Basic Writings of Nietzsche

Description

This captivating collection brings together five of Friedrich Nietzche’s most important philosophical works, exploring themes such as nihilism, metaphysics, and the nature of morality—featuring an introduction by Peter Gay and commentary from Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze

More than one hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche’s most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. 
 
Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features seventy-five aphorisms, selections from Nietzsche’s correspondence, and variants from drafts for Ecce Homo. It is a definitive guide to the full range of Nietzsche’s thought.

This edition includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide"Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure."
–Walter KaufmannPeter Gay is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the former director of the Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His works include The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom and Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.

1. Nietzsche remains one of the most influential philosophers of our time. As Walter Kaufmann notes, "No other philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, with the exception of Kant and Hegel, has influenced so many widely different thinkers and writers so profoundly." What are some of the main aspects of Nietzsche’s influence, and what are some of the factors that account for his tremendous and enduring influence?

2. One of Nietzsche’s major themes is the idea of "the eternal recurrence." What do you think Nietzsche was attempting to do with this idea? What does he seem to mean by it? What are its implications?

3. As Peter Gay notes, Nietzsche has been one of the most persistently misunderstood writers in the history of Western thought. What are some of the misunderstandings that have attended his work? Are some thinkers more easily misappropriated than others?

4. Nietzsche’s style is particularly iconoclastic and unique; as Walter Kaufmann notes, "Nietzsche clearly wanted to be read with a delighted awareness of nuances of style and thought." Discuss how Nietzsche’s style-which often condenses complex ideas into seemingly simple phrases-works to inform your reading or understanding of his thought. Is Nietzsche’s style inseparable from his meaning?

5. One of Nietzsche’s favorite devices is the aphorism. Why is this form significant for Nietzsche? What does he accomplish by writing in this way? Can all of his writing be said to be in some way aphoristic?

6. For Nietzsche, the most important philosophy is always "untimely," and Nietzsche had a particularly complicated and contentious relationship toward many of his contemporaries, for instance Wagner. Discuss Nietzsche’s various attitudes toward his contemporaries as stated in Basic Writings, and conversely the ideas, figures, and ways of thinking that Nietzsche seems to find most sympathetic to his own philosophy.

7. Nietzsche has been considered a nihilist, and also a philosopher who more than anything sought to transcend nihilism. Discuss the idea of nihilism in broad terms, and Nietzsche’s use or development of this idea.

8. What, for Nietzsche, is the "will to power"?

9. Throughout Nietzsche’s work is a call for a new philosophy, for radical breaks with various conventional ideas and methodologies, and for new philosophers. What are some of Nietzsche’s hopes for the future of philosophy?

Attempt at a Self-Criticism
 
Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been an exceptionally significant and fascinating question, and deeply personal at that: the time in which it was written, in spite of which it was written, bears witness to that—the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As the thunder of the battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the muser and riddle-friend who was to be the father of this book sat somewhere in an Alpine nook, very bemused and beriddled, hence very concerned and yet unconcerned, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks—the core of the strange and almost inaccessible book to which this belated preface (or postscript) shall now be added. A few weeks later—and he himself was to be found under the walls of Metz, still wedded to the question marks that he had placed after the alleged “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and of Greek art. Eventually, in that month of profoundest suspense when the peace treaty was being debated at Versailles, he, too, attained peace with himself and, slowly convalescing from an illness contracted at the front, completed the final draft of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.— Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the art form of pessimism? The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks—how now? They of all people should have needed tragedy? Even more—art? For what—Greek art?
 
You will guess where the big question mark concerning the value of existence had thus been raised. Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts—as it once was in India and now is, to all appearances, among us, “modern” men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness? The sharp-eyed courage that tempts and attempts, that craves the frightful as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom one can test one’s strength? From whom one can learn what it means “to be frightened”? What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian—and, born from it, tragedy— what might they signify?— And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—how now? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks—merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans’ resolve against pessimism—a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science—indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what—worse yet, whence—all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?
 
2
 
What I then got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem—today I should say that it was the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet—what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art—for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science—a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label. In spite of the problem which seems congenial to old age, the book is marked by every defect of youth, with its “length in excess” and its “storm and stress.” On the other hand, considering its success (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself as in a dialogue, Richard Wagner), it is a proven book, I mean one that in any case satisfied “the best minds of the time.”1 In view of that, it really ought to be treated with some consideration and taciturnity. Still, I do not want to suppress entirely how disagreeable it now seems to me, how strange it appears now, after sixteen years—before a much older, a hundred times more demanding, but by no means colder eye which has not become a stranger to the task which this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.
 
3
 
To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, “music” for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, “music” meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in artibus2—an arrogant and rhapsodic book that sought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus3 of “the educated” even more than “the mass” or “folk.” Still, the effect of the book proved and proves that it had a knack for seeking out fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new secret paths and dancing places. What found expression here was anyway—this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy—a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God,” one who concealed himself for the time being under the scholar’s hood, under the gravity and dialectical ill humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian. Here was a spirit with strange, still nameless needs, a memory bursting with questions, experiences, concealed things after which the name of Dionysus was added as one more question mark. What spoke here—as was admitted, not without suspicion—was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this “new soul”—and not spoken!4 What I had to say then—too bad that I did not dare say it as a poet: perhaps I had the ability. Or at least as a philologist: after all, even today practically everything in this field remains to be discovered and dug up by philologists! Above all, the problem that there is a problem here—and that the Greeks, as long as we lack an answer to the question “what is Dionysian?” remain as totally uncomprehended and unimaginable as ever.US

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