Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,3

of his books.

The translations were made especially for this volume. I have used Clifton Fadiman’s early translation of The Birth of Tragedy, done when he was a graduate student, as a basis for some parts of my new version. But even where I did not start from scratch, I have compared every sentence with the original, and my revisions are so extensive that the new version is probably more different from his than most Nietzsche translations—including Fadiman’s—are from those that preceded them. And in large part I did work from scratch. I have made extensive use of a draft translation of On the Genealogy of Morals, furnished me by R. J. Hollingdale; but I alone bear the responsibility for the final version. The other translations, as well as the commentaries, involved no collaboration.

In the original German, almost every numbered section constitutes a single paragraph. Nietzsche used dashes and three dots to indicate breaks. I have largely dispensed with these devices and begun new paragraphs wherever that seemed helpful.

W.K.

Introduction by the Editor

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure. Philosophers of that sort are mostly French and rarely taken very seriously by twentieth-century philosophy professors. The only French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). One may actually be led to wonder whether in philosophy there is an inverse proportion between profundity and importance on the one hand, and clarity and excellence of style on the other. If Plato seems to prove that this need not be so, many twentieth-century philosophers would be quick to counter that, philosophically, Plato’s early and more literary dialogues are less important than his later dialogues, especially where they stump even professionals. And in Kant’s case it is plain that his worst-written book, the Critique of Pure Reason, is his greatest work.

Where does this leave Nietzsche? At first glance it would seem in the company of Montaigne, Pascal, and Voltaire. But there is much more philosophy in his writings than in theirs, and his influence—also on philosophy professors—far exceeds theirs. A surprising number of German professors of philosophy have written books on him ever since he died in 1900, and hardly any German philosopher of note since that time has escaped the impact of Nietzsche’s thought. To single out at least a few of them: Hans Vaihinger and Georg Simmel, Nicolai Hartmann and Karl Jaspers. Indeed, the only outstanding exception was Edmund Husserl; and his most renowned followers—Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger—changed their orientation drastically after coming under Nietzsche’s influence. This is also true of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, one of Sartre’s best-known literary works can be shown to embody Nietzsche’s ideas: the ethic of The Flies differs sharply from Sartre’s own Being and Nothingness, finished at the same time, and from his famous lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, but contains dozens of echoes of Nietzsche’s writings, and the central motifs of the play are Nietzschean.1

Perhaps Nietzsche’s influence on literature is even more striking than his impact on twentieth-century philosophy. Besides Sartre, one may think of Camus, Gide, and Malraux; of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse; and among German poets, of Rilke and Stefan George, Christian Morgenstern and Gottfried Benn.2 His influence on Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce, and on Eugene O’Neill and other major American writers deserves more study than it has yet received.

Nietzsche’s anticipations of and influence on various psychological theories are no less remarkable. In section 142 of The Dawn he anticipated the so-called James-Lange theory of the emotions; again and again he pioneered what Jaspers later called, in the title of his first major philosophical work, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (psychology of world views); and Sigmund Freud remarked in an autobiographical sketch that Nietzsche’s “premonitions and insights often agree in the most amazing manner with the laborious results of psychoanalysis.”3 Alfred Adler’s modification of Freud’s theories, which in turn profoundly influenced Sartre,4 is even closer to Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to power than Freudianism.

Freud also “several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”5 This is surely an extraordinary compliment from the founder of psychoanalysis whose life’s work it had been to develop techniques to advance man’s