Basic Writings of Fredrich Nietzsche (Modern Library Series) Book

2/10/2013 - "When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you" wrote Nietzsche. I thought I was spiritually strong enough to peer with impunity through the hole Nietzsche tore open in the veil of the abyss - that somehow the abyss would not notice me glancing into it, would leave me alone. Now, more than one year after completing this anthology (and Thus Spake Zarathustra) I understand that these books don't leave a serious reader unchanged. While on one level I approached them seriously, ready for the challenge, on another level I may have been playing chicken with the abyss, not fully considering the personal impact philosophy can have. If you really open your mind and let these ideas in, your old ideas will most likely find themselves overpowered. Once read, these books can't be unread. I don't regret reading them - but felt moved to add this warning to prospective readers. I greatly appreciated many of Nietzsche's ideas, but the whole of his philosophy left me in a kind of turmoil that I don't know how to resolve. It may be that Nietzsche himself was playing chicken with the abyss, and eventually fell in.

As you can see from my original reviews, below (which I'm not going to revise! - let then stand!) I really enjoyed reading these books. I respect Nietzsche intellectually and artistically, and like him a great deal - but I disagreed with him vehemently at times - particularly his position as an "immoralist." And I find Christ much more attractive than Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was so subtle, though, that it was never clear to me that he actually believed many of the things he said. Instead, I had the sense he wanted to be argued with, was inviting other intellectuals of his time to stand up to him - and, in that, may have been greatly disappointed. Now that I've belatedly "discovered" Dostoevsky, I would say Dostoevsky looked more far more deeply into the abyss than Nietzsche ever did - and although he clearly influenced Nietzsche, he also offered the strongest contemporary literary pushback - the anti-Nietzsche if you will.

1/12/2012 - Reading Nietzsche has been a delight and a challenge, inspiring and sometimes appalling. He intended to provoke in the extreme, to tear down the highest values and create new values in their place. If you are spiritually strong, like to argue with your reading material, and appreciate a supreme literary stylist whose work is full of humor and grace and finesse - you might appreciate Nietzsche. Sometimes while reading my imaginary self felt like a little boat floating on a dark, shoreless sea under the moon, about to be struck and perhaps incinerated by lightning, but my real self meanwhile was enjoying the sunshine and a bowl of seafood gumbo across a cafe table from this fascinatingly sane and insane man who caused me to examine my self and my life more deeply than I might have done otherwise.

This volume contains several of his books: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, "Seventy-Five Aphorisms in Five Volumes" (selections from other works), and Ecce Homo, I posted a few comments below for TBOT, BG&E, OTGOM, and Ecce Homo as I finished them.

1/12/2012 - Finished Ecce Homo, his loosely autobiographical work and commentary on his life's work. EH contained some of his tenderest writing outside of Zarathustra - intimate peeks into his own life. It also offered explanations of his intentions and methods for most of his books, and a fuller explanation of his deliberately provocative term for himself, "the first immoralist." (Although, from his description of his lifestyle, it's not clear to me that he ever actually did anything much immoral.) These "saner" passages are interspersed with prophetic passages that seem to border on sheer insanity - except that they do contain at least a grain of truth regarding his future influence.

1/1/2012 - Finished On the Genealogy of Morals. Three finely crafted, stealthy attacks of essays - highly readable, formidable fighting words - although they require prior knowledge of his other books to be more fully understood. In the third essay - the climax - he proposes that what he calls the ascetic ideal - the basis, he contends, for all major religions - and for modern science as well - and even, surprisingly, for modern atheism -has been so dominantly powerful because it has never had any rival whatsoever - it has been the only game in town - and yet - he contends its harmfulness to life has outweighed its benefits. Here is his own apt description of the essays conceived as a work of music - from Ecce Homo:

"Every time a beginning that is calculated to mislead: cool, scientific, even ironic, deliberately foreground, deliberately holding off. Gradually more unrest; sporadic lightning; very disagreeable truths are heard grumbling in the distance -- until eventually a tempo feroce is attained in which everything rushes ahead in a tremendous tension. In the end, in the midst of perfectly gruesome detonations, a new truth becomes visible among thick clouds."

This description is in itself ironic as the climax of the third essay questions the value of, and perhaps the existence of, truth. Not for the fainthearted.

11/19/2011 - Finished Beyond Good & Evil. This is an extremely challenging book of difficult ideas, some attractive and some quite repulsive - brilliantly, subtly insightful, masterfully poetic, and still relevant for understanding the modern world. His writing is extremely compelling and always pushes me to new ways of thinking, even if in opposition to him. And it's fascinating (although also frightening in retrospect) to read, 150 years later, the works that were nearly unknown during his lifetime and yet became so influential, and so horrifically used and misused during the 20th century. Since this is an anthology of several of his books, I'm making a short post each time I complete one of the books.

10/16/2011 - Finished The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music! Nietzsche was an antagonist, a controversialist, an adversary - and at the same time a generator of liberating, life-changing insights that still shine in creative brilliance almost 150 years later. He was also one of the foremost poetic stylists of the German language, so unlike the work of many other philosophers, his books are a pleasure to read for a lover of poetry and language - even in translation. In this, his first book, as a young philologist he tore down the universal homage of Socrates and his Western myth-deprived heritage of optimistic rationality, prophesying with great prescience that this belief "that it can correct the world by knowledge and guide life by science and actually confine the individual to a limited sphere of solvable problems" was actually a degenerative illusion that relied on a slave class to prop it up, and was leading Western society into devastating destruction. He presented both science and religion ultimately as aesthetic phenomena, forms of myth-making to veil the fatal gaze into "what defies illumination." As the life-embracing alternative to the Socratic, he offers Dionysian wisdom, experienced by the aesthetically inclined soul in the arts of tragedy and music, where the veil of beauty cast by the Greek god of art, Apollo, is united with the power of the god Dionysus in whom "the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things." Here is a marvelous and challenging quotation:

"... suddenly the desert of our exhausted culture...is changed when it is touched by Dionysian magic! A tempest seized everything that has outlived itself, everything that is decayed, broken, and withered, and, whirling, shrouds it in a cloud of red dust to carry it in the air like a vulture. Confused, our eyes look after what has disappeared, for what they see has been raised as from a depression into golden light, so full and green, so amply alive, immeasurable and full of yearning. Tragedy is seated amid this excess of life, suffering, and pleasure, in sublime ecstasy, listening to a distant melancholy song that tells of the Mothers of Being ..."

While I do not agree with many of Nietzsche's ideas, there is no doubt they have had a profound influence on me.