Having recently accepted an invitation to give a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain next September 10-12 (at the University of Sussex, for UK readers who might be interested), I was reminded of the unusually large number of interesting scholars working on and interested in Nietzsche in Britain (an ironic development, given Nietzsche's famed antipathy for the English)--for example, Ken Gemes and Christopher Janaway at Birkbeck College, University of London; Sebastian Gardner at University College London; Raymond Geuss at Cambridge University; David Owen and Aaron Ridley at the University of Southampton; David Cooper at the University of Durham; Michael Rosen at Oxford University; Peter Poellner at the University of Warwick; and so on. And this isn't counting some of the terrific British philosophers whose work reflects an apprecative interest in Nietzsche, like Simon Blackburn at Cambridge, Galen Strawson at Reading, and, of course, Philippa Foot, now emerita at Oxford. Although Nietzsche studies in the U.S. is finally coming in to its own philosophically, thanks to Richard Schacht and Maudemarie Clark, among others, I think it's fair to say that, per capita, the amount of significant work is higher in Britain. I have no explanation for why things should have developed that way, but it is a striking (and welcome) development nonetheless.
Less welcome, I think, is the proliferation of specialist journals on Nietzsche, including the Nietzsche Society's own Journal of Nietzsche Studies , the American New Nietzsche Studies, and the oldest of them all, the German-edited Nietzsche-Studien. I've heard it said that this is a sign of the health and vitality of Nietzsche studies, but I actually draw the opposite conclusion: the proliferation of these journals, whose editorial and intellectual standards are generally low, is a sign of the fact that so many philosophically weak scholars work on Nietzsche, and so can't get published in real journals. While I've seen useful items in all these journals at one time or another, the fact remains that the best articles on Nietzsche are consistently in a handful of journals: European Journal of Philosophy first and foremost; Philosophy and Phenomenological Research a close second; and then, sometimes, Journal of the History of Philosophy. Other good articles on Nietzsche appear elsewhere, of course, but these three are the most reliable. The reason for this is fairly simple: articles in these journals have to meet ordinary philosophical and scholarly norms for publication, and so, unsurprisingly, those articles on Nietzsche in these journals that pass muster are well above the average in the field.
An amusing (but also depressing) anecdote: a rather good young philosopher who works on Nietzsche submitted a nice essay to Nietzsche-Studien. The editor rejected it without soliciting referee reports, explaining that it reflected that Anglo-American "prejudice" (I think that was the word) of being interested in "coherence" and "arguments." Here's some apt thoughts from Nietzsche on that subject, thoughts the editors of Nietzsche-Studien apparently don't remember (or understand):
"School has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment and consistent reasoning." (Human, All-too-Human, sec. 265).
"In those days [of Plato], souls were filled with drunkenness at the rigorous and sober game of concept, generalisation, refutation, limitation" whereas, by contrast, some contemporary philosophers "want to be 'artistic natures,' with a genius in their hand and a demon in their body and consequently enjoying special rights in both worlds, and especially the divine privilege of being incomprehensible." (Dawn, sec. 544)
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