Review: The Portable Nietzsche

The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third time I have read this anthology. That last time was around 1990. It is worth reading again. But now the cover is gone, and the first pages have drifted away. Over the years I have, of course, I have read other Nietzsche in other editions, but nothing has ever risen to the level of translator and editor Kaufmann’s insights, notes, and arrangement. Even this could be improved by me. I would like more help as I read and Nietzsche refers to contemporary events and personages like David Strauss, etc. Also, this particular collection is Thus Spoke Zarathustra with assorted other works. I think that 1883 could have been trimmed down in the excerpt and a few more letters and aphorisms thrown in and that would be better. Speaking of the “aphoristic” (learned that adjective from Kaufmann) over the years I have been moving away from the radical provocations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Antichrist to these insightful, witty aphorisms that I see as a middle period. Those two works I see in the third act with the curtain opening on the Wagner love and the Greek scholar’s dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

They are a bit more clearly aimed, while the latter works are not exactly Nostradamus in perplexing obscurity. All that hallucinogenic metaphor probably explains how Nazi theorists and other anti-Semite thinkers believe there is some basis for their worldview here. Kaufmann points out some spots that are quicksand for the deluded despite Nietzsche being overtly anti-anti-Semite (he actually respects Jews for Spinoza and more), anti-party, and anti-nationalistic as in this note:

Being nationalistic in the sense in which it is now demanded by public opinion would, it seems to me, be for us who are more spiritual not mere insipidity but dishonesty, a deliberate deadening of our better will and conscience.

Of course, if his sister had predeceased him, maybe none of that association would have come about:

LETTER TO HIS SISTER
Christmas 1887

…You have committed one of the greatest stupidities- for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy… It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to AntiSemitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and AntiSemitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible…

I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times…

Essentially, Nietzsche is furiously individual with warnings for all that fear the individual:

The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of "work" and the tireless talk of the "blessings of work" I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work-and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late-that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess. And now horrors! it is precisely the "worker" who has become dangerous. "Dangerous individuals are swarming all around. And behind them, the danger of dangers: the individual.

- The Dawn (1881)

Or, put more succinctly:

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

- The Dawn (1881)

Really eternal recurrence and even ressentiment I find more interesting than profound. The whole beyond good and evil idea I find more worth mulling on, as is alluded to here:

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)

and

What is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.

- Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Then we go onto this meat to chew on:

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena-more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it.

- Twilight of the Idols (1888)

And then this which intrigues me as Buddhism has since I was a teen:

That the strong races of northern Europe did not reject the Christian God certainly does no credit to their religious genius-not to speak of their taste. There is no excuse whatever for their failure to dispose of such a sickly and senile product of decadence. But a curse lies upon them for this failure: they have absorbed sickness, old age, and contradiction into all their instincts and since then they have not created another god. Almost two thousand years-and not a single new god! But still, as if his existence were justified, as if he represented the ultimate and the maximum of the god-creating power, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! …

I hope that my condemnation of Christianity has not involved me in any injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of adherents: Buddhism. Both belong together as nihilistic religions-they are religions of decadence-but they differ most remarkably. For being in a position now to compare them, the critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to the students of India.

Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity: posing problems objectively and coolly is part of its inheritance, for Buddhism comes after a philosophic movement which spanned centuries. The concept of "God" had long been disposed of when it arrived. Buddhism is the only genuinely positivistic religion in history. This applies even to its theory of knowledge (a strict phenomenalism): it no longer says "struggle against sin" but, duly respectful of reality. "struggle against suffering." Buddhism is profoundly distinguished from Christianity by the fact that the self-deception of the moral concepts lies far behind it. In my terms, it stands beyond good and evil.

- The Antichrist (1888)

The miscellany of Notes and Letters are intriguing insights into Nietzsche the individual. For one thing, while he did eventually go instance, he comes across “off stage” much more collected than his later zany published works. I would like more of this type of insight, as his reading habits:

LETIER TO OVERBECK
Nizza, February 23, 1887

…I did not even know the name of Dostoevsky just a few weeks ago-uneducated person that I am, not reading any journals. An accidental reach of the arm in a bookstore brought to my attention L' esprit souterrain, a work just translated into French. (It was a similar accident with Schopenhauer in my 21st year and with Stendhal in my 35th.) The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary…

In a lot of this, I couldn’t help but think of Nietzsche alive today as a cable news pundit and with a Twitter account (first three from Twilight of the Idols, 1888):

The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt-not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life-for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live. To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished…

and

The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it-what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic-every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

and

Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power…

And, boy oh boy:

One need only read any Christian agitator, St. Augustine, for example, to comprehend, to smell, what an unclean lot had thus come to the top. One would deceive oneself utterly if one presupposed any lack of intelligence among the leaders of the Christian movement: oh, they are clever, clever to the point of holiness, these good church fathers! What they lack is something quite different. Nature has neglected them-she forgot to give them a modest dowry of respectable, of decent, of clean instincts. Among ourselves, they are not even men. Islam is a thousand times right in despising Christianity: Islam presupposes men.

Christianity has cheated us out of the harvest of ancient culture; later it cheated us again, out of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful world of the Moorish culture of Spain, really more closely related to us, more congenial to our senses and tastes than Rome and Greece, was trampled down (I do not say by what kind of feet). Why? Because it owed its origin to noble, to male instincts, because it said Yes to life even with the rare and refined luxuries of Moorish life.

- The Antichrist (1888)

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