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...