space of possibilities it outlines. As such, it avoids postmodern value relativism without, however, giving in to the false promises of a positivist understanding of historical knowledge. Jensen’s book is an important contribution that both clarifies and complicates our understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy of history. Any account of Nietzsche’s “historical philosophizing,” and of his genealogical project, will have to take Jensen’s insights on board.