The Portable Nietzsche Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Bibliography

  THE PORTABLE - NIETZSCHE

  THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part

  Zarathustra’s Prologue

  Zarathustra’s Speeches

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Second Part

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Third Part

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Fourth and Last Part

  NOTE (1884)

  LETTERS

  NOTES

  FROM A DRAFT FOR A PREFACE

  FROM Beyond Good and Evil

  FROM The Gay Science: Book V

  FROM Toward a Genealogy of Morals

  LETTER TO OVERBECK

  NOTES (1887)

  LETTER TO HIS SISTER

  NOTES (1888)

  FROM The Wagner Case

  TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS - OR, HOW ONE PHILOSOPHIZES WITH A HAMMER

  THE ANTICHRIST

  FROM Ecce Homo - HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS

  NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER - OUT OF THE FILES OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

  LETTERS (1889)

  Editions of Nietzsche

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. He attended the famous Pforta School, then went to university at Bonn and at Leipzig, where he studied philology and read Schopenhauer. When he was only 24 he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basle University; he stayed there until his health forced him into retirement in 1897. While at Basle he made and broke his friendship with Wagner, participated as an ambulance orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, and published The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (1873–6), and the first two parts of Human, All Too Human (1878–9). From 1880 until his final collapse in 1889, except for brief interludes, he divorced himself from everyday life and, supported by his university pension, he lived mainly in France, Italy, and Switzerland. The third part of Human, All Too Human appeared in 1880, followed by The Dawn in 1881. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written between 1883 and 1885, and his last completed books were Ecce Homo, an autobiography, and Nietzsche contra Wagner. He became insane in 1889 and remained in a condition of mental and physical paralysis until his death in 1900.

  Walter Kaufmann was Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1947 until his death in 1980. He held visiting appointments at many American and foreign universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Heidelberg, Jerusalem, and the Australian National University; and his books have been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

  Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America

  by Viking Penguin Inc. 1954

  Paperbound edition published 1959

  Reprinted 1959 (twice), 1960 (twice), 1961 (three times),

  1962 (twice), 1963 (twice), 1964 (twice), 1965 (twice),

  1966 (twice), 1967 (twice), 1968 (three times), 1969 (three times),

  1970 (three times), 1971 (three times), 1972 (three times),

  1973, 1974 (twice), 1975, 1976

  Published in Penguin Books 1976

  Copyright 1954 by Viking Penguin Inc. Copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1968 Copyright © renewed 1982 by Viking Penguin Inc. All rights reserved.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.

  The portable Nietzsche.

  Reprint of the 1954 ed. published by The Viking Press, New York,

  which was issued as no. 62 of Viking portable library.

  Bibliography. p. 688.

  1. Philosophy—Collected works. I. Title.

  [B3312.E52K3 1976] 193 76-47577

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67419-8

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  TO EDITH KAUFMANN

  Wenn’s etwas gibt, gewalt’ger als das Schicksal, So ist’s der Mut, der’s unerschüttert trägt.

  —GEIBEL

  Acknowledgments

  All the translations in this volume are new, except for some passages that have previously appeared in my Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press has generously given permission for their use here. But even these passages have been revised, and, wherever feasible, I have made available other aphorisms and letters instead of reproducing material already available in that book.

  In the Introduction and editorial matter too, Princeton University Press has kindly permitted reliance on my Nietzsche. But whereas that book sought to explode the legends woven around Nietzsche and to analyze the break with Wagner, the relation to Lou Salomé and to his sister, the final madness, and, above all, his philosophy, psychology, and critique of Christianity, the editorial matter in the present volume has been wholly subordinated to the translations. Nietzsche himself is to speak, and no lengthy editorial reflections seemed worth a corresponding cut in the space allotted to him.

  I am greatly indebted to Princeton University for a year’s leave of absence, which enabled me, among other things, to complete this volume; to Jean Yolton, for generous help with proofs; and to Hazel and Felix Kaufmann, my wife and my brother, for many helpful criticisms, particularly of my translation of Zarathustra.

  W. K.

  INTRODUCTION

  There are philosophers who can write and philosophers who cannot. Most of the great philosophers belong to the first group. There are also, much more rarely, philosophers who can write too well for their own good—as philosophers. Plato wrote so dramatically that we shall never know for sure what precisely he himself thought about any number of questions. A
nd Nietzsche furnishes a more recent and no less striking example. His philosophy can be determined, but his brilliant epigrams and metaphors, his sparkling polemics and ceaseless stylistic experiments, make it rather difficult to do so; and to read him solely to reconstruct the world of his ideas would be obtuse pedantry. At least two things should come first: sheer enjoyment of his writing, and then the more harrowing experience of exposing oneself to his many passionate perspectives. We should not rashly take a well-phrased point for Nietzsche’s ultimate position, but we often stand to gain if we ask ourselves why it should not be ours. Add to this that few writers in any age were so full of ideas—fruit—ful, if not acceptable—and it is clear why he has steadily exerted a unique fascination on the most diverse minds and why he is still so eminently worth reading.

  An anthologist can easily re-create Nietzsche in his own image, even as writers of lives of Jesus present us, perhaps as often as not, with wishful self-portraits. Doubtless Nietzsche has attracted crackpots and villains, but perhaps the percentage is no higher than in the case of Jesus. As Maritain has said: “If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more misused than the Bible?”

  The present volume is not an anthology. It contains the complete and unabridged texts of four of Nietzsche’s works; and the additional selections from his other books, notes, and letters aim to round out the picture of his development, his versatility, his inexhaustibility. There is much here that is surely admirable: formulations, epigrams, insights, suggestions. And there is much that is shocking: bathos, sentences that invite quotation out of context in support of hideous causes, silly arguments—and many will recoil from his abundant blasphemies. For this is no “reader’s digest” of Nietzsche, no “essential Nietzsche,” no distillation and no whitewash, but an attempt to present as much as possible of him in one small volume. The book can of course be read like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but what one gets out of Nietzsche may be vaguely proportionate to the sustained attention one accords him.

  The arrangement is chronological, and an effort has been made to give some idea of the development of Nietzsche’s thought and style, from his artless early notes to his occasionally brilliant aphorisms; then to the gross unevenness of Zarathustra; the incisive prose of his last works; and the alternation of diabolical polemic and furious rhetoric in The Antichrist. In Nietzsche contra Wagner, calm returns as Nietzsche takes time for once to edit some of his earlier prose and in places achieves perfection. His last letters, written right after his breakdown, reflect the disintegration of his mind, but they are still meaningful. The rest is silence.

  II

  The new translations were made because the older ones are unacceptable. As a single, and admittedly extreme, example, the hitherto standard version of Zarathustra is discussed briefly in the editor’s preface to that work. Great writers are far more difficult to transpose into another language than is usually supposed, and Nietzsche poses many additional difficulties. While any detailed discussion of principles of translation would lead too far, a few remarks may prove helpful.

  Rather than flatten out Nietzsche’s highly unusual German into stereotyped idioms, an effort has been made to preserve as much as possible of his cadences, even where they are awkwardly groping or overstrained. What is thus lost in smoothness is gained for the understanding of the development of his style and personality.

  A few of his terms create special difficulties; for example, Geist. To be perfectly idiomatic, one would have to render it now as spirit, now as mind, now as intellect, now as wit. But generally the connotation of Geist is much more inclusive than that of any one of these words, and Nietzsche’s meaning depends on this. If we select “spirit” in one sentence and “wit” in another, something essential is lost: we get smooth propositions, not Nietzsche. Hence it seemed important to stick to one English word; and “spirit” was chosen. The religious overtones are entirely in order and altogether indispensable for an understanding of many paradoxical passages, particularly in The Antichrist; but it is well to keep in mind that the meaning is sometimes closer to esprit.

  Mitleid has almost invariably been rendered by “pity,” although “compassion” would have the advantage that it too means literally “suffering with.” The two English terms, however, do not have entirely the same meaning, and it is no accident that Aristotle, Spinoza, and La Rochefoucauld, of whose precedent Nietzsche makes much, have all been translated in the past as criticizing “pity.” And “pity” alone suggests the strong possibility of obtrusiveness and condescension apart from which Nietzsche’s repugnance cannot be understood. Again, it would not do to alternate the terms: pity, as Zarathustra’s “final sin,” is one of the central themes of Part Four, in which many statements about pity in Part Two are quoted or alluded to; and such later works as Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist explicate the symbolism of Zarathustra. Nietzsche, in short, is not only a brilliant writer but also a philosopher who employs certain key terms, which must be rendered consistently. But the problem is even more deeply rooted than has been suggested so far.

  After publication, many writers cut the umbilical cord and are ready for another conception. Nietzsche’s works, however, are not independent creations. In the first place, Nietzsche wrote, to use his own phrase, with his blood: each book is part of the man, and the resulting existential unity makes all of them part of a single work. Each aphorism looks as if it could be understood by itself—and up to a point, of course, it can be—but in fact not even the books can be understood in isolation from one another. Nietzsche himself insisted on this point and underlined it by frequent quotations from, and allusions to, his earlier works. These internal echoes add essential overtones and are important clues to Nietzsche’s meaning. This is another reason for consistency in translating certain words and phrases.

  That Nietzsche did not dissociate himself from his published works but kept living with them is surely due in part to the fact that publication was in no case a major experience: for all the response he got, or rather did not get, the books might just as well never have been published at all. They did not become public property but remained his own—as children who fail to find a place in the world continue to be of special concern to their parents. The self-quotations are sometimes, at least in part, attempts to advertise himself. But it is far more fruitful to look at them, and at the far more numerous allusions, as leitmotifs.

  Taking their cue from Wagner’s leitmotifs, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig have pointed out, in connection with their remarkable German translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that the style of the Old Testament often depends on Leitworte, words which are central and particularly emphasized in one passage and then picked up again elsewhere, thus establishing an unobtrusive cross reference—an association which, even if only dimly felt, adds dimension to the meaning. Perhaps no major writer is as biblical in this respect as Nietzsche.

  A professor of philosophy who favored my Nietzsche with a most flattering review regretted one lapse “in linguistic usage”—“the most unkindest cut of all.” Shakespeare, of course, is generally better known than this, but some apparent lapses in this volume might well be due to the fact that Nietzsche knew the Bible so much better than many people today. Certainly he knew it better than one of his chief translators, who converted publicans into “toll-gatherers,” the Last Supper into “The Supper,” “unknown god” into “unfamiliar god,” and so on. When Zarathustra speaks of trying the reins, the archaism is surely preferable to having him test kidneys.

  Nietzsche’s style is not Teutonic but European, and more than that: he alludes freely to the books that constitute our Western heritage, from Homer to Dostoevski, and he sprinkles his prose with French and Latin phrases. There is something very modern in this: in his own phrase, Nietzsche was indeed a good European. But he never comes as close to patchwork as Eliot in The Waste Land, and he holds a reasonable mean between the cryptograms of the later Joyce and the obtrusive erudit
ion of Toynbee, who underlines every allusion to the Bible with a footnote. Moreover, Nietzsche, unlike Joyce, almost invariably supplies a surface meaning too, and recognition of his allusions reveals a multi-dimensional style of writing and thinking, unlike Toynbee’s.

  It is not only his attitude toward religion that ranges Nietzsche far closer to Joyce than to Toynbee: there is also his addiction to plays on words, which probably poses the greatest single problem for the translator, especially in Zarathustra. But more of that in the editor’s preface to that work. Suffice it to say here that it is impossible to be faithful to the content while sacrificing the form: meaning and mood are inseparable. If the translator makes things easy for himself and omits a play on words, he unwittingly makes a lighthearted pun or rhyme look serious, if he does not reduce the whole passage to nonsense. And he abets the common misconception of the austere Nietzsche, when, in fact, no other philosopher knew better how to laugh at himself.

  Those who browse in this volume will find a conglomeration where anyone reading it straight through will likely find one of the most fascinating men of all time: a man as multi-dimensional as his style, profound and then again piteous, as tragic as he is widely supposed to have been, but no less comic—almost as different from his popular caricatures as a character in Shakespeare, or more likely in Dostoevski, is from the comic strip version of Superman. In his own formula: Ecce homo!

  III

  Nietzsche was born in 1844; lost his father, a Lutheran minister, in 1849; spent his childhood surrounded by his mother, sister, grandmother, and two maiden aunts; was sent to a first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta; and proceeded to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig to study classical philology. Our knowledge of his youth rests largely on his sister’s later hagiographies, but the twenty-four-year-old comes to life for us in the recommendation that earned him a professorship at Basel. The writer was Friedrich Ritschl, a generally conservative professor at Leipzig.