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Vocation as Therapy: Nietzsche and the Conflict between Profession and Calling in Academia

Martine Béland

It is our vocation that disposes of us,

even when we don’t yet know it.

– Nietzsche, HH I, Foreword, § 7

As an academic at the University of Basel Nietzsche was no different than scholars of today: he was expected to keep himself informed of the latest results in his discipline, to publish review essays, to represent his institution during congresses, to train future specialists, and to publish original work in his field. But Nietzsche found no pleasure in these endeavors: he stopped publishing reviews in the early 1870s; he hated to bear the “face of a university-representative,” as he wrote in July 1872 while going to the University of Munich’s jubilee; rather than training pure philologists, he exhorted his students to take up philosophy; and rather than building his reputation as a serious scholar, he published a first book that “lacked all the usual signs of classical scholarship,” that is, footnotes, quotations from Greek sources in the original, and references to scholarship.¹

In fact, at the outset of his career in philology, Nietzsche rapidly became conscious of the ever-widening gap between the demands of his profession and his “natural” inclination toward philosophy.² In a late letter, Nietzsche told of an important crisis that happened in the middle of his decade-long career.³ But he spoke of such a crisis as early as January 1871, when he said that his profession was contradicting his “task” and keeping him away from his “path,” while a “conflict” “wore him down” even “physically.”⁴ Nietzsche’s writings from the early 1870s show that while he was pondering the disciplinary constitution of knowledge and criticizing specialization in the humanities and social sciences, he was in a state of conflict between his profession and what he considered to be his vocation. This crisis entailed many repercussions. Indeed, Nietzsche interpreted his illnesses—both moral and physical—as the result of his having not followed his calling from an early point on.

As this paper sets out to show, this conflict asked for a radical therapy: an early retirement from academia. Nietzsche’s decisive transfer to philosophy was a curative step in the construction of himself while fulfilling his vocation. His decision to leave academia and become a “wandering” philosopher—to use his friend Erwin Rohde’s expression—was not motivated strictly by physical health issues: this decision was first and foremost a philosophical one, whereby Nietzsche sought to recover his moral health. His definition of philosophy as vocation can thus be considered as a therapy for the illnesses caused by the paradoxes of scholarly professions.

The following pages describe the structural conflict between profession and calling according to Nietzsche. I first situate Nietzsche within academia by showing what his profession as philologist entailed at the time he started his career. I then move on to describe Nietzsche’s conception of classical philology through his Basel correspondence and essays on his profession: his May 1869 inaugural lecture, printed as Homer and Classical Philology; his 1871 summer semester introductory course to philological studies, Encyclopedia of Classical Philology; and his 1875 unfinished notes for an essay that would have been entitled We Philologists. I thereafter pinpoint three attempts made by Nietzsche to reconcile profession and vocation—to no avail. To explain these repeated failures, I clarify Nietzsche’s concept of profession (Beruf) and his definition of a philosophical calling. This serves to show that his understanding of the demands of a profession, on the one hand, and of the requirements of philosophy, on the other, made it impossible for him to be a philosopher while holding an academic chair: philosophy for Nietzsche cannot be a profession. To finish this paper, I turn to two sources of Nietzsche’s conception of a nonprofessional philosophical life.

Nietzsche in academia: Philology as a profession

Nietzsche’s perspectives on his profession are somewhat neglected by scholars, who often simply remark upon his criticisms of academic philology. Carl Pletsch, for instance, writes that Nietzsche “announced himself to the intellectual world of Basel” with “ambivalence about himself and his profession” and adds: “Luckily, Basel was a quiet and unpretentious place for Nietzsche to work out his ambivalence.” This is surely a simplification of the paradoxes of Nietzsche’s early professional life. These professional issues, though, are extremely revealing, if one considers that Nietzsche was less interested in consolidating his career than in “the construction of himself as an intellectual.”⁵ Some scholars, though, have strived to contextualize Nietzsche’s perspectives on his profession. In a convincing paper, James Whitman stresses that while publishing The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche identified with a magisterial tradition that flourished in German philology as of the 1830s. He shows that “Nietzsche’s sense of artistic vocation would [not] have been at odds with his profession as classicist,” especially as regards the importance of a scholar’s personal experiences: “The philological tradition in which Nietzsche was trained required, and indeed celebrated, the display of a professor’s powerful personality.”⁶ But Whitman does not speak of the conflict between Nietzsche’s profession and his calling. Before turning to this issue, it is important to clarify Nietzsche’s position within his academic field.

According to his letters, the young professor arrived in Basel in the spring of 1869 with enthusiasm, but also apprehensions regarding his decision to devote himself entirely to philology and to undertake a heavy workload. Upon his arrival, he taught for 14 hours weekly: 8 of university lectures plus 6 of secondary courses at the Basel Pädagogium.⁷ Not surprisingly, he found his task most tiresome. He was nevertheless content with the appointment that transformed him from a “shooting star” into a “fixed star.”⁸ After but 5 months in Basel, he wrote to his friend Carl von Gersdorff: “I am quite satisfied with my academic activity, of which I have now happily finished the first semester. I notice that my students participate avidly and have a real sympathy for me, in that they often and gladly seek advice from me.”⁹ Nietzsche was simultaneously satisfied with his recent philological research (papers and reviews published since 1867), worried by the fatigue caused by his professional activities, and convinced of his pedagogical mission. Indeed, he was conscious of being the rising star of the Leipzig school of German classical philology. Some clarification as to what this meant will be useful here.

In the midst of a rationalization and bureaucratization of the universities and academies in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, classical philology was among the first disciplines to become specialized and professionalized.¹⁰ “Specialization” can be defined as “the degree to which scientific work is concentrated narrowly in one or a few areas, rather than broadly diffused over many,” whereas “professionalization” “refers to the possibility of making a career out of scientific work, both in the sense of earning a livelihood and achieving a collective identity with other practitioners in the field.”¹¹ In this context, philology rapidly rose to the forefront of scientific disciplines, thanks to a series of innovations in the field: professional associations (the first was formed in Leipzig in 1837), scientific journals (of which there already existed four in 1846), and uniform professional training for future professors (through the Seminar developed by philologist August Boeckh in 1810).¹² As the historian of science Lorraine Daston puts it, “What had been the ancillary sciences of the eighteenth-century universities became the certification of the serious scholar in the nineteenth-century university seminar.”¹³

One must not conclude from these processes that nineteenth-century academia as a whole was enthusiastically embracing this new stance. Indeed, many criticisms of specialization emerged, and they mostly came from the Berlin Academy of Sciences, whose members—in the spirit of German classicism and idealism—strived to maintain the “fundamental,” “organic” unity of knowledge.¹⁴ Historian Theodor Mommsen’s 1895 lecture to the Academy gives a telling example of this attitude: “We do not accuse nor complain; the flower withers and the fruit must ripen. But the best amongst us sense that we have become specialists.” In the 1880s, Hellenist J. G. Droysen diagnosed the same problem: “The humanities’ privilege is shaken, philology’s era has past; philologists are no more than monograph writers of classical Antiquity.”¹⁵

In fact, German historical sciences were then going through an important crisis. Classicist Karl Reinhardt described what he considered the tragic dilemma of German classical philology in a 1941 conference. While the early nineteenth century had “tremendous hopes for the ‘rebirth of Antiquity in the German spirit’,” the rapid subsequent development of historical sciences revealed the dilemma that was at the heart of philology: “The ‘classical’ . . . must be recognized at the same time as a historical value bound to a specific epoch, and as an eternal value.”¹⁶ In fact, once that “historical truth” became the guiding criteria for philological research, the “chief value of classical studies” could not continue to be based on aesthetic grounds (as was the case for Goethe or Schiller).¹⁷ Philology, as Reinhardt put it, was facing “the dilemma between the classical ideal and the historical reality of its undertaking.”¹⁸ To quote philologist and Nietzsche scholar James Porter: “In this new uncertainty was encapsulated the whole of modernity’s relationship to the classical past, and so too its own historical self-image.”¹⁹

It was in this context of crisis amid rapid professionalization and specialization that Nietzsche became professor of classical philology. He is in fact representative of the issues facing German historical sciences in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But he is original in that, whereas philology did not seek to ponder its theoretical issues, Nietzsche readily reflected upon them. In most of his early essays, he addressed the crisis of classical studies: its sociological causes (the transformation of the learned class as a consequence of increasingly technical disciplines in the context of industrialization), its pedagogical consequences (the transformation and perhaps disappearance of the classical education [Bildung]), and its political context (that of nation-building in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war).²⁰

Nietzsche’s classical philology

At the outset of a career, after long research studies, it is habitual, as philosopher Wilhelm Wundt noted in an 1876 article, to consider the task at hand and the means with which one hopes to accomplish it.²¹ That is what Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture intended to do. His entry in professional philology, as Porter noted, is a reflection on “the entire attitude of modernity to the study of the ‘so-called “classical” antiquity’.”²² Nietzsche was conscious of the importance and difficulty of founding and defending the absolute value of the classical. As an admirer of Goethe and Schiller, he argued for a classical vision of Antiquity: philology’s pedagogical mission is “to uncover a buried, ideal world and to show the present the mirror of the classical as an eternal model.”²³ This task required that philology open up to other areas of knowledge. In this respect, Nietzsche’s perspective recalls that of Schelling’s 1803 Lectures on the Method of Academic Studies. Schelling stressed that the philologist must work with artists and philosophers: “Its task is the historical construction of the works of art and science, whose history the philologist must seize and represent within a living conception.”²⁴ In Greek Antiquity, “all public actions were but different paths to a general, objective, and vital work of art.”²⁵ That was precisely Nietzsche’s thesis in 1869: to guarantee the status of the classical, philology must define itself as a “scientific-artistic movement.”²⁶ Nietzsche would go on to develop his thoughts on the relationship between historical knowledge and culture in his famous second Untimely Meditation (1874): rather than to achieve a “complete” knowledge of the past, history must strive to be recognized as an artistic or symbolic force.²⁷

In today’s terminology, Nietzsche’s perspective on his profession would be viewed as “interdisciplinary,” though, in this regard, it was not particularly original in its time. In Germany, classical philology has always been conscious of integrating different disciplines such as history, linguistics, literary studies, archeology, and the arts.²⁸ As Reinhardt has said in words that could well have been Nietzsche’s or Schelling’s, “the classical—one cannot research it as a scientific object without it starting to crumble or to evaporate. For it to make sense, it must be depicted, felt, embraced, it must become spirit and body—but that was and remains a task for other spirits than philologists.”²⁹ Nietzsche’s distinctiveness in this respect is that he gave all the importance to philosophy’s contribution to classical studies. As he told his first-year students, one must emphasize the intimacy between philology and philosophy so that the claim “to the classicality of Antiquity against the modern world does not sound like a laughable pretention.”³⁰ A broader philosophical perspective would enable philology to overcome its internal crisis, and for this to be achieved, the classicist’s personal attitude was of utmost importance. Nietzsche thus defended ideas that were also held by academicians such as Mommsen and by pioneers of classical philology. Indeed, Boeckh, founder of the philological Seminar, insisted that the “philologist give unity to his material by reliving it in his own mind.”³¹

Following his classical and “interdisciplinary” conception of philology, Nietzsche’s courses directed classical studies toward philosophy. He enthusiastically traced philosophical issues in the Greek texts that his students were to read, as he wrote to his former professor Friedrich Ritschl on 10 May 1869: “By making them read Plato’s Phaedo, I can inoculate my pupils with philosophy.”³² He explained that it would be profitable “if every future expert first studied philosophy for one year, so that he would not resemble the factory worker who screws his bolts day in day out.”³³ Once more, Nietzsche thereby voiced worries that were common in German academia. Physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond described similar concerns in his 1882 lecture to the Berlin Academy: “Relinquishing their claims to fame, a thousand diligent, scientific workers daily put forth innumerable details, unconcerned with internal and external completeness, only eager to attract instant publicity and gain the best price for their commodities.”³⁴

Nietzsche’s harsh appraisal of professional research, which he shared with many German scholars, is rooted in his thoughts regarding the disciplinary constitution of knowledge. At the start of his career, he noticed an inner contradiction in all knowledge-oriented professions. This contradiction can be summarized by two opposite assertions: “Life is worth living,” and “Life is worth knowing.”³⁵ The 1869 lecture accordingly opposed two impulses: one that leads the professional classicist’s scientific work, and one that leads the instinctive pleasure which enticed him to precisely research the Greeks rather than another field of knowledge. Nietzsche showed that as the scholar does his scientific work, he overlooks the initial pleasure he first took in Greek works, ideas, or objects:

When we consider Antiquity scientifically, when we try to take hold of its becoming with the eye of the historian, or when, like the naturalist, we try to categorize and compare the linguistic forms of ancient masterpieces to relate them to morphological laws, then we always lose the wonderful form, the particular atmosphere of Antiquity, we forget the nostalgic impulse that brought us toward the Greeks with the power of our instinct, this sublime guide of ours.³⁶

Nietzsche thus pointed to an incompatibility between the instinctive impulse—the passion—that had initially determined the choice of his career, and the scientific impulse that guided his professional research work. While both impulses feed on the same ideal, one expression of this ideal tends to extinguish the other.

The inner contradiction of philology as a profession is thus double. On the one hand, the philologist’s professional activity rests upon a classicist ideal that is slowly obliterated by the “historicist” perspective resulting from scientific historical data. This disciplinary contradiction entails the general problem of the historical conscience in nineteenth-century Germany, as mid-twentieth-century philologists such as Reinhardt have remarked. On the other hand, the scientific impulse toward knowledge that motivates the scholar tends to deaden the passionate drive that brought her to a particular field of knowledge. This personal contradiction causes a malaise within the scholar, whatever her discipline. Nietzsche suggests that this second contradiction characterizes the disciplinary constitution of knowledge as such. It is thus impossible for a scholar to escape it and the problems, the difficulties, and—eventually—the crises that it causes. He who has chosen a scholarly career will necessarily be confronted to the contradiction between passion and knowledge impulse. Nietzsche’s Basel writings indeed show that he did not escape this existential difficulty: he rapidly felt the contradiction between his profession and his “instinctive passion” and “inclination” toward the Greeks.³⁷

Towards a therapy: Three attempts at reconciling profession and vocation

Although his inaugural lecture showed that a scholar could not escape the contradiction between passion and science, it seems that Nietzsche did not immediately grasp the practical—and radical—implications of this thesis. Indeed, in the first half of the 1870s, he made three attempts at reconciling his profession with his vocation. We will now turn to these failed attempts at healing what he interpreted as an existential illness.

(1) In January 1871, Nietzsche applied to the chair of Philosophy at the University of Basel. His long and inauspicious letter to the principal of the University, philologist Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger, illustrates the conflict between his profession and what he deemed to be his proper task (his “eigentliche Aufgabe”), his “natural” calling:

I live here in a most peculiar conflict that has exhausted and physically worn me down. Naturally I am strongly inclined to philosophically unify my reflections and to dwell undisturbed and with sustained reflection on one problem. I feel myself always thrown hither and thither, and driven off my course, by my daily variegated professional work and by the way it is disposed. This juxtaposition of Pädagogium and university I cannot in the long run tolerate, because I feel that my real task, to which I must necessarily sacrifice any profession, my philosophical task, is being made to suffer by it, and is even being reduced to an activity on the side.³⁸

Nietzsche cherished many hopes regarding this new position, but his project—which included proposing his close friend Erwin Rohde as successor to his chair of philology—did not work out: the University of Basel hired yet another Aristotelian, Rudolf Eucken. Nietzsche’s attempt at becoming a professional philosopher entails two observations. First: his initiative was an attempt to unify profession and task—in other words, to fulfill his vocation within a profession. This project thus ignores the final implications of the contradiction between scientific drive toward knowledge and passionate attraction toward the Greek world. Second: Nietzsche singled out his Schopenhauerian philosophy as the cause of his application’s rejection. He wrote to Rohde on 29 March 1871: “Think how much one has me [mich in der Hand hat], when one refers to my never withheld Schopenhauerianism!”³⁹ Nietzsche said nothing of his unusual attempt to change faculties and to be recognized as a scholar of a discipline that he had not specialized in. He simply concluded that in order to maintain the possibility for him to eventually become a professional philosopher, he must prove and legitimize his identity as one. He announced to Rohde that his next step in this direction was his upcoming book on tragedy. Let us now turn to this second attempt.

(2) While his first attempt sought to engage in a profession that would respect his vocation, Nietzsche’s second attempt rather sought to unify profession and vocation within his philological career. He told Rohde in March 1871 that The Birth of Tragedy was his strategy. Nietzsche’s first book was an effort to renovate the field of philology⁴⁰: in the spirit of his inaugural lecture, he guided scientific philological endeavors toward philosophy and art as curative forces, in order to develop a newly self-conscious practice of philology. The book’s reception, though, reveals that its author incorrectly foresaw its effects. The Birth of Tragedy was indeed echoed mostly by silence.⁴¹ During its first year, it gave way to only two responses in the press: Rohde’s celebratory review in the 26 May 1872 Norddeutsche allgemeine Zeitung, and young doctor of philology Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff’s two-part critical pamphlet (spring 1872, winter 1873). In both pamphlets, Wilamowitz made “out as if Nietzsche was arguing from philological fact, or that he was at the very least arguing on the basis of philological knowledge,” which he was not: in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche did not defend theses on the grounds of scholarship, “but on some other level, which we might variously call rhetorical, aesthetic, or cultural grounds, with a heavy dose of imaginative invention besides.”⁴² Yet some classicists did recognize the usefulness of Nietzsche’s intuitions. For instance, amid the criticisms that he addressed to Nietzsche, philologist Ernst Leutsch of the University of Göttingen nevertheless wrote that here was a “scholar who does not lack spirit, as several insights in the book show.”⁴³ But most scholars in the field deemed that with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche “was indeed risking academic notoriety.”⁴⁴ In a broader perspective, one can see that Wilamowitz was criticizing Nietzsche’s philosophical stance inasmuch as he was arguing against the possibility of doing classical philology in any other way than a purely scholarly one. Wilamowitz considered philology as a science whose solid, critical method yielded definite results that enabled scholars to make precise, substantial progress in the historical knowledge of the past.⁴⁵ His second pamphlet against Nietzsche ended with these words:

If he [Mr. Nietzsche] now were to reply to me that he simply did not want to know anything of “so-called world history,” nor of “history and criticism,” that he merely wished to create a Dionysian-Apollonian work of art, a “metaphysical consolation” . . . then I revoke my critique and lower its import. . . . then I will gladly permit his gospel, for my weapons are unable to touch it. . . . but one thing I would then demand: that Mr. Nietzsche keep his word and withdraw the thyrsus and move from India to Greece, and climb down from his pulpit on which he is meant to teach scientifically.⁴⁶

Wilamowitz’s conclusion was clear: as his first book—an unscientific essay written by a bad scholar—showed, Nietzsche was not worthy of his position.

Interestingly, while “the immediate response of the profession” to Nietzsche’s book was silence,⁴⁷ Nietzsche’s answer was the same. The 1872–73 quarrel about The Birth of Tragedy was between Rohde, Wagner, and Wilamowitz: Nietzsche did not answer directly to Wilamowitz. In fact, Nietzsche decided to keep away from all future disputes. After reading Wilamowitz’s first pamphlet, he wrote to Gersdorff on 3 June 1872: “I will never get involved in a polemic.”⁴⁸ However, his first book did have an important consequence as to Nietzsche’s disciplinary status: as of this publication, he was considered mostly as a philosopher (and more often than not, as a Wagnerian philosopher). A short column in the Philosophische Monatshefte even named Nietzsche among the Philosophy Professors of Basel!⁴⁹ Ironically, he was listed precisely between two holders of the Basel chair of Philosophy, one of which was the recently appointed Eucken. Nietzsche wrote on 30 April 1872, that he was most happy to be “included within the ‘professors of philosophy.’”⁵⁰ This shows that he still ignored the final consequences of the contradiction between profession and vocation. It is certain that this attempt at realizing his task within his profession failed because the philological profession was not open to his methodological, philosophical, and cultural perspectives. But it also failed, on the one hand, because of the structural contradictions between passion (vocation) and science (scholarly profession), and on the other hand, because of the inner tensions of a philosophical vocation. We will turn to this last point shortly, but let us first describe Nietzsche’s third attempt.

(3) While he was thus confronted with two public failures early on in his career, it is telling that Nietzsche’s third attempt at reconciling profession and vocation remained private. During the winter of 1875, he took notes for an essay on philology that he entitled We Philologists. He never published nor even finished this project that would have been another of the Untimely Meditations. In these notes, Nietzsche reflected upon his profession in a more personal manner than in his inaugural lecture. He noticed that like marriages, successful careers are extremely rare because “one chooses a profession when one is not yet able to choose: one does not know the different professions, one does not know oneself.” He thereby identified a cause of the failure of a career: one can choose the wrong profession when one does not yet know oneself. While he was speaking on his own behalf, Nietzsche was also considering that most scholars do not have the right job for them: they sit in their chair because they wrongly interpreted their passion. They mistook their drive toward a particular type of knowledge for their true vocation. In other words: most academics’ careers reveal that they ignore, or are ignorant of, their vocation. Nietzsche was sour as to the outcome of such a personal mistake: the scholar “uses his active years in this profession, he uses all of his capacity to reflect upon it, then he becomes more experienced; but should he reach the height of his professional insight then it is usually too late to begin anything new.”⁵¹ He considered that this situation contributed to his own moral and physical illness.

The structural conflict between profession and vocation in philosophy: Nietzsche and the definition of “profession”

I have situated Nietzsche within the context of his profession in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and described his failed attempts at reconciling scientific impulse and intuitive passion. I will now turn to the structural conflict between profession and philosophical vocation. To better understand Nietzsche’s position on this matter, one can consider the Lutheran tradition—of which he was well aware—that infuses the concepts that he used. For this task, I believe it is not an anachronism to examine Max Weber’s exemplary definition of profession. While speaking of the Lutheran usage that recognizes the vocational meaning of a professional activity, Weber explains that the German word Beruf names a particular area of work but also a position that one holds for life.⁵²

This concept has both an external and internal signification: a Beruf is a profession and at the same time a vocation or calling. As Weber stressed in his famous 1917 conference Science as a Vocation, the scholar’s Beruf as a profession (in its external sense) follows the demands of disciplinary specialization and method.⁵³ As for its internal sense, the scholar’s Beruf, according to Weber, is necessarily linked to a passion for knowledge per se. Passion and work, “both together,”⁵⁴ are the prerequisite for the scholar’s inspiration—which Weber assimilates to an “intoxication” (Rausch)—and thus for his ideas. Without an inspiring passion and conscientious work guided by method, one cannot make a profession out of knowledge as science. Now as work and passion, a profession has exterior and interior effects. Through her profession, a scholar participates to the progress of knowledge in her particular field, but she also makes considerable progress as to the knowledge of herself. That is why Weber’s 1917 conference ends on his saying that science as a vocation entices the individual to work so that the “the ‘demands of the day’ are fully met, both professionally and humanly.”⁵⁵ Beruf is a “profession-calling”: in this Lutheran-Weberian sense, the scholar’s task or vocation is his profession.

Rather than following on this “existential” understanding of profession as a calling (a Berufung), Nietzsche dissociates Beruf and Aufgabe. He considers “profession” in its external sense as a concept that has to do only with work. To quote Weber again, one can say that, for Nietzsche, profession is “the activity defined by the division of labor which both constitutes for an individual his source of income and thereby the lasting source of his livelihood and his survival.”⁵⁶ Weber adds that this meaning of Beruf characterizes Latin languages that lack a word for the German concept that encompasses both ideas of “profession” and “calling.” But Nietzsche precisely distances himself from the Lutheran concept: the “organic” unity of profession is impossible for he who recognizes his vocation as a philosophical calling. On the basis of his reading of Schopenhauer and of his Greek definition of philosophy—more on this shortly—Nietzsche proposed that philosophy cannot be an academic endeavor. In other words, inner philosophical passion and the calling that it ignites cannot be exteriorized in a career socially and economically speaking. Nietzsche’s task thus led him toward a “philosophical life” independent from a profession. Before we turn to his philosophical path, let us make three remarks on this structural conflict between profession and vocation in philosophy according to Nietzsche.

First, it is clear that to change careers would not be a solution to this conflict. Indeed, the problem does not reside in the passion—be it understood as a “drive” (Trieb), an “enigma” or an “intoxication”⁵⁷—that prompts an individual to apprehend a particular field of knowledge. Rather, the problem lies in the disciplinary constitution of this passion. Nietzsche suggests that if it engages with the demands of a scholarly discipline, one’s drive toward knowledge will unavoidably become inclined to seek its own accomplishment above all else, as is the case with philology: “classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of the initially hostile and violent impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pursuit—the pursuit of it is very real.”⁵⁸ This goes to say that disciplinary endeavors do not primarily function so as to quench the scholar’s passion, but rather so as to define, circumscribe, limit, and preserve the academic discipline itself. This observation precisely refers to the activities of the bustling scientific laborer whom Nietzsche, like Berlin academicians, criticized as dangerously resembling more and more a factory worker.⁵⁹ The scientific laborer shuns his passion for the “enigma” as he turns to more practical objectives. Some of these objectives contribute to maintain the discipline (such as finding data that confirm the disciplinary constitution of knowledge), while others contribute to maintain the researcher’s own status (such as building one’s reputation and negotiating a salary). In fact, these practical objectives accomplish the specialization and professionalization of the discipline. One can understand Nietzsche’s words in his 1875 notes accordingly: “When we observe how few philologists there actually are, except those that have taken up philology as a means of livelihood, we can easily decide for ourselves what is the matter with this impulse for antiquity, it hardly exists at all; for there are no disinterested philologists.”⁶⁰

Second, it appears that while a profession entails many public actions (lectures, conferences, publication of research, professional representations, social mingling, etc.), a vocation as Nietzsche understands it—that is, a philosophical vocation—rather commands some degree of private expression. Indeed, because “particularly sad facts lie in the essence of things,” philosophy discovers disturbing truths that are not for all ears to hear.⁶¹ In the early 1870s, Nietzsche cherished the idea of a gathering of philosophical spirits—he used the expression “cultural-educational sect” (Bildungs-Sekte)—akin to the philosophical communities of Antiquity, something like “a new Greek academy,” as he wrote to Rohde.⁶² Even in these dreams of private communion, Nietzsche’s intellectual desires echo those of Mommsen and other academicians who felt part of a group of initiates at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Through this multidisciplinary quasi “religious confraternity,” the unity of knowledge could survive in spite of the increasing specialization of academic disciplines.⁶³ Nietzsche’s peculiarity, though, is that he did not think of the universities or scholarly academies as places where the philosophical spirit could flourish.

Third, from what has been said above regarding his three failed attempts and his definition of profession, it follows that Nietzsche considered the conflict between profession and vocation as irreconcilable. This observation became concrete reality when he retired from academic life in 1879. He was not in favor of saying, as Rohde did, that an academic career “is in all circumstances the safest and most reliable one for confronting all dangers.”⁶⁴ Because he considered that philosophy could not be a profession, Nietzsche opted for a nonprofessionalized vocation. He abandoned his profession to lead a philosophical life and became the “wandering doctor” that Rohde dreaded. Commentators do not hesitate to say that Nietzsche at this point was “liberated” by his physical illness. He indeed acknowledged this fact in 1888 when he wrote about the 1876–78 period: “Sickness slowly liberated me.”⁶⁵ His bad health no doubt intervened in his decision to quit academia, but one must not conclude that this was the only or even major reason for his retirement. As I hope to have shown, Nietzsche’s 1870s crisis was fundamentally philosophical: it pertained to a deeply reflected upon conflict between profession and vocation.

Nietzsche’s definition of philosophical life: Sources

As we have seen, Nietzsche’s understanding of this conflict and his parallel project to resign his chair progressed throughout the 1870s. His letters reveal that early on he considered the possibility of quitting academia. In 1872, he talked of long trips away from Basel, and he wrote to Rohde on 11 April: “For the purposes of this endeavor I now define my position so that you may be my successor in every respect.”⁶⁶ But Rohde did not support his friend’s anti-professional stance. He constantly reminded Nietzsche that “at no price” should he abandon the position that secured the financial, intellectual, and social means “to build his life in a grand style without fear.”⁶⁷ Though he did believe that in an ideal world, philosophical spirits could shut themselves off from everyday life, Rohde held academia to be “without doubt the noblest among all professional duties.”⁶⁸ He invariably tried to convince Nietzsche to keep his chair: as he wrote on 14 November 1872, in their common war against the new German culture “to give up material chances would be the greatest folly.”⁶⁹ Rohde dearly hoped that Nietzsche would abandon his “wandering doctor plans” rather than his career, and he himself in no case wished to become a literary vagabond.⁷⁰

Clearly, Nietzsche and Rohde defended two opposite visions not of the task at hand, but rather of the site from which this task could be fulfilled. Rohde wanted to pursue their cultural movement in the academic world, supported by professional titles, grants, and networks, whereas Nietzsche talked of “running away” from academia to “travel,” of “abandoning” his career for new “philosophical sects,” and of finding “radical truths” that would define a “philosophical life.” Let us now turn to the definition of a philosophical life that Nietzsche developed while reflecting upon the disciplinary constitution of knowledge. There are two major sources for his considering it impossible to be a “professional” philosopher: the first is Schopenhauer; the second is the Greek conception of philosophy in the fifth century B.C. I will look briefly at both.

Nietzsche read Schopenhauer every year between 1865 and 1878.⁷¹ His 15 December 1870 letter to Rohde shows how important Schopenhauer’s 1851 essay On University-Philosophy was for him: “in the long run, I also realize what Schopenhauer’s doctrine of university wisdom is all about. A completely radical institution for truth is not possible here.”⁷² Schopenhauer believed that “if profit is being derived from it, intention at once gains an ascendancy over insight and from self-styled philosophers we get mere parasites of philosophy.”⁷³ According to him, the demands of a profession paralyze the mind in such a way that ideas simply cannot bloom: “hardly anything is so obstructive to the actual attainment of a thorough or very deep insight and thus of true wisdom, as the constant obligation to appear wise, the showing off of so-called knowledge in the presence of pupils eager to learn and the readiness to answer every conceivable question.”⁷⁴ Schopenhauer indeed stressed that philosophy as a profession cannot be truly independent because it must answer to the authority that supports it: “a government will not pay people to contradict directly, or even only indirectly, what it has had promulgated from all the pulpits by thousands of its appointed priests or religious teachers, for insofar as such a proceeding were effective, it would inevitably render ineffective the former organization.”⁷⁵ Schelling had already raised this issue in his lectures on academic studies: “The normal view of universities is that they should produce able servants and tools for all purposes of the state.” And Wolf, the founder of classical philology, held the same conclusion about universities in 1787: “the State has little use for the mere humanist.”⁷⁶ But Schopenhauer further suggested that philosophy simply cannot exist if a superior instance imposes a dogma upon it, whether it be the Christian religion, Hegelianism, the omnipotence of the Prussian state, or the disciplinary definition of knowledge. Schopenhauer stressed that “the atmosphere of freedom is indispensable to truth,”⁷⁷ and accordingly, he urged that philosophy should stop being a profession.

Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer’s ideas on this issue. He noticed that scholarly work unfortunately does not serve the goal of defining one’s own existence: “Just take a look at the activities with which a scientific person spends and thus kills his life: what does the Greek rule of particles have to do with the meaning of life?”⁷⁸ Because a philosopher “is meant to seek the truth for himself and not so as to write books,”⁷⁹ Nietzsche repeatedly returned to one of the first philosophical principles: “Know thyself.”⁸⁰ This brings us to the Greek sources of his conception of philosophy. It goes without saying that Nietzsche as a philologist knew the Greeks very well. He gave lectures on Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s metaphysics and rhetoric, Diogenes Laёrtius, Democritus, and the Presocratics. In his lectures, he reiterated Socrates’ definition of the origins of philosophy: he stated that philosophical insights originate from “astonishment at everything that lies before one.”⁸¹ In fact, it is this fundamental wonder, this “enigma” of the unknown that ignites passion and determines the choice of a career. In philosophy, this impulse should take a practical form: Nietzsche believed that a philosopher must give an example by his or her life more than by his or her writings. “I am a philosopher inasmuch as I am able to serve as an example. . . . But this example must be given by outward life and not merely through books, in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through one’s expressions, attitudes, clothing, food, and way of life rather than through speaking or writing.”⁸² He further believed that “in a refuted system, the only thing of interest is the personal element,” that is, the efforts toward philosophizing.⁸³ Philosophy is better represented by the verb than by the noun.

This reflexive activity encompasses all of the individual’s existence, so much so that it defines a particular type of life—a philosophical life. As Nietzsche stressed, “The only critique of a philosophy which is possible and which proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in according with it, has never been taught at universities.”⁸⁴ That is to say that the most important philosophical attitude cannot take place within academia. As early as March 1871, Nietzsche wrote to Rohde: “I am gradually habituating myself to being a philosopher, and already I believe in myself.”⁸⁵ As a philosopher, he wished to realize what he called a type, a “hitherto undiscovered highest possibility of philosophical life.”⁸⁶ This life must be guided by a precept that defines philosophy since Socrates: “The Delphic God shouts out to you, at the very start of your wandering to that goal, his saying ‘Know thyself.’ It is a difficult saying.”⁸⁷ The Delphic precept invites an individual to return to the first site of philosophical investigation, because the knowledge of oneself opens onto a knowledge of the world. Nietzsche tied his reflection to Heraclitus’ motto: “I sought and consulted myself.”⁸⁸ Because he followed the Delphic precept, Heraclitus showed that one must first turn toward oneself in order to learn what it means to be a human being. And as we have seen, Nietzsche believed that it was precisely this knowledge, this first stage of philosophical investigation that philologists lack—as most scholars in all fields: they chose their career out of lack of self-knowledge. Philologists failed to notice, as Dale Wilkerson rightly points out, that “all examinations of the past are explorations of oneself.”⁸⁹

Conclusion

Nietzsche did not stay a rising or even a fixed star of classical philology for long. With his early retirement from academia, he recovered his wandering star status and lived the philosophical life of a “literary vagabond” that his former kindred spirit dreaded. Perhaps “The loss was philology’s,” as some scholars today consider that Nietzsche must be remembered “as one of the more promising and least realized classicists of all time.”⁹⁰

Nietzsche was physically ill in the 1870s, but as we have seen his decision to resign from his career was essentially philosophical. It stemmed from his having identified the cause of his mental and physical illnesses as an irreconcilable existential conflict between his profession and his natural calling to philosophy—a conflict that he felt since starting his career. Turning away from academia and favoring a nonprofessional philosophical activity was a therapeutic process: the only possibility of healing was to quit the profession for the vocation. Nietzsche’s understanding of both conflict and therapy rested upon his “material” definition of profession and his Schopenhauerian and Delphic conception of a philosophical calling and life.

Nietzsche’s decision to leave academia was no doubt radical. In fact, it appears unique when one considers that the reflections behind it—regarding the limits of the disciplinary constitution of knowledge, the problems facing specialization in the humanities and social sciences, the structural paradoxes of knowledge-oriented professions, and the limits to philosophy as a profession—were actually shared by many nineteenth-century scholars, from Schelling to Schopenhauer to Mommsen.⁹¹ But these did not turn away from their university chairs or their prestigious positions at the Berlin Academy. A contextual appraisal of Nietzsche’s ideas thus enables one to grasp the true originality of this thinker. Contrary to what one too often reads in noncontextual Nietzsche commentaries, his originality lies not in his young age when he started his professorship, nor in his defense of artistic vocation in classical philology, nor in his longing for a global philosophical perspective to historical studies.⁹² Rather, Nietzsche’s true originality lies in the radical decision in favor of a philosophical life, following his experience in and assessment of the crisis in philological studies.

Once this is made clear, we can pursue for ourselves a reflection upon the issues raised by Nietzsche. Can science be reconciled with passion within a knowledge-oriented profession, in a more Weberian than Nietzschean sense? Can one practice philosophy in its existential definition as “manière de vivre”⁹³ from within academia? And perhaps more pressingly, does the disciplinary definition of knowledge in academia impose ultimately fatal limits to a scholar’s “inspiring passion”?⁹⁴ Indeed, these are fundamental and pressing interrogations in an academic age dominated by the obligation for scholarly research to fit into predefined disciplinary categories, following which governmental organisms issue funding opportunities inasmuch as a research project can yield quantifiable and operational data, and this in all fields of inquiry—even philosophy.

Notes

1 On Nietzsche’s published reviews and philological essays, see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and James I. Porter, “‘Rare impressions.’ Nietzsche’s Philologica: A Review of the Colli-Montinari Critical Edition,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6(3), (2000): 409–31. On his going to the University of Munich’s jubilee, see KSB 4, p. 37. On the philosophical orientation of his philology, see EKP (which I will discuss later in the paper). And on The Birth of Tragedy’s lack of scholarship apparatus, see James I. Porter, “‘Don’t Quote Me on That!’ Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche in 1872 and 1873,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 (2011): 73.

2 Nietzsche to Vischer-Bilfinger, January 1871, KSB 3, p. 175.

3 Nietzsche to Brandes, 19 February 1888, KSB 8, p. 260; see also EH, “Menschliches.”

4 Nietzsche to Vischer-Bilfinger, January 1871, KSB 3, p. 175.

5 Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 106.

6 James Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 461.

7 On Nietzsche’s workload, see Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie, vol. 1, part 2: Die zehn Basler Jahre (19 April 1869 bis 2. Mai 1879) (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978), ch. 4.

8 Nietzsche to Ritschl, 2 August 1869, KSB 3, p. 34.

9 Nietzsche to Gersdorff, 28 September 1869, KSB 3, p. 61.

10 See William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 9–10; and R. Steven Turner, “Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate, 1790 to 1840,” in M. Bollack and H. Wismann, eds, Philologie et herméneutique au 19e siècle (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), pp. 468 and 475–76.

11 Lorraine Daston, “The Academies and the Unity of Knowledge: The Disciplining of the Disciplines,” Differences 10(2) (1998): 69; see Turner, “Historicism, Kritik,” p. 460.

12 See Daston, “The Academies,” p. 74; Turner, “Historicism, Kritik,” p. 461; and Clark, Academic Charisma, p. 171.

13 Daston, “The Academies,” p. 77; see Turner, “Historicism, Kritik,” p. 465.

14 See F. W. J. von Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode (Lehrart) des akademischen Studiums (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), pp. 41–164; and Daston, “The Academies.”

15 Droysen is quoted in Karl Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie und das Klassische,” in Carl Becker, ed., Vermächtnis der Antike: Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreibung (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), p. 342. For previous quote, see Theodor Mommsen, “Ansprache am Leibnizschen Gedachtnistage,” in Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1905), p. 198.

16 Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie,” p. 339 and 336. On the crisis in the German historical sciences, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Introduction to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (trans. A. Harris, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. xxviii–xxix; and Christian J. Emden, “The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition,” in P. Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), p. 372.

17 Lloyd-Jones, Introduction, p. x.

18 Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie,” p. 342.

19 James I. Porter, “Nietzsche, Homer, and the Classical Tradition,” in P. Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), p. 13.

20 See Emden, “The Invention of Antiquity,” p. 378. On the transformation of the learned class, see Turner, “Historicism, Kritik.” On philology’s incapacity to confront its theoretical issues, see Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie,” p. 342.

21 Wilhelm Wundt, “Mission de la philosophie dans le temps present,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 1(1876): 113.

22 Porter, “Nietzsche, Homer,” p. 12.

23 HKP, KGW 2, 1, pp. 249–50.

24 Schelling, Vorlesungen, III, p. 40.

25 Schelling, Vorlesungen, XIV, p. 146.

26 HKP, KGW 2, 1, p. 253.

27 See NN § 3.

28 See Lloyd-Jones, Introduction, p. xi and xiv; and Turner, “Historicism, Kritik,” p. 469.

29 Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie,” p. 351.

30 EKP § 7, KGW 2, 3, p. 370.

31 Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition,” p. 459.

32 Nietzsche to Ritschl, 10 May 1869, KSB 3, p. 7.

33 EKP § 7, KGW 2, 3, pp. 369–70.

34 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Zustande der Gegenwart,” in Reden, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Veit, 1886), p. 450.

35 See HKP, KGW 2, 1, pp. 251–2.

36 HKP, KGW 2, 1, p. 252.

37 Ibid.

38 Nietzsche to Vischer-Bilfinger, January 1871, KSB 3, p. 175. Emphasis in all quotations in this paper is in the original.

39 Nietzsche to Rohde, 29 March 1871, KSB 3, p. 189.

40 See Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition,” p. 463.

41 Ibid., p. 466.

42 Porter, “‘Don’t Quote Me on That!,’” p. 75. Rohde’s review and both of Wilamowitz’s pamphlets are reprinted in Karlfried Gründer, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Olms, 1989).

43 l [Ernst von Leutsch], [Review of Die Geburt der Tragödie], Philologischer Anzeiger 5(3) (1873): 138; see Rohde to Nietzsche, 12 January 1873, KGB 2, 4.

44 Porter, “‘Don’t Quote Me on That!’,” p. 74.

45 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (trans. A. Harris, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 1.

46 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, “Zukunftsphilologie!,” in K. Gründer, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Olms, 1989), p. 55.

47 Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition,” p. 455.

48 Nietzsche to Gersdorff, 3 June 1872, KSB 4, pp. 5–6.

49 See Anonymous, “Die Vertreter der Philosophie an der Universität Basel,” Philosophische Monatshefte 8 (1872): 93–5. For Nietzsche considered as a Wagnerian philosopher, see for instance Leutsch, “Review,” pp. 137–8.

50 Nietzsche to Rohde, 30 April 1872, KSB 3, p. 314.

51 The two last quotes are from Nachlaß 3[19], March 1875, KSA 8, p. 20.

52 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Marianne Weber, ed., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck/UTB, 1988), p. 63. On Nietzsche and Lutheranism, see Duncan Large, “‘Der Bauernaufstand des Geistes.’ Nietzsche, Luther and the Reformation,” in N. Martin, ed., Nietzsche and the German Tradition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 111–37.

53 See Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Winckelmann, ed., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, vol. 1 (Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck/UTB, 1988), p. 588 (as regards specialization) and 590 (as regards method).

54 Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” pp. 590–1.

55 Ibid., p. 613.

56 Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, p. 64, note.

57 See, respectively, for “drive,” Nietzsche, Nachlaß 3[62], March 1875, KSA 8, p. 31; for “enigma,” Reinhardt, “Die klassische Philologie,” p. 335; and for “intoxication,” Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” p. 590.

58 HKP, KGW 2, 1, p. 253.

59 See for instance EKP § 7, KGW 2, 3, pp. 369–70; and Du Bois-Reymond, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Zustande,” p. 450.

60 Nachlaß 3[62], March 1875, KSA 8, p. 31.

61 EKP § 7, KGW 2, 3, p. 371.

62 Nietzsche to Rohde, 15 December 1870, KSB 3, p. 165. For “Bildungs-Sekte,” see Nachlaß 32[62], early 1874-spring 1874, KSA 7, p. 776.

63 Daston, “The Academies,” p. 82.

64 Rohde to Nietzsche, 6 May 1872, KGB 2, 4.

65 EH, “Menschliches” § 4, KSA 6, p. 326. For an example of a Nietzsche scholar attributing a liberating effect to Nietzsche’s physical state, see Paolo D’Iorio, “La naissance de la philosophie enfantée par l’esprit scientifique,” in P. D’Iorio, ed., Nietzsche, Les philosophes préplatoniciens, trans. N. Ferrand (Combas: L’Éclat, 1994), p. 41.

66 Nietzsche to Rohde, 11 April 1872, KSB 3, pp. 304–5.

67 Rohde to Nietzsche, April 1872, KGW 2, 2.

68 Rohde to Nietzsche, 6 May 1872, KGB 2, 4.

69 Rohde to Nietzsche, 14 November 1872, KGB 2, 4.

70 See Rohde to Nietzsche on 6 May 1872 and 14 November 1872.

71 See Thomas Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 254–5.

72 Nietzsche to Rohde, 15 December 1870, KSB 3, p. 165.

73 Arthur Schopenhauer, “Über die Universitäts-Philosophie,” in Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften, vol. 1 (Zurich: Haffmans, 1988), p. 156.

74 Schopenhauer, “Über die Universitäts-Philosophie,” p. 152.

75 Ibid., p. 141.

76 Wolf is quoted in Clark, Academic Charisma, p. 171. See Schelling, Vorlesungen, III, p. 23.

77 Schopenhauer, “Über die Universitäts-Philosophie,” p. 152.

78 Nachlaß 3[63], March 1875, KSA 8, p. 32.

79 Nachlaß 32[73], early 1874-spring 1874, KSA 7, p. 780.

80 See NN § 10, KSA 1, p. 333.

81 VP I, KGW 2, 4, p. 215. Also see Plato, Theae. 155c-d, and Aristotle, Meta. A, 2, 982b.

82 SE § 3, KSA 1, p. 350.

83 PTZ I, KSA 1, p. 803.

84 SE § 8, KSA 1, p. 417.

85 Nietzsche to Rohde, 29 March 1871, KSB 3, p. 190.

86 MA § 261, KSA 2, p. 217; see also PTZ.

87 NN § 10, KSA 1, pp. 332–3.

88 FV I, KSA 1, p. 758.

89 Dale Wilkerson, Nietzsche and the Greeks (London/New York: Continuum Press, 2006), p. 3.

90 See Porter, “‘Don’t Quote Me on That!’,” p. 90; and Porter, “‘Rare impressions’,” p. 410.

91 A parallel could perhaps be drawn here between Nietzsche and Swiss historian Johann Jakob Bachofen, who retired from his University of Basel chair in 1845 after holding it but 4 years. Bachofen pursued his research on archaic societies and published most of his works as an independent scholar. According to Hubert Cancik, Bachofen is to be counted among the four figures most important for Nietzsche in Basel (along with Wagner, Overbeck, and Burckhardt). See Hubert Cancik, Nietzsches Antike: Vorlesungen (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995).

92 Regarding the rather common practice in Swiss and German universities of hiring very young scholars during Nietzsche’s time, see Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. For other examples of artistic vocations in philology, see Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition.” And for another defense of a philosophical perspective in historical studies, see Schelling, Vorlesungen.

93 See Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002).

94 Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” pp. 590–1.

Abbreviations to Nietzsche’s texts

EH	Ecce homo
EKP	Encyclopædie der klassische Philologie
FV	Fünf Vorreden über fünf ungeschriebene Bücher
HKP	Homer und die klassische Philologie
KGB	Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe
KGW	Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe
KSA	Kritische Studienausgabe
KSB	Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe
MA	Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
NN	Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben
PTZ	Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen
SE	Schopenhauer als Erzieher
VP	Die vorplatonischen Philosophen