Writings from the Late Notebooks

by Friedrich Nietzsche, Kate Sturge (Translator), Rüdiger Bittner (Editor)

This volume offers, for the first time, accurate translations of a selection of writings from Nietzsche's late notebooks, dating from his last productive years between 1885 and 1889. Many of them have never before been published in English. They are translated by Kate Sturge from reliable texts in the Colli-Montinari edition, and edited by RUdiger Bittner, whose introduction analyzes them in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. This volume will be widely welcomed by all those working in Nietzsche studies.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

331 pages, paperback

First published March 10, 2003

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

Reviews

[Noah Leben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine translation of Nietzsche's late notebooks, which contain some of his most intoxicating ideas (and possibly his most influential, given their subsequent reinterpreations through Heidegger, Bataille, Klossowski, Deleuze, etc.). However, this rating is solely for the writings of Nietzsche contained herein, and not the author's introduction, which manages to both undercut and mischaracterizes Nietzsche's thought and ought to be skipped outright.

"And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn't exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure and losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by 'nothingness' as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended; instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is anywhere 'empty' but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and 'many', accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of its courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue - this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery world of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of the circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself - do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you too, for you, the most secret, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly? - This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And you yourselves too are this will to power - and nothing besides!"

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

15[117]
'On the asceticism of the strong
The task of this asceticism, which is only a transitional training and not a goal: to free oneself from the old emotional impulses of traditional values. To learn, step by step, how to follow one's path to the "beyond good and evil".
First stage: to endure atrocities
to commit atrocities
Second, more difficult, stage: to endure basenesses
to commit basenesses: including, as a
preliminary exercise: to become
ludicrous, make oneself ludicrous.
- To provoke contempt and nevertheless sustain distance by means of an (unfathomable) smile from above.
- to take upon oneself a number of degrading crimes, e.g., stealing money, so as to test one's sense of balance.
- for a while not to do, speak, strive for anything that doesn't arouse fear or contempt, that doesn't force the decent and virtuous into war - that doesn't shut one out...
to represent the opposite of what one is (better still, not the exact opposite but simply something different: this is more difficult)
- to walk every tightrope, to dance on every possibility: to get one's genius into one's feet
- for stretches of time, to deny - even slander - one's ends with one's means
- once and for all to represent a character which hides the fact that one has five or six others
- not to be afraid of the five bad things: cowardice, ill repute, vice, lying, woman -'


16[12]
'Life itself is not a means to something; it is merely a growth-form of power.'

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tedious, repetitive, and -- after having read all of his published writings -- a bit superfluous.

I love that the book ends with this entry (Nietzsche went mad):

Sickness is a powerful stimulant -- but one has to be healthy enough for it.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reference material for Nietzsche readers.

[Nick Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the ultimate example of madness-as-breakthrough

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read these notebooks if you're thinking about reading Will To Power.