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Nietzsche
- The Man and his Philosophy
- 2nd edition
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Published online:
- 13 September 2019
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- 28 April 1999
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This classic biography of Nietzsche, first published in the 1960s, was enthusiastically reviewed at the time. The biography is now reissued with its text updated in the light of recent research. Hollingdale's biography remains the single best account of the life and works for the student or non-specialist. The biography chronicles Nietzsche's intellectual evolution and discusses his friendship and breach with Wagner, his attitude towards Schopenhauer, and his indebtedness to Darwin and the Greeks. It follows the years of his maturity and his mental collapse in 1889. The final part of the book considers the development of the Nietzsche legend during his years of madness. R. J. Hollingdale, one of the preeminent translators of Nietzsche, allows Nietzsche to speak for himself in a translation that transmits the vividness and virtuosity of Nietzsche's many styles. This is the ideal book for anyone interested in Nietzsche's life and work to learn why he is such a significant figure for the development of modern thought.
13 - The Year 1888
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 13 September 2019
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- 28 April 1999, pp 193-216
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Summary
A: You are removing yourself faster and faster from the living: soon they will strike you off their list!—B: It is the only way of sharing the privilege possessed by the dead.—A: What privilege?—B: To die no more. (FW 262)
The chronology of Nietzsche's travels during the year 1888 is as simple as that of previous years. He stayed in Nice until the 2nd April, when he left for Turin, arriving on the 5th and remaining in the city until the 5th June. He was delighted with it and decided it would be ‘my Residenz from now on'. For the summer he went to Sils-Maria and stayed there until the 20th September, when he returned to Turin. Apart from a relapse in the middle of the summer, he was feeling his health had improved; his spirits were lighter, and he experienced a joy in working which exceeded anything he had known before. Had his 'medical knowledge’ been what he claimed, he might have recognized the symptoms and perhaps, even at this late stage, done something to prevent or retard the ultimate consequences: but he did nothing and, in all probability, failed to realize there was anything to be done. He accepted his ‘recovery’ at its face value, whereas it was only the deceptive prelude to total collapse: when he left Turin on the 9th January 1889 he was incurably insane—'a ruin that only a friend could recognise'.
His decline into insanity took the form of an increasingly intense feeling of euphoria culminating at last in megalomania. As early as February his letters reveal that the overcompensation of previous years was beginning to assume a somewhat heightened colouring: writing to Seydlitz on the 12th, for instance, he says:
Between ourselves—it is not impossible that I am the first philosopher of the age, perhaps even a trifle more than that, … something decisive and fateful standing between two millennia.
By May he was experiencing a sensation of well-being which sent him into cries of rapture: ‘Wonder upon wonders,’ he wrote to Seydlitz on the 13th, ‘I have had a notably cheerful spring up to now.
11 - Zarathustra
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 13 September 2019
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- 28 April 1999, pp 158-168
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Summary
I taught them all my art and aims: to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance in man. (Z III 12)
Between The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche arrived at the hypothesis that all actions are motivated by the desire for power. Employing Schopenhauer's terminology he called this principle the ‘will to power’, and by means of it he now tried to give a picture of a possible reality deprived of all metaphysical support.
The will to power is introduced in the chapter called ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’: hitherto there have been many peoples, consequently many 'goals'—i.e. moralities; the reason each people has had its own morality is that morality is will to power—not only power over others but more essentially power over oneself:
Zarathustra has seen many lands and many peoples: thus he has discovered the good and evil of many peoples. Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than good and evil. No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates. Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours … A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power. What it calls hard it calls praiseworthy; what it accounts indispensable and hard it calls good; and that which relieves the greatest need, the rare, the hardest of all—it glorifies as holy. Whatever causes it to rule and conquer and glitter, to the dread and envy of its neighbours, that it accounts the sublimest, the paramount, the evaluation and the meaning of all things. (Z I 15)
Morality, understood as being identical with custom, is now visualized as the self-overcoming of a people: a herd turns its desire for power against itself, it conquers itself, it learns to obey self-imposed commands, and in obeying becomes ‘a people’.
Part II - 1869-1879
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 45-46
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How little reason and how greatly chance rules over men is shown by the almost invariable disparity between their so-called professions and their evident unsuitability for them: the fortunate cases are exceptions …, and even these are not brought about by reason. A man chooses a profession when he is not yet capable of choice: he does not know the various professions, he does not know himself. (Wir Philologen)
1 - The Child
- from Part I - 1844-1869
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 3-17
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The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy. (A 10)
Nietzsche's views have always seemed so strikingly different from the background of opinion against which he grew up that they have often been thought to owe their origin to a violent reaction against his upbringing. His entire philosophy even has been seen as no more than a calculated antithesis to the tradition in which he was raised. He was the heir of a line of Lutheran pastors going back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, his father and both grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and he lived the first five and a half years of his life in a parsonage and later in an equally pious home; and it has been argued that his subsequent irreligion is to be explained by reference to these facts. There are two main reasons for rejecting this view as an adequate explanation of the genesis of Nietzsche's thought. In the first place, no serious student today would be inclined to exaggerate the differences between his outlook and that of Christianity: the tendency today—a justified tendency, as I think—is to emphasize the conventional elements in his philosophy and its connection with that ‘Protestant’ tradition of inquiry of which the whole of German philosophy may be said to be a part. Secondly, the need to account for the irrationality supposed to characterize Nietzsche's thought is disappearing with the growing recognition that it is not irrational at all. The notion that his philosophy was a reaction to his environment presupposed it was founded on emotion rather than on reason: the background of emotional rebellion was called on to account for the irrationalism, the irrationalism held responsible for the violence and radical nature of the rebellion. Here again the conventional picture has had to be modified, and the temptation now is to ignore rather than emphasize the element of rebellion which is undoubtedly present in his work and to emphasize rather than ignore its strong links with the past.
The more closely one studies Nietzsche's work, the less inclined one is to look outside it for an elucidation of its meaning or an explanation of its origin.
14 - The Revaluation
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 217-227
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Summary
A Revaluation of all Values, this question-mark so black, so huge it casts a shadow over him who sets it up … (G Vorvport)
He who has publicly set himself a great objective and afterwards realises he is too weak for it is usually also too weak publicly to repudiate that objective, and then he inevitably becomes a hypocrite. (MA 540)
The completed works from Beyond Good and Evil to Ecce Homo stand in the foreground of the creative period of Nietzsche's life the background of which is the mass of unfinished material best referred to collectively as the Revaluation. This material has played a part in Nietzsche studies out of proportion to its importance; indeed, discussion of his later philosophy has been haunted by the shadow-existence of the Revaluation, and the practice of quoting from it side by side with the finished works as if both possessed equal validity as 'Nietzsche's opinions’ has blurred the distinction between what he himself published, or prepared for publication, and what he rejected for publication. Three considerations are involved: Nietzsche's own attitude towards the Revaluation; the question of its publication; and the quality of the material itself.
By the end of 1888 Nietzsche had been fighting against ill-health for sixteen years. It is no romantic exaggeration but the simple truth to say that what kept him alive during the latter half of this period was his sense of mission; and the more desperately ill he was, the more desperately did he magnify the significance of that mission. In the sense in which he used the expression, Nietzsche's mission was a delusion. Its vehicle was the grandiose project called at first The Will to Power, planned as a work to which Zarathustra would stand as an introductory poem. Its scope was to be very large: a thoroughly detailed account of his philosophy. He began assembling material for it during 1884, and the Nachlass contains very many plans for its layout: the one dated the 17th March 1887 was arbitrarily selected by Elizabeth as the framework for her compilation called The Will to Power.
The first mention of the projected book in Nietzsche's published writings occurs in the Genealogy, where he directs the reader in a parenthesis ‘to a work I have in preparation: The Will to Power.
5 - Wagner, Schopenhauer, Darwin and the Greeks
- from Part II - 1869-1879
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 56-85
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For me they were steps, I have climbed up upon them—therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them. (G I 42)
As soon after coming to Basel as he conveniently could, Nietzsche visited Wagner at Tribschen. Wagner was at work when he paid his first call on the 15th May (1869), but invited Nietzsche to come back for lunch; Nietzsche was unable to do this, so Wagner suggested he return two days later, on Whit Monday. The meeting was so successful that he was again invited, this time to attend Wagner's birthday celebrations on the 22nd. Nietzsche's teaching duties made this impossible, and he was next at Tribschen for the weekend of the 5th to the 7th June. From then onwards he was a regular visitor, staying with the Wagner family twenty-three times between May 1869 and April 1872, when Wagner departed for Bayreuth. He was a guest for Christmas 1869 and again in 1870; on that occasion he formed part of the tiny audience which heard the first performance of the Siegfried Idyll, Wagner's Christmas and birthday present to Cosima. (Her birthday fell on the 24th December.) Before the year 1869 was over he had been accepted—one might almost say adopted—as a member of the household, with a room of his own which he might use any time he chose to; often he had charge of the Wagner children, who treated him like an elder brother.
The importance in Nietzsche's life of his relationship with Wagner can hardly be exaggerated. The experience was an awakening: his eyes were opened to the possibilities of greatness that still existed in human nature. He learned the meaning of genius and strength of will, expressions he had used without any very lively sense of their real significance. In course of time he learned other things from Wagner, and not always those things Wagner would most willingly have taught him: that even the most sincere man is still very much an actor, that pettiness and greatness can co-exist in the same soul, that love and hate are not mutually exclusive but opposite aspects of the same emotion.
Selective Bibliography
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 263-266
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10 - Lou Salome
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 148-157
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Whom does woman hate most?—Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: ‘I hate you most, because you attract me but are not strong enough to draw me towards you.’ (Z I 18)
By the summer of 1882 Nietzsche had, in a sense, already started writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The foundations of the book had been laid in the series from Human, All Too Human to The Gay Science, and in the last work the specific outlook and tone of Zarathustra appear in many passages. Part One of Zarathustra was put on to paper in February 1883. These facts should help us to see the ‘affair’ of Lou Salome in its proper perspective. At the time, Nietzsche thought it very important, and his disappointment at its failure threw him off balance for a while: but there is no ground for thinking it changed him in any way or that his work from 1883 onwards would have been any different in its essentials if he had never met Lou Salome.
After staying for about a month with Nietzsche in Genoa, Paul Rée left on the 13th March (1882) and shortly afterwards turned up in Rome, where, at Malwida's house there he encountered Lou Salome and fell in love with her. Lou (properly Louise) was born in St. Petersburg in 1861, daughter of a Russian general of Huguenot extraction. Determined to live a life of independence she had left Russia in September 1880 in the company of her mother to study at the university of Zurich; there she fell ill and a friend gave her a letter of introduction to Malwida and the suggestion she should go to Rome to recuperate. She arrived at Malwida's in January 1882, and was staying with her when Rée arrived.
Rée proposed marriage to her, but she declined and counter-proposed that they should live and study together ‘as brother and sister’, with a second man for company. This idea surprised Rée (and outraged Malwida when she heard of it), but he accepted it and suggested Nietzsche as the third party. Nietzsche had left Genoa on the 29th March and gone to Messina, where he stayed for three weeks: his health was very low, and he was probably on his way back to Germany to consult his doctor when he appeared in Rome towards the end of April.
16 - The Collapse
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 237-240
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But to reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods. I, indeed, drew that conclusion; but now it draws me. (Z II 2)
As he was leaving his lodgings on the morning of the 3rd January 1889 Nietzsche saw a cabman beating his horse at the cab rank in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. With a cry he flung himself across the square and threw his arms about the animal's neck. Then he lost consciousness and slid to the ground, still clasping the tormented horse. A crowd gathered, and his landlord, attracted to the scene, recognized his lodger and had him carried back to his room. For a long time he lay unconscious. When he awoke he was no longer himself: at first he sang and shouted and thumped the piano, so that the landlord, who had already called a doctor, threatened to call a policeman too; then he quietened down, and began writing the famous series of epistles to the courts of Europe and to his friends announcing his arrival as Dionysus and the Crucified. How many he wrote is not known for certain. Those directed to public figures announced that he, ‘the Crucified’, would be going to Rome ‘on Tuesday’ (the 8th January), where the princes of Europe, together with the Pope, were to assemble: a notice to this effect went to the secretary of state of the Vatican. The Hohenzollerns, however, were to be excluded, and the other German princes were advised to have nothing to do with them: even now the Reich is still the enemy of German culture.
To Peter Gast went a single line:
To my maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice. The Crucified.
To Brandes a slightly longer epistle:
After you had discovered me it was not difficult to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me … The Crucified.
Letters also went to (among others) Strindberg, Malwida, Bùlow, Spitteler and Rohde. Cosima received a single line:
Ariadne, I love you. Dionysus.
Preface to the Revised Edition
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp vii-viii
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As I said in the Preface to the original edition, the purpose of this book is to outline the life of Nietzsche as concisely as seems reasonable; his philosophy is considered as a part of his life, and here too the objective is conciseness. What I try to describe is the course of his existence and his thought in their essentials.
I have subjected the book to a thorough revision in which I have corrected what I now perceive as stylistic faults, removed some passages that seem to me misguided or out of date, and amended a few statements of supposed fact which later research has shown not to be factual; but in every essential respect the book has remained the work which first appeared in 1965.
I have eliminated the appendices of the original as being superannuated and have replaced them with a Postscript which in a strictly limited way surveys the changes that have taken place in the publication, reception and appreciation of Nietzsche over the past thirty-five years (part of this Postscript was first published in International Studies in Philosophy, vol. XXII/2, 1990). The original bibliography belongs, of course, to an older generation of Nietzsche study, and I have substituted a new one.
All the passages quoted from Nietzsche's works and letters were newly translated for the original 1965 edition: the works are cited by title or title initials (for which see the list that follows) and chapter and/or section, which are the same for all editions; the letters are cited by date so that they can be referred to in any edition. Little Venice, London
3 - The Student
- from Part I - 1844-1869
- R. J. Hollingdale
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Everything he is now doing is worthy and quite in order, yet he has a bad conscience about it. For the extraordinary is his task. (FW 186)
In retrospect, Nietzsche thought of his ten months at Bonn as time wasted. What they in fact represent is the period in his life in which he tried to live like any other young man and found he couldn't do it. The desire to be ‘different’ is common—and superficial; the man who actually is different very often doesn't want to be, because he has a premonition how much unhappiness his singularity is going to cost him. In the long run he cannot help himself; he must face the isolation and disappointment which life has in store for him as best he can; but at first he may resist his fate, or seek to deny it altogether, by involving himself with spurious enthusiasm in the pursuits which those around him appear to find normal. This is what Nietzsche tried to do at Bonn, and that is why he afterwards thought he had been squandering his time.
Initially he certainly experienced a sense of freedom at his liberation from Pforta, and he gave it rein on a holiday trip on the Rhein which he took with Deussen, who was also moving to Bonn, and a youth named Schnabel; the three indulged in a moderate amount of horse-play and wine-drinking, and Nietzsche enjoyed a brief flirtation with Deussen's sister. (Deussen's home was in the Rheinland.) Nietzsche and Deussen were enrolled at the university together on the 16th October 1864.
Bonn had an excellent reputation in the field of philology because of the presence there of Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl, who were not only philologists of the front rank but men of wide culture and teachers capable of inspiring great devotion in their pupils. Jahn is best remembered for his biography of Mozart, and both would probably have risen to positions of eminence in any field they might have chosen. Nietzsche was at first attached to Jahn rather than to Ritschl, but when, as a result of a quarrel they were unable to settle, the two men left Bonn, it was Ritschl he followed to Leipzig, and it is with Ritschl's that his name will always be associated. Their meeting, as described by Deussen, could hardly have been more inconsequential.
Part I - 1844-1869
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 1-2
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We are … good Europeans, the heirs of … millennia of the European spirit: as such we have outgrown Christianity, and precisely because we have grown out of it, because our forefathers were Christians of the ruthless integrity of Christianity, who for the sake of their faith gladly sacrificed their goods and their blood, their station and their country. We—do the same. (FW 377)
6 - Basel and Bayreuth
- from Part II - 1869-1879
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 86-106
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Wagner was merely one of my illnesses. Not that I should wish to be ungrateful to this illness … the philosopher is not free to dispense with Wagner … I would understand what a philosopher meant who declared: 'Wagner summarises modernity. There is nothing for it, one must first be a Wagnerian.’ (W Vorwort)
In his summing-up of Nietzsche's mental history, Kurt Hildebrandt concludes that between 1873 and 1880 he ‘passed through a period of neurosis, the fundamental cause of which was a psychical conflict’, and the climactic point of which was reached in 1879. The course of his inner life during the earlier part of this period, which came to a muffled climax with his flight from and return to Bayreuth in 1876, constitutes an almost perfect mechanism for the production of neurosis: increasing tension between his desire for independence and the feeling of subservience to Wagner; conflict between the world of 'free-thought’ into which he was moving and the Teutonic-mystic ‘Bayreuth idea’; emotional frustration coinciding with the marriage of his closest friends; ever-present ill-health the existence of which provided a retreat and ‘excuse’ for indecision. Nietzsche later characterized the ‘decadent’ as one who desires what harms him; we should, in this case, speak of the ‘neurotic', and a sign that Nietzsche was becoming neurotic during the mid-1870s is that his emotional inclination was all towards what he knew intellectually he should be giving up: hence the dichotomy between his private opinions on Wagner and Bayreuth and those expressed in his published works. He could see that the ‘ideological’ side to Wagner, which had been subordinate while he was the lonely artist in his Tribschen retreat, had come more and more to the fore after he had gone to Bayreuth, and that with this ideology he would sooner or later have to break; but when he saw Wagner at work, heard his voice and his music, associated with his family and his collaborators, or listened to attacks upon him from men who were unworthy to fasten his shoes, his old love for the man and his mission reasserted itself with irresistible force. At such times the idea of deserting him seemed unthinkable; yet it continued to be thought.
2 - The Schoolboy
- from Part I - 1844-1869
- R. J. Hollingdale
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Youth is disagreeable: for in youth it is either not possible or not sensible to be productive, in whatever sense. (MA 539)
Pforta was a hard school and a strict one, but it was what Nietzsche required at the age of 14. Like those of most public schools of its time, its regulations read as if they were designed for a prison for persistent offenders, but it is probably a mistake to think them actually harmful to a boy who has to learn somehow that ease and happiness are not the same thing, and may as well learn it from people who have his welfare at heart. He has left us an account of a typical day in Pforta school life. Pupils were woken at 4 a.m. and had to be ready for action by 5; classes started at 6 and continued in one form or another until noon. They resumed at 1:15 p.m. and went on until ten to 4. Further classes were held in the evening, and bedtime was 9 p.m. Behaviour at mealtimes was strictly regulated, and there was little more than an hour during the day when the student was left to his own devices. This routine was followed for five days a week. Sunday was free, and there was one other day on which the boarders could lie in bed an hour longer and then spend their time in revision of the week's work. And there were also, of course, the long school holidays in which to recover. At first Nietzsche disliked this life intensely. He suffered from homesickness: in February 1859, after he had been at Pforta four months, he was prostrated by an overwhelming desire to get away from it and go back home, and he suffered a similar attack on returning from the summer holidays of the same year. He confided his troubles to his tutor, Buddensieg, who helped him to recover, after which he became something of a model scholar, chiefly because he excelled in the subjects the school placed most emphasis on.
The real interest of Pforta lay in Greek and Latin, and to a lesser degree in the German classics.
15 - The Poet
- from Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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Artists continually glorify—they do nothing else: they glorify all those conditions and things which have the reputation of making men feel good or great or intoxicated or merry or happy or wise. (FW 85)
Throughout the years of his maturity Nietzsche never ceased to write poetry, and although his achievements in verse cannot compare with his achievements in prose they are of interest as a parallel expression of the two sides of his personality I have called the Socratic and the Heraclitean. At one extreme are the little epigrammatic pieces the best known of which are those prefixed to The Gay Science; at the other, the formless Dionysos-Dithyramben. Mediating between these two extremes is a strongly rhythmic and rhymed form, a development of the style of his early years and capable of expressing both the Socratic and Heraclitean attitudes.
The epigrammatic verses are essentially an intensification, by means of metre and rhyme, of the single-sentence titled aphorisms which first appeared in Human, All Too Human and its sequels; e.g.:
Test of a good marriage. A marriage proves itself a good marriage by being able to endure an occasional ‘exception’. (MA 402)
Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. (MA 483)
The noble hypocrite. Never to talk about oneself is a very noble form of hypocrisy. (MA 505)
Bad memory. The advantage of having a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times. (MA 580)
Modesty of man. How little pleasure suffices most people to make them find life good; how modest man is! (WS 15)
Premises of the Machine Age. The printing press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusions no one has yet had the courage to draw. (WS 278)
The most dangerous party-member. The most dangerous party-member is he whose defection would destroy the entire party: therefore the best partymember. (WS 290)
The object of aphorism is memorability through conciseness, and in the concisest of all his works, Gôtzen-Dàmmerung, Nietzsche reduces the wordage of his aphorisms to an all-but-absolute minimum; e.g.:
Even the bravest of us seldom has the courage for what he really knows. (G I 2)
From the military school of life. What does not kill me makes me stronger. (GI 8)
A List of Nietzsche's Works
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In the large body of work published under Nietzsche's name during his life and since his death it is necessary to make a distinction between his genuine 'works’ (i.e. those books published by him or prepared by him for publication) and all the remaining material (i.e. Nachlass [material left behind after his collapse and death], philologica, juvenilia): for the former group Nietzsche is responsible, for the latter he is not, since its distinguishing characteristic is that he did not offer it to the public as his ‘work’. Yet, mainly through the publication of The Will to Power—a compilation drawn from the Nachlass of the 1880s—the dividing line between these two groups has become blurred and the logical and orderly development of his philosophy obscured. If we are to attempt to trace that development we must first be clear where it is to be discovered—i.e. in the ‘works’. It would also be well to fix in advance the order in which Nietzsche's works appeared, since this is obviously of importance to any consideration of how his thought developed. For these reasons I give here a chronological list of Nietzsche's works as defined above. (The initials by which they are cited in the text are given on the right.)
1.Die Geburt der Tragôdie, oder Griechentum und Pessimismus (The GT Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism). Published 1872, under the title Die Geburt der Tragôdie ans dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music), and consisting of 25 sections, with a ‘Foreword to Richard Wagner’. 2nd edn. 1874 embodies some textual changes. 3rd edn. 1886 bears the altered title given above, and is prefaced by an ‘Essay in Self- Criticism’: although termed a ‘new edition’ it is in reality a reissue of remaining copies of the two previous editions (with the title changed and the prefatory essay added). The text quoted in the present work is that of the 2nd edn.
2.Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations). Erstes Stuck: David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller. UI (First Essay: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer.) Published 1873. A long essay in 12 sections. Zweites Stuck: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historié fur das UII Leben. (Second Essay: On the Usefulness and Disadvantage for Life of [the study of] History.) Published 1874.
Index
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- 28 April 1999, pp 267-270
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Part III - 1879-1889
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Nietzsche
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- 28 April 1999, pp 113-114
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Summary
… people find difficulty with the aphoristic form: this arises from the fact that the form is not taken seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis. (GM Vorrede)
4 - The Professor
- from Part II - 1869-1879
- R. J. Hollingdale
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- Book:
- Nietzsche
- Published online:
- 13 September 2019
- Print publication:
- 28 April 1999, pp 47-55
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- Chapter
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Summary
He who possesses greatness deals harshly with his virtues and interests of the second rank. (FW 266)
Basel was a completely German town, and it had a narrow escape from incorporation into the Reich. When Nietzsche joined it the university there was already 400 years old; it was a small one, but its reputation extended far beyond the borders of Switzerland, and the fact that it engaged him at all at so young an age showed it was willing to experiment.
Upon his arrival he took up temporary lodgings while he looked for a permanent residence. He found it after two months at No. 45 Schiitzgraben, near the Spalentor, where he engaged a large room. When Franz Overbeck came to Basel he lived in the same house, and almost every evening for five years he and Nietzsche had their meal together in Overbeck's room.
The task Nietzsche had taken on was not a particularly light one. He tells Ritschl in a letter of the 10th May 1869 that he has enough to do ‘not to get bored’:
Each morning of the week I give my lectures at 7 o'clock, [he writes.] On Mondays I hold a seminar, … on Tuesdays and Fridays I have to teach at the High School twice, on Wednesdays and Thursdays once: up to the present I enjoy this … I have seven pupils for my lectures, which they say I should be content with here.
The subjects of his lectures during these first years reflect his real interests. His inaugural lecture on Homer and Classical Philology, delivered on the 28th May and privately printed later in the year, made it clear that he considered philology the handmaid of art. During 1869 he lectured on the Choephorae of Aeschylus and the Greek lyric poets (also, at the request of his pupils but with some distaste, on Latin grammar); in 1870 on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and on Hesiod; in 1871 on the Platonic dialogues, ‘an introduction to the study of philology’ and Latin epigraphy. The emphasis is on the Greeks, and especially on poetry and drama. In his public lectures, when he was able to give way to his predilections without restraint, he spoke on The Greek Music-Drama (18th January 1870) and Socrates and Tragedy (1st February 1870).
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