Interpretation of Nietzsche's thought is a complex enterprise. Because of his avoidance of any conventional philosophical system and his many experiments with styles and genres, Nietzsche's writings seem to demand a sense of active reading. The “Nietzsche” that emerges from scholarly discussion typically depends on the interests of the interpreter and especially often those of the interpreter's discipline. Themes which are taken to be most central to Nietzsche's philosophy often depend on which works are regarded as most important or most accessible; but the relative importance which attaches to each of Nietzsche's works is by no means obvious. Indeed, Nietzsche scholarship has experienced fads with regard to given points of interest. As we will consider below, Thus Spoke Zaiathustia's celebrity outside of Germany declined after the Nazis invoked it for propagandistic purposes, while Nietzsche's early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has assumed new importance in recent literary-critical discussion, in part because it suggests that all language is metaphoric.

In 1933, five years after moving to Key West with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, Ernest Hemingway revisited Paris and there composed a travel letter for Esquire magazine about the “gloomy” mood of the city where he had spent six momentous years in the 1920s. His return seemed “a big mistake”: Some old friends had killed themselves, others clung to the past by scribbling memoirs, and everyone seemed “very discouraged.” The painters complained that nobody was buying their work, and the big cafes in Montparnasse teemed with “refugees from Nazi terror” - as well as with German spies. Everyone assumed the stark inevitability of another world war. But Hemingway's somber report seemed finally to mask a private grief, betrayed near the end of the letter when he evoked the plangent image of the city as a forsaken mistress:

Hobbes was very close to important figures in the history of politics and science as well as philosophy. His long life was marked by the disturbances that England underwent in the middle of the seventeenth century. The temptation is therefore strong to explain away as a mere consequence of the political upheavals of the 1640s his setting aside of the project of a complete philosophical system and his turning to a series of works of political philosophy. The main purpose of this essay will be to emphasize the inner consistency of Hobbes's philosophical and scientific system, to identify the place and function of history in his system, and only then to study his performance as historian.

Instead of a description - that is, a history - of Hobbes's views on history, I will adopt three successive perspectives upon this subject. The first perspective is provided by the taxonomy of sciences in Leviathan and its theory of science. The functions and modes of history as defined in the early preface to the translation of Thucydides and in later historical works is the second perspective, with particular emphasis on the Leviathan-Behemoth diptych. The final part examines Hobbes's performance as a historian in the light of the criteria identified in the first two parts.

Posterity has not looked admiringly on Hobbes's ventures into mathematics. Modern historians, aware that the untutored philosopher made no contribution to the subject and that he claimed success in problems now known to be insoluble, tend to view his efforts with dismay or to pass over them in silence. Jean-Etienne Montucla set the pace by publishing (1758) a large two-volume history of mathematics that contrives not to mention Hobbes even once. Later writers, when they have noticed him at all, have often exhibited only the unrepentant circle-squarer or the obtuse opponent of his century's revolutionary application of algebra to geometrical problems. Julian Lovell Coolidge's enchanting book on the mathematics of “great amateurs” gives chapters to such peripheral figures as Piero della Francesca the painter and Denis Diderot the man of letters, but finds no space for the author of Leviathan. Petr Beckmann's history of the number Л - a number that, as we shall see, figures implicitly in much of Hobbes's geometry - introduces the philosopher's name only to dismiss it with a sneer.

When he returned to Cuba after World War II, Ernest Hemingway faced the necessity of resurrecting his moribund literary career. He had closed out the 1930s with a triumphant novel about the Spanish civil war, confounding the critics who had declared his career to be over. But during World War II he had forsaken his art to serve as a Collier's correspondent - although he had actually published only six dispatches - and had confined his literary efforts to two long free verse poems written to Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was time to return to his real vocation.

Hemingway could not mark his return to letters by writing a mere journeyman novel or a few stories reminiscent of his prewar work. As he would observe in 1954, a writer of a certain standing had to strive continuously to push beyond his previous limits:

In preparing a line-by-line, word-by-word scholarly commentary on The Old Man and the Sea, I discovered many aspects of the narrative thus far overlooked. One pattern of neglected detail refers to workaday practicalities peculiar to the locale, and very often to local customs and habits of mind - to a general Cuban cultural consciousness. Here, as in many of his other works, Hemingway unobtrusively relies on such detail to account for his characters' motivation and to reveal what is actually being referred to in much of the dialogue. In other words, he requires his readers around the world to notice the specific cultural context of his narrative and to familiarize themselves with that context in order to follow what is literally happening in the plot.

This is an approach we accept as a matter of course in reading the works of other modernists - Joyce, Pound, or Eliot, for example. Yet it is a challenge posed so subtly by Hemingway's method that it has eluded us from the very beginning, in “Out of Season” (composed April 1923), his first narrative written in the style that was to make him famous. As I have pointed out (“Hemingway's Italian Waste Land“ esp. 79-89), readers can understand that troublesome story only by learning something about the attitudes of provincial Italian villagers living on the Austrian border after World War I. And our failure to recognize Hemingway's challenge to “think in the head” of his various other foreign characters has accounted for many a canonized misreading or marginal understanding of his works. We have tended to forget that Hemingway is at bottom a travel writer, performing the traditional novelist's function of helping us measure ourselves by and against precisely described exotics.

That we find, approximately a century after his productivity ended, commentators referring to French “Nietzscheanism” is a development that we can imagine would have pleased Friedrich Nietzsche. On several occasions, Nietzsche remarked that he felt more at home with the French, their culture and their language, than with Germans. More than once, he regretted having to write in German rather than in a more fluid, playful, musical language like French. And more than once, he felt his spiritual kin to reside west of the Rhine, preferring the philosophical companionship of Montaigne, Voltaire, and La Rochefoucauld to that of Leibniz, Kant, or Hegel.

I want to write here about the political uses made of Nietzsche, about what Nietzsche says about politics (broadly understood), and about the politics of reading and writing about Nietzsche. Twenty-five years ago few people would have cared. Nietzsche was a minor figure, stimulating to adolescents, without rigor, a bit silly. Now he is a minor industry in the intellectual professions. Everyone is writing about Nietzsche, some their third or fourth book. Articles appear everywhere: The bastions and inner walls of the most analytic redoubts have fallen,- journals of literature both learned and popular vie for text. Nietzsche seems inexhaustible - he is available, it seems, to everyone. Everything in Nietzsche seems living. Yet if everything is living, everything about Nietzsche also seems fragile.

I want also to say something here about the various claims that have been made on Nietzsche. I do not want so much to argue that Nietzsche is or is not the ally of a particular political persuasion as much as to investigate why he lends himself to such a wide range of positions, and what it means about a writer that he can be subject to so many varying claims of political allegiance. Most importantly, I wish to raise the question of what it means for a writer, such as Nietzsche, to resist the currently available political identities.

Like many of his contemporaries, Hobbes showed a keen interest in optics. In fact, the question of the nature of sensory perception was the first philosophical problem he pondered, and his search for an explanation of vision led him to believe that all natural phenomena could be reduced to local motion of material bodies. Hence, from the very start, his theory of light and vision served as a model for his theories of natural phenomena in general. Apart from speculations on light and vision expressed in passing in a number of optical works, Hobbes wrote three specifically optical tracts: the Tractatus Opticus I (ca. 1640), the Tractatus Opticus II (1644), and A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1646). Although these works were written in the 1640s, Hobbes conceived the main principles of his optics early in the 1630s.

Hobbes's earliest attempt at a systematic account of his natural philosophy probably dates from around 1630. It was published in 1889 by Ferdinand Tönnies as "A short tract on first principles.” This text consists of three sections, each composed of one or more principles followed by a number of conclusions. In the first section, Hobbes presents the conceptual building blocks and principles of a mechanical explanation of natural operations. The things constituting nature are defined in terms of their relationship qua being, operation, and generation.

In his autobiographical writing Ecce Homo of 1888, Nietzsche makes a statement about his success as an author that has baffled many of his readers ever since. After chiding the Germans for not understanding his notion of Ubermensch, for aligning him with Darwinism, and for absolutely misinterpreting his Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche continues:

Nietzsche's claim to such exquisite readers is usually dismissed as the tortured self-appraisal of an author painfully aware of the low success rate of his writings or even as a sign of megalomania foreshadowing his impending mental breakdown in January of 1889.

Only recently has one attempted to take this statement literally and come to amazing discoveries. If we simply look at the title page of one of Nietzsche's published texts, The Gay Science, for instance, we see the cities to which Nietzsche refers listed for branches of his publishing house Ernst Schmeitzner, namely, H. Schmitzdorff in St. Petersburg (5 Newsky Prospekt), C. Klincksieck in Paris (11 Rue de Lille), Loescher & Co. in Rome (307 Via del Corso), E. Steige in New York (22-24 Frankfort Street), and Williams & Norgate in London (14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden). Yet Nietzsche's statement was meant not only to indicate that these firms affiliated with Schmeitzner were able to distribute his published writings in these cities, but to point to actual readers known to him either through direct contact or reference by others.

Ernest Hemingway wrote about many places - northern Michigan; France and Italy; Key West, Havana, and Bimini; East Africa - but no place had the effect on him, as a person or as a writer, that Spain did. In the second sentence of his last book, The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway claimed to like Spain better than any country except his own, and privately he said he loved Spain more than any place. To understand how and why Spain affected him so deeply is to explore the most profound mysteries of Hemingway's craft, both as stylist and as creator of narrative fiction.

The effect of place on writers is well known, especially the home place: William Faulkner's northern Mississippi or Thomas Wolfe's North Carolina highlands come readily to mind as examples. With Hemingway the case is quite different. He wrote very little about his hometown of Oak Park or nearby Chicago. Nick Adams, one of his most autobiographical characters, thinks in the story “The Killers” that he ought to get out of town. Hemingway himself did virtually the same and seldom returned.

More than once in his writings, Hobbes pronounced on the scope and organization of science. He had provocative views about the subjects that could be termed “scientific” about the scientific subjects that were basic, and about the relative benefits of the various sciences. Some of these views reflect his allegiance to the new mechanical philosophy and his opposition to Aristotelianism; others show the influence of Bacon, who was a virtuoso deviser of blueprints for science. Still others belong to a program of self-advertisement: Hobbes wished to be seen as an important scientist himself - an important worker in the field of optics and no less than the inventor of the science of politics. After expounding Hobbes's views about the organization of science and considering some of the problems they raise, I shall suggest that they throw light on old questions about what has been called “Hobbes's system”

Background

Many different types of early clarinet have long been familiar from photographs in books and journals, but a number of these are now actually being used in historical performances world-wide, giving a quite new perspective to the art of clarinet playing. The expectations of the great composers in terms of sound and musical style (‘performance practice’) has become a lively subject for discussion, widely reflected within such periodicals as the Galpin Society Journal and Early Music. There has always been much detail which a composer did not trouble to write into his scores; he simply knew that certain conventions would be observed. Some of these conventions are no longer current, whereas others have undergone significant changes of meaning. Using a clarinet for which a particular repertoire was originally intended may well make the music sound more expressive and can make more sense of what the composer actually wrote. Is the kind of performance anticipated by Mozart in his own day valid for later generations of players? We can never really answer this question, if only because life has changed so much during the last couple of centuries. The importance of the microphone in our musical lives, coupled with the various implications of air travel, are two factors which have brought about such changes that we do not have the option to turn back the clock. Even if we could hear Anton Stadler's premiere of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto from 1791, we should not necessarily want to adopt all of its features, since to some degree twentieth-century taste would almost certainly continue to influence our interpretation.

Introduction

When an overall view is taken of those who have influenced composition for any instrument, a number of specific types may be observed. The most obvious type is the professional virtuoso who provides direct inspiration; outstanding clarinettists who have done this are Karl Stamitz's Joseph Beer, Mozart's Anton Stadler, Spohr's Simon Hermstedt, Weber's Heinrich Baermann and Brahms's Richard Muhlfeld. Where, as in the case of the clarinet, the instrument is mechanically operated there is also the player-inventor who gives the spark to fire a composition; the most notable of these is Iwan Muller. Thirdly, there are those who give commissions which result in significant additions to the repertoire; amongst these are Benny Goodman, ‘King of Swing’, and the amateur player-philanthropists Werner Reinhart, the Duke of Sondershausen and Count Troyer.

The rise of the virtuoso

Connecting specific players with the very first works for the clarinet is not easy, though we can be fairly certain that it was Johann Reusch (c. 1710–1787) who inspired Durlach's Kapellmeister Johann Melchior Molter to compose his six concertos in the late 1740s. At that time Reusch was Durlach's flautist, merely doubling on oboe and clarinet. Significantly, he later moved to Karlsruhe as a bona fide clarinettist.