“Nietzsche … a Pascal in a cold age.” Romano Guardini[1]
What should one read, what should one study, who should one get to know? It is almost always better to spend time with those who are your superior in soul and in mind than with others. Yes, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Gospels, Thomas, Dante, Shakespeare, Pascal, Goethe, and Tolstoy—and many others.
And then there is Nietzsche. One reason time with him is special is that he knew himself better than almost all other men know themselves. In his old age, Sigmund Freud declared no man had greater self-knowledge than Nietzsche.[2] If so, then Nietzsche knows the vast majority of his readers better than they know themselves. This means he knows you better than you know yourself, and that would be a good reason to read him.
A second reason, only Pascal, Rembrandt, and the tragedians pay a like attention to suffering. No wonder then that he was engaged with tragedy and with Christ.
A third, reason to read him now is that he foresaw certain things in the coming epoch, our epoch, no one else did. It was he, not Hegel, not Marx and even not Tocqueville, who predicted the wars of unprecedented ferocity and scope, wars for the whole world, which still proceed steadily. And he foresaw much else in our times. No wonder, every deep thinker since has been formed by him, except one, maybe two.
Nietzsche also foresaw, more exactly divined in his times, the “death of God” in the hearts of men. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky had intimations of that too. More than they, perhaps because he participated in that “death,” or murder, Nietzsche suffered the consequent degradation that might follow, has followed, is with us, and in us, and for so many is “us.“ According to Nietzsche, “A nihilist is a person who says of the world as it is, that it better were not, and with regard to the world as it should be, that it does not and cannot exist.”[3] Against such nihilism Nietzsche exerted all his mighty powers. Did he prevail? —to learn you will have to read him. Péguy, Guardini, Girard, and DeKonnick have best judged that struggle, and the spiritual consequences. Its political consequence, militant atheistical communism, has been most deeply examined by Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago. Founded in hatred of God (found first in Machiavelli), this novel regime aimed to extinguish also the love of the good, in every one of its victims.
Moreover, Nietzsche will introduce you to others who are your superior in heart and in mind. Whatever he mentions is worth looking into. While he looked deeply forward, and while he looked deeply into himself, Nietzsche also looked deeply back. Few men in modernity look so far back to the roots of our civilization, even unto the founders, to Socrates and to Christ. The struggle to unite the reason of the one and revelation of the other is the story of the West. Western man is he who —think of Hamlet, read Thomas, and read Pascal— tries to reason about revelation. Nietzsche’s lyrical epic, Thus Spake Zarathustra, is the story of a teacher’s life, like theirs; in it Zarathustra attempts to become a Socrates with the soul of Christ, and then in his later Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), Nietzsche tried to do it himself.
Did Nietzsche know the future, our future, your future? Did he know our past, your past, the past that has made you? Does he know Socrates and Christ, the Fathers of the West, and thus you, you child of the West, though you don’t know these Fathers? And does he know himself and therefore you, you creature of the present time, better than you know yourself and your times? The only way to find out is to read him, and to read him as you would any wise man, assuming that he is wiser than you, for only by so assuming will one begin to do the work necessary to see if he is, and then if he is, to benefit from him.
What he wrote is very exciting, be careful; and it is exceedingly difficult, so be ready. It could not be otherwise. “All great things are difficult.” And they are lonely; it is unlikely you will ever meet in life the equal of Nietzsche, but you might, however, meet others who feel the same way. The great thinkers, though they be rivals of each other, do make a fraternity of those who look up to them.[4] And Nietzsche might be dangerous. Because Nietzsche is one of those lofty thinkers, others are Montaigne, and Rousseau, who is more wide and rich in thought than definite and precise in teaching, there are in him mighty opposites struggling with each other, and you will have not just to view them, but meet them yourself. You will have, then, to struggle with them. Watch out. Even before you recognize it, they will be struggling for you.
Is it worth it for you, especially just now? As you may be unsure, let me provide you with a little anthology of quotations from his writings. One of the best ways to test an unknown author is by sentences; if you find some that keep you thinking, you may want to go to the books they come from. But do know there are some writers without any aphorisms; in all of Tolstoy there is only one. (Write me, address below, for this bouquet of quotations.)
Might you want guidance. May what’s below provide some. I’ve read Nietzsche for fifty years, taught his works for forty, here in our country, and four years in Germany (at Heidelberg on my Humboldt Fellowship and elsewhere); I headed the Nietzsche Society (1983-86) and I’ve published some things (listed below). However, Nietzsche is one of those lofty thinkers who, as I said, is more wide and rich in thought than definite and precise in teaching. Consequently, others who have also spent a long time with him might provide different counsel. What follows is mine.
I. The Best Guide
Incomparably the best guide to Nietzsche is Nietzsche himself. First of all, because a book worth serious reading will teach us to read it as nothing else does. No little part of its greatness is knowing that. Each book of Nietzsche’s does that, just as each of Plato’s, or Aquinas,’ Montaigne’s, or Shakespeare’s does.
Second, because Nietzsche, unlike most other great authors, instructs us in the art of reading. He did so because he thought this art would soon disappear. Few books of his are without explicit instruction in this precious art, and several have long treatments of it, its maxims, its aims, and its dangers. For a beginner, look at “On Reading and Writing” in Book I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Many of Nietzsche’s books also provide examples of reading, for when Nietzsche reads others, he is also teaching us how to read, and thus how to read him. (Consider “The Problem of Socrates” in The Twilight of the Idols.)
Do not be fooled by the form of Nietzsche’s thinking. Yes, his aphorisms sparkle, they excite, they electrify, — and they might electrocute! Yes, his books do seem like a thousand strikes of lightning, each a singularity, randomly placed, to be read without continuity. They are much more. His aphorisms are like pearls strung together beautifully. Thus the meaning of any aphorism is fully to be understood only in its place within the beautiful whole Nietzsche fashioned, a book. And finally, each book is only to be understood within the whole that his books make up. As Nietzsche said, for a philosopher there can be no isolated insights.[5]
In studying Nietzsche, take very seriously his claim to have written in ten sentences what others have written in a book and his advice that after reading one entry or page, you should stroll to the next bench, in the forest or beside the stream, before reading the next one. (And if you read any secondary works on Nietzsche, ask first: does the author write well, and if he does not, there is no chance he can understand Nietzsche. And if as turgidly, drop him right away.)
Third, Nietzsche is the best guide to Nietzsche in the specific sense that he wrote a book whose explicit purpose is to guide us through his other books. Prepared in his last alert year, Ecce Homo (which means “Behold the Man” and “Behold Man”) is Nietzsche’s autobiography, the completion of his life’s task, and an account of that task, including the books in which it was accomplished. As a consequence, Ecce Homo is the most authoritative secondary book on Nietzsche there will ever be.
In Ecce Homo, in the chapter “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Nietzsche gives a chronological account of his writings; the peak is Zarathustra (1883-85); all roads in Nietzsche lead up to it; everything written before is on the way up to it (especially The Frolicsome Science, whose old title, “The Gay Science,” must, alas, be sacrificed), and everything after is meant to help others find a way up to it (especially Beyond Good and Evil). You can, then, start anywhere, but you should know you are meant to reach Zarathustra eventually. Many readers never do. (And lots never should.)
Many fail because of disciplinary deformity. Thus, many readers of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the favorite of professors of literature, ignore the preface Nietzsche wrote later, in which he forgives the book its youthful errors (and thereby acknowledges them). (If you happen to have read it, you should read the late The Case of Wagner immediately.) Many readers of Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887), the favorite of Anglo-Saxon professors of philosophy, ignore the “toward” (Zur) in the title, the subtitle “A Polemic,” the subsequent note that calls it a clarifying supplement to Beyond Good and Evil, andthe direction at the end of Section II to look to Zarathustra, as a thinker far above polemics. It is then a mistake to interpret Nietzsche’s other books in the light of this lower book. Just the opposite, reading it ought to make the reader rise up to those other books. Also instructive are the later set of prefaces Nietzsche wrote, a little before Ecce Homo, to help the reader with his earlier books.
So, where to begin? Three choices beckon, I think. The first is to go straight to Zarathustra. Students of great literature, especially of the epic broadly conceived, Homer and Dante but Goethe too, are perhaps in the best “disciplinary” position, provided they transcend the “discipline” of literature by thirsting for truth. Two other choices stand out, I think. The first is to begin with the book that led Nietzsche to Zarathustra and the second is to begin with the book he wrote to lead others to it. The first four “books” of the former, The Frolicsome Science (1882),[6] lead literally to Zarathustra, who suddenly appears at the end, in No. 342; in the course of Frolicsome every idea for which Nietzsche is justly known appears. Nietzsche called it “deep, but bright and gracious.” (Note that “Book Five” of Frolicsome was added after Zarathustra.) Alternatively, you might begin with Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which Nietzsche wrote after Zarathustra, to make his readers weary of modernity and long for Zarathustra, as the poem that concludes it (BGE) does.
Wherever you begin, with Ecce Homo, The Frolicsome Science, Beyond Good and Evil, with Zarathustra itself, or one of his other works, read slowly. As I said, Nietzsche tells us we should walk to the next copse and sit on a bench quietly before reading the next aphorism. In the Frolicsome Science, he declared: “The contemplative life—that means strolling with thoughts and friends.” (FW#329). His walks in Sils Maria were long and mostly solitary. Might running in a forest (such as the Schwarzwald, as I have) qualify? I suppose so, but only if at the end, you sit in a Café, enjoy a Kuchen, and think.
So witty, so allusive, and so exuberant a writer as Nietzsche is best read in the original. Since Nietzsche saw all his books through the press, most German editions are reliable. For scope, fidelity and price, however, one edition stands out; the Kritische Studienausgabe ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, boxed in fifteen paperbacks (Berlin/New York: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag/de Gruyter, 1980); last I looked, it cost 200 Euros (about $250); it includes all the books Nietzsche published and almost all the notes, scraps, plans and observations he left unperfected or undestroyed at the time of his disappearance into madness (in January of 1889). The chronological order in which this edition arranges these leftovers (Nachlass), some of them quite striking, is incomparably superior to the way many readers used to know them, in the arrangement of Nietzsche’s unscrupulous sister Elizabeth according to one of twenty-five plans she found in his papers, the plan most conformable to her inveterate Jew-hatred and then her Reich nationalism, which she titled Will-to-Power.
A word about this fraud. For some years after Zarathustra Nietzsche did mention a large project to be entitled Will-to-Power and did work on it, but in Ecce Homo, which Elizabeth kept from the public for twenty years, Nietzsche makes clear that he thought better of such a project and abandoned it, without regrets. (The critical examination of Nietzsche’s leftovers by Montinari and Colli confirms this; see Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsches Nachlass von 1885 bis 1888 oder Textkritik und Wille zur Macht” in Nietzsche Lesen (Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), pp. 92-119; trans. in Reading Nietzsche trans. Greg Whitlock (Univ. of Illinois: Urbana, 2003). The Will-to-Power that Elizabeth Nietzsche published had an enormous impact. At least part of what made Nietzsche seem a proto-Nazi stems from the arrangement she chose for this non-book. (She did not, however, invent his criticism of pity, praise of cruelty, and his attribution of slavishness and hatred of life to Christianity.) And since then, despite the fact that Elizabeth’s fraud was exposed, part of Nietzsche’s attraction to nihilists of all stripes, from soft epistemological to hard political, is still this Will-to-Power non-book. Read and reread Nietzsche’s books first, the noble ones he wrote, wrote beautifully, with every passage well placed, in a well-designed order, before turning to what he did not have the opportunity to perfect or to destroy. (I discovered that a basket of scraps, some of which his epigones cannot do without, even No. 1052 (in the false reckoning) that I would not like to do without, Nietzsche told Herr Durrish, the Hausmeister at Sils Maria, to throw out, as he left that summer of ’88, never, as it turned out, to return. See below for Bernd Magnus’ publication of my discovery.) How right Nietzsche was to forecast and to fear the decline of reading!
Still, since in Ecce Homo Nietzsche brought his work and his life together, we are almost invited to look into his leftovers, if only to see if his claims about himself in Ecce Homo are true. And there are fine things in the Nachlass, for example the definition of a nihilist I quoted above, or the remark that modernity is the substitution of “daily newspapers for daily prayers.”(Something he though perilous, not “progressive” as Hegel did.) Nietzsche’s first drafts are more worth reading that most anybody else’s final drafts. Would that he had lived to either perfect them into books or destroy them.
Now some further resources. Chronicles of his life are in several of the books I’ve mentioned. The most comprehensive, with pictures of what things looked like in his time, is F.N.: Chronik in Bildern und Text ed. Benders und Oettermann (DTV und Carl Hanser, 2000) Very attractive is the book, with fresh color pictures, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image by David Krell with photography by Donald Bates (Univ. of Chicago, 1997). If you grow interested in the sites, know that it is possible to stay at Sils Maria, in the house Nietzsche dwelt in seven of his last eight summers (if you do, look for the entries in the register for early spring of 1983). For a year by year chronicle: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/1890s.html
For Nietzsche’s work in classical philology and the notes for his lecture courses, you can go to the Musarion Ausgabe (München: Musarion, 1920-29); recently I heard of a recent gigantic edition (2000 pages) in German; of these, perhaps it is Frühe Schriften ed. ed. Hans Joachim Mette, Kart Schlechta, and Karl Koch (5 vols. München, Beck, 1994). The lectures and scraps on rhetoric have been translated into English: F. N. on Rhetoric and Language ed. Sander L. Gilman & Carole Blair (trans. David J. Parent (Oxford U. P. 1988). Nietzsche’s course on the “Pre-Platonic Philosophers,” which treats the Socrates he never ceased to struggle with, has been translated by Greg Whitlock (Illinois, 2001). (Notes for some of Nietzsche’s best courses, found in the Musarion edition, are still untranslated.) Additional translations are: The Poetry of F. N. ed. & trans. Philip Grundlehner (Oxf. Univ. Press, 1986); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks trans. Marianne Cowan (Gateway, 1962); and Dithyrambs of Dionysus bilingual trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Anvil Press Poetry, 1984).
The scores of Nietzsche music, including his setting of Lou Salomé’s “Hymn to Life,” are in Die musikalische Nachlass ed. Curt Paul Janz, (Basel: Bärenreiter, 1976). They are also on records. To me they sound as if they might merit some of the criticisms Nietzsche made of Wagner’s music in The Case of Wagner, esp. section 7; namely, that he composes passages, that are not parts, for there are no wholes. Nietzsche both loved and hated Wagner; their friendship, regard and use in the elder, love and service in the younger, did not survive Wagner’s move to Bayreuth, founding of his own fan club, and, as Nietzsche judged it, rapprochement with Christianity and Imperial Germany; for the sake of understanding the love, I secured a ticket, paid $150, travelled to Bayreuth, and heard Tristan and Isolde (Nietzsche’s favorite) with Nina Stemme singing Isolde, but not fallen in love (thus I agree with Nietzsche’s criticisms in his spritely The Case of Wagner.) For two who have fallen in love, read Bryan Magee’s Tristan Chord [sometimes called the guiltless “adultery chord”] and Roger Scruton’s Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Since his other courses for the Teaching Company are so good, I suppose Robert Greenberg’s on Wagner would be helpful.
Reader of Nietzsche should eventually study Schopenhauer, and then return to Nietzsche, beginning with his own Schopenhauer as Educator. Here’s one on-line source, also probably more there, though older translations: http://gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm
A possible starter anthology: Essential Schopenhauer ed. W. Schumacher.
As to English translations of Nietzsche’s books, the best are by Walter Kaufmann (Viking and Vintage). Although one might prefer a different reading here and there, Kaufmann deserves every merely-English-speaking reader’s gratitude. He looked up to Nietzsche, and his translations show it. Before his death, he had translated almost all of Nietzsche’s books. Inferior translations of the four Untimely Meditations, Human All Too Human and The Dawn have been done by R. J. Hollingdale. (In a letter to me, Kaufmann complained that Hollingdale only translates what I’ve already translated, and Curt Paul Janz rejected Hollingdale as a translator of his biography. I do, however, find Hollingdale’s book on Nietzsche sympathetic and sound.)The Untimely Meditations, together with leftovers on the study of the classics, have been well done by William Arrowsmith et al as Unmodern Observations (New Haven: Yale, 1989), though the Peter Preuss translation of The Use and Abuse of History (Hackett) is superior. Additional early leftovers have been ably translated by Daniel Breazeale, as Philosophy and Truth (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979). A set of lectures Nietzsche gave at Basel, but did not conclude or publish, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, has been translated by Michael W. Grenke (St. Augustine Press, 2004). Grenke has gone on to translate Five Prefaces to Unwritten Books.
For years the Italians and the French have had a translation of the Nachlass (leftovers) from the chronologically faithful edition of Montinari et al. An English edition of all Nietzsche including the leftovers in the Montinari /Colli edition is underway under the general editorship of Ernst Behler, and with his death, carried on by long ailing Bernd Magnus, now dead, and now no one seems to be carrying on. Unfortunately, this edition has proceeded chronologically (putting out translations of books already well done by Kaufmann), so no volume of the most important late leftovers has yet appeared. For a selection of those leftovers, on certain topics only, see the Rüdiger Bittner’s Writings from the Late Notebooks, in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series (2003). An index, on disk, for all of Nietzsche’s writings, has been done (very expensively) by Malcolm Brown, last I knew at Dartmouth.
The book My Sister and I, still on some college library shelves and even reissued, is an artful fraud. Excellent on the question of Nietzsche’s madness from late 1888 on is Daniel Breazeale’s “Ecce Psycho: Remarks on the Case of Nietzsche,” in International Studies in Philosophy XXIII/2, pp. 19-33. The exact cause has never been adequately determined; I have asked a German surgeon if exhuming his corpse would tell and been told “uncertain.” (Alas, most writers on the “cause” don’t want to be embarrassed by saying something definite, or should be embarrassed by what they declare certain.)
II. Secondary Works
A. Sometimes, even before finishing our first reading of an author, there is some times something to be gained by reading an introductory survey of his work. Some times! To my mind the best short introduction to Nietzsche, after Nietzsche himself, is Erich Heller’s “The Importance of Nietzsche” in his Artist’s Journey into the Interior (Random House, 1965); this gem provides instruction for the beginner, subtleties for the advanced, and felicity for all. It has been reprinted with other of the author’s essays on Nietzsche in The Importance of Nietzsche (University of Chicago, 1987). Read with it the at once sympathetic and critical essay by Stefan Zweig I mention elsewhere. Zweig has an almost Shakespearean gift in understanding the soul of another. (His novella Confusion describes the happiness of inquiry and joy of finding a teacher as nothing else, except Plato.)
B. After you have read and reread Nietzsche, all of his books, and arrived at your own provisional account of his thinking, you might want to turn to other readers to see what they have found in him. But if you haven’t done that yet, it would probably be best to stop reading this Guide and go do that first. Give it a thought. Or go do it now, and give it lots of thoughts.
Now if you’ve read all of Nietzsche, or a lot, and do have a provisional account of your own of this thinking, then you might want to consider what the best of fellow readers think. Now what sort of a book by what sort of a reader would that be?
The highest example of such a book would be one that Nietzsche himself would find worth reading. Such a book might be Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961) 2 vols.; it is something rare: a secondary work that is itself primary, itself of the same order of greatness as the work it interprets, thinks in the wake of and tries to think beyond. (Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle would surely be another example.) Such a primary secondary book is, of course, likely to be as difficult as a merely primary book. In the case of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, it is more difficult because, for one thing, Heidegger’s depth is without gaiety. It is Ängstliche Wissenschaft, not Fröhliche Wissenschaft (Anxious Science, not Frolicsome Science). For a shorter confrontation, there is Heidegger’s final course, after World War II, Was Heisst Denken. The play in this title would require a triple translation: What Is Called Thinking/ What Calls for Thinking/ What Calls Thinking. According to Heidegger himself all his basic thoughts are in this book; read it and you will see what a remarkable teacher he was. It’s as if, while you went elsewhere till next week’s lecture, he just stayed there thinking.
Heidegger’s Nietzsche has been translated into English by David Krell et al. in 4 vols. [New York: Harper and Row, 1979-87]; although this edition arranges parts of Heidegger’s text differently from the German edition, adds some related material and leaves out three essays from volume II of the German edition, which had been earlier translated (not as well) by Joan Stambaugh, in a volume entitled The End of Philosophy (Harper, 1973), it makes Heidegger’s thoughts available to the English reader; Krell translates superbly. Harper should have cleared his way to translate all, including Being and Time.
Perhaps on a level with Heidegger and more loyal to Nietzsche is Karl Löwith’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return of the Same (trans. Harvey Lomax) Stanford, California, 1997. That Löwith is critical of Nietzsche and of his teacher, Heidegger, is precisely one way he is loyal to the one and on the level with the other. See also Henri de Lubac below.
Among poets the most indebted to Nietzsche is Rilke; “loyal to the earth” he surely was in verse and in death; and rightly does Erich Heller call him “the St. Francis of the Nietzsche movement.” From Rilke Nietzsche might learn much, perhaps also from Kafka and Solzhenitsyn, who have the most to teach about what happens after God dies. Whether he would appreciate the silent confrontation, on this ground, that Romano Guardini offers in The Lord, is hard to say. (Should one add Thomas Mann, whose Dr. Faustus is modeled on Nietzsche, I wonder? Certainly for confrontation on nihilism and God, more of Dostoevsky than Nietzsche knew of (The Idiot) and some of Tolstoy would be best; “The Death of Ivan Ilych” provoked many thoughts in Being and Time.) A gem is Malraux’s The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. There is also Lampedusa’s story “The Professor and the Mermaid.” The greatest evocation of the ancient Dionysius, celebrated by Nietzsche especially in The Birth of Tragedy, is in The Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. (I kid thee not. Go read it. You’ll find out who the Pan in “panic” is.)
C. There are also good books by readers who know they are not quite on Nietzsche’s level, who look up to him, and are certainly very well ahead of us, and therefore very helpful. Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, and Albert Camus, in The Rebel, are perhaps the most worthy, but there is hardly an important thinker since Nietzsche who has not learned from him. (Simone Weil is the exception, as Adam Zagajewski says, in his luminous essay “Nietzsche in Krakow” in his wonderful In Defense of Ardor, the reading of which prompted me to seek him a month later in Krakow.) DeGaulle as you can see in his Edge of the Sword, and Churchill, as you can see in his essay “A Second Chance” also engaged with Nietzsche. And “studies show” that in the early years of the 20tth century Nietzsche was the author most commonly read under the covers by cocky youths who then uttered his name loudly in cafes to épater their bourgeois elders, Unter den Linden, in the Latin Quarter, and later, in Greenwich Village.
Among books explicitly on Nietzsche, the best are in German and in French, but they are untrendy, and either untranslated or only belatedly. It was belatedly that Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s appeared in English. In the English-speaking world a few books stand out. Bernd Magnus’ Existential Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1978), attempts to face the eternal return of the same. Admirable for its comprehensiveness, its seriousness, and perhaps for much more (I have only read parts) is Laurence Lampert’s commentary on Zarathustra entitled Nietzsche’s Teaching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); too bad he relied on a Bible that doesn’t have the same number of books at the one Nietzsche would have had in mind (thus rendering his imitation of Strauss on Machiavelli all amiss). Robert Eden’s Political Leadership and Nihilism (Tampa: University of Florida, 1984) is the best book on Nietzsche and politics. Charles M. Natoli’s Nietzsche and Pascal on Christianity (New York: Peter Lang, 1985) is up to its mighty opposites because the author cares as much about the truth of Christianity as Pascal and as much about its value as Nietzsche. (Have there been any recently? I keep my eyes peeled, and John McCarthy at the Review of Metaphysics has his too. **NB, look on the shelf in Sils Maria West.)
The serious confrontation with Nietzsche by Romano Guardini, present in his The Lord, is also in his The End of the Modern World and his interpretation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, but you have to know Nietzsche very well to discern it. In the Archive at Munich, I found a plan of Guardini’s book on Nietzsche, and a chapter of it, which he never completed. His successor in Munich, Eugen Biser, carried on the engagement. Other elevated Christian confrontations with Nietzsche are Henri de Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism, in which he opposes Dostoevsky to Nietzsche; and Hans Urs v. Balthasar’s Apocalypse of the German Soul (alas only in German; Vol. II is wholly on Nietzsche; a couple of his introductions to Nietzsche were published in Communio (ed. David Schindler), and on Nietzsche’s confrontation with Aquinas, there is the fine essay, long deliberated, by Fr. James Lehrberger, in The Thomist 80 (2016). Only a great-hearted Christian can converse with Nietzsche. Take for example Cardinal Josef Ratzinger whose first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est confronts in Nietzsche as a worthy adversary of Christianity (the first Pope ever to, according to my friend Fr. James Lehrberger). Charles de Koninck’s unpublished lectures are deep, searching, confronting:
http://www.charlesdekoninck.com/course-notes-on-nietzsche/
Shorter version: http://www.charlesdekoninck.com/?p=145
I do not know of such a confrontation by a Protestant; recommendations welcome. Avoid all those, such as Peter Kreeft, who only thump on Nietzsche, and in Kreeft’s case abuse him. (In general, avoid all authors who while expounding, declaring, holding forth, and glowing, show they’ve learned nothing.)
Stanley Rosen’s essays on Nietzsche, in several of his books, should be collected; his book on Zarathustra is out, The Mask of Enlightenment. An essay that shows how much art it takes to read a single book of Nietzsche’s is Leo Strauss’ “Note On the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” in a posthumous collection, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University Press, 1983). Earlier: http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_3-2-3.pdf. That the author reuses this art to hide the depths, so that the essay is also about another book, would surely please Nietzsche. Also instructing in placing Nietzsche in the history of modernity is Strauss’ “Three Waves of Modernity” (Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche), in the Ten Essays by Leo Strauss ed. by Hilail Gildin. The transcription of the first of his three courses on Nietzsche, on Zarathustra, is now, at last, published. (In the early ‘70s Herbert Storing gave me the task of preparing the one at St. John’s on Beyond Good and Evil, but he died suddenly, on the Senate floor, and only recently was it brought out.)
D. There are many others books on Nietzsche by those who do not know they are not on his level, whether they praise or attack him. Both kinds may be worth reading, at some point. Fools never learn anything, and cannot teach anything, but from them we can sometimes learn things and knaves have sometimes much to teach us; certainly we have no right to our own views unless we can state our opponents’ views better than they can and, likewise, refute them. Most analytic “philosophers” adopt toward Nietzsche the presumption implicit in Arthur C. Danto’s title Nietzsche As Philosopher (New York: MacMillan, 1965); passing Danto on the Columbia campus, Lionel Trilling accosted him, “what a snotty title.” An influential example today is Brian Leiter, very thorough on the Genealogy, and very thoroughly wrong, as well as refuted by any single remark of Nietzsche’s on what philosophy is. Among the current epigones of Nietzsche are the celebrity nihilists, stern Foucault, turgid Deleuze, and playful Derrida. (Gadamer once said, “Derrida is very playful, but he would be very disappointed if we did not take his playfulness seriously.”) They take one thing from him, and forgetting the rest, inflate it till it is visible to intellectuals, and there you have it, a long comfy career. Though all three are French, none write well, no clarté, no mesure, no élan, sophisticated froth, from which you can infer how little able they would be to read Nietzsche.
(On a number of the ambitious, celebrity nihilists, such as Deleuse, Derrida, and Foucault, who have run with something out of Nietzsche, thus degrading it and distorting him, you will find truly judicious confrontations, in Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017), including exposure of what their turgid prose is trying to achieve, but check the first edition for some, such as R. D. Laing, not in the second.) No one who writes poorly can to be trusted on Nietzsche. He who does not write well, cannot understand another who does.
The best “attack,” on Nietzsche —there have been many— is Heidegger’s. To be more exact, it is a critical confrontation with Nietzsche’s thought, and its comprehensive depth and seriousness is not entirely obviated by the fact, established by Montinari, that Nietzsche abandoned any Wille-zur-Macht big book; after all, Nietzsche thought about it for a long time. Unfortunately, Heidegger’s depth is not achieved, without his heavy tramping and muddy coinages, which have become the secondary cause of many “Nietzscheans” writing so poorly.)
E. Much good work on Nietzsche use to appear annually in Nietzsche Studien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971- ), but less so recently, with more room being made for scholarship; more than a decade ago, Reinhard Maurer observed that essays published in the time of the founders, Montinari, Colli, Müller-Lauter, et al, would not be accepted now. While reading all scholarship, bear in mind what Nietzsche says about the emancipation of scholarship from philosophy and about the type of the scholar, for example “We Scholars” in Beyond Good and Evil, and it is a fact worth remarking that a scholarly journal devoted to a great spirit would seldom, if he submitted something anonymously, accept it for publication. Not that Nietzsche ever wrote what would not be recognized as “by Nietzsche” however anonymously submitted.
F. For those who want to read Nietzsche slowly, and in German, there are now the volumes of the Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, put together by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften and published by De Gruyter. Three volumes have appeared so far; two on the latest writings by Andreas Urs Sommer (vols. 6,1 [Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Fall Wagner”, “Götzen-Dämmerung”] and 6,2 [Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, “Ecce Homo, “Dionysos-Dithyramben”, “Nietzsche contra Wagner”]) and one by Jochen Schmidt on The Birth of Tragedy (vol. 1,1). More volumes will appear over the coming years (to finish in 2023). (Andreas and I were office mates during my three “Sommer” semesters at Greifswald; it pleased me much that one of the last of his copies of his commentary on Der Antichrist he gave me, because he thought I had helped with the oral exams of students.)
Also useful: Nietzsche-Lexikon / hrsg. von Christian Niemeyer. – 2., durchges. und erw. Aufl. – Darmstadt : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, [Abt. Verl.], 2011. – 508 S. ; 25 cm. – 978-3-534-24028-9 Pp. : EUR 79.90, EUR 49.90 (für Mitglieder) [2187].
G. For things on the web, you might start with: Nietzsche@a15162824.alturo-server.de, Spuren@a15162824.alturo-server.de Reply-To: mail@friedrichnietzsche.de
Also: FNS: Other Sites of Interest. http://www.fns.org.uk/fnslink.htm
For a chronicle: one by Malcolm Brown once at Dartmouth (who also has a (expensive) searchable CD of Montinari / Colli edition) at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/
Nietzsche Chronicle: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/nietzsche/
And for quotations: online versions of all of Nietzsche’s writings.
http://www.nietzschesource.org/
a site with rather full excerpts from Nietzsche’s works, in German, then the English
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
For the early Nietzsche: The Nietzsche Channel:
http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/poetry/poetry-dual.htm
And you might enjoy Nietzsche’s political attack ad on Kant:
Attack Ad on Kant by Nietzsche
And here is Jordan Peterson with an important point from Nietzsche:
For societies, conferences, events visit: http://www.nietzsche-gesellschaft.de/start/
And more generally
http://www.information-philosophie.de/?a=1&t=513&n=2&y=5&c=28 or:
http://www.h-net.org/announce/group.cgi?type=Conferences
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/#BooAboNie
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- Nietzsche Circle
- North American Nietzsche Society
- Journal of Nietzsche Studies
- Nietzsche Haus in Naumburg (Germany)
- Nietzsche Haus in Sils-Maria (Switzerland)
- Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
- Nietzsche Source — Digital Versions of Nietzsche’s Complete Works
- Nietzsche Quotes
Nietzsche Chronicle (biographical events listed by date)
Audio:
Zarathustra read aloud (in German), first three books:
From Till Kinzel: Just found this complete (first three books only) reading of Also sprach Zarathustra by the German literature scholar Peter Wapnewski(whom I once saw when a student at the TU Berlin and who at the time was quite famous for his marvellous readings of the German medieval literature on radio, the Nibelungenlied, Parzival, Tristan…)
https://th-cam.com/video/_-dq4euWArM/also-sprach-zarathustra.html
Hour between Platon und Nietzsche:
on television, written by Wilhelm Weischedel many years ago
Movies, with Nietzsche : https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lou_andreas_salome_the_audacity_to_be_free
Novels with Nietzsche:
H. The attention Nietzsche pays to himself and his life in such a work as Ecce Homo makes biographies of him more important than they are for many thinkers but also far less authoritative, since he wrote his own biography. The best in English remains J. R. Hollingdale’s sensible and largely sympathetic Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). For its penetration of the very soul of Nietzsche, read Stefan Zweig’s long essay in Struggle with the Demons, itself a part of the larger, Master Builders (also in an anthology ed. by Walter Kaufmann; and recently well translated by Will Stone). A translation of the thorough Curt Paul Janz’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie 3 vols. (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), though announced long ago from Oxford Press, has not appeared. (Janz told me he rejected Hollingdale as translator for his poor German.) Nietzsche’s letters to others are best found in the Kritische Studienausgabe sämtlicher Briefe (KSB)ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, boxed in eight paperbacks (Berlin/New York: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag/de Gruyter, 1986), costing 100 Euros (about $150). Letters to him can be found in the Kritischen Gesamtausgabe des Briefwechsels (KGB), (as above, 1975 ff.). A good selection of letters has been well translated by Christopher Middleton, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: University Press, 1969). Another selection is Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from his Letters ed. and trans. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Harvard U. P., 1971). For some letters, here find the old Ludovici translations:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche
A collection of reports of conversations Nietzsche had with many contemporaries, many treasured by them for the rest of their lives, can be found in Conversations with Nietzsche ed. Sander L. Gilman, trans. David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); for the whole collection, larger by a third, see Gilman’s earlier Begegnungen mit Nietzsche second ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985). The reason why people visit the place in the bookstore where Nietzsche is, although they have all his works and can expect no new ones, is precisely in hopes to find a new one. (If anyone finds the rumored “rules for writing” that he may have given his brief beloved protégé, Lou Salomé, please share it.) These “meetings” are the closest we are likely to come to that discovery, short of the Blessed Isles. It is remarkable how uniformly gracious, considerate, and even charitable is the Nietzsche who lives in the reports of these meetings. (What a contrast he and Tolstoy make; the one appreciated for his love, but a life of bad conduct, and the other the opposite.)
Of course, there are always his books. He said his aim was to say in ten sentences what others might say in a book—no what they did not say. And he did. And what he and he alone wrote, we may reread.
I’ve read Nietzsche for fifty years, taught him for forty, and have more I want to share about him in books; the guide I’ve provided here is what I think best, not what all his readers would advise (and I mean those who really read him, to learn something, not those with other motives). Once someone spends time, once you spend time with him, you’ll find your guides too. All the students of the great teachers, Aristotle and Thomas, Kant, and Hegel, for example, but many others, resemble their teacher and thus each other; all the students of the great searchers, Socrates, Plato, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, differ from each other (even if it is still right to name them “the students of,” e.g. Socratics, Platonists, etc.) So if you become a student of Nietzsche, don’t be surprised if you turn out different. As Yogi’s son once summed up their relation: “our similarities are different.”
Dr. Michael Platt Friends of the Republic
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1275 Knopp School Road, Fredericksburg, Texas 78624
drmichaelplatt1942@gmail.com
APPENDIX:
Should you desire to know better he who you have been attending to, by reading his stuff on Nietzsche, let me provide a list:
“Nietzsche on Flaubert and the Powerlessness of his Art,”
Centennial Review, XX (3): Summer 1976, pp. 309-313.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23738373?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A88b6899f586b53b620380dc4d2217a2e&seq=1
“Woman, Nietzsche, and Nature,” Maieutics, No. 2: Winter 1981, pp. 27-42.
“Nature and The Order of Rank,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. XXII: 1988, pp. 147-165 (according to Nietzsche)
“What Does Zarathustra Whisper in Life’s Ear?” Nietzsche Studien, Band XVII: (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 179-194.
“Behold Nietzsche,” Nietzsche Studien, Band XXII:(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 42-79. (on Ecce Homo)
Reprinted with additions: in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. Daniel W. Conway, with Peter S. Groff Vol. III: On Morality and the Order of
Rank (London & New York: Routledge, 1998) pp. 218-255.
“René Girard and Nietzsche Struggling,” Proceedings of the Nietzsche
Congress of 2006, ed. Clemens Pornschlegel and Martin Stingelin
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 351-375; includes quotations from Nietzsche’s Nachlass revelatory of Nietzsche’s struggle with Christ and an observation of it by Romano Guardini.
Reviews: Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 1980) in Review of Metaphysics Vol. 36 (September 1982), pp. 163-165.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume Four: Nihilism, trans. by David F. Krell (Harper & Row, 1982) in The Review of Metaphysics Vol. 38 (March 1984), pp. 637-639.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Unmodern Observations [the four Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and “Wir Philologen”] ed., trans., & intro. William Arrowsmith et al (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1990) in The Review of Metaphysics Vol. 46 (Sept. 1992), pp. 171-73.
also in Philosophy and Literature Vol. 16/2, (Fall 1992), pp. 425-26. (as if still 1876)
Harry Neumann, Liberalism in the Claremont Statesmanship Series
(Durham: Carolina Academic, 1991) in The Review of Politics
(Spring 1994); entitled “A Living Nihilist”
Nietzsche, Friedrich On the Future of Our Educational Institutions Trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2004)
in The Review of Metaphysics, Spring 2006
Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy (Univ. of
Chicago, 2010) in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol LXIV No.4 (June 2011)
Adjacent, Mingled, Underlying:
“Interpretation,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, V (1): Autumn 1975, pp. 109-130. (dialogue on interpretation and friendship)
“Looking at Bodies,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy (Vienna), Volume III: (1979), pp. 87-90. (brief chronicle of humanity and dust)
“Would Human Life Be Better Without Death?” Soundings, LXIII (3): Fall 1980, pp. 321-338.
“Shakespearean Wisdom?” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John Alvis & Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), pp. 257-276. (on “Sonnet 94”)
“Leo Strauss: Three Quarrels, Three Questions, One Life,” in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective [Corrected Edition, w. blue cover] eds. Kenneth L. Deutsch & Walter Soffer (Albany: State Univ. Press of New York, 1987), pp. 17-28. (ca. 1200 errors in uncorrected [purple] edition)
“Souls Without Longing,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, XVIII, 3, (1991) pp. 415-465. (thoughts à propos of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind)
“ ‘A Teenager — I’m So Sorry’,” Practical Home-Schooling ed. Mary Pride Vol. I, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 19-21. (several substitutions. including the title “Myth of the Teenager,” made by Mrs. Pride for her audience)
Reproduced frequently by Home-School and Church groups; on their web sites: www.home-school.com/Articles/myth-of-the-teenager.php
If these readers knew I teach Nietzsche or if teachers of Nietzsche knew I teach home-schoolers, both might drop me forever, but my work on the novelty of the “Teenager” and Nietzsche’s Last Man is connected, and likewise my next item, on joyous music and thus against Rock. After all, if the blues is a good man feeling bad, then a bad man feeling good must be Rock.
“A Different Drummer,” Fidelity ed. E. Michael Jones pp. 20-37. (title changed to “Physics Without Ethics: The Brutality of Rock n’ Roll,” footnotes dropped, errors introduced, and a sensational cover—all without my approval or prior knowledge and later passed to EWTN’s web site, again without my consent); Mentioned in The Evidential Power of Beauty by Thomas Dubay, S. M. and Part of the required curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College. Briefly: Plato and Nietzsche are right: music matters.
“Only Christianity,” Saints, Sovereigns, & Scholars: Essays Presented to Frederick D. Wilhelmsen ed. Fr. James Lehrberger, Robert Herrera, & Mel Bradford (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 211-230.
In my Seven Wonders of Shakespeare (St. Augustine probably in 2021), at the end of Wonder Three, I devote a section to the philosophers who since Shakespeare have paid him some attention. NB. Nietzsche once said that in Birth of Tragedy he didn’t mention the main thing; I believe he means Christ, the “dying god” most like and yet most antithetical to Dionysus; but Nietzsche certainly left out Shakespeare; why might we need a rebirth of tragedy from Wagner (the unnamed hero of the second half of the Birth of Tragedy) when we have Shakespeare? In Seven Wonders, I bring Shakespeare into confrontation with Nietzsche, who tried to avoid him, and Hegel, who tried to swallow, excuse me sublate, him. To be added a section on Schopenhauer on tragedy and how Shakespeare differs.
[1] Helmut Kuhn to me in 1983.
[2] And in his old age Freud also admitted that in his youth Nietzsche represented a nobility he could not attain. Read Freud on something noble, such as Michelangelo or Shakespeare, and you may doubt the claim he insinuates for himself in that admission.
[3] Musarion Ausgabe, XIX 79, and also to be found in Will-to-Power, No. 585a.
[4] You may find companionship, and guidance, in A. G. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life.
[5] Preface, Part II of Toward a Genealogy of Morals. Also in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches we read: “Die schlechtesten Leser. – Die schlechtesten Leser sind die, welche wie plündernde Soldaten verfahren; sie nehmen sich Einiges, was sie brauchen können, heraus, beschmutzen und verwirren das Uebrige und lästern auf das Ganze.”
[6] Alas one must give up translating the title The Gay Science. Frolicsome, cognate with the German Fröhliche,” is the proposal by me and David Lachterman. Together we also came up with the Elizabethan “Surpassing Man” for Übermensch (so blandly translated Overman and rendered so flashy and yet so flat by the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet “Superman”).
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