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 doubt. Ambition verging in megalomania that became a central feature of his madness was already present in 1884: Zarathustra, he said – yearning disguising itself as prophecy – would ‘split history into two halves’.
“To become ‘great’ in the nineteenth century Germany was to write a ‘big’ book. None of Nietzsche’s publications prior to the projected ‘masterwork’ fitted the bill – brevity alone disqualified them. So the task which came to absorb all his energies after the completion of the Genealogy of Morals in August, 1887 was to produce something which would equal, indeed surpass, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and – particularly - The World as Will and Representation.” (page 536)
Yet his attempts to flesh out and shape the basic ideas for The Will to Power proved a dead end. Ultimately, he stated with some resignation that it was all contained in The Antichrist, which was only an introduction to what he originally intended. Why did Nietzsche abandon The Will to Power? Was it a precursor to his onset of madness, only a few weeks away? Young suggests that it was primarily due to a fundamental internal conflict.
“What we see, then, is that, at the beginning of 1888, Nietzsche was in a state of spiritual turmoil caused by a clash between, on the one hand, his will to greatness, greatness in the traditional mould, and, on the other, his intellectual integrity, which was in danger of being compromised.
“In Nietzsche’s published works intellectual integrity – ‘honesty’, the ‘intellectual conscience’, ‘intellectual cleanliness’, the ‘will to knowledge’ – is presented time after time as the highest personal virtue of both himself and thinkers he admires. And in the end – a fact greatly to his credit – after a long and agonizing struggle, it is his will to intellectual integrity, his will to truth, that wins out over his will to greatness and causes him to abandon the original project.” (page 543)
Young points out that Nietzsche’s primary areas of inquiry for The Will to Power were cosmological, biological, and psychological. During the course of working through various issues on these general topics Nietzsche met more problems than he originally anticipated. He grew uninspired about the work, especially in the light of successfully completing Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo, among other works at the time. He decided whatever he found most successful about The Will to Power project was sufficiently contained in The Antichrist, from this same period.
According to Young, Nietzsche’s late works do not express any of the would-be underpinnings of The Will to Power notebooks simply because Nietzsche had already abandoned the work in favor of a wider perspective of human impulses. “Intellectual integrity, then forced Nietzsche to abandon both the cosmological and the biological doctrines. Neither is even mentioned, let alone endorsed, in the published works of 1888….he becomes open to the rich variety of human motivations and no longer tries to force them all onto the procrustean bed of the will to power. In discussing ‘the psychology of the artist’, for instance, Twilight of the Idols recognizes three fundamental impulses: Apollonian ‘intoxication’, which excites the eyes and inspires great visual art, Dionysian ‘intoxication’, which inspires music and dance and ‘the highest feeling of power’, which inspires great architecture – but, it seems, none of the other arts. Throughout 1888, moreover, sexual intoxication (as distinct from marriage which is viewed as a power struggle) is viewed as a cause of perception and action alongside, and not reducible to, will to power: a note from the spring of the year, for instance, itemizes the ‘yes-saying affects’ as ‘pride, joy, health, sexual love, enmity and war, reverence…the strong will’ as well as ‘the will to power’ as affects which transfigure things, make them golden, eternal and divine.’” (page 546)
He simply could not work out some fundamental underpinnings for his projected ‘revaluation’. “The late works abandon the reductive psychological doctrine and allow human motivation to blossom into the richness it actually has. Yet beneath this richness Nietzsche detects an underlying pattern. This pattern, however, abandons the monism of ‘will to power and nothing besides’ in favor of a dualism between two kinds of human life, a dualism which, I think, is intended to gather human motives into two camps. On the one hand, there is healthy of ‘ascending’ life, the governing ‘principle’ of which is the will to power. Healthy life, says The Antichrist, is ‘an instinct for growth, for accumulation of force, of power’. But as a counterbalance to the will to power, there now appears what Freud would later call the ‘death instinct’. ‘Where there is no will to power’, The Antichrist tells us – note the explicit rejection of the psychological doctrine – ‘there is decline’, ’decadence’. ‘Decadence’ makes its first appearance as a significant philosophical term in Nietzsche’s published works in 1888.” (page 547)
“In the late works, Nietzsche abandons each of the three elements that had constituted the grand vision of the world as ‘will to power and nothing besides’. This should not, however, be understood as returning the will to power to the modesty of its role in the works of the 1870’s – no more than a useful tool for uncovering the depth psychology of selected kinds of human behavior. For the will to power remains, to the end, the governing ‘principle’ of healthy life. What really happens to it in the final works is that it is transformed from a principle of universal explanation into a principle of demarcation, demarcation between the healthy life and decadent life. Healthy life, that is, remains the insatiable quest for power – or ‘growth’ – remains ‘that which must always overcome itself’. Moreover, Nietzsche assumes, health is the highest desideratum. Even the decadent would prefer to be healthy, and only become decadent when the capacity for health deserts them.” (page 548)
Young calls attention to the fact that a lot of what Nietzsche was working out in his notebooks for The Will to Power is not advocated in his published works. Nietzsche’s late works are dissimilar to the notebooks in much of their content. This fact should serve as guidance to anyone considering the notebooks. They were Nietzsche’s tinker shop, where he could express himself extravagantly and contradict himself and explore both ideas that are included in his published works and, importantly, ideas that appear nowhere in his written works.
The notebooks were published by Nietzsche’s sister after his death, edited and arranged with her commentary, under the title The Will to Power. Elizabeth pitched it as her brother’s masterwork when it is, in fact, a hodge-podge of notes on similar topics, a lot of which contains strands of thought that he never intended to publish, intellectual dead ends. While these notebooks are still very much Nietzsche’s writings, they are more like his playground. There is some profundity here. But nothing in these notebooks should be read out of context compared with his published works; that is, where the notebooks expound and even contradict his published works, the latter should always prevail. He simply never intended much of the notebooks for anyone other than himself. He, in fact, abandoned the very act of fleshing out The Will to Power in favor of The Antichrist and his other late works. So, one should keep that in mind when placing importance on what one reads in the notebooks.
Walter Kaufmann, in the introduction to his updated translation of The Will to Power offers insights as to its history. “Two false views of The Will to Power have had their day, in turn. The first was propagated by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, when she first published the book after his death: for a long time, it was widely held to represent Nietzsche’s crowning systematic achievement, to which one had to turn for his final views.” (page xiii)
Young’s contention that Nietzsche ideologically abandoned The Will to Power (or at least changed his original emphasis) is supported by Kaufmann’s specifics as to which aspects of the notebooks had no parallel with his published works from this same time period. “…the book contains a good deal that has no close parallel in the works Nietzsche finished; for example, but no means the only, much of the material on nihilism in Book I, some of the epistemological reflections in Book III, and the attempts at proofs of the doctrine of eternal recurrence of the same events – and scores of brilliant formulations.” (page xiv) These “formulations” are to a large degree what make the notebooks worth reading, but, in most cases, they nevertheless do not find specific connection with the ideas he presents in his published works.
“Nietzsche himself had contemplated a book under the title The Will to Power. His notebooks contain a great many drafts of title pages for this and other projected works, and some of the drafts for this book suggest the subtitle: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. Later on Nietzsche considered writing a book of a somewhat different nature (less aphoristic, more continuous) under the title Revaluation of All Values, and for time he conceived of The Antichrist, written in the fall of 1888, as the first of four books comprising the Revaluation of All Values.
“In 1901, the year after Nietzsche’s death, his sister published her version of The Will to Power in volume 15 of her edition of his collected works, arranging 483 notes under topical headings. In 1904 she included 200 pages of additional notes ‘from The Will to Power’ in the last volume of her biography of Nietzsche, to help its sales. And in 1906 another edition of collected works offered a new version of The Will to Power in two volumes: the new material was mixed in with the old, and the total number notes now came to 1,067.” (page xvii)
“To arrange the material, Frau Forster-Nietzsche chose a four-line draft left by her brother, and distributed the notes under its four headings. Nietzsche himself had discarded this draft, and there were a dozen later ones, about twenty-five in all; but none of these were briefer than this one which listed only the titles of the four projected parts and thus gave the editor the greatest possible freedom.” (page xviii)
Still, Young points out, Elizabeth’s arrangement and presentation of her brother’s notebooks reflected her personal agenda to control and direct Nietzsche’s philosophy. She selected which notes to include and, perhaps more importantly, which ones not to include. The commentary she offered in the first editions of the work reflected her prejudices about Nietzsche’s thought, including interjecting her own anti-Semitism as if it were her brother’s perspective. In doing so, she not only directed the reader into ideas that Nietzsche demonstrably did not share, but she also promoted the inaccurate idea that The Will to Power was a unified intellectual work.
“One of the many bad things about Elizabeth’s Will to Power is that, by arranging her brother’s aphorisms thematically rather than chronologically, she disguises the fact that the notebooks are notebooks, a confused and often contradictory jumble of experiments in the laboratory of thought, not ex cathedra pronouncements of final doctrine. Like most philosophers, Nietzsche jots down an idea but then sets it aside for a period of time while haring off a different, often opposing, direction.” (page 544)
For his part, Kaufmann has no qualms about how the notebooks were reorganized. “…for all its faults, this arrangement has the virtue of making it easy for the reader to locate passages and to read straight through a lot of notes dealing with art or religion or the theory of knowledge. Provided one realizes that one is pursuing notes and not a carefully wrought systematic work, the advantages of such an arrangement outweigh the disadvantages.” (page xv)
Elizabeth’s excesses have long-since been unmasked and today we understand her motivations largely thanks to the excellent research of such classic Nietzsche scholars as Kaufmann. “One wonders how her success was possible and why the many learned men who produced monographs on various aspects of Nietzsche’s thought deferred so humbly to this woman. Of course, she reaped the belated sympathy which many people suddenly felt for her brother, but it was her handling of Nietzsche’s Nachlass that constitutes the decisive factor. She jealously established and guarded her authority by first gaining exclusive rights to all her brother’s literary remains and then refusing to publish some of the most important among them, while insisting doubly on their significance. Nobody could challenge her interpretations with any authority, since she was guardian of yet unpublished material – and developed an increasingly precise memory for what her brother had said to her in conversation. Finally, she blended all these considerations with a shrewd business sense.” (page 5)
“All this may seem academic. Yet it is significant that The Will to Power was not, as is so often supposed, Nietzsche’s last work; and that it was abandoned by him before The Antichrist was written; and that this, like most of Nietzsche’s later books, was based in part on notes which were later included, uncritically, in the posthumous edition of The Will to Power. Moreover, The Antichrist, however provocative, represents a more single-minded and sustained inquiry than any of Nietzsche’s other books and thus suggests that the major work for which it constitutes Part I was not meant to consist of that maze of incoherent, if extremely interesting, observations which have since been represented as his crowning achievement. While he intended to use some of this material, he evidently meant to mold it into a coherent and continuous whole; and the manner in which he utilized his notes in his other finished books makes it clear that many notes would have been given an entirely new and unexpected meaning.” (page 7)
In the introduction to his (far more accurate) translation, Kaufman not only corrects the misconceptions fostered by Elizabeth’s misappropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but he offers some sage advice for reading Nietzsche in general. This applies to any of his printed works but even more so to his posthumously published notebooks:
“On the surface, Nietzsche seems easy to read, at least by comparison with other philosophers. In fact, however, his style poses unusual difficulties, and anyone who has taken the trouble to compare most of the existing translations with the originals must realize how easy it is to miss Nietzsche’s meaning, not merely occasionally but in section upon section. The reasons are not difficult to find.
“Nietzsche loved brevity to the point of ellipsis and often attached exceptional weight to the nuances of words he did put down. Without an ear for the subtlest connotations of his brilliant, sparkling German, one is bound to misunderstand him. Nietzsche is German’s greatest prose stylist, and his language is a delight at every turn like a poet’s – more than that of all but the greatest poets.
“At the same time Nietzsche deals with intricate philosophical questions, especially but not only in The Will to Power, and whoever lacks either a feeling for poetry or some knowledge of these problems and their terminology is sure to come to grief in trying to fathom Nietzsche, sentence for sentence, as a translator must.” (pp. xx – xxi)
The Will to Power, then, is Nietzsche’s private notes and writings edited and rearranged by his sister Elizabeth, originally with additional commentary provided by her with which Nietzsche would not have agreed. The first editions from 1901 – 1906 cannot be taken very seriously and will lead to misconceptions about Nietzsche, including that he was a proto-fascist philosopher. More recent translations show The Will to Power as filled with robust and diverse thought-experiments and sketches; ideas Nietzsche considered, but did not necessarily finalize. His notes are filled with thoughts in various stages of appropriation, discourse, or dismissal.
Having mentioned all that as a cautionary tale, The Will to Power has some wonderful passages. And I’ll share some of my favorites in my year-end post.
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 doubt. Ambition verging in megalomania that became a central feature of his madness was already present in 1884: Zarathustra, he said – yearning disguising itself as prophecy – would ‘split history into two halves’.
“To become ‘great’ in the nineteenth century Germany was to write a ‘big’ book. None of Nietzsche’s publications prior to the projected ‘masterwork’ fitted the bill – brevity alone disqualified them. So the task which came to absorb all his energies after the completion of the Genealogy of Morals in August, 1887 was to produce something which would equal, indeed surpass, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and – particularly - The World as Will and Representation.” (page 536)
Yet his attempts to flesh out and shape the basic ideas for The Will to Power proved a dead end. Ultimately, he stated with some resignation that it was all contained in The Antichrist, which was only an introduction to what he originally intended. Why did Nietzsche abandon The Will to Power? Was it a precursor to his onset of madness, only a few weeks away? Young suggests that it was primarily due to a fundamental internal conflict.
“What we see, then, is that, at the beginning of 1888, Nietzsche was in a state of spiritual turmoil caused by a clash between, on the one hand, his will to greatness, greatness in the traditional mould, and, on the other, his intellectual integrity, which was in danger of being compromised.
“In Nietzsche’s published works intellectual integrity – ‘honesty’, the ‘intellectual conscience’, ‘intellectual cleanliness’, the ‘will to knowledge’ – is presented time after time as the highest personal virtue of both himself and thinkers he admires. And in the end – a fact greatly to his credit – after a long and agonizing struggle, it is his will to intellectual integrity, his will to truth, that wins out over his will to greatness and causes him to abandon the original project.” (page 543)
Young points out that Nietzsche’s primary areas of inquiry for The Will to Power were cosmological, biological, and psychological. During the course of working through various issues on these general topics Nietzsche met more problems than he originally anticipated. He grew uninspired about the work, especially in the light of successfully completing Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo, among other works at the time. He decided whatever he found most successful about The Will to Power project was sufficiently contained in The Antichrist, from this same period.
According to Young, Nietzsche’s late works do not express any of the would-be underpinnings of The Will to Power notebooks simply because Nietzsche had already abandoned the work in favor of a wider perspective of human impulses. “Intellectual integrity, then forced Nietzsche to abandon both the cosmological and the biological doctrines. Neither is even mentioned, let alone endorsed, in the published works of 1888….he becomes open to the rich variety of human motivations and no longer tries to force them all onto the procrustean bed of the will to power. In discussing ‘the psychology of the artist’, for instance, Twilight of the Idols recognizes three fundamental impulses: Apollonian ‘intoxication’, which excites the eyes and inspires great visual art, Dionysian ‘intoxication’, which inspires music and dance and ‘the highest feeling of power’, which inspires great architecture – but, it seems, none of the other arts. Throughout 1888, moreover, sexual intoxication (as distinct from marriage which is viewed as a power struggle) is viewed as a cause of perception and action alongside, and not reducible to, will to power: a note from the spring of the year, for instance, itemizes the ‘yes-saying affects’ as ‘pride, joy, health, sexual love, enmity and war, reverence…the strong will’ as well as ‘the will to power’ as affects which transfigure things, make them golden, eternal and divine.’” (page 546)
He simply could not work out some fundamental underpinnings for his projected ‘revaluation’. “The late works abandon the reductive psychological doctrine and allow human motivation to blossom into the richness it actually has. Yet beneath this richness Nietzsche detects an underlying pattern. This pattern, however, abandons the monism of ‘will to power and nothing besides’ in favor of a dualism between two kinds of human life, a dualism which, I think, is intended to gather human motives into two camps. On the one hand, there is healthy of ‘ascending’ life, the governing ‘principle’ of which is the will to power. Healthy life, says The Antichrist, is ‘an instinct for growth, for accumulation of force, of power’. But as a counterbalance to the will to power, there now appears what Freud would later call the ‘death instinct’. ‘Where there is no will to power’, The Antichrist tells us – note the explicit rejection of the psychological doctrine – ‘there is decline’, ’decadence’. ‘Decadence’ makes its first appearance as a significant philosophical term in Nietzsche’s published works in 1888.” (page 547)
“In the late works, Nietzsche abandons each of the three elements that had constituted the grand vision of the world as ‘will to power and nothing besides’. This should not, however, be understood as returning the will to power to the modesty of its role in the works of the 1870’s – no more than a useful tool for uncovering the depth psychology of selected kinds of human behavior. For the will to power remains, to the end, the governing ‘principle’ of healthy life. What really happens to it in the final works is that it is transformed from a principle of universal explanation into a principle of demarcation, demarcation between the healthy life and decadent life. Healthy life, that is, remains the insatiable quest for power – or ‘growth’ – remains ‘that which must always overcome itself’. Moreover, Nietzsche assumes, health is the highest desideratum. Even the decadent would prefer to be healthy, and only become decadent when the capacity for health deserts them.” (page 548)
Young calls attention to the fact that a lot of what Nietzsche was working out in his notebooks for The Will to Power is not advocated in his published works. Nietzsche’s late works are dissimilar to the notebooks in much of their content. This fact should serve as guidance to anyone considering the notebooks. They were Nietzsche’s tinker shop, where he could express himself extravagantly and contradict himself and explore both ideas that are included in his published works and, importantly, ideas that appear nowhere in his written works.
The notebooks were published by Nietzsche’s sister after his death, edited and arranged with her commentary, under the title The Will to Power. Elizabeth pitched it as her brother’s masterwork when it is, in fact, a hodge-podge of notes on similar topics, a lot of which contains strands of thought that he never intended to publish, intellectual dead ends. While these notebooks are still very much Nietzsche’s writings, they are more like his playground. There is some profundity here. But nothing in these notebooks should be read out of context compared with his published works; that is, where the notebooks expound and even contradict his published works, the latter should always prevail. He simply never intended much of the notebooks for anyone other than himself. He, in fact, abandoned the very act of fleshing out The Will to Power in favor of The Antichrist and his other late works. So, one should keep that in mind when placing importance on what one reads in the notebooks.
Walter Kaufmann, in the introduction to his updated translation of The Will to Power offers insights as to its history. “Two false views of The Will to Power have had their day, in turn. The first was propagated by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, when she first published the book after his death: for a long time, it was widely held to represent Nietzsche’s crowning systematic achievement, to which one had to turn for his final views.” (page xiii)
Young’s contention that Nietzsche ideologically abandoned The Will to Power (or at least changed his original emphasis) is supported by Kaufmann’s specifics as to which aspects of the notebooks had no parallel with his published works from this same time period. “…the book contains a good deal that has no close parallel in the works Nietzsche finished; for example, but no means the only, much of the material on nihilism in Book I, some of the epistemological reflections in Book III, and the attempts at proofs of the doctrine of eternal recurrence of the same events – and scores of brilliant formulations.” (page xiv) These “formulations” are to a large degree what make the notebooks worth reading, but, in most cases, they nevertheless do not find specific connection with the ideas he presents in his published works.
“Nietzsche himself had contemplated a book under the title The Will to Power. His notebooks contain a great many drafts of title pages for this and other projected works, and some of the drafts for this book suggest the subtitle: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. Later on Nietzsche considered writing a book of a somewhat different nature (less aphoristic, more continuous) under the title Revaluation of All Values, and for time he conceived of The Antichrist, written in the fall of 1888, as the first of four books comprising the Revaluation of All Values.
“In 1901, the year after Nietzsche’s death, his sister published her version of The Will to Power in volume 15 of her edition of his collected works, arranging 483 notes under topical headings. In 1904 she included 200 pages of additional notes ‘from The Will to Power’ in the last volume of her biography of Nietzsche, to help its sales. And in 1906 another edition of collected works offered a new version of The Will to Power in two volumes: the new material was mixed in with the old, and the total number notes now came to 1,067.” (page xvii)
“To arrange the material, Frau Forster-Nietzsche chose a four-line draft left by her brother, and distributed the notes under its four headings. Nietzsche himself had discarded this draft, and there were a dozen later ones, about twenty-five in all; but none of these were briefer than this one which listed only the titles of the four projected parts and thus gave the editor the greatest possible freedom.” (page xviii)
Still, Young points out, Elizabeth’s arrangement and presentation of her brother’s notebooks reflected her personal agenda to control and direct Nietzsche’s philosophy. She selected which notes to include and, perhaps more importantly, which ones not to include. The commentary she offered in the first editions of the work reflected her prejudices about Nietzsche’s thought, including interjecting her own anti-Semitism as if it were her brother’s perspective. In doing so, she not only directed the reader into ideas that Nietzsche demonstrably did not share, but she also promoted the inaccurate idea that The Will to Power was a unified intellectual work.
“One of the many bad things about Elizabeth’s Will to Power is that, by arranging her brother’s aphorisms thematically rather than chronologically, she disguises the fact that the notebooks are notebooks, a confused and often contradictory jumble of experiments in the laboratory of thought, not ex cathedra pronouncements of final doctrine. Like most philosophers, Nietzsche jots down an idea but then sets it aside for a period of time while haring off a different, often opposing, direction.” (page 544)
For his part, Kaufmann has no qualms about how the notebooks were reorganized. “…for all its faults, this arrangement has the virtue of making it easy for the reader to locate passages and to read straight through a lot of notes dealing with art or religion or the theory of knowledge. Provided one realizes that one is pursuing notes and not a carefully wrought systematic work, the advantages of such an arrangement outweigh the disadvantages.” (page xv)
Elizabeth’s excesses have long-since been unmasked and today we understand her motivations largely thanks to the excellent research of such classic Nietzsche scholars as Kaufmann. “One wonders how her success was possible and why the many learned men who produced monographs on various aspects of Nietzsche’s thought deferred so humbly to this woman. Of course, she reaped the belated sympathy which many people suddenly felt for her brother, but it was her handling of Nietzsche’s Nachlass that constitutes the decisive factor. She jealously established and guarded her authority by first gaining exclusive rights to all her brother’s literary remains and then refusing to publish some of the most important among them, while insisting doubly on their significance. Nobody could challenge her interpretations with any authority, since she was guardian of yet unpublished material – and developed an increasingly precise memory for what her brother had said to her in conversation. Finally, she blended all these considerations with a shrewd business sense.” (page 5)
“All this may seem academic. Yet it is significant that The Will to Power was not, as is so often supposed, Nietzsche’s last work; and that it was abandoned by him before The Antichrist was written; and that this, like most of Nietzsche’s later books, was based in part on notes which were later included, uncritically, in the posthumous edition of The Will to Power. Moreover, The Antichrist, however provocative, represents a more single-minded and sustained inquiry than any of Nietzsche’s other books and thus suggests that the major work for which it constitutes Part I was not meant to consist of that maze of incoherent, if extremely interesting, observations which have since been represented as his crowning achievement. While he intended to use some of this material, he evidently meant to mold it into a coherent and continuous whole; and the manner in which he utilized his notes in his other finished books makes it clear that many notes would have been given an entirely new and unexpected meaning.” (page 7)
In the introduction to his (far more accurate) translation, Kaufman not only corrects the misconceptions fostered by Elizabeth’s misappropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but he offers some sage advice for reading Nietzsche in general. This applies to any of his printed works but even more so to his posthumously published notebooks:
“On the surface, Nietzsche seems easy to read, at least by comparison with other philosophers. In fact, however, his style poses unusual difficulties, and anyone who has taken the trouble to compare most of the existing translations with the originals must realize how easy it is to miss Nietzsche’s meaning, not merely occasionally but in section upon section. The reasons are not difficult to find.
“Nietzsche loved brevity to the point of ellipsis and often attached exceptional weight to the nuances of words he did put down. Without an ear for the subtlest connotations of his brilliant, sparkling German, one is bound to misunderstand him. Nietzsche is German’s greatest prose stylist, and his language is a delight at every turn like a poet’s – more than that of all but the greatest poets.
“At the same time Nietzsche deals with intricate philosophical questions, especially but not only in The Will to Power, and whoever lacks either a feeling for poetry or some knowledge of these problems and their terminology is sure to come to grief in trying to fathom Nietzsche, sentence for sentence, as a translator must.” (pp. xx – xxi)
The Will to Power, then, is Nietzsche’s private notes and writings edited and rearranged by his sister Elizabeth, originally with additional commentary provided by her with which Nietzsche would not have agreed. The first editions from 1901 – 1906 cannot be taken very seriously and will lead to misconceptions about Nietzsche, including that he was a proto-fascist philosopher. More recent translations show The Will to Power as filled with robust and diverse thought-experiments and sketches; ideas Nietzsche considered, but did not necessarily finalize. His notes are filled with thoughts in various stages of appropriation, discourse, or dismissal.
Having mentioned all that as a cautionary tale, The Will to Power has some wonderful passages. And I’ll share some of my favorites in my year-end post.
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