Basic Writings of Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
Ever since he went insane and silent in 1889, Nietzsche’s ideas have been most things to most men. Devout Christians can hardly derive any comfort from Nietzsche’s writings, which are centrally preoccupied with a destructive analysis of Christianity, its birth, its triumph, its unfortunate longevity; nor could principled democrats find much to please them in his political views. However, nihilists and existentialists, cosmopolitans and chauvinists, followers of Freud and his critics, Anti-Semites and Philo-Semites, Francophiles and professional Teutons, nature worshipers and pragmatists have all been struggling over Nietzsche’s legacy for a century and more.
They cannot all be right; in fact, most of them are merely dining off a few scraps that Nietzsche had thrown them in a careless mood. But this has not stopped them from arguing. I am not going review Nietzsche’s writing as I believe any attempt, no matter how well intended, to rephrase, paraphrase or synopsize Nietzsche, without including a fair amount of Nietzsche’s actual words, is a terrible injustice committed against one of the greatest philosophers in the world. This post will therefore be to introduce some of the most famous writings of Nietzsche that has been included in this copy-- The Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
The Birth of Tragedy
This book is a compelling argument for the necessity for art in life, and has later become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism. The book is fuelled by Nietzsche’s enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the philosophy of Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner. Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provided a consolation for it.
Beyond Good and Evil
This book dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a slave morality. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own will to power upon the world.
On the Genealogy of Morals
This is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns.
Ecce Homo
Ecce Homo is both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange. It remains one of the most intriguing, yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome - Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ - and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his forthcoming revelation of all values.
The Basic Writings of Nietzsche also included The Case of Wagner and seventy five aphorisms. Overall it is a great collection of Nietzsche’s work.
