Walking the Tightrope

As usual, Julian Young offers unique insights in his analysis  of Nietzsche's Genealogy . Like Hollingdale and Cate, he finds the work closely connected to Beyond Good and Evil (BGE). Somewhat unlike these other scholars, however, Young does not specially emphasize the "will to power" as contained in the work, he only acknowledges it as an underlying influence. Further, he stresses that the work is more polemic (its subtitle is "A Polemic") than BGE against the influence of Christian morality on western culture.  According to Nietzsche, Christianity (and associated influences) revalued the morality of the ancient world. This sets up the potential for another change in valuation. The specifics of this change remain rather vague, however. Nietzsche builds his case for reevaluation without a specific program for replacing all the flaws he details in the work, though it seems the morality of the Greco-Roman world is a good, general model to use. "The cen...

Curtis Cate's analysis of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM) does not stress the "will to power" to the extent that Hollingdale did (see previous post).  Instead he emphasizes other strands of Nietzsche's thought ( amor fati and various positions first enunciated in his "Untimely Meditations", for example) threaded into the work.  Cate agrees with Hollingdale, however, that GM is an extension and clarification of Beyond Good and Evil .  Let's begin with an understanding of how spontaneously Nietzsche completed the core of the work, indicative of his writing style since the first part of Zarathustra was completed four years earlier. "On July 17, barely two weeks after beginning, Nietzsche informed Naumann, who must have been astonished by the 'half-blind' professor's prolixity, that he had completed a small Streitschrift (polemic pamphlet) intended to amplify and elucidate Beyond Good and Evil .  The title he had chosen was Zur Geneal...

R.J. Hollingdale ranks alongside Walter Kaufmann as among the foremost scholars on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Hollingdale's approach to Nietzsche's next great work, On the Genealogy of Morals , concentrates heavily on what the work says regarding the phenomenon of the " will to power " and " the master/slave morality " structure. This post extensively quotes from Hollingdale's philosophical biography of Nietzsche.  BGE is the abbreviation I use for Beyond Good and Evil .  GM stands for On the Genealogy of Morals . " Beyond Good and Evil  is devoted to an elaboration and explanation of theories put forward in Zarathustra , and Towards a Genealogy of Morals is described as performing the same service for Beyond Good and Evil , so the two books can best be considered together." (page 180) "The first problem Nietzsche faces is the difficulty involved in saying that the will to power is 'true' if the search for truth is itse...

"In this book you will discover a 'subterranean man' at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him - presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths - going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable, without betraying very much of the distress which any protractors deprivation of light and air must entail; you might even call him contented, working there in the dark." So begins the new preface for Daybreak . Nietzsche makes it plain that he is critiquing his work and his working methods from the beginning, putting present context into his past thought in order to show an alleged progression to the point where he found himself in 1887. In that year Nietzsche republished his initial works in two phases.  First came Daybreak and The Gay Science with its new Book Five.   Human, All-too-Human and The Birth of Tragedy followed a few months later. Each "new edition" of these works contained a new preface.  Each p...

Just after the publication of Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) in 1886, Nietzsche attempted what we would call today a "reboot" of his philosophical career. Having obtained the rights to all his previous works , he wrote new prefaces and rebound the ample supply of unsold copies as new editions. I will deal with these new prefaces in my next post. Part of this reboot was an entirely new Book Five added on to the republished version of The Gay Science in 1887. With this section, Nietzsche stitched this earlier, brilliant work published in 1882 (prior to Thus Spoke Zarathustra ) with his current thinking. Part Five allows us to see The Gay Science as the beginning of Nietzsche's mature philosophy, comparable with BGE. The new section was entitled "We Fearless Ones" and it was Nietzsche's attempt to summarize the qualities necessary for an individual to thrive in society after the death of God. It involved a criticism of many aspects of western civilization bu...