HANDOUT ON FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

What's here?

• Reading assignments for this session
  
• Key dates for Nietzsche
  
• Study questions on these readings
  
• Some further thoughts from Nietzsche
  
• What next?--suggestions about where to go from here

Friedrich Nietzsche, excerpts from "On Truth and Lie in an Extra- Moral Sense" and Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954): 42-7, 473-86.

Key dates for Nietzsche

1844 Nietzsche is born in Rocken, a town near Leipzig.
1849 Nietzsche's father dies.
1864 Nietzsche begins his study of classical philology.
1868 Nietzsche meets Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's devotion to Wagner will last until the early 1880s, when the two men have a bitter falling-out.
1869 Though he has not completed his doctorate, Nietzsche is appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basil, Switzerland.
1870 Nietzsche volunteers as a medical orderly and also serves briefly as a soldier with the Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian war.
1872 Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy, his first major work.
1878 Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human
1879 Because of ill health, Nietzsche resigns from the university. He spends the rest of his active life in Switzerland and Italy.
1882 Nietzsche, The Gay Science.Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
1886 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
1887 Nietzsche, Toward a Genealogy of Morals
1888 Nietzsche writes "The Wagner Case," The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, AND Nietzsche contra Wagner
1889 After seeing a coachman flogging a horse, Nietzsche rushes toward the horse and collapses with his arms around the horse's neck. This collapse marks the outbreak of Nietzsche's insanity, which many believe to have been the result of syphilis. His madness, accompanied by physical paralysis, will last for the rest of his life.
1900 Nietzsche dies in Wiemar.

Possible discussion questions

1. In recent years, much has been made of Nietzsche's assertion that "truth is a mobile army of metaphors" (46-7). Why might this assertion appear to be a striking or important one? How might it change usual ways of thinking about "truth," "metaphor," or the relationship between the two?

2. In talking about truth and metaphors, Nietzsche also takes up the subject of forgetting and forgetfulness (see esp. 45 and 47). According to Nietzsche, what role has forgetfulness played in human history--especially the history of human thought?

3. Why does Nietzsche consider Socrates to be a "degenerate" (474) and a "misunderstanding" (478)? Can you infer anything about the ways in which Socrates, at least in Nietzsche's mind, might have differed from earlier Greek thinkers and writers?

4. How, according to Nietzsche, have other philosophers tended to feel about history, time, the senses, and the body? How does Nietzsche seem to feel about such things? (Here, it might be helpful to take Plato as an example of the other philosophers.)

5. On pages 484-6, Nietzsche begins to talk about what he calls "the true world." What "world" does he have in mind here? Is it the world we live in--the world of time and change and physical decay? If not, what other world might it be?

6. On pages 485-6, Nietzsche charts the "history of an error." What "error" does he have in mind? Assuming that Nietzsche is the "Zarathustra" mentioned in step six, what role does he play in this history?

Some further thoughts from Nietzsche

1. "Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it." Twilight of the Idols.

2. "If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy." Twilight

3. "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems . . . that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet." Twilight.

4. "For heaven's sake, do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato. . . . Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instincts of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian--he already takes the concept 'good' for the highest concept--that for the whole phenomenon Plato I would sooner use the harsh phrase 'higher swindle,' or, if it sounds better, 'idealism,' than any other." Twilight.

What next?

• Homepage for English 60A
  
• Syllabus for weeks one and two (Precursors: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure)
  
• Students' comments on Nietzsche
  
• Links to internet resources on Nietzsche