/lit/ - Literature

Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy are great!

It's a weird book, it's kind of the black sheep of Nietzsche because he wrote it right after his falling out with the Wagner circle. If you recall in the intro he talks about how he needed it as a curative, he needed to adopt this extreme position to feel it out, etc. It's really neat, I like it a lot. It can come across superficially like he's being a redditor atheist STEMlet but he's really just adopting the extreme of anti-romanticism because what he valued in romanticism (as embodied in Wagner's circle) was becoming mushy and lazy (as embodied in the worst hangers-on of Wagner's circle, who incidentally mocked and mogged him for being autistic and passionate).

>>21747826
That wasn't the edition I read, just a mere illustration

>>21747816
>In the evening we are visited by Dr. Rée, whose cold and precise character does not appeal to us; on closer inspection we come to the conclusion that he must be an Israelite.
(11-01-76)
>At noon arrival of a new book [Human, All Too Human] by friend Nietzsche—feelings of apprehension after a short glance through it; R. feels he would be doing the author a favor, for which the latter would one day thank him, if he did not read it. It seems to me to contain much inner rage and sullenness, and R. laughs heartily when I say that Voltaire, here so acclaimed [Nietzsche dedicated Human, All Too Human to Voltaire], would less than any other man have understood The Birth of Tragedy.
(04-25-78)
>Firm resolve not to read friend Nietzsche's book [Human, All Too Human], which seems at first glance to be strangely perverse.
(04-27-78)
>We find it hard not to speak now and again about friend N.'s sad book [Human, All Too Human], although both of us can only surmise its contents from a few passages, rather than really know it!
(04-29-78)
>N.'s pitiful book [Human, All Too Human] makes [R.] exclaim to me, "We shall remain true to each other."
(04-30-78)
>R. has written to Prof. Overbeck, thanking him for his nice letter; in it he mentions N. and says meaningfully that he hopes Nietzsche will one day thank him for not having read his book [Human, All Too Human].
(05-23-78)
>R. wanted to amuse himself by sending Prof. Nietzsche a telegram of congratulations on Voltaire's birthday [Nietzsche dedicated Human, All Too Human to Voltaire], but I advise him against it and recommend silence here, as in many other things.
(05-28-78)
>Over coffee he [R.] comes back to Prof. Nietzsche and his book [Human, All Too Human], which seems to him so insignificant, whereas the feelings which gave rise to it are so evil.
(05-30-78)
>R. reads some of Nietzsche's latest book [Human, All Too Human] and is astonished by its pretentious ordinariness. "I can understand why [Paul] Rée's company is more congenial to him than mine." And when I remark that to judge by this book N.'s earlier ones were just reflections of something else, they did not come from within, he says, "And now they are Rée-flections!"
(06-24-78)
>R. had a good night; he goes for a walk in the palace gardens with children and dogs and then takes a rest with Prof. Nietzsche's book [Human, All Too Human], the trivial contents of which thoroughly disgust him.
(06-25-78)
>[R.] continues reading Prof. N.['s book Human, All Too Human].
(06-26-78)
>N.'s book [Human, All Too Human] provokes R. into saying playfully, "Oh, art and religion are just what is left in human beings of the monkey's tail, the remains of an ancient culture!"
(06-27-78)

>>21747865
>Later a nice letter from E[lisabeth] Nietzsche brings the conversation around to her brother's dismal book [Human, All Too Human], and R. remarks that, when respect vanishes, everything else vanishes, too: "That is the true definition of religion; unlike Jesus Christ, I cannot be without sin, but I can respect the sinless state, can beg pardon of my ideal when I am disloyal to it. But our times have no feeling for greatness, they cannot recognize a great character. There can be no bond with it."
(01-28-79)
And then the last recorded statement Wagner would make about Nietzsche in his lifetime:
>Then R. comes back to Nietzsche, observes that the one photograph is enough to show what a fop he is, [Probably referring to a photograph of Nietzsche (wearing a fur coat, hat, scarf, and gloves) that Nietzsche sent to Cosima ca. End March 1871. The fur coat was borrowed from Franz Overbeck. Read Cosima's 1871 reply, criticizing Nietzsche's pose in the photograph.] and declares him to be a complete nonentity, a true example of inability to see. [....] [Hermann] Levi tells us that Nietzsche recommended to him a "young Mozart," [Heinrich Köselitz, a/k/a Peter Gast (1854-1918)] actually a thoroughly incompetent musician! This gives us food for thought! R. says to me eventually that Nietzsche has no ideas of his own, no blood of his own, it is all foreign blood which has been poured into him.
(02-04-83)

>>21747865
>>21747867
This shows a lack of understanding of both the book and Nietzsche himself. You can see already why they didn't get along. Wagner was incredibly powerful but he wasn't a "twice-born soul," to use William James' expression. Nietzsche was more protean than he could understand. He's too blunt to understand how Nietzsche can appreciate something and state it forcefully without committing to it, or how Nietzsche could plunge himself into the "opposite" of romanticism as a purgative for the too-easy, lazy, low-hanging romanticism of the Wagnerkreis. This isn't to overvalue Nietzsche, either. It's just different human types.

>>21747880
Also, Cosima was a worthless cunt nobody and the worst kind of woman, a slave who felt like she somehow had any part in the greatness of her master and like eating her actually great husband's asshole as vigorously as possible was somehow a deal with the devil that enabled her to get her own asshole eaten by others to a lesser degree, when in reality all she ever was was an ass-eating groupie. It reflects poorly on Wagner that he never put her in her place because she's an embarrassment to him.

>>21747880
>He's too blunt to understand how Nietzsche can appreciate something and state it forcefully without committing to it, or how Nietzsche could plunge himself into the "opposite" of romanticism as a purgative for the too-easy, lazy, low-hanging romanticism of the Wagnerkreis.
This is an after-rationalisation on Nietzsche's part. It was all instinct. At this point Wagner's criticisms were entirely correct. Nietzsche himself would say 'the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-too-Human was the visionary of Zarathustra.' While proposing Wagner's name as a more likely candidate. And it was exactly at the time of beginning Zarathustra that Nietzsche would write in letters of hoping to become Wagner's heir, and to create a new Ring.

>>21747890
You're seething for no reason. Cosima did nothing wrong and Nietzsche always admired her.

>The few instances of higher culture with which I have met in Germany were all French in their origin. The most striking example of this was Madame Cosima Wagner, by far the most decisive voice in matters of taste that I have ever heard.

>>21747902
I don't think it's implausible, based not only on a reading of AZM but on readings of the earlier Nietzsche writings and an understanding of how neo-romanticism of the 1860s variety was becoming pedestrian as fuck after the Franco-Prussian War, and Nietzsche was ashamed to be associated with it. If you read the Betrachtungen and the fragments from this era he is openly and unironically romantic, he is clearly high on Wagner's promises of a new German Hellenism and all that stuff. Then suddenly this massive about face, right after falling out with the Wagnerkreis? Simply further exploring conceptions which were already contained within romanticism implicitly (the Enlightenment critique of naivete, to which romanticism was a response), but turning them around on the naivete of decadent romanticism itself?

>>21747913
It reflects even more poorly on Nietzsche that he simped for such a slave. Your Wagner als guru thing is fine as far as it goes but it shouldn't make you myopic. How can I seethe over a dead groupie? I just despise her.

>Art thou a slave? Then thou canst not be a friend. Art thou a tyrant? Then thou canst not have friends.

>Far too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in woman. On that account woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knoweth only love.

>In woman's love there is injustice and blindness to all she doth not love. And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always surprise and lightning and night, along with the light.

>As yet woman is not capable of friendship: women are still cats, and birds. Or at the best, cows.

>>21747926
>Then suddenly this massive about face, right after falling out with the Wagnerkreis?
I think it had been building up for a long time. All of his private notes and correspondences at the time of writing HATH seems to suggest he genuinely believed everything he wrote.

>>21747940
I just don't see what there is to despise her for. She was a loyal wife to Wagner, had a positive influence on his work (consider the keeping of the parabasis in Meistersinger and the removal of the final lines in Gotterdammerung) and her aesthetic opinions were respected by both Wagner and Nietzsche. Even Below continued to respect her:

>What happened was the most natural thing in the world. You know what a wonderful woman Cosima is—such intellect, such energy, such ambition, which she naturally inherits from her father. I was entirely too small a personality for her. She required a colossal genius like Wagner's, and he needed the sympathy and inspiration of an intellectual and artistic woman like Cosima. That they should have come together eventually was inevitable.

>>21747865
>>21747867
Chad. I love him.

>>21748130
You’re a fanatic. You would’ve loved him even if he raped and tortured you.

>>21747816
Specific political trends and predictions are found in the early aphoristic works, though sparse. They become things to mine for exposition and prefiguring of his later works, more enjoyable and estimable thereafter.

>>21747902
>to create a new Ring
Wagner developing TSZ without a fallout would have been a sight to behold. Strauss' wasn't the worst outcome. But that marks the thrust of the attempt.

>>21747940
They shared a patrilineal ancestor, a high ranking church figure in the 1700s. There's destiny for you.

>>21748280
The Ring and Zarathustra are pretty much brother works. The whole superman philosophy, the fateful treatment of modernity, the mythological sensibility, the end of the old world order, the rejection of Christian morality, and of course the enormous similarities in the language used. The Untergang section of the Vorrede is practically taken straight from scenes 1 and 2 of act 3 of Siegfried.

>>21747816
I'm 240 pages into it and Christ, it's a fucking slog. I liked From The Souls of Artists and Writers, but now I'm in the Assorted Opinions and Maxims and I can't fucking wait for this book to be over. Maybe Nietzsche's just not my thing. He's frightfully dense, and the aphorisms don't seem to cohere. One minute he's talking about the psychology of Christianity, the next about artists, the next about utilitarians, etc.

>>21749003
This particular book is sort of unique in this respect. You will enjoy the later books more. They are shorter, more to the point, more differentiated in their content. There's a reason most biographers of Nietzsche give short shrift to this one. You did the patrician thing by starting with it, just hang in there. Read something breezy and fun next like Twilight.