Hugur - 01.01.2004, Page 151

Is/enskur Nietzsche við aldamót
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Abstract
An Icelandic Nietzsche at the Turn of the Century
The last decade of the twentieth century marks the dawn of academic Nietz-
sche studies in Iceland. In 1993, the first Icelandic translation of Nietzsche
appeared, prepared by the Icelandic Nietzsche-scholar, Sigrídur Thorgeirs-
dóttir. That same year, the leading Icelandic moral philosopher, Vilhjálmur
Arnason, wrote an influential paper regarding Nietzsche on morality. In
some ways similar to Walter Kaufmann’s defence of the discredited postwar
Nietzsche, Arnason attempts, by softening the image of Nietzsche, to
demonstrate that he had been misunderstood in Iceland as an immoralist á
la Callicles, whereas Nietzsche, according to Árnason, is in many aspects a
moral thinker. In 1997, Róbert H. Haraldsson, another Icelandic Nietzsche-
scholar philosophy, wrote an article taking Árnason’s defence of the misund-
erstood Nietzsche one step further. Whereas Árnason, although accentuat-
ing the moral drive in Nietzsche’s philosophy, echoes Philippa Foot by
pointing to an immoral elitist side of Nietzsche, Haraldsson aims at dem-
onstrating that Nietzsche does not endorse an immoral elitist aestheticism,
arguing that his concept of a higher morality is not plain aestheticism but in
fact a non-elitist moral concept. In this article I criticize these softened
moralist interpretations of Nietzsche, as well as Thorgeirsdóttir’s disqualif-
ication of the older Icelandic reception of Nietzsche as unserious. By recon-
structing the reception of Nietzsche in Iceland since 1891, predominantly by
theologians, writers, poets, natural scientists and Nordic scholars rather than
academic philosophers, it is shown that these interpretations, although not
flawless, offer a relatively realistic perspective on Nietzsche’s elitist philosop-
hy, interpretations that vanish with the new softened apolitical moralist
image of Nietzsche introduced in the 1990s. I demonstrate how such att-
empts to highlight a moral side of Nietzsche are related to the fact that mor-
al philosophy has dominated Icelandic philosophy since the beginning of the
1990s. By challenging this moralization of Nietzsche, I argue that he was in
fact a radically amoral elitist philosopher, offering a socio-historical philos-
ophy of human conduct more elaborate than the philosophy of Icelandic et-
hicists, who moralize social analysis by devaluating power, interests and ot-
her aspects central to a critical genealogy.