In his recent book, Horst Hutter remarks upon the voluminous secondary literature on Nietzsche, and the challenges this creates for scholars working on the philosopher. Hutter contends that “the enormous number of recent works on Nietzsche … seem to me to be beyond the capacities for absorption by even a large team of scholars; there is an explosion of studies of [this] philosopher.”Footnote ¹ Anyone who has attempted to make a contribution to the secondary literature on Nietzsche must surely sympathize with Hutter's remarks.Footnote ² However, one field of Nietzsche studies is far less crowded. The works of Nietzsche's middle or positivist period—Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science—have not enjoyed the attention paid to his earlier and later writings.

Because these books have not received as much scholarly attention as Nietzsche's other writings, Paul Franco's article “Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and the Problem of Culture”Footnote ³ should be welcomed by students of Nietzsche. However, Franco fails to take advantage of the opportunity to really engage with the small secondary literature and move the debate about the significance of these neglected works forward. While Franco mentions most of the other works on Human, All Too Human (henceforth, HH),Footnote ⁴ he barely interacts with what those who have gone before him have said. His decision not to heap “stone upon stone, brick upon brick” (as Nietzsche recommends) is problematic for three related reasons. It (1) forfeits the opportunity to build on what exists—either by affirming, correcting, or adding to the secondary literature in one area of Nietzsche studies where this is possible; (2) makes it impossible for readers to assess the originality of Franco's contribution; and (3) fails readers who should be able to rely upon reputable scholarly writings as fair and faithful guides to the literature on Nietzsche.

Franco clears the path for his discussion of HH to focus primarily on the text alone by suggesting that insofar as other commentators have discussed this work, they have seen it only through the lens of what Nietzsche later calls his genealogy of morality.Footnote ⁵ Franco positions his work as a response to this in two ways. First, he concedes that this is an important dimension of HH, so he devotes the third section of his article to it.Footnote ⁶ Second, he argues that the focus on morality is incomplete or “mysterious” unless we see it as part of Nietzsche's wider concern with modern culture. Indeed, “the theme of culture … represents not merely an overlooked aspect of Human, All Too Human but the key to the book as a whole and the axis around which all of the other reflections contained in it—on metaphysics, morality, religion and art—revolve.”Footnote ⁷

This dual reading of HH—as concerned with the history of morality but as more profoundly concerned with the theme of culture—engenders a pair of related expectations. First, one expects Franco to show how his views about Nietzsche's excursions into the history of morality compare with what others have said on this topic. Second, one expects Franco to demonstrate clearly the heuristic value of his focus on culture. How is the mystery solved by reframing Nietzsche's remarks about morality as concerns about culture? What value does this add to the earlier readings? Yet because of its failure to seriously engage earlier interpreters, Franco's article disappoints both expectations. From the article's third page onward, references to the relevant secondary literature are few and far between: the article deals mainly with the primary source. As a consequence, readers remain ignorant about the ways in which Franco endorses, rejects, or modifies the arguments of the handful of earlier scholars who have written on HH. Moreover, readers are unable to assess the validity of Franco's claim to originality—how can we tell whether and how reframing the problems of morality as a concern about culture really does illuminate Nietzsche's purposes and achievements in this work when Franco elects not to engage the readings he claims to be superseding?Footnote ⁸

In section 3, Franco takes up the issue that, he acknowledges, earlier readers of the middle period have attended to—that is, Nietzsche's analyses of the history of morality. However, as he does not discuss any of those earlier readings, it is impossible for most readers to evaluate the originality of his contribution. He claims, for example, that one of the ways in which Nietzsche departs from the outlook of his (then) friend Paul Rée is by questioning the very distinction between egoistic and non-egoistic actions.Footnote ⁹ Nietzsche illustrates this with reference to the concept of pity, which is supposed to be other-regarding but which he exposes as essentially selfish.Footnote ¹⁰ Franco contrasts Nietzsche's critique of morality with that of La RochefoucauldFootnote ¹¹ and discusses Nietzsche's claim about the original innocence of all action and its implications for the issue of freedom versus necessity.Footnote ¹² These are all valid claims, yet none of this territory is new. Brendan Donnellan's study of Nietzsche's relationship to the French moralistsFootnote ¹³ is not referred to at all by Franco—only his article about Rée and Nietzsche is.Footnote ¹⁴ Chapter 3 of my book on Nietzsche's middle period is devoted to the discussion of egoism, self-love, and vanity, and to a careful discussion of the differences among these ideas in Nietzsche's thought. The role Nietzsche accords to egoism in moral motivation, and its relationship to Rée's thought on this question, is a recurring theme of Robin Small's work.Footnote ¹⁵ Chapter 4 of my book analyzes the concept of pity, showing what a careful and nuanced depiction Nietzsche gives of this multifaceted emotion. My book includes more than a dozen references to La Rochefoucauld along with a comparison of his critique of pity with Nietzsche's. In a section entitled “Free Will,” I scrutinize and criticize Nietzsche's claims about the necessity of action.Footnote ¹⁶ Small also devotes pages to this issue.Footnote ¹⁷ Franco's discussion of moderation complements my own discussion of the value Nietzsche attributes to this in the middle period.Footnote ¹⁸ Many of the issues in Franco's discussion across two paragraphs of section 5 on the question of time and leisure have been discussed by me in a section entitled “Leisure.”Footnote ¹⁹ I go on to connect this with the vision of aristocracy evident in the middle-period writings. Although he cites my book once, as making the claim that the middle period works are unduly neglected by Nietzsche scholars,Footnote ²⁰ Franco never mentions these chapters, let alone engaging with their content, despite the fact that they are close to his own interests. Maybe Franco thinks that previous discussions of these themes are lacking in some or many ways, but by proceeding as if they don't exist, he misses the opportunity to demonstrate why his own discussions are more insightful.

The second side of Franco's dual response to the extant writings on HH appears in his claim that whereas they neglect the issue of culture, his analysis gives it pride of place. His interpretation thus represents an advance on those earlier readings. However, it is hard to reconcile this claim with the position he enunciates soon after that “tracing the problem of modern culture back to more fundamental moral, religious and metaphysical presuppositions constitutes one of the chief theoretical innovations of Human, All Too Human.”Footnote ²¹ He reiterates this view a few pages later, writing that in HH's chapters on the history of the moral sensations and on the religious life, “we arrive at the fundamental substratum of the problem of modern culture.”Footnote ²² At the article's conclusion, we read that “Nietzsche's reflections on the problem of modern culture thus lead him to ever more fundamental reflections on metaphysics, morality and religion.”Footnote ²³ If, as these remarks indicate, questions of morality, metaphysics, and religion (MMR) are more fundamental than those of culture, where have earlier interpreters erred in focusing on morality? What interpretive value is added by Franco's focus on culture if it immediately returns us to the more fundamental level of MMR?

As Franco unfolds his understanding of Nietzsche's new view of culture in HH, two key aspects emerge: the importance of history and the endorsement of a scientific approach to knowledge. In this work Nietzsche adopts “an historical approach to philosophy”Footnote ²⁴ and believes that as culture moves from lower to higher, it becomes more scientific.Footnote ²⁵ Eventually these two aspects are fused in Franco's presentation, for “the knowledge that distinguishes higher, or scientific culture, is historical knowledge.”Footnote ²⁶ This is a valid approach to understanding Nietzsche's enterprise in HH, but, once again, it is not novel. Franco himself offers the general observation that earlier readers have attended to the importance of Nietzsche's historical perspective in the middle period writings. As I argue in the opening lines of my chapter “We Children of the Enlightenment,” it is impossible to read the works of the middle period without being struck by their abundant praise of science.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, I suggest that Nietzsche fuses the idea of science with the idea of history in his approach to morality in the middle period writings, so that “the sort of science of morals and manners he practices during the middle period is more a combination of history and psychology than anything resembling the natural sciences.”Footnote ²⁸ And there is no doubt that Nietzsche sees the sort of science he is practicing at this time as making a contribution to development of the higher culture he envisages. If, as Franco suggests, the two key elements of Nietzsche's new view of culture are history and science, and if earlier writers on the middle period have pointed this out, it is incumbent upon him to explain clearly what is gained by reframing a reading of this text from a proto-genealogy of morality to an emphasis on culture. By failing to engage the existing literature, Franco forfeits the opportunity to underscore what is truly original in his approach to this text. My point here is not that everything that could be said about the relationship of history and science to culture in HH has already been said. On the contrary, the middle period writings are rich and fascinating, warranting intense scholarly attention and debate. However, this debate is not progressed if new contributions fail to actively engage existing ones.

A number of other issues Franco touches on are open to debate. Does Nietzsche really slough off the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner as he moves into the middle period, or is this his own hyperbole? Franco seems to take Nietzsche's claims on this at face value, but for many scholars the reality is more complicated—and more interesting.Footnote ²⁹ What is the significance of Nietzsche's change in style for the transition to the middle period? Although Franco mentions only aphorisms,Footnote ³⁰ what we really see in the move from the Untimely Meditations to HH is the introduction of a multiplicity of styles, from real aphorisms to much longer paragraphs and passages and much in between.Footnote ³¹ The issue of style has been hotly debated in the Nietzsche literature, and while authors of articles cannot be expected to cover all bases, one pressing question for Franco is whether this diversity of style troubles in any way his confident, Casaubonesque assertion about culture providing the key to the whole of HH. A third question is how scientific, rigorous, and disciplined is Nietzsche's own use of history? Do his repeated but wholly unspecified allusions to primeval times or primitive humanity, which are uncritically reproduced by Franco, meet his own standards of historical inquiry?Footnote ³² When were these times? What evidence do we have of them? These are all issues of legitimate scholarly debate and disagreement, and it would be instructive to hear Franco's considered views on them. My aim in this reply, however, has been to underline the importance of actively engaging in a debate with earlier scholars in an area of Nietzsche studies where it is still possible for a single individual to add bricks and stones to those already laid.