Friedrich Nietzsche: Writings from the Early Notebooks

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Nietzsche The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings (edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman)

Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman)Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs)

Nietzsche Daybreak (edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, translated by R. J. Hollingdale)

Nietzsche The Ga y Science (edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff)

Nietzsche Human, All Too Human (translated by R. J. Hollingdale with an introduction by Richard Schacht)

Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra (edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin)

Nietzsche Untimely Meditations (edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R. J. Hollingdale)

Nietzsche Writings from the Early Notebooks (edited by Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, translated by Ladislaus Löb)

Nietzsche Writings from the Late Notebooks (edited by Rüdiger Bittner, translated by Kate Sturge)

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Voltaire Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings (edited by Simon Harvey)

Raymond Geuss

University of Cambridge

Alexander Nehamas

University of Cambridge

Ladislaus Löb

University of Cambridge

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The selected material in this volume is used and re-translated from Friedrich Nietzsche, SÄMTLICHE WERKE, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, by arrangement with STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900.
[Selections. English. 2009]
Friedrich Nietzsche : writings from the early notebooks / [edited by] Raymond Geuss, Alexander Nehamas, Ladislaus Löb.
p. cm. – (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-85584-6 (hardback) 1. Philosophy. I. Geuss, Raymond. II. Nehamas, Alexander, 1946– III. Löb, Ladislaus. IV. Title. V. Series.
B3312.E5G48 2009
193–dc22  2009005335

ISBN 978-0-521-85584-6 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-67180-4 paperback

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Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

No modern philosopher has been read in as many different ways or appropriated by as many diverse schools of thought, social and political movements or literary and artistic styles as Nietzsche – perhaps, Plato’s towering figure aside, no philosopher ever. Notorious during much of the twentieth century as a ‘precursor’ of German National Socialism, he was also an inspiration to left-wing and avant-garde radicalism in the century’s early years as well as to the European and American academic left toward the century’s end. Denounced by some for undermining all traditional faith in truth and goodness, he has been praised by others for confronting honestly and truthfully the harmful and deceptive ideals of a self-serving past.

Nietzsche’s almost irresoluble ambiguity and many-sidedness are partly generated by his style of writing – playful, hyperbolic, cantering and full of twists and turns – and by his fundamental philosophical conviction that ‘the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity” ’.¹ Nietzsche was intentionally a philosopher of many masks and many voices. His purported objectivity is also due to the fact that most of his writing (more than two thirds of his total output, not counting his voluminous correspondence) has come to us in the form of short notes, drafts of essays and outlines of ideas and books he never published – fragmentary texts that allow great latitude in interpretation. These unpublished writings – his Nachlass – were mostly inaccessible until the recent publication of the standard edition of his works.² His readers had to rely on a series of different editors who, beginning with his own sister, selected the texts to be published according to their own preconceptions, arranged them in idiosyncratic ways, and sometimes attributed to him ideas and even whole books he had never himself contemplated.³

Because of their intrinsic interest, their bulk, the role they have played in Nietzsche’s reception so far and the role they surely should play in trying to come to terms with his sinuous engagement with the world, Nietzsche’s unpublished writings deserve serious study and reward careful attention. But, in order to be read at all, these texts – fragments that range from the casual to the polished, from the telegraphic to the discursive, from the personal to the detached, and address, sometimes in considerable detail, topics and problems that preoccupied him throughout his life – must first be placed within a context.

I    Reading strategies

This volume contains an extensive selection from the notebooks Nietzsche kept between 1868, just before he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland at the age of twenty-four, and 1879, when he resigned his position because of his health and devoted himself full-time to his writing.⁴ During that time, Nietzsche composed and published The Birth of Tragedy (1872), his four Untimely Meditations (1873, 1874, 1876) and Human, All Too Human, volumes I and II (1878). Ten years later, in January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in a public square in the Italian city of Turin and never regained full control of his faculties until his death in 1900. These notes, then, represent his philosophical reflections over more than half of his creative life. They address questions that were central to Nietzsche’s early philosophical views: the relative importance of music, image, and word to art and life; the role of ancient Greece – Greek tragedy in particular – as a model for a renewed German culture; and the nature of genius. But they also raise issues with which he grappled throughout his life – the nature of truth, knowledge and language, the connections between art, science and religion, the ancient Greeks’ attitudes toward individual and collective goals, the role of philosophers both then and now, and the nature and function of morality. They also reveal different sides of Nietzsche’s life-long involvement with his two great ‘educators’, the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.