آخرین یادداشت‌ها

by Friedrich Nietzsche, ایرج قانونی (Translator)

نیچه در طول زندگی‌اش همیشه افکار خود را در دفترهای یادداشت یا برگ‌های کاغذی که با خود حمل می‌کرد ثبت می‌کرد. بدین ترتیب او عملاً همه‌جا می‌توانست نویسندگی کند. […] او معمولاً این یادداشت‌ها را نگه می‌داشت و بر پایهٔ آن‌ها دست‌نوشته‌های آثار چاپ‌شده‌اش را تهیه می‌کرد، و در نتیجه شمار بسیاری از آن‌ها محفوظ ماند. ارتباط میان دست‌نوشت‌های نیچه و آثار چاپ‌شده‌اش در طول دوران زندگی‌اش دستخوش تغییر شده است. در حالی که آثار چاپ‌شده هرگز کل محتوای یادداشت‌ها را در بر نمی‌گرفت، تنها پس از ۱۸۸۵، یعنی پس از تکمیل چنین گفت زرتشت، بود که اختلاف بنیادینی میان آن‌چه نیچه در یادداشت‌های خود ثبت می‌کرد و آن‌چه به شکل مشخصی به دست چاپ می‌سپرد به‌تدریج بالا گرفت. در حقیقت، نیچه احساس می‌کرد که در حال بیگانه‌شدن با واسطه و رسانه‌ای است که تا کنون به آن اعتماد کرده است. «ارادهٔ معطوف به قدرت»، بزرگ‌ترین و بلندپروازانه‌ترین پروژهٔ ادبی آخرین سال‌های زندگی نیچه، که او هرگز آن را به چاپ نرساند – و تنها پس از مرگ‌اش بود که خواهرش آن را جمع کرد و به ناشر سپرد – در دل همین یادداشت‌ها جای دارد، یادداشت‌هایی که از آوریل ۱۸۸۵ تا اوت ۱۸۸۸ را در بر می‌گیرد. (از پیش‌گفتار کتاب)

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

478 pages, Hardcover

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

[TL]

'11[74]
—that in the "process of the whole" the work of mankind is of no account, because there is no total process (conceived as a system—) at all;
—that there is no "whole", that no evaluation of human existence, of human goals can be made with a view to something which doesn't exist...
—that necessity, causality, purposiveness are useful illusions
—that the goal is not the increase of consciousness but the enhancement of power, an enhancement in which the usefulness of consciousness is included, with pleasure as much as with unpleasure
—that one does not take means as the highest measure of value (thus not states of consciousness, such as pleasure and pain, if consciousness is itself a means—)
—that the world is not at all an organism, but chaos: that the development of "mental life" is a means for the organization to gain relative permanence...
—that all "desirability" is meaningless with respect to the total character of being.'

11[82]
At every moment the meaning of becoming must be fulfilled, achieved, completed.

11[94]
That emperor [Marcus Aurelius] constantly kept in mind the transience of all things so as to not take them too seriously and to remain calm among them. To me, conversely, it seems that everything is far too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything — ought one to pour the costliest balms and wines into the sea? — and my consolation is that everything which has been is eternal: the sea washes it up again' [no period]

11[95]
...To appraise being itself: but the act of appraising is itself still this being — and by saying No we still do what we are... One must understand the absurdity of this gesture of passing sentence on existence; and then also try to divine what is really happening here. It is symptomatic.'
[c.f. Spinoza]

[Noah Leben]

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 mischaracterize 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!"

[Ben]

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]

Reference material for Nietzsche readers.

[Nick Lloyd]

Perhaps the ultimate example of madness-as-breakthrough

[David]

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