think for our selves will be the end

This book was a very dense and frustrating read. It was like a really stormy day that has moments of brilliant and refreshing sunlight, but is mostly just muddy and cold.

As a whole, I feel like both of these essays don't really hold up. There are so many contradictions, hypocrisies and wild tangents, too many to make the arguments feel cohesive and strong. Additionally there are a lot of really obnoxious, outdated rants about the "weak," the "sick," the "Jews" that really take away from the effectiveness of his points. The German Nationalism stuff is also horrid.

However, both essays are also highly quotable and unarguably brilliant. The flashes of true, bold intellect are there and they are striking. Lots of good thoughts about aesthetics and ethics here. This guy was truly a great thinker, great and terrible.

I checked this out at the public library in Spring Hill, TN. The Birth of Tragedy was interesting but difficult to understand because I'm not familiar enough with Greek tragedy, as Nietzsche obviously was. This kind of stuff always leads me to read stuff that the writer talks about. Nietzsche outlines how Greek literature went through a change, from "alpha" to "nerdy." It would be interesting to deep dive into that literature and witness that change for myself. The Genealogy of Morals, my favorite of the two books in this volume, is quite dark. It outlines a change similar to that of the Greeks, when humans developed morality. It would be more difficult to do a deep dive into this; one would have to use their imagination.

terribly confusing

These works were Nietzsche's first and even though he hadn't hit his stride yet, it's full of Nietzsche insight, humor, clarity, and vigor!

The first book I ever decided to "deface" by writing in the margins. This one required writing my thoughts down in it as I went so I could refer back to them as I progressed. It's dense but fascinating.

Birth of Tragedy was very hard to understand, but it is very great! Nietzsche's genealogic method is very great in the second book, but I must comment that when he openly spoke about the genealogy of morals in the cases of debtor-creditor relationship, he is not very aware of the inexistence of morality in cats, but the females do practice debtor-creditor relationship with regards to their maternity. Besides that, I agree with his points, especially the Dionysiac spirit, the brutality of law throughout history, and Christanity's reversing of the Aristocratic ideals by praising asceticism.

I would recommend everyone read this at least once. He takes a unique approach on life I had never seen before. He talks about life in the forms of Slave and Master morality. Although I don’t necessarily agree with what he is saying he makes an interesting argument based on social dynamics.

This American translation brings together the first and last of Friedrich Nietzsche's great rants against the social reality of his time - 'The Birth of Tragedy' (1872) and 'The Genealogy of Morals' (1887). It is instructive to compare them.

'The Birth of Tragedy' was his first published book. One can understand why it was not well received by his academic colleagues since it is an extended fantasy on what the Greeks should have been like rather than necessarily what they were like.

There is a paradox (quite in keeping with Nietzsche's entire modus operandi) of having a thinker whose instinct was to attack all forms of socialised essentialism adopting a highly essentialised view of the classical world.

But one suspects that, by this point, the young Nietzsche no longer gave a damn about classical philology and simply saw an opportunity to plunder it to make entirely other points about society, politics and philosophy - a sort of 'breaking free' in its earliest stage of development.

The famous Apollonian-Dionysiac conflict (expressed surprisingly like Hegelian dialectic at one point) may have been sincerely meant but it was also a means to a psychological end still in the process of formulation.

There is an air of sustained hysteria throughout. The models for emulation, the mentors, are Schopenhauer and Wagner. Music and drama (and music drama) are presented in high-flown romantic terms as part of an aesthetic view of life and morality.

Germany is presented emotionally as the potential heir of the Greeks. A reference to 'dwarves' probably means the small minds of those who see the world in closely parsed academic terms but could also reference back to Wagner's Alberich and that could lead us to see them as the Jews.

So, in 1872, we have an angry young man, still in thrall to his mentors and the national-racist and pessimistic revolutionary culture of the period, trying to burn his boats, consciously or subconsciously, with the academic community that had nurtured him so far.

The rant allows him to explode not only at that community ('killing daddy') but also start his excoriation of the entire culture around it as decadent and not worthy of the potential for himself, his nation and the species. The ideas are ill-formed as yet but the seeds of the future are there.

Fifteen years later, the ranting methodology has not gone but now he has a market for it. He can say what he really thinks and, boy, does he do so. But he has also changed a great deal in the meantime - not in his core (which is integral) but in jettisoning what had held him back in 1872.

He has totally ditched his mentors. Not only is Wagner rejected but his aesthetic and antisemitism are damned, the first as inauthentic and the second as absurd. Schopenauer has been left behind as a pessimistic nay-sayer who could not see that the Will has to be directed outwards - to Life.

Instead, we now get three essays, not always perfectly coherent, which go straight to the jugular of Christian posturing in the closed-in culture of nineteenth century Europe and he slashes at that jugular without mercy. He clearly wants to kill the beast.

The rating should be five stars for this book but only three stars for the 1872 rant so we end up squaring the circle at four stars but be in no doubt that 'The Genealogy of Morals' is of devastating importance to Western culture as it was to develop over the subsequent decades.

What Nietzsche did (much as he had done in the previous book) was to create a simplistic mythic version of history (one that must upset any serious academic) and then weave out of this myth some remarkable psychological truths that are capable of completely rewiring the reader's mind.

I do not for a moment take seriously the notion that the 'Greeks' thought 'like that' in 'The Birth of Tragedy' nor would I accept the highly simplified account of pagan-Christian relations and history as other than a gross simplification of a complex reality.

However, just as 'The Birth of Tragedy' allows the reader to glimpse the possibility of revolt against the habits imposed on us by an unthinking socialisation, so 'Genealogy of Morals' brilliantly shatters the self-image of society as good rather than evil. It postulates another way of thinking.

Nietzsche's writing, the writing of an aggressive ego, states radical things but the rewiring of the brain comes from the realisation, at a much more subtle level, that, whatever the absurdity of his analyses at this point or another, what he says is psychologically and socially true.

The rewiring comes from a shock tactic, the only way we can ever get out of our habitual ways of thinking. Simple logical argument that takes us from A to B to C might 'persuade' us intellectually but Nietzsche's approach hits a deeper emotional level where change actually happens.

Intellectual persuasion just layers us with another variation of the world into which we are habituated but emotional shock can change how we see that world altogether. If our perception of reality changes, we change.

We have, of course, to throw ourselves backwards in time to the Central European (indeed Western) culture of the 1880s (before Freud) in order to understand just how shocking some of Nietzsche's 'bestial' claims about its moral foundations and social presumptions were.

Nietzsche's influence grew after his death. Although most people now would probably avoid or evade Nietzsche's understanding of our situation, all the 'diseases' he identified are with us still. They are embedded in our species yet our culture is fundamentally different because of him.

Not just our culture - the way individual minds work in the West has been affected consciously or unconsciously by him much as we have been changed by the pre-existence of Descartes, Hume, Darwin or, later, Freud.

The achievement of Nietzsche was to look at the parallel worlds of science and morality and point out that both were secondary. We had become decadent (even if we might see them as necessary for survival) under their domination. We were potentially greater than either but had forgotten this.

Science and morality are useful but they are not necessarily 'true' when it comes to asking the central questions about what is it to be a human being in the world (a theme that Heidegger would take up with more rigour several decades later).

The 'shock' lies not any 'flat earth' denial of science (science is not denied, merely made secondary, which is, in itself, uncomfortable for positivists) but in an undermining of moral claims where they are imposed outside ourselves on us as individuals for the benefit of others.

The central claim of the book is famous, or infamous if you prefer - that Christian morality has insidiously destroyed us as a species, turning the strong into slaves serving slaves who are corralled into their slavery by an insidious priestly class.

Nietzsche goes where few have dared to go and where most, even his admirers, would not go today. His attack on 'compassion' as a virtue would shake most people as cruel and yet it is logical within a much wider critique of the cruelties involved in our own willing repression of ourselves.

His deeper point is that the contingent imposition on us by habit of the morality expressed in unemotional impositions from outside for a greater good do irreparable harm to our own selves - he prefigures Freud in some respects.

Worse, those who are the alleged beneficiaries of this morality are, in fact, its greatest victims, unable to develop themselves to their fullest as livers of a full life with all their animal emotions intact.

The emergence out of our university class of a world of natural victims, intersectionality, activism (the new presbyters), self-imposed liberal middle class guilt, self censorship and submission would have been recognised as the 'eternal return' of the slave culture he excoriates.

I have always thought that Nietzsche's polemic detaches itself here from his own reality. He has to make his point but his breakdown over the flogging of that horse in Turin indicates a man who was not without compassion and that this 'hardness' was as much towards himself as others.

He wanted to gain Life in a society that was built to say 'nay' to every pleasure. And, of course, the English philosophers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century would have easily allowed good sentiments and paganism to co-exist - but Nietzsche lived in Kaiserine Philistia.

In this paradox of saying one thing and being another, he reminds me of De Sade who sees truths about our species no one else is willing to see, takes those truths to their logical conclusion but, ultimately, and desperately, wants a world where he is wrong about our condition.

The question with Nietzsche is always whether we are prepared to accept the truth he expresses or find a better argument against him. Most critics have not done so without appealing to various forms of magical thinking. We are left with the necessity to reject truth-telling to live in society.

The classic liberal mind finds this very difficult because it has been trained to see the truth as good and that the good is true. To discover (which is the case) that existence is 'beyond good and evil' and that the good is constructed by men out of their circumstances is often too much to bear.

But there is another way of looking at this. That the search for the truth must lead inevitably in unpalatable directions but that, once we are led there and have it, it really no longer matters any more. All that mattered was to discover it and the discovery of it implies no need for meaning.

Meanwhile, the process of creating our own good is a series of choices related to our true selves (such as we make them). Social morality is best created (invented) by us and not by priests. We do not need to rely on either habit or moralists.

Compassion (distinguishable from the patronising Buddhist version or the psychic vampirism of Christian social relations) might re-emerge on a more solid base as the natural magnanimity of the person in full control of themselves with no desire to harm others, ready to assist from strength.

The risk, of course, is that it doesn't - that the reader of Nietzsche is a sociopath (many sociopaths have taken their cue from him). And so we are back to the inevitability of a repressive socialisation where Nietzsche merely enables the salvationary idea of rebellion against its oppressions.

Even today, 'The Genealogy of Morals' remains well worth reading. It strips away our assumptions that the world we have been given is in any way connected to the 'truth of things' and it helps us choose those half-truths necessary to hold things together regardless.

Christianity survives and prospers to this day because it is a sufficient half-truth to hold things together for many individuals and some societies but anyone who reads Nietzsche and does not 'have faith' (magical thinking) at least knows the true basis of its utility and can come to a view.

Next fall's read

This review is only for The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, which forms the first half of this book. The second half is The Genealogy of Morals, which I will put off reading for the time being.

Friedrich Nietzsche is like the butcher who rests his heavy thumb on the scales as he weighs his meat. In Greek tragedy, he detects two strains, the Apollonian, which is all light and reason, and the Dionysiac, which is more concerned with the terror, mystery and immanence of life. When he weighs the Dionysiac elements, Nietzsche positively leans on the scale. This results in some strange judgments, particularly when he attacks Euripides and Socrates as corrupters of the tradition perfected by Aeschylus and Sophocles and the old Greek religion.

The author hails recent developments (in his day) in Germany, with Kant, Schopenhauer, and especially Wagner. What we know and Nietzsche did not was that his Dionysiac love fest ended in National Socialism and the horrors of World War II. His patent hatred of French and Italian art and culture gives his philosophy a purely intramural reach -- one which had later repercussions in the century to follow.

My own feeling is that the Apollonian and Dionysiac both represent different attitudes toward life which are equally valid and perhaps necessary. If by his emphasis on Wagner's Liebestod, Nietzsche deprived himself of the joys of Cosi Fan Tutte and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and only hurt his own argument. Life contains both light and darkness, in roughly equal measure.

On the other hand, I think Nietzsche created a fascinating dichotomy that has multiple uses that we have only begun to see in criticism and even  politics.

(Actually two-and-a-half stars). This book consists of two widely divergent works by Nietzsche, and represents for me a sort of re-entry into attempting to grapple with the philosopher after a break of many years. I read The Will to Power at a young age and not very well, and Thus Spake Zarathustra a bit later and more carefully, and then went on to other things, always with a sense that I should return to Nietzsche some day. Honestly, now that I have, I’m not certain it was worth the effort, but perhaps these works (or the translations) were not the best place to begin.

The first of the texts is “The Birth of Tragedy,” a fairly early work Nietzsche wrote about Greek drama and its relationship to contemporary trends in German culture. The translator is at some pains to point out the flaws in this less mature sample of Nietzsche’s thinking, and the edition begins with an apologia by the author himself. Perhaps the most obvious issue, to a non- Nietzsche scholar such as myself, is that this work begins with a dedication to the genius of Wagner, who obviously was still a major influence on Nietzsche at this time, although he later broke with him and may have been embarrassed by his earlier Wagner worship.

The text itself is a discussion of rather more than “the birth” of tragedy as a dramatic expression. It is more of a discussion of tragedy as an art form, its impact and relevance, all examined through the lens of an Apollonian-Dionysian dynamic, which Nietzsche saw as central to Greek culture (and thus as important to “Western” culture). The Apollonian spirit, so far as I understand it here, represents the rational, controlled side, while the Dionysiac is based in euphoria and joyous chaos. Although in a sense Nietzsche seemed to favor the Dionysian, this may be because he viewed modernity as slipping too far toward the Apollonian side, and in need of a corrective for the purposes of balance. He certainly did not make the mistake here of demonizing the Apollonian current and rejecting it, indeed, he argued that tragedy would have been impossible without it.

At one point in the text (a part he specifically apologized for in the introduction) he presents an extensive quote from Schopenhauer. Ironically, I experienced my one true “a-ha” moment in reading this from this quotation. Schopenhauer argued that music is different from other art forms, because, unlike all other art forms, it does not attempt to re-create nature or reality, but rather to transcend it. Musicians don’t try to emulate bird song, or noises they hear in the street, they try to create something original, which is more beautiful than the sounds we hear when music isn’t playing. As such, Schopenhauer claims it is a “pure” expression of the will. Obviously, he was writing before the popularity of abstract art, but I get what he was saying here, I think better than I get most of Nietzsche’s argument.

Music comes into this because the original tragedies were wholly or partly sung (the chorus sang its lines, at least). With this, Nietzsche tried to link opera and Greek tragedy, but I’m not sure how far he succeeded. In part, it seems to me at times that Nietzsche claimed to know more about what Greek drama was and how it worked on its audience than is possible, based on the small amount of evidence that has survived. I don’t really know enough to refute him, but I’m cautious about accepting his arguments on faith. The translator, writing in 1956, argues that some of his premises are now commonly accepted by scholars, but that may have changed in the intervening 50+ years.

In spite of those criticisms, I did like “The Birth of a Tragedy” much better than “The Genealogy of Morals.” This book was written as a critique of morality and religion, and it seems to me that a professional philosopher should have been able to do much better. Much of the argument is based on a-historical speculations about what “man in his natural state” is like. Nietzsche falls on the side of Hobbes, that life was nasty, brutish, and short, and then proceeds to use this as an argument against the social contract. He then postulates that “ascetic priests” came about because they were “sick” and sick people have a drive to create more sick people. “Healthy” people, in his world, do not care for the sick, they avoid them and try to stay among their own kind, lest they become infected (so much for the famous “that which does not kill me” line).

All that would be bad enough, but the book is laced throughout with anti-Semitism, German nationalism, male chauvinism, anti-democratic elitism, and other forms of ignorance. It’s hardly fair to “judge” Nietzsche in terms of the Nazis, but it’s easy to see where Nazis were able to pick and choose passages from this book to support their program. Much of the first third is focused on how Jews are “the priestly, rancorous nation par excellence,” suggesting that the entire book is essentially a criticism of their influence on German life. I don’t think that this book is where he introduced his erroneous “herd mentality” concept (which obviously reflects his own biological ignorance about herd animals) but it is referenced a few times.

Towards the end of the book, he includes anti-Semitism and listening to the music of Wagner among the weaknesses of the German people. Doubtless he meant only a "crude" form of anti-Semitism (since he had indulged so much more sophisticated a form) and obviously this book came out after his famed break with Wagner. The work doesn’t show much positive consideration of how a “healthy” society can interact to minimize harm to its members, nor even a very interesting criticism of Christianity (which is what was promised on the back cover). Mostly, it is just rancor and back-biting, a bile-filled attack on the things he didn’t like. I expected much more.