The Will To Power

[Anonymous No.10458568]

How is The Will To Power so underrated? I'm only halfway through it but I'm finding that it explains Nietzche's philosophy in a more straight-forward way than any of his published works. I might even dare suggest it be the starting point for someone curious in Nietzche (provided they are aware of its history).
Thoughts on The Will To Power?

[Anonymous No.10458578]

Heidegger considered it the clearest articulation of Nietzsche's core philosophy, but it gets a bad rap because his horrible talentless cunt of a sister compiled it and supposedly did violence to his archive for petty political reasons and for her own self-aggrandizement.

[Anonymous No.10458607]

>>10458568
Mostly because of the "his Nazi sister changed it!!!" myth

[Anonymous No.10458635]

>>10458578
I've always heard this, and that she butchered it to make it Nazi propaganda, but in Taffel's introduction he claims "recent scholarship has established that Förster-Nietzche's early actions as her brother's literary executor were more likely designed to increase the sale of his works and thereby raise her own public stature than to further an ideological agenda. Moreover, close comparisons to Nietzche's notebooks with The Will To Power have shown that the primary objective of the editors was to enhance the final publication's semblance of coherence and completeness." He goes on to speculate that the pessimistic aspects of the work come from his late bitterness that despite achieving the self-creating genius status equivalent to the highest form of life affirmation and human achievement, he was isolated, with no peers to recognize and celebrate that achievement, and with very few sales of his work, he felt his achievement to be hollow

[Anonymous No.10458693]

>>10458578
>>10458607
The
>edited by Walter Kaufmann
Edition is edited by Kaufmann not Nietzsche's sister. It's explained in the intro. What I mean is, he attempts to undo any of the crap she got jumbled together in there.

>>10458568
Yeah OP, def underrated & it really is the clearest, pithiest explanation of his ideas, but tell a Nietzsche pseud this and his fedora will start spinning angrily.

[Anonymous No.10458729]

>>10458693
I'm actually reading Ludovici's translation, I just used Kaufmann's edition for the pic.
I know Ludovici translated it back in 1910 and was a pretty fascist guy but Kaufmann always softens the blow of Nietzche's thought and claims certain ideas were 'just metaphorical.' So I'm not sure which translation is best.
Is there any concensus on an overall best Nietzche translator?

[Anonymous No.10458741]

Btw I'm using a phone with shit auto correct, I know there's an 's' in Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.10458754]

>>10458729
The penguin editions of Nietzsche’s work usually have great translations.

[Anonymous No.10459041]

>>10458729
Haha just read both, desu. Read them side by side with the original. This is usually a redpill on translations (they're all terrible and misleading).

[Anonymous No.10459122]

>>10458568
It's not even a book. It is a patchwork cobbled together from Nietzsche's unpublished notes according to one of several vague outlines he made. You shouldn't accept the material therein as a clear expression of his thought when he decided not to publish it -- that is more telling about his thought. Especially since he became a radical experimentalist/'attempter' in the later years, you shouldn't take anything as a definitive and final expression of his views, but this is especially true of writings he decided to leave unpublished.

[Anonymous No.10459133]

>>10458578
Nietsche was the antisystematic philosopher par excellence, but Heidegger construed him as the culmination of systematic philosophy so that he could go on to claim himself as the beginning of the next stage of philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10459151]

>>10459122
R. J. Hollingdale:
>But one must again point out that the ‘experimental’ method of philosophy—the adoption of many
points of view, including the extremest, in an effort to arrive at a reasonable point of view—is bound to
produce abortive ‘experiments’: answers that are premature, inferences that are ill-founded, formulations
that carry a valid insight to the point of absurdity; and that the acumen of an ‘experimental’ philosopher
is shown in his ability to judge whether an ‘experiment’ has failed […] The publication of the above
aphorism in The Will to Power is not evidence that Nietzsche was insane, but rather the reverse: he wrote
it, but he rejected it.

[Anonymous No.10459157]

>And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of forces that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to power— and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! (WP 1067; 1885)

[Anonymous No.10459168]

>>10459157
Isn't this just Empedocles?

[Anonymous No.10459185]

>>10458568
Let's just say I consider it such an important read that if you haven't read it, you might as well say "I haven't read Nietzsche." It may be a compilation of unpublished notes, but many of the notes were already being compiled by Nietzsche for a new book which he had already titled The Will to Power. Though not perfect, it still formulates to produce a readable text that elucidates the core concept of his entire body of work, will to power.

[Anonymous No.10459215]

>>10459122
>You shouldn't accept the material therein as a clear expression of his thought when he decided not to publish it -- that is more telling about his thought.
Mhmm.

[Anonymous No.10459231]

>>10459215
And let us not forget our other favorite sadboy