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Showing posts from July, 2014

Prelude to an Unfinished Project

I have two translations of Beyond Good and Evil in my library.  One is the classic by Walter Kaufmann published in 1966 .  The other is "a new translation" by Mario  Faber published initially in 1998.  The subtitle for the work is important: "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future."  As Rudiger Safranski points out, Beyond Good and Evil was part of a multifaceted effort by Nietzsche to create a much broader and complex work which, as I pointed out previously, was never ultimately realized by Nietzsche. From 1885 to 1888 Nietzsche assembled a vast collection of notes, ideas, and unfinished sections of books with the original intent of writing a reevaluation of all cultural values under the working title "The Will to Power".  "Although Nietzsche did not even come close to using all of the material from the preliminary work on these books, he did express what he considered the most significant ideas in Beyond Good and Evil , the fifth book of The G