Niamh Reilly (NUIG)
Nietzsche in Ireland’s battle of ideas before 1916
3pm, 29th April, 2022
In the first two decades of the 20th century, across the island of Ireland, significant public engagement with the meaning and relevance of Nietzsche's philosophy was increasingly evident in newspapers and public platforms. (For example, digital archives indicate approximately 200 Irish newspaper articles or letters to the editor that refer to Nietzsche during 1900-1920.) In part, this fascination with Nietzsche mirrored a transnational trend in the Anglophone world following the translation into English and wide distribution of Thus Spake Zarathustra in the early 1900s. In Ireland, exchanges became increasingly polarised in the politics of World War I propaganda, in which Nietzsche was cast solely as architect of "Prussian atrocity" and attacks on religion or, alternatively, his legacy was defended against anti-German (pro-British) slander. Nonetheless, the depth and nuance of engagement with Nietzsche during this time by leading and aspiring Irish public intellectuals, and the implication of this engagement in competing formulations of Irish nationalism and other visions of Ireland -- past and future -- is a significant phenomenon in the history of ideas that has yet to be explored. Framed in relation to a public panel organised to commemorate the centenary of Thomas Davis in Dublin, November 1914, which featured WB Yeats and TM Kettle (as well as the emerging Padraic Pearce), this paper examines Yeats' and Kettle's ideas about the philosophy of Nietzsche, places their opposing views in their respective political and philosophical contexts, and considers how each one’s interpretation of Nietzsche shaped their very different visions of Ireland to come.