The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

International Nietzsche Studies

by Friedrich Nietzsche, Greg Whitlock (Translator), Gregory Whitlock (Translation)

The Pre-Platonic Philosophers supplies English-language readers with a crucial missing link in Nietzsche's development by reproducing the text of a lecture series delivered by the young philosopher (then a philologist) at the University of Basel between 1872 and 1876. In these lectures, Nietzsche surveys the Greek philosophers from Thales to Socrates, establishing a new chronology for the progression of their natural scientific insights. Roughly formulating many of the themes he later developed at length, Nietzsche sketches concepts such as the will to power, eternal recurrence, and self-overcoming and links them to specific pre-Platonics.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Germany, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1876

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

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The text of Nietzsche's lecture course of 1872-73, written between The Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks; the lectures were never polished for publication and never published separately even in German before 1995, but remained buried in the Gesammelte Werke in an incomplete form and unknown to all but Nietzsche specialists. There are seventeen lectures, which cover all the major Pre-Socratic natural philosophers from Thales to Democritus, as well as the later Pythagoreans and Socrates. Nietzsche has many interesting insights on these philosophers, especially Anaximander, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, some of which foreshadow modern views of the development of Greek philosophy and others which are more iconoclastic (or even rather strange). I had always wondered why Nietzsche never wrote anything on the Sophists, who seem to me to have some resemblances to his thought, but from the comment on them in the lecture on Socrates it appears he accepts the Platonic denigration of them at face value.

The major importance of the lectures, however, is for the light they shed on his own philosophy and its development. The text is accompanied by an extensive commentary by Whitlock which traces the origins of many of his ideas in the Neo-Kantian materialists such as Lange and Ueberweg, as well as of course Schopenhauer, and the eighteenth century physicist Roger Joseph Boscovich, and also shows how his interpretation of the early Greek philosphers leads to his later ideas of eternal recurrence and the will to power. This book will be a must-read for all students of nineteenth century German philosophy.

[Bruno]

fixe

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Particularly interesting if you are curious about the origins of scientific thought.

[Birch · Rating 3 out of 5]

ok

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good insights here on Nietzsches thinking.

[Richie Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

this text is biographical. the content is good because its nietzsche of course, but there are zero fragments. as for the quality of the book, many pages were unbound and falling out

[Alex Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for Nietzsche's early etymological insights into the genealogy of the Greek word "sophos", which we associate today with theoretical or technical wisdom (techne), whereas according to him it first connoted refinement and rarity of discernment and taste, and whose usage is first noted with regard to kings, artists, and then philosophers, so as to suggest his hypothesis as laid out in the later works, notably Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science, and Twilight of the Idols, that philosophical inquiry represents a kind of risk of fermentation of culture and decadence of sovereign values. Excellent introduction by the editor also with regard to Nietzsche's academic crisis with respect to the scandalous reception of his Birth of Tragedy, after which these lectures were supposedly given, in a kind of "back to basics", return-to-philology, and return-to-academia, approach to ancient philosophy, but whose prejudices clearly surface such as in the above mentioned instances, but especially in his staunch defense and exultation of Heraclitus as the sovereign thinker par excellence, in the face of contemporary prejudice that could not make sense of the notion that fire, as divine principle, is the sovereign force, not human consciousness, nor a stoic and conscious divinity in a poise of disinterested contemplation as the Kantian ideal would have it. In sum, a provocative set of lectures on ancient philosophy by the man arguably responsible for the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks in the late 19th century himself. The introduction also serves as a guideline for following Nietzsche's scholarship into the skeptical strains of Democritus, which foreshadows Nietzsche's foray into a skepticism skeptical of itself, not unlike the skeptics of Plato's Third Academy, except that Nietzsche emerges as a thinker who synthesizes the skepticism of skepticism itself, or the negation of the negation (or, the suspension of the suspension, to differentiate it from Hegelian negation), as pure affirmation, as we see beginning with his mature works, notably The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

[Ege Atakan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nietzsche, Richard Wagner'in ErosThanatos'unun üzerine yerleştirilmiş bir Empedokles idi.

Tragedya kültürü ve sanatı ile ilişkilendirilmiş bir felsefe yoluyla Nietzsche hem bir Empedokles hem de Yunan kültür reformunun modern bir temsilcisi olmayı amaçladı.

-Algının Fizyolojisi ve Nunc stans?
-Gebt mir ein Materie?
-Kavramsal Poetika?
-Kant'ın Maskeleri olarak Parmenides ve Zenon?
-Schopenhauer'ın Maskeleri olarak Herakleitos, Anaksimandros ve Empedokles?
-Thales'in Sistematiği?
-Anaksimandros'un iki düalizmi (oluş-apeiron ve sıcak-soğuk)?
-Anaksimenes'in materyalizmi veya ilk "nasıl" cı?
-Parmenides ve Herakleitos'un monizmi (varlık ve oluş)?
-Anaksagoras’ta dairesel devinimin enerjisi olarak nous?
-Empedokles'in EroThanatos'u ve bir proto-Darwinist?
-Pythogorasçılarda nitelik ve nicelik?
-Demokritos'un özdeği ve boşluk?

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the lectures shined a lot of light on the early development of N's thoughts on the Greeks and offered a lot of cool foreshadowing of future ideas, but the translator/editor's approach was too heavy-handed for my taste and tended to ruin the flow of the prose with excessive explanatory insertions.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A joy to read because of new material on Nietzsche's thought of the Greek philosophers.