The ethics of reading a man's nachlass.

[War God]

I have always felt uneasy about reading Nietzsche's unpublished papers, especially considering that The Will to Power, for example, was published against his will.

Where or when did Nietzsche explicitly state that he was against 'its' publication?

[sparkinthedark]

Why do you think FN bothered to turn these notes into some great aphorisms and essays?

[War God]

I liken it to peeping through a keyhole at someone getting dressed.

The consideration of decency is overruled by the task of knowing and understanding Nietzsche's philosophy.

At the very least, one should take such writings with a grain of salt

Agreed. But the same goes for the writings published by Nietzsche himself: none of them expresses his "definitive position", as there is no such thing.

"The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest."
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

It is up to us to reconcile Nietzsche's seemingly contradictory positions, seeing that they were the positions of one man, and therefore form a unified whole. By interpolating between those positions, we may reconstruct his dance in our minds. And seeing him dance may even inspire us to dance ourselves!

[The Arriving Man]

I think a reluctance to read W2P may stem from the fact that it was published by his sister who was a Nazi sympathizer. Did she not have it edited to suit a National Socialist viewpoint?

In that case, The book would posess a taint and should be read with suspicion.

[Enjolras]

Good to have you back...

It is up to us to reconcile Nietzsche's seemingly contradictory positions, seeing that they were the positions of one man, and therefore form a unified whole. By interpolating between those positions, we may reconstruct his dance in our minds. And seeing him dance may even inspire us to dance ourselves!

[/quote]


Given that N was writing against the dialect, it seems to me folly to give a dialectical reading of him.

Where on earth does it state in any of N’s work that you should negate difference? Only in Birth of tragedy do you get the whiff of contradiction, which he later repudiated in Ecco homo calling it “offensively Hegelian”.

It is concepts such as “unified whole” that is the target of critique of pluralism. When you cry... “they were the positions of one man” it reminds me of Zarathustra “On Apostates” when the Gods laughed themselves to death at the proclamation of one of the Gods “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!”. There is not just one N, but an army of N’s.

The best way to see him dance is to follow his movement... not to attach the cosmic dancer to a ball and chain.


Enjolras.

[Onasander]

I have no plans to ever read this, and if I do, it would be resulting from supreme boredom. It's a 'reconstruction of a non-work', that's really ify stuff to rely on.

I have timed myself, I can construct a poem quicker than I can type it- it's meaning comes between after I form it, which is practically instantly, but not until the end of the last sentence sometimes do I know what it is I am writing about. I can then literally completely change to a completely new set of ideas and start typing them without any relevancy to the before lines on a completely new tangent that is completely original. And the stuff is often awesome, sometimes contradictory, sometimes I dislike it. It's a fantastic writing tool to possess, and I know of others who can do this, and so don't put a lot of stock on scribbles. It's one thing to quote them, a whole nother thing to use them as the basis for supporting a definitive theory or view on what someone believed.

This is very important to note- humans are capable of doing this- a collection of philosophical notes and scribbles, even if on the same page, cannot in and of itself be reconstructed into a text by any other than the author himself..... I may make a exception to a long serving disciple who knew the guy foreward and backwards in every respect doing this- but Nietzsche clearly disliked his sister, I doubt her ability to know what he was thinking.

[sparkinthedark]

I'm not sure you've understood how that book is structured. This is how N's notebooks look like:

"Through thought the ego is posited; but hitherto one believed as ordinary people do, that in “I think” there was something of immediate certainty, and that this “I” was the given cause of thought, from which by analogy we understood all other causal relationships. However habitual and indispensable this fiction may have become by now—that in itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin: a belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false."

"The intellect cannot criticize itself, simply because it cannot be compared with other species of intellect and because its capacity to know would be revealed only in the presence of “true reality,” i.e., because in order to criticize the intellect we should have to be a higher being with “absolute knowledge.” This presupposes that, distinct from every perspective kind of outlook or sensual-spiritual appropriation, something exists, an “in-itself."—But the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids us to speak of “things-in-themselves.”"


There are many notebooks he left behind, full of fragments like this. Now, all his sister did was to pick the ones she and a few editors thought were essential, arrange them into chapters (without gluing them together)and place them in a collection. A book full of fragments. That's the Will to Power.

[Onasander]

Yeah, I do full 'fragments' like that all the time. I pop the out at random to startle (or annoy) others as much as myself in rapid succession. It's damn close to automatic writing, but not quite- cause when I do automatic writing, I'm not that smart. In fact, I'm not that smart in general, only during hat trick performances or stuck in a writing dream where a text is being written before me.

If I can do this, others can- and probably everyone to a degree, but especially authors. That stuff is not consciously organized into a larger framework, some of it I've thought about, other stuff is a big surprise and it makes me wonder what my brain has been cooking up whenever I turn manic at night and can't sleep.

He probably just blurted the stuff down on paper, and cannibalized from it afterwards for his larger works. It would explain BGE (wouldn't explain his shitheaded publisher for that though). Some of that stuff he might of looked at and said to himself 'Do I really mean that? It contradicts my idea of '' and '' and '' and everyone will see the contradiction and think I'm a ass. In other cases he could of said 'This is sweet, so gonna use it in my attack against Parliamentary Republics' or whatever he was hatching up in his head for the future. If he did something like put stars next to something, or circled ideas and linked them connectively or with arrows- then you might have the formulation of a proto-manuscript. If he didn't, then we don't really know. They guy retired to lollipop land without leaving advanced directive as to what his views on the essays were from all I've heard.

Just know there is massive potential to have some very schismatic and contradicting 'Nietzsche's out there doing this, or anyone for that matter, and definitely shouldn't be touched until last if ever- read the stuff he presented to US first in that format... if boredom overtakes you, or something deeply vexing afterwards, so be it. This goes for any author. Wouldn't recommend 'The Road to Dune' to anyone wanting to get started reading the Dune series as the first book they read- read it the way the author wanted it first.








A good book about notes and their founding traditions would be 'The Book That Nobody Read' it's about every first edition on Galileo's de revolutionibus (don't get me on my latin) and the separate schools of notes that arouse from people adding on and copying notes and explanations from other people's margins in explaining the text. A different subject in a good many ways, but related and I think a good many of you would like it.