Customer Reviews

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

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Daybreak: Thoughts On Moral Prejudices (1881) goes further than Human All Too Human in elaborating Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality. It is perhaps also more masterful than the earlier work in its artful use of aphoristic juxtaposition to engage the reader in his or her own reflections. Indeed, Nietzsche seems bent on conveying a particular type of experience in thinking to his readers, much more than he is concerned in persuading his readers to adopt any particular point of view.

Nietzsche criticized the Christian moral world view on a number of grounds that he was to develop further in his later works. His basic case rests on psychological analyses of the motivations and effects that stem from the adoption of the Christian moral perspective. In this respect, Daybreak typifies Nietzsche's ad hominem approach to morality. Nietzsche asks primarily, "What kind of person would be inclined to adopt this perspective?" and "What impact does this perspective have on the way in which its adherent develops and lives?"

Nietzsche argues that the concepts that Christianity uses to analyze moral experience--especially sin and the afterlife--are entirely imaginary and psychologically pernicious. These categories deprecate human experience, making its significance appear more vile than it actually is. Painting reality in a morbid light, Christian moral concepts motivate Christians to adopt somewhat paranoid and hostile attitudes toward their own behavior and that of others. Convinced of their own sinfulness and worthiness of eternal damnation, Christians are driven to seek spiritual reassurance at tremendous costs in terms of their own mental health and their relationships to others.

For instance, Christians feel that they need to escape their embodied selves because they are convinced of their own sinfulness. They are convinced of their own failure insofar as they believe themselves sinners and believe themselves to be bound by an unfulfillable law of perfect love. In order to ameliorate their sense of guilt and failure, Nietzsche contends, they look to others in the hope of finding them even more sinful than themselves. Because the Christian moral worldview has convinced its advocates that their own position is perilous, Christians are driven to judge others to be sinners in order to gain a sense of power over them. The Christian moral worldview thus paradoxically encourages uncharitable judgments of others, despite its praise of neighbor love.

The fundamental misrepresentation of reality offered by the Christian moral worldview provokes dishonesty in its adherents, particularly in appraisals of themselves and others. It also encourages them to despise earthly life in favor of another reality (one that Nietzsche claims does not exist). Still further psychological damage to the believer results from the Christian moral worldview's insistence on absolute conformity to a single standard of human behavior. Nietzsche contends that one size does not fit all where morality is concerned, and that most of the best and strongest individuals are least capable of living according to the mold. Nevertheless, Christians are urged to abolish their individual characters, and to the extent that they fail to do so they reinforce their own feelings of inadequacy.

Nietzsche's picture of Christian morality seems dismal. He regards it as the motivation for attitudes that are self-denigrating, vindictive towards others, escapist, and anti-life. Nietzsche never alters this basic assessment of the moral framework of his own tradition; instead, he continues to develop these themes in all his later discussions of morality and ethics.

Daybreak is for readers that want to experience the tremendous efforts that Nietzsche undertook to overcome his training and experiences as an educator and to discover and create his own voice. As with the extraordinary previous work -- Human, All Too Human -- Nietzsche writes in a manner that strongly suggests a very rich series of debate openings. He aims to stimulate, provoke, and establish a literary forum to air his overflowing wealth of ideas, questions, doubts, intuitions. Daybreak, like other works by this incredible writer, is meant for slow readers. You don't just simply sit down and read it from cover to cover like an entertaining best seller. Every other page will contain a notion that will either delight, mystify, irritate, or -- best of all -- provide one of those wonderful ah-hah experiences that only happen when you are immersed in serious thought. It's best to take your time with one section after another and seriously ponder what he is saying, because Nietzsche builds a very startling view of human existence that cannot be appreciated by a quick reading.

As emphasized in the extremely well-written introduction by the editors (who do a great job in setting Daybreak in its context among other works by Nietzsche), the main subject of the book is a critique of morality -- what does it really mean to humans when we try to strip it down to its essentials and challenge the many conventions of custom. Nietzsche does not simply treat morality as an interesting subject for a pleasant intellectual dialogue, but rather makes it clear that he is in deadly earnest about how fundamentally important it is, and how our attitudes about it create ourselves and our world. You cannot read this book passively, because Nietzsche writes about difficult concepts that are very much alive today, such as this excerpt from section 149 about the common compulsion to conform to social custom, "The need for little deviant acts":

"Sometimes to act against one's better judgment when it comes to questions of custom... many toerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as 'honest', 'humane', 'tolerant', 'not being pedantic', and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ... The thoughtless error! ... it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself!"

There's much more of course, and one of the constantly exciting aspects of reading Nietzsche is to experience the way he interweaves discussions of art with larger philosophical concerns. His insights into literature and music are never trivial, and he provides a series of very startling perspectives. Daybreak is not the best known of Nietzsche's works, but it is essential to anyone who wants to engage seriously with his thought.

In Nietzsche's Daybreak we see the beginnings of Nietzsche's complete and exhaustive interrogation of morality with its link to suffering. As with all of N's books, there are real gems here. His tone is calm and sedate, not shrill and inflated as in later works, such as the Anti-Christ or Twilight of the Idols. And it begins with a commencement to undermine our faith in morality. This is a recurrent them of Nietzsche's, who critics have said, gave the criminal back his conscience.

Some important points contained in the book include his linking of animal behavior and human morality and comments about the suffering and its consequent blame that become keys to his later works. Also worth mentioning are his comments in 205, Of the people of Israel. Read this section. It is prophetic. Nietzsche saw the Jewish problem in Germany as critical to the coming century. That he became associated with anti-Semitism has been unfair and a travesty.

Daybreak is a great primer for Nietzsche's later, more systemic, works such as Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. Many of his later ideas are interrogated here, in some intances, the arguments are even better articulated.

Well, Nietzsche is one of those dudes you don't just read and then put away--no, you have a relationship with Fred your whole life. You go through ups where you think he's a brilliant... sage, you go through downs where you think he's a brilliant... child. Etcetera--thinking that he's brilliant is about the only constancy in the experience of returning to his writings again and again. You think you understand him, you think a bit more, you think you don't understand him... you think a bit more, then you think you understand him again. So it goes.

Right now, I know for sure that I do not understand: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Birth of Tragedy. And I find The Gay Science too frivolous for me. Again, at the moment... not for all time.

Nietzsche overwhelms me in any large quantity. But these little aphorisms and prose poems in Daybreak are just perfect. They concern the relationships between morality, art, religion, tradition, custom, nationality, society, the individual, history, politics, lies, truth, human motives, and a bunch of other stuff too. Nietzsche knows what he's about: he'll never give you compartmentalized insight. Nietzsche never would have, and never did, write a book just about Aesthetics, or a book just about Morality, or a book just about Sociology. No, he was always aware of the holistic connection between these scholastically divided FACETS of the human condition. Maybe that's my hint to you for enjoying him more.

Daybreak reads like one of those old-style table of contents where they would put little chapter summaries underneath each line... but Daybreak reads like a table of contents for pretty much the entire corpus of 20th century "humanities" literature, plus much stuff that no one's attempted to write yet.

Is it all good? No, but about 95% of it is. So get yourself a cheap copy, head on over to the coffee-house, and dive on in. I'll see you there one of these days.

_Daybreak_, or _The Dawn_, is probably the most neglected of Nietzsche's books, yet it is one of the most stylistically compelling and most daring, and thus most easily passed over. I would even recommend it as a first (but not last) study of Nietzsche to acquaint people with a more experimental, psychological side not commonly associated with his name. While readers may be familiar through other works with his aphoristic style, _Daybreak_ marks an important first step in his later thought and should not be left out.

This edition has an extensive set of notes for the many, possibly oblique cultural references and an index.

"We must learn to think differently...in order to feel differently."

The following review pertains to the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's `Daybreak' edited by Clark and Leiter and translated by Hollingdale. Daybreak was originally published in 1881, and, as with the majority of Nietzsche's other works received little recognition during the author's lifetime.

Along with `Human all too Human', `Daybreak' is often seen as a transitional text between Nietzsche's early writings and his more mature work (e.g. On the Genealogy of Morality), and, as a result has sometimes been overlooked. Written in his trademark aphoristic style the text offers a range of insightful observations regarding; human nature, Christianity and free will amongst other topics.

As an aside, I am surprised that Nietzsche's writing does have a wider following amongst modern-day atheists. While I tend to disagree with Nietzsche on many religious issues, and though his work has the occasional hint of late- nineteenth century naiveté, it is passionate and thought provoking critic. From my perspective, he offers a more realist assessment of a world without God than many contemporary commentators who cling to the fruits of religion (e.g. free will and moral value) while denying the source.

My only criticism of the text pertains to the end-notes. While they are brief and helpful with regard to translations and introducing historic ideas and individuals, they are not referenced in the body of the text. I am not sure what the reason for this is, however, converting them to footnotes and referencing them in the text would be helpful in future editions.

Overall, Daybreak is another helpful installment in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. I recommend it to all students of Nietzsche's

The review of this book by " A customer" (one size does not fit all) is plagiarised from a work, I can't remember which. naughty!

Anyway, this is one of Nietzsche's greatest (and least fashionable) books and is itself more profound, honest and radical than virtually every other author's best work. This book contains many of the most tragic and dangerous opinions that Nietzsche would subsequently express more shrilly. Nietzsche is not for the faint-hearted, but those with a strong stomach who are estranged by much of Nietzsche's later shouting, should read this wonderful book. I cannot praise this book too highly, but as already stated, the stylistic beauty and dazzling erudition cannot disguise that, to paraphrase Hollingdale, what is really going on here is destruction.

If you're going to really understand Nietzsche it is of prime importance to understand the development of his ideas as they were written, chronilogicaly. To skip a work or omit one is to alter the perspective he is giving us. This is his first work to undermine the truth of morality, for morality's sake. His tone varies, but to miss out on "the first Christian" is a mistake. Thoroughly entertaining. I would skip the lame intro. Nietzsche would have burned it along with the rest of the systematic analysis of his work. 5 stars for our brilliant anti-nihilist, minus one for the lame academics they picked for the intro. Why not Solomon? Or Schacht or any other articulate academics. In general this series is great. These books are built for abuse. Why can't they make all paperbacks like these.

Great addition to Genealogy or BG&E, and to the beginning phase of the mature Nietzsche's writing; Leiter's introductory material is top-notch.

Daybreak being as much the culmination of Nietzsche's early philosophy as the beginning of his mature philosophy, is the marker from which he would later depart for new philosophical territories, latitudes and altitudes of thought and inquiry. The thoughts 'left on ice' will soon melt-over in a true eruption as seen in The Gay Science through Beyond Good and Evil. If Human All Too Human is the Groundwork for the Revaluation of All Values, Daybreak delineates the nihilistic abyss and chasm over which Nietzsche poses his challenge to the overman and their forefathers, the philosophers of the future. The bridge to the future begins with the Dawn, and the Great Noontide and Twilight of the Idols begin with the gloaming thought in this text: Artemis hunts at night.