Carol Diethe: Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism.

Laberge, Yves

Carol Diethe

Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism.

2nd edition.

Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press 2007.

Pp. 424.

$90.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5613-4).

John Protevi, ed.

A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006.

Pp. 638.

$56.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11605-2).

Students in philosophy and social sciences always need to consult reliable dictionaries in their area of specialization, in order to understand and distinguish concepts and ideas, or just to find clear definitions with greater detail than ordinary dictionaries provide. Since these two A-Z reference books are not just general dictionaries in philosophy but specialized works in specific areas of the discipline, both will be quite useful for advanced undergraduates and other scholars (and even non-philosophers). I examine each work separately.

In Protevi's dictionary we find almost 500 entries and longer articles (ranging from one paragraph to three pages) in roughly three categories: philosophers (from T. W. Adorno and Kant to Marx and Slavoj Zizek), social thinkers (like Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault), and countless theoretical and philosophical concepts (absurdity, aesthetics, literary theory, negritude, phenomenology, rationalization). And of course we find here a detailed entry on postmodernism, understood as 'a rejection of the abstraction, cold formalism, elitism', and 'a collapsing of the distinction between the high and the low' (459). If a dictionary succeeds in making the lay reader understand what a complex concept such as postmodernism is, then one can say it is a good pedagogical instrument.

Oddly, in his short introduction, Protevi seems on the one hand reluctant to provide his own definition of continental philosophy, appearing to rely instead on a sharp geographical delineation between authors in the Anglo- Saxon tradition of the 1950s and Western European authors (mainly) of Germany and France (viii). On this view continental philosophy sounds like non-Anglophone or non-British European philosophy, as seen by British observers. On the other hand, Protevi's actual definition relies on a short non-geographical account taken from the entry on 'Analytic philosophy', in which Simon Glendinning draws from Gilbert Ryle's distinction: 'Continental philosophers' are 'those philosophers who ... regard philosophy as some kind of quasi-perpetual intuition of essences' (25).

Even though continental philosophy is in one sense supposed to refer to European authors, some American philosophers are included, such as Alphonso Lingis, who was a professor and translator (for the books of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty), or Donald Donaldson, who was very much influenced by the French tradition of Saussure (but also Kant), plus many European-born philosophers who had a long career in the United States, like Leo Strauss or Scottish-born Alasdair MacIntyre. There is as well an entry on Montreal-born Charles Taylor, who studied at Oxford University from the late 1950s. A few authors from the eighteenth century are included, but there is no entry for, say, encyclopaedists Denis Diderot and his colleague D'Alembert. In other words, we do not get everything about European philosophy; largely we get a series of articles about contemporary European philosophers in their unique or exclusive approaches. (One way of construing this is to say that we get a high dose of reputedly eccentric writers who became hip at some point in Anglo-Saxon universities, from Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord to Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, and some others targeted in the Sokal Hoax.) There are also some timely comparative entries on Asian and African philosophies.

Among the many fine entries found here, the article on cinema includes some avant-garde films as examples. In addition to citing a few famous films, it refers to Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein (as they apply to film theory). Importantly it also has entries on Kierkegaard and on Gaston Bachelard, who is an excellent example of a French philosopher influential in Europe and almost everywhere else, except English-speaking countries. The omission of Bachelard in a dictionary on European thinking would have meant, overall, a less credible work. By the same token, however, among the French admirers of Bachelard, an entry on Pierre Bourdieu should have been included, though perhaps this is just a point of detail.

Despite its undeniable positive qualities, there are at least two general objections to be made about Protevi's dictionary. First, certain influential thinkers from Switzerland are overlooked, like Carl G. Jung and Jean Piaget. They were not philosophers, although they influenced their generation. Others are also missing, like German philosopher Oswald Spengler, who in the early 1920s wrote The Decline of West, plus some important French thinkers such as Raymond Aron and Edgar Morin--both core thinkers who can be located between the social sciences and philosophy. A sociologist and philosopher, Edgar Morin wrote dozens of books on complexity theory and interdisciplinary methods. (Alas! very few of his works were translated into English.) The introduction should have explained the main criteria for inclusion (or exclusion) of specific themes or authors. While we find an entry on French philosophers like Sarah Kofman and Michel Serres, we get no entries on some contemporary French philosophers who published an even greater number of books, e.g., Luc Ferry or Patrick Tort (who wrote extensively on Darwinism, a fundamental continental matter).

My second complaint is about the lack of reference tools that should be found in any reference book. There is neither an index nor a bibliography, and not all quotes and works mentioned in the entries have the names of publishers or the page numbers of the quoted passages (as we require from our students). For instance, a long six line quote of Gramsci notes only that it comes from his Prison Notebooks, with no precise reference about the version used or year of initial publication (275). Contrary to what is claimed in the introduction (xi), editors should not rely first on the internet to provide the complete references to standard works in this discipline; au contraire, even in the twenty-first century, references should be to autonomous and complete editions. The absence of an index in this dictionary is also a pity. Consider a student doing research on symbols: shouldn't she be directed to the entry on Edmund Husserl, which also mentions that concept (292), and to the entry on feminism (214), and of course to the entry on symbolic exchange (566) (which relies a little too much on Baudrillard but does not mention Bachelard)? Even the most general books carry an index, and we expect reference books to provide even more of these cross-referencing tools.

Philosophers are always asking for more when investigating their own discipline, and most editors thus want to include more entries. But publishers are often reluctant to carry too many pages, specially when the number reaches the 700-page mark. So, although we already have a short entry on philosophical imaginary, which only focuses on the works of Michele Le Doeuff (and not, say, Gilbert Durand), a future version should include as well entries on imaginaire (or imagery), interdisciplinary, and of course on culture and cross-cultural theory, essential topics in continental philosophy. Nevertheless, one should not focus too much on what is missing in a dictionary, but should instead try to appreciate what is to be found. In this case, there are hundreds of instructive pages of explanations and discussions about the fundamental concepts of continental philosophy. Here, definitions are not oneliners; terms are often explained in a few sentences by various authors. One might suppose this dictionary was conceived for English-speaking students requiring the conceptual means to tackle complex (and sometimes elusive) European thinkers, who were not themselves the champions of clarity--yes, there are much-needed entries on Derrida and Ricoeur. Even experienced professors in continental philosophy will probably learn from this dictionary. Incidentally, a less expensive, paperback version also appeared in Scotland, with a slightly different title: The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, published by the Edinburgh University Press (2005).

Now to the second edition of Diethe's dictionary, which includes the general philosophical concepts of Nietzsche (1844-1900), plus those salient elements and themes central to Nietzsche's thought, such as eternal return, ressentiment (written in French, as Nietzsche always did), science, sexuality, and slave morality. A first edition of this dictionary appeared in 1999, but this new version is much more comprehensive, now with some 100 additional pages. Every book Nietzsche wrote (and even The Anti-Christ) is introduced in a specific entry. All major philosophers (before and after Nietzsche) are included here, with discussion of their mutual critiques (whenever feasible) and their sets of influences, from Plato and Darwin to Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze. Of course, Nietzsche's friends and relatives are included as well, in a general entry on friendship, plus some specific entries related to his closest associates (from Lou Andreas-Salome to Richard Wagner). The entry on Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche explains how she reconstructed Nietzsche's thoughts after his death. The musical universe of Nietzsche is covered as well, both in an entry on music, and in another on Nietzsche's close friend Peter Gast, with whom he exchanged hundreds of letters that were published and even translated into French. In fact, there seems to be no one missing here. We even have an entry about the odd whip that can be seen on the famous photograph from 1882 of Lou Andreas-Salome, Paul Ree, and Nietzsche (as shown here on p. 207).

This dictionary really is extensive: the introductory essay has more than fifty pages and focuses on Nietzsche's influence in various countries (from Spain to China). Most entries are about one page long. Surprisingly, along with the names of philosophers, included here are entries on some major novelists and playwrights like Holderlin, Goethe, Georg Kaiser, Franz Wedekind (the author of Erdgeist [Earth Spirit] and Lulu). One of the strong points of this book is that it highlights the indirect influence of Nietzsche's thinking on many fields and disciplines that are sometimes distant from philosophy, including German expressionism. We even get an entry on the famous weekly journal Die Aktion, published in Berlin between 1911 and 1932. In fact, this excellent dictionary has a broad range and is made not only for Nietzsche connoisseurs; it enables the reader to follow most of the history of ideas in Europe using a Nietzschean perspective. This can be fascinating, since this book is clear, well-written, and easy to follow, even for an undergraduate. For instance, we get accurate entries on the futurism movement in Italy (during the early twentieth century), on novelist Milan Kundera, and even on Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Appendices provided by Diethe are extensive and helpful; there is a glossary, a chronology, a detailed bibliography with useful references on Nietzschean studies in many countries, but--here again--no index, which is too bad.

It would be difficult and perhaps unfair to compare these two volumes, for although they are both dictionaries, they are quite different one from one another: the first is a collective effort (which implies the simultaneous presence of various styles, sometimes uneven quality, and a variable clarity in the texts), while the second is single-authored. Protevi's dictionary is brand new, Diethe's has had the opportunity to undergo revision and updating--the chance to correct errors and to add missing topics. To sum up, while both dictionaries are insightful and will inspire graduate students and scholars, we should wait for Protevi's revised edition to make some fairer comparisons. Meanwhile, philosophers and serious academics in the social sciences should refer to these two impressive books; any decent university library ought to have them.

Yves Laberge

Quebec City