Customer Reviews

A Nietzsche Reader (Penguin Classics)

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Assigned as a textbook in my 19th century philosophy class, I must admit that this little volume was a pleasure to read - twice. While it may be criticized as a collection of Nietzschean quotable quotes, I was continually fascinated by his insights. It left me wondering if any of the ideas attributed to Freud were actually original, and it confirmed some of my own hard won critiques of contemporary evangelicalism.

Before the class was over I had purchased another half dozen books by this man!

A warning to those considering reading this - you will not receive pages of editorial content. Go elsewhere if you are looking for an interpretation of Nietzsche. Also, you may find this thinker as addictive as I have.

This book includes quotations from Nietzsche explaining the Superman, the Will to Power, his view of Religion, etc, etc. A decent introduction of his thought and ideas, but for a more complex understanding of the man Nietzsche was, I would recommend you buy his books individually. Nonetheless, a great book for the price.

THE way to start Nietzsche. It's good to know the basic philosophical currents of Western thought(at least Plato and Aristotle for the basic schools of philosophy, with Augustine, renaissance thinkers like Erasmus or Bacon, Kant, and the other German philosophers of the time being good addenda for added richness) before you get into this, because so much of this is either a recasting of those old thoughts or a vicious attack upon them. I didn't find the language difficult at all...every once and a while, there would be a convoluted sentence that took several passes to understand, but in general it's quite straightforward. A beautiful body of work condensed into some salient passages. Suggestion: start with this...you'll be able to have a perfectly educated conversation about all of his major ideas after reading this book, and you'll be able to tell how much you agree or disagree with him. Then, if his work agrees with you, pick up the Viking Portable Nietzsche, which has all of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, the Antichrist, and Contra Wagner, and then a section of excerpts similar to this book. By that time, you'll know what other works you want to read in their entirety(I suggest Beyond Good and Evil, to begin with, along with The Birth of Tragedy as a side-endeavour), and you'll also know more Nietzsche than any pseudo-intellectual poseur who wants to sound good at parties could comprehend.

The philosophy itself deserves five stars for being eloquent, fully realised, and the work of an educated genius, not to mention its historical value on the way modern thought works, but I simply must subtract one star for its incompleteness. You get the ideas, but not the full range of its art and magesty.

After giving "Nietzsche in 90 Minutes" the 45 minutes it deserves, I started looking for something a little more advanced. I didn't feel I was ready to start in on "Thus Spake Zarathustra" so I picked this gem up. After finishing it, I moved on to some of Nietzsche's works and was thankful I'd read some background first.

This is still a moderately difficult read for someone that reads a few pithy quotes now and then and feels more at home in a computer lab, but it is manageable. I'm sure a true philosopher type would look down his/her nose at this book, but I found it useful!

Nietzsche has been interpreted to represent the last word in a line of thought which begins with Socrates, generally referred to as the era of Western classical philosophy. Like enormous bookends, Nietzsche and the object of so much of his thought, Socrates, sit, at the crucial intersections of the flow and development of ideas, and adjudicate, with all that came between and after somehow in the radius of their influence. Nietzsche, father of existentialism, intellectual father of the 20th century.
The battle will always rage (Nietzsche, true to the fire of his Herakleitian habit, would have liked that): which is better, this one, Hollingdale's anthology, A Nietzsche Reader, or Kaufmann's anthology, the venerable Viking Portable Nietzsche? I'll cop on that one. But, for the prospective buyer, I'll attempt a brief, opinionated comparison.
1) Translation: I was nurtured on the Kaufmann, which I used to carry around with me in my high school days, 40 years ago. Thus, for me, the Kaufmann translation rings truer to my tinny ear and limited knowledge of German. Besides, Kaufman was German. But, as Nietzsche gets down on the Germans at least as much as the English (a fact to which his Nazi misinterpreters liked to turn a blind eye), and, as Hollingdale's translations are accepted in the academic world to be at least as accurate as the revered Kaufman, pas differance there, or one merely of taste.
2) Organization: The Hollingdale is far better organized for quick reference or for the first time reader who wants an easily accessed guide to Nietzsche "from the horse's mouth" (with Nietzsche - this way is best, for so much of Nietzsche's power is in his enormous literary gifts). The creme de la creme of much of Nietzsche's most powerful work is arranged under the key rubrics: Philosophy and Philosophers; Logic, Epistemology, Metaphysics; Morality; Art and Aesthetics; Psychological Observations; Religion; Nihilism; Anti-Nihilism; Will to Power; Superman; Eternal Recurrence. The book ends with a truly neat 20 page collection of many of Nietzsche's best aphorisms and summary statements.
The Kaufmann, on the other hand, sprawls, and weaves a tapestry of the man's conceptions, which coalesce finally into a remarkably comprehensive summation of Nietzsche's basic positions. One could say that if the Hollingdale is the digital approach, the Kaufmann is the analog. The Kaufmann, however, has one insurmountable advantage: included are the complete texts of Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Neitzsche Contra Wagner, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Kaufmann translation of the latter is widely regarded as the best ever, and the book is an awesome masterpiece, at once hilarious and deep, a classic among classics, which says almost all that Nietzsche wishes you to hear in one loud shot.
3) Construction: Both have useful introductory sections, the Kaufmann is a bit better, including a helpful chronology. Neither has a particularly huge Bibliography, but the Kaufmann has been updated fairly recently by Viking. The Hollingdale is svelte, 285 pages, in the time tested Penguin format, tightly bound, light in the pack. The Kaufmann is chunky, 700 pages, a number of which are falling out of my 1968 edition bought for a pittance at a good, old fashioned, independent used bookstore.
My advice: Take the Hollingdale to school, but take the Kaufmann to that proverbial desert island.

The 240 extracts from Nietzsche's best known writings provide an ample introduction to his philosophy. The most powerful sections - 'Morality', 'Will to Power' and 'Superman' are well represented, and the slim volume is bolstered by some interesting sections on art and aesthetics. The novice Nietzsche reader will gain a good overall impression of Nietzsche's powerful philosophy, which aims to strip human morals down of all their falseness and affectations and misguided Christian influence.

Only one drawback - given the necessarily fragmented nature of the book, some sections hop disjointedly from one writing to another, giving a somewhat inconsistent impression of Nietsche's philosophy as a whole. For example, a long treatise deconstructing the impact of Wagner's music in sublime descriptive prose is followed by a terse section condemning literary style as an affectation as it purports to point to something beyond itself, which does not exist.

Neitzche has been one of the most influential philosophers in history, but he also is one of the most complicated. I find Neitzche's language very difficult to read and I had to carefully re read some of it. I still don't get it.

The reason why I'm giving this book such a high grade is beacause the translation is not bad, I've read the original stuff before from BGE and some others and this is quite good. It is also well organized and puts the concepts in a way that was as easy as possible.

Try to read this if you can't read Neitzche's works, it is a bit easier and you probably would have less hassle. Not a bad layout.

As long as one is still young, one tries to philosophize. One guesses the delirium which philosophy has produced, one dreams of copying it and of carrying it further. The youth likes itself in the trick of the heights; with a thinker youth loves the tightrope walker; in Nietzsche they loved his poses, his mystic clownery; really a summit fun fair ... " wrote Emile Cioran.

But nowadays with Nietzsche one has his problems. Maximum embarrassingly had been how Nazi-leaders misinterpreted and misused Nietzsche for their race theories, veiled by Richard Wagner's melodramatic style.

If one takes his gossip of the "Superhuman" [Übermensch], nevertheless, as the psychoanalytic classified attempt, to know himself as gotten sick in need of care (fallen ill with Syphilis) between sister and mother, rescueless wedged, and therefore, as a counterbalance, get lost in the daydream to be a new Dionysos or a Greek God (at first mockingly, then in the final stage schizophrenic megalomaniac), - then his efforts seem to be "human, all too-human".

"What does not kill me, will make me stronger ... " he tried to persuade himself euphorically, in fear to have a lack of courage. The treating physicians probably did not tell him (regarding the prudishness of that time) the shocking truth of the irreparable gravity of his illness.

"Philosophy is a kind of revenge versus reality ... " he wrote full energy, high-spirited. One dreams to have a power, which one does not possess in the reality. Nietzsche's writings are a sort of compensation of a frustrated human being, writings like a battle-cry, tattooed deep in the soul, hoping to get managed a departure into success.

The only germ of a flaming up love relationship - namely to Lou Salome (later companion of Rainer Maria Rilke and at the same time famous first female psychoanalyst in the circle of Freud) - this only germ, rich in chances of an erotic self-realization, was trampled down by the heavy envy and jealousy of his frigates-like sister and his mother.

Aged twenty, however, he had used a experimental way, practicing his sort of sexuality, which seemed at first sight easy and more cheap, in the final effect has been full of pain: "There are two things, a genuine man wants: danger and play. Therefore, he wants the woman, as the most dangerous toy ... " he noted in juvenile carelessness. He himself reported to the doctors in Leipzig and Jena, who should treat him against his Syphilis infection, that he had practiced brothel visits 1865 in Cologne and 1866 in Leipzig.

Indeed, he struck already in 1865 in Trieste by the fact that he, weeping, embraced a horse (hit by a coachman) and then broke down. The actually heavy outbreak of the illness is dated by doctors on 1888. Nietzsche's note "The degree and kind of a person's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit ... " oscillates on this background ambiguously of course with a maybe unintentional double-sense. Certain is, that only the final phase of his writing (ecce homo) is to be considered as intellectually clouded.

Yet we have the duty to weigh with necessary care the writings before 1888. But even as a heavy nursing-destitute he still produced some special diamonds of written language: "If you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss afterwards also looks into you inside ... "; "He who has a goal to live for, is able to endure almost everything ... " or: "There are servile souls, which propel the appreciation for given benefactions so far, that they strangle themselves with the snare of gratitude ... " That means evidently, that he only rather sullenly will have submitted himself under the over-protection, coming from his sister and mother. Nevertheless, no superhuman-power could help him to escape their claws.

On the other hand, maybe just by the distance to an everyday life Nietzsche was able to focus the society in such a cool manner - and to daydream completely undisturbed a total free self-reliant human being. This ideal type is a little bit shaped like Nietzsche himself: The "Superhuman" is a strong-minded and unbound philosopher, but sometimes the cautious and shy philologist Nietzsche is shining through.

On the one we remember the popular Nietzsche-slogan "God is dead", then, on the other hand, we feel, that his origin from a priest's family has not passed - and we even suppose, that the negative posture towards the religion and the minister's family, are finally only the two sides of the one and same coin.

Though - the religious criticism of Nietzsche is not to understand only psychologically as an opposition against his family background (11 forefathers on the paternal side were ministers): To see denominations critically has been the intellectual behaviour of that time. Nature science, Kant, Descartes: they shocked the church authorities of that days.

Nietzsche's mocking remark "Madness of single persons is something rare, but the madness of groups, parties, crowds seems to be the rule ... " qualifies his personal fate (syphilis) nearly not as bad as the ("healthy") foolishness of the masses - especially, if one considers, what the German history planned to bring up ...

And because he wrote (and his power-mad sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche has forgotten to censure and to extinguish that during the posthumous publication of his writings:) "He who thinks a lot, is not suitable for a party man; too soon he thinks through the party throughout ... " - because he wrote this, it is not to be accepted seriously, that he could have live in harmony with a National Socialist party.

Also he brought on paper: "I mistrust all dogmatics and systematic and avoid to contact them. The will to a system is a lack of righteousness." And, elsewhere: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies." Or (without ever having heard an O-tone of Goebbels or Hitler, Nietzsche formulated timeless brilliantly): "With a very loud voice in the neck one is nearly unable to think fine things."

"The most valuable examinations are found latest, but the most valuable examinations are the methods " - Nietzsche wrote. Indeed: if one did not take Zarathustra's words as instructions for war lords or other dubious idols, but, in the contrary, classifies this work as a brilliant, highly ironical effort to use language creatively, Nietzsche's books would have a fair chance to survive. Maybe his ability to describe psychological subjects will live longer than some of his philosophical disputes. The collection of R.J. Hollingdale (he died 2001) is a very good chance, to proof Nietzsche's message ...