Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics) Paperback – November 28, 2000

Nietzsche was the greatest polemist ever. He played the role of Saint-Michael, the dragon slayer, in his Homeric battle with the existing dragons (the Christian moralists). He tried to revalue all generally accepted `good and evil' values and really felt that mankind was pregnant with a new super-species, the `Übermensch'.His influence on philosophy, literature, psychology and politics is immense.Of course, some aspects of his vision on mankind are unacceptable.The all important influence on his Nietzsche's life and philosophy came from Schopenhauer: `I very earnestly denied my `will to life' at the time when I first read Schopenhauer.'The life of a Nietzschean immoralistLife is to express one's will to and lust for power. The cardinal instinct of man is not self-preservation, but the discharge of strength. Everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents serves the enhancement of the species `man'. This enhancement has always been the work of an aristocratic society. The noble man creates his own morality, his good and bad, with egoism and exploitation as his real nature. He despises the slaves, the unfree, the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated.Christian morals, democracyWhen the aristocratic value judgments declined, the plebeians imposed their own morality of unegoism, pity, self-sacrifice, self-abnegation and ascetic ideals on mankind. The egoistic `good' of the masters became the `evil' of the Christian faith.This faith constitutes not less than a sacrifice of all freedom, enslavement and self-mutilation. By preserving all that is sick, it breads `a mediocre herd animal'.Democracy, `the nonsense of the greatest numbers', with its `equality of rights', is the heir of Christianity.It is a gruesome fact that an anti-life morality received the highest honors and was fixed as a law and a categorical imperative.ArtArt is a saving sorceress. She alone knows how to turn the nauseous thoughts about the horrors of life into the sublime and life's absurdity into the comic.Musically speaking, Nietzsche himself was a composer.`The Case against Wagner' compares the Dionysian opera `Carmen' by Bizet, with the Christian opera `Parsifal' by Wagner, the redeemer.EvaluationBesides his unacceptable profound misogyny (`woman's great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance'), Friedrich Nietzsche's brutal evangel is not less than a call for war, not peace. But in an age of nuclear, bio- and chemo-weapons, of veiled State terrorism and of demographic explosions, his call for an uninhibited exploitation of man's basic instincts to fight for the spoils should be categorically rejected.His romantic anti-rational and anti-scientific stances became pipedreams.On the other hand, his attacks on the power of the moralists, his sincere call to live in `Dionysian' freedom and not for `eternal bliss', as well as his vision that art is the only truly metaphysical activity of man, will continue to appeal strongly to many and remain the bright parts of his virulent diatribes.His work is a must read for all philosophers and lovers of truly essential polemics.

This volume contains 'The Birth of Tragedy', 'Beyond Good and Evil', 'The Genealogy of Morals', 'The Wagner Case', and 'Ecce Homo'. Together with the 'Viking Portable Nietzsche', the two contain all of Nietzsche's major writings. The translation and introductions by Kaufmann are fantastic, faithful to the original, and quite useful. His footnotes are useful, especially in the 'Genealogy of Morals', which is the text I recommend new Nietzsche readers begin with.

The Birth of Tragedy-75 Aphorism-Beyond Good and Evil-The Genealogy of Morals (3 Essays)-The Case of Wagner-Interpretations/commentariesA great collection, though a strange chronological leap from BOT to BGE. Right for the price and a great review of the later published books of FN. All of Kaufmann's footnotes are maintained. You'll at least want to have had read The Gay Science before coming to this, or even TSZ; Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals are NOT the place to get your feet wet and FN is not joking in Ecce Homo when he says that a close reading and familiarity with his earlier writings is necessary to delve and dredge up all that he has thought through--and to then move on to further possibilities presented by the various threads lain therein.But if you are really eager to get to these later works, do at least have some familiarity with Hegel and read the Untimely Meditations and then make the leap to this volume.Caveat: I cannot recommend the Zarathustra translation by Kaufmann, as available through the Viking Portable Library or Penguin; it is truly facile. Hollingdale's translations of the TSZ, Twilight and the AntiChrist are much preferable, thought they lack K's commentary.

I have read Nietzsche's other translations and I admit this is by far the best one I have found. People are critical of his aphoristic style but that's what I liked the most about "Beyond good and evil". The book starts with Birth of tragedy. I havent yet finished the book; I have read a few chapters in this book and I can say that"Beyond good and evil" and "Geneology of morals" are gems. I found "Birth of tragedy" a bit abstract. I have heard about Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner and I am looking forward to start "The case of Wagner".

These are arguably the best modern translations of Nietzsche's major works available. There are some other very good versions by Hollingdale, but Kaufmann is at least his equal, if not superior. (I base this on how the translations read, because I don't read German; German speakers may have a different opinion, but I doubt it.)You can either read about Nietzsche (Kaufmann has also written one of the best critical studies of his oeuvre), or read him and come to your own conclusions; or better yet, you can do both--but read Nietzsche first. He's an eminently readable writer and since he never wrote a systematic treatise but spead his insights over all his books in the form of aphorisms, short treatises, and some lengthy (but not too lengthy) essays, he's not difficult to understand."God is dead" is not his central thesis, in spite of that becoming the received idea connected with him. If there is an overriding vision it would probably be more like this: what you understand of reality is a matter of perspective, and apodictic truths are as much an illusion as God.Definitely the Nietzsche collection to own, along with Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche.