Readers of this volume can get a good account of the grounds for this hostility in “The Case of Wagner” and in Walter Kaufmann’s introduction (which, like all his other introductions in this volume, is outspoken and authoritative).

In 1879, intermittently troubled by ill health including almost intolerable headaches, Nietzsche resigned his professorship and sought relief in the Swiss mountains (the little village of Sils Maria) and Italian cities like Turin—in vain. It was by and large a lonely life, his solitude broken only by occasional visits by a few—a very few—loyal disciples. But for a decade, he produced his most enduring books in this hermitlike existence. Two among these crucial texts appear in this volume, in full: Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), and repay the closest attention.

For the most part his writings are cast in chains of brilliant aphorisms or connected essays. He pursued his quarrel with Christianity and conventional morality, his analysis of the aristocrats of life and the crowd man, his thoughts on human knowledge and human destiny. He did not complete a philosophical system; he had intended to write a synthesis of his thinking and diligently took notes for what he wanted to call “The Will to Power.” But he never did, and what his sister brought out after his death under this title had neither the form, nor the intellectual argument, he had wanted to give it. Still, the enterprise he managed to stamp with his unique way of thinking was one of stupendous daring and unending interest even for the reader who in the end disagrees with Nietzsche. In 1888, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes gave Nietzsche his first general recognition in a series of lectures. And then, in January 1889, Nietzsche went mad and could no longer defend himself against the distortions by his sister and like-minded ideologues.

Yet now, thanks in considerable part to the expositions and the translations by Walter Kaufmann, of which generous samples appear in this volume, and to the work he inspired over the years, it is possible to see Nietzsche plain. As he put it a little pathetically in the intellectual autobiography he wrote shortly before his breakdown, Ecce Homo, a book eminently worth reading: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.”

——

PETER GAY is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the director of the Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His works include The Enlightenment and, most recently, Mozart (Penguin Lives).

A Note on This Edition

This volume contains five of Nietzsche’s major works, complete, as well as seventy-five aphorisms from his five aphoristic books, selections from his correspondence about The Case of Wagner, and variants from Nietzsche’s drafts for Ecce Homo. I have also furnished footnote commentaries on all of this material, and have contributed introductions and indices.

All footnotes are mine, except three in The Case of Wagner, which are clearly identified: these are the only footnotes Nietzsche himself included in any of his books.

The translations were made especially for this volume. I have used Clifton Fadiman’s early translation of The Birth of Tragedy, done when he was a graduate student, as a basis for some parts of my new version. But even where I did not start from scratch, I have compared every sentence with the original, and my revisions are so extensive that the new version is probably more different from his than most Nietzsche translations—including Fadiman’s—are from those that preceded them. And in large part I did work from scratch. I have made extensive use of a draft translation of On the Genealogy of Morals, furnished me by R. J. Hollingdale; but I alone bear the responsibility for the final version. The other translations, as well as the commentaries, involved no collaboration.

In the original German, almost every numbered section constitutes a single paragraph. Nietzsche used dashes and three dots to indicate breaks. I have largely dispensed with these devices and begun new paragraphs wherever that seemed helpful.

W.K.

Introduction by the Editor

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure. Philosophers of that sort are mostly French and rarely taken very seriously by twentieth-century philosophy professors. The only French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). One may actually be led to wonder whether in philosophy there is an inverse proportion between profundity and importance on the one hand, and clarity and excellence of style on the other. If Plato seems to prove that this need not be so, many twentieth-century philosophers would be quick to counter that, philosophically, Plato’s early and more literary dialogues are less important than his later dialogues, especially where they stump even professionals. And in Kant’s case it is plain that his worst-written book, the Critique of Pure Reason, is his greatest work.

Where does this leave Nietzsche? At first glance it would seem in the company of Montaigne, Pascal, and Voltaire. But there is much more philosophy in his writings than in theirs, and his influence—also on philosophy professors—far exceeds theirs. A surprising number of German professors of philosophy have written books on him ever since he died in 1900, and hardly any German philosopher of note since that time has escaped the impact of Nietzsche’s thought.