Nietzsche

553 Pages·2007·6.08 MB·English

by  Walter A. Kaufmann

Nietzsche
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Nietzsche
PHILOSOPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST,
ANTICHRIST
BY WALTER KAUFMANN
Fourth Edition
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
1974
TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN
HAZEL, DINAH, AND DAVID
Copyright 1950 © 1968, 1974 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
LCC 74-11763
ISBN 0-691-01983-5
Third Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1968
Fourth Edition, 1974
FIRST PRINCETON PAPERBACK EDITION, 1974
The author wishes to thank the Manuscript Division
of the Princeton University Library
for permission to reproduce the Nietzsche letter
that appears on pages 470-472 and the Houghton Library
at Harvard University for permission
to reproduce the Nietzsche letter that appears on pages 476-479
The other two letters that are reproduced
are from the author's own collection.
http://pup.princeton.edu
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION (1974)
Since the publication of the third edition, this book has come of
age and is now about to enter upon its second quarter of a century.
When I began to work on Nietzsche, he was in eclipse both in his
native Germany and in the English-speaking world, and it seemed
needful to dissociate him from the Nazis and to show that he had
been a great philosopher. The book has succeeded on both counts,
and now Nietzsche is studied more widely than ever before. Even
in the United States, where few professors paid much serious atten-
tion to Nietzsche in the 1950s, the literature on him is growing.
If the narrow departmentalism of our universities should decline
further and give way to interdisciplinary studies of a high order,
the number of really perceptive studies of Nietzsche would surely
increase.
The third edition of this book was very extensively revised and
exceeded the original edition by more than a hundred pages.
Meanwhile, the new German critical edition of Nietzsche's works
has gathered momentum and requires some comments, as does the
discovery of a page that Nietzsche asked his publisher to insert in
Ecce Homo. All this will be found in a new section at the end of
the Appendix (452ff.). Up to that point the pagination of the
third edition has been retained. The references to this book in my
translation, with commentary, of The Gay Science (1974) are there-
fore still in order. Part V of the Bibliography has been revised
thoroughly, and Part VI (Works about Nietzsche) has been ex-
panded. Because Nietzsche's relation to Dostoevsky is of special
interest, a long article on this subject has been summarized briefly
(see Miller).
iv NIETZSCHE: PHILOSOPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST, ANTICHRIST
The requirement that every addition before page 452 had to
be balanced by an omission has made it difficult to make changes
in the text. Nevertheless, revisions have been made on more than
forty pages before 452, including ix, x, 68, 71, 76, 97, 115, 133, 168,
172, 183, 185, 204, 313, 340, 391, 419, and 424. The following
changes make some difference in the account given of Nietzsche's
ideas: his critique of systems (79, 81), the question whether he was an
atheist (100-102), his revaluation (111), how one becomes what
one is (159ff.), the discovery of the will to power (the role of
hypothesis versus induction: 172, 183, 185, 204), master and slave
morality and autonomy (297), breeding (306), and the eternal
recurrence (319, 322-25). On 355 a slip has been corrected, and on
395 a couple of sentences have been inserted to call attention to
two images in which I have long recognized self-portraits of Nietz-
sche: "an 'artistic Socrates' " and "the Socrates who practices mu-
sic." The old title of Chapter 13 seems to have led some writers to
suppose that the chapter deals only with "Nietzsche's Admiration
for Socrates," while ignoring the passages that are sharply critical
of Socrates. Those who have read the chapter will have found that
it takes note of all passages in which Socrates is discussed as well as
some in which he is not named outright. To avoid misunderstand-
ing, the title has been changed to "Nietzsche's Attitude Toward
Socrates."
Sometimes I am asked about the relation of my own views to
Nietzsche's. I have always tried to resist the exegetical temptation
of reading my own ideas into the texts, as well as the censorious at-
titude of dogmatic historians who constantly pass judgment, say-
ing more or less: he said . . . , but I say unto you . . . . I have de-
veloped my own views of Christianity in Critique of Religion and
Philosophy and in The Faith of a Heretic; I have argued for views
very different from Nietzsche's in Tragedy and Philosophy; and
my moral philosophy is to be found in Without Guilt and Justice.
But the present volume is devoted to Nietzsche.
Finally, I want to thank those who have called my attention to
points that required revision: notably Ivan Soll (319, in an article),
John Wilcox (many points, mostly in his book), and Alan Spiro
and Tom Ferguson (many points, entre nous). I have been fortu-
nate indeed to have had Spiro and Ferguson in a seminar in the
fall of 1973 and as assistants in the spring of 1974.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1968)
I
A man who has published six books, all of them about Nietzsche,
says on page 431 of the fifth of them: "This compelled the author
once again to occupy himself intensively not only with Nietzsche,
which in any case is not one of the pleasant things in life, but
also with the Nietzsche literature, which is, with few exceptions,
insufferable." l
Over twenty years have passed since I submitted my doctoral
thesis on "Nietzsche's Theory of Values" to the Department of
Philosophy at Harvard, and since then I have written extensively
on Nietzsche (though nothing like six books) and translated ten
of his books, if I may for the moment include The Will to Power
under this heading; but if anything "compelled" me to occupy
myself so intensively with Nietzsche it was my love of his books.
Agreement rarely involves love, and love does not necessarily
entail agreement. Most of my books are not about Nietzsche, and
over the years I have developed my own views on many of the
problems with which Nietzsche dealt.
The literature about Nietzsche is another matter entirely. In
1952, when I visited C. D. Broad at Trinity College, Cambridge,
he mentioned a man named Salter. I asked whether he was the
Salter who had written a book on Nietzsche, to which Broad,
one of the most eminent British philosophers of his generation,
replied: "Dear no; he did not deal with crackpot subjects like
that; he wrote about psychical research." (Broad had been Presi-
dent of the Society for Psychical Research.)
1 Erich Podach: see section II of the Appendix, below.
vi NIETZSCHE: PHILOSOPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST, ANTICHRIST
All sorts of men, including some crackpots, have written
about Nietzsche, but among those who have contributed to the
literature are Thomas Mann and Camus, Jaspers and Heidegger,
and leading poets as well as renowned scholars. No other modern
philosopher, at least since Kant and Hegel, has been so highly
esteemed by so many illustrious writers. Yet many studies, includ-
ing some by very honorable men, are based on scholarship so
shoddy it almost defies belief. This does not mean that the
Nietzsche literature is worse than secondary literature on other
fascinating men and subjects.
If Erich Podach, who finds the Nietzsche literature, "with few
exceptions, insufferable," had not concentrated exclusively on
Nietzsche but had also done research on Kierkegaard or Chris-
tianity, on Judaism or the Bible, he might have found most of
the literature no less repellent. Whoever digs for gold must clear
away a lot of rubbish.
Or must he? Would it not do to bypass the accumulated errors
and confusions, concentrating solely on the primary materials?
This advice could mean two different things. Those who ignore
the secondary literature usually fall into scores of errors and con-
fusions from which some of their predecessors might have saved
them. And if one reads the literature but does not refer to it in
print, where are readers to find guidance, confronted with a
wealth of studies many of which are quite uninformed?
Obviously, the thing to do is to lose little time over incom-
petent writers who are unlikely to be taken seriously by many
readers, but to be firm and forthright, faced with "men of posi-
tion and fortune." And to allude to another Aristotelian formu-
lation: one should not sacrifice the truth to friendship.
This book is about Nietzsche, but it is also a guide to much
of the Nietzsche literature. If one is not content to offer just an-
other view of him, there is no alternative. Sound method requires
that we do not merely marshal the evidence for our own views:
we must go out of our way also to confront evidence that on the
face of it contradicts our views (in the present case, passages in
Nietzsche that do not seem to fit our image) and alternative con-
structions (those proposed by other writers on the subject).
If no other study of Nietzsche deals so thoroughly with rival
interpretations, demonstrating why they are untenable, it is also
true that most other writers on Nietzsche tend to fasten on a few
snippets from his works, heedless of the fact that scores of other
Preface to the Third Edition vii
snippets might be used to support very different exegeses. They
treat Nietzsche the way most theologians treat Scripture—or the
way many theologians gerrymander the writings of rival faiths in
order to come up with bogeymen.
It was the surpassing merit of Karl Jaspers' Nietzsche (1936)
that he counseled Nietzsche's readers never to rest content until
they had also found passages contradicting those found first. This
should have spelled the end of the theological era of Nietzsche
exegesis, but of course, it did not: some recent studies are as
arbitrary as any. Alas, Jaspers' own interpretation rests content
with superficial contradictions and ignores the context of the
snippets on his file cards, the development of Nietzsche's thought,
and the difference between Nietzsche's books and notes.2
In sum, these are some of the differences between this book
and most other studies of Nietzsche: (a) I love Nietzsche's books
but am no Nietzschean. (b) The development, the context, and
the interrelations of Nietzsche's views are given an unusual
amount of attention. (c) So are apparently negative evidence and
rival interpretations.
II
A fourth point might be added. When I was working on the
original edition, a young colleague in another department ex-
pressed surprise: "I thought Nietzsche was dead as a doornail."
Today few philosophers are more alive, and millions are discuss-
ing his pronouncement that "God is dead." But it would be a
mistake to associate Nietzsche primarily with a few theologians.
After all, they are making news not because they echo Nietzsche's
words more than fourscore years later, but because, while doing
this, they insist on remaining Christian theologians. It is plain
what Nietzsche would have thought of that: as little as he would
have thought of most movements that have sought the sanction
of his name.
By 1950 Nietzsche had been linked in turn with evolution,
with depth psychology, and with the Nazis; but in the English-
speaking world he had not come into his own as a philosopher.
In the United States, my book probably did its share to get
Nietzsche to be taken seriously as a philosopher; but soon it be-
2 See Chap. 2, section I, below.