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April 30, 2014 at 9:50 am (This post was last modified: April 30, 2014 at 10:01 am by Mudhammam.)
I just recently started reading Nietzsche. I picked up The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. It has a lot of his notes and letters, and essential excerpts from his well-known essays. I haven't gotten too far, reading it chronologically, except that I did already read "The Anti-Christ" and his "madman letters," the ones he wrote after his mental breakdown. Damn, The Anti-Christ was a brutal attack on Christians, and fucking awesomely written at that. The guy says stuff I think today! And I never really read Nietzsche before. Examples:
"There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today—I suffocate from his unclean breath. My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called "Christianity," "Christian faith," or "Christian church"—I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better."
Preach it Nietzsche! This was in 1887, I believe! How about this next one...times sure don't change a whole lot:
"A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be mortally hostile toward the "wisdom of this world," which means science. It will applaud all means with which the discipline of the spirit, purity and severity in the spirit's matters of conscience, the noble coolness and freedom of the spirit, can be poisoned, slandered, brought into disrepute. "Faith" as an imperative is the veto against science—in practice, the lie at any price."
You can't help but love someone who opens up a work with this:
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."
April 30, 2014 at 10:24 am (This post was last modified: April 30, 2014 at 10:27 am by Crossless2.0.)
The Portable Nietzsche is a good place to start. My beef with the anthology, however, is that it gives short shrift to his earlier work, which is worth reading. Thus Spake Zarathustra and the works that followed it tend to get the most attention. I think the trio of works (Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; The Gay Science) that immediately preceded Zarathustra are fascinating and well worth the time and effort.
Not sure why, but the full title of The Gay Science keeps dropping out of my post.
I just recently started reading Nietzsche. I picked up The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. It has a lot of his notes and letters, and essential excerpts from his well-known essays. I haven't gotten too far, reading it chronologically, except that I did already read "The Anti-Christ" and his "madman letters," the ones he wrote after his mental breakdown. Damn, The Anti-Christ was a brutal attack on Christians, and fucking awesomely written at that. The guy says stuff I think today! And I never really read Nietzsche before. Examples:
"There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today—I suffocate from his unclean breath. My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called "Christianity," "Christian faith," or "Christian church"—I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better."
Preach it Nietzsche! This was in 1887, I believe! How about this next one...times sure don't change a whole lot:
"A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be mortally hostile toward the "wisdom of this world," which means science. It will applaud all means with which the discipline of the spirit, purity and severity in the spirit's matters of conscience, the noble coolness and freedom of the spirit, can be poisoned, slandered, brought into disrepute. "Faith" as an imperative is the veto against science—in practice, the lie at any price."
You can't help but love someone who opens up a work with this:
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."
(April 30, 2014 at 10:24 am)Crossless1 Wrote: The Portable Nietzsche is a good place to start. My beef with the anthology, however, is that it gives short shrift to his earlier work, which is worth reading. Thus Spake Zarathustra and the works that followed it tend to get the most attention. I think the trio of works (Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; The Gay Science) that immediately preceded Zarathustra are fascinating and well worth the time and effort.
Not sure why, but the full title of The Gay Science keeps dropping out of my post.
Indeed. Thus Spake Zarathustra was a good read, and Human, All Too Human is one of my favorite Nietzschean works. Haven't gotten around to Beyond Good and Evil though; is it good?
"The reason things will never get better is because people keep electing these rich cocksuckers who don't give a shit about you."
-George Carlin
(April 30, 2014 at 11:35 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote: Indeed. Thus Spake Zarathustra was a good read, and Human, All Too Human is one of my favorite Nietzschean works. Haven't gotten around to Beyond Good and Evil though; is it good?
As Rampant A.I. suggested, Beyond Good and Evil is essentially a continuation of Zarathustra -- or rather, it is a more straightforward treatment of the themes of Zarathustra. I highly recommend it.
@OP: You might wish to check out Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. It isn't necessarily the last word on Nietzsche, but Kaufmann, more than any other person, is responsible for dispelling many of the crudest caricatures and slanders used to discredit Nietzsche in English-speaking countries after WWI/WWII.
Nietzsche is a treasure cove of insights and wisdom:
"Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations, who want above all to produce as much possible and to be as rich as possible? It would be your affair to present them with the counter-calculation: what vast sums of inner worth are thrown away for such an external goal. But where is your inner worth when you no longer know what it means to breathe freely?"
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
“How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!”
"The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. So do the spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirits."
I forget which book this comes from, but it's a gem: "When a head and a book come into contact and one makes a hollow sound, is it necessarily the book?"
