Insight Editions · No. 89
The Portable Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche · Selected and translated, with an introduction, prefaces and notes, by Walter Kaufmann
Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings include Thus Spoke Zarathustra, critiques of Christianity and morality, reflections on culture and power, and selections from letters and earlier works.
A study guide to The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche, selected and translated, with an introduction, prefaces and notes, by Walter Kaufmann. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
How the volume builds
- Frame (Ch 1). Kaufmann's introduction: style, translation, the life, the misuse.
- Before Zarathustra (Ch 2 to 4). The young philologist, "On Truth and Lie", Human, All-Too-Human, The Dawn, The Gay Science and the death of God.
- Zarathustra (Ch 5 to 9). The Prologue and overman; the speeches; will to power and redemption; recurrence; the higher men.
- The last years (Ch 10 to 16). Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy in excerpt; Twilight; The Antichrist; Ecce Homo and the break with Wagner; the letters of madness.
| Work | How it appears | Chapters |
|---|---|---|
| Thus Spoke Zarathustra | complete, four parts | 5 to 9 |
| Twilight of the Idols | complete | 11 to 12 |
| The Antichrist | complete (sections 1 to 62) | 13 to 14 |
| Nietzsche contra Wagner | complete | 15 |
| Early and middle works, BGE, Genealogy, Ecce Homo | selections | 2 to 4, 10, 15 |
| Letters and notes | selections, 1865 to 1889 | 2 to 4, 10, 16 |
What is whole and what is excerpted. The weighting toward Zarathustra and 1888 is Kaufmann's choice.
Portable arc.
Signature moves.
Edition fork.
Core contrasts.
Selections read in full
Kaufmann Introduction; Early selections 1865-1882 (shared across Ch2-4); Zarathustra book frame + First Part header + Prologue; Z Speeches; Z II; Z III; Z IV; Letters + BGE/GS V/GM/Wagner Case excerpts; Twilight (full, across Ch11-12); Antichrist (full, across Ch13-14); Ecce Homo excerpts + Nietzsche contra Wagner; Letters 1889.
Kaufmann's Introduction
Kaufmann intro arc.
A philosopher who writes too well
Kaufmann opens with a typology: philosophers who can write, those who cannot, and the rare ones who write too well for their own good as philosophers. Plato wrote so dramatically that we will never be sure what he thought; Nietzsche is the modern case. His philosophy "can be determined", but reading him only to reconstruct ideas "would be obtuse pedantry". Two things come first: sheer enjoyment of the writing, then "the more harrowing experience of exposing oneself to his many passionate perspectives". We should not mistake a well-phrased point for his final position, yet we gain by asking "why it should not be ours".
- Against the anthologist's mirror. An anthologist can remake Nietzsche "in his own image", as lives of Jesus are often self-portraits. Nietzsche has attracted "crackpots and villains", perhaps no more than Jesus has; Kaufmann quotes Maritain: "what book has been more misused than the Bible?"
- Not an anthology. The book contains the complete texts of four works; the other selections round out his development and "inexhaustibility". It includes the admirable and the shocking: "bathos, sentences that invite quotation out of context in support of hideous causes, silly arguments", and abundant blasphemies. It is "no distillation and no whitewash".
- The arc. From "artless early notes" to brilliant aphorisms; the "gross unevenness" of Zarathustra; the incisive late prose; the "diabolical polemic and furious rhetoric" of The Antichrist; the calm of Nietzsche contra Wagner; and the last letters after the breakdown. "The rest is silence."
Translating Nietzsche
| Problem | Kaufmann's choice | Reason given |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Keep Nietzsche's unusual rhythms, even when groping | Smoothness would hide the development of style and personality |
| Geist | Always "spirit" | Alternating spirit, mind, intellect, wit gives "smooth propositions, not Nietzsche"; religious overtones needed, though the sense is sometimes closer to esprit |
| Mitleid | Almost always "pity" | Aristotle, Spinoza and La Rochefoucauld were rendered as criticising "pity"; pity suggests obtrusiveness and condescension; it is Zarathustra's "final sin" in Part Four |
| Leitmotifs | Translate key words consistently | The books echo one another; Buber and Rosenzweig's Leitworte |
| Puns | Try to keep them | Dropping a pun makes a joke look solemn and feeds the myth of an austere Nietzsche |
Kaufmann's translation principles as stated in the Introduction.
Nietzsche wrote "with his blood": each book is part of the man, so all of them form a single work. Because publication brought almost no response, the books stayed "his own", like children who fail to find a place in the world; the self-quotations are partly self-advertisement but better read as leitmotifs. Kaufmann thinks no major writer is as biblical in this respect, and mocks a previous translator who turned publicans into "toll-gatherers", the Last Supper into "The Supper" and the "unknown god" into an "unfamiliar god". Nietzsche's style is "not Teutonic but European": he alludes from Homer to Dostoevski, avoids Eliot's patchwork, the cryptograms of the later Joyce and Toynbee's footnoted erudition, and almost always supplies a surface meaning.
The life in brief
Nietzsche's career as Kaufmann narrates it.
- Ritschl's letter. The Leipzig professor had never in thirty-nine years seen a young man "so mature as early": "the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists". "Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here." Basel ignored the "formal insufficiency" of no doctorate; Ritschl added that Nietzsche was "not at all a specifically political nature", with "no special tendre for Prussianism".
- Basel and the war. A younger colleague of Jacob Burckhardt and of Franz Overbeck, his lifelong friend, Nietzsche, now a Swiss subject, volunteered as a medical orderly in 1870 and came back in shattered health, then divided his time between Wagner at Tribschen and his first book.
- The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Tragedy was born of music and died of the rationalism incarnate in Socrates and evident in Euripides; its weakness was ten added sections on Wagner. F. M. Cornford later hailed it; most philologists found it preposterous. Its fame rests on the Apollinian and the Dionysian; later the Dionysian means "passion controlled as opposed to passion extirpated".
- Untimely Meditations. On David Strauss (1873), on history for life and on Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), on Wagner (1876). Kaufmann gives instead the almost complete Homer's Contest (1872).
- The break with Wagner. Bayreuth's cult, Wagner's jingoism and anti-Semitism, and his lack of interest in Nietzsche as a thinker caused the breach; Parsifal sealed it, not because it was Christian but because Nietzsche thought it insincere obeisance by a disciple of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer.
- Lou Salomé. In 1882 he hoped the twenty-one-year-old, born in St. Petersburg, might be his Plato; she preferred Paul Rée, later became Rilke's beloved and Freud's friend.
- Zarathustra and after. Kaufmann judges Zarathustra "less philosophic than ever", its thought "clouded and shrouded by an excess of adolescent emotion", owing its mass success "not least to its worst qualities". Beyond Good and Evil is more continuous than it looks; the Genealogy is three essays.
- The Will to Power. The book his sister published is "an utterly uncritical collection" of notes, "by no means" his main work. In 1888 came The Wagner Case, Twilight, The Antichrist (first of four planned parts of a Revaluation of All Values), Ecce Homo and, on Christmas Day, Nietzsche contra Wagner; less than two weeks later he broke down.
Misuse and influence
Nietzsche's real career began after his active life ended. Kaufmann distrusts the word influence, which simplifies history "after the manner of Procrustes". His central claim: "no other German writer of equal stature has been so thoroughly opposed to all proto-nazism", which Nietzsche met in Wagner's tracts and in his brother-in-law Bernhard Förster. Nazi citations required "incredible misquotation and exegetical acrobatics". His sister helped, but so did his love of a bon mot: he invented slogans for hostile positions and filled them with a different spirit ("the will to power", "the overman", "beyond good and evil"). "Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does" aimed at Hume, Bentham and Mill, yet may have fed Hitler's misconception of the English as effete.
Nietzsche's orientation, Kaufmann says, citing Ecce Homo, "was fundamentally anti-political"; his concern was the individual dissatisfied with every "party".
Four marks of his achievement
Early Letters, Notes and Essays (1865-1875)
Early selection I.
Letter to his sister (Bonn, 1865)
The twenty-year-old answers his sister's principle that "truth is always on the side of the more difficult". He grants it only in part: it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is not 4, which does not make it true. But is it really harder to accept what one was raised on, what comforts the circle of good relatives, than to "strike new paths" amid insecurity and wavering conscience? The true inquirer seeks "only truth, even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly". Had we been raised to find salvation in Mohammed rather than Jesus, would we not feel the same blessings?
Notes, 1867-1871
- On Schopenhauer (1867). "The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
- On ethics (1868). Character is "an incurable disease"; an imperative ethics treats symptoms. The disposition already makes the murderer. There is an "ethical aristocracy" no title can buy. Popular ethics resembles the police: it suppresses bad expressions through religion's rewards and punishments, so "Thou shalt not kill!" makes sense but "Be good!" is as nonsensical as "Be talented!"
- Truth versus welfare. The "general welfare" is not truth's sphere. If suffering redeems, as Schopenhauer and Christianity teach, then regard for welfare would mean increasing it: consistent ethics becomes "consistent cruelty". Christianity unnerves by commanding respect for every magistrate and acceptance of suffering without resistance.
- Note (1870-71). A state that cannot reach its goal swells unnaturally: Rome's empire "is nothing sublime compared to Athens"; the strength stays in leaves and stem instead of the flower.
Homer's Contest (1872)
Humanity is not separate from nature: man "in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character", and his terrifying abilities may be the soil of all humanity. The Greeks, "the most humane men of ancient times", had "a tigerish lust to annihilate".
- Cruelty. Alexander dragging the living Batis of Gaza behind his carriage caricatures Achilles with Hector's corpse; the Corcyrean revolution; the execution of whole male citizenries and sale of women and children. Why did the Greeks exult over the combat scenes of the Iliad? We would shudder to understand them "in Greek".
- Behind Homer. Before Homer lie "night and terror": Hesiod's theogony thickened with "the gloomy voluptuousness of the Etruscans", where "combat is salvation". Greek law grew from murder and its expiation. Orpheus and Musaeus point toward disgust with existence and the identity of existence and guilt, a trait shared with India and the Orient, not specifically Hellenic.
- The two Eris. Hesiod calls one Eris evil (wars of annihilation) and praises another as good: jealousy and envy that spur men to contests. The Greek thinks envy "the gift of a beneficent godhead".
- Rivalry as culture. Xenophanes attacked Homer, and later Plato did too, from a craving to take the poet's place; Themistocles could not sleep for Miltiades' laurels; Pericles' opponent said "Even when I throw him down, he denies that he fell". Pindar and Simonides, sophist against sophist, the drama as wrestling: "Even the artist hates the artist." Plato's dialogues are a contest with orators, sophists and dramatists, ending in the repudiation of all imitative art.
- Ostracism. The Ephesians banished Hermodorus: "Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere." Ostracism was originally "a means of stimulation": it "desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius".
Hesiod's two goddesses of strife as Nietzsche reads them in Homer's Contest.
Notes, 1873: against the deification of success
"Deification of success is truly commensurate with human meanness": stupidity, wickedness and laziness always help. World history is, in Heraclitus's phrase, "a chaotic pile of rubbish"; "What is strong wins... If only it were not so often precisely what is stupid and evil!" Against Hegel's "reason in history", Nietzsche replies that we demand aims only of stories: "That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin; that I can posit an aim for myself is another matter." The state is only a means; its history is "the egoism of the masses", justified only by the few geniuses, like a blind hunter who finally hits a bird by accident.
"The damned folk soul!" By "German spirit" we mean Luther, Goethe, Schiller and a few others. Ascribing predicates to a people is always dangerous; Greek "folk" and Greek language cannot be brought together, the language's basis is Indo-Germanic, and "those of German race!" names nothing: earlier there was "only a terrible mixture".
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
"In some remote corner of the universe... there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history', yet only a minute."
- Vanity of the intellect. If we could talk to the mosquito, it too would feel itself "the flying center of the world"; the philosopher imagines the universe's eyes trained on him. The intellect was given to the weakest beings to hold them in existence; its chief power is simulation: flattery, masks, convention, "the single flame of vanity".
- Nature threw away the key. Man rests "upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous... hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger".
- Truth as peace pact. Out of need and boredom men live in herds and fix "a regularly valid and obligatory designation of things"; this linguistic legislation creates the contrast between truth and lie. Men hate not deception but its harmful consequences.
- Words and concepts. A word is "the image of a nerve stimulus in sounds": stimulus to image is the first metaphor, image to sound the second. Every concept equates the unequal: no leaf equals another, and "honesty" as the cause of honest acts means "the leaf is the cause of the leaves".
Notes on Wagner and culture (1874-1875)
- Wagner (January 1874). "If Goethe is a transposed painter and Schiller a transposed orator, then Wagner is a transposed actor." As a pamphleteer, "an orator without the power to convince"; he related himself to Schiller-Goethe, Beethoven, Luther, Shakespeare, Bismarck, but "invented the German spirit as opposed to the Romance".
- German culture (1874). "Political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful." One must be "ashamed of one's power"; slackening cultural tasks would turn German power "into the most revolting tyranny". The scholars' place must go to philalethes, lovers of truth.
- Two failures (1875). The political defeat of Greece taught that culture needs boxing gloves; the rise of Christianity let raw power and dull intellect defeat aristocratic genius. "Sparta was the ruin of Hellas."
- Against race theory. One cannot argue from languages to nationalities; "Where have there ever been autochthonous peoples?" Greekness comes from institutions and adopted language more than disposition.
- Credo. Man thinks the whirlpool of forces rational: "an error!" "The only happiness lies in reason"; the highest reason is in the work of the artist. Happiness lies in swiftness of feeling and thinking.
- Mission. "To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves!" "The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task."
Human, All-Too-Human and Its Sequels (1878-1881)
HH period.
Human, All-Too-Human (1878): method and religion
- Original error of philosophers (2). They treat contemporary man as "an eternal verity... a sure measure of things"; "Lack of a historical sense is the original error of all philosophers."
- Misunderstanding of the dream (5). In dreams primeval man thought he knew another real world: "here is the origin of all metaphysics", of body and soul, of spirits and probably gods. "The dead live on; for they appear to the living in dreams."
- Christianity as antiquity (113). Sunday bells growl for "a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son". A god begetting children with a mortal woman, the innocent as vicarious sacrifice, drinking his blood, sins against a god atoned for by a god: "Can one believe that such things are still believed?"
- The artist's sense of truth (146). The artist has "a weaker morality than the thinker" about truth: he defends the fantastic, mythical and extreme because his art needs them, not for man's dignity.
- Artists' ambition (170). Greek tragedians wrote to triumph, by Hesiod's good Eris. Aeschylus and Euripides were long unsuccessful until they had educated judges. Honour without merit is vanity; merit not caring for honour is pride.
- Small sayings. "It is neither the best nor the worst in a book that is untranslatable" (184). Poets present thoughts "on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk" (189).
Ennoblement through degeneration (224)
The same holds for individuals: the sick man in a warlike tribe grows calmer and wiser, the one-eyed has one stronger eye. So the struggle for existence is not the only explanation of progress. Education should set a person firmly on his path and then "wound him" so something noble can be inoculated. Machiavelli says duration matters more than the form of government; only secured duration allows ennobling inoculation, though authority resists it.
Reason, culture and party (265-361)
- Reason in the schools (265). Schools should teach "rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consistent inference" and leave religion alone. Nietzsche cites von Baer on Europeans' ability to give reasons, unlike "Asiatics"; in the Middle Ages Europe nearly became "an appendix of Asia" again.
- Inference (271). Correct inference is late and still not dominant, against Schopenhauer's "Of inference, all are capable"; myth, magic, cult and law are mines of false inferences.
- Many strings (281). Those with two strings, knowledge and religion, misread higher culture, as when art is taken for disguised religion.
- Party (298, 303). In every party one member, by "all-too-devout pronouncement", provokes apostasy; we often contradict only a tone.
- Socrates' experience (361). Masters are amateurs in most fields but judge "just the other way around".
Women, marriage, war and nations (380-475)
| Aphorism | Claim |
|---|---|
| 380 From the mother | Each man's image of woman comes from his mother |
| 390, 406 | Friendship with a woman is preserved by "a slight physical antipathy"; marriage as a long conversation |
| 407, 408 | Girls imagine they can make a man happy; educated Germans are Mephistopheles and Wagner, not Faust, so the Gretchens die out |
| 424 Future of marriage | A marriage of souls for raising children may need concubinage; Periclean men turned to the Aspasias |
| 444 War | It "makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant", but barbarizes into strength: "a sleep or a winter for culture" |
| 462 My utopia | Hard labour to those who suffer least from it, the most obtuse |
| 465 | "Culture owes its peaks to politically weak ages" |
Selected aphorisms from Human, All-Too-Human, sections 380-465.
Further maxims: "Public opinions, private lazinesses" (482). "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies" (483). Whoever thinks much "soon thinks himself right through the party" (579). Scientific method matters more than results: without it superstition returns, so everyone should study at least one science "from the bottom up" (635).
Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879)
- "The mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness" (77). "A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling" (202).
- "Love" (95). Christianity's subtlest artifice is a word: love made it "the lyrical religion", a find for those who miss love and "people with sublimated sexuality".
- Readers (129). The worst readers of aphorisms are the author's friends, who guess back to the particular occasion: "pot-peeking".
- Humaneness (231). "If thou wilt go toward morning, then I will go toward evening": without this feeling every friendship and discipleship becomes hypocrisy. Every master has one disciple, who becomes unfaithful, being destined for mastership (357).
- Stages of life (271). Schopenhauer's philosophy reflects "ardent and melancholy youth"; Plato's the middle thirties, hot and cold torrents making a rainbow.
- Solon (301). The party man no longer learns; Solon: "I grow old and always continue to learn."
The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880)
- "The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity" (38). Prohibitions without reasons, like the Decalogue's, suit "an age of subjugated reason" (48).
- Persecutor of God (85). Paul thought up, and Calvin re-thought, eternal damnation for the glory of God: "Paul has remained Saul after all."
- Socrates (86). One day the memorabilia of Socrates will replace the Bible, with Montaigne and Horace as guides; above Christ he has "the gay kind of seriousness and that wisdom full of pranks", "Moreover, he had the greater intelligence."
- The Faust idea (124). A seamstress seduced by a great scholar with the devil's aid: the German "tragic idea", which Goethe's mild heart softened by sending both to heaven.
- Classical and romantic (217): visions of the future from strength or from weakness. Beggars live because the greatest giver of alms is cowardice (240). A letter is "an unannounced visit" (261).
- Education (267, 282). "There are no educators"; the thinker speaks only of self-education; teachers, like shopkeepers, are "a necessary evil".
Letter and notes (1879-1881)
From Naumburg (November 1879) Nietzsche tells Overbeck his mother read him Gogol, Lermontov, Bret Harte, Twain and Poe, and offers him Tom Sawyer. Notes of 1880-81 analyse the "immoral" girl who loses her virginity: what is despised is not imprudence or disobedience but "the weakness of her fear". "Being moral means being highly accessible to fear. Fear is the power by which the community is preserved"; mores hide behind divine punishments, so the atheist seemed infinitely evil, and as communities grow peaceful, "the refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear". Two short notes: "One hardly dares speak any more of the will to power: it was different in Athens", and a physiological speculation that reabsorbed semen fuels the feeling of power, highest in abstinent priests like the Brahmins.
The Dawn and The Gay Science (1881-1882)
Dawn/GS.
The Dawn (1881): Paul and the Christian passions
- Thinking evil makes evil (76). Christianity turned Eros and Aphrodite into "hellish goblins" and linked procreation with bad conscience; the result was comic: the "devil" Eros became more interesting than all the saints, making the love story everyone's only shared interest.
- The philology of Christianity (84). Christian scholars say "I am right, for it is written" with impudent arbitrariness; preachers exploit the fact that nobody can interrupt them. The Church pulled the Hebrew scriptures from under the Jews, finding the wood of the cross in every switch, ladder, twig and staff: "Has anybody who claimed this ever believed it?"
- Becoming moral (97, 101). Submission to morality may be slavish, vain or resigned: "in itself it is nothing moral". Accepting a faith because it is customary is dishonest, cowardly and lazy.
- Reason (123). Reason came into the world "in an irrational manner, by accident".
- Perhaps premature (164). "There is no morality that alone makes moral." The deviants, often the inventive ones, "shall no longer be sacrificed"; "numerous new experiments of life and society shall be made".
The Dawn: work, state and Germans
- Eulogists of work (173). Praise of work hides "the fear of everything individual": work is "the best police", using up nervous energy that might go to reflection, love and hatred; security is "adored as the supreme goddess", and "the danger of dangers" is the individual.
- As little state as possible (179). Politics and economics are "fields of work for the lesser heads"; to make the state "Providence" is a low goal. "Our time... squanders what is most precious, the spirit."
- Esprit and morality (193). Germans "know the secret of being boring" and feel boredom as moral; Hegel, who had the most esprit, wrapped a witty core in veil after veil, creating his bad style.
- German hostility to the Enlightenment (197). German philosophers revived prescientific concept-mongering; historians and romantics honoured Christianity, the folk soul, medievalism and "Indianism"; natural scientists fought Newton and Voltaire. Kant aimed "to open the way again for faith by showing knowledge its limits". But history and feeling have turned into new geniuses of the Enlightenment: "This Enlightenment we must now advance further."
- Of the people of Israel (205). The next century will decide the fate of Europe's Jews. Treated contemptibly for two thousand years and pushed into "the dirtier trades", they never ceased to believe in their calling; their family and marital customs "distinguish them above all Europeans". When Israel transforms "its eternal revenge into an eternal blessing for Europe", the seventh day will come again.
- The impossible class (206). Higher pay cannot abolish workers' "impersonal serfdom": "Phew! to have a price for which one remains a person no longer but becomes a gear!" Against the "socialistic pied pipers" Nietzsche urges emigration in the grand manner: "Let Europe relieve itself of the fourth part of its inhabitants!", protest against the machine, capital, and the choice between slavery to the state or to a revolutionary party.
- Maxims. The surest way to corrupt a youth: teach him to esteem those who think alike over those who think differently (297). "The good four": honest, courageous toward the enemy, generous to the vanquished, polite always (556). "The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes" (573).
Postcard to Overbeck (Sils Maria, July 30, 1881)
"I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor": Spinoza. His tendency, "making knowledge the most powerful affect", is Nietzsche's, and he shares five doctrines: Spinoza "denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil". "My lonesomeness... is now at least a twosomeness." He adds: six severe attacks already; he must have clear skies for months.
The Gay Science (1882)
Kaufmann notes that the English title "Joyful Wisdom" is "a mistranslation", and that aphorisms 285 and 341 are among the first statements of eternal recurrence.
- What preserves the species (4). "The strongest and most evil spirits have so far advanced humanity the most"; "The new is always the evil"; the good are husbandmen of the spirit, but all land is exhausted and "the plow of evil must always return". The English doctrine that good means expedient for the species is wrong: evil urges preserve it as much, with a different function.
- For the industrious (7). There is no history yet of love, avarice, envy, conscience, piety or cruelty, no philosophy of nourishment.
- Historia abscondita (34). Every great human being has "a retroactive force": the past may still be essentially undiscovered.
- Small pieces. Kant wanted to prove, for scholars and not popularly, "that the common man was right" (193). The witches' guilt was nonexistent though all believed it: "It is thus with all guilt" (250).
The structure of The Madman (Gay Science 125).
- Preparatory men (283). A more warlike age should honour valour and prepare "heroism into the pursuit of knowledge". "The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius!... Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!"
- Excelsior! (285). "You will never pray again"; no guardian for your seven solitudes, no avenger, no reason in what happens; "you want the eternal recurrence of war and peace". A lake that dammed its outflow rises higher: "perhaps man will rise ever higher when he once ceases to flow out into a god".
- One thing is needful (290). "'Giving style' to one's character, a great and rare art": survey strengths and weaknesses and fit them to an artistic plan, hiding or reinterpreting the ugly. The strong enjoy "constraint and perfection under a law of their own"; the weak hate style. "Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor."
- Will and wave (310). The greedy waves digging for treasure: "thus live we who will... You and I, do we not have one secret?"
- Interpreters of our experiences (319). Founders of religions never made their experiences "a matter of conscience for knowledge"; "We ourselves want to be our experiments and guinea pigs."
- The dying Socrates (340). "This mocking and enamored monster and pied piper of Athens" was as great in his silence.
The section closes with a fragment from a draft letter to Paul Rée (1882) about Lou: "She told me herself that she had no morality, and I thought she had, like myself, a more severe morality than anybody."
Zarathustra: Kaufmann's Preface and the Prologue
Prologue arc.
Kaufmann's preface: the work of a lonely man
- Publication. The first three parts, "each composed in about ten days", barely sold; Part Four was printed privately, and its first public edition was held up in 1891 for fear of a blasphemy charge. It appeared in 1892, unconfiscated, while Nietzsche was insane.
- The author. "The most important single clue to Zarathustra is that it is the work of an utterly lonely man." Kaufmann quotes Stefan Zweig's picture: a shy, nearly blind man in modest boarding houses at Sils Maria, Nizza, Mentone, Rome and Turin, with one trunk, two shirts, a tray of drugs against migraine and insomnia (chloral hydrate and Veronal), writing for hours until his eyes burn.
- Letters and histrionics. His letters are sometimes "fantastic fragments out of the soul's dialogue with itself": appeals to honour, an imagined pistol duel, hasty marriage proposals followed by relief at refusal. The young Dr. Paneth, who met him at Nizza on December 26, 1883, found "not a trace of false pathos or the prophet's pose".
- The verdict. "Often painfully adolescent emotions distract our attention from ideas that we cannot dismiss as immature at all." Zarathustra "still cries out to be blue-penciled", yet it abounds in "sapphires in the mud", and it is "a uniquely personal record".
- Laughter. "Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?" The blend of sublime and ridiculous sits between the Second Part of Faust and Joyce's Ulysses, and explains Nietzsche's love of Heine; it contradicts the sister's grim image, Zweig's piteous one, and Bertram's "Attempt at a Mythology" from the circle of Stefan George.
The one idea Kaufmann singles out is the eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche in Ecce Homo called "the basic conception of the work", striking him in August 1881. Read as a Darwinist expecting evolutionary improvement, Nietzsche seemed to contradict himself, but he rejected that reading as the work of "scholarly oxen". He was wrong to think recurrence a necessary result of science; its meaning was personal, "the highest formula of affirmation". Hardest was not his own recurrence but the small man's.
Kaufmann's note to the Prologue and Part One
Faith in God is "dead as a matter of cultural fact"; it is now up to man to give life meaning. Kaufmann rejects Shaw's "superman", tied now to the comics, and keeps "overman" to stress the link with self-overcoming and the play of "over" and "under". Untergehen, the sun's setting and "to perish", becomes "go under". Mensch means human as opposed to animal: not "a super-brute" but a human being who earns the cosmic position the Bible gave him by birthright, in "the few" who rise above the mass. The first edition titled the Prologue "On the Overman and the Last Man", whom Kaufmann compares to Huxley's Brave New World and Heidegger's Das Man.
The Prologue (sections 1-10)
The action of Zarathustra's Prologue.
At thirty Zarathustra went into the mountains; after ten years he addresses the sun: "You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?" Weary of his wisdom "like a bee that has gathered too much honey", he must descend like the sun at evening: "Thus Zarathustra began to go under." In the forest an old saint who loves God, not man, advises alms; "I give no alms. For that I am not poor enough." They part laughing "as two boys laugh"; alone, Zarathustra marvels: "This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!"
- Sin against the earth. Once the sin against God was greatest; "but God died, and these sinners died with him". The soul once wanted the body "meager, ghastly, and starved". "A polluted stream is man. One must be a sea" to receive it without becoming unclean.
- The great contempt. The greatest experience is the hour when happiness, reason, virtue, justice and pity all seem "poverty and filth and wretched contentment"; "Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man?" The overman is "this lightning, he is this frenzy". The crowd, thinking him the advertiser, calls for the tightrope walker.
- The rope (section 4). "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." A litany of "I love him who..." follows: the great despisers who are great reverers, those who sacrifice themselves for the earth, him whose virtue is "his addiction and his catastrophe", him who is abashed when the dice favour him, the "heavy drops" heralding lightning.
The jester in motley overtakes the tightrope walker in mid-rope and leaps over him; the walker falls beside Zarathustra, fearing the devil. "There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body." "You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that." Zarathustra carries the corpse: "To men I am still the mean between a fool and a corpse." The jester warns him that the good and the just and "the believers in the true faith" hate him; gravediggers mock; a hermit gives bread and wine to "a living and a dead man".
At noon a new truth comes: "companions I need, living ones", who "follow me because they want to follow themselves". The good and the just hate most "the man who breaks their tables of values... yet he is the creator". He seeks "fellow creators... fellow harvesters and fellow celebrants". An eagle circles with a serpent wound round its neck "like a friend", "the proudest animal under the sun and the wisest", and he asks that his pride go with his wisdom, and with his folly when wisdom flies.
Zarathustra, First Part: The Speeches
Z I speeches.
The three metamorphoses
The three metamorphoses. Kaufmann: the break with norms is constructive only after the discipline of tradition, as with Beethoven, and "parting from our cause when it triumphs" recalls Nietzsche leaving Wagner at Bayreuth.
Sleep, afterworlds and the body
- Teachers of virtue. A praised sage teaches how to sleep well: ten overcomings, ten reconciliations, ten truths and ten laughs a day; "Honor the magistrates and obey them, even the crooked magistrates"; "Blessed are the poor in spirit... especially if one always tells them that they are right". Zarathustra concludes that traditional sages sought "opiate virtues": "Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon drop off." Kaufmann quotes Zweig on Nietzsche's own sleeplessness and fifty grams of chloral hydrate in two months.
- The afterworldly. Zarathustra once saw the world as "colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity", but "this god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods". "It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds", and "weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap". The ego "speaks of the body"; he teaches "an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth", and honours honesty, "that youngest among the virtues". Kaufmann notes the "leap" sounds aimed at Kierkegaard, of whom Nietzsche heard only in 1888.
Kaufmann adds that the term "ego" here influenced Freud by way of Georg Groddeck.
Passions, the criminal, reading
- Enjoying and suffering the passions. A virtue that is truly yours is nameless: stammer "This is my good". "Once you suffered passions and called them evil. But now you have only your virtues left: they grew out of your passions." Wild dogs in the cellar become birds; "You milked your cow, melancholy". One virtue is better than many, since virtues are jealous and can "deny and stab" themselves. Kaufmann contrasts Kant's "a collision of duties is unthinkable".
- And madness before: "his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife", and his poor reason made him rob. Say "enemy" not villain, "sick" not scoundrel. Kaufmann sees Raskolnikov before Nietzsche had read Dostoevski.
- Reading and writing. "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood." "Another century of readers, and the spirit itself will stink." Aphorisms should be peaks. "Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?" "I would believe only in a god who could dance"; his devil is "the spirit of gravity: through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter."
The tree, the preachers of death, war
A youth who avoids Zarathustra sits under a tree: "The more he aspires to the height and light, the more strongly do his roots strive earthward... into evil." The youth confesses that "the envy of you" destroyed him. Zarathustra warns that the noble man's danger is not to become one of the good "but a churl, a mocker, a destroyer": "do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!"
The preachers of death come in many colours: the terrible ones with a beast of prey inside, the consumptives of soul who see a sick man, an old man or a corpse and cry "Life is refuted" (Kaufmann recalls the Buddha's departure), the preachers of "Lust is sin" and "Pity is needed", and those for whom life is "furious work and unrest", whose industry "is escape and the will to forget yourselves".
The new idol and the market place
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'"
Creators made peoples and "hung a faith and a love over them"; annihilators set traps and call them state. Every people speaks its own tongue of good and evil, but the state "tells lies in all the tongues". "For the superfluous the state was invented": it roars "the ordering finger of God am I" and lures even the "vanquishers of the old god". The superfluous steal the works of inventors and call it "education"; "they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper"; they clamber to the throne, "as if happiness sat on the throne". "Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous... the rainbow and the bridges of the overman." Kaufmann: "Straight anti-fascism", though in no rival creed's name: anti-political.
The flies of the market place: flee to solitude from "the noise of the great men" and the stings of the little. Around inventors of new values the world revolves invisibly; around actors revolve "the people and fame". The actor "believes only in gods who make a big noise". The small "punish you for all your virtues. They forgive you entirely, your mistakes"; "It is not your lot to shoo flies." Kaufmann reads Bayreuth against Sils Maria, adding that today we think rather of Hitler.
Chastity, friend, goals, neighbour
- On chastity. "I counsel the innocence of the senses." Chastity "is a virtue in some, but almost a vice in many": the "bitch, sensuality" begs for a piece of spirit when denied meat, and lust may call itself pity.
- On the friend. For the hermit the friend is "the third", the cork that keeps "I and me" from sinking. "In a friend one should have one's best enemy." "Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends." The speech declares woman "not yet capable of friendship... cats and birds. Or at best, cows", then turns: "who among you men is capable of friendship?"
On love of the neighbour. "Your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves." "Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future." "I teach you not the neighbor, but the friend", in whom "you shall love the overman as your cause". Kaufmann argues the polemic is "profoundly similar to Jesus'", who attacked comfortable virtue, not the Mosaic commandment.
The creator, women, adder, marriage, death
- The way of the creator. "Free from what?... your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?" Can you be "your own judge and avenger of your law"? Beware "the good and the just!" who "like to crucify" self-inventors, and "holy simplicity", which plays with the stake. "You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!"
- Little old and young women. "Everything about woman is a riddle... one solution: that is pregnancy." "Man should be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior." The old woman's parting "little truth": "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!" Kaufmann points to the diminutive Weiblein, to the mockery of this line in Part Three, and to the photograph Nietzsche staged of himself and Paul Rée pulling a cart with Lou holding a flower-decked whip; yet he concedes the remarks on women are "more often than not, second-hand and third-rate".
- The adder's bite. Bitten under a fig tree, Zarathustra refuses the poison: "You are not rich enough to give it to me." Moral: "if you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame"; "A little revenge is more human than no revenge"; "where is that justice which is love with open eyes?" "I give each my own." Kaufmann sets it against Romans 12 and calls it an attack on ressentiment.
- Child and marriage. "Are you a man entitled to wish for a child?" "You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce something higher": marriage is "the will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it". Most marriages are "this wretched contentment in pair", "when a saint mates with a goose".
- Free death. "Die at the right time!" "Verily, that Hebrew died too early whom the preachers of slow death honor": had Jesus reached Zarathustra's age, "he himself would have recanted his teaching". Kaufmann sees Socrates' death preferred to Jesus', and notes Nietzsche's own death took eleven years.
The gift-giving virtue
Leaving The Motley Cow, Zarathustra receives a staff with a golden handle, "a serpent coiled around the sun". Gold has the highest value because it is "uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle", always giving itself: "a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue." Such love approaches all values "as a robber; but whole and holy I call this selfishness", unlike the "sick selfishness" that says "Everything for me". "All names of good and evil are parables." "Remain faithful to the earth... Indeed, an experiment was man." "You that are lonely today... shall one day be the people... and out of them, the overman."
Zarathustra, Second Part
Kaufmann's frame
Kaufmann prefaces Part Two with twenty-two numbered notes. They work as a reader's map, but they also grade: On the Pitying, On the Tarantulas and On Self-Overcoming are "high points"; On Immaculate Perception is "a mismatch of message and metaphor"; the narrative of On Great Events is "at least debatable" as an achievement. Two notes carry real scholarship: the pun of On the Virtuous ("ich bin gerecht" sounding like "ich bin gerächt", I am just, I am revenged) and the Goethe allusions, since the final chorus of Faust ("What is destructible / Is but a parable... The Eternal-Feminine / Lures to perfection") is parodied in "all that is permanent is only a parable" and in On Poets.
| Group | Chapters | Kaufmann's tag |
|---|---|---|
| Return | Child with the Mirror; Blessed Isles | new style; "God is a conjecture" |
| Polemics | Pitying; Priests; Virtuous; Rabble; Tarantulas; Famous Wise Men | pity, ressentiment, "delivered from revenge" |
| Songs | Night Song; Dancing Song; Tomb Song | "Light am I"; life and wisdom as jealous women |
| Philosophy | Self-Overcoming; Those Who Are Sublime | will to power; grace |
| Culture | Land of Education; Immaculate Perception; Scholars; Poets | eclecticism; detachment; "Nietzsche's autobiography" |
| Crisis | Great Events; Soothsayer; Redemption; Human Prudence; Stillest Hour | anti-political; recurrence approached but not spoken |
Part Two's twenty-two chapters grouped, with the gist of Kaufmann's notes.
Return: the mirror and the blessed isles
Years pass in the cave. A child shows Zarathustra a mirror and he sees "a devil's grimace": "my teaching is in danger; weeds pose as wheat". He leaps up, "wounded by my happiness", and announces a new speech: "My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles." Even his enemies "are part of my bliss".
The speech also condemns "all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent" as "the turning sickness", and asks that the best parables "speak of time and becoming", "a praise and a justification of all impermanence".
Pity and priests
- On the pitying. To the knower man is "the animal with red cheeks": "shame, shame, shame, that is the history of man." "If I must pity, at least I do not want it known." "Man has felt too little joy: that alone... is our original sin." "Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful." "The bite of conscience teaches men to bite." "Even evil deeds are better than petty thoughts": a boil "speaks honestly", a fungus rots silently. And the devil's word: "God is dead; God died of his pity for man."
- On priests. "Pass by them silently and with sleeping swords... my blood is related to theirs." "Would that someone would yet redeem them from their Redeemer!" Churches are "sweet-smelling caves" of "Crawl up the stairs on your knees". "His disciples would have to look more redeemed!" "Blood is the worst witness of truth." Ends: "Never yet has there been an overman... even the greatest I found all-too-human." Kaufmann calls it "relatively mild" next to The Antichrist.
The virtuous and the rabble
"You who are virtuous still want to be paid!" Zarathustra teaches no "reward and paymaster", "not even that virtue is its own reward"; "that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child". Then a catalogue: virtue as "the spasm under the scourge", as vices grown lazy, as a brake, as cheap clocks "that must be wound", as "sitting still in a swamp", as gestures, as the belief "only that the police is necessary".
On the rabble. "Life is a well of joy; but where the rabble drinks too, all wells are poisoned." "Does life require even the rabble?" "Not my hatred but my nausea gnawed hungrily at my life"; "I often grew weary of the spirit when I found that even the rabble had esprit." He flies to heights where "the fount of pleasure wells up", builds a nest "on the tree, Future", and warns: "Beware of spitting against the wind!" Kaufmann links nausea to Sartre's La Nausée and calls its conquest Zarathustra's "greatest triumph".
On the Tarantulas: the same word "justice" claimed by two opposed wills.
The famous wise men served "the people and the superstition of the people, and not truth"; they are asses pulling the people's cart, "even when they shine in harnesses of gold". The truthful live in "godless deserts": "Hungry, violent, lonely, godless: thus the lion-will wants itself." And: "Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own agony it increases its own knowledge." Kaufmann answers the apparent clash with Part One's "spirit as toy": both are metaphors, and Nietzsche rejects "any crude dualism of body and spirit".
Three songs
- The Night Song. "Light am I; ah, that I were night!" The giver's loneliness: "I do not know the happiness of those who receive"; "There is a cleft between giving and receiving"; "My happiness in giving died in giving." Every sun moves "cold against suns". It closes: "And my soul too is the song of a lover."
- The Dancing Song. Zarathustra finds girls dancing and asks them not to stop: "the devil is the spirit of gravity." Life mocks him for calling her unfathomable: "Thus runs the speech of all fish." Wisdom says angrily, "You will, you want, you love, that is the only reason why you praise life." "Deeply I love only life, and verily, most of all when I hate life." Evening follows: "Is it not folly still to be alive?"
- The Tomb Song. On "the isle of tombs" lie the visions of his youth, killed by enemies who stole his nights and made "my dearest singer" strike "a horrible dismal tune" as he was about to dance. "In me there is something invulnerable and unburiable... that is my will." "Invulnerable am I only in the heel." "Only where there are tombs are there resurrections."
On Self-Overcoming
Self-overcoming as the speech describes it. Kaufmann concedes that philosophically it "raises many difficulties" and sends readers to his own Nietzsche.
On those who are sublime guards against heroics. The "ascetic of the spirit" is "decked out with ugly truths" and thorns, "yet I saw no rose". "All of life is a dispute over taste." "Gracefulness is part of the graciousness of the great-souled." "When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible, such descent I call beauty." "Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you"; "I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws." Kaufmann calls these three sentences "a wonderfully concise statement" of the whole philosophy.
Culture: education, perception, scholars, poets
- The land of education. The men of today have "fifty blotches painted on your faces", "paintings of all that men have ever believed", "walking refutations of all belief". "Rather would I be a day laborer in Hades" (Achilles in the Odyssey, per Kaufmann); their reality is "Everything deserves to perish" (Mephistopheles). He loves only "my children's land".
- Immaculate perception. The moon is a lecherous monk on the roofs; "pure perceivers" who want "to look at life without desire" are "lechers" ashamed of their entrails. "Where is innocence? Where there is a will to procreate." "Loving and perishing: that has rhymed for eternities." Kaufmann keeps the feminine sun of the German and notes the words do not rhyme there either.
- On scholars. A sheep eats his ivy wreath: "Zarathustra is no longer a scholar." Scholars "knit the socks of the spirit", are "good clockworks", play "with loaded dice"; they laid "false ceilings" between them and him. Kaufmann: "Nietzsche's, not Zarathustra's, autobiography."
- On poets. "Faith does not make me blessed, especially not faith in me." "The poets lie too much... But Zarathustra too is a poet." Gods and overmen are "our motley bastards" placed on clouds. The poet's spirit is "the peacock of peacocks", craving spectators "even if only buffaloes"; "I saw ascetics of the spirit approach; they grew out of the poets."
Crisis: great events to the stillest hour
On great events. Seamen hunting rabbits see Zarathustra fly into a volcano crying "It is time! It is high time!" He returns on the fifth day to report his talk with the fire hound, the overthrow-devil: "the greatest events, they are not our loudest but our stillest hours." "Church? ... That is a kind of state, the most mendacious kind." The hound says "bow-wow" and slinks off. Kaufmann hears the white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland.
The soothsayer preaches "All is empty, all is the same, all has been!" Zarathustra fasts three days and dreams he guards coffins in the "mountain castle of death" until a black coffin bursts with "a thousandfold laughter". The favourite disciple says Zarathustra is himself the wind and the coffin; Zarathustra orders a good meal and shakes his head at the interpreter.
The argument of On Redemption, which Kaufmann says leads up to, but stops short of, the eternal recurrence.
On human prudence gives three rules: let yourself be deceived rather than guard against deceivers; "I spare the vain more than the proud", for they are good actors and "physicians of my melancholy"; and do not let timidity spoil the sight of evil, since "the overman should not lack his dragon, the overdragon". "I guess that you would call my overman devil."
The stillest hour speaks "without voice": "You know it, Zarathustra, but you do not say it!" "Speak your word and break!" "Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world." "Your fruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit." He weeps loudly and leaves his friends by night.
Zarathustra, Third Part
Kaufmann's frame
Kaufmann's sixteen notes are frank about quality. He finds "sentimentality" beside the praise of hardness, judges that in On Apostates Zarathustra is "often little better than his ape", calls Old and New Tablets uneven (section 12's crusade puns), and suggests "the discipline of communication might have served the philosopher better than the indiscriminate flattery of his solitude". He again quotes Zweig, this time on Nietzsche's weather-sensitive nerves: "overcast skies depress me deeply", and only the windless Engadine steadies "the quivering barometer needle".
The wanderer and the vision
At midnight Zarathustra crosses the island's ridge. "In the end, one experiences only oneself." "Peak and abyss, they are now joined together"; "you must know how to climb on your own head"; "Praised be what hardens!" Then, pitying the sleeping sea, he laughs at himself, "you loving fool", and weeps.
The vision and the riddle. Kaufmann calls it Zarathustra's first account of the eternal recurrence, followed by "a proto-surrealistic vision of a triumph over nausea".
On involuntary bliss: in the "afternoon of my life" he wants to plant his children apart, "a living lighthouse of invincible life", but still cannot summon his "abysmal thought". Happiness pursues him all night: "That is because I do not run after women. For happiness is a woman."
Before sunrise and the small people
Kaufmann notes the first appearance here of the phrase "beyond good and evil" and of a line of the Drunken Song.
On virtue that makes small. Seeing a row of new houses, Zarathustra says "Everything has become smaller!" The small people "want contentment"; "I serve, you serve, we serve" prays even the hypocrisy of rulers; "they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal"; mediocrity is "called moderation". He answers: "Yes, I am Zarathustra the godless!" and gives the formula: "Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will. Do love your neighbor as yourself, but first be such as love themselves." Kaufmann: Nietzsche cares "not [for] a code of morals but a kind of man".
Upon the Mount of Olives praises winter, a cold bath and "my long bright silence"; the jealous moan, "The ice of knowledge will yet freeze him to death!" Kaufmann sets this beside Stefan George's poem on Nietzsche's death.
The ape, the apostates, the return
- On passing by. At the gate of the great city "Zarathustra's ape" foams against newspapers, courtiers and "the city of shopkeepers". Zarathustra stops him: "I despise your despising"; "all your foaming is revenge". Lesson: "where one can no longer love, there one should pass by."
- On apostates. "We have become pious again." "It is a disgrace to pray! Not for everybody, but for you and me." The old gods "laughed themselves to death" when a jealous one said "Thou shalt have no other god before me!": "Is not just this godlike that there are gods but no God?"
- The return home. Solitude speaks like a mother: "To be forsaken is one thing, to be lonely, another." "On every parable you ride to every truth." Below, "everyone talks and no one listens"; his greatest dangers were "consideration and pity". "My soul sneezes... Gesundheit!"
On the three evils
In a dream he weighed the world, "a humanly good thing". Then he weighs the three most slandered things.
| "Evil" | To its slanderers | To the free and strong |
|---|---|---|
| Sex (Wollust) | thorn and stake of despisers of the body; the rabble's slow fire | "the garden happiness of the earth"; for the lion-willed, "the reverently reserved wine of wines" |
| Lust to rule | "scalding scourge", "the terrible teacher of the great contempt" | when "what is high longs downward for power": the "gift-giving virtue" |
| Selfishness | "selfless" is what world-weary cowards and priests wanted | "wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul"; it spits on the servile |
On the Three Evils. Kaufmann renders Wollust as "sex" throughout, arguing it is the only English word that fits every sentence.
On the spirit of gravity. "Whoever would become light and a bird must love himself", "with a wholesome and healthy love"; it is "of all arts the subtlest". Man carries "too much that is alien to him", camel-like. He has discovered himself "who says, 'This is my good and evil'", silencing the dwarf's "Good for all, evil for all". "One cannot fly into flying." And: "'This is my way; where is yours?'... For the way, that does not exist."
On old and new tablets
Thirty sections, "surrounded by broken old tablets and new tablets half covered with writing", gather the book's themes.
- 3 to 5: man "a bridge and no end"; "do not spare your neighbor"; "What you do, nobody can do to you in turn. Behold, there is no retribution"; noble souls "do not want to have anything for nothing".
- 7 to 10: "Good men never speak the truth"; "Alongside the bad conscience, all science has grown"; the thawing wind breaks the winter doctrine "At bottom everything stands still"; "'Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill!'... where have there ever been better robbers and killers than such holy words?"
- 11 to 12: a "great despot" might rewrite the past as a bridge to himself; the rabble think back only to the grandfather. Hence a new nobility: "Not whence you come... but whither you are going!" Love "your children's land".
- 16 to 20: "To will liberates, for to will is to create." "To the incurable, one should not try to be a physician." "What is falling, we should still push... he whom you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster!"
- 21 to 26: "the best should rule"; "Thus I want man and woman: the one fit for war, the other fit to give birth"; "every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh"; "a little marriage" on probation; "Human society is a trial... and not a 'contract'"; the good "must crucify him who invents his own virtue".
- 29: "'Why so hard?' the kitchen coal once said to the diamond." "This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!" Kaufmann notes it reappears at the end of Twilight.
The convalescent
Nausea, nausea, nausea." He lies seven days among berries and two stolen lambs. His animals chant: "Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being... Bent is the path of eternity." He calls them "buffoons and barrel organs". "Words and sounds" are "rainbows and illusive bridges". "Man is the cruelest animal"; "man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him". The snake was disgust: "'Eternally recurs the man of whom you are weary, the small man.'" The animals name his destiny, "the teacher of the eternal recurrence": "I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest."
From The Convalescent to The Seven Seals. Kaufmann notes Zarathustra himself still does not state the doctrine; the animals do.
Longing, the other dancing song, the seals
On the great longing is a litany ("O my soul, I...") in which he has given his soul everything; she asks "Which of us has to be thankful?", and he asks her to sing. In The Other Dancing Song he chases life, gets "two red blotches" on his face, threatens a whip; life says they found their island "beyond good and evil" and knows he thinks of leaving her when the midnight bell rings. He whispers something in her ear ("Nobody knows that"); Kaufmann reads it as his eternal recurrence. They weep together. The bell's twelve strokes frame the song: "The world is deep... Deep is its woe; Joy, deeper yet than agony... But all joy wants eternity."
Zarathustra, Fourth and Last Part
Z IV.
Kaufmann's frame
Kaufmann stresses that Part Four "was originally intended as an intermezzo, not as the end of the book", and that it is "a new stylistic experiment" held together "by a unity of plot and a pervasive sense of humor". His key claim is that "all the characters are caricatures of Nietzsche", and that Zarathustra's own grating personality is partly deliberate malice: Nietzsche did not want to be "a new idol". He quotes Ecce Homo: "I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon." The model is "a Shakespearean fool rather than the founder of a new cult".
| Encounter | Who | What he holds of Zarathustra | What he lacks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kings | two kings and an ass | nausea at "good society"; love of "the good war" | "very peaceful kings with old and fine faces" |
| The leech | the conscientious in spirit | "Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life" | knows only "the brain of the leech" |
| The magician | Nietzsche and Wagner blended | plays "the ascetic of the spirit" | "I am not great" |
| Retired | the last pope | sees God died of pity | still needs to adore |
| Ugliest man | murderer of God | "Pity is obtrusive" | revenge on the witness |
| Voluntary beggar | a gentle sermonizer | disgust with "mob above and mob below" | learns happiness from cows |
| The shadow | the free spirit | "Nothing is true, all is permitted" | has lost his goal and home |
Kaufmann: each of the seven encounters shows a man who accepted part of the teaching "without, however, embodying the type he envisages". The soothsayer and the ass complete the guest list.
The honey sacrifice and the cry
Years later, his hair white, Zarathustra climbs a mountain for a "honey sacrifice", then admits it was cunning: the honey is bait. "I am through and through: reeling, reeling in... a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are!" He speaks of "our great Hazar... the Zarathustra kingdom of a thousand years". Next day the soothsayer returns: "All is the same, nothing is worth while." A long cry rises from below. Zarathustra asks his "final sin", and the soothsayer answers: "Pity!... It is the higher man that cries for you!"
The seven encounters
- The kings. "Two kings I see, and only one ass!" The king at the right is nauseated by "our gilded, false, painted mob", "saint and scamp and Junker and Jew"; "the peasant type should be master". "Man's fate knows no harsher misfortune than when those who have power on earth are not also the first men." Zarathustra improvises a rhyme in which the Sibyl laments "The Caesars became beasts, and God, a Jew!" The kings quote his "good war" lines back, but are plainly peaceful.
- The leech. Zarathustra steps on a man lying in a swamp with his arm bitten by leeches: "the conscientious in spirit". "Rather know nothing than half-know much!" "In the conscience of science there is nothing great and nothing small." His whole world is "the brain of the leech".
- The magician. An old man writhes and sings "Who warms me, who loves me still?" to an "unknown god", "hangman-god". Zarathustra beats him with his stick: "Stop it, you actor!" The magician says he played "the ascetic of the spirit"; Zarathustra replies "There was seriousness in it too" and the magician admits "I am not great... my breaking, is genuine." Kaufmann reads the song on three levels: Nietzsche's own cry at the recurrence, projected onto Wagner forsaken by Nietzsche, and onto Cosima as Ariadne. In 1888 it became "Ariadne's Lament", with Dionysus answering, "I am your labyrinth."
- Retired. The last pope, blind in one eye, sought the saint of the Prologue and found him dead. God, "this god out of the Orient", was "harsh and vengeful" when young, then "most like a shaky old grandmother", and "choked on his all-too-great pity". Zarathustra: "He bungled too much, this potter"; "There is good taste in piety too", which said "Away with such a god!" The pope answers that Zarathustra's "overgreat honesty" is itself piety.
- The ugliest man. In the valley Snakes' Death something "scarcely like a human being" asks: "What is the revenge against the witness?" Zarathustra sinks with pity, then rises: "you are the murderer of God!" The ugliest man flees the pity of the little people and the saint who said "I am the truth": "The god who saw everything, even man: this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live." Zarathustra reflects: "I love the great despisers."
- The voluntary beggar. A "sermonizer on the mount" preaches to cows: "Except we turn back and become as cows... chewing the cud." He gave away riches but the poor refused him: "the great, bad, long, slow revolt of the mob and slaves". "What do 'poor' and 'rich' matter today?" Kaufmann's tag: "A sermon on a mount, about cows."
- The shadow. Thin and "outlived", he has followed Zarathustra into every forbidden thing: "'Nothing is true, all is permitted'... Where is my home?" Zarathustra warns him that "a narrow faith" may imprison the restless at last. Kaufmann points to The Wanderer and His Shadow of 1880.
At noon Zarathustra sleeps under a vine-wrapped tree: "Did not the world become perfect just now?" "It is little that makes the best happiness." He wakes to find the sun has hardly moved. Kaufmann: "A charming intermezzo."
The welcome and the last supper
The cry now comes from his own cave, where all the guests sit, the ugliest man wearing a crown. Zarathustra offers security, then tells them "in plain and clear German" that "it was not for you that I waited": they are "not high and strong enough", "mere bridges", with "hidden mob in you too". "Laughing lions must come!" At the supper the soothsayer demands wine, the kings bring "a whole ass-load", Zarathustra serves two lambs with sage, and the beggar objects to meat. "I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all." Kaufmann: Nietzsche "satirizes the Gospels... but he also makes fun of and laughs at himself".
On the higher man
Kaufmann singles out section 13's "mellow moderation" ("Walk in the footprints where your fathers' virtue walked"; "solitude is inadvisable for many") as "not usually associated with Nietzsche", and reads section 7 as sublimation against both licence and "castratism".
Songs, science and the wilderness
While Zarathustra steps out for air, the magician sings The Song of Melancholy: "Suitor of truth? No! Only fool! Only poet!... Climbing around on mendacious word bridges." Kaufmann thinks this thought "made Nietzsche feel more than despondent" and helped push him from parables toward "some of the most supple prose in German literature".
The shadow then sings Among Daughters of the Wilderness: "Wilderness grows: woe unto him that harbors wildernesses!" A European "under palm trees" with Dudu and Suleika, a palm dancing on one leg, and a closing parody of Luther: "I cannot do else; God help me! Amen." Kaufmann links the tinsel skirts to the Cologne brothel the young Nietzsche fled, and notes the pun on "date" is not in the German.
Awakening, the ass festival, the drunken song
The guests laugh and Zarathustra counts it "a triumph": the spirit of gravity retreats. Then silence and incense: all kneel to the ass, and the ugliest man chants a litany: "He carries our burden, he took upon himself the form of a servant... never says No." Refrain: "But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh." Zarathustra cross-examines each. The pope: "Better to adore God in this form than in no form at all!" The conscientious man: God "seems relatively most credible to me in this form". The ugliest man: "whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs." Zarathustra concludes, "we have become men, so we want the earth", and asks them to repeat the feast "in remembrance of me". Kaufmann calls it Nietzsche's "Black Mass" and notes his skill, unusual among philosophers, at laughing at himself.
The logic of the Drunken Song, sections 9 to 11, which Kaufmann finds "certainly meaningful" as an attitude.
The sign. At dawn doves swarm round Zarathustra and a lion lays its head on his knees and laughs. "My children are near, my children." The lion roars at the higher men, who flee. Zarathustra remembers the soothsayer's word: "Pity! Pity for the higher man!... that has had its time!... Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my work." He leaves his cave "glowing and strong as a morning sun".
Between Zarathustra and the Last Year, 1884 to 1888
Interlude.
Letters and notes, 1884 to 1885
- Note (1884). "Without the Roman Caesars and Roman society, the insanity of Christianity would never have come to rule." When Nero and Caracalla ruled, "the paradox originated that 'the lowest man is worth more than that man up there'", with a god "as far removed as possible from the image of the most powerful: the god on the cross".
- To Overbeck, 1884. "'My greatest dangers lie in pity' has been confirmed again and again." On Emerson: had such "a glorious, great nature" had "a really scientific education"... "in Emerson we have lost a philosopher."
- To his sister, 1885. A well-meaning person "can do immeasurable harm, if he is immodest enough to wish to profit those whose spirit and will are concealed from him".
- To Overbeck, 1885. He holds up Dante and Spinoza, who had a "God" for company; "My life now consists in the wish... that somebody might make my 'truths' appear incredible to me."
- Notes. "Rule? Press my type on others? Dreadful. Is not my happiness precisely the sight of many who are different?" "The will to a system: in a philosopher, morally speaking, a subtle corruption." Being nationalistic "would... be for us who are more spiritual... dishonesty".
- Draft preface, fall 1885, "The Will to Power". "A book for thinking, nothing else." "I wish I had written it in French so that it might not appear to be a confirmation of the aspirations of the German Reich."
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Kaufmann calls the book "more continuous than it seems at first glance" and picks seven sections.
The Gay Science, Book V (1887)
343, "The background of our cheerfulness." "The greatest recent event, that 'God is dead'", is too great for the many to grasp, along with all that "must collapse now that this belief has been undermined... our whole European morality". Yet for free spirits it feels like "a new dawn": "at last our ships may venture out again... perhaps there has never yet been such an 'open sea'."
Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887)
Kaufmann explains that the Genealogy is given only in selections because its ideas "will be gleaned from Zarathustra and the books of 1888". He also adds that Nietzsche "has reservations about 'master morality' too", pointing to Twilight.
Genealogy I, 10: "The slaves' revolt in morals begins... when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values."
- I, 10. Noble natures cannot take "enemies, accidents, and misdeeds seriously for long"; only here is "real 'love of one's enemies'" possible.
- II, 12 to 13. "The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual usefulness... lie worlds apart." Punishment has an enduring "drama" and a fluid "meaning"; "only what has no history is definable."
- III, 28. "The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse." The ascetic ideal gave meaning, "the faute de mieux par excellence", though it placed suffering "in the perspective of guilt". Its content is "a will to nothingness... yet it is and remains a will! Rather than want nothing, man even wants nothingness."
Letters and notes, 1887 to 1888
- To Overbeck, February 1887. Chance found him Dostoevski's L'esprit souterrain, as chance had found him Schopenhauer at 21 and Stendhal at 35: "The instinct of kinship... spoke up immediately." The Greeks "have a lot on their conscience... without that little bit of Judaism, etc."
- Notes 1887. Descartes' "there is thinking; consequently there is that which thinks" is "our grammatical habit". The will to power appears among slaves as a will to "freedom", among the rising as "justice", among the strongest as "love of humanity" and pity. "Hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher... he must protect the rule." To his disciples he wishes "suffering, being forsaken... that one holds out".
- Notes 1888. Utilitarians "are naive": they see "perhaps as far as five steps". "There are only interpretations", not facts. Artists live "under the vampirism of one's talent". "Dionysus versus 'the Crucified One'": the tragic man "affirms even the harshest suffering"; "The God on the cross is a curse on life... Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life."
The Wagner Case (1888), "an often very funny polemic" in Kaufmann's words: Wagner's opera is "the opera of redemption": innocence redeems interesting sinners (Tannhäuser), the Wandering Jew is redeemed by marriage (Flying Dutchman), "old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste young men" (Kundry). "Lohengrin contains a solemn excommunication of inquiry"; of the Dutchman, "he merely ceases to be eternal; he gets married".
Twilight of the Idols, I: Sounding Out the Idols
TI I.
Kaufmann's preface: the title and the hammer
1888 was Nietzsche's "most productive" year: The Wagner Case, Twilight, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche contra Wagner. Kaufmann concedes these books show "a rapid breakdown of the author's inhibitions", and that in The Antichrist "fury breaks all dams", but sets Twilight apart.
Nietzsche's preface, dated Turin, September 30, 1888, calls the book "a recreation, a spot of sunshine" amid the "revaluation of all values", and "a great declaration of war" on "eternal idols", listening for "that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails".
Maxims and Arrows
| No. | Maxim |
|---|---|
| 3 | "To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both, a philosopher." |
| 8 | "Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger." |
| 12 | "If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." |
| 19 | Virtue involves renouncing "advantages" ("Inscription for an anti-Semite's door") |
| 23 | "'German spirit': for the past eighteen years a contradiction in terms." |
| 26 | "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." |
| 33 | "Without music, life would be an error." |
| 34 | Against Flaubert: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value." |
| 44 | "The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." |
A sample of the forty-four Maxims and Arrows. Several (16, 20, 27, 28) are jokes at women's expense, in the vein Kaufmann elsewhere calls second-hand.
Four "questions of conscience" run through 37 to 41: shepherd, exception or fugitive? genuine or actor? looker-on or helper? "One must know what one wants and that one wants."
The Problem of Socrates
The sages agree that life "is no good"; even dying Socrates owed "Asclepius the Savior a rooster". Nietzsche retorts: "At least something must be sick here." Judgments of the value of life "have value only as symptoms"; "the value of life cannot be estimated."
"Reason" in Philosophy and the True World
Philosophers' idiosyncrasies are "their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism": they handle "concept-mummies". "With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus": the senses "do not lie at all"; what we make of them introduces "the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood". The nose is "the most delicate instrument". Philosophers put "the emptiest concepts" first, as causa sui, and so arrive at "God". Language is "crude fetishism": it sees "a doer and doing" everywhere. "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Four propositions follow; the fourth: any split of "true" and "apparent" world, "whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian)", is "a symptom of the decline of life". "The tragic artist is no pessimist... he is Dionysian."
"How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error", in its six stages.
Morality as Anti-Nature
"All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous... and a later... phase when they wed the spirit." The Sermon on the Mount's "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out" is a dentist pulling teeth so they will not hurt; the church's cure "is castratism", and "an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life". Radical means are needed only by the weak-willed; the most poisonous words against the senses come from "the impossible ascetics".
- Spiritualized hostility. "The spiritualization of sensuality is called love." We immoralists "find our advantage in this, that the church exists"; the new Reich "needs enemies more than friends". "One has renounced the great life when one renounces war."
- Peace of soul may be many things: good digestion ("sometimes called 'love of man'"), laziness, senility, or "maturity and mastery".
- The formula. "Every naturalism in morality, that is, every healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life." Anti-natural morality says "God looks at the heart" and makes "the ideal eunuch" its saint. "Life itself values through us when we posit values." Schopenhauer's "negation of the will to life" is "a condemnation pronounced by the condemned".
- Against "ought." "The single human being is a piece of fatum": to say "Change yourself!" demands that everything change retroactively. "We immoralists... make it a point of honor to be affirmers."
The Four Great Errors
| Error | Nietzsche's example and claim |
|---|---|
| Confusing cause and effect | Cornaro's slender diet did not cause his long life; his slow metabolism caused both. "His virtue is the effect of his happiness." Licence follows decline, not the reverse. |
| False causality | The "inner facts" of will, spirit and ego are "phantoms". "There are no mental causes at all." The concept of "thing" mirrors faith in the ego; so does the atom. |
| Imaginary causes | A dream invents a story for a cannon shot. "Any explanation is better than none"; "the banker... thinks of 'business,' the Christian of 'sin,' and the girl of her love." Sin is slipped under physiological discomfort. |
| Free will | "The foulest of all theologians' artifices": men were thought free "so that they might be judged and punished". "Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman." |
The Four Great Errors, the chapter Kaufmann thinks first suggested the Baconian "idols" of the title.
Twilight of the Idols, II: Germans, Skirmishes, Ancients
TI II.
The "improvers" of mankind
"There are altogether no moral facts." Moral judgments are "a misinterpretation", but "semeiotically... invaluable". Two things have been called improvement: taming and breeding.
The two "improvements". Nietzsche concludes that both are "entirely worthy of each other".
Nietzsche prefers Manu to the Christian "atmosphere of disease and dungeons" (the Gospels, he says, smell foul beside Manu), then recites the edicts that confine the chandala to garlic, onions and water from animal footprints, with "murderous epidemics" as the result: "the concept of 'pure blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept." Christianity, "sprung from Jewish roots", is "the anti-Aryan religion par excellence... the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love". The principle: "All the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral", for Manu, Plato, Confucius and the Jewish and Christian teachers never "doubted their right to lie" (the pia fraus).
What the Germans lack
- Power makes stupid. The new Germany has "more virile virtues than any other country", yet "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles: I fear that was the end of German philosophy." Asked abroad for German philosophers: "Well, Bismarck."
- Narcotics. "Alcohol and Christianity", now joined by "our constipated, constipating German music"; "how much beer there is in the German intelligence!" David Strauss as author of "a beer-bench gospel".
- Culture against state. "Culture and the state... are antagonists"; "all great ages of culture are ages of political decline". Goethe's heart "opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon". The Reich means "a displacement of the center of gravity" to Paris.
- Education. "Educators are lacking", except "my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt". "'Higher education' and huge numbers: that is a contradiction"; "pulchrum est paucorum hominum".
Skirmishes of an untimely man: on writers
The fifty-one skirmishes open with "My impossible ones": Seneca, "the toreador of virtue"; Rousseau; Schiller, "the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen"; Dante, "the hyena who writes poetry in tombs"; John Stuart Mill, "insulting clarity"; Zola, "the delight in stinking". Then portraits.
| Target | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Renan | "in one's guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic, in fact, a priest" |
| Sainte-Beuve | "a genius of médisance"; "hiding behind the mask of 'objectivity'" |
| George Eliot | "They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality" |
| Carlyle | "an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one" |
| Emerson | "Compared with Carlyle, a man of taste"; "happier" |
| Darwin | the struggle for existence is "asserted rather than proved"; "the weak prevail over the strong"; "One should not mistake Malthus for nature" |
| Schopenhauer | "the last German worthy of consideration", guilty of "the greatest psychological counterfeit in all history, not counting Christianity" |
Selected skirmishes on writers. The Eliot entry contains the key argument: Christian morality "stands and falls with faith in God".
Skirmishes: art and beauty
"If there is to be art... one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy." Idealizing is "a tremendous drive to bring out the main features". "In art man enjoys himself as perfection"; "Raphael said Yes... consequently, Raphael was no Christian." The Apollinian frenzy excites the eye, the Dionysian "the whole affective system"; the architect expresses "the will to power" in "a grand style". "Nothing is beautiful, except man alone... nothing is ugly except the degenerating man." Against l'art pour l'art: "Art is the great stimulus to life"; the tragic artist shows "the state without fear in the face of the fearful".
Skirmishes: morals and politics
- 37, whether we have become more moral. Our tenderness is "a consequence of decline", not progress; the Renaissance was "the last great age". "'Equality'... is an essential feature of decline"; what marks strong ages is "the pathos of distance". Spencer and the socialists are both decadents.
- 38, my conception of freedom. "Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained"; war for them "educates for freedom". "Freedom is the will to assume responsibility for oneself." "The free man is a warrior", who "spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats". Highest type: "five steps from tyranny", Julius Caesar.
- 39, critique of modernity. Institutions need a will "anti-liberal to the point of malice"; Russia is "the only power today which has endurance". Modern marriage founded on "love" has "lost its meaning".
- 44 to 45, genius and criminal. Great men are "explosives"; the milieu theory "is truly a neurotic's theory". "The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances"; Dostoevski is "the only psychologist... from whom I had something to learn". "Catiline, the form of pre-existence of every Caesar."
- 48 to 49, progress and Goethe. "Return to nature" means "an ascent", as with Napoleon; Rousseau is "idealist and rabble in one person"; "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" is the true slogan of justice. Goethe "disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself"; his "joyous and trusting fatalism" Nietzsche has "baptized... with the name of Dionysus".
- 51. "I have given mankind the most profound book it possesses, my Zarathustra; shortly I shall give it the most independent."
What I owe to the ancients
The Hammer Speaks reprints Zarathustra III's "Why so hard?" dialogue of coal and diamond: "become hard!"
The Antichrist, I: Kaufmann's Case and the Type of the Redeemer
AC I.
Kaufmann's preface
- The title. "Antichrist" calls up the apocalyptic figure, but can mean "The Anti-Christian", and in sections 38 and 47 only that sense fits. Kaufmann thinks a parallel to "anti-Semite" is also intended.
- Anti-Semitism. He grants the book's attitude is "at first glance, puzzling", and that some have suspected anti-Semitic motives, but insists "he is as opposed to anti-Semitism as ever", citing Nietzsche contra Wagner, the last letters (where Nietzsche "would even like to shoot all anti-Semites"), and his love of the Jewish scriptures.
- The target. Kaufmann names Hofprediger Stöcker, Wagner, Chamberlain ("whose tracts made such a tremendous impression on Hitler and Rosenberg") and Bernhard Förster, who wrote that Christ appeared "on the dark background of the most depraved of all nations". Nietzsche's reply: Jesus and Paul are "the two most Jewish Jews"; the qualities the anti-Semites denounce are found in the Gospels, whose Christians are "little superlative Jews".
- Assessment. Stylistically "very uneven", best "when he manages to restrain himself", as in sections 45 and 48. "Philosophically, his uncritical use of terms like life, nature, and decadence greatly weakens his case." "Historically, he is often ignorant": the two Hebrew words "do not make sense", and the portrait of Jesus "is quite unconvincing". Yet: "The errors of great men are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
Preface and first principles
"This book belongs to the very few... Some are born posthumously." Its readers must be "honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness" and "above mankind... in contempt". "We are Hyperboreans", beyond "this tolerance and largeur of the heart".
The question is not what succeeds mankind but "what type of man shall be bred"; the higher type has appeared only "as a fortunate accident". "'Progress' is merely a modern idea." Christianity made the strong man "the reprobate" and corrupted even Pascal.
Pity, theologians, Kant
- Pity (7). "Pity makes suffering contagious"; it "crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection". "Pity is the practice of nihilism"; Schopenhauer made it a virtue because he was hostile to life. "To wield the scalpel here, that is our part, that is our love of man."
- Theologians (8 to 9). "The pure spirit is the pure lie." "Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth."
- German philosophy and Kant (10 to 12). "The Protestant parson is the grandfather of German philosophy"; "'Tübingen Seminary'" says it all. Kant's success "is merely a theologians' success"; the categorical imperative "endangered life itself"; "Kant became an idiot." "Everyone [must] invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative."
- Method and man (13 to 14). "The most valuable insights are the methods"; anyone scientific "was a Chandala". "We have placed him back among the animals": man is not "the crown of creation" but "the most bungled", though "the most interesting".
God, Buddhism, Israel
| Buddhism | Christianity | |
|---|---|---|
| Stance to reality | "a hundred times more realistic"; "the only genuinely positivistic religion" | "mortal enmity against reality" |
| Problem | "struggle against suffering" | "struggle against sin" |
| Means | open air, moderate diet, no prayer, no asceticism, no revenge | casuistry of sin, prayer, the darkened room, hatred of the body |
| Origin | higher, scholarly classes in a mild climate | "the lowest classes"; then barbarians "made sick" |
| Promise | "does not promise but fulfills" | "promises everything but fulfills nothing" |
Sections 20 to 23 and 42. Both are "religions of decadence", but Buddhism stands "beyond good and evil". Faith, love and hope are "the three Christian shrewdnesses".
Sections 24 to 27 trace Christianity to Jewish soil: "Salvation is of the Jews." The Jews "chose... to be at any price", at the price of "the radical falsification of all nature"; the priests turned Yahweh, once a god of power and rain, into a god of conditions and the "moral world order", rewrote Israel's history as "guilt before Yahweh, and punishment", and made "sins" "the real handles of power". "The priest lives on sins."
Nietzsche's "five points" on Israel and the step to Christianity, which "negates the church" and then becomes one.
The type of the Redeemer
"In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." What followed was a "dysangel" (39). The disciples, insulted by the death, asked "Who killed him?" and answered "ruling Jewry", turning Jesus into a rebel and judge (40). Then "God gave his son... as a sacrifice": "What gruesome paganism!" (41).
Paul and immortality
"On the heels of the 'glad tidings' came the very worst: those of Paul", "the genius in hatred", who "nailed him to his own cross", falsified Israel's history once more, and "transposed the center of gravity of that whole existence after this existence", into "the lie of the 'resurrected' Jesus". "His need was for power." "Personal immortality" flatters every "Peter and Paul" and spreads "the poison of the doctrine of 'equal rights for all'", which "every revolution simply translates into blood and crime" (42 to 43).
The Antichrist, II: Faith, Manu, Rome and the Verdict
The Gospels as seduction (44 to 46)
"One should read the Gospels as books of seduction by means of morality." "'Judge not,' they say, but they consign to hell everything that stands in their way." Section 45 is a run of verses each answered by one stinging line:
| Verse | Nietzsche's comment |
|---|---|
| Mark 6:11, shake off the dust; worse for that city than Sodom | "How evangelical!" |
| Mark 9:1, some here shall not taste death before the kingdom comes | "Well lied, lion!" |
| Matt. 5:46, if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? | "in the end it wants to be paid well" |
| Matt. 6:33, seek ye first the kingdom | "God appears as a tailor" |
| Luke 6:23, so did their fathers unto the prophets | "Impertinent rabble! They compare themselves with the prophets" |
| I Cor. 1:20 ff., God hath chosen the weak and base things | "a first-rate document for the psychology of every chandala morality" |
Section 45 in brief. "Paul was the greatest of all apostles of vengeance."
In section 46 one should "put on gloves" to read the Christian scriptures; "there are only bad instincts" in them; after Paul, Petronius reads clean. To be attacked by a "first Christian" is an honor. The only figure who commands respect is Pilate, whose "What is truth?" is "the only saying that has value".
God's fear of science (47 to 49)
"We deny God as God." Paul's God, who "ruins the wisdom of the world", was aimed at "philology and medicine": "The physician says 'incurable'; the philologist, 'swindle.'"
Faith, martyrs, convictions (50 to 55)
- The "proof of strength" (50). "Faith makes blessed: hence it is true" is circular, and pleasure is no proof of truth. "The service of truth is the hardest service." "Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies."
- Sickness (51 to 52). "One has to be sick enough for it." Christianity "turned to every kind of man who was disinherited by life", "the rancor of the sick". "Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far." Philology is "the art of reading well", which theologians lack; a god who cures colds on time would be "an objection to God".
- Martyrs (53). "The martyrs have harmed truth." "Is the cross an argument?" Zarathustra: "blood is the worst witness of truth."
- Convictions (54 to 55). "Great spirits are skeptics." "Convictions are prisons." The believer "is necessarily a dependent man". By lie he means "wishing not to see something that one does see". "An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle." The "holy lie" is common to Confucius, Manu, Mohammed, the church, and Plato.
Section 56: "it is a matter of the end to which one lies."
Manu, caste and the pyramid (56 to 57)
Manu is "an incomparably spiritual and superior work", where "the sun shines on the whole book", procreation and woman treated "with respect". A code is closed by "a double wall": revelation and tradition, to make the right life "unconscious". Then the caste order:
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| The most spiritual ("the fewest") | rule "not because they want to but because they are"; "Knowledge, a form of asceticism" |
| The strong | "guardians of the law", warriors and king, "the executive arm of the most spiritual" |
| The mediocre | the broad base; "For the mediocre, to be mediocre is their happiness" |
"A high culture is a pyramid." "The inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all."
He hates most "the socialist rabble, the chandala apostles": "The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin."
Rome, Islam and the Renaissance (58 to 61)
Sections 58 to 61: Nietzsche's history of cultural harvests lost to Christianity and the Germans.
- Rome. The imperium was "the most magnificent form of organization" ever achieved; "Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum". "Not vanquished, merely drained."
- Islam. Moorish Spain was "more congenial to our senses" than Greece and Rome; the crusades were "higher piracy". "Peace and friendship with Islam", as Frederick II felt.
- The Renaissance. His dream: "Cesare Borgia as pope", with which "Christianity would have been abolished." Instead Luther, "a shipwrecked priest", "restored the church: he attacked it." "If we do not get rid of Christianity, it will be the fault of the Germans."
Ecce Homo Excerpts and Nietzsche contra Wagner
EH+NcW.
From Ecce Homo
Kaufmann's note says the passages come from "Why I Am So Wise" (sections 1, 5, 7), "Why I Am So Clever" (on Heine), the Zarathustra discussion, and the final chapter.
- Sickness as training. Amid "an uninterrupted three-day migraine" he had "a dialectician's clarity par excellence". From sickness he learned "the gift of reversing perspectives: the first reason why it is perhaps for me alone that a 'revaluation of values' is at all possible today."
- Bluntness. "Silence is an objection"; "All who remain silent are dyspeptic." "To take upon oneself guilt and not punishment, that alone would be godlike."
- Heine. "He possessed that divine sarcasm without which I cannot conceive the perfect"; he and Heine are "by far the first artists of the German language".
- Two epigrams. "One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive." "The whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called 'moral world order.'"
Nietzsche contra Wagner: the files of a psychologist
The preface, dated "Turin, Christmas 1888", says the chapters "go back all the way to 1877" and prove "we are antipodes". It is "an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans".
| Section | Claim |
|---|---|
| Where I Admire | Wagner is "the Orpheus of all secret misery", "the master of the very minute", great in pieces "often only one beat long", but he "prefers large walls and audacious frescoes". |
| Where I Offer Objections | "My objections... are physiological": "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology". "Wagner makes sick." He is "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac": "the pose is the end". |
| Wagner as a Danger | "Infinite melody" means swimming, not dancing: "chaos in place of rhythm". |
| A Music without a Future | "All true, all original music, is a swan song." "The Germans themselves have no future." |
| We Antipodes | Two kinds of sufferers; he once read Dionysian power into Wagner and Schopenhauer: "myself". |
| Where Wagner Belongs | "Paris is the real soil for Wagner"; he belongs with French romanticism: "all talents far beyond their genius... But sick." |
| Apostle of Chastity | A poem ("That which you hear is Rome") and Parsifal, "operetta material par excellence", "an attempted assassination of basic ethics". |
| How I Broke Away | Farewell "by the summer of 1876"; Wagner had condescended "even to anti-Semitism" and "sank down... before the Christian cross". "I had had nobody except Richard Wagner." |
| The Psychologist Speaks Up | "Great men" are "subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction"; "Deep suffering makes noble; it separates." |
| Epilogue | Amor fati; pain "makes us more profound"; the Greeks "superficial, out of profundity". |
Nietzsche contra Wagner, section by section.
"We Antipodes": "is it the hatred against life or the excess of life which has here become creative?"
The Last Letters, January 1889
Last letters.
Kaufmann's note
He explains the names: the murderers Prado and Chambige, Lesseps of the Suez Canal, Daudet's satire on the French Academy (perhaps the source of "Astu"), Conte Robilant, and Cardinal Antonelli. Burckhardt took the letter to Overbeck, who fetched Nietzsche home. After an asylum, his mother cared for him; after her death "his sister moved him to Weimar... as part of her attempt to start a Nietzsche cult". He died on August 25, 1900.
The three letters
| To | Date | Signed | Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peter Gast | January 4 | The Crucified | "Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy." |
| Jacob Burckhardt | January 6 | Nietzsche | "I would much rather be a Basel professor than God"; a student's room for twenty-five francs; "I am Prado... I am also Chambige"; "at bottom I am every name in history". |
| Franz Overbeck and wife | January 6 | Dionysus | "I am just having all anti-Semites shot." |
The letters in order. The Burckhardt letter carries four marginal postscripts.
The end, as Kaufmann's note tells it.
What survives in the delusion is telling. The jokes about decent criminals echo Twilight's "the criminal type"; the double signature, Dionysus and the Crucified, restates the opposition that closes the 1888 writings; and the hatred of anti-Semites remains, now as a fantasy of shooting them.
What the Portable Nietzsche Adds Up To
Main Points
- Style is part of the argument: Kaufmann insists Nietzsche writes too well to be read quickly.
- The death of God is a cultural event whose consequences are still to come.
- Values have a history: master and slave morality, ressentiment, the priest.
- The overman is the meaning of the earth, set against the last man.
- Will to power names self-overcoming, not only domination.
- Eternal recurrence is a test of affirmation: amor fati.
- The true world became a fable, step by step, in Twilight.
- Socrates and Christianity are diagnosed as decadence, judged by "life".
- Nietzsche's Jesus is a gentle symbolist; Paul invented the church.
- Wagner is the case study of a sick modern art; the break is personal and principled.
- Anti-anti-Semitism runs from the 1887 letter to the last postcards.
- Hardness, caste and breeding language is real and not explained away by context.
The method that recurs from Human, All-Too-Human to The Antichrist.
Kaufmann's slants, in one table
| Slant | Where it shows |
|---|---|
| Defence brief framing | Introduction and prefaces read every hard passage toward the liberal humanist reading. |
| Self-citation | "See my Nietzsche" points away from the text to his own monograph. |
| Silence on politics and eugenics | Breeding, caste, the "weak shall perish", misogyny: mostly unannotated. |
| Anti-Semitism thesis | Strong and documented, but it has to absorb Antichrist 24, 44, 46 and 58 as "cant". |
| Sanity quarantine | 1888 treated as fully lucid; the collapse framed as a clean break. |
| Dated scholarship | Recurrence's physics, Manu, Buddhism, Rome, medical diagnosis. |
The lenses across the sixteen chapters, condensed.
Synthesis arc.
Practice list.
Legacy fork.
Synthesis pairs.
By major work
| Work | Payoff |
|---|---|
| Early / Dawn / GS | Free spirit; God dead |
| Zarathustra I-IV | Overman; return; higher men |
| BGE/GM excerpts | Moral psychology |
| Twilight | Hammer method |
| Antichrist | Christianity verdict |
| EH + NcW | Self; Wagner break |
| 1889 letters | Tragic close |
About this book
The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1954. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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