The Portable Nietzsche (Portable Library)
by Friedrich Nietzsche
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Book Summary Information
Author: Friedrich NietzscheTranslator: Walter Kaufmann
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1977-01-27
ISBN: 0140150625
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Penguin Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140150629
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Portable Nietzsche (Portable Library)
Book Review: Review of Twilight of the Idols
Summary: 4 Stars
NOTE: This is not a review of the volume. Nor is it a review of Twilight of the Idols so much as it is an interpretation and commentary. It should be understood in that spirit.
Aesthetics in the Twilight: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Living
Beauty is momentary in the mind -
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
- Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (1915)
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche is not producing philosophy, he is creating art. Twilight of the Idols incarnates the eternal recurrence of Dionysius-Nietzsche - expressing in the flesh the immortal beauty of one who lives by the senses, the instincts, the eternal joy of becoming. A solitary reading of Twilight of the Idols could easily mislead the reader into thinking that the work is full of contradictions. Before we begin to assess what he calls us to Be, let us first establish what he himself claims he is Not.
Nietzsche has often been associated (erroneously) with hedonism, anarchism, and pessimism. He has also been mistakenly identified as a moralist and a philosopher. Nietzsche is not an advocate of raw experience in whatever indulgent form it may take. The eroticism of homosexuality (477, 528), intoxicants (507), and hedonism itself (541) are all signs of decay from which Nietzsche avidly seeks to distance himself. Nietzsche distances himself from political ideologies: anarchism (534), nihilism (527, 533), socialism (535, 541). Nietzsche posits an antagonistic relationship between political power (the "state" which Nietzsche disdains) and culture. Nietzsche clearly favors the latter as "what matters most" (509). Political movements merely vie in competition for control of the state, the success of any of which is synonymous with decline and decay ("power makes stupid" 506). Schopenhauer and his pessimistic philosophy represent for Nietzsche, a life-denying philosophy which must itself be denied: at the end of a passage on death and suicide, Nietzsche concludes: "one must advance a step further in its logic ... as Schopenhauer did - one must first of all negate Schopenhauer" (537).
The accusation that Nietzsche is a moralist is more difficult to refute. By interpreting Twilight as a work of art, and not as a didactic tract, his value-judgments become freed from the accusation of being moralistic. Thus it is not inconsistent for Nietzsche to pass judgments on aesthetic grounds (484); he does so without any pretense to or appeal to "morality". His contempt for "systems" and "systematizers" (470) further distances him from the charge of being a moralist and places him in the realm of the artist who makes aesthetic (not systematic) choices.
Nietzsche's mistrust of systems also helps refute the final charge against him of having committed philosophy. Fundamentally, however, he abhors philosophers for "threaten[ing] the life of everything they worship" (479) by entombing life in the form of "concept-mummies" and burying the senses through the philosophical quest for the "empty fiction" of the "'true' world" (481). The only "philosopher" on whom he bestows his total admiration is Dionysus (563), whose philosophy is far more associated with "art" and "psychology" than "morality" or "systems".
Nietzsche never describes himself as a philosopher in Twilight of the Idols . He does describe himself as both an "immoralist" and a "psychologist" . That he wholeheartedly embraces his role as a Dionysian immoralist cannot be doubted. His role as a psychologist is more complicated. He derides the field of psychology as "miscarriage and not-yet-science" in which "reality is not encountered at all" (481). He further defines two motivations of "psychologists": to gain advantages over others or to feel superior to them (523). He leaves us to guess where he falls on this continuum.
Buried in the heart of this work are a set of passages which clarify the vital function of "psychology": finding joy in oneself through a psychology of the artist (517 - 520). To achieve this, the psychologist must "leave [observation] to his instinct" and come to "know who one is" otherwise the result is "a heap of splotches, ... a mess of screaming colors", "anti-artistic" and "factual" (517). The psychologist-artist must reject illusory moralities and erroneous philosophies and instead become filled with the Dionysian condition of frenzy in all its forms: sexual, victorious, cruel, destructive. This frenzy leads to "reflections of [man's] perfection" - the affirmation of Yes, the mode of being anti-Christian (518 - 519), the realization that "In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection" (525).
Beauty: the organic principle around which Nietzsche's living work has grown. "Nothing is beautiful, except man alone ... nothing is ugly except the degenerating man" (526). Despite the call to beauty, Nietzsche's Twilight confronts us with ugliness (529). How are we to approach decay, degeneration, and death? Nietzsche's solution: accept the role of the tragic artist who embraces all without fear (530), beyond terror and pity (563), even to the point of death. He exhorts us to move beyond "good and evil" (501). He calls us to "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems" (562). Our living can become beautiful, even in the twilight hours of our dying existence: "To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses... a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life" (536 - 537). To be oneself: this is the eternal joy of becoming (563). Through aesthetics, in our own twilight, Nietzsche guides us to beauty - in our flesh, in our living, even in the hour of our death.
Summary of The Portable Nietzsche (Portable Library)
The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world?s leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, ?Few writers in any age were so full of ideas,? and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted.
The Portable Nietzsche includes Kaufmann?s definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche?s four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche?s development, versatility, and inexhaustibility.
?In this volume, one may very conveniently have a rich review of one of the most sensitive, passionate, and misunderstood writers in Western, or any, literature.? ?Newsweek
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