Pretty good book when judging based on originality. Creative ideas presented that make you think.

(Sic)

I enjoyed the first book better as its focus is on Greek gods and philosophers. The second book was ok but focused too much on Nitetzsche dislike of his contemporaries and culture.

One of the key texts for evaluating tragedy in literature.

Birth of Tragedy starts really slow and some parts are pretty boring, but it gets better. Genealogy of Morals is pretty good, but I think some of the ideas are better expressed by Foucault

Crazy for this one Fred, quite eccentric

Nietzsche is a life changing author.
His writing is of mind altering substance.
I can't explain to you very much in this small space, you need to read it for yourself, I promise.

I actually didn't read this specific book, I read The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals separately, but they are both very important pieces of philosophy.

Read or die.

Horrible translation. The texts are interesting, of course, and provocative and guaranteed to set your impression of the world on its head.

But- if you are to read Nietzsche you've just got to do it with a translation by Walter Kaufmann. I have no German, but I've never read anything which is as vibrant and severe and powerful as his editions. Actual philosophy professors have said as much to me, too.

Trust me on this.

The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first work. It describes the differences between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses in art and how the relationship between the two played out in ancient Greece. The Apollonian impulse, associated with Apollo, the god of light, is associated with the visual arts and epic poetry. Since the Apollonian impulse is representational , it is more closely tied to reason, whereas the Dionysian is more emotional and is primarily expressed through lyric poetry and music. The Apollonian is about self-control and self-knowledge, while the Dionysian is about the loss and self in union with nature. Both characteristics are essential to tragedy.

The Dionysian transcendence of the self puts us in touch with the wildness of nature that is normally repressed in civilization:
“The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved through art, and through art life reclaimed him.”

The Genealogy of Morals (1887)
This book is a series of three essays. The question addressed in the first essay is: “Under what conditions did man construct the value judgments “good” and “evil?” And what is their intrinsic worth? Have they benefited or retarded mankind?” Nietzsche distinguishes the dichotomy of "good and evil", which he associates with modern morality, from the dichotomy between "good and bad", which defined classical morality.

The modern European concept of “goodness" is based on treating weakness as morally superior. The weaker members of society have decided that their aristocratic superiors are evil so their achievements, ambitions and luxuries must also be evil. This is where the ethic of puritanism comes from; the lower classes resent the rich and so they decide that the lifestyle of the rich is corrupt. The lower classes can’t experience the same kind of happiness that the rich can, so they settle for the “drugged tranquility” that religion provides. They lack the power to overthrow their superiors, so they console themselves with the idea that obedience is a virtue and that God will eventually punish their wicked masters on Judgment Day, vindicating their sense of moral superiority.

Nietzsche traces this view of goodness to early Jewish criticism of the Roman Empire. Christianity has inherited this view of good and evil, which inverts the classical ideal that associated goodness with nobility and strength and badness with the weakness of social inferiors. According to Nietzsche, the classical ideal was temporarily revived during the Renaissance. But the egalitarianism of the French Revolution asserted the superiority of common morality again, returning to Jewish and Christian ethics.

In the second essay, Nietzsche writes about the origins of punishment and guilt. He identifies a similarity between the German words for “guilt” and “debt,” suggesting that guilt originally had nothing to do with moral responsibility, but simply indicated that a debt needed to be paid. Punishment was originally meted out not on the basis of guilt, but simply as a reprisal. If someone broke a promise, for example, they were in debt to the person they let down, and could balance the debt by submitting to punishment. Punishment was harsher since it was openly acknowledged that the purpose of punishment is to let the victim of the crime enjoy the suffering of his enemy as compensation for what he has lost. Nietzsche suggests that this is still the main purpose of punishment, even though people are now more reluctant to say so explicitly. In earlier societies, this conception of punishment meant that there were no hard feelings between creditor and debtor after a debt was paid. Because of these Nietzsche characterizes these societies, despite their cruelty, as more cheerful than ours. Nietzsche argues that as the harshness of punishment has declined, man has increasingly relied on the emotion of guilt “in order to hurt himself, after the blocking of the more natural outlet of his cruelty."

The third essay explores the purpose of asceticism. Nietzsche argues that philosophy was born of and depends on ascetic ideals. The contemplative, skeptical mood of philosophy ran counter to ancient morality, and must have been mistrusted. In order to dispel this mistrust, philosophers used the practice of asceticism to inspire fear and awe from society. What has made asceticism such an influential ideal is that it explains the meaning of suffering - it says that we suffer because of sin.

Nietzsche says that asceticism and scientific inquiry have the same root: they share a fundamental belief in truth and a commitment to detachment. Art, on the other hand, is “far more radically opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science. In art, the lie becomes consecrated, the will to deception has good conscience at its back."

The ascetic ideal signifies “a will to nothingness, a revulsion from life, a rebellion against the principal condition of living.” But human beings would rather embrace nothingness as their purpose than be devoid of purpose. He goes on to say: “I have great respect for the ascetic ideal as long as it really believes in itself and is not merely a masquerade.” It’s worth quoting the rest of this passage:

“But I have no patience with those coquettish dung beetles who are so eager to smell of the infinite that, before long, the infinite comes to smell of dung. I have no patience with those who try to mimic life, with worn-out, used up people who swathe themselves in wisdom so as to appear objective, with histrionic agitators who wear magic hoods on their straw heads, with ambitious artists who try to pass for ascetics and priests and yet are, at bottom, only tragic buffoons. And I am equally out of patience with these newest speculators in idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude. (The ease with which any wretched imposture succeeds in present-day Germany may be attributed to the progressive stultification of the German mind. The reason for this general spread of inanity may be found in a diet composed entirely of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagner’s music. Our national vanity and hemmed-in situation and the shaking palsy of current ideas have each done their bit to prepare us for such a diet.)"

I just found an interesting series at the Guardian that has a detailed look at The Genealogy of Morals, written by Giles Fraser. I've just started reading it, it starts here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisf...

I purchased this book on January 17, 1970 (per a stamp on the inside cover) and read the entirety of it sometime in 1970. I'm guessing that I completed it by June 1970.

The rating is for The Birth of Tragedy, with which I profoundly disagree for many reasons. I probably reread The Birth of Tragedy at least once during the ensuing decades.

Although I read The Genealogy of Morals in 1970, I don't now, more than four decades later, recall it. I will have to reread it.

My first foray into Nietzsche, and I'm not sure how to interpret it.

The two works in this volume read very differently from one another. This is no surprise, as BoT is Nietzsche's first work, published in 1872. It reads as a strong foray by a relatively young scholar. His opposition of the Dionysian and Apollonian outlooks, both confronted by the Euripidean/Socratic turn in Greek culture, provides a workable interpretive parallel to the Enlightenment turn of which he lived in the latter days.

Honestly, I found this an enjoyable read, quick, easy, understandable.

GoM was published 15 years later. Wikipedia hails it as Nietzsche's finest, most sustained work. Maybe I should blame a bad translation, but I found GoM alienating and gratuitous. (Maybe that means I read it right ... probably it means I'm not the kind of reader Nietzsche's looking for.)

I'll muddle on through the other scattered Nietzsche I've accumulated. The man was brilliant--that can't be denied. But it's the brilliance of a dark, sickly age. That's my impression.

Still reading