Walking the Tightrope

Here are some select quotes from The Will to Power  as translated by Walter Kaufmann .  As acknowledged in the previous post, cherry-picking is not the best way to approach Nietzsche, his arguments are often far more subtle.  But, these give a representation of what his notebooks are like.  Kaufmann chose to keep Elizabeth's original four-section organization of the work even though the notes were not originally written this way at all.  It does make it easier to reference and discuss the content of the notebooks.  For context, I have included the approximate dates when these notes were written.  From Book One – European Nihilism Essentially, this section reveals that Nietzsche saw nihilism as an inevitable symptom of our times, a necessary reaction to humanity's need to transition from its old culture and manner of understanding to a new "evaluation" of human experience. “ Our pessimism: the world does not have the value we thought it had....

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Nietzsche devoted much time during the last years of his sanity to writing multiple outlines and drafts for a project roughly titled The Will to Power , which he originally conceived of as the pinnacle of his life’s work.  Beginning in 1885 he experimented with various ideas for a work with shifting titles, beginning with an “Attempt at a new Explanation of all Events.”  Later this evolved into “A Reevaluation of All Values” although there were other conceptual approaches considered in addition to these.  All of his work for the project was contained in his notebooks from 1883-1888.  The only aspect of this project to be published was The Antichrist , a fragment of the original concepts.    According to Julian Young, Nietzsche was driven by the realization that he had yet to write a book to rival philosophers whom he respected.  “That Nietzsche had to an extraordinary degree a yearning for greatness is beyond do...

Note:  This post can be considered an addendum to my previous post entitled Sorrento Days . Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paolo D’Iorio offers us an intimate look at Nietzsche's time in that Italian town at the beginning of the formation of thinking that would turn him away from his past with Richard Wagner and The Birth of Tragedy toward the future of his “ positivist period ” where concepts such as the “free spirit” took root and flourished.  It spans his notebooks and correspondences of late-1876 into 1877 to reveal the circumstances of his life and thought that lead to the profound period of philosophical development which resulted in Human, All Too Human . The subtitle for the work is apt: “Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit.”  The books does address the intricacies of his free spirit philosophy .  Rather, it is an account of its birth and early development during and immediately following his time in Sorrento .  The author relies hea...

Nietzsche arrived at Bonn with his good friend Paul Deussen.  It was partly because Deussen wanted to attend Bonn himself that Nietzsche chose that institution.  Not long afterward he became a fraternity “party” boy.  “Finding himself rootless and ignorant in a new city, Nietzsche, together with Deussen, sought out former classmates and found that a host of these had joined fraternity called Franconia.  On October 23, the Sunday after their arrival, the two young men were invited to a tavern and given a recruitment pitch by Georg Stockert, their former dorm-mate at Pforta.  Drinks were surely served, and the bar setting would have encouraged camaraderie and group dynamics.  By the day’s end Nietzsche, Deussen, and six others had signed up as pledges.  The recruiter no doubt stressed what the neophytes needed to hear – that the fraternity promised continuity, community, and enlightenment on the local scene.  Given the tavern setting, he probably di...